An Occasional Hell

by Silvis, Randall;

  Whatever was up there behind the moon, he wished he could grab it, wished he could wrench it into the open, confront it, challenge it face to face once and for all. He was angry but it gave him no comfort, a bastard anger born of helplessness. He had come out here into the yard to try to relax, but he was still stiff with anger, his body as twisted as a braid of chain, all that torque with nowhere to go.

  Two hours earlier Abbott had telephoned. I found Aleta and Clifford Jewett, he had said.

  And?

  They weren’t surprised. Pretty upset about the house, but they weren’t surprised about Draper.

  Did you ask Aleta about the glass?

  I don’t know anything about a glass.

  We can’t pretend I wasn’t there, Larry. I called for an ambulance from their phone, I gave the dispatcher my name.

  There was a pause then. DeWalt could hear in it the trooper’s weariness, his desire for an end. He pictured the trooper lying in bed beside his sleeping wife. They had made love but it wasn’t very good. Then Abbott couldn’t sleep. He called DeWalt and spoke softly, too tired for bitterness.

  Here’s what I remember you telling me, Abbott said. You went there to ask a few questions, knocked on the door, nobody answered. You turned around to leave, but then you caught a whiff of gas. The house was full of gas, you couldn’t help but smell it. You picked the lock on the back door, went inside, went upstairs and found Draper. You tried to carry him out but he pulled a gun on you. You went downstairs and called the ambulance. Bam, the house exploded. You were lucky you weren’t killed.

  Is that what you told the Jewetts?

  That’s what you told me, isn’t it?

  DeWalt had wondered then if it might yet be possible to save this friendship, if something salvageable remained at a deeper level, something that could not be insulted or demeaned.

  Did you ask if they’ve ever been to Niagara Falls? said DeWalt.

  Clifford said that if he wanted to see a lot of water splashing, he’d climb a tree and take a piss.

  He’s fairly witty for an atavist, isn’t he?

  He’s not as dumb as he looks.

  How about the house? Did your boys find anything?

  Ashes. We found a whole lot of ashes.

  Any lumps of melted lead that might once have been musket balls? Or a bullet mold? Or, I don’t know, a brass name-plate signed and dated by Joseph Honaker?

  It doesn’t take much to make you happy, does it?

  So you didn’t find anything.

  We’re still going through it, okay? You don’t mind if we wait until the ashes cool, do you?

  Sorry, Larry. I don’t mean to push.

  Anyway. So. I had an interesting talk with Craig Fox earlier tonight.

  Yeah?

  He’s starting to remember how strangely Gillen was acting the morning Gillen sent him down to the inlet. Like maybe Gillen already knew what Fox would find there. Like maybe Gillen and his partner, if he had one, wanted Fox to be there when the police arrived.

  That’s just paranoia talking, Larry. The kid’s scared.

  I would be too in his position.

  Elizabeth Catanzaro had absolutely nothing to do with her husband’s murder.

  I hear you’re not on her payroll anymore.

  I’m not on anybody’s payroll.

  Then what am I talking to you for?

  You called me, Larry.

  Thanks for reminding me. You’ve been cut loose now, so … try to think about something else from now on, all right? Go write another book, why don’t you?

  Yes, it was a very thin moon and it was wearing thinner all the time. It was wearing out because nobody ever looked at it anymore to marvel and to wonder. Nobody except DeWalt and maybe teenagers exhausted from making love on a blanket in a wheatfield and maybe children resting from chasing fireflies and maybe dogs penned up in a kennel and with nowhere to run.

  DeWalt remembered how he and his father had used to study the moon. His father had loved being out of doors at any time of day or night. He would have his first cup of coffee each morning on the front porch, no matter what the season, the coffee steaming into his face even as the dawn’s ghosts of fog were rising. Look out there, DeWalt’s father had said once, the boy, still heavy with sleep, having climbed shivering into his father’s lap. See the ghosts getting up out of bed, Ernie? Look at the way they stretch. They’re going back to heaven now. Back up with the angels. At night they come down here to sleep with people they used to know, but in the morning they go back up to heaven. I think that one out there is your grandmother, Ernie. You remember her, son? Hi, mom, I sure do miss you, sweetheart. Tell all the angels Ernie and me said hi.

  DeWalt wondered now if his father had somehow known that he was destined to die early. Maybe he knew he had a bad heart and that his luck could not last very long. These days a man could live quite a while with a bum heart, but not in Ernie’s father’s time. In those days you took what God dished out and you did not hope to tinker with it.

  Maybe that was why Dad liked sitting on the porch during thunderstorms, DeWalt thought.

  Bradley, get in this house here before you get struck with lightning!

  If God wants me, Rose, he’ll find me no matter where I hide. So I’m not hiding.

  Then send Ernie in, for pete’s sake. He’s going to catch a cold.

  He’s not hiding either, are you, son?

  DeWalt’s father had loved thunderstorms and big winds and the river ice breaking up and tearing free in the Spring. Calm nights, dark woods, waterfalls and blizzards. The fiery turn of leaves in autumn. The stark black bones of a tree in the dead of winter. Stars. The northern lights. The red dot of Venus. And every pale or bright configuration of the moon.

  And so now, without comfort of drink or companion, DeWalt considered the moon. Without comfort of a blanket or pillow he lay through the tremulous night and studied the moon until his eyes refused to consider it. He closed his eyes then and thought that if the early morning chill did not chase him inside, it might be nice to awaken out here, here with the thin ghosts of morning. It might be nice to consider those rising wisps as they stretched, to scrutinize them for familiar shapes, to watch them into Heaven as he had not done now for a very long time.

  This was his intention but he was not able to do it. He awakened well after midnight to a suffocating scent, gagging even as he sat up. It was a charnal reek he breathed, an odor of putrefaction, a stench that faded quickly, leaving only the foul taste of it sticking in his mouth.

  Whether the scent was real, carried past him on a breeze of night air, or whether it had blown over him in a dream, he did not know or care. What mattered was the knowledge the scent carried. He sat there shivering, clutching his rigid stomach, on the verge of being sick. He knew where to find Jeri Gillen.

  The river was white in the morning, buried beneath a thick bed of sleeping ghosts, a narrow but dense fogbank which clung to the cool water even after the land ghosts had fled. Less than half a red sun had yet cleared the high horizon but enough light shone into the fogbank to make it an unearthly white, the white of transcendentalist painters, the white of a soaring imagination made weightless by too little sleep.

  DeWalt had tried to be a painter once but his hand refused to reproduce the pictures inside his head. He was just a boy then, not even old enough to vote. He had tried writing songs on a guitar too, had in fact composed a basketful of songs, but no one ever thought them as wonderful as he had expected them to be.

  For a while in his life he had dreamed of becoming a creator of things beautiful but had learned to his great disappointment that he had no talent for beauty. And so I became a man who expresses life’s ugliness, he thought. Until I lost my talent for that as well. And now I am a man with no talents at all but I can admire the white of a fogbank at dawn and appreciate the cool brown music that flows beneath it.

  He could appreciate too the growl of the backhoe half a mile away. He could appreciate that muffled roar
of finality, the mechanized sound of satisfaction, of end. It was what warmed him despite the chill of morning. In a minute or two he would hear the machine stop, and a few minutes later they would find Jeri Gillen’s body and they would find the murder weapon too.

  The certainty of this should have made DeWalt happy as he stood there at the inlet, listening, staring into the fog, his right foot on a stone in the ring of stones encircling the long-cold firepit. But there was a sadness to the morning, a sadness which had nothing to do with DeWalt himself. A sadness external to him, originating in the day itself, the air, the deep damp green of the leaves and weeds, the creaminess of sky. There was no good reason for him to feel sad and so he knew that what he felt was because of what he breathed, what was absorbed into his skin.

  Maybe it was the trees who resonated sadness and he was empathetic to them. He had always had a fondness for trees. The scarlet-berried sumac and the white-barked birch. Black oak and tulip maple. Sassafras, hemlock, the bloody leaves of dogwood. Maybe the trees knew how soon the winter would come and what would happen to them then. There was a sadness inherent to nakedness, as they would soon be. A sadness of vulnerability. A shame.

  You could not tell just by looking at them that the trees were sad, but if you were sensitive to their dilemma you could smell their musty sadness every time you breathed.

  Maybe all emotions are external, DeWalt thought then. What we think we feel is mere reflection. We are not the generators of emotion, but receptors. Nature broadcasts her laughter and tears in undulating waveforms which we then pick up and reflect in our faces and movements and words. Some people are sensitive to trees, and some to water, to clouds, to rocks or flowers or sand or fields of golden weed. Some people pick up only the high modulation; some the low. Some unlucky people are susceptible to the entire range of frequencies.

  And some people think too much, DeWalt. If you are going to stand here thinking nonsense as an excuse for waiting for the backhoe to stop digging, waiting for yourself to be proven a sage or a fool, at least try to think of a happier nonsense. Think of the look on Larry Abbott’s face when he comes walking down the hill to tell you you were right.

  No, DeWalt. Don’t think of that.

  He wondered if Abbott had recognized, three hours earlier, after DeWalt’s telephone call awakened him, the reluctant tone of deception in DeWalt’s voice. DeWalt himself had certainly been aware of it. He was not in the habit of lying to a friend.

  “It was Draper and Clifford,” DeWalt said a moment after the trooper’s mumbled hello. “They were both involved, and I can give you the proof.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Abbott had muttered, not yet sufficiently awake to be angry.

  “In a couple of days, Larry, I swear to God I know this, in a couple of days your men are going to place the Jewetts at Niagara Falls. I think you know that too. That will put the murder weapon in their hands, but you’ll need more. And I can give it to you, Larry. I can tell you where to find Jeri Gillen’s body and the rifle used to kill Alex Catanzaro.”

  Abbott was silent for a moment, suddenly awake. “This better not be a dream I’m having,” he said.

  “It’s the end of your nightmare is what it is.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “First of all, my guess is that Draper Jewett, and maybe Clifford too, routinely spied on Alex and Jeri. I mean think about it. They know what’s going on down there in that car every Saturday morning. In and outside the car. You don’t think they’d take a peek every once in a while?”

  “I’ve thought of that,” Abbott conceded. “It’s a possibility.”

  “For Draper, certainly.”

  “Why? What’s special about Draper?”

  “I’ll get to that in a minute. First of all, in a couple of days, as I said, you’ll be able to link the Jewetts with the museum robbery. They’ve got the murder weapon. They know exactly when and how to deliver it to the man who commissioned the robbery. They go down to the inlet to give it to him—”

  “Loaded? A valuable weapon like that?”

  “I don’t know why it was loaded, Larry. I haven’t figured that out yet. Maybe the Jewetts didn’t know the rifle’s value. Didn’t know they’d be endangering it by actually firing it. Maybe they thought they’d do Alex a favor by showing him that it was still fireable. I mean who knows what went through their heads?”

  “You’re presuming that you know.”

  “Not on motive. On motive I’m guessing. And what I’m guessing is this. Draper and/or Clifford carried the rifle to the inlet to hand it over to Alex. But when they got there, things were hot and heavy inside the car. Whoever was holding the rifle got a little too stirred up by it all. Got carried away. And Alex got killed.”

  “An act of passion.”

  “Just as we always surmised. Except that we had the wrong cast of actors.”

  “Somebody got a hard-on for Jeri, killed her old man and then took Jeri, where, back to the house?”

  “Eventually, yes.”

  “And you think it was Draper.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Fuck, DeWalt, get to the point, would you? It’s after three o’clock in the fucking morning.”

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t Draper who pulled the trigger. In fact I’d guess it probably was. But I’ll tell you this. There is no way in hell that Draper Jewett could have carried Jeri Gillen a half mile through the woods. The man was dying even then. He was little more than a ghost.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have to carry her that far. Maybe ten, twenty yards. Just far enough to put her in his truck.”

  “I don’t care if it was three feet, he couldn’t have done it. Because first he would have had to subdue her. And the evidence points to the fact that she ran down the lane in an attempt to escape. Remember the spilled purse? He never could have caught her.”

  “He threatened her with the rifle.”

  “It’s a single-shot weapon. By the time he reloaded, she’d be out of range.”

  “Maybe she didn’t know that. She was panicky, hysterical. Maybe he had another gun with him.”

  “Maybe,” said DeWalt. “But I’ll tell you something else. A guy’s kidneys shut down the way Draper’s did, a guy is that far gone, and his pecker shuts down too. In all likelihood, Draper Jewett was impotent.”

  Abbott was silent for a moment. Then, “That sounds to me, Ernie, like it weakens your argument more than it supports it.”

  “I’m not saying the desire isn’t still there. In fact, it’s probably stronger than ever. Precisely because it can’t be satisfied.”

  “So then … he could still want to screw her?”

  “He wants her so badly it’s driving him crazy. And maybe that’s why he shoots Alex. Frustration. Jealousy. Who knows? In any case, Alex is dead. Jeri takes off running. Is Clifford there to catch her? He has to be. Either that, or Jeri goes running up the hill to the Jewett’s house. Unaware, of course, that it’s the Jewetts’ house. She’s sitting there naked and shivering, telling her story. And pretty soon, who comes dragging in but Draper himself.”

  Again Abbott said nothing for half a minute. Then, tiredly, his voice evincing a lack of expectation, “The first thing you said when you called was that you know where the body is. Do you or don’t you?”

  He thought he knew, yes. But now was no time for speculation, for guesswork. He needed certainty now; a convincing lie.

  “The first time I went to the Jewetts’ place, Clifford and Draper were excavating the septic tank. Just as I got there, they were pulling the cover back onto the tank. But later Clifford told me that the honeydipper would be showing up within the hour. So why would they be recovering the tank if it hadn’t been cleaned out yet?”

  “Maybe they wanted to take a last look at their shit,” Abbott said.

  “Or maybe they were putting something into the septic tank. And maybe if you contact all the honeydippers in town—there can’t be more than one or two, right?—maybe their reco
rds will show that they did not do any work for the Jewetts that day.”

  “It’s a lot of maybes,” Abbott said.

  “Two phone calls at most. That’s all it will take to find out.”

  “Two phone calls and a court order.”

  “Or wait a week and give Clifford a chance to dispose of the evidence.”

  This time the silence was a long one. Finally Abbott said, “I’ll think about it,” and hung up.

  Nearly four hours later, DeWalt’s telephone rang. “We’ll be out at the Jewett’s place by seven-thirty,” Abbott had said.

  And DeWalt answered, “I’ll be waiting at the inlet.”

  And now, waiting for the backhoe to fall silent, he stared into a fogbank. He tried to identify individual wisps streaming off from the main configuration to twist and dissipate in the sky. He saw a movement on the right edge of his peripheral vision and turned to face it. But it was only a leaf, a small brown heartshaped leaf, already dead, suspended it seemed in midair between two cattails, fluttering but not falling, a miracle of levitation.

  He stepped closer and saw the silvery filament stretched between the cattails, the spider’s thread upon which the stem of the leaf was caught, a single sticky tightrope. DeWalt felt an inclination to pluck the leaf free—he felt its sadness, perhaps—to let it fall to the ground where it belonged, to the wet and warmth of a natural decay. But he stopped himself; at the last instant he drew back his hand. The leaf vibrated on its tether, a harp string almost plucked.

  Who was DeWalt, after all, to intervene? Things get caught, tangled up; that was how it went. True for a falling leaf, for a fish on a hook. True for a man in his lover’s arms. Things get trapped. Forever stopped. Interruption previous to an expected end becomes the end itself. It is how life goes.

  Still looking at the leaf then, the dew-jeweled thread, DeWalt realized that he could hear nothing but the river. The backhoe had stopped digging. How long ago? he wondered.

  They will be sliding the cover off the septic tank now, he thought, and he gave them time to do so, the heavy lid stuck at first, grinding and scraping, Abbott standing back to watch the two young troopers who had accompanied him, Abbott still not convinced, reluctant to believe but with the grudgingly obtained court order in his pocket, the backhoe operator remaining in his machine, hands on silent levers.