She smiled and left the room. I knew only two things: that Lauren had spent most of her childhood here, and that somewhere in the building there was an empty frame that had once held the picture of me and Savannah near the beach at Bluepoint. This was why I couldn’t just leave. I had to at least mention this. There was a second floor, and for a few minutes, I thought I heard her up there, milling around, moving book carts. In a way, the Hove library was no different from the countless others that I’d been in: there is a certain sensory combination shared by public buildings constructed in the forties and fifties: wood dust and double-glazed windows and durable industrial carpet and the pleasurable smell of books decaying and yellowing. At the foot of a stairway to the second floor hung an oil canvas, at first glance like most of the other lifeless oil canvases hanging on the walls here. It was a picture of our bluff: Bluepoint. Robert Ashley’s house. Sun on the roof. There was the sand, the dirty gulls, the boardwalk, and, worst of all, the big dune, right of center, swept smooth. I took two steps closer to the picture, knowing already what I discovered officially a moment later by way of a bronze plaque: this was one of Lem Dawson’s paintings.
Over the years I had allowed myself to believe Lem a genius, a dead genius, a genius that one way or another I’d gotten killed. I didn’t have any real reason to think this. In fact, I shouldn’t have thought it at all. I’d misconstrued his reluctance to show me his work as the eccentricity of some great talent. But now I saw how wrong I’d been. The painting was awful. I noticed nothing but its considerable flaws: its seams, its poorly rendered sense of light, its skewed perspective, the sentimental way he’d approached the clouds, the birds, the shadow of the trees on the flat side of Robert’s house. The waves were especially amateurish: they were puffy, dry-looking, like the canned snow spread around in shopping malls at Christmas. To see this, to see how very bad he’d been! I took a step back, then two, and then a dozen, thinking that distance would help, that perhaps Lem’s paintings were like something by Seurat, the whole puzzle locking into focus at a certain point. This didn’t help.
Was this the only picture that had survived the rain that last day in Bluepoint? I tried to discover whether the big baroque frame Savannah had picked for the canvas (which certainly didn’t help matters) was concealing proof of water damage. Pictures in museums and galleries hide in their frames all the human evidence of their making: vise marks on the canvas edge, hand-hammered staples, cigarette ash, pencil markings, food stains. I wanted to take the painting out of its frame, but I wouldn’t allow myself to even graze my finger across the wall where it hung; Lem’s nervous voice came suddenly to my ear. I wanted, at the very least, to obey this wish of his.
Savannah screamed then. Or she screamed a moment after I heard something crash beneath me—something glass, something large. I can’t be sure now. For a moment it was impossible to tell if the noises were related. I heard the fire alarm go off for a second, then stop. Two hideous shrieks, followed desperately by my name. “Hilly! Come! Hilly!”
When I found her, she was frozen on the bottom step of the staircase that led downstairs. She was shaking, and when I touched her shoulder she shuddered as if I’d shocked her. Ahead of us, the room was destroyed. This was the children’s section—all on its side, every book tossed from the shelf, the light fixtures swaying, the bulbs broken, glass everywhere. We went a few steps in. Savannah bent to pick up the broken remnants of a children’s mobile—Disney characters, meant to hang above the story-time lounge. Everything was crushed. Around another corner, the walls were streaked with graffiti, most of it nonsense, just painted stripes. By now, Savannah was crying. “This is terrible,” she kept saying. “Terrible.”
Finally, we got to the reference room. It was a square anteroom, off of which there were two hallways that led to a bank of offices. In front of us were the new microfiche machines, all of them bashed in, their monitors wrecked. At our feet were a few reams of tape, all of it pulled from its spools. The lights were wrecked here, too. When she saw this, Savannah collapsed. I caught her, helped her to a chair. Already, she was thinking of the money.
“We can’t fix this,” she said. “We just can’t.”
Whoever it was that Larry Becker was talking about, whoever it was that Charles owed money to, had spent a while in here wrecking the place. I felt a breeze then, wind against my hair, and I heard the faraway sound of a lawn mower or a tractor. The reference room had no windows, though. The wind was coming from somewhere else. Savannah felt it too, the wind rustling her hair.
“There’s wind,” she said. “There shouldn’t be wind. Why is there wind?”
“Does your office have windows?” I asked her. “Because that’s probably where they came in.”
She pointed at the hallway to our left. “Down there,” she said.
I went down the hallway. There was a trail of broken glass on the carpet that led to Savannah’s office door, swung open now to reveal the damage, the window smashed through, everything upended, her desk stripped of its drawers, papers in a storm’s wake, a typewriter turned on its face, pictures and diplomas and certificates smashed and torn. I was right. This was where they’d come in. Sitting in the middle of Savannah’s desk was a bomb. For an instant, I froze. I thought of what Jenny would think if I were killed this way—what kinds of questions she’d have, the awful truth she’d discover. I allowed myself to get closer. I’d covered bombs now for five years. I’d seen the wreckage. I’d been knee-deep in burned wood and books. I’d gone to the Boston Police Department and received hours’ worth of tutorials on how to behave if I were to ever see a bomb. But of course, I’d never seen a bomb before it blew. In the movies there was always a clock. Or a mess of wires. There was ticking. But here, there was nothing. It was just an old car battery wrapped in silver duct tape. I thought it was a fake, left here to scare the hell out Savannah. This had nothing that a real bomb had—wires, a packet of shrapnel. No clock. No ticking. Even though I was sure it wasn’t real, I backed out of the room and closed her door. I wasn’t going to take any chances. Before I ran back to get her, I saw that whoever had done this—Larry Becker, or his buddies—had painted a big green dollar sign on her door.
The first police officer who arrived was the same cop who’d wanted to introduce me to Charles my first night in Ebbington. Hove, it turned out, had to rent its police department from Ebbington, an arrangement that was profitable for the cops, but one that made nearly everybody in Hove uneasy and distrustful. The first thing Savannah told him was that she was Charles’s daughter, that this same thing had happened in his diner, that someone was out to get them. All of which didn’t seem to matter very much to him.
“Are you hurt?” the cop asked.
“No,” Savannah said, shaking her head, confused as to why the cop wasn’t listening to her. “I’m fine. The building is a wreck, though.”
“You need to go out to the Peterson Estates,” I started to say. “You need to talk to a guy named Larry Becker.”
But the cop flipped shut his notebook. “We’re going to go in, take a look around. You stay here. Somebody will take a statement from you.”
“No,” I said. “Take my statement now. This is unacceptable.”
Suddenly I was furious. Furious to have come out here and to have misjudged the situation so badly, to have found Charles and Savannah still so angry with me. Furious for letting Savannah take Lauren home to her father. Furious that my father had left my girlfriend ten thousand dollars. Furious that Jenny had unearthed my bank statements. Furious to see the damage that Charles was still causing in his daughter’s life. Furious to see what a bunch of dumb gamblers had done in a public library. Furious to see some lazy cop blow me off.
“Look,” I said, pointing at his notebook. “Write it down. Larry Becker. Peterson Estates.”
“I know who he is,” the cop said. “Why don’t you go look after your friend over there and let me do my job.”
He pointed outside, toward the sculpture garden. Savannah had wa
lked off, sobbing, and was leaning against the big metal deer. Some of her coworkers had arrived and had gone to talk to her, to comfort her. Some more cops were on the scene, as well as a few guys from the local papers, everyone milling around, expecting to find more than they did.
I was right. The bomb was fake. The first officer on the scene had known this the moment he saw it. They hadn’t even needed to call in a bomb squad. I wasn’t even sure that they had a squad to call if they needed it, but nevertheless, the officer had just picked it up and walked it across the lawn to his cruiser. Of course, he was manhandling the evidence. He wasn’t bagging the thing, wasn’t tagging it for fingerprinting. The cops here saw this as a simple act of vandalism. I tried to tell whomever I could about Charles’s gambling debt, about what Larry had told me, about the guys in Ebbington who were hungry for their money. One cop, an older guy, his hat pushed back on his head, frowned.
“There’s a high school a quarter mile from here,” he said, pointing out across the cornfield in which we were standing. “It’s probably just some kids. They do this from time to time. Especially out here. I doubt this has anything to do with Larry.”
I let the insinuation hang there. That the local kids had done this. The black kids.
Outside the parking lot, a pair of cops directed traffic. In a small town like this, even the hint of trouble brought a crowd. Already a line of cars snaked down the road. It was still morning, not yet noon. Behind me, Savannah was talking to some of her coworkers. They were talking about the money, I was sure of it. The building hadn’t been wrecked, aside from a few windows. But the damage inside—the books, the furniture, the mobiles and microfiche machines—all of it would cost a fortune to fix.
I heard Charles Ewing’s car before I saw him arrive. He’d driven up on the curb, circumventing the traffic jam. This was the same Dodge Dart he’d taken to Gaithersburg Grounds. It was a clunker. Certainly not anything he’d be able to put up in a card game. Certainly not anything anyone would want. I wondered whether he did this on purpose, to keep himself from gambling it away. He parked in the lot, beside Savannah’s Land Rover. He’d come straight from work, his apron still on, the diner open, evidently, window or no window. He stopped with one foot up on the parking lot curb. Then he found me.
“Where’s she?” he asked.
I pointed out to the garden.
“She’s upset,” I said. “But she’s fine. The place is a wreck, though. Total wreck.”
“I told that guy I’d get him his money,” he said.
“Doesn’t matter now,” I said.
“Is it really that bad?” he asked.
“They broke a couple windows. Threw some paint around. Then just ransacked the place.”
Charles shook his head. “Shit.”
“You should go talk to her,” I said. “She’s in shock. They left this fake bomb in there.”
He pushed me then, catching me by surprise, knocking me over. Suddenly he was standing over me. “The fuck you doing here, son?”
I tried to get up, but he had his foot on my chest suddenly.
“Seriously? All the places to come. You come here?”
“Let me up,” I said.
“You just bad luck, Hilly.”
“I’m not bad luck.”
“You come around, horrible shit happens.”
“I had nothing to do with this.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“Isn’t this your fault?” I asked. “Isn’t this because of your debt?”
Across the field, Savannah was still sitting against that deer, crying. Charles caught me staring out at her and let out a short, mocking laugh.
“What is it with you and her? Huh? She got her own life now. She’s happy. She don’t need you coming by, getting her head confused.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, although I felt a childish thrill at the idea that I might confuse her, replaced with an instant wave of reproachful shame. “Can you let me up so I can go help her?”
“White boy trying to do good, right? What good that do except to get her uncle killed?”
The breath went out of me.
“I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Sure you did. If you never came into his life, into our lives, my brother-in-law be alive, painting still, he’d be here, probably, living in this town, doing something good with all that talent he had. Now he’s dead. He’s dead ’cause of you.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” I said again.
“Always coming around with your fucking charity. Black man couldn’t possibly take care of his daughter without help from some rich white motherfucker. Isn’t that it? Right? You gotta bring me by food! Milk! A ham! I couldn’t possibly have done that myself?”
I managed to get to my feet. Either he let me, or I overpowered him. “Charles,” I said, gasping. “Charles, it was more complicated than that. You know it was.”
“Everything’s more complicated for someone like you. Who gives a shit whether he read your daddy’s mail?”
“I know. I realize that now.”
“Now’s too late, though. Now he’s dead. Now you’re just here bugging the shit out of me in my own fucking town. Truth is, you ratted on him, he went to jail, then some motherfucker put a knife in his neck.”
“I was seventeen.”
“You got any idea the kind of shit I put up with when I was seventeen? I never got nobody killed.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I came here to apologize. To both of you.”
He was glaring at me. One of the police officers came over to us, grinning at first, then giving me a concerned look that made me feel uneasy, as if he were asking me wordlessly whether this big, angry black guy was giving me any trouble.
“Hey, Slim,” the officer said, and then Charles let go of me.
We’d attracted a certain amount of attention by this point, and so when I grabbed Charles by the shirt collar, nearly a half dozen people stepped in to intervene, none of whom prevented me from completely losing it. “This is all your fault!” I yelled. “All of it. This is you. You! Not me. Your debt. Your gambling. Lem was right about you.” Of course, what comes next is what made the papers, and what, even forty-some-odd years later, I am still known for, and what, periodically, close friends of mine will still tease me with after a few drinks.
“Eighteen thousand?” I laughed. “Eighteen thousand is nothing! I have a thousand times that much money! I have millions! I could buy this whole fucking town! I’m Arthur fucking Wise’s son! You could have called me! Millions and millions and millions and millions! Did you hear me! I’m Arthur Wise’s son!”
Eight
Somehow I was the one to put Savannah in her Land Rover, the one left to pick her up off the ground when the cops finally left the library. By that point, she knew what lay ahead. Months of budget battles to find the funds to fix this. Months where the bottom level of the library would have to be closed, the carpets cleaned, the walls repainted, the microfiche machines hauled off to the dump. Months of filing claims with the insurance companies. Months of asking for donations from nearby libraries to replace the books they’d lost. We were two of the last people to leave. I hadn’t known whether to stay or whether to go. At a certain point, I thought I’d just hitch a ride to Cedar Rapids right then. What else could I do? Her father was right. I was bad luck. But by then she wouldn’t walk, or she couldn’t. She’d become so upset, so distressed, she couldn’t do anything but sit against that big metal deer and weep. So I carried her across the field, the corn whipping at either side, the sun low now, birds out, cicadas buzzing. As I did this, she whispered into my ear. “Hilly. Why did you come now? Why now? Why not two years ago? Why not then? I hoped I’d find you. But you’re late.”
These were the words I couldn’t forget while I sat in Billy McKinley’s office a day later. They kept playing in my head, a loop of everything I’d ever wanted to hear from Savannah for the last twenty years. Ever
ything except for that last line. I was late. Late for her; late for me. Jenny was at home, waiting, having indulged my extending this trip one more day. Savannah’s husband was in Vietnam somewhere either in the north or in the south, she didn’t know where. We’d missed each other, and now I was in Chicago, fifty-nine stories above Michigan Avenue, the city beneath us mired in a driving rain blowing west off the lake. Billy had the corner office, a desk the size of a Ford pickup, leather sofas the color of wet cigar paper. On the wall he had pictures of his six sons. I’d known Billy when we were teenagers; his father, Chet, was one of my father’s first good friends in that moneyed world of the fifties, the first guy who’d never really cared that my father was self-made, that his money was new, that he didn’t know the difference between Easthampton and Bridgehampton. Now Billy had pictures of his children on the wall. They all looked exactly the way Billy had looked when he was young: freckles, a pug nose, barely any chin, and red hair like the rust color of the sun when you look at it with your eyes closed. The McKinleys were two generations removed from the Irish immigrants who’d dug the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan, and there was some deep connection between my father and Chet because of this.
Billy didn’t seem to have any real responsibilities that day except to ply me with liquor and try to talk me into investing some of my newly claimed wealth in financial instruments whose contents I didn’t understand. At various times, various attorneys arrived with documents for me to sign (wire transfer forms, certifications of interest, incorporation papers). Before I knew it, we were shitfaced, it was three in the afternoon, and I’d eaten two porterhouse steaks that we’d had brought up from Smith & Wollensky. At one point, while we were talking about our childhoods or the automobiles our fathers had owned during the Truman administration or the years Billy spent waiting for me to finally come to my senses and claim what he called was my “gigantic heap of cash,” I mentioned something about my job, about how I needed an office like the one Billy had, full of leather and windows.
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