Needless to say, everybody hustled right out of there. They gathered up their things, and retreated to the other side of the street. It was extraordinary, really, how rapidly an entire wood-framed building could be consumed by fire: the interior seemed to fill, all at once, with an eerie ochre glow, and then the windows shattered in quick succession, and the flames burst out and lapped at the clapboards until they caught, too, and the outlet store was wreathed in fire. The terrible roar, the blinding light obscured all conversation, all thought, and the tears of the bereaved onlookers dried in the heat almost as quickly as they were shed. By the time the fire engines and police cars arrived, it was already over.
None of them was permitted to leave until each had been questioned, and this was accomplished by about eight in the morning, at which time everyone was allowed to go home. Names, however, had been taken, and addresses and phone numbers, and the police could have been forgiven for believing that one of the campers-out was responsible for the fire: they had all had the means and opportunity. The campers, for their part, thought they remembered some protesters lurking around—the police, it was suggested, ought to question them. They were the ones who hated Happy, and, by association, Equinox. This was exactly the kind of thing they would do!
Strange, though, that Happy Masters herself seemed, when she arrived at six AM completely composed and dressed as if for a day of business (which she was), unenthusiastic about this obvious and excellent lead. Nevertheless, she was unable to provide the investigating officers with any better ideas, or perhaps just didn’t want to.
The Happy Girls Outlet Store was, incidentally, completely consumed by the blaze.
22. Excalibur
“I would like,” Happy said, leaning over Reeve’s desk and exposing, inside the vee of her sweater, two lacily restrained and really quite attractive breasts, “the demolition to begin immediately.”
“Ahh…”
“What part don’t you understand, Reeve?”
“Well, it’s just that…”
“It’s just that you don’t want a new library after all, despite the widespread campus support for my plan? It’s just that you want to spit in the faces of the trustees of this college? It’s just that your demotion from Ivy-League celebrity to small-town dick-polisher was insufficiently drastic, and you’d prefer to be teaching gym at Auburn High? Is that it?”
“Nnnooo…” Reeve said, rushing to articulate himself before she jumped in again, “It’s just that classes are…in session? And the students are using it? The library?”
She glared.
“You are talking about the library, aren’t you? Please,” he said, gesturing with what he hoped was not obvious desperation, “have a seat.”
She sat. Thank God. If this was what he had to deal with on a Monday morning, what was the rest of the week going to be like? He went on. “I assumed—that is, I’d hoped—that this was a project for summertime? When there aren’t any classes? I mean, there’s no reason to demolish a library now that we aren’t going to replace until next year. And there’s the matter of moving the books somewhere, books and computers and whatnot. Plus—that is, your designers—they haven’t even finished their drawings, have they?”
Her glare had metamorphosed into something else now, some kind of clinical scrutiny. She didn’t speak.
“Um, because, you know, Happy, I have this other thing to deal with this week—this sex lecture thing. They were protesting outside my office, you know. I tried to keep out everyone under 21, that didn’t go over too well. I’ve capitulated in every possible way.” He swallowed. “I can only hope it won’t be too…horrible.”
A single plucked eyebrow rose slightly.
“I wish,” he went on several seconds later, “you would speak.”
She was smiling now, placidly smiling. “Yes, I’m sorry, Reeve. I don’t know what I was thinking. You’re right. There’s no need to act just yet.” She settled back in her chair and appeared to enter a brown study. “You know I’ve had a difficult weekend.”
“Of course,” Reeve said. Even with his window closed, he could still smell the smoke from the Outlet Store fire. Everybody was blaming the people who’d camped out—they’d had little ovens, or candles burning, or something. Which reminded him. “Happy birthday, by the way.”
Her eyebrows rose slightly. “Thank you. However did you know?”
“People told me.”
“I’m fifty-two.”
“You don’t look a day over thirty,” he said, reflexively. He did not voice his wish that she would leave his office now.
“So,” she said, “you going to the sex thing?”
“Men aren’t invited.”
“Too bad,” she said with a snort, and rose to her feet.
He got up to see her out. “I’ll be picking her up at the airport, anyway,” he said. “I’ll have to imagine the rest.”
“I’m sure,” she replied, exiting, “you won’t have to,” and for the life of him he could not begin to know what she meant.
* * *
The hand-lettered sign on the door of the Goodbye Goose read CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, and the same could be said about Dave Dryer, who lay on his sofa, gooned on painkillers and booze in front of the television. He hadn’t moved since Halloween except to see what the sirens were all about, and the burning building had been insufficient to break him from his stupor.
It should come as no surprise, then, that a knock at the back door didn’t make him get up, either, nor the handful of gravel that chattered against his window. Instead he shouted “Go away!” A mistake: he gave himself away. Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and in a moment, the visitor was standing in Dave’s living room and glancing around in amusement at the mess. “Dude,” he said, in a greasy, cheerful voice. “This is fucked up.”
“Go away,” Dave repeated. A tear squeezed out of the corner of each eye: whether this was a side effect of his ongoing bender, oral ailment, or prescription medication was unclear. Maybe it was merely a product of misery and humiliation. Or perhaps fear was responsible: fear of the ghost of Thomas Crim, this figure in white who had entered his apartment and stood over him, arms crossed. The ghost tilted back his tricorn hat, shook his head in evident dismay, and floated into the kitchen. Dave sat up. His hands and shoulders trembled. He rubbed his eyes. The ghost returned.
No. Not a ghost: just Kevin Russell, hatless and clad in black. He was holding a large drawstring garbage bag.
“Where the hell did you come from?” Dave said, his tongue seeming to fill his entire mouth.
“My place. Where the fuck else would I be?” He picked up the empty beer and liquor bottles, snack wrappers and cigarette butts, and shoved them into the bag. When the floor was cleared, he sat down on it and crossed his arms over his knees.
He looked good, in a slick and unpleasant sort of way. His hair was clean and seemed to be full of some kind of goop. His black turtleneck was tucked in to black jeans, and his work boots were polished. He smelled faintly of aftershave and faintly of something else, like the engine of a car. He stared into Dave’s eyes and said, “Who’d’ve thought! Me looking after you for a change.”
Dave blinked. Was he being insulted? “Don’t, then.”
“Ain’t sayin’ I mind it, Dryer.”
“You’re blocking the TV.”
Kevin didn’t move. “Get off your ass, man. Come over my place. I got a case of wine. As long as you’re off the wagon you can get drunk and gimme a hand.”
The room reeled. Dave curbed his urge to vomit. “A hand with what,” he said.
“Cleaning. I’m getting my shit together.” He shifted, coughed, pulled a cigarette butt out from under his behind. He threw it on the coffee table. “Why’d you close the bar, man?”
Dave sighed, slumped back on the sofa. “Bitch ran me out of business.”
Kevin nodded, grinned. “There’s ways of getting back at people,” he said.
Their eyes met across the table, and Dave
recognized something in his friend he hadn’t seen in awhile—the nameless thing that bound them, a way of seeing. An unspoken acknowledgement that they had been robbed of happiness, and if they ever wanted anything from the world, they were going to have to take it by force. This is how Dave remembered college—a patient and gruesome extraction of information out of people who would not otherwise have been inclined to let him have it. And the bar, where he had cheated people out of their money—had gotten them to pay him to poison them. And the girls he had lured into bed. All of them suckers, Kevin’s look told him. But now the suckers had moved on.
Dave had lain here on the sofa these past few nights, listening to the sounds from Happy’s Bistro—the DJ spinning records, the girls hooting and laughing as they spilled shitfaced into the street—and he recognized that something had been stolen from him. The fact that he had stolen it to begin with somehow made it worse. He was the sucker now, and his head throbbed as if to remind him.
But look at Kevin: calm, slick, clean. Somehow he had transformed pain into life. He stood up and held out his hand to Dave, and Dave took it, each man’s eyes never straying from the other.
“Okay,” Dave said, the words coming out muffled and blurred through his swollen lips. “Lemme get dressed.”
Twenty minutes later they were rummaging through the pile of rotting cardboard boxes that filled half the cabin Kevin lived in. These sat on a sagging expanse of linoleum floor, underneath the leaky end of the moss-covered roof, and they were stuffed with all the things that had passed through Kevin’s father’s life that he had once deemed worthy of keeping. It had gotten cold again, and the November sky was shale from horizon to horizon, and the propane heater that warmed the room was making Dave light-headed. Or maybe that was the painkillers. “He torched our house for the insurance,” Kevin said, as if this weren’t a peculiar or surprising fact. “Then he sold the land and we moved back here. This used to be the back yard.”
“What happened to the money?” Dave asked him. He was going through a box of Auburn newspapers of no obvious significance, looking at old classified ads from the seventies. Job openings for prison guards. Upright pianos. Kittens.
“Dog races, drinking. Some of it I got. That’s what I lived off of for ten years.”
Dave said, “What are you living off now?” He gestured toward Kevin’s clothes, the case of wine. A bottle of the stuff, a 1998 Bordeaux Dave happened to know cost something like thirty bucks, stood open and two-thirds empty on the table.
“I’m gainfully employed.”
“Doing what?”
Kevin smirked, snorted. “Figure it out,” he said.
They hauled box after box of moldy papers into Dave’s truck—junk mail, motorcycle magazines, pornography. Dave staggered in and out of the shed like a zombie, squinting every time he emerged into the filthy light of day. Then, an hour into the job, when he thought he was going to have to call it quits, he kicked aside a paper grocery bag of receipts and found the box.
Long, narrow, oaken, the wood swollen and warped and split, it seemed to hum, to call out to Dave like a familiar. His head cleared. He waded into the junkpile and lifted it out. Pillbugs and earwigs rained to the ground. He held it in his hands and followed the damaged grain from end to end. The throbbing in his jaw backed off a fraction.
“Huntin’ rifle,” Kevin said. “He won it in a poker game. He couldn’t hunt for shit. Made too much noise.”
Dave set it on the ground and undid the rusted latches. The case sprung open, breaking the hinges in two. The inside was lined with black velvet molded into the form of the rifle, which had at one time been heavily greased and appeared to have escaped much damage from the water, save for some rust on the barrel and discoloration of the wood.
He didn’t know a lot about guns. He knew how to fire a rifle, but had only ever used one, which he and his mother had taken out and sunk in the middle of the lake after his father had used it on himself. But there was something about this one. He picked it up. Its barrel was long and narrow, and it terminated in a metal plate engraved, or maybe just sort of scratched, with a crude but detailed whirlpool design, like a hurricane. The design was repeated, with slight variations, on the other side. Overall, the weapon was wonderfully sparse and elegant. The steel around the trigger was worn smooth and shiny and the wood had a strong grain. It was heavy but balanced, the way you’d think a gun ought to feel. Like a limb. Like Excalibur. The hurricane seemed to turn, a mesmerizing illusion, as the rifle moved beneath the bare overhead bulb. It had a kind of elemental nobility, crudely etched as it was. Who had done it?
“I dunno,” Kevin said, in answer. “I doubt it was my dad. He could hardly write, let alone draw.”
Dave took a wad of newspaper and started wiping off the grease. Some rust came away with it. He held up the rifle and sighted down the barrel. What the hell did he know—but it looked true, like it led to something far away. It looked as if anything that traveled down it would keep on going, straight ahead, forever, defying gravity and the resistance of the air.
“Keep it,” Kevin said.
“Wha?” Dave looked up, returning to himself.
“I don’t hunt. I got the old man’s pistol anyway.”
“Huh.” Of course he was keeping it. He didn’t need Kevin to tell him. Funny—his headache was gone now, the drugs and the work must have done the job, and his face felt almost human. He gazed again at the hurricane. It really did seem to be turning. It seemed to have a purpose, an intelligence. He looked at it for quite some time.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Hmm?”
And this time, when their eyes met, there was none of the understanding that had passed between them before—Kevin was merely annoyed. He said, “Put it down, man, help me with this stuff.” And Dave did as he was told—he placed the gun in its case and went back to work hauling boxes out to the truck. But every time they came in for another load, he stopped to look at the gun, and each time he did he felt a little bit better. Every single moment, he was feeling just a little bit better.
“Do you even know what this is?” the guy at the gun shop asked him the following day, turning the rifle over in his hands. Dave had gone in to ask for ammunition, and instead gotten a pair of raised eyebrows and an inquisitive stare.
Excalibur, he didn’t say. Instead he offered, “Rifle?”
“Well, sure, but—well, you know it’s a Winchester.”
Dave hadn’t known, nor did he know what that meant, other than that it was a gun company. He had a headache and his mouth tasted bitter and rotten. He smacked his lips and shook his head.
“An 1895. Kinda worth a lot of money, if you get it fixed up nice. See here,” he said, pointing, “under all this corrosion, it’ll say what it is.”
“Huh,” Dave said. In his field of vision, the gun salesman doubled up, and then the two of him wavered and merged. Give it back, he thought.
“I bet it’s even the original stock. Shame about this shit on the metal.”
“What?”
“This stuff scratched in it.” He was pointing to the hurricane, which appeared to speed up in its rotation, ever so slightly, beneath the man’s immaculate finger.
“I like that.”
“Hunh. Well. Okay.” He handed the gun back to Dave, then turned around and regarded the wall of ammunition behind him. From a low shelf, he produced a few small, slightly crushed yellow cardboard boxes. “That’s all I got right now but I can get more in if you’re gonna buy ‘em.”
“Okay,” Dave said, accepting the boxes. They had a pleasing weight.
“Maybe while you’re here you might want some stuff to clean it up? Sandpaper, tung oil, some tack cloth…”
In the end, Dave went home with a sack full of supplies, which he spread on the bar and examined item by item. He worked all day on the rifle, and didn’t look up until it was dark. He felt a renewed sense of purpose in his life. He made a mental note to thank Kevin, when he got ar
ound to it.
* * *
Happy was out when Janet showed up for work the following morning. Louisa, the housekeeper, let her in, and allowed her to go up to Happy’s empty office, where she sat for a good thirty minutes, listening to the house creak in the cold. She knew her boss was busy, what with the fire and all, and that her birthday had been ruined, but Janet had wanted to have a private moment with her to extend her good wishes, and tell her how great it was to work for her, and how she really admired her, more than admired her actually, and just say thanks for making her life so special. Well—she wasn’t going to say “special.” Something better would come to her.
She was wearing the gifts that James had bought her in New York—a dark gray wool dress and black square-toed shoes; a little bitty wristwatch with a gold chain band and a pair of gold earrings in the shape of question marks. She’d promised not to wear them to the house, but that had been the entire point—to wear them for her, to let Happy see her at her best. And of course she was eager to see—to hear—what Happy thought of the presents she, Janet, had picked out for her, though of course she couldn’t reveal that she had done so. Knowing Happy, James had told Janet, she would suspect him of inviting her to the city simply in order to seduce her.
“Oh,” Janet had said. They had this conversation in bed, in the hotel, and she was discovering that she did not like being naked with him, and with his nakedness, and with her shame, now that the sex was over.
And it was over, in a way that sex with a woman never was. He was finished with her. She was grateful for this, of course. He had touched her to the very limit of her endurance, had run his hands and mouth over her, calling her his China doll, his butterfly, his geisha. Geisha? It was almost a relief when at last she squeezed her eyes shut and let him fuck her—he seemed to get it all out of his system. Afterward he wouldn’t shut up—he told her she was delicate and mysterious. She didn’t feel that way. She didn’t feel like Happy either—in fact, he’d forgotten to call her that. What she felt like was a slut.
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