The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Dick says there’s a rainy season coming.”

  “So he’s not only a master Bait-Maker, he’s a meteorologist as well?” Louise said. The tone in her voice—why did it come out sounding resentful like that? Did she really resent the attraction the Summers had for her son? She felt suddenly silly, small-minded.

  “He’s an old man,” Max said, coming to the defense of Dick Summer for some reason. “He’s probably been around. Old people develop certain feelings for things like the weather. They have internal barometers. Fact.”

  “Dick knows some things,” Dennis added.

  “I bet he does,” Max agreed. “Anyway, the outcome is that we wait for your bait to … well, ripen … and then we can take a trip?”

  “Right,” Dennis said.

  Louise finished her wine. It had rushed to her head, creating a small buzz there. At least Max had gotten his project off the ground, she thought. It was some kind of start. As the warmth flooded through her she smiled at her husband, catching his eye as if to say, Thank you, Max.…

  Dennis was scratching the back of his wrist vigorously.

  “Is that still bothering you?” Louise asked.

  “Maybe I came in contact with poison ivy or something.”

  Max said, “Let Dr. Untermeyer take a look.” He raised Dennis’s arm, staring at the reddened spot where the boy had been scratching. There was a small collection of pale freckles there, tiny flecks created by exposure to sunlight. “It’s not poison ivy, I can tell you that.”

  “What is it?” Dennis asked.

  “You’ve been getting a little too much sun, that’s all. Here’s what you do. Outdoors, you keep the arm covered with a long-sleeved shirt. At night, before you go to bed, you can spread a little calamine over it to relieve the itch. Okay?”

  Dennis didn’t say anything.

  “You owe me thirty-seven dollars for the house call.”

  “Since when do freckles itch?” the kid asked.

  “I’m no dermatologist, Denny. You want a skin specialist, it’s going to cost you another thirty-seven.”

  Louise moved in the direction of the kitchen. “I think we should eat. Is anybody hungry?”

  “Me,” Dennis answered, scratching.

  Metger said, “I happened to be in the vicinity. Just thought I’d drop by and see how you folks are settling in.” He smiled and raised his coffee cup to his lips. “Besides, I wanted to meet your son. Didn’t get the chance last time.”

  Louise looked at the empty dinner plates on the table. The tatty leftovers of a meal. She wished she’d had time to clean up, but the young cop had just descended on them. She glanced at Max, who was tapping his fingers on the table.

  Metger said, “I’m about to have a kid of my own.”

  “Your wife’s pregnant?”

  “More than seven months.” The cop had a look of pleasure on his face.

  “Well, congratulations,” Max said.

  “Really,” Louise said. “You must be very excited.”

  Metger smiled and looked around the kitchen. It appeared to Louise that there was nothing exactly idle in the way he did this—it was almost as if he were looking for something specific, checking on something. He had had the same kind of searching look on his first visit. She remembered that now. It made her feel just a little uneasy, although she couldn’t quite say why.

  “We just had dinner,” she said, “As you can see.”

  The cop said, “Looks like my place just after dinner,” and he smiled, as if to say the mess didn’t matter to him.

  “Are you familiar with this house, Sheriff?” she asked.

  “Familiar?”

  “You give the impression that you know this place.”

  Metger laughed. He had a good-natured, open laugh. “There were some tenants here who had a young daughter. I visited them once. But it’s a long time ago. Why do you ask?”

  “You seem to be looking for something,” Louise said.

  “I didn’t mean to give that impression,” Metger remarked. “I guess I was just trying to remember how much this place has changed, that’s all.”

  “And has it?”

  “Different furniture. Different paint.” Metger shrugged. “What you might call a face-lift.”

  He drained his coffee and put the cup on the table and hitched his belt up at his waist. “You folks get into town much?”

  “Not often,” Max said.

  “You ought to take your son to the carnival some night,” Metger said. “If he likes that kind of thing. There’s a carnival comes here every July for a week. It’s not bad. There can’t be much for him to do around here.”

  Louise couldn’t help it. She said, “He visits the neighbors a lot.”

  “Neighbors?”

  “The old people.”

  “The Summers?”

  “Dick and Charlotte,” she said. “He seems to have formed a close friendship with them.”

  “You know the Summers well, Sheriff?” Max asked.

  “Hardly.”

  “I guess they’ve lived here a long time.”

  “As far back as I remember.”

  “More coffee, Sheriff?” Louise asked.

  Metger shook his head. “It makes me jumpy.”

  Max, who had lifted the coffeepot in anticipation, smiled and put it down again.

  Meter said, “Yeah. The Summers are fixtures in these parts.” He moved toward the door now, turning his cap around in his fingers, like somebody nervous. “I’d like to meet your son if he’s around. Think I could?”

  “I’ll call him,” Louise said.

  “You don’t have to go to any trouble.” The sheriff was already walking out of the kitchen toward the living room.

  “It’s no problem.” She followed him through the living room and out into the hallway.

  There Metger hesitated, gazing ahead at the door of Dennis’s room as if he had changed his mind, filled with a sudden reluctance to meet the kid now.

  “His room isn’t exactly tidy,” Louise said. “Could you pretend you don’t notice?”

  “I’ll do that,” Metger said. He moved again, as if motion were an afterthought and his attention belonged elsewhere.

  Louise knocked on Dennis’s door before going in. The boy was sitting on the bed. He looked up at Metger, then he reached out and stuck the stopper in the glass jar that contained the bait. Thank you for your consideration, Louise thought. The air in the room was bad, dank. She could hardly breathe. She wondered if Metger noticed. He must have but was too polite to mention it.

  “Dennis, meet Sheriff Metger.”

  Dennis smiled. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi, Dennis,” the cop said. “How do you like it out here? It’s not like what you’re used to, huh? It’s quite a ways from San Francisco.”

  Louise detected a note of strain in Metger’s voice—he wasn’t used to talking with kids, that was all. He spoke with the forced, patronizing cheerfulness of the inexperienced adult. He’d learn soon enough.

  “I like it,” Dennis said. “I like the trees.”

  Grinning, like some clumsy uncle on first meeting a niece, Metger moved toward the bed. He was looking around the room, but this time he was trying to take things in more surreptitiously than before. He was no good at subterfuge—it showed all over his face. Louise saw him glance at the bedside table, the lamp, then turn his eyes back to the boy again.

  She said, “Sheriff Metger’s about to become a father, Denny. Isn’t that nice?”

  Dennis nodded politely, although she knew this information was of no real interest to him. She’d only mentioned it to fill in a silence she’d suddenly found a touch awkward.

  “Well, Dennis, real nice meeting you,” he said. There was a strange little break, a crack, in his voice.

  “Yeah,” the boy answered. He seemed awed by the cop’s gun. “Is that loaded? Really?”

  “Sure it is,” Metger said.

  “You ever use it?”

  “I�
��ve been lucky, Dennis. I’ve never had to fire this gun. In fact, I only ever took it out of its holster one time.”

  “When was that? What happened?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “If you lived in San Francisco, you’d use it all the time.”

  Metger smiled. “Carnarvon’s a whole other ball game. We don’t get big-city action around here. You might be surprised to know that most cops never have to use their weapons.”

  There was a silence now. Metger appeared to have run out of chitchat. He shook Dennis by the hand, clapped him on the shoulder, then he was ready to leave. Louise walked with him to the front door. Max came out of the living room to the hall.

  “You meet Dennis?” he asked.

  “Nice kid,” the cop said. His face was pale.

  “We think so. But we’re prejudiced,” Louise remarked. She took Max’s hand and held it in her own—why did this policeman unnerve her? Beyond the porch, twilight was receding and darkness falling between the trees. A wispy wind tugged at the pines.

  Metger leaned against the porch rail. “Well, thanks for the coffee.”

  “Anytime,” Louise said.

  “I better be running along. Who knows? There might have been a crime wave in my absence.” He laughed at this notion. Carnarvon was safe. Carnarvon was cozy. Nothing ever happened in Carnarvon.

  She watched him go toward his car. It backed out and then it was gone, leaving a fading vibration on the air. As she turned to go inside she had the feeling that Metger hadn’t entirely wanted to meet Dennis.

  That had been an excuse, a pretext for something else.

  28

  Frog stood on the edge of the clearing.

  Earlier, when he had left the Untermeyers, he had gone back up into the forest to nap—to cop, as they used to say, some zzzzs. But when he’d lain down inside the VW his courtship of sleep was a waste of time and so he’d tossed and turned and sipped a little Mondavi he had left in a bottle and then finally, driven by his own need for financial sustenance, he’d strolled through the trees to this place.

  He reached up and flicked at the overhanging branch of a pine. It vibrated back and forth.

  Then he stepped a little closer to the house, although he was still hidden by a scruffy stand of trees. He could see the trash that was strewn across the yard—somebody had clearly made a small effort to fix the place up. Some of it had been sorted and lay in tidy little mountains. But it was still a bucolic slum, reminding Frog of all the garage sales he’d ever known, all the porch sales and yard sales of North America, those little neighborly enterprises where fat people turned up in rusted wagons to rummage through broken lamps and scuffed sneakers and assorted nuts and bolts, where they dickered over the price of a used shirt or a secondhand set of 1933 encyclopedias, in which there was no entry for penicillin and the far side of the moon was a matter of academic speculation.

  He looked at the porch. Nothing, nobody. A whisper here, a rustle there—beneath the mold and humus, creatures stirred.

  What you do, he told himself, is you go straight up to the house and introduce yourself and you say, Okay, I’m not a pushy kind of a guy, but I’d like to help you get this slum of yours into some kinda shape, I mean the goddamn neighbors are bitching and the town council is holding a special session and I don’t want to see you nice old geezers out on your goddamn asses.…

  Moreover, Mr. and Mrs. Summer, I come cheap. Five bucks per hour and I might go as low as four-fifty. Be good to me, I am a fugitive from a commune. I know my weeds. I’ve smoked enough of them.

  He puffed his cheeks, made a low whistling sound. He pushed through the trees until he had a side view of the Summer property. Behind the house a small wilderness of weeds proliferated. What that place needed was the services of SuperFrog, Weeder Extraordinaire and all-round Good Neighbor. He wished now he had a business card, something to put the stamp of authenticity on him. Old people like the Summers could be highly suspicious of wandering hippies. Like the last time he’d come here—had they been coldly polite or politely cold? Now he remembered how they must have seen him fucking in the stream and he was a touch embarrassed—perchance they won’t remember me. Old memories could be very flaky things.

  He headed around the front of the house toward the porch and then he paused because he had the curious sensation of eyes pressed against windows. He was being watched.

  But when he glanced at the windows he couldn’t see anybody. No watchers. Nothing.

  He stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans to appear nonchalant. Easy Does It. One Day At a Time.

  When he reached the bottom of the steps he stopped once again and he looked up at the open doorway. There was a darkness beyond, as if the inside of the house were an open mouth. And he was struck by a sudden weird incongruity: it was an image of young Dennis coming to this place by choice, a bizarre juxtaposition of youth and everything antique that this dump stood for. It might have been a framed watercolor: Still Life of Boy with Very Old People.

  Cool now, Frog. Turn yourself into a smile.

  Sooner or later, like the figures on some Bavarian weather clock, old Dick and Charlotte will appear out of the darkness. At which point you offer the hand of friendship, suggest a freebie to help them with their weed situation, and generally act kind.

  He didn’t move from the foot of the steps.

  But he heard a faint sound from within. A footfall, perhaps. A shuffle. They’re coming to greet me.

  Forms appeared in the shadows. Ah, yes, Frog thought. In his head he was running through the text of his introductory speech, preparing his attitude, so to speak. A smile, of course. An offer to scythe those weeds out of the earth. Tidy up the entire yard for—shall we say—sixty bucks? Too expensive? Fifty then …

  They stood in front of him. Dick and Charlotte, hand in hand.

  He might have been touched by the sweetness of this affection had it not been for the fact that he found something utterly queer in their appearance.

  I get it, he thought. Dressing up, huh? Trying to fit yourselves into very old threads on account of some wild outbreak of nostalgia. Let’s break open the old trunks, Charlotte, let’s put on the clothes we wore when we were very young.… Let’s see if we can’t get into the mood for a little decrepit sex.

  The old woman smiled and raised one hand in an ambiguous gesture that might have meant welcome. Frog couldn’t be sure. He was still overwhelmed by the antique clothes the pair were wearing. She had on a long satin skirt that covered her feet and a high-collared blouse with a brooch at her throat. And the man, old Dick, wore tight-fitting pinstripe pants, a jacket with very short lapels, and a shirt with a high, detachable collar.

  He wasn’t sure what to say. He felt a trifle dislocated.

  The woman was still smiling at him. It was, Frog thought, a peculiar smile, similar to the kind you saw on the blissed-out faces of Krishna people in airports when they attempted to foist a flower on you or have you purchase a glossy book imprinted with the Wisdom. A spacey thing.

  “I’m Bartleby,” he said, going with the correct name. It might have been too much for them if he’d introduced himself as Frog.

  “We know who you are,” the woman said.

  “Oh. Well, it’s a small neighborhood,” and Frog smiled uneasily. There was something here, something he just couldn’t fathom.

  “We were about to have some tea,” the old man said. “Maybe you’d care to join us?”

  Frog went up the steps slowly, wiping his clammy palms on the sides of his pants.

  Max stood on the sun deck and looked out into the black trees. The tiny breeze that had blown up earlier, feebly stirring branches, had faded now and the darkness was silent. He was conscious of light falling through the sliding glass doors at his back and imposing itself on the slats of the deck. He turned to see Louise emerge from the bedroom. There was a confused scent of toothpaste and cologne and shampoo; she was a moving conglomeration of perfumes. Her hair was piled up
inside a towel and her skin glistened.

  She stood beside him silently. He put one arm loosely around her shoulder, drawing her toward him. “You smell very good,” he said. And he thought, Connie always wears something called Amore, a scent redolent of cut lemons. Why think of her now? You can pretend she doesn’t exist, she isn’t going to call anymore, nothing ever happened. Ah, indeed—your private Dream Factory. He kissed his wife’s shoulder.

  Louise said, “I’m glad you got the ball rolling with Denny.”

  “And I’m glad you’re pleased,” Max said. The family unit—could he draw it around himself like a fortress? Would it protect him?

  “When are you going to take me to Carnarvon to wine and dine me?”

  “Any time you like,” Max answered. “We only have to make the babysitting arrangements.”

  “Damn, I forgot to mention it to Charlotte when she was out for her nightly stroll. I’ll go over there in the morning. Maybe we can do it tomorrow night.”

  Max looked at the trees. “That’s fine,” he said.

  He had an image of the hotel room overlooking the Bay, a clouded picture of Connie as she stood in front of him slowly removing her blouse and unbuckling the belt of her pants and stepping out of her clothes as if they were just so much gossamer. He felt a curious tingling in the pit of his stomach.

  He turned to Louise. He was suddenly cold, shivery, and he pressed himself against her for warmth. Out in the forest a couple of brids, panicked for God knows what reason, flapped upward through branches, creating a flurry of sound. Max laid his face aginst Louise’s shoulder. The chill passed. He was fine, he was all right, everything was going to be okay—how could it be otherwise? He glanced at the moon, a reassuring silvery presence up there.

  Connie Harrison, he thought. It was as if his relationship with her were a sealed bottle he’d thrown into the ocean, something that kept coming back to him on the repetition of tides. I don’t want it, don’t need it. But there it was again, the hotel room, the girl’s wonderful flesh, the sympathetic little light in her eyes, her desire for him. He shut his eyes like a man trying to find a comforting darkness where he might lose himself in amnesia. There it was again—the old tide climbing up on the same old shore. He thought he could feel it knock on his heart. He held Louise tighter.