Voices in the Dark (3 page)

“You a guest or a crasher?”

He drained the wineglass and gave it to her. “I have to talk to your husband,” he said, the words full of weight.

“James, what is it?”

He gazed beyond her. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

“Maybe the billiard room, I’m not sure. James, tell me what it’s about.”

“I think it should come from him.” He edged past her. “Don’t worry, I’ll track him down,” he said, and for a wild second she imagined him scampering on all fours with his nose to the floor.

She tried to follow him, but others got in the way. Regina Smith touched her arm and said, “We must see more of you and Harley.” She nodded and weaved, heads bobbing around her.

She still had the chief’s empty glass and placed it on a table. Strong fingers gripped her arm. “Kate, I’m sorry,” Paul Gunner said. The words and the tone frightened her, and she pulled away, bumping shoulders with someone. Then she saw the stricken air of her husband.

“Harley,” she said, bearing down.

Chief Morgan edged back into the double doorway of the billiard room, where he became a shadow. Her husband stood in bright light, his arms slack, as if the movement had gone out of them for good.

“My son is dead,” he said.

2

IT WAS THE HEART OF SUMMER, THE DOG STAR ADDING ITS HOT breath to the sun’s. On Beacon Street, traffic was packed into a heated whole. From a tall window in the cool of her studio, Mary Williams gazed down at it with a sadness that had to do with other things. When she turned to the man behind her, the endless brow of his shaved head shined in her face. With a smile, he stripped down to his Jockey shorts and tensed his stomach into curling muscles, which he displayed challengingly.

“You can’t hurt me here. I see the punch coming, I can take it every time.”

“Why would I want to punch you?” she said.

“You’d be surprised those who’d like to.”

She watched him flex his arms, the muscles ropes, not a bit of him wasted. His presence was pronounced and emphatic, which made him seem taller than he was. His nude head was the bone handle of his body. The only evidence that he was approaching sixty was the netted skin around his deep-set eyes, like the wingscape of butterflies.

“Where’s the fag?” he said, and she stiffened.

“Don’t call him that. I’d find it offensive even if it were so.”

“Did he leave you?”

“He’s away for a while. He’ll be back.”

“A guy like that, you don’t know what he’ll do.”

“You don’t know anything about him,” she shot back.

“I got eyes, that’s enough.”

Bending, he unzipped a rugged gripsack and pulled out a set of camouflage clothes, which was what she wanted to capture him in. His name was Eaton, but he called himself Soldier. Nearly twenty years out of the army, he still imitated the life.

“I shouldn’t need more than an hour,” she said and watched him reclothe himself into a warrior and blouse his pants with stretched condoms square-knotted at the ends.

“I got the cap,” he said. “Do you want me to put it on?”

“No need,” she said, her gaze fixed on him. His ears lay flat as if in babyhood and beyond they had been taped. A violet hue burned through his suntanned scalp. His temple pulsed.

“Where do you want me?”

She stationed him in the strong light from the windows, where he stood in a way that looked hostile, not exactly what she wanted. “Relax. Act as though you were waiting in a line.”

“I was doing that, I wouldn’t relax. I’d want to get to the front.”

“Okay. Be that way.”

She perched herself on a high chair, with a sketch pad in her lap and a collection of charcoal pencils in the pocket of the paint-smeared shirt she wore over shorts. Her feet were bare, the toes curled over a rung. Quickly, the edge of her hand scuffing the rough paper, she began sketching him but without verve or confidence, without the fire with which she could pretend she was Goya etching madness, Munch darkening a scream. She tore the sheet from the pad, tossed it aside, and started afresh.

He winked at her. “I like it better when you do me in the raw.”

With quick strokes she strove to capture from his stance someone lonely, displaced, and rootless, but produced only caricature. Her nerves were out of order.

“You got nice toes,” he said, “but you ought to paint the nails. Give ’em character.”

Her pencil concentrated on his face, weathered and shatterproof, and on his deep-set eyes, which could go conveniently vacant, immunizing him from criticism and insult. Every line in his brow seemed to have a purpose that defied translation. She was better doing women. Women she understood.

He said, “I know somebody could give you a nice pedicure.”

“I don’t want a pedicure, Soldier. I just want to get this right.”

“You’ll never get me right. I’m nobody you ever knew.”

“You’re commoner than you think,” she declared, shutting the sketch pad and slipping off the chair. “But you’re right, it’s not working. Maybe the next time.”

“Tell me the problem,” he said, “maybe I can solve it.”

She pattered to a table, where she opened a leather bag and extracted bills from a wallet, half the usual amount, which she offered up. “Will this do?”

“Yeah, I’ll accept it.” He deposited the money into a deep pocket. “I know the problem,” he said. “Your friend’s not here, right?”

She took herself to a window and gazed at the traffic, which the city endlessly sucked in and dribbled out. Sometimes her head hurt thinking about it. Pedestrians herded themselves along a crosswalk, their steps quick and their eyes wary, for the change of lights did not guarantee safety. Without turning, she said, “Your girlfriend, Soldier, I’d like to meet her.”

“You would, huh? Why?”

“I’d like to do her.”

“It’s not her thing.” He came up behind her and caressed her back with the heel of his hand. “You’re sad, aren’t you? How long has he been gone?”

“Two weeks,” she said.

His breath closed in on her. “You got different bedrooms. How come?”

“That’s none of your business, Soldier.”

“Don’t get mad, I’m just asking. When will he be back?”

“I don’t know,” she said, unable to muffle the worry in her voice or cloak the tension in her shoulders. He rubbed her back in a circular motion. Leaning over, he brandished his unwanted face.

“You know what I like best about you?” His lips went to it. “This little mark on your cheek.”

She stepped away, nerve-worn, uncertain, vulnerable, all of which heightened her sense of the absurd. His splotchwork of clothes presented farce rather than force. His arms hung long. He was not tall, only middling.

“You want me to go, just say so.”

Her mind veered from one thing to another as she flung a final look out the window. “There’s no rush,” she said.

• • •

Holly Pride at the library may have been the first to take note of the fellow, his appearance scruffy then but not yet derelict. When he breezed through the twin doors, she knew he was no townie and surely no resident of the Heights, but where others might have seen merely untidiness and eccentricity, she went beyond the stubble and rumpled clothes and surmised refinement and poetry, a story within a story.

“May I help you?” she asked when he approached the desk, bringing with him a bath of air, hot and humid. She was ready to rummage shelves for him, but all he wanted was a street map of the town, which she provided with a timidity that arose at vital times, a curse to her, a bit of amusement to him. Seated at a secluded table, he pored over the map and later scanned the town’s ill-written weekly,
The Crier.

Only she seemed struck by him. Fred Fossey, the part-time veterans affairs officer, was deep into a war book and never looked up. Other patrons ignored the stranger, but occasionally, with bent brows, Fossey glanced at them.

He stayed an hour and in leaving thanked her with the sort of smile into which she could have read anything. Shifting to a window, she watched him ambulate the green, pausing to admire the rockery of flowers lovingly maintained by the Bensington Garden Club. She was sure he would return the next day or soon after, but he didn’t.

He did, however, reveal himself in the leafy little neighborhoods beyond the green. Mildred Crandall, the town clerk’s wife, answered a knock at the back door and laid eyes on him when his appearance had deteriorated to whisker and grime. He astounded her because she had not seen tramps in Bensington since Depression days, when her mother had hurried them away with table scraps. She sent him walking with a powdered doughnut cocooned in plastic wrap.

May Hutchins let him sit a spell in her gazebo, where she served him a bowl of high-fiber cereal weighted with strawberries and drenched in low-fat milk. He wore a signet ring she hoped was not stolen. The best time of day, he told her, is when the dew is still on the grass. “Yes,” she said, “I’m an early riser too.” A robin’s egg, he went on, is more precious than a pearl. She shied away from the unpleasant odor that flew up at her but relished his words.

Dorothea Farnham, whose husband was a selectman, would have no truck with beggars and threatened him with a bone knitting needle when he failed to move fast enough from the back step. Then she cursed him roundly, which was a mistake. A while later, stepping out the front door, she saw something on the porch that heated her face. It approximated shit and, on closer inspection, was exactly that.

Sergeant Avery responded to her incensed call and cruised the neighborhood in one of the town’s two marked police cars. The sergeant came up dry, but early that evening, five miles away, a man fitting the description was seen bathing his feet in Paget’s Pond, which was conservation property, no swimming allowed.

At the selectmen’s meeting, second Monday of the month, Orville Farnham told the board that a person of disreputable ilk, no apparent abode or income, in other words a bum, was infecting the town. A motion was made, seconded, and Farnham brought his gavel down on a unanimous vote for the police chief to handle the matter forthwith. Chief Morgan, not present, got the message in the morning.

In his investigation, which carried through the week, the chief learned that the fellow had been here, there, and everywhere, including the Heights, where he had been seen plucking flowers. Everett Drinkwater, the funeral director, glimpsed him reading stones in the cemetery, and birders with binoculars spotted him in purple loosestrife behind Wenson’s Ice Cream Stand on Fieldstone Road. Tish Hopkins, an elderly widow with a farm farther up Fieldstone, found him sleeping with her hens, rousted him with a pitchfork, and offered him a meal for an hour’s work, which he declined. She fed him anyway.

Toward the end of the week the man was sighted several times on rural roads near the West Newbury line, which gave the chief a fair idea where he was taking shelter. “I’d better come with you,” said Sergeant Avery, who was off the clock. It was late afternoon, the heat high, with two fans whirring in the station. The chief said, “He’s not that big a deal.”

The chief’s old car, unmarked except for the faded town seal on each side, ran rough. He rode it around the green, turned right onto Pleasant Street, and drove with the sun in his eyes until he reached County Road, a long and lonely stretch through pinewood, with only occasional frame houses to break the view. The sky was irreproachably blue.

A mile from the West Newbury line he slowed at the sight of a weathered post that had once supported a mailbox and angled onto a dirt road that crept into the woods and came abruptly to a clearing. A battered pickup smeared with pine needles squatted on four flat tires. Nearby, the rusted handlebars of a bicycle protruded from weeds like the horns of a slain buck. To the left was a shack of a house with a ruined front step and torn window screens. The persons who had lived in it, Dogpatch types, a father and son, were dead, and another son, who lived in Florida, had forsaken it. The chief slipped out of the car.

Robins sang, jays made noises. Wild raspberry canes, thick with thorns, sprang at him. He ambled toward the house, his eyes on the windows. The door hung loose. Avoiding the rain-rotted step, he edged directly into a kitchen inundated with the hot and gamey smell of animals. Skunks had long had their way with the rubbish, and raccoons with half-human hands had ransacked the cupboards. Beneath the stained sink was the murk of a rat hole. The chief stood still, breathing soundlessly, aware that someone was in the shadows of the next room. He squared himself.

“Come out of there,” he said forcefully. “I’m a policeman.”

He waited, listening to the mad scampering of squirrels on the roof, at least two, maybe three. A dense spiderweb near the ceiling flaunted the remains of moths. From the other room came a silence not of emptiness but of indifference.

“Come out or I’ll shoot.”

A voice sounded. “You don’t have a gun.”

“I’ll get one.”

“What kind?”

“Never mind what kind!”

A floorboard creaked, and a man emerged, his hair matted and his whiskers like needles. The chief drew back from the reek of him, humid like fruit past its time, the juices fermenting.

“Who the hell are you?”

The man was smiling. “Your prisoner.”

• • •

Regina Smith spent the afternoon playing golf at the Bensington Country Club with Phoebe Yarbrough, Anne Lapierre, and Beverly Gunner, but she did not leave with them. She went into the clubhouse to make a phone call, glimpsed Harley Bodine sitting alone, and, with a surge of compassion, joined him at his table. She had not seen him since his son’s funeral.

“It’s not something you can get over,” he said. He was drinking a martini. A smiling waitress brought her white wine. They were the sole patrons.

“In time you will,” she said. “Not entirely, but enough to go on.”

He looked unconvinced, wary, and she, uncharacteristically, reached out to touch his forearm. Actually she had never liked him, too ambiguous, too furtive, but now she was dealing with someone who had lost a child, which changed the rules. He was costumed for golf, but she knew he had not been on the green.