Handling Sin

by Malone, Michael

  “Raleigh, listen…”

  “No. Pardon me, Mingo, but I’d like to take a bath.” Hayes removed his pants and yanked out the belt; having emptied the pockets, he crammed the trousers into the wastebasket. “Mingo, I said—”

  “Oh, sure, go ahead.…VERA! VERA, UP HERE!” Sheffield wedged up the window screen with his shoulder, and stuck half his bulk outside. By holding to the bedpost, Hayes was able to stop himself from charging the elephantine rear and slamming it through the opening.

  As it was, by the time he had helped haul Sheffield back inside, Mrs. Sheffield, still heavily bandaged, had whirled into his bedroom. Paying no attention to Hayes, she rushed as quickly as she could under the circumstances over to her squatting husband and began violently to shake him by the ears. “Why did you do it? Why! I can’t believe it, I can’t! Lord Jesus, be with me now in my darkest days.”

  Raleigh, in shirt and shorts, loudly and pleasurably sighed. “Vera,” he said, “I know it looks bad, but honest to God, Mingo and I are not having an affair.”

  Ignoring this, Vera was now swaying Sheffield side to side by the shoulders. “Tell me I haven’t lived with a man twenty-five years and didn’t know I was married to a murderer!”

  As Mingo, mouth open, could not answer Vera’s extraordinary request, Raleigh shouted at her, “What the hell are you talking about? Who’s been murdered? The police are here about a murder? They think Mingo murdered somebody?”

  “YES. Some woman. All they found is her shoe, and blood in an Oriental rug over in some construction site. And they won’t say why, but they’re looking for Mingo!”

  There was a very hard thump. Mingo had fainted.

  Hayes was not a heartless man. He did not simply step over the pile of bodies—Sheffield’s prone; Vera’s swaddled, atop him—on his way to a bath. Instead, he looked out the window. “The policeman’s gone.”

  Vera wailed, “I know! He said he’d try again later. Oh, it was awful. Mingo just ran out the back and told me, just like that, ‘Say you don’t know where I am.’ ” She slapped her husband a half-dozen pats. “So I did, but lying gives me hives, it really does. It was awful.”

  “Well, obviously, Vera, it can’t be too serious or the police would wait, for Pete’s sake. If they really thought Mingo was a murderer! This is some misunderstanding. Or a joke. So, you just call Chief Hood and get it sorted out. All right? Now calm down.” Raleigh took a glass of stale water from the night table, knelt down and tossed it in Mingo’s face. “The police are only after Mingo for pouring paint on the menswear after Billy Knox fired him.”

  Sheffield spluttering to life, heard his wife shriek, “FIRED him?” and rolled back over, huddled up like a hippopotamus fetus.

  “Look, y’all will excuse me,” said Hayes. “You’ve got a lot to talk about, and I’m going to take my shower. I’m supposed to be in two different places right now. I’m leaving town, Vera, so you’ll have to handle this. I’ve got to drive all the way to Cowstream, and possibly New Orleans.” As Raleigh moved about his bedroom, collecting clean underwear, noticing that someone (Aura, Holly, and/or Caroline) had been borrowing his socks again and hadn’t even bothered to do so surreptitiously, as his top drawer was a shambles. It was clearly not the best hiding place for the thousands of dollars that he had never had a moment to take to the bank; not with Holly so desperate for Grand Nationals modified Fords, and Caroline so capable of spending every cent of it on cosmetics, and Aura so eager to stop the arms race, whatever the cost. Hayes put the money in the pockets of his blue gabardine (his only other spring suit—his only spring suit, now that his seersucker was ripped to shreds).

  As Raleigh chose his wardrobe, he sidestepped the Sheffields, who continued to lie on the rug in tears. “Pardon me,” he remarked each time he passed them. He found enormously satisfying this new style of serene irony.

  “Why does everything have to always happen to me?” Mingo was sniffling. “I never killed a fly.”

  Hayes spoke pleasantly as he chose a tie. “What about your dog you ran over and wouldn’t even admit it?”

  Vera was calling on her Savior to kill Billy Knox immediately for discharging on two weeks’ notice the sweetest man who ever lived.

  “Thou shalt not kill,” smiled Hayes. “Good-bye now. Make yourselves at home.”

  The shower’s hard heat was an immense comfort to the insurance man’s sore body. While under the spray for the longest stay of his life, he began to let himself hope that he could beat back Chaos by organizing it. He would take Betty Hemans to the office. And take Jimson’s bust out of it. He would take his aunt Victoria to his aunt Lovie Clay’s, fifty miles east in Cowstream. He would pick up the trunk and the Bible. He would…well, beyond today, he would not risk thinking. As for Aura’s politics, if she went to jail, the twins could drive out for pizza with Booger Blair in his sports car. As for Mingo’s crimes, let Mingo take care of himself; Raleigh had acquired enough crimes of his own. Anyhow, it wasn’t feasible that Mingo had killed anyone so soon. Even psychoses took a little time to grow. You couldn’t progress from slopping paint on clothes to murdering women overnight. Even madness was bound to keep a schedule.

  Despite the lessons of the past few days, Raleigh Hayes was still far from following those who teach that Chaos reigns over a universe of random black holes. He’d always known Chaos was out there lurking, and he could see now how vast the abyss was, but he still clung by his nails to an edge of the cliff of reason, in the uncrumbled faith that the cliff was there. Nor had recent events led Hayes to consider even the most tangential chance that he himself could be, by the frailest link, involved in this suspected murder—no more than he would ever have thought, reading in the papers of a homicide, that the police would soon come rapping on his door to ask him about it. The police would rap on the doors of the sort of people who did that sort of thing. That he was not the sort so defined Hayes, so constituted the language of his self, nothing in his recent conversations with Pierce Jimson and Kaiser Bill suggested to him that the former thought him a blackmailer; the latter, a killer. This same failure of the imagination kept Hayes from even hearing Vera say that the supposed murder happened in a construction site, much less connecting the news with the fact that he had himself recently tossed two guns of Mingo Sheffield’s into just such a place.

  Nor did it once cross Hayes’s mind that because his secretary Bonnie Ellen Dellwood had disappeared, she might be this unknown victim of foul play; whereas he had no trouble assuming that Bonnie Ellen and her so-called husband were inconsiderate enough to move to California without a moment’s notice. In other words, Hayes was a skeptical man, not a believer. The paranoid sensibility with its faith in the connectedness of outside forces irritated him profoundly— whether in books (he couldn’t stand the espionage novels Aura loved), or in life (he couldn’t stand the way, whenever Mingo was an hour late home from work, Vera came over to predict that he’d died in a crackup on the beltway, and to ask had Raleigh noticed any flaming wrecks off the road). Raleigh’s commitment to the managerial power of the will was such that it was far easier for him to believe people would do idiotic things on purpose than that idiotic things could be, without purpose, done to them. Were this not true, sanity would be a useless skill, was probably a handicap. Therefore, his aunts and uncles were dead because they chose to smoke Lucky Strikes and swill Coca-Colas. He was alive because he chose to jog and fasten his seat belt. He was alive because he insured life against accidents.

  While dressing in the steamy bathroom, Hayes did give the matter of the “murder” some thought. He concluded that the bloodstained carpet and the lady’s shoe were most likely litter dumped by some uncivic slob. It was even conceivable that they were the abandoned evidence of some virgin’s deflowering. These were more reasonable theories than murder.

  But, in fact (as Aura always said when he sneered at her taste for spy novels), stranger things have happened. In fact, the Oriental carpet belonged to Dr. Jasper Kilby, a dentist in
the Forbes Building, who’d made enough money to quit working on Wednesdays, so hadn’t yet discovered his rug was gone. The shoe belonged to Bonnie Ellen Dellwood. As much as it would have shocked Hayes to hear that Bonnie Ellen had been rolled in Dr. Kilby’s rug and dropped in Boyd Joyner’s excavation lot, exactly where Hayes had thrown the guns, it would have shocked Kaiser Bill (who’d put her there) just as much to hear that she’d gotten up and walked away, after Mingo’s pistol struck her in the side of the head and jarred her back to consciousness—though not self-consciousness—for she’d wandered off, bruised and groggy, with no memory of what had happened to her. Who, in any case, would care to remember that her husband had even accidentally almost killed her; who would care to discover that the Forbes janitor (thinking her employer had shot her) had rolled her in a carpet and left her in a construction pit; who would want to know that the Thermopylae police, like frantic princes, were searching all over town for the foot to fit her slipper?

  When Raleigh Hayes, combed, shaved, starched, and in control, finally strode back into his bedroom, he was pleased to find the Sheffields gone. When he walked outside, he was less pleased to find his car gone as well.

  “Aura took it,” called Vera, as Raleigh stomped back around the corner. She stood barefoot in her driveway, wearing a man’s raincoat and looking suspiciously naked beneath it. “She had to use the Fiesta to take my Nukes group, and Barbara Kettell drove Aura’s wagon. She thought you were going to take a nap. But, Raleigh, you’re welcome to the Pinto.” Keys shook glittering in the sun. Already backed to the curbside was the garish yellow vehicle with “God Is My CoPilot” on its smashed rear fender, and KISSY PU on its license plate.

  A seizure, strong as, and otherwise resembling, electrocution, shot Hayes racing toward his house with a vague notion of smashing his body into the siding. But he came to his senses before he even crossed the lawn, took a slow breath, walked back, and accepted his neighbor’s offer. Yes, he was still in control.

  “Keep it just as long as you like.” Vera smiled in her husband’s shy, furtive way. “There’s a bunch of clothes for the Salvation Army in the back. Don’t mind them.”

  “Thank you, Vera. Could I impose on you to tell Aura…” Tell her what? To go into analysis? Move to Moscow? “Tell Aura I’ll call her. I’ll be back late tonight.”

  “BACK? I thought you said you had to go to New Orleans?” “Not tonight.” For Pete’s sake, what business was it of hers? Hayes slid into the front seat, which, like the steering wheel, was covered by a nappy sheep pelt. He turned on the ignition; the key chain was a cube of Lucite with a St. Christopher’s medal in it. Atop the dashboard, a little plastic statue of Jesus was flanked by two rolypoly black Buddhas whose heads jiggled “yes” on springs.

  In parting, Hayes said, in his close-to-howling style, “Vera, in the hypothetical eventuality that my wife is apprehended this afternoon by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, would you mind looking in on the twins, when and if they drop by our house after school? Thank you very much. And speaking of spouses and prison, where’s Mingo?”

  “I couldn’t tell you,” Vera vaguely replied. “Well, I guess this is good-bye. Have a safe trip. God bless you, Raleigh.” To his amazement, she leaned into the car (she was naked beneath the raincoat), and kissed him on the cheek. “The Lord’s with you, Raleigh. He’s with you every step of the way. Bye-bye.”

  “Vera, I’ll be back tonight!”

  But Mrs. Sheffield guessed better than Raleigh. He did not return from Cowstream that evening. He did not see Thermopylae again for two weeks, not until Easter, not until after his world was rearranged in ways he wouldn’t have imagined a few short days ago.

  Of course, Vera had inside information. No sooner had Hayes driven her rattling Pinto onto the beltway than he heard, behind him, “Tschoo! Tschoo! TSCHOOO!”

  No sooner had he cursed a rear tire for blowing out than he felt, at the back of his neck, the cold muzzle of a pistol, and heard the voice that had grated on his nerves for forty years.

  “Raleigh, don’t turn around. I’ve got a gun on you. It’s me. Mingo.”

  “Oh, really?” Hayes turned around anyhow. “Jesus Christ! How many goddamn guns do you own?”

  Tented by the crinolines of Vera’s pink taffeta evening gown, Sheffield raised up from the backseat floor, revolver in hand. His eyes were all pupil; his voice, a hoarse lunatic whine. “Raleigh, they’re not going to get me. I’m not waiting around to be strapped in the gas chamber.”

  “Mingo! You scared me to death! What did you say?! Good God, don’t tell me you actually killed somebody?”

  “You think being innocent’s going to save me? Didn’t you see Birdman of Alcatraz?”

  “Put that goddamn gun away!”

  “You better shut up!” The muzzle poked at Raleigh’s now distended neck. “You’re going to take me with you to New Orleans, so I can get a freighter to South America. You hear? Slow down! You’re going to get us pulled over!”

  “Mingo, are you crazy? The only place I’m going is Cowstream. You think I’m going to New Orleans in Vera’s Pinto?!”

  “It was her idea.”

  “Without a suitcase! This is real life! This isn’t some goddamn movie of yours! Are you crazy?”

  Maniacal giggles pierced Raleigh’s right eardrum. “I am crazy.” The round loony face leaned into Raleigh’s peripheral vision. “That’s exactly right. I am crazy. That’s why if you don’t take me to New Orleans, hee hee hee, I’m going to blow your brains out, hee hee hee, and then I’m going to blow out mine! What do you think of that? Wouldn’t you call that crazy?”

  Hayes tried to see Mingo and the highway at the same time. He shouted, “Why drag me into this? Mingo, this is a bad time for me, it couldn’t be worse, I’ve got fifty different things I’ve got to do today.”

  “It sure could be worse. I could kill you!”

  “I don’t believe this. I goddamn don’t believe it!” Hayes beat his head and hands against the sheepskin steering wheel, slammed on the brakes, and skidded to a stop on the beltway shoulder. “Get out of this car, you blubber-headed son of a bitch!”

  The gun moved slowly up through Raleigh’s hair, then the hammer clicked, sharp as the rattle of a snake. He heard a whisper that didn’t sound at all like Mingo. “I guess you thought I was just kidding. Well, I’m not. Do you believe in God?”

  “Wh…at?” Hayes was, now, seriously frightened.

  “Just ask Him if I’m kidding. Go ahead, you don’t believe me, ask Him. He’ll tell you.”

  Hayes started to move his head, felt the point of the gun slide through his hair, and froze. He opened his eyes and was looking straight at the little white plastic statue of Christ taped to the dashboard. As crisp as the unclouded sky above him, as palpable as his own hand, as inescapable as Mingo’s rushed breath in his ear, Raleigh Hayes heard coming from the tiny sealed plastic mouth of that cheap trinket the words “Take him with you. He’s not kidding.” On either side of Christ, the ebony Buddhas shook their heads, “yes yes yes.”

  And with a gasp, the insurance salesman felt the cliff of reason tremble, felt his fingers loosen in the crumbling stone, and then he was tumbling, still scrabbling for a hold, off the edge of the only world he thought there was. “Don’t believe it, Raleigh,” he called to the falling man. “Hang on.”

  The Buddhas laughed like fools, as if Christ had just told them a big joke, at Raleigh’s expense.

  Chapter 10

  How Raleigh Was Confirmed in His View of the World AS A BABY, like all his peers—for there are no agnostics in the cradle—Raleigh Whittier Hayes had been a believer; the world contagious with magic, he the center and circumference, his the mana to summon Titans to his bedside, set birds flying, move clouds with a stare, scare waves away. Maturation immunized him by slow infection. His powers weakened. By five, he could no longer change a traffic light from red to green, had no idea what dogs and cats were talking about, and was considering the possibility
that he might be mortal. At six, he declined to join Jimmy Clay in leaping from a high tree bough with a towel safety-pinned around his neck and “KAZAAM!” on his T-shirt. That shattering his scrawny arm did not dent Jimmy’s belief in his omnipotence struck young Raleigh as another crowding example of faith’s folly and self-conceit. That Mingo Sheffield (a little boy so fat he had neither wrists nor ankles, and couldn’t even buckle the sandals he wore over droopy socks), that Mingo sobbed, “You’re a liar!” and butted the soft bristles of his crew cut into his pillow, when told by Raleigh that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny were only parents, struck the seven-year-old with the rich sense of superiority to his neighbor that was never to leave him.

  When Raleigh’s father warned him that if he spit at a star, he’d blind an angel, he didn’t believe it. Not because he already discredited angels, but because he more modestly appraised his own powers. And so, like stars blinking out, Raleigh’s world faded from the sacred to the profane, pausing along the way in an elaborate totemic system of supplication and avoidance, based on the hope that while he might be powerless, he would still be able, by unswerving ritual, to appease whatever, or whoever, the Powers were. The first star seen at night remained to be wished on; crossed fingers, four-leaf clovers, a ring made from a quarter luckily found in the curb, clothes worn inside out—these might mediate for mortals. Whereas, years earlier, he would not eat snap beans because he heard them beg so piteously to be spared, now he ate them with numerological exactitude: three beans followed by five corn nubbins followed by two bites of pork chop would propitiate the Powers. Miscalculations, on the other hand, could conceivably enrage them into the sort of spitefulness with which they were known to respond to some hapless soul’s breaking a mirror, walking under a ladder, opening an umbrella indoors, or even getting out of the bed on the wrong side. The sidewalk itself was mined terrain: a stepped-on crack and his mother’s back would be broken; passing other children on the sidewalk could spell disaster—“Two’s company, three’s a crowd, four on the sidewalk isn’t allowed.”