Devil's Dance

by Daniel Depp

  ‘To come home? No, not if you mean it. Not if you’re going to stay. I can’t take the up and down, David. I have a life and I’m offering to share it with you. But even if you don’t want it it’s still my life and it’s the only one I’ve got.’

  He sat on the pool deck next to her chair, resting his head in her lap. Her fingers toyed with the hair on the back of his neck.

  ‘I talked to Pookie,’ she said. ‘Now she tells me you’re still undecided about whether or not to go on with the agency. I thought you’d worked all that out.’

  ‘I thought I had too,’ he said. ‘But there are new developments.’

  ‘What sort of developments?’

  ‘The kind that makes me think Dee was right. That it’s ultimately a destructive and dehumanizing way to make a living, and that I probably ought to be ashamed I’m any good at it. It occurs to me that maybe the only reason I’m any good at it is because there’s something flawed about me in the first place.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve got Walter’s money now. I suppose I could do anything I want. Buy a ranch, raise horses. Sell rare cowboy books. Or I could just sit around and drink beer.’

  ‘You could have done those things anyway.’

  ‘Then why didn’t I do them.’

  ‘Walter.’

  ‘Loyalty to Walter had nothing to do with it. I stayed because I wanted to stay. I stayed because I needed to. Walter understood that. But I hate what I’ve become. I can’t stand who I am anymore.’

  ‘Then stop. You just said yourself you can do it now, it’s easy, there’s no reason to stay.’

  ‘It’s just not that simple.’

  She threw her arms up in frustration.

  ‘I do not understand you. I just do not fucking understand you at all. Why keep doing something that makes you hate yourself?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I can. It’s just that maybe I’m not the man I always thought I was. Maybe this is what Dee and Walter both saw in me, except Dee had to run from it and Walter knew he could put it to use.’

  ‘You’re a good man, David. The best I know. You’re exhausted, you’re still reeling from Walter’s death. Give yourself a little time. Or is it something else? What’s happened, David? What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know who I am anymore and I can’t run away from it. That’s the thing. If I leave now, if I run away from it, I’ll never know, it’ll always follow me. The only way I can find out is just to stay with it, to plough through and see if I can come out the other side.’

  She took his face in her hands.

  ‘Something’s happened to you, David. Tell me what it is.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘A kind of midlife crisis, I think. That’s all.’

  ‘Whatever you want to do, I’m here for you. You know that. But you need to be sure. If it’s ever going to work between us, you need to know you made the decision for your own reasons, not mine.’

  There was a long silence. She held his face and studied it. Then she pulled her hands away and stepped back and said,

  ‘This is you leaving me, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m just going back to the Woodland Hills place. For a while.’

  ‘You’re not dumping me?’

  ‘No. I’m just grabbing a little space.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘I have to go away for a couple of days. I’ll be back on Sunday. We’ll talk. There’s some other business I have to finish.’

  ‘It’s not another woman, is it?’

  ‘I wish it were that simple,’ said Spandau.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘I could never figure that one out,’ he said.

  ‘I thought maybe I could help you with it,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t look like I’m doing so hot. Look, I’m not Dee. I’m a tough old broad. You don’t have to be afraid for me, if that’s it.’

  ‘I think I probably do,’ he said. ‘That’s just the point.’

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  There were boxes in the attic of the Woodland Hills house. Dee had taken a few with her when she left, but the rest were his, and the dates and notes on the cardboard cartons were probably as close to an autobiography as he would ever get. He was not so much a collector as an accumulator. Collection implied some sort of order or purpose. Spandau’s life had neither. It was as random as the contents of these boxes around him.

  He shifted them around, opened a few. It was like archaeology, like diving backwards through time. College, high school, the army. Photos of his parents, his sister, friends and relatives he’d not thought about in years. Finally he located the box he was actually looking for, and carried it downstairs.

  He opened a beer and went out into the backyard. The tattered carcass of another dead fish lay just outside the pond. He waited for the usual anger to rise but it didn’t. All that came was a great, sad weariness that threatened to wash his legs from under him, and he fell into a chair and sat staring at the pond. One more notable failure but this was the first time he blamed himself and not the raccoons. Why hadn’t he seen the answer before? It wasn’t the goddamn raccoons, it was him. It was him all the time. The raccoons just did what raccoons do, however ghastly and inconvenient it appeared to us humans. This was their nature, this was the way it worked, and you could rant and rage and fire guns into the air but nothing was going to change this. It was Spandau who was the guilty party. How many fish had died? A dozen maybe in the last couple of years? All placed there by Spandau, all swimming around happily, just waiting to become a carnivore’s midnight snack, because Spandau was too stupid and too arrogant to give up a fight even common sense told him he’d never win.

  Somehow, he thought, I’ve got to make peace with this thing, and he wasn’t sure if he meant the fish or Dee or Anna or Pookie or Leo or the two men whose deaths he helped advertise across a cafe window. A whole chain of lives he’d failed to protect. Before another nightfall he’d go out, get a tank, bring the fish inside. Or better yet, he’d give them away, find them a home with somebody who had more sense than to get them hurt. That’s what you did if you cared about things. You put them first, you got them the hell out of harm’s way. And if you were the thing that was hurting them, well, you just moved your own sorry ass, however much it hurt.

  SIXTY-NINE

  He stood at the gate, looking at the house. They were in there. They saw him. Curtains moved.

  He stood there for a long time. It began to rain. A curtain was pushed aside and he saw, for a moment, her face.

  It was raining hard now. The front door opened and Michael came out.

  ‘You’re a determined bastard, I’ll give you that,’ said Michael. ‘But there’s no point to this. She won’t see you. Nor should she. There’s nothing else to be said. Exactly what the hell is it you want anyway?’

  ‘I’m not sure, exactly,’ Spandau laughed. ‘But I think it might have something to do with forgiveness.’

  ‘You come up here asking her to forgive him, it’s a waste of time. You can’t really expect it of her.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Jerry,’ Spandau said. ‘I’m talking about me.’

  ‘You? Aside from being a general nuisance and sticking your nose in everywhere it doesn’t belong, there’s not a whole lot for her to forgive.’

  ‘Just tell her. Please.’

  Michael shook his head, turned, and went back into the house. It was a while before she came out, wearing a thin raincoat and holding a newspaper over her head.

  ‘What is it you want from me, Mr Spandau? Michael says you’re asking my forgiveness but I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve done nothing to me that I need to forgive.’

  ‘I wanted to ask you because I’m not sure anybody else would know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘It’s raining, Mr Spandau, and you still haven’t told me what you want.’

  ‘Do you think – one day – yo
u’ll be able to forgive him? Do you think that’s possible? I’m not asking for him. I’m asking for me.’

  ‘God forgives us all,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not about God,’ he said. ‘It’s about you. As a human being. Do you truly think you’re capable of that kind of forgiveness?’

  She thought. The rain beat an irregular tattoo on the newspaper above her head. She said,

  ‘Yes, I believe I will. I believe one day I will. I believe that kind of forgiveness is possible. I couldn’t live if I didn’t. I don’t think any of us could. We make so many mistakes, we take so many wrong paths, we are so weak and the temptations are so strong. You read your Bible, Mr Spandau, and one of the things you realize is that we don’t get thrown into Hell. We just bury ourselves there, we fall through being weighed down by all the things we can’t manage to forgive, all the things we can’t let go of.’

  Spandau nodded.

  ‘Is this what you wanted to hear?’

  ‘It will do,’ he said.

  ‘Go home, Mr Spandau,’ she said. ‘Go back where you belong and take care of the things you love. The forgiveness will come. Sometimes it just takes a while. I’ve been waiting fifteen years. I expect I’ll have to wait a while longer, but I’m not so far away as I once was. I can tell you that.’

  She reached out, put her hand on his chest.

  ‘I will pray for you, Mr Spandau. But you go on now. You get on with your life and you let me get on with mine.’

  She turned, went back into the house. Spandau looked up and saw the boy and the priest watching him together from an upstairs window. The boy waved. Spandau waved back. Spandau went to his car and opened the trunk and removed the cardboard box. He went back to the gate and leaning over placed it just inside. Then he went back to his car and drove away. He imagined the boy and the priest and the woman looking out the window at the box sitting there in the rain. Maybe they’d come out now, maybe they’d wait until the rain had stopped. He thought they’d probably wait. He knew there was something wonderful about the box sitting there, full of possibilities, teasing them against their will.

  How long, Spandau asked himself, do you wait for forgiveness? She’d been working on it for fifteen years, more likely all her life. How long before you forgive yourself, how long before you allow others to forgive you? And what the hell are you supposed to do in the meantime?

  There was not, he realized, much in his life he had not fucked up. Dee was right, his life did seem to be little more than a series of betrayals. It was what he did best. You start out with the best of intentions but end up waylaid by your own nature. You think you’ve got a shot at being some kind of good man in a bad world but maybe this is just goddamned arrogance. What happens when it dawns on you that maybe you’re the shit everybody ought to be avoiding? I fucked up my marriage, I’m fucking up with Anna, I can feel that already slipping sideways. I left my best friend to die alone and in pain and then blamed him for it when I was just too self-absorbed to see. Now there are two men murdered that I’m responsible for and I don’t feel a thing, not a goddamned thing. This is what scares me. A good man would feel something but I don’t. Spandau envied the people in the house. Envied them their hope, envied their conviction, right or wrong, that it was still possible to live and love and somehow pass on through the horrible things we do to each other.

  What they’d find when they did come out and tear open the soggy box was a fire engine, old, a little rusty, the red paint more than a little faded, but built in an America when people still believed things ought to last. Spandau remembered the boy had been waiting for his own fire engine. Maybe he’d got it by now. It didn’t matter. Rusted and faded though it was, the small metal vehicle connected the boy to a past where things like truth and honor and family still seemed to mean something. It connected the boy to Spandau’s world, or at least the world he’d grown up in – the world he still carried with him even if he’d betrayed it. Maybe the boy would never know it, but Spandau would. Maybe Father Michael would too. He was a clever old bastard. He’d know damned well the gesture had to mean something. Maybe he’d know that Spandau had just passed on to the boy the best part of himself. And that it was, however pathetic, a gesture of hope.

  SEVENTY

  He drove all Sunday and reached Anna’s that night. There was nothing to say, and she was wise enough not to ask again. They hardly talked, though he found himself compelled to tell her over and over that he loved her. They made love and afterwards she could feel something desperate in the way he clung to her, the way some part of his body needed to touch her as if fearing she’d float away, when the truth is that it was him who was going.

  I’ve lost you, she thought. At least part of you anyway.

  He’d filled a small box with his belongings. Better to do it tonight, it would be harder in the morning.

  No, he wasn’t leaving her, he was just moving back into his own place.

  Yes, they were still a couple, they’d still see each other, they weren’t breaking up.

  Then why is it, she thought, that some part of you has gone and the rest is waiting to follow?

  ‘Will I see you tomorrow?’

  ‘There’s a lot I have to do,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you.’

  Oh god, she thought. Oh god.

  She let him go. Kissed him, walked him to the car. Waited until he was out of sight before she fell apart.

  Sank to the sidewalk and sat there crying.

  Pam came out of the house, went over to her sister, sat down next to her, and draped her arm round Anna’s shoulders.

  ‘He’s not worth it,’ said Pam.

  Anna reached up and gave her sister’s hand a gentle squeeze. ‘How long have we been doing this?’

  ‘What part?’

  ‘The part where they leave me and you tell me they’re not worth it.’

  Pam thought.

  ‘Your ninth birthday party. Larry Burrows kissed that little slut Sophie whatsername and you ran out and hid in the barn loft and threatened to burn it down. I brought you out a glass of Ovaltine and we ended up hanging out and dropping lit matches on the chickens. I was five.’

  ‘You’re lying this time, though.’

  ‘Yeah, pretty much,’ said Pam. ‘You didn’t tell him, did you.’

  ‘I don’t want it to be the reason he comes back. If he comes back.’

  ‘What happens if he doesn’t?’

  ‘I’ll have it anyway. I’ve had two abortions, both because the fathers were assholes and I didn’t feel I could love their offspring. David is maybe the most emotionally confused man I have ever met but he’s good and true and for the first time I want to keep at least a part of him no matter what.’

  Pam stood up. She held out her hand. Anna took it and struggled to her feet, grunting.

  ‘I feel like the Hindenburg already. I’d axe you to death right now for a glass of wine and a smoke.’

  ‘Come on, my little fertilized flower. I’ll make you a glass of Ovaltine. If we can find some poultry to victimize, so much the better.’

  They headed arm in arm to the house.

  ‘Best Actress Oscar, my ass,’ said Anna as they went inside. ‘If the bastards could only have seen me tonight.’

  SEVENTY-ONE

  On Monday morning Pookie, Leo, and Tina were in the office when Spandau got there. He wasn’t sure what he expected, but when he walked in it was like another business day, same old, same old. Casual greetings, they looked up from their work, said hello, put their heads back down. Better this way, he thought. Smooth transition, no muss no fuss, we’re all pros here. Pookie was even wearing a business suit.

  ‘You’ve got me,’ Spandau said. ‘Who are you today?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s just a suit.’

  He opened the door of his office and saw the candles, the rose petals scattered everywhere. They’d elevated his office chair on cinder blocks and draped it in gold-trimmed velvet, a makeshift version of an emperor’s throne. A cir
cle of laurel hung from the ceiling just above where his head would be. His desk was covered with food. The centerpiece was a small roast pig replete with apple in mouth. Tucked between the knuckles of one baked trotter was a card. ‘Welcome home, you redneck bastard. Julien.’

  ‘Ascend to your rightful throne, O Great Caesar!’ Pookie said from the door. A sheet was wrapped around her like a toga. Spandau climbed up into the chair. Leo and Tina came in, draped in togas as well, chanting, ‘Hail, Caesar!’ and bowing. They filed around the desk, stood beaming across at him.

  ‘We exist to serve your wishes, my liege,’ said Leo.

  ‘Shall I feed you sweetmeats from my own gentle hand?’ Tina asked seductively.

  ‘Peel me a grape,’ said Spandau.

  Tina popped a grape into his mouth. He clapped his hands.

  ‘Bring on the dwarves, freaks, and the dancing women,’ he commanded.

  ‘Oh,’ said Tina, ‘you mean business as usual then?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Leo and Tina peeled their robes, lined out, and shut the door behind them. Pookie remained.

  ‘You’re going to do this then? No kidding?’

  ‘Yep,’ he said.

  ‘Not that I’m not utterly ecstatic about it, but would you mind if I asked what settled it for you? Because when you walked in here today I was pretty sure it was General MacArthur bidding farewell to the troops.’

  ‘Because it’s there,’ said Spandau, leaning back in his chair and putting his feet on the desk. ‘Because a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Because I want to be able to enter my house justified.’

  Pookie glowed. She loved these games.

  ‘Okay, the first is George Mallory talking about Everest, why he wanted to climb it. The second is from High Noon but I think it might be a common misquotation, I have to look it up. That last one is Joel McCrea in Ride the High Country. I’ve always loved that line.’

  ‘Clever girl.’

  Spandau tossed her a grape. She popped it into her mouth, chewed thoughtfully. Then,

  ‘You don’t have a clue, do you?’ she said brightening. ‘It’s a completely emotional decision, isn’t it? You had no idea what you were going to do until just now.’