“Touching.”
“I need to get to my apartment.”
“And after that?”
I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. My life hinged on the contents of a bureau drawer. It was too absurd to dwell on.
We looked at each other in silence, and then after that I got up from the chair. It was a struggle. She just stood there in the doorway with her arms folded and watched.
Gale said in a flat voice, “What is it exactly you’re looking for?”
“I keep my knife in the top drawer of a bureau in my living room. If it’s still there, I know the Chief is bluffing.”
“Do you really think the Chief bluffs?”
“If he isn’t, then all hell’s going to break loose.” I suddenly became very tired. I let out a short breath and said, “I should get some rest, Gale.”
At first she didn’t make a move. Then she nodded and said, “I’ll help you upstairs.”
She eased me down on the bed in that sparse, dim room. The two windows on either side of the bed were half open. A breeze lifted the curtains. Gale went to close them.
“Please don’t,” I said.
She looked at me. “It’s cold.”
“Cold feels good right now.”
She looked away from me, toward an empty corner of the room. She thought about something for what seemed a long time. I waited. Finally she looked toward the open bedroom door and went to it. She closed it, turned the lock, and paused with her hand on the knob. After a minute she let go of it and turned and faced me.
She was near the foot of the bed, her back against the door, her hands behind her. I didn’t know what was going on. She looked both puzzled and relieved all at once, like someone who suddenly accepts a dark fact of their life and is to their surprise made free by it. She stayed there for a while, looking at me, and then all at once, decisively but without urgency, moved away from the door and approached the other side of the bed. There she removed one shoe, then the other, but left her white socks on. Then she unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down her hips and stepped out of them. I looked at her bare legs. Then she removed the flannel shirt and did that trick women do and removed her bra without removing her shirt. All that remained was her black turtle neck that stopped just below her navel and lavender panties with a white flower trim.
Her long legs were smooth and still tanned, tight from her tennis playing. She pulled open the covers of her half of the bed and climbed in under them. She lay on her side. Then she draped her left arm and leg over me. Her left hand lay flat on my chest.
Her face was inches from mine but I didn’t dare make a move. We looked at each other for a while, and then she lowered her head and rested it on my chest, settling into me.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “If I’m not here when you wake, I’ll be downstairs. But I won’t leave, okay? I won’t leave. So go ahead and get some sleep.”
But I didn’t sleep, not for a while anyway, and neither did she. We did a good job of not lying still, but there was no fooling each other; our breathing gave us away. Still, we just laid there together, unable for a dozen reasons not to act. I ran through them all in my head, but she was still there, beside me and awake, when I was done. Then my physical state got the better of me and I started to drift off. The last thing I knew was her breathing, which still held the element of consciousness to it.
He lies propped up on pillows in tan chinos and a white T-shirt, the perfect middleweight, on his back, smoking. He is a young man with sleepy eyes and a sharp jaw, and I am a boy of seven, motherless in a world bigger than I can comprehend. He is smoking on a bare mattress by an open window in a room of a hotel that has never had a heyday. I remember the crack lines in the plaster walls and the smell of overcooked grease coming up through the floors. It is his day off and I watch him smoke, all day, watch the curls of dirty white that look somehow almost liquid rise to the yellow-stained ceiling. It disappears and I wonder where it goes but never ask. His eyes squint as the smoke rises past them, drifting lazily from his nose and mouth in puffs, like smoke signals. I think that maybe they mean something but cannot figure out what. I sit on my cot and watch him for hours as he smokes and looks out that window at whatever comes and goes on the main street of Riverhead. After a while he naps for a bit, and so do I. When he awakens, I wake. I feel safe and entertained and contented. He shrinks the world down to this single room and makes clouds with his mouth. Even then I take the silence between us as a good thing.
Now we are in a dark room, maybe a bar. He approaches me from the other end of the room as if he has come back for me. He walks on the balls of his feet. I can barely see him in the dark. Now he says something I cannot hear. His hard, bony face hangs long. I wonder if this is concern. I do not know him well enough to tell. It hits me now that I am not a child but an adult. I see that he has aged, that there are lines in his face that remind me of the cracked plaster. His eyes are focused over my head and behind me. I turn but see nothing.
I hear sounds, the rush of someone coming up to me quickly. Before I can look to see who it is, I hear a long forgotten voice whisper in my ear. It is my father’s voice, urgent but assured.
“Wake up, son,” he says. “Wake up.” I feel his breath in my ear, I feel its warmth spiral into me. “Wake up son, we’re in trouble.”
I awoke to the weak blueness of twilight. I had lifted my head off the pillow before I was even completely conscious, and I knew at once that was a mistake. For a moment I couldn’t breath. I lay my head back down and stared at the flawless ceiling above. I felt for a while like I had a foot in two different worlds. I wasn’t sure which one I wanted. When my mind cleared I thought of how I could not remember the last time I had dreamed of my father and the hotel room we had called home after my mother died. It didn’t dawn on me till just now that it was then that my father became so silent. Of course I see now how lonely he must have been.
There was a rim of unpolished metal along the horizon, and above that, like strata, were differing shades of night. Gale was not in bed with me, so when I could I got up and put on my sneakers and made my way assisted only by the railing down the stairs. There were few lights on in the house, and I went from room to room till I found her on the glassed-in porch, in her rocker, under an afghan. Her feet were on the seat of the rocker, her knees to her chest. She hugged them.
She didn’t look at me when I entered, just kept her eyes ahead and looked through the windows at the dark shape of an oak tree in her front yard. It looked like a hand with countless narrowing fingers.
She knew I was there, I knew that, but I waited a while, and when she didn’t speak or show any signs of speaking, I said, “What’s up?”
“Eddie called a few minutes ago,” she said. Her voice was monotone. She continued to look straight ahead. “He’s on his way to pick you up and take you out of town. Or so he thinks, anyway.”
I nodded. “I’m doing what I have to do, Gale.”
She said nothing to that.
A pair of headlights swung into her driveway, long beams scanning her lawn. I knew they belonged to Eddie. I looked and saw his cab move slowly down the driveway. I could hear leaves crumbling under the tires.
Gale stood, wearing the afghan like an embrace, and faced me. Again, she said nothing. Then she turned away from me and went into her house.
I stood there on her dark porch for a minute, dazed, then joined Eddie in his warm cab. Together we rode in silence toward violence.
***
“You sure you want to do this?” Eddie said.
We were parked across the street from the Hansom House. There wasn’t a cop in sight. I looked at Eddie’s tired eyes framed in the long rectangle of the rear view mirror. I wondered when was the last time he had slept.
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
“I’m giving you five minutes, then I coming in to get you, okay?”
I reached for the door handle. “Okay,” I said. I looked up and down Elm Street but saw nothing o
ut of the ordinary. Train station and Mexican restaurant on one end, a long row of middle-class houses on the other. I walked up the path and through the front door. I looked down the entrance hallway and saw George behind the bar. I saw the backs of a handful of regulars. To left of the hallway was the stairs.
I started up, slowly. It was difficult to walk lightly. I made it to the first landing and started up the second flight. At the top of the stairs I stopped and listened before turning the corner. I heard nothing. I started down the dim hallway to my door. From what I could tell I was alone on the third floor.
I paused at my door to listen again, then opened it and stepped inside. Nothing seemed out of place. I left the lights off and made my way across my living room by the light from the street lamps outside my front windows. The floorboards squeaked twice under my feet. I went to the bureau and pulled open the top door. There were just a few things in there, bits of mail and a photograph of Catherine and newspaper clippings, but no knife.
I stood there in the half dark and wondered just how long the Chief had been in my apartment the other night before I woke up. Long enough, it seemed. I picked up the photograph of Catherine and looked at it, then put it back and closed the drawer fast and ran into my kitchen.
I grabbed a paper napkin off my eating table and a pen from the countertop and wrote “Sorry, Eddie” in big letters. I searched through a kitchen drawer and found a thumb tack, then grabbed a fork from the dish drainer and my roll of silver duck tape and went out into the hallway. I tacked the napkin to the door, then went down one flight of stairs to the second floor.
George’s door was locked, but I could tell by the way it gave when I leaned against it that he hadn’t thrown the dead bolt. I slid the fork between the door and the jamb and pried back the smaller bolt at the knob. It took about a minute for me to catch it just right and pull it back enough for the door to swing open. Once inside I grabbed the keys to his Bug from a dish on a table by the door. I left four hundred dollars of Jim Curry’s money where the keys had been. I put the fork into my back pocket and moved through his living room to his bedroom. His bedroom window, like mine, looked out over the yard behind the Hansom House. It was for me the only way out.
I opened the window, tossed out my roll of tape, then made my way out onto the sill. I sat on its edge and brought my knees to my chest and swung my legs out. I could feel my ribs giving too easily, as if they were about to fold. I ducked and leaned forward so my head was outside the window and I was sitting on the sill with my legs dangling. I reached behind me and grabbed the sill with both hands. I took a breath, closed my eyes for a moment, and then slid off the sill and let my body fall.
I snapped to a stop like a man dropped from the gallows. I felt tearing in my stitches. I gasped at the pain in my ribs. I almost laughed in disbelief. It took all I had to hang on. I stayed there till I could breathe again, then looked down. The ground really wasn’t all that far away, but in my condition it may as well have been four stories instead of one.
I looked up at my hands. My knuckles were white. The sill was digging into my palms. With my arms up like they were my rib cage expanded against the tape Gale had wound around them to keep them from moving. I felt like I was being crucified, suffocating under my own weight. I closed my eyes and took a few breaths. I had no choice but to let go. I winced in anticipation and opened my hands. It took every bit of will I had.
I dropped fast and hit the ground within what seemed less than a second. I let my knees buckle to slow my fall. But it did little. When my body hit the ground it was as if I had set off dozens of tiny white-hot fires inside me.
I lay there on my side for a moment. The cold ground felt good on my face. For a sweet few minutes I didn’t know from anything. Then I thought of Gale, of her sleeping beside me, her body tangled with mine, and the feel of her face so near to mine. I knew then what I had to do. If I would kill a man just to survive, how much farther would I go to finally really live?
Just one man stood between me and Gale and the only life I have ever wanted. He left me no room to move, nowhere to go but through him. He had attacked me at Townsend’s cottage—after first sending me there. He had charged at me like the football player he’d said he had been in his youth. And I live in the shadows because of him.
There was no choice to make but the wrong one. Wrong was all there was now.
I grabbed the roll of tape and pulled myself up to my feet and lumbered around the side of the Hansom House to the front. I peeked around the corner. Eddie was still in his cab, waiting. Every once in a while he’d glance up at my windows. I looked for George’s Bug. It was parked at the end of Elm Street, outside the Mexican restaurant where I used to work, maybe four or five car lengths behind Eddie’s cab.
There was no route I could take to it that would hide me from Eddie. So I just stood up as straight as I could and started walking to it. I looked at Eddie as I went out of the corner of my eye. He was looking at the Hansom House, sometimes at the front entrance, others at my windows above. I kept my eye on him till my path turned and I could no longer look at him without turning my head. Then I just looked ahead and walked toward George’s Bug. When I reached it I opened the door and slipped in. I was looking forward then. I could see Eddie’s cab through the windshield. I could see him still waiting and looking.
I slid in the key and cranked the ignition. The motor was still as loud as a Harley. I flipped on the headlights, shifted into gear, then made a U-turn. I stopped at the end of Elm and looked into the rear view mirror. I saw Eddie climb out of his cab and pause, looking up at my windows. He leaned into his cab and killed the motor and the lights, then started up the path to the entrance.
I looked ahead then and made a left turn on Railroad Plaza. I passed the train station, lit up but abandoned, then made a left turn onto North Street, heading under the row of bare trees toward the heart of the village.
His house was a modest Victorian on Moses Lane, north of Hill Street. It was somehow smaller than I expected. Only the second-floor lights were on, the windows glowing yellow behind curtains. The rest of the house and the property around it stood in blackness. That suited me fine. I parked the Volkswagen several houses down, killed the motor and the lights, grabbed the tape, and got out and opened the trunk. I removed George’s crowbar and then backtracked to the house and made my way down the driveway, past a black Crown Victoria, so shiny in the dark it looked almost liquid.
I reached the rear of the house but didn’t bother with the back door. I was looking for something else, a ground-level window into the basement that I could tape up to keep the glass from falling when I broke it with the crow bar. But instead I found something better below the utility meters at the far corner of the back of the house.
It was an old-style coal shoot, its double doors locked from the inside. I looked around the backyard, more out of habit than caution, and then felt around till I found the hinges. The bolts felt like a quarter inch at least. I put the flat end of the crow bar against the top knob of the bolt, then began to work it back and forth as I pressed forward. I was careful not to push too hard and risk sliding off and announcing my presence by hitting the door with the bar. It took a few moments but I broke through the rust and worked the bolt free. Then I worked on the lower bolt. It was more difficult, but once it got started it came out easily enough. After that I pried the unhinged door free of the jamb and lifted it as far as it would go. It was barely enough for me to squeeze through. I used the crow bar to prop it open, tossed the tape aside, and got down on my stomach and made my way on sore elbows and knees into even more blackness.
Once inside I found nothing to grab hold of and rolled down the chute to a hard basement floor. I stood and kept still for a few minutes, listening to my breathing, which was the only thing to hear. The air that touched my face was cool and watery, like the air that rushes up from the bottom of a well. Disorientation screwed with my inner compass. I quickly lost sense of where the coal chute was, or w
here I was in relation to it.
Finally I picked a direction at random. After a few steps I found a wall and felt my way along it. Made of rocks, it was damp and felt like the walls of a cave. A residue of moisture was applied to my palms with each touch, a dank film that evaporated when I removed my hand and reached for another part of the wall farther down. It took me a minute to cover a few yards, and then the toe of my right sneaker hit something solid.
I felt around till I was touching something made of wood. I ran my hand across it till I made out the familiar shape of a staircase.
The door at the top of the stairs led into the kitchen. Even though the lights were off, this darkness was nothing compared to what I had just stumbled through. I could see the appliances and the kitchen table and white cabinets and countertops.
I stood there in the doorway for a minute and listened and sensed the house around me. I heard nothing but I knew I was not alone. I remembered my experience in Townsend’s cottage and went to the back door and unlocked it, in case I needed out fast. Then I backtracked through the kitchen and moved through a narrow dining room into a living room. Off that room was a study. I started toward it slowly. Below, the furnace kicked on. It sounded like the low, irritable grumble of a waking animal. I felt a slight rumble in the floorboards.
I reached the door of the study and looked in. There was enough light to see the gun safe and the desk and the glass showcase filled with trophies behind it. The walls were covered from ceiling to floor with framed photographs. I thought of one of those old European estates where paintings of all sizes cover every inch of a wall like pieces of some jigsaw puzzle. The door was halfway open. I eased it the rest of the way with the back of my hand and took a step in.
You can tell a lot about a man by his study. In Augie’s, like this one, there was a desk and a fireplace, but Augie’s walls only held a half-dozen framed photos. Hanging directly above his safe was a photo of Tina at the age of thirteen, at the firing range, orange ear protectors over her tiny head and safety glasses on the end of her nose and a .45 caught just in the first split second of recoil in both her hands, a puff of gray smoke in the air above the hammer. Standing just behind her, looking toward the target that was well out of frame, was Augie, beaming proudly. There were no photographs of Augie’s late wife anywhere. He had told me that this was because seeing her face just hurt too much.
Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard Page 16