by T. M. Wright
"Us?" I asked.
She smiled pleadingly up at me like a small child. "He's done left us all alone," she said again, and her smile faded. "Who are you?"
"I'm Abner's friend," I said.
"Are you gonna"—gawna—"leave us alone, too?"
"Us?" I repeated. "Who's 'us'?"
She was several feet away from me but I could feel cold air coming from her, as if from an open refrigerator. "All of us," she said. "I'm Myrna. This is Stephanie, this is Jodie, this is Max," and they appeared one by one, like lost children, behind her as she spoke their names. Stephanie looked to be Myrna's age, but was very tall, and very thin, as if she were anorectic, and Jodie was midway in height between Myrna and Stephanie, her face flat and round, like the face of a pig, the dark eyes small, close-set, Squinting; Max was gargantuan, and vaguely malevolent-looking, like a bouncer at a nightclub where everyone usually behaves themselves.
"I can't help you," I said, "I'm sorry."
"We don't want no help," Myrna drawled. "We just don't wanna be left alone." I saw then that she was still and stiff, that when she spoke, only her lips moved.
"I can't help you," I said again. My voice sounded peaky from fear.
"We don't want no help, we just don't wanna be left alone, don't"--doan—"leave us alone."
Max picked it up. "Doan leave us alone," he growled. Then Stephanie followed: "Doan leave us alone," and Jodie, who looked like a pig, but whose voice was sweet and high-pitched: "Doan leave us alone," all of them still and stiff, so only their mouths moved.
It became a chorus, a refrain, "Doan leave us alone." Their voices blended into something sweet and sour, something that was at once pleading and cajoling and demanding and futile: "Doan leave us alone. Doan leave us alone."
"But you are alone!" I screamed. And as soon as the words left me I wanted desperately to snatch them back. "I'm sorry," I whispered. Their mouths stuck open; their gazes were wide, accusing, and hurt. Then, like raindrops hitting parched earth, they dissipated and were gone.
I went and sat shakily at the kitchen table. "Maybe I'll go back to Bangor," I whispered. "It's nice in Bangor. People are simple and happy there." Sure, I thought. Leslie and I could get married and we could go to Bangor together. We could have a little house, a few kids, some cats and dogs, a garden, a sump pump, an ant problem, menus made up a week in advance (meat loaf on Monday, spaghetti on Tuesday, Welsh rarebit on Wednesday). We'd have each other. And Bangor was where it would all happen, because Bangor was what I knew. It fit me. It was like an old sweater. But I walked very lightly on these possibilities because, like expanses of spring ice, they were insubstantial and could crack and expose the dark water beneath, where Abner was. Soon, I realized, he would push himself panic-stricken from one thin patch to another—where the sunlight shone through—in a desperate search for air and life.
And that's where I had to come in for his sake. I had to punch a hole in the ice and jump in and pull him out of the water. Or drown in it, too.
~ * ~
I poked my head back into the man-size hole in the hallway wall where Art DeGraff had been held prisoner. I stepped into the hole and stood inside the wall, trying, I think, to call up the same awful feelings of claustrophobia and aloneness that Art had to have felt. But that was impossible. The wall was open for me; it had been closed for him. I stepped out of the wall, ran my hand along the jagged furring strips surrounding the hole, and wondered if Art himself had somehow smashed out of the wall—like Superman--or if someone else had gotten him out. Which is when I remembered what Abner had told me on the telephone. "Someone got him out. Someone sprung him."
I whispered, trying for a smile, "I'm going to take my balls and go home," but my smile trembled, and my head whirled. Then I began to methodically search the beach house for something that might tell me where Abner had gone.
~ * ~
I began in the small, sparsely furnished damp room I'd slept in a week earlier. There was a wrought-iron twin bed in that room, a small wood-framed picture some anonymous countryside scene, faded and pinkish green—above the bed, a battered oval nightstand alongside the bed. I opened the one drawer of the nightstand; it looked empty, but it also looked to be too shallow by half for the depth of the nightstand. I felt around inside. My fingers hit what I guessed was a picture frame keeping the drawer from opening all the way. I pulled the frame down, opened the drawer, took the frame out. It had a five by seven black-and-white photograph in it of Art DeGraff--I recognized his mannequin like handsomeness—and a stunning black woman dressed in a very brief light-colored bikini. They were standing together on the bow of a cabin cruiser. The woman was Phyllis. I took the photograph from the frame and studied the back of it. Alongside the Eastman Kodak Company logo was a date that indicated the photo had been taken two and a half years earlier. I turned the picture around again and studied it more closely. Because there was a curtain over the room's only window, the light was not good, so I pulled the curtain open and held the photograph up to the daylight. My gaze lingered on Phyllis, on the breasts that promised to come spilling wonderfully out of that skimpy top, on the marvelous flat belly, the smooth dark thighs, the hint of a pubic shadow beneath the equally skimpy bikini bottoms. And when I looked at Art's face, I saw a kind of Look what I've got here! grin on it.
But as I held the photograph closer to the window, I saw that that Look what I've got here! grin was not a grin, but a grimace of fear, and I said to myself, Well, of course, this photograph never did show him grinning, although I knew it had, and then I said to myself, It's the way the light's falling on the picture; it makes him look frightened, but I knew that that was wrong, too.
I put the photograph back in the frame, and the frame back in the drawer of the nightstand. Then I noticed for the first time what I supposed was a closet door in the wall opposite the bed. I went to the door and tried it; it was locked. I took my wallet out, got a VISA card, and tried to slip it between the door and the frame to spring the bolt. It didn't work. I stuffed the card in my shirt pocket. I tried the knob again. Nothing. I decided to take the hinges off the door. For that I'd need a screwdriver, or something like a screwdriver. I searched my pockets and found a couple of dimes, a quarter, five pennies. I shoved one of the dimes beneath the flange of the pin on the top hinge. The pin wouldn't budge. "Dammit," I whispered. I stared at the door for a good half minute. At last I decided that instead of taking the hinges off the door it probably would matter to no one if I bashed it in. I liked that idea. I needed to engage in a bit of mayhem at that house—I needed to exercise some control over it.
I stepped back from the door and gave it a hard kick. Nothing. I felt a sudden sharp pain in my big toe and I supposed sickeningly that I'd broken it. "Damn it all!" I whispered. I turned angrily to the bed, tore the mattress and box spring off, and found beneath it a half-dozen sturdy wooden slats. I grabbed one, turned again. And saw that the closet door was standing open a good three inches.
I stepped forward, put my hand on the knob, hesitated, and yanked the door open. I peered in.
It was a large walk-in closet, and except for some dust mice on the floor, and one yellowing, crackly page from the Leisure section of the New York Times on one of the five floor-to-eye-level shelves, it was empty.
My search of the house had just begun, and yet, somehow, I felt as if the rest of my search, through all fourteen rooms, was going to be as futile and as frustrating as my search of this room had been. But that, I quickly realized, was only a kind of wearying combination of laziness and fear—it was a big place, after all, and whatever I might find in it would probably much rather be left alone—like the black widow spiders that hung out under people's porches, or rattlesnakes that sunned themselves on rocky hillsides—"Don't bother them," my dad used to say, "and they won't bother you."
I left the small bedroom and headed for the narrow enclosed stairs that led to the second floor. Abner had pointed toward those stairs the day before, after our picnic; "Not
hing up there, Sam," he told me. "Just smelly and cold up there," and I thought I could tell from the casual, offhand way he'd said it that it was true. Abner was never much of a liar. In Bangor, he tried gamely, but it was usually clear from the flickering of his eyelids and the way he shuffled his feet that he was lying. I like people like that—people who can't lie; I think it's a sign of character. It was, in fact, one of the things that kept Abner and me together in Bangor—the fact that he had character.
Now I realized that people can learn to lie.
So I started up the narrow enclosed stairway.
Improbably, it smelled of spaghetti sauce. I found that its dirty-with-age beige walls had names written on them variously in pen, pencil, crayon, even what looked like some kind of dark liquid (not blood; it was the wrong shade for blood). There was a "Tammy," a "Fred the Frog," a "Minerva G.," the initials, scrawled childishly in that dark liquid, "S.T.M," a "Victor Darling" (and I spent a moment or two trying to decide if that was actually the man's name or if, perhaps, his lover had written it there). "S.T.M." was lower on the wall. "Victor Darling," "Minerva G.," and some of the others were higher up.
I'd left the door open at the bottom of the stairway. The light switch didn't work, so the only light was what filtered up from the first floor. In that light, a kind of dim yellowish-green light, I thought I could see other names, much fainter than Victor Darling's and Minerva G.'s, et cetera. Names so faint, in fact, that I would not have seen them had I not stopped to look. I could read some of them—"Ransom" some-thing-or-other, "Lord Ali," which made me think, of course, of Muhammad Ali, a "Rebecca," a "Thomas Pillson." I guessed that there were two hundred or more names in that hallway and I supposed that they were the names of people who had lived in the house, that someone had long ago started a kind of tradition of signing the hallway if they lived in the house. So I stopped searched my pockets, came up with my house keys, and used one to scratch my name halfway up the wall, next to the name "Eli Wallberger," which had been done in fine, black block lettering that had faded nearly to invisibility.
It pleased me to see my name there, on that wall. Maybe it was the same kind of pleasure I'd gotten from trying to kick the closet door in—see this, feel this?!—I'm in control here!
And when I was done scratching my name into the plaster, I went up to the second floor.
TWENTY-FIVE
What struck me first about the second floor of the beach house were the colors. Someone had gone crazy with high-gloss lacquers—red, pink, green, yellow, purple; I could see no black, no white, no cream or beige, nothing neutral.
I stood at the top of the stairs, at the beginning of a very long hallway that had high ceilings and a number of tall, narrow, apparently unpainted doors. The colors were arranged in a hippie-ish pattern—"psychedelic" is the word—as if gallons of various bright-colored paints had been thrown willy-nilly into a very strong wind, frozen, then transferred to those walls. In the middle sixties a cousin who had painted her room like that had explained that it was "life art."
"Huh?" I'd said.
"Life art," she repeated, adjusting the hem of her granny dress. "You look at it and you say to yourself, ‘The person who did this is alive.' You know? This is the art of the living."
~ * ~
It was cold in that hallway, as Abner said it would be. And there was a vague, indefinable smell wafting about. Every now and then my nose caught it briefly and I said to myself, Yes, that's the smell of . . . but I could never finish the thought because by then the smell would be gone. The phrase mown grass comes to mind now.
~ * ~
I counted eight doors in that hallway: three on the left and five on the right. They looked as if they might have been oak, but it was not until I screwed up some courage and looked closely at one that I realized it was covered with an oak-print Contact paper that was bubbly and torn in spots and peeling at the edges. As tacky as it was, it merely carried on with the tacky theme that the psychedelic walls had begun.
It was very quiet. I hadn't expected that. I'd expected . . . devils, I think. I'd expected that some gateway to the Other Side was being hidden up there and when I looked too closely I'd find it and unleash a whole crowd of drooling, gelatinous monsters.
I was hoping for monsters. Because with monsters, at least it's clear right from the start who your enemies are.
I knocked on the door I'd looked closely at; I got no answer. I knocked again. Then I tried the knob. It turned. I let it rotate back. I hadn't expected the room to be unlocked.
"Hello," I called again.
I heard from within the room, "Who's there?" It was a woman's voice, and it surprised the hell out of me because it was so human, so annoyed-sounding. "If you're selling something, I'm not buying."
"No," I managed.
"What?"
I stepped closer to the door. "No, I'm not selling anything." My voice sounded pathetic, gurgling. I cleared my throat. "I'm not selling anything. I'm looking for someone."
I heard her curse. I heard what sounded like a chair being pushed back on a hardwood floor, then the sound of footfalls. Moments later the door was pulled open and a tall, handsome middle-aged woman dressed in a long green satin robe appeared. She pursed her lips. "And who are you?" she said.
"Sam Feary," I answered.
She nodded once, casually. "Yes. Abner's friend. I was wondering when you'd show up." Her annoyance seemed to have changed to resignation. She had a square face and shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair which she wore full around her head. Her hazel eyes were large, and expressive of much living—they were the eyes, I thought, of someone who has seen quite a lot and knows with grim certainty that she will see much more. She had a habit of pursing her lips often. At first I thought it was the result of her annoyance; later I grew to realize that it was a sort of nervous habit. "I suppose you have to come in, don't you?" she went on, and gestured vaguely toward the room.
"Do you live here?" I asked.
She smiled wearily. “I live where I have to," and she turned and went into the room. I followed.
~ * ~
She sat in a very large white Queen Anne armchair. She looked aristocratic in it, especially in that long green satin robe. It seemed to please her to sit, as if she were tired from her little walk to the door and back. She nodded to indicate a love seat to my left, near the door. The love seat was covered in a worn flower-print-on-white fabric and had dark stains at the arms. I sat in it, and glanced quickly around the room; there were several hundred books in a tall dark oak bookcase between two windows, some knickknacks in a white plastic étagère near the love seat, and on a tall thin mahogany end table next to her chair, a battered, dirt-smeared softball.
"My name is Madeline," the woman said pointedly, as if the fact of her name were something that hinged not only on the rest of our conversation but also on everything that concerned me at the house.
"Madeline," I said, and added, "Yes, I've heard of you."
She pursed her lips. "Through Abner, I assume."
"Yes. Through Abner."
She nodded. "I'm no one." I could tell from her tone that she meant it. "I'm only a middle-aged former housewife whose son has ... "—a small, quivering grin came and went quickly on her mouth"... has passed on. We'll be reunited someday. I know that. I have no doubt of it. It's as clear and true to me as gravity. But, until then, what I have chosen to do . . ." She stopped, thought a moment. "No, that's incorrect: What I have been forced to do, Mr. Feary, is to sit here in this . . . this throne—it is something like a throne, isn't it? And it isn't very comfortable either; it puts my backside to sleep, so when I get up and try to walk around, Lord—I look like a goddamn drunken sailor." She stopped, apparently having lost her train of thought. She went on after a moment, pursing her lips again, "What I have been forced to do, Mr. Feary, is to try and dissuade people like you from doing the abominably stupid things that people like you invariably end up doing." Another quick, quivering grin. "So humor me, won't yo
u?"
She looked and sounded like Maude from the old sitcom of the same name, the kind of woman who is very easy to talk to, but hard as hell to contradict, the kind of woman who makes no bones of the fact that she is the bearer of wisdom and that those around her are merely the bearers of sweet ignorance. There was no overt manifestation of ego in this. Only truth, as she saw it.
I started to say something about the house, about the cold and the smells and the bizarre things that happened in it, and she held her hand up to stop me: "I have a little speech, Mr. Feary. When I have delivered it, and you have absorbed it, as I am certain you will"—her voice was dripping with sarcasm—"then you can say whatever it is you have to say, and we can both go about our business as if we never met." She stopped, apparently as a cue for me to settle down and listen; so I did.
"Good," she said. "Thank you. You're much easier to talk to than your friend." She crossed her legs and leaned forward in the chair with her hands on her knees. "This is my speech, Mr. Feary. Listen closely:
"Mind your own p's and q's." She smiled thinly.
After several moments of silence, I said, "Yes. Continue."
She said, "I'll bet you can't tell me where that comes from? That phrase. 'Mind your own p's and q’s.’”
"Sorry," I said.
"Printers used it," she said. "It has something to do, you know, with the fact that the p's and the q's are the same, only reversed, and I guess it was easy to put a p into a q box by mistake."
"That's your speech?" I asked.