The Far Side of the Dollar (29 page)

He parked in an orange grove that smelled of weddings and listened to the story of her life. Even though he’d often doubted that he belonged to the Hillmans, it was hard for him to believe that he was Carol’s son. But he was strongly drawn to her. The relationship was like an escape hatch in Captain Hillman’s tight little ship. He kept going back to Carol, and eventually he believed her. He even began to love her in a way.

“Why didn’t you tell me about her?” Stella said. “I would have liked to know her.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” His voice was rough. “Anyway, I had to
get to know her myself first. I had to get adjusted to the whole idea of my mother. And then I had to decide what to do. You see, she wanted to leave my father. He gave her a hard time, he always had. She said if she didn’t get away from him soon, she’d never be able to. She wasn’t good at standing up for herself, and she wanted my help. Besides, I think she knew he was up to something.”

“You mean the kidnapping and all?” she said.

“I think she knew it and she didn’t know it. You know how women are.”

“I know my mother,” she answered sagely.

They had forgotten me. I was the friendly chauffer, good old graying Lew Archer, and we would go on driving like this forever through a night so dangerous that it had to feel secure. I remembered a kind of poem or parable that Susanna had quoted to me years before. A bird came in through a window at one end of a lighted hall, flew the length of the hall, and out through another window into darkness: that was the span of a human life. The headlights that rose in the distance and swooped by and fell away behind us reminded me of Susanna’s briefly lighted bird. I wished that she was with me.

Tom was telling Stella how he first met his father. Mike had been kept in the background the first week; he was supposed to be in Los Angeles looking for work. Finally, on the Saturday night, Tom met him at the auto court.

“That was the night you borrowed our car, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. My fa—Ralph had me grounded, you know. Carol spilled some wine on the front seat of the car and he smelled it. He thought I was driving and drinking.”

“Did Carol drink much?”

“Quite a bit. She drank a lot that Saturday night. So did he. I had some wine, too.”

“You’re not old enough.”

“It was with dinner,” he said. “Carol cooked spaghetti. Spaghetti à la Pocatello, she called it. She sang some of the old songs for me, like ‘Sentimental Journey.’ It was kind of fun,” he said doubtfully.

“Is that why you didn’t come home?”

“No. I—” The word caught in his throat. “I—” His face, which I could see in the rear-view mirror, became contorted with effort. He couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Did you want to stay with them?” Stella said after a while.

“No. I don’t know.”

“How did you like your father?”

“He was all right, I guess, until he got drunk. We played some gin rummy and he didn’t win, so he broke up the game. He started to take it out on Carol. I almost had a fight with him. He said he used to be a boxer and I’d be crazy to try it, that his fists could kill.”

“It sounds like a terrible evening.”

“That part of it wasn’t so good.”

“What part of it was?”

“When she sang the old songs. And she told me about my grandfather in Pocatello.”

“Did that take all night?” she said a little tartly.

“I didn’t
stay
with them all night. I left around ten o’clock, when we almost had the fight. I—” The same word stuck in his throat again, as if it was involved with secret meanings that wouldn’t let it be spoken.

“What did you do?”

“I went and parked on the view-point where I picked her up the first time. I sat there until nearly two o’clock, watching the stars and listening, you know, to the sea. The sea and the highway. I was trying to figure out what I should do, where I belonged. I still haven’t got it figured out.” He added, in a voice that was conscious of me: “Now I guess I don’t have any choice. They’ll put me back in the Black Hole of Calcutta.”

“Me too,” she said with a nervous giggle. “We can send each other secret notes. Tap out messages on the bars and stuff.”

“It isn’t funny, Stell. Everybody out there is crazy, even some of the staff. They get that way.”

“You’re changing the subject,” she said. “What did you do at two a.m.?”

“I went to see Sam Jackman when he got off work. I thought I could ask him what to do, but I found out that I couldn’t. I just couldn’t tell him that they were my parents. So I went out in the
country and drove around for a few hours. I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to go back to the auto court.”

“So you turned the car over and tried to kill yourself.”

“I—” Silence set in again, and this time it lasted. He sat bolt upright, staring ahead, watching the headlights rise out of the darkness. After a time I noticed that Stella’s arm was across his shoulders. His face was streaked with tears.

I
DROPPED
S
TELLA OFF FIRST
. She refused to get out of the car until Tom promised that he wouldn’t go away again, ever, without telling her.

Her father came out of the house, walking on his heels. He put his arms around her. With a kind of resigned affection, she laid her head neatly against his shoulder. Maybe they had learned something, or were learning. People sometimes do.

They went inside, and I turned down the driveway.

“He’s just a fake,” Tom said. “Stella lent me the car, and then he turned around and told the police I stole it.”

“I believe he thought so at the time.”

“But he found out the truth later, from Stella, and went right on claiming I stole it.”

“Dishonesty keeps creeping in,” I said. “We all have to watch it.”

He thought this over, and decided that I had insulted him. “Is that supposed to be a crack at me?”

“No. I think you’re honest, so far as you understand what you’re talking about. But you only see one side, your own, and it seems to consist mainly of grievances.”

“I have a lot of them,” he admitted. After a moment he said: “You’re wrong about me only seeing one side, though. I know how my—my adoptive parents are supposed to feel, but I know how I feel, too. I can’t go on being split down the middle.
That’s how I felt, you know, these last few nights, like somebody took a cleaver and split me down the middle. I lay awake on that old brass bed, where Mike and Carol, you know, conceived me—with old Sipe snoring in the other room, and I was there and I wasn’t there. You know? I mean I couldn’t believe that I was me and this was my life and those people were my parents. I never believed the Hillmans were, either. They always seemed to be putting on an act. Maybe,” he said half-seriously, “I was dropped from another planet.”

“You’ve been reading too much science fiction.”

“I don’t
really
believe that. I
know
who my parents were. Carol told me. Mike told me. The doctor told me, and that made it official. But I still have a hard time telling
myself.”

“Stop trying to force it. It doesn’t matter so much who your parents were.”

“It does to me,” he said earnestly. “It’s the most important thing in my life.”

We were approaching the Hillmans’ mailbox. I had been driving slowly, immersed in the conversation, and now I pulled into the driveway and stopped entirely.

“I sometimes think children should be anonymous.”

“How do you mean, Mr. Archer?” It was the first time he had called me by my name.

“I have no plan. I’d just like to change the emphasis slightly. People are trying so hard to live through their children. And the children keep trying so hard to live up to their parents, or live them down. Everybody’s living through or for or against somebody else. It doesn’t make too much sense, and it isn’t working too well.”

I was trying to free his mind a little, before he had to face the next big change. I didn’t succeed. “It doesn’t work when they lie to you,” he said. They lied to me. “They pretended I was their own flesh and blood. I thought there was something missing in me when I couldn’t feel like their son.”

“I’ve talked to your mother about this—Elaine—and she bitterly regrets it.”

“I bet.”

“Let’s not get off on that routine, Tom.”

He was silent for a while. “I suppose I have to go and talk to them, but I don’t want to live with them, and I’m not going to put on any phony feelings.”

No phoniness, I thought, was the code of the new generation, at least the ones who were worth anything. It was a fairly decent ideal, but it sometimes worked out cruelly in practice.

“You can’t forgive them for Laguna Perdida.”

“Could you?”

I had to think about my answer. “It would depend on their reasons. I imagine some pretty desperate parents end up there as a last resort with some pretty wild sons and daughters.”

“They’re desperate, all right,” he said. “Ralph and Elaine get desperate very easily. They can’t stand trouble. Sweep it under the rug. All they wanted to do was get me out of sight, when I stopped being their performing boy. And I had all these terrible things on my mind.” He put his hands to his head, to calm the terrible things. He was close to breaking down.

“I’m sorry, Tom. But didn’t something crucial happen that Sunday morning?”

He peered at me under his raised arm. “They told you, eh?”

“No. I’m asking you to tell me.”

“Ask them.”

It was all he would say.

I drove up the winding blacktop lane to the top of the knoll. Lights were blazing outside and inside the house. The harsh white floods made the stucco walls look ugly and unreal. Black shadows lurked under the melodramatic Moorish arches.

There was something a little melodramatic in the way Ralph Hillman stepped out from one of the arches into the light. He wasn’t the wreck Susanna had described, at least not superficially. His handsome silver head was sleekly brushed. His face was tightly composed. He held himself erect, and even trotted a few steps as he came toward my side of the car. He was wearing a wine-colored jacket with a rolled collar.

“Prodigal son returneth,” Tom was saying beside me in scared bravado. “But they didn’t kill the fatted calf, they killed the prodigal son.”

Hillman said: “I thought you were Lieutenant Bastian.”

“Are you expecting him?”

“Yes. He says he has something to show me.”

He stooped to look in the window and saw Tom. His eyes dilated.

“My boy!” His hoarse, whisky-laden voice hardly dared to believe what it was saying. “You’ve come back.”

“Yeah. I’m here.”

Hillman trotted around to the other side of the car and opened the door. “Come out and let me look at you.”

With a brief, noncommittal glance in my direction, Tom climbed out. His movements were stiff and tentative, like a much older man’s. Hillman put his hands on the boy’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length, turning him so that his face was in the light.

“How
are
you, Tom?”

“I’m okay. How are you?”

“Wonderful, now that you’re here.” I didn’t doubt that Hillman’s feeling was sincere, but his expression of it was somehow wrong. Phony. And I could see Tom wince under his hands.

Elaine Hillman came out of the house. I went to meet her. The floodlights multiplied the lines in her face and leached it of any color it might have had. She was pared so thin that she reminded me vaguely of concentration camps. Her eyes were brilliantly alive.

“You’ve brought him back, Mr. Archer. Bless you.”

She slipped her hand through my arm and let me take her to him. He stood like a dutiful son while she stood on her toes and kissed him on his grimy tear-runneled cheek.

Then he backed away from both of them. He stood leaning against the side of my car with his thumbs in the waistband of his slacks. I’d seen a hundred boys standing as he was standing against cars both hot and cold, on the curb of a street or the shoulder of a highway, while men in uniform questioned them. The sound of the distant highway faintly disturbed the edges of the silence I was listening to now.

Tom said: “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I never did. Or maybe I did, I don’t know. Anyway, there’s no use going on pretending. You see, I know who I am. Mike and Carol Harley were my father and mother. You knew it, too, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t,” Elaine said quickly.

“But you knew
you
weren’t my mother.”

“Yes. Of course I knew that.”

She glanced down at her body and then, almost wistfully, at her husband. He turned away from both of them. His face had momentarily come apart. He seemed to be in pain, which he wanted to hide.

“One of you must have known who I really was.” Tom said to Hillman: “You knew, didn’t you?”

Hillman didn’t answer. Tom said in a high desperate voice: “I can’t stay here. You’re both a couple of phonies. You put on a big act for all these years, and as soon as I step out of line you give me the shaft.”

Hillman found his voice. “I should think it was the other way around.”

“Okay, so I did wrong. Stand me up against a wall and shoot me.”

The boy’s voice was slightly hysterical, but it wasn’t that that bothered me so much. He seemed to be shifting from attitude to attitude, even from class to class, trying to find a place where he could stand. I went and stood beside him.

“Nobody’s talking about punishing you,” Hillman said. “But a homicidal attack is something that can’t be laughed off.”

“You’re talking crap,” the boy said.

Hillman’s chin came up. “Don’t
speak
to me like that!”

“Or what will you do? Lock me up with a bunch of psychos and throw away the key?”

“I didn’t
say
that.”

“No. You just went ahead and did it.”

“Perhaps I acted hastily.”

“Yes,” Elaine put in. “Your father acted hastily. Now let’s forget the whole thing and go inside and be friends.”

“He isn’t my father,” Tom said stubbornly.

“But we can all be friends, anyway. Can’t we, Tom?” Her voice and look were imploring. “Can’t we forget the bad things and simply be glad they’re over and that we’re all together?”