“Something is, clearly,” she said. “Tell me.”
“Things are peachy,” he said; this sort of heavy sarcasm didn’t suit him it all, as though a crude ventriloquist had taken over his speech. “I’m having a fine, fine day. How about you?”
“Clay. What is it?”
“I asked you a question,” he said, “one of those married-couple basic questions.” He smiled, a smile that had a friendly shape but nothing else: “How’s your day going?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Not well, I guess, seeing you like this.”
“My apologies,” Clay said. “Anything else happen, besides me pissing you off?”
Nell tasted a bitter, coffee taste in her mouth. “Nothing much.”
The smile stayed on his face. “Things’ll be better when the museum opens, gives you something to do.”
“Yes,” she said, a new little disturbance—did he see her now as some kind of bored housewife?—trailing in the wake of all the big ones.
“So you’ve just been hanging around the house all day?”
“Pretty much.”
“Pretty much,” he said. “Pretty much, would you say, or totally?”
“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.” But she understood perfectly, and also felt what was coming, like a storm on the way.
“I’ll try to be more clear,” he said. “Remember Timmy? The rookie? Looks about ten years old?”
“Of course.”
“Of course, huh? So I’m making myself clear at last. What do you think of him?”
“You’re asking what I think of Timmy?”
“Yeah. The kid who helped out with Norah, kept her name off the sheet for you—what’s your take on him?”
“For me? That was just for me, keeping her name off the sheet?”
“Now you’re going to start lying to yourself?” he said. “Who else was it for? Think it did her any good?”
He was right—the cover-up of Norah’s accident was her doing, and maybe letting Norah suffer the consequences would have been better. But lying to yourself: that infuriated her, and she pushed on. “You want to talk about lying?” she said. She’d never spoken to him like this in their whole marriage—nor he to her—yet now this crude dialogue was flowing on both sides with an ease any outsider might have thought habitual. Nell felt self-disgust, but couldn’t stop; something horrible was in the air.
“Yeah, let’s,” said Clay. And she knew that he couldn’t stop either. “Let’s talk about lying. Where were you today?”
“How can you speak to me this way?” she said. “Like you’re interrogating some criminal?”
“It’s easy. You’re acting like one.”
“I’m acting like one?” Her voice rose, carrying her away. “Why don’t you try explaining—”
The phone rang. They both turned to it. Three rings, and on the fourth the answering machine picked up. Lee Ann spoke, her voice loud and clear in the front hall. “Nell,” she said. “Still there? Had to take that call. And guess who it was? The man of the hour. Changed your mind about meeting him, it seems—he mentioned your visit to the Ambassador Suites. I wish you’d told me. Going to pick up now? There’s more and more to talk about all the time…No?” Click.
Nell turned to Clay. All at once he didn’t look angry; colder now, more impassive, almost withdrawn. “What are you doing?” he said. “Or do you even know?”
“I apologized to him,” she said. “It was the right thing to do.”
“Then why hide it from me?”
“Because I didn’t want this—what’s happening now.”
“That’s not good enough.”
“No?” Her voice began to shake. “Then how’s this, since you’re so good at seeing through me? You manipulated my statement, got me to accuse an innocent man and send him away for life. And I want to know why. Is that good enough?”
The shakiness jumped the space between them, infected his body. He came toward her, his right hand rising slowly, and shaking most of all. “Don’t you ever say that again.”
“That you manipulated me?” she said. “Or that I want to know why?”
He didn’t come any closer. His gaze went to his hand. He lowered it; the effort seemed to take a lot of strength. “Don’t you do it,” he said, his voice growing softer. “This has to stop.”
“Stop? I’ll never stop wanting to know why,” Nell said. Then a question burst out of her, uncontainable at that moment, the biggest question of all. “Where were you when Johnny got killed?”
Clay moved, so fast Nell didn’t have a chance to dodge him or protect herself in any way. All she saw was his fist—somehow strange and alien, like a new weapon designed by engineers—flying toward her face. But it halted, quivering in midair, inches away; and then dropped like a deadweight to Clay’s side.
He backed away, actually stumbling—she’d never seen him stumble before, his movements always so smooth and athletic—but now he stumbled and almost fell, his face white and deformed by shock and disgust, disgust for them both, and other forces Nell couldn’t identify. “We’d better not be together right now,” he said, one hand on the wall, holding himself up. “I’ll be at Duke’s. If you need me.”
He didn’t slam the door, didn’t even close it, just walked out and went away. Nell closed the door and sagged against it.
CHAPTER 24
This was nice, to play a little music in Joe Don’s barn, way at the back of his old man’s spread, to relax, to smoke some weed. Nothing wrong with smoking weed. Weed was natural, grew right out of God’s own ground, had no other use, meaning smoking it was okay with Him. And the nicest part? To do all this with a young, female beauty close by. Norah—he could see her now, behind a tiny cloud of pot smoke, gauzy like one of those old black-and-white movie actresses—was a beauty, no doubt about it. More than that. There were other beauties around: Pirate knew that very well, had checked out the porn on his TV at the Ambassador Suites. Norah wasn’t like that. She had this innocent thing about her. Hey! And he was innocent, too. They had something in common. He reached over to pass her the joint, but Joe Don, in mid-riff, intercepted it with his fretting hand.
“Good dope, huh?” said Joe Don, somehow continuing a thudda-thudda-chunk-chunk run too quick for Pirate to follow with his eye, a run that led to the chorus of this song Joe Don was working on:
Saw your face
Down the hall
Nothin’ else
Matters at all.
Joe Don had a good voice, a bit like Marty Robbins, but deeper. Norah sang along, not doing a second part, just trying to hit the notes, which she mostly missed, but it didn’t matter, her voice so whispery, almost not there at all. Joe Don played a little tag, came to a stop.
“And I used to hate country music,” Norah said.
Joe Don started laughing. Pirate laughed, too. Joe Don leaned over and kissed Norah’s cheek. Pirate stopped laughing.
“Maybe got a title for it,” said Joe Don.
“Let me guess,” Norah said. “‘She Matters.’”
“Wow,” said Joe Don. “Like that one, Alvin?”
“Cool,” Pirate said.
“Better’n what I got,” said Joe Don. “Almost.”
“Almost?” Norah said, giving him a poke in the ribs. She and Joe Don sat on an old couch, dusty and threadbare. Pirate was on a worn footstool with cigarette burns through the leather. “What’s yours?” she said.
“‘Norah’s Song,’” said Joe Don.
Norah gave him a look. He gave her a look back. For a moment, Pirate felt like a fifth wheel, a mixed-up feeling that threatened to swallow up all this fun. His fingers itched for the gold tassel, but his Bible was back in his room at the Ambassador Suites. He reached instead for the joint, burning unnoticed now in Joe Don’s hand—had he overheard her saying something about the perfect shape of Joe Don’s hands?—and took a deep drag. Ah, freedom, he thought to himself, but for some reason didn’t feel free. “Ah, freedom.” Too late, he realized
he’d spoken aloud.
They both turned to him and smiled. “Must feel good, huh?” Joe Don said.
“Must,” said Pirate.
They laughed, like he’d made a funny joke. Pirate joined in. They laughed and laughed, got a bit delirious, although maybe not Joe Don, who went and picked up the phone.
“Wreck on the interstate,” he said, hanging up. “Back soon.”
Pirate rose. “Maybe, uh, drop me off at the hotel.”
“Hang here,” said Joe Don. “Won’t be long.”
“Yeah?”
“Why not?” Joe Don glanced at Norah.
“Sure,” said Norah.
“Okeydoke,” Pirate said, sitting back down. “How about if I fool around some on the Rickenbacker while you’re gone?”
Joe Don shook his head, like he really wanted to give the go-ahead but couldn’t because of some iron rule. “Just this superstition I got, me and the instrument, one-on-one relationship, you know? But there’s the Telecaster—no problem you using that.”
“Cool,” said Pirate.
“Turn it up to eleven,” Joe Don said.
Norah laughed, but whatever the joke was Pirate didn’t get it. Getting a little tired of not getting things? Oh, yeah—especially of not getting things he would have known if he’d spent the past twenty years on the outside. But payback was on the way, had already begun, and he was at peace.
“Turn it up to eleven,” he repeated, adding a chuckle, if chuckle was the word for a quiet laugh that died abruptly away.
“Don’t you love that movie?” Norah said.
Pirate had never heard of a movie called Turn It Up to Eleven. “One of my favorites,” he said.
“Adios,” said Joe Don, resting the Rick on its stand.
“What other movies do you like?” said Norah, a few moments later.
Movies. That was a tough one. Four o’clock Wednesday was movie time in the C-block lounge, but Pirate’s mind had tended to wander during the showings and he seldom stayed till the end; except for The Passion of the Christ—that one stuck. “Lots of them,” he said, “but I can never remember the names.”
Norah took a hit off the joint. “I used to like movies about history,” she said. Then came a long silence. Pirate started to get the squinting feeling in his non-eye, like one of those behind-the-scenes visions was on the way. Beyond the gauzy smoke, Norah’s eyes looked damp. “Shakespeare in Love,” she said. “Master and Commander. The Last of the Mohicans.”
Those had to be movies. “Yeah?” he said. “And then what happened?”
“What happened after The Last of the Mohicans?” she said. “There were no more Mohicans.”
Norah started laughing, did the delirious thing again. Pirate tried to join in, but he didn’t think it was funny, and besides, he’d asked a serious question, so this was pissing him off. After a while, the room got quiet. The behind-the-scenes vision came, and for a moment, he saw through the gauze, through the skin, down to the face of a girl about ten or eleven years old. Just a glimpse; and then that squinting pressure let up and normality returned.
“Hungry?” said Norah. “There’s some salsa and chips.”
Pirate wasn’t hungry, but an idea came to him and he said, “Salsa and chips—sounds good.”
She got up and went into the kitchen. Pirate was on his feet the next second, and a second after that he had the Rick in his hands. The chords to “You Win Again” went E, B7, E, A. He didn’t plug in, just played them off-amp, real quiet, but they sounded so good on the Rick. Pirate knew he could always fork over the $995 for the Rickenbacker in the pawnshop window—a hundredfold!—play “You Win Again” on any Rickenbacker in the world, pile Rickenbackers to the sky. He heard Norah coming and put the guitar back in the stand. The problem was Pirate wanted this one, Joe Don’s.
She spoke behind him. “He’s funny about the guitar.”
“I didn’t touch it,” Pirate said, not turning.
Pause. Then she said, “I know. It’s just one of those musician things.”
Now he turned, gave her a nice smile. “No problemo,” he said.
They scarfed up all the chips and salsa, maybe in a minute or two. Your mom wouldn’t even eat a Twizzler with me. Pirate came close to saying that—Norah was so much easier to be with than her mother—but decided against it for no real reason, just instinct.
“Good salsa,” he said. “And chips.”
She nodded. Her eyes had an inward look.
“History movies,” he said.
“What about them?”
“How come they’re your favorites?”
“I said they used to be. Because history was always my favorite subject. I loved imagining the past.”
“Like The Passion of the Christ?”
“Didn’t see that one,” Norah said. “Too gory for me.”
How did she know if she hadn’t seen it? Plus Pirate hadn’t found it particularly gory. But he just said, “Yeah, too gory.”
“I don’t like the sight of blood,” she said.
“No?” said Pirate. He remembered blood spurting from the neck of some dude who’d pissed off the Ocho Cincos: like a tiny red fountain, actually a pretty sight if you could have taken a picture of just that part. Hey! An interesting observation. Was it worth passing on? Why not? “I was just—” he began, but she interrupted.
“I know what you’re going to say,” she said.
“Yeah?” How was that possible? She’d never done time, never been involved with anything violent.
“You’re going to say how come I used to like history but don’t anymore.”
The furthest thing from his mind: How would he have known something like that? “So?” he said. “How come?”
“Because,” she said, “the past turns out to be horrible. Twisted and horrible.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Exactly! That’s it exactly, so messed up. The innocent goes to jail, the guilty goes free and my father…” Her face got all out of shape—actually looked ugly, which he wouldn’t have thought possible—like the waterworks were about to open up, but it didn’t and her face smoothed back out. “What happens to him?”
“He got killed?” Pirate knew that for a fact, the big fact that started this real bad ball rolling, but he said it like a question—her line of talk was getting a little strange, confusing him.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s like a fucked-up triangle.”
That one went over his head. He reached into the chips bowl, foraged for the last crumbs.
“Have you ever seen his grave?” she said.
How would that have happened? “Nope,” he said.
“Would you like to?”
Not really. What Pirate wanted to do was try out the Rickenbacker with the amp on and no one hassling him. He was about to say, Rain check, but then thought—maybe some fresh air might be good. And piggybacking on that: “Can I drive?”
“Sure,” said Norah. “Why not?” The ten-year-old’s answer, no boring complications about license, insurance, vision: Pirate was feeling ahead of the game; that was new.
“It’s like riding a bicycle,” Pirate said, top down, wind in what was left of his hair, needle touching seventy. And he could see just fine, except for the lane where his nose got in the way. “You know what I mean? The way you never forget.”
“Yeah,” said Norah. “Um, this is a forty zone.”
A forty zone? For a moment he didn’t understand what she meant. Then he got it and reached for the shift to gear down, only it was an automatic, which he already knew but remembered too late. There was a high-pitched revving shriek as he shifted into N, his left foot pressing down through clutchless space. He banged the stick right back into D, braked smoothly, drove the rest of the way without incident, but the fun—feeling young, rag top, open road—was gone. Not his fault: he blamed Norah. She’d gone grown-up on him; he preferred the ten-year-old version.
Johnny Blanton was buried in a cemete
ry on high ground on the north side of Belle Ville, near the county line. He had a white stone marker with his name and dates, not as big as the stone markers on either side.
“We should have brought flowers,” Norah said.
Pirate glanced around, saw a bouquet of flowers lying on a nearby grave. He went and got them, handed them to Norah.
“Thanks,” she said. She smelled the flowers—Pirate liked the way her nostrils flared—and leaned them against the stone. “Half of my DNA is his,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“You’d think if half of someone’s DNA was in you, you’d know them, just automatically. But I don’t know him.”
Pirate gazed up at the sky. Clear blue. The air was warm, the breeze soft; he heard birds chirping somewhere far away. This was nice.
“I’ve tried to get to know him from his writing,” Norah was saying. Or something like that. She was talking too much. Why couldn’t she just enjoy the day? And now she was watching him, maybe waiting for some reply.
“He was a writer?” Pirate said.
She shook her head. “A scientist. You didn’t know that?”
Huh? Why should he know that? Why should he know anything about this guy? He, Pirate, was the victim. “Nope,” he said.
“A brilliant scientist,” Norah said. “He would have been famous. But all his writing is so technical—I really can’t get a sense of him at all.”
“What about old pictures?” Pirate said; he didn’t want to encourage this discussion but it was an obvious idea.
“That turned out to be a problem.”
“Oh? Too bad.” He was ready to get back behind the wheel, but Norah didn’t seem to be in any hurry. She stood there, lost in thought. More to break the spell than anything else, Pirate tossed out another idea. “How about asking your mom about him?”
“I used to,” Norah said. “Now that’s a problem, too.”
Christ. “How come?”
Norah turned to him. “It’s this whole Hamlet thing.”
Hamlet thing. That meant Shakespeare. Pirate had never read Shakespeare, but she’d been talking about him, back at Joe Don’s barn, something about…movies, that was it.
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