Michael Malone

by Dingley Falls

  And so last night at 5:00 A.M., Winslow Abernathy was awake, thinking about the kamikaze plane that had cometed into his life some thirty years ago. He lay naked across his bed, too tired to shower or to search for pajamas. The lawyer tried to keep his eyes closed, but every few seconds, minutes, hours, they sprang open again. Slowly night became morning by fading the black sky to a gray sheet streaked diagonally by lines of rain. On his stomach, back, side, legs bent, stretched, scissored—all positions maddened him with an exhausted impatience. He could not numb his mind. This wasn't what life was like, certainly not what his life was like. Life was not one of Evelyn's grand operas. Life was a soap opera, a rerun of Search for Tomorrow, interminably paced and imperfectly performed. It was a story in which one could expect to live moderately happily (at any rate, as an affluent American male) for a moderate number of years, touched by a moderate number of losses, moderately spaced over those years. Yet here was Winslow Abernathy hurling through his life with the velocity and the faith (and no doubt the fate) of a kamikaze pilot.

  What in God's name was he trying to prove? That if his thirty-year wife could run off with a poet, he could, before the week's end, outdo her in audacity by involving himself with a troubled married woman whose husband was murdered a few days after Winslow met her, possibly by her rapist, possibly by a new client of his (an unemployed ex-con ex-marine out on bail for aggravated assault)? Because yes, he was involved with Mrs. Haig, whatever that was supposed to mean. It was absurd. Did he expect her to listen to his suit before they buried her husband and marry him the day he could divorce his wife? When Mrs. Haig did not (as that woman at the hospital had put it) know him from Adam! But that wasn't true. She knew him as well as he knew her. She felt as he felt. He could see that she did.

  What was this new sense he had that he could read unspoken truth everywhere he looked? It was absurd. He couldn't see without his glasses. Life wasn't like being blown across the foredeck of a battle cruiser by an exploding airplane. At least it was not like that until the instant when it became like that, when the plane crashed, or they told you you were dying, or the woman was raped, or the car hit you, or the baby was born, or you fell in love. Hours, days, decades passed. And finally, unable to sleep, he got out of his bed.

  By 7:00 A.M., when north of Dingley Falls smoke of the fire still wisped in clouds against the clouds, Winslow Abernathy was showered, shaved, and dressed. By eight he had finished breakfasting with Prudence Lattice (at her request), had conferred with Sammy Smalter about Ramona's condition (unchanged), had called a garage to repair (unnecessary) and deliver the MG to its owner, and had (with a note pinned to his front door) stolen his son Arthur's Audi, to which he still had a key. By nine he was out on Route 3 in conversation with police detectives who were rummaging among the ruins of the Haig house. By ten he was in further conversation with other detectives who were rummaging through stacks of neo-Nazi literature in Limus Barnum's store. By eleven he was walking down the hall in Argyle Hospital as Chin Lam Henry came out of Judith Haig's room. He asked Mrs. Henry to wait for him in the cafeteria, explaining that as he'd be going to Madder shortly to speak with her husband, he could offer her a ride while she answered a few questions for him. Then he knocked on Mrs. Haig's door.

  By noon he was eating chili in the hospital cafeteria. By 12:25 he was driving back north from Argyle, his hands so casual on the steering wheel that no one would ever suspect that this moderately attired, middle-aged man, his thinning hair neatly combed, his glasses firmly in place, was clinging to life suspended over a foreign sea and convinced that he enjoyed, miraculously, perfect sight.

  chapter 59

  "Do you know the Book of Kells?" asked Walter Saar over orange juice in his study. "To paraphrase them, Jonathan, life is not linear. Not causal. Not, pardon me, straight. Look at us here, idiotically enamored in the midst of slapdash, heartbreaking mayhem, and all those flukes will loop into our lives, and we have looped into each other's, and altered everything, including the future. Croissant? Frozen, I fear, but my country right or wrong."

  "Thank you. The Book of Kells?" asked Father Fields.

  "Yes. Those stir-crazy Irish monks have scribbled the truth around their capital letters. Life twists and turns, rebounds on itself, loops out, slides back, heads everywhere and nowhere, and is inextricably connected. It is their slightly crazy Gaelic way of showing life can be lovely, but honey, you sure can't see where it's going."

  Youth triumphant over lack of sleep in his clean blue eyes, the curate looked past the French coffeepot at the beautiful bloodshot eyes of the headmaster. "I can see where I want it to go," said Jonathan shyly.

  Saar smiled slowly, then he stood to clear the table. "But you are, by medical report, blind as a bat. And so am I. And so is love.

  Because I confess, somehow I have trouble envisioning Ransom and his fellow trustees seeing our His and His towels hanging in the master's john. Nor can I imagine the academy permitting me—assuming now that the Reverend Highwick failed to notice—to commute to classes from our little cottage at St. Andrew's, where of course Ernest Ransom also rules among the moneychangers. It seems to me that our best bet is to draw straws as to who will seduce Ernest Ransom, then we can all keep our jobs and live happily ever after."

  Jonathan laughed, pleased that Saar assumed a commitment between them, even for the purpose of demonstrating its impossibility.

  Saar raised his coffee cup. "'Ah, love, let us be trite with one another, for the world which seems to lie before us so,' etcetera, 'hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.' Absolutely true!" insisted the headmaster, full of joy and love and certainty and peace. "Still, I think it was tacky of Matthew Arnold to be so negative on his honeymoon. But then the Victorians were like that; they all resembled their furniture, earnest and massy and flaccidly muscular, like Robert Browning's thighs."

  Jonathan put his fingers to Walter's lips. "We don't have to be trite."

  "How about trite and true?" said the irrepressible Saar, who was nonetheless sincere. Indeed, far readier, terrified though he was of the danger, to leap from the sea cliffs into love than was Jonathan Fields, who saw no dangers and did not think he was terrified of the ocean at all but rather of standing alone on the ledge.

  In the handsome Ransom home, order, though under the sword, still sat on the throne. As the help (Wanda Tojek) rested on weekends, Saturday meals were served by Mrs. Ransom, and she served cereal for breakfast. Mr. Ransom ate his in the presence of a morning newspaper, over which he superimposed certain of his personal preoccupations. One of these was the land that had just been burned to ashes. Of course, it wasn't his property, and of course, whatever the owners had built there (if anything) had clearly been removed (or destroyed), since none of the fire fighters had reported finding anything (or anyone), and of course, that was all to the best. The compound of buildings that he himself had seen years ago (or had he?

  After all, long ago. A nightmare? A mirage?) could not then have been whatever it was that Ramona's two "young people" claimed to have photographed. So the base (or whatever) had been removed, just as he had supposed. And what if it had still been there anyhow?

  There was certainly nothing illegal about it! His children's generation had tried to poison his mind against his government, whereas his was the best government in the world. Had it not saved the world only thirty-some years ago? Of course, the less government the better. It had no business in business, of course, or in the rights of individuals to bear arms or to bear children (certainly should be illegal to abort them and ask the government to pick up the tab!), and other rights, and so on, as long as order was preserved. Nor should the majority bed and board the so-called underprivileged, who were sure, as soon as they were rested and fat enough, to bite the hand that fed them! But social security was one thing, national security another. Ridiculous! The middle-class children of the last decade, with their middle-aged gurus, had, to put it bluntly, tried, well,
to unman their founders. Here in this bicentennial summer, this wonderful country was ashamed of who it was, suspicious even of what was no more than self-preservation! Ridiculous! Didn't know what they were saying!

  With such annoyance, Ernest Ransom argued his way through the editorial pages of the morning Times. The banker (decorated for gallantry in the last just war, recipient of a silver star and the Croix de Guerre) grieved that his nation, which had once driven triumphant through the streets of the world, puissant in its virtue and honorable in its preeminence, was now stripped of its rank, mocked, harried at home, and despised abroad. He closed and tersely folded his paper, then felt for his coffee. His wife moved the cup into his hand.

  "Oh," he noticed. "Where's Kate?"

  "Is that a joke? It's only nine o'clock. All I ask of Kate and Emerald is that they wake up in time for dinner. If she came home at all. Do you want to know what I think? Kate's going to marry Sidney Blossom."

  "Don't be silly."

  "All right."

  Folding his napkin and kissing his wife, Ransom rose from the table. He was dressed in a gray linen suit with a yellow shirt and a gray tie with tiny red crossed golf clubs on it that Arthur Abernathy had given him last Christmas, when Emerald had given him an oil painting of herself done from one of his photographs, and Priss had given him a five-band portable radio for the boat, a digital watch pen, a monogrammed robe, a nautical brass shoe horn, a gold-plated badger shaving brush, and a case of Scotch; and Kate had given him a baby cherry tree for his garden (with a card saying, "Daddy, Don't read anything into it! Kate"), three books on the forced resignation of the former president, and a pair of boxer shorts on which were printed Wall Street ticker tapes (he had never worn them).

  Though the bank would be closed today, the banker would be in it. He would also be meeting for lunch with some town leaders at the Dingley Club to discuss what steps to take—for example, about the influx of newsmen—in the aftermath of the fire and the "gunfight murders." But he would not be meeting with John "Hawk" Haig to discuss the highway cancellation so many years ago (a meeting that Haig, in a mysterious and offensively threatening tone, had insisted on Friday evening when he had phoned), for Haig had died tragically, so the first selectman Arthur Abernathy announced in the press release, died in defense of his home as a man, and in performance of his duty as an officer of the law.

  "Oh," noticed Mrs. Ransom. "Have a good day." Her husband left the glassy gazebo of their spring-green breakfast nook, and she (already dressed for her tennis lesson two hours later) sat back, lean and sharply tan, to keep up with the Times.

  chapter 60

  Dingley Falls had not been so communally aquiver in ages, as now over the gunfight murders. The fact that the town had almost burned down quickly dulled in comparison. Indeed, since no one had been killed by the fire, visiting newsmen ignored it completely, except as a background to death when television reporters stood on the charred grass in front of the skeleton of the Haigs' home and talked of the tragic site of the Gunfight Murders.

  Of course, it happened to be the case that the forest fire was covering up a much bigger story than the one that had taken place in John "Hawk" Haig's red brick ranch house. But Dingleyans blamed the blaze on a bolt of lightning; that is, on God or chance, depending on their point of view. No one absorbed in the fascinating horror of local killings had the foggiest notion that the federal government was slipping away undetected after having, over seven years' time, coolly murdered (simply in order to learn how to do it better) at least fifty human members of the surrounding community, and who knows how many other mammals, before God or chance, butting in, murdered the murderers.

  Had the two-man staff of the Dingley Day been told that in their very front yard Operation Archangel had, in the name of national security, come, killed, and vanished without a trace, while all Dingley Falls sat inside staring at Limus Barnum's face on their television screens, A.A. Hayes would have called the news "ironic," and Coleman Sniffell would have called it "typical." But suppose even that such news had filtered into town from elsewhere; suppose even that they had heard proof of viralogical testing in some other town in Connecticut, reports of fatalities from mysterious infectious disease. The local scandal of the Haigs and Limus Barnum still would have loomed more luridly for Dingleyans. Suppose even that an ambitious scandal tracker from a national syndicate, or a bounty man from a national network, uncovered the facts; that someone with the valor of Theseus and Daedalean brains slithered through the meandrous maze, seized the monster, slew it, held up its squirmy hydra heads, and cried, "Look! Evil!" Yes, the hounds of the press would have come on a run, and at first, everyone, outraged, would have shaken his fists at the government or shaken his head at human nature or voted out the current party, and sooner or later forgotten about it, as Dingleyans had forgotten the abandoned highway. As their fellow countrymen had forgotten countless other high and secret crimes committed against them by their government, and by big businessmen busily making business big.

  The gunfight theory first announced by the police hypothesized that Limus Barnum, having abandoned his motorcycle (which three teenagers had pulled from the Rampage below the Falls), had walked to the Haig house, assaulted Judith Haig, been surprised in the act by Hawk Haig, who, coming to rescue his wife from the fast approaching fire and unable to get into his chained house, had broken through the window and fired at Barnum, precipitating the gunfight.

  This theory was discredited when it was learned that while Haig's gun had been fired several times, it was bullets from Barnum's .357 Magnum that had killed both men. There was one bullet in Haig's heart. There were three in Barnum's body. Fortunately, the police's sole witness, Mrs. John Haig, was able to dictate to her lawyer an alternative theory that fit the facts.

  That afternoon, Winslow Abernathy returned to the trailer park, where he spent a little time in conversation with some of the residents before he knocked on Maynard Henry's door again.

  "Hello, Maynard. I gave your wife a ride back from the hospital just now. Nice of her to be concerned enough about Mrs. Haig to pay a call."

  "Yeah. I guess. Where is she?"

  "Actually I asked her if I might speak with you privately. She said to tell you she'd be in the A&P."

  "Okay, okay, come on in."

  Maynard Henry wore a long-sleeved sweatshirt now, but he had on the same pants as last night and hadn't shaved. The wheat-colored hair was dirty; it lay flat on the narrow skull. In his eyes was the panic that his pacing tried to assuage. The eyes were bleary as though he hadn't slept. "What's going on?" he snapped. "MacDermott never showed. No cops all morning. You saw the lady?"

  "Yes. So did your wife." Abernathy walked past him into the room.

  "Yeah. She talk to you?"

  "Yes. How's your arm?"

  "Fine. Better. You talk to the cops already? What are they going to do?"

  "May I ask something first? What about your dog? Where is it?"

  "He's dead. I had to kill him." Henry kept his eyes on the window as he said this and spoke without inflection.

  "Really? You shot him?"

  "Yeah."

  "I see. He must have hurt you quite badly then. I mean, some of your neighbors happened to mention to me that you were very devoted to the dog. You killed him?"

  "Cut the shit and let me have it, what's gonna happen here? You talk too much."

  "Like women. Will you sit down for a second?"

  Henry flung himself into the black cloth chair. The lawyer cleaned his glasses with a fresh handkerchief. "About an hour ago," he began quietly, "Mrs. Haig talked with me and asked me to make a brief statement on her behalf to the police, which I did. In it she positively identified her assailant as Limus Barnum."

  "She told you I never did a thing to her, right?"

  "Yes. Right." He was watching Henry's eyes. "Yes. She told me you came there sometime close to ten, asked for Chin Lam, and she told you Chin was at Pru Lattice's." Abernathy crossed his arms over his
chest. "And she told me that you left immediately upon learning where your wife was." The lawyer watched Henry's head jerk up and saw the eyes widen before the mask hurried over them.

  After a silence, Henry muttered, "So how'd they get shot, the two guys you said before? Haig, her husband, who's she say shot Haig?"

  "Yes, that is the question, isn't it? Mrs. Haig says that Barnum shot and killed her husband, who was firing on him through the broken picture window." Abernathy turned to look down at the dragon on the table. "Her statement is that then she, struggling with Barnum for the gun, and convinced that he intended to kill her as well as her husband, shot Limus Barnum herself."

  Henry sucked in air with a soft hiss.

  The lawyer nodded. "Yes." They were quiet. Then Abernathy buttoned his jacket. "The gun went off three times. Face, chest, and groin." He could see the mask jerked off Henry's eyes, and in them pure surprise. The look terrified him, snatching at his own suppositions. Had she actually done it? For the surprise was not feigned, unlike the clumsily professed ignorance in the young man's earlier question. No, impossible that she had murdered. But something was wrong. He went on. "Since Mrs. Haig is presumably the only witness and the only surviving participant, and since the premises have been destroyed by fire, her testimony will be almost the sole basis of any official account of this incident. Unless, of course, there should happen to be contradictory evidence. But the police have no reason for thinking there is. On the other hand, quite honestly, Maynard, a few questions have occurred to me. Private speculations." Abernathy waited while Henry took his cigarettes and matches from the table that held the ivory ball and wedding picture. "Would you be interested? Well, indulge me, anyhow. While I realize he would have wanted to approach the house quietly, I find it odd that Barnum would leave his motorcycle behind on the highway, with the key in it, and yet there seems to be no key among the effects on the body.