The Cavanaugh Quest (37 page)

“You have to hand it to her,” he said, his mouth full.

“Right, good food.”

“Not the food, man,” he said with a puzzled expression. “Lasagna’s just lasagna as far as I’m concerned … but the way she gets her guns on top of the hills, I mean, she’s a methodical one … She analyzes the situation, sees what will work and what won’t, and doesn’t spend time fucking around with the stuff that’s not gonna do it. She has a way of seeing to the heart of the problem. Not very feminine, if you know what I mean—she doesn’t follow the feminine stereotype—got a mind like we used to think only men had. Now, of course, we all know better …” He licked tomato sauce off his fingertips. “Because Gloria Steinem told us so.” He drank some of the Chianti and stuck out a sticky hand. “Baxter, mathematics,” he said.

“Cavanaugh,” I said. “Befuddlement.”

“That’s good.” He laughed. “Me, too. Say, I got your hand all sticky … son of a bitch, sorry about that …”

She found me later and smiled ruefully. “You must be horribly bored. I really am sorry, I shouldn’t have let you come. But I wanted to see you. Selfish. Do you want to leave?”

I told her about my unsettling day with Crocker and the rats, how I hadn’t been able to get unwound since seeing it happen. She said she’d heard something about it on the television news but had been up to her elbows in the kitchen at the time.

“I’ve been thinking I might run up there and take a look yet tonight. If the rats break out they’re going to need more than heavy artillery on the surrounding hills.”

“Would you take me? They’ll never miss me here, they’ll be playing all night, at least some of them, until every last calorie of food and wine is gone … Come on, let’s go.” She looked up expectantly.

The night had turned brisk and chilly and the wind blew papers and dust along the empty streets as I headed up into the alternately garish and dowdy North Side. She huddled inside her arms and I told her about the man with the rats hanging on him. And I told her that Crocker had given me a pretty harsh warning.

“You’re really very foolhardy,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to become of you.” She spoke with a dying fall, as if something rather sorrowful had occurred to her.

Floodlights had been set up in the park, the beams trained on the hill. Two fire trucks stood gleaming on the grass, police patrolled the perimeters, and several of Crocker’s workmen lounged against earthmovers smoking, talking. A canteen of sorts had been set up near the trailer and the strong aroma of coffee mingled with the smell from the hill. The night’s cold had toned down the fetid odor and we sat and watched from the Porsche. An ambulance pulled up beside the Crocker trailer and two white-outfitted men went over to the coffee.

We levered ourselves out of the car and headed toward the maroon-and-gold trailer. Crocker himself was standing sipping coffee, filling the doorway, his face drawn and dirty. He didn’t seem to focus on me properly, then gave a sour crunch to his mouth as I became clear. He’d taken off the hard hat and his thick white hair was plastered against his head; he rubbed his eyes with his knuckles, the University of Minnesota ring catching the dim light in its red stone. He started to speak to me.

“Haven’t you had enough for one—”

Then he saw Kim behind me and stopped abruptly, his mouth cocked open and locked in place. He covered his surprise reflex by knocking back some coffee; when he looked up he was grinning almost boyishly, erasing for a moment the years and the tiredness. He must have been a ladies’ man, the football hero.

“Kim,” he rumbled. “What are you doing here? No place for a girl—”

“Hello, Mr. Crocker,” she said very quietly, casting a glance at the ground, almost as if she were suddenly reverting to the days when she took orders at Norway Creek. “Paul wanted to come up and see if it was under control …” She shrugged. “So I came with him. I had no idea you’d be here.”

“Well, it’s my responsibility, it was my machinery that broke it open and set the damn things loose. I’d better be here until we know what’s going to happen with them—”

“What’s the status?” I asked.

“Christ, it’s a mess. They haven’t come out yet, not in large numbers anyway, that’s why they rigged up those lights up on top. Somebody’s figured that’d keep them blinded, keep them underground … I sure as hell don’t know. I’ve heard about things like this, but I’ve never seen it happen. They’re up there now, took canisters of gas … but it’s not easy, tough to control. They keep talking about a rat stampede … You’d have a hell of a panic then.”

“What happened to the guy who got bitten?”

“Another mess. Rat bit damn near clear through his hand, they bit through arteries in his hand and leg, I guess … he’s in the hospital … I don’t know what’s gonna happen, that’s all I know for sure.”

Kim edged away from us, toward the coffee maker. Crocker leaned toward me, glowering, speaking from behind tight lips.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Can’t you see I’ve got enough trouble here? Just take your goddamn questions and your insinuations and get the hell out of here …” His voice cracked, from exhaustion and frustration. “You heard what I told you this morning. You need a lesson taught you, son. Take the girl and move out.” He gripped my arm until it hurt, an old man who scared me. “You’ve made a hell of a mistake, you’ve pushed me at just the wrong goddamn time. And I’m pushing back.” He drew himself up and threw the barrel chest my way. “And don’t go dragging that girl into all this crap you keep shoveling—just leave her out of it. Kim would never—ah, just leave her the hell out of it.”

“What would she never?”

“Are you seeing her?
Seeing,
I mean,
seeing
her …”

“Shove it, Sunny Jim,” I snapped. “Just shove it where the sun don’t shine. And stop threatening me, either get hard with me or shut the fuck up.”

He stared at me wearily as if he’d broken better and bigger men than me over his goddamn knee.

“Just you remember one thing,” he said quietly. “You gave the order.”

I’d once thought him gruff and kindly, doting on his grandchildren, presiding over the dynasty he’d begun. But he was a different man now. Everybody kept changing just when I thought I was getting hold of them.

“Do you think you should have spoken to him like that?” She hooked an arm through mine.

“Probably not,” I said. “But eventually you get tired of having people lie to you, lead you astray, jockey you around, threaten you. Then you press the button.”

We climbed back into the Porsche and I got it started. Crocker was still standing in the doorway watching us. I was sure he was a dead man but he didn’t seem to believe it. None of them believed it. I drove around the park, watching the hill, which lay in peculiar, mottled shadows from the floodlights. Men paced the hillside like sentries and there was no sign of the little brown fellows. Somewhere under the hill their world was being poisoned, generations were dying, choking, wilting, and all they had done was build in the wrong place. The wrong place at the wrong time and it was an old story, a rat tragedy. All bullshit.

“But what if Mr. Crocker pushes the button? His button?” She was half turned to face me, sitting with one leg under her. “He sounded angry enough … to kill somebody. You.”

“I don’t know,” I said, and we drove back to the Riverfront Towers in complete quiet but for the continuing agonies of the car. I looked at her when the car was stopped and she was staring at her lap. I leaned over clumsily and tilted her head up, kissed her dry lips.

“I wonder if they’ve finished with the Eastern Front,” she said, her lips moving against mine.

“We could check, I suppose,” I said.

She was a different person, too: normal, not herself. I didn’t trust it, but I wanted to. I came close. She leaned against me in the elevator and I tried to be satisfied with whatever blessing came my way.

There was a note scotch-taped to the kitchen wall: “Russkies held out longer than usual. But not long enough. Great party. And good night, Kim-O, wherever you are.”

“They are gone,” she sighed, her voice unnaturally cheery. “It’s hard to believe.”

“Well, here we are,” I said. “Alone at last.”

“We’ve been alone before,” she said.

“This is a little different …”

“I thought so. I thought maybe—”

I reached out and took her, held her against me, hoping she was ready.

“Paul,” she said, her voice trembling.

I kissed her again, wanting her to be pliant, yielding. I moved my hand from the small of her back down to her hips, pulling her against me so she’d know. And she tried.

I’ve got to give her that. She tried; she had several reasons for wanting it to work, one of which may even have been instinctual and spontaneous. She held herself against me and returned my kiss with a kind of pathetic manufactured fervor, her body stiffening as she tried to make it softer, melt, lubricate. Mind and matter were at it and I knew it and finally she knew I knew it. She stopped pressing, stopped the movement of her lips on mine, and sighed deeply, clinging, with her arms around my neck, leaning on me. It was exhausting, fighting toward such a commonplace goal so far from her grasp, and she clung like a child. She was sweating and I don’t remember ever feeling any closer to anyone. For most people in my life it had been so easy, so natural; for her it was so terribly difficult, so consigned to failure’s hollow bin … Shared failure can bring two people closer together: The ragged edges of character and breeding show through and you get close. The toughest, rawest kind of failure is the dispiriting failure of the body. She couldn’t make her body work for her and in the darkened, private rooms where she lived she was of no use to me; it wasn’t true, but she felt it, backed away, shaking her head, fists clenched.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her lips were pressed together, everything about her was tight, clamped shut. “I really wanted to … you don’t know what it’s like, but I can’t, I can’t let go. When you go, I’ll be able to satisfy myself—it doesn’t bother me to tell you that, I don’t feel as if I have any secrets from you—when I’m alone I’ll take a hot bath and I’ll be all right, I’ll make it happen, but now it’s hopeless … sometimes I think I’m the only sexual partner I can trust, I can use myself and I won’t betray me …” She opened her refrigerator and popped a can of beer, sipped from the rim and handed it to me. “God,” she whispered, “I can’t believe the things I let myself tell you …” The can was cold against my mouth. “Are you angry?”

“No,” I said. “I love you.”

“I wish you didn’t,” she said. “It’s because you haven’t been able to have me …”

“I don’t know anything about reasons.”

“I’m so distracted, my mind is splintered—maybe that’s why I’m so far away so much of the time. I really tried tonight, from the moment you called. I wanted to be light and easy, but I couldn’t do it. I’m in the middle of so many things, so incomplete, I wish I could tell you … how my mind works, the way I think and what I have to do …” She came back to me and took my hand.

“But I can’t and if you’re fed up, I don’t blame you. If you want to leave and never come back, I’d understand …”

“I’m not done yet,” I said. “I can wait …”

“I hope you don’t have to wait forever, that’s too long.”

It was well past one o’clock when I left Kim and I didn’t really take my mind with me. She had completely occupied my thinking process, doubtless because I’d decided that it was only a matter of time before she felt secure enough with me to let whatever there was between us take root, flower. I drove rather aimlessly, trying to imagine exactly what she would be like when I finally took her to bed, and I didn’t pay any attention to the car behind me. But it was there, patient, determined, waiting for me to get away from the lights of the downtown loop. They must have thought I was crazy, cruising the deserted, bright, windswept streets, but they stayed with it. Up Hennepin, all the way to Franklin, where I turned right and bumped westward to the northern end of Lake of the Isles. In the bright moonlight the tennis courts in the park had a gray glow about them and the heavy trees on the gentle slope of Kenwood Park were navy blue. The surface of the lake moved in the wind, lapped at the shores with a faint sucking sound; the wind in the treetops made noises like a train rushing out of a darkened tunnel.

I stopped the Porsche and crossed the street, walked through the shadows and stood by a tree which angled out over the water. I thought I was alone and I felt like a poet, shivering in the wind, watching the white plate of moon flicker and ripple in the water. I don’t often feel like a poet but I did then, drifting on the youthful hope of love and warmth and affection which I’d given up as lost causes a long time ago. It was back, that sense of humanity which springs only from the pulse of love, eager and glowing first love. What I felt, felt new, unlike whatever I’d known before, and I stood for a long time leaning on that tree feeling pleased, even proud, as if I’d dragged life out of the cold ashes and made it spark and catch fire again. A miracle.

I’d almost gotten back to the car when I noticed what appeared to be a pickup truck a hundred yards or so away. That was just registering as a curiosity when they stepped out from the shadow of an immense oak near my car. They moved neither quickly nor slowly, just calmly, wordlessly, around my car, one on either side of me. Nobody said anything. One pinned my arms behind me and the other hit me with a methodical left and right, burying his fists in my stomach. Lasagna and Chianti backed up in my throat and the fellow behind me let me slide to the ground. I could hear myself gagging and gasping, the grinding of their shoes on the pavement. I was desperately sucking at air and I got some dirt and pebbles in my mouth. I drew my knees up toward my chest, bracing myself, protecting myself from the boots which were sure to start tattooing my ribs, kidneys, groin.

But the kicks didn’t come. One of the men leaned over me, turned me face up.

“Can you breathe through your mouth?” He was talking to me and my addled brain wondered what the hell was going on.

I groaned some animal sound, an affirmative, and he leaned down beside me, tilted my face so that I was staring straight up, seeing the moon through a pattern of leaves. Involuntary tears blurred my vision. I couldn’t see his face, only a darkened, bleary shadow, but he was staring at my face. Then, like the blade of a guillotine descending, the side of his hand dropped down and smashed across the bridge of my nose. I heard something crunch in my head, waited, and was then engulfed in a circular, swirling sort of pain, inescapable and acute. I brought my hands up to my face and felt the stickiness of blood smearing down my cheek. I choked on blood running into my throat, turned my head, spit it out with a nasty gurgling sound.