Johnwayne prepared to attack. Or jump out the window.
Mr. Winston glanced at his bare wrist. “Give me a minute’s head start. And Godspeed.” The boy exhaled as the door clicked shut. After a moment he eased into the hallway. Mr. Winston had paused at the bottom of the narrow stairs that led to the third floor and ultimately to the widow’s walk. The two of them gazed down the hall at each other. Mr. Winston flashed thumbs up.
Johnwayne was back at work in the stables a short while later when he heard Mrs. Winston’s fierce contralto outside. “Goddamn it John Winston what are you doing up there!” Johnwayne and the Winstons’ old groom ran out to see Mr. Winston lobbing stuff — a silver trophy, a salad bowl, a teddy bear — off the widow’s walk onto the back lawn. Then he rolled a blue vase down the roof. It fell safely into the cradling green limbs of the right-hand arborvitae.
Mrs. Winston rode her horse up to the house. “James,” she called to the groom. “You and Marcus get him down from there. Then I want the trapdoor locked shut. Locked and nailed!”
“Yes’m.” But searching around, the groom couldn’t find the stable boy anywhere. Johnwayne had heard Mrs. Winston’s command and quickly snuck away, damned if he’d help thwart the quest of a spiritual brother.
Initially in his job, Del Locke had followed the lead of Penscot police veterans and avoided trouble whenever possible. He was capable of confrontation, of making hard choices if necessary, but a recent period of self-censure had dulled the edge of swishy arrogance he’d cultivated through his twenties. Less sure, less happy, less gay than he wanted to be, Del’s becoming a cop six months ago had been his bitter joke on society. Yet the work appealed to him unexpectedly. He considered himself less a protector than society’s healer, a monk with a badge, a doctor with a gun. It made him think he might be an exceptional man after all, a guy whose inner and outer lives meshed in defiance of stereotypes. And with this healthy surge in ego he was beginning to get tough.
As often happens with benign, nice people, Del’s occasions of vehemence could be clumsy and overreactive. With his mother, say, he might endure her nonsense for weeks before exploding with invective shocking even to him. Subsequent amends and apologies only built his resentment again to a blow-point both freeing and scary. He couldn’t seem to stop the cycle, perhaps didn’t want to, for at least when he was being irrational his life didn’t feel dishonest.
Fleeing Penscot Island for the big city after high school had seemed irrational at the time, a desperate search for joy he’d been certain he didn’t deserve — but found. Del was mostly faithful. His lover Paul was not. Paul liked the rougher bars. He’d come home at dawn pleased as Pan, his jock beneath his Levis rank from the varied athletics. Then he got sick; the decline came swift and inexorable. Yet he held to the circuit with a vengeance, covered his skin with foundation and his swollen eyes with Vuamets. Eventually Paul felt obliged to inform his family. His family wanted him home. He and Del shook hands goodbye in their apartment. Del watched him hobble out to his parents’ waiting car, then went to the kitchen to wash his hands. He didn’t know if Paul was living or dead now. A dream haunted him in which Paul, alive, called his name. In another dream his lover was dead and calling him just the same.
A couple of days after the whales were shot at Oceanside beach, Del’s younger brother did an odd thing. Taking pity apparently, Johnwayne gave him their mother’s blue satin nightgown that till recently had been Johnwayne’s most cherished belonging. He left the gown on Del’s bed, a pillow stuffed inside to clarify its charms. Del had laughed to find it there. Then he realized Johnwayne was trying to spice up Del’s love life. His brother, it seemed, was moving on to better prospects.
Shamed, Del located the phone number of Paul’s parents. His heart thumped as he dialed. He knew the odds were for bad news, but to go forward toward any kind of future, he had to settle the past. A woman picked up. He asked for Paul.
“Who is this?”
“A friend of his.” And tougher, “We were roommates.”
“Paul died last winter.”
Del nodded. His eyes were closed. “I’m sorry.”
“You should be. You probably infected him, you fucking murderer.”
His eyes opened. This was a setback.
One night Araby Munro phoned her boyfriend in New York City. The note and poem she’d written him in school should have arrived by now, and she wanted to talk about what the note said and what the poem said, to make a joke of it all if he wanted. When he answered, however, she immediately asked why hadn’t he called her. He shouted a slew of ready reasons and she hung up quick, lest he hear her cry.
She next considered phoning her mother at the Institute. The last time she had, her mother — slow coming to the phone, in the background a putter of clinic efficiency, like a sort of benevolent wiretap — had been unreachably spacy. Araby had groped for things to say, drawing the biggest blank when her mother begged, “Talk to me.”
Araby looked up Brendan’s phone number instead. Two Cochrans were listed. She picked one, and a woman answered, “The Lois System.” Araby asked for Brendan. “Bren? You want 3425. He’s hot, huh?” Araby said she was calling about homework and hung up.
She knew he’d be thrilled she was calling him. He was immature that way, acted like everything she did was super. They’d composed limericks together in the cafeteria. She wrote a dirty one that began, “There was an old broad from Tobruk” that actually made him blush. Two of their compositions he’d folded and kept:
[EXT]
There once was a boy named Brendan,
Whose town he had many a friend in.
He thought friends were the best,
Till a girl with a chest,
Said they’re a start, not the endin’.
There once was a girl named Araby.
I would love it if she would take care o’ me.
I’m not really ill,
But I know that I will
Be if she doesn’t come marry me.
[/EXT]
The receiver picked up and a mad-sounding man said, “What?”
She asked for Brendan.
“Who’re you?”
“This is Araby. From school.”
“Oh. I’ve heard about you. That your real name? Araby.”
“Yes it is.”
“I thought it might be, like, short for Arabella.”
“Just Araby. I like it. Arabella’s awful.”
“No shit.”
“Who’re you?”
“Me? Jerome. Bren’s dad.”
“Is that your real name? Jerome.”
A laugh broke from him. “No.”
He gave a muffled yell, the phone to his chest. There was talking. Brendan came on. “He likes you.” She was amazed how good this made her feel. “So,” Brendan said casually. “What’s up?”
“Nothing. Talk to me.”
This threw him. He could feel her waiting. Loudly he said, “I love you too.”
“What?”
“Sorry. I wanted my dad to leave.”
“Scared him away?”
“It’s easy to do.”
“You know,” she smiled (he could tell), “there are worse guys than you.”
Silence.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” Brendan said. “I’m happy.”
As they talked Araby doodled a quick poem on the phone pad:
[EXT]
I’m here.
I’m happy.
They said.
[/EXT]
It was 2 a.m. Ollie Newberry couldn’t sleep. The walls of his room at the White Bird Inn seemed to throb in the darkness like an insect’s body, breathing through its skin. His suitcase sat packed on his roommate’s stripped bed. During the night it had taken many shapes, lastly an undersea mollusk. Fo
r an hour he’d been staring at it, awaiting its halves to open and spit.
After his last police questioning, Ollie had packed his stuff and collected his last check at the White Bird, free now to return to begin his fall term at boarding school. Ferries departed each day for the mainland. Through the window at Mantra’s Cafe he’d watch the remnant tourists on their last shopping sprees; he wasn’t one of them any longer. He drank purposefully all day long, titrating the liquor so that any activity except more drinking wasn’t worth the effort. He fed his depression like a keeper feeds his animals, tigers and wolves gone slothful in captivity. The bartenders served him without hassle about his age. Last night the Lois woman had been on duty. She’d kept forgetting his name. That would be something, he thought — to teach the bitch his name.
And fuck her too, that’d be nice. Ollie was a virgin. The goal of his summer had to been to fuck someone; they said if you couldn’t get it on Penscot Island, give up. He’d come close at a Fourth of July beach party, but had been unable to separate the girl from her pants. Sprawled atop her in the sand, he’d pressed his erection into her thigh and she’d pressed back. The height of his holiday: her chubby smile and the way she’d sighed, “I just love the moon when it’s full.” The memory made him squirm. How pathetic it was, in this day and age, to be sixteen and know nothing.
His thoughts had outgrown the room. He dressed, took a half-pint of vodka he’d found in his roommate’s closet, and went outside. Yellow streetlamps glowed fat in the fog, the damp air like cobwebs on his face. He took a swallow of vodka and laughed at himself, 2 a.m. and boozing like a poet. A cat crossed the sidewalk in front of him, black of course. Ollie cut down the lane to avoid it.
Shopfronts walled the sloping street; strolling along its narrow center, Ollie’s perspective was a rat’s in a maze. He’d driven this way with his roommate the morning Tim got killed. He chugged his vodka and hastened for the waterfront, breathing it now, remembering the way.
Tim’s car had been the kind of rusted-out bomb only a rich kid could like. Rented scuba gear clanked in back. “Diving at night,” Ollie had told him, “you’re gonna love it.” Tim, a peer in attitude but twelve years older by the clock, had Ollie beat in every experience save this one. Ollie had done it while on vacation with his dad and stepmother, diving off a pier in the Virgin Islands with guides and spotlights and a dozen tourist-adventurers. He remembered how scared he’d been at first, the black water disorienting, like a spacewalk blindfolded. Tonight with Tim, he was still scared.
“We should’ve got stoned,” Tim said. “You brought flashlights?”
“Are you kidding? We’d be dead without them.”
Ollie’s flashlight had fizzled out on their final ascent to the skiff, concealing him in the dark water. When Ollie tugged the safety cord between them, Tim fluttered his light assuringly. Ollie remembered the push of water from Tim’s flippers in his face, the lobster sack tied to Tim’s weightbelt. He remembered the sea surface a few feet above, and a soft thrumming motor drone almost sounding like silence till it crescendoed in deafening horror.
Tim’s parents had flown to Penscot two days after the incident. They took Ollie to lunch. He’d expected a bad scene but it turned out okay; they hated him much less than he’d feared. Tim’s mother was queenly. Occasional tears rolled disregarded down her face. She asked him, “What’s the last thing Tim talked about with you?”
“Must we flagellate?” her husband implored.
“I want to know!”
During the ride in the skiff out of the harbor, Tim had favored Ollie with details of his sex life. Tim referred to himself as The Kid in these recaps, to his partners as always This Lady, a title anonymous yet respectful. Last night, Tim said, This Lady denied The Kid ultimate knowledge but in compensation fellated him twice. “Good for her fingernails, she said. How could I refuse her?” Was Ollie supposed to tell Tim’s mother that? He looked at her in panic.
“Tim said,” he stammered at last, “he was looking forward to seeing his family.”
The man sobbed. The woman lit a cigarette and said nothing.
The rest of the lunch was taken up with talk about Ollie. Between jokes about his abortive love life and mature discussion of his career plans, he felt like a star downplaying his celebrity so as not to upstage the event. The adults hung on each word, laughed in all the right places — he sweated under the strain. It was a relief when they’d fire a question about that morning. Was it an accident? Did Tim suffer at all? Why in God’s name were they there? But even before he could fully answer, they’d abruptly change the subject to Ollie’s family, say, or his hobbies or favorite movies. They wanted to know how Tim died, and then again they didn’t.
Lunch ended. Tim’s dad shook Ollie’s hand and walked out of the restaurant. His wife said to Ollie, “I wish you could have talked my son out of going. It was such a needless thing.”
Ollie realized she was assuming, knowing Tim’s character, that Tim was the instigator. “I really never meant — ”
She touched his shoulder. “Ollie, I’m not blaming you. He’s to blame. I’m just wishing — ” She faltered. “I’ll have to stop that, I know. Tell me,” she asked, “was it stealing? Were you stealing from the fisherman?”
He nodded. “There was supposed to be a last bash at the White Bird for all the employees.”
“And Tim thought lobster would be nice.”
Tim thought — or Ollie? “Yeah. Free lobster.”
Her hand squeezed his shoulder. “Now again. What did my son say to you? The last thing.”
“I don’t remember.”
“Ollie. “
“He said, ‘This summer has given sweetly.’”
“Given what? Exactly.”
Ollie swallowed. “Vagina.”
She nodded. She smiled. Her chin crumpled and she hugged him suddenly. Against his body he felt a vibration, a quivering such as he’d never felt before. The sound in his ear was almost a giggle. “He could be a beast, couldn’t he?”
“Definitely.”
“Since when he was a baby, always, always,” a sobby laugh broke from her, tears and saliva on Ollie’s neck, “so grabby!” She lunged away, spun and half-staggered toward the exit door, pushed through it and disappeared.
Ollie found himself at the yacht club. He was drunk. The cry of the foghorn swirled. A line of dinghies nosed the dock, knocking together as the water moved under them. The bottle in his hand held a last mouthful. With gestures of drama drink had revealed in him, he raised a toast “To The Kid,” emptied the bottle and tossed it in one of the dinghies. He untied and pushed the craft into the channel to be received by the current. An empty bottle in an empty boat — let the finder draw his own conclusions, Ollie intended no message. He urinated into the sea. With his free hand he wiped his eyes dry, murmuring “I’m sorry” aloud.
Tim once had explained his secret method of bedding strangers. Be politely impolite. State indecent intentions with decency. What the hell, Ollie thought as he wound his way back to the White Bird — I’ll try it with this Lois. And if by a miracle she actually slept with him, well, it would stand in memoriam with other losses this summer, with time and tide and all else that goes, yet maybe still a worthwhile thing.
Nineteen
Jerome Cochran never amounted to much; even his son would have said so. But there was something regal to the man that infantry grunts, good people around town, and fellow miscreants responded to without realizing. No one was improved for knowing him. It only felt that way.
Jerome loved a problem. He loved scratching his chin over puzzlements of woodwork and boat maintenance, debating solutions, cursing the job and himself for accepting it. Raising money for Robby’s bail was a problem, for instance. His teenage son was a constant problem. And then there was the distracting vision of a would-be nun that kept popping into his head.
This las
t problem was especially vexing because it was of his own making, an exercise in emotional navigation, of taking a fix on a distant star to find out where he stood. He was conscious of the archetype figuring here — the idealized angel offering instant salvation — and he was undecided on whether it was quite to his taste. The presumptuousness inherent to such unilateral matchmaking escaped Jerome completely. He was a pig. No woman could be happy without him, he thought. He carried the burden of earth’s unhappy women as a priest does the burden of lost souls. Jerome’s sexual manner was tongue-tied and contrite. His fear was that women would tell him their prayers and that he’d be obliged to answer them.
By now, his sister-in-law Lois was persuaded that Anna’s visit indeed represented a farewell prior to Anna’s formal application to become, for real, a Benedictine nun. So Lois accommodated her. Aside from a tirade about nuns as dykes and sex as oxygen, she raised no fuss over Anna’s intentions. Lois’s girlhood in Catholic school had forever sacked the mystique nuns hold in the eyes of some, and to imagine Anna as having always been a nun wasn’t hard — her starched demeanor and recent years of chastity put her in that zone already. With little to chat about, Lois used her husband’s incarceration as an excuse to make herself scarce.
She wasn’t home when Willoughby rang the front doorbell one afternoon. Anna was there — and Jerome, who answered the door. The two men fell into defensive slouches. Anna was carrying two steaming mugs into the parlor. With the jumpy politeness of a houseguest hosting, she chirped to Willoughby, “Lieutenant! Tea?”
Willoughby reeled from the multiple whammies. He’d come by to pay Matthew Priam a surprise visit, an objective not remotely related to his vengeance quest — he’d been fidgety for company, for diversion. Glimpsing Anna through the window on his way up the front walk, he’d found himself anticipating their meeting while at the same time hoping Matthew wasn’t home. The latter reaction unsettled him. It seemed a betrayal, as if he owed Matthew some kind of fidelity after receiving his confession of illness. Crazy. Matthew was strange and now was making Willoughby strange too. Willoughby’s subsequent muddlement was hardly assuaged when his old sergeant opened the door.
Life Between Wars Page 13