Black House (6 page)

But maybe the paper kind of got lost this morning,
Fred thinks, picking it up from the counter and folding it until it looks like a thick paperback book (but part of the headline accuses him even so:
FISHERMAN STILL AT L
).
Maybe the paper just kind of, I don’t know, migrated straight to the old garbage can beside the house.

Yes, good idea. Because Judy has been strange lately, and Wendell Green’s pulsating stories about the Fisherman are not helping (
Thighs and torso bitten,
Fred thinks as he glides through the early-morning-quiet house toward the door,
and while you’re at it, waiter, have them cut me a nice rare chunk of butt
). She reads the press accounts obsessively, making no comment, but Fred doesn’t like the way her eyes jump around, or some of the other tics she’s picked up: the obsessive touching of her tongue to her upper lip, for instance . . . and sometimes, this in the last two or three days, he has seen her tongue reach all the way up and pet at her philtrum just below her nose, a feat he would have thought impossible if he had not seen it again last night, during the local news. She goes to bed earlier and earlier, and sometimes she talks in her sleep—strange, slurry words that don’t sound like English. Sometimes when Fred speaks to her, she doesn’t respond, simply stares off into space, eyes wide, lips moving slightly, hands kneading together (cuts and scratches have begun to show up on the backs of them, even though she keeps her nails cropped sensibly short).

Ty has noticed his mother’s encroaching oddities, too. On Saturday, while father and son were having lunch together—Judy was upstairs taking one of her long naps, another new wrinkle—the boy suddenly asked, right out of a blue clear sky, “What’s wrong with Mom?”

“Ty, nothing’s wrong with—”

“There
is
! Tommy Erbter says she’s a Coke short of a Happy Meal these days.”

And had he almost reached across the tomato soup and toasted-cheese sandwiches and clouted his son? His only child? Good old Ty, who was nothing but concerned? God help him, he had.

Outside the door, at the head of the concrete path leading down to the street, Fred begins to jog slowly in place, taking deep breath after deep breath, depositing the oxygen he will soon withdraw. It is usually the best part of his day (assuming he and Judy don’t make love, that is, and lately there has been precious little of that). He likes the feeling—the
knowledge—
that his path might be the beginning of the road to anywhere, that he could start out here in the Libertyville section of French Landing and wind up in New York . . . San Francisco . . . Bombay . . . the mountain passes of Nepal. Every step outside one’s own door invites the world (perhaps even the universe), and this is something Fred Marshall intuitively understands. He sells John Deere tractors and Case cultivators, yes, all
right,
already, but he is not devoid of imagination. When he and Judy were students at UW-Madison, their first dates were at the coffeehouse just off campus, an espresso-jazz-and-poetry haven called the Chocolate Watchband. It would not be entirely unfair to say that they had fallen in love to the sound of angry drunks declaiming the works of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder into the Chocolate Watchband’s cheap but exquisitely loud sound system.

Fred draws one more deep breath and begins to run. Down Robin Hood Lane to Maid Marian Way, where he gives Deke Purvis a wave. Deke, in his robe and slippers, is just picking Wendell Green’s daily dose of doom up off his own stoop. Then he wheels onto Avalon Street, picking it up a little now, showing his heels to the morning.

He cannot outrun his worries, however.

Judy, Judy, Judy,
he thinks in the voice of Cary Grant (a little joke that has long since worn thin with the love of his life).

There is the gibberish when she sleeps. There’s the way her eyes dart hither and yon. And let’s not forget the time (just three days ago) when he followed her into the kitchen and she wasn’t there—she’d turned out to be
behind
him, coming down the stairs, and
how
she had done that seems less important to him than
why
she had done it, gone sneaking up the back stairs and then come tromping down the front ones (because that is what she must have done; it’s the only solution he can think of). There’s the constant tapping and petting she does with her tongue. Fred knows what it all adds up to: Judy has been acting like a woman in terror. This has been going on since
before
the murder of Amy St. Pierre, so it can’t be the Fisherman, or not
entirely
the Fisherman.

And there is a larger issue. Before the last couple of weeks, Fred would have told you that his wife doesn’t have a fearful bone in her body. She might be just five foot two (“Why, you’re no bigger than a minute” was his grandmother’s comment when she first met Fred’s intended), but Judy has the heart of a lion, of a Viking warrior. This isn’t bullshit, or hype, or poetic license; it is the simple truth as Fred sees it, and it is the contrast between what he has always known and what he sees now that scares him the most.

From Avalon he races onto Camelot, crossing the intersection without looking for traffic, going much faster than usual, almost sprinting instead of jogging. He is remembering something that happened about a month after they started going out.

It was the Chocolate Watchband they had gone to, as usual, only this time during the afternoon, to listen to a jazz quartet that had actually been pretty good. Not that they had listened very much, as Fred now recalls it; mostly he had talked to Judy about how little he liked being in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (Moo U, the Letters and Science snooties called it), and how little he liked the unspoken family assumption that when he graduated he would come on back home and help Phil run the family farm in French Landing. The idea of spending his life in harness with Phil gave Fred a severe case of the glooms.

What do you want, then?
Judy had asked. Holding his hand on the table, a candle burning inside a jelly glass, the combo onstage working a sweet little number called “I’ll Be There for You.”

I don’t know,
he’d said,
but I tell you what, Jude, I should be in Business Admin, not Moo U. I’m a hell of a lot better at selling than at planting.

Then why don’t you switch?

Because my family thinks—

Your family isn’t going to have to live your life, Fred—you are.

Talk is cheap, he remembers thinking, but then something had happened on the way back to campus, something so amazing and out of his understanding of how life was supposed to work that it fills him with wonder even now, some thirteen years later.

Still talking about his future and their future together (
I could be a farm wife,
Judy had said,
but only if my husband really wants to be a farmer
). Deep into that. Letting their feet carry them along without much interest in exactly where they were. And then, at the intersection of State Street and Gorham, a scream of brakes and a hearty metallic bang had interrupted the conversation. Fred and Judy had looked around and seen a Dodge pickup that had just tangled bumpers with an elderly Ford station wagon.

Getting out of the wagon, which had pretty clearly run the stop sign at the end of Gorham Street, was a middle-aged man in a middle-aged brown suit. He looked scared as well as shaken up, and Fred thought there was good reason for that; the man advancing toward him from the pickup truck was young, heavyset (Fred particularly remembered the belly bulging over the waist of his jeans), and carrying a tire iron.
You goddamn careless asshole!
Young and Heavyset cried.
Look what you done to my truck! This my dad’s truck, you goddamn asshole!

Middle-Aged Suit backing up, eyes wide, hands raised, Fred watching fascinated from in front of Rickman’s Hardware, thinking
Oh no, mister, bad idea. You don’t back away from a guy like this, you go
toward
him, even as mad as he is. You’re provoking him—can’t you see that you’re provoking him?
So fascinated he didn’t realize that Judy’s hand was no longer in his, listening with a kind of sick foreknowledge as Mr. Middle-Aged Suit, still backing up, blathered about how he was sorry . . . entirely his fault, wasn’t looking, wasn’t thinking . . . insurance papers . . . State Farm . . . draw a diagram . . . get a policeman to take statements . . .

And all the time Young and Heavyset was advancing, thwocking the end of the tire iron into the palm of his hand, not listening. This wasn’t about insurance or compensation; this was about how Mr. Middle-Aged Suit had scared the shit out of him while he was just driving along and minding his own business and listening to Johnny Paycheck sing “Take This Job and Shove It.” Young and Heavyset intended to take a little payback paycheck of his own for getting the shit scared out of him and all jounced around behind the wheel
.
.
.
had
to take a little, because the other man’s smell was inciting him, that piss-yellow smell of fear and innate defenselessness. It was a case of rabbit and farmyard dog, and all at once the rabbit was clean out of backing room; Mr. Middle-Aged Suit was pressed against the side of his station wagon, and in a moment the tire iron was going to start swinging and the blood was going to start flying.

Except there
was
no blood and not a single swing, because all at once Judy DeLois was there, no bigger than a minute but standing between them, looking fearlessly up into Young and Heavyset’s burning face.

Fred blinked, wondering how in the name of God she’d gotten there so damned fast. (Much later he would feel the same way when he followed her into the kitchen, only to hear the steady thump of her feet descending the front stairs.) And then? Then Judy slapped Young and Heavyset’s arm!
Whack,
right on the meaty bicep she slapped him, leaving a white palm print on the sunburned freckled flesh below the sleeve of the guy’s torn blue T-shirt. Fred saw it but couldn’t believe it.

Quit it!
Judy shouted up into Young and Heavyset’s surprised, beginning-to-be-bewildered face.
Put it down, quit it! Don’t be dumb! You want to go to jail over seven hundred dollars’ worth of bodywork? Put it down! Get it together, big boy! Put
.
.
.
that
.
.
.
thing
.
.
.
DOWN!

There’d been one second when Fred was quite sure Young and Heavyset was going to bring the tire iron down anyway, and right on his pretty little girlfriend’s head. But Judy never flinched; her eyes never left the eyes of the young man with the tire iron, who towered at least a foot over her and must have outweighed her by a couple of hundred pounds. There was certainly no pissy yellow fear smell coming off her that day; her tongue did no nervous patting at her upper lip or her philtrum; her blazing eyes were steadfast.

And, after another moment, Young and Heavyset put the tire iron down.

Fred wasn’t aware that a crowd had gathered until he heard the spontaneous applause from perhaps thirty onlookers. He joined in, never more proud of her than he was at that moment. And for the first time, Judy looked startled. She hung in there, though, startled or not. She got the two of them together, tugging Mr. Middle-Aged Suit forward by one arm, and actually hectored them into shaking hands. By the time the cops arrived, Young and Heavyset and Mr. Middle-Aged Suit were sitting side by side on the curb, studying each other’s insurance papers. Case closed.

Fred and Judy walked on toward the campus, holding hands again. For two blocks Fred didn’t speak. Was he in awe of her? He supposes now that he was. At last he said:
That was amazing.

She gave him an uncomfortable little look, an uncomfortable little smile.
No it wasn’t,
she said.
If you want to call it something, call it good citizenship. I could see that guy getting ready to send himself to jail. I didn’t want that to happen. Or the other guy to be hurt.

Yet she said that last almost as an afterthought, and Fred for the first time sensed not only her courage but her unflinching Viking’s heart. She was on the side of Young and Heavyset because . . . well, because the other fellow had been afraid.

Weren’t you worried, though?
he asked her. He had still been so stunned by what he’d seen that it hadn’t crossed his mind—yet—to think he should be a little ashamed; after all, it was his girlfriend who’d stepped in instead of him, and that wasn’t the Gospel According to Hollywood.
Weren’t you afraid that in the heat of the moment the guy with the tire iron would take a swing at you?

Judy’s eyes had grown puzzled.
It never crossed my mind,
she said.

Camelot eventually debouches into Chase Street, where there is a pleasant little gleam of the Mississippi on clear days like this one, but Fred doesn’t go that far. He turns at the top of Liberty Heights and starts back the way he came, his shirt now soaked with sweat. Usually the run makes him feel better, but not today, at least not yet. The fearless Judy of that afternoon on the corner of State and Gorham is so unlike the shifty-eyed, sometimes disconnected Judy who now lives in his house—the nap-taking, hand-wringing Judy—that Fred has actually spoken to Pat Skarda about it. Yesterday, this was, when the doc was in Goltz’s, looking at riding lawn mowers.

Fred had shown him a couple, a Deere and a Honda, inquired after his family, and then asked (casually, he hoped),
Hey, Doc, tell me something—
do you think it’s possible for a person to just go crazy? Without any warning, like?

Skarda had given him a sharper look than Fred had really liked.
Are we talking about an adult or an adolescent, Fred?

Well, we’re not talking about
anyone,
actually.
Big, hearty laugh—unconvincing to Fred’s own ears, and judging from Pat Skarda’s look, not very convincing to him, either.
Not anyone
real,
anyway. But as a hypothetical case, let’s say an adult.