“Everyone was more focused at that stage on how they’d bring in fire equipment, and I was less welcome underfoot every time someone blinked. When those same police wanted statements from me late this afternoon, though, I couldn’t grace their presence fast enough.”
I liked this friend of the Metcalfes, whether or not it was reciprocated. “I hope they treated you right. What did you do that wasn’t unselfish and supportive?”
“They’re not paid to see it like that, are they? Eliza got grilled too, and she’s the bereaved widow, for Chrissakes. We compared notes after, and for what it’s worth, we were each under some pressure to divulge any information on someone named Wilbur Rice.”
“On Wil?” Oh shit, that was stupid. Boost my “index of suspicion” a notch or two, why don’t I?
“Friend of yours?” Words, as I pictured it, to accompany her antennae bending toward me.
“To the extent I knew how much he hated that ‘Wilbur’ on his birth certificate. It’s weeks since we’ve been face to face.” As evasions went, too clever for my own good? Or simply transparent? Not too late to shift the subject. “Why the interest in Wil? Though I don’t suppose they let you in on that.”
“Not apart from the fact that nobody can find him. Eliza did relate for posterity how upset Herb was last summer when your friend Wil hurt himself with a saw and the saw disappeared the next day, and we decided it must have been the same saw that the murderer used. Could the cops want Wil as an alternative suspect for some reason? Seems so open and shut to blame the homeless person.”
“Unless they’re hoping to pin a second murder on the homeless man, which they could never prove without a corpus delicti, and if Wil’s body was in that burning shack, they may be permanently up the creek. Whether he was in there as a victim or as the killer.”
“But you don’t believe he’s either, do you? Listen, you’ll have to do better than that to throw me off track. I used to make a living at shell games. You know damn well he was nowhere near that shack. I don’t care about this Wilbur one way or another, but if he’s someone who can clear up what happened to Herb, you owe it to his family to contact the police. What’d you say your name was?”
“Jeff.” That was indeed the sum total of what I’d said. And woe to me if the Metcalfes’ phone had caller ID. The chain of inevitabilities flashed ahead of me. Police haul me in for interrogation. I lie badly, or dole out the truth selectively, and then I put my foot in it, strain credulity once too often, and slam! I’m in a cell, padded or not, a captive audience with courtside seat for impending catastrophe. “Whatever your name is, I promise you, my conscience is my guide. Has a date been set for the funeral?”
“Immediate family only.”
“Okay. But does it trouble you that you were the one civilian witness at the crime scene and the fire?”
“Please don’t start dragging me into cover-ups and conspiracies. You sound like one of those geeks who used to do that amateur ghost-hunting show on cable. On the trail going out, I met camera crews going in. The story should have been on the 6 o’clock news, but the local stations are having the same staffing problems as the police, so they couldn’t get it together on two hours’ notice. All the gluttons for tragedy will have to tune in at 11.” She paused for breath and emphasized each forthcoming syllable. “There was no cover-up.”
“If you say so.” I was still smarting from that dig about OGAM. “And would you please convey my absolutely sincere condolences to Mrs. Metcalfe?”
She said yes, in a noncommittal tone that guaranteed nothing. What a relief to hang up. I did like her, though it felt like I’d been sparring ten rounds with an opponent out for blood. Typical. She impressed me as someone I’d like to have dated, except we’d never have run into each other outside of circumstances that made her thoroughly distrust me. Plus she wouldn’t give me her name.
Meanwhile, had “Occam’s finest,” in the context of solving a homicide, really been content to knock on Wil’s door, shrug after a minute, and call it quits without obtaining a search warrant? Or did they have nowhere to search because Dyer Hall had gone up in smoke, without benefit of reportage at 6:00 thanks to the same staffing shortfall that relegated Herb’s murder to the 11 P.M. news?
Foolishly or not, I broke out the Spaten Optimator. A strong, malty ale on an empty stomach. It wouldn’t lighten my psychic burden, but maybe I wanted it to make me miserable. As I richly deserved. I’d cultivated a new friend and mixed him up in my harebrained “crusade,” and now he was dead. I didn’t kill him, and the cause was noble, but had he never met me he’d be alive today. Anger at myself, and at those who’d more directly done him in, was as overwhelming as it was useless.
Two bottles along, and that anger softened up, and at the realization that the shack’s previous owner, gentle old A. P., belonged entirely to the ages henceforth, or to oblivion really, with the journal and photos and house that preserved memories of him gone forever, I became weepy. The man had not been completely eradicated until this afternoon, and it felt like I’d killed him too.
The devaluation of my own life hadn’t begun to sink in and couldn’t penetrate the atmosphere of emotion blanketing my mind, but I was cognizant that the reality of it would be ready to pounce, as inevitable as hangover, in the morning. Three-beer binge did confer one fortuitous blessing. I didn’t have to subject myself to whatever spin the 11 P.M. news attached to misfortunes in the woods and maybe on Ellery Avenue. I was dead to the world by 8:30 or 9.
26
I’m fucked. A deceptively simple thought upon awakening. Equally germane to my headache, and the dire outlook of cops at the door, and the pittance my life was worth, given Herb’s cavalier execution. A moot detail, whether his death had occurred according to plan or in an overheated moment. Attempted to bolster my slumping psyche and flesh with black coffee, a four-egg cheddar omelet, and the proposition that I’d be home free if I could tread like a ghost, assuming that was softly enough, till the Tuesday after next. It might not be, based on my notoriety as a loose cannon, predisposing me to make noise about the Third Floor’s resort to mob-style assassination. All I could do was blow smoke, but with perseverance people might start believing that where they smelled smoke, there had to be fire. Did I entail less risk at large or in a secret grave?
I could neither second-guess nor change City Hall’s choice of response. A prime example of mental fodder that would drive me berserk in a week unless I studiously avoided it. Had never really acquired the habit of accepting what I couldn’t alter. Ditto for taking one day at a time, but sanity hinged on not getting too far ahead of myself.
One day at a time was plenty to contend with, for the shape I was in. To start, had to make this a lost weekend from the outside world’s perspective. A policy predicated on going nowhere. Didn’t even unlock the front door or raise the front window shades. Switched off the answering machine, to preempt any messages meant to jar my equilibrium. If enmity wanted to send out feelers before it struck, let it have that much less to work with. The phone did ring on several occasions when I was indoors. Mostly a half-hearted three or four times, and rarely a dozen or more. Always a sinister air about it, arresting me in midstride as if echolocation through the wires might detect brash movement. But I’d be the last to vouch for my own extrasensory accuracy. In my wound-up mood, no differentiating between stress-enhanced clairvoyance and paranoia.
Someone may have leaned on the doorbell while I was out back, out of earshot. Another case of ignorance as bliss. Periodically roved into the woods behind my yard from morning till dusk every day, beyond sight of the house. Carried minced-up hot dogs and cold cuts in a Ziploc baggie that I crammed into jacket pocket. On the lookout for Occam’s pack of strays, in hopes of befriending them with meat, conquering any shyness they might have developed since previous association with humans. I whistled and shook a can of pebbles that maybe passed for kibbles, but the only word I called was “Elsie.” Wishing foremost to lure her home and redomestic
ate her, in memory of the Rices. And before some bastard neighbor could coax ex-family pets into eating poison treats. Couldn’t name anyone particular who’d do such a thing, in fact had no inkling of my neighbors’ names or faces, but I automatically refused to put it past them.
All my strivings were futile, as usual. Wherever the pack went during sunlit hours, it was audible only after bedtime. Still, those hours were better spent than indoors lying low, stewing in my insecurity, ears peeled in vain for footfalls beneath the windows or in the next room, muting the TV or stereo for cadences originating without exception in the soundtrack or my imagination.
Such spikes in anxiety goaded me mercilessly, especially Monday night, into agonizing over Tuesday’s appointment. Should I or shouldn’t I blow my cover and go downtown to Unemployment for “adjudication”? Brave a run-in with City Hall sons of bitches down the block? I’d be a sitting duck for harassment or worse. But whatever befell Occam, I’d have to eat, gas up the Taurus, eke out some trickle of cash flow afterward. And insofar as I was qualified to collect, my checks would be issued through a state databank, unaffected by one town’s disruption. To be honest, I lost sleep en route to a decision etched in stone all along, but pushing myself out the door Tuesday morning was much easier in a dull, punchy mood.
By midmorning, post-rush hour traffic was nonexistent on the inbound side of the Occam Pike. That didn’t ring any ominous bells. It had to happen every so often. Also shrugged off several outbound cars speeding fit to go airborne. They conformed all too well to our famously oblivious style behind the wheel, and I was deep in my own fretful brown study. Also seemed reasonable at first to blame scofflaw drivers for the blockage on Ellery Avenue, between double-parking and idling in midlane, until the number of immobile vehicles, with engines running or not, disabused me of supposing they were the sum of isolated incidents. Too many cars lay ahead for me to suppose I could steer around them, or if I did, that I could turn around and get out. Bottleneck was becoming a cul de sac. I put the Taurus into reverse and maneuvered a dozen car lengths backward, and with growing trepidation, pulled up to the curb.
An explanation for this auto graveyard dawned on me, and squinting into cars only helped confirm it. Every single passenger and operator sat with upraised face and arms, craning their necks, forearms pushing against vinyl ceilings, jaws hanging slack. If my eyes could have penetrated blue sky and cumulus clouds, would they have fastened on the vanguard of meteors swarming earthward, as the eyes of these hosts full of “color” seemed to be doing? The note on Thayer’s fridge had forecast this for the “Tuesday after next,” but how long ago had he posted it? Dammit, I might have been ready for this had I mustered the willpower to open the fridge and gauge how long the food had been rotting. No use denying it. The “Tuesday after next” was today.
Finding Dyer Hall intact as I trod by was some small consolation. At windows there and elsewhere on the avenue stood abundant proof that occupants had held the fort, and now they pressed against the glass and strained arms toward their ceilings, as if playing at synchronized statues or pillars of salt. Had they not been fully clothed, would they have met with the same obliteration as Wil? And from here, each figure seemed to be reaching for a light bulb or candle, practically cupping it in their palms. Too distant for exact determination.
No joy came of marking how life didn’t languish universally in suspension. In yards and hedges and weedy strips alongside the curb, squirrels and pigeons and sparrows, infrequent consumers of the tap water at best, hopped around and scavenged as on any normal day. Temporary though it was, this confluence of separate worlds felt more and more grating and pathetic, to an excruciating degree at the intersection with Commercial Street, where subsidized apartments for the elderly, dating to 1960s urban renewal, towered on city land. Underground irrigation, on the taxpayer’s dime, piped reservoir water to the grubby lawns out front and the ginkgo trees lining the sidewalks.
Pedestrians, the first to emerge from the woodwork since my arrival, indiscriminately dotted the sidewalks and street like mushrooms, amidst the cars as if overtaken by stasis while trying to learn why traffic was stalled. Through common taint in blood and sap, people and trees shared a fleeting parity, in which the vertical arms of octogenarians with walkers, and of healthcare professionals in suits or uniforms, and of more nondescript passersby mirrored the vertical branches that had formerly projected every which way from ginkgo trunks. Limbs human and vegetable, whether in sleeves or decked in yellow, fan-shaped leaves, were reaching so hard that wood as well as muscle succumbed to faint trembling.
The ginkgos’ fleshtone, globular berries littered the pavement and exuded a profanely suitable odor of vomit. A pungent trope for the direction in which all life here was headed. Even as bluish-gray, pitted, sunken faces gazed up in submission to the “color,” so now the trees that had been sturdy enough to retain their leaves submitted, from their roots up, to splitting bark and gray, granulating rot to the pith. And unless my imagination was overreacting, the progress of disease was visible to the patient, naked eye.
Doomsday couldn’t have come on a nicer mid-October morning, for all the difference earthly climate must have made to alien mood. I paused in my ill-considered errand to the Department of Labor and admired the sunshine on the lustrous red hair and turquoise smock of a willowy nurse, who wore the ravages of gauntness and discoloration remarkably well, as if she might have ingested Gorman County toxicity only through occasional resort to a coffee machine. Sadly, she’d swallowed at least the modicum for damning her to a part in the spectacle. And did I have a worthier subject for an impromptu experiment in saving somebody, even if I turned out to be someone she wouldn’t touch if I were the last man in Occam?
I clenched her wrist and tugged, and after overcoming resistance like that of a thick, rugged bough, was briefly thankful to see her supple again, gasping, staggering to rebalance herself, and clear-eyed. But eyes glazed almost instantly as she bared her teeth and snarled and yanked her wrist free, and in one torpid gesture regained her footing and uplifted her arms and face, as involuntarily as a bough unbending after being released. Very much like the foreign will in Lucinda, lashing out angrily when Wil dared apply a steadying hand to her shoulder. Okay then. What more to do here, short of dragging one uncooperative victim inch by inch toward an extremely nebulous goal of liberation? What made her more deserving of rescue than the thousands around us, beyond my attraction to how she probably used to look?
Before I could bring myself to move on and leave her to her fate, a titanic stack of clouds obscured the sun and cast a pall upon her, in which was revealed the flickering of transparent, bluish flames above each hand, camouflaged by full daylight, barely discernible in the reduced sunshine not only in her case, but atop every uplifted arm and branch in the landscape. Seek no further to explain the glow whose source was hidden by lintels in every tenanted window. Nor could those mock St. Elmo’s fires in dusky rooms be anything but that elusive, living color, not exactly blue or gray or violet, ultimately nothing with a human name, and primed like pilot lights for God knew what?
Forging onward toward less populated sidewalk, I wondered if the bumper crop of medical personnel signified an awareness of the crisis flaring up throughout town, perhaps one of many calls to action on the strategic level of ants storming out to defend their hill. Too little too late!
The breeze shifted like a pat on the cheek, cool but tasting contrarily of burning oil and paint and barbecue and rubber and less explicit fuels. It constituted one more imperative reason to reverse course, clear out of a place where my stated purpose had become invalid, where I was about to witness something I really didn’t want to. No matter. My feet would only work in one direction, past the dollar stores and donut shops and display windows with “For Rent” signs, beside the glacial floe of bumper-to-bumper traffic that restricted my view to a few car lengths.
I must have flustered myself into short-term myopia, or I’d much sooner have noticed the sm
udgy, sheer veils of black smoke that came and went within a distorting shimmer of heat from the next intersection. Into the fraught silence crept a low crackle of flames, and into the autumn chill, an ongoing ebb and surge of warmth, and as the acrid fumes strengthened into choking intensity, I reeled to a standstill. The accident was suddenly too close for comfort.
Judging by the extant wreckage, two SUVs had smashed together at a right angle and at similar speeds, and had melded into an untidy circumflex. No telling any longer what models they’d been, but both had been on the macho scale of Yukons or Suburbans. The inferno sparked by their collision had peaked a while ago, for their steel carcasses now fed an unflagging but sedate fire. I vanquished a perverse urge to see what was left of anyone inside. Enough for me to realize where the scent of barbecue had come from. Averted my sight to twisted shrapnel on the pavement. Here was a type of carnage that hadn’t needed the catalyst of alien trance to happen year in and year out, and maybe it hadn’t today.
And though it was no solace to the casualties, their immolation had acted as a stroke of mercy, obliging drivers to stamp on their brakes in a chain reaction that overspread all downtown, before the “color” took over. At worst, I observed a few fender benders as I skirted the radius of serious heat and smoke. The nearest vehicles had suffered some bubbling paint, and the nearest motorists, a touch of facial redness and blistering, but nothing to wince at. Damn lucky, apart from the doom about to engulf them.
The Color Over Occam Page 22