“I knocked,” Louise said. “Nobody answered.”
The Summers reached the bottom step. Louise smiled at them, and then it struck her that the difference in Charlotte’s appearance lay somewhere in the old woman’s face, in that general area—but what was it?
“I came to ask if you would mind baby-sitting tonight,” Louise said. There was a breathless quality in her voice, a kind of hush, like that of somebody talking in a cathedral. Had they seen her examine the pink glass jar? Had they caught her doing that? But she hadn’t really done anything, she’d only looked, she hadn’t actually gone and touched the thing or removed the stopper to see what was inside—and now, like a criminal doomed to return to the scene of his crime, she found her attention straying back to the jar. Goddamn, don’t even look at the thing.
“Baby-sitting,” Charlotte said, and looked at her husband.
Dick was still smiling.
“Only if it’s convenient …” and Louise heard another sentence trail off into nothing.
“I think we can do that,” Charlotte said. “Don’t you, Dick?”
“No problem,” Dick said, “What time?”
“Seven’s fine,” Louise said. She looked back at Charlotte. Then she knew. She knew what was different about Charlotte. She had obviously been applying something like Grecian Formula to her hair; there was a darkness rising out of the roots, overshadowing the whiteness of the strands. Louise smiled to herself. Sly old thing, she thought. Even at her age there was vanity, an awareness of appearances. Grecian Formula! She was about to say something, perhaps offer a compliment on the change, but she didn’t. She had the feeling she wasn’t meant to notice. Instead, she remarked on how good the kitchen looked.
“Did a little cleaning,” Dick said.
“You sure did,” Louise said. “It looks terrific.” And despite herself she let her eyes fall once again on the candy jar. “That’s a nice little piece. It must be pretty old.”
She put her hand out toward it, letting her fingertips touch the ridged contours of the glass surface.
“Quite old,” Charlotte said and came to the table, picking the jar up and cradling it in the palms of her hands in a gesture Louise thought was strangely protective.
Louise gazed into the thick pink glass. The dark mass that lay inside seemed to float lightly as Charlotte moved the jar against her body. A dark, weightless mass contained in pink glass.
No, Louise thought. No …
She held her breath.
Charlotte said, “Seven o’clock’s fine. Just perfect.”
Dick was coming across the room. “Don’t have any plans anyhow.”
“Yep,” Charlotte said, smiling. “We don’t have any other plans at all.”
Louise felt crowded by the old couple suddenly, as if they had somehow grown in stature around her, their small stooped bodies changing shape, filling the kitchen and blocking the light. She moved toward the door. The wind blew across the porch and dashed through her hair and then she was going down the steps and the sunlight seemed to have a cutting edge to it all at once, sharp against her face and lips.
She looked back up the steps at the sight of the Summers standing side by side in the doorway.
Charlotte was holding the pink glass jar against her breasts.
“We’ll be there by seven,” the old woman called out.
“Count on it,” Dick added.
Louise blinked in the searing, hostile light. She tried to smile back at the Summers but it was suddenly a terrible effort just to raise her hand and wave.
She turned and went quickly across the yard and when she reached the trees she stopped. She had a tight, clenched feeling around her heart. She opened her mouth and breathed very deeply.
A pink glass jar.
There was a cold sensation in her stomach.
32
Stanley Metger was lost in space, his own strange space in which time and memory had collapsed like a frail house of dominoes. He occupied room number eighteen at the Carnarvon Nursing Home, a new building on the outskirts of town—all sharp edges and angles and glass, a functional place where a functional staff cared for the very old and infirm.
The clean lines of the building, the brisk appearance of it all, made an unpleasant contrast with the ailments of the occupants. You expected this structure to house a computer assembly company, some kind of light, antiseptic industry; you didn’t expect it to contain the relics of people who had outlived their social usefulness. As Metger, depressed, crossed the lawn he looked up at the window of his father’s room and he remembered the kind of man Stanley Metger used to be.
Strong, with broad shoulders and a red, beery face, the elder Metger had worked his own construction company for years in Carnarvon. He was a man to whom honesty was as important as breathing. He had no tolerance for hypocrites and liars, no place in his life for the pretentious. He reserved in his garrulous heart a special black place for politicians, whom he placed on a level with polyester evangelists, purveyors of junk food, and the people responsible for TV commercials. There was scum on the river of society, he used to say—always wear protective clothing, Jerry, whenever you go out there to swim.
Jerry Metger climbed the stairs to the door of room eighteen. The man he remembered, the man he had loved and admired and been awed by, was not the same man who occupied this room now. Stanley Metger had disappeared, replaced by a stranger, a shadowy substitute, someone the younger Metger didn’t always recognize. The muscular arms had wasted. The tattoos, which had seemed mysterious and somehow sinister to a gullible young boy, had lost their flamboyance and now looked like cancers on the man’s flesh.
But more than anything else it was they eyes that upset Jerry Metger. They were flat and lifeless and they drifted at times with no apparent object in sight. You never knew what they were seeking or where they were going. They seemed unconnected to the brain, as if wires had burned out. Sometimes Jerry Metger thought he could smell the faint aroma of something that had been scorched a long time ago.
He stepped into the room.
His father sat on the edge of his narrow bed, his face turned toward the TV, which played soundlessly in the corner. It was a sick room, Metger thought, filled with sick smells. Bottles of useless medications littered the bedside table. There were photographs—old family pictures that showed Stanley Metger in his prime. There was one of his dead wife, Jerry’s mother. There were several of father and son.
“Dad,” Metger said. He moved toward the bed.
The older man turned his face slowly. There was a game show on TV and the colors ran across Stanley Metger’s face.
“It’s me. It’s Jerry.” Metger sat down on the bed beside his father.
“Jerry,” Stanley Metger said. He seemed to be tasting the name in his mouth, searching for a familiarity of flavor. Obviously it meant nothing to him, because he turned his face back to the TV.
It hurts, Metger thought. It’s all such a pain. But you go through the hopeless motions anyhow. “How are you?” he asked. The question floated like cigar smoke in the stale air of the room.
“Jerry.” Again the name was pronounced as if it were totally strange. A smile crossed his father’s face—it was sly, a sneaky smile. He reached inside the pocket of his gray flannel slacks and produced a cellophane bag that contained M & M’s. He rattled these for a moment, popped one in his mouth, then returned his eyes to the noiseless TV.
“Got your little stash, huh?” Jerry Metger asked. There was always a secret cache of candy in the room somewhere.
“They don’t know,” his father said. “Don’t you go telling them.”
“I promise I won’t.”
The older man rubbed his eyes. He got up stiffly and turned the TV off. “You realize there’s nothing wrong with me, don’t you?”
“Sure, Dad.”
“I’m only here for a week tops. No longer.”
Jerry Metger nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
“They’re running some
tests. They said. I know what they’d like. To hell with them, I say.”
“What would they like, Dad?”
The same sly smile crossed the face. “That’s between me and these four walls.” Stanley Metger, in a gesture of secrecy, tapped the side of his nose.
Flashes of paranoia. Fear. Secrecy.
Jerry Metger looked at the blank gray face of the TV and tried to fight his depression, but it always went deep when he came to this place. He had to remember that this wasn’t just a social call. It was more than simple filial concern that had brought him here. But even as he remembered this, he was swept by a wave of futility. His father was dead—what he saw in front of him was a shell, a lingering shadow, nothing more. You couldn’t expect to get anything out of a shell.
Except maybe a pale echo.
Stanley Metger had burned out overnight, without any sign of symptoms, without any warning. During the last lucid conversation Jerry had had with his father, Metger Senior had mentioned something about a book he was writing—an idea so off the wall it took Jerry by surprise. People keep telling me I ought to get some of my stories down on paper before the Grim Reaper silences me, Jerry. I thought to myself, hell, why not give it a try? But Jerry Metger had never seen a page of any manuscript. As far as he knew, his father hadn’t committed one word to paper—unless, of course, he’d done so secretively. Then he got sick. Suddenly, irreversibly sick. These things happen sometimes, Lou Pelusi had said at the time. Senility, if you want to call it that, kicks in without warning. The brain just goes. Good old Lou, always a comfort.
Jerry rose from the bed, wandered to the window, and looked down at the lawn. Grass rippled in the wind like a green tide. Then he watched his father roam around the room in the curiously stiff manner of the aged, as if every move were a terrible effort. But he wasn’t what you’d call an old man. Although he was only in his early sixties, he looked so much older—his skin hanging on his skeleton loosely, his face sunken, a fleck of spit at the corner of his mouth.
Now he said, “They think they got me in this place for life, boy.” He laughed, a strange little wheeze that rattled in his throat. For a moment there was a burst of life in his eyes, then the spark died. He moved to the TV, switched it on again. He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the picture.
Jerry Metger sighed. “Aside from the tests, they treating you okay in here?”
His father nodded. “Food’s all right if you like mush. Mush is what you get around here. Not just the food. People’s brains. It’s all mush. I was telling your mother only yesterday they treat you in here like you’re a goddamn baby. Strained peas. For God’s sake. I don’t need strained peas. Your mother laughed.”
Jerry Metger went to his father and sat down beside him. On past visits he’d tried a little truth therapy, as if to shock his father back in the direction of reality. Sometimes there had been a response, more often not. Now he dickered with the notion of saying that his mother had been dead for the past nineteen years, but he decided against it. He clapped his father on the shoulder. “If you don’t like the food, I’ll bring you something next time I come. Maybe I’ll get some Chinese from the Lotus Gardens, or some of Al Trunkey’s Down-Home Ribs. You always liked those, didn’t you?”
“Best ribs in the world,” Stanley Metger said. “Al’s secret is in that mesquite he uses. And in the sauce. Special ingredients. He told me one time what he put in that sauce. I forget what the hell he said though.”
Memory and forgetfulness. It sometimes seemed that a light bulb went on and off inside his father’s brain. Certain dark corners were briefly illuminated, then the light went out again and the older man was left stumbling blindly through his own amnesia. Jerry Metger rubbed his father’s shoulder. He could feel the bones through the rice paper of flesh.
“Ted Ronson said to tell you hello.”
“Ronson? That carpetbagger? I don’t need any message from him. And you can tell him that. I never thought his spit was wet, if you catch my meaning.” Stanley Metger was silent a moment. “Wasn’t a bad kind of guy until he decided he’d go into politics. Me and him, we used to drink up a goddamn storm. He was here the other night.”
“Ronson was here?”
Jerry Metger leaned closer to his father. In moments of clarity Stanley Metger was like a man who sees a sudden path opening up in front of him and he follows it until it reached the confusion of a crossroads and then he’s lost once again.
“Are you sure it was Ronson?”
The older man shut his eyes. A nerve worked under his jaw. He didn’t answer his son’s question and Jerry wondered where his father’s reality began and ended. Maybe he was simply confused, maybe it was an illusion. Ted Ronson hadn’t mentioned anything about visiting here. Hadn’t said he’d been to see Stanley. It was surely something Ronson would have talked about. Instead, he’d given the distinct impression he hadn’t seen Stanley in a long time.
“Old Ted Ronson,” Stanley said. “I never once voted for him. He tried. Jesus Christ, that man tried. One time I told him I’d give him my vote when hell froze over.” He took out his bag of M & M’s and put one between his thin lips.
“What did he come here for?” Jerry Metger asked.
“Who?”
“Ronson.”
“Did he come here?”
“You said he did.”
“It’s like a mist sometimes,” the older man said. “You can’t see through it clearly.”
Metger sighed. All the lines in Stanley’s mind were blurred. How could he tell if Ted Ronson had actually been here or if Stanley had imagined it?
Metger brought back to his memory how his father had really been once. Not this sickly, skinny person who sat on the bed now, but that other man—the big man with the vast appetite for living, the loud laugh, the infectious zest. He brought back memories of beer parties and empty kegs and smoky rooms filled with laughing people and his mother following his father around as if she were afraid he might drunkenly fall over and would need somebody to catch him. He never did fall.
Prompt him, Metger thought.
Try to prompt him.
“You think about the old days much?” he asked.
Stanley Metger turned to stare at his son. For a moment a blankness crossed his face, as if all possibility of future expression had been bleached out of skin and muscle. Metger thought, I’m losing him. He’s tuning into a different station. But then the older man smiled.
“It comes and goes,” he said.
“You ever remember telling me one time about a boy you knew back in the forties I think it was—”
“What boy? I knew lots of boys—”
“Yeah, well, this kid was a friend of yours, I guess.”
“I had lots of friends.” An edge of petulance in the voice—that strange impatience sick people sometimes show toward the healthy. “You got a name for this kid?”
Jerry ransacked his memory. He shook his head. He didn’t have a name—all he had was a faint recollection, dreamlike in its vagueness—one small legend from a childhood filled with them. His father had always been a great talker, someone who loved to hear the sound of his own voice rambling on. But in the midst of so many old tales, exaggerated stories about the old Welsh miners who’d first come to this place, yarns about colorful characters with names like Evan One-Eye and Tommy the Stiletto and the utterly eccentric Taffy Owens, mines with peculiar names like Deadman’s Diggings and the Yellowjack Shaft, and bloody stories of betrayals and double crosses and weird superstitions about ghosts who haunted certain valleys or could be heard to whine in the dark depths of mine shafts—how could Metger truly remember any particular one? Among so many whispers, how could he isolate one?
“I forget the name, Dad.”
“So how do you expect me to remember anything?”
“This kid died, I remember you telling me he died—”
“Died?”
“He had some strange disease.”
Stanley Metger ratt
led his little bag of candy. The petulance in his voice was more pronounced, like that of an old man who wants to feel that he has better things to do than sit around reminiscing. “What disease? I don’t remember shit about any kid with a strange disease.”
“’You’re the one who told me …”
Stanley Metger shook his head vigorously. His attention had drifted back to the TV. He got up, turned the set off. He went to the window and stood with his palms upraised against the glass.
“I get tired real easy,” he said.
Metger nodded, studying his father there at the window. He’d gone again. It was as if a book had suddenly been shut and all that was left was the dust rising from the pages.
Metger got up from the bed.
His father was still gazing from the window. He said, “You tell your mother she ought to bring me that travel rug I need. It’s plaid. We bought it years ago. I need it here because they don’t like to give you too many blankets. They want you to be cold, see. They don’t want you warm in this place.”
“Why’s that?”
Stanley Metger looked furtive and when he spoke he whispered. “Cold kills you quicker. That’s why. Place like this needs a fast turnover. It’s a business. It’s all business.”
Metger went toward his father. He hugged him for a moment. “I’m pretty sure they don’t want to kill anybody quick in here, Dad.”
“That’s what you think.”
Metger let his arms hang at his sides. “Okay, I’ll remind her to bring the rug—”
“It’s got to be the plaid. Don’t forget that. Remind her it’s the one we bought in Carmel that time.”
A heartbreak, Metger thought. “I’ll do that.”
He moved toward the door, pulled it open. From his back he could hear the noise of cellophane crinkling and candies rattling again. “I’ll come by next week, Dad.”
There was no answer.
Stanley Metger had poured all the M & M’s into the palm of one hand and was counting them with his fingertip. He stood in the yellowy light at the window like somebody in a fading photograph. He was mumbling to himself. “Yellow … red … brown …”
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