by Farris, John
"I don't think I could do what you did in the war. How scary was it?"
"Jumping was bliss, compared to getting there, all but one time at night, usually in miserable weather, with inexperienced or panicky transport pilots who had trouble locating the DZ. Going into Sicily from North Africa, some of our pilots got lost in the dark, and a lot of C-47's were shot down by friendly fire from the navy standing off the coast at Gela. Most of us were so sick from dysentery we'd picked up in Tunisia, our bowels were like running faucets. Counting 'chutes, we each carried at least a hundred and twenty-five pounds of gear. Anybody who wasn't hurt or killed on landing was just lucky. I had a trick knee for three years after Sicily."
"How many jumps did you make?"
"Maybe forty in practice. Four in combat. Sicily, Italy, France, and Holland."
"You never were scared?"
"I was always afraid of screwing up and getting my men killed."
"Did you ever screw up?"
"If I had, I surely doubt anybody would have noticed." Whit's Texas drawl and phrasing became more noticeable when he was being ironic. "Except for Salerno, our combat missions were either inadequately planned, badly timed, or improperly executed due to circumstances beyond anybody's control. But . . . hell, no, when I think about it, there's not much I would have, or could have done differently. The only way to get out of a snafu is to keep moving and improvise."
"Snafu?"
"Military term for screwup."
"Oh," Terry said. After another yawn he stopped turning in the bed. Whit looked at the luminous dial of his chronometer. Ten after ten. In the fireplace a burning log broke apart, the flames flickered lower. He looked over at Terry, and was surprised to see the boy's eyes were still open. Appraising him.
"Mom said she couldn't sleep in the same room with you after you came back. You'd wake up yelling and screaming and scare the hell out of her."
"Yeah, I know it was a problem for Millie. Wasn't doing me any good, either."
"You don't have nightmares anymore, do you?"
"They're few and far between." Whit felt a change of subject was in order. "How's your mother's new book coming?"
"She's into revisions. It's about Eleanor of Aquitaine. I've read all of Mom's books, but history's my worst subject. I get bored except for the sex scenes. Don't tell her I said so."
"They make a lot of money. Five best sellers in a row."
"Yeah," Terry said, uninterested in the subject of money, which he had never lacked. "What were some of the other problems?"
"Between your mother and me? Well, the war lasted a long time. I shipped out to North Africa before you were born and by the time I got home you were potty-trained and had a two thousand word vocabulary. And your mother had the fastest-selling novel in the country. I was a burned-out bird colonel with such a bad case of the shakes I couldn't hold a glass at all those literary cocktail parties in her honor I was obligated to attend. Millie didn't understand what was wrong with me and I didn't know who the hell she was anymore. She owned clothes I couldn't afford to buy her, and she was on a first-name basis with movie stars. I felt like I had to go it alone for a while. In the time it took me to get my bearings and adjust to being a civilian, Millie met André on the Washington social circuit. You know the rest."
"Mother's got a new boyfriend. His name is Raphael. I think he was an assistant director on one of Pagnol's films. Raphael is a lot younger than she is. She says she's never going to get married again."
"Probably a wise decision."
"Are you?"
"Am I going to get married? Not much chance, Terry."
"What about, you know, I met her last summer on Long Island. The painter. Wasn't her name Ellen?"
"Elaine. We see each other occasionally. She doesn't come into town that often. She's getting ready for a show at her gallery."
Terry didn't reply.
After a couple of minutes Whit turned his head on the pillow and looked at his son. His eyes were closed. His breathing had slowed. He twitched a little, nervously, beneath the blankets, exhaled sharply, then slid deeper into sleep. His face was shaped like his father's. A little long, but with a good chinline. He also had the slightly protruding density of brow that sheltered the eyes; theirs were not faces open to quick inspection, snap appraisals of character. They had, in the same spot, similar harmless moles, on the jaw near the left earlobe. Almost everything about the boy was Whit, from the way he was hung to the slimness of hip and a tendency to saunter. But Terry had his mother's keener, skeptical, sometimes acerbic witch-hazel eyes, and her excellent teeth. Whit felt a tug of appreciation, a momentary impulse of comradeship. He yearned to smoke a Camel. But he had quit again because of the troublesome coughing and was determined to build up his wind, which in turn he hoped would quicken his step on the courts. He'd been playing like a tired old man lately.
He wished there'd been time tonight to try to explain to Terry how people are changed, permanently, by circumstances. We come together, we cling to each other for a while, we are, inevitably, separated. He was reminded of a cliché that Millie the novelist might have scorned. The river of life. Human beings caught up in a timeless flow, now drifting, now hurtling through rapids, colliding with one another, slipping away, sometimes nearly drowning, everyone destined for that unimaginable waterfall at the end. Every day, by chance, countless bondings both biological and psychological occurred. I need you. I love you. Stay with me forever. But the river became too swift, too tricky: there are many other bodies swirling nearby, counter forces combining with cataclysmic events in the roaring depths, ceaselessly at work to separate the paired ones.
So Terry was curious about him, about the relationship out of which he had been born. A dialogue was under way, perhaps; the slight but persistent tension between them seemed to have lessened in the moments before he fell asleep. Whit didn't try to fool himself into thinking they had reached a new level of understanding. Nothing so profound. Whit already had missed too much of his son's life. They had little in common. He worked hard to keep the relationship going, but more out of duty and a sense of guilt than from love. The deep love for his flesh and blood that he knew he ought to feel. But it had been a long time since Whit Bowers had felt something stronger than a superficial attraction to anyone. The end of his marriage to Millie had been a relief. Burned-out bird colonel. But he wore the Academy ring. After extensive R&R he might have gone on faking it, swung the prestigious Pentagon post or Occupation duty, accepted the promotion to brigadier merited by his war record. But there was a surreal feeling about staying in uniform once the shooting stopped. He had gone to war expecting that he would die in battle; convinced that he must die. It was the destiny forecast in the dreadful dreams of childhood. Better men than he had been killed, seemingly at random; he had come home after months of bloody fighting on three fronts with only nicks from shrapnel, a steel pin in one ankle and some decorations for heroism under fire. His proof that he had been among the quick and the victorious. The dreams that had nothing to do with the war he had fought began to recur almost immediately, and the message was plain: his destiny was unfulfilled, unforeseeable.
Terrifying.
Now he was forty-eight years old. The lucky ones, he sometimes thought while in a sink of morbidity, lay peacefully beneath uniform white crosses in foreign countries. The unlucky were still struggling to pull their lives together. He found himself in between, steady for now but on a tightrope that sometimes shrank to the diameter of a human hair. He had stopped his heavy drinking, going from job to job, living off his contacts from the Army's Old Boy network and his father's revered name. He was doing acceptable work in a not very demanding position with Langford Industries. Not enjoying himself, but not hating it either. Making enough money to indulge in strenuous hobbies. He skied and played a respectable game of tennis and went after billfish whenever possible. He had learned several methods of diverting his mind when the brooding, potentially debilitating thoughts intruded.
> Elaine, his sometime lover whom Terry had inquired about, had been in analysis for several years and, at the most intimate stage of their relationship, she urged him to give it a go. He needed to get in touch with himself before it was too late, Elaine insisted. No, not for him, not ever; sorry. So he had backed away from Elaine; they were still on cordial terms but seldom made the effort to see each other. Someone else would come along, though the river was swifter now and he felt more alone than ever in its rapids.
And now it was turning into one of those nights when he was weary from the long drive but not within reach of sleep. If he did drift off, it would be into the territory of the childhood terrors. Whit got up and walked into the bathroom, took a sleeping pill from his shaving kit and swallowed it without water. Debated taking another. He decided that two of the pills would make him groggy and possibly irritable in the morning. He walked back to the bed in his skivvies, shivering, the fire all ash and red-eyed coals now, the squat electric heater not doing much to warm the room.
Chapter Two
Terry Bowers was wide awake at five A.M., and restless. It felt like ten o'clock to him. Half the morning, gone. He was a habitual early riser wherever he happened to be.
In the twin bed three feet away his father snored placidly on his back. The motel unit smelled, not unpleasantly, of warm birch log ash in the fireplace. There was a streak of twilight where the blackout drapes didn't quite come together over the windows. The old heater glowed lifelessly in one corner like an electrocuted June bug. Birds were chirping in the bushes outside. He heard a truck in a monotonous middle gear on the road a hundred yards away.
Terry got up, used the toilet, gave his hair a lick with the brush, and dressed. Chinos, penny loafers, flannel shirt, rust-colored leather jacket with a brass zipper and elastic cuffs. He let himself quietly out of the room and stood on the small roofed porch, looking around.
There was a low-lying mist drifting in bursts across the landscape as if from silent, unseen guns. Overhead, stars so faint they disappeared even as he tried to focus on them. From one of the rooms around the semi-circular drive he heard a baby's thin squawl of hunger. He'd always been observant; he was slowly, unconsciously cultivating the artist's mania for seemingly pointless conjecture. That rusted car with Illinois plates (Land of Lincoln), one stove-in door covered with plastic sheeting taped to the body; how had the owner managed to drive his wreck this far, and where was he going?
Judging from the number of cars and pickup trucks parked around the drive, about half of the motel's rooms were occupied. What if, under some kind of spell, everybody had to come out now, get into a car that didn't belong to them, and drive off in a totally unplanned direction? The red and white Corvette was destined to be someplace else tonight, maybe five or six hundred miles away. It might be in Texas. How far was Texas from Asheville, North Carolina? He could look it up later in the Rand McNally road atlas. His father had been raised in El Paso, on the Ft. Bliss military reservation.
He walked slowly down the drive made of smooth brown river stones, toward the Blue Ridge Parkway, past the motel's restaurant that wouldn't open until seven for breakfast. He remembered the eyes of the girl who had waited on them last night, the school ring she wore on a gold chain around her neck. She was lavaliered, she had explained. It meant she was going steady. She had said, in a quietly amazed voice, "Paris, France?" when he told her where he was from. He liked her western Carolina accent and her delicately boned face and the way she would look at him and then look away with a slight smile as if he'd given her something weighty and interesting to think about. What if she walked out of the mist right now, wearing her green-and-white checked waitress's uniform, thick-soled white shoes that had smudges on them, and he pointed his finger at her and suddenly they were together on the Champs-Elysees. What would she say when she saw the Arc de Triomphe in front of her? When she smiled at him again, tickled and bemused, he would take her by the hand and they—
Nothing came or went on the road. He forgot about the young waitress when he saw a black dog with four white paws, run over in the night and dead for hours. The dog lay stiffly on its side, snarling mouth caked with dried blood. If it had been his dog, he thought, looking at the white paws, he would have called it "Sneakers." No collar. The dog probably didn't belong to anyone and had no name. His mother had two dogs. Toy poodles, both a kind of dowager, blue-rinse color. Mitzi and Miou-Miou. Terry tolerated the poodles but wished he owned a Great Pyrenees, his favorite breed. But he knew he wasn't going to have a dog that big (they often weighed two hundred pounds), not while they lived in a seven-room apartment. Maybe if his mother bought that restored olive mill with six acres in the countryside near Nice—
His hands smarted from the cold, and he put them in the pockets of his jacket, walking south along the parkway. A rooster crowed in the distance. The mist was thicker in places along the road. Looking back, he could make out the elevated blue neon of the motel sign, but not the motel itself. He kicked at trash in his way. A Nesbitt's Orange Soda bottle, a squashed Marvel Mystery Oil can, a bread wrapper. Almost every step of the way there was litter.
Americans could be such pigs, he thought scornfully. Thinking in French, as a Frenchman.
Terry hadn't walked far, only about a quarter of a mile, when he came to one of the roadside rest areas that afforded, when the weather was clear, vistas of mountains and valleys. An unhitched house trailer was parked well off the road, listing to one side. He had seen a couple of others like it on the way down from New York: it was a dull silver color, and shaped like a loaf of bread. There were small windows covered with venetian blinds. One of the tires had gone flat and was half off the rim, which accounted for the tilt.
The narrow door in the side of the trailer was standing open. Terry thought he heard someone groaning inside. The groans were soft, intermittent. He had heard his father make similar sounds in his sleep. The trailer was about fifty feet away in the mist. There was nothing particularly interesting about it except for the door that was open on a cold morning. Yet he felt rooted, unable to go any closer, reluctant to turn and walk away.
The groaning had stopped.
Another sleeper, troubled by his dreams.
"Boshie!"
The cry from within the trailer caused Terry's heart to jump.
"Help me—help me!"
He wasn't immediately frightened, but he didn't know what to do. Maybe there was someone else in the trailer who would respond to the plea for help.
"Where are you? I need you! Please, Boshie!"
The pathetic cries indicated that he was alone, or thought he was. Instinctively Terry moved closer.
A large man in a monk's hooded robe appeared, lurching, limping badly, from the other side of the trailer. He slammed the door shut. He looked odd as a walrus in this setting. But he was carrying something in his other hand, a club, or—Terry backed away, a sudden freeze in the region of his bowels.
The crying and pleading continued inside, but on a rising note of insult and pain, as if the slammed door had been a heartbreaking rebuff.
"What do you want?" the man in the monk's, robe asked Terry. "Where did you come from?"
With his head bent the man's face was unseeable within the bulky cowl. It wasn't a club he held, Terry observed, it was a croquet mallet. The man also seemed off-balance, like the trailer; his right foot protruded beyond the hem of the russet robe. The foot looked grotesquely swollen, shapeless. On it he wore only a filthy white athletic sock.
Terry felt as if he'd taken a wrong turn into a forbidden area of a medieval cathedral; a crease of superstition, like a small bone in his throat, made it difficult to speak.
"I—I don't want anything. I was out for a walk."
"Are you staying at the motel?" He had a deep voice, which was neither threatening nor angry. But there was an inflection of command; sometimes Terry's father sounded that way, when he was talking to certain taxi drivers or obnoxious maitre d's. Their rudeness always vanished
, right away.
Terry nodded, answering the question, but he liked this less and less; he was poised to run. The hooded man seemed to realize it.
"Why don't you go back there?" he suggested. "This is no place for you to be—not at this time of the morning."
"Is somebody sick?" Terry asked. "Do you want me to call a doctor?"
When the man replied his voice faltered, descending on a scale of emotion from sadness to futility.
"No. A doctor won't do him any good. My brother has come home to die."
"Oh—I'm sorry. What are you going to do about the flat tire?"
"The others drove into town to buy a new one when the Goodrich store opens." The man raised his head.
The pious cowl fell back and Terry saw that he had strange, bulging eyes that looked in different directions—simultaneously to heaven and to hell. "We'll be on our way soon. There's nothing you can do. Go back to where you came from, boy. Leave us in peace."
"Okay," Terry said, a tremor running through him like a quick furry animal. There seemed to be no point in repeating that he was sorry.
As he was turning to leave he heard a clatter of metal blinds at one of the small windows of the trailer. He looked up. He saw aged hands with long yellow nails holding the slats apart. A human throat with the runnels and wrinkles of old age. A trembling mouth with only a few teeth remaining.
What else he saw broke Terry's nerve and sent him flying, the sounds of a jeering, birdlike scream trailing after him.
"Geeeeek! Geeeeekkkk!"
He was beneath the flickering blue neon sign of the motel before he stopped running, winded, and bent over with his hands on his knees. He looked back to be sure that nothing—nobody—was following him, stalking him relentlessly out of the mist.
As soon as he could he jogged across the motel grounds, around the drained pool and the children's playground, ignoring a severe stitch in his side. He let himself into the room and quickly bolted the door behind him.