The Moon Around Sarah (4 page)

‘Leave them alone, Sal. Nothing can be done.’

When Raymond Tucker had entered Dennison’s office with his lazy, easy, stride, Eric’s eyes had lifted with caution. His gaze was steady, but without warmth, and there was
recognition
in them, nothing more. He had learned that trick long ago; it had saved him a few beatings.

‘Working?’ was the first word that Raymond Tucker said to the son he hadn’t seen in four years.

‘I get by,’ Eric answered. His attitude was languid but wary. He was too aware of his father’s ways. Raymond’s half-smile usually meant trouble for someone. ‘Look, Raymond,’ he tried, ‘let’s just let it all lie for today, OK? We have things to do and then we can go our separate ways.’

Raymond’s hands were curling at his sides, an involuntary movement not unfamiliar to his son.

‘Let it lie?’ Raymond Tucker said in a voice so soft it was like velvet steel. He took off his tweed jacket, folded it and placed it aside on one of the green leather chairs. ‘Let it lie again? You’ve just never been man enough to own up to your dirty little act, have you? Destroying a young girl….’

‘Let it lie, Raymond,’ Eric said, rising carefully to his feet. He was an inch taller than his father, but he felt like a child before the broad-shouldered man in jeans.

‘You’ve said that already. Let it lie. You say that to the man who lost his home, his wife, his little daughter because of you. You worthless little bastard!’

‘Raymond….’ Eric backed away, raising his hands
defensively
. Whatever courage he had built up began to leak out of him as his father approached, rolling up the cuffs of his white shirt.

‘Raymond…’ the elder Tucker said, still coming forward, his big tanned hands now clenched into white-knuckled fists, ‘you can’t even call me “Dad”, can you, you worthless little prick. I’m glad of that at least. You’re no son of mine.’ He took two rapid steps nearer. Eric was backed against Dennison’s heavy oak desk and now as he spoke, Raymond Tucker emphasized each word by thumping the palm of his hand against Eric’s chest.

‘You … are … nothing, boy! A scum on the earth, a scab on my existence. You destroyed our family, damn you!’

Eric saw what was coming next, and threw up his hands, but he was too slow. Raymond threw a fist from his hip and his knuckles smashed into Eric’s face, sending him
staggering
aside, reeling toward the wall.

‘Destructive, soulless little bastard!’ Raymond yelled, and he hit his son again, this time striking him on the throat, as Eric tried desperately to roll away from the blow.

‘Raymond….’ Eric pleaded hoarsely.

And Raymond Tucker hit him again, this time striking him flush on the jaw, driving the younger man to his knees, blood spilling from his mouth.

‘Bastard!’ Raymond Tucker panted, hovering over him.

‘Raymond!’ Eric pleaded again.

He was hit again, his head snapping back against the wall, the flesh on his cheek splitting open. Raymond was wheezing with wild emotions. The door behind him burst open and he turned, giving Sal Dennison and Edward only a cursory glance before he returned his attention to Eric.

Eric was seated limply on the floor, leaning against the wall. His mouth and throat, his cheek were smeared with blood.

‘Bastard!’ Raymond said explosively. His mouth moved as if he was going to spit, his jaw muscles tensing. He raised his fist again.

‘Raymond!’ Eric screamed in terror. His head fell and he buried his face in his hands. ‘
Daddy
… oh, Daddy, don’t hurt me any more! Daddy, no, please….’

The two men watching saw Raymond’s tension lessen. He lowered his clenched fist and stood watching his son cry for a minute. Then his hunched shoulders slowly lowered and he turned to lock eyes with Edward.

‘If you ever feel pity for the little son-of-a-bitch, just look at Sarah and remember what he did to her,’ Raymond Tucker said with subdued savagery. ‘I don’t apologize.’ Then he turned and deliberately spat into Eric’s battered face. ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said, ‘from
Daddy
.’

As if nothing had happened, he then asked Edward, ‘Are you by any chance using my car today?’

‘Yes,’ Edward managed to answer. The hinges of his jaw seemed to be glued together. His brother sobbed into his hands. Sal eased to one side, trying to become invisible.

‘Good. Give me the keys. I’ll be using it. When you want my signature, come and find me.’

‘But I’m supposed to pick Mother up.’

‘Your mother,’ Raymond Tucker said, ‘will find someone to pick her up.’ Snatching his jacket from the chair, he went out. Sylvia darted into the supply closet to avoid him. Sal
Dennison watched Raymond’s departing back, mouth agape, a gloss of fine perspiration on his forehead.

‘Jesus, God,’ he muttered.

Edward’s mouth was a thin, tight groove. He went to his brother and reached down to help him to his feet, but Eric slapped his hand away.

‘Damn you all!’ Eric said. ‘Each and every one of you – damn you to a bloody, eternal hell.’

T
HE RAIN HAD
begun slowly, the reaching fingers of sea-fog drawing the huge northern thunderheads toward the shore. An hour later, the fishing pier was invisible in the prowling darkness of the clouds. Fishermen scurried toward their pickup trucks, tossed their catch and gear into the beds and drove homeward, lights on, wipers flailing. The wind rose dramatically; the
temperature
plummeted. Out on the horizon, lightning crackled and danced brilliantly through the stacked clouds, casting eerily colored flares of light across the dark and restless sea.

Sarah sat on the green bus-stop bench, her hat in her hands. It was impossible to keep it on in this wind and the rain had soaked it to bedraggled limpness. People had
scurried
past, heading toward shelter, as the earlier mist was replaced by huge spattering drops which presaged a long hard downpour thundering toward the North Coast. Now the streets were empty and gray and slick with rain.

Sarah did not know how long she would have to wait, and she was very cold, wearing only her thin cotton dress with the butterflies and roses; but Mother had told her to wait, and so she would wait. The wooden bus-stop bench was
hard; people had carved secret messages into it. The wind was growing angry and cold; within the building where Mother had gone it was warm. Now and then a man would go in or come out and Sarah could feel the warm air gusting out. The air in there was thick with tobacco smoke, lively with music. She thought of going in, but Mother had told her to wait. Besides, those places were for grownups. Mother had always told her that.

The rain began in earnest. Slanting down aggressively, the raindrops rebounding from the sidewalk and the asphalt of the street like little silver ball-bearings.

Sarah pitied the snail.

With the mist it had come creeping from some secret snail-place, etching a silver trail across the damp, broken sidewalk. She watched its slow progress. Where had it come from? Why? Where could it possibly think it was going? She leaned forward, hat in her hands, hands on her chin, skirt tucked down between her knees.

It continued on its crooked way as the rain clouds swept in from the sea. Its tiny dark eyes atop the stems on its head seemed to look back at her. What was it watching for? An indication of danger so that it could run away? Just looking up toward the rainy skies or watching to see that Sarah wouldn’t gobble him up like ducks do?

The man who stepped on it wore an orange parka and a distant expression. The snail was a small crunch and a pool of lifeless slime; it had seen the man but was too slow and its proud shell too little defense.

‘What in God’s name are you doing out here!’

The voice was familiar, yet unidentifiable. Sarah glanced up through the falling rain to see the young man she had met on the pier, now wearing a green quilted jacket and a red baseball cap.

‘For Christ’s sake…’ he looked around, spreading his hands in disbelief, then crouched in front of Sarah. ‘Where is your mother?’

He spoke to her differently now than he had before; more slowly, carefully. It made her smile.

The young man – Donald, wasn’t it – rose and stood with his hands on his hips. Rain had darkened the shoulders of his jacket and dripped from the bill of his baseball cap. A car rumbled past, throwing a fan of water against his legs. He didn’t even turn around.

‘Now this is something,’ he said to himself. ‘Really
something
.’ He waved his hands skyward in bafflement. To Sarah, the man resembled a perplexed rain god at that moment.

He startled her briefly. His hand, cold and callused, reached out and took hers. Her eyes widened uncertainly, but he smiled that nice, crooked, smile, and said, ‘You can’t sit out here, girl. You’ll get pneumonia for sure. Come on, we’ll get you some coffee. What happened? Did you get lost?’

No. Of course not! Sarah knew exactly where Mother was, but she could not go in to get her – it was a place for grownups and she was not allowed.

But it was terribly cold now, and so she let the young man with the crooked smile and strong hands take her from the bus stop bench and rush her away through the cold, sad rain.

The rain continued in a steady downpour. It pinged off the steel awnings over the shops along the street; turning briefly to hail, the sound was like random machine-gun fire. Thunder crashed close at hand and the ground under their feet seemed to move with its intensity. With his head bowed to the wind and rain, Don March plodded on, towing the slender reluctant girl behind him.

At the corner coffee shop, he stopped, read the
hand-lettered
sign on the door and cursed. He peered into the window, shielding his eyes with his free hand.

‘They’re closed, damn it.’ He looked around futilely; Sarah was trembling badly with the cold and damp.
Where was the girl’s mother?
He thought briefly of going to the police station, but immediately discarded the impulse; it would scare her to death, probably. Poor thing, poor drenched, lost thing, standing there with her wilted hat in hand. And still she smiled, if hesitantly. The damp and wind had formed her thin dress to her body as close as a second skin. She wore no underwear. Don felt an unexpected surge of sexual response. Then, disgusted with himself, he managed to banish the feelings.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing else for it. We’ll go to my place. I won’t leave you out in this weather.’ And they struggled on. The wind was so heavy now that it was
difficult
to walk against. The driving rain stung their eyes.

They had nearly reached his studio – two rooms over a Hallmark shop – when a young man in a torn red
sweatshirt
careened past them, cursing wildly to himself and the storm. His face was bruised badly; the falling rain mingled
with the blood trickling down his cheek. He narrowly avoided colliding with Sarah and rushed on, staggering through the storm, his curses smothered by the thunder. They saw him run out onto the long pier, his arms flung skyward.

Sarah tugged Don in that direction, but he held her back. ‘Come on. There’s nothing we can do for that poor fellow. The police will take care of him.’

Oh, yes
. That was right, Sarah thought. The last time it had happened to Eric, the policemen had come for him, and Mother had told her the same thing.

‘It’s all right, Sarah. All right now. The police will take care of your brother.’

Donald March’s studio, reached by way of a flight of outside wooden steps, was cluttered, cold and damp. The first thing that Don did was to light the kerosene heater sitting in the center of his room.

‘We’ll have to get you out of your clothes,’ he said to Sarah. ‘I’ll look around and find something dry you can put on.’

Sarah was studying his unframed photographs, pinned or stapled to a sheet of pressed cork attached to the wall. A few shots of the ocean at sunset, the dying red sun communing with the conquering black sea; a few nude shots of Michelle who worked in the donut shop and posed with a huge stuffed panda bear, supposedly lost in some night reminiscence at the window. Her body was too voluptuous, her face without the character to express anything much.
As a result, she looked like a pudgy woman staring at an outside clothesline hoping her underwear would soon dry. There was an unfruitful series of double-exposed photos, an attempt to imitate the Dutch artist Escher’s graphics, in which the same figures rose from the sea where their forms suggested fish and rose to the lighter sky where the spaces between them were perceived as birds in flight. The
photographic
representation was totally unsatisfactory; an experiment gone wrong. His fish could not be caught in the proper perspective and the gulls above appeared ready to dive and devour them. In the end, he had achieved nothing more than some semi-interesting double-exposures of fish and birds. There were a few comic shots of animals: a squirrel riding a cocker spaniel’s head and a sow with a kitten nursing along with its litter, for which the local newspaper and one defunct area magazine had paid March a little grocery money. Looking at his work now, through the eyes of Sarah, he felt a lack of artfulness. She however, seemed fascinated by it all: the contrasts in the black and white prints with their contrived shadows, the brilliance of the sunsets in color. Her eyes shined; she might have been touring the Louvre.

It was
that
look, he realized, that had captured his
attention
on the pier that morning. An innocent fascination with life itself, in all of its aspects.

‘Well, I try,’ he said as she turned her head, her huge brown eyes pleased, offering that smile which was hesitant and amused all at once.

Don walked into his bedroom and dug through his
dresser and closet. Shrugging, he emerged with the only suitable garment he could find: a faded blue bathrobe. On the way, he grabbed a towel she could use on her hair. His intention was to let her dry out, make her a hot cup of coffee to sip on while he went out searching for her mother. At least the girl was out of the rain. Maybe the storm would let up soon….

She was naked, standing by the heater, when he
re-entered
the room. Her wet dress lay in a pile beside her.

It was totally unnerving; her body was graceful and completely charming. Erotic. Yet her eyes as she turned to him were only childlike. He understood Sarah’s mother’s anger and concern now. She was a woman, but was not. After all, there were pictures of nude women on the wall. He had instructed her to remove her clothes, and so she had. How could she even imagine shame, this innocent?

‘Here, put this on,’ he said, handing her the bathrobe at arm’s length. He sat down on a white-painted wooden chair, studying her thoughtfully as she wrapped the robe around her with sublime grace.

‘Now I see, little one,’ he said. ‘Now I see. I didn’t
understand
before. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you until I can get you back to your family. I’m sure they’re worried about you.’

Sarah dried her hair, carefully folded the towel and put it on the photograph-strewn table. She looked carefully at – without touching – March’s Nikon and the old Deardorff with its long 120mm lens; his still-unrepaired Hasselblad, the Pentax he had bought out of impulse and never yet even
loaded with film and the brand new Canon digital he had purchased just to experiment with, had not even finished paying for, and already detested.

She was not to touch things she did not understand.

Grandfather had taught her that many years ago at the old workbench when he had pinched her fingers in the big thing for dropping one of his experiments. Now, Sarah tied the robe and went back to studying the photographs on the wall, as the man watched her, saying nothing.

There are so many worlds in this world, Sarah thought. It all depends on who is looking; which way the eye is turned. Where the sun happens to be. The same street looks so different if a dog happens to be running across it; the sea so oddly different once it begins to rain. The man knew that. He was a thoughtful man, Sarah decided, very much so to understand these things.

And she liked his crooked smile.

‘All right,’ Donald March said, rising, ‘I’ve made a
decision
. I’m going to leave you here for a little while. Can I trust you to stay right here while I’m gone?’ He was speaking with extreme care again. Again it caused Sarah to smile. ‘I’m going out to find your mother, OK?’

He ran a hand over his hair and asked, ‘Listen – I know you can’t, but it would help me if … can you write down your mother’s name? Your address? A phone number?’ With soft exasperation he looked into her eyes. ‘
Anything
? I really want to help, but I haven’t a clue where to begin.’

She looked helplessly around until Donald, ripping through a drawer, found the stub of a pencil and an old
envelope to give her. In a small cramped hand she wrote with painful slowness:

Sarah.

‘Yes, I know. That is your name, right? Sarah. I heard your mother call you that.’ And in what long-ago time had someone taken a little girl and taught her to form the letters with such crooked painstakingness? Donald looked into those large brown eyes so bright with inquisitiveness.

‘Do you know your mother’s name?’ he asked again. ‘Where she is now? Where do you live, Sarah?’

Well, of course she did! What funny questions this young man asked.

‘Can you write it down?’ Don pleaded.

Sarah smiled, placed the stubby pencil and the envelope down on the table and returned to studying the
photographs
on the wall.

‘I know that you know,’ Donald said. ‘But they never taught you to write anything but your name, did they?’

She half-turned, her pointing finger touching a
photograph
of the dying sun above a tragic sea. The shadow of a lone, distant gull was caught in the upper right hand corner. Donald liked that picture himself. He had caught a last line of brilliant gold, flashing through the somber mauve and deep rose-hues of sunset. It was more luck than skill, but camera art often is.

The rain continued to drive down, as hard as ever, the wind blowing strong enough to rattle the windowpanes and whine through the gaps between window and frame.

‘All right,’ Donald said with a reluctant sigh, ‘I’m going to
try to find your mother. You stay here, Sarah, do you
understand
?’ It wouldn’t do to have her wandering the streets in the rain, half-dressed and confused.

Yes
, she nodded. Of course she understood.

What she did not understand was why Eric had been running down the pier, and why he had been crying and bleeding. And why the naked lady in the picture was looking out of the window. Did she, too, wonder where her daddy had gone?

‘I’ll be back, Sarah. You stay put,’ Donald March ordered, shrugging into his green quilted jacket, he put on his
baseball
cap. Zipping his jacket up, he spared Sarah one last wondering look, tugged his cap low over his eyes and went out to follow the splintered wooden steps down to the rainswept street.