No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  “The old thing is history,” Morgan said.

  “But it’s still on your mind, ain’t it? All these years nosin’ ‘round ain’t got you nothin’.” The tone of voice was pugnacious, and the small eyes, blue like the flame of a welder’s torch, were shrewd and arrogant. “You and the old chief smirched my reputation.”

  “We were doing our jobs.”

  “If I believed in lawyers I’d’ve sued and be sittin’ pretty now.”

  Summer sounds from the swamp competed in intensity. Cicadas were the loudest. Morgan said, “Where’s Junior?”

  “Don’t know, off somewhere.” Papa spun the wheel again. “You here about what he did that time at the school? MacGregor had no call treatin’ him like he did.”

  “Officer MacGregor could’ve arrested him, probably should’ve.”

  “What good would that’ve done? Boy Junior’s age got no authority over his pecker.”

  “He’s no boy, he’s in his twenties.”

  “But he ain’t bright, so why make more of a fool of him? I know why MacGregor did it. He thinks he’s you.”

  High in the pines the sudden squawk of a crow sounded like the dissonant hooting of a toy horn. On the ground a dry leaf flipped itself over like a live thing. “Tell Junior I need to talk to him soon as possible.”

  “What are you blamin’ him for now?” Papa snatched up a small socket wrench and looked for nuts to tighten. Swiveling the rod of the kickstand, he wrenched one that did not need it. “He ain’t competent to be questioned. He could say anything, think it’s true.”

  “Straight answers won’t hurt him.”

  “You ain’t told me what it’s about yet.”

  Morgan turned and, treading over flat weeds, returned to his car, where black flies sketched the air. A breeze brought him the smell of fern and a taste of the swamp. With a deliberate turn, he looked back at Papa. “Can he handle a rifle?”

  “You know well as anybody I learned both my boys young. Clement, time he was ten, could shoot the eye out of a squirrel.”

  “How about Junior?”

  Papa’s gnarled face twitched, then was still. “You’re trying to put things in my mind don’t belong there.”

  “You got a rifle in the house?”

  “Old one that won’t work. You wanna look at it?”

  Morgan climbed into the car and peered out the open window. “That’s not the one I want.”

  “You wanna look up my ass?” Papa shouted. “Maybe you’ll find it there.”

  Averting his head, Morgan radioed Meg O’Brien and asked what was doing. Nothing much. Selectman Jackson had phoned, no message. Her voice clawed through static. She was worried about Matt MacGregor. “You don’t have to be,” he told her. She was alone in the station, she said. Bertha Skagg, her relief, whose ankles tended to swell, had called in sick. “I’ll be there shortly,” he said.

  “Where are you?” she asked with an edge.

  “In the woods,” he replied and switched off, for Papa had come to the car with a soft grunt and was staring in with the crack of a smile. Morgan twisted the ignition key. The motor sulked, then caught. “Something to tell me, Papa?”

  “We oughta be more partial to each other, you and me. We both lost a woman.”

  “You were never good to yours.”

  “You gonna hold that against me all my life?”

  “Only what happened to her.”

  Papa’s blue eyes blazed, his face caught fire, and his head lolled as if mere threads kept him sane. “You don’t know I did it. You don’t know anybody did it.”

  “I know she didn’t do it herself,” Morgan said and shifted the car easily into reverse. “Same as I know God didn’t strike down Flo and Earl Lapham.”

  • • •

  “Go home,” he told Meg O’Brien, and she did, but returned shortly to her post with two chicken sandwiches, one for him, which he accepted gratefully. Since his breakfast with Bakinowski he had put nothing in his stomach except a Milky Way. The call came while he was sitting at his desk. Meg, perversely, put it through without asking whether he wanted to take it. Christine Poole’s voice was the coldest he had ever heard it.

  “Have you mentioned me to Arlene Bowman?”

  “Of course not.” His sandwich went tasteless. “Why would I?”

  “She knows about us. So does that woman working for you. How many others know, James?”

  “None that I know of,” he said, with no wish to speculate, for the town was full of eyes.

  “This is humiliating.”

  “I never meant that to happen.”

  “But it has!” Anger and anxiety disfigured her voice. “Good God, what if my husband finds out? What do you think that will do to him? And how can I look him in the face, James?”

  He was slow in responding, too slow, and abruptly the line went dead. Presently Meg appeared in the door and stood with formal rigor, her rupture of pony teeth showing. With customary forwardness she said, “When are you going to learn?”

  “When are you going to quit listening in?”

  “When are you going to stop fooling around in the Heights? There are solid unattached town women who’ve had their eyes on you for years. Want me to name a couple?”

  “I had a marriage, Meg. Another won’t take the place of it.”

  “Afraid to love and lose again, aren’t you, Jim?” Only during intimate moments did she forsake his title for his name. They had known each other all their lives. In the several years after his wife’s death, when he had shut himself off from any romantic life, she had occasionally invited him to her house for a light supper, always a chore for him. Their common ground was here at the station. Here she could speak her mind, and he could use his authority to shut her up.

  Very quietly he said, “Let’s drop it, Meg.”

  4

  A few stray clouds, like lost sails, maneuvered through the brilliant Florida sky. On the white beach the child’s shadow marked the hour. The woman’s shadow might have been the minute. The child, a boy of no more than five or six, said, “That man’s looking at us.”

  “He’s looking at me,” the woman said, taking her grandson’s hand. “Ignore him.”

  Together they scuffed to the ocean’s edge, which gently swelled, splashed, and foamed. In the heat of the off-season the beach was sparsely populated, enlivened only by the wing-beats of pelicans. The boy played in the surf, and the woman moved to deeper water. She was in her fifties, big but not fat, certainly handsome. Her bathing suit was the sort Esther Williams had worn long ago in the movies. Lowering her head, throwing her arms out, she made an arrowhead of her hands and floated forward. When she waded back to the boy, the man was gone.

  Later, wearing a beach jacket over her wet suit, she sat alone in the patio bar of the hotel. Her table was smack in the sun, and her hair was drying into tight, natural curls. Her drink was more fruity than alcoholic. The man appeared from behind her and said, “May I?” She hesitated, then simply smiled. As he drew a chair the waiter, on cue, brought him a bottle of beer. Removing dark glasses, he said, “My name’s Chico.”

  She surveyed him. “You don’t look like a Chico.”

  His fair face beaten by the sun, he looked Yankee or German. His features were closely crafted, the planes precise and straight, the brow smooth, the nose shaved narrow. His weather-bleached hair, which had thinned, was combed straight back, which gave him a dated look, as if he too had watched the Esther Williams movies, though they were before his time. She judged him to be not much more than thirty.

  “Do you often stare at older women on the beach?”

  “When they look like you,” he said and lit her cigarette with a lighter that flamed high. Beyond them sprinklers bathed a bordering lawn already as green as it could be.

  “You’re still staring.”

  “Do you mind?” He drank his beer from a frosted glass. A Swiss watch consumed his wrist. He had on a silk shirt, powder blue slacks, and alligator loafers, no socks.


  “What exactly are you looking for, Chico, or should I assume the obvious?”

  The waiter, serving another table, dropped a tray of drinks. The sudden smash of glass startled her but not him. His lusterless eyes did not blink or swerve from her. Here was a man, she mused, incapable of fear, only of madness. A practicing psychiatrist, she sketched a profile of a loner, quiet, monosyllabic, mostly unknowable, with no women in his life except disposable ones. He did not frighten her, but he greatly interested her.

  “Are you staying here at the hotel?”

  “I have a room,” he said in a way that made it sound permanent. “What color was your hair when you were young?”

  “Sort of blond.” A hand supported her chin. “Why do you ask?”

  “When I imagine somebody naked I want to get it right.”

  Years ago she had had a patient who physically resembled him, a seducer who planted strawberries on women’s throats for their husbands to see. She interpreted the behavior as cruelty, but upon reconsideration saw it as a death wish and was not surprised when months later she read of his murder in the Miami Herald. Sipping her drink, she said, “That’s good, Chico, very good. That would thrill some women.”

  “I know a place, if you like, we could go swimming in private.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “For the adventure.”

  “And do you plan to swim in the buff or keep on your underpants?”

  “I don’t wear underpants, never have.”

  She lightly crushed out her cigarette. “I’d think the material of your trousers would irritate your thing.”

  “I’m not circumcised.”

  “That would explain.”

  A boy in the uniform of the hotel came out on the patio, glanced about, and then wound his way to their table. “You have a telephone call,” he said, and Chico rose. The boy, Cuban, smiled at her.

  “Will you be here when I get back?” Chico asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “This is interesting.”

  She watched him stride into the hotel, shoulders squared, suggestive of the military, in which she could easily picture him serving. In his absence she smoked another cigarette and gazed off at flower beds in the shape of coffins, as if the hotel management had been killing off guests and burying the bodies. He returned with less of a stride and sat down without drawing in the chair.

  “I’m afraid I have to leave.”

  “The call must’ve been a woman,” she said with a smile. “Are you popular, Chico?”

  He finished his beer. “You haven’t told me your name.”

  “That’s true. Tell me something instead: what brought you to my table?”

  His eyes pondered her. Then he removed his wallet and produced a brittle snapshot, the colors dim, the edges smooth as silk from wear. The picture was of a woman, not old, not young, whose expression seemed set in the tragic tension of someone about to be hurt. She stared hard at it.

  “It looks nothing like me.”

  “To me it does,” he said and returned the picture to his wallet. “What is your name?”

  She plucked one from the air. “Esther.”

  • • •

  The same sun that scored Florida fired the roses that walled the front porch of Drinkwater’s Funeral Home. Inside, his back to the two glorious caskets, the Congregational minister said, “Time softens sorrow, scatters it with the winds, but always leaves behind irreducible kernels. This is the human condition. The kernels we carry to our own graves.”

  The resonance of the minister’s voice carried beyond the seated gathering to the standing overflow in an adjoining room, where Chief Morgan, a ghost of his own clinging to him, gently tried to shrug it off. Alone, he might have sought to embrace it.

  Friends and neighbors seated closest to Lydia Lapham and her aunt felt elect, privileged, entitled. Most had known the deceased all their lives. May Hutchins, her hair an hour out of curlers, had shared her most intimate secrets with Flo Lapham when they were classmates at Pearson Grammar School. Malcolm Crandall, the town clerk, had been Earl Lapham’s best friend in high school. He remembered Earl’s first car, purchase price thirty dollars, an old Buick that snorted like a hippopotamus and farted clouds of oil.

  “Let us pray,” the minister said, and Doris Wetherfield, seated toward the rear, bowed her head. She had lowered the hem of the dress Flo Lapham was wearing in the casket.

  Lydia Lapham’s head was not bowed. Her ear would accept only one voice at a time, which at the moment was her father’s, full of pride on that sunny day she had graduated from nursing school, the top of her class. She was no longer that person, she had shed skin too many times since, and now she sat with her aunt, the only family she had left. When her aunt began to sob, she gripped the older woman’s hand. The minister, an austere figure in gray, said, “Amen.”

  Everett Drinkwater took charge, each maneuver scripted, his pale hand under Miss Westerly’s elbow as she and Lydia rose awkwardly to their feet. Matt MacGregor, clumsy in an ill-fitting civilian suit more appropriate for winter, threw out an unneeded hand of support to Lydia, who appeared stunned by the crowd of faces behind her, more than she had anticipated or wanted.

  Outside, Mr. Drinkwater and an assistant queued cars into a caravan that stretched up the street. Motors idled, headlights glowed in the sunlight, and pennants fluttered from aerials. The caskets would emerge later, their insides stripped of certain niceties, such as the pillows on which the heads of Flo and Earl rested. Randolph Jackson took the time to press the hands of people who every two years returned him to his selectman’s seat. “A sad day,” he said as a cat’s-paw of warm air reshaped his sandy hair and revealed the bald spot. Then he climbed into his Audi, which still smelled new. His wife turned to him from fixing her face and said, “What if that lieutenant is right?”

  He cast soupy eyes at her and frowned, which deepened the grooves in his spotty brow. He scrunched down behind the wheel in a way that doubled his chin and made a loaf of his belly. Then the side doors of the funeral home opened, and he straightened. “Here they come,” he said.

  At the cemetery, he breathed in air awash with the richness of the grass and the scent of potted plants in high bloom. Some of the grander tombstones carried ornate engravings that could have been diagrams for entering the other world. With the frown back on his face, he skirted the periphery of the crowd and surreptitiously approached Chief Morgan. He kept his voice low, his chin high. “I’ve heard some disturbing things about one of our officers, Jim. I hope to God it’s not true.”

  At the double grave site, Fred Fossey, wearing the full regalia of the American Legion, removed the flag draping Earl Lapham’s casket, wrapped it into official folds, and presented it to Lydia Lapham, who was gazing into the crowd, picking out faces from the hospital. A doctor she considered a stout bottle of quack medicine with an imposing label stared back with eyes full of sympathy. Another doctor, whom she had expected to see, defied distance by seemingly planting his face in front of hers.

  “Let me,” Matt MacGregor said and relieved her of the unexpected weight of the flag, for suddenly she was very tired and queerly light-headed and suspected she could easily stretch out on air that would float her away. Then she felt MacGregor’s arm around her, supporting her, for tears were gushing. “Ashes to ashes,” the minister said and tossed dirt here, then there, from the ceremonial handful.

  “I can depend on you to do what’s right,” Randolph Jackson said, moving closer to the chief. “I know you well enough for that.”

  Morgan seemed to shake his head. “The only sure truth you can say about a person is that he was born, lived awhile, and died. Beyond that, everything’s open to argument.”

  Jackson shot him a wary look, but then relaxed, for he felt he understood. “Your wife’s here, isn’t she, Jim?”

  “I hope not,” Morgan said. “I hope there’s a better place.”

  The crowd began to disperse. Jackson threaded his
way toward his wife, and Morgan stayed in place with his arms dangling. He looked to his left, his right; he was alert like an animal. In a sea of sunshine the crowd was going one way and a lone figure another. He pursued it, first with a hurried step and then in a trot that quickened. The figure was rabbity, jerky, fleeing into the warmth of the day, with Morgan keeping pace for a while. Zigzagging, dodging tombstones, it began to give ground, but Morgan was losing wind. He stopped, took a breath, and brought a cupped hand to his mouth.

  “Junior!”

  • • •

  He had his boarding pass in hand when a woman stepped in his way. She was a vigorous little creature in a tight top and striped shorts, with a touch of humor in the pertness of her nose. Her eyes were black olives. “On the go again, huh, Chico?”

  She knew the name he went by, but not his real one. She was an undercover security officer at the airport, with training in martial arts and with a weapon in her shoulder bag. Two years before, she and a partner had detained him — indeed, she had flung him against a wall, spread him, and cuffed him — but later a phone call persuaded them to let him go, much to her chagrin.

  He smiled. No hard feelings then and none now.

  She glanced at his carry-on. “What have you got in there, something I shouldn’t see?”

  “Would you like to look?” he asked.

  “What good would it do me?” She winked with rueful irony. “Have a pleasant trip, Chico.”

  Twenty minutes after he boarded the jetliner he felt it leave the ground, claw the air, and presently sock itself into a shaft of steel blue sky. Soon the hostess served him a mixed drink, which he sipped slowly. His seatmate was an elderly woman with a wispy look, as if a breeze had brought her in. Turning to him, she said, “I’m always tense the first ten minutes, then I get over it.”

  He nodded politely and rattled the ice in his drink. A man across the aisle thrashed a newspaper about as if surely something in it must be worth reading.

  “I can tell you travel a lot,” the woman said. “The way you sit, relax, take everything for granted. That’s simply marvelous.” Then her hands were busy, and soon she was showing him color Kodaks of her grandchildren. She was on her way to see them. “It’s so hard to buy for them. I usually give them money.”