Touchy and Feely (Sissy Sawyer Mysteries) (25 page)

‘Very well,’ said Sissy. ‘But don’t leave it too long. The future always comes quicker than you expect.’

 

R
obert finished his scrambled eggs and took another bite of toast, and then another.

‘Feely and me have to go out for a while.’

Serenity was lighting up her first joint of the day. She was still wearing only a large turquoise shirt and bright red ski-socks. Her hair was all messed up and there were dark maroon circles under her eyes.

‘You’re coming back?’

‘Of course we’re coming back. We have some business to take care of, that’s all.’

Serenity was having trouble getting her joint to burn. ‘What possible business could you and Feely have in Canaan?’

Robert looked across the table at Feely and gave him a collusive smile. ‘We’re very important persons, Feely and me. In fact you could say that we’re cataclysmically important.’

‘Apocalyptic,’ said Feely.

‘Whatever,’ said Serenity. ‘So long as you two don’t run out on me without saying
hasta la vista
.’

‘You think we’d do that? We’d never do that. Now—I’m just going to change these bandages. I think they’re starting to stink.’ Robert waved his left hand under Serenity’s nose. ‘What do you think? You think they’re starting to stink?’

Robert went upstairs leaving Feely and Serenity sitting at the table together in front of the dirty egg-plates. Serenity smoked for a while, and then she said, ‘I saw the drawings you did. The ones of me.’

Feely felt himself blushing. ‘I’m sorry. They were only extemporaneous.’

She leaned forward, grinning, with smoke leaking out from between her teeth. ‘I thought they were cool. I thought they were really amazing. Nobody ever did anything like that for me before. Nobody ever cared about me that much.’

‘I can’t believe that. I’m sure your parents care about you.’

‘Are you shitting me? My parents never cared about anybody. They don’t have any feelings. Like I told you before, they’re empty. Pepperpots with no pepper in them. You can grind them all you like but you never get anything out of them.’

Feely said, ‘That’s very metaphorical.’

‘Well, that’s me. That’s the way I am. Metaphorical. You know what T.S. Eliot said? ‘
We had the experience but we missed the meaning
.’ My parents had me but they never understood what the hell I was.’

She paused, and then she said, ‘
You
know what I am, don’t you, Feely, because you’re the same as me. We’re
generous
, that’s us. We give our bodies and our souls to anybody who has need of them. If you don’t share yourself with other people, you’ll never grow. You’ll be stunted, like a circus dwarf.’

Again she paused. Then she closed her eyes and said, ‘Do you love me, Feely?’

He felt himself growing even hotter. ‘Sure. You read my comic.’

‘What about Touchy? Do you think that Touchy loves me?’

‘I don’t know. He’s full of so much rancorousness, I think he finds it hard to focus on anything else.’

‘So . . . what’s this business that you and him are doing together?’

Feely shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you that, sorry.’

‘Oh, I see! I’m allowed to have sex with you, but I’m not allowed to know what business you’re doing?’

‘It’s Robert’s business, really, not mine. I’m just doing him a favor because he’s hurt his hand.’

‘Go on.’

‘I can’t tell you, Serenity. He’ll kill me, if I tell you.’

Serenity stood up and walked around the table. She sat on Feely’s lap, hooked her arm around his neck and forcibly rubbed noses with him, so that it made his eyes water. ‘We’re
lovers
, Feely. You and me, we were joined together. Nobody can ever say that we weren’t.’

‘He’ll kill me.’

‘Don’t be a wuss. He treats you like his own son. He treats you
better
than his own son.’

Feely looked over her shoulder toward the fireplace, where another huge log was slowly smoldering. He had never realized that life outside El Barrio could be so ambiguous. Maybe Serenity was part of the conspiracy, too. Maybe she was trying to trap him into denying Robert, as well as everybody else. He couldn’t work out if she were angel or devil, or neither, or a little of both.

‘Robert wants me to shoot somebody.’

‘What?’

‘He has a sniper rifle in the trunk of his car. He wants me to shoot somebody with it.’

‘Who?’

‘Nobody special. Anybody.’

Serenity stared into his eyes from only six inches away, so that he couldn’t focus. Then she started laughing. She laughed so much that she fell off his lap onto the rug, with one leg caught beneath the coffee table.

‘Can’t breathe!’ she gasped, her eyes filled with tears. ‘Don’t make me laugh any more!’

Feely didn’t know what else to say. ‘You won’t tell him I said that?’ he begged her. ‘Please, you won’t tell him I said that?’

At last Serenity sat up and wiped her eyes with her shirtsleeves. ‘I love you, Feely. You’re amazing. I think you and I should get married. Can you imagine my parents’ faces, if I introduced you as my fiancé? Mother . . . this is Feely. He’s a walking dictionary, and he shoots people.’

 

R
obert drove out of Orchard Street with his tires snaking on the snowy road. Feely clung onto his seatbelt and said, ‘Take it easy, Robert. We don’t want anybody to notice us, do we?’

‘You’re right. We only want people to notice what we
do
.’ Feely could tell that Robert had washed his teeth, because he smelled strongly of peppermint toothpaste, but it still wasn’t strong enough to cover the whiskey.

‘Where are we going?’

‘South-east. The wind’s blowing from the north-west, so we’ll come out of the wind like avenging avengers.’

He took Route 44, toward Norfolk. There was hardly any traffic on the road, and they drove nearly all the way to East Canaan before they passed another car. Robert didn’t talk very much. His fingers were probably throbbing, and his senses were dulled with Tylenol. Every now and then he muttered something under his breath, but Feely couldn’t make out what he was saying. The only word he picked up was ‘transparent.’

They passed slowly through the center of Norfolk the way that Robert wanted them to, like ghosts. The village green was blinded with snow; and the redbrick library looked like a building from a Victorian Christmas card.

‘Ever had the feeling that you’re dead already?’ said Robert.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

Robert grimaced at him, but didn’t elaborate.

On the east side of town they passed the dim illuminated sign for the Big Bear Supermart, with hundreds of cars parked around it, hundreds of them, like a silent gathering of lemmings. Then they were out in the forests again, with snow-covered pine trees rising on either side of them in tiers.

Feely sang, ‘We love the subs . . . ’cuz they are good to us . . . the Quizno subs . . . they are tasty, they are warm because they toast them . . . they got a pepper bar!’

Robert said irritably, ‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a TV ad, that’s all.’ Feely was just about to start singing it again, but something stopped him. Robert looked unfocused, and perplexed, as if he couldn’t quite remember what he was doing here.

‘You OK?’ Feely asked him.

Robert lifted up his bandaged left hand and pressed it against his chin, but said nothing.

They had almost reached the Mad River Reservoir when Robert spotted a side road with a sign saying ‘Mad Falls, 2m’. He jammed his foot on the brake and the Chevrolet slewed sideways and ended up with its nearside front wheel right on the edge of the roadside drainage-ditch.

He backed up, with twin fountains of snow spraying high up in the air. ‘Mad Falls, this is the place! If ever I saw a place that was crying out to have something cataclysmic done in it, Mad Falls is it!’

Feely said nothing. He had started to hope that Robert was feeling too tired and too drugged-up to think about shooting anybody. But Robert stamped on the gas and drove them up a sharp, icy incline, and Feely was thrown from side to side until his shoulder was bruised.

‘Mad Falls, you couldn’t invent it!’

‘What if it’s unpopulated?’

‘We only need one! One happy person, per day!’

Feely was silent for a while. Then he said, ‘What if they’re not happy?’

‘Stop splitting hairs, for Christ’s sake! They must be happy, to live here. If you lived here and you weren’t happy, you’d have strangled yourself years ago.’

They drove for over ten minutes, the Chevrolet jouncing and slithering and sliding on the ice. Every now and then they hit a bush, and snow exploded over the windshield. Feely was beginning to feel nauseous, and it didn’t help that Robert had the heating turned up to maximum. At last, however, they topped a rise, and there below them lay a small green-painted farmhouse, with a barn, and a collection of outbuildings. Smoke was blowing out of the chimney, and the lights were on.

‘Here we are,’ said Robert. ‘All you have to do is ask, and the Good Lord will give it to you, on a plate.’

He turned the car around, and then he steered it into the right-hand side of the track, so that it was half-hidden from the farmhouse by overhanging branches. Then he killed the engine and put on his wooly hat.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Feely.

‘We wait.’

‘How long for?’

‘Jesus, Feely, we wait until an opportunity presents itself. That’s what being a sniper is all about. Some snipers, they can wait for
days
until an opportunity presents itself.’

‘OK. I get the picture.’

They sat and waited. Robert drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, and occasionally lifted his bandaged hand and turned it this way and that. Feely whistled the Quizno jingle between his teeth. ‘We love the subs . . . ’cuz they are good to us . . .’

‘Is that the only goddamned tune you know?’ Robert demanded.

‘No. I know
Amor De Loca Juventud
. “
Mueren ya las ilusiones del ayer . . . que saci
con lujurioso amor
 . . .”’

Robert looked as if he had just broken a tooth. ‘Just shut up, OK. Silence is better. Silence is more professional. You don’t get professional snipers singing TV jingles, OK?’

‘OK,’ said Feely.

Another half-hour went by. Feely said, ‘I need a leak.’

‘Can’t you hold it? Professional snipers have to hold it.’

‘No, I really have to go.’

‘OK, then. But close the door quietly. And don’t write your name in the snow.’

 

L
izzie came into the kitchen to find her father sitting at the table, pulling on his boots.

‘You’re not going out?’

Thomas Carpenter looked up at her and nodded. ‘Got to clear that driveway, Lizzie. We don’t want to be snowed in for Christmas, do we?’

‘Oh, come on, Dad, we won’t get snowed in.’

‘That’s what your mother said, last Christmas, and we couldn’t get out of the front door till the second week in January.’

‘Well, at least wait until the snow eases off.’

‘Forecast says it’s going to go on snowing all day, and most of the night. If I don’t do it now, it could be too late.’

Lizzie started to collect up the breakfast plates. ‘Dad, you’re like a big kid. You just can’t wait to try out your new snowplow, can you?’

‘That’s nothing to do with it. I don’t want us marooned here, that’s all, the way we were last year.’

Thomas Carpenter stood up, and zippered up his bright orange coat. He looked old for fifty-eight, with spiky gray hair and a bristly white beard, and deep creases around his eyes. He could have been Ernest Hemingway’s twin brother, except that he was shorter, and squatter, and his nose was bigger.

Lizzie tugged up his hood for him, and laced it. ‘I just don’t want you getting bronchitis again.’

‘I’ll be fine. That’s dry snow out there. Dry as a crow’s bone.’

‘Well, I’ll have some hot tomato soup waiting for you when you come in.’

‘You’re an angel, Lizzie.’

He opened the kitchen door and went outside. Lizzie stood by the window watching him as he crossed the driveway toward the barn. He always looked lonely these days. Sometimes she would come into the living room and see him sitting by the stove with a book open on his lap, but she could see that he wasn’t reading. His mind was back to last winter, when Lizzie’s mother had still been here.

Lizzie finished clearing the kitchen table and stacked the plates and mugs into the dishwasher. She was a tall girl, with very long auburn hair tied in a ponytail. She had the bulbous blue eyes and the washed-out face of a pre-Raphaelite princess, as if she had spent her life moping in water-meadows or lying on ottomans suffering from pleurisy. In reality she wouldn’t have known what a pre-Raphaelite princess was. She had been brought up on the farm with her father and her mother and her three brothers and she had left school when she was sixteen. Two-and-a-half years ago, she had married Ted, a widower fifteen years her senior who ran a machinery-hire business in Winsted. She never talked about Ted, or her wedding night, and she had never been back to Winsted since.

Thomas Carpenter opened the wide barn doors and there was his beloved yellow Club Cadet mini-tractor, covered with sacking. Along one side of the barn were shelves with every kind of fence paint or creosote or rust remover that you could think of; as well as scythe-blades and shears and complicated tractor attachments for sowing and edge-cutting and weeding.

His new yellow snowplow blades were already fitted. He had bought them this August from Ted, when he had gone to Winsted to talk about compensation for Lizzie’s unconsummated marriage. Ted had insisted over and over that the marriage
had
been consummated ‘even if Lizzie hadn’t been one hundred percent
au fait
with what was supposed to fit where.’ As a gesture of conciliation, however, he had offered Thomas the new rear-fitted Driveway Superplow at a seven percent discount.