Concert of Ghosts Page 3

  Tennant blinked in the hard light of the morning. He looked along a stretch of Bridge Street. Bleak downtown Oswego was not his place of choice. Nearby was the sound of the Oswego River, which poured vigorously into Lake Ontario. The smell of freshly fried donuts drifted in the air.

  “So who the hell is Rozak?” Tennant asked.

  Harcourt McKay, on whose upper lip lay a band of sweat, shrugged. “Maybe some joker. You get guys—clerks, shoe salesmen, nobodies—pretending they’re something else. Lawyers. Doctors. Gives them the old ego boost, I guess.”

  “Terrific joke,” Tennant remarked. “He sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He mentioned Kant. He knew the name of the county attorney, Flitt. He was pretty damn convincing.”

  Harcourt McKay had a strange mannerism, drawing his neck down deep into his shoulders. “I’m no psychologist, Harry. Who knows what gives some guys a kick, huh? He imagines he’s a lawyer, so he sounds like one. I was you, I’d write this Rozak off as a basic loon and concentrate on the biz at hand.”

  “Yeah,” Tennant said. The biz at hand. The prospect of jail. But he couldn’t get Rozak out of his mind. He could see the maroon painkiller go from hand to mouth, he could still hear the voice. Everybody’s got a doctor somewhere, Harry. So what was Rozak’s game? A loose nut at a loose end, nothing better to do than make believe he was a lawyer? But the guy had had a certain authority about him, a sincerity that suggested he was more than a mere imposter. And his confidence about the outcome of Harry’s case had been absolute. Way too good, Tennant thought, to be true. He was depressed.

  Maybe McKay was right. The world was filled with oddballs. And Rozak was one of them—what else?

  McKay said, “We’ve got a bunch of work to get through, Harry. My diary’s stuffed for the day, so we’ll talk tomorrow. My office at noon. You want me to drive you home?”

  He turned down McKay’s offer. He thought he could thumb a ride back to Sterling. Besides, he had an urge to walk for a time, to clear the jail out of his head. He wanted to think.

  McKay handed him a business card. “Tomorrow noon. See you then.”

  “One thing. I don’t want to do hard time,” Tennant said.

  McKay scrunched his neck down. “Who said anything about time?” He smiled—a quick flap of lips—and walked to his car, a wine-colored Buick rusted by the severity of Oswego’s winters.

  Tennant watched him drive away, then moved along Bridge Street in the direction of the state university campus, a scattering of windblown buildings on the shore of the lake. He figured his chances of a ride were better where there were students. He walked past stores, bars: the Cameo Café, Gentile’s Cameras, Byrne’s Dairy. In the distance were the monstrous stacks and electric wires of the power plant that dominated this small city.

  The morning was already humid and uncomfortable. When he reached a bar called The Woodshed, he was picked up by a dirt farmer in an old Dodge flatbed, who dropped him about two miles from home. Tennant, fretting again over his dog, hurried along the edge of the blacktop.

  He’d gone about a mile when a red Cadillac, brilliant as a wax apple, pulled up alongside him. The girl behind the wheel lowered her window. “Can you help me? I’m looking for somebody called Harry Tennant.”

  2

  Tennant had lived for nine years in a quiet green world, a limited universe that made no demands other than the need to harvest his crop. He had his small white frame house and the secrecy of the trees and a mailbox at the end of a dirt road. He rarely received mail except for discount coupons and items addressed to Occupant. He had no phone, and his electricity came from a generator; few bills arrived for him. When he wanted groceries, he drove his pickup truck past barns and onion fields to the township of Sterling in Cayuga County. He didn’t know the owner of the grocery store, nor did the owner know him. He didn’t even know the name of his nearest neighbor. An isolated life, but a regulated one—until the bust.

  Until the appearance of the girl, a stranger in a Cadillac convertible.

  She was small, thin, her black hair cut short to her scalp and parted boyishly to the side. She wore black jeans and a loose-fitting sweater, careless and casual, unaffected. A single earring, a silver hoop, hung from her left ear. But these details were extraneous, impressions Tennant barely gathered, because what captivated him was that aspect of her face that surely struck a response in everyone who saw her: She had the marvelous eyes of a torch singer. Large, cryptic, sad, as if they’d been witness to heartbreaks and atrocities and might never again see anything worth a damn in the human condition.

  “Why do you need to see Harry Tennant?” he asked.

  “I’d like to talk to him.”

  “About what?”

  The girl smiled. “You his social secretary?”

  She opened the car door. Tennant saw she wore scuffed tennis shoes. She tilted her head to the side and looked at him frankly. “Or are you Tennant?”

  “I’m Tennant.”

  “You don’t look much like your photograph. A little maybe. But not a lot.”

  “Photograph?”

  “Look. Are you in a hurry or have you got time to talk?”

  Tennant’s mind still echoed with the word photograph. When did he last have a picture taken? He couldn’t imagine what she might be referring to. For a moment it occurred to him that she could be an agent of the law, an official of some sort following up on the bust, somebody with questions to ask.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  The girl didn’t answer directly. “Is your place nearby? I need a drink. This humidity’s a killer.”

  Tennant pointed. “About a mile up the road.”

  “Get in. I’ll drive you.”

  He opened the passenger door. He wondered why he was obeying her so readily. Surprised, he thought. Too perplexed to refuse her. It had been a morning of perplexities.

  As he sat down, he asked about the photograph.

  “Here.” She dug inside a large lizardskin purse that lay on the seat. She produced a scrap of yellowed newspaper.

  He looked at it with a lack of concern. A blurred newspaper photograph of five young people, taken—if the bell-bottom pants and headbands and hairstyles were any guide—sometime in the late sixties. He had an odd jangling sensation in his mind, a buzzer sounding in a darkened recess, but then it passed. He wasn’t in any mood for strangers who came bearing ancient bits of paper. The other pressures upon him, the law, the disappearing Rozak, the prospect of jail—which, with Rozak’s vanishing act, had come to seem tangible—made him more than impatient. The notion of imprisonment tended to make everything else insignificant by comparison.

  “Well?” the girl asked.

  “Well what?”

  “You just dismiss it?”

  “You show me some old picture. What am I supposed to say?”

  “You can’t be serious. Look again.”

  He sighed and did what she asked, studying the photograph more carefully. His eyesight had lately begun to diminish, and he hadn’t bothered to get glasses because it involved too much; when he examined the picture a second time, he had a nervous sense of looking into a distorted glass in which lay a puzzling image from some other reality.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look like you don’t remember it.”

  “I remember,” he said.

  The lie came to him before he had time to think about what he was saying. He couldn’t take his eyes from the picture. He might have been looking at a counterfeit whose validity he desperately wanted to believe. The hand that held the paper wouldn’t be still. Something weird. He was gazing at an unmistakable image of himself from more than twenty years ago, but there was a void between Harry Tennant and the photograph that had nothing to do with the passage of time. He had a feeling of displacement, a sensation a man might have in the middle of an earth tremor. Fault lines, he thought. Cracks in my personal landscape. Why the hell couldn’t he remember the picture? What was wrong with
him?

  “Well?” the girl asked.

  “Well what? It’s just some old photograph,” he said defensively. “I don’t see anything especially interesting about it.”

  “It’s more than just some old photograph.”

  “Is it?” He stared out at fields that were flat and colorless in the midday light. Two mournful brown mares in a fenced meadow regarded him without much interest. He let the paper flutter from his hand to the seat as the big car turned past the mailbox on to the narrow dirt road.

  The girl braked when the house came into view. “We need to talk about this.” She picked up the clipping and held it toward Tennant.

  “Some other time.”

  He got out of the car. He was reluctant to enter the white frame structure from which ancient paint peeled like sunburnt skin. It seemed smaller than it had yesterday, and shabbier, a crabbed little dwelling. The windows were without reflection, like rectangles of dank water. The porch was in shadow and lifeless.

  No Isadora stood there, no great welcoming whip of a tail lashing the air.

  Crows cawed and a buzzard flapped with sleek purpose in the sky. There was all the noisy serenity you find in thick wooded areas. Crickets, the busy fretting of blue jays—a harmony of sorts, but misleading now. The woods looked gaunt, stripped of their secrecy; a process of defoliation might have gone on in the hours of darkness—the trees uprooted, then transplanted in unfamiliar configurations. Tennant, who’d been able to find his way in these woods blindfolded, realized he no longer belonged in this place. It wasn’t home. Perhaps it had never been. Perhaps he’d spent the last nine years lying to himself.

  He considered calling the dog, but if she was awake, she’d already be rushing happily down the steps of the porch, driven by the frantic energy of her love for him. He felt an exhausting wave of despondency. He took a few hesitant steps toward the house, conscious of the girl some paces back. What did she want anyway? What possible importance did she attach to an ancient photograph? He had more on his mind than a picture he couldn’t remember.

  Rubbing his palms apprehensively on his jeans, he climbed up on the porch. He suddenly knew there would be grief. He knew you could never be prepared for it. What was a dog anyhow? You could always buy another one, right? In the great scheme of things a pet was expendable. You replaced an animal with a snap of your fingers: just like that.

  He pushed the screen door aside.

  What struck him immediately in the gloomy interior was how badly the place had been trashed. The cops had gone through it like a hurricane. They’d pulled drawers from cabinets and dumped the contents on the floor. A sofa was overturned and slashed, disgorging the stuffing. Pictures, cheap little Victorian things he’d picked up at auctions, had been yanked from the walls. Broken glass lay across everything as though it were a form of congealed rain. For some reason a wall had been punched out and the slats of frail old lathework made visible.

  He moved across the floor. The guitar he’d tried for years to learn stood in a corner, neck snapped. The books he’d spent a long time over—books that at first had intrigued, then finally failed him—were scattered here and there, brutalized. Mystical works mainly—Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Huxley. Explorers of hallucination, voyagers in misty perceptions, dabblers in the unsayable. What had he ever hoped to discover in those voices—a system by which to live? All he’d found were puzzles, spiritual acrostics, mind-trips—his hobbies in isolation.

  None of these games mattered now.

  Worse than fruitless mysticism, than a broken musical instrument, worse: The dog lay at the foot of the stairs where he’d last seen her. She was still and cold, large in death because the process had not had time to diminish her. He kneeled beside the animal and placed a hand upon the big skull. It amazed him that life could leave any creature so vital as Isadora. His sorrow was a sudden winter in his heart—icy, dark, merciless. When he’d bought Isadora as a pup, she’d been an animal of great joyful clumsiness, anxious to please, slow to learn. What he remembered were the enormous paws and the floppiness of the body. She loved to walk with him in the woods. He’d fallen into the habit of conversing with her about the composition of the soil, the state of his plants, the head-clearing whiff of the buds. Like many people who have only animals as companions, he believed she listened and in her own way understood.

  “Jesus Christ, Harry. What the hell has happened here?”

  Harry. An easy familiarity. He hadn’t heard the girl enter the house. Now, as she saw the dog for the first time, she gasped and said, “Oh God.” She placed a hand on his shoulder while he crouched over the animal. He was grateful for the touch, the sympathy. How long since anyone had shown him kindness?

  “Who did this? Who did all this, Harry?”

  “We call it law and order in this country,” he answered. There was a break in his voice.

  He stood up. He thought: I’ll bury the dog among the trees. Yes. His eyes were wet, and he drew the cuff of his shirt across them. He walked past the girl and stepped into the kitchen, where he took a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from a cupboard. A long hit.

  Canisters of flour and sugar and coffee had been dumped on the floor. Cabinets lay open, assorted items of china upturned, broken cups, saucers. The kitchen window was cracked. Foodstuffs had been dragged out of the refrigerator. A jar of honey spilled on the floor had already drawn a congregation of ants.

  The girl entered the kitchen. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For what it’s worth I’m really sorry, Harry.”

  The Jack Daniel’s made Tennant’s chest warm. He drank again. The girl stood with her hip against the table. In her black sweater and black jeans, she might have been fading away into the shadows around her. Her pale, expressionless face belonged exactly in this dead house. Even the solitary earring had shed luster.

  “They trashed the place,” he said. “Okay. That’s bad enough but it’s only stuff. Things. You can always replace things. But the dog, the poor fucking dog …”

  The girl touched his shoulder again. “I know.”

  “They could have gutted the goddamn place without harming the goddamn dog.”

  “The pigs aren’t renowned for their delicate sensitivities, Harry. They’re licensed for brutality. Nothing gets in their way.”

  Tennant wanted to roar. To explode. He experienced an impossible clot of sensations and urges, frustrations that couldn’t be dissolved in one swift gesture. He thought about getting the gun he kept in the attic—if the cops hadn’t found the weapon—and shooting something, anything. It was an old Taurus revolver he’d fired maybe a half-dozen times at stationary targets in the woods—soda cans, rotted tree trunks. He had no affinity with the weapon, which had come from Bobby Delacroix. “You never know when you might need a piece, Harry,” Bobby had said in his conspiratorial way, his hand fingering the sterling silver death’s-head he wore round his neck. Bobby, who purchased Tennant’s crop every year, was all flash and secrecy and hidden weapons. Guns made him complete. But the Taurus was a needless gift so far as Tennant was concerned. Unlike big-time growers in California and Oregon, who protected massive acreages with machine guns and land mines, Tennant had nothing in these woods worth killing for. He harvested a small crop that brought him more than enough for his needs.

  Death had no role in his size of business.

  Now he sat here in this broken house with a dead dog and a girl he didn’t know. He set the Jack Daniel’s on the table. He was dizzy and it was only midday, but he felt time had slowed. He lit a cigarette and coughed. He needed to be sober, clearheaded enough to make decisions. What next? How to act? He couldn’t just sit here and get wasted. No, he had to move, get his blood going. He had to bury the dog. That was the first thing, the most difficult.

  He went back to the foot of the stairs. The girl followed him. She picked up a length of thick curtain the cops had hauled from a window, and she laid it across Isadora in a gentle manner. Tennant studied the dog a moment, then walked outside, found the wh
eelbarrow, and dragged it ponderously up the steps to the porch. Then he entered the wretched house again.

  The girl said, “Let me help you, Harry.”

  He was dizzy again. He hated the sensation of drinking on an empty stomach. The day was rushing away from him like a train he’d missed. “I appreciate the offer, but there’s not much you can do.”

  He stooped, caught the dog by her paws, and dragged her considerable weight halfway across the floor. He tried to imagine her as refuse to be hauled out, a piece of furniture beyond repair. There was no other way he could get through this. This struggle. This misery. His eyes were wet again. Without asking, the girl reached down and slid her arms under the animal’s body and, with an enormous effort, helped Tennant raise Isadora from the floor. Tennant kicked the front door open. With the girl’s help he managed, somewhat clumsily, to slide the animal into the wheelbarrow.

  The curtain that covered Isadora slid away, snagged on a door hinge.

  Tennant found himself staring at the Dane’s head. He experienced a moment of slippage. All his perceptions were scattered like random atoms. The smell of fur struck him, a deep musk reminiscent of damp places and wet black-brown soil. He walked to the end of the porch, where he stuck his finger into his throat and tried to throw up. Nothing came except some sticky fluid, but his head cleared. When he turned around, the girl was covering the dog again with the drape.

  “Are you okay?” Her voice was very quiet, the kind reserved for terminal wards.

  “I’m fine. I’m sorry about that.” He gestured loosely toward the end of the porch, embarrassed.

  “It happens. It’s nothing to be sorry about.” The girl leaned against the porch rail and stared out into the trees. “Maybe you want to bury your dog alone, Harry. If you need my help, fine.”