An Occasional Hell

by Silvis, Randall;

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  So then, Alex had not been responsible for the firebombing. Not unless he had hired somebody to do that too. However, with no connection between the Kinetics and the Fort Erie robbery, Alex had no apparent motive for the firebomb-ing. Still, it was interesting to DeWalt that Alex should have such unimpeachable alibis for both events. To a cynical man, it might even appear as something less than coincidence.

  He returned the slip of paper to his pocket. He stood and smiled gently. “I’m going to have to leave now.”

  She only nodded. She did not inquire as to his possible return.

  “I’ll call you if anything should come up,” he said.

  “Fine.”

  “Do me a favor though. Think back, and try to remember what that $7000 might have been used for.”

  Her body tightened, went rigid as if in defense, as if she were about to turn and castigate him for his implication. But then it sagged; just enough to tell him that she had no idea where the money had gone. He left her staring at the wall.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sometimes a man sinks so close to Hell that he can feel the devil’s breath on the soles of his feet. And if the man has been cold for a long time, this sardonic warmth is inviting. A man who will allow himself to be seduced by this warmth is the kind of man who will stroll into a crowded shopping mall and, pirouetting slowly, not without some macabre turn of grace, will rain hot astonishment from an AK-47.

  But you, DeWalt, you are not that kind of man, are you? You are beyond seduction. Immune.

  I would try to be more discriminating perhaps. To get some good out of my time in Hell.

  How so?

  I would stroll not into a shopping mall but into a crack house or down a certain street corner or if I were back in Chicago into any one of a number of ethnic restaurants.

  Of course one can not always be as discriminating as one desires. One has to accept that errors will be made. Errors, after all, are what have cast you in this drama.

  Miscast, thought DeWalt. He started his car and, backing away from the Catanzaro house, glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. His eyes were no longer bright; not eager or alert; not even terribly interested. He did not recognize those eyes. I’m too young to be this old, he thought.

  Even the car seemed sluggish, as if it too wanted to give up, quit, stop spinning its wheels for no reward. With his foot barely touching the accelerator he coasted down the driveway. He felt empty. Beyond recourse or reconciliation.

  It was through the heart of this dark mood that a shadow of hope scurried past.

  There are moments in life when out of the blue a connection is made. Unbidden and unexpected it is, a gift for no occasion, a surprise, many times undeserved. Henry James (or had it been James Joyce? Jesse James? Joyce Brothers?) called these moments epiphanies: a glimpse, a scent, a lost memory recaptured, a delicate kiss from the lips of truth. Writers are fond of epiphanies, of any device that will add strength to structure, shoring up a leaning tower, stabilizing edifice with artifice. That is why there are far more epiphanies in fiction than in life: a writer lives and dies by artifice. In life, we live and die unaided.

  Still, DeWalt, life is not without surprises. Maybe it is because we sometimes let our guard down; give up; turn our attention elsewhere. We cease creating ourselves in the third person, or in any person at all. We fall resigned into the chair of forgetfulness. And that is when the thing ignored springs out: Remember me? But fuller, fleshier, in better light than we have ever seen it before.

  This is how it happens: You are in your car, DeWalt, alone, driving lethargic and truculent down a long driveway, your foot hardly nudging the accelerator because you do not want to come too soon to the highway, where you will have to decide which way to go. Behind you is a farmhouse and a woman alone with a grief you cannot touch. It is morning, not yet noon, the sky as blue as a gas flame. Everything is August clear, everything except your thoughts, too cold and murky and weedchoked to plumb. So instead you wind down the window and drink a breath of summer. You hold it upon your tongue until it melts. You smell the hemlocks to your left, the needle-matted damp shade beneath them. The sun is high on your right, shining down broken through the oaks and chokecherries, shattered but as bright as a mirror. The air is hemlock sweet and country quiet and its beauty fills you with an unspeakable sadness.

  You sit, DeWalt, at the end of the driveway. The day lies ahead, too long, it runs east and west, it waits, it requires your decision. You hold your foot on the brake. There is a song in your ear like the plucking of a single guitar string, a staccato metal sound, tight, repeating. You feel that your head is going to burst. The glare of the windshield stings your tired eyes.

  Then up from the grass across the road flies a small bird, a yellow finch, a tiny burst of fluttering color. You nearly gasp out loud, DeWalt. The bird rises, dips, disappears again under cover of deep grass. It has nothing to do with anything; a moment in nature. It was not for you or about you; you are an anomaly to the moment, an accident.

  But DeWalt, notice this: you have smelled the cat. More precisely, the remembered smell, a moldy, almost chemical odor—you place it precisely now—a cat’s litter box. The odor you smelled in the Gillen’s apartment and then again in Craig Fox’s room. Why the other cat, the head in the kitchen sink, did not trigger this recognition, you do not know. Too many other concerns, perhaps. Revulsion. Compassion. You were trying too hard to know.

  But all right. Here it is at last. Now you have something. You lift your foot from the brake. You pull out onto the highway, you wheel around hard to the left, you drive so fast that your tires squeal.

  DeWalt had not been to his office on campus for several weeks now. The hallway seemed dim, most of the classrooms dark. A few students lingered near the water fountain; he nodded but turned quickly so as not to have to speak. In a few weeks this building would be so dense with highstrung bodies that he would find it difficult to walk to the faculty lounge for coffee without being drawn into a conversation of depressingly earnest young English majors, arguments he would be called upon to arbitrate: Post-modern neo-dadaism is, is it not, the only valid choice for a contemporary writer? Don’t you agree that, pedagogically speaking, deconstructionalism is the hope and the way and the light of the world? By what ratio, do you think, should left-branching modifiers predominate right-branching modifiers in any piece of serious fiction?

  Such confrontations were never easy for DeWalt. Fortunately he escaped unscathed today. He slipped into his office, turned on the light and locked the door. Seated at his desk, he dialed the extension for the registrar’s office. A work study student answered.

  “This is Professor DeWalt in the English Department,” he said. “I need the class schedule for a student named Craig Fox, please.”

  “Greg Fox, okay sir. Do you want a copy of the schedule sent to your office?”

  “It’s Craig Fox, with a C. Craig. And no, just give it to me now. I’ll wait while you punch it up. Just don’t put me on hold.”

  Five minutes later he was climbing into his car again. Another seven minutes, 11:40 AM, and he was seated in a booth at the Colony Restaurant. A waitress he had never seen before, a sallow-faced brunette with a pit bull’s underbite, poured his coffee, her eyes on his filling cup as if she were watching a toilet flush.

  “Is Della working today?” he asked.

  “This isn’t her table though.”

  “If she’s here could you tell her I’d like to speak with her, please?”

  She walked away scowling. Half a minute later Della emerged from the kitchen. The scowler lingered nearby as Della approached his booth.

  “Hi, Ernie! Ready to fly away with me on that lover’s weekend to Hawaii?”

  “I’m wearing my bikini trunks this very minute,” he said.

  She plopped down across from him, leaned close and whispered, “Look at her, she’s not even pretending not to listen. What a weasel.”

&n
bsp; The other waitress blinked. When Della turned to look at her, she finally slithered away. Della flashed DeWalt a satisfied grin. “Now then, handsome. What can I do for you today?”

  “Did Jeri have a cat?” he asked. “A kitten?”

  “Yeah, she did. Why?”

  “What color was it?”

  “It was one of those, you know, what’s it called when they’re sort of reddish brown and white all mixed up?”

  “Calico.”

  “There, you see, that’s why you’re a writer. So anyway, what about this cat?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything else just yet.”

  “Ahh come on, that’s not fair.”

  “Maybe next time I see you, okay?” He pulled a handful of coins from his pocket, sorted out three quarters and laid them on the table. Della, as he stood, scooped up one quarter and slipped it into his pocket. “Don’t you dare tip her,” she said, not at all softly. “We’re trying to get her to quit.”

  Craig Fox’s final class of the morning, the Laws of International Banking, ran from ten o’clock to twelve-thirty. From an empty classroom on the second floor of Burney Hall, the Psychology building, DeWalt watched the main entrance of Collier Hall. Class ended a few minutes early, as it did most every class during summer session, and at 12:19 Craig Fox emerged.

  Dressed in yellow seersucker walking shorts and a powder blue Polo shirt, Fox looked as slick as a fullpage ad from the Spring issue of GQ. Strolling beside him was a very attractive young lady, bare legs and a flowered skirt, casual chic. They walked in no hurry up the sloping sidewalk, toward the cafeteria. Fox appeared to be doing all the talking.

  Once Fox and the girl were well past, DeWalt came outside and followed them uphill. The cafeteria was crowded and noisy. Ten minutes passed before Fox and his companion reached the food counters. Then, still chattering to the girl, Fox set upon building a sandwich of cold cuts, meticulously layering slices of turkey breast between alternating layers of lettuce and tomato and cucumber.

  DeWalt broke into line and stepped up behind him. Over Fox’s right shoulder, he whispered, “Meeeow.”

  Fox turned, grinning, until he saw who was standing there. DeWalt’s mouth held not a trace of smile. His eyes were hard and cold and they did not blink. Fox attempted to reform his own smile, but there was no confidence in it. “Good morning,” he said. “I mean good afternoon, I guess.”

  “Not for cats it isn’t.”

  Fox’s smile fell apart. His head gave a little jerk, an involuntary twitch. He turned to face the counter again. DeWalt continued ahead of him down the line; he picked up an apple from the fruit tray, paid the cashier, and left the building.

  On a street one block behind the Theta Chi lot, DeWalt parked his car. By watching between houses he could keep an eye on all the cars in the lot. He knew that Fox would be moving cautiously now, trying to see in all directions at once, and he expected to wait much longer than he did. Not twenty minutes after DeWalt had left the cafeteria, Craig Fox emerged half-running out the back door of the fraternity house. He hopped into a shiny blue Nissan 4X4, that year’s model, and sped away.

  DeWalt remained several car lengths behind as he followed the student north out of town. It was unlikely that Fox knew what kind of automobile DeWalt owned, but DeWalt was taking no chances. He might be following him for a long time; Fox’s family home was in Cleveland. DeWalt slipped a Rickie Lee Jones tape into the tape player. He unbuttoned his shirt, unwound the bag and tubing and tossed the bag onto the passenger side floor. So much for sterile fields. He was not due for another exchange quite yet but he might not have an opportunity later.

  Rickie Lee’s piccolo voice soon filled the automobile, impish and sexy, a sad little girl. DeWalt kept his eyes on the blue Nissan. The piano accompaniment tinkled like crystal, it played through the slender tube, it urged the dark weight of poison from his body. He had made the connection; he had broken through. He knew without knowing how he knew, without caring how he knew, that Craig Fox was leading him straight to Rodney Gillen. Maybe to Jeri Gillen too.

  The feeling was returning to DeWalt’s hands finally, hands warm with blood now, strong on the hard curve of the steering wheel. He would follow the Nissan all day and night if necessary; he had nowhere else to go.

  By the time Rickie Lee began “My Funny Valentine,” DeWalt had left the town far behind, was moving deep into green country now, into a quiet, uncultivated land. He hung the new bag of dialysate above the passenger window, where the sun could warm it as it emptied into him. He felt better now than he had felt in months. There were warm tears of gratitude in his eyes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  For nearly two hours DeWalt followed Craig Fox north. The boxy blue profile of the 4X4 was easy to track over the hillocks and gentle switchbacks of route 58. The two-lane highway cut through farmland and undeveloped countryside, past tiny hamlets built around their churches—square stonewalled castles for the Catholics, white clapboard cottages topped with groping spires for the Methodists. DeWalt drove through state game lands and a corner of the Allegheny National Forest, a part of the state he had always intended to explore someday.

  He was exploring it now, at nearly sixty miles an hour. Fox was being careful: he drove as fast as possible but not fast enough to risk a patrolman’s attention. And he knew this road well, braking before blind turns, accelerating through the curves.

  Then DeWalt crested a long hill and saw laying before him a half-mile stretch of highway with no blue 4X4 in sight. He drove another eighth of a mile and then noticed the entrance road to Honey Lake, the “private resort community” he had been reading about on billboards for the past fifteen minutes, the 400-acre manmade lake and shoreline community wherein “the pleasures of boating, swimming, fishing, tennis and golf on a picturesque 18-hole executive course await.”

  DeWalt made a left turn onto the macadam entrance road, then followed the road for half a mile, but could go no further. Here the road was blocked by a gate similar to a cattle guard, a gate that Honey Lake residents could open by slipping a membership card into the scanner box. DeWalt had no membership card. He sat there and stared at the gate.

  Craig Fox had either gone where the woodbine twineth—as DeWalt’s Aunt Sara used to say—or he had driven beyond this gate. There was no other explanation for his disappearance. DeWalt felt confident that Rodney Gillen was in there too. Perhaps even Jeri Gillen; although this, for some reason, he doubted. In any case, he told himself, the smart thing would be to back up, DeWalt, drive to the nearest telephone and call in the state boys. But what if they arrived to find Fox sunning himself on an inflatable raft, all alone but for his ambitions? Things were already strained between Abbott and DeWalt; the trooper suspected DeWalt of misreading or ignoring certain facts, facts which clearly implicated Elizabeth Catanzaro. And hadn’t DeWalt promised Abbott, almost three hours ago now, to telephone with an update of information gleaned from Elizabeth?

  I’ve got to see him first, DeWalt thought. Then I can call up Abbott and tell him, “Larry, I saw Rodney Gillen, he’s here and he’s all yours, come and get him.”

  He backed away from the gate and parked his car along the side of the road. There was no fence blocking off the surrounding woods themselves, only numerous NO TRESPASSING signs, so DeWalt, on foot, set off through the trees on a path roughly parallel to the road. For ten minutes he ducked branches, brushed cobwebs from his face, and wended his way toward the lake.

  When he came to the edge of the trees and could actually see the Honey Lake community, he was more than a little surprised. He had expected a few small cabins, a mobile home or two parked in the shade of a tree-sheltered lot: a semi-rustic setting, a kind of despoiled Walden Pond. But not this despoiled.

  The lake was so crammed with small sailboats, rowboats, canoes, kayaks, inflatable rafts and inner tubes that an individual with a good sense of balance could hop from one craft to the other across the breadth of the lake, and never get his feet wet.
On the far side was a tiny mall: a post office, laundromat, grocery and drugstore, a video arcade, a shop that rented boats and bicycles, a beauty salon, a community hall for bingo and dancing. Around the perimeter of the lake ran a smooth asphalt road, painted tennis court green. At the southern end of the lake, a picturesque arched footbridge traversed the exit stream. The lake road was not wide enough to accomodate automobile traffic except in the case of an emergency; travel here was restricted to transport by foot, bicycle, roller skates, and, by all appearances the most favored form of locomotion, by golf cart.

  The “cottages” were all at least twice the size of DeWalt’s house, each girdled by a sprawling wooden deck that seemed to overhang the entire lot. In front of the mall was a marina jammed with nonmotorized craft. Behind the mall, lots were terraced up the hillside. Hidden somewhere amidst all this natural beauty were tennis courts and a golf course.

  Jesus, thought DeWalt. What are you going to do now—go around knocking on doors? “Hi, sorry to disturb you, but are you harboring any criminals in there?”

  He was trespassing. He had not registered for a tour and sales pitch and therefore would not be eligible for a free hibachi. And even if he could rent a bicycle or golf cart, it would take at least thirty minutes to walk around the lake to the mall and its rental shop, by which time he would have only enough strength left to collapse.

  He was ready to say Fuck it. Go back to your car and call Abbott, don’t be a fool. The hike through the woods had depleted his energies. His side ached, his chest ached, he was out of breath, sweaty and leg-weary. What was he trying to prove? He could feel the plastic bag sticking to his damp skin.

  Then he thought of Elizabeth Catanzaro, of what she had endured, was enduring, stood yet to endure. She learns that her husband is having an affair—sucker punch, she falls to her knees. But she gets back up, decides to fight it out. Then her husband is murdered. She is implicated. She discovers the head of a kitten in her kitchen sink. She seduces the hired hand but isn’t attractive enough, or so she believes, to give him an erection. He then suggests that her husband was not only an adulterer but a thief, a criminal. And still she remains standing, fists at the ready.