“They do that, you know,” Brenda said, falling in step beside him.
He knew.
“They figure you’ve done your time.”
He knew that too.
Reach a certain time, the mind and the body and the will must go. Must go. As if it were a law. It didn’t matter the age, either; when they didn’t want you, didn’t believe they needed you, it didn’t matter.
Grey hair.
Liver spots.
A slight stoop at the shoulders when gravity suggested you’d been born too damn tall.
Twinge in the joints even when the weather’s good.
Here’s your hat, Kayman, what’s your hurry.
He glanced across the street, to a house tucked beneath large maples. Something was there, on the lawn. As the drizzle became a light shower, hissing carefully through the leaves, something was there.
Someone.
“What the hell is thatr” he demanded when he stopped.
No answer.
Brenda was gone.
But it was there, and there was one on the sidewalk, near the last comer. Shimmering as the rain passed through it and, at the same time, giving it vague shape.
A dark figure, but not black; transparent enough to see the people hurrying now down Centre Street, but substantial enough to make its presence known.
He backed away, turned, and saw another one on the corner across the road.
Standing there.
Just . . . standing.
they came
Short quick breaths then as he tried to decide how much of it was real, how much simple distortions in the air.
Another one, behind a low hedge.
Standing.
He hurried, wanted to run, felt his legs crying for a speed they were unable to deliver.
Another one, on a porch.
It walked down the stairs.
Shimmers.
Not quite shadows.
Trying to see all of them at once forced him to slow down before he collided with a tree; his left hand waved at them, shooing them weakly. At the intersection he crossed over without looking, and a car had to swerve around him, horn screaming, driver cursing, and he stumbled after it for several steps, lips moving in an apology and unable to find the words.
By a mailbox, a small one.
Standing.
The light rain rolling off it, almost but not quite giving it a face.
He stubbed his toe on the curb, nearly fell, ran a few paces before slowing to a limp, a hand tight against his stomach. Blood hissed in his ears as the rain hissed and tires hissed and his breath hissed between his teeth.
He was supposed to be somewhere.
Blinking away the raindrops didn’t help. Wiping a hand across his matted hair didn’t help. Moaning aloud didn’t help.
One sat on a tire swing — it didn’t have a face, and the swing didn’t move.
Where was he supposed to be?
The guy in the bar — what the hell was his name? — he might help, but Kayman didn’t know where he lived; and even if he did, he wasn’t sure he could find it. The houses all looked alike, all of them old, all of them darkening as the shower increased, all of them without light as the afternoon lost its sun, all of them sitting back there like animals waiting in the high grass for something to come along to feed them for the night.
Behind him there were four, walking hand in hand, the rain drawing them, clothing still too blurry to have lines.
One stood in the middle of the street.
When he turned away, one stood not three feet away.
He screamed softly and ran.
It had no face, but he had seen lips moving.
He could see right through it, but it wasn’t a ghost.
He slid sharply on a wet leaf, right leg jerking out, something pulling in his groin as he skipped to catch up and keep from falling. He whimpered. His shirt molded itself to his chest and back, pulling him down at the shoulders, running water over his pants that added a hundred pounds to the weight he carried. Water sloshed in his shoes.
He ran.
As best he could, he ran.
Help me, Estelle, Jesus God, help me.
Ran.
Shapes and shadows and indistinct outlines walked on.
Estelle?
Electricity traveled along a wire inside his arm, sped across the top of his chest, and vanished somewhere in the vicinity of his heart.
He cried out.
And ran on.
You’re killing yourself, Kayman, Jesus, you’re killing yourself
A boy in a baseball cap rode past him on a bike, whistling.
The thump of windshield wipers on a car idling at the corner before pulling away.
He smiled and showed his teeth. He had liked the rain at one time in his life, liked to walk in it, get wet with it, take a good long hot shower after it and cuddle with Estelle on the couch and listen to it beat helplessly against the roof, glide in trails and ladders down the panes, fill the gutters and roll the acorns away.
One stood in a puddle near a storm drain.
Faceless.
Darker, indefinite form filling in drop by drop.
Another line of electric fire finally slowed him down while he searched the rain for someone he knew, someplace he knew, arms hanging at his sides. Shambling zigzag across the sidewalk, unable anymore to pick his feet up.
Car horns.
A pickup swinging around a corner as he reached it, splashing him, the passenger in the cab waving a quick hey, we’re sorry, old man before it vanished into the rain.
Into the twilight that arrived several hours too soon.
He nearly fell off the curb, nearly tripped up the other side, staring straight ahead, mouth open, water dripping from his lower lip, his eyebrows, his earlobes, the tips of his fingers twitching by his sides.
Electric fire.
I’m going to die.
Falling at last against a slick telephone pole and laying his cheek against the wood, sobbing harshly, swallowing, praying someone would find him and stop, take his hand, lead him home, Jesus God, he was an old man, he didn’t deserve to die like this, he wanted to go home, wanted his bed, wanted to go home, Estelle, for god’s sake, please come and take me home.
One stood in front of him. Watching.
He tried to wave it away, but he couldn’t lift his arm.
Watching.
Without a face.
He tried to ask it who it was, what it was, but there were only stutters and moans and a slow shake of his head that seemed to free him from the pole, and he stumbled on, knees bent, shoulders sagging forward, turning slowly like a poorly hanged figure spinning slowly in the wind, turning until he recognized a lawn ornament just ahead. A brown deer, lying in the grass, facing the street.
“Oh god,” he whispered. “Oh god, please let it be.”
When he came abreast of it, he stopped, swayed, stared at the familiar Cape Cod with the plaster dwarf beside the porch steps and waited for something to take it away, blow it out of reach, tell him it was only a rain mirage.
It remained.
He grinned.
He pushed at the air with both hands to get him moving again, two more houses down; all he had to do was get two more houses down.
He knew he had made it when he saw Ronnie standing in the middle of the street, untouched by the rain, defined by the rain, hands clasped at her belly, staring straight ahead.
“Go away,” he said, wheezing, falling into a fit of coughing that propelled him up the drive to the steps he managed to trip on only once, to the porch where he fell into the nearest chair and closed his eyes, hands over his face, smelling the rain and his sweat and the sour stench of his fear.
Not stirring when the screen door opened, or when he heard footsteps on the floor,
“Where the hell have you been.?”
He couldn’t answer Norma, and didn’t want to. He was home. He was safe. Nothing could touch him now.
&nbs
p; “Damn, are you okay?”
The cold made him rigid save for the movement of his palms over his face, up and down, only an inch either way, up and down, drying himself off, hiding the rain shadows, hiding Ronnie.
“Jesus.”
She went back inside. Voices. Footsteps. The screen door — goddamn, he’d fix that damn thing first thing in the damn morning — and a dry towel being worked over his hair.
“I was scared,” Estelle said, though her hands were firm. “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”
He mumbled something into his hands.
“We tried everywhere, even the Ring, but you weren’t there.”
His legs began to shake, and he couldn’t control them.
“Norma said you’d just gone for a walk, we could wait for you here.”
Hair pulled; she wasn’t happy. He winced and lowered his hands, gripped the armrests tightly, and when his head was yanked back, looked into her eyes. They were red, puffy; she’d been crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean . . . I’m sorry.”
She dropped a second towel into his lap, and he used it to dry his hands and wipe ineffectually at his shirt.
“She’s dead,” Norma said, and fresh tears wet her cheeks.
“Huh?”
She tossed the towel away and grabbed a handful of hair. “Damn you, she’s dead! And where the hell were you?” She snapped his head back, forward, back again, until he grabbed her wrists, but he couldn’t stop her.
“Dead!”
His head hit the wall.
“Dead! Where the hell were you?”
His head hit the wall.
He couldn’t stop her.
“Bastard, where the hell were you?”
He couldn’t stop her, he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t bring himself to try to hit her, so his head struck the wall again and there were lights that danced in the falling rain, music that full with the water from the eaves, electric fire in his wrists and chest until Norma pulled her away and held her close, rubbing her back, almost rocking her in place.
“What . . . ?” Kayman closed his eyes, but the lights were only worse.
“That doctor friend of yours, Sholcroft?”
He nodded, and winced, and couldn’t move his arms.
“Not an hour ago, they found her car out on Chancellor, near the college.”
Oh god, he thought, and felt his own tears.
“A boulder.”
Oh Jesus.
Estelle broke away from Norma’s embrace and ran into the house, wailing, cursing him, cursing God, incongruously cursing each of her children by name.
Norma wouldn’t meet his gaze; he was surprised to see she was embarrassed. “She wanted you here. Estelle, that is. The cops called because your name was on that emergency card in her wallet.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“Instant, they said.”
It’s never instant, he wanted to tell her. It doesn’t make any difference how it is, it’s never instant.
“You okay?” Gruff again, protecting Estelle.
He dared not nod, could not shrug.
“So where the hell were you?” she asked quietly, without accusation.
“Lost,” was what he said when he could finally speak without sobbing.
She didn’t respond.
He didn’t explain.
The rain in pale drops from the gutters.
“You better get out of those clothes, Kayman. Estelle doesn’t need you sick on top of everything else.”
His fault, he thought; he had driven her away with his madness, and she had driven into a rock. And now Estelle, terrified and needing him, and he hadn’t been there either, too busy fleeing from demons that didn’t exist for anyone but him.
He leaned forward and stared blindly at the street, at the storm.
When finally he stood, Norma was gone. No matter. It was Estelle he had to see, talk to, explain things to.
The door made no sound when he opened it and went inside, the stairs didn’t creak when he climbed them and hurried down the hall to their bedroom. “Better change,” he said as he walked in. “Gonna catch my d — pneumonia, if I’m not careful.” He walked straight to his closet and reached in for a clean shirt, his free hand lightly rubbing his chest, and freezing him when he realized the shirt he wore was dry. “Well,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “guess I was out there longer than —”
She was gone. “Estelle?”
Not anywhere in the room, or the bathroom, the spare room never used once her children had stopped their visits a hundred years ago.
“Estelle?”
Not in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the basement. Not her, not her smell, not a sound of her moving ahead of him, keeping just out of sight.
“Estelle?”
She wasn’t on the porch.
Norma was gone as well, and he figured the two of them must have gone to the teacher’s house, nothing to worry about. Estelle was upset — angered and grieving and without the comfort he should have given her. It was all right. He’d just walk over there and hold her and sooner or later the rain would end and it would all be all right.
He stepped outside, grinned at himself for forgetting an umbrella, he didn’t need to be drenched a second time that day, and turned to open the door.
Flory stood on the top step.
Electric fire.
“Come with me, Kayman,” she said, smiling, wearing the same blouse and jacket she had worn when they’d spoken.
He gasped.
The smile wavered, lost its humor.
“Kayman, come with me, please.”
He ran, pushing himself through the house and out the back door, wincing at the rain stinging, then pounding, his head, swinging around the comer and down the driveway, running and not moving much faster than a brisk old man’s walk. Across the street, feet casting waves in large puddles, and up to the next comer where he turned into the next block and slowed, looked over his shoulder, saw nothing but the rain that turned the air grey.
Norma’s door was unlocked; no one was there.
Flory stood on the sidewalk: “Kayman, come with me.”
He tried other doors along the street, warm lights in the windows, at the foot of drives, over garages; no one was home.
“Kayman,” Flory said.
No car to flee in; he used his legs instead, forcing himself to ignore the fire — the electric pain, that stitched a scar across his middle — reaching Centre Street without realizing it until he found himself panting in front of the police station. Drowned rat, he thought as he hastened inside; god, I must look like a drowned rat.
No one was there.
He called; he yelled; he slammed through the gate in the low wood railing and slammed open all the doors of all the offices he could find.
No one was there.
Flory stood in the rain: “Kayman, come with me.”
He could barely move, barely breathe through his mouth while his lips felt bound in ice. He nearly fell down the steps slick with water, fell against a car parked at the curb, swallowed, didn’t move when something cool passed over his shoulder and she beckoned him again.
His eyes closed. Suddenly he felt so old, so frightfully, terrifyingly old that “Where?” was little more than a deathbed whisper.
She said nothing, and in the silence of the rain he looked up and over the automobile’s roof Johnny stood on the sidewalk across the street, Brenda beside him. They waved and walked away, west toward Mainland Road. Before they reached the corner, the rain had erased them, but he could still see the smoke from Johnny’s cigarette floating for a while before the fain erased that too.
“Is it over?” he asked. “Am I . . . is it over?”
Fighting, rebelling, denying, praying that the downhill slope wouldn’t be quite so steep, quite so rocky that the slide would be more gentle. More right.
“Come with me, Kayman.”
Streetlights and house lig
hts and the splash of rain; cold and a cold wind, cold skin, in a twilight that hid the sky but not the town around him; too weary to think, to find reason, to find something in his madness that would give him a clue so he could find his way back, to the house and Estelle and what the hell did it matter, Jesus God, he was tired. So goddamn tired. Everything about him, inside and out, ached, begged him to find a bed, demanded he stop moving.
And then a flash of anger that they had left him after all.
An old man alone.
Walking in the rain with a ghost that only proved how mad he really was.
“You know,” he said, and Flory’s head tilted; she was listening. His left hand flapped at his side. “I guess it really is like Ronnie said once — god, that was a long time ago — that the best you can do is hold on. There’s no stardom, no wealth, not much of anything but just holding on for people like me. Maybe you, too, I don’t know.” The hand stopped; the other one started. “I make furniture, you know. Pretty good stuff, too. It . . .” He squinted into the rain, no longer feeling it, no longer caring. “It just wasn’t good enough. It didn’t look like anything else, you know? It made itself sometimes, and it wasn’t . . .”
At Mainland Road he saw the fence of Pilgrim’s Travelers.
He stopped.
“You know that song, all those books, about doing it your way, the hell with what people think?”
“Come with me, Kayman,” she said, crossing over.
He glanced behind him, looked ahead, watched her glide through falling water.
“When you get old,” he said quietly, “and you don’t have to be very old, hell, you could be fifty, I was pretty close to it, it’s a goddamn son of a bitching thing,” he shouted, “when you got to start the hell all over again!” He crossed the road, a fist swiping at the rain. “You know that? You know it?” His voice lowered. “No. You don’t know that. You don’t know that at alL.”
She stood under the arch, waiting.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant, Volume IV: The Black Carousel Page 17