‘Mother never went in the water, ever, because she couldn’t swim, Mr –’
He raises his voice. ‘Lucy, I saw it with my own eyes.’
His eyes. I remember recoiling from their colourlessness when he removed his shades to swim. It seems to me that those eyes are unreliable witnesses.
‘So, Lucy…’ He’s wondering why I’m here. ‘Is there anything I can do for you? Do you need any help over there?’
I say slowly: ‘I guess the police have questioned you, Mr Holler…’
‘Sure. A woman. She was about your age.’
‘Did she ask you when you last saw Daddy?’
‘Of course.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘Sunday night, over at Joe’s.’
‘Mr Holler, what did you do on Sunday night?’
He gestures and the gesture is too large and too careless for a man whose movements are habitually so controlled.
‘Well now…’ he says awkwardly. He’s looking for that relaxed, throwaway style that Daddy used sometimes and Joe Zacarro has perfected. But he can’t wear someone else’s clothes. The words don’t fit him. ‘I mean…’ he tries again. ‘Well, what do old guys like us ever do?’
I look at his body, square as a box because his shoulders have been tense for years. In his own well-lit home he doesn’t seem so pale. Behind him the walls are white, ahead of him sun floods through the bank of windows.
I say: ‘Remember death? Is that what old guys like you do?’
He twitches suddenly, the escape of a small movement. Within an instant his body is contained again and he has resumed his usual stiff-backed position. He looks at me in silence. His mouth is shut tight, the way mine was when Rougemont confronted me with the truth, with my shoes.
I am still standing by the window. I feel the sun flooding the room from behind me. Maybe Mr Holler can only see my silhouette, maybe I seem like a shadow, the way Rougemont always looks to me.
I say: ‘On Sunday night you and Joe Zacarro and Daddy drove out to the coastal highway in an old tow truck. You dumped a wreck right at the roadside where it would remind drivers the next morning how precious their lives are. To themselves and to others. A man sees a wreck and imagines his kids fatherless. A wife imagines her husband a widower. Young folk imagine their parents bereaved. Everyone thinks of the unfinished business, of how it would be if their lives just stopped abruptly, before they’ve done what they want to do, achieved what they want to achieve, said the things they mean to say. And, for a while, not for long, they slow down, they drive carefully, they live life a little differently. All thanks to you and Joe and Daddy.’
He says nothing.
‘I’ll bet you do it often. I’ll bet you dump wrecks all around the area. And I’m not criticizing you for that, Mr Holler. I admire you for reminding so many people to readjust their priorities. I think you and Joe should go right ahead with it even though Daddy’s dead. I don’t want to tell the police or have them stop you. I only want one thing.’
He looks at me. His shades are so dark that I can see the window reflected in them, and, beyond the window, the valley. The tiny dots of distant trees, the right angle of the roads, the red-brown of the fertile valley dirt, it’s all there between my eyes and Mr Holler’s.
I say: ‘I want you to tell me who the other guy is. The one who owns the tow truck. I need to talk to him.’
Before he has time to think about it, his response jumps out of him.
‘No, Lucy. No.’
‘Someone has to talk to him. If not me, then the police. And I guess none of us wants that, Mr Holler.’
He rearranges his legs. He sits more upright. He grips the arms of his chair too tightly.
‘Lucy, I’m going to give you some advice. Stay right out of this one. It doesn’t concern you. If your father had wanted you to know he would have told you. Just…’ He waves a hand dismissively. ‘Just, wind up his affairs, sell his house, take the money and go back east. That’s all you need to do, that’s all Eric wanted you to do.’
My heart quickens. Anger shoots through me as though someone just injected it into a vein.
‘Mr Holler, Daddy didn’t die the way he should have, quietly, with his family gathered around his bed. And I want to know why. I’m not going back east just because you tell me I don’t need to find out any more. I have good reason to connect the tow truck driver with Daddy’s death. You can help me locate him.’
I raised my voice. I raised my voice to this pale and arthritic old man. If anyone was looking through the window at us now, what conclusion would they draw? I turn back to the valley, not the one reflected in his sunglasses, but the real one where the colours are brighter and the lines are sharper. My eye follows the old, practised route like a dog who knows which way to slink home. Past the car accident with Robert Joseph, past the farm I walked to with Lindy.
‘No,’ he says.
I stare at him.
‘I’m not going to give you any information your father didn’t want you to have.’
‘Daddy didn’t know that someone was going to kill him.’
‘I don’t betray confidences. Under any circumstances. If you want to proceed, it will have to be with police help, not mine. That’s my decision and Joe Zacarro will support me.’
I feel a quickening of my heart, the tightening of my nerve endings. ‘Listen Mr Holler –’
He holds up a white hand to silence me.
‘I don’t want to talk about this any more, Lucy.’
Leaning on a stick, he shows me out in silence. He is a man who has developed a whole style of still dignity to contain his humiliation. He killed his son by mistake. A hideous own goal. The smallest of errors, just the width of an electrical wire, with outsize consequences. He unbolts the door. I wish he would mention Jim Bob. Jim Bob’s thin brown body with its blond crewcut seems to lie between us.
‘Good bye, Lucy.’ His voice is flat as the valley. ‘Your father arranged things the way he wanted them. I hope you’ll think hard about his wishes before you go any further.’
30
You wouldn’t drive into the valley without air-conditioning in weather like this. That would be crazy. All the straight lines, when you’re right down among them, turn out to be fuzzy with heat. It rises like a spirit from the asphalt, making the edge of the road look crooked and distorting the rows of trees so they seem to sway like a drunken chorus line.
It’s a long way to the intersection. When you watch from the deck it seems to take cars small as insects just a few minutes to crawl there from the valley side. Now I’m down here it feels like driving across the bed of an ocean that goes on for ever.
Finally I reach it but, from inside the car, the intersection is an insignificant landmark. I swing south. When I get to Sunnyfruit Orchards I try to pinpoint exactly the place where Robert Joseph turned over his father’s car. I choose one spot then another and then another amid the rows of fruit trees. Finally I admit that I don’t know where the accident happened.
I hope the Joseph home will look the way it used to. In my memory it is a blur of green light and green shade. I grip the wheel hard, my body tense, as I cross the aqueduct and turn into the drive. Immediately I am surrounded by new shapes and colours and I experience again the pleasure I used to feel on leaving behind the sunbaked brown dirt and systematic planting outside and arriving in this other country. I was happy here. The sweep of the lawn lifts my heart because it used to lift my heart. I smile at the riot of flowers and shrubs because they used to make me smile. The shadow patterns beneath the big trees delight me because they used to delight me. I look for the hammock where Robert and I spent all that summer but one of the old trees which it swung from has gone, and the hammock too. I wonder if the tree fell down. I wonder how loud the crash was.
The big house, freshly painted, gleams where the sun slips through the trees. I park right outside. Nearby, a woman who has been bending over a flowerbed straightens to stare at me. She
is wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and it is impossible to see her face. My heart thumps. It could be the gardener or it could be Robert’s wife or the wife of one of his brothers or maybe even Mrs Joseph. My heart booms in my ears like a big machine driving by.
I stand uncertainly near the car, looking at the house, the green, green yard and the woman, who is walking slowly towards me. The figure is close when I realize that this is a man wearing a long, faded, loose-fitting dress.
‘Ralph!’ I say. The thin, white face breaks into a smile. He was walking slowly because he was afraid of me. Now he speeds up and takes my outstretched hand. His touch is light. He looks at me with bright, blue eyes and an undiminished smile.
‘Hi, Ralph. It’s Lucy. Lucy Schaffer. I haven’t seen you for a few years.’
‘Hi, Lucy,’ says Ralph happily.
Ralph is Mrs Joseph’s brother. He isn’t a transvestite but whatever brake stops most men from wearing a cool dress on a hot day isn’t a brake Ralph knows how to apply. In a curious misdistribution, Mrs Joseph got all the genes for being quick, bright, clever and capable. Ralph never would have, been able to hold down a job or graduate from high school and Mrs Joseph made sure he never had to. When she married Robert’s father, Ralph came too. During my summer with Robert, Ralph was always there, usually in the yard, planting, pruning, watering.
Ralph wanted to see what Robert and I did in the hammock and behind the rose garden. As he knew, sex is what we did. I had no sexual experience at all and Robert had less than he admitted to. We were technically incompetent. Robert generally came before he wanted to, with a cry of ‘Oh no!’ It didn’t matter. I laughed at his embarrassment, his apologies. I said: ‘I like you to do that, it makes me feel irresistible.’ He said: ‘You are irresistible.’ He didn’t understand that the way he held me, his need to cradle me in his arms, his pleasure at my pleasure, his delight in my body, every inch of it even my elbows, the love in his touch, was more exciting than split-second timing. Or maybe he knew it. Maybe he knew that his love made me a different Lucy and his power frightened him and that’s why he disappeared.
Jane knew. Jane understood how Robert liberated me from loneliness and I think she was glad for me. We didn’t discuss it. She asked once if we took precautions. I was dreamy and secretive. I just said, yes.
Somehow, wherever we hid to make love, Ralph always managed to find us. We checked behind shrubs and trees first, we sent him on wild goose chases across the yard into the orchard, we turned on the TV for him but, when we looked up afterwards, there was Ralph watching us with unashamed curiosity, his gentle blue eyes wide.
‘How are you, Ralph?’ I ask now.
‘Good,’ he smiles vacantly. He doesn’t recognize me.
‘Is Mrs Joseph here?’
‘No.’
‘When is she back?’
‘She’s staying with Robert.’
Something inside my belly contracts with disappointment.
‘Oh, that sure is a shame. I was hoping to contact an old friend of your family. Someone by the name of Marcello…’
‘Barbara,’ says Ralph. ‘Barbara died.’
More disappointment. The Marcello Trust and Barbara Marcello must be no more than a coincidence. I’m ready to thank him and get back in my car when I remember Barbara.
‘Oh, but I knew her! She was Mrs Joseph’s friend! She was real nice.’ The friend who was there the day the car crashed, who held my hand and talked to me softly until Jane arrived.
‘Shelley loved Barbara,’ agrees Ralph.
Barbara was often at the Joseph house. She was tall with long hair which she wore loose at a time when most mothers had short perms. She had one son, a lonely, demanding boy. He was about eleven and he’d get disproportionately upset when Robert and I made it clear that we were more interested in isolating ourselves than in playing football or watching TV with him. Eventually, though, we’d look forward to the kid’s visits because, when we escaped from him, he’d persuade Ralph to play cards and that way they’d both leave us alone.
‘She was an artist, right?’ I persist. I don’t remember ever seeing her pictures but her talent gave her a kind of mystique.
Ralph smiles. ‘Cancer,’ he says.
‘I think she had a son… I can’t remember his name…’
‘Ricky. Ricky fixes beautiful cars,’ Ralph informs me.
‘Ricky, that was it.’ Then, for a moment, everything halts. My heart stops beating, blood stops moving around my body. ‘Ralph, did you say he fixes cars now?’
Ralph nods. ‘Up in San Strana.’
I start to move. I move quickly. It is so imperative that I drive to San Strana right away that I don’t even ask about Robert. I thank him warmly, shaking his hand again, edging towards the car.
‘Shelley’s home tonight,’ he says as I slip behind the wheel. ‘Come see her soon, she’d like that.’
I slam the door and he shouts something after me. I don’t hear so I wind down the window for him to repeat it.
‘That stuff you used to do with Robert,’ he informs me. ‘He must have learned how to do it right because now he has three children.’
I smile wordlessly.
‘Come back,’ he instructs me. ‘We’ve waited a long time for you, Lucy.’
He waves as I drive away.
Out in the hot valley where everything else moves slowly, I’m fast. I drive fast. My heart beats fast. In my search for the Marcello Trust, in my pursuit of the tow truck, it never once occurred to me that the two might be connected. The journey takes almost an hour but for all that time there is a tingling in my fingers. Anticipation. Only as I approach the San Strana valley do I remember how much I fear this man and his truck. He was a strange and lonely pre-adolescent who barely touched my life and who I never imagined would re-enter it. All I know about him now is that he is tall and dark-haired, he avoids all contact with my family, he can run fast, he wants something from our house and he was aggressive to Daddy.
It is easy to locate Ricky Marcello’s garage. I ask for directions in one of the tourist shops in Cooper, San Strana’s main town, and three people are all able to assure me that it is just a couple of miles away. First I’ll reach a converted barn called the Marcello Gallery and a hundred yards past it is the garage.
‘Ricky’s pretty good but he only fixes cars when he wants to,’ warns one man. ‘So I sure hope you’re not in a hurry.’
I drive out of town through the green, wooded valley. The great trees bow under the burden of their leaves as if they’ve spent the day absorbing their weight in sunlight. A river flows through this fertile valley and the habitations which cluster around it are old and shaded by trees which have none of the slender, fast-grown appearance of the trees around Daddy’s house. The whole place is like the Joseph farmstead, as though someone picked up a piece of San Strana and transplanted it to the big, hot valley.
Soon I pass signs to the gallery and start to slow. I had intended to pull into the garage but when I see the tow truck standing outside it I lose courage and accelerate instead. After a few minutes I turn. Then I drive past the garage again, real slowly this time. It does have a sign but the sign is small and indifferent to the possibility of new business. COOPER ROAD GARAGE, E. MARCELLO. Ricky must be a pet name or a diminutive. I wonder what the E stands for.
There are no gas pumps, no bright red posters advertising tyres or screaming the virtues of high grade oil. The garage is just some old sheds, a tow truck and a small collection of cars, most of them, like the tow truck, antique. It is too picturesque to be a serious business.
I drive past it one more time before I turn again and pull off the road. Then I approach the garage quietly, on foot, like someone whose car broke down nearby.
The shed doors are all closed. I stand behind the tow truck and listen, barely breathing, wishing my heart would pump more quietly. I am a raw nerve, waiting for noises or smells to touch me. A clanging wrench. A whistling man. Hot oil. But I detect nothing. I
stay in the shadow of the truck long after I have concluded that the place is empty.
I can see most of the cars from here. They are in different states of repair. A couple are complete wrecks. An old blue car, cigar-shaped, has white paint all around one light like a bandage. There are two vintage sports cars which seem in good condition.
I’ll have to leave my hiding place soon. Standing here in motionless silence, ready to run if I have to, makes my fingers and toes jangle. But I remember how, when Daddy worked under the tractor, you sometimes didn’t know he was there. You could wait a long time for movement or noise. I listen, all my senses alert, my body tense, my ears buzzing.
A path leads behind the sheds. It is gravel. I walk noiselessly on the grass at its edge. Once I knock against an old oil drum and its clang brings me to a standstill. Then I edge around the buildings. Behind them is a small field. A well-trodden trail leads towards a house, barely visible through the trees. I calculate that the house must be a little way behind the barn which has been converted into a gallery.
I feel exposed in the field. The sun is a cruel spotlight. I cross quickly. There is a bridge over a creek and then I am relieved to be invisible among trees near the house. When I see movement on the verandah at the back of the house, I lie flat on the ground, watching. A woman, with a baby. The house is large and mellow with age and the verandah seems to connect it to the trees outside. I see the baby crawl on to the verandah and then the woman follows and picks it up. She holds it high over her head for a moment. In the distance I can hear the baby’s whoop of delight. I think suddenly, bitterly, of Stevie, who was never delighted by anything. Then the woman puts the baby down and walks into the house. The baby follows her. They leave a void behind them. They are inside the house together and I am alone in the woods. What am I doing, lying here with grass tickling my face? Trespassing. Peeping at other people’s families. Following some lonely trail of my own. And it seems, lying belly-down in someone else’s woods in someone else’s valley, that all my life I’ve chosen a lonely trail.
Summertime Page 29