Giovanni's Gift (27 page)

“You can't fault a man for dreaming,” and in the foyer he gave me my jacket and pointed at the bandage on my left palm. “I've been meaning to ask, Grant. What happened there? Looks like you took quite a fall.”

“It's nothing,” I managed; all I wanted was out.

“Maybe you ought to be more careful about where you're going.”

Driving the switchbacks down the pass from the hillside aerie, lighting a cigarette with my injured but free hand, I grew furious with myself for having agreed to meet with Tate. How ridiculous of me to think he would offer anything other than lies and flamboyant deflections. His tender assertion that he would never do anything that would hurt his wife rang hollow as a cracked bell, not to mention his factitious concern about my hand. Above all, the map, which Tate must have laid out for me to see—or, even worse, had left on the desk in complete disregard of whether I saw it or not, utter indifference—this map focused my impotence, my helplessness. Tate was not a man on whose shoulders a pair of angel wings looked very good; but neither was I. Are the greedy and vengeful any better than the inept and traitorous? And I was traitorous—wasn't I?—because I had no intention of telling anyone about this map. How could I tell, even if I wanted to? What was I supposed to do, go narrate to Henry that during a pleasant game of darts, Tate shared his covetous dreams with me? Not hardly. Grant, what a fool you are, I thought. The lights in the valley below were sparse, and burned like the reflections of the brightest of the stars above, so that for one moment I experienced the sensation of being in space, surrounded by cold fiery stars. As I descended toward town—my left hand, the injured one, lay in my lap—I thought back over what had happened just the night before, and how I'd come by this painful bruise. I wondered, was there any way on earth that Tate hadn't known exactly what had transpired up at Ash Creek? or, more to the point, who was there, last night, armed with a crowbar and either rancor or a twisted sense of humor?

There had been the pounding on the roof that awoke me from my sleep. There had been soon afterward voices in the hall, which I recognized as those of Henry and Edmé. Then there had been a brief silence followed by half a dozen rapid jolting whacks. Never had I heard my aunt Edmé scream before, but now I heard her scream. As if by rote, I'd turned off my lamp and sat unmoving in the blackness, convinced this was a nightmare. Quiet then for another interval, in which I found myself counting out the seconds—one pause, two pause, three pause, four—and yes, there'd been more hammering, lashing hard with metal—surely that was a tire iron—on metal. And now I was up, too, out into the dark hall, and downstairs, hearing the hoarse whispers of my uncle and aunt, as the pummeling echoed down through the walls and window glass. Somehow, I had dressed in the interim, had pulled on sweater, pants, shoes without socks, and as I rushed past them, silhouetted in the pale light that gave through the windows from the tentative sky outside, I did whisper to my uncle, “Don't shoot,” as I bounded onto the porch and noisily marched the length of veranda toward the rise behind the house. “Who's there?” I shouted in a voice so hostile it seemed like someone else's, as I stomped along, and “Get down off there—
come on, you son of a bitch
.”

The bludgeoning percussion had ceased. I stood at the end of the porch, now very quiet, listening. Behind me, the kitchen door opened and rattled shut. Henry was out here, too, I assumed. Above, on the eaves, all was still. Only the eternal wash of stream water in the lowest folds of the valley gave up any sound. This standoff lasted, again, for some incalculable length of time. It seemed unusually foolhardy of the night visitor to have climbed onto the roof, where he could be treed, so to speak, cornered in his arrogance without any easy path of escape. I could hear Henry down in the yard below, and shivered from the damp chill. Henry trained a flashlight on the roof; I saw the single bright beam sweep slowly from south to north, though could not see what it illuminated on the eaves above me. No shouting, no cursing, no threats. All was eerily calm—so much so that I felt emboldened by the quiet and left the relative security of the veranda for the footpath at the base of the knoll. Having walked it so recently, my feet recalled its first switchbacks in the lightless night. Breezes stirred the leaves of trees, the atmosphere upset, I supposed, from the earlier quick blizzard. I turned around twenty, thirty feet up the rise, from where I could now see the rooflines.

“Come on, man,” I muttered. “Come on down.”

No sooner had these words settled themselves into the air than I heard a scraping, scratching sound on the far side of the house, to the west, and just instinctively moved toward the clamor there. Henry clearly heard, too, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed his flashlight bobbing past the pebbled walk that led to the front gate, up the gentle grade between the big pines south of the house and the long front porch. Myself, I stumbled blind across the base of the rise, through the kind of natural alley between the back gable and scrubby hill. There was the squeal of torn tin, which I presumed was a rain gutter peeling away from its moorings as the prowler came sliding off the roof and, having caught himself on the lip of the gutter, plunged to the earth, bringing the conduits down with him. This was it, I believed; he would break a leg in the fall, or else be knocked out cold when he hit the hard ground, and now we would finally learn what all this was about. I hurried, tripping, catching the butt of my hand on stone, hoping to arrive around at the west end of the house before my uncle, in case there was a scuffle.

When I came to the corner, I stopped momentarily, caught my breath, listened. It seemed darker around on this side than on the other. Faint as something nearly forgotten were the footfalls I heard—or, rather, the rhythmic brush of someone's legs combing fast through grass, running away from the house, up into the long field that rose toward the saddle ridge and fenced boundary beyond. Wary, I took some steps out into the black open yard. Henry arrived from around the opposite side, and I called out to him to shine his flashlight up into the field. The ghostly sphere leapt over grass and ground as he swept back and forth across the darkness, bringing into view small chunks of landscape at any given instant. Nothing, nothing, and no one. And then, yes. The figure was quite distant already, and running with surreal agility and haste. But still, there he was, embraced at least for the moment in a luminescence by which we could see him. I was off, in pursuit without the slightest thought of what I would do should I happen to catch up. Henry, too, chased him across the field—the figure was already half a hundred yards ahead of us—but it wasn't long before both the intruder and I had left him back alone in the field, catching his breath while continuing to hold the flashlight on the pursued, until both the night visitor and I had sprinted beyond its range, where the pitch blackness of the night encompassed every shape and form, and the only senses left to me to trail him by were hearing and taste, for I swear to God I could taste the person on my tongue, as one would taste a bad penny placed there. It was a taste impossible to describe, not acrid nor tart, nor sweet nor sour. Tasted of nothing, tasted of a thousand subtle poisons.

My voice cried out, “Stop,” but the man kept running—I could hear the crashing footfalls not so far ahead of me—and it was as if, again, another voice proclaimed, in a rough imitation of my own, “I said
stop.
I've got a gun.” The voice that came from my mouth, that bellowed those words and that lie, might as well have been the devil's own, for what they provoked. I myself now stopped, because I no longer heard those comfortable sounds of the intruder escaping my pursuit. What I heard now was the very faraway sound of my uncle laboring up this long ridge, as I stared hard as I could into the blackness ahead, and tried to hold down the clamor of my gasping breath. Something here was going wrong, I knew. This was the first time I felt the searing panic rise through me. The first understanding that now, here, I was in serious danger. Or could be.

Then it was I fell hard on the outcropping of stone, having been broadsided, knocked down full force without warning. Far too startled to react with anything approaching intelligence or swiftness, I sat there stunned, in total darkness. The ache in my hand suggested to me that my skin was torn away. Instinctively, I touched the palm to my lips to see if it was wet with blood. My back throbbed, my shoulders stung, pain irradiated through me. Even my pride, such as it might have been worth at that juncture, had been bruised. I heard the intruder—the assailant—running fast in a new direction, down along the fence line toward the east. Henry was still too far behind for me to bother calling out to him to shine the light toward the horsegate, where apparently the intruder was headed. It occurred to me that I might as well remain where I was, curled into a seated fetal ball. Why stand if there was any chance of being knocked over again? And why believe that, even if the man who'd assaulted me was halfway down the slope by now, making his escape, some other person didn't lurk nearby, ready to come at me? Hadn't I mistakenly thought the person I'd been chasing was far ahead of me? I decided to remain right where I was, since the hillside had become populous with night visitors, at least in my imagination.

The morning after, my uncle discovered the scene in his studio that Tate would refer to when I met with him later at his house in a room full of books he would never read. My uncle's utopian city of board and paste was demolished, leveled most likely with the same length of iron that had been used to pound the roof and wake us all from our sleep.

Henry was apoplectic. He was grim and unnerved and enraged at the same time. As well, he seemed beaten. He entered the kitchen, where Edmé and I sat, having just finished putting salve and bandages on my hand, ourselves still in shock from the visit during the night, and collapsed slowly into the chair beside the telephone stand at the doorway there, pale and staring blind ahead into the room.

“Henry, my God, what is it?” Edmé said, rising to approach him. Her hand was delicately extended in his direction, the fingers, I saw, tentative, even trembling. Edmé's reaction to Henry was difficult for me to watch. She knew this man; it was clear she'd not often seen him this distraught. Even David Lewis's news had not caused in him this kind of response. My mind, beginning to race, imagined this was just the look he had on his face the day he came back from his hike into the gorge after having discovered Giovanni's mutilated corpse.

“They just wouldn't do that,” he said, casually.

“What?” said Edmé, her voice lowered. She moved toward him as one might approach a hurt animal, tenderly but with a kind of slow caution—as if he might jump from catatonia into a frenzy.

“They wouldn't.”

“They who? Henry?” Edmé asked.

Henry turned abruptly toward me, and locked his eye on mine. “You answer that question, Grant.”

“You're asking me?”

“Don't you see your responsibility in this?”

Now I stood up. “Wait just a minute. This was going on long before I got here. You can't blame this on me.”

“It was never this bad. They came and woke us up, maybe, with their music. They'd do things like that. Pranks, kid stuff. It wasn't until you came that it turned violent, burning buildings and vandalism and—”

“I haven't done anything,” I said.

Edmé placed her hand on Henry's shoulder, interrupting his concentration. He glanced up at her, but then right back at me.

“Grant hasn't done anything, Henry,” she echoed, quiet, firm.

“They completely destroyed it. It wasn't like it meant a thing to anybody else. I don't see why they had to do that.”

Truly he was talking like a child.

“Edmé?” I asked; though I had no question other than a vague query, I suppose, about what to do.

Henry continued on a different tack, “Parading around with Helen like you are, can't keep your pants up for two minutes, is it any wonder you're in another divorce? Your father would be ashamed; your mother, too. You don't even know Helen—”

“Henry, stop,” Edmé breathed.

“—and what do you care about Giovanni Trentas, going around asking about his murder? Who the hell do you think you are? You think people don't talk to each other, you think this hasn't gotten back to me?
Now
look. They break into the studio and do this. You're going to make it so they
do
win, so they push us out of here. You're on
their
side.”

“Edmé,” I said, myself trembling at this outburst. “Tell him again I didn't have anything to do with whatever it is.”

“You heard Grant?” she asked him.

“I heard,” he shouted, then quietly, “I heard.”

Finally, averting his eyes, my uncle wept.

He would find me later in the day and apologize. I accepted the apology and made one of my own, but knew that a profound change had taken place between us; or rather, a schism that maybe had been there for some long time without acknowledgment had been unveiled, revealed to us both.

And now, not so very many hours later, here I was, hearing the voices of Henry and Tate commingling in my head, speaking to me as I made one last turn in the road, which delivered me again into the long valley. The stars were all above me, as well they should be. The road was straight, which I preferred, for once. I rid myself of the voices by listening to the wind rushing around the edges of the old jeep. It was chilly, and the heater did not work. I found myself shivering a little and thought quite seriously, for the first time since I'd arrived in Ash Creek, about driving and driving all night in any direction that might carry me away from here. My usual fantasy under such circumstances was to wonder how I might go about finding Jude, and then give myself over to a Jude reverie. But that seemed less palatable than in times past. And not because I'd promised myself I'd leave my direction to the whims of chance, but because that promise seemed more and more one which, if I had any wisdom left in me, I would go out of my way not to keep.