Wise Men: A Novel

by Stuart Nadler

“Something like that.”

  “That’s what Davis said.”

  “Look,” she said. She reached into her back pockets, both of them, and took out two separate handfuls of money. “I’ve got seven hundred dollars saved up. It’s basically everything I’ve ever made working at the grocery store in town. So I can pay you if you need me to.”

  “I think you’ve got it backward,” I said. “Normally I’d pay you for the help.”

  “I was thinking we could do a trade,” she said.

  “What would we be trading?” I asked.

  “I need to get out of here. To leave.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere,” she said. Again, she pushed the money toward me. “I have seven hundred dollars. When I can go for seven hundred dollars?”

  “That’s why you’re here?” I asked. “You want me to help you run away?”

  All of a sudden she seemed panicked that I might not help her. Coming here to talk to me, to knock on my door at midnight, in a part of town that had only the highway and some gas stations—coming here must have been so difficult for her. A girl her age could feign precociousness and maturity all she wanted, but this scared her. “I just heard you were asking around for her.” She paused. And then, she said her name. “For Savannah. And I just thought, you know, I could show you where she is. And you could help me.”

  “Put away the money,” I said.

  “You can have it,” she said. “It’s all there. You can count it.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “I know you’re rich and everything. But still.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re Arthur Wise’s son.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “You are, though, right? I mean—he’s your father?”

  “I’m not rich,” I said. “He’s rich.”

  “I just thought we could trade,” she said. “You take the money, and I’ll take you to her.”

  “Look—”

  “No. No.” She reached out and put the money into my hands. “Don’t say no.”

  In a way, Lauren seemed a lot like Savannah had, the first time I met her—frightened, embarrassed. Jenny was always telling me I had a thing for women like this. When I’d met her, it was at the restaurant in Beacon Hill where she still worked. That night, as she was clearing away a table, I saw that she’d started to cry. I went over to her. One of her brothers had suffered an injury in the unofficial incursion into Cambodia. A land mine had knocked him out, and he’d woken up strapped to gurney in a medevac, banged up but alive. Jenny claimed I had a rescue complex. A need to take care of people, even if they could take of themselves. When she told me this the first time, I laughed her off. Not for the first time, she was right.

  “How do you know Savannah?” I asked Lauren. “How do you know where she lives?”

  “She’s a librarian,” she said. “In the town over. I go there sometimes. It’s better than the one we have in town. People are actually quiet in there. It’s a good place to study. So I take the bus. My dad works near there. Sometimes he forgets to pick me up.”

  “He forgets?”

  “Yeah. He’ll just forget.”

  She opened her eyes a little wider, as if to tell me that this was the sanitized version, that saying that her dad just forgot about her sometimes was only the beginning.

  “So sometimes, she’ll just take me to her house, ’cause it’s not far.”

  “Savannah does this?”

  “I can take you.”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I said.

  For the first time, she smiled. She opened the mouth of her duffel and took everything out of it: her clothes, a few books, some makeup, a handful of tampons, a compact mirror with a princess sticker on the lid, a small wadded ball of hair elastics. It was terrible to see all of this. Terrible to see her underwear fall off the pile, into the dirty hotel hallway, and the quick, shy way she retrieved it. And it was terrible to see the last thing she pulled out. It was black plastic cap gun. At first I couldn’t tell it was fake. Which was the point. When she put this down, she looked up at me. “It’s a toy,” she told me. “If I’m running away, I need to be able to scare people. Creepy men mess with girls. It’s pretty realistic.”

  “It’s a good idea,” I said.

  “Here,” Lauren said. “Look.” Again, her imploring hand thrust something toward me. It was a photograph. She gave it to me facedown, a white sheet with a blue stamp on it that read Stockton. I turned it over. It was me. And it was Savannah. That first day on the lawn, when her father threw the ball through my tire.

  “You don’t look too different,” she said.

  I started shaking. “Where—”

  “It’s you, right?”

  “Where—”

  “I figured you might not believe me. I used some of my money and got a cab to the library. I thought if I borrowed the picture—”

  “Lauren—”

  “You gotta help me, Mr. Wise.”

  “How—”

  “Look,” she said, “I stole it. OK?”

  “From where?”

  “From her office.”

  She got up on her toes and threw a crooked finger at Savannah’s face.

  “Her office,” she said again. “I stole it from her office.”

  The picture’s edges were torn, jagged, and there was still old glue on the back. Lauren picked at the polish on her nails. I couldn’t stop staring at the picture.

  “When I saw you today at the ballpark,” she said, “I recognized you. Even before Davis said who you were. I knew it was you.”

  I managed a small noise. I was still shaking. I had the picture in my hand. I pointed at Lauren. “If you’re lying—,” I began to say.

  Five

  It was a small gray house on the edge of the soy field, the living room lights on, a crack in the wood on the bottom step. We’d taken the county road out of Ebbington, passing for ten miles through empty, flat country so stark, it seemed like land that hadn’t been discovered by man, just the dark space between towns, empty, not yet farmed, not yet stuck with shops or strip malls or auto dealerships. Towns in Iowa crop up unexpectedly, sometimes in the crook of an elbow, sometimes on what passes for high ground. Everything there is postglacial, steamrolled by ice, carved by wind. Lauren knew the way perfectly. Countless nights she’d ended up here when her father was working late or drinking late and nobody came to the library to take her home. Savannah had done this. Taken the girl whom no one had come for. This was what Lauren told me as we drove down Route 112. She went to the library there because it was usually empty, and because she could get her work done without people bothering her. At school there were always boys asking her to go with them to a game on Friday nights, or to a movie. And at home, there was her father. She started to tell me something about him but stopped. “I’m running away,” she said. “There’s not really much else you need to know, I guess. I like the library. They let you stay as long as you want. People are nice to me there. Savannah’s nice to me.”

  I parked in the dirt outside Savannah’s house. This was Hove, Iowa, ten miles west of Ebbington. It was near one in the morning now. A yellow Chrysler sat in the driveway beside a row of potted tomato vines.

  “This is so romantic,” Lauren said. She’d been sullen on the way over, lost in her head, nervous about running away, but now that we were here, somewhere she was comfortable, she’d perked up.

  “Is that what this is?” I asked.

  “I wonder if someone will come back for me in twenty years.”

  “Maybe Davis will.”

  “Oh please,” she said.

  “If I told you how long I’ve been looking for her—” Lauren stopped me. She had the picture in her lap, the photograph Charles had taken of me and Savannah in Bluepoint.

  “I have an idea,” she said, pointing at it.

  “I was just about to give up,” I said. “Right when you knocked o
n my door.”

  She smiled at me. I looked down at her arms—at the raised welts, the crisscrossed scars, the scratches.

  “Are you nervous?” she asked.

  “Very.”

  “Why don’t we get out of the car?”

  “Why don’t we wait another minute?”

  “Why don’t we get out.” She slapped my thigh. “That could be a good start.”

  “You think she’s awake?”

  Lauren looked out at the house. “Lights are on. I’ve heard that sometimes there’s this phenomenon where people turn off the lights when they go to sleep.”

  “Are you being sarcastic right now?” I said. “Don’t do that.”

  “Come on,” she said. “Haven’t you ever heard of levity?”

  “I hadn’t heard that word when I was your age,” I said. “That’s for sure.”

  “Look how nervous you are!”

  “Is there a man in there?” I asked after a moment, having paused to try to figure out the best way to ask. “I don’t want to go in there if there’s some other guy in there.”

  Lauren smiled knowingly. “Not right now.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded. “How about we go up?”

  I looked out at the house, the flat front of it, the siding streaked with grime and dirt. A weather vane on the roof was broken and lay collapsed against the chimney. The mailbox at the edge of the lawn had the name Stockton printed across it in faded marker. Savannah Stockton. Lauren went to the door, her moccasins scuffling on the flagstone. She’d brought her duffel with her. So this is where Savannah has been this whole time, I thought. When I’d been imagining her everywhere else, she’d been in the middle of the goddamned haystack, nearly in the dead center of the country.

  “Hey,” I called out to Lauren, whispering, hanging back. “Stop.” I had nothing more to say. I just couldn’t go any farther. Going farther meant getting closer to Savannah, which meant experiencing some level of terror far more extreme than the terror I’d just experienced with her father. The notion that I might be met with something other than anger seemed unreasonable now, wholly misguided. Lauren turned, lamplight at her back. She shot me a pitying expression, her lips in a mock pout. She’d put on a denim jacket and tied back her hair into a ponytail. It was easy to see why Davis had fallen so hard for her. She was pretty, but in a few years she’d be beautiful. She walked down the steps toward me and put a hand on my wrist.

  “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Well, can you at least tell me what I should expect?”

  Lauren had both of my hands now. “She is the most wonderful person. Which is something I think you already know.”

  Lights struck up behind the front door, twin pewter lamps slowly burning to life. Lauren turned expectantly, letting my hands drop, a smile forming on her mouth, her eyes the final thing to leave me, something close to mischief in them. From inside the house, there were footsteps—slow, cautious footsteps—of someone who’s heard a noise out on her porch past midnight.

  When Savannah opened the door, her foot was the first thing I saw. I’d been looking down, dreading the moment when she discovered me. I looked so much like my father now. His was the last face she’d want to see. Also, I wasn’t unaware of how potentially terrifying it might have been for a white man to be making noise on the porch of a black woman in October of 1972, this being the year that George Wallace was shot, the year Angela Davis was acquitted, and the very week a full-fledged race riot had broken out in the cabins of the USS Kitty Hawk. Still, I didn’t want her to see whatever expression happened to appear on my face—elation at finding her, confusion at seeing that she looked nothing like the girl she had been or, worse, some terrible combination of the two. I was taller than Lauren, and so I tried to position myself at the back of the porch, close to the step that led to the walkway.

  Savannah’s tiny foot: a striped athletic sock, one orange band at the calf flanked by two wider blue bands, some dirt on the toe. I allowed myself to look up slowly. I didn’t know whether she’d seen me or not. After all this time, I was finally here. I’d finally found her. I felt every inch of my body—my heart going, my arms struggling to seem normal, my eyes refusing to blink. I wanted to take all of this in. To see everything. Her hair was cut close to her head. That was the first thing I noticed. That her hair was short. She was already gray at her temples. This was the second thing. We were older now. She had on a white wool cardigan and gray corduroys. A pair of eyeglasses hung on an orange cord around her neck.

  “Lauren?” Savannah asked softly. She reached out and put one hand on Lauren’s shoulder. Her other hand pulled tight the lapels on her sweater. “What are you doing? It’s so late.”

  “I couldn’t stick around any longer,” she said in a sturdy voice that I admired. In barely an hour, Lauren had won me over. She kicked at her duffel bag.

  “Oh, Lauren. I thought… you promised me you wouldn’t!”

  “I lied.”

  “Damn it, Lauren. And you came here?”

  “Well, I also ran into this guy right here.” She reached back for me and pulled me by the arm so that we were standing side by side. “And then my plans kind of changed.”

  Savannah looked up at me then. This wasn’t Charles. She knew me the moment she saw me. If she felt any joy in seeing me again, I couldn’t find it in her.

  “How much did you pay her?” she demanded.

  “Excuse me?”

  She looked at Lauren and then back at me. She crossed her arms against her chest. “There’s nothing here for you.”

  I tried to take a deep breath but came up short. A woman emerged behind Savannah, blinking herself awake.

  “Lauren?” She was in a floor-length red nightgown, a bear stitched onto the breast. “What are you doing here?”

  “She’s running away,” Savannah said, her voice flat, not annoyed but not pleased.

  “Oh God. Oh, that’s disappointing to hear. You’ll be kidnapped by some trucker.”

  “This is Pam,” Savannah said, although she wasn’t looking at me. “Pam’s my roommate.”

  “And her coworker,” Pam said, grinning at me.

  “Hilton Wise,” I said, my hand out to shake hers.

  She squinted at me. “You look familiar,” she said.

  I saw Savannah smirk at this.

  “It’s probably my father,” I said, although I hadn’t wanted to say it. “We look alike. And people seem to know him.”

  “Wise. Wise. Wise.” Pam repeated this like it was some bad version of a yoga mantra. “Oh, right. Wise. The airplane guy, right? He’s the pilot? The recluse?”

  “You’re thinking of Howard Hughes.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “My father sued Howard Hughes.”

  Pam laughed. “Oh. Wow. Far-out.”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  Pam waved Lauren inside, and then it was just the two of us on her porch. Savannah looked straight at me now. “I heard you were here,” she said.

  “From who?”

  “From my father,” she said. “If Lauren weren’t here, I’d call the cops on you,” she said, stepping aside, her arm extended into her house. She let out a few fake laughs. “But make yourself at home.”

  Savannah’s kitchen was an open space, filled with a butcher’s block table, copper pans hanging on hooks above a double-wide sink, and a stoneware vase filled with pink gladiolus. It was easy to see how cheerful it would have been, had it been afternoon. Someone had positioned a sunflower in a tall water glass on the windowsill. What I’d glimpsed of the rest of the house was clean, sparsely but tastefully decorated. There were photographs everywhere: some of Pam, but most of them of Savannah. This was everything I’d missed in her life: There she was on the Pont Neuf, a black American woman abroad. There she was in San Francisco, standing beside a giant fake pagoda. And in some of the pictures, there was a man: in a dress uniform, the cap on his head tilted back to block the sun, a broad smile. In w
ork pants and a sweat-drenched white shirt, straddling the peak of a roof on a building, his hammer drawn. At a writing desk, square-framed glasses on his face, sitting behind a typewriter and an ashtray and a plate with a sandwich on it.

  After she sat us down at her kitchen table—“Here,” she said, telling me where to go, her cold hand brushing mine, the first physical contact between us in two decades—she didn’t concentrate on me for more than a fleeting second, choosing instead to worry loudly over Lauren being here in her house at one in the morning, her long-threatened plan to run away now in progress. Nearly every five minutes, Savannah consulted her watch and tried to calculate just what level of terror Lauren’s father might be experiencing. “Your father’s probably already been to the cops.”

  “No way,” Lauren said. “You think he’s even left the bar yet?”

  “He’s probably terrified,” she said.

  “Are we talking about the same guy? Larry Becker? He’s shitfaced. I guarantee you.”

  “Where were you even thinking of going?” Pam asked.

  “Connecticut,” she said, sitting up straight, saying it with a certain defensive emphasis added to the syllables, as if she knew that the name alone opened her up to attack. Which it did.

  “Connecticut?” Pam laughed. “You want to run away to Connecticut?”

  “My aunt lives there,” she said. She seemed like she’d regressed seven years and was suddenly a ten-year-old. “She’s nice to me.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Savannah said. She had her finger up in the air, an idea on the end of it. “You know what’s going to happen? Your dad’s coming straight here. He never liked me. Never trusted me. I’ll be the first person he suspects.”

  “Suspects of what? That’s bullshit,” Lauren said.

  “What’s bullshit,” she said, “is you showing up here at midnight. A teenage runaway? Really? Isn’t that beneath you?”

  Pam, largely silent at the table, nursing an enormous cup of coffee and rum, a lit Winston streaming smoke from the grooved tooth mark of a ceramic ashtray, grunted in affirmation. “Totally, totally, beneath you.”

  “Oh please,” Lauren said. “I think it’s crap that you’re both hassling me so much. Like, be cool!”