The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3

by Donald Harington

  No, I said. I could not answer any of his questions. I could only tell him that I was doing what I felt like doing, that I was looking for answers, that I had never stopped trying to discover why I had come home, and that if there were any answers I felt it had to do with Margaret, who, in my fanciful mind, was so inextricably conjoined with the town.

  “Well,” Naps sighed, driving me home, “looks like her and the town both are hiding out this time of night.” We parted and promised to keep in touch.

  Many an old night in my nervous, questing youth, I had let myself into my father’s house late on little cat’s feet, skillfully, entirely in the dark, lessening the chance that he might awaken and rise to come and smell the exhalation of tobacco (I smoked in those days, for social reasons) or alcohol (usually beer, sometimes stronger) which hung like a stale lotion around the front of my face. Now, for no reason, all the old talent returned to me naturally, the dexterity, the maneuvering, and I jockeyed my way up the back steps, across the junk-littered porch, through the door, into the kitchen (where I paused for a sip of cold water from the bottle in the refrigerator, opening the door of it in such a way that it made no noise and its light did not go on—the little button held down under my deft thumb), on through the hall and into my bedroom, where I closed the door firmly yet soundlessly before turning on the light. The light switch did not even click, the way I adroitly handled it. You know, I told myself with amusement, you might have made a good living as a second-story man; and my weary mind yearning for sleep began already to dream: I would become a highly successful Little Rock burglar, the papers would carry stories of the latest haul by the mysterious Prowessed Prowler, and finally I would have a dramatic showdown with Detective Lieutenant Hawkins, who cracked the case. Ah. Go to bed.

  Early the next morning I heard the voice of my grandmother talking to someone on the telephone, and then I heard her yelling into the phone, and the phone slammed down. Then she came into my room, looked at me, and said, “You awake?” Then she said that somebody had called, a man who would not identify himself, and that he had instructed her to tell me I had better get out of town fast and not come back again, if I knew what was good for me. Slater?

  After breakfast Grammaw Stone and I rode a bus to St. Vincent’s to visit with Dall; he was mighty pleased with her cake; she was mighty pleased that he was going to live; he was mighty upset about the phone call I reported to him; he was mighty disappointed that I hadn’t re-secured Margaret yet; I was mighty nervous about everything. Sonofabitch, he said, referring not to me but to Slater. Aw hell, he said later, trying to cheer up me and himself both. They’re just bound to catch that bastard soon and—“Don’t swear, Dall,” my grandmother admonished. “It aint nice.”

  Later in the morning I went to Dall’s house to feed Bowzer again, but Bowzer wasn’t there. I called him for a while, and waited half an hour for him to come home, but he didn’t. Perhaps he was just out roaming the neighborhood, but I had an awful suspicion that Slater might have done away with him. I left some fresh food in his bowl, and then wandered off through the town, and spent most of the rest of the day in futile walking, soaked with sweat from the hot May sun. A cold shower and a brief nap in the afternoon repaired part of my deteriorating substance, but I felt I would never again be a whole man.

  Naps phoned to ask if I had had any luck and to tell me that he had had none. He invited me over for supper, but I felt obliged to eat with my folks. I stayed at home and brooded for as long as I could stand it, and as long as my father and grandmother provided some company and sense of security, but then after they had gone to bed I grew intolerably restless and plunged once more out into the night, and roamed the streets again. It was almost monotonous, all of this roving, but although I damned myself for it I could not help it.

  This self-damning frame of mind made me begin to think that my pursuit of Margaret was not out of the purest of motives and that what I really wanted from her was some sex or at least whatever she had given to Slater (and what had that been?). I even began to believe that I was a twerp incapable of really loving anyone but myself, incapable of desiring any friends except for their usefulness, incapable of being satisfied with this town, this home—or any place for that matter, incapable of establishing a real trust or faith in anybody, and doomed forever to this senseless rambling.

  Was this really me?

  Chapter thirty-six

  I remembered that Bowzer was lost. How could I ever face my old buddy again in his disabled and gauze-swaddled confinement and tell him that his good dog, whom he loved so much, was gone? It might complete the defeat of his spirit, and he would lose the will to live. Better that I lie than reveal the truth.

  It was too late now, after midnight, to go visit with Dall again, anyway. Perchance before the morrow Bowzer would reappear, if he was in any condition to reappear. Maybe he had already come home. I would just run over and see.

  On foot I continued to Dall’s house, scanning the dark streets and yards en route, and calling softly to the dog. Various mongrels replied to my call, but none of them was Bowzer. Approaching Dall’s house I suddenly realized, for the first time this evening, that Slater might be out after me, vengeance-minded, and my veins froze, but I warmed them with the thought of the worthiness of my mission, to find the lost dog and restore him to his master. If Slater had harmed the poor pooch in any way, and I had the fortune to come across Slater, I would rip him apart from limb to limb with my bare hands…Bowzer was not in Dall’s back yard. The food I had left in his bowl was untouched. In turning to survey the surrounding darkness for some sign of him, I noticed that a light was burning in the kitchen of Dall’s house. Had I left the light on when I was in there mixing Bowzer’s dinner last night?

  Or was Slater in there?

  Call the police? Run? Die of this apprehension raging in my vitals?

  Or confront the scoundrel? I had a fleeting vision of tomorrow’s headlines: DOUGHTY EX-ARKANSAN, HOME ON VISIT, NABS ERRANT PLAYWRIGHT. I could hear Hy Norden telling about it on television: “Clifford Willow Stone, twenty-eight, Boston antiques curator and a native of Little Rock best remembered for his victories in the 1953 Golden Gloves tournament, single-handedly found and captured James Royal Slater, whom police and sheriff’s department officials had been seeking on a charge of intended murder of his wife, last night at a house on West Fourth Street, after a brief struggle in which Stone disarmed Slater and gave him a sound drubbing. Reports from St. Vincent’s Hospital, where Slater was taken after the fray, indicate that Slater is in serious condition but that it is expected he will live to face trial…” And an interview with me and all.

  But could I do it? I mean, if he really was armed with a gun or something? Could I dodge his fire? Good Lord, it was an awful decision.

  Maybe I could sort of sneak in quietly through the back door and club him over the head with something before he had time to turn around.

  Stop this damn trembling, Clifford Stone! I rebuked myself. Maybe you just left the light on the other night. Go in and turn it off.

  So I went in, very quietly, sneaking with the best of my mouse-soundless skills, and I opened the door a crack and thrust my arm in and flicked off the kitchen light switch. But then I flicked it back on again, because I had caught sight of somebody sitting at the kitchen table. It wasn’t Slater. It was some woman. A redhead. When I turned the switch off and then on again, she wheeled around and threw me a really panicked look, and I stared dumbfounded at her, wondering if I might possibly have entered the wrong house, these little bungalows in this neighborhood look so much alike, and the next thing I expected her to do was to throw up her hands and scream a banshee’s furious wail and go running off into the bedroom, yelling, “Man sakes alive! Wes! There’s a prowler out there! Get up, Wes! Quick! A prowler!” But she didn’t do this. The panic in her face ebbed and she just stared at me. I had a brief thought that this might be Dall’s old wife Rowena returned to badger him, but this woman was much prettier than
the Ozark hill gal I had seen in that photograph, and besides she was a redhead and Dall’s wife was supposed to be a blonde. Well, maybe she could have dyed her hair and sort of fixed herself up or something…

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry, but I thought—” I began, troubled by something in her voice. “This is the Hawkins residence, isn’t it?”

  “Clifford,” she said. “How did you find me?”

  “Find? Me? I mean you? I? Who?” I babbled.

  And then she took off the wig.

  “Good gravy, what were you wearing that thing for?” I demanded.

  “Just because,” she said.

  I sat down at the kitchen table across from her and began to shake helplessly, I know not why. Or maybe I do. “Coffee?” she said, and I nodded and she took a pot off the stove and poured me some. Two cups before I could speak, and then I quavered, “I just came to feed his dog. I didn’t expect to find you of all people here. What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for Doyle,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I just wanted to talk to him,” she said.

  “What about?”

  “I just wanted to talk to him,” she said again, somewhat adamantly. “He told me once that if I ever needed somebody to talk to, to just come on over any time and talk to him. So I did. It’s not the first time I’ve come over here.” She glanced at the clock and said, “But I’ve been here for almost two days now and he hasn’t come home. Would you have any idea where he is?”

  “Yes, I would,” I said.

  “Then tell me. Do the Little Rock police have to go out of town for long spells or something?”

  “Some of them do,” I said. “If they are investigating somebody who lives outside the city limits, and if they are very brave and rash and determined, like Dall, they will go outside the city limits and let nothing stop them. Even if the person they are investigating happens to be as crazy as Slater, they won’t let that stop them.”

  Her face came to life. “Are you saying—?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, for goodness sake, what is he doing out at Jimmy’s house, if Jimmy is here at his house?”

  I sprang up from my chair and glanced wildly around me. “Where—?”

  “Oh, I don’t mean now,” she said. “He left about an hour ago.”

  “He was here?”

  She nodded.

  “And you saw him? You talked to him? He didn’t do anything to you?”

  “No, I just told him what I said to him before, and what I’ve been trying to tell you and Doyle and everybody: I don’t want to see him again any more. Ever. So he left.”

  “He didn’t even point his gun at you or anything?”

  “Has he got a gun?” she asked. Then her face became very troubled, and she said, “Clifford, you’re not saying he…he didn’t…he didn’t shoot Doyle, did he? Clifford?”

  “No, he didn’t shoot Dall,” I said.

  She sighed in relief, and laughed at herself a little. “I’ve just been so confused,” she said. “Sitting here all alone and not knowing who is where or what is what. I still can’t figure out how Jimmy knew that I was here, and I can’t figure out how you did either.”

  “I told you. I just came to feed Dall’s dog. But it’s gone. Did Slater say anything about that dog? Did he say what he had done to it?”

  “No. Well, he mentioned something about the first time he came over here, Sunday night, the dog bit him, and he asked me if the dog was still around. Personally, I’ve never seen the dog, and I don’t even understand why Jimmy would have come over here Sunday night. I wasn’t here then.”

  “Margaret, pour me another cup of that coffee and I’ll try to bring you up to date.” She did, and I said, “But first, would you mind too awfully much telling me why you ran away and got yourself lost like this? Everybody’s been looking for you—me and Naps and Naps’s friends and the police and everybody—we didn’t know what might have happened to you.”

  She spent some time thinking about it before she could find an answer, and then she searched my eyes, and put her answer, if that is what it was, in the form of a question: “Did you get my note?”

  “Sure,” I said, a bit impatiently. “But I still don’t understand why you had to run off like that. What good did that do? Did you want to find Slater and console him about the bad reviews of his play?”

  “Of course not. I wanted to talk with Doyle.”

  “Why?”

  “I needed his advice.”

  “What about?”

  “You.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “I don’t know anything about you. I never knew you. I thought Doyle might be able to tell me about you, and he could tell me if I should go with you.”

  “I see,” I said. “You wanted to ask him if—”

  “—if I should leave Little Rock to go with you,” she said. “Or if I should do whatever you ask me to do when you get around to asking me.”

  “Why Dall?”

  “Who else? I can’t depend on myself for answers any more.”

  “Couldn’t you have waited just a little longer, and talked with me about it, instead of running off like that?”

  “You were asking me to leave, remember? And I don’t want to.”

  “Do you mean you actually want to stay here in Little Rock forever?” I couldn’t believe it, and I thought she was out of her mind, and I told her so: “Margaret, you’re out of your mind.”

  “Probably,” she said. “But it’s what I want.”

  “So,” I said to her accusingly, “your reason for wanting to stay here in Little Rock is that you have such a crazy attachment to your crazy old mother that it would break your heart if you went away and left her. So whoever marries you would have to move into that house with you and help you hold her hand when she feels bad.”

  “Clifford, I would be just as happy if I never saw her again. And I’m hoping that this town is big enough that I won’t have to.”

  “Fine. So if I will get us a nice ranch-type house out in Broadmoor or Kingwood, and join the Lion’s Club and start a subscription to the Arkansas Democrat and take you to Razor-back football games and to picnics in Boyle Park, you’d marry me? What kind of life is that?”

  “It’s a better life than being eaten up by wanderlust, and letting one’s nights be haunted by constant dreams of faraway places.”

  “Oh? Haven’t you ever had any wanderlust yourself?”

  “All my life I’ve been positively consumed by it. My lust for wandering has tormented me and frustrated me to such a point that I realize that wherever I might wander I would always lust for some place else. I’m just the kind of person who would be unhappy anywhere, and if I’m going to be unhappy I might as well stay in my home town and make the most of it, instead of tormenting and frustrating myself even more by roaming all over the earth in search of some magic enchantment or excitement.”

  “East, West, home is best,” I said sarcastically.

  “Yes,” she said with conviction. “Yes it is, in a way. Because however you look at it, if a person has any roots at all, those roots are in one’s home town and—Now don’t you squint those beady eyes of yours at me, Clifford Stone!”

  “I’ll squint my beady eyes at whom I please, but go on.”

  “I know you think that this town is bad, that it’s corrupt, and that it’s decadent and sterile and banal and all that. That’s why you got out of it and went away up East in the first place, isn’t it? And I couldn’t tell you just how often I used to want desperately to get out of it myself. But the basic difference between you and me, I guess, is that you have got to where you are interested or involved in everything that has happened, or is happening, or is going to happen, in this entire country, or the world for that matter, and thus your curiosity and your discontent and your wanderlust are never assuaged, never satisfied, because you couldn’t even hope to live long enough to see and do
all the things that you want to see and do. But I…I suppose that apart from being too much absorbed with myself the only things that could really interest me now, the only things about which I could truly care, are those that are happening right here in this small corrupt decadent banal microcosm of a city, in these small dull microcosmic streets and backyards and front porches and vacant lots and parks and all. And I think, oh, I think, if I could just tune myself in to these petty sights and sounds and smells and learn to find some meaning in them and, yes, even to love them, then perhaps I shall never be bored again, I shall never suffer wanderlust and, who knows? I might even become happy or at least content, satisfied, at ease. And that would be the only seventh heaven I could ever want, or find.”

  “Ah yes,” was all I could say, and if I was still squinting my beady eyes it was only to hold back a threatening lacrimal flow. Then from the depths of my own yearning and chronic perennial homesickness or homeseeking or whatever it is, I called out to her and asked, “Don’t you think maybe I could learn to be like that too?”

  She lay her hand on my arm and smiled. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s something you have to decide. That’s what I meant in my note when I said that if you stay, you should know why you’re staying.”

  I began to nod my head in a rhythmic, continuing agreement. At length I quit nodding my head and gave it a flippant toss and said, “Well then—”

  I’d like to show you what I mean,” she said, “if we could just take a little tour of some of these streets. Maybe it isn’t too late for you to change your mind about this town. Tomorrow—” She glanced at the clock and said, “I mean today, because dawn is only a few hours away, isn’t it?—we could take a little walk and I’ll show you things you’ve never seen before. After Doyle comes home and I talk to him for a little while, then we could—”