Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  “Not now, Matthew.”

  “Sure! Terror is fun when you’ve got your health. Isn’t that right, boys?” The lobstermen regarded him doubtfully. “Jackals,” he sniffed. “Come to feast.”

  “Why’re you here, then?” someone shot back.

  “To knit shrouds, of course. For us all.” Matthew Priam was a local painter whose reputation as gadfly and pain in the neck dwarfed his reputation as artist. Rumored to be gay, liaisons with either sex couldn’t be confirmed. He was close friends with Jerome, and a more unlikely pair would be hard to imagine. Everywhere they went they argued. People kept their distance; grown men bickering like two old ladies seemed an unhealthy spectacle. The pages of Matthew’s magazine rustled under his arm. He squinted, scanning the harbor. “Do you mean the performance is canceled?”

  “For Christ’s sake,” Jerome said.

  Matthew sat on the wall a few feet down from Willoughby. “Have we met?”

  “I’m a friend of Sister Bernadette’s.”

  “Who?” Matthew, Jerome, Lois.

  “He means me.” Anna spoke in a rush. “That’s the name I’ll take when I conclude my novitiate. In the monastery. If I enter.” Nothing was clarified. She apologized to Willoughby, “I shouldn’t use it till then. I’m Anna for now.”

  “Much better.” Matthew flattened the puzzle page on the wall before him and took a pencil from his pocket.

  “Sister Bernadette?” Lois said. “Anna, you gotta be kidding.”

  “I’ve always felt very in tune with the story of Bernadette, with her struggle — the way people mistrusted her vision and her belief. I like her.”

  “She’s been dead a long time, no?”

  “I mean spiritually, Lois.”

  “I like the name,” Jerome chipped in. He had the low spacy voice of a bully who has found something to pacify him. “Great flick too. She was the one heard voices, right?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Matthew’s gaze had been bouncing from face to face, settling on Willoughby’s. “What’s your opinion?”

  “On Bernadette? Nice enough. A little pretentious.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” That was Anna.

  “Where the fuck is Robby?” That was Jerome.

  “He’ll be along,” Matthew chirped bravely. Bravely, because he’d awakened this morning sure he was dying. Oh, everyone’s dying, Matthew knew that — but in his case there was less question as to how and when it might happen. On the chubby side, he’d lost nine pounds in two months. Good news, except he felt no thinner. Yesterday’s X rays had been inconclusive — the doctor would schedule more tests at a mainland hospital — yet Matthew was convinced. A frantic hypochondriac all his life, this was his reward. He’d seen it years ago with his mother. Cancer got her too, wrapped around her vitals like a fist. Still, it wasn’t all bad. Someday people would marvel at his courage and wish they’d treated him better. His paintings would be lavished with posthumous praise, his biographers theorizing that he’d died as he lived, as if he knew what he was doing. So at the moment Matthew’s terror was more or less dormant. At the moment he was being courageous.

  Most of the crowd had left to resume the workday. The cops were grouped nearby. Down on the pier a white-haired man had set out three fishing lines, a container of sea clams beside his folding chair. He was reading a National Geographic, an old issue with a frayed white cover, printed when the earth was still full of mystery. Studying a trivia quiz, Matthew asked aloud, “Who directed The Searchers? Was it John Huston?”

  “Yeah,” Lois said.

  “Was John Ford,” Willoughby said.

  Jerome seconded. “There was a picture. Shit.”

  Matthew jotted the name and thumped the page with his pencil. He shut the magazine and one by one regarded the members of their little group. “Here we are.” Then, glancing seaward, “And here’s Robby, come to join us.”

  All heads turned together. Matthew was right.

  Five

  What does a killer’s wife do? Stay home? Wear black? Consternation put a scowl on Lois Cochran’s face as she drove home from the pier after her husband’s arrest. Her sister sat beside her, Matthew Priam in back.

  The car stalled at an intersection. Down the lane to the right was the ferry dock. The ferry’s boarding ramp was lowered to swallow a stream of idling automobiles. Sailboards and bicycles were tied to luggage racks; bike wheels turned in the breeze, remembering July. Lois had planned to take the day off in honor of her sister’s visit; now it could be, she smiled to herself, in her husband’s honor too. She ran a housecleaning service, in summer employing four girls, in winter working alone. She also bartended part time, for amusement as much as tips.

  She turned up a side street where close-set gray cottages crowded the buckled brick sidewalk. Age had sagged the houses as weather does cardboard crates left outdoors. In season people paid a lot to live here, renting by the week — the part of town painters painted when they tired of sand dunes and trawlers.

  Matthew’s house had been in his family for generations. Its foyer walls were of plaster thickened with horsehair. Cobwebs stirred under a breakfront as the door swung shut — Lois was a conscientious housekeeper only for clients and for Matthew’s flat upstairs. She did his place for free. In return the rent she and Robby paid for the first floor apartment hadn’t increased in four years. Matthew couldn’t bear solitude, plus he liked Lois, her backbone, her sanity. And like a buyer captivated by the runt of the litter, she was fond of him. The attachment was limited, however. Whatever his signals of need and attraction, they were as lost on her as ripples on an undiscovered lake. In her opinion he was asexual. She considered herself the opposite.

  In the foyer she kissed Anna’s cheek. “A proper welcome for my favorite sister.” Anna smiled. Why had she come? Lois kissed her again. Anna’s suitcase sat behind the door, promising departure.

  Their unease put Matthew, for whom a blooming of sisterly rapport would have raised his hopes for other miracles, in mind of his self-certain doom. No one knew about his X rays yesterday. With rare initiative he’d made his appointment, even biked himself to the hospital. Now he was going to die of cancer. Die. The word bounced off his brain like hello off a canyon wall. He spoke to drown the echo. “I do hope, Lois, that you won’t let Robby’s faux pas take time away from your sister.”

  Anna said, “He is her husband.”

  “Except she and Robby are, how shall I say, splitsville.”

  “Goddamnit Matthew!” Lois snapped.

  “Do I lie?”

  “But I’ve got a guest here, c’mon.”

  Anna was hurt. “A guest?”

  Lois hugged her in clumsy apology. Matthew was touched by the try at affection. He padded upstairs, blushing like a voyeur who’d expected coarseness and witnessed instead the bumbling love of virgins.

  Lois took papers and a baggie from a music box on the coffee table. Claire de Lune played as she tore up a Lucky Strike and rolled dope and tobacco into a cigarette, which she slipped into the pack of Luckies like an arrow into its quiver. “This Robby’ll want.”

  “You’re taking him drugs in the police station?”

  “They’ll never know. I haven’t smoked in years, myself. It just makes me stupid. Stupider.”

  “Don’t put yourself down for my benefit.”

  “I feel down, Anna.”

  “With reason.”

  “You mean Robby? I don’t care what he did. I care that it feels like my fault, like I’m stupid and evil and it’s my fault.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’m his wife. His comfort and joy.” Lois stopped. She didn’t trust Anna. “So. You’re gonna be a nun. I thought it was a joke in your letters.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “My sister the Sister.” Anna knew to let Lois play out her attack. �
��Why not put a gun to your head and speed up the process?”

  “I know it looks that way to you. But there’s an ecstasy to it, a real way of expressing something.” Something degraded by talk. Anna resorted to joking, “Being a nun doesn’t strike me as crazy. Makes me think I should be one.”

  “Fed up with guys, huh?”

  “I give up.”

  Two paintings hung in the parlor, a watercolor sunset rendered in various blues, an oil-on-wood mullet, gray as flint, and wrapped in the National Enquirer. Anna followed Lois to the master bedroom where another painting hung over a Salvation Army four-poster. It showed a woman sitting crosslegged and nude on a harsh-lit linoleum floor, her downcast pose implying self-perusal. “Me,” Lois said as she took T-shirts from Robby’s drawer. At the base of the painting was Matthew Priam’s name and the year it was painted. “I was fatter then.” The bedside wall was covered with mirrored tiles which were not for watching yourself sleep.

  “It must’ve been strange, posing like that,” Anna said.

  “I’ve done lots of ’em. They sell.”

  “Robby doesn’t mind?”

  “He knows Matthew’s safe. And it excites him, I think. To me it’s sad, the picture. It freaks Jerome,” Lois added. “He won’t come near this room.” Herself, painted: heavy thighs, belly flaccid and creased at the navel, breasts fat with fat nipples, all glaringly lighted, a woman stripped. Yet there was something taunting about her, this woman who showed all but her eyes. You could hurt someone on her account. There was no way you could hurt her.

  Lois grabbed Robby’s guitar together with an armful of clothes. He’d taken up the instrument in high school with rock star aspirations and had proved to have beer party talent. “He can play the blues for real.” She invited Anna to come along to the police station but Anna begged off.

  “Anything I can do here — ”

  “It’s my problem.” On her way out Lois opened the music box and made herself a joint. Anna rested on the guest room bed and listened to the chimes play.

  Directly upstairs Matthew too was resting. On the wall at the foot of his narrow bed a frameless canvas blended peaches and blues in an impressionist study of a girl. Her face had an egg’s soft hue and oval, and she gazed from the portrait as if at a mirror: One wondered what she saw. The painting was by a local artist who’d drowned last winter, fallen off a pier. Rumors of suicide lent his art a possibly bogus resonance. Matthew had attended the funeral and was offended when the minister wept. As an ardent nonbeliever, Matthew expected men of God to leave the crying to him.

  Wearily he studied the peach-and-blue portrait. His pulse jumped. Going to die. There it was again, bracing as wind through a window crack. No wreck on the highway, no mere Ethiopian. It was him, he was going to die. The girl in the painting seemed to agree.

  His eyes hurt from last night’s sleeplessness. Tossing on the bed he thought of the dead painter and the guy killed in the sea this morning — their worst was over. He shut his eyes and prayed hard to a god he didn’t believe in for things he couldn’t have.

  Anna meanwhile was praying downstairs. With Lois gone to sedate her husband, it had occurred to Anna that the proper task of a would-be nun was the remembrance of those in need, the killer and his victim, and to petition the Lord for mercy upon them. Her prayer lifted invisibly in the air and joined Matthew’s over the house. Together the prayers sped away like two birds leaving the ground. Don’t ask where they went.

  Six

  Jerome Cochran went out shooting. Whenever he was vexed he would drive to the moors and shoot. The moors were treeless rolling uplands between the island’s perimeter beach and interior forest and were, in each season but snowy, a burnished red in color. Though tracts of green and earthtoned flora shared the landscape, red is a lion among colors and therefore reigned. In spring the heather bore reddish buds that soon matured to violet. In summer it was the blood-colored cranberry bogs one noticed from the hilltops, not the shrubs and flowering weeds. In fall the sumac and chokecherry went scarlet long before November stole the land’s other green, and even in white winter red occurred in the blood of a deer in the snow, the glare of a hunter’s cap, the pickup parked by the road.

  Jerome’s pockets rattled with bullets and ammo clips as he trudged through rainy brambles toward a favorite duck pond, his old black Labrador bounding gamely beside him. Jerome’s pistol was a nine-millimeter Colt automatic purchased in Saigon and smuggled home in a Red Cross footlocker. The slide of round into clip, clip into receiver, was for him a satisfaction, a perfection of form and function like missiles in silos and shafts into sockets. He was a man inclined to be contrite about what turned him on. A strong supporter of handgun control, should stricter laws someday come into effect, he would break them only reluctantly.

  He fired the pistol at a decrepit duckblind he’d built here years ago. The pistol’s report was deadened in the damp air. Hunks of rotted wood spattered the water. Jerome was vexed about Robby — his brother’s crime had opened a host of options troubling because they were doable. Jerome wasn’t vexed about Willoughby Claire. It was a gift of his to put from his mind matters he couldn’t control. So Willyboy was out there waiting. What else was new? He’d been there all along, in a way. As for his actually coming to Penscot, Jerome more or less had invited him, a year ago dictating to Matthew Priam two letters of confession, one each to Sergeant Dale Parker and Lieutenant Willoughby Claire.

  He’d mailed the letters care of the Department of the Army. Claire’s had come back from the DOA unopened — the lieutenant had never drawn disability pay, so the Army hadn’t his address. But the point was confessing, not beginning a correspondence. Jerome didn’t care that Parker had never responded. And he cared only a little, at the small mystery of it, that Lieutenant Claire finally had.

  Earlier today, Jerome had followed the squad cars from the lobster pier to the police station. He held a certain sway with the Penscot police by virtue of his relationship with the chief, Thomas Rickert. They’d become friendly in the early eighties when Jerome briefly was put under surveillance after rumor had him selling cocaine out of The Cave, a pool hall on the island’s west end. The surveillance established only that he got laid a lot, but this discovery, together with Jerome’s prowess as a pool player, had inspired warm feelings in Chief Rickert, who had a duffer’s awe for womanizers and pool sharks. A patron of The Cave himself, Rickert often had sat at the bar watching Jerome tear up the tables, buying him drinks, scouting him girls, driving him back to town if Jerome was too drunk. One night the roles reversed, Jerome driving the sauced cop home on some evidently sad anniversary. “Thanks, Billy,” Rickert said groggily as he exited Jerome’s truck. Billy Rickert was the chief’s son, killed during Tet ’68. The slip had tipped Jerome to his sentimental hold on the chief, a hold he’d never tried to exploit till today.

  After much haggling Rickert had not said he wouldn’t delay Robby’s transfer to the mainland for arraignment until after the weekend, and Jerome had taken heart. It was a big favor. Robby had a right to a quick hearing whether he wished one or not, and any delay would reflect badly on Chief Rickert, whose administration was under fire for being easy on scofflaws and too often blind to peddlers and takers of dope. Penscot’s reputation as a family resort had suffered as college kids and young urban professionals increasingly prowled the streets. Natives were feeling guilty, their Puritan roots demanding some penance for hosting the party. A goofup in the handling of Robby’s case could mean curtains for the chief of police.

  “Now scram” Rickert had told Jerome. “I got a family to call.”

  “I feel bad for the dead guy, really I do. But he was where he shouldna been.”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “I thought he was high school.”

  “Trust-fund hippie. Ski slopes and beaches to the bitter end. Keel caught him square on the airtank, broke his back.”

 
“Quick.”

  “I can tell ’em that, at least.”

  “You want me to call?” Jerome was serious. He often presumed to shoulder other people’s misery, obtusely believing they’d appreciate it. Rickert turned him down.

  Lois Cochran had been just arriving when Jerome climbed in his pickup outside the station. She carried clothes and a guitar case like an evicted folksinger. Of her red eyes Jerome scowled, “You better’ a been cryin’.”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Shit. Here I am worried sick about my kid doin’ drugs, and his aunt’s a goddamn pothead! You don’t see me gettin’ boozed up and blue.”

  Lois rested the clothes on his truck door, her head on the clothes. “I feel guilty.”

  “You oughta!”

  “About Robby. I threw him out last night. He was drunk.”

  “He get rough?”

  “Horny. And when he’s drunk and horny — ”

  “I am not interested.”

  “So we had a fight and he left.”

  “He’s left before. So’ve you. No reason to waste somebody.”

  She straightened. Tiny raindrops blew over her shoulder through the truck window. “This was different. To really hurt him I compared him to his brother. I’d never done that before, out loud.”

  Jerome shifted. “Compared how?”

  “Compared. In every way. I wanted him out.”

  “Guess it worked.”

  “Except now I feel guilty. I think back at what happened — I mean, somebody died — and it adds up to maybe my fault. Do you think it’s my fault?”

  “I think lookin’ back makes things add up that don’t.”

  “You sound like Matthew.”

  “Matthew’d know how to deal with this. Where’s he?”

  “Home sleeping.”

  Jerome put his truck in gear. “Like I said.”

  “What’s happening,” she indicated the station, “inside?”

  “I didn’t see Robby. I got nothin’ to say to him. I dickered with the chief to delay the arraignment.” Jerome had experience with due process. “I need time to raise bail.”