Cold moon over Babylon

by Michael McDowell

  “Nina,” Belinda cried, “with the smell of chicken blocking every one of my five senses, I don’t know how I’m gone manage it, but I am gone leave this kitchen for five minutes, to say ‘hi' to Mr. Red, and then I’m coming right back in here, and demand a piece of white meat off you.”

  “It’s got your name on it, Belinda.”

  Belinda knocked softly at James Redfield’s door, the same knock with which her father was familiar, and he called her inside.

  She stuck her head into the room: “I am not here, Mr. Red, and you didn’t see me!”

  “Belinda,” he said: “I do see you though.” He was already pulling himself up in the bed, preparing for her company.

  “No, you don’t,” she cried: “I got to go back in and sit with Nina for twenty minutes, and I want you to shoot me through the head if I’m fifteen seconds longer. She set me aside a breast of chicken, and I am just desperate to stick it between my teeth.”

  “Who’s out there?” James Redfield demanded.

  “I didn’t see anybody but Nina. And you didn’t see me!” she whispered, and pulled the door shut.

  She wandered slowly back to the kitchen, and sat at the place Nina had set for her. “You already eaten?” she asked,

  “ ’Fore you got here, Belinda.”

  “Then why don't you go on home? I'm gone be here the whole afternoon, not doing a thing but sitting and talking to Mr. Red, and trying to get some sun on this pale white body of mine that’s going to flesh and fat.”

  “You not fat, Belinda, and you about as pale as I am, But you just let me wash, these dishes up, and I’ll go on,” said Nina. “I predate it, Belinda, and you tell Mr. Red I’ve gone home, and I’ll see him in the morning.”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” cried Belinda. “You :fixed me this chicken that’s fit to be served at the Married Feet of Canaan, and you think I’m not going to wash half a sink of dishes in return, why then you are crazy-out-of-your-mind-fit-to-be-sent-to-the-state-asylum-at-Winter-Haven!”

  Nina clapped her pudgy hands together: “Belinda, I have never, I have never left a house where there was dirty dishes in the sink.” She turned on the hot water;

  Belinda sat at the table with her breast of chicken, her green salad, and her glass of iced tea, staring at Nina’s back. Before Nina was finished, Ben came in from the pool, dripping water over the tiles. He threw himself into the chair next to Belinda’s, and drummed his heels on the floor.

  “You are splashing me, Ben,” she said irritably: “You are getting my crust soggy.”

  “That’s supposed to be my chicken,” said Ben. “Nina said she was saving the breast for you, and she wasn’t even sure you were coming! I had to make do with three drumsticks, but three drumsticks aren’t worth one good breast...”

  Belinda pulled at the gold chain around her neck, and made no reply.

  Nina finished up, gathered her things quickly, and left the house, by the back door. She said goodbye to Belinda but not to Ben.

  “Well,” said Ben, “I think that Nina would like to dip me in batter and stick me in a four hundred and fifty degree oven.”

  “I wish she would,” cried Belinda vehemently. “You might be doing somebody some good then. It is something, I tell you, something for me to come over here in the middle of the day, about to start my nursing duties and I find you, a grown man with two shoulders and a head sticking on between ’em, in a chlorined swimming pool in a private backyard. It’s amazing to me that you don’t do something with yourself, Ben. I am liable to go in there this afternoon and tell Mr. Red to send you to El Paso, Texas, where they can stick you in a little concrete house on the Rio Grande River with a rifle, so that you can watch for Mexican families swimming over to the United States side. Then maybe you would be doing somebody some good. What good are you doing in the swimming pool?” Ben waited patiently for the end of this tirade, then he said: “Hey, Belinda, why don’t you go with me down to Cantonment this afternoon? We could have a real good time.”

  “Ben,” cried Belinda, “I can’t do that. I just sent Nina home, and I’m not gone leave Mr. Red all by himself,” “Well, wait’ll Nathan gets back. Nathan can stay here with Daddy. Nathan usually gets home about now.”

  “Your daddy would have a apoplectic stroke if he thought he was here all by himself with Nathan.”

  “He’s alone here with me and Nathan every night, and don’t have a apoplectic stroke every night.”

  “That’s night,” argued Belinda, “this is the daytime.” “I don’t see much difference,” protested Ben sullenly. “I’m not gone argue with you, Ben, I am gone go in there and sit with Mr. Red, and talk to him, ’cause he don’t talk back to me the way you do. You wait for Nathan and go to the track with him like usual.”

  “You just don’t want to go with me, that’s all.”

  “You are right, I certainly do not.”

  Belinda had washed and put away her plate, cutlery, and glass. Without another word to Ben, she left the kitchen and returned to James Redfield’s room.

  A little later, she saw Nathan drive up to the house. In a while, he drove off again, with Ben.

  “Mr. Red,” she then said sweetly, “that was Ben and Nathan going off somewhere, and I don’t know where they’re going to, but I don’t think they're gone be back ’fore suppertime.. Would you mind if I took you around to the pool, so that I could get some diving practice in? I always carry a spare bathing suit in my glove compartment, you know, for emergencies.”

  Mr. Red agreed without hesitation. Belinda guided the wheelchair through the house, and pushed it out onto the flagstone-paved poolside. She arranged the old man fussily in the blue shade of a large ornamental pine.

  During the remaining hours of the afternoon James Redfield watched the young girl dive over and again from the supple board into the pool. Every fifteen minutes, Belinda, with red eyes and puckered skin, squatted at his side, wanting to know if she had improved with the last set of dives, and demanding whether, in truth, she were getting too broad in the behind.

  Chapter 12

  Warren Perry, of small stature and swarthy complexion, was only a few years older than the teenagers that he taught. He had grown up in Atmore, Alabama, only fifteen miles north of Babylon. In his senior year of high school he had been admitted to Vanderbilt University, but because of his father’s bankruptcy that spring, he could not afford to attend. Even at the much less expensive and prestigious college at Troy, his funds were so curtailed that he worked to finish as quickly as he could, in just under three years. Directly after graduation, he had searched for a job as close to his mother as possible, and that position was in Babylon.

  As much as was consistent with filial respect, Warren Perry disliked his mother. Mrs. Perry had affected emotional debility after her husband committed suicide in Warren’s freshman year at Troy. She miserably and frequently declared to her son, over the telephone and on postal cards, that nothing but his constant attention could keep her out of the grave. Warren passed every weekend with his mother, and most of that time was unhappily consumed in resisting her woeful urgings for him to return permanently to Atmore. As it was, Babylon was a too-easy commute along the road that ran past the Larkin blueberry farm.

  Because he spent a substantial portion of the week at his mother’s house, Warren felt he did not need much of a place in Babylon. He was also obsessed with saving money, in order to stave off the bankruptcy that had driven his father to suicide. Warren didn’t know that his father had lost all his money at the dog track in Cantonment. The widow had always represented the bankruptcy as a bolt from God, arbitrary, inexorable, fatal, and likely to recur in the next generation.

  Above his garage, Ted Hale had a small apartment: living room, bedroom, kitchen, and bath. It had been set up for his mother-in-law the year before his wife ran away with the FBI agent. After her daughter bolted, the old woman had still wanted to move in, but Hale wouldn’t allow her to do so. Since then the sheriff had rented it ou
t for two- and three-year stretches to unmarried schoolteachers. Before Warren, this apartment had been taken by the female algebra teacher, who had moved to St. Petersburg with her sister—who the sheriff suspected was not related to her at all.

  When Hale returned home shortly before noon on Friday, he found Warren backing out of the driveway in his beat-up green Rambler. Hale blocked his path with the cruiser.

  “You in a hurry?” the sheriff called out.

  “I got to be at the school at one,” said Warren, surprised by the sheriff’s guarded voice. “State Board is coming by, and Ginny asked me to help her cut. D'you find Margaret yet?” he asked with averted eyes.

  Without answering, Hale motioned for Warren to follow him into the house. They entered the kitchen through the back door, and while Warren stood impatiently by, the sheriff tried to interpret Belinda’s lengthy but noncommittal message.

  “No,” said Hale at last, giving up on the note, “I haven’t found her. I wanted to speak to you.”

  The schoolteacher looked away nervously. “I cain’t imagine what happened to Margaret. She was helping me over at the school yesterday, and she left about five. It looked like rain, and I said I’d drive her back out to her place, we could put her bicycle in the back, but she said she had time to make it. It beats the life out of me what could have happened to her between the school and the farm out there...”

  Hale looked closely at his lodger. Warren had never spoken so volubly nor so quickly. “And you didn’t hear from her after that, you’re sure?” said the sheriff at last.

  Perry shook his head quickly. “No, no, and Miz Larkin sure must be worried. I know I'm worried. I cain’t imagine what happened to her.”

  “What was she doing helping you, Warren?”

  “She was helping me check in textbooks, you know, seeing how many had been marked up and so forth—”

  “No,” said Hale, “I mean why was she helping you?”

  Warren shrugged easily. “ ’Cause she liked to help, I suppose. Margaret’s a good girl, she—”

  “She help the other teachers? She get paid for helping?”

  “No,” said Warren. “She just helped me, I guess. I’m real fond of Margaret. I sure do wish you’d find her, ’cause—” He glanced at his watch. “I got to get over to the school. Can you let me out?”

  Hale nodded, and the two men left the kitchen. Slowly the sheriff pulled out of the drive, and the green Rambler scooted away.

  Hale parked the cruiser beneath the water oaks in front of his house, and again examined the note his daughter had left him.

  At one o’clock exactly, Hale crumpled the note in exasperation and got out of the car. He went cautiously around the side of his house to the garage in back. At the foot of the steps that led up to Warren’s apartment, he sifted through his keys, and then walked slowly up. At the top, he hesitated with the key, but at last thrust it into the lock —and found that the door was unsecured. Hale stepped inside, and went hesitantly from room to room, not touching the furniture, opening the closet doors with his handkerchief.

  He was relieved to find no evidence that Warren Perry had spent the night with a fourteen-year-old girl. In the drainboard of the sink was a single plate, and cutlery for one. Two old Playboys and the most recent Penthouse lay open on the rumpled bed.

  But Hale was still at a loss to account for the schoolteacher’s nervousness. He wished now that he had asked Perry exactly what his relationship to Margaret was. But it occurred to him also that this was a point which might be better cleared up by Ginny Darrish or Annie-Leigh Hooker, who would have no reason to lie about it— when Warren might.

  Chapter 13

  After the two tiresome representatives of the State Board of Education had left the high school, Ginny Darrish and Warren Perry climbed into Ginny’s aquamarine Vega and drove out across the Styx to the Larkin farm, Warren knew the Larkins only slightly, but Ginny had insisted that he accompany her. It would doubtless reassure Evelyn to hear Warren say that Margaret had left the school safely the previous afternoon,

  Jerry, sitting morose and unoccupied on the front porch, told them that his grandmother was in bed upstairs. He begged, however, that Ginny would go up and keep her company. “I’d stay with her every minute of the day,” he said, “but sometimes she gets on my nerves. Sometimes I get short with her, when I don’t mean to.”

  Ginny smiled sweetly at Jerry, and put by his offer to go with her into the house.

  Fearful that their voices might carry from the porch to Evelyn’s bedroom above, Jerry suggested that Warren walk with him through the blueberry patch. For the next half hour the two young men lost themselves among the enormous plants. As he walked, Warren gazed up at the sky, for the crowding luxuriant shrubs made him uneasy. From the midst of the patch where not even the farmhouse was visible, it seemed that all the earth was covered over in blueberries.

  Jerry in contrast stared all the while at die ground. Frequently he would stop and miserably lift out of the mud the smashed lower branches. While he crushed the worthless berries in the palms of his hands, Jerry talked of his sister's unaccountable disappearance. He spoke haltingly and seemed near to tears, but Warren Perry was at a loss to determine whether Jerry was disturbed more by Margaret’s failure to return or by the damage done to the crop by the previous night’s storm.

  Only for a few minutes each late afternoon did the declining sun shine directly on the Larkin farmhouse. Even at that, it illuminated no more than a portion of the papered wall opposite Evelyn Larkin’s bed. All other times, in all other rooms, the surrounding pines deflected and broke apart the light,

  Ginny Darrish wanted to close the curtains against the glaring hot light, but Evelyn Larkin wouldn’t allow her. Confined to her bed by Dr. Everage, who had visited her at noon, Evelyn was irrationally convinced that Margaret was less likely to return if, from the Styx bridge, she saw her grandmother’s drapes closed against her.

  Evelyn lay on her side, facing away from the window. The sun, beating through the panes, was reflected off a glass-covered photograph of Margaret on the far wall, to shine golden but cold on the pillow behind Evelyn’s head. Ginny Darrish sat in a rocker, with her rose-tinted sunglasses left on against the brightness in the room.

  “Well,” said Ginny, “I don’t think you should worry, Evelyn, because Margaret has been up and down that highway, from here to Babylon and back, umpty-million times, and it doesn’t seem likely from my point of view that she lost her way.”

  “Oh, Ginny,” wailed Evelyn, her voice softened by tranquilizers, “that’s just it! Margaret didn’t get lost, she couldn’t get lost, that’s why something must have happened to her!”

  “Nothing happened, Evelyn. Margaret is a good girl, she didn’t run off with anybody.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Well,” replied Ginny, unperturbed: “When a girl doesn’t come home for supper, that’s what everybody’s bound to say in Babylon. I’ve been principal too long not to know what people say about girls and boys, and I've been there long enough to know they don’t deserve it.”

  “But what could be keeping her away, then?” demanded Evelyn.

  Ginny flipped her aquamarine purse idly in her aquamarine lap. “I don’t know, we’ll just have to ask her when she gets back.”

  Evelyn turned wearily onto her back, and closed her eyes against the sun, “I wish I could get out of this bed.”

  “Don’t you dare, Evelyn Larkin!”

  “I feel like I ought to be up and about looking for Margaret. You know, Ginny, I would be up, I’d be combing the streets, if it weren’t for Nathan Redfield...”

  “Nathan!” cried Ginny: “What’s Nathan got to do with this?”

  Ginny listened with pink, pursed lips while Evelyn Larkin told what had happened in the bank that morning. “What can I do, Ginny? I can’t think about Nathan Redfield and his old bank loan when Margaret is missing. Why does he keep on about this thing? We’re behind, I know that, but it�
��s the start of the season. The berries have always gotten us through, Nathan knows that, why doesn’t he leave us alone? He’s been pestering us till it seems like there’s no end to it. I should have told him about Margaret, then maybe he would have left us alone. I cain’t think about all this, you know how I am. Ginny, you couldn’t be thinking about some old bank loan if you had a little girl and she was missing—could you?”

  Ginny Darrish shook her silver head solemnly. “I could not, and that is a fact. It is a stinking shame what Nathan did to you this morning, even if he didn’t know about Margaret, and I have a good mind to go straight to James Redfield, and tell him what Nathan did!”

  “Oh!” cried Evelyn, “don’t do that! Please don’t do that! That might just get us in more trouble with Nathan. Nathan runs that bank now, his daddy doesn’t have a thing to do with it. We’re bad enough off, I don’t want us to get in more trouble with Nathan. So please just forget I told you,” pleaded Evelyn. “It's Jerry’s business to handle all that kind of thing now, Nathan knows that—I don’t know why he came up to me in the first place. But I don’t want Jerry to know I’ve been talking about it, so please just don’t say anything about it, promise me, will you, Ginny? I don’t know what Jerry would say to me if he found out I told you that!”

  “I promise,” said Ginny, and clasped Evelyn’s shaking hand tenderly in her own. “What's Margaret’s sign?” she said.

  “What do you mean?” said Evelyn: “What kind of sign?”

  “When was she born? I’m gone look up her horoscope.” “Margaret was born on the twelfth of October. You don’t think any horoscope is gone tell us where Margaret is, do you, Ginny? You cain’t really believe that?” Evelyn’s voice was guardedly hopeful.

  “I do believe it, I believe every word of it. Margaret’s a Libra just like my mama was. I know all about Libras.” Ginny pulled out of her purse a small much-worn paperback book and skimped expertly through it. “Where is Margaret's moon?” she demanded.