The Cavanaugh Quest (24 page)

“Ted Hook?” I said.

“All my life,” he said, his voice crackling, a peculiar whisper, his head down.

“My name is Paul Cavanaugh, Mr. Hook. I wondered if I could ask you a couple of questions?”

“Only if you sit the hell down,” he said. “I can’t bend my head, I’m slowly turning to stone or some damned thing. Makes me irritable. I can’t recollect what it was like to be well, hell of a note, ain’t it? Sit down, sit down. Hand me my spoon, it’s on the floor. I dropped it. Can’t reach it. I could starve to death before anybody would come to pick it up.” He wheezed deeply and sniffed. I handed him the spoon and he took it in a gloved hand. A plate of mashed potatoes sat untouched before him, butter melting in yellow puddles. His hatchet-shaped face, the jawline the edge of the cleaver, was etched with pain, and around the eyes a hint of something more. He’d lived a long time, nearly sixty years, with the effects of a mustard gassing, and I supposed he knew his share about pain of any kind.

“Is this a family operation?” I sat in the captain’s chair.

“Hate to call these little shitheads family,” he said glumly, shoving the spoon into the potatoes, “but they are. Little prick at the bar is Artie, my brother’s grandson—he oughta been drowned as an infant!” He guided the spoon mouthward and began to lick it with a darting, purple tongue, as if it were ice cream. He squinted at me, caught me watching. “If you don’t like it, don’t look. What the hell do you want, anyway? Do I know you?”

“No, not me, but you just might have known my father—Archie Cavanaugh? He used to come up here with some friends, they had that lodge back up in the hills …”

“You mean my wife knew ’em, don’t you? I never had much truck with ’em but Rita, she worked her ass off out there at that lodge.” He chuckled to himself, dribbling a mist of potatoes down his chin. He lifted a beer stein to his ragged, concave mouth, sipped. “I can’t remember their names—Archie or any of the rest of them. Why should I?”

“What kind of men were they? I mean, how did they behave themselves? Was there ever any trouble?” My mouth was dry.

“Trouble? Christ, I can’t remember. I’m eighty years old, give or take a couple years, I can’t remember my own name some days. I’m not jokin’ you, youngster.” His gloved fingers throbbed on the tabletop. “Only trouble I know about is the thing with Rita, that’s Rita, my wife. Quite a girl, Rita was, but too much for me … I was all shot up and gassed, sick all the time, not a whole hell of a lot different than this poor old fart you see before you now …” He shot me one of his crackling wheezes, blinked behind the thick round spectacles; one eye was grayish-white, opaque with cataract. “I never really held Rita’s way of acting against her, our marriage was not one of passion, you get me? You follow? I ain’t talkin’ to myself, am I?”

“I follow,” I said. “Tell me the story.”

He looked out the bay window. The beach beneath his restaurant and his motel had a gray and rocky look, dimly lit by lamps at the back of the buildings. A red sand bucket stood out, glared against the sand. The waves thrust themselves on the shore and their fingers crept toward us.

“Pretty damned curious, I’d say,” he said cagily.

I shrugged.

“Well, why should I care? You’re somebody to talk to.” He held the beer to his lips, hands clutching the heavy stein like a baby’s. “Rita was a hard worker, never idle, working at our old place, the café and the cabins we used to have north of here, cabins were the thing in the thirties. Before this new kind of motel, y’see. Then she went to work out at this lodge, for these young fellas from the Cities. They came up to hunt and fish and get drunk I guess, and they needed somebody to cook sometimes and keep the place tidy. I never knew what they paid her, Rita and I kept ourselves separate, but she paid her way with me … She wasn’t a bad wife, not a bad bargain, as things went. Hell, everybody’s got some skeletons in the closet.” He peered at me, one eye sharp and gleaming, like a watchful animal. “Ain’t they, ain’t everybody got things they don’t talk about?”

“Sure,” I said, “everybody. You’re sure right about that, Ted.”

He nodded, wise and sly in his antiquity.

“When she died, Rita left me one hundred and fifty thousand dollars! One hundred and fifty thousand dollars … Can you believe it? It took awhile to get at it but the banker here in Grande Rouge, I known him for years, all my life, he knew the money was there and he let me borrow against it—”

“Rita died? I thought she … well, I didn’t know she was dead.”

He nodded again. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Whatever happened to Rita Hook? People used to gossip about that all the time, day up, day down. What became of Rita? Where is she now?” He sang it, like a child, or someone whose mind was nipping in and out of corners. “Well, the truth is I don’t know any more than anyone else. But she either went so far away nobody could find her or she packed it in, died. Anyways, she never showed up again after that night she went out to the lodge for the last time …”

“You say you don’t remember any of the men in the club, but maybe you do. How about Jon Goode? Or Jim Crocker?” No answer. “Maybe … Carver Maxvill?”

“Nope. Just can’t recollect at all.”

“Funny,” I said. “One of them disappeared, too. Long time ago, man named Maxvill, a Minneapolis lawyer. Like your wife, he just wasn’t there one day …”

“That’s how it was with Rita. Gone. She said she was going out to the lodge one night, dead of winter, cold as a bitch. I told her that. ‘Rita,’ I says, ‘it’s too cold, it can wait till tomorrow.’ But no, she says, she wants to get it done that night, she said she had some picking up and straightening to do, pipes to check, one damn thing or another.” He sucked air in, wheezed it out, clapped his gloved hands around the gleaming wheels of his rolling, invalid’s chair. “It was a snowy night, blowing and cold, not long before Christmas, she had old Running Buck—what was his name?—Willy, it was Willy, the Indian guide, drive her out in his old pickup. Willy was the guide for them city boys, he was out there whenever they were, taking ’em hunting, fishing … So he took her out that night and about midnight he shows up at our place, poker-faced as usual, tells me that Rita decided there was too much work to do out at the lodge, so she figured she’d stay overnight … Didn’t make any difference to me, she was a big girl. Running Buck bought a bottle of hooch from me that night, wanted to keep warm, I suppose, and drove off …” He blinked, looked away from me again, toward the lake, remembering the night he’d last seen his wife. The memory didn’t seem to hurt him but he was an old man and maybe none of it seemed so bad anymore. It all came to this anyway, he seemed to be saying, so what difference did it make? But there were the ridges in his face, a kind of glittering madness in his one good eye.

“Next day she didn’t call me—those fellas always kept the lodge on the telephone line year round—so about noon or so I called the lodge. No answer. Well, I was worried. I called the law and the sheriff went out there in the snow, I was down sick all that winter, and there wasn’t no trace of Rita out there. It was raining and sleeting and snowing, no tracks, car or otherwise, at the lodge, just a wet mess … and that was the last of Rita. Evaporated. Didn’t take no money, no clothes, but I figure she musta gone off with some fella …” He drained his beer and burrowed his chin down into his scarf. He muttered. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The tables had begun to fill and the noise level was rising. I hitched my chair closer to him.

“Son, niece, wife, all gone to hell … Gone.” He shook his head slowly. “Draft in here, I’m cold. Brrr.” I was sweating. Logs were burning in the fireplace behind me. “Everybody’s gone, all but these shitheels waiting for me to pack it in, can’t be too soon for them.” He sniffed, rubbed his nose. “Well, maybe I’m ready to go, maybe tonight’s the night. I can feel the cold in my bones … what’s your name again?”

He didn’t look at me.

“Paul.”

“I don’t know you, do I?”

“No, not really.”

“I suppose I’m boring you?” He had snapped back into focus. He was alert again, smiling slyly up at me.

“Not at all,” I said.

“I’m alone, an old man, dying in slow motion,” he wheezed, breath whistling in his throat. “My family gone—oh, yes, I had a family, a son and a niece and a wife, all of us living together for a time, but there were problems, things we didn’t ever talk about. Skeletons in the closet,” he repeated, chuckling into the wrinkled scarf. He shoved the plate of potatoes away. “We had a boy, lucky, that was. I wasn’t up to much on the bedroom front, y’know? After the gassing? But we had a boy. Long gone, probably dead somewhere, too, like his poor mother. Then Rita went clear back to Chicago that time to be with her sister while her sister was having her baby, no husband, y’know, not that I’d hold that against her, poor wretch … Died having the baby, she died in a place called Merrivale Hospital it was, same place Rita’d went to have our boy, with Rita by her side, holding her hand as she slipped away. The baby lived and Rita brought her home and …” He coughed, sniffling, rubbing the drop hanging from the end of his pointed, bony nose. “She’s gone, too. Once Rita left us I had the two kids and what was I to do? My poor health kept me from being the father they needed, y’see? And now they’re gone and old Ted’s by his lonesome. Sad, sad story … Could you fetch me a beer, young man?”

I went to get him the beer and when I returned he was snoring, mouth hanging slack, asleep. I put the stein on the table in reach and went outside. It was like leaving a grave.
TED
shone like blood against the sky and the mist was thickening, turning to a cold rain.

I grabbed a hamburger and a root beer at the A&W, which was the only drive-in in town, passed the Chat and Chew, which looked crowded with its window steaming over, took a right through the sparse residential section, and found myself on a blacktop heading into the black night. I smelled the rain and the wet trees but beyond the penumbra of the headlamps the evening offered a void. There was no moon; it was like slipping quietly, unnoticed through infinite space. The night Rita Hook left Grande Rouge might have been dark like this, snow blustering before the pickup truck. Countless times on countless nights the members of the club had driven out from Grande Rouge toward the lodge on the same scraps of highway. Now it was my turn.

I wondered what I was learning, made sure I remembered how I’d been pulled into this whole thing in the first place; it seemed a long time ago, a thousand questions ago, the first ones buried beneath all that followed. The secrets of the past leaped up in my mind, like figures stepping from the roadside, from the deep blackness, into my headlamps. What was it Father Boyle said—something or other was bound to happen sooner or later? Bound to come out sooner or later? Something along those lines. Something. Carver Maxvill had disappeared in Minneapolis; no one wanted to talk about it anymore. But it was bound to come out sooner or later … What? The fact that a man kicked over the traces, let go, and was swallowed up, Jonah-like, in the whale? Surely there was more to it than a matter of public record; after all, he’d been stolen from the newspaper morgue. But what in God’s name had the man done? What could have been so awful that the thought of his name sent the wild bunch scurrying, angry, fingers pointing like characters in a Daumier etching?

Ted Hook, living out the end among the shitheels, people he despised, heading for the grave not knowing whatever happened to Rita … Where did she go? Was she still alive and did she remember the old man she’d married, who’d given her a son?

I turned off the blacktop onto a wet gravel road winding its one lane between a thick outcropping of shrubbery. Water dripped steadily onto the hood and windshield.

There were ridges in the roadway and sharp bends and I needed to concentrate. I felt alone, as if the state of solitude were pressing down, closing around me, as if it were my fate and nature, had always been. Born to be alone … No point in kidding yourself. Anything else was an illusion: You were always alone and without a map, no matter what your analyst or your mother told you. You picked your way, carefully, as best you could. Men were capable of anything and you had only yourself to blame in the end.

Where had Rita gotten $150,000? Hadn’t Ted wondered, just a little? $150,000! A housekeeper. Christ. Why hadn’t she taken it with her? Maybe she never went anywhere. But, then, why couldn’t they find her? Because sometimes people lose themselves. Carver Maxvill did it. Why not Rita Hook?

The lodge was a blur in the night, indistinct in the darkness and the fog and the rain. I didn’t stop to inspect it beyond recognizing it from the snapshots. The smell of pine needles and wet fir trees was overpowering. I yanked my suitcase out of the back and opened the door with the key Archie had given me. He hadn’t been there in all those years but he assured me that he’d been told the key would work, that he was welcome to use the lodge anytime he wanted. Goode, Crocker, Hub, and Boyle still came up a time or two each year for the fishing and he was welcome; once a member, always a member.

The door opened easily and the lights clicked dimly on, yellow and warm with shadows everywhere. A moose head gazed benevolently from a place of some honor over the fireplace, which was high and expansive with wood stacked to dry beside it. A huge braided rug lay before the fire. Three couches, one of wicker, one of leather, one of loose cushions on a wooden frame, made a square on the rug with the fireplace the fourth side.

I twisted a sheet of newspaper, lit it, and thrust it up the chimney to see if the flue was clear. The smoke sucked quickly upward, drops of rain spattering my hand. I built a fire in the long charred grate and watched it roar. It was a comfortable, large room. A 1937 copy of
Esquire
lay on an end table. I opened some of the windows, heard the rain in the trees.

There was canned food in the kitchen, a set of plain dishes, assorted scotches, bourbons, gins, mixes, brandies. Dishes stood in a rubber rack where they’d been placed to drain. A copy of a Minneapolis newspaper from a month before lay on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Maybe that was why the place didn’t seem echoing and cold and deserted. It was never left unattended for long.