Rainy City (24 page)

“Well, I did.”

“A baby? People don’t normally recall things that happened before they were two. How old were you?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. I suppose I was two and a half. Three?”

“That would make it about twenty years ago, wouldn’t it?”

“Twenty-two years ago.”

She spoke rapidly, gulping her breath between sentences. The confession was a boulder rolling downhill now and she didn’t want to clam up until it was all the way down.

“I guess I was three. Daddy used to take me up poking around in the mines with him. He had a lot of friends in those days. We used to go up with all sorts of people. One time, we went up with this man. All I remember is that the man had a bottle and he was drinking. He was a big man, almost as big as my father. There was a lot of yelling. We were inside the mine. I don’t know which mine. Just a mine. The only light was a lantern and it was spooky. They fought. Daddy began socking the other man. Then he picked up a big piece of timber and hit him over the head with it. A lot of times. I was so terrified I wet myself.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I’ve never forgotten that night.”

“Do you remember anything else about the struggle, or the man?”

“All I remember is the inside of the mine. It was near Christmas. I began having terrible nightmares. And every time I brought it up, or tried to, Daddy would yell at me. lie used to scream at me all the time. Thinking back on it, I don’t know which of us was the more terrified. Him, fearing that I might blab what I had seen, or me, thinking I really had imagined it all and afraid of what he would accuse me of next. For years, I thought I had imagined it.

“Daddy deliberately played games with me, trying to destroy my credibility. And he did. Oh, how he did. Even I used to wonder about myself. He was always forcing me into situations where I had to lie or take the consequences. I remember when I was about six, he used to leave candy lying around the house, tell me not to take it and then watch from the other room. Sometimes he’d let me take it, and sometimes he’d catch me. If he caught me, he always did it when we had company. It was only when I grew more mature, that I realized he did it all purposely.”

“Your father seems to be someone who always has to be in control.”

“He played psychological games with me the whole time I was growing up. When I was sixteen, he gave me a car for my birthday. One of those little European two-seater sports cars. Along with the keys, he handed me a list of rules. I could drive to school, but I was expected to be home twelve minutes after it let out. He actually drove from school and timed it so he would know how long it took. He would have had the maid time me. I knew he was going to be insufferable. I took the keys and threw them out into the sound. Outwardly, it was a generous gift. Actually, it was another way to catch me doing things wrong. His scheme was always to dangle something I wanted very badly in front of me, then tie so many rules to it there was no way I could obey them all. Of course, he got mileage out of my throwing the keys away, too. He was always telling everyone I had mental problems. And what made it worse was that nobody ever seemed to see my side of it. Inevitably, it became an all-out war.”

“What about your mother?”

“You’ve seen her. He owns her, lock, stock and barrel. Whatever Angus Crowell thinks, Muriel Crowell thinks.”

Staring straight ahead at the highway, the memories pulled her pale cheeks into long, sorry pouts. The look on her face made her seem three years old, the image of her daughter.

It was quite a bit longer before either of us broke the silence. Melissa directed me to drive through the town of Monroe and into the foothills. Before we cleared the burg, though, we had to stop for fuel. As I stood jawing with a gas jockey who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, Holder drove past on the main drag, heading in the opposite direction. He did not see us. Ile was driving a brand-new Toyota Celica. It looked like the sort of car that might belong to a girl friend. I had every reason to believe our destination was the same place he had just departed.

I tipped the gas jockey and drove away while he twisted his baseball cap sideways and stood gawking at the blonde in my passenger seat. He was in love, was trying to memorize the vision before it faded. I looked over at pretty Melissa sitting ramrod-stiff in the worn, faded Volkswagen seat.

“He owns old mining claims all over the Northwest,” she said, feeling my eyes on her. “He tramps all over the country on weekends. Mother thinks he prospects; but I don’t believe it. I think he’s just out catting.”

A side road diverted us north. After a few miles, Melissa told me to slow down while she scanned the woods to our left. It took three miles of slow hunting before she spotted the narrow dirt path that led off the two-lane highway.

Immediately after we turned into the overgrown path, a logging truck roared down the highway behind us, its trailing vacuum rocking the bug. It was the first vehicle we had seen in more than five minutes. I could not even remember how far back the last house had been Ten miles, maybe.

Melissa must have been reading my mind as she got out of the car and walked up the overgrown path toward a fork in the road. “It’s really in the boonies, huh?” she said.

“It seems like the ‘Leaving Seattle’ sign was only a minute ago.”

I got out and followed her to the fork. I was a city boy and I knew it.

“One of these winds down to the river,” said Melissa. “The other one goes up to the mine. I can’t remember which is which. I was only here a couple of times. Dad liked to come up by himself and I did my best not to get caught alone with him.”

It wasn’t difficult to tell which trail was wide enough to allow a Winnebago to pass. There were ruts in the uppermost trail and it had had the trees and high brush hacked away six months ago to accommodate something large and cumbersome. The tall, wet grass was bent over. Someone had driven it since the last rain. Judging by the condition of the packed soil, I would have to guess the last rain had been yesterday sometime, or maybe even two days ago, though the land undoubtedly remained soggy up here for weeks at a crack.

“That way,” said Melissa, spotting the same bowed and wet grasses I was looking at. “I think that’s the way to the mine shaft.”

“How far?”

“I don’t really remember. Quite a ways, I think.”

We got back into the car. Out of curiosity, I noted the distance on the odometer as we bumped along on the rutted trail. In several places we saw freshly sheared branches like broken bird wings high above the road where the Winnebago had been too wide for the path. We plowed through two separate places where it looked as if the motor home had bogged down. It was a bumpy 3.2 miles to a clearing beside the road. Melissa asked me to park in it. There was no motor home in sight. And no sign of her father.

“He used to camp right here. I guess he parks it up closer to the shaft now. It might be best if we walked the rest of the way.”

We got out and stretched our legs. The ground up here was higher, drier and sandier. The stands of trees had been thick since we’d left the highway and even though at least half of them were deciduous and stripped by the winter, I doubted if one could see more than a hundred feet off the road. Anything could have been out there watching us. Or anyone.

Around a bend, the trail opened up into a pasture about the size of an infield in a ballpark.

The Winnebago sat plunk in the center of the virgin dew-spotted grass. Angus Crowell was nowhere to be seen, off somewhere sorting butterflies. Melissa, who had been leading me up the road, stopped and turned to me. Her face had the blank, drugged look rd seen two days ago when I’d first met her in Tacoma. For a moment I thought she was suffering a relapse, reverting to a doped-up tramp before my eyes. But she gritted her teeth and pushed on.

I scanned the motor home for signs of life. Nothing. The drapes were uniformly pulled closed, the doers all sealed. It might have been sitting two hours, or two months.

“He’s watching us,” said Melissa. As far as I could tell—and I was pretty good at that sort of thing— nobody was in any sort of position to be watching anything.

“Don’t get paranoid,” I said.

“You don’t know him. He’s watching. I can feel it.”

We had climbed in elevation since leaving Seattle, but I could not guess how much. A saucer-shaped cloud hovered a few hundred feet over a mountain behind the clearing. At least an Easterner would call it a mountain. Native Westerners would term it a hill. It was steep and craggy and rigidly picturesque, and I imagined there was at least one man-sized hole drilled into its bowels. The mine.

I let Melissa rap on the rear door of the Winnebago. It was her gig. I was only the support unit. The more small things I let her handle, the more able she would be when it came to the big crunch.

Nobody answered the door. She knocked again, getting the same negative results. Melissa heeled around brusquely and scanned the woods and mountain behind us.

“He could be anywhere,” I said.

“No,” said Melissa, turning back to the Winnebago and rattling the door. “He’s right here.” She knocked a fourth time and a fifth. I began meandering around the clearing. Anybody observing the tightness in her neck and shoulders, anybody with half a gift for interpreta-tion would think Melissa had gone loopy. She had that awkward stiffness, the stiffness of the blind, the adult retarded, the crazed, the damned.

At the edge of the woods, I stumbled onto an ancient debris pile grown over by weeds. Embedded in the grass and dirt were old rusted pick heads, forgotten iron wheels and broken shovels. The mine probably hadn’t been active since the war, maybe even long before that. I wondered whether Crowell ever found traces of what he was looking for up here. I heard a noise behind me. The rear door to the Winnebago had been opened from the inside. By golly, Melissa had been right. He had been burrowed in there all along.

I jogged over to the motor home where Crowell had only cracked the door open. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and they both stopped talking when I arrived.

I huffed once or twice, catching my breath, and said, “Afternoon, Crowell.”

Angus Crowell did not have time to acknowledge me. He was staring at his daughter, his face a contorted mask. She stared right back, though it was evident she was frightened to death. The snake and the field mouse. “Father, this is Thomas Black,” Melissa said, her voice cracking. “I believe you’ve already met.”

Angus nodded and said, “Ayeah,” like some old-time sourdough, all without taking his hard eyes off his daughter. He was almost like one of those absurd boxers trying to psych out his opponent with menacing primate stares. It was an act, and I realized it even if Melissa did not. Angus Crowell infused every day with minor dramas, and sometimes with major theatrics, and he was damn good at it. Obviously, it had been a boon to his business and social life, if not his family life.

Finally, the old man broke the stalemate and said, “Excuse me. I don’t know where my manners went. I’m out here in the wilds and I don’t know where the hell my mind’s been. The last thing I expected was company.” He looked more fully at me as if it were difficult for him to see without glasses, and then he laughed. “I come up here to get away from people. Last company I had was a pair of drunken deer hunters. You hunt deer, do you, Mr. Black?”

I shook my head.

“Yeah, well, tell you what. If you two could wait outside a minute, rn get things shipshape in here.” He closed the door and I could hear him rustling around inside.

Walking over to Melissa, who had strolled off a good thirty yards, almost to the woods, I spoke in a low voice.

“What were you two talking about?”

The pretty blonde was rigid and formal, as if we were two strangers riding a bus and battling to avoid each other’s eyes. “I told him I came to clear the air.”

“What did he say?”

Melissa turned away from me again and looked up at the mountain, tears beginning to well up in her eyes. She folded her arms snugly against her small breasts and her shoulders squared themselves up against the mountain.

“Melissa, what did your father say?”

“Don’t you understand? This is all for your benefit.”

She was choking on her own words, strangling on her own life.

“What is? What’s for my benefit?’

“This whole charade. He knew you were up here when we first arrived. He was watching us. He waited until you were out of earshot. Damn He said what he said because he knew when I told you about it you’d think I was crazy. Why do you think he’s leaving us alone right now? He wants to be sure I’ll tell you about it.”

“If you don’t want to say it, don’t. I don’t have to know.”

Melissa pivoted around sharply and grabbed my belt, inserting her fingers down between the belt and my pants. It was a big move for her. She wasn’t the type of person who touched others easily, especially members of the opposite sex, at least not in a social setting.

“He said nasty things. Horrible perverted things. They didn’t even make sense. He sounded like someone who just escaped from a mental asylum.”

“Why would he do that, Melissa?”

“Don’t you see? So when I told you about it you’d look at me the way you’re looking right now. It worked. He’s outsmarted us both. I just should have kept my big mouth shut. Chalk up number one to dear old Dad.”

“Don’t get all worked up, now,” I cautioned.

“Don’t you see? If I keep my nerve and go through with this, you’re going to be the lone witness and it’s going to boil down to my word against his. And Father doesn’t relish losing, not at anything. He wants my word tarnished from the outset. The way it’s been my whole life.” She sniffled. “And it is.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t believe that.”

I hugged her. The air rushed out of her lungs like a paper bag underfoot. She was shaky and weak. I hadn’t been holding a lot of Women lately. This week I’d held two of them, Kathy and Melissa. I couldn’t help compar-ing them, their bodies, their smells, the sway of their hips against my legs, the way they laid their heads against my chest, the manner in which their breasts thrust against me.