Hearts In Atlantis (66 page)

Sharon knows . . . exactly what
does
Sharon know? Some of it, yes. Just how much he can't say. Certainly enough to provide the tinsel; enough to tell him he looks nice in his Paul Stuart suit and blue Sulka tie; enough to wish him a good day and remind him to get the eggnog. It is enough. All is well in Willie's world except for Jasper Wheelock. What is he going to do about Jasper Wheelock?

Maybe I ought to follow you some night
, Wheelock whispers in his ear as Willie shifts the increasingly heavy case from one hand to the other. Both arms ache now; he will be glad to reach his building.
See what you do. See who you turn into
.

What, exactly, is he going to do about Jasper the Police-Smurf? What
can
he do?

He doesn't know.

The young panhandler in the dirty red sweatshirt is long gone, his place taken by yet another streetcorner Santa. Willie has no trouble recognizing the tubby young fellow currently dropping a dollar into Santa's pot.

“Hey, Ralphie!” he cries.

Ralph Williamson turns, his face lights up when he recognizes Willie, and he raises one gloved hand. It's snowing harder now; with the bright lights around him and Santa Claus beside him, Ralph looks like the central figure in a holiday greeting card. Or maybe a modern-day Bob Cratchit.

“Hey, Willie! How's it goin?”

“Like a house afire,” Willie says, approaching Ralph with an easy grin on his face. He sets his case down with a grunt, feels in his pants pocket, finds a buck for Santa's pot. Probably just another crook, and his hat's a moth-eaten piece of shit, but what the hell.

“What you got in there?” Ralph asks, looking down at Willie's case as he fiddles with his scarf. “Sounds like you busted open some little kid's piggy bank.”

“Nah, just heatin coils,” Willie says. “ 'Bout a damn thousand of em.”

“You working right up until Christmas?”

“Yeah,” he says, and suddenly has a glimmer of an idea about Wheelock. Just a twinkle, here and gone, but hey, it's a start. “Yeah, right up until Christmas. No rest for the wicked, you know.”

Ralph's wide and pleasant face creases in a smile. “I doubt if you're very wicked.”

Willie smiles back. “You don't know what evil lurks in the heart of the heatin-n-coolin man, Ralphie. I'll probably take a few days off after Christmas, though. I'm thinkin that might be a really good idea.”

“Go south? Florida, maybe?”

“South?” Willie looks startled, then laughs. “Oh, no,” he says. “Not
this
kid. I've got plenty to do around the house. A person's got to keep their house in order. Else it might come right down around their ears someday when the wind blows.”

“I suppose.” Ralph bundles the scarf higher around his ears. “See you tomorrow?”

“You bet,” Willie says and holds out his gloved hand. “Gimme five.”

Ralphie gives him five, then turns his hand over. His smile is shy but eager. “Give me ten, Willie.”

Willie gives him ten. “How good is that, Ralphie-baby?”

The man's shy smile becomes a gleeful boy's grin. “So goddam good I gotta do it again!” he cries, and slaps Willie's hand with real authority.

Willie laughs. “You the man, Ralph. You get
over
.”

“You the man, too, Willie,” Ralph replies, speaking with a prissy earnestness that's sort of funny. “Merry Christmas.”

“Right back atcha.”

He stands where he is for a moment, watching Ralph trudge off into the snow. Beside him, the streetcorner Santa rings his bell monotonously. Willie picks up his case and starts for the door of his building. Then something catches his eye, and he pauses.

“Your beard's on crooked,” he says to the Santa.
“If you want people to believe in you, fix your fuckin beard.”

He goes inside.

There's a big carton in the storage annex of Midtown Heating and Cooling. It's full of cloth bags, the sort banks use to hold loose coins. Such bags usually have various banks' names printed on them, but these don't—Willie orders them direct from the company in Moundsville, West Virginia, that makes them.

He opens his case, quickly sets aside the rolls of bills (these he will carry home in his Mark Cross briefcase), then fills four bags with coins. In a far corner of the storage room is a battered old metal cabinet simply marked
PARTS.
Willie swings it open—there is no lock to contend with—and reveals another hundred or so coin-stuffed bags. A dozen times a year he and Sharon tour the midtown churches, pushing these bags through the contribution slots or hinged package-delivery doors when they will fit, simply leaving them by the door when they won't. The lion's share always goes to St. Pat's, where he spends his days wearing dark glasses and a sign.

But not
every
day, he thinks, now undressing. I don't have to be there
every
day, and he thinks again that maybe Bill, Willie, and Blind Willie Garfield will take the week after Christmas off. In that week there might be a way to handle Officer Wheelock. To make him go away. Except  . . .

“I can't kill him,” he says in a low, nagging voice. “I'll be fucked if I kill him.” Only fucked isn't what he's worried about.
Damned
is what he's worried about. Killing was different in Vietnam, or seemed different, but this isn't Vietnam, isn't the green. Has he built these years of penance just to tear them down again? God is testing him, testing him, testing him. There is an answer here. He knows there is, there must be. He is just—ha-ha, pardon the pun—too blind to see it.

Can he even
find
the self-righteous son of a bitch? Shit yeah, that's not the problem. He can find Jasper the Police-Smurf, all right. Just about any old time he wants. Trail him right to wherever it is that he takes off his gun and his shoes and puts his feet up on the hassock. But then what?

He worries at this as he uses cold cream to remove his makeup, and then he puts his worries away. He takes the Nov–Dec ledger out of its drawer, sits at his desk, and for twenty minutes he writes
I am heartily sorry for hurting Carol
. He fills an entire page, top to bottom and margin to margin. He puts it back, then dresses in Bill Shearman's clothes. As he is putting away Blind Willie's boots, his eye falls on the scrapbook with its red leather cover. He takes it out, puts it on top of the file-cabinet, and flips back the cover with its single word—
MEMORIES
—stamped in gold.

On the first page is the certificate of a live birth—William Robert Shearman, born January 4th, 1946—and his tiny footprints. On the following pages are pictures of him with his mother, pictures of him with his father (Pat Shearman smiling as if he had never pushed his son over in his high chair or hit his wife
with a beer bottle), pictures of him with his friends. Harry Doolin is particularly well represented. In one snapshot eight-year-old Harry is trying to eat a piece of Willie's birthday cake with a blindfold on (a forfeit in some game, no doubt). Harry's got chocolate smeared all over his cheeks, he's laughing and looks as if he doesn't have a mean thought in his head. Willie shivers at the sight of that laughing, smeary, blindfolded face. It almost always makes him shiver.

He flips away from it, toward the back of the book, where he's put the pictures and clippings of Carol Gerber he has collected over the years: Carol with her mother, Carol holding her brand-new baby brother and smiling nervously, Carol and her father (him in Navy dress blue and smoking a cigarette, her looking up at him with big wonderstruck eyes), Carol on the j.v. cheering squad at Harwich High her freshman year, caught in midleap with one hand waving a pom-pom and the other holding down her pleated skirt, Carol and John Sullivan on tinfoil thrones at Harwich High in 1965, the year they were elected Snow Queen and Snow King at the Junior-Senior prom. They look like a couple on a wedding cake, Willie thinks this every time he looks at the old yellow newsprint. Her gown is strapless, her shoulders flawless. There is no sign that for a little while, once upon a time, the left one was hideously deformed, sticking up in a witchlike double hump. She had cried before that last hit, cried plenty, but mere crying hadn't been enough for Harry Doolin. That last time he had swung from the heels, and the smack of the bat hitting her had been like the sound of a mallet hitting a half-thawed roast, and
then
she had screamed, screamed so loud that Harry had
fled without even looking back to see if Willie and Richie O'Meara were following him. Took to his heels, had old Harry Doolin, ran like a jackrabbit. But if he hadn't? Suppose that, instead of running, Harry had said
Hold her, guys, I ain't listening to that, I'm going to shut her up
, meaning to swing from the heels again, this time at her head?
Would
they have held her? Would they have held her for him even then?

You know you would have
, he thinks dully.
You do penance as much for what you were spared as for what you actually did. Don't you?

Here's Carol Gerber in her graduation gown;
Spring 1966
, it's marked. On the next page is a news clipping from the Harwich
Journal
marked
Fall 1966
. The accompanying picture is her again, but this version of Carol seems a million years removed from the young lady in the graduation gown, the young lady with the diploma in her hand, the white pumps on her feet, and her eyes demurely downcast. This girl is fiery and smiling, these eyes look straight into the camera. She seems unaware of the blood coursing down her left cheek. She is flashing the peace sign. This girl is on her way to Danbury already, this girl has got her Danbury dancing shoes on. People died in Danbury, the guts flew, baby, and Willie does not doubt that he is partly responsible. He touches the fiery smiling bleeding girl with her sign that says
STOP THE MURDER
(only instead of stopping it she became a part of it) and knows that in the end her face is the only one that matters, her face is the spirit of the age. 1960 is smoke; here is fire. Here is Death with blood on her cheek and a smile on her lips and a sign in her hand. Here is that good old Danbury dementia.

The next clipping is the entire front page of the Danbury paper. He has folded it three times so it will fit in the book. The biggest of four photos shows a screaming woman standing in the middle of a street and holding up her bloody hands. Behind her is a brick building which has been cracked open like an egg.
Summer 1970
, he has written beside it.

6 DEAD, 14 INJURED IN DANBURY BOMB ATTACK

Radical Group Claims Responsibility

“No One Meant to Be Hurt,” Female Caller Tells Police

The group—Militant Students for Peace, they called themselves—planted the bomb in a lecture hall on the Danbury UConn campus. On the day of the explosion, Coleman Chemicals was holding job interviews there between ten
A.M.
and four
P.M.
The bomb was apparently supposed to go off at six in the morning, when the building was empty. It failed to do so. At eight o'clock, then again at nine, someone (presumably someone from the MSP) called Campus Security and reported the presence of a bomb in the first-floor lecture hall. There were cursory searches and no evacuation. “This was our eighty-third bomb-threat of the year,” an unidentified Campus Security officer was quoted as saying. No bomb was found, although the MSP later claimed vehemently that the exact location—the air-conditioning duct on the left side of the hall—had been given. There was evidence (persuasive evidence, to Willie Shearman if to no one else) that at quarter past noon, while the job interviews were in recess for lunch, a young woman made an effort—at considerable risk to her own life and
limb—to retrieve the UXB herself. She spent perhaps ten minutes in the then-vacant lecture hall before being led away, protesting, by a young man with long black hair. The janitor who saw them later identified the man as Raymond Fiegler, head of the MSP. He identified the young woman as Carol Gerber.

At ten minutes to two that afternoon, the bomb finally went off. Gobless the living; gobless the dead.

Willie turns the page. Here is a headline from the Oklahoma City
Oklahoman
. April of 1971.

3 RADICALS KILLED IN ROADBLOCK SHOOTOUT

“Big Fish” May Have Escaped by Minutes,

Says FBI SAC Thurman

The big fish were John and Sally McBride, Charlie “Duck” Golden, the elusive Raymond Fiegler . . . and Carol. The remaining members of the MSP, in other words. The McBrides and Golden died in Los Angeles six months later, someone in the house still shooting and tossing grenades even as the place burned down. Neither Fiegler nor Carol was in the burned-out shell, but the police techs found large quantities of spilled blood which had been typed AB Positive. A rare blood-type. Carol Gerber's blood-type.

Dead or alive? Alive or dead? Not a day goes by that Willie doesn't ask himself this question.

He turns to the next page of the scrapbook, knowing he should stop, he should get home, Sharon will worry if he doesn't at least call (he
will
call, from downstairs he will call, she's right, he's very dependable), but he doesn't stop just yet.

The headline over the photo showing the charred
skull of the house on Benefit Street is from the Los Angeles
Times:

3 OF “DANBURY 12” DIE IN EAST L.A.

Police Speculate Murder-Suicide Pact

Only Fiegler, Gerber Unaccounted For

Except the cops believed Carol, at least, was dead. The piece made that clear. At the time, Willie had also been convinced it was so. All that blood. Now, however  . . .

Dead or alive? Alive or dead? Sometimes his heart whispers to him that the blood doesn't matter, that she got away from that small frame house long before the final acts of insanity were committed there. At other times he believes what the police believe—that she and Fiegler slipped away from the others only after the first shootout, before the house was surrounded; that she either died of wounds suffered in that shootout or was murdered by Fiegler because she was slowing him down. According to this scenario the fiery girl with the blood on her face and the sign in her hand is probably now just a bag of bones cooking in the desert someplace east of the sun and west of Tonopah.