Hide and Seek (9 page)

"Anything you want, Casey. Don't mind me."

She swirled the ice in her Bloody Mary, oblivious to his irony.

"Fine."

"You go to your movie and we'll go see the band."

"All right."

"What about you, Clan?"

He was pointing his finger at me again. He was using the bandaged hand and it was sort of funny-looking but I didn't dare laugh. I kept it straight.

"That's fine too."

You could see he was ready to walk out in one of his ten-minute sulks.

He still had a half a drink left, but he got up off his stool.

"Sit down, Steven," said Kimberley. "We can all get together tomorrow night. Relax."

It didn't really take. He still wanted to march off on us, you could tell. It was all display. Competitive, possessive and pretty silly.

By tomorrow he'd have forgotten all about it. In this kind of contest of wills with Casey he never won anyway. You wondered why he bothered.

But he sat, and he finished his drink. And then stalked off, without a word or a smile for any of us. I turned to Kimberley.

"Are you going to get more of this tonight? Maybe you ought to come along with us."

"No, he'll be fine. He'll walk it off now. Besides, I'm the one who wants to hear the band, remember?"

Casey was expected home for dinner. So I ate alone at the diner, something very rubbery they had the guts to call steak, and then drove out to her place around seven in the pickup. I turned off the ignition and waited. I didn't like going inside unless I had to. The few times I had, Casey's mother had been very uncomfortable. I had the distinct sense that she thought her daughter was slumming. She was a fluttery, mousy thing, and I didn't like her much. Casey's looks came from her father. As for him, he made me uncomfortable.

The street was so quiet you could almost feel the dusk turn to dark around you like a slag of fog descending. I heard crickets, and somebody dropped a pan a few doors down. I heard kids shouting somewhere out of sight down the block, playing some ga me or other, and a mother's voice calling one of them home for dinner.

Casey was late.

After a while I heard voices raised inside their house. I'd never had the illusion that they were a happy family. On the other hand, I'd never heard them fighting, either.

I checked my watch. Ten minutes after seven. The movie started at eight. It would take us half an hour to drive to Trescott. It was going to be tight, but we'd still have a little leeway.

(waited. I didn't mind waiting. There was no temptation to turn on the radio. I'd always liked the evening quiet of Dead River. It was one thing the town had to offer, a kind of gentle cooling of the spirit that comes along with the cooling of the land. The summer nights were almost worth the winter nights, when you suffered, housebound, through the cold. You could almost feel the stars come out, without seeing them.

I was eased back, sitting low in the seat, dreaming.

I jumped when I heard the door slam.

There was no light on in front of the house, so it was hard to see her face at first as she came toward the car, but I could tell from something in her walk, in the way she moved, that she was upset. Her movements were always so controlled and confident, made up of loose and well-toned muscle. But now, I saw a rough abruptness about her that I wasn't used to. She pulled the door open on the passenger side.

"Drive."

She launched herself into the seat. Her voice seemed thicker, angry.

"Yes. I don't care. Anywhere. Fuck it!"

I think she took a good five years off the life of my car door. My ears rattled in tandem with the window. I started the car.

"Easy."

She turned to me, and something took a dive in the pit of my stomach.

Those lovely pale eyes gleamed at me. I'd never seen her cry before. I started to reach for her, to comfort her.

"Please!"

She was begging.

Casey, begging. I couldn't quite believe it at first.

I did what she asked. I drove.

"What's up?"

"Please just drive."

"You still want the movie?"

I'll don't know where we went.

The outskirts of town for a while, then up and down the main

I tried to get her to talk about it, but she shut me up with a look so painful that I kept my own eyes fixed to the road ahead after that and gave her the long quiet that was clearly all she wanted from me and all I had to give. I felt her body shaking gently and knew she was crying.

It astonished me that anything could happen in that colorless, moneyed, lifeless household that could possibly make her cry. It astonished me that she should cry at all, I think. The command was gone, the toughness melted away, and beside me was a woman like any other. And even though I liked that toughness and that command, I realized I'd been waiting a longtime to see this, to see what was underneath.

It was good to know I could help her just by being there. I felt oddly comforted. I'd never cared for her more.

It was quite a moment.

I remember we'd turned onto Northfield Avenue when I felt her straighten up beside me. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her wipe the tears off her face. It was a single harsh gesture with the fingertips of both hands. I heard her sniffling back the mucus and heard her clear her throat. We turned to one another at the same time.

For me it was just a glance before I had to look back to the road again. But I felt her stare on me long after that, measuring me somehow.

When she spoke, her voice was gentle, but I sensed that she'd turned a corner again, and what lay beneath it was not. I'd seen a crack in the wall, no more than that. Her voice ran drifts of ectoplasm over me like the thin, strong lines of a spider.

"I want to go back."

"You want me to take you home?"

"Please. Yes."

"All right."

We weren't far from there. We drove in silence. I turned onto her street and noticed a pothole in the road I hadn't seen when we'd

passed it before. It seemed out of place on that one good street in all Dead River.

I parked across from her house and put the pickup in parking gear. It rumbled: the idle was running high again. I put my arm across the seat and turned to ask her if she wouldn't like to tell me about it before she went inside again. I wanted to know. It wasn't just curiosity.

She was putting me through some very fast changes. I felt she'd cut me off again, done it quickly and thoroughly, and I wanted back in. She opened the curbside door.

"Wait for me here."

She closed the door carefully, quietly.

I turned off the car and watched her.

She crossed the street and walked up the field stone path that cut the lawn in two and led up to the porch. There were low shrubs planted in a rock garden roughly as deep as the porch on either side. They ascended in height, the symmetry almost too neat to please the eye. She stopped in front of the first step and looked off to her left. She was looking for something on the ground.

Now what the hell?

She took a few steps to the left and kept on looking. I had the ridiculous momentary impression that it was night crawlers she was after. That we were going fishing. She bent down into the garden and took something up in each hand, seeming to weigh them before she stood again.

From that point on her movements were completely economical. The Casey I was used to, and even more so.

It was clear that she knew exactly what she was doing. She took three steps backward onto the lawn and looked up into the left front window.

There was a light burning inside from a floor lamp. I tried to remember the layout of the house, and I thought it would have to be the den, her father's workroom.

There is something terrible to me about the sound of breaking

I remember we had a cat when I was a kid who woke us all one night by knocking a cheap cut-glass vase off the kitchen table. I was on my feet and into the kitchen so fast that I wasn't fully awake when

I got there. With the result that the sole of my foot took seven or eight stitches.

That's how it was this time too.

I think my hand was on the ignition as soon as her rock went crashing through the window. I think the car was in drive and my foot on the brake before the shattering sound even left my ears. Part of it was instinct, part of it self-preservation.

It was her house. But I had the feeling it would be my ass.

My throat felt constricted.

"Jesus!" I yelled. "Come on!"

Somehow I couldn't get her attention.

She was still moving in that same determined way across the field stone path and then across the right side of her lawn, ignoring me. I knew instantly what she was doing, where she was going. I knew it like I knew how my head would hurt if you hit it with a hammer. There would be no stopping her. Calling out would only make it worse. The sound of breaking glass had been so loud I half expected to see porch lights go on all along the street. But everything was still quiet. As she marched across the lawn and over a macadam driveway to the house next door.

I looked back to her place. My hands were sweating on the steering wheel. I saw her father framed in the window. He had just come through the doorway and was standing there in perfect profile, staring down at the damage, at all the broken glass I imagined winking up at him from the floor.

He turned slowly toward the window and looked out. He looked to the right and then to the left, and then he looked at me.

I had to turn away.

There was too much sadness there, too much guilt in me.

I heard another crash. Louder than before. She had put the second rock through the right front window of the house next door.

I didn't ask myself why. I knew why. There would be questions now, plenty of them. Her father would be answering some of them.

There was shouting inside. A woman. A man. Casey was straightening up, recovering the follow-through. A slab of glass came drifting down off the top sill like the blade of a guillotine, hit the

bottom sill and shattered. The shouting sounded almost hysterical tome.

I watched her walk back to the car. She took her time.

There was a moment when I almost left her there I glanced back to her place and saw that her father was gone from the window. The porch lights went on. Soon he would be standing there. I leaned out to her.

"Get in, goddamn you!"

Sympathy can turn so quickly. Just add fear. Stir.

By the time she was back in the car I was burning. Burning and scared.

I had just enough control left not to gun the thing to get away from there. We slid away from the curb nice and slowly.

See no evil, hear no evil.

I wondered if anybody was buying it but me.

I wanted to hit her.

I wanted to slap her so bad my shoulders twitched. I wouldn't even look at her. I kept thinking how she'd involved me, how she'd done this to me. Not just to the people next door or to her parents for whatever idiot reason, but to me. I hadn't done anything. I hadn't

asked for it. ,_, ..p

All kinds of things went through my head. I felt like opening the door on her side and giving her a push. Never mind that the car was moving.

Fuck her. If she could do that to me. Just fuck her.

I drove two blocks under the most careful, most frantic control of my life, absolutely boiling inside, and then hit it hard and went looking for the highway.

I hit sixty on the quiet streets of Dead River and pushed it up to seventy-five on the coast road. The road was not nearly good enough for seventy-five. Neither was the pickup. I realized what I was doing and pulled over.

I cut back the engine, cut the lights. We sat there in the deep black of emptynighton the shoulder of a bad road with noonearound but the crickets and the frogs, and I had not lost an ounce of my delicious anger. I held out as long as I could, hoping she'd say something to make it all right again, knowing in my heart that there

was nothing she could say, not now. And then I groped for where I knew her shirt would be and pulled her over with both my hands and shook her like a rag doll, bounced her against the car seat while she whimpered to me to please stop and I told her to go to hell and felt the shirt tear along the sides of my big, happy fists.

"You don't understand!"

She was crying again but this time I didn't care. It didn't mean a thing. She couldn't touch me. I shook her until I felt the shirt go at the shoulder too and then that was no good to me so I slid my hand into her hair and shook her that way.

"You sonovabitch! You don't understand!"

Then suddenly I had a tearstained screeching little bomb on my hands.

I've told you she was all muscle.

Well, we came close to taking out the front seat in that pickup of mine.

I could barely see her and she could barely see me, so there was a lot of inadvertent pain for both of us. One of us broke the rearview mirror. Somebody put a dent in the radio as big as an apple.