Bloodstone (6 page)

There were others out now, walking through the park-like atmosphere, enjoying the sunshine. They passed a young couple, holding hands. Stowe asked them if they’d seen the falls. They told him they hadn’t, and so he took them down past the church on a nicely paved path, over the banks of a steep hill to an overlook of the river, where the water rushed through a series of deep channels and burst out over the drop, the spray reaching all the way up to them.

As they stood on the edge of it, looking down, Stowe told them the story of Annie’s son Joseph, the boy who had fallen to his death in 1958, the subsequent uproar over the safety of the falls, and the argument regarding the installation of a fence around the edges. Ultimately, the town had decided that a chain-link fence would ruin the natural beauty, which was another way of saying it would scare away the tourists. Stowe told them there were still a few people that were so
bitter about the decision they wouldn’t attend town meetings anymore. “And Annie, she just wasn’t able to handle it. Her mind went, she started predicting all kinds of things, the end of the world. Hellfire and damnation, that sort of stuff. She told everyone that her boy was coming back for her before the end, and they would go up to heaven together. It’s in the Bible, you know—Armageddon?”

“The faithful will be saved,” Smith said.

“Exactly. Well, she just wouldn’t let up. The people felt sorry for her and a little guilty, I guess, and so they kept her out of the state institution and took care of her themselves. They still do. Sue Hall is just the latest in a long line of them to look after Annie.”

The three of them stood and talked for another few minutes before Stowe glanced at his watch, apologized, and said he ought to be getting back to work.

As they walked back across the green grass, Smith thought they had found a friend in White Falls, or at least a friendly face; but later when he thought of that day, it was Annie he kept going back to, crazy Annie’s savage face as she spat out her words from the Gospel According to Luke. Smith had recognized the quote from his early church school days; it recounted the occasion of Easter.
And they
found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they
went in they did not find the body
.

The resurrection. The day Christ rose from the dead.

And that other. Her touch on him, and her words;
You’ve
come back
.

So much pain for one woman to take. Her little boy gone, just gone, and nothing had been done about it. By the time they reached the Old Mill Inn again, though the sky was warm and bright, Smith felt as if a great black shadow had fallen over the world.

Jeb Taylor was in the Friedman’s back garden with the manure again, troweling it under the loose soil, pulling up tree roots near the garden’s border. He had been working through the pain, concentrating on it, focusing it into a small spot in the center of his forehead where it was easier to deal with. God, what he wouldn’t do for a drink right now. Take the edge off a little.

It always struck him, what people would do to have a nice garden, what they would
pay
. Here he was digging and digging and digging, and for what? For plants that would grow and flower and then wither and die in the fall. And then he, or someone else, would be back next spring to do it all over again. Turning the old dirt, mixing in the manure, peat moss, and maybe a little
Miracle-Gro
. Planting the seed, covering it all with a bit of straw for heat, watering carefully, weeding out the unwanted elements. Like a recipe from one of Ruth’s old cookbooks. It seemed like such a waste of time.

In the midst of these thoughts he happened to look up at the house. What he saw there made his breath catch in his throat—Mrs. Friedman, standing at the second-floor window in nothing but a white bra and panties. When she saw him she did not move away. Her hand brushed against the lace curtain, holding it back, and he thought,
she thinks the
sun’s on the glass and I can’t see
. She stood there for a full minute, and Jeb thought it was funny that she would think he couldn’t see when the sun was shining on the front of the house and not the back, and in fact half the garden was in shadow.

He worked for the next several hours in silence as the sun crept over the rooftop and reddened his back, and then took his lunch in the shade of the oak tree just beyond the garden. All this time he didn’t see Mrs. Friedman again, and by late afternoon he had forgotten the whole thing, thinking once again about what he was doing and why the hell he was doing it. Mrs. Friedman wanted a landscaped flower garden with a pebbled stream in the middle, something you saw on one of those home improvement shows. A goddamn waste of time. A manicured “small pebbled stream” belonged in L.A., Beverly Hills maybe, but not Maine. Some hot shit director or movie star with a twenty-acre estate would hire a landscaper who got paid two hundred bucks an hour to do it. Then the landscaper would hire a couple of kids to do the work and make a killing. Jeb had seen it all on
Lifestyles
. Maybe that was something he could do; move to Hollywood and work on famous people’s gardens, sit back in the shade and drink whiskey from tall, cool glasses.

They wouldn’t let you in those big Hollywood gates, Jeb.
They wouldn’t even let you wash their dicks for them
.

True. But it would be nice to live in Hollywood and look at all the pretty girls in bikinis. He sighed, and rubbed at the small of his back where a sharp pain nagged at him. The voices had been getting louder lately, and they never had anything good to say. They’d been running around and around his head, driving him crazy, ever since the night he’d gone up to Thomaston to get the suitcase. The suitcase that was still sitting up in his closet, hidden under the pile of old t-shirts and odd socks and sweat pants.

He split a bag of cow manure down the side and mixed it with peat moss, the peat lifting dust-like in the sunshine and
making him sneeze. The manure was old and dry and smelled like blood. A little of that mixture in with the fresh soil and he would have a good base. He was looking forward to the long trip down to Bath, where he would stop in at the greenery to buy the plants Mrs. Friedman wanted. He loved these trips because they always took an hour or more, and most of the time was spent on the road in his car with the windows down and the radio on. A real sense of freedom, flying down an open road in the sunshine while other people were locked up inside some stuffy office that smelled like old paint. If he hurried he could be ready to do the trip tomorrow or Monday at the very latest, and the plants could go in the ground in another week or two if the weather held.

A few minutes later he looked up to see Mrs. Friedman standing in the open doorway at the rear of the big house, hands on her hips, loose button-down shirt flapping in the slight breeze. Some of her hair had come loose from the elastic, and strands floated around her face. She pushed them back and called out to him.

“Could you come in here for a second? I’ve got something I need help with and I’d like to get to it today.”

He slipped his shirt on and followed her inside.

“The chandelier in the dining room has burned out and I need to get the ladder from the basement,” Mrs. Friedman said, as they walked through the narrow rear hall. She smelled of shampoo and something else he couldn’t place. He saw her hair was still slightly damp at the center. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I can’t carry it alone and we’re having a dinner next Saturday for friends, and I’m just a mess running around trying to remember everything. I’d like to get this done while I’m thinking of it.”

He nodded, following her through the kitchen, down into the dim basement, thinking that only rich Beverly Hills people had “a dinner for friends,” and that maybe the Friedmans should move there and get the hell out of Maine. The old wooden stepladder was on its side against the stone
foundation down at the end of the first chamber, between a bunch of boxes and old paint cans and storm windows. On the way over he was aware of Mrs. Friedman close behind him, the smell of her shampoo hanging in the air.

“Just take one end,” she said, “and I’ll take the other, if I can manage it.” They lifted it awkwardly, Jeb fumbling around for a place to put his feet amid the clutter. His head kept brushing the light cord that hung down in his face, sending it flapping around. The basement was musty and smelled of varnish. It was a big basement, the kind that felt like a crypt, with exposed brick and stone, low ceilings, and interconnecting rooms that doubled back on themselves. He didn’t like confined spaces. He felt trapped, like the walls were trying to close in on him.

They got the ladder to the basement steps, and it took another minute of maneuvering to work it around the support beams and up the narrow space. Jeb took the bottom end and pushed. His head throbbed, his hangover made worse by the varnish smell.

“Phew,” Mrs. Friedman said when they finally had the ladder propped up against the dining room wall. She wiped her brow with a shirtsleeve. “Thank you, honey. I think you lifted most of that yourself. That would have been too much for me.”

“Welcome, Mrs. Friedman.”

“Please, you’ve been working here for weeks now. Call me Julie, okay? I’d like that much better.” She brushed his bare arm with a hand. “I don’t act like a Mrs., do I? I always think of little old ladies when I hear that.”

Jeb, who had thought of her as a Mrs. from the first moment he met her, said nothing.

“I don’t know if I’ve told you what a good job you’ve been doing around here. Pat doesn’t have the time to help out anymore, with the law practice becoming so busy. Would you like a cool drink? I think I have a soda in the kitchen…” She walked through an archway, and he heard a
refrigerator door opening and closing, and the pop of a soda can. A moment later she returned with a glass of Coke. “There. That should help with the heat. I don’t know how you stand it out there in the sun all day.”

“It’s only April. Wait till July.” He took a long drink of the soda. It felt good on the back of his throat.

“I was wondering,” Mrs. Friedman interrupted, smiling, “it’s a little embarrassing really. I’m sort of afraid of heights. The ladder—if you’d help me with the bulbs…Please, it would only take a minute. I know, I’m just a silly old woman. Older than you, anyway.” She was still smiling at him, the corners of her mouth curling up. For a crazy moment he almost believed she was going to keep smiling, her mouth getting wider and wider until she swallowed him up.

“I’m almost nineteen.” As soon as he said it, he wanted to pull it back in.

“Nineteen? My, I wouldn’t have guessed that. You look more like twenty-five to me. You remind me of the way Pat used to be, a long time ago.”

Control was slipping away from him. Something was going on here, but it was like he had been invited to a party and not given directions. The anger welled up in him again.

“Just those two on the right side of the chandelier,” she was saying as she went into the other room again. He thought she was going to leave him there to do it himself, but in a moment she swept back in carrying two boxes of light bulbs. “What do you think, sixty or hundred watt?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Sixty, then. A little less light makes things so much more romantic, don’t you think?”

She’s making fun of you, just like all the rest, can’t you
see her laughing? Don’t let her laugh at you. Do something
.

“I don’t know,” he repeated. Stupid. Why couldn’t he ever say what he was thinking? He put the soda down and began to set up the ladder, feeling the blood in his face and knowing
he had turned beet red, hating himself for it and her for doing this to him.

She stood under the ladder as he climbed, and when she handed up the box of bulbs her hand brushed his and it seemed to him she let it linger there a few seconds longer than necessary. He remembered the glimpse of her standing in the window that morning. He hadn’t had much experience with women, and he didn’t know what to do with this one now. Mrs. Friedman was older than he was, but she was still attractive in a rich-bitch sort of way. She had a few wrinkles around her mouth (laugh wrinkles, Ruth used to call them), and her hair had a few streaks of gray, but she knew how to hold herself all right.

He took the box and turned to the chandelier, flustered, and as he did she kept talking below him, going on about something to do with the party and how nice the grounds looked. He screwed the dead bulbs out and replaced them with the new ones. When he glanced down he saw with a shock that Mrs. Friedman had slipped out of her button-down shirt and now wore only a white tank top. She wore no bra now. Her nipples showed through the fabric. “It’s so hot in here.” She sighed. “Don’t you think it’s hot? I just took a bath and now I feel like I need another.”

“I don’t know.”

“Is that all you can say?” The smile had turned playful, and she made no move to cover herself, even though she was almost naked.

“I don’t—” He stopped himself before he said it again. The blood had begun to thump in his ears (and somewhere else), so loud he thought for sure she could hear it too.

“Why don’t you come down here before you fall.” He climbed down the ladder, and she stood dizzyingly close. He could smell the shampoo again, and another smell underneath, too light for him to make out. He stared down at her breasts under the tank top, unable to help himself. “Do you like working for me, Jeb?” she said softly. Her voice was
low and steady, soothing. “I love it that you’re here. I get so lonely during the day, Pat’s at work until all hours of the night. I never know when he’ll come home. Sometimes it’s not until ten or eleven o’clock.” She reached out with her finger, tracing a line down his arm, across the inside of his elbow. She took his hand and placed it against her breast. “Here,” she breathed softly. “That’s it.”

He squeezed, feeling her nipple harden against his palm. Blood thundered in his ears. She sighed again, her eyes drifting closed. A smile played about the corners of her mouth.

Throw her down Jeb, rip her clothes off, that’s what she
wants you to do, put your mouth on her breasts and her
stomach and let her touch you what’s wrong are you gay,
that’s what they’ll say, what she’ll say they’ll all laugh at
you in town everybody will know you’ll be the joke of the
year the little stupid Taylor boy who never even had a
woman can’t get it up
—

Her hand had slipped to the top of his pants, it was moving lower, lower…

“I have to go,” he managed to sputter, and then he was stumbling out of the house and into the sunshine, and the thing he felt was not sexual at all, he felt
rage
, more anger than he had ever felt in his life. She had been teasing and making fun of him like all the rest. He clenched his hands into fists and felt the nails cutting into his palms again like they had before, and this time he didn’t stop until he felt blood running across his wrist.

As he was stumbling into his car she came out. “Jeb, wait.” Her voice had changed. “Are you all right? I didn’t mean—” Then she saw the blood on his hands, and she covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”

And that was somehow worse than anything else. The look in her eyes.

He started the car and spun out of the driveway, leaving
her standing there, knowing she would be back inside in an instant and on the phone to her fat ugly friends spreading the news that Jeboriah Taylor was a scared little faggot.

At Johnny’s he sat in a corner booth with half a bottle of whiskey and went over the scene again and again in his mind. She had been up to something all right. Probably wasn’t used to someone refusing her. He thought about what might have happened if he had grabbed her hard and pressed his lips against hers, and then lifted her up and carried her to the bedroom. Like a real man. Would she have gone willingly? It seemed impossible to believe, a rich woman like that willing to go to bed with him, Jeb Taylor, handyman, town idiot, son of the murderer Ronnie Taylor. He decided once again that she had been playing a game with him.

A very dangerous game, wasn’t it? Because couldn’t you
have kissed her anyway? There wasn’t anyone else around.
Couldn’t you have gotten so angry that you couldn’t help
yourself, that you might even have—?

He poured another shot and downed it, feeling the burn across his lips and throat, sliding down into his stomach. It lit up his entire body with tongues of fire, caressing him, easing the pain in his cut hands. He looked down at the tiny half moons of broken skin. The rage inside of him was so strong and insistent that for a moment he felt he would explode. And the voices in his head just wouldn’t go away. He felt as if he were being pulled apart by something unseen and all-powerful.