The Cavanaugh Quest (27 page)

Mr. Appleton had given me instructions for several possible eventualities. In case the doctor took flight, in whatever direction, I had only one task: kill him. He told me several ways to do it. If he had the briefcase, take it. Give it to him, Appleton, in Helsinki. He explained with great care the crucial advantage I had in this unlikely, obscene situation; the other side (I have no idea who they were) had no way of knowing me or what I was up to. By the time they discovered it, it would be much too late to do anything about it. Thus, I was the man my country needed. It was insane.

But Mr. Appleton was, I was absolutely certain, capable of killing me. And all I could think of was how best to save my own skin. Watching the night whisk by in spotty bits of moonlight, listening to the heavy breathing of the doctor across the way, I fought it out of my mind.

Who was less likely to kill me—Appleton or the lads who were going gunning for the doctor? If I killed the old man, Appleton had told me I was safe, out of it, on my way. If I failed to kill the old man, Appleton had assured me that he himself would kill me. But would he? Would he really kill me? Would I die without ever knowing what I’d stumbled into?

I killed the old man with the .38-caliber pistol Mr. Appleton had given me. I did it in the compartment while he slept, pressing the barrel where I thought his heart would be. I couldn’t risk a head shot; I didn’t want anyone to know he was dead until, at least, the train reached Helsinki. I got off the train in a suburb, took a taxi to the railroad terminal, and surprised Mr. Appleton, who was waiting to greet me and take my briefcase or kill me.

I felt as if I’d turned into a dark hallway where I would walk forever. I heard Appleton chuckling underneath the absurd brushlike mustache, felt his huge hand on my back. He told me he was sorry I’d gotten involved and had to do what I did, but I should remember that it was a war and we all had to be ever vigilant.

I didn’t see Goode in London; I was afraid I’d try to kill him with my bare hands. For months, then years, I dreamed about the old man, the white stubble on his chin, the deep lines scooped out of the pink white cheeks, the smell of cologne and age. I would wake up in the night, nauseated, hearing the rush of breath, the rustling of dry lips, the soft grunt from the unconscious sleeping man as he took the impact of the bullet …

My life was never the same. I became a different, less human being and I mourned the loss of myself. I split apart, as if cleaved by an ax, and half died. Half a man remained and that half knew a terrible thing: It had killed a whole man to save only half of itself. There was a built-in error. How could the thing that remained ever prove that the price paid for continued existence was worth it? And how could it ever reach out to another human, a fellow, and make the connection? There was something missing. Something necessary.

It was dark when I finished the story. I felt as if I’d undergone some extremely punishing physical activity. I was out of breath and my memory had been beaten to jelly. Self-consciously I tried to laugh and produced a groan, tried to muffle it by clearing my throat. Confession was good for the soul, and I’d never quite located mine.

The shape that was Kim, a shadow in the faint glow from the embers, leaned toward me, her face pink in the memory of the flames and her cheeks wet. I heard her sniffle, saw her hand swipe across her face. She rested her hand on my arm, consoling.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve cried, too. I’ve cried for that poor old man … but he’s still there, there’s no getting free of him. He’s there, he’ll always be there. He’ll die when I die, only then.” I took her hand in mine, felt the wetness of her tears.

“No,” she whispered, “no, for you, I’m crying for you, not the old man.” She swallowed hard. “Killing someone to save yourself … We’re programmed to survive. It’s not unnatural to kill, particularly not for survival. Jesus …” She pulled her hand away and threw a pebble into the embers, sparks showering upward, a bright fountain. “He was right, your Mr. Appleton. It’s a war, it
was
a war, and war rules are different. You got caught in it, you had to kill someone. It was the only way out. Sometimes you have to do things …”

“It’s the living with it,” I said. “The killing was easy. Knowing what you did, the choice you made … that’s hard.”

She let herself lean against me as we walked back across the ledges to the car. I had my arm around her shoulder. We drove in silence, sat quietly in the turnaround before the lodge. Rain came and went, mist clinging and ground fog building up in pockets.

“Thank you for the picnic,” I said. “The whole day. It’s been a nice surprise. Better than nice.”

She smiled and nodded. I leaned across the car, touched her face, turning her toward me. I kissed her tentatively and she kissed me back, without passion, but comfortably, without resistance. It didn’t last long.

“I’m going back to spend the evening with Ted. Go to bed early. Days outside in weather like this can wear you out.”

I nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “I enjoyed the day, too.”

I got out and looked back through the window. I could taste her faintly on my mouth. She pulled the huge car in a slow, deliberate arc and moved serenely off into the night, snatched from my sight by an abrupt turning in the narrow roadway.

I stood on the porch for a while watching the clouds of fog gather around the lodge like the mists of Brigadoon. My father and all the rest of them, the good and the bad, had stood where I stood, watching identical nighttimes softly closing around them. I was aware of them, the fact that they had been there once, frail and human and foolish, but the woman was pushing them into the perspective they deserved. She was in the here and now, and I had told her my most awesome secret. And I had kissed her, which may not have been much of a seventies accomplishment but then I wasn’t much of a seventies man.

I sat on a living-room couch, half reading a beat-up paperback copy of C. P. Snow’s
The Masters
which had been left in a pocket of my suitcase from a trip long ago. But the image in my mind was Dana Andrews in
Laura,
sitting in the empty apartment with rain streaming down the windowpanes, falling in love with a painting. He was a forties man and I knew how his mind worked. And I wondered what the day had meant to Kim, the day and the kiss. It seemed so large to me. Could it possibly have meant anything comparable to her?

Unfortunately just enough of my mind was still functioning to make me realize that though she’d now revealed with a flourish the mystery of her parentage, she was still mostly a puzzlement. She had said nothing about Billy Whitefoot, where he’d come to play his part in her life. She’d ignored the story of Larry Blankenship. Yet they were there, gentlemen of indistinct proportions, mute in the past. I could see them, I kept signaling to them, but I couldn’t make them hear.

I was back to the facts of what I knew. Rita had been employed by the club members and Rita had been Kim’s surrogate mother. And Rita had gone to the lodge one winter night and never been heard from again. And the members of the hunting and fishing club had taken care of the little girl when she’d come to the city. She owed something to those men who had reached out to a frightened, north country girl with no place to go … But did she really? Did she ever owe anybody anything? It didn’t seem to be in her makeup. She kept even, she never fell behind when it came to her debts.

Later, in bed with
The Baseball Encyclopedia
and the career of Hank Sauer, who had become the Cubs’ big home-run hitter after Bill Nicholson had been shipped to Philly, I got to thinking about the disconnected, random selection of people and events which make up the grid of one’s life. All those Cubs I’d watched as a kid, they’d come from all over the country, from dozens of Depression backgrounds, and entertained me at Wrigley Field, where you could smell the greenery of the vines on the walls in the outfield.

What had happened that day in the lobby was much the same thing. A man I’d never known commits suicide and the event develops a hungry life of its own, reaching out ravenously to consume whomever it touched. Harriet, Tim, the club members … Rita and Carver and old Ted. And Kim. If Larry Blankenship hadn’t pulled the trigger, I’d never have met Kim. It was a bond, like a muscle, flexing, pulling us together. I felt close to her and, through her, to all the points at which she was bound to the pattern …

To Larry by marriage; to Harriet by hate; to Tim through his sense of responsibility; to Rita by her mother’s blood; to Ted by chance; to Billy by marriage; to Darwin by lust; to Anne by friendship; to Ole by love and caring; to the members of the club by fate.

To me … by what?

It made a hell of a list. Great for an old-timers’ game. Maybe I could throw out the first ball. Finally I went to sleep.

I woke up lonely and cold, badly in need of some human companionship. I resisted the faint desire to call Kim. She needed plenty of room. I hoped that she had some thinking to do about her own life, about Ole; but in the morning light I was unsure of her. There was the nagging fear that she didn’t take me so seriously, that we were on different wave-lengths like Chekhovian characters rattling on to each other in our own private worlds, neither hearing the other.

I packed my suitcase and went outside to find a brisk, clear morning with heavy dew lingering in the grass. The Chat and Chew Cafe was steaming with eggs and bacon, several locals fueling up for the day, glad to see the sun hanging in a pale-blue sky above the lake. Dolly smiled at me when I came through the door and I sat down next to my friend Jack, the cop.

“You must figure I do nothin’ but eat,” he growled. “And you wouldn’t be too damn far wrong. Har, har, siddown, siddown, you find your daddy’s place all right?”

I nodded, ordered the ranch breakfast, which included a steak and hashbrowns as well as eggs, the works. Hot coffee perked me up.

“Y’know, ever since I was talking to you the other day, I been thinking about what I said, about Ted and Rita, the two kids—”

“What about the kids?”

“Well, there was the boy, he was older, course, and he was their natural child, or so everybody said.” He mopped up some egg with a corner of toast, leaving a yellow stain on his lower lip. “Well, I shouldn’t say that because a lot of people figured that maybe it was someone else who put that particular bun in Rita’s oven, not old Ted … but, what the hell, Rita and old Ted said it was their own, and what harm was there in that? Officially the boy was theirs. Robert, Robert Hook, that was the boy’s name. Real fat kid, eyes just like raisins in a rice pudding, always looked like he was peeking outa that fat face. Real quiet kid, always had his head down, looking at the sidewalk. Funny, the dumb stuff you remember, ain’t it?

“And then there was the girl. I reckon Rita was real close to that sister of hers, down there in the Windy City, Chicago. She musta been gone, aw hell, six months taking care of her down there … you know how sisters are sometimes. I had a pair of sisters, kinda unhealthy, they was so close. Anyway, she came home with the little baby girl, Shirley … just a tiny baby. Then once Rita took off and Ted was in bad shape, he sent ’em out to the orphanage …

“Wait a minute,” I said. “What is this Shirley thing? I thought the girl’s name was Kim?”

He looked at me, surprised. “Oh, you know the family, then?”

“No, I just happen to know the girl … Kim.”

“Well, you’re right about that, but they didn’t name girls Kim back in those days, see. Little Shirley decided she’d become Kim once she was gone. When she came back to town, years later, hell, she was all growed up, one of them damned teenagers, and she was Kim by then … made sure we all got it right, too. So we called her Kim Hook, but she’d taken another last name—I forget.” He looked at my plate. “Eat up, for God’s sake, your steak’s gettin’ cold. She still visits Ted, I hear, little Shirley.” He watched me go to work on the steak and eggs. “Look, though, here’s my point. I got to thinking about our little chat with Dolly the other day and I was reminiscing with a couple of the boys havin’ a beer the way you do, y’now, and somebody remembered something about the Indian guide I told you about … Running Buck?”

Dolly stopped to listen, sweat beaded on her brow, still smelling of powder. Two girls were bearing the brunt of the serving and she rested a fat arm on the pie cabinet, blew on a hot cup of coffee. She listened attentively, eyes flickering away at her clientele.

I said, “The man who took Rita out to the lodge that last night.”

“Well, this guide had a kid with him most of the time, kid was ’bout the only person he ever hung around with or said more ’n two words to. Me and my memory, I can’t recollect the kid’s name—”

“I remember the boy,” Dolly interrupted, eyebrows knit as if on the verge of a discovery. “But I can’t get his name either. Anyway, he must of been Running Buck’s son, wouldn’t you expect?”

“Funny thing is,” Jack said, pausing for emphasis, chins quivering over his open-necked blue policeman’s shirt, “the kid’s still in these parts, that’s what I remembered whilst we was having a beer! Hell, he come back after going down to the Cities for a spell but he didn’t stay long, went off to college somewhere, Mankato or St. Cloud, anyway now he’s running the Indian Affairs Center up in Jasper, up on the Range …”

“Running Buck’s boy,” Dolly said. “Sure is funny the way people turn out, ain’t it? Who’d a thought it?”

“I figured I oughta tell you, seein’ as how you turned up here for breakfast.” Jack scowled in thought. “If you’re interested in the club, the boy might be able to fill you in on some details, your father and his friends. He used to help Running Buck, I’m sure he worked out there at the lodge from time to time … doing errands, odd jobs.” He drained his coffee cup and covered it with his hand.

“Where’s Jasper?” I asked.

“North and west of here, not too far from the border. Ely, Coleraine, Hibbing, Virginia, Jasper, they’re all up there together.” He gave me directions and I finished my breakfast, listening to him ramble on. “Once you get there, go to the center and just ask for the director, name just on the tip of my tongue—anyway, he must be So-and-So Running Buck, don’t you see? I don’t know.”