“As I was saying here the last time when we were rudely interrupted …”
That seemed to amuse her. Still, Geraldine made me turn the photograph of you, which was on the bureau, to face the wall. That girl was not without a certain sensitivity.
Since folly is, in fact, the subject of this little true confession, I would be lying, Ray, if I didn’t say to you that you were a damn fool to do what you did. That fact in no way mitigates my own folly or lessens my need for confession. But goddamn it, Ray, I have been terribly hurt by what you chose to do. Ever since. Did you stop to consider the probable effect on Geraldine and me? Or on other people? If you didn’t, you damn well should have. And if you did, then anything you may have hoped to achieve has been deeply undermined by the punitive and vindictive nature of your action.
I refuse to let guilt cripple me. Sure I have gone right ahead making a wake of mischief behind me, getting into trouble and out of it, goofing off and fouling up. Just like I did before then. And like I guess I am bound to keep on doing for as long as I live. For better or worse. I am the same person. But nothing has ever been quite the same since then.
It must have been around two in the morning when I woke up and wanted a smoke. Out of matches. Geraldine got up, slipped on a robe, and went into the kitchen to fix us something to drink. We looked everywhere for matches. No luck.
“Try the basement,” she said. “We used to keep some down there in case that damned old hot-water heater conked out.”
I tried the light, but the bulb was out. Stumbled down dark stairs and felt my way toward the hot-water heater. Stubbed my toes on something hard. Felt it in the dark. Felt and hefted it. And then the other one right beside it. Both of them heavy.
“Geraldine,” I called. “He left his suitcases in the basement.”
I groped in the dark, trying to find the heater and the matches.
“Jack?”
I looked back and saw her framed in the doorway, backlit by light from the hallway.
“Did you say he left his suitcases down there?”
“I believe so. Wait till I light a match.”
“I wonder why he did a thing like that?”
“Wait until I can see something …”
Ray, I already knew as clearly as if I had seen it in noon sunlight. But I was praying my mind’s eye had deceived me this time. I found the matches. They were damp. The first couple wouldn’t strike.
“I’ll go find a flashlight,” she said.
“Just a minute.”
The third match caught and flared. I held it up. There were the two suitcases all right. And there, too, over in the corner just before the match went out, there you were. Sprawled and lying in the corner like a broken doll.
“Is he still alive?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Go get that light and I’ll take a good look.”
While she hunted for the flashlight I came back up and swallowed the drink she had fixed. She gave the light to me and I was sent down again. Ray, you and I both have seen our share of blood and gore in the wars. So I wasn’t worried about having to look at a stiff. After a time you learn that the only blood and gore you are entitled to feel anything about is your own. I put the light right on you, Ray.
“He’s been dead quite a while,” I said.
You had done a job of it, taking half of your face and head. You had, evidently, sat down in a little deck chair, which lay nearby, taken that pistol of yours, and put it in your mouth. And then at some point, early or late, you pulled the trigger. Very brave, in a way. Because there is always the chance that you’ll live. I couldn’t do it that way, myself, Ray, not with a pistol. For fear I might flinch or twitch and botch it. I stood there looking at you, admiring your courage. On the floor, bloodstained (oh there was plenty of that), there was a framed portrait photograph of her. You must have been holding it in your free hand when you pulled the trigger.
“Is there a note? Do you see a note anywhere?”
Geraldine was right beside me, her face pale and drawn in hard, tight lines of shock. She looked old, Ray, hard and old. I could see what she was going to look like in twenty years. Or less.
“I don’t see anything. Maybe he left one some place else in the house.”
“Maybe …” Then she said, “I wonder if his life insurance has a suicide clause.”
She turned back to the stairs and started up slowly.
“That was the only good … the only really good picture I ever had taken in my whole life,” she said. “And he ruined it.”
“I doubt if he wanted to.”
“Want! Want!” She shouted at me. “He never knew what he wanted!”
By then she was sobbing and I was sick. Vomiting all over the basement. Puking my guts out. I couldn’t cry. But my stomach, the seat of truth, reacted for me. Not out of squeamishness and not even from shame. Not then, not yet. But from sorrow. And not just sorrow for you, but for the three of us. For all of us. For Annie and the children. For all the children you would never have. For scratchy towels and big soft fluffy ones. For television and stitchery …
I kept on vomiting until I had the dry heaves. Until there was nothing left to come up. Then I was over it. I went and sat in the kitchen and discussed calling the police. She wanted me to leave first, but I explained that within five minutes they would know I had been there anyway and then there would be some bad trouble.
“He’s been dead since sometime Saturday, Sunday at the latest,” I said. “That’s my guess. We can prove we were in Boston together, and it’s clearly a suicide. If we tell the truth, we’ll be all right.”
She didn’t like it, but she agreed. And so the cops came and went, and then the undertaker came and went. By which time it was already full daylight. She fixed breakfast. Oddly, we were both hungry.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “I’ll get the movers to come later and pack everything up.”
“What about the funeral?”
“I told the man I want him cremated.”
“I’ve got to finish out the rest of the semester.”
“I know,” she said. “It won’t look right if you don’t. I’ll be in touch as soon as I’m settled somewhere.”
I just nodded.
“You got a garden hose that will reach down there?”
She pointed to the front yard. I went outside, hooked two sections of hose together, screwed on the nozzle, and then brought it down into the basement. Then went back up and turned the water on. Then back down again.
That’s the last thing I ever did for you, Ray. Hose the remaining stains of you, and my vomit, too, off the wall and the floor and down the floor drain. It was clean and drying fast when I left.
There was no note. At least nobody ever found one.
That might have been better, after all. A crazy note. Or maybe a raging note. Or a self-pitying one. Even some heartbreaking and silly message. But you left it all to the imagination. You left each of us, separate and equal, to live with the blank cruelty of it always. Which may have been right and even just, but which was also unforgivable.
Well, I am ready to forgive you for that, Ray.
If St. Augustine is right (and it almost always turns out that he is), the dead have neither interest in nor concern for the living. The dead do not care anymore. Finally, they can be careless. Which means I don’t have to ask your forgiveness too.
But, alive, I am able to forgive you. Not out of my own guilt. If I were ever to entertain guilt seriously, I would join you among the indifferent dead. Not from any guilt, but because forgiveness is the one free act of human love that is still possible for me. Not that people can ever really completely forgive each other. But in the ritual of wishing to and trying to forgive one another, in ceasing to judge one another and leaving Judgment to its proper Author, then for a brief moment we can find and feel the secret energy of divinity in us.
Forgiveness is a simple and glorious act of human freedom. Suicide and lunacy are not. Sartre
and Camus were full of shit.
You think I’m too serious all of a sudden? Well, you’re right, old buddy. Right about that, anyway.
Thou shalt bring down the noise of strangers, as the heat in a dry place; even the heat with the shadow of a cloud; the branch of the terrible ones shall be brought low.
ISAIAH 25:5
NOISE OF STRANGERS
LARRY BERLIN is driving north on Route 27 when he spots the car. It is a new white Plymouth going too fast. No more than a dazed sudden smear of shine and chrome against the monotonous gray of the dawn. Any other time and he probably would let it go, let the car go by and on, to hell or safety for all he cares, rather than slowing down to stop and then turning around, which means having to doodlebug here with a ditch and dense pinewoods on both sides of the road and neither a trail nor a footpath to nose into.
It may be nothing more to him at this moment than a wince of surprise after long, slow, boring night hours, the surprise of now rounding a wide curve and coming almost face to face with a shimmering apparition of pure speed when he had every reason to look for only the yawn of the empty highway ahead of him. Or, maybe, it is something more. An abrupt, utterly thoughtless, visceral knowledge of danger. Danger and challenge. Whatever it is that warns and alerts him, he does not waste one second to make up his mind. He twists the wheel sharply to avoid the collision. He slows down and brakes. In two smooth motions, he doodlebugs his car, and now he is off in the other direction in pursuit, his foot jamming the gas pedal down to the floorboard. He can feel a slow easy grin begin to take command of his lips as he grips the steering wheel tight and leans forward. Like a jockey.
Whether he is now really gaining or it is only that the Plymouth has started to slow down after the first few tire-singing miles of the chase, he can’t be sure. The car ahead grows in size, looms in the clear space of his windshield, and he knows for sure he is going to overtake and pass it in just a minute or so. It is then that he remembers to turn on the pulsing red light and touch the switch on the panel that sets his siren howling.
After that, the other car slows down in a hurry and pulls over to the side of the road. He noses in close past it, cutting sharp across and braking hard in a screech and a shallow surf of dust on the shoulder. He climbs out and now the driver of the other car is out, too, a big man in a dark suit shouting something at him and clawing inside his coat below his left shoulder with a frantic hand. Larry Berlin already walking toward him sees the sudden glint of gunmetal and without breaking stride he draws his own pistol from his holster, points, and fires. By the time his finger squeezes off a second round, the big man has staggered blindly, pitched, and fallen headlong on the highway as if struck down, smashed in a broken whimpering heap by the huge indifferent fist of a giant. Larry Berlin takes a few more steps and stands over the loose-jointed, crumpled form. The man is dead. He stands there, breathing deep, profoundly astonished, looking past the shiny tips of his own boots at the thick smear of blood slowly spreading on the road. He does not recall even hearing the sound of his pistol firing, so pure was his concentration. But now he does hear something—a sigh, a rustle of clothing, or a sudden intake of breath in that breathless moment. He whirls back toward the car, bent, both hands holding his pistol
Sheriff Jack Riddle is jolted out of sleep by the jangling of the phone. He knows, wide awake but with his eyes tight closed from the first ring, that it is not the alarm clock or the doorbell or any other of the irrelevant buzzings and ringings that mark and measure a man’s time. Even so, he lets it ring and ring. In the hazy false dawn between sleeping and waking, he allows himself the immense luxury of simply ignoring it a little while, then speculating on what or who in the hell it might be at this hour before, exasperated, he finally rolls over heavy with a kind of a twitch and a flop like a catfish in the bottom of a rowboat. Grabs blind for the phone. Misses! It falls with a dull clatter. He wonders if he has broken it, but it rings again. Eyes still shut tight, he starts feeling for it, his right hand moving tip-fingered across a rough piece of rug and then on the slick floor until at last he blunders against the cold insistent shape.
He groans a little and lifts the receiver to his ear.
“Yeah?”
“Hello, Jack, this is Larry.”
“Okay.”
“I just had some trouble out on 27. I’m bringing in a prisoner. I think maybe you better be there.”
“That’s what you think, huh?” he says irritably. “Meet me at the office.”
He leans far over the edge of the bed to hang up the phone. He leaves it on the floor. Then he lies back on his pillow, slowly and gently as if his head were fragile as a bird’s egg, opens his eyes and looks with wonder and interest at the familiar spots and cracks in the ceiling.
His wife, Betty, has not stirred. She is sound asleep, her back turned to him, hugging her pillow like a teddy bear. He smiles. Then he eases out of bed, quiet and careful so as not to wake her, gropes on the bedside table where the phone had been, finds and lights a cigarette. He stumbles barefoot, stiff, huge and awkward as a bear, to the bathroom. Splashes cold water on his face and, dripping, takes a skeptical look at himself in the mirror.
He is a big man, big-boned and heavy, with a large, round, close-cropped head, cut so close to the scalp that the patches of gray are like a light stain. He likes it cut that way. Keeps him from having to think about it. When he was a boy, he was called Cannonball because of that head. His eyes are greenish in the light like a cat’s and fringed with pale, sparse lashes. His nose is broad and flat and broken. He has a hard, sunburned face, cut with the fine deep lines of wind and open weather. But for all the intrinsic sculptured strength and brutality, it is a warm face. He is quick to smile and at ease with his power. He runs his fingers across his bristly cheek. He won’t take the time to shave now. He will probably be back in plenty of time to shave and have breakfast with Betty.
Yesterday’s khaki uniform is in a rumpled pile on a chair. He might as well wait until later to change his clothes too. He slips into the khakis, kneels to lace and tie his high-top shoes, and leaves the bedroom and the small frame house, pausing at the door to pick up his gray, battered, broad-brimmed hat. Pulls the front door to softly behind him. Squares his hat, hikes his britches, and steps over the rolled-up morning paper on the stoop, figuring he can save that for later too. Climbs in his car, easing his bulk behind the wheel, allows himself a long sigh, then starts the engine and backs out of the driveway.
The town of Fairview is small and old. It is the county seat. It offers for casual inspection a wide main street flanked by low brick buildings and running into and then out of a shady green park where the county courthouse stands and behind that, hidden from view, the squat two-storied shape of the county jail. The highway races headlong into Fairview from pinewoods and miles of bright, bare, flat fields, then snarls up and passes slowly for a few minutes through the dense, pleasant shade of the town, passes by the brick buildings, the brief glitter of storefronts and sidewalk, ducks under more shade trees, going by wide lawns now and white frame houses set back at a comfortable, old-fashioned distance from the street, houses grotesquely lively with the jigsawed scrolls and curlicues and latticework and the stained glass a generation of grandparents loved. Wide, airy front porches with railings and swings and potted plants. In the yards azalea, oleander, live oak, and the inevitable rich magnolia. And then the road is long gone again sprinting off breathless into the shadeless glare that leaps toward a vague horizon.
A traveler or tourist will remember Fairview, if at all, for its brief and unexpected blessing of shade and its couple of lazy traffic lights designed evidently to arrest the enormous and irresistible lunge of his progress elsewhere. He will recall it as a quiet place, a museum piece from the past, where he was forced to sit with foot-tapping impatience waiting for a light to turn from red to green.
Fairview is anachronistic, dying, but endures still as the center and hub of a sprawling, lightly populated county given
over to small farming, ranching, and a few logging and turpentine camps. Before the turn of the century there was a short, deceptive period of prosperity, a fatness from the profits of naval stores. Most of the brick buildings and most of the big, fine houses were built on those profits. And, again, just before the Depression gripped this amazed nation in an iron fist, there was a time for a fantastic, gaudy daydream based upon a wildly inflated notion of the value of the raw land of the peninsula of Florida. But Fairview, inland, lacking everything to please the tourist except a mild climate, failed early in the Boom. Since then, there has been small reason for Fairview’s existence, except as a place for people already there to age and die in, except as the legal and material heart of a poor rural county. Except as a place with a few commonplace memories and the dusty official archives. The town endures now without thriving and without really changing much, a preserved relic, it seems, of what at least from this anxious point in human history was an easier, gentler, more relaxed time to be alive. The only recent additions to the face of the town are the Bide-a-Wee Motel on the north edge, the Winn-Dixie Supermarket, and the glass and concrete of the hospital and medical center.
“At least we can die in a new building,” the natives say.
The county jail was built well before the First World War. It is brick, too (there was a mayor in the brick business), and as solid as a fort or a blockhouse. It seems to have sagged at joint and sinew with age, to have hunched down on arthritic hams and settled into the earth. Or, perhaps, simply to have grown out of the earth like some monstrous plant. The long shadow of the stern, cupolaed courthouse falls across the lawn and reaches the front steps of the jail behind it. The upper story of the jail is for confinement, a row of small barred windows running completely around the building. Pass close by at certain times, like twilight, and you are likely to see fists on some of those bars, a tic-tac-toe of black and white hands against a graph of cold steel. And sometimes a lax palm waving or imploring. And sometimes music, whistling, a snatch of a song, a harmonica. And always some rude laughter escapes.
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