On the Loose

by Andrew Coburn

  "It may not have been real."

  "It was real all right. Why do people with money like to flaunt it? All it does is lessen the dollar and cheapen the merchandise."

  Reverend Stottle, his head swimming, scarcely listened. His hand, still warm from Trish Becker's knee, had sensed the skin beneath the fabric. Sarah turned to the silver service.

  "I see she tried my cake. Did she like it?"

  He nodded. "She thought it very tasty."

  "She didn't finish her coffee. Was that not tasty?"

  He ignored the unaccustomed sharpness of his wife's words and smiled, though he resented her voice obtruding into his thoughts.

  "For the life of me," she said, "I can't imagine why Harry Sawbill married a piece of goods like that. Wasn't he already living with her, more or less?"

  "She's a fine woman, Sarah."

  She turned slowly and gazed at him at length. "You didn't do anything foolish, did you, Austin?"

  He colored faintly, just enough to show.

  "Damn it, you did," she said.

  Bareheaded, Chief Morgan felt the cold as he crunched over frozen snail tracks left by the plow. Snow was banked high around the green and heaped higher at a point beyond the post office. In front of the post office he saw the bundled figure of Amy White, though he didn't recognize her until he approached her. She wore a knit cap and a scarf pulled tight across her chin. Her nose was violet.

  "I saw you coming," she said.

  A gusting wind nearly threw her against him. He gripped her arm and steadied her, surprised by how small she was inside the bundle.

  "We're leaving soon," she said. "No more winters."

  He had heard that she and her husband had bought a condo in Florida and planned to live there permanently. "We'll miss you," he said.

  "No, you won't. Nobody will, but before I go I want to know if it's true. Did the Sawhill boy kill my aunt?"

  The question didn't surprise him. His suspicion had been rumored throughout the town and now was coming back to haunt him. "There's no proof."

  Her eyes condemned him and made him look away for a moment. The sky was ice blue, the sun feeble. She said, "It's made me sick thinking about it."

  "It hasn't made me feel good either."

  "But you're the police chief. You have a responsibility."

  He knew it better than she. He felt the weight, which had shifted into guilt, much more of a burden.

  "I loved my aunt, Chief. I lost my mother young. Aunt Eve took her place."

  The cold was getting to him. They each endured another hollow blast of wind that had swept across the snow-covered green, powdering the air.

  "I'm glad I'm leaving," Amy White said. "I don't want to be here when they let him out."

  "But I will be," Morgan said. "I'll be waiting."

  Belle Sawhill picked up her daughters from Pike School in Andover and drove cautiously over winter roads back to Bensington. At the gateway to the drive she braved the wind and collected the mail. As she drove toward the house, the twins fidgeted. Jennifer said, "Anything for us?"

  "We'll see."

  In the warmth of the large kitchen the twins snacked on graham crackers and peanut butter. Belle sorted the mail. Ben subscribed to several magazines, which she put to one side, along with bank statements, one of them hers. Household bills she kept for herself to pay. The bigger bills were for Ben, whose secretary would tend to them. Advertisements and flyers she threw away.

  "Nothing," she said.

  Jennifer made a face. "You sure?"

  "Positive."

  "He never answers our letters."

  Sammantha, refilling her milk glass, said, "I bet he gets lots of letters from people he doesn't even know."

  Belle shuddered inside. She didn't want them thinking of him as some sort of celebrity, a special being, though she knew that among their classmates they now possessed an aura. "Bobby's sick," she said forcefully.

  "I bet he didn't mean to kill that woman," Jennifer said.

  "But he did. And that's why they put him away. To make him better."

  "Maybe the woman was bad," Jennifer said.

  Sammantha smiled mischievously. "Maybe she was trying to seduce Bobby."

  Belle arched her spine. "What kind of talk is that? Nobody deserves to be killed. And the woman was a very good woman."

  They lowered their heads, and she watched them crunch on their crackers and remembered them of an age when she still had milk in her breasts. Now they were ten, and their breasts were beginning to stand out like forced blooms. Too soon, too quick. It didn't seem fair.

  "Her name was Charlotte," Jennifer whispered to her sister.

  "No, it wasn't," Sammantha said. "It was Claudia."

  Belle wished they were still toddlers chatting away in unformed language, in the private syncopated talk of twins. When one had a cold, the other felt she should have one too.

  Jennifer, her voice breaking, said, "He'll be all grown up when we see him again."

  "We'll be older too," Sammantha said.

  Jennifer looked at her mother. "Will he still be sick?"

  Belle did tricks with her mind, worked it backwards, and said, "Remember when you two cut each other's hair? My God, you looked funny!"

  Chief Morgan visited Mrs. Perrault. Guilt drove him to it. Mrs. Perrault's surprise was obvious and her pleasure genuine. "I've been thinking about you," she said, showing him into the overheated front room and seating him in a chair that seemed his now, or could be. "I was at the hairdresser's this morning. How do l look?"

  Tinted, permed, and teased, her hair was a velvety mist, the hue reflected in her eyeglasses. "You look great."

  "You never did come to dinner."

  "I'm sorry, no excuse," he said and suddenly was back on his feet.

  Mrs. Perrault's elder sister was in the doorway. Though it was midafternoon she was in a flannel nightgown, nothing under it, as if at her age she had nothing to hide. She swayed into the room and came close to him, her bust nearly in his arms. Her voice gusted.

  You have more bad news for us?"

  Mrs. Perrault spoke sharply. "He's come to see me, Ida. Why don't you put a robe on?"

  "I'm fine the way I am. I don't put on airs, and I don't need to impress the police chief." She stared into Morgan's eyes. "There's just the two of us now, her and me, two old widows hanging on."

  He had heard that the younger sister had taken a spill on ice and broken her hip. From the hospital she had gone into a nursing home in Andover. "I'm sorry about your sister."

  "She's gone loony on us."

  "She's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's," Mrs. Perrault explained quietly.

  "As if enough hasn't happened to us."

  "Please, Ida. James is my visitor. Why don't you leave us alone."

  "This is my house too, I pay my way," Ida said, but she left, indignantly, and clumped up the stairs, a relief to Mrs. Perrault, whose eyes had gone old inside her spectacles.

  "Let's go in the kitchen, James. More privacy."

  In the kitchen she served him hot chocolate, which he didn't think he wanted but found himself enjoying. He used a spoon to eat the dab of marshmallow floating on the surface.

  "All this snow, James, I can't go to the cemetery. Do you go?"

  "Whenever I can. My wife's there. Now Claudia."

  They were sitting across from each other, Mrs. Perrault with both elbows planted on the table. She said, "None of my business, but were you and Claudia good lovers?"

  "I like to think so," he said, taken aback only for an instant.

  "I wanted so much for her to be happy. Her husband's death did terrible things to her. Now her death is doing terrible things to me." She produced a tissue, which she didn't use, simply clutched for the ready. "She has a shoebox of his letters from Vietnam. Should I keep them or burn them?"

  "I don't know."

  "I don't either." The tissue was crushed in her fist, an indication she was not going to use it. "Do you have a life, J
ames?"

  "M~ : h."

  "I ha'c only memories. God gave us memories to taunt us when we're old. Old and ugly, but I was a pretty child. Grown-ups oohed and aahed over me."

  "I can believe that. And you're not ugly."

  "I never knew my real father, did you know that?"

  Morgan said nothing. When he was a child he had overheard his mother repeating the gossip, which made his father chuckle, the sort of chuckle he knew was naughty. Perhaps that was why he remembered it.

  "My mother had a fling," Mrs. Perrault said. "I'm the result. That's why I'm different from my sisters. They have the family face, I don't. I'm the oddball. My sisters have always known, but we've never talked about it."

  Morgan said, "Did you ever tell Claudia?"

  "No, but telling you is like telling her."

  Morgan reached across the table and wrapped his hand over her fist. He had no words.

  She said, "The dead don't grieve. They leave that for the living."

  Moments later she walked him to the door, the tissue left behind on the table, next to the hot chocolate she had poured for herself but hadn't touched. When he opened the door the cold rushed in.

  "You should wear a hat," she said.

  He agreed with a smile. When he kissed her cheek her tears came.

  "That boy, James. Don't let him come back."

  A youth with dreadlocks and tan skin said, "Did you hear about Duck? He's a fuckin' hero."

  Dibble, strengthening his arms in the exercise room, nodded. Everyone had heard about the outburst in Dormitory A, which housed boys fifteen and younger. A white twelve-year-old had tried to slash his own throat with jagged glass.

  "Grissom was ripshit," the youth said with a laugh, "till he heard what Duck did."

  While others were egging the boy on, Duck dived in and knocked the glass from the boy's hand but not before he suffered a slash across the cheek, the wound a flame shooting from his face.

  "Grissom's giving him extra privileges and says he don't have to work the toilets for a month. It's all free time."

  "He deserves it," Dibble said.

  "You ain't heard the best part." The youth gave out another laugh. "He don't wanna leave the toilets."

  Later Dibble and Bobby Sawhill visited Duck in the dorm. Duck was sitting up on his cot and reading a funny book, which he lowered at once, revealing a heavy bandage on the left side of his face. "Didja hear?"

  "Yeah, we heard," Dibble said. "You're a hero."

  "Am I really, Dibs?"

  "You bet your Polish ass you are. Isn't he, Sawhill?"

  Bobby said, "I wouldn't have done what you did. I'd have been afraid."

  "I get extra dessert, didja hear that?"

  "We got the picture," Dibble said. "Don't touch your bandage. Does it hurt?"

  "Burns. They gave me shots."

  "You're lucky you didn't get hurt worse. Why'd you do it, Duck?"

  He looked stymied for a moment. "I don't know for sure. I think I didn't want to see the boy bleed. I hate blood."

  Dibble looked at him sternly. "Stay away from the toilets for a while. Give yourself a rest."

  "I can't, Dibs. That's my job."

  He was back in the toilets within the week, restocking dispensers with paper towels and replacing rolls of tissue. At times he muttered aloud over the poor job done by the boy who had filled in for him. Mirrors were scummed. He was examining buckets and scrub brushes and lining up jugs of disinfectant when Ernest sidled in and leaned against a sink.

  "What's a hero still doing in the shithouse?"

  Duck neither responded nor looked at him. He screwed the tops tighter on the disinfectant jugs.

  "Heard about whatcha did. Real brave, Duck. What's your full name? I wanna put it on a plaque."

  "Stanley A. Chmielnicki."

  "You're shittin' me. What's the A stand forAsshole?"

  Duck drew a labored breath. He wished Dibble were with him, Bobby too. He wished his grandmother was still alive, her head kerchief-bound, her eyes loving him. Ernest edged nearer.

  "Take the bandage off. Let's see if you really got a cut there."

  He jerked back as if from a torch. "Don't touch me."

  "I'll do what I want to you." Ernest hooked a thumb in the waist of his sweatpants. The hood of his sweatshirt framed his face. "Nothin' to lose, Duck. Another coupla weeks I'm goin' to the joint."

  Duck's eyes burned with sudden tears. "I hate you."

  "Hey, I want you to love me."

  Tears brimmed, toppled, shaming him, but he found a voice. "I'm boss here. Get out!"

  "You're nothin'." Ernest sneered, hovered, "You're just a fuckin' little Polack."

  "Nigger," Duck said.

  It was the worst thing he could have said, and he knew it. He wanted to reach out and pull the word back. He wanted to dig it out of Ernest's ear. Too late. Too late.

  Ernest came at him.

  Dibble came upon Duck an hour later. Duck stood unsteadily near the urinals, his eyes twitching, as if his mind were pitching and rolling. There was blood on the floor and some on his clothes.

  "Jesus Christ," Dibble said, "what happened?"

  Duck put a hand to his head. His legs buckled. He went down before Dibble could grab him. His head on the floor, he tried to smile as Dibble crouched over him.

  "I fucked up, didn't I, Dibs?"

  "I don't know. What did you do?"

  "Ernest called me a Polack. I called him a nigger. I shouldn't have done it, huh?"

  Dibble took a hard breath. "There's a difference, Duck. A big difference. You said the magic word." Dibble looked him over. "Where are you bleeding? I can't tell."

  "I don't know. It came out of my mouth. I'm glad you're here, Dibs. Wish Bobby was too."

  "What did Ernest do to you?"

  "Everything." He reached for Dibble's hand. "Am I going to be all right?"

  Dibble held him in his arms while he hemorrhaged. Dibble patted his head, nothing else he could do.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Harry Sawhill's face worked its way out of waves of sleep, out of other worlds in which dreams were only half remembered. Eyes forced open, he managed to smile up at his wife, who held a glass of orange juice, which he didn't want. His head stayed in the pillow.

  "What time is it?"

  "Nearly noon," Trish said. "Are you getting up?"

  "In a while."

  She placed the juice glass on the bedside table and noted his color, amber creeping into the gray. She raised a window to get the stuffiness out of the room. Mild spring air poured in. Turning, she said, "What am I going to do with you, Harry?"

  "What will you do without me?" he said, producing a smile that surprised her. "Will you get along?"

  "Depends. What do you plan to leave me? Your second-best bed?"

  He closed his eyes. Drinking had gored his liver, but it was his heart that concerned his attending physician at Lahey Clinic, a woman named Feldman, youngish, bright, caring. Dr. Feldman referred him to a cardiologist, whose examinations resulted in warnings.

  "Come down in an hour," Trish said. "I'll have breakfast ready."

  "Just coffee, Trish. OK?"

  Downstairs she phoned the Lahey, got through to Dr. Feldman after a short wait, and said, "I'm worried. I don't like his color."

  "Is he taking his medication?"'

  "Far as I can tell."

  "Is he still drinking?"

  "Off and on. More on than off."

  "Then he's killing himself. Tell him I said that. Tell him I'm angry." Dr. Feldman went off the line for a moment. "I'm putting him down for next Thursday, three o'clock. Is that all right?"

  "Thank you, Doctor. I guess you know he thinks the world of you."

  "But not enough to do as I say."

  Trish plugged in a fresh pot of coffee and stared through the kitchen's large bow window. Trees were swelling, leaves stretching out on buds like hands grabbing life. She felt none of the excitement of spring. Too long she'd been op
erating in a medium of vague fears, fears that were now gaining shape.

  Back on the telephone, she rang up Ben Sawhill's private office number. When she heard his voice, she said, "We're going to lose him, Ben. He's not taking care of himself."

  "When has he ever?" Ben said.

  "I'm scared, scared."

  "Well you should be. Longevity's a genetic gift, and Sawhills don't have it."

  "Good God, why did I call you?" She paused to get a hold on her emotions. A bluejay lit on the windowsill and peeked in on her. The crest told her it was a male. "Ben, can't we do something for him? He's your brother."

  "Tell me what I haven't done already and I'll do it."

  "Damn you," she said. "What about me?"

  "You'll go on."

  "You guarantee it?"

  "Not in writing."

  Somehow his voice always cut through her anxieties and lessened them. During the trauma of divorce proceedings her children turning against her, his scoldings had sustained her. She laughed. "I do love you, Ben."

  "That's something we'll have to discuss in another life."

  Gently she pressed the receiver button down. When she blew a kiss to the jay, it flew away.

  Someone was at the front door. With a glance at her watch, she wondered who in hell would be calling unexpectedly, no one coming to mind until the second before she opened the door. Reverend Stottle said, "I felt I should call on you."

  "Why am I not surprised?"

  "The last time we saw each other, I didn't mean to offend you."

  "You didn't." She was amused it still bothered him. "I was facing a crisis and needed strength. I don't think you were the one to provide it-my mistake, not yours."

  "I thought this time I might talk with both of you. I've never made a call to the Heights before. May I come in?"

  After a hesitation, she let him in with a smile and led him over marble and then hardwood to the kitchen, where Harry was sipping coffee from a pottery mug at the table. Harry was in bathrobe and slippers, showered but not shaved. To the reverend's eye, he looked tubercular.