No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  “Yes, go on,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t stop now,” she said with huskiness.

  His eyes were on Bowman. “The chief has a habit of stepping out of line with other men’s wives. He’s the fox in the chicken coop.”

  “My husband, I’m quite certain, has heard of the chief’s recklessness.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I just wanted to be sure.”

  Bowman spoke from the confines of a frozen face. “Get out.”

  He rose with grace and a slight squeak from his alligator shoes. His bearing was military. “Don’t feel too bad, Mr. Bowman. You’re not the only one.”

  • • •

  She was in her bedroom, where she had finished brushing her hair. Still sitting at her dressing table, where jewelry lay on velvet, she removed her earrings, golden teardrops with delicate engraving. When she rose, her body shimmered through her frail gown like light penetrating glass. Her stride into the adjoining bathroom highlighted the indisputable aristocracy of her legs. When she came out, he was standing there with a blue-steel .38-caliber revolver. His face had thawed. In his brow were lines drawn as if in hell.

  “You know what I’m going to do,” he said.

  “No, Gerald, what are you going to do?”

  He pointed the revolver at her, and she did not budge. He squeezed the trigger. In its own way the click resounded as loud as a shot would have.

  “I knew it wasn’t loaded,” she said.

  He lowered his arm. “One day it could be.”

  She approached him slowly, smiled into his face, kissed his cheek. Looking into his eyes, she pressed her hand to the front of his trousers, shaping her fingers to the outline of his penis as if it were a roll of bills. “Do you want to?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Much later he switched on the light and wrote out a check with a Mont Blanc fountain pen. The ink was sepia, which gave a timelessness to her name. This was a game they had not played in years. She looked at him from her pillow.

  He said, “Why, Arlene? Tell me why.”

  “Happiness is other times, Gerald, never now.”

  He left the check in the light of the lamp and got to his feet. The ghost of his body lay damp on the sheet. He found his robe, colorful like a boxer’s, and put it on. “How many others?”

  “No others. Morgan used me. The way you use your secretary.”

  He let that slide and stared at her, his mouth a straight line. She lay uncovered. Her face was as fresh as soap stripped of its wrapper. Her skin was lucent between the ribs. He said, “So the chief’s had himself a good time.”

  “You could say that. Before me it was the ball player’s wife. Now it’s Christine Poole, if you can imagine that.”

  “The man knows his business, does he?”

  “I call him Chief Cock.”

  “You’re pushing me.”

  “No, dear. You’re asking. But you needn’t worry. He may have more oomph, but you have your tricks.”

  Reaching down, he wrapped his hands around her narrow feet and squeezed. Her painted toenails glared as if he had drawn blood. “I don’t want to hear.”

  “Then get even.”

  “With you?”

  “With him, you fool!” She kicked free. “Take away his job. Get him fired. Leave him naked.”

  • • •

  Lydia Lapham got home from the hospital at eleven-forty and resolved to drink no more coffee, but soon she had a pot perking. It had been a stressful evening. The brief encounter with Reverend Stottle was upsetting, but the later arrival of a woman with razored wrists was unnerving, as if with mutilation the poor creature were defeminized, altered, checked. At eleven on the dot, as she was quitting her shift, she heard that Mrs. Dugdale had died, a blessing, but it unsettled her anyway.

  In the living room she put on lights and drew the shades. On the coffee table was a slim volume of poetry she would never read. Most poems touched on things she did not want to think about. At the kitchen table, a window open to the noises of the night, she sat rigidly with her coffee until a muscle loosened in her back. On the table were the two pages of her father’s unfinished letter to his wartime friend in Michigan. With his fountain pen she wrote a postscript. The words were black threads rising, dipping, curling, and looping. He died with her, she ended it.

  Upstairs, trembling a little for no obvious reason, she began running a hot bath. In her bedroom was a pot of shasta daisies for replanting, a gift of sympathy from the hospital administrator. Undressing, she threw her uniform into a corner and then the rest of her things. Naked, she was frozen milk. Her nipples were wintry points. The sinister part of tragedy was the aftermath, the scouring of feelings, the trivializing of thought, for which her nurse’s training had not prepared her. One could tear the head off a perfectly healthy flower and not feel bad about it.

  She tilted the large dresser mirror, aiming it at the bed, which was tightly made. Lying atop the powder blue chenille spread, she regarded the shape of her legs, the size of her feet. With her eyes in the mirror, she lifted her knees and viewed herself as a lover might. The sight did not seem appetizing, but Matt, and Frank before him, had always found it so.

  She took her bath and went to bed. An hour later, she was still awake. Clad in a sweater and dark trousers, she slipped out into the night. Trees were moon-washed. The night air pushed at her. She knew the car would be there. His head was tipped back. Chief Morgan was asleep. Some watchdog! She reached through the open window and touched his shoulder. He came awake instantly, his eyes full of false light.

  “Come in,” she said.

  8

  At the cemetery a large maple quivered with life. Leaves quaked. Birds flew in and out. And Fred Fossey stood with bowed head at the graves of Flo and Earl Lapham, no stone in place yet, only two markers, with a toy flag behind Earl’s. “Bless you both,” he said aloud, feeling the sun on his neck. The morning was hot, the sky as blue as the grass was green. The grass sent up its spiciest scents.

  His gaze dwelled on Flo’s marker. All these years in love with her, so much in love, with fantasy inherent in every thought he’d ever had of her. “You never knew, did you, Flo? Never for a moment. Or maybe you did. I bet you did. I hope so.” He wiped the sweat from his neck with a handkerchief. “I’m sorry, Earl. That wasn’t for your ears.”

  “You talking to yourself, Fred?”

  May Hutchins, with flowers in her hand, had come up behind him. He was not embarrassed, not in the least — why shouldn’t the world know? “I was talking to them both,” he said.

  May nodded with understanding. “They say the dead don’t hear, but I wonder.”

  “They hear, but they don’t answer.”

  The cut flowers in her hand were from her garden. She crouched, ladylike, and lay them between the markers. The sun added fire to the curly red ends of her hair.

  “I should’ve brought some too,” he said, watching her rise. “Ethel’s got some nice petunias. I could’ve brought those.”

  “Mine can be from both of us,” she said with more understanding than he had realized, which touched him deeply.

  “I’m not trying to slight Earl, but it’s Flo I came to see.”

  “We both loved her.”

  “How did you know I did?” he asked, and she nudged him with an elbow.

  “Hell, Fred, everybody’s known that since high school. Flo once said to me if she hadn’t married Earl she’d have married you.”

  The last part was a white lie that darkened as soon as she said it, but he appreciated it all the same. With emotion he looked down at Flo’s marker, from which emanated a mournful indifference. He said, by the way, “Old Mrs. Dugdale died last night.”

  “Good Lord in heaven, I didn’t know she was still alive. Who told you?”

  “Ethel. She calls Drinkwater every morning to find out who’s come in. That way she doesn’t have to wait for the paper.”

  “God almighty, I wondered how s
he found out those things so fast.”

  “You take the telephone from Ethel’s ear, you’ll find she doesn’t have a head, just pure Bensington air.”

  “That’s not nice, Fred.”

  “You don’t know the things I have to put up with.”

  “A major part of life is putting up with things, don’t you know that?” Her elbow brushed him. “Could you move away for a while? I want to talk to my friend alone.”

  “I was just going anyway,” he said, though he shuffled off reluctantly. On his way to his car, he passed the stones of Vietnam War veterans, whose battles, home and abroad, were over and whose ailments, physical and mental, were part of the soil. He also noted those who needed new flags.

  Nearing his car, he glimpsed on the ground a flag honoring one of the World War II boys, and he detoured to tend to it. Respectfully he returned it to the plastic holder and stepped back to read the name on the stone, which seemed to stand taller now as if it had risen a little out of the sod. The grave was that of Chief Morgan’s father.

  Taking another step back, he snapped off a little salute. From the maple a cardinal trilled, a jay squawked.

  • • •

  It was only a little after seven when crows woke Lydia Lapham with hysterical throat-clearing caws, as if a murderer were among them. She rose from her bed with too little sleep. Morgan, who had had less, was gone. Where was he? Her head couldn’t tell her, and her nerves didn’t want to know. A robe made her decent.

  With the uncoordinated movements of broken sleep she stumbled past the dresser and knocked over a wicker wastebasket that contained the foil from a condom used twice and forsaken the third time.

  The bathroom mirror showed her the state of her eyes and echoed the raggedness inside her head. A smile would have brought a small explosion to her face. Brushing her teeth, she remembered he had entered her with a sense of trespass and proceeded cautiously until she urged, “You can go harder than that, I won’t break.” After that, he had the snort of a bull, she the low of a cow. That was the way it was, the way she wanted it. Inadvertently, with his voice tangled in her hair, he called her Elizabeth, which didn’t bother her in the least. Indeed, she relished being two sides of a spinning disk, flesh and spirit drawing on a common muscle the way darkness and light swing off the same hinge.

  She brushed her hair and tightened her robe. She descended the stairs, expecting to see him in the kitchen, embarrassed by the prospect. Would his mouth fly open for a kiss? She hoped not. Would the healing qualities of his voice translate to the morning? She suspected not.

  The old coffee thrown out, a fresh pot awaited her, along with a note written in his hurried hand with her father’s pen. See you soon.

  There should have been more than that, much more. She crumpled the note. With bitter anger she sailed to a window. His car was gone.

  With her robe wrapped tighter than ever around her, she sat in the breakfast nook with her coffee and watched birds assault the feeder that dangled outside the bow window. The feeder was a plastic tube with a short perch and a hole that accommodated only smaller birds. A finch was at it now. The finch ignored her and fed.

  The coffee gradually brought her back into existence, but she was still groggy. Her hands trembled. Her legs were not all that steady when she moved to the living room and let in light. With her head on one of her mother’s fancy toss pillows, she stretched out on the sofa, where she napped an hour and woke partially restored. The telephone rang moments later. She scurried to it. It was he.

  “Damn you,” she said with joyful anger. “Damn you twice.”

  • • •

  Eschewing the buffet, which reminded him of the military, Clement Rayball breakfasted in the formal dining room at the motor inn. The waitress gave him a dish of strawberries and a pitcher of cream for his cornflakes. His newspaper was opened to a story in the sports section. The Sox were back from a long road trip. Last night they had beaten Cleveland, Clemens the winning pitcher, three hits by Boggs. The only mention of Crack Alexander was that he was benched. A twisted ankle, it claimed.

  At the next table a businessman was smothering himself in pancakes, his lips glittering. Clement glanced at him and flipped pages to the foreign section, where he read a lengthy article about Central America. He was halfway into another article when the businessman rose, billowing from his breakfast and tongue-lashing the waitress, little more than a child, for delaying his check. Closing the paper, Clement caught the man’s eye. “It takes only a little effort to be good to people.”

  “I pay for service,” the man snapped back.

  “No,” Clement said. “You pay for the privilege of being served.”

  The waitress, red-faced, scooted off, and the man said with satisfaction, “She knows she’s not getting a tip.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll double mine,” Clement said.

  The man wheeled by him, then turned back from a safe distance. “What are you, a communist?”

  “A Boy Scout of America,” Clement replied with irony that flew over the fellow’s head.

  Several minutes later he left the dining room and stepped into the growing heat of the morning. The sun had much color. The sky might have been Florida’s. Before slipping into his rental car, which was squatting in the heat, he opened all the windows. By the time he crossed the line into Bensington, the windows were shut and the air conditioner was heaving a chill breath.

  In Oakcrest Heights he drove past the Bowmans’ house and several others and cruised between stone lions into a curving driveway. The house was magnificently pretentious, quite suitable for a millionaire ball player. Two of the three stalls were open in the garage, exhibiting a Rolls Royce and a Jeep Cherokee. He stopped when he spotted a husky, bare-legged man jogging the perimeters of the extended front lawn. He climbed out, waited awhile, then walked toward him. They met on the grass.

  “Something you want?”

  “I’ve been a fan of yours for years,” Clement said. “I was worried. I read in the paper you got benched, bad ankle.”

  “It’s OK, just sore.” In the heat Crack Alexander’s thinning hair lay misdirected on his head, like spill from a bottle. He looked older than his pictures, and bigger. He stood well over six feet, superlative in voice and manner. He lifted his T-shirt with a huge hand and mopped his face.

  “We’re all pulling for you,” Clement said.

  “I ain’t worried. No reason you should be.”

  Inside the man’s bluster, Clement had heard, was an ulcer that wouldn’t heal. “You’ve been having some tough luck lately.”

  “Everybody has that.”

  “Especially on the road, I mean.”

  “I’m home now. It’ll make a difference.”

  Clement toed the grass, which was unnaturally bright, alien under his feet. “You must have one of those chemical trucks doing your lawn.”

  “Yeah, a guy comes, but we’re not gonna have it done anymore. The wife says it turns the worms purple, gives ‘em cancer.”

  “Yes,” said Clement, “those road trips can be grueling. More ways than one.”

  “What d’you mean by that?”

  “You know.”

  “No, you tell me.”

  Clement gazed toward the house, and Crack did too. Clement shrugged sympathetically. “While the cat’s away, the mouse plays.”

  Something bad and big came over Crack’s face. Clement stood his ground.

  “You want to know the guy’s name?”

  • • •

  Sissy Alexander, who seldom used much makeup, sat at her dressing table and tried to paint happy thoughts on her face. It was an old trick performed in high school when she had been the subject of little ditties flattering only in disrespectful ways. Always, no different now, she gave too much and received in return too little.

  She rose in one of her favorite dresses, white, flouncy, and ruffed, in which she was a magnolia blossom, not a little unlike herself at age seventeen, when she had married
Crack and traveled the bush leagues with him, at times believing in him more than he believed in himself, knowing from the first time he laid hands on her that stardom was built into his body. That was when she was all puppy fat and baby talk, when baby talk was the lingua franca of their life together.

  At the high window overlooking the front grounds she saw him jogging along the far edge, competing against himself and the growing heat of the morning. Gone was the long, loping stride with which, with such splendor, he had made it to the bigs. The bigs: that was a world apart from any other. There he had joined deities in form-fitting livery and dug his silver cleats into turf as shiny as brand-new money. And there, from her privileged box seat at Fenway, she had felt a part of the play, certainly part of Crack’s graceful pursuit of a ball in center field, his glove big enough to snare an owl. So too, with Crack at bat, was she aware of the sex symbols of the opposing catcher, who, armored and masked, squatting, wiggled insinuating fingers in his spread crotch. She joined the ecstasy of the crowds rising into screams from a single swing of the bat. The fair youth trotting the bases like a god and doffing his cap to the multitudes was Crack. She felt on her own bottom the congratulatory slaps he received on his.

  The umpires were priests with the power to send players to heaven or hell, except for Crack, whom they could merely relegate to purgatory, where he stayed no more than a day. He was in his prime, he was at the glorious beginning of his career and almost at the zenith. Already his agent was bargaining for super dollars, no amount too outrageous to ask for.

  She bathed and bubbled in the thrilling backwash of his success. She knew all his teammates and called them by nickname. Dewey, whose glove was golden, she had a crush on and blushed whenever he spoke to her. Yaz was a prima donna, though so was Crack, even more so. She was a little afraid of Pudge Fisk but never took her eyes off him when it was his turn to hit. She adored the way he always stepped back a moment from the plate to size up his wood. Everything was sexual, and she had to admit that, especially the way Crack went for his crotch when behind on the count.