The Autumn Dead

by Edward Gorman

  "God, why are we so jealous?"

  "Insecure."

  "But why are we so insecure? I mean, we're bright, we're attractive. We should have at least a little self-confidence."

  "Probably our genes." I looked into the rearview again.

  The black-clad rider still sat astride his black Honda.

  "Your mind is drifting. I can tell over the phone."

  "Sorry."

  "Something wrong?"

  "I don't think so. Just my usual paranoia." Then I said, "You could do me a favor."

  "What?"

  "On your way back to your office, you could stop by my place and pick up some clean clothes for me."

  "In other words, you want to stay all night?"

  "If you wouldn't mind."

  "No, that'd be nice. Only I want the window up."

  Donna is never so happy as when she's covered with goose bumps and sleeping soundly. "Can't we flip for it?"

  "We flipped for it last time and you cheated."

  "Oh, yeah."

  "So if you stay, the window's going to be up. Clean fresh air."

  "Okay. And I appreciate you stopping by my place. I have the feeling I'm going to be busy."

  "Where you going?"

  "Up near the Highlands. Little housing development there. Where Karen Lane claims to be staying."

  "Claims?"

  "Right now, I'm not sure I believe anything she tells me."

  "Good." Donna laughed. "Stay that way."

  They'd built the houses in the mid-fifties, and though they weren't much bigger than garages, the contractors had been smart enough to paint them in pastels—yellow and lime and pink and puce, the colors of impossible flowers, the colors of high hard national hope—and they were where you strived to live in 1956 if you worked in a factory and wanted the good life as promised by the Democrats and practiced by the Republicans. There were maybe four hundred houses in all, interlocked in Chinese puzzle boxes of streets, thirty to a block, glowing in the sunlight, hickory-smoked with backyard barbecues and driveways filled with installment-plan Ford convertibles and DeSoto sedans. The housing development seemed the quintessence of everything our fathers had fought World War II for. My own father never made it there; we always stayed in the Highlands farther down in the valley. But on Sundays we'd drive in our fifteen-year-old Plymouth with its running boards and mud-flaps through the streets of the development while my parents discussed just which type of house they would buy—there being four basic models—when the money came in.

  Now this part of the development was as forgotten as Dwight Eisenhower's golf scores. In the late-afternoon sunlight, the houses looked faded now, and scraped in places and smashed in others, tape running the length of some picture windows, and chain-link fences giving some of the tiny homes the air of fortresses, particularly those with Day-Glow BEWARE OF DOG signs. Blacks and Chicanos were pushing up the valley now, taking the same route as these whites had twenty-five years earlier. But you saw a lot of Dixie-flag decals on the bumper stickers of the scrap-heap cars along the curb, and, you saw in the eyes of the ten- and eleven-year-old kids—already wheezing on cigarettes and walking with their arms possessively around girls every bit as tough as the boys—you saw the sum total of decades of hatred. Meals, at least steady ones, were something you had to fight for up here, and blacks, to feed their own families, meant by one way or another to take your meals. So you had the old lady sew an NRA decal on your work jacket, and you even—just for curiosity's sake—went to the Klan rally held out on an outlying farm. You wouldn't kill a black man personally, but you wouldn't condemn someone who had.

  The Roberts home was freshly painted white, and a new white Chevrolet sedan sat in the drive. The place was so clean and neat, it must have made its neighbors want to come over and smear dirt on it out of sheer envy.

  I parked behind the Chevrolet and got out. A collie came up. He was bathed and smelled clean when he put his front paws on my stomach and asked to be petted. From this angle I could see into the backyard. There was a clothesline filled with white sheets and shirts and the kind of pink rayon uniform waitresses wear. Beneath the sheets flapping like schooner masts in the breeze, I saw a pair of jean-clad legs.

  I went back to the clothesline, the collie keeping me eager and friendly company, and when I got there I said, "Susan?"

  And then I saw the feet go up on tippy-toes and saw her head appear over the sheets.

  "My God," she said.

  She was older now but stillpretty. There was only a little gray in the otherwise auburn hair, and as she came around the sheets, I saw that she'd put on just a few pounds—far fewer than I had—and looked trim in her white blouse and blue man's cardigan and pleasantly snug jeans. In high school she'd always been one of my favorite people—she'd had a kind of wisdom that I attributed to the early loss of her father; she knew what mattered and what did not—and just the way her brown eyes watched me now, with humor and curiosity, I knew she was still going to be one of my favorite people.

  "I don't believe it," she said. Then she smiled. "It's really nice seeing you."

  "It's really nice seeing you." I nodded to the clothes, the pink waitress uniform, the shirts, the sheets. "I didn't know people still hung wash out."

  She laughed. "I do because it's the cleanest smell in the world. Here. Grab one of those sheets and smell it."

  "You serious?"

  "Of course I'm serious."

  So I did and it smelled wonderful, clean as she'd promised. "I see you on TV. On commercials. You're a good actor."

  "I'm learning."

  "It must be exciting."

  "Sometimes." I nodded to the house."How's Gary?"

  For the first time, her face tightened. "He's in there working."

  "He sell anything yet?"

  "Stories here and there."

  "He'll make it. You can't lose faith."

  "That's the funny thing. I haven't, but he has." She shook her head. "He's been writing stories since we were in high school, right? That's why he went into teaching high school English, so he could stay close to what he loved. Well, he finally got some real interest on a novel a few weeks ago—after nearly twenty years of trying—and he burns it."

  "He burned the novel?"

  "Yes. Said it wasn't good enough."

  She shrugged, glanced down at her hands. She had always been pretty rather than beautiful, with an almost mournful grace. It was a grace that had only deepened as she got older. Then she smiled and I wanted to hold her, she gave me that much sense of tenderness. "I'll bet I know why you're here."

  "She here?"

  "No. But she called. Said she'd see us at the reunion dance tonight. You going?"

  "I hadn't planned on it. But if it's the only way I can see her, I will."

  She said, "You're not starting up with her again, are you?"

  "Do I look crazy?"

  "I shouldn't have said that. She's my friend."

  "She can still be your friend and you can still tell the truth."

  "She's pretty messed up. All those husbands." She reached out and took an edge of the sheet and brought it to her nose. "I always associate this smell with my mother. 1 always helped her hang out the wash and I loved to put my face against wet clothes and let them freeze my cheeks till my skin got numb." She inhaled the aroma. "Unfortunately, I can't convince either of my kids to help me. It's a different age." She put the sheet back down. "But I was talking about Karen, wasn't I? She's kind of a basket case."

  "She also may be in some serious trouble."

  "Why?"

  I started to tell her, but then the back door opened and a small, slight man with thinning brown hair caught back in a ponytail and rimless eyeglasses came up. Gary.

  "God," he said and put out his slender hand. We shook. He looked much older than Susan, and much wearier. He was still thin, but it was a beaten thin, and his clothes were redolent of the sixties, faded tie-dye shirt and bell-bottoms, like a hobo looking for the
ghost of Jim Morrison. Gary and I had lived two blocks away from each other in the Highlands, and sometimes I'd gone to his parents' apartment, where we smoked Luckies and drank Pepsis all afternoon and listened to Elvis and Carl Perkins and Little Richard, dreaming of owning custom cars and having as our own the women Robert Mitchum always ended up with. But that was just one side of Gary. He'd had a battered bookcase filled with paperbacks reverently filed alphabetically, everything from Arthur C. Clarke to John O'Hara, from Allen Ginsburg to e.e. cummings (he'd gotten me into Jack Kerouac, an affection I've never lost), and the only time I'd ever seen him hit somebody was one afternoon when a kid drunk on 3.2 beer tripped into Gary's bookcase, knocking a brand-new Peter Rabe to the floor. Gary, not big, not known for his temper, slapped the kid across the face with the precision of a fabled pachuco opening up somebody's gullet with a shiv. Now we stood on either side of twenty-five years and he said, "God, look at you."

  "Look at you."

  "I mean, you look great, Jack. I look like a sixty-year-old man."

  And I heard then what had always been in him—some generalized bitterness, half self-pity, half frustration with a world that had passed your old man by and was intent on doing the same thing to you—and I glanced over at Susan, who watched her husband with the same concern she'd always had for him. In ninth grade she'd simply adopted him in some curious way, part maternal and part sexual, and she had never let go of that impulse or of him down all these long years.

  Gary said, "We see you on TV."

  "Yeah." Then, "How about letting me read some of your stories?"

  "Oh, they're not much. You know that."

  "Really, I'd like to read some." And I wanted to, too. He had the early knack for telling stories, very good ones when he wrote in the vein of the magazines we both liked, Manhunt and Ellery Queen, less so when he affected the styles he found in the New Yorker and the Atlantic.

  "Hubris," he said.

  "Why?"

  Gently, she said, "He wrote a perfectly good detective story three months ago but wouldn't send it off."

  "Why not send it out?"

  "I don't want to be a detective writer. I want to be a real writer."

  And then I remembered how he'd shifted somewhere in college, telling me about it one night behind a couple of joints and some wine, how popular fiction had started to bore him, how it was "genius" or nothing. So now he had a tract home and graying hair in a ponytail and he took the efforts of his heart and mind and burned them. Much as I liked him, and felt sentimental watching him now, he seemed alien to me somehow, aggrieved in a way that he wanted to be literary but which came off as merely pathological.

  One of those awkward silences fell between us, until Susan said, "Jack thinks Karen's in some trouble."

  His head snapped up. His blue eyes looked agitated behind his rimless glasses. "What kind oftrouble?"

  "I'm not sure," I said. "Something to do with a missing suitcase. Do you know anything about it?"

  "Nothing about a suitcase," Susan said.

  "Gary?"

  "No. Nothing," But his air of anxiety continued. He reminded me of how Glendon Evans had acted earlier that afternoon.

  "Kids," Susan said.

  "What?"

  "That's her trouble. No children."

  Gary said, "That isn't hertrouble."

  "No?" I asked.

  "No. Her trouble is that people think she's one thing when she's another."

  "What is she, then?"

  He flushed, seeing how seriously I'd taken his statement.

  Then he put on a big party smile. "You shouldn't pay any attention to a forty-two-year-old man who's gotten more than two hundred rejections in his time."

  I wasn't going to let him go so easily—I wanted to press him on his remark—but Susan said, "I'm afraid you drove out here for nothing."

  "Not for nothing. I got to see you."

  "You should take a few pointers from Jack, Gary."

  He put out his hand again. "Well, I'm going to try to squeeze in a few more pages before dinner. Hope you'll excuse me."

  "I really would like to see some of your work."

  "Sure, Jack." Then he sort of cuffed me on the arm and left.

  We watched him go inside. When he was gone, Susan said, "He has a surprise coming."

  "What?"

  "The detective story he thought he burned. He set it on fire in the fireplace, but I got most of it out. It's only singed."

  "You've read it?"

  "Not yet. But I know it'll be good. I'll send it in even if he doesn't want me to. Am I being a bitch?"

  I laughed. "Somehow, Susan, I can't imagine you ever being a bitch."

  "You always idealized me."

  "I guess it's your eyes and your hands. They were always exceptional."

  "Well, I can't tell you how nice it is to hear things like that. If I didn't have to go get dinner, I'd ask you to keep right on talking."

  I said, "So you don't know anything about a suitcase?"

  "No. She's never mentioned anything."

  "And nobody's tried to break into your place?"

  She said, "My God, no. Now you've really got me scared."

  "I'd just keep everything locked up tight."

  She looked a bit older now, her brow tense with worry. "What's going on, Jack?"

  "I don't know."

  "She really is in trouble, isn't she?"

  "Yes. But as usual, she only gives you half the facts, so you can't be sure what's going on."

  "She's my friend, as I said, but she can be a very frustrating woman."

  "Yeah, I seem to remember that."

  "I felt so bad for you. You know, the way she treated you back then."

  I smiled. "I appreciate that—but it was probably a good experience for me. Taught me about things."

  "You know, I've never believed that. I think a part of you should stay naive and unhurt all your life. I've never understood why pain is supposed to be good for you."

  I laughed. "Now that you mention it, neither do I. But you've been lucky. You've always had Gary, and he's always had you."

  "I'm sure we've both been tempted. Even up here. Among all the unfashionable Highlands people—" saying this with just the slightest sardonic touch—"adultery is the favorite. Until AIDS came along, most of my best friends were always having affairs while their husbands were at the factories. But there was so much pain—" She shook her head. "I suppose it's exciting—"

  "Take my word for it, you haven't missed anything."

  "Somehow I believe you."

  She'd picked up the sheet again; smelled it. Dusk was a gauzy haze in which you could hear the suppertime laughter of children and the stern voices of TV anchormen enumerating the terrors of the day. Setting the sheet back, she said, "I'm glad you finally found some excuse to come up here."

  "Yeah, me, too."

  "I always liked you. Is that okay to say?"

  "That's wonderful to say."

  Then the pain was back in her eyes. "We were going to the reunion tonight, but Gary backed out. The last few months . . ." She shook her head. "Maybe you could take him out for some beer some night. Cheer him up. I can't seem to do it."

  "I'd like that," I said, and I would, though I knew I'd never do it. "I'd like that very much."

  She stared at me then. "You've been lucky."

  "Pretty much."

  "You got out of the Highlands."

  "It's not so bad."

  "You know better." She frowned. "He should've let me work. I could've helped us find a house somewhere else. Living here—it does something to you. You know how it is here, Jack. I just keep thinking maybe he would really have turned out to be a writer if we hadn't lived here. You know?"

  I kissed her on the cheek, caught the scent of the clean wash again, and left. "Maybe he'll be a writer yet."

  She smiled. "You know what his problem is?"

  "What?"

  "He isn't a boy anymore."

  "He's near
ly forty-three. He shouldn't be a boy."

  "But he should still have some fun. He never has any fun. He just writes stories and tears them up and says they're not good enough."

  I let her lean into me and we stood a moment, the air fresh with her laundry and the smell of new grass, and hamburgers grilling on the back porch next door.

  "Can you believe we're twenty-five years older?" she said. "Sometimes it's scary, isn't it?"

  "That's the right word for it, Susan. Scary."

  I hugged her and listened for a time to the children in the dusk, their laughter like pure water, and then I went and got into my car and started back through the maze of streets. I had one other person I wanted to talk to about Karen, somebody I was not looking forward to seeing at all.

  I was halfway there when I happened to glance in my rearview and found that not all my paranoia is unjustified.

  Somebody in black leather on a black Honda cycle was accompanying me.

  Chapter 6

  The highlands has a shopping district of four blocks, stores that even back in the forties looked old, two-story brick jobs mostly, with the names of their original owners carved in fancy cursive somewhere near the roof, the names running to Czech and Irish, with the polysyllables of an occasional Italian name also being included. Growing up, I'd come here with my parents to shop for groceries or to buy something from the hardware store or the auto-parts store or to get a shirt from the secondhand store (when you really had dough you went to Penney's), but shopping centers had killed all that off now—you drove out to one of five malls on this side of town that had taken the place of the merchants who had settled and helped build this area since as far back as 1849, when six thousand people migrated up here from the Virginias. Now you didn't have merchants, you had tavern-owners. That's all that was left now, bars advertising naked women and country-Western music and big-screen Bears games, with a store that sold fancy cowboy clothes or a concrete lot filled with the sad hulks of used cars thrown in to serve the workingmen who bring their paychecks and their beaten hopes down here. When you come here at night, it's not so bad, with workers from the slaughterhouse a mile away and their Czech girlfriends wandering from tavern to tavern like people out of a John Steinbeck novel. But in the daylight you see how everything needs paint and how the walks are cracked, and you see all the names spray-painted on the sides of the taverns, lurid reds and blacks and green on whitewashed surfaces; KILL QUEERS! NIGGERS SUCK! MEXES STAY OUT!