Ash Wednesday (43 page)

Another bad time had come when Beth wrote to him from Pittsburgh. The letter brought back a nostalgic affection that surprised him. Alice filled so much of the gap that Beth had left that when he received the envelope he thought he might feel only a vague regret on reading what was inside. But instead he heard her voice clearly, and the look of her, the sweet smell of her, her very presence all touched him so that he would have wept had Alice not been in the next room.

Dear Jim,

I've been here for several weeks now, and am slowly getting used to living alone. My apartment is nice—a town house, really, with two floors—and the neighbors are friendly. The school is large, although my class has only about twenty in it, which isn't too bad. So far everything's going all right, and I'm not as freaked out being back in the classroom as I was afraid I'd be. In fact, I'm kind of enjoying it. I guess I forgot what it was like to be around kids.

I hope you're doing well and writing again. I'm sorry we parted on such a bad note. It's kind of funny. I was always the one who told you to stick to things, that you were too much of a dilettante. But you stuck to this, didn't you? And I was the one who couldn't stick it out with you. I left you, the house, the town, the marriage. Speaking of which, do you want to do anything further right now? For me, I'm content to just let things be as they are for a while. No divorce, or legal separation, at least not yet. We may have a problem with the tax people, since April 15 is only a few months away, but if we do, I'll give you a call. I've got no problem with money right now, and I hope that you're okay in that department. If not, give me a call, and we'll see what we can work out. Number is 412-555-9377.

I won't pretend that I don't miss you, but I've been missing you now for a long, long time. I hope you decide to leave it all behind someday. If you do, let me know. I'm still your wife.

Love, Beth

Jim Callendar licked his dry lips, feeling sordid and cheap. He wondered if Beth had slept with anyone since she left and decided quickly that she hadn't; it wouldn't be like her. But then he thought,
What am I feeling guilty for? She's the one who left, not me.

Still, he could not help himself. Guilt had been his primary component for so long that to add the small guilt of adultery to the main was as easy as a drunk taking one more short one for the road. He wrote back to her immediately. It was a hair shirt of a letter, purgative and confessional.

Dear Beth,

I received your letter today and am glad to hear that things are going so well for you. I am writing again, and doing rather well at it. I'm even toying with the idea of trying some fiction, or maybe something about what's happened here in town. I'm starting to feel better about myself too, though not to the point where I'm ready to leave. That may take a while. But I have changed, and I have to tell you that the main reason for it is a woman I've met. I didn't really
try
to meet her; it was one of those things that just happen. But she's staying with me now, and we're helping each other. I hope you're not hurt by my telling you, but I've never had any secrets from you, and I wanted you to hear it from me before it got to you from any of your friends back here.

I really don't have much more to tell you than that, and I hope it won't upset you. What you mention about leaving things as they are is all right with me, unless you change your mind in light of what I've told you. I'll understand.

Love, Jim

P.S. Money is holding out fine.

He decided not to show either letter to Alice, and put Beth's in the back of the desk drawer, while he addressed his own to her. The next day when he took it out to his mailbox along with several bills to be paid, he saw a lonely figure across the street several houses down, just at the point where Sundale Road bent and became lost to sight. Even from a distance he recognized Brad Meyers, standing in the front yard of his ex-wife's house. He had seen him there before, had figured out that he must have moved back in, although he didn't know the circumstances, and felt strangely nonplussed at having the man he regarded as his nemesis living so close. It seemed to Jim that the two of them were still somehow linked, so why should they not be physically close as well?

Brad Meyers turned, saw Jim Callendar at his mailbox, and turned away, thinking that it was over between the two of them. They had had their confrontation, and it had left him empty, given him no satisfaction, only a soreness in his soul that still ached. Ironic that they now lived so close to each other, he thought, since what had bound them was severed that night, for him at least. He would, he had decided, have no more to do with Callendar. The score was settled, the transaction completed. Besides, there were other things to think about: the reasons for it all, for what had happened in Merridale.

Judgment, he had thought at first, some sort of judgment passed by the fates, by God, by whatever was up there, on him. But as the months had passed, he had come to think that it wasn't on him alone, but on everyone, everyone in the town, and maybe in the world as well. Merridale was, as all small towns are, a microcosm of humanity, and he felt that it was not his destiny alone that was being affected, but multiple destinies in an intricate framework whose structure one could not hope to comprehend much less begin to actually work out. There are powers at work here, he thought. Oh, yes, powers.

"Uncle Brad!"

He looked up and saw Wally come around the back of the house, Fluffy hot on his trail. Brad had bought the puppy for the boy just a week before, despite Christine's outspoken disapproval. "We don't need a goddamn dog!" she'd said when he brought it home after Wally was in bed.

"A dog's good for a kid," he'd answered. "Besides, we can keep it outside when it's bigger. We're not in an apartment anymore."

"It'll
howl
. It'll
bark
. Remember? Remember those
things
outside?"

"It didn't when I brought it in. And it isn't now.”

“It
will!
"

"No. It's different. It's young. It can get used to these things, adapt. It doesn't know that they're not natural.”

“Bullshit. How do you know?"

"We're keeping it. If it howls, we'll get rid of it. But I don't think it will."

Brad was right. The pup didn't howl, not at all. Wally had named it, choosing the ill-fitting sobriquet of Fluffy. The dog did not look like a Fluffy. It was short-haired, a cross, Brad theorized, between a
Weimaraner
and a pointer, a little, unblessed doggy bastard some embarrassed purebred lover had probably been delighted to get rid of at the pet shop in Lansford where Brad had found it.

Bastard or not, it was one hell of a cute mutt, eyes button-black, tongue always lolling in the middle of a permanent, sappy grin. He guessed that it was two months old, just past the roly-poly stage, but retaining enough puppy cuteness to form an endearing link between boy and dog and man, all of whom now came together in a breathless blur, Brad grabbing the boy and whirling him into the cold air, the pup leaping at his ankles. Wally laughed at his sudden freedom from gravity, staggering as Brad lowered him to the ground. "What's up, kiddo?" Brad asked.

"Will you push me and Fluffy on the swing?"

"Sure. C'mon." The three of them jogged around the back of the house to the swing set, the ground yielding wetly under their feet. The snow had disappeared completely in the last week, melting away a day at a time until not a trace was left. Even the dirty piles mixed with cinders and ash had vanished, soaking into the ground or running down storm drains, dampening finished basements and flooding unfinished ones. It was as if the winter had spent all its fury in the incessant snows of December and was now attempting to make up for its cruelty with an early spring, knowing that the town had already endured more cruelty than it should rightly bear.

Brad slipped off his jacket and hung it over the monkey bar. It felt good to be outside in shirtsleeves. He could not remember it ever being this warm at the beginning of February. Wally climbed up on the wide swing, and the dog leaped into his lap, spotting his jeans with wet earth. Brad started to protest, but stopped, remembering his own dog as a boy, a big dopey foxhound against whom it was futile to struggle on a wet spring day. Jeans would wash. Dirt would not last. But boys and dogs and memories would.

He pushed them higher and higher, so that he had to step farther back with every sweep of the swing. "Keep your feet up," he cautioned the boy. "Don't let 'em drag or you'll slow down."

"Higher!" the boy yelled, and the man complied. He smiled and thought that for the first time in so long he was happy, nearly at peace with himself. It was not a feeling that would last, he knew, but while he possessed it, he intended to enjoy it and remember it, so that he might reclaim it more often. It stemmed in part, he thought, from being in the old house again, the house he had shared with Bonnie and Frank and Linda. When he closed his eyes and heard Wally laugh, he could pretend that time had moved backward, that it was Frankie he pushed on the swing, and that his mind had not yet started its inexorable breakdown into the rage that had held him for so many years. If only, he thought dreamily, time would move even further back—back to when he was still in school, to the day he was to report for his pre-induction physical, to the day he volunteered to work with
Kriger
.

But time
didn't
turn back. Ever. And even if it had, would it have made any difference? What had happened was over and done with, and nothing could change it, could make it not have happened. " 'The
moo
-
ving
fing
-er
writes
, ' " he chanted softly to the rhythm of the swing, " and
hav
-ing
writ
moves
on
.' "

"
Whazzat
, Uncle Brad?" Wally asked between gulps of air, holding fast to the swing chain with one hand, to Fluffy with the other.

"Just a poem, kiddo. Just a little poem."

"Like rhyming words . . . 'silly' . . . '
billy
' . . .

"Right," Brad laughed. " 'Catty'. . ."

" '
Hatty
'!"

" 'Fiddle'. . ."

" 'Diddle'!"

They played rhyming words and Brad pushed Wally on the swing and Christine watched them from inside the house, gazing hollow-eyed through the bedroom window. At that moment she hated them both, hated whatever it was inside them that let them forget what lay all around. "Bastards," she whispered, turning from the window and lying down on the bed. She looked down the length of it at her body and marked how much weight she had lost the past few months. Her breasts were still large, but her waist and hips had slimmed considerably. If she had intended it, she would have felt proud, but it had been an involuntary loss, stemming purely from her diminished appetite. She seemed to eat less each day, only pecking at her dinner while Brad and Wally wolfed down whatever was on their plates. Over and over again she wondered, How can they eat like that? when all around were those things, and then she wondered if she would ever change, ever grow used to them like so many of her friends at the plant did.

Friends? Only acquaintances now. She had lost her friends. They had slipped away, adapting, getting used to what had happened in the town: "There's no point in staying upset. They're here and that's that. There's no harm done." They were right, she told herself, and then she'd ask, What is wrong with me?

No, not
me
. What is wrong with
them?
And she would know with certainty that she was the only sane one, the only one to react and keep reacting like a normal person would to something so hideous and so unnatural. It was the others who were crazy. The whole town was crazy.

And Brad was crazy too. He was the craziest one of all, and he was making Wally crazy too. Still, she couldn't leave him. She had nowhere to go outside Merridale, and living with him was better than living alone. She didn't know what she would do if she had to live alone. She thought maybe she really
would
go crazy then. In fact, she was afraid of his leaving her, so much so that she had stopped her prowling for men, her trading of sex for a night away from Merridale. Being on Sundale Road rather than downtown was definitely an improvement, and she slept better at night knowing that there was no blue phantom inside the house itself, no Old Black Joe in the living room.