There was another dangerous thing going on at the Sturgis house. He could smell it, divine it with the most primitive sense, the one that was never wrong when it nosed the primitive. Maybe Coleman was more than a little suicidal himself. He remembered the metal sheen of Lester's wife's red hair, her soiled clothes and her pale skin, but mainly the fear of Lester that had made her appear stupid.
There among the dying elms were the dead and wounded cars, the detritus of a battle or a flood, and the pink and blue trailer beneath its stilted second roof, like the wreck of the Burlington Zephyr, or some once glittering streamlined wonder, windows fashioned into parallelograms signifying speed. The V-8 engine still sat in its oil on the ground.
When he turned off his engine he heard the murmur of television and a child's high, gasping whine, a lament that sounded practiced and tired. He wished he had gone to George and Phyllis first, and discussed with them his coming here, but that would have been a weakling's attempt to gain courage. He wasn't a child, but he didn't want to knock on the metal door. His pistol, that tool of the simpleminded, was in its place under the dash. It all depended upon what world within a world he was about to enter.
He went up to the door. There was a doorbell but its square, cream colored button was stuck flat into its orifice as if by the thumb-grease of generations. He knocked on the tinny door, the sour stench of poverty flowing from its brown, tinted jalousies.
The frame of the trailer shook as steps came to the door, and as the door opened upon not much but the big body of Lester Wilson, in green chinos, Lester's voice blared back into the trailer a word, or words, that Luke thought at first foreign, or inner trailer language: "Shunnerap!" Harsh, strangled language Luke figured out, he thought, to mean, "Shut her up." Then the big head turned down toward Luke, almost the deadly, sclerotic, smooth-bristled, stupid bully of a child's nightmares. The lips were wet where the teeth were missing or rotten, and there were shoals of black dots of stubble, but not many yet, for the fellow was only in his twenties. "What do you want?" he said, with some emphasis on the "you." He stood there to intimidate what was on his doorstep, his eyes too bleary for his age, his green belly soiled.
"I want to buy your dog from you," Luke said. Again, because there might be a real reason to fear this man, Luke could not keep a countering disdain out of his voice.
"You want to what?"—to make Luke repeat himself.
"I want to buy your dog. He seems to want to stay at my place, and. . . ."
"He 'seems to want'? What fucking dog you talking about? I suggest you twirl your ass around and get along home."
"I'll be glad to do that, but I want to get this business straight first. You know what I'm talking about."
"You giving me some lip, mister?"
"Jesus," Luke could not keep himself from saying. "Do you live like this all the time?"
"What's that you said?"
It had been so many years since these youthful wells of adrenalin had been tapped. What a dance it was, the tarantella of violence! He could say, then Lester would say, then he could say, and soon they would cleanly transcend the compromises of civilization. Lester was not wearing his revolver, but for authority he would be the police, and his property was in question. Luke would have the possible beating of that property, the dog, who had certain vaguely specified rights, too, but mainly Luke would have middle class, landowner, old family status; the prior discussion would have to be violent enough to cause amnesia on both sides before the action became primordial, but that could happen, if Luke wanted it to happen. He didn't want it to happen, and so he controlled himself in order to be in control.
He said, "Just to get it all straightened out, the dog's name is Jake, and I'm offering you a hundred dollars for him. I brought him back to you once, but he didn't choose to stay. I have witnesses to say I brought him back to you." If the man could, or would, listen, Luke could choose his own weapons, which would be words fashioned into plausible lies. He went on, "As you may know, the animal's volition in this matter is a small but valid point of law, and in any case it remains a civil matter. The dog, however, was later beaten, a fact documented in the records of the Leah Veterinary Hospital, and this matter is not civil, but a case in tort, or criminal law, animals having certain rights generally espoused by the ASPCA and written into the codes having to do with humane treatment. Of course you may not have actually beaten the dog, but a beating did take place, and given your general reputation, as I understand it, a prima facie inference would certainly exist. However, I'm willing to ignore all that, not press charges, and in fact buy the dog from you."
"You going to stay around here after I told you to git?" Lester said, but he had been gravely touched.
Luke saw it so clearly, and had seen it so many times, how the essentially powerless feared the word. Lester was a bully and a brute, but he had only a minor clientele, in a small circle of hell. It would be so much more honorable to hit Lester with a fist. It was disgusting, boring; how could he have ever considered Lester Wilson a real danger, or have been so angry at the beating of a dog?
"Who says I beat up a dog?"
"No one; the fact remains that the dog was so badly beaten he had to be taken to a veterinary hospital for treatment. That is a fact; the rest, as the law would imply, is a presumptive inference." What a fluent liar he was. He could see that Lester suspected that he was being had, but didn't quite dare to call.
"None of your goddam business what happens to my dog. Now you move your ass out of here and take your money with you. I'll get my dog back when and how I feel like it!"
How poor, that "when and how," and how stupid of Lester to try to fight with words.
Ten minutes later they sat in the trailer's kitchen, at the chrome-legged Formica table, the kitchen grimily polished where hands and feet had travelled it, a jade plant strangling on the counter beside the sink, diapers fuming in a corner. Through an archway could be seen a torn red sofa bed, a figured carpet, the pink-green-blue cyanotic faces of television and a pale child; a baby cried somewhere down there.
Lester had no doubt decided out of caution, which was a sort of fear, to trim and deal. He may have suspected that to Luke the money was shit, a small purse tossed to a peasant. Tense joviality did not become him, and even he would be afraid that he might give the impression of groveling before his better. They discussed the size and number of trout in Zach Brook. Luke made out a bill of sale for the dog and Lester pretended to gloat inwardly over the high price by saying too many times what a good rabbit dog Luke had there. He had a beer opened already, and he opened one for Luke.
"Lots of deer up there, too, though the dog ain't one to run deer. Building yourself a camp, I hear. You got yourself a good deer rifle? I got one I bought at the State auction, Marlin .35 Rem. Sell it to you cheap. Fish and Game took it off some deer jacker last year."
Luke thought about this offer; if Lester could think he got the best of it in a matter unrelated to the dog, one in which he hadn't any reason to suspect he'd been manipulated, it might be helpful when the resentment flared again, as it would.
Lester got the rifle from a corner, where it and several other guns leaned, wiped the kitchen dust from it with his hand, and handed it to Luke. It was fairly new, with only a little superficial rust from sweaty hands. It was lever action, with iron sights and a leather sling. Luke opened it, put his finger in the breech and looked down the barrel at the light reflected from his finger. The rifling seemed good.
"Ninety dollars," Lester said, "and I'll throw in a box of shells, five missing from the box of twenty."
The last time Luke had to research commercial rifles was several years ago, but even then this rifle, with the extra sights, sling and sling hardware, would have cost more than that. So if he bought it he would have a bargain anyway, especially with the fifteen shells, each worth about a quarter.
"Sold," he said. He made Lester a check on the Leah Trust Company, and wrote, "Rifle, Marlin Mod.
336" on the bottom of the check.
Lester said, "You got a good buy. Got the new Microgroove rifling, you know. You're going to like the way she shoots." He folded the check and put it in his breast pocket. Now there would be, hopefully, some genuine triumph in it for him.
As Luke was leaving with his rifle and box of shells, the yellow Dodge rumbled up outside. At the door he met the young red-haired woman whom Coleman Sturgis had called Claire. She was astounded to see him, and flustered. Her white face seemed grimy with a kind of general abuse, ghost bludgeonings. She lowered her head without speaking and went into the trailer. Lester, standing large in the kitchen, looked steadily at her, saying nothing as she went past him.
21.
Luke sat in the Sturgises' long living room with a too-dark bourbon and water in his hand. Coleman was both drinking and smoking. Luke had taken a couple of drags from the fat yellow joint Coleman had made, then said he didn't need any more. As Coleman spoke he held the joint in sterling silver roach tweezers.
"To tell you the truth, Luke, though it might not sound too brotherly, Louise has begun to bore me with her drills, so to speak. I love her dearly and all that, but the constant repetition of sheer panic somewhat dulls one's edge." He took a long drag on the joint, held it with eyes and cheeks bulging, then seemed to hold it for a second long breath, or non-breath, before he let out a diminished gray wisp. "By the way," he said, "what business had you with the loathsome Lester?"
Luke explained about the dog, and said he'd finally bought him. "I gave Lester some pseudo-legal doubletalk, accused him of beating the dog beyond what the law allows, and finally he let me buy him for about four times what he's worth."
"And did he beat the dog?"
"Oh, yes. With a baseball bat or a two-by-four. Lucky he didn't kill him. But dogs are pretty tough critters."
"A violent man," Coleman said, and his eyes flicked to Luke's.
Maybe Coleman needed a confidant. He remembered when he'd felt the same. Once he'd always had, it seemed, a good friend to whom he could confide things, nearly anything. He'd had Helen, too, depending upon the nature of the thing to be confided. But now he had no one. Everyone he knew seemed flawed, dangerous, too interested or needful, and so he kept things to himself, like a plotter. Whatever had happened to his equals, his friends, except that they were gone to far places and age? That was enough, that was enough.
Coleman was about his age, but aware.
"I gather, as they say," Coleman said, "that you smelled a rat this afternoon. I shouldn't say, 'a rat,' though. What should I say? That I was, indeed, alone here with Miss Claire—Mrs. Wilson—and so on. You may read it that I like to live dangerously."
"I suspected something like that," Luke said. Coleman was wearing dark slacks, loafers, a white shirt open at the collar, and he seemed quite dapper and jaunty in the face of his danger. Luke wondered how he had so easily left the subject of Louise, whose situation, repetitious or not, didn't seem all that casual. But this was Coleman's drama, not Louise's and Coleman had from the first struck him, with that winsome, watery look that peered around as if for credit, if not for praise, as a little boy.
"You might well ask how I dared to get involved with the young wife of such a violent man, and I'd have to answer that I think it's utterly insane, dangerous and doomed. But Claire, strange Claire, is more than she seems."
"Most people are," Luke said.
"Not necessarily. Perhaps if you'd been a teacher for sixteen years, as I've been, you'd come to realize how repetitive the gene pool actually is, in everything from hair color and handwriting to the distribution of adipose tissue and analogical thought patterns.
"But Claire—how interesting it was when I first saw that though she was terrified of me by definition, because I was a man, she did have submerged needs that hadn't been destroyed by her experiences. At twelve, and thereafter, she was raped by a brother. Her father beat her mother bloody with whatever came to hand, including split stove wood. There was no romance, tenderness or even seduction involved in her marriage to Lester. She can barely read or do simple arithmetic. She knows little about the household arts, such as hygiene, medicine, nutrition, anatomy or sex. We had to teach her many of the simple chores she comes here once a week to do. Television itself is quite often a mystery to her, its jokes and simple ironies over her head. What she sees on the screen are moving images, seeming alive and energetic but essentially motiveless.
"Physically she was given that garish hair that makes her look, in some lights, almost artificial, and with it eyes as clear, green and simple as emeralds. Many so-called red heads have unfortunate skin—freckles, coarseness, bristles—but hers is that rare, pure white that comes as close as any Occidental skin to deserve that adjective. Because of a lack of the proper exercise and horrendous nutrition she has a protuberant belly that hasn't and won't recover from the trauma of two pregnancies, but it, too, accented by her gaudy orange pubic hair, is white. One thinks of snow, of percale—no, more of a satin, or even velvet, there being on that skin an infinitesimal velour. The bluish to green bruises caused by Lester are the only flaws in this admirable dermis, and they of course come and go."
Coleman placed the extinguished roach in a small tin box and added bourbon to his drink.
"More and more dangerous," Luke said.
Pleased by Luke's attention, Coleman went on, "But since I'm not enjoined, not in any way, to evaluate Claire's intelligence, to give her an F, so to speak, I've been journeying with her to countries other than those of the mind. As for the initial seduction, that was nothing. After she'd got used to my presence, and I hadn't hit her with a piece of stove wood, or a belt, which I don't wear in the first place, and had smiled at her, even touched her lightly several times, I came into my bedroom where she was changing sheets and pillowcases and gently, firmly but somehow neutrally, told her that we would lie down together there, right there, you see, Claire, for a minute, to see how it is. Strange customs have these rich summer people. No, I doubt if such a complicated shadow of thought crossed her obedient mind.
"But where did we journey? We began, I suspect, in what was to her Cascom, New Hampshire, but to me seemed like some dense archipelago in, though I may slander the place, New Guinea, where the men wear their sexual parts strung up to their belly buttons on strings and the women are humped quickly, grossly, publicly and upon male whim. And when they are not 'presentable,' as it were, the females are considered filth—of course by themselves, too—and a cause of disease and other abominations. I may be confused in my geography, but not terribly much in my anthropology, and I apologize to the Cargo Cult or whatever if I have my archipelagoes mixed. But do you understand what a tabula rasa I'd found? Can you realize that the girl had never been allowed the time, or given the slightest motivation, to find that the vagina lubricates itself and that male penetration is not as painful as shoving a splintery stick up between the legs? Ah, how slowly and carefully, how tenderly, did we our pleasures prove. Ah," Coleman said and took a drink. "Ah, our tender loving levers and orifices, her sweet clitoris on my tongue unbrutalized. Luke, it was a whole history of the evolution of love, like having lived since the Eocene."
"Just so you don't find a certain troglodyte sniffing after you through all those misty ages," Luke said.
"Amen! Amen, but it was worth it."
"What about Claire now that she's found that it can be fun?"
"God, I don't know. More bruises, I suppose. And she seems to be making small hominid noises about leaving him, but where could she go?"
"With two kids, one a baby?"
"Yes, yes! Lord Cupid, what have I done?"
What a fine moment Coleman thought this was. Luke believed very little of the story, though Coleman might believe most of it. The basic, most dangerous part of it Luke did believe.
"But Louise," Coleman said after several sighs, a pacing across the room and back, and a drink. "Louise. You'll be curious, I imagine. I don't k
now much about the . . . intensity ... of your affair, which seems rather off and on, but there is an intensity, I do feel that. Of course I don't know how candid you want to be, or if you want to say anything at all, but I'm sure you have questions, such as your earlier one, 'How's Louise?'—which is rather complicated and I couldn't go into it very deeply then because Claire was at the moment warm and dewy from her bath."
"Would she want me to come and see her tomorrow?"
"That's the sort of question it's always hard to answer with Louise."
"Why did she divorce her husband?"
"Maybe all questions are hard ones when it comes to Louise," Coleman said. "It seems to me I remember a Louise who was a fairly happy young woman, who met this older man, a publisher who was in the process of divorcing his wife, or who said he was—you just don't assume things with that character. Anyway, Louise did marry him, and that was the beginning of the nightmare."
"Who was the guy?" Luke asked, surprised that he'd asked the question so easily. He'd had a little time now to cope with his sick feelings about Louise and suicide, with Martin Troup's and Ham Jones's accusations and denunciations, with Lester Wilson's brutishness, and he was thinking of the Avenger, and all sorts of little evidential coincidences. He usually tended to trust anyone he was dealing with, thinking that the truth was more or less normal— except in a poker game, and there deception was honorable, mutually agreed upon. But he watched Coleman with care.
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