by Paul Lederer
Sarah was studying his unframed photographs, pinned or stapled to a sheet of pressed cork attached to the wall. A few shots of the ocean at sunset, the dying red sun communing with the conquering black sea; a few nude shots of Michelle who worked in the donut shop and posed with a huge stuffed panda bear, supposedly lost in some night reminiscence at the window. Her body was too voluptuous, her face without the character to express anything much. As a result, she looked like a pudgy woman staring at an outside clothesline hoping her underwear would soon dry. There was an unfruitful series of double-exposed photos, an attempt to imitate the Dutch artist Escher’s graphics, in which the same figures rose from the sea where their forms suggested fish and rose to the lighter sky where the spaces between them were perceived as birds in flight. The photographic representation was totally unsatisfactory; an experiment gone wrong. His fish could not be caught in the proper perspective and the gulls above appeared ready to dive and devour them. In the end, he had achieved nothing more than some semi-interesting double-exposures of fish and birds. There were a few comic shots of animals: a squirrel riding a cocker spaniel’s head and a sow with a kitten nursing along with its litter, for which the local newspaper and one defunct area magazine had paid March a little grocery money. Looking at his work now, through the eyes of Sarah, he felt a lack of artfulness. She however, seemed fascinated by it all: the contrasts in the black and white prints with their contrived shadows, the brilliance of the sunsets in color. Her eyes shined; she might have been touring the Louvre.
It was that look, he realized, that had captured his attention on the pier that morning. An innocent fascination with life itself, in all of its aspects.
‘Well, I try,’ he said as she turned her head, her huge brown eyes pleased, offering that smile which was hesitant and amused all at once.
Don walked into his bedroom and dug through his dresser and closet. Shrugging, he emerged with the only suitable garment he could find: a faded blue bathrobe. On the way, he grabbed a towel she could use on her hair. His intention was to let her dry out, make her a hot cup of coffee to sip on while he went out searching for her mother. At least the girl was out of the rain. Maybe the storm would let up soon….
She was naked, standing by the heater, when he re-entered the room. Her wet dress lay in a pile beside her.
It was totally unnerving; her body was graceful and completely charming. Erotic. Yet her eyes as she turned to him were only childlike. He understood Sarah’s mother’s anger and concern now. She was a woman, but was not. After all, there were pictures of nude women on the wall. He had instructed her to remove her clothes, and so she had. How could she even imagine shame, this innocent?
‘Here, put this on,’ he said, handing her the bathrobe at arm’s length. He sat down on a white-painted wooden chair, studying her thoughtfully as she wrapped the robe around her with sublime grace.
‘Now I see, little one,’ he said. ‘Now I see. I didn’t understand before. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you until I can get you back to your family. I’m sure they’re worried about you.’
Sarah dried her hair, carefully folded the towel and put it on the photograph-strewn table. She looked carefully at – without touching – March’s Nikon and the old Deardorff with its long 120mm lens; his still-unrepaired Hasselblad, the Pentax he had bought out of impulse and never yet even loaded with film and the brand new Canon digital he had purchased just to experiment with, had not even finished paying for, and already detested.
She was not to touch things she did not understand.
Grandfather had taught her that many years ago at the old workbench when he had pinched her fingers in the big thing for dropping one of his experiments. Now, Sarah tied the robe and went back to studying the photographs on the wall, as the man watched her, saying nothing.
There are so many worlds in this world, Sarah thought. It all depends on who is looking; which way the eye is turned. Where the sun happens to be. The same street looks so different if a dog happens to be running across it; the sea so oddly different once it begins to rain. The man knew that. He was a thoughtful man, Sarah decided, very much so to understand these things.
And she liked his crooked smile.
‘All right,’ Donald March said, rising, ‘I’ve made a decision. I’m going to leave you here for a little while. Can I trust you to stay right here while I’m gone?’ He was speaking with extreme care again. Again it caused Sarah to smile. ‘I’m going out to find your mother, OK?’
He ran a hand over his hair and asked, ‘Listen – I know you can’t, but it would help me if … can you write down your mother’s name? Your address? A phone number?’ With soft exasperation he looked into her eyes. ‘Anything? I really want to help, but I haven’t a clue where to begin.’
She looked helplessly around until Donald, ripping through a drawer, found the stub of a pencil and an old envelope to give her. In a small cramped hand she wrote with painful slowness:
Sarah.
‘Yes, I know. That is your name, right? Sarah. I heard your mother call you that.’ And in what long-ago time had someone taken a little girl and taught her to form the letters with such crooked painstakingness? Donald looked into those large brown eyes so bright with inquisitiveness.
‘Do you know your mother’s name?’ he asked again. ‘Where she is now? Where do you live, Sarah?’
Well, of course she did! What funny questions this young man asked.
‘Can you write it down?’ Don pleaded.
Sarah smiled, placed the stubby pencil and the envelope down on the table and returned to studying the photographs on the wall.
‘I know that you know,’ Donald said. ‘But they never taught you to write anything but your name, did they?’
She half-turned, her pointing finger touching a photograph of the dying sun above a tragic sea. The shadow of a lone, distant gull was caught in the upper right hand corner. Donald liked that picture himself. He had caught a last line of brilliant gold, flashing through the somber mauve and deep rose-hues of sunset. It was more luck than skill, but camera art often is.
The rain continued to drive down, as hard as ever, the wind blowing strong enough to rattle the windowpanes and whine through the gaps between window and frame.
‘All right,’ Donald said with a reluctant sigh, ‘I’m going to try to find your mother. You stay here, Sarah, do you understand?’ It wouldn’t do to have her wandering the streets in the rain, half-dressed and confused.
Yes, she nodded. Of course she understood.
What she did not understand was why Eric had been running down the pier, and why he had been crying and bleeding. And why the naked lady in the picture was looking out of the window. Did she, too, wonder where her daddy had gone?
‘I’ll be back, Sarah. You stay put,’ Donald March ordered, shrugging into his green quilted jacket, he put on his baseball cap. Zipping his jacket up, he spared Sarah one last wondering look, tugged his cap low over his eyes and went out to follow the splintered wooden steps down to the rainswept street.
‘Well, Edward, what now?’ Sal Dennison asked. The bearded attorney sat tilted back in his huge green-leather swivel chair, fingers steepled before his chest. He had removed his coat. His gray vest was partially unbuttoned. Square gold cufflinks reflected lamplight. He had put on a pair of half-round spectacles worn low on his nose. Outside, the sky was gray and tumultuous. Distant lightning briefly illuminated the darkly-tinted office window overlooking the sea. ‘We have a problem don’t we?’
‘Don’t let it worry you, Sal. It can be handled,’ Edward said with barely subdued frustration, ‘I can get my father’s signature. I’ll sign of course, and I will sign for Sarah as conservator.’
‘And your aunt will sign?’
‘Just try to keep Trish from signing!’ Edward said. ‘She wants this all wrapped up even more than you and I do.’
‘Yes…’ Dennison fiddled with a gold fountain pen briefly, ‘that still leaves us with problems. After
that grand little exhibition here – the fistfight, that is – what about your brother? Will Eric balk?’
‘He has no reason to. I know he needs the money. It’s a matter of me finding him, I guess. I doubt he would be willing to come back to the office.’ Edward stood staring out the window where cold, rapid rivulets raced across the dark glass. ‘Damn it, Sal! You know how much I want this wrapped up as well.’
‘Yes,’ the attorney said, allowing his swivel chair to spring upright. ‘I do, Edward, but Golden West, as much as they want the property, won’t sit still for endless delays because of your family problems. And I do represent them, Edward … I don’t have to remind you that they do have an option on three hundred acres on the other side of Bottleneck Creek.’
‘I know, yes,’ Edward said impatiently.
‘And,’ Dennison reminded his fellow lawyer, ‘I do have other business to conduct in this office. Please understand me….’
‘I do understand you,’ Edward said sharply.
‘I was given to understand that everyone could amicably and in his own best interest, execute the contracts. I do not understand how deeply the rape.…’
‘The contracts will be executed! Today!’ Edward flared up. He was immediately apologetic about his burst of anger. He had sworn years ago that he would repress any tendencies toward the sort of fury that was his father’s terrible flaw. ‘Sorry, Sal,’ Edward added, ‘I’ll find them. I’ll hand-carry the contracts. If they can’t sit down together for half an hour to get this done, I’ll see to it that they sign individually.’
‘Today?’ Dennison asked dubiously.
‘Today. Yes – that’s what I said, isn’t it? I’ll have Father’s and Aunt Trish’s signature within ten minutes. She’s downstairs; he’s out in the car. I’ll find Eric.’
‘And do you know where your mother is, Edward? I mean, this is quite serious, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I know how to find her,’ Edward said tightly. ‘Don’t worry, Sal, you have no idea how much I want to get this all over and done with.’
And be gone from this miserable town. And live a life in which contact with his sad, broken and damned family was limited to an exchange of Christmas cards.
Sal Dennison had reached into his desk drawer and now he removed a fresh sheaf of legal-sized documents which he pushed across the desk, his eyes cast down.
‘The commitment papers, Edward.’ Sal said, still not lifting his eyes to Edward’s.
‘Yes, yes,’ Edward said. He snatched up Dennison’s gold pen and removed the cap shakily. He signed all three copies with rapid flourish. That was done at least. One less thing to worry about. If the rest of this mess wasn’t resolved soon, Edward thought they might come and drag him off to an institution.
‘I’ll find them,’ Edward promised, picking up the stack of bound contracts to stuff them into his normally carefully-ordered briefcase. Then, with an unseen nod, he went out of Dennison’s office, leaving the bemused attorney to sit staring at the commitment papers Edward Tucker had just signed, before he tossed them into the wire basket on his desk with a shrug, and buzzed Sylvia to ask for coffee.
The sea was Eric’s emotional brother, his mentor. Wildly flailing and churning, ranting against the pilings of the dark pier and the never-changing, precariously brooding, black bluffs stretching far into the northern distances. It slashed bitterly against the bracings of the long, empty, desolate pier where no other soul existed. Only Eric’s own dark sea-soul – ravaged by the bitter storm – churned to wild, eternal, unpredictable motion. A single lost gull white and shrieking; an endless battering of rain and the inflexible cycle of the sea continued despite the storm. A frothing madness. An inward-rushing attempt at emotional coitus. The rebuff of the dark headlands. Some broken estuary where the tide briefly is, briefly rested and beloved sea and land could co-join. A swirl of angry tide, a hissing withdrawal from the rocky beach as it was rebuffed endlessly … sea dreams. All they knew of the sea was that it collected in mercury-gray tidepools when the dream-storm was ended. These were the residues of rages past, a spattering of quiescence detested for its stagnant after-soul, crowded with unspeakable, strangely flapping, quite desolate mud-colored sea life. And yet the sea continued to rage forward, to beat its futile head against the unyielding rock.…
I am mad. If I wasn’t always mad, I am surely mad now.
Eric’s heart was beginning to slow. He had his forehead bent to the cold wooden rail at the very end of the pier.
‘I should have known better!’ he shouted into the buffeting wind. Had he actually believed anything could be different this time? Returning like a dog who has been kicked into the alley without any real memory of transgression.
‘It’s a lie,’ he said, lifting his bloody face to the icy wind. It was a lie! But it had been repeated so often that at times he couldn’t force himself to remember the truth. The endless repetition had transformed the accusation into truth, even in his own mind at times. Some crime committed in a dark, savagely-scarred night dream. The prisoner stands accused and is judged guilty: by his own admission … of dreams. The nightmare is the admission….
Eric straightened up, reached shakily for a handkerchief and wiped the blood from his lumpy face.
‘I hate you! I hate you, Raymond! Father.…’ he added with a twisted expression.
What bastard Fate had deposited his small soul among that twisted family? Family. Now that was funny. Is that what you would call a nest of mis-fitting grotesques like them? Some poison crept in their veins. Everyone said it was because of what had happened to Sarah, but that was not true. There had always been a sickness dwelling among them.
As a child, he did not think there was a night when he had gone to sleep without hearing Raymond roaring at Mother; without her shrieking back. Only Edward seemed to have survived unscathed somehow – maybe because he was always lost in his books.
‘If only I didn’t need the god-damned money.’
But he did. His adolescent ambition had been music. He had dreamed of applause, rapid acclaim, independence. But the truth, painfully discovered, was that he did not have the talent or the showmanship or the sheer perseverance to make much of that career. He had left home with the mockery ringing in his ears, to make an attempt at it; a swelling bravado in his heart. But the truth was, he had only left home to be leaving, and years of weekend gigs at cheap roadside bars had done more to complete his collapse than to free him. A dozen pairs of hands clapping almost apologetically; sleeping in a van with drugged-up musicians. Standing beside a muddy road somewhere in Nebraska until a truck slowed down and stopped and two bearded farm boys got out and beat him senseless, taking his last twenty dollars and his battered Gibson Les Paul guitar.
And so Cain cometh home.
And so Adam beat the shit out of him.
Original Sin: oh, yes, there is such a thing – much larger than some Biblical concept. It was all around, hovering like a stormy sky. We are all guilty … of something called know-not-what … just ask Sarah.
Just ask Sister Sarah.
With his hands anchored deep in his pockets, Eric started back toward the shore, the wrathful rain driving down against his back.
Finish it! Be gone…. He smiled to himself, thinking: there must be some place east of Eden if one could only scrape up the bus fare.
Ellen didn’t feel well at all. It had been all right earlier; fun, in fact. More fun than she had had for a long time. She had liked dancing with that crazy cowboy with the green eyes until he had started buying her straight shots of whisky. Then she had thrown up in the bathroom, losing her blue hat in the pool of toilet vomit. By the time she returned, the cowboy had taken up with a much younger blonde. That hadn’t mattered much. She didn’t want to dance anymore. She sat alone at the end of the bar trying to kill her whisky-sickness by drinking more whisky, while the sad-eyed bartender polished glasses and wondered what to do with her.
Outside it was still raining madly. Ike, the bartender,
didn’t want to throw her out in this weather, nor did he want to cut her off. Sometimes people got crazy when you refused to serve them; he didn’t want anyone screaming and cursing in the bar. It was warm and peaceful inside; the Country music played softly and the atmosphere was subdued and friendly. The customers were quietly gentle; they appreciated the refuge from the storming day, it seemed. All he could do was to try to slow the lady down, the bartender decided. Water her drinks if he had to; that was what he had been doing for a while when, sometime later, she pitched forward off her barstool and split her forehead wide open on the floor.
Shit! Edward stood in the rain staring out along the length of the deserted pier. That was where he had hoped to find Mother and Sarah. He had told his mother he would pick them up there, but that was before it had started raining. Of course they would have sought shelter, but where? He should have known that today would implode, self-destruct. He walked on now through the rain which had lightened slightly. The Buick was gone when he had left to find Raymond. His father had driven off somewhere; why, God only knew.
Aunt Trish had signed the contracts with hasty anxiety, wanting to be done with all of this. That was all Edward wanted!
Finishing in Dennison’s office, he and Trish had exited the building to find the Roadmaster gone.
‘He told me he’d wait,’ Edward said in exasperation. ‘He promised me…’ he stared up the empty street.
‘I’ll go on in a cab,’ Aunt Trish had said with tight-lipped determination. ‘I can’t wait for him, wherever he is. I’m sorry, Edward. I can’t wait for him. I can’t do anything more. I’ve done all I could for this family. I’ll be waiting at the house.’
She managed to flag down a taxi within minutes and as Edward watched, the heavy-hipped woman positioned herself in the back of the cab and pulled the door shut. Watching the yellow cab draw away from the curb, Edward wished he could be so lucky. Just go to the house, pack a suitcase and leave.
Unfortunately he had his obligations; he had to find Mother, Sarah, Eric. And now Raymond had taken off on him as well.