Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  As he spoke, Haig had stood and walked to the opening between the kitchen and the dinette. He was a large man, bulkier than he had been as a youth, but still muscular; by no means fat, just large. Most people thought him a handsome man; some, in fact, thought he looked better now than at eighteen, when his blond, close-cropped curls and chiseled features and athlete's body had seemed too perfect for down-to-earth manliness. Now the hair was grizzled brown, the features had broadened, the body had thickened.

  The bad knee from the car accident had to be favored more, particularly when, as now, he was tired. Tonight, as his wife had cooked, he had stood there with his weight off the weak leg, still in his dress pants and suede boots and a blue dress shirt, its collar loosened behind his tie. His hands, raised over his head, pushed on either side of the doorway. Judith was disturbed by the dark, wet stains under his arms. His hands looked huge to her, the fingers spread out, pushing against the walls. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows, and muscles twitched along the thick brown arms. "Well, more later," he had said, then asked if he had time for a shower, and she had nodded yes.

  So dinner had been cooked and eaten under the protection of the post office news and highway news. Even ordinarily Mr. and Mrs. Haig were not at ease with each other. Whenever they were separated, the transition back to cohabitation was always clumsy. Hawk felt intrusive and Judith felt intruded upon. His voice and steps sounded to his own ears like a loud, hollow echo in the still house.

  He seemed to loom quickly and awkwardly there, out of proportion to the furniture. To her, his soiled clothes coiling out of the open suitcase on the bed were almost cause for panic. She had unpacked them and pushed them down into the hamper.

  First evenings together were always difficult, but on this particular one Judith was constrained, as well, by the distance she had put between them through her unexplainable involvement with Chin Lam Henry and Winslow Abernathy. It was not that she had never kept secrets from John before. Her whole felt life was a secret, wholly unshared. Yet she had rarely, if ever—and she couldn't recall which, so devoid of significance had her actions been—falsified what she did. Now she had actively denied Sarah's report of her interest in the Vietnamese girl. Nor was she certain why she had felt it necessary to warn Winslow Abernathy against calling her at home, except she knew it was necessary that John not be challenged by so much as a thought that Abernathy presumed an interest in her—whether the thought were true or not.

  After dinner the routine that kept them safe from intimacy had reasserted itself. Haig had announced his need to catch up, reclining, on the news of the world. She had saved the papers for him. From her knitting (the many-colored scarf she thought of as Sammy Smalter's was almost finished), Mrs. Haig looked over at her husband, now after a shower, in a summer police shirt and trousers. His legs extended, longer than she had remembered them, out from the crackling newspaper. Inside the enormous socks, his toes were moving. He made continual tiny noises in his throat and mouth and with his fingers and by shifting his weight in the vinyl chair.

  She felt an easing of pressure because it was almost nine o'clock; he would have to leave soon for the station to take over patrol until eleven. Then suddenly Haig flapped his paper shut and saw her looking at him. She lowered her eyes at once, but he came over behind her chair, stretching with a yawn to disguise his intent and awkwardness. Judith willed herself to relax as he put his hands through her hair, then onto her neck, and rubbed. Her head jerked slowly back and forth. Then the hands pressed on her shoulders, kneading them over and over in the same place. Then finally the hands slid down and pressed against her collarbone. Then they slid farther down and lay twitching against her breasts. It was to Mrs. Haig as if two large, pink baby animals of undefined and foreign species had crawled from behind the chair down to her bosom to try to suckle there. She took the hands away and held them.

  He whispered, "Hey, honey, hey there," his breath slightly rasped, and came around in front of her, pulled her up by the hands, wrapped his arms around her body, and began to kiss her. The pressure of his lips strained her neck back, and his tongue was hard and jabbing inside her mouth. Her arms were crushed up between their bodies.

  Her husband's action had not been unexpected by Mrs. Haig.

  Generally after such absences he expected them to do what he called "be together." In this case she was also aware that he felt he had been denied the previous three weeks by scrupulous sacrifice to her newly diagnosed illness. She knew he had asked Dr. Scaper just before leaving for Hartford whether, given her heart condition, the conjugal act could harm his wife, and the doctor had said no, there was no reason why it should. John had always kept an accurate record of the days lapsed between sexual relations. To repay these marital IOUs she had longer respites now than in the early years of their marriage. She had expected to be called to account tonight. But not this early; later, after they were in bed, where it usually began.

  His hands were moving rapidly up and down her back; they pulled her hips toward him. She could feel the hardened lump and tried to twist to the side. "John," she said, and tried to push away from his chest with her hands, "it's nine o'clock."

  Above her his neck and ears were flushed and his breath was loud. "Come on, hon, hey, come on."

  "You told Joe you'd come to the station at nine. John. Please, John." The words were her only struggle to escape, though the wish to escape beat inside her like the flapping wings of an enormous bird panicked in a cage. "John, you told Joe."

  He squeezed his hand around her wrist and led her across the hall to the bedroom, where, without turning on the light, he pulled her down beside him on the bed, his weight forcing her next to him.

  Then pushing her backwards, he rolled on top of her, one leg wedging hers open.

  "John. Please," she asked a final time.

  "No," he said. "Now. Hon, come on, now. It's been almost a month. A month." He held her wrists down over her head. "I've missed my wife. Missed you, hon. You're still my girl." He was rubbing harder against her, then he rolled off and said hoarsely, "Take off your clothes and get under the covers, all right? I've got to wear these tonight, so I guess…" His voice trailed off. Standing beside her, he undressed like an athlete in a changing room, ignoring with silent circumspection a nearby body.

  His wife had done as he had said. As his eyes adjusted to the dark room, he looked down at her; her eyes were closed, her arms beneath the sheet crossed over her breasts. He stroked his erect organ, then slid beneath the sheets.

  When it was over, he pulled away immediately and showered once again. He returned to the bedroom in his shorts and a T-shirt, switched on the light, and slapped cheerfully at his stomach. "We're not so old," he said to his wife. She lay under the covering still, her face turned away from him. After he dressed, he sat beside her on the edge of the bed. "That's right," he told her. "You just lie back and get some rest. I'll let myself in, I'll be at the station really late, don't worry about getting up for me. Good to be back, Jude."

  After she heard the car ignition, she pulled the sheet around her and, steadying herself for a minute by the bedpost, walked to the bathroom.

  Maynard Henry had lost time. It had taken time to beat the pad- lock off his trailer with a rock. It had taken time, scattering to the floor the neat shelves of cartons and bottles, to find a can of strong cleanser so that he could scour the graffiti off the side of his trailer. It had taken time to search the area for his wife and his dog. Her balled-up note of explanation still lay in the dark dirt beneath the trailer where the graffitist had randomly thrown it. No one in the compound could tell him where Chin might be. Juan Treeca, Raoul's brother, had shoved their trailer door shut, cursing him in an endless stream of Spanish profanity that he couldn't translate. Henry walked back through the dark to his trailer, felt up along a closet shelf, and took down his service revolver. When the Treeca father jerked open his door again, Maynard shoved the gun in the old man's stomach.

  Then they told him
Chin was not, and had not been, in their trailer at all. Mrs. Treeca, fat and proudly dressed, had shouted up at him, "You are free, and six weeks to come now Raoul must stay in that hospital. Who will pay? Ah, tell me who!" Henry had set her aside, firmly but without anger or even interest. He began to search Madder.

  But no one was where he was supposed to be and that had cost Henry time. The man with whom he had left his truck at the station was out somewhere driving in it. Victor Grabaski, the only other person in town who might have taken her away, was not in his trailer, nor was Victor's cousin, Karl. Henry felt sunburned, grimy, hungry, and exhausted by frustration and alarm. Anything could have happened to his wife. She could be dead, or hurt, or lost and unable to explain herself. Any bastard could have told her anything. How could she tell the difference between what made sense in America and what didn't? It was possible that he had lost her for good, that the government had returned her to Southeast Asia as suddenly and as haphazardly as it had lifted her out of the panicked streets of Saigon and brought her, by chance, here to him. Anything could have happened to her because he hadn't been there to stop it.

  Because he had been tossed in the can by that bastard Haig, whom he'd like to kill with his bare hands.

  Maynard Henry was a man of violent instincts whose outbursts, throughout his thirty-two years, had been matters for long, concerned discussion among first his family, then his teachers, and then his military superiors. All had judged him unmanageable in every cordoned area where they had had him in charge—playpen, playground, or combat zone. They judged him prickly, touchy, purposely unpleasant. Unlike his affable brother, Arn, he had made few friends. They said the marines would be the perfect place for him, since what he needed was straightening out, a firm hand, the goal of becoming a man. They thought he should be shipped somewhere (far from Dingley Falls, Connecticut) to get rid of all that young hostility and aggression. In 1965, when he was twenty-one, they sent him to the other side of the world to kill people. In 1970, he had come home, still a man of violent instincts. He had not been typically violent. Unlike many, he had not crawled out of that darkness mad.

  When his comrades in arms had whacked off the heads of Vietnamese, stuck cigarettes in their mouths, and photographed these trophies, he had responded with only a slightly heightened degree of the angry disgust with which he had regarded, for example, an Argyle pimp in a peach and burgundy Eldorado, or a fatherly lecture by his brother Arn on how to make it in this world. Henry had not collected villagers' ears, but he had bitten off the earlobe of a fellow soldier whom he had attacked in a bar, and this ear, being an American ear, was more remarked upon in his battalion than those others.

  The same passion that fueled Maynard Henry's choleric rages also ignited different kinds of turbulent urges in him, for he was susceptible as well to ungovernable fits of compassion, loyalty, and bravery in defense of others' safety or his own rigid principles. But he had almost no capacity to analyze or to adjudicate his emotions, and so when he lashed out at a beggar, he could not trace how pity beyond his control had triggered his rage.

  For the past month, the fulcrum of all the violent instincts, the eye of the still hurricane, had been his wife, Chin Lam. She had become the flame of his indignation toward his enemies and of his shame for having once been her enemy, of his anger for being left out and of his pride for taking his own way. He loved her fiercely. He ached to find her at once, but what he saw himself doing was shaking her until her neck snapped.

  At the end of Long Branch Road, Henry was standing, looking north across the small, turbulent falls of the Rampage. On the other side of the river, the shabby, red brick building that housed Dingley Optical Instruments was closed and dark. Dim shapes scurried across Falls Bridge. They were dogs, nearly a dozen of them, and as they raced at him now, he curled his palm around the .45 in the pocket of his nylon windbreaker. Then he recognized Night, his German shepherd, among the leaders and called to him with a whistle. The pack moiled around Henry's legs while he strapped his belt through Night's collar as the huge black dog leaped to his shoulders to lick at his face.

  When they reached Ransom Circle, the dog began to bark, scrabbling off to the right, toward Chin and the center of Dingley Falls, although Henry had turned left onto Hope Street. The two fought for control until, struggling against the dog's weight, the thin man stumbled. "You motherfucker cocksucker," he yelled, spitting out the curse as he yanked so savagely on the leash that the shepherd toppled for a second off balance. It yelped and then let itself be pulled along. Halfway through the block Henry reached down, rubbed the dog's head, and in a sweet, scratchy singsong said, "Hey, baby, it's all right, you all right, Night? You sorry-ass motherfucker, you all right? Where is she, boy? You know where Chin went?

  Thought you were going to watch out for her, you cocksucker, okay now, it's all right, we'll find her, don't you worry, you sorry-ass motherfucker, that's a boy, Night."

  In 1974, Chin Lam's father (an eagerly corrupt petty bureaucrat) had chanced to do an army MP named Victor Grabaski a substantial favor involving the dismissal of certain potentially damaging legal charges about the trading of American blue jeans for opium. By chance, Victor Grabaski had been in a position (near a helicopter) to return the favor a year later by shoving the just-orphaned Chin Lam to the front of a mob, then pulling her into the machine with him as it took off. She was transported eventually to California and finally (still in contact with Corporal Grabaski) to Connecticut, where two relatives of hers were thought to have escaped earlier. But by chance these people proved to be total strangers, with names confusingly identical to her aunt and uncle's, thereby misleading the Americans in charge of Vietnamese refugees, who had processed Chin. Her true relatives had been misplaced somewhere else in the United States (and were, in fact, managing a Burger King restaurant in Cincinnati). With the best will in the world, Operation Rescue and Resettlement, working in haste, was losing people right and left.

  Good Samaritans were running away with the homeless before they could be registered; childless couples were grabbing round-faced orphans right off the airline counters; needy hospitals were hauling away M.D.s who would, as one administrator phrased it, "work like coolies for peanuts" as Americans opened their arms in this crisis, aroused to goodwill by the titillation of catastrophe.

  Victor Grabaski, by default her oldest friend now, had finally arranged (through union contacts) for Chin Lam to be hired at Dingley Optical Instruments. But before she had to begin assembling binoculars (or repaying Victor in the currency he had slowly realized he preferred in exchange for his protection), Maynard Henry had seen her and begun precipitously to court her. When Grabaski had responded with a proprietary claim about the beautiful nineteen-year-old girl, Henry had broken a broom over Victor's back and kicked his cousin Karl unconscious while Chin Lam was running from the trailer to summon help for him.

  They had married. On her part it was an act as full of meaning and as irrelevant as the act of a man falling off a cliff who grabs at the one hand reaching over the edge to him. Henry was her lifeline.

  Since they had been together, she had been equally terrified by the thought of his violence should she displease him and of her helplessness should he (who cared for her and spoke some part of her language) disappear. His arrest, for which she seemed to be responsible, had felt to Chin Lam so like another deadly fall through space that she had clutched again at the air above her and felt to her shock what Maynard had not wished her to find—other hands besides his own held out to her.

  And now the thin, veiny hands of Prudence Lattice patted one of Chin's. In her living room the old woman sat beside the girl and promised her not only a livelihood but a home, should she, for any reason, ever require one. Miss Lattice had kept Chin safe for herself until after dinner. But then, prompted by Winslow Abernathy's unexpected visit in the early evening while Chin was out searching the neighborhood one last time for Night, Miss Lattice had been forced by her conscience to tell her guest that her
husband would probably be returning to Madder before morning. Yet, she added, let Chin stay until he called her. He would see her note. There was no need to go now. It was too upsetting to think of her walking in the dangerous dark to the trailer park, waiting in the dangerous dark for someone. For someone, Prudence was thinking, like Maynard Henry, whom she had never met, but imagined as a vague, violent shape, unpredictable, huge, and menacing. Insistent on his own will, ravenous with those impulses to seize and plunder and kill that were ungovernable, and mysteriously male. Like her brother, dead at war.

  Or the person who had murdered Scheherazade. For it was inconceivable to Miss Lattice that a woman would crush the head of a defenseless cat.

  chapter 52

  When he had killed the cat that way, he knew he was losing control.

  He wasn't deranged. He didn't worry, he said, that he would find himself stabbing nurses or shooting down at passersby from the top of a tower. It had been just a cat, a public nuisance that should have been put to sleep anyhow. Still, something was wrong, something was slipping out of place, out of line, something was roaring up in him and pressing out the reality of Limus Barnum, like suffocation by fire.

  Up in his room where he kept things, Barnum sat in his bathrobe, sweaty and cramped, in front of the mirror. The robe was pulled open and underneath it he was naked. It was after eight. He was furious at the time it was taking him to masturbate. The erection Mrs. Haig at the post office had given him was still unrelieved. Livid with frustration, he flurried through more and more magazines of photographs. But the man in the mirror paralyzed him. The eyes in the mirror were hateful and frightening. And yet he couldn't turn away from the mirror, for he had to be certain he would be seen.

  The penis was limp again, chafed sore by now from being rubbed too long with panicked vigor. He felt a sudden vehemence swell up in him as if he would rip the flabby organ off and fling it away. Something had to happen. Whatever the problem, it was costing him too much time. He couldn't afford it. It had gotten out of hand. His life up in this room was seeping out under the door and following him into Dingley Falls. It wasn't that what he did in the room distressed him. All guys read pornography. And if you happened to be the kind of guy with a lot of sperm, you had to get it out of your system. As for his uniforms and fantasies, he did not analyze their rationality, and though he was aware of fear that he might be overseen and caught out, he did not translate this dread as guilt. Besides, everybody had a right to his own privacy. The world of the mirror was beginning to demand too much of him, that's all. He was losing control of the store. All his life he had made a good living, with no help from anyone else; but now he couldn't keep the store open. It had to be closed at odd hours because this other world was taking over.