“Valleyview.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Sounds real Kodachrome. I’ll tell you what we need up here estatewise, is about six copies of the death certificate. You handle that?”
“I can.”
“Your people got the address here; I just received Kelsey’s bill.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“It’s pure-D exorbitant. What in God’s name were you feeding him?”
“We—”
“Anyway, he isn’t missing anything. I’ll wait on the certificates. Thanks for your efforts. G’bye.”
Lucien hung up. If that doesn’t do it, what will? He knew he had gotten ahead of himself when he buried Kelsey.
· · ·
Lucien went through the front door of the hot spring and into the front office. Antoinette sat on the corner of the reception desk. She was waiting for him.
“Dig him up,” said Lucien
“What?”
“We have to dig up Kelsey.”
“I don’t believe this,” said Antoinette.
“We don’t have a death certificate. We can’t get one without the coroner’s report.”
Lucien had been through his share of burials, certainly ones closer to him than this. But having to dig up Kelsey made all the others seem not final. It wouldn’t do. It would make things seem like some medieval uproar with loosed spirits ranging about among live people.
“He had a twinkle in his eye, that Kelsey.” Antoinette said this with the innocence of an aborigine sticking something into another mammal and breaking it off.
“You’re on the detail to dig him up,” said Lucien simply. It was the acme of infantilism.
At the cemetery a big yellow backhoe was off to one side, and a stranger in coveralls was viewing the bag containing Kelsey. Antoinette sobbed uncontrollably in her camel’s-hair coat and cowboy boots. Two pool cleaners were coming to load Kelsey to the coroner’s office. “Call Mrs. Kelsey once he’s delivered. Tell her he’s all hers. I hope it’s the last I hear of him in this life.” Lucien cut his eyes to the container. “What a thing to say about a companionable fellow like that.” He returned the questioning stare of the man in coveralls. “So many of our customers are people you hate like heck to spend an evening with. This guy had one good story after another.” Lucien paused by his car and, without turning to face Antoinette, urged her to get a grip on herself. Beyond the low line of foothills he could hear the iron connecting of trains. The low drifting smoke from the plywood mill came ghostly through the coulees as thermals changed in the approaching afternoon. Overhead two groups of crows passed each other, one going to the river, the other to the hills. Imagine if the papers got a picture of those boys sitting on Kelsey. Remains of area industrialist handed over to carrion birds in Montana. Are we one nation or not. The civil war where you least expect it.
Lucien stood by the galvanized tank and ran water for his horses, the hose three feet under and sending up circling shafts of yellow straw through the dark water to show it in motion. Over the white pipe fence the cedars twisted in the wind. Lucien thought, What am I looking for? What in the world?
Where hard spring snow had turned enamel under the huge pines, sudden birds’ shadows now appeared, then went; Lucien carried buckets of grain and thought, It has lasted until June, a miracle which may have fallen on Thanksgiving. His spirits were starting up. They would stay up for a while if they could get Kelsey buried once and for all.
As Lucien thought about it, he really didn’t know what the effect of trapping the hawk had been on James, what kind of day it had made. When Lucien had dropped him off, the White Cottage was full of Suzanne’s relatives, mostly cousins and including a good number of no-accounts who had nothing better to do than give Lucien a dirty look as one who’d done a good girl wrong. There was a cousin from Great Falls who used to run a greasy spoon up that way that was open twenty-four hours a day and therefore had no doorknobs. On days he wanted to fish and could find no one to spell him, he wrapped a hundred feet of logging chain around the building and padlocked it. He alone smiled at Lucien standing awkwardly in the doorway, the unwelcome host. But early Tuesday morning Suzanne called and said that James had enjoyed his day.
“Did he say anything about the pigeon?”
“Yes.”
“Did that upset him?”
“He seems to appreciate that you and he had some kind of adventure. When I said it was sad about the pigeon, he said that’s how hawks have to live. He was kind of taking up for you in that, I thought.”
“That’s nice.”
“So things aren’t as bleak as you may believe.”
“It serves my purposes to feel that I am singled out. I get mad. Which serves to get me out of bed in the morning.”
“Do you remember my cousin Danny?”
“Not really.”
“Well, he wants to know if you can use an irrigator.”
“I want to hold you and kiss you.”
“You stop this right now.”
“We don’t need an irrigator. We put in a wheel-line sprinkler and we don’t use it. We just write it off. Lying there, it underscores the nothing-is-real atmosphere that people on holiday demand. Your cousin Danny would ruin that.”
“You’re not kidding about the atmosphere. I’ve seen some lulus around that spring.”
“I know.”
“But I also noticed a lot of the old local yokels.”
“They get to have it both ways. Their thing is to come just out of curiosity, night after night. I humor them. We elbow each other in the ribs. We point. They keep coming back. I specialize in catering to the big-spending local dipso. If I didn’t have the out-of-towners, I’d have to hire topless dancers.”
A long and awkward silence followed, maybe not awkward but full of something that brought pain without impatience. So it was a question of where it would end. Finally Lucien broke the quiet. “Why can’t we just see each other in a normal kind of way?”
“Because we had that. And you left it. It has not returned just because we occupy the same real estate at the moment. I’m surprised you asked that question.”
“You’re surprised that I asked that question?”
“Yes, because it implies that I am either stupid or have no memory.”
“I’m very much alone, Suzanne,” Lucien said and was immediately sorry for even having tested this lame idea out loud. He received an actual Bronx cheer. “I’m coming over,” he said and hung up.
When he got to the White Cottage, Suzanne let him in and said, “Will someone tell me why I’m even opening this door?” Lucien swept her into his arms and held her tight. His hands slid down over the roundness of her buttocks and felt them grow solid. He sensed himself getting suddenly hard. At least it will have something other to do than soak my foot through the top of my shoe, he thought confidently.
“I’m not going to fuck you,” she said.
“Oh, yes you are.”
“Oh, no I’m not.” Her pelvis was firm and unmoving against him. He had never wanted to make love with anybody so much in his life. He couldn’t remember how it had been with her because he had never really cared.
She planted the tips of her ten fingernails against his chest lightly and pushed him away. He glanced down. His nicely fitted slacks had a grim off-center bulge in them, and there was a spot too. Love.
Suzanne’s eyes flickered away. Lucien remembered when she was a virgin. Virgins are bores, he thought, like people with overpriced houses. I suppose we could show you the living room; but we’re not even sure we want to sell and we’re very particular about the buyer. Lucien remembered Suzanne’s virginity as something that one approached like a root canal. Against the precociously carnal Emily it seemed a little sappy.
So instead they had tea. Suzanne seemed so beautiful that Lucien stared too much and made gestures that were either not appropriate or off in their timing. The wind blew the door open and a strange dog came in while they watched. He d
rank from the spring and turned a gaunt brindle muzzle toward them coolly. When Lucien tried to shoo him, he merely watched, then left at his own speed, jogging angularly out through the door again.
15
The four nannies came up from Aspen in a chartered plane. Lucien met them and helped throw their numerous pieces of luggage into the carryall. The pilot barely emerged from the cockpit to open the wing compartments. He looked like he had been through hell and seen all its famous inconveniences. He got back into the plane and stared saucer-eyed at the four ladies. The oldest of them, a girl of nearly thirty, wore an old prairie skirt and a T-shirt that said
ASPEN, COLORADO.
JEWS IN FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE.
The shirt made Lucien nervous. She took the lead conversationally and told Lucien that Montana was great, really great, she couldn’t tell him how great. Two of the others looked to be sisters, early twenties, Eastern Mediterranean-looking. The last was almost silent, and when she remarked on what a nice day it was, she did so in an Australian accent. She wore Zuni jewelry and loud lipstick, hot pink. All bore the same high-strung, peaked quality that Lucien associated with the end of civilization as we know it.
He took them to the spring, checked them in and followed from a discreet distance as McCourtney showed them their rooms. Each tore into the contents of her luggage, then closed the door. It must have been very exciting luggage. The eldest nanny leaned out past McCourtney and called down the corridor to Lucien, “I’m Freddy. Ring me up when nothing’s happening. I’m a light sleeper. And, you know, whatever.”
Late that night Wick Tompkins came out and asked Lucien to have a drink with him. They sat off at one of the glass tables where you could hear the voices from the spring and where you could imagine anything from being at sea to being at an old sanitarium in the Alps. Wick took out a cigarette and tapped it tight against the table, reversed it, tapped the other end and then set it between the edges of his teeth. He struck a match and gazed at Lucien.
“Remember that guy Emily ran off with?”
“W. T. Austinberry,” said Lucien. “I do indeed.”
Wick lit his cigarette. “Pretty-boy type.”
“Only compared to us.”
“What was your impression of him?”
“My impression? I don’t know. Kind of a harmless cat, y’know. But not so bad. Why?”
“Smart?”
“Uh, not too smart.”
“That’s right,” said Wick. “Not too smart.”
“What are we driving at, Wick?”
“Emily shot him.”
“Dead?”
“M-hm.”
Lucien got the old sick heart back. He just wouldn’t believe it. “Where is she?”
“Turks and Caicos.”
“What’s that?”
“A little island country.”
“What’s she doing there?”
“What else? Avoiding extradition.”
“How do you know this, Wick?”
“Why, she called. She needs five thousand dollars. I gather that she has plenty of money but is embarrassed temporarily because of sudden moving.”
Lucien wiggled his hand in the air for another round.
“Send it,” he said. Then he gave his small smile that meant the discussion was closed. Wick sighed in resignation and made himself a note.
“I love you, I hate you,” said Wick. “But I can’t save you from yourself.”
It was quite late by the time Lucien walked Wick to his car. Wick looked back through the side window with a sad, uncomprehending smile and drove away, red tail-lights flicking on and off tentatively as Wick tried to make out the exit. Lucien went inside, wondering what terrible thing Austinberry must have done to make Emily take his life; absolutely no one was giving her a chance. She was like a deer being run by a pack of wild dogs.
He picked up the in-house phone and rang Freddy. He had feared waking her, but she was unbelievably wide awake. “Give me five minutes,” she said. “Walk in and, whatever.”
Lucien went behind the bar first and made himself a Stolie and tonic. He walked out to the edge of the spring. An elderly couple circled in each other’s arms, dancing a musicless waltz in the night-blue depths like old and beautiful love on the rim of eternity. This is where we first made love, thought Lucien, my fugitive and I.
He sipped his way down the long corridor, carpeted for the comfort of wet bathers’ feet, to Freddy’s door. He finished his drink and leaned to set it next to the door. Inside he heard a vague hum like the sound of a transformer on a public building which has been shut up for the night. He went inside and there was Freddy, by God.
She was stretched out sideways on the bed, naked. The humming came from a gadget she had clutched to her genitals; her head hung upside down from the edge of the bed. She opened her mouth wide and indicated its dark center with the long fingernail of her one free hand. You won’t have to ask twice, thought Lucien, quickly undressing. He stepped over to Freddy and she manipulated him rigid without turning over. Lucien braced his knees on the mattress edge either side of her upside-down head. She stretched her tongue out far and wide. Whatever, thought Lucien mirthlessly, and slid himself all the way down her throat. He was able to glide freely in and out before her thrilling epiglottal clench drove an orgasm up through him. He fell forward on his hands to steady himself through the spasms; and heard the heated giggling from underneath. In a moment he dragged himself from Freddy as her glistening mouth closed in a kind of backward kiss. He went down on his knees and peered under the bed. There were the three little faces of the Aspen nannies.
“Just what sort of people are you?” he asked.
He woke up the next morning, made breakfast and brought it back to bed with him. This morning he let Sadie get in bed with him. That was a Sunday morning privilege and ceremony, when he would read the previous Sunday’s New York Times. Sadie always spotted the plastic mail wrapping and knew it was her day. Today was Thursday and Lucien had gotten four days behind; but Sadie didn’t know that, so today she got bed privileges and finger-held fragments of bacon and egg whites. People wondered why he didn’t build a better home to go with his new prosperity; but this old house suited Lucien fine. It was two ranges of hills from the hot spring, an increasingly important factor of insulation.
He cradled the phone against his shoulder, scanned “The Week in Review,” and dialed Antoinette. “Anybody looking for me?”
“The coroner’s office.”
“The coroner’s office …”
“They want to know what to do with Kelsey.”
“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Lucien, grabbing the phone in his hand. “Wait a minute,” he shouted. Sadie jumped off the bed. “Call the coroner back and tell him you talked to me. Tell him I said there was no such fucking thing as Kelsey. You got that? Just tell him so he knows: There’s no Kelsey.” He hung up and waited until his breathing was normal before he went back to his paper.
As luck would have it, Turks and Caicos was in the paper. Apparently it was a cluster of islands in the eastern Bahamas. Apparently it was all beaches and banks where dope dealers and Vesco types stored their money. There was a picture of a palm-shaded beach with a lethal-looking cigarette boat in the foreground and a modern slab of a bank in the background. Lucien knew Emily’s taste, he thought, enough to think she’d find this beach scene tacky and shallow. It saddened him to imagine her hurrying up the crushed coral walk and pushing through the plate-glass door to the air-conditioned room that held the five thousand he’d sent.
He got up to dress. Sadie jumped on and off the bed till he looked over at her and she stopped. He really didn’t know how to dress; whether to dress for his guests or to dress for the plumbing repairs he had to make on the mixing valves beneath the spring. Maybe a flight suit to symbolize either getting out of town or aiding Emily in her banking would have been on the nose. Maybe a diaper.
· · ·
The mail contained an eight-by-ten
envelope from Wick Tompkins. Now, this was suspicious. Lucien hardly ever knew Wick to use the mail to him. Wick’s hand deliveries of trifling papers were part of their life together. The contents of the envelope were simple and eloquent: a Uruguayan police photograph of W. T. Austinberry with a bullet hole in his left eye socket. The face had been scrubbed free of blood, the right lid tucked in place. The horrid gap nearly obscured the identity of Austinberry, but somehow the vaguely cowboy Scots-Irish face remained his.
Lucien went to the phone.
“Where did you get the picture?”
“The police here in town.”
“What were they doing with it?”
“Helping verify who it was.”
“Well, it’s him.”
“It sure is. Wouldn’t you venture he’d kind of lost his looks?”
“I’d like to know what he did to deserve it, Wick. That’s what I’d like to know.”
There was a long pause.
“Lucien,” said Wick. “Don’t do this to me.”
16
Lucien stopped down at Dominic Armada’s room. By keeping the room year-round—and he never asked for a rate-Dominic had transformed it into his own single flat, with none of the atmosphere of a hotel or spa. The room smelled of Ben-Gay and garlic; the beady-eyed Madonnas stood along the wall like duck decoys. There was a photograph of the bay of Naples that made Lucien long suddenly and irrationally for the sea, a longing that ended abruptly with a memory of the island church where Lord Nelson was married and where Lucien raised questions about his life that he still had not answered.
“Siddown, siddown, siddown, Lucien,” said the old penitent. Lucien sat on one of the Miami lawn chairs Dominic had brought for its associations and drank wine from a highball glass. Lucien immediately entered into the sort of urbanized character he became around Dominic; it was a relief to be that person for a moment.
Something to Be Desired Page 12