1985 - Stars and bars

by William Boyd

  Fifteen minutes later he announced he was going to make some coffee and would Bryant like some? A glass of milk, she said, and a cookie, not taking her eyes from the screen where angry hoodlums shot at each other from speeding cars.

  In the kitchen, he prepared the drinks. From his pocket he removed his sleeping pills and poured the powder from three capsules into the milk.

  ‘Henderson?’

  He looked round with a guilty start. It was Shanda. She glanced over her shoulder and toppled into the centre of the kitchen on her high heels. She leant against the table and gave her belly a heave, like a man adjusting a heavy pack.

  ‘Whacha doin’?’ she said.

  ‘Milk. For Bryant.’

  ‘Oh.’ She paused and flicked her wings of hair with the backs of her fingers. ‘You leaving tomorrow? Going to New York, Alma-May said.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He stirred Bryant’s milk as if that were what one always did with milk.

  ‘Can I come with you?’

  The clatter of the teaspoon against the glass rang like an alarm bell. Milk slopped onto the table.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘I have to get away, Henderson,’ she said in a rush. ‘I can’t stand it here. I got to get far away. Someplace like New York. I want to go along with you.’ Shanda said this fast but tonelessly, staring at the savage points of her high-heeled shoes.

  ‘Good God, Shanda,’ he blustered, appalled at this notion. ‘Don’t be absurd. I—I—I…I mean, of course you can’t come away with me.’

  ‘Of course I kahn?’ Her eyes widened with hope.

  ‘Can’t, kahn’t. You kahn’t.’ Desperation. ‘Kent. You kent come with me. You kent.’

  ‘Please, Henderson. I hate Freeborn. I hate the trailer, I hate the fuckin’ medical wadding all over the place. I hate the smell of mouthwash. I hate the—’

  ‘But-Jesus-what about the baby?’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said darkly. ‘I’m not happy here. That’s all that matters.’ She touched his arm. ‘Please!’

  ‘No, Shanda. No, no, no.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. No way.’ He picked up his coffee and Bryant’s spiked milk. The irony did not escape him: drugging a reluctant companion, spurning the eager.

  ‘Just think about it, please? Think about it some more? I just have to get far away, that’s all. You’re the only person I know who lives far away.’ She followed him to the door. ‘Don’t say anything now. I’ll talk to you in the morning.’ She clattered off back to her trailer.

  Thank Christ, he thought, I’ll be long gone. He felt a thrill of excitement about his planned abduction. He went through to the sitting room and told Bryant of Shanda’s request.

  ‘She’ll do anything to get away from Freeborn.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘God, does she hate that guy.’ She took a large gulp of her milk. ‘Mng. Is this fresh?’

  ‘From the carton.’

  ‘Probably yak milk or something.’ She drank the rest and munched her biscuit. A few minutes later she looked at her watch. ‘I guess Duane’s not coming tonight. I was hoping you and him could have a talk. So you could tell Mom more about him.’

  ‘Shame. Perhaps I’ll catch him in the morning.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’m sacking out.’ She got up. ‘See you.’

  ‘Sleep well.’

  After she had gone he sat on in front of the television. He wrote a brief note to Cora explaining his hasty and unorthodox departure and giving her his New York address, should she ever feel inclined to visit, while he was still in the country.

  After midnight, he switched out all the lights and went softly upstairs. He slipped the note beneath Cora’s door. He paused outside Gage’s rooms. One last look at the paintings. He tested the door. Locked. Freeborn had secured his property already.

  He crept around the passageway. Beckman was away too. He went into Bryant’s room. She was snoring slightly, her mouth slack, drool dampening the pillow.

  In his own room he made sure everything was ready for a prompt departure and lay down fully clothed on his bed to wait. For once insomnia proved a blessing; there was no danger he would fall asleep.

  He felt strangely calm. The act he was about to commit did not appear so outrageous in the setting of this bizarre household—de rigueur rather, almost run-of-the-mill. Everything had gone wrong, but from somewhere he seemed to be deriving the capacity to act.

  The hours moved by with their usual heel-dragging lethargy. He watched a wand of moonlight move across the wall and transform itself into the replica of a window, widening slowly, and then slowly begin to thin again. He got up for a drink of water and listened to the dark house, replete with night noises: clicks, creaks, the settings and stirrings of old timber. A platoon of burglars could move about without fear of detection.

  He paced about his room in stockinged feet trying to imagine the future and confer on its prospects some dim allure. There was—surely, certainly, incontestably—room for another monograph on Odilon Redon? Time indeed for a reassessment of this exotic minor artist, with his fantasy and sentimentality. Sentiment was in vogue again, he thought he remembered someone saying, or about to be in vogue. If he could tap that vein…?

  When he got back to New York, he told himself, lying again on the bed, supine, head resting on the cradle of his interlocked fingers, he was going to be quiet and dignified. People—Beeby, Melissa, Irene—could rail at and abuse him as they saw fit (he checked his watch, just after three) and he would smile sadly and keep his own counsel. He would not be provoked; he would remain grave, sober, sagacious…The star and moonlit replica of the window pane had acquired a faint peachy hue in the bottom two quadrants. A prefiguring of dawn. The light seemed to flicker and shift. He rubbed his eyes. A faint but sinuous ripple appeared, as if a muslin curtain had been stirred by a breeze.

  Curious, he got up and went to the window. At the very foot of the silver garden a bonfire was burning. Quite a large fire too, he saw, gilding the trees and bushes with highlights of orange. He couldn’t hear the noise of the fire and for a moment all he registered was the scene’s strange and disturbing beauty.

  Then he saw a broad-backed figure move in front of the flames: a thickset, masculine shape. Then, his eyes beginning to ache from the effort of focusing, it seemed to shimmer into a slim elfin one. He caught another glimpse of the wraith before it retired to the shadows. Henderson felt suddenly frightened. What the hell was going on? What was burning there?

  He pulled on his shoes. He had to investigate, if only to see whether this worrying bonfire and its attendant might prove any obstacle to his own plans, due—he looked at his watch again—to be set in motion very shortly. He crept out of his room: all was dark, and, if not silent, as inactive as before.

  He stepped carefully through the kitchen and out onto the back porch. Now he could hear the faint crackle of the flames. Allowing his eyes to become adjusted to the dark he waited some thirty seconds or so before advancing into the garden. The nail sickle of a new moon and the congregation of stars obligingly lit his way. He edged tentatively along an overgrown alley, pausing from time to time to listen to other noises, staring at the flickering flames to see if the mysterious stoker still tended his pyre. All he could hear apart from the- electric trill of the crickets was the sound of his own breathing and the endless surge and flow of the blood in his ears.

  He crept closer, moving from bush to shrub, from tree trunk to tree trunk. Then he saw a tall oddly pear-shaped figure step in front of the fire. Henderson hid some twelve or fifteen feet away. The flames illuminated a heavy expressionless face. Henderson knew instantly who it was. He stepped casually out of the bushes.

  ‘Hi there, Duane.’

  Duane turned round unconcernedly: ‘Yeah? Who is it?’

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  Duane peered at him. ‘Mr Dores, yeah? Hi.’ He had dark hair, parted in the middle and falling to his collar. His face had a stubborn, prognathous—but othe
rwise inoffensive—aspect. He was carrying a lot of extra weight, but his height and big frame compensated for the excess.

  ‘Good to meet you, sir. An’ hey, listen. I’ll get your car tomorrow. I promise.’

  ‘Great.’ Henderson felt untypically calm. He looked at the fire. Its fuel seemed to gleam and glint strangely.

  ‘What are you burning?’

  ‘Oh. Mr Gage’s pictures.’

  Henderson felt his adam’s apple swell to block his throat. He knelt down. Testing first with licked fingertips he slid a semi-charred stick from the fire’s edge. It had been a thin finely worked section of frame, some of the dull gold moulding was still unburnt. Using it as a poker he prodded at the contents of the fire. Frames, nothing but frames. Some intact, some broken. Empty frames with a few crisp, blackened shreds of canvas adhering to them.

  ‘Why have you burnt them?’ he asked quietly, not wanting to provoke or cause offence.

  ‘He told me to.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mr Gage.’

  ‘When? Why?’

  Duane put his hands in his pockets and gazed at the fire. ‘Well, you know, after he had his kind of attack…Beckman took Monika home and went for the Doc. I picked Mr Gage up and carried him back to his room. I felt kinda bad seein’ as how he’d been shouting at me, and all. That it was sorta on account of me, like…’ Duane paused.

  ‘He was, ah, you know, breathin’ all sorts of wheezes and gasps and he says, ‘Duane, you got to do one thing for me.’ I says, ‘Sure thing, Mr Gage, what’s that?’ An’ he says, ‘You gotta take those paintings off of the walls and burn ‘em. Burn ‘em all. And don’t let Freeborn or Cora or Beckman see you doing it. Don’t let anybody know.’ So I said OK, good as done. And then he said swear. So I swore on the Bible and my mother’s head. He told me to do it as soon as I could…’ Duane kicked aimlessly at a jutting frame.

  ‘And then, I guess, he died. Though I couldn’t be sure. Then Beckman and the Doc came in.’

  Henderson picked up another section of frame. Holding it to the fire he could read the careful copperplate of its inscription. ‘Edouard Vuillard (1886-1940).’ He tossed it back on the fire. So much for the Gage collection. Smoke and cinders.

  ‘But why did he ask you to burn them?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t know, Mr Dores. Maybe he didn’t have any more use for them seein’ as he was dying. Maybe he didn’t want for anybody else to have them. They were his own, sorta thing. Not anyone else’s.’ Duane spread his hands. ‘Listen, I’m just doing what he toP me, you know? I swore I would.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Henderson rubbed his forehead.

  ‘Mr Dores?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did, uh, Bryant like kinda say anything to you? About us?…Not you an’ me. Me an’ Bryant. I’d sure like to talk with you—’

  ‘Let’s talk about it in the morning,’ Henderson said. He was suddenly reminded of his kidnapping plans. He had to keep Duane out of the way.

  ‘I think I’ll get back to bed,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘I’ll just stay on here. Make sure it all burns away. Check it don’t spread, sorta thing.’

  ‘Good idea. In fact you’d better make absolutely sure. Be very careful.’

  ‘Don’t worry, sir. I’ll make sure.’

  ‘See you in the morning.’

  ‘Sure, and hey, I’ll get your car back. Sure thing. Nice talkin’ to you, Mr Dores.’ Duane held out his big hand.

  Henderson shook it, smiled, and walked quickly back into the house. In his room when he bent down to pick up his bag he thought he would faint. He paddled air onto his face with stiff hands. He felt as though some tiny but vicious fist were pounding him repeatedly in the chest. His legs trembled dramatically. Easy, boy. He summoned up one of Eugene Teagarden’s breathing drills, flaring his nostrils, voiding his lungs. Nymphs and shepherds. In, out. Come away. Inhale. Exhale. Cough. Come come come co-ome away.

  Then, marginally composed, he crept into Bryant’s room.

  Speed was crucial now. He switched on the light. Bryant slept on, mouth open, still snoring. Her clothes lay scattered all over the room. He thought of trying to gather them into her suitcase but decided there wasn’t time. Anyway, the girl had enough clothes as it was. He picked up a pair of green jeans and a yellow sweatshirt. He would simply pull them on over her pyjamas…

  He knew, or rather he thought he knew from their effect on him, what the consequences of taking three sleeping capsules were. One was not comatose and could be woken. And from there one could stay awake with some prompting, could walk, even talk a bit, just like someone who—logically enough—had been roused from deep sleep. The difference was that the sensation of bleary baffled consciousness never departed, as it did from a normal sleeper, normally roused; rather it prevailed for a further twenty-four hours. Or at least that had been his experience. He remembered his own stumbling, blunt day after he had taken the pills. His head turned quicker than his eyes. His hands were composed of ten calloused thumbs. His bottom lip grew oddly heavy, irresistibly inclined to hang free from its partner. Saliva pooled in every oral cavity, causing embarrassing spillage, or else constant loud draining noises. After he had spent a couple of hours in the office like this, Beeby had ordered him home. Now Henderson was counting on Bryant being similarly inconvenienced.

  ‘Bryant, ’ he hissed, and whipped the sheet back. He whipped it up again and turned away, one hand on his mouth, one across his forehead. The fist started punching again. He looked stupidly about the room. She was naked.

  Bloody thoughtless bitch! he swore petulantly. He saw her pyjamas crumpled by the bed. He rubbed his hands across his face as if he were washing it. His palms were warmed by the heat of his brow and glowing cheeks. There was nothing for it. He prayed Duane was still diligently supervising the fire. He pulled down the sheet again.

  He felt guilt and shame swill through his body as—despite stringent moral injunctions to the contrary—he stared at Bryant’s nude body in fascinated curiosity. The firm pointed breasts, the soft pale nipples, the skin stretched tight over the staves of her rib cage, the etiolated trace of a bikini bottom, the oddly touching, thin, vertical stripe of pubic hair…He had to wake her up. He sat beside her. But first—evil Henderson—he covered a breast for a second with a hot shivering palm.

  ‘Bryant. Wake up.’ He shook her, grabbed her wrists and hauled her into a sitting position.

  ‘Wha…?’

  He pulled the sweatshirt over her slubbed blinking face, tugged it down over those accusing breasts. Working like a harassed mother—he concertina-ed the legs of the jeans and directed her boneless feet through the holes. Tug. Up to the knees. Keep the eyes on the toenails: chipped and scarred with aubergine varnish.

  ‘Wha’s happ…’—swallow—‘…ning, Hndrson?’

  ‘We’re going.’ Tug, heave. ‘Lie down. Make a bridge.’

  ‘Wha?’

  ‘Make a bridge.’ He slid a hand, palm uppermost, between the warm sheet and her warm buttocks and lifted. She held it there. Mohican crest. He pulled.

  ‘OK.’ There just remained the zip on the fly. He was disgusted to notice a straining behind his own.

  ‘Hold it.’ Zip. Soft cilia brushed the knuckle of his forefinger. Then he pushed his hand down the left sleeve of her sweatshirt, located her left wrist and pulled it through. Right sleeve. She was dressed. He licked his lips and tasted salt. A palm wiped across face came away slick and shiny.

  ‘Hennerson. I wanna go…sleep.’ Her eyeballs rolled, white in the sockets for a second.

  He found some shoes, flat creased gold moccasins, and slipped them on her feet. Then he had a flash of inspiration. He tore a leaf out of his notebook and wrote in capital letters:

  DEAR DUANE,

  IT’S NO GOOD. I DON’T LOVE YOU ENOUGH TO GO AWAY WITH YOU. I’VE GONE BACK TO NEW YORK WITH HENDERSON. IT’S ALL OVER. SORRY.

  BRYANT.

  He couldn’t fret over composition or style. H
e just hoped Duane could read. He folded the note, wrote ‘DUANE’ on the front, and left it prominently on the pillow.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to Bryant. ‘We’re going to meet Duane. Don’t make a sound.’

  He took her hand and led her out of the room. She came docilely. She lurched and staggered a bit and once said ‘Duane’ in a loud clear voice but they made their way down the stairs without being discovered and without too much difficulty. Henderson unbolted the front door and stepped outside onto the porch. There was a faint dawn-lightening in the sky by now, the stars were almost gone. His brick still stood in place of his car: even if the car had been there he realized he couldn’t have used it. He had to leave with maximum stealth. And he was running a little late. He was counting on Duane not visiting Bryant’s room until after breakfast.

  With his case in one hand and the other on her elbow he guided Bryant down the steps. The large bulk of Freeborn’s trailer was completely dark. He felt the sweat cool on his face.

  ‘See Duane?’ Bryant mumbled.

  ‘Shh. Yes.’ Goodbye, he breathed at the Gage mansion, goodbye forever.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  ‘Henderson? Is that you?’

  He whirled round almost dropping his case with shock and surprise.

  ‘Whatcha doin’?’ Shanda stood at the foot of the trailer steps, wearing a pale grey dressing gown.

  ‘We’re getting out of here,’ he whispered.

  ‘I heard noises earlier. Were you movin’ around?’

  ‘No.’ It was probably Duane. ‘Goodbye, Shanda.’

  ‘Hey, wait on a minute. I’m coming too.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Henderson, I can just go right on back in there and wake Freeborn. I’m sure he’d like for to know what you’re all doin’ out here.’

  ‘Oh God, Jesus H. Christ. OK. Anything. But hurry, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I’ll be two minutes.’

  He felt his sinuses thicken and clog and his eyes screw up of their own accord. It could have been a sneeze but he knew it was tears of frustration. He shook his head angrily.