October Light (47 page)

There was very little time, but she moved without hurry, climbing the attic stairs, feeling for the string that turned the light on. She groped and groped and was beginning to think it must have broken when at last, lower than she'd expected, it came to her fingers. When she'd turned the light on she continued to the top and crossed, still unhurried, to the apples. One of the crates was less than half full and she picked it up then, changing her mind, set it down on the floor to drag it. It scraped quietly to the top of the stairs and—without hurry, as if time were in the hands of some invisible guardian who would not allow James to move till she was ready—she managed to get the crate down, stair by stair, and over near the foot of the bed.

Now things became more difficult. She stood at the door a moment, listening. He was still in the bathroom. Noises of his going to the toilet came to her, and sometimes a groan—poor old bastard! She saw in the mirror that she was smiling. On the way to the bed she paused and glanced out the window. The cars were still there. “Good,” she said aloud. Some of them were running, her friends trying to keep warm, no doubt. The rain was drizzling steadily, now and then shaken by a gust. Surely any moment the police would arrive. She hoped they did of course, yet in this mysterious state of serenity she didn't really care—perhaps she even, with a part of her mind, had a hope that they'd arrive too late.

The bed, fortunately, was on castors, and though it was heavy, and though the floor was slopy and the boards where they butted together not even, she managed to get it to a foot from the door, where, when the time came, she could stand on it. She lifted the applecrate up onto the bed, listened again, then unlocked the door, opened it almost to the bed, put a pair of shoes against it to keep it there, and stood back to inspect. It would do.

Carefully, still feeling the mysterious serenity, she climbed up onto the bed. It was almost impossible, as she'd known it would be, to stand up on the bed and lift the applecrate to the top of the door—it would be something, she thought, if she fell and broke her neck!—but at last, by some miracle, she managed it. Slowly, slowly, as when you put the top block on a tower of blocks, she drew her hands away from each side of the crate. It sat firm, though precarious, tilted from the top of the doorframe—the summerbeam—to the door, and, even when she'd lowered herself to the bed again, it did not fall. She got out of the bed and carefully rolled it to its place against the wall. She smiled. In the mirror above the desk, it seemed to her, she looked positively young.

“Now the lamp,” she said. She looked out the window. The cars were still there; no police car.

She moved the white wicker table over to behind the door, where James wouldn't see it and the crate might possibly fall on it if it didn't fall on James, and where in any case the door would bump it when he came barging in; then she went to the wash-stand for the kerosene lamp. It was nearly full, and the wick was white and new, rising from the brass and sinking into the clean glass bowl. As she picked it up, to carry it to the table, she realized, with a gasp, that she had no matches. At once, all her serenity fell away. She had a vision, clear as a nightmare, of James raising the gun to aim at her, his eyes not human. There would be a thunderous crash that rocked the room—“Oh dear God,” she whispered. Her heart was like a hot potato, pounding just behind her throat. She set down the lamp and hurried around the table to the dresser and opened the top draw, then the next and the next. No matches! She looked around wildly, trying to think, then remembered the desk. Of course. Ginny sometimes slept in this room, and Ginny would certainly have matches, she couldn't be without a cigarette two minutes.

She tugged at the front of the desk. It seemed to be locked. She stared at the keyhole in disbelief, then tugged again. Nothing. She turned, listening, imagining she'd heard a footstep, but she'd been wrong, he was still in the bathroom—silent now. Still on the potty? She tugged again. The desk was locked. Then her mind cleared and she realized that for Ginny, too, it would be locked, so the matches must be somewhere else. She pulled at the handles of the desk's top draw. It slid out so easily she almost fell down, and there, lo and behold!, lay a dozen paper matchbooks. She snatched one up and without even closing the draw went back to the lamp on the table. It lit easily, at the first match. She adjusted the wick, then balanced the lamp on the edge of the table, so that the first good bump would send it crashing to the floor. She straightened and looked up at the applecrate—still motionless and dark, waiting for him—and nodded to herself, satisfied.

She knew, of course, that the plan had its risks. She refused to allow herself to think of them. If the applecrate fell on him it would probably kill him, or at very least knock him unconscious; but if he looked up before he came in, and saw it, or if it fell and missed, well, that would be tally-ho Sally, and James not dead with her! So she had no choice but to back up the crate with the kerosene firetrap, and pray that when they saw the flames, if she couldn't get out past them, they'd come and save her. Perhaps they wouldn't, of course, for fear of James' gun … She wouldn't think about it. She had lived a full life, a long one anyway. The plan was the only hope she had; it wouldn't fail her; it couldn't. It was like a gift from heaven—not her own plan at all but something that had come out of nowhere, like the plan Peter Wagner had had about knocking off his enemies with eels, in her novel. Not that she wasn't sorry—as Peter Wagner had been—to have to do it. But the world was full of violence these days, nobody even thought twice about it. It wasn't
she
who'd started this war. It was his tyranny that started it;
she
was willing enough to live and let live. It was just as Horace had always said, “Enemies in war, in peace friends.” Even if it was no one's fault really, she must do what she must. That was simply how she was.

She sat on the edge of the bed, listening. Still no hint of a sound from James! She looked out the window, leaning close to the pane to see better. The cars were still there. By the road there was movement and, squinting hard over the tops of her glasses, she was able to make out a boy and a girl, walking in the rain, holding hands. She stepped from the window, checked her deathtrap one more time, then decided she needed to use the bedpan. She pulled the windowshade down and squatted above the pan. Her bowels were like water and made a terrible stink—and there was no place to put the mess, she realized in dismay: she could hardly throw it out the window with her friends all watching. She thought and thought, then carried the pan up to the attic.

When she came down again, bringing with her two apples, which she tossed into the bed, there was still no sign of James. She stood very still, listening, baffled, but there was nothing, no sound in all the house, only the rumble of rain on the attic roof and the howl of wind and then, very faint in the distance, a siren. She hurried to the window. She had, for an instant, an impression that the ghost was back, watching the house from the mailbox, but there was no one. The siren grew louder. A car door opened and someone got out, Ginny's husband, Nit. He went up to stand by the mailbox and wait. Lights appeared down the road and then the state police car was sweeping in, stopping so suddenly it rocked, and the trooper who was driving leaned his head out. He and Mr. Nit talked; she couldn't hear the voices. After a while the police car pulled in farther and parked among the other cars. They just sat there, watching the house, not doing a thing.

According to the onyx clock it was three in the morning. She realized, seeing the time, that she was tired, sick-tired, but not sleepy. Even though it was way up in the attic, and behind the closed attic door, she could smell that bedpan. It was the bedpan, she realized, that she ought to have propped over the door to fall on James.

Smiling like the wicked old witch she was—or so, that moment, she described herself—she got herself into her bed with her trashy book.

Unbeknownst to Sally, though she ought to have guessed, James sat fast asleep on the toilet, his bowels still hard as a Pharaoh's heart, despite the little burst that had brought him here, his trousers at his ankles and his shotgun leaning against the wall.

Down in the yard the Mexican was saying—holding a newspaper over his head to keep the rain off—“What do you think?”

The older of the state policemen shook his head. “Hate to go in shootin if the man's changed his mind.”

“Then again,” the younger policeman said, “time we hear somethin it might be too late.”

“That's true,” the older one said but didn't move. He looked around at the cars. “You people might's well go on home, I guess. No use sittin here in the weather.”

“I'll stay,” Virginia Hicks called, “I'm his daughter.”

“We'll stay too, if you don't mind,” Lane Walker said. “I'm a minister. My friend here is a priest.”

“Suit yourself,” the state policeman said.

The younger one was writing with a ball-point pen. What he was writing on had pages and pages, an inch or more of them clamped together by a black binder.

The Mexican leaned toward the window, trying to see. “That some kind of a report?” he asked.

The older policeman grinned. “Naw,” he said. “Damn kid's workin on a
book.”

Sally, up in her room, read:

12

THE PRICE OF PEARL

On the second day after she'd lost track of him, Pearl Wilson slipped her key into Dr. Alkahest's apartment door as she'd done a hundred times before that (the elevator stood open behind her, the grated, shuffling little room peculiarly humble in the presence of the entryhall's cool white walls, the cobalt blue curtains; it had the look of a servant waiting politely, secretly scornful), and as soon as she'd pressed the apartment door open half an inch she knew there was something terrible inside. She hesitated, half expecting the door to be snatched out of her hands and the thing inside, whatever it was, to snatch her wrist and jerk her inward. Nothing happened. The rational part of her mind moved over the question with careful antennae while the rest conjured demons: Sundayschool horrors and newspaper horrors (she had read last night of a rape that had happened in one of the federal office buildings, and she had suffered then, as she suffered now, in the jungle-shadowy back of her mind, the flame of the intruder's breath, the blue-white fire of his nails and teeth).

She closed her eyes, took a breath. If anything terrible was waiting in the room it would be a man in a suit, legs crossed at the knee, a notebook, a gold ball-point pen. That was the shape things ominous took in apartments like this one.

All this time Pearl stood erect, prim—except for the closed eyes, the intake of breath, no sign of her panic on her face: a lovely young black, perhaps twenty-seven, in a fine, moderately expensive brown coat from Macy's, loosely belted, a discreet brown hat with a vermilion feather three inches long, brown stockings, brown, Italian shoes that perfectly matched her purse, her hat, her gloves. Her form was magnificent, her face like a carving, not soft and pliable but elegant, poised. Her lips were full and sharply lined, undecorated. Her lashes, natural, were finer and darker than Japanese black silk. One might have wondered, peeking out at her in what she took for the empty entryhall, “Where does such a creature belong?” In some university, perhaps, regally poised at her student desk in a red dress open at the neck, narrow V'd, taking notes in her round hand on history or literature or microbes; but Pearl had done badly at

State and had quit—though her speech was faultless and she liked to read, she'd gotten C's in English, even worse in math—and she never wore red. In some shop then? Some nifty gentlewomen's shoppe like the ones where she bought her shoes, her brown silk scarf? But Pearl had tried that. Her mind would click off while the supervisor was speaking with her, and in a moment she would see, as if from infinitely far away, the fat little woman's lips shaking, her tiny blue eyes unnaturally light, one fat pink hand pressed to her heart. “Girl, why you got to be so uppidy?” her mother used to wail when she was still alive. Pearl would walk away. She wasn't uppity. She knew what was deserved and what was not—knew, exactly to the penny, her worth.

So she cleaned house like a Nubian slave, though a born princess, because the money was good, so that she could live in approximately the way she wished—could buy records and books, new clothes for church, an occasional lithograph, reproductions of paintings—could keep up the noble old traditions she in fact had never known. If traditions made you safe, gave stability, identity—or at least the illusion of secure identity—she would be safe, though she knew there was no safety, finally. She'd had a friend once, a young minister. He had taken his religion seriously—had taken it to the streets, to the druggies, the drunks and small-time thieves. But it was expensive and, besides, unseemly, taking religion to the ugly and fierce; religion was community, and they preyed on community. Soon he'd found he had behind him only his beliefs, no church. His beliefs had changed. He had seemed to her once beautiful and vulnerable, the two inextricable in his character, or perhaps the beauty
was
the vulnerability. If she were to meet him now, she knew, she would be afraid of him.

Still there had come no sound from the room. Strong as it was, she dismissed the intuition and opened the apartment door wide. Nothing was changed. If he'd been back while she was away, he'd left no sign. The gray-white monkscloth curtains were drawn, making the place a crypt. She opened them, then opened the window a crack to get rid of the scent of—what? Without removing her coat, as if the intuition she'd dismissed was still with her, she walked through the never-used dining room to the kitchen. There was nothing changed there either: no sign that he'd eaten or even entered the place. Yet she hesitated, troubled by an inexplicable sense that, once again, the jungle had inched closer. She caught that smell again, like escaping gas, and knew even before she checked the range that that was not where it came from. Moving quickly all at once, she went back into the dining room and opened the bathroom door. She caught her breath. On the white sink, the white Formica top beside it, there were black handprints. She shot a look behind her, but the dining room was empty. “Jesus,” Pearl whispered. There was a towel on the floor, black and horrible, and the room was full of a smell like rottenness. Worse. There were smudges of filth on the floor too, and on the bathtub and toilet. She knew now what the black stuff was, though the word escaped her. Was the creature still here. Her roommate would be at work, not reachable till five. She remembered then the telephone number in her purse. Leonard had insisted that she take it, his neighbor's number; they knew where to get him if she needed him. “Phone up, now,” he'd said, urgent yet casual, like the boyfriend in one of those sunlit, big-city horror films. “No jive, baby. Phone up.” She felt better, as if the phone number were Leonard himself, curled up snug in her purse ready to leap out into the room with a howl of
Banzai!
to defend her.