The Moon Around Sarah (6 page)

‘It was right around here,’ Eric said, as they paused, chilled and trembling beneath the striped awning of a card shop.

Fine
, Edward thought sarcastically. Somewhere around here. What did that mean? It reminded him of some of the vague descriptions he had pried out of witnesses in his brief stint as a trial lawyer. ‘A guy about medium height’ … ‘a black guy’ … ‘a big dude.’ Edward’s own mind was more precise in thought and description than Eric’s; he
understood
that, but this was Sarah they were discussing.

‘Which way were they walking?’ Edward asked without heat, drawing on his last reserves of patience.

‘That way … because I was coming from Dennison’s office, right? That way.’

‘What did the guy look like, Eric?’

‘I dunno. A blond guy, I think. His hair was kind of long,’ Eric’s brow furrowed, ‘and he had on a green jacket, one of those quilted ones and a Cincinnati Reds baseball cap.’

‘All right. OK,’ Edward said. ‘This is a pretty small town. Someone around here might know who he is.’

‘She looked OK, you know, Edward. Smiling and stuff.’

Edward answered savagely, ‘When isn’t Sarah smiling? She’d trust anyone who came along, Eric, and you know it! Don’t be so damned stupid!’

Eric said abashedly, ‘I just meant … the guy wasn’t dragging her along or hurting her or anything….’

‘So you knew everything was OK, right? You didn’t even stop to help your own sister.’

‘It wasn’t like that, Edward.’ Resentment mingled with shame in his eyes. ‘It didn’t ring true, that’s all. My head was.…’

‘All that girl needs is another major trauma in her life.’

‘Yes! Edward, I know but….’

‘Then you can find a way to avoid responsibility this time, too.’

‘God damn you, Edward!’ Eric yelled. His battered body stiffened and he hunched forward angrily.

‘Go ahead,’ Edward challenged, ‘swing at me. I wouldn’t mind being the second member of the family to kick your ass today.’

‘Stuff it,’ Eric said, letting his breath out. ‘Let’s find Sarah.’

The siren of the ambulance flying by was harsh and piercing. Red and blue lights cast fearsome reflections against the low gray clouds.

Ellen was being transported to the hospital.

Sarah stood at the studio window in the borrowed blue robe; it was much too large for her so she had rolled the sleeves up six inches. The rain still fell but it had settled into a steady, almost soothing rhythm. The room was warm, the wick of the kerosene heater burned evenly, brightly. A warm yellow glow filled the room, only faintly smoky.

Sarah wondered where the young man had gone that it was taking him so long. It should have been simple for him to find Mother. But she would wait. Her thin dress was dry now, hanging above the heater from a nail in the beam. Her hat looked weather-battered and sad, but she had already shaped it a little and smoothed the pink ribbon. By the time the sun returned it would be dry and pert again.

She had spent most of her time studying the
photographs
on the wall. It was so strange. Moments of life which were not life. At home, they had a family photograph album filled with pictures of dark unsmiling people staring into the camera with a sort of dread in their eyes. Maybe they knew that the camera was taking this moment from their lives and holding it as a sort of decorated headstone to be stared at incuriously when they had run out of all their moments; Mother always cried when they started looking through it.

The photograph that Sarah liked very much was of the fish and the birds winging away above them. She thought she understood what the young man had wanted to capture in it … perhaps. To Sarah, it looked like the souls of submerged dreams winging away to the freedom of the long blue skies.

Below her suddenly she saw Edward and Eric walking together through the rain. How had they come to be together? She rapped against the windowpane futilely, trying to get their attention, but they couldn’t hear that sound above the rush of the rain and never even looked up.

Only moments later, she heard an automobile horn blare,
and she saw the big blue Buick race by, throwing water up from its wheels.

And
Daddy
was driving it! He didn’t stop for Edward and Eric but kept on roaring up the concrete road, taking a corner so wildly that the rear end of the car almost slid out from under him. He narrowly missed a parked moving van and roared on, disappearing over the hill.

This, Sarah thought, seating herself on the
white-painted
wooden chair, was a very odd day.

She wished she were at home with Poppsy and the sun was shining and White-ears would come back to the mouse nest. She hadn’t taken Baby a daffodil yet today, and she did not like the rain anymore.

There was nothing to do, however, but to sit and wait for the young man to come back. To wait for Mother … was she sick again? Sarah hoped not. Sometimes when Mother got sick she broke things and even hurt herself like the time she had put her hand through a windowpane the night after Daddy had left to … well, to do whatever it was that Daddy had to do. Then everyone had been screaming and yelling. Auntie Trish, Edward and Eric crying and yelling at once….

That
, it seemed, was over now. Daddy had come back to town. Mother was here. Edward and Eric were walking together as they had when they were younger, towing her in a red wagon in the sunshine while Poppsy bounced along after them.

Everything would be better. Mother and Daddy would stay at the house again, and Eric would come home. They
could all go down to the lake again and skim across the
sun-bright
water in the rowboat, and Daddy would laugh and hug Mother and dumb old Poppsy would bark at the fish.

Yes, something she did not understand was happening today; but they were all here together again and that could only mean something good. Maybe when they were at home again the blond young man would come and show her his pictures and they could sit in the yard on a clover-warm day.

This was a day of great promise despite the crazy
confusion
.

Sarah studied the pictures again, feeling sorry for the girl who had no clothes looking out the window for her daddy. Sarah’s daddy had come home, maybe hers would too. Probably he had in the very next picture. Everything was going to be fine again. Not exactly the same as before, but bright and hearth-fire warm with no yelling! Mother was not strong; Daddy was. So strong. He could fix so many broken things.

Still, Baby could not be fixed. They had told her that, when Baby died. Baby was broken and so they had buried her secretly and solemnly, all of them taking whispered oaths to tell no one. All except Sarah, that is. She couldn’t take any oaths; she could tell no one. She had quite forgotten how to speak.

Raymond Tucker thundered through the streets in the old Buick, his blood pressure hammering at a dangerous level. The bitch! The crazy bitch. On the bottle still. He knew it!
Eric – little bastard. Strutting Edward. Had he actually fathered them?

He continued to brood, driving faster and faster.

‘Damn you, Ellen!’ He hated the bitch. If she was out drinking, what had she done with Sarah? Once Ellen started drinking, she wouldn’t stop. He’d find her three days later – a week maybe – in some peeling, musty motel room with a stranger wearing cowboy boots and a stupid grin…. ‘Where’s Sarah?’ And half the time she wouldn’t know.

So whose fault was it really when that happened to Sarah? Yeah, but Raymond got the blame for it because he had left home and allowed it to happen. Anybody would have left that stupid bitch. Anyone with half a brain.

Couldn’t she have stayed off the liquor for
one day
, get these god-damned papers signed. No, she couldn’t let the opportunity slip by…. Raymond braked uncertainly. For just a moment he thought … was that Edward and Eric walking up the hill in the rain? It couldn’t have been. For what reason?

An ambulance whipped past Raymond, siren blaring, lights flashing angrily. He glanced at it and slowed down a little. He could end up in the back of that the way he was driving. It wouldn’t do any good for
him
to crash the car or lose control of himself completely on this difficult day.

He had always been emotional, in the wrong way. From his own father he had learned only one emotion: anger. Touching, sensitivity, he had not really understood. Looking back he didn’t think that he had ever said ‘I love you’ to Ellen except when he needed a piece of ass. Any gentleness
had been interpreted as a sign of weakness by his father, and giving in to any of those ‘woman’ ideas of softness and love talk was just emasculating, a loss of autonomy and authority … at least that was what he had learned and he was damn sure too old to alter his perspectives now.

Love. That was their key word. They asked for promises of love … just before they went off and slept with some punk sailor in a hotel. Was that supposed to be ‘love’? What a joke women were, all of them sluts. He wanted nothing more to do with any of them. All Raymond wanted now was to live out his life in placid isolation.

He slowed the Roadmaster as he reached the main street of the rain-decimated town. He cruised slowly toward the establishments where the neon lights flickered through the gray mist in garish disregard of the lost day.

His eyes searched past the sweep of the windshield wipers for the shadow of Sarah. His blood was beginning to flow hotly again as he analyzed what had happened.

He had never been able to control Ellen because he had been a heavy drinker himself in his younger years. Again, so had his father; it was what men did. Jack Daniel’s and Coors, and if someone didn’t like it, you went to fists. He wondered how many fist fights he had been in, in his life.

All right! Maybe it had all been wrong, some remnant of the frontier times his father and grandfather had sprung out of. But he didn’t like these feminists and new-wave politicians telling him he should put a pink ribbon in his hair and ‘yassuh’ to minorities and women. Like, when a kid needed to be swatted, he needed it. That was all. When some
broad wouldn’t shut her quacking mouth, sometimes it had to be shut for her. No, Raymond Tucker had tried to
understand
modern times, but he couldn’t!

He swung the car in at the curb, parking in a red zone. If the cops didn’t like it, they could go to hell, too. What were they going to do? Write him a ticket or scare him with jail? He had seen a few of those, and tougher than any they had around here; from La Mesa prison in Tijuana to Ban Tho in Vietnam….

His thoughts drifted briefly. All right, he was lying: those places had scared the hell out of him! He watched the crazed reddish streaks and neon green ripples reflected against the rain-smeared windshield.

He knew that he had just never learned to control his temper. No one had told him how it was done. A man fights. A dog sniffing through the alleys, that was what they all were. You sniffed their butts and that told you if they wanted to fight or fuck. Beyond that there weren’t any significant relationships.

Raymond sat with his hands resting limply on the steering wheel. The changing colors of the neon bar sign continued to streak the gray day and the cold windshield. There was a different world just outside the car door.

The thought came from nowhere. ‘I am sorry, Eric,’ he said deep inside himself, ‘my baby boy.…’ But he could not sustain the emotion and his rage returned. How could any boy do that to his own sister? It was so disgustingly distant from his own inculcated morals that it was completely incomprehensible. His own father wouldn’t have only horse-whipped
him, he likely would have pulled his old Colt .44 from his desk and shot him in the balls….

‘I am,’ Raymond thought, rubbing his forehead, ‘growing very old and tired.’

He climbed heavily from the car and walked through the silver rain toward the bar, wondering what he might do or say when he did find Ellen. He knew only that it would not be pretty.

T
HE BAR WAS
dark, subdued, when Raymond Tucker shoved his way through the door. He bumped
shoulders
with a young blond guy in a green jacket and Red’s baseball cap who was just leaving, but Raymond didn’t even nod an apology; that, of course, would be a sign of weakness.

There were only a handful of men drinking draft beer scattered along the bar, wearing cowboy hats or yellow Caterpillar caps – construction guys knocked off the job because of the rain. The place smelled of wet flannel shirts and green beer. The jukebox, flashing red and yellow lights, was playing, but it was turned down so low that Raymond couldn’t even hear the words to the song. A cowboy-type in cheap boots, hat tilted back, was hunched over it, studying the selections. A big Budweiser sign with its ‘B’ burning out, flickering against the dark mustiness of the bar, hung above a long mirror. The bartender was a doleful, balding man. Short, thick, with hound-dog eyes and a swollen nose. Someone ordered a pitcher of beer and the bartender nodded and filled one from the tap. He took a five-dollar bill from the guy, swept up some change left as a tip from the
bar and pocketed it, whistling along silently with the muted jukebox tune.

‘Hey bartender!’ Raymond said. Heads turned. His voice was loud in the quiet bar.

‘One second…’ the bartender closed the register drawer and ambled to where Raymond stood, his stance and crossed arms aggressive, ‘what’ll it be, friend?’

‘I’m looking for a woman.’

Ike held up an interrupting hand, ‘about five-three, maybe 45 years old? Wearing a blue dress and hat.’

‘How in hell do you know that?’ Raymond asked.

‘She’s the only woman’s been in here this morning. She fairly well screwed up my morning.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She came in. Got real drunk. Fell off the stool and cracked her head open. I had to call an ambulance … say, I just told your friend all of this. What’s up?’

‘What friend?’ Raymond asked suspiciously. His eyes narrowed ominously as the bartender answered him.

‘That guy that just went out. You must have seen him. Young guy in a green quilted jacket and red baseball cap.’

‘Who is he?’

‘His name’s Don. I don’t know his last name. He comes in here now and then for a few beers,’ Ike shrugged, ‘that’s all I know.’

Someone at the end of the bar was spinning an empty bottle to catch his attention. He glanced that way and held up a hand to ask for patience.

‘The ambulance took her to the hospital?’ Raymond asked.

‘Sure did. She knocked her head real good. Split it right open. Be surprised if she doesn’t need twenty stitches.’

Shit
. Well, it really was no surprise.

‘Which hospital did they take her to?’

‘They didn’t say. It would be County General, wouldn’t it? That’s the closest one around. That’s all I know.’

‘OK,’ Raymond took a step away and then turned back toward the bar, ‘that young guy – how did he know her? Was he drinking with her?’

‘I don’t know, Mister,’ Ike said, ‘I don’t watch who comes and goes, what they’re doing unless they’re making trouble.’

‘Ike!’ The man with the empty beer bottle was growing impatient.

‘I’m coming! Sorry, pal,’ he said to Raymond, ‘I told you all I know.’

‘Yeah, all right,’ Raymond muttered, and he started out of the bar, wondering who the young guy was. He must have known Ellen. What did the bartender say his name was? Oh well, it probably made no difference. They always had names, but usually Ellen never knew what they were. Number Four, line up, take a number….

He slammed the bar door behind him and went out into the day which suddenly was glaringly bright, the sun spraying golden light through the rifts in the drifting, parting clouds. Looking seaward the ocean seemed blue again. A storm crew’s street-sweeping machine bumbled along the road, picking up blown leaves and papers.

What now? The hell with Ellen! There was no point at all in chasing her down at the hospital. The only reasonable
thing to do was to find Edward and tell him where she was so that the contracts could be signed. And to find Sarah.

Who was that kid?

It was totally illogical after all of his absent years that Ellen could still raise a rage in him, some sort of residual jealousy. What could you call that?

Dumb.

He climbed into the Buick convertible and fiercely banged the door shut. He sat there for a long minute, trying to sort through his thoughts. Still a few occasional
raindrops
plopped against the windshield. The big orange street-sweeping machine swung around him and continued on, brushes swirling with lazy competence.

‘OK,’ he said to himself with sudden decision, ‘find Edward.’ He would let him know what was going on; sign the contracts himself. Find a room somewhere and hole up until the checks were cut and he could blow this town. By no means talk to Eric again….

Find Sarah.

Ellen, the bitch, had run off and left his little girl in the streets in the rain and … a sudden thought interrupted his angry brooding: the kid. Now, who was this guy, and if he knew who Ellen was, mightn’t he know something about Sarah? It was possible. He wasn’t long gone, this Don guy. Raymond thought he should be able to catch him and ask him, if he was walking. Which way had the kid gone?

Starting the Buick’s engine, Raymond stared southward in the direction the sweeper had gone. He looked northward in his mirror, frowning. Which way? Flip a coin. He dropped
the car into gear and pulled a slithering U-turn across the boulevard, cutting off a woman in a yellow Thunderbird. He roared northward, back up the damp road in the direction of Dennison’s offices.

‘Is that the guy?’ Edward asked Eric.

He could see a young blond guy in a green jacket, red baseball cap tugged low, plodding up the hill toward them, his hands thrust into his pockets, face grim.

‘I don’t know,’ Eric said, ‘I think maybe it is.’

‘Hey!’ Edward called across the street. Rainwater still rushed past in the gutters. The young man looked up at him. ‘Yeah, you! Wait a minute, will you?’

They splashed across the street toward him, Edward’s shoes sinking ankle-deep in cold water.

Don March stood waiting for them, his hands on his hips, unsmiling as the two strangers crossed to meet him.

‘We’re looking for our sister….’

‘Sarah?’

‘How did you know? Yes, Sarah.’

Don was staring at Eric’s bruised face. ‘I’ve seen you before. Earlier. You were running past us.’

‘Yes,’ Edward said with a sharp glance at his brother, ‘but that doesn’t matter. What matters is….’

‘Sarah’s all right,’ Don told them. His expression was one of frank disgust. ‘No thanks to her family.’

‘Do you know where she is?’

‘She’s in my studio – and don’t give me that kind of look, friend – either one of you. You’re the ones who left her out in
the rain. I just tried to keep her dry. Have you got a problem with that? Because I’ll tell you, I don’t think much of you.’

‘Our mother.…’ Eric began weakly.

‘Yeah,’ Don said bitterly. ‘I know all about that. Your mother was watching Sarah. Except it doesn’t seem that your mother is competent to watch anybody, does it?’

‘Watch it,’ Eric said, leaning nearer, but his own battered face subtracted from his menace.

‘OK,’ Don said with a sigh, lifting a semi-apologetic hand, ‘maybe there are things I don’t understand about this
business
. I just found your sister sitting in the rain and took her someplace dry. If you don’t already know, your mother’s been taken to the hospital. She got drunk and fell off a barstool.’

‘How could you know…?’

‘I went looking for her. I sort of met your mother earlier and knew what she looked like. I found a bartender who recognized her from my description.’

‘All right,’ Edward said hastily, ‘we’re sorry you had to get involved in this.’ He was beginning to feel ridiculous in his gray suit. As the sun beamed down now, steam rose from his shoulders; a $300 suit ruined forever. ‘All we want to do is find Sarah and take her home.’

‘OK, follow me,’ Don said. Residual anger still stiffened his expression.

The three men slogged up the street where puddles as bright as mirrors now danced with a blue and silver sheen. A flock of gray pelicans passed overhead, returning to the sea now that the storm had passed.

‘Up here,’ Don said, leading the way to the studio.

When they had climbed the outside stairs and entered the cluttered studio, Don’s blue robe was neatly folded on the wooden chair, the kerosene heater turned off, Sarah’s dress, which had been hanging from the ceiling, was gone.

And Sarah was not there.

‘What’s going on here?’ Eric demanded. ‘Where is she?’

‘I guess she took off….’ Don rambled into the other room and returned, his cap tipped back, his eyebrows drawn together in concern. ‘She’s not here. I don’t know where she went.’

There was nothing to show that she had ever been there at all, it seemed. But Don discovered the small piece of paper carefully pinned beneath the study of fish and winging birds, and he showed them what was written on it:

Sarah.

‘That’s terrific,’ Edward said roughly, ‘where in hell is she? You let her just walk away!’

Don turned on the lawyer, his face set dangerously, ‘Listen, my friend, she isn’t
my
sister. I found her out there and tried to help her. I’m not the one who lost her … oh forget it!’ Don said, calming a little. He took a deep breath, ‘Let’s go out and find her so that you can take her home.’

‘Is
that
where she thinks she’s going, Edward?’ Eric asked his brother with evident hostility. Edward didn’t answer. He seemed to pale slightly; his hand tightened on the handle of his briefcase.

‘What does he mean by that?’ Don asked.

It was a long silent moment with rain trickling from the eaves beyond the window before Edward replied.

‘She’s going to a hospital where they are equipped to take care of people like Sarah,’ he said at last.

‘A hospital, is that what you call it!’ Eric said hotly. ‘“People like Sarah!” What do you know about people like Sarah? Except that they get in the way of everyone else’s little plans.’

‘You’re one to talk, Eric,’ Edward said, loosening his tie with one hand, ‘we at least tried to take care of her, not carve her up psychologically as you did!’

‘Oh, sure! I did it! Not you and Mother and Dad … you were always so concerned about Sarah! You always had her best interests at heart. What do you think put her in the strangled little world she lives in? It wasn’t
me
, Edward.’ He shook his head heavily, ‘No, it wasn’t me.’

‘The hell it wasn’t, you son-of-a-bitch!’ Edward took a step toward his brother, half-raising his briefcase as if he wanted to hit Eric with it and all the weight it contained. Don watched them in astonishment.

‘Jesus!’ he said, not loudly. ‘I don’t know what happened, what all of this is about, but I can look at you two and see what a lovely family you are. What a pleasant home Sarah must have had.’

‘That’s right,’ Edward shot back, ‘you don’t know, so keep your opinions to yourself. You’re right, though. Sarah’s home life is a mess and always has been. Which is exactly why she’s going to be institutionalized – don’t let the word put you off – put in some place where the people, if
anonymous
, are kinder to her.’ Edward smiled as if his point had been made and taken, ‘You see, Mister … the house we grew
up in and the surrounding one hundred and eighty acres is being sold. Is sold. Within thirty days there will be no
home
for Sarah to return to.’

‘As if she ever had one!’ Eric yelled, his words muffled behind his hands. ‘As if any of us ever did! They never gave us that simple thing. Home.’

‘I admire you, Eric,’ his brother said sarcastically, ‘I really do.’ His suit continued to drip on the floor, he was bedraggled-looking, but his confidence had returned. ‘You have a unique capacity for blaming everything that has happened to you on everyone but yourself.’

Now it was Eric who became angry again. His hands dropped from his bruised face and he stepped forward, hotly flushed. He halted his movement abruptly and turned back toward the steam-fogged window and muttered, ‘Screw you, Edward.’

‘Fine,’ his brother said with audible tension, ‘screw me, screw us all and you go on your way – that’s your pattern isn’t it?’

‘Just sign these goddamned papers, please!’ Edward continued, ‘I’ll see that you get some money today if I have to advance it out of my own pocket. You have to get out of this town, out of our lives and this time, stay out.’

Don March stared at his two unwelcome visitors with blank disbelief. They were going to deal with business matters now and look for Sarah later!

Edward had placed his alligator briefcase on the table, thumbed the gold-plated latches open and produced a set of blue-backed contracts and a mother-of-pearl fountain pen,
shoving Don’s cameras aside. Eric, his jaw set, went to the table and signed the contracts in three places without reading a word on them.

March couldn’t contain himself, ‘
That
is what you’re concerned about now?’ he said, gesturing toward the contracts, ‘not Sarah, but your paperwork? It’s all becoming quite clear to me now. Now I
am
beginning to see why she is like she is.’

‘You don’t know,’ Edward said. ‘You don’t know a
god-damned
thing. Just butt out. Forget it; it doesn’t concern you Mr.…’

‘March, Donald March,’ the photographer said, ‘and no, I won’t butt out, pal. I’ve known your sister only for a bit of one morning, but apparently I care about her more than you do. You sign your contracts, whatever you have to do,’ he said, putting his cap back on. ‘Close the door when you go out, please.’

‘Where are you going…?’

‘Take a guess!’ Don said from the doorway. ‘To find your sister! I only wish there was some way I could find to keep from returning her to the bosom of her loving family.’

Don slammed the door behind him. Both brothers were yelling after him, but he paid no attention. He walked out into the windy, bright day. Fleet clouds still scudded past overhead, casting quick-running shadows. He had no idea of where he was going, what he was going to do. Except to know that he would find Sarah.