Flight to Darkness

by Gil Brewer

  She said, “I want it all settled now. Today.”

  “Reckon we can?” Frank said.

  She seemed not to hear him. “Frank had me sign the entire business over to him. It was the only condition under which he’d work. That was before we received the telegram about you, of course. Then after that it was all right, anyway.”

  The jay ceased its wild shrieking.

  “Everything’s signed over to Frank, now. I agreed. He said when he had it running smoothly, we’d tear up his papers and the both of you could sign new ones—share and share alike. But, of course, that was before. . . .”

  “I really don’t—” I didn’t know what to say. My life was a grand mess.

  She raised her hand. It trembled weakly, fell back to the bed. “Isn’t that right, Frank?” she said.

  “Yes, that’s what I said then.” He eyed his cigar. He was no longer nervous; he was almost bold.

  “But now things are fine,” she said. “You’re really alive, after all. I want everything in order today. As your father wished.”

  I said nothing.

  “Frank has gone through with his promise to make the business good.” As she spoke I saw a faint film of perspiration spring out across her forehead.

  “Mother,” I said, remembering what the doctor had said. “We can put this off a while. Perhaps you should rest.”

  “Yes,” Frank said. “I agree.” He didn’t move.

  “No,” she said. “Now. It can’t be put off. Frank,” she turned her head, “have you that paper? You can tear it up now. I have all the other papers here.” She reached and opened a drawer on the table, took out some papers folded neatly and tied with a blue ribbon. The exertion tired her. “Lawyer Algren. Phone him, Frank. Tell him to come immediately.”

  Frank rose slowly, placed his cigar in an ash tray. “No. I’ve been thinking. I’ve changed plans.”

  “Changed?”

  “Yes.”

  I stood. Mother’s fingers twitched on the papers in her hand. “What do you mean, Frank? I was going to have half interest in the business signed over to Eric before we received that telegram, whether I died or not. That doesn’t change anything, because he’s alive now. And the other will has to be altered again now.” Her head lifted from the pillow. I pressed it back. She said, “Have you the paper you signed, Frank?”

  “It’s in my safe-deposit box at the bank.” He smiled. “Now, take it easy,” he said. His eyes flicked over to me brown and bright. “Let’s not rush into this.”

  Mother’s head nodded up and down jerkily. What color there was in her face drained away. “I want those papers signed today,” she said. “Lawyer Algren will come right away if you call. It has to be today, Frank.” She turned to me. “Eric, go phone Algren.”

  She was afraid. I was afraid, too, because I didn’t want to look at Frank.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Frank said. He placed both hands on the foot of the bed and leaned toward her. “Listen. Do you think for one minute I’m going to go into partnership with a bum? A good-for-nothing? After I’ve worked like hell to build this loan business into something, after I’ve given everything I had to make it go? And the other—the will—why should that be changed?” He paused.

  “Frank,” I said. “Save it.”

  “It won’t save.” His voice was filled with contempt. He faced me, then looked back at her. “It won’t save at all. You may as well know that right now. I’m not going to tear up that contract. The business is mine. I made it and intend to keep it. It’s state-wide. And the rest of the money’s going to be mine, too. Who’s taken care of you? Who’s sacrificed his youth, his time and effort, just to keep you happy? Eric? No. He’s been off to the wars.” He was talking levelly. It would have been easier on her if he had shouted.

  “Frank . . .” Her voice was dry. She strained forward and, with an effort, sat up in bed. I reached to guide her back, but she knocked my hand away.

  Frank said quietly, “You may as well know this, too. When I made that proposition, had you sign the business over to me, I had no intention of ever going through with our bargain. I did it to save whatever heartbreak—”

  She was trying to say something but it wouldn’t come. Her face was gray, pale and tortured. “Your father—” she managed. “Eric, call Algren!”

  “No,” Frank said. He remained cool, leaning over the bed, but his eyes shone and the vein in his temple pulsed bluely. “The contract can’t be broken. It’s solid. I made sure of that.” He straightened. “Eric’s like father was. Lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing. Face it. In a year there’d be no business, no money. And he’d run through the rest of the inheritance buying whisky and women. I can smell the whisky on him now. He reeks of the stuff. Look at him, a tramp, a bum.”

  Mother trembled and her breathing was rapid.

  “Frank,” I said, “shut up!”

  “I won’t. I won’t shut up. I won’t. I don’t reckon you can make me shut up, either. Coming home high and mighty to clean up, but I know and you know I know. Mother’s too soft-hearted. You’re all the same. I’m the only one in this family with any business sense. You know why? Not because I inherited it from a strange member of the family who had some pride, some intelligence, no, not that. Because there never was a Garth in this damned country with enough brains to do anything better than bait a fishhook, or swill corn whisky, or paw at the maid’s leg. Yes. Because I’m a Garth in name only, thank God.” He glanced at me. “You. The beloved, no-good son. You reckoned I was proud of the name Garth? Well, I reckon I’ll take what I deserve. Nobody’s done anything for mother but me. I’m the only one. I’ve stuck by, and I don’t reckon anybody’ll take what’s due me, by God.” He was breathing hard. “I worked for it,” he said. “Some intelligence, by God.”

  “Eric,” mother said weakly. “Don’t let any of this talk bother you. I never—Frank promised, he promised so many things.” Her breathing was a rapid flutter. Her chin quivered helplessly, the papers fell to the floor. She grabbed for them, but missed. “You lied,” she gasped, pointing at Frank. “You lied to me! No son, no son at all!”

  “Now, Mother, you must rest,” Frank said. “You’ll see it’s all for the best. Think it over.”

  “Frank,” I whispered. “Get away. Get out of here.”

  She was shaking and could no longer speak. She mouthed soundless words, her eyes voiding helpless agony.

  “We’d lose everything,” Frank said. “Father was wrong, that’s all. You’re wrong. I won’t do it.” He spoke with a calmness that cut like a knife.

  She reached for her breast, her fingers clawing, and fell back in the bed. Her eyes closed, wrinkled with pain.

  Outside the jay screamed again and again.

  I whirled toward Frank. “Call the doctor, hurry! Hurry up, you fool!”

  “She’ll be all right, Eric,” he said. He stared at her for a moment. Then something touched his face; something reached him, as she gasped. His features dissolved with fright.

  I shoved him toward the door. “The doctor—get him!”

  “Yes, yes. All right.” His voice wavered. “She’ll be all right.” He hurried from the room, his feet pounded along the hall.

  At her side, I didn’t know what to do. But inside—I was crazy. If Prescott could have had a look into my mind just then, he’d have slapped me in a strait jacket.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  “Your father,” she said. Her voice was very faint. “Frank—” she said.

  “Lie still,” I told her. “It’s all right now.”

  Her eyes came open. She gazed startled about the room. She tried to breathe, through the white pain that showed in her eyes, for a long while without success.

  The jay screamed five more hellish times and ceased.

  Chapter 11

  I walked slowly out of the room, down the hall, until I reached the head of the stairs. I stood there and watched Frank come up from below. His flagrant hand-painted tie stream
ed over his shoulder. He held a fresh unlit cigar in one hand.

  “Is she all right?” he said. “I got Bantram. He’ll be right over.”

  Something inside me began to expand. Blood pulsed and pounded in the back of my head.

  Nearing me, Frank thrust his face out, brown eyes glittering. “You did this,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “It’s your fault, coming home this way. Why didn’t you stay up there? We don’t want you here.”

  Then I saw it. He was scared. Fighting to attain a dominance over things that had long since left him. The big brother who wasn’t a brother at all, but still trying to wish himself off as a god, preparing the ritual in his mind so you could see the cogs working. Scared way down to the soles of his feet, his eyes all sick with sudden belligerent hope. Because he knew I knew plenty. And he had to play his hand out, fast, before the man on the other side of the table opened his eyes any further. But it was too slow.

  “All right, all right,” he said. His voice was strained, fast, and pleading. He tried to fight the pleading down and attained an abrupt brass. “So I faked the telegram. Who’s to know? Who can change it? What difference? Why not?”

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I told them she’d had illusion, dreamt it. Told them to agree with her in their presence. Nobody doubted. Told them no telegram had come. It was no harm, because you won’t have the money. It’s not yours. You’ve done nothing but whore around all your life.” He was talking so fast the words stuck together head and tail. He knew he was going to get hurt and he didn’t like the idea. “So I faked the telegram. What you going to do about it? Nothing. You can’t do a thing.” He was wild with it, wild with the thought that he could succeed. “And all the rest, too. Think you’re so damned smart. By God, I’ll show you what’s smart.” He was almost crying because the walls of his majestically foolish scheme were crumbling so fast he couldn’t escape getting hit by a few bricks. Maybe a whole wall. He wasn’t sure. It wasn’t nice to watch.

  “So you faked a telegram?” I said. “And all the rest?”

  He hesitated, paling. “Yes.”

  I lifted my fist from the floor. Everything I had was behind that blow. It connected flush with the side of his jaw. His cigar flew in a savage spiral. I hadn’t known whether I would strike. Now I wanted to hurt him.

  His feet left the stairs in wild groundless running. He crashed against the banister, scrabbled cursing onto the first landing. On his knees, he faced me. Then, standing, he started toward me, red-faced, enraged, and hoping he wouldn’t lose face.

  I started down. “She’s dead, Frank.”

  “Dead,” he said. “Dead. . . .”

  “Yes. That’s what happens to people. Are you afraid of the word? Would you rather I coated it with sugar so you could swallow it without choking?” None of this was any good. It would cure nothing. It could never save Mother. But I had to do it and at the same time all the fear that was inside me welled up to the surface. The pain in my fist was far from agony—it was sweet.

  “She’s dead,” he whispered. “You’ve killed her.”

  He stood there saying that and I hit him again. Again he sprawled down to the first landing. This time he came at me like a dazed but furious bull.

  We stood face to face on the landing. He was breathing hard. He started to say something, then swung. I caught the blow on my left forearm and got in a straight, hard right. He went over the banister, clinging, and pawed himself back onto the stairs. “She’s dead up there!” he shouted. “This is sacrilege.”

  His face was twisted now, his bright eyes blinking. He stood there hunched over, licking off his lips. The whites of his eyes slowly turned pink. This was what I wanted. I wanted him as mad as he could get.

  “Your pretty suit’s getting bloody,” I said.

  He glanced down. I kicked for the point of his chin. He nailed my leg and twisted. He had weight and he was in a hell of a lot of better condition than I’d figured. Pain spun into my belly and we took the rest of the stairs fighting.

  I wanted to break him like I’d break rock. Change that contemptuous face—tear that smile away.

  We crashed into the hallway with him on top. He bubbled at the mouth and sobbed a little as he slammed at me.

  “You aren’t fit to live, Frank,” I said. I got one hand up between his arms and grabbed his throat. You handle rock, your hands get hard, your fingers very strong. Like Norma said one time, you kind of catch the hardness from the rock. I squeezed his throat as if I closed my fingers on the handle of a maul.

  He grabbed for my hand. I swung up my left and brought the heel down hard on the bridge of his nose. It cracked. He let out a yell. Blood pumped into my eyes.

  He rolled off, making noises in his throat. My fingers snared the back of his coat collar. The coat ripped like a zipper.

  Then we were on our feet. He cursed me in a concerned calm manner that was almost comical. Something—the shock of mother’s death, the way he’d acted in the bedroom—somehow prevented him from really fighting. And I found that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to kill him or not. I thought about the wooden mallet and the battlefield in Korea and the wooden mallet hanging on the rack in the barn with Norma there and then Leda screamed into my mind like some wanton image of lost hope.

  “You’re no good, Frank. You’re rotten.”

  He came at me. I feinted with a left, leaned with all I had behind my right. It caught him in the gut.

  He bowed slowly, stared at the floor, gagged.

  “Oh, God, God, God,” he said.

  “You’ve got what you want.”

  “Get out of this house.”

  “I’ll go for a while. But only because I don’t like looking at you.”

  I walked down the hall and out the front door. I left the door open and stood on the gallery a moment. Then I went on down into the driveway and over toward the side of the house where a length of hose lay coiled like a snake on the fresh green lawn.

  I turned on the hose and let the warm stale water run out until it was cool and fresh and smelling faintly of rubber. I drank and rinsed Frank’s blood off my face and hands. Then I took off my jacket, tie, and shirt, left the shirt and tie on the lawn and put my jacket back on. The shirt wasn’t bloody. I combed my hair and went out back and stood there watching the sun shimmer on the water.

  I felt wrong inside. I wished I hadn’t started anything with Frank. But I had and I felt wrong inside about it. It had been kind of good in a way, though. Some of his affectation had left him. But there was no real satisfaction anyplace. I didn’t know any more really about myself than I had back there in California. Except that I hadn’t killed him. But maybe that was because there wasn’t a wooden mallet handy. I knew my mind was working like a sick mind, sometimes. Anyway, if I knew Frank at all his affectation would return quickly enough. Fake telegram or not. There was no point in wondering about it.

  Frank would be lost without his front. But that front was only paper now, not even a good grade of cardboard. It had become more than a mere front. It was his nature. He probably didn’t even realize it was false anymore. I wasn’t sure I’d broken his nose although the cartilage had made a good noise. I hoped I’d broken his nose. I hoped that.

  He didn’t know what fear was.

  I glanced up at the rear bedroom window where she would be lying up there in bed. The black arm of a pine limb reached almost to the window ledge with a spike clump of green leaf on the tip and three cones. That’s where the jay had been.

  At the front of the pine was a wooden bench. I went over and sat down. I hated Frank as I had hated no one in the world, and I tried to reason. Don’t rationalize, Prescott had said. View it all objectively. Hell. There was nothing but hate, white and hot. Yet I knew death alone wasn’t a thing you blamed anybody for, exactly, and not this kind of death for sure. Mother had been a good woman and she’d lived, but not much, only she hadn’t known of any other way to live. Maybe that was wrong, too. Because you never did kn
ow what went on in another person’s mind—the little things that went to make up the dream. Leda and Frank and Norma and Lenny and you and me.

  We all did a little carving, trying to shape that silver image into something closer to reality, or what we wanted as our reality. Only the knife was dull always, because the one true image remained. And it died with you if you didn’t allow it to walk out of your head. If you tried to change the silver into gold, or alter color, or shape, or poise, you weren’t you, really. Because the one image remained. And that was you. Bastard, king, warrior, bum, or just the guy who shoves molded dough into an oven and brings out bread. . . .

  A small boat with an outboard motor went phut-phut-phuttle-phut by close to shore. A man balanced with both feet, one on either gunwale, holding a gig. Somebody had told them flounder would be along here. But not in the afternoon they should have said. At night. And the tide was wrong. The one operating the motor waved to me, then the one with the gig, and I waved. The sound of the motor went echoing across the tiny keys of snarled mangroves.

  I heard a car coming along the drive pretty fast. I went around front. It was Dr. Bantram in a hurry up the front step of the gallery. He saw me, paused, blinking behind his glasses with his black bag hanging.

  I turned off the hose and went up to him. We climbed the steps and stood by the front door.

  “How is she?”

  “She’s gone,” I said. “She was gone before Frank called you. He didn’t know. Will you take over?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, Eric. It had to happen. It was due, any time.” But there was that look in his eyes of complete unconcern about death with slight wonder about me because I was the town bum once. He went back to his car and dropped the black bag into the front seat, then returned to the open front door where I waited.

  “Her heart was never strong. She survived three bad attacks somehow, so it had to be this time.”

  At the end of the hall Frank was coming down the stairs.

  “Does Mrs. Garth know?”