The Wanting Page 28

  “Now and again,” he answered. “Why?”

  “Pretty woman up there,” Dunning said. “Can’t put my finger on her name, though.” He looked at Ronson for help.

  “Martine,” Ronson said. “Fine-looking thing.”

  “Right, Martine,” Dunning said. “You and her used to be an item, didn’t you, Jerry? Or is that just scuttlebutt?”

  “I know the woman,” Metger said. He could see it—a whole new angle was opening out in front of him.

  Ronson spread his hands and said, “Nobody would blame you, Jerry. I mean, pregnant wife and all. You don’t have what you’d call an outlet, do you? And she’s one hell of a looker, that Martine. Hell, Jerry, I understand all that. You think Nora would?”

  “Fuck you,” Metger said.

  Bryce Dunning smiled. “Touchy, touchy. You know what they say. There’s no smoke without fire. Especially in this town.”

  Metger said nothing. They could come at him from any direction they liked. They could smear him any way they wanted. He flexed his hands—there was an anger rising inside him. But it was a blind thing going nowhere.

  “I mean, Jerry, we like having you as sheriff,” Ronson said.

  Bryce Dunning smiled in agreement. “Nora doesn’t need to know a thing about Martine. She sure won’t hear it from us, I’ll tell you that.”

  Sure, hell, we’re all men of the world in here, Metger thought. He moved around the room. He could hear Nora in the kitchen, the clatter of knives, dishes. He had a strange feeling of powerlessness right then—his home, wife, and child menaced in a way he wasn’t sure how to fight against.

  Bryce Dunning said, “Florence Hann took sick last night.”

  “Oh, yeah, we forgot to mention that,” Ronson said.

  “Took sick? How?”

  “Had one of them nervous attacks,” Ronson said.

  “She was okay when I dropped her off,” Metger said. “She wasn’t sick then.”

  “Sudden, sudden,” Dunning said quietly.

  “What have you done with her? Made her disappear? Buried her?”

  Ronson laughed. “Jerry, you got this funny notion in your head about some people around here. I mean, this ain’t the goddamn Mafia, Jerry. People don’t disappear. She needed some treatment and now she’s getting it. Plain and simple. She’s nicely settled in the nursing home. Not too far from your father, matter of fact.”

  Not too far from your father. A small sensation of panic rose inside Metger, then subsided. Not too far from your father! Was he supposed to glean something from this simple sentence, something underlying the words themselves? Another kind of meaning? That was the trouble with people like Ronson and Dunning—they made the English language as slippery as bathtub soap. Their meanings kept slipping, kept sliding. Not too far from your father, matter of fact. Was Ronson telling him something?

  Metger’s sudden anger was a wild thing. He felt a tightness in his throat and his fists clenched and the room seemed to turn blood red in front of his eyes. He fought the sensation away—it wasn’t going to do any good to yield to brute anger with these guys. They were warning him, that much was clear. But the implication of this warning was shocking to him. Were they saying that they were responsible for Stanley Metger’s condition? For Florence Hann’s? Was Lou Pelusi the hatchet man?

  Now the door opened and Nora came inside the room, asking a question about how many bacon sandwiches were required. Both Ronson and Dunning laughed and said they’d come from the steam room and they weren’t about to put on more calories and they were all laughing. So ordinary, Metger thought. So very ordinary.

  When they were gone Metger went inside the kitchen.

  Nora folded her arms across the lump the baby made in her body.

  Metger watched her a second and then he went toward her and held her closely against him. His mind was filled with the dark of graveyards, with old tombstones, with a sad woman scratching at weeds, with his father counting M & M’s in a sterile room inside a nursing home.

  And with a life as yet unborn.

  Uncertain of her direction, Louise remembered Frog having said something about how—if you followed the wash—you would reach a stream that flowed in an east-west direction. Traveling due west for a quarter of a mile, you would find his VW van. It had seemed at the time very simple, but now, faced with the density of the trees and the fact that she understood left and right better than she grasped east and west, she hesitated.

  Maybe Frog had left the vicinity anyhow.

  People like him, people without ties, didn’t stay too very long in one place, did they?

  She followed a bend around the trees. She had the weird feeling that she was alone in all the world.

  She followed the bank of the wash, carefully clambering around boulders and rubble. Silences and shadows stalked her. The funnel in the land curved again and when she stopped she realized she was very close to where the Summers lived.

  Which was where Denny was bound to be right now. Why did that suddenly worry her? Because Denny is not himself, she thought. He is not the same boy I first came up here with—and this perception, which surprised her, caused her to shiver. It didn’t matter what Dr. Max said, it didn’t matter that the boy had been given a clean bill of health, because when you got right down to it a mother’s instinct was worth a damn sight more than the eye of a distracted physician, and that’s what Max was—distracted, distant, functioning on what she thought of as automatic pilot.

  On an impulse, she took a detour.

  When she came to the clearing she saw the small log house before her. In the branches of a tree a bird shrieked.

  That house, Louise thought. It looked so damned gloomy to her now, so washed out, bleak under a sunless sky.

  She moved through the clearing, noticing differences around her. The Summers—presumably with Dennis’s help as unpaid labor—had made their yard as tidy as it could possibly be, given all the junk lying around. Wood had been sorted into a neat pile. The sprawling collection of tires had been transformed into a pyramid. Rolls of chicken wire were neatly stacked. Everything was in its place, almost as if there were some design intended here, a pattern that perhaps only the Summers might understand.

  She paused, gazing at the house.

  Drab, she thought. It hadn’t looked so drab before. It didn’t matter that flowers were blooming around the porch, that the windows were clean, that the porch itself—which used to slope—had been shored up with fresh planks of pine, the place was still drab.

  She moved in the direction of the porch.

  There was the incongruous sound of music, scratchy music filtering out of the house. It was a polka. Louise couldn’t remember its name, but it was faintly recognizable. She hated polkas, hated the forced jollity of them. She hated them now especially. And then there was another noise—laughter. It floated down toward her. Simple clear laughter. It sounded so … incongruous. Laughter in the gloom. A polka emerging from the shadows.

  She climbed the steps to the porch.

  From the doorway she peered inside the gloomy kitchen. She felt vibrations underfoot and then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, she saw—Dick and Charlotte dancing.

  Charlotte had an arm around Dick’s waist and her head was thrown back and she was laughing even as she moved her feet nimbly, quickly, to the crazy rhythm of the music. Dick clapped his hands and Charlotte danced around him. Louise, amazed by the outburst of energy, didn’t move for a while. There was a vitality here, a sense of life being lived with gaiety. The music forced itself inside her head.

  Where was Denny? She couldn’t see her son. She stepped inside the kitchen, knocking on the door. But the music smothered any sound she made.

  And Dick and Charlotte danced on, around and around, the old woman kicking up her heels and Dick smacking the palms of his hands together. The floor of the kitchen shook. Plates trembled on shelves.

  They don’t see me, Louise thought. I don’t exist. Only the dance is real.<
br />
  The ribbon in Charlotte’s hair flew backward as she whirled and her mouth was open in laughter and her dark hair flopped untidily, wildly, while she spun around her husband’s body. Dark hair? Louise wondered.

  The music stopped. The silence was sudden, eerie. Dick and Charlotte collapsed against one another and Louise had a sudden insight into the love they felt—it came at her out of nowhere, with all the ferocity of an arrow. A perpetual love, she thought. Undeniable and strong, something that the passage of time didn’t erode. A love that rejuvenated these old people.

  She blinked in the dim kitchen. All around her everything was clean, sparkling, tidy. Even the old Acme stove, which had been crusted with spillage, shone in the corner of the room.

  Where was Denny? she wondered.

  “Louise!” Charlotte said. “We didn’t hear you.”

  Dick smiled at Louise. Charlotte ran a hand across her hair, which, Louise saw now, wasn’t quite as dark as it had seemed. It was gray, streaked with darker strands. It comes out of a bottle, Louise thought. It’s a dye, a cosmetic. She wants to make herself look younger for her husband. That’s what it is. Tht’s what it comes down to. Love’s little vanity—nobody in love should ever age.

  “I hope I didn’t interrupt,” Louise said.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Dick said. He was panting a little. His chest rose and fell. Louise moved farther inside the kitchen.

  She saw now how the Summers were dressed. Dick wore a rather formal dark suit and Charlotte was dressed in a long white dress into which had been crocheted the most amazing floral detail. Louise couldn’t help herself—she simply had to reach out and touch it. She fingered the flowers, feeling the upraised petals, the sinewy stalks.

  “I made it,” Charlotte said.

  “It’s beautiful,” Louise said. And it was. The details were astonishing. She stepped back, admiring it.

  It was the gown Charlotte Summer had been wearing in the photograph.

  Louise looked around the kitchen, but there was no sign of her son. How could it be the same gown? It had to be a replica, a duplicate, because the original would be yellowed by this time, wouldn’t it? Why would Charlotte Summer go to the trouble of duplicating a garment she’d worn—how long ago? How many years ago?

  “She worked hard on it,” Dick was saying.

  “I can tell,” Louise said. Where’s Denny?

  “It took a while,” Charlotte remarked.

  “She enjoys working with her hands,” Dick added, his voice proud.

  Her hands, Louise thought.

  Right then Charlotte had her hands behind her back, hidden out of sight.

  “Is …” Louise was about to ask where Dennis was when she stopped. There was a sound from the stairs and she looked up into the gloom, seeing Dennis descend slowly. What was he doing up there? He appeared halfway down, his hand on the rail.

  “Mom,” he said, bored.

  “I was just passing. Thought I’d say hello …”

  Dennis smiled weakly. His hand gripped the rail. He looked at the Summers and asked, “Do you want me to change the record?” His voice was hoarse.

  That’s it, Louise thought. The phonograph is up there and Dennis is the deejay. That’s it. She squinted at her son. He looked—she struggled for the right word—depressed? Unhappy? Maybe the Summers had told him they were planning a trip and the information had made him miserable. Maybe he was already anticipating his loneliness. There was a strange little reversal of roles going on here, she thought. It was Dennis who was down and the Summers who were up. Before, when he’d first started to visit them, she’d had the impression that he was the one bringing a certain cheer into their lives—but it was different now, it had shifted.

  Dennis reached the foot of the stairs.

  Charlotte said, “I don’t think we have the strength to dance anymore.”

  “Sure we do,” Dick said. “Put on something lively, Dennis.”

  Dennis nodded and climbed the stairs again and Louise watched him ascend slowly, carefully, into the shadows. After a moment music floated down. Another polka. Charlotte and Dick danced again.

  As if she had ceased to exist for the, as if the dance had consumed them to the exclusion of all else, Louise turned away and went onto the porch and moved across the clearing. The polka tracked her, sharp little notes pecking around her head like a flock of demented birds.

  39

  Inside the tiled corridor of the nursing home, Metger asked the nurse at the desk which room Florence Hann occupied. The nurse was a middle-aged woman with dyed platinum hair and a huge chest, presumably held up by a cantilevered bra. She ruffled papers and looked at the sheriff.

  “Twenty-three,” the woman said. “Just along the corridor from your father, Sheriff.”

  “I’m going up to see her.”

  The nurse smiled. She had immaculately capped teeth—she might have had a forty-watt bulb in her mouth. “She’s probably sleeping, Sheriff. Came in very early this morning, I believe. Had some kind of breakdown, I gather.”

  “I bet she did,” Metger mumbled.

  The nurse watched him stride toward the stairs.

  Metger climbed up, taking the steps two at a time. Outside the door of room eighteen, he hesitated. He heard a TV play inside his father’s room. Their cases are remarkably similar.… Florence Hann and his own father, neighbors in the Loony Palace. Two people who had both been well at one moment, then sick at the next—how had such a thing happened?

  Don’t think, Jerry. You don’t want to know.

  But his mind came back again and again, as a moth will circle the candle of its own doom, to the notion that both Florence Hann and his father had been—had been deliberately made sick by Ronson or Ronson’s cronies, made sick and brought to this wretched place with their brains fused, where they might spend the rest of their days as harmlessly confused vegetables.

  Victims, Metger thought, of the people who run Carnarvon, the keepers of the secrets.

  Metger continued down the hallway. He knocked on the door of twenty-three. Receiving no answer, he went inside anyhow.

  Florence Hann lay on the bed, arms clasped in front of her body, her eyes shut. She was breathing in a very shallow way and her face was bleached of color. What she reminded him of was a corpse he’d once seen fished out of Canyon Lake after having been in the water for four long days. He approached the woman, pulled a chair up to the bed, sat down.

  “Florence”—in a whisper.

  Zero.

  He reached out and touched the back of her hand. He’d never felt flesh so cold. Some kind of breakdown. He took his fingers away from her.

  “Florence,” he whispered again.

  Nothing.

  How had it been done? An injection of some kind? Heavy drugs? But they wouldn’t last forever, would they? They’d wear off sooner or later and Florence would be coherent again—so what then?

  An operation. Open the skull, a small incision, a tiny knife. Was Lou Pelusi the technician? Was that the way it worked? Did Ronson and his cronies see danger in a dotty woman like Mrs. Hann and a garrulous old guy like his own father? Were they enemies of the status quo? Yeah, Metger thought, a pair of revolutionaries, terrorists bent on bringing down the delicate system known as Carnarvon. And so they were silenced. And so they were shut in these awful rooms for the rest of their lives—senility, nervous breakdowns, convenient labels easily attached.

  Jerry Metger stood up. Florence Hann was motionless. He turned away, went out into the corridor. He stepped into his father’s room.

  Stanley Metger didn’t look up.

  “Dad,” he said.

  Metger felt useless. “Dad,” he said again. “Before you got sick … did Ted Ronson come to see you? Did Lou Pelusi visit you? Did he give you anything? A drug? Anything like that?”

  Hopeless questions—why bother asking them?

  He wasn’t going to get anything answered here.

  Metger tried to imagine himself as a smal
l boy sitting up in his bed while Stanley—half drunk, a cigarette staining his fingers orange-brown—told him a story in that rambling way he always used. Did I tell you about the time Taffy Owens decided to steal the Carnarvon Baptist Church? Not the collection plate, Jerry. Not the Bibles. Not the stained-glass window. No, nothing so small, Taffy wanted to steal the whole goddamn church! He went down there in the middle of the night with a big wagon and a team of horses and a couple of guys to help him out and they tried to get that church up on the wagon and haul the sucker right outta town—all because Taffy decided the preacher was an asshole! Tried to steal the whole church, Jerry! Taffy Owens never thought small. Didn’t know the meaning of the word!

  Stories, Metger thought. All those old narratives that adhered to his father the way glue sticks to wood. And he’d wanted to write them down in book form.

  Jerry Metger gazed at the TV. There was a cartoon showing a cat flattened by a bulldozer. The sound effects were shrill. Stanley was looking at it without really seeing it.

  “Dad,” Metger said. “I need to know …”

  Stanley Metger poked a finger inside his mouth, brought out a scrap of food, and wiped it against his pants.

  Did you ever write your stories down, Dad? Did you put them on paper? Did you write down something that certain people in this town didn’t want to read, something that revealed the secrets? Was that it? All these questions—and Jerry Metger wasn’t going to get an answer to any one of them.

  He leaned forward and kissed his father on the side of the face and the older man—as if some faint memory moved inside him—caught the sheriff by the wrist.

  “You be careful,” Stanley Metger said.

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  Stanley shut his eyes.

  “Because they’ll come and take your fucking candies away from you, boy.”

  Metger sighed and moved toward the door.

  He glanced once across the room, seeing his father silhouetted against the gray window, and then he left.

  A bird hopped overhead, chattered, rose up into the cold sky. Louise watched it go.

  She continued to walk. The forest nudged against her with a pressure she could feel. The wash curved once more.