No Place for an Angel (19 page)

“You were going to write a book about that Japanese island after the war. What happened to that?”

“I never had time to finish it.” He stopped, pushing his heel in the sand (they were in Florida, on the beach) and thinking. “Maybe I could yet.” For a moment he actually considered it, then he kissed her suddenly, jumped up and ran into the surf.

“Jerry,” she said, when he returned, “why can't we just let the times go on without us, let them just roll over us? They're going to do what they want to anyway. It's only going to get bigger and bigger, more and more powerful. Why not let them just go, and be ourselves?”

He was dripping and the breeze was blowing. The salt drops clung to him whitely like a sort of fleece. A trim brunette nearby was reading the magazine; she nudged her husband from under her beach umbrella, pointed at the cover and then at Jerry. The water was a startling blue and the white gulls rode the breeze. Now the palm fronds along the shore drive stirred and the flags near the big square hotels fluttered and lifted. Steadily glittering, cars went past, past, past, along the shore drive. There were people everywhere, everywhere. Beautiful brown people, nourished to perfection, a constant kaleidoscopic glory of the flesh, sporting, Olympian and free, enjoying money, sex, sunlight, food, health, liquor, abandoned in the glad release of having stopped trying to make any sense out of anything. One sidelong glance at all this and her voice with its small argument simply disappeared. He rescued it. “Be ourselves?” he echoed, and rubbed his shoulders with a great fleecy towel.

Jerry went water skiing in the afternoon. Catherine tried her best to join him, but wearied early, was no good anyway. It was always like that. She was never strong enough to keep up. Jerry soaked up a sport as innocently as skin soaked up the sunlight. He hated Coney Island where they had gone once, just out of curiosity. People were so ugly there, like sea spawn, sprawling about like crabs. No one would have been surprised to see them all start copulating with the first available body—if only you found the right whistle and blew it, they would doubtless have gone at it instantly. He was depressed for hours, wrung in the fastidious recesses of his soul where he loved freshly starched shirts that fitted over brown firm skin. Oh, the glory.

Latham Sasser, in the great charity of soul that had come to him since he had been studying animals, kept a journal in which he wrote down the doings of his father and mother, for parents, he told himself, were a curious species—one had only to listen to any of the boys talk; one had only to observe one's own.

Many things had been kept from him, and yet it was amazing how much he knew. One day, to relieve himself from wonder and dismay at himself (how he grew and what strong feelings awoke to contend within him, crosswinds, dark torrents, a buried rushing stream), he wrote down—It is known to me that Daddy and Mother are not happy. He finds whoever he can get away with.

He sat back, looking down at the page on which the words had appeared, in the chill-warm woodland silence, thick with the myriad consciousness of leaves. A bitter taste like brass came up in his mouth. Was the flaw himself? He drew his one slightly shrunken leg compulsively beneath him. He rubbed the back of his hand across his face several times, and shivered. He bit the side of his hand. How to strike out the words, to pretend that he had not put them down? Then slowly, unwillingly, with the firm gentleness with which he might lift some captive creature, his grip rendering helpless tooth, claw and wing, he saw the full shape of the words and what they did: they said what the trouble was and in so doing confined it. So he did not strike through or destroy the writing. Instead, deliberately, freeing the leg beneath him which had begun to cramp from being thrust awkwardly back, he wrote down: It is not my fault.

The words, as soon as he put them down, seemed even stronger than the others; they stood upon the page like an axe blow, severing his own inner life from theirs. He wavered for a moment like a child trying to stand alone, or like himself the day he gave up the crutch and began slowly to walk again. Then he steadied. He turned the page, away from parents, back to his notes on bird- and deer-watching. Sickness, before he was five, had taught him a certain grace, a way of not taking too much of a part in things. Yet he remembered, with whatever there was in it of pain and wonder, the man who had come to him one late afternoon, quick bright eyes drinking up all his words and a voice filling in. He remembered walking into the woods with this presence and returning and talking again, late into the night. Then the man left and never came back. It seemed now like the visit of a god, for when he saw his father again and expected it all to resume, his father had not recalled even what had happened. The creature had merely seemed to be his father, but in reality was feathered or richly furred, a person too radiant to regard. If a trick, it had been a trick played not especially to deceive him, Latham Sasser, but just for the joy of playing. He must talk it over some day with his mother. He did not know her intelligence, whether to value it or not, but he counted on her. He pictured her as always sitting somewhere reading a magazine and waiting, patient, exactly where he had thought she would be, even down to the particular chair. Possibly this was because she had so often literally done this in hospitals whence so many of his earliest memories stemmed. If he walked into this constant room where she sat reading and asked her anything she would tell him the truth. But suppose she didn't know the truth? Was some trick being played on her as well? Then her image dimmed, defacing. He saw the image of the radiant creature he had taken for his father dim also, for the telephone had sprung up, an urgent rage between them, and the man had dropped everything to answer it. Had that man really understood so much? How could it seem so if it wasn't true? It had been far more than anyone else understood, Latham determined, and looked quietly up into the eyes of a young deer with velvet horns.

Catherine and Jerry Sasser finally came late on Sunday morning from Dallas to Merrill. Their minds were more harried by things that had not happened than by anything that had. Jerry had never been able to get in touch with anyone remotely connected with the magazine article he had read, to his dismay, on the day before. Nothing whatever had developed between him and the little airline hostess, who, at the Longhorn, had run into a boy she not only knew but also used to go out with fairly often in Seattle. This young man, obviously a good ten years younger than Jerry, resembled him in some hard-to-define way: he had the look of so many men in public or semi-public life. It was more a question of posture than anything else—they stood slightly forward, head tilted for listening, a drink held a few inches away from the chest with the left hand, while the right was free to shake hands, light cigarettes, smoke or move people gently aside by the shoulders while fending a path toward another quarter of a crowded room. The style had become as rigid as a coat of frozen armor. Talking to Jerry with Jan Radley between, the young man might have been speaking to an older brother.

Older, older, Catherine thought. Does Jerry notice that? He must have, everything was making him nervous. For one thing there was no chance to talk with Ogden alone, for the Vice-Presidential candidate was present and Oggie had a few nervous matters of his own to get straight. For another, when he learned that Catherine and Jerry would be going up to Merrill the next morning, he did not offer his plane. “Cutting expenses,” he said, winking at Jerry. “No breath of scandal shall attach to us in these final, all-important weeks.” That brought back the article. “I saw Turner in Washington,” Jerry said. “I explained the situation to him and he said he understood.” “So it won't come out,” Ogden said. “Turner gave me his word on it,” Jerry shrugged. “Good boy!” Ogden clasped his hand.

“How could you tell him that?” Catherine asked him. They were waiting at the airport, having engaged a private plane to take them out to Merrill. Jerry paced back and forth on the pavement outside the terminal. He walked to the edge of the shade, just entered the sun and returned. The glare was so intense he seemed to turn into a negative of himself each time he entered it.

“I don't know.” He walked away and returned. He hated waiting. “What else could I do? Bluff it out. If advance copies got run off and released by mistake, then maybe Turner really will stop the article in the later press. Anyway, it's not that paragraph or two that matter but the wheels they'll set in motion about Ogden in general, Jerry Sasser in particular—” He frowned, bit the underside of his cheek, halted, then walked again. “Hell to pay.”

On a distant runway, she now noticed that a small private plane had emerged; looking new, freshly painted in contrasting tones of white and red, and young, somehow—it would be theirs, she felt, even before they were called. “Did you ask that stewardess, that Miss Radley, about the magazine?”

“She didn't know anything. I should have taken it off the plane with me.”

“What good would that have done?”

“Why, nothing. It might prove to me I wasn't seeing things.”

Then they were shaking hands with the pilot.

The airport at Merrill was not a commercial one, but was only a hot flat space of ground, leveled, paved and striped with white and yellow lines, about five miles from town, in the desert. Though there was no road through, it was not so very far from Sandy Gulch and the old home place of the Lathams where Catherine used to visit Uncle Dick and Uncle Mark. They flew above and she could see down below the white expanse of sand, and even, from the air, what no one could any longer see on the ground, the ghost of the old road that had angled down into the sand and how it emerged on the other side, wandering off toward the West, California and the Great Dream.

She saw the old Latham house and the green line of eucalyptus, silkily blowing, poplar, mimosa, and cottonwood. Oh, to get there! That day or so of rest. She saw the image clearly, saw it, so far, as inaccessible, as if she had seen it on a movie screen, and then the land tilted up and blotted out all but the scrubby, dusty reaches of a poor field bristling with oil wells. They were coming down.

Nobody had spent any money to make the Merrill airport “nice.” There was a big hangar of bright, corrugated iron sheets which thumped under the steady hammer of the sun as though somebody were hurling brickbats at it, and there was a large quonset hut, war surplus, set up as a shelter for waiting in. During the week a boy from Merrill kept it open as a small concession—there were cold drinks to be had and ice cream, candy and peanuts—but now his counter was concealed by a roll-down screen which was secured at the bottom by a heavy lock. A Coca-Cola machine was purring in the silence and Catherine, who had been moving all summer in the thickening heat from one air-conditioned oasis to another, sank down on a bench, convinced that she would smother. Jerry handed her a frosted bottle from the machine and went to telephone to see if the taxi he had rung up from Dallas to order was on the way. But now before he could dial, they heard it, just outside. Was it air-conditioned? It was.

“Aren't you Mr. Jerry Sasser?” the driver wanted to know, casting a glance behind him. “And Miss Catherine?”

“We don't want anybody to know we're here,” Jerry said. “My wife needs a rest; we're just going out to the farm to be quiet for a day or so. There'll be an extra ten in it for you if you'll just not say anything about our being here.”

They drove on in silence, mounting into the foothills. The scrubby trees were dropping back and the sandy soil; here was a clump of green, hanging limply in the heat, and there was the house with the cow-pool on one side of a two-acre lawn and a swimming pool on the other. The road curved toward Merrill.

“When you pass through,” Jerry went on, “don't think it's peculiar if your passengers lean down so nobody can see us. We strictly mean it about wanting a day or so to ourselves. This election—”

The boy still did not answer. He drove steadily, into the green hills. The road tilted. Catherine began to feel a strange relief. No telephone, Jerry had promised. Normal hours, regular meals. Silence. Two days of this. Two whole days.