Graves' Retreat (13 page)

    “But how long have you been planning it?”

    He sighed. “Years, I have to admit. Years.”

    “And you won’t ever do it.”

    “I’ll surprise you someday.”

    “I’m afraid you won’t, Byron. That’s what I’m really and truly afraid of.”

    After a pause, he said, “Lillie Langtry is at the opera house, you know.”

    She said it very simply, the way the most terrible things are often said. “I won’t be seeing you anymore, Byron.”

    “My God, Susan, do you know what you’ve just said?”

    “Yes.”

    “And you’re serious?”

    “Yes.”

    “But, Susan-”

    “I may be going away.”

    “But where?”

    “Maybe I’ll go to live with my Aunt Juanita in Omaha.”

    “But Omaha-”

    “It’s a nice enough city. Progressive.”

    “But our plans-”

    She could see he was in shock and she felt terrible for him.

    But lately the griefs of her girlhood had begun to overwhelm her again. She needed a man who could protect her from her own father. And Byron, much as she loved him, simply was not that man.

    He stood over her now and took her hand.

    “All I can ask is that you reconsider.”

    “Byron, I haven’t come to this decision rashly.”

    “But I can change. You’ll see.”

    “Byron, you’ve said that for so many years. I’ve asked you over and over again not to let him-” She sighed. “You know how he treats you.”

    Byron said, “Maybe I’m not the weakling you think I am.”

    “I don’t think you’re a weakling,” she said softly.

    But he seemed angry now, defensive. “But that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

    “No, it’s not, really. It’s just-you let my father cow you.”

    “And I suppose Les Graves wouldn’t?”

    “Les Graves?” She wondered if he knew about the dozen meetings she’d had with Les.

    “I saw the way you watched him the other night. Heard the admiration in your voice when you talked about him.”

    She shook her head. All Byron referred to was how she’d praised Les’s pitching.

    “I said he was a good athlete was all.”

    “But you seem to run out of any kind words for me. When was the last time you called me a ‘good’ anything?”

    She saw how hurt he was and sensed that the conversation was about to turn pointlessly vicious.

    She stood up and walked over to the edge of the veranda. She listened to the night’s dogs and bam owls and birds.

    “I’m sorry I’ve hurt you,” she said, her back to him. “Maybe I’ll change my mind once I’ve been in Omaha awhile.”

    “Omaha!” he scoffed. “I wish you’d get that damn silly notion out of your head!”

    His voice had been like a rifle shot.

    Her mother came to the French doors. “Are you all right, Susan?”

    “Yes,” Susan called back. "I’m fine, Mother.”

    “You’re sure?”

    “I’m sure.”

    “Why is Byron so upset?”

    “We’re just talking, Mother. It’s all right. Really.”

    There was a pause and then her mother said, “Why don’t you give Byron some lemonade?” She made it sound as if a simple glass of lemonade would make the world a completely better place to live.

    After her mother had returned to the parlor and her knitting, Susan said, “I’m sorry I’ve hurt you, Byron.”

    “I’m sorry I got so angry.”

    “I understand.”

    “I hope you’re not serious about Omaha.”

    “I think I’d like to give it a try.”

    “I-I’ll miss you so much I’ll be insane, Susan. I mean that.”

    “I’ll miss you, too, Byron. You don’t know how much.”

    Then suddenly he took her into his arms and said, “Then don’t go. You don’t have to go. I’ll change. You’ll see. I’ll prove it to you.” Gently, she pushed him away. “I should go in now, Byron.”

    “But, Susan-”

    “Please, Byron.” She touched his fine face with her silken hand. “Please let’s not hurt each other anymore. I really need to go in.”

    In the moonlight, his eyes were silver with tears. His voice was a rasp. “I love you, Susan,” he said.

    And then he turned and ran, vanished into the secret parting of the hedges.

    She heard him run through the dewy grass and leap over the creek nearby and land heavily on the other side, and then keep on running through the night, as if the sheer energy of it would give him succor.

    As perhaps it would.

    Then she turned and went up to the French doors and stood looking for a time at her mother. What a splendid house. What a splendid prison.

    Before her father broke her as he’d broken her mother and brothers, Susan would leave.

    She went upstairs to write her aunt in Omaha.

    There were seven hotels in Cedar Rapids, four of them in the downtown area.

    

    

    Neely spent the next forty-five minutes going to each one trying to find out if Black Jake Early was staying there.

    At each hotel Neely took from his pocket a fat leather wallet, pinned into the flap of which was a heavily ornamented four-pointed silver star.

    "Yes, sir,” the clerk at the final hotel said when he saw Neely’s badge.

    “There’s a man I have some interest in.”

    “Interest in, sir?”

    Neely paused, giving the man as sober a stare as possible. “Yes. An interest in.”

    “I see. An interest in.” The way the man said it, Black Jake Early might have been guilty of anything from burning down orphanages to sedition.

    “Now, I’m going to describe him and I’d like you to think very hard and see if he might not be staying in your fine hotel here.”

    When he said this, Neely glanced around the sad lobby, where several men gummed, a few of whom lacked various limbs, told and retold Civil War stories. The place stank from the meat-packing house five blocks away. Neely wondered if late at night, lying on their beds, they could hear the animals screaming as they were led down the ramps onto the killing floor.

    The man still stared at Neely’s badge. People’s fixation on authority had always bothered him. Show a man a badge and his voice would take on the cowed and toadying cadence of a child seeking a favor. He lost all dignity. Even when he’d been part of the labor movement back in Chicago-even the socialists had set up a hierarchy with leaders and symbols little different from those of the government they wanted to tear down.

    “I’ll be willing to help any way I can, sir,” the clerk said. He was skinny and wore a red string tie under the soiled collar of his white shirt.

    Neely closed his plump wallet and put it back in his pocket. “He’s very big,” Neely said. “Very big. And he usually wears a black Stetson and three-piece suits and he’s got a small scar just to the left of his mouth-”

    “Good Lord,” the clerk said.

    “Excuse me?”

    “He’s here. Right here at this hotel. Good Lord,” the clerk said nervously, glancing around as if an invading army were camped just outside the plate glass window, which had been taped back together after some accident.

    “He’s in the hotel, then?”

    “Well, not right at the precise, exact moment, no, sir.”

    "But he is staying here?”

    “Oh, yes, he’s staying here.”

    Neely leaned even closer to the man. “You didn’t happen to talk to him, did you?”

    “No, sir, he’s just not that sort.”

    “What sort?”

    “The sort you talk to. Not unless he talks to you first.”

    “I see.”

    “Have you ever seen him? Up close, I mean?”

    “No, I guess I haven’t.”

    “It’s his eyes.”

    “What about them?”

    “Well, sir, we’ve had our share of roughhouses come through here -this place doesn’t always attract the genteel sort-but this man's eyes… They’re mean. The kind you read about in the newspaper. When they talk about how killers look.”

    “Killers,” Neely said, letting the man’s imagination do all the rest. “Maybe now you know why it’s sort of important we find this man.” Now it was the clerk who leaned forward to Neely. "What’s going to happen? If there’s going to be trouble, I’d better send somebody up to Mound Farm.”

    “Mound farm?”

    “That’s the part of town where the owner lives.”

    “There won’t be any trouble. At least not right now. I just need you to help me out a little bit.”

    “Help you out how?”

    Neely nodded to the room keys on the hooks behind the man. “I need to look in his room. Just to make sure he’s the right man.” For the first time the clerk showed some hesitation. “Boy, sir, I don’t know. I really think I’d better get the owner down here. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

    Neely raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Just time enough for Early to come back and know that we’re on his trail.”

    Then the clerk’s frown changed to a half smile. “I guess I didn’t think of that.”

    “I need that key. For just a few minutes is all.”

    The clerk scanned the lobby. As if somebody might be watching them or overhearing.

    From outside on the hot air drifted the smells of freshly killed hogs. In England some of the socialists Neely had met were vegetarians. He’d thought of being that himself, sometimes.

    He put out a hand and the clerk put a key in it.

    “You really got to be quick about it,” the clerk said, an edge coming back into his voice.

    “I’ll be very quick,” Neely said. “Very quick.”

    He went through the lobby and up the stairs and down a long hall smelling of cheap pine and bleach. The sounds coming from behind the doors put him in mind of the hospitals he’d been in at the end of the war. Coughing, spitting up, groaning- He’d had a leg injury but that wasn’t half as bad as the noises he’d had to put up with during his three-week stay.

    

    

    Early’s room was at the end of the hall. He slipped the key into the lock and went in.

    The place was what you expected. Shabby furnishings and a bed that sagged in the middle. You smelled sweat and you smelled piss. The window was open at least and there was a slight breeze.

    In the comer Neely found a big, colorful carpetbag. He dumped it out on the bed, working in the dim illumination of the streetlight outside, going through its contents one by one. Shirts-two expensive white ones; trousers wide enough to fit two normal-size men inside; a book,
Kidnapped,
by Robert Louis Stevenson; rags and oil for cleaning guns; socks, underwear, string ties.

    Then he found it.

    A stiff piece of white paper folded in half.

    He took it over to the window and opened it up so he could get a good look at it.

    There was T.Z.’s image. The baggageman had lived just long enough to give the railroad authorities a very good description of T.Z.

    Neely went over and put everything back inside the carpetbag.

    So that’s why Black Jake Early was here for sure.

    For T.Z.

    From inside his suit coat pocket, Neely took a pencil stub. He went over to the bureau and found a piece of paper, and then he quickly wrote a note. It said:

    YOU WANT T. Z. GRAVES. I WILL HELP YOU FIND HIM. I WILL CONTACT YOU TOMORROW NIGHT. I EXPECT A PART OF THE REWARD FOR THE RISK I’M TAKING.

    He put the note right on the bed, right where Black Jake Early would be able to see it the moment he walked into the room.

    Then he stood for a moment in the long shadows of the shabby hotel room.

    He thought about what he’d just done. In the days when he’d had ideals left, he could not have even conceived of such a thing. But nothing meant anything anymore. He had seen too many starving and wounded children and too many murderous rich people to believe that the world made any sort of sense at all. You did what you did to prolong your life as long as you could-feed your hungry belly, find a roof to keep out the rain, take pleasures where you found them (liquor, furtive women)-and then you died and there was just oblivion and you left behind you starving and wounded children and murderous rich people.

    So in the scheme of things, it did not really matter that he would betray T.Z.

    There was just oblivion waiting and no, it did not matter at all.

    But for all his hardness, he was shaking and sweating unduly, and he left the room abruptly, as if something in it had threatened to contaminate him.

    

    

    She sang “Angus Dei” and “Oh Beautiful Mother” and then there was silence and Les just sat in that silence there in the church, afraid to make a move and afraid not to make a move, lest May Tolan leave the church before he had a chance to see her.

    He heard the lid closing on the organ and then he heard the organist say “Good night, May” with a whispered clarity that echoed off the tall ceiling.

    “Good night, Clarissa,” May Tolan whispered back.

    Then there were footsteps creaking down the choir loft stairs as the organist left and then the sound of the heavy front door being pushed open with some effort by a frail woman. For a moment there was the smell of apple blossoms from outside commingling with the incense in the church. The door fell shut again and once more there was just the silence.

    For a time Les just stared at the altar ahead of him, at Christ crucified above the communion rail, cruel spikes through the palms of his hands and the arch of his crossed feet. The crown of thorns looked sharp from even this distance.