The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  It was an old Dodge with a long gearshift, which the boy manipulated back and forth. In his mind he was suddenly steering this jalopy down the hilly streets of San Francisco. He was gathering speed, swerving around traffic, running stoplights.

  Brrrmmm, brrrrmmm, he said, twisting the wheel. It was childish—he knew that on some level. But he’d forgotten the fact he was twelve, he was supposed to be gaining maturity, he was supposed to be cool. Sitting up in the high cab with one hand gripping the wheel and his feet on the pedals and the knob of the big gearshift in his fingers, it was easy to forget you were all of twelve and heading for junior high.

  Ahead of him, birds flew out of log piles, no doubt panicked by the presence of the Mad Driver. He tipped his head back, glanced at his face in the rearview mirror—in his opinion he had too many freckles—then let his hands fall into his lap. His attention was drawn out through the window and across the junk-filled yard to the house, where he noticed the front door lay open in deep shadow. What if he’d been seen? he wondered. What if the old people were unfriendly and didn’t want kids hanging around? What if they were like his Untermeyer grandparents, who hated him for the way he left fingerprints on paintwork and crumpled their antimacassars and spilled little trickles of sugar? Old people got cranky; at times they were like babies.

  He climbed out of the cab. There were streaks of rust across his black T-shirt. He moved toward a mountain of old tires, feeling the urge to take a headlong dive into them. Smoke, drifting toward him from the chimney, teased him with its perfume. He was astonishingly hungry now. His stomach creaked like old wood planks. He glanced back at the house. There were no curtains at the dark windows. Two ancient deck chairs were placed side by side on the porch. Their canvas straps sagged. Was somebody watching him? Would the old couple step out at any moment and chase him off their land? He had the impression that the house was empty. Maybe the occupants had gone for a walk, leaving something delicious to bake in the oven.

  He skirted a rusted-out pile of old gardening tools—rakes and scythes and shears that were grown over with cobwebs and tangled in barbed wire—and he paused at the foot of the steps leading up to the porch. Beside one deck chair lay a clay pipe in an ashtray that was nothing more than an empty Bumble Bee tuna can. Alongside the other was a crochet needle. Dennis wondered if he should go knock on the door; maybe, if they were at home, they’d ask him to come inside for milk and homemade cookies. Just maybe. And if they weren’t at home …

  The steps made groaning noises as he climbed. The scent reached out to embrace him from the darkened kitchen beyond the open door. He couldn’t stand it. He had to eat something!

  He raised his hand, rapped his knuckles on the door. No answer. He knocked again. Then, encouraged by silence and yet wary of the fact that he was actually trespassing, he stepped into the room. There was an old stove and shelves that contained dishes and little porcelain figures—animals and fish and children, all of them covered in dust. Here and there the desiccated corpses of dead flies and the skeletons of dried moths hung to fragile cobwebs. There was a desk, a table, a couple of chairs, a tall dresser made of cherry wood. His attention wandered to the dark shadows on the far side of the room where he could see a fragment of staircase that led up, through increasing folds of shadow, to the top part of the house.

  “Anybody home?” he called out. He stared at the shut door of the stove, longing to throw it open and discover the goodies baking inside. “Anybody home?”

  He wandered to the bottom of the stairs and peered up through the dimness. A floorboard creaked somewhere at the top. The shadows up there changed abruptly. There was the sound of a hand on the banister rail.

  Dennis looked up, trying to make out shapes. He rehearsed what he was going to say and how he’d say it. He’d smile and be nice and ask if they could spare a glass of milk. He’d be very polite about it all and maybe they’d throw in some of whatever was reaching perfection in that stove.

  He heard the hand squeak on wood, the flat palm causing friction on the handrail. And then a voice came down through the shadows, a voice that was both cracked and cheerful. A man, a woman—Dennis couldn’t tell.

  The voice came again, closer. “Well, this is a pleasant surprise,” it said. “This is truly a pleasant surprise. Welcome to our home, young man.”

  Out of the gloom a hand appeared on the wooden rail. It was the oldest hand Dennis thought he’d ever seen.

  11

  What Max dreaded most was the telephone. During the two days before it had been connected he had experienced a strange sense of serenity, as if he were somehow floating through time, adrift from the things that harried him. He wanted to say it was freedom, but he wasn’t sure how to define that. He knew only that he was liberated in some narrow sense of the word and the feeling was one of muted exhilaration. But now that Louise had the phone hooked up, his tranquility was menaced—he was accessible to Connie Harrison. She could call Directory Assistance, get the number from them, and pick up her own telephone in the city. She could punch in the digits. Connections would click. Wires would fill with sound waves.

  And then the telephone would ring in this house with a shattering sound.

  He sat on the living-room sofa. The potential of the black instrument to disturb him seemed unlimited. What the hell would he do if Connie called and Louise was in the room, as she was right at this instant? How could he carry that off? He rose and walked nervously to the window. There was the edge of a slight hangover rubbing at the center of his skull; last night he’d gone overboard on the scotch, which hadn’t mixed well with that wretched medication. He resolved to abstain and yet the sense of threat he felt made him so nervous that he thought automatically of the pills. He drew one hand over his face.

  Louise, who was flicking through the manuscript of the book she was to illustrate, looked up at him. “He seems pleasant enough,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Frog. Pleasant. A little quaint. He reminds me of old friends I haven’t seen in twenty years.”

  Max nodded his head. The trees on the far side of the narrow dirt road appeared oppressive to him suddenly. A squirrel dangled from a branch, then swung nimbly out of sight. He strolled around the room, glanced once at the telephone, listened to Louise leaf through the script. Once she laughed at something; he didn’t ask what. His mind was filled with a picture of Connie Harrison picking up her receiver. She wouldn’t do it, though. Why would she put him in that kind of awkward situation?

  Max stood behind his wife looking at the neatly typed words on the paper she held.

  He read:

  … if only the bird would sing again

  Richard would be very happy …

  Enthralling, he thought. Poor unhappy Richard.

  He returned to the window, his hands behind his back. The book he’d been reading—a boring tome on allergies—lay open on the coffee table. He was tempted to pick it up, but instead he continued to look out through the window at the trees. Lighten up, he instructed himself. Breathe deeply. Relax. She isn’t going to call.

  When the telephone suddenly screamed he felt himself jump—the sound seemed to be located inside his own skull. He turned to the instrument quickly, but Louise had already picked it up and was talking into it. Max held his breath even as he thought he was being ridiculous. What would prompt Connie to call? She wasn’t the kind of person who wanted to make trouble, was she?

  Louise said, “Professor Zmia?”

  Max breathed out. Not Connie after all. He sat down in an armchair and gazed at his wife, who was smiling at him even as she talked to the professor.

  “Trouble with the dishwasher,” she was saying. “Yes, I guess it does take time to get the hang of the buttons.… Yes, yes.… If you’ll look … if you’ll look in the kitchen cabinet over the stove you’ll find the instruction booklet.… I know, I know.… What? … Oh, we’re fine … very pleasant … Max is fine. And Dennis is always out exploring someplace.… The woods are very
pretty—”

  Louise laughed at something the professor said.

  “Well, everything’s so computerized these days.… I guess not.… I hope you can figure it out from the booklet. Goodbye, Professor.”

  Louise set the receiver down. She looked across the room at Max. “Poor man couldn’t make the dishwasher work,” she said. “He couldn’t figure out the cycles.”

  Max reached for his wife’s hand.

  “He asked after you,” she said.

  “I gathered that.”

  “And Denny too. He wanted to know if we were enjoying ourselves.”

  Max nodded. “How’s he doing down there?”

  “Aside from the dishwasher, he seems to be doing all right.” Louise closed the folder of the manuscript. There was a sticker on the cover with the title The Day the Canary Wouldn’t Sing.

  She turned to Max and smiled. “He’s so much nicer on the phone than he is in person somehow,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I don’t have to look into those funny eyes of his.”

  “What funny eyes?” Max asked.

  “Didn’t you notice how they just seemed to bore right through you?”

  Max shrugged. “I can’t say I did.” He paused. He was feeling better all at once, back in control of himself. “Did you hear any orgiastic sounds in the background? Girls squealing? Anything like that?”

  Louise shook her head. “The only background noise was music.”

  “Balalaika? Something exotic?”

  “It sounded more like Mantovani. Actually, I think it might have been ‘Moon River’.”

  “What a disappointment,” Max said. I thought the Professor’s taste would be more eccentric. ‘Moon River’!”

  “Maybe he was only playing that music to lull us into a false sense of security.” Louise stood up, the manuscript clutched in her hands. “He probably changed the record as soon as he hung up.”

  “You think he’s that devious?”

  “I wouldn’t be the least surprised.” Louise stepped into the kitchen. After a time, Max went and joined her.

  12

  The man in the misshapen three-piece tweed suit paused at the corner of First Avenue and Delaney Street. Sweating in the midday humidity, he gazed across the street at the windows of various stores and recalled a time when Carnarvon had not been quite the tourist haunt it had grown into—when there had been real shops and not these overpriced boutiques designed to trap the tourist dollar. A time when greedy realtors had not taken everything over and weren’t pulling in the bucks as fast as they could be printed. But that was Carnarvon nowadays—a paradise for quick-buck property developers who dreamed at night of erecting condominiums and filling them with seasonal occupants, flocks of migratory suckers who thought time-sharing was the greatest notion since sliced bread.

  The names of the shops irritated him. Hanging By a Thread was a clothing store whose window was filled with designer jeans and shirts with patterns that resembled spilled paints. Bits ’n’ Bytes sold computer software. If you wanted a haircut you went to Hair Hair or if you needed to buy used books you went to The Page Boy. Sometimes he half expected to find McMahon’s Funeral Home renamed The Dead End. It was all too trendy.

  He crossed the street, noticing the out-of-state plates on the vehicles around him. Big Winnebagos from Texas, campers from New Mexico and Colorado. Carnarvon had once been a sleepy little place—back in the golden days before tourists discovered it and a hyperactive chamber of commerce had seen fiscal possibilities in turn-of-the-century architecture, leafy back roads, and miles of unspoiled pine woods.

  Then the smart money had flowed in from L.A. and San Francisco and Dallas and all the old stores had been converted into what they were now and all the fine old taverns had been turned into restaurants serving up whole-grain bread and bean sprouts and that unsatisfying food known as nouvelle cuisine.

  The man poked one thick finger under the damp collar of his shirt. He moved along the sidewalk and stopped when he came to the intersection of Delaney and Fourth. It was quieter here. There were less shops and the traffic was thin. He thought a moment about the phone call from Sheriff Metger. I’d like to meet with you, Miles.

  The man felt uneasy, without really knowing why. Metger wanted to talk with him—okay. But he hadn’t seen Jerry Metger in months. He rarely saw anyone these days. What could the sheriff of Carnarvon want with a retired physician anyhow?

  You could melt on a damned day like this, he thought. He had some trouble catching his breath and his lungs felt like old sponges. He raised a hand to his mouth and coughed into it. The hacking sound distressed him as it always did. Sixty-seven-year-old lungs—you couldn’t expect them to work like new, especially after a lifetime of cigar smoking. His eyes watered.

  When he reached the end of Delaney Street he stepped inside Bascolini’s Tavern, the last bar left untouched by the holocaust of change that had swept through Carnarvon. Bascolini’s hadn’t surrendered to the urge to install stained-glass windows and plants in brass pots—it was a dull, dark, cool place smelling of spilled beer and old tobacco smoke. It was comfortable. It was a place whose only function was that of drinking, without needless ambience, distracting signs, hanging ferns that threatened to smother you, funny windows that made your skin look as if you had scarlet fever or the yellow plague.

  The man saw Jerry Metger at a corner table. He hesitated a moment before he went across the floor toward the cop. Metger raised his face and smiled, half rising from his seat to assume an awkward little crouch over the table.

  “Been a while, Miles,” Metger said.

  Miles Henderson squeezed himself in between table and chair. The palms of his hands left damp slicks on the wood. He gazed at the cop. It was hard to believe that this young man was the sheriff—the face was smooth and unlined and the hair soft and boyish. He reminded Henderson of a young evangelist; he had that kind of energetic light in his clear eyes. An intensity that Henderson instinctively didn’t like. Intense people were scary—they could become fanatics right in front of your eyes.

  “You still drink gin?” Metger asked.

  Miles Henderson nodded. Metger waved to the barman and a drink was fetched and Henderson raised the glass and sipped.

  “Don’t see you around,” Metger said.

  “I don’t get around,” Henderson replied. He tapped his leg and added, “Circulation’s bad. Sometimes they just stiff up on me. Too much mileage. My tread’s worn. If I was a goddamn radial tire I’d be through to the steel by now.”

  Metger ran a fingertip around the rim of his beer glass. “Can’t you do something about it?”

  Henderson shrugged. “I get medication. Helps now and then. That why you asked to see me, Jerry? To get the lowdown on my blood problems?”

  Metger smiled. It was like a small light bulb going on in the center of his face. “I wanted to talk to you, Miles.”

  Henderson took another sip of his gin. He felt it slide warmly into his bloodstream. He was tempted to drain the glass entirely but he understood he needed to pace himself because if he went at it wholeheartedly now he’d be drunk on his ass before five o’clock and Henrietta would be a harridan. He said, “If it’s a medical matter, I don’t need to remind you I retired years ago and all that’s left of my practice is a couple of mildewed prescription pads and a mind full of useless bullshit, Jerry …”

  Jerry Metger leaned across the table. “It’s not medicine, Miles. It’s something else.”

  Miles Henderson leaned back and closed his eyes. He tired easily these days. Especially when it was humid like this, he could feel his strength evaporate through his pores. Aging was a bitch, a perfect bitch. Something else, he thought. Jerry Metger’s phrase went through his mind like bats flapping down dark tunnels.

  Miles Henderson opened his eyes. He had a sudden insight into what was on Jerry Metger’s mind and he didn’t want to talk about that, didn’t want the subject raised, didn’t need any of it. Good Christ, he was retired, he had his
gin and his computer chess game and his classical music collection and his old books, and he was set on a placid journey through retirement to death and he didn’t need anything dredged up from those years when he’d been the coroner of Carnarvon County because all that was long gone and he wanted to forget.

  “It’s that goddamn house, isn’t it, Jerry? It’s that goddamn house again. Tell me otherwise.”

  “It’s been rented,” Metger said. “A family. One kid.”

  Henderson burped gently into his hand. He wanted another gin. When the barman brought it Henderson drank it back quickly and smacked his thick lips and saw tiny spots dance before his eyes. He rose a little unsteadily and looked down at Metger, shaking his head from side to side.

  “So it’s been rented. Big deal.”

  “Family from San Francisco.”

  Henderson tapped the side of his skull and smiled. “You’ve got a bee loose in your hive, sonny. I hear it buzzing from where I stand.”

  Jerry Metger stood up. “You don’t want to think about it, do you?”

  “You’re damn right, Jerry. I don’t want to think about it and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “It was your case, Miles—”

  “Yeah, and it’s twelve years old and I’ve forgotten the half of it and I don’t see any goddamn connection between then and now, Jerry.” Henderson made a gesture of finality with his hand, chopping the air swiftly. “Leave it alone. Just leave it alone. The older some questions get, Jerry, the less chance you have of getting any answers. You understand me?”

  Metger sat down again, played with his empty beer glass in a resigned way. He reminded Henderson of a forlorn kid tinkering with a toy.

  “It’s time for my nap,” Miles Henderson said. “That’s what I do these days, Sheriff. That’s what old men do best. They nap and they like it.”