We walked out of the woods and encountered the farm’s herd of aging cows lined up along the fence. I had stopped twice to stretch and once to take another aspirin, so I was feeling fairly limber. I held Cat against my chest and broke into a shuffling trot, tapping bovine snouts as I lurched along the fence line. A big Guernsey named Dolly broke from the herd and galloped along the fence beside me. Tags ringing, teats flopping, and gulping air in great woofing breaths, the mighty beast thundered along beside me until sanity prevailed and she abruptly stopped, shook her head, and ambled back to the herd.
I, a not so sane or mighty beast, trotted on for another five minutes until I made it back to the boat. I sprawled on my back in the weeds and stared up at the sky until my heartbeat dipped below a hundred and I could breathe through my nose without wheezing like an asthmatic bulldog. Cat, her broken tail twitching, crouched under the bird feeders, obviously hoping for a miracle to drop from the sky. About a dozen birds were raising holy hell above her head, fluttering and diving at her while making a crackly racket. Twice, she rose up on her hind legs and swiped her good paw at them and tumbled over backwards. After the second tumble I picked her up and we climbed into the boat.
As I dressed, I thought about Frank Jankey. I, or we, if Priscilla didn’t get bored and quit, had a discrepancy clutched in our paw and I was getting curious and a little excited. It was a bit like the old days when I was hunting down a dairy or a journal, or digging through an old chest in some musty attic, and discovering something prime, something virgin, and feeling the grin spreading across my face in sweet delight. This was a different kind of hunt but I was becoming preoccupied with it, dwelling on it here and there, and from past experience I knew that I wasn’t going to let it go.
… . .
PRISCILLA, DRESSED IN A LOOSE FITTING purple running suit, and with a purple headband wrapped around her flattop, was sitting at the counter drinking coffee. I sat on the wobbly stool beside her, hauled Cat out of the sling and set her on the counter. Priscilla gave me a look, then held her arm up and made a production of looking at her watch. “Have an erotic experience with yourself in the shower and have to recuperate?”
“No, I spent the morning reading your biography: Priscilla: The tender story of a girl and her mouth.”
Gretchen put a steaming mug of coffee in front of me, refilled Priscilla’s cup, and gave Cat a piece of ham. She poked me on the forehead with a finger and smiled like a hyena. “That DVD thingy? God, I should have bought one years ago. I’ll never have to watch another damn commercial again.”
“Turn the thing off and you’ll never have to watch television again.”
She grunted, jabbed my forehead again and said, “Up yours, Harry.”
Priscilla dumped two sugars into her coffee and stirred it. Before she could lift the mug, Cat, ever alert for an opportunity, dipped her head into it and lapped away for maybe two seconds. She lifted her head, and purring loudly, licked her muzzle. Priscilla looked at her, then picked up the mug and stared into it for a moment. She put the cup down, pushed it away and muttered something I couldn’t hear.
Gretchen brought her another coffee and switched mugs. She pulled Cat’s ear and grinned. “Well, I got to get back to feeding the world. You two do well by the day.”
Priscilla put a sheet of lined paper in front of me and said, “Frank wasn’t a very sociable guy and most of his friends weren’t actually his, they were Eva’s. She thinks these are the three people Frank talked to the most because they’re the ones he mentioned the most.”
“Norman Armstrong, Stewart Coe, and Joe Akerman. Gretchen mentioned two of them when I asked her about Frank’s friends. And, I know Stewart, we taught history together at the college, he’s the department head now. I’m surprised he’d associate with your grandfather as he’s also a bit of a snob.”
“I don’t think Eva’s mistaken. And I know Norman Armstrong, at least I saw him at the house a couple of times when I was here for a visit. Big fat guy, Frank was always trying to get him to exercise.” She pointed to the other name on the list. “I also know Akerman. Sarah Akerman used to be friendly with Eva. Eva said she hadn’t seen her in years though, and she thinks Joe Akerman is an asshole.”
I sipped coffee and thought about it. After a time I tapped the paper and said, “Okay, let’s see Akerman first and get him out of the way. Then we’ll see Armstrong and Stewart, maybe one of them will give us something to carry it all further.”
“Listen, are you going to cart that mangy, coffee swilling hairball around with us everywhere we go? If you leave it home you can also leave the trailer home and lighten your load.”
“I told you, Cat doesn’t like to be alone, she needs my company.”
She snorted, rolled her eyes and said, “Will you get a grip? It’s a cat, and a seriously poor excuse of one at that. Who the hell does she think she is, drinking my coffee? And it looks like it’s gonna croak in an hour or so. Leave it home, it’ll adjust, the damn things sleep most of the time anyway.”
I gave her my infamous, Look of Disdain, and said, “You through?” She nodded and I said, “Good, now you and I and Cat can go talk to Joe Ackerman.”
She shook her head, gave Cat’s tail a gentle yank and said, “All right, let’s go see Ackerman the asshole.”
As she stood up, she reached over and dug her fingers into my shoulder. The pain hit like lightening and I made a noise that turned every head in the place. I yanked my shoulder away from Priscilla’s iron grip and sputtered, “Thank you so very much.”
With a Mona Lisa smile on her lips she said, “So, Old Man, how long did you have to stretch this morning to get the pain out?”
“No longer than usual. I was a little stiff, but walked it out.”
She laughed. “Oh please! You’re too old for that macho crap. You were sore as hell and it took you at least twenty minutes of stretching to get you out the door this morning.” She pushed a closed fist at me. I tried for another look of disdain as I held out my palm.
She dropped three coated aspirin in it. I slipped the aspirin in my pocket and said, “I took some before I pedaled in.”
… . .
JOE ACKERMAN LIVED IN A SMALL house on a small plot at the end of Union Road, an unpaved street on the wrong side of town that obviously was on the bottom of the Department of Public Works to do list. The house needed paint and the picket fence needed pickets and a lot of paint. The screens on the enclosed porch were loose and rusty, and the cracked sidewalk leading to the front porch sported a small forest of tall weeds poking through it.
Priscilla held the bikes while I rattled the porch door. After a minute or so I rattled it again and was rewarded with footsteps. A woman came out of the house, shuffled across the porch, pulled open the screen door, and stared at me. She was short and squat, with white hair and a round face and round eyes that stared intently at a reality I wasn’t aware of. She looked around seventy and wore a full length green dress. The toes of polished black shoes poked out of the bottom of the dress.
“What is it you want?” she asked softly.
I tried a smile and said, “Good afternoon, Mrs. Ackerman, my name is Harry Neal and this is Priscilla Matson. May we speak with your husband please?”
Her eyes darted from me to Priscilla to some far point in the galaxy. The silence grew heavy and dark and I started formulating exit excuses. Suddenly, she sucked in a breath and blurted out, “Joe Ackerman does not reside here anymore. On April tenth at eleven o’clock, he called me an obsessive dictating bitch and told me to go to hell and moved to his sister’s in Wisconsin. My son and his family may or may not be in Texas, I don’t know because they haven’t called or written in over two years and they didn’t give me their address when they moved.” Tears slid down her cheeks. I stepped back and tried to think of something useful to do besides muttering the inane blather that I was spewing out as I patted her shoulder.
Priscilla eased me aside and put her arms around her. Sarah dipped her he
ad onto Priscilla’s shoulder and sobbed. Priscilla got an arm around her waist and walked her into the house. She nodded toward the back and said, “There’s probably some kind of booze in the kitchen.”
Arms wrapped around each other, they stumbled into a small living room that was an ad from an eighties era furniture store, and dropped onto a brown couch with doilies on the arms. With her hands digging into the tops of her legs and her body flailing about, Sarah Akerman cried without restraint, filling the air with wrenching sounds that spoke of things I didn’t want to think about.
I went to the back of the house and found the kitchen. Everything was cleaned to a high luster and smelled of bleach and perfumed soap. I rummaged through cabinets where everything was arranged with exquisite neatness, and drawers where the silver was polished and arranged just so. Naturally the refrigerator was spotless, and on the top shelf, neatly lined up, were six large bottles of Champagne. I grabbed one, pulled off the wrapper and gently worked the cork out of the bottle.
It didn’t seem the time to let it pop and ricochet around the room.
I poured three water glasses full of the stuff, and using a dinner plate for a tray, brought them into the living room. I put the glasses on a large coffee table, went back to the kitchen, returned the plate to the perfect stack, returned to the living room and sat in an easy chair with lumpy cushions.
Priscilla fed Sarah Champagne a noisy sip at a time. When one glass was empty she picked up the other and put it to Sarah’s lips. Except for an occasional sob, she’d stopped crying and was concentrating on the Champagne. When both glasses were gone, Priscilla held out her hand and I put my glass in it. She fed Sarah my Champagne, then, with her arm around her shoulders, waited.
Minutes passed in silence. I studied the blue and white wallpaper and the tasseled shades on the floor lamps. I was wondering if the antique radio in the corner worked when Sarah said, “Well, II seemed to have popped my cork.”
Priscilla stroked her hair and said, “Maybe. Or maybe you just let go to get a better grip.”
Sarah nodded. Her brown eyes had lost some of their manic intensity and she seemed to be tracking fairly well. “After Joe left things were all right for a while, but then I began to fear going out and people frightened me. I clean the house at three in the morning, drink while watching the Today Show on the television, and usually sleep in the afternoons. I call out for everything. But, I-I’m getting worried, I’m going to run out of money in a few weeks and I don’t know what to do.”
“Not to worry,” said Priscilla. “The worst is over.”
Really? At that I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of Champagne. I could still hear them talking, but it was a low murmuring, like a radio left on upstairs. It continued for some time and I used the opportunity to rekindle a liking for wine with bubbles. About twenty minutes later Priscilla came into the kitchen. “I called Ona and she’s on the way over. Sarah’s packing a few things. She’s gonna spend some time at our place.”
I touched her shoulder and said, “It appears we arrived in the nick of time, you handled that well.”
“It wasn’t that big a chore. She’s mild compared to some I’ve handled, but yeah, we probably arrived in the nick of time. Another week or so and she would have done something, a serious something.”
There were two loud raps on the porch door and Ona yelled, “Anybody in there?”
We got to the porch the same time as Sarah, who was carrying a leather purse and dragging a suitcase along the floor by a broken strap. Ona put her skull and bones cap on backwards, hugged Sarah and said, “Jesus H. Christ, Sarah, why the hell didn’t you call or come over? For god’s sake! Living here alone and driving yourself apeshit. Eva insists you come over and stay for a while, so come on, lock the joint up and come with me, we’ll drink beer and talk till dawn.”
“I really prefer Champagne,” Sarah said, and started bawling again. Ona muttered nonsense in her ear while patting her head like she would a lost puppy’s. We sat on the steps until the house was locked up and they drove away in the old pickup, then we got on the bikes and headed downtown.
We settled in the park by my favorite maple. I played with Cat while Priscilla did a deli run, returning with wine, seltzer, granola bars, and a little bag of kitty treats. She unwrapped her granola bar, rolled the wrapper into a tiny ball and flicked it at a trash can. She tore a chunk out of the bar with her front teeth, turned to me and said, “Sarah thinks that Joe told her Frank was worried about something the week he died. She’s not sure, things are more than a little fuzzy, but she thinks it had something to do with Charles Watson, a guy he knew.”
“Huh, Charles Watson again.”
“You know him?”
“No, but his name has come up before. Were he and Frank friends? He wasn’t on your list.”
“Not really, just the occasional beer at Gretchen’s. Watson was well off and traveled in higher circles, but he liked Frank. He admired Frank’s fitness level, his endurance and his dedication to the art. That’s what he called Frank’s running, an art form.” She dropped a treat in front of Cat, who slapped it with her good paw, gobbled it up, raised her bad paw and begged for more. Like an inquisitive chipmunk, Priscilla stuck her nose in the bag, sniffed, made a face, and said, “This stuff smells like a pile of dead frogs.”
We finished our picnic in silence. After a time I struggled to my feet, stretched and said, “Okay, let’s find Norman Armstrong.”
… . .
FROM A PAYPHONE I CALLED ARMSTRONG’S home and chatted briefly with his wife. Fifteen minutes later we were walking down the wide corridor of the second floor of Spear Hospital. From the outside the hospital resembled a factory. Inside it was worse. But not because of the ascetics of the place, which were actually rather nice. It was the smell. A long forgotten smell that pulled from the depths of my brain well hidden memories of dying parents and scrolled them across my consciousness with horrific clarity.
Priscilla pulled on my arm and pointed back down the hall. While dwelling on parental death I had marched us past Armstrong’s room.
We stood just inside the door and stared at the man in the bed. Norman Armstrong was little more than yellow skin stretched over bone. Priscilla looked at me and raised her eyebrows. I shrugged and flip-flopped my hand. She gazed at Armstrong for a moment, then ran a hand over her flattop and rapped sharply on the door jam. The yellow head turned and flopped on its side. Protruding, red rimmed eyes focused on us. They were the eyes of three thousand hours of pain. Armstrong tried the smallest of smiles and whispered, “Come in.”
Priscilla marched to his bed, pulled the sheet down from his chin to his chest and fussed with his pillow. I followed and took up a position at the end of the bed. Priscilla touched Armstrong’s arm, smiled and said, “Hey Norman, remember me? It’s Priscilla Matson, Frank’s Granddaughter. And this is Harry Neal, a friend of mine. If you feel up to it, we’d like to talk to you about Frank.”
For what seemed like minutes, Norman stared at Priscilla. Finally, with agonizing slowness, he nodded. I was gripping the bed frame tight enough to cramp my forearms. With effort, I relaxed and concentrated on resting my hands lightly on the frame and tried to look as if I was happy to be there.
His voice was a dusty puff of air that brushed my ear with the lightest of whispers. “Frank’s been dead, nine, ten years.”
Priscilla leaned closer and said, “That’s right, but we don’t think he died the way everybody thinks he did and we’re kind of looking into that. You and Frank were good friends so we thought we’d ask you what you think. Was Frank acting unusual before he died? Did he say anything out of the ordinary?”
He raised a hand and dropped it. “Raise the bed please.” I fumbled with the buttons and managed to raise him to a sitting position.
“Thank you. Dying this way, the way They want me to, is terrible. I should have killed myself when I had the strength. Now all I can do is lie here and die the way they want me to.”
Priscilla flipped the lid of a wide mouthed jug, removed an ice cube and ran it over Norman’s lips. She put several ice cubes in a hand towel, bashed the towel against the wall several times, opened the towel and put small pieces of ice in his mouth. He closed his eyes and nodded.
I focused on keeping a smile on my face. Norman was probably two or three years younger than me.
“You have a lot of muscle on your body, do you run, like he did?”
“Nah, I do bicycles and weights, I could never get into running.”
He forced air into his lungs and said, “Frank ran too much. Sometimes twice in one day. Felt bad if he didn’t run. But I’d look at him right after he got through running and he didn’t look good. Looked… sick. All sweaty… drawn. I kept telling him to ease up, but he’d just ran more.”
His fingers caressed the sheet and fell against the bed rail. Priscilla fed him more ice. “He looked tired after a run. So tired. Frank, I’d say, you look like shit. He’d just smile. He used to try to get me started. I wanted to, I really did. Now I’m here. All that fat, all those cigarettes, no exercise. I’ve committed suicide and it’s taking me a year to fall down and die.”
He inhaled and stopped breathing. The silence, the wait, was so heavy that I felt myself sagging. Finally he exhaled with a dry whoosh and sucked in more air. “He-he was depressed before he died. And, I think, afraid. But of what, I don’t know. I don’t remember him saying anything about it. It was the way he was acting. Hishis body language. Two days before he died he helped me paint my garage. He kept looking around like he expected someone to show up. I asked him if anything was wrong and he said, no, that everything was fine. But it wasn’t, and-and two days later he was dead.”
Bentley Dadmun - Harry Neal and Cat 09 - Dead Dead Dead, the Little Girl Said Page 6