“We sit at night in the silence of our rooms, and we ask why, hoping for solace, and we conclude—that God in His infinite foresight knew perhaps of this child’s failure to achieve salvation and put him in limbo to save him from the fires of hell. Then too, if life can be joy, it can also be pain, and fear and sickness and grief, and perhaps we can find consolation in knowing that he never had to go through it all, that he never had to be like the rest of us, that his death was mercifully for the best.”
The gravesite was in a far fenced-off corner of the cemetery under a large sheltering chestnut tree, no crosses on any of the graves, a deep hole with concrete walls and a floor. To keep the grave from sinking once the casket and the body decompose, he thought. After they lower the coffin, they’ll top it with a concrete slab and bury it all. Earth was piled by, covered with imitation grass. When I die, let them cremate me, he thought.
The day was hot and bright, and he smelled the warm moist air. The priest entrusted the body to the earth from which it came, which seemed a lie considering the concrete, and then the undertaker said that it was time to leave, but Claire would not budge.
“I’m staying until the end,” she said, the only time she had spoken since the night at the funeral home.
So there was some discussion between the undertaker and the attendants, and just as they finally lowered the tiny casket by straps into the man-sized hole, Sarah came forward and set a wreath of flowers on the lid. He knew that it was not her idea, that she would never have thought of it by herself. It was Claire. It was Claire who had made her do it. He looked at Claire, and she was staring at him through the veil. He looked at the casket descending, and when he could not see the small dark lid or the white wreath of flowers on it anymore, he turned away.
18
What took the longest was for Claire to let him sleep in the same bed with her again. She spoke to him now, but only to ask what pants he needed ironed, to say that supper was ready. They bought their food at a different supermarket each time. They stopped having milk delivered. They drove Sarah to and from school instead of allowing her to walk, and they never let her play outside without them. Even with the cruiser in front of the house, every car that slowed made them stare.
But nothing happened, and the more nothing happened, the more he tensed in dread of answering the phone and hearing the man’s voice rasp at him again. The abrupt harsh ring never stopped unnerving him. He concentrated to forget by working, but it wasn’t any use: he knew all about the position he was in, he had written about it too many times. If somebody wants to get you bad enough, there simply isn’t any way to stop them. They have too many ways to do it. It’s all just a matter of time.
He went upstairs to the closet in the hall and arranged the rifle, pistol, and revolver on the top shelf, with a box of ammunition for each of them. Webster had warned him not to think like that, but Webster wasn’t the one in fear of dying. The guns were normally kept in a locked dressing cabinet in the bedroom, hard to get at, secure from any accident with Sarah. Now he had to show her where they were, tell her, order her not to touch them, and he believed her when she promised.
He went to his bank, withdrew five thousand dollars in twenties, and put the money in a knapsack in the same closet.
19
Early one morning, he came downstairs, and there was no detective in the hallway by the phone. The tape recorder, the earphones, the lead-in wires, all the surveillance equipment was gone. He hurried to the front window, and the police car was gone too. He was suddenly conscious of the thin loose pajamas he wore. Immediately he stepped clear of the window.
“I tried to get over here before you found out,” Webster came and said. “Understand I had nothing to do with it. The chief himself ordered it. Three shifts of men a day, one on the phone, two in the car outside, another two in three cruisers circling the district. Multiply that by the weeks we’ve been at this, he says, and figure the cost, figure the other places we need those men.”
His face was burning. It was all he could do to control himself. “But you’re supposed to be the police. If you can’t protect us, what good are you?”
“I know how you feel, but—”
“You don’t know how I feel at all.”
“Well, listen to me anyway. The chief has a point. He says if Kess and his people haven’t moved against you by now, it’s either because they’ve lost interest or else they’re waiting until we pull out. In any case, there’s no sense in our sticking around. If they’re really determined to wait for us to go, he says we could be here all year and still do no good. The day we left they’d be right back at you.”
“So why not save time and let them come for us today, is that it? What is he, one of Kess’s men or something?”
“Now you watch it. I spent all night arguing with him, and that kind of talk just makes me wish I hadn’t bothered. I’ve already talked to the guys who were out here guarding you, and they all agreed to come around from time to time and make it look like we’re still involved. You have my office number and my home. If anything happens, even if you think you’re only imagining it, you give me a call. I don’t care what time day or night, you call. With any luck, you won’t need to. The chief could very well be right. Maybe they lost interest. Maybe they’re satisfied now that they’ve scared you and killed your son.”
“Maybe nothing. They’re going to come all right.”
20
He left the car door open, running across the hot tar parking lot toward the entrance to the grade school. WOODSIDE, it said on top. Claire was hurrying behind him.
“What is it? What’s happened?” he shouted to the woman waiting nervously outside for them. She was pale in the sun, young like the doctor had been. Too young. Sarah’s teacher. Short. Dull brown hair cut even with the bottom of her ears. Green dress stretched out. Five months pregnant, maybe more.
“Tell me what it is,” he called, running up to her ahead of Claire.
“I. She.”
The building was new and clean and shiny, one long level of brick and glass. He swept past her, swinging open the bright front door. The place had the sharp sweet smell of floor polish.
“Which way?” he demanded, voice echoing. “Where have you got her? For God’s sake tell me where she is.”
“Down there,” she said and swallowed.
To the right, and he was hurrying along the corridor, past open-door classrooms, past drinking fountains low on the wall for children, too impatient to knock as he wrenched open the door marked PRINCIPAL, and there was Sarah weeping, wrapped in a blanket on a corner chair, a nurse beside her, the principal rising off-balance behind his desk.
“It was a mistake,” the man was saying. “You have to understand we had no way of knowing.”
He barely glanced at the man: thick glasses on the desk, squinting eyes, open tie, rolled-up shirtsleeves. He rushed immediately over to Sarah, holding her. Claire was right behind him. Sarah continued weeping.
“Sweetheart, tell us what it is. Are you all okay?”
She shook her head yes, she shook her head no.
Then he saw the blood on the floor.
“Jesus.”
“You’ve got to understand,” the principal was saying.
“Jesus, you’re hurt, Sarah. You’re cut. Who cut you? Where?”
He fumbled to open the blanket. The nurse tried to stop him, stronger than she looked.
“You keep out of this.”
“You’ve got to understand.” the principal was saying.
“All right then, damn it. Tell me. Tell me what it is I have to understand.”
Sarah wept louder.
“I had her calmed down,” the nurse said. “Now you’ve made her afraid again.”
“That’s a good idea,” the principal said and tried to smile. “I’m sure we’d all accomplish more if we all calmed down.”
“I’ve made her afraid of what?”
“The policeman,” Sarah said and wept.
“Sweetheart, try to tell us about it.”
“Oh, Mommy, the policeman.”
“We did our best,” the principal said. “You’ve got to understand that. I don’t know what’s been going on, but there’s been a policeman watching her for the last few weeks while she’s been back to school. Today there was a different one.”
“No.”
“He told me he needed to ask her some questions, that something new had happened and he needed to ask her about it. How was I to know what’s been going on? Nobody’s told me anything.”
“We wanted her to lead some kind of life.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t right keeping her at home all the time. She was going crazy. We wanted her to meet new children, play, do something to keep her mind off things. If we had told you what was happening, you wouldn’t have let her come, or else word would have gotten around and everybody would have been staring at her. We figured the policeman was enough to protect her.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The policeman. Just tell me about the policeman. I was wrong.”
“He came this morning and asked to have your daughter taken out of class so he could talk with her.” The sweat stain was spreading under the principal’s arms. “So I let him. You understand why I let him, don’t you? The next thing, one of the teachers heard her screaming in the basement. She was bleeding and screaming and—”
“Where?”
“In the basement.”
“No. Where was she bleeding?” But he already knew and his throat was gagging him but he had to hear for certain anyway, and then the principal was telling him how she had been assaulted and the logical thing that the armed policeman had used to do it and he thought he was going to be sick.
“No,” he said. “No,” he kept repeating.
21
He drove her home between Claire and himself on the front seat. The bleeding was finally stopped—the doctors at the hospital had stared at him when he explained. They disinfected the area. They cushioned her with pads that would need to be changed, and they gave her pills to help with the pain. He thought of poison again. They wanted to keep her there for observation, but he said, “No way. The next time it might be a doctor instead of a policeman. She’s coming home with me.” So now Sarah huddled between them, clutching a blanket, holding herself, and her face was the gray of cement.
“Why, Daddy? Why did he want to hurt me there?”
He had to think it through before he could explain. “Sweetheart, when your mother was getting big with Ethan, do you remember you asked how she got him?” The image of Ethan made him pause, the body stiff and senseless in his coffin in his grave. He realized he had started speeding and eased his foot off the gas pedal. “Do you remember you thought that a baby started to grow inside a woman as soon as she reached a certain age, or else as soon as she got married, and you wanted to know if that was true?”
She held herself closer.
“So I told you no,” he said.
“Stop it,” Claire said.
“She asked me a question and I’m going to answer it.” Then to Sarah: “And I told you how your mother and I had gotten together, and what we had done to make Ethan. Well, that was a good thing to do. Your mother wanted me to do it, and I wanted to do it, and it made us feel very happy together. It’s something special that you do only with someone you love, and if everything goes properly and you do have a baby, well that can be even more special.”
“But why did he want to hurt me there?”
He rounded a corner and couldn’t keep from saying it. “Sarah, not everybody will always be as kind to you as we have. There are some people in the world, bad people, who enjoy taking something special and abusing it. We don’t know why they want to enjoy hurting us, but they like to do it anyhow, and we need to keep watching for them.”
“Stop this,” Claire told him sharply.
“I’m going to answer her question,” he said. “Sarah, that’s why we told you never to take anything like candy from a stranger, never to go for a ride with somebody you don’t know. That’s why I’m telling you now to be careful of every person you meet. They might be good, but they might be one of the bad ones, and there are a lot of bad ones around, not just the people who are after us, but a lot of others too. They like to hurt you, tell you lies, cheat and steal from you and ruin your reputation out of jealousy. They—”
He rounded the corner into their street, and when he saw what was happening, his first impulse was to slam on the brakes, his second to rush the car down to the fire trucks. There were sirens coming. There were thick black hoses stretched out from the fire hydrant on the corner. He raced the car thumping over them, past people standing watching, toward the firemen in slick black rubber raincoats struggling with the pressure in the hoses, spewing water loudly onto the house, onto the garage.
Flames licked through the top of the garage, bright orange in the black smoke rolling skyward. He braked so hard that he and Claire and Sarah jerked forward, and just in time he thrust out his right hand to keep Sarah from hitting the dashboard, and then he was out of the car, hearing the shouts and the truck motors and more sirens coming, feeling the black sticky soot drifting down on him, the air a fine cool mist from the backspray of the hoses. And there was Webster in his gray suit leaning somberly, hands in his pockets, against the nearest fire engine.
He walked slowly over, looking once more at the smoke and flames. “It’s just the garage,” he said. “From what I’m told, the house has a good chance to be saved.”
He couldn’t answer. The wind changed and the smoke came drifting over, burning his nostrils and his throat when he breathed. He watched the bright orange flames bursting through the black smoke on top of the garage. He looked at Claire holding Sarah in the car. He looked back at Webster.
“So how did they start it?” he managed to ask.
“Don’t know yet. I came just after the trucks got here. One of the neighbors phoned the fire department.”
“Did they see who did it? Enough for a description?”
“I have a man checking on that. Actually I didn’t know about the fire until I got here. The reason I came out was to say that the teacher at the school gave us a description of the man who attacked your daughter, and we ran it through the files, and there’s no policeman on the force who matches it. I don’t know where he got the uniform, but I know he wasn’t one of us.” There were big black flakes of soot on his suit and face. “What’s the matter?” he said. “You look like you don’t believe me.”
“I can’t tell who to believe anymore. My son is dead, my daughter assaulted, my home on fire. All that and the police won’t protect us, and—”
“We’ll protect you now all right. The chief admits he was wrong, and he’s assigned a special detail to keep watch on you.”
“Sure, and what if it’s one of your men who lent this other guy his uniform? What if that one is on the detail?”
“You’ve got me there. We can’t very well have police come out here to watch the police.”
“Then I’m right back where I started. Only worse.”
22
“You can see where it started,” the fire chief said.
The back wall of the garage was burned through in the middle, circled by char that was blacker than any place else except the beams from the roof. The rim of the circle was uneven, with black fingers splayed out in every direction. They waited while the firemen hosed down the smoking, hissing wood once more, and then they stepped carefully in among the pools of water and the rubble. The heat from the wet cracked cement floor came up through the soles of his shoes. Sarah’s bicycle was twisted, its tires melted. The stench choked him.
“There,” the fire chief said. “You can see what I mean.” He was pointing at the broken glass on the back floor, then up to the charred design around the hole in the wall.
He took a moment, and then he s
aw all right. “Molotov cocktail.”
Mix one-third liquid detergent and two-thirds gasoline in a soft-drink bottle, cap it, and attach a rag. Sure. They drove up fast, got out, lit the rag, and threw the bottle against the garage’s back wall. The bottle shattered. The detergent stuck the gasoline to the wall and concentrated it like napalm. That’s why there was a hole in the wall and charred fingers out from it. That’s where the gasoline splashed and stuck.
But he wasn’t only thinking it, he must have been saying it as well. Because the fire chief was looking at him, asking, “How come you know so much about it?”
23
He had no other choice: they had to spend the night in the house. If they were going to be attacked anymore, he couldn’t let it happen in a friend’s house, or in a hotel where he wouldn’t know the routine and couldn’t be warned by something out of the ordinary. He waited in the car with Claire and Sarah until the fire chief made certain that the fire would not start again. Sarah was in too much pain to walk. He had to carry her into the house, and Claire did what she could to make the place look like it used to be. The stairs, the upper floor were pooled with water. The walls were black and stained with water. He put Sarah on the bed in his and Claire’s room. Her own room down the hall was a mess after the firemen got through with it. He and Claire opened windows, but there was little breeze, and the thick smell of the smoke was everywhere.
Then Claire disappeared, and when he went looking for her, he found her behind the unlocked closed door in the bathroom. She was sitting with the toilet cover down, her face slack and tired, staring emptily at the bathtub. Her jeans were wet and black from cleaning up.
Testament Page 6