Rummies

by Peter Benchley

  "You called we," Preston said.

  "Oh. Yes. This is Mr. Bixler." He looked at the lawyer. "Scott Preston."

  "Just a couple of questions, Mr. Preston," Bixler said pleasantly. "When did you last see Priscilla Godfrey?"

  "Last night. I've already been through this with her parents."

  “You what?" Larkin came out of his chair.

  “Guy ..." Like a dog trainer, Bixler motioned Larkin to sit down.

  “They asked," Preston said. "What'd you want me to do, lie?"

  "No," said Bixler. "Not at all." He cleared his throat. "It might be better, though, if you refrained from discussing the matter with them. Now: for my records, are you aware, Mr. Preston, that all patients check into The Banner Clinic of their own accord, that they are free to leave at any time?"

  "Sure. But what does what I think have to do with I anything?"

  "Just answer the questions, Scott!" Larkin said.

  "I did." Preston favored Larkin with what he hoped was a patronizing smile. "Guy."

  Bixler ignored Larkin. "A precaution, Mr. Preston. There's a chance, I'd say remote, that you might be asked ... in the event Miss Godfrey doesn't ... I don't think there's any likelihood, really ... to give a deposition."

  "Okay," Preston said. "Go for it."

  Bixler looked at his pad. "Are you further aware that under its charter from the State of New Mexico, the clinic—unlike, say, a hospital—has no more liability for the welfare of its clients than a hotel?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "Look, you think people come in here looking to sue somebody? They come in here looking to save their lives. Nobody reads all that crap they make you sign."

  Bixler did not look pleased. "Did Priscilla Godfrey say anything to you about wanting to leave, intending to leave, wishing she could leave?*'

  "No."

  "Did she ever talk about wanting to be alone, get away to think, that kind of thing?"

  "No."

  "Are you the only person she confided in?"

  "How would I know?" Preston was beginning to enjoy this. "If she confided in anyone else, she wouldn't tell me, would she? That's what confiding means."

  Bixler gave him a hard look. "So it's possible she told someone else she was intending to leave."

  “Not likely."

  "I didn't ask you if it was likely. I asked if it was possible."

  "Sure, it's possible. It's also possible she was kidnapped by a sex-crazed jai alai player. But it's not likely."

  "Look here!" This time Larkin came all the way to attention. "You think this is a game, Scott? You think you're back in Skull and Bones? This is serious business, mister, and I don't like your attitude. In fact—"

  "Guy ..." Bixler raised his hand again.

  Larkin would not be denied. "I haven't liked your attitude from day one. Let me tell you something: I would say the chances are slim, very slim, that you will ever . . . ever . . . receive . . . your . . . medallion!" Thus delivered of his thunderbolt, Larkin sat down.

  Bixler said, "Thank you, Mr. Preston."

  "Have you called the police?"

  "For what? No crime has been committed. People have gone AWOL before. Sometimes they hitchhike into town and get drunk or take drugs. Usually they come back."

  "And if they don't?"

  “Get out, Scott!" said Larkin.

  Preston was tempted to wish Larkin a great day, but he suppressed the impulse and left without saying anything.

  When he had closed the door behind him, he heard Bixler say, "Not smart, Guy," and Larkin reply, "I hate Yalies."

  Priscilla had said nothing to anyone about doing anything or going anywhere. The last person with a recollection of seeing her—and it was easy not to recall seeing someone, because in the evenings everybody milled in and out, watching television, eating ice cream, chatting—was Twist, who told Preston he had been watching a movie on TV, Cry Freedom, and Priscilla had wandered in and watched for a few minutes, but when someone hit the Steve Biko character with a club she had left, saying something about there being too dam much pain in the world.

  "I wouldnVe remembered it," Twist said, " 'cept for 'dam.' Here's this dude gettin' the shit kicked outa him, and here's little Gloria sayin' 'dam.' "

  "She went to bed?"

  "Beats me where she went. She split, 's all I know."

  It was dark, long after the evening lecture, before Preston had a chance to slip away and go into Priscilla's room. He shut the door and turned on the light and stood and looked. Everything was in place. Her clothes hung in the closet, her cosmetics lined a bathroom shelf, a copy of "The Big Book" was open on the desk beside a pad and a red pencil with which she had been underlining passages.

  He went to the desk and opened the top drawer and found her wallet, full of credit cards, her driver's license and $385 in cash.

  This was not a woman who had run away, not a woman who had gone into town for a few drinks.

  Because he didn't know what else to do, he went to the dresser and opened the drawers. He didn't know what he was looking for. Something missing. But how would he know if something was missing? He paid no attention to what people wore.

  Except for the Godfreys.

  Except for Priscilla.

  The first two drawers were full of lingerie. The third held blouses and a couple of T-shirts and a pair of exercise shorts.

  The fourth was packed with sweaters. He was about to close it when, for no reason at all, he remembered what she had been wearing the night she arrived. A linen skirt and navy blue pumps and ... a blue cashmere sweater.

  It wasn't there.

  All right! Wherever she had gone, she had worn a sweater, which meant she had left at night, because no one would wear a sweater in the desert in the daytime.

  He examined the closet. Two dresses and half a dozen skirts, including the linen one, hung on hangers. Amid them was an empty pants-hanger. Did she ever wear slacks? Jeans? He couldn't remember.

  Shoes. The blue pumps were there, and a beige pair and a black pair, a pair of shower clogs and a pair of Topsider moccasins.

  But no running shoes, the shoes she wore on their walks. Her Nikes were gone.

  Okay. She had gone out at night and had planned to do some walking.

  She had had an accident, maybe been bitten by a snake or hit by a car.

  No. There were security guards all over the place, and cars passed by all the time. Somebody would have found her.

  She had gotten where she was going but had been unable to get back.

  Why?

  Because they wouldn't let her.

  Who was "they"? How the hell do I know who ' 'they'' is ? Nobody lives around here except . . .

  Banner.

  Preston felt sick. Don't avoid it. Look at it.

  Okay. Banner invited her up the mountain again, and she went and—Go ahead, torture yourself!—this time she let him hold her—"May I hold you?" Jesus!—and they did the Deed of Darkness and she's still up there, rutting around like a sow.

  No. Thank God. She knew her parents were coming today, she wanted to see them, to show them how far she'd come, she'd told him that. And Banner wouldn't dare keep her up there. He wasn't completely nuts, no matter whether he was still sticking things up his nose from time to time. He'd have to know people would be looking for her.

  So?

  So she went up there. Maybe he invited her, maybe he didn't, but she went up there. . . .

  Why would she go up there if he didn't invite her?

  There's too dam much pain in the world.

  Marcia. She went up there to plead Marcia's case, to get Marcia's job back for her.

  And?

  She had said what she had to say, and maybe Banner said yes, maybe no, but she started back and . . .

  What?

  Never got here.

  Why not?

  Because she couldn't.

  What does that mean?

  She just couldn't.

  T
hat's bullshit. That . . .

  Oh my God!

  Preston switched off the light, walked to the window, opened it, climbed out and began to run.

  The sound floated over the still night air, clarion clear. If a security guard had been patrolling in one of the electric golf carts, he couldn't have missed it. But perhaps he would have fled, convinced he was fantasizing or being tantalized by the spirit of some long-dead child.

  The voice was high and soft, not wistful or unhappy but placid as a little lake in a forest glen. But a lake without life, as if killed by acid rain.

  The sound chilled Preston, made the hair rise on his arms and the back of his neck.

  "The itsy-bitsy spider Went up the waterspout. Along came the rain, And washed the spider out. Along came the sun,

  And dried up all the rain, And the itsy-bitsy spider Went up the spout again. ''

  He came over the sand rise, the erosion bulwark at the farthest point of their walks, and stood looking down at their hiding place.

  She had dug a pocket in the sand and lay in it, staring up at the moon, with the fingertips of one hand climbing her other forearm in time with the song.

  ". . . the itsy-bitsy spider Went up the spout again.”

  She stopped. Without moving, without seeming to see him, she said, '*Hello, Scott. I've been hoping you'd come."

  He skidded down the face of the bulwark and sat beside her. He took one of her hands and held it. It felt as if all the muscles had been removed. Like holding a lamb chop.

  "Are you okay?"

  “The itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout. ..."

  “Priscilla?"

  “Did you know you can't kill yourself by eating sand? You get full too fast.''

  Very slowly, he lay her hand across her stomach and lifted her shoulders and drew her into his lap, so her head rested against one of his thighs. He stroked her hair. It was as gritty as if she had been boiled in a wave and slammed against the ocean floor. He saw in the moonlight that her bottom lip was split and puffy, and there was a bruise on one of her cheeks.

  "Can you tell me?" he said.

  “Is that Eloise?" she asked, pointing at the sky.

  It took nearly four hours for him to learn what had happened. The moon was down, and her constellation, Eloise, hung directly overhead.

  Weeping seemed to pull a plug that allowed her to cleanse herself. She had been singing, and tracing the outlines of Eloise, and telling him that sand bugs tickled when they crawled over you—for she had lain buried in the sand, with only her face exposed, for all of today's daylight hours—when suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, tears had erupted and her throat had caught and she had begun to sob in the spastic, strangulating way of a chastised child, clutching one of his arms so tightly that after a while her fingers cramped and he had to help her pull them off, one by one.

  After that, she was quite coherent.

  Preston's deduction had been on the money: She had decided to go up to Xanadu to demand—to plead, to beg—that Banner reinstate Marcia and Dan. She had been convinced that Banner had nothing to do with their dismissal. No one who had been through drug addiction, no one who had felt the frailty of the human spirit, who had known the loneliness of the black hole, could fault another for seeking love and accepting it gratefully—from whomever, wherever, however.

  The decision must have been made by a board of detached, self-righteous racists.

  When she arrived. Banner was there, but not there— drifty and dreamy one minute, edgy and twitchy the next.

  He was delighted to see her, had fixed on her as a gift from God, some sort of manna sent down to liberate him from whatever demon had gripped him.

  He asked if he could hold her.

  She said no, she had come to talk about Marcia.

  He didn't know what she was talking about, didn't know who Marcia was. That made her feel better, confirmed her assumption of his innocence. All she had to do was explain the injustice to him, and he would correct it.

  He offered her a drink.

  She said what did he think she was, suicidal?

  Nonalcoholic, he said. For God's sake. What did she think he was, crazy?

  She said she didn't come up here to socialize.

  He said was having a glass of grape juice socializing?

  All right, she said, and he gave her what he called no-kick champagne.

  But as soon as she took a sip she knew he had lied to her because you can't disguise the warmth it makes going down. There might have been more than alcohol in it, too, because as much as she felt angry at him, as much as she wanted to throw the glass at him and walk out, those feelings seemed to be separated from her, like someone else's, and deep down inside her she didn't care. About anything.

  That was the last thing she remembered until the next morning, this morning, when she woke up on a couch in the living room. Her first thought was relief at discovering that she was dressed exactly as she had been, but when she moved she realized something was wrong, not just the cuts and bruises, but her clothes didn't feel right. It was the way her sweater bound the sleeves of her blouse.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know how when you put a sweater on over a shirt, you always have to shake down the shirt sleeves and straighten them out because the wool grabs the other material?"

  Don't ask this question. Don't do this. He couldn't not. "So you think he—"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Doesn't matter!"

  "I thought about it all day, in the sand. It doesn't matter, because they already raped away my soul."

  "Who did?"

  "Everybody."

  She had heard the TV coming from the library. She went in, and there was Banner, watching cartoons in his undershorts and drinking orange juice with probably something in it because it had a pale, watery look to it.

  He didn't answer her when she asked him what had happened, just kept watching the Road Runner escape from Wile E. Coyote. He didn't even look at her when she said she was going to report him, just said in a voice that made her think for some reason of an iguana, "Who to?"

  She hadn't had time to think, she said, but she was going to tell somebody, maybe the police, because he was a hypocrite and a liar and a bunch of other words that came to her at the time. Even then he wouldn't look at her, and she got so angry she wanted to pick up a fire poker and smash him with it, but at last he turned that big mane of silver hair and sneered at her and said, "Go ahead."

  They won't believe you, he said, because you're just a junkie who couldn't take it anymore and went over the hill and got yourself some shit and then fell down a couple times.

  They'll believe me, he said, because I'm—and he winked at her as he said it—a saint.

  Then he turned back to watch Road Runner.

  XVI

  She wouldn't let Preston take her to the hospital, wouldn't agree to see the doctor, refused even to have a talk with Nurse Bridget.

  “It's okay, Scott," she kept saying in rejection of the several options Preston advanced for vengeance. “It's okay."

  As if the weeping had purged her not only of pain but of rage.

  As if this were the fate she somehow deserved.

  The only thing she wanted was an apple. She was hungry.

  What, Preston wanted to know, what was she going to tell Larkin?

  “Nothing."

  “Then I will. And if he won't do anything, I'll—"

  ''You will not!” she snapped at him. '"My life is my business."

  "But you can't just—"

  "It's okay," she said, and she smiled and squeezed his hand and started back to the clinic. The rims of the hills to the east were in faint relief against the gradually lightening sky. "Really. It is.”

  Preston lay down for an hour, hoping to sleep, but his brain played and replayed fantasy scenes of horror at the mountaintop Xanadu. When Kimberly was young, he had had nightmares about her being abducted or murdered or beaten by nannies, and he ha
d pacified himself in the restless dawn by imagining the ghastly retribution he would wreak. Now he conjured a vision of Stone Banner, skinned alive and hanging from a chandelier by his balls.

  He found himself trembling with fury, so he got up and took a shower. He was the first one in the dining hall.

  Larkin must have intercepted Priscilla on her way to breakfast, and whatever she told him must have satisfied him—Preston assumed that Larkin was so grateful to see her alive, in one piece and not intending to file charges, that he would have accepted a story of her being shanghaied by gypsies—because he went through the cafeteria line right behind her and carried on an animated conversation with the shrink. Frost, while he filled his tray with granola, yogurt and fruit juice.

  Preston had saved a place for Priscilla at his table, but she passed behind him and went to a table in the comer, and ate alone.

  All day he kept tabs on her—waiting for her after group, barging into line beside her at lunch, cornering her before the afternoon lecture—asking her if she was all right, urging her please to see someone, hoping to spark anger or outrage, waiting for the moment when she would take him aside and say she had called the police or that her parents were contacting the board of directors or at least that the redoubtable Preble, Plunkett and Twyne were on the case.

  But it was always the same: a blank little smile, a touch on the arm and ''It's okay, Scott."

  Marcia had accused him of victimizing Priscilla, and here she was—victimized? Forget “victimized." Lobotomized!—by The Banner Clinic's own holy eponym.

  It was okay, was it?

  For her, maybe. Not for him.

  They say living well is the best revenge? Fuck that. Revenge is the best revenge.

  What kind of revenge?

  Nuclear.

  Terminal.

  Dream on.

  He couldn't work it out alone.

  He had hoped to have the meeting at night, during free time, when it might appear to be nothing more sinister than a bull session, but tonight they were scheduled to board a bus for their first off-grounds, civilian A.A. meeting, in the basement of the Methodist church in town.