The Waiting Room (18 page)

"Abner, I don't understand that."

"Art was my prisoner. He was
our
prisoner! Phyllis and mine. He was here. Alive! In the walls! And now he's gone, he's gone, Sam. Someone . . . got him out. Someone sprung him."

"You realize that you're making absolutely no sense?!"

He chuckled grimly. "Of course I realize that. But it's the truth, Sam. He was here and now he's gone. And my guess is that he's awfully damned mad."

"Of course he's mad."

"Sorry?" Abner said.

"It was a joke, Abner."

He ignored that. "Art's after me, Sam. And there's only one place for me to run to, only one safe place—"

"Abner, let me come over there; I'm coming over there now—"

"My place is with Phyllis. I wanted to tell you that. I wanted to say good-bye. I wanted to thank you for being a friend."

I took a breath. I thought he might be challenging me, asking for help. I said, "Your place, Abner, is with the
living!"

He said, "Of course it is, Sam. And so is yours." Then he hung up.

When I got to the beach house several hours later, it was empty. I found a big, ragged hole in the hallway wall and a note on the kitchen table. The note read:

Friend Sam,

We grab what happiness we can, when we can, where we can. In this case I have no choice, thank God, but to go for the gusto, to wrap myself in Phyllis, and she in me.

Old Art is pretty damned mad, and for good reason—if I'd been locked up in someone's wall for a year I'd be mad, too. So I can't blame him if he wants to get even. But that doesn't mean I have to stick around for it.

Please don't come after me. You'll just get yourself in a hell of a mess, and there's really nothing at all you can do for me now—even if I wanted you to.

You can use the Malibu. Phyllis and I have transportation to where we're going. The key's under the mat. Remember—let the engine idle fast a good three or four minutes in cold weather.

Maybe I'll be back, Sam. Maybe I won't.

If I have a moment, I'll give you a call.

Abner.

"Dammit!" I whispered, and stuffed the note in my pants pocket.

~ * ~

The hole in the hallway wall was man-size. There were ragged edges of furring strips beneath the plaster, and when I stuck my head into the hole, I could dimly see that there was indeed room for a man to stand or sleep inside. But not room enough for anything else. Above, a hole the size of a fist let air in from the upstairs; I assumed that poor Art was fed through that hole.

I pulled my head back after a few seconds because the smell inside that wall was overpowering.

"Are you looking for Abner?" a female voice said.

A quick screech of surprise escaped me; I started to hyperventilate, forced myself to breathe slowly, deeply. I turned my head. A woman stood just behind me. She was short, brunette, and appealing in an innocently vivacious way. She was dressed in jeans and a green halter top, and there was an overwhelming air of sadness and confusion about her. She went on, her voice a kind of high-pitched purring sound with a vague southern drawl to it. "Abner's not here. Abner"—it sounded like "Abnah"—"had to go away. I don't know where. I wish I knew where. He's done left us all alone."

"Us?" I asked.

She smiled pleadingly up at me like a small child. "He's done left us all alone," she said again, and her smile faded. "Who are you?"

"I'm Abner's friend," I said.

"Are you gonna"—
gawna
—"leave us alone, too?"

"Us?" I repeated. "Who's 'us'?"

She was several feet away from me but I could feel cold air coming from her, as if from an open refrigerator. "All of us," she said. "I'm Myrna. This is Stephanie, this is Jodie, this is Max," and they appeared one by one, like lost children, behind her as she spoke their names. Stephanie looked to be Myrna's age, but was very tall, and very thin, as if she were anorectic, and Jodie was midway in height between Myrna and Stephanie, her face flat and round, like the face of a pig, the dark eyes small, close-set, Squinting; Max was gargantuan, and vaguely malevolent-looking, like a bouncer at a nightclub where everyone usually behaves themselves.

"I can't help you," I said, "I'm sorry."

"We don't want no help," Myrna drawled. "We just don't wanna be left alone." I saw then that she was still and stiff, that when she spoke, only her lips moved.

"I can't help you," I said again. My voice sounded peaky from fear.

"We don't want no help, we just don't wanna be left alone, don't"--
doan
—"leave us alone."

Max picked it up. "Doan leave us alone," he growled. Then Stephanie followed: "Doan leave us alone," and Jodie, who looked like a pig, but whose voice was sweet and high-pitched: "Doan leave us alone," all of them still and stiff, so only their mouths moved.

It became a chorus, a refrain, "Doan leave us alone." Their voices blended into something sweet and sour, something that was at once pleading and cajoling and demanding and futile: "Doan leave us alone. Doan leave us alone."

"But you
are
alone!" I screamed. And as soon as the words left me I wanted desperately to snatch them back. "I'm sorry," I whispered. Their mouths stuck open; their gazes were wide, accusing, and hurt. Then, like raindrops hitting parched earth, they dissipated and were gone.

I went and sat shakily at the kitchen table. "Maybe I'll go back to Bangor," I whispered. "It's nice in Bangor. People are simple and happy there." Sure, I thought. Leslie and I could get married and we could go to Bangor together. We could have a little house, a few kids, some cats and dogs, a garden, a sump pump, an ant problem, menus made up a week in advance (meat loaf on Monday, spaghetti on Tuesday, Welsh rarebit on Wednesday). We'd have each other. And Bangor was where it would all happen, because Bangor was what I knew. It fit me. It was like an old sweater. But I walked very lightly on these possibilities because, like expanses of spring ice, they were insubstantial and could crack and expose the dark water beneath, where Abner was. Soon, I realized, he would push himself panic-stricken from one thin patch to another—where the sunlight shone through—in a desperate search for air and life.

And that's where I had to come in for his sake. I had to punch a hole in the ice and jump in and pull him out of the water. Or drown in it, too.

~ * ~

I poked my head back into the man-size hole in the hallway wall where Art DeGraff had been held prisoner. I stepped into the hole and stood inside the wall, trying, I think, to call up the same awful feelings of claustrophobia and aloneness that Art had to have felt. But that was impossible. The wall was open for me; it had been closed for him. I stepped out of the wall, ran my hand along the jagged furring strips surrounding the hole, and wondered if Art himself had somehow smashed out of the wall—like Superman--or if someone else had gotten him out. Which is when I remembered what Abner had told me on the telephone. "Someone got him out. Someone sprung him."

I whispered, trying for a smile, "I'm going to take my balls and go home," but my smile trembled, and my head whirled. Then I began to methodically search the beach house for something that might tell me where Abner had gone.

~ * ~

I began in the small, sparsely furnished damp room I'd slept in a week earlier. There was a wrought-iron twin bed in that room, a small wood-framed picture
some anonymous countryside scene, faded and pinkish green—above the bed, a battered oval nightstand alongside the bed. I opened the one drawer of the nightstand; it looked empty, but it also looked to be too shallow by half for the depth of the nightstand. I felt around inside. My fingers hit what I guessed was a picture frame keeping the drawer from opening all the way. I pulled the frame down, opened the drawer, took the frame out. It had a five by seven black-and-white photograph in it of Art DeGraff--I
 
recognized his mannequin like handsomeness—and a stunning black woman dressed in a very brief light-colored bikini. They were standing together on the bow of a cabin cruiser. The woman was Phyllis. I took the photograph from the frame and studied the back of it. Alongside the Eastman Kodak Company logo was a date that indicated the photo had been taken two and a half years earlier. I turned the picture around again and studied it more closely. Because there was a curtain over the room's only window, the light was not good, so I pulled the curtain open and held the photograph up to the daylight. My gaze lingered on Phyllis, on the breasts that promised to come spilling wonderfully out of that skimpy top, on the marvelous flat belly, the smooth dark thighs, the hint of a pubic shadow beneath the equally skimpy bikini bottoms. And when I looked at Art's face, I saw a kind of
Look what I've got here!
grin on it.

But as I held the photograph closer to the window, I saw that that
Look what I've got here!
grin was not a grin, but a grimace of fear, and I said to myself,
Well, of course, this photograph never did show him
grinning,
although I knew it had, and then I said to myself,
It's the way the light's falling on the picture; it makes him look frightened,
but I knew that that was wrong, too.

I put the photograph back in the frame, and the frame back in the drawer of the nightstand. Then I noticed for the first time what I supposed was a closet door in the wall opposite the bed. I went to the door and tried it; it was locked. I took my wallet out, got a VISA card, and tried to slip it between the door and the frame to spring the bolt. It didn't work. I stuffed the card in my shirt pocket. I tried the knob again. Nothing. I decided to take the hinges off the door. For that I'd need a screwdriver, or something like a screwdriver. I searched my pockets and found a couple of dimes, a quarter, five pennies. I shoved one of the dimes beneath the flange of the pin on the top hinge. The pin wouldn't budge. "Dammit," I whispered. I stared at the door for a good half minute. At last I decided that instead of taking the hinges off the door it probably would matter to no one if I bashed it in. I liked that idea. I needed to engage in a bit of mayhem at that house—I needed to exercise some
control
over it.

I stepped back from the door and gave it a hard kick. Nothing. I felt a sudden sharp pain in my big toe and I supposed sickeningly that I'd broken it. "Damn it all!" I whispered. I turned angrily to the bed, tore the mattress and box spring off, and found beneath it a half-dozen sturdy wooden slats. I grabbed one, turned again. And saw that the closet door was standing open a good three inches.

I stepped forward, put my hand on the knob, hesitated, and yanked the door open. I peered in.

It was a large walk-in closet, and except for some dust mice on the floor, and one yellowing, crackly page from the Leisure section of the
New York Times
on one of the five floor-to-eye-level shelves, it was empty.

My search of the house had just begun, and yet, somehow, I felt as if the rest of my search, through all fourteen rooms, was going to be as futile and as frustrating as my search of this room had been. But that, I quickly realized, was only a kind of wearying combination of laziness and fear—it was a
big
place, after all, and whatever I might find in it would probably much rather be left alone—like the black widow spiders that hung out under people's porches, or rattlesnakes that sunned themselves on rocky hillsides—"Don't bother them," my dad used to say, "and they won't bother you."

I left the small bedroom and headed for the narrow enclosed stairs that led to the second floor. Abner had pointed toward those stairs the day before, after our picnic; "Nothing up there, Sam," he told me. "Just smelly and cold up there," and I thought I could tell from the casual, offhand way he'd said it that it was true. Abner was never much of a liar. In Bangor, he tried gamely, but it was usually clear from the flickering of his eyelids and the way he shuffled his feet that he was lying. I like people like that—people who can't lie; I think it's a sign of character. It was, in fact, one of the things that kept Abner and me together in Bangor—the fact that he had character.

Now I realized that people can learn to lie.

So I started up the narrow enclosed stairway.

Improbably, it smelled of spaghetti sauce. I found that its dirty-with-age beige walls had names written on them variously in pen, pencil, crayon, even what looked like some kind of dark liquid (not blood; it was the wrong shade for blood). There was a "Tammy," a "Fred the Frog," a "Minerva G.," the initials, scrawled childishly in that dark liquid, "S.T.M," a "Victor Darling" (and I spent a moment or two trying to decide if that was actually the man's name or if, perhaps, his lover had written it there). "S.T.M." was lower on the wall. "Victor Darling," "Minerva G.," and some of the others were higher up.

I'd left the door open at the bottom of the stairway. The light switch didn't work, so the only light was what filtered up from the first floor. In that light, a kind of dim yellowish-green light, I thought I could see other names, much fainter than Victor Darling's and Minerva G.'s, et cetera. Names so faint, in fact, that I would not have seen them had I not stopped to look. I could read some of them—"Ransom" some-thing-or-other, "Lord Ali," which made me think, of course, of Muhammad Ali, a "Rebecca," a "Thomas Pillson." I guessed that there were two hundred or more names in that hallway and I supposed that they were the names of people who had lived in the house, that someone had long ago started a kind of tradition of signing the hallway if they lived in the house. So I stopped searched my pockets, came up with my house keys, and used one to scratch my name halfway up the wall, next to the name "Eli Wallberger," which had been done in fine, black block lettering that had faded nearly to invisibility.