Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  He touched her. “What are you afraid of?”

  “You.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Then of the future.”

  “Why should you be afraid of the future?”

  “Half of life is sadness. The second half.”

  He spoke slowly. “Then maybe you should marry me.”

  “I’ve had enough of marriage.”

  He stared, his eyes alive to the unswerving beauty of her face. “Then I don’t know what to say.”

  “Sometimes nothing is best.”

  She rose from the bed, and as always he was taken with the sight of her calm wholesome shape. After she vanished into the little bathroom, he lay listening to the rush of tap water and the flush of the john. He heard her blow her nose. When she reappeared he was moved by the ever-newness of her, the soap-and-water freshness that made her bright and immediate.

  “Barney.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want you to be asleep.”

  “I’m not. Can’t you tell?”

  A knee pressed down beside him, and the other one swung over him. She sat astride him, a warm and wide weight below his chest. “Barney.”

  He gazed straight up. “What?”

  “I’d never hurt you. Don’t ever hurt me.”

  • • •

  “We’re running out of everything,” Henry Witlo muttered as he rummaged through the refrigerator, clinking bottles and bowls. Finally he said, “We’ll have pancakes, that OK with you?” Emma Goss said nothing, and he forced her to set the table while he broke eggs and made the batter. Dishes rattled. “Will you calm down, for God’s sake? Will you do that much for me?”

  She was shivering and shaking, and her wrists still ached from where he had fended her off, gripped her hard, and brought her to her knees. Her breathing was labored. She poured maple syrup into a small pitcher, spilling some.

  “What’s the matter with your hand?” he asked.

  Her thumb hurt. For the first time she noticed it was hot and swollen.

  “You did that to yourself,” he said. “Not my fault.”

  She transferred flatware to the table, dropping a spoon.

  Seconds later she found herself with a knife in her hand, the sharpest in the house, and she stared at the blade.

  He had eyes in the back of his head. “What are you going to do, stick me with it?”

  He made a heap of pancakes, placing some in the oven to keep them hot. The rest he forked onto their plates and drenched them with syrup, emptying the pitcher, though she protested with her eyes. She sat with her chair not fully drawn in, as if at any moment she might leap out of it. She took little bites until hunger urged her on to greater ones, and she began swallowing almost without chewing. Henry, jaws stuffed, grinned from across the table.

  “Guess I’m not such a bad cook.”

  She rendered the smallest kind of answer with her eyes, distrusting what was going on behind his.

  “Use your napkin, Mrs. Goss.” He touched a corner of his mouth with his little finger. “You’ve got something here.”

  Her face changed color. A part of it puckered.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Don’t cry.”

  Later he left her alone to clean up, and she was glad to busy herself, to be away from his face, the grip of his eyes. Her stomach heaved from what she had eaten, but she ignored it, along with the throb of her thumb. Then too soon she heard his heavy tread. He reappeared with eyelashes wet and yellow hair slicked back at the sides. He had on one of her husband’s white dress shirts tucked tightly into his jeans, the collar open, the cuffs turned back at the wrists. Something was in his grasp. Sharply she turned away.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  She stook like a child while he brushed her hair and yanked the back of her dress to straighten the seam. Then he jingled something in his free hand. A pouch with two keys falling loose. She stared at them. They were to Harold’s Plymouth.

  “Guess what,” he said. “I’m going to take you for ice cream.”

  She tried to lock her feet to the floor, to hook her hand under the table, but his strength would allow none of it. The white of her husband’s shirt blinded her. Her feet slid forward when he pushed open the side door. She was about to say, “Leave the light on,” but it no longer mattered as she pictured her death in dark woods or behind a derelict building, with a policeman beaming a light over her body. She floated out onto the breezeway, where the evening air gushed hot from the street against her face.

  “You don’t even need a sweater,” he said cheerfully.

  Inside the garage the darkness swelled around her, and she thought she heard voices: her parents calling to her, her teacher correcting her, her husband scolding her. The garage door rose with a clatter, and streetlight plunged in on her. Henry nudged her into the car and within seconds was sitting beside her. As soon as he turned the key the radio came on with the cracked voice of the aged Sinatra, Harold’s station, the only one he had tuned in on the push buttons. She shuddered. The motor purred as if brand-new.

  “I’ve checked everything, Mrs. Goss. All it needs is a little air in the tires.”

  He backed swiftly out of the garage, past his Dodge Charger, which was crushing the lawn, and swung smoothly onto the street. Her heart leaped when the headlights picked up Mrs. Whipple talking to a neighbor, and her face flamed when Henry tooted and waved. Farther down the street, he switched from Sinatra to rock.

  “Please,” she said, pressing an ear.

  He turned it off and stuck an elbow out the window. “Where’s the best place for ice cream, Mrs. Goss?”

  She could have mentioned Sid White’s in Andover or Benson’s in Boxford, places Harold had liked, but she said nothing. He drove into the thick of Lawrence, the traffic fretful and full of fumes. When he stopped at a signal, she stared at the glow of brake lights on the car ahead of them. When he sped over the bridge to the north side of the city, she prayed for a collision, a stupendous crash with a rain of glass and metal, in which he would die and she would rise up to walk away whole.

  “I’m not sure where I’m going,” he said. “You want to help, I’ll listen.”

  “I don’t want an ice cream,” she said.

  “We get there, you’ll change your mind.” He smiled over at her. “You wait, you’ll see.”

  On Broadway, where the traffic was sluggish, forbidding steel shutters locked in stores for the night. Companionless men hung around outside the Wonder Bar. She felt conspicuous, certain that their reaching eyes would hit upon her. In front of a novelty shop a whiskered scavenger, whose chesty cough she could hear, was dismantling a pyramid of empty crates. Hispanic youths moved as if to a rhumba beat against the savage glare of a sub shop. At any moment she expected them to launch an assault.

  “You’re safe, Mrs. Goss.” Henry continued to smile. “You got me beside you.”

  She sat with her head driven back, her nose clogged from diesel exhaust from an old Mercedes that had cut in front of them.

  “Still don’t know where I’m going, Mrs. Goss. Hold on.”

  He cut through a crossfire of lights, took a sharp turn down a sidestreet of narrow alleys, and presently emerged in a section of the city where rickety tenement houses had been razed for the construction of apartment buildings, which had risen up without rhythm or thought. It was a gray area that suggested neither comfort nor need, only neutrality. Here, staring at Henry’s hands held lightly on the wheel, she expected to be strangled.

  Many minutes later he said, “Open your eyes, Mrs. Goss.”

  She saw a row of yellow lights and large illuminated windows, behind which families crowded tables, children frolicked in the aisles, and teen-age waitresses floated like angels. Through a loudspeaker a man announcing numbers for take-out orders strove to put thunder in his voice. He sounded like God.

  Henry, turning off the ignition, said, “I’m going to guess vanilla, am I right?”

  Left alone, she c
ontinued to stare out at the windows, now with a fear that the faces inside were real only while she looked at them and would fade the instant she faltered. It all seemed less an image of reality than a play upon her imagination. She dropped a hand tentatively on the door release and shifted her weight. Her dress, mysteriously wet, clung to the seat.

  Henry smiled at her from the side of the building, then leaned his head into the take-out window. A kitchen worker with his heavy hair trussed in a net emptied trash into a dumpster. Girls wrapped in the attention of their boyfriends huddled near a shiny car with racing numerals on its side. She considered a cry for help but was racked with questions. Would they think her crazy? Would they answer with giggles? Would they turn their backs in distaste? She pressed at the door, but it stayed shut.

  Henry returned with two sugar cones, which he carried like candles. His was chocolate, a large scoop, and he was already licking it, tapering it. Hers came with a napkin through the open window. Immediately it began to drip on her fingers. Settling in, he said, “Careful, Mrs. Goss, you’re getting it on your dress.” He plucked the napkin from her and wiped the front of her. “You’re worse than a kid, you know that?”

  Her bottom lip quivered. “They’re going to put you in prison,” she said.

  “Me?” His eyes rolled. “Not me, Mrs. Goss. You’d better worry about yourself. You write letters to your husband. He’s dead. They could put you in an institution for that.”

  “I’m going to tell the police,” she said.

  “Sure, you do that, Mrs. Goss. Cops come, see me in your husband’s clothes, driving his car, sleeping in his bed, what do you think they’re going to believe? They’re guys, men of the world, they know what widows do. And Mrs. Whipple, what do you think she’ll tell them?”

  A kind of loneliness washed over her, as if till now she had lived her life a thousand miles out at sea and this was her first time ashore, a stranger.

  “You don’t have to eat that, you don’t want to.” He lifted the ice cream cone from her sopping hand and tossed it out of the car.

  EIGHT

  BARNEY COLE parked his Cutlass in the uphill drive. Chick Ryan’s house was a large venerable Victorian, the best in the neighborhood. Chick’s wife opened the front door and smiled with eyes of a melancholy turn. “Such a stranger,” she said, letting him in. The carpet was thick, the hall furniture solid mahogany. The chandelier was enormous. “You can kiss my cheek,” she said. “I won’t mind.”

  He kissed her with a sense of loss. He remembered her as a tall, high-waisted brunette with a long mane. Now her hair was short and gray, and her height seemed diminished. “How are the kids?” he asked.

  “Wish they were all married. Then I wouldn’t worry so much.” She laughed faintly. “Chick’s out at the pool.”

  “I didn’t know you had one.”

  “That’s how long it’s been since you’ve been here.”

  “The house looks lovely.”

  “We’ve recently redecorated.” With gentle ceremony, she led him through the large living room and through the dining room to the kitchen. At the back door she said, “Would you like to bring a beer out with you?”

  He shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”

  A stockade fence concealed the pool. Cole stepped through a narrow gateway and shielded his eyes. The pool was almost Olympic size. Chick, wearing red trunks, was flopped in a deck chair, a sprung-open can of Budweiser in his hand. His body hair was black, a pelt that made him part bear. He grinned under dark glasses. “Where’s your beer?”

  Cole made a negative gesture with his hand. “Nice pool.”

  “I got extra trunks, you want to go for a dip. No? Then sit down and live the life.”

  Cole pulled up an aluminum chair almost weightless to the touch. “The house looks great. New furniture?”

  “I’m a dirty cop, Barney. Can’t help it. It’s the way I am.” He grinned again under the glasses. “Sure you don’t want to take a dip? Wife and I used to go skinny-dipping till she lost her shape.”

  Cole said, “What have you got for Louise? She’s anxious.”

  “I was her, I’d be anxious too. What I’ve come up with is zero, depending on how you look at it. I’ve checked everybody. It wasn’t local.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure as I can be on something like this. Hey, would I shit Louise? How’s she doing?”

  “She’s out of the hospital. Staying at her mother’s place.”

  “She really must be big-time, somebody wants to hit her. Tell her she wants a bodyguard, I might be able to round somebody up.”

  “I’d hope she has her own resources.”

  “Comes down to a matter of who you can trust.” Chick took a swig from the can. “By the way, I had coffee at Dolce’s with Arnold Ackerman. He says Buddy Pothier’s losing the eye. It got infected, doctors can’t save it. The other one’s OK. I guess that’s why we got two of everything. Most everything. I was Buddy, I’d get the guy who did it and cut off what he’s only got one of.”

  “He’s still not talking?”

  “He wants to talk, all he’s got to do is come see me. That’s what I told Arnold.”

  Cole rose from his chair. “All that hair, Chick, how do you expect to get a tan?”

  “I don’t. Sun’s not good for the skin.”

  “I’ll pass on your information to Lou.”

  “You do that.”

  Cole headed for the gate with the sun hot on his neck and the queasy feeling that he was a bit player in a drama for which he had no script, only cues.

  “Barney.”

  He turned.

  “When you say g’bye to my wife, give her a squeeze. I ain’t got the desire anymore.”

  • • •

  After a bout of dark thoughts, some that took the breath out of him, Daisy Shea shivered up from his desk, took the phone off the hook, and, as had become habit, quit early for the day. He descended the narrow stairs, the wood worn smooth, and poked his head into the furniture store below. “Anybody comes looking for me,” he said in a loud voice, “take their name.”

  “I’m not your secretary,” an old man called back. “And where’s my rent?”

  With dignity, Daisy stepped onto the sidewalk and loosened his tie. The afternoon hung hot. Next door was Patty’s Pet Shop, where mongrel dogs lolled in the window and a stink hung out the open door from a filthy monkey in a cage. Patty, fat of face and thick of torso, sat on a kitchen chair outside the store with a cigar in his mouth. His heavy eyes blinked. “Going home?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Daisy, “I’m going home home.”

  “Home home? What’s that?”

  “Where I was somebody, Patty. Where nothing was so bad a good night’s sleep couldn’t take care of it.”

  He cut through an alley to a back lot, where his car stood baking in the sun. Soon he drove onto Broadway with a hand in his wavy white hair, the feel and fall of it a clue to his health. Passing a construction site, he envied the vigor of men in work helmets tipped at belligerent angles. Cruising over the O’Leary Bridge, he breathed in the rank odor of the Merrimack and held it in his lungs as if it were medicinal. With a tremor of anticipation he turned left at the lights on Essex Street and penetrated an area where he had once known every smell and sound, every scar on the sidewalk, every face on the block. With a trace of fear he watched the street deteriorate, and with an interlace of soft feelings he parked against a bleak backdrop of public housing.

  “I’m here,” he announced to himself, his tone uncertain.

  The outline of the Essex Street Housing Project was there, the sheer bulk of the architecture, but the essentials were blunted, the details effaced, the grass gone, along with the trees he had seen planted and had watched grow. The only brightness came from the graffiti smeared on the brick buildings. He could not read the graffiti. It was in Spanish.

  He got out of the car with a brave smile and an unsteady step, as if someone were dangling a noose ove
r his head. A dirt bag from a vacuum cleaner and leavings from a McDonald’s take-out lay in the gutter. The whole place was strangely quiet, the time of day, he supposed. Nothing looked familiar, let along friendly, which ate at his courage but not his resolve. He stepped onto the sidewalk as a Hispanic woman was passing by. He smiled at her and pointed a finger.

  “I used to live there,” he said as she quickened her step. “That building in back. Second floor.”

  A breeze guided him along an asphalt pathway much narrower than he remembered. Underfoot were skins from an orange, the tongue from a shoe, the chain from a bicycle. A bread wrapper lifted itself up and fluttered away. From an open window protected by steel mesh came the dull bark of a dog. A dark-skinned woman, full-bosomed in a sleeveless top, peered down at him from a doorstep, where the metal rail listed on loose stanchions. “You selling?” she said. “We don’t buy.”

  “No, no,” he said without breaking stride. “I belong here.”

  He made his way to the courtyard and beheld swings, sandboxes, and seesaws where there was only the carcass of a burnt-out Pontiac GTO and the debris of marginal lives. His head jerking this way and that, he looked for his mother who enjoyed chatting with neighbors, for Casey the cop who distributed candy from his pockets, for Riley the maintenance man whose breath was telltale of alcohol, for old Mrs. Madigan who at odd times of the day appeared pleasantly out of her mind. Glimpsing none of them, he strained an ear for their voices and heard only the rapid Spanish of young toughs wearing felt hats and goatees. He knew they were talking about him and smiled.

  “Guy gotta be crazy,” said one in English.

  He moved quickly but clumsily, overcharged and overanxious, to the building where he had lived. NO ES COSA was spray-painted on the battered door, and he wondered what it meant. The urinous odor of the hallway dismayed him without deterring him. He heard the wail of a baby from the bottom apartment and wondered whether Mrs. Flanagan had added to her brood of seven, but when the door suddenly opened it was a squat duck-legged woman with black skin who peered out at him.