Voices in the Dark (26 page)

“I won’t,” she said, turning a corner and confronting her reflection in a pane of glass, which baffled her. She reeled back like a stroke victim failing to recognize himself in the mirror, an introduction needed each day. “Herman,” she hollered. “Come tell me who I am.”

• • •

“Remember Will Harris?” May Hutchins asked.

“Sure I remember him.” Fred Fossey rocked on worn heels. “We both went to Korea. He didn’t come back.”

“But you did.”

“And here I am, May.” He’d been eying her keenly all the while, his first time alone with her in her house. They stood in her parlor, and she had their high school yearbook open, certain pages overly thumbed through the years.

“Here’s your picture, Fred.”

Slipping to her side, he peered at the thumbnail photo. “I was funny-looking then.”

“You still are.”

“We guys used to walk around with our pants turned up, our white socks showing. Sweat socks, that’s what we wore with our penny loafers. Do you remember, May?”

“Now that you mention it.” Memories squeezed her heart, she turned pages, skipped the one on which Dorothea Farnham appeared, and came to her own. “Recognize her?”

His cool hand was on her warm bottom. “You were beautiful, May.”

“I was attractive.”

“Guys wanted you.”

She’d been burdened with too much embarrassing bloom and racked with fugitive desires consigned to a diary, the entries penned in glaring red ink, valentines pierced with arrows drawn around the dates. “Inside I was a hot number, but nobody got to me.”

“How about Malcolm Crandall?”

“He came close, my mistake.”

His hand, which had heated up, was still on her. He pulled it away. “May, you’re not wearing anything underneath.”

“That’s right, I’m not.”

The yearbook was cast aside. His face loomed. Standing pelvis to pelvis with her, swaying as if at a school dance, he kissed her like a novice.

“Not like that,” she said and, demonstrating, felt him spring to life.

“May,” he murmured, his hand tentative at her breast, as if cupping a flame. His body was a quivering exercise in expectation.

“Upstairs,” she said.

They left the room and moved through another, which smelled of floor wax and furniture polish. They climbed stairs to forbidden territory, where the carpeting was springy and the smells more intimate.

“Jeez, May, don’t you make your bed?”

“The clock’s running out on us, Fred. Don’t you hear it?”

“Don’t talk sad, May. Talk happy.” He was fumbling with his belt, jamming the buckle, getting nowhere.

“At our age,” she said, weighing implications and tipping the scale, “so much is to be gained, so little to be lost.”

He triumphed over the buckle and stumbled out of his pants. His boxer shorts were tapered, unlike Roland’s, which bagged to the knees. “I can’t believe I’m in your bedroom.”

“Turn around. Don’t watch.” She yanked off her dress and flung it at a chair as if it didn’t belong to her. There was little else to remove. She kept on her watch and the gold chain around her neck. “Okay, you can look.” On the bed she appeared as a prize, unwrapped, the swells of her thighs exaggerated, the push of her belly diminished. She was bounty for any man’s eyes and more than enough for Fred’s. He gawked at her.

“Jeez, May, what did you do?”

For a moment embarrassment garnished her face. “Don’t you like it?”

“I do.”

With nail scissors and razor she had made her cunt cute by trimming the rusty hair into a heart. “I did it for you,” she said and had second thoughts. “No, I didn’t. I did it for me.”

They made love belly to belly, and then he snoozed. Ten minutes later he woke with a start. “I’d better go, May.”

“I was about to suggest it.”

“I’d rather stay.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

He looked skinny, uncertain. He leaned over to kiss her. “Having you, May, Roland’s got to be the luckiest man alive.”

“No, Fred. You are.”

• • •

Dudley said good-bye to Tish Hopkins and then, as an afterthought, struggled to remove his ring. “Here,” he said, “I want you to have this. Harvard College, class of fifty-seven. Or fifty-eight, I forget which.”

“Oh, no.” She protested in a voice crackling like brittle parcel paper. Her flat cap sat square on her head. “It’s too valuable.”

“I got it in a pawnshop.”

“I still can’t take it.”

His eyes bled blue, his shaved face hung white. “People have been good to me here,” he said and pressed the ring into her callused hand. “Please.”

“What will I do with it?”

“You can wear it.”

He trekked past chicken coops to the road and waited on the shoulder, where the late afternoon sun blazed against his white shirt, the cuffs turned back at the wrists. The taxi that finally arrived all the way from Boston was a rattletrap with a noisy throb in the motor. Looking in through the open window, he said, “Can I sit in front?”

“It’s not allowed,” the driver said, clearing the seat beside him of debris. “But I’ll make an exception.”

The taxi took time to achieve speed. A crow eating something on the road flew away only at the last second. Dudley enjoyed taxis. For the length of the ride his wishes were supreme. The wheels rolled for him, the driver his bearer.

“You’re a black man,” he said.

“Some of us are.”

“I could have been,” he said, “you never know. The dice decide that. My name’s Dudley. What’s yours?”

“John.” John, turning onto Summer Street, gave him a look. “Your missus said you might be a mess, but you look pretty clean and proper.”

“Folks were wonderful to me.” Maples shaded the street. Dudley pointed at a particularly well-groomed Victorian. “But the lady lives there was mean. I did a poop on her porch.”

John tossed him another look. “Why don’t you relax now, enjoy the ride.”

The taxi breathed in more than it breathed out, and Dudley took the heat in his face. They bypassed the green and on Ruskin Road followed a lawn-chemical truck on its way into the Heights, where the grand houses kept their distance on rising grounds and flower gardens exported their scent in long drifts.

“Rich people,” John commented.

“Roll of the dice,” Dudley said, closing his eyes. “My stomach’s upset.”

“You’re not going to be sick, are you?”

“No, but I think I’ll nap for a while, may I?”

When he opened his eyes again, the taxi was cruising an inner lane on Interstate 93 and withstanding the shock of the faster traffic. The car ahead of theirs exhibited bumper stickers hyping the sport of bowling and glorifying the ownership of guns. When he woke from another nap, they were in the snarl of Boston, in the drumbeat of stop and go.

“Let me off here,” he said. “I can walk the rest of the way.”

“She said for me to take you to the door.”

Dudley’s hand was on the latch. “It’s not for her to say.”

“You’re the boss,” John said.

“Can you lend me some money? She’ll pay you back.”

“How much you want?”

“Twenty dollars, that would do it.”

“I’ll let you have ten.”

Stepping out into the stationary traffic, he was startled by the hoot of a horn and hustled to the wide sidewalk, where well-dressed bodies swept by him. The lesser-dressed, nowhere to go, billowed around him. He felt at home, too much at home. Up ahead was a squad of skinheads whose violet scalps and bald faces gave them the look of death and evoked flashes of Sweeney, the cat killer.

He plowed through the crowd to a display window, where a naked dummy, a sexless male, was another evocation of Sweeney. Eyeballs rolled back. No vital signs. Gore at the base of the head.

He had let Sweeney stalk him up four flights of stairs to the flat pebbled roof, where he taunted him by walking the slender wooden edge. He knew where it was safe and where it wasn’t, and Sweeney didn’t.

“I bet you don’t dare look down,” he said, and that was when Sweeney, teetering on rot, swung out a sudden arm for balance.

With cramps in his stomach, he moved into the human sea, now with the tide, then against it. A tattooed arm on which a dragon snorted fire jostled him. Through a window he saw a jeweler with a loupe in his eye and a gentleman with a tightly furled umbrella that could be used for defense. Ahead of him two youths were swearing in broken sentences. Slipping by them, he entered a coffee shop, ensconced himself on a stubby seat at a low counter, and ordered milk.

He had soared skyward when Sweeney plunged into the void. Pure spirit, he was jostling clouds in an ocean of air when Sweeney burst into blood and bone on the asphalt. Never before had he flown so high, seen so much, been so big.

His eyes lit, he sipped his milk through a straw and smiled appropriately when the woman on the next seat looked at him from a face void of cosmetics, which reminded him of his mother, who, unlike Sweeney, should not have died.

“Aren’t you feeling well?” the woman asked.

“My tummy’s upset.”

“Milk is good, but warm water is better.”

His mother had been ill off and on and then had gotten worse. Mrs. Cronin, who lived on the first floor, huffed up the stairs twice a day. A public nurse came once a week. His mother ate soup. Anything solid she couldn’t keep down.

“Bottled water is best,” the woman beside him said.

From his breast pocket he removed the folded bill John had given him and placed it on his napkin. His mother’s weight had always fluctuated, though she had never been fat. In the final weeks she’d been skinny. “You ought to find a good girl and get married,” she had told him.

He smelled something musty laced with spearmint. The woman had opened her purse. “Everything is so expensive,” she complained.

“Are you leaving?”

“Don’t you want me to?”

With a soft step he had entered the dim of his mother’s room. She was a still figure under the covers, her face turned to the wall. After a few minutes, slowly and unerringly, he backed out. Seated at the chrome-legged table was Mrs. Cronin, in whose life priests were the controlling force, though gin did more to soothe her soul. “Did she finish her soup?” The breezy voice altered with the next breath. “What is it, luv?” Her chair scraped. “She’s gone,” he said, and the cuckoo came out of the kitchen clock to mock the moment.

“I didn’t cry,” he said. “Some things are too sad for tears.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Did I miss something?”

The word
death
did not scare him. The other word did,
oblivion.

• • •

Soldier, drinking beer from a can, stared at an oil Mary Williams had dug out of storage and hung in her studio. It was an abstract festooned with ostentation, convoluted with overstatement, and overcharged with rebellious colors bleeding into one another. Soldier didn’t like it. “It’s a joke,” he said.

“It belonged to my grandmother.”

“It’s still a joke.”

“It’s Expressionism,” she said. “I identified with this stuff when I came out.”

“Came out of where?”

Three months, when she was sixteen, she had been confined in an institution where the mirrors were metal and the doors had handles like those on ships. Three months had seemed like
three years. No razors allowed. An attendant who had read
Auntie Mame
said she looked like King Kong under the arms.

“Out of where, Mary?”

“Out of myself.”

Soldier went into deep thought, lips pressed in, eyes narrowed, when she looked at her watch. “What’s going to happen to me, he gets here?”

“Maybe we can work something out,” she said, with no idea if anything could be.

“He’ll sponge off you.”

“The last three years he’s paid for everything.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It’s not necessary you do.”

“You need me in other ways, admit it.”

“Don’t make me choose, Soldier. You’d lose.”

He finished off his beer. His hand, cold from the can, was an ice pack on hers. He kissed the stain on her cheek. “Don’t be so sure.”

But she was perfectly sure and looked at him with a twinge of regret. He brought forward the flaps of his ears.

“Who makes you laugh?”

She ran a hand over his shaved head and down the side of his jaw. His presence had a weight and reality hers did not. “We’ll talk about it later.”

When the bell sounded, she dashed through the passageway to buzz open the downstairs door. Tremors in her legs, she was waiting at the top of the stairs when John came up them, alone. Her face fell in the instant.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“He made me let him off, few blocks away. Said he wanted to walk.”

Her voice went bare bones. “I depended on you.”

“I’m just a taxi driver, ma’am. I can’t make people do what they don’t want to do.”

“Don’t call me ma’am. My name is Mary. You let me down.”

“No, Mary, he did.”

12

THEY MET IN THE MORNING AND WALKED THROUGH THE PINES to the pond. Fronds of ferns arched toward them. The sky was mackerel. “I got the job,” Kate Bodine said, and Chief Morgan’s smile vanished into his face, to be saved for another time.

“I was sure you would.”

“Aren’t you glad for me?”

“Give me awhile.”

“It’s different from what I thought. The station’s going all news, and I’m on the team. News I can write, James, and I can read it well. I won’t have butterflies. The camera used to terrify me.”

They sat on flat rock, which was mossy and would probably stain them. He wore chinos and she white shorts that showed her fine thighs and strong calf muscles. “When do you start?” he asked.

“Next week.”

“What did your husband say to that?”

“I told you, James. He’s not interested. And he’s not touching
me anymore, which is a relief.” She picked up a twig and tossed it into the rim of the pond, disturbing a dragonfly. “I’m an uncomplicated person. I realize a career is all I want, not a bunch of things.”

“Sounds like you’re settling for a career.”

“You could put it that way, but I prefer my words. I’m going to look for a place to live in Boston.”

“Then the marriage is over.”