The Wanting Read online

  He turned and made his way across the floor.

  He heard Jerry Metger call out, “Wait! I’m not through yet.…”

  The murky sunlight on the street made him blink and he was a little disoriented from the gin he’d drunk too quickly. He peered along the sidewalk. The inside of his mind felt like a map that had been left in the rain. He put a hand to the side of his face and shut his eyes, imagining the colors of the map running every which way across the sodden paper.

  It was twelve years ago and it was cold to him now. Cold and dead. He was damned if he was going to let Metger get to him on this subject. Damned if he was going to reopen an old puzzle like some scar tissue that hadn’t quite healed.

  He’d go home to Henrietta and drink some more gin and maybe he’d sleep and the sleep would be untroubled and drunken and dreamless.

  Louise painted a small yellow bird. She moved the brush slowly, taking care over each detail—the brightness of a blue eye, the layering of feathers, the pink claws. She understood that if her work had any real merit, it was this attention to small detail. Once or twice she’d tried to create more impressionistic watercolors but she’d always felt uneasy about them—the kids who read these books and examimed the pictures were sticklers for every little detail, every shadow, every color. The wanted authenticity. Now, leaning over her easel, she examined the canary that gazed out at her from the paper. She’d painted it in mid-flight, wings extended and claws spread. Somehow it seemed unintentionally menacing, coming out of the paper like a weird bird of prey.

  She added more blue to the eye, as if this might take the edge off the menace, defuse the threat in the bird’s expression, but it didn’t do. She sighed and put her brush down and gazed at the creature. What was she supposed to do? Paint a smile on the bird’s face? Give it a jaunty upward turn of the beak? She removed the paper from the easel and set it down on the floor beside her. She’d try again. This time she’d paint the bird in a stationary position, perhaps situated on its perch. It would alleviate the menace. Maybe she’d put it in a cage, which was the way most young kids first saw domestic birds anyhow. There would be a comforting familiarity in that.

  Years ago, around the time when she first met Max, she had been doing abstract oils, great swatches of color—mainly shades of green in geometrical shapes—on large canvases. She painted twenty hours a day, driven, it seemed to her, by an enthusiasm that was almost evangelical. The green canvases mounted up until they filled her small apartment. She hadn’t sold any of them. Once a small Los Angeles gallery, a fringe establishment, had hung a few—an act of uncritical kindness, she thought now. Nobody had bought any and the only review, in an underground paper now defunct, had savaged them, calling them “derivative,” “unfeeling,” and “without any spark of creativity.” From that point on she’d never done any more of the large green canvases and whenever she thought about them now she felt a strange little embarrassment—they had been youthful creations and unspeakably trite. Even Max, who had been charitable about her work back then, the way any love might be about his loved one’s creations, said that sitting in her apartment was a bit like being trapped inside a green nightmare.

  After graduating she spent a couple of years in an advertising agency where she discovered a knack for certain kinds of illustrations—small red-cheeked children and dogs and butterflies and cute little automobiles. Her illustrations were charming and she was highly paid for them by West Coast publishing houses. Now and again she’d done some greeting cards, usually of a sentimental nature. Get-well cards for five-year-olds, heartbreakers, and tearjerkers. Christmas cards depicting a plumply healthy boy sitting on the lap of robust, florid Santa. The children in her illustrations always had plump little hands and puffed-out cheeks and curly hair, usually blond. The thing she always thought saved her illustrations from being sickening was a humor that crept into them, a mischief. Her kids sometimes had bruises on their knees or scruff marks on their shoes or an unruly curl sticking up out of their heads or a toothless smile—tiny things that suggested blemishes in an otherwise perfectly cozy little universe.

  She cleaned her brushes and massaged the sides of her neck. She glanced once at the canary that was frozen in mid-flight, then stood up and walked out on to the sun deck. She surveyed the trees. Immediately below she saw Max, sitting with his back to a tree trunk, a book open in his lap. His head hung to one side and his eyes were closed—the embodiment of idleness. Why shouldn’t he be lazy? she wondered. He had worked too long and too hard to build up his practice, rarely taking any time off except for occasional long weekends. Watching him, she was conscious of circles under his eyes; the bald spot at the center of his skull was visible. Dear Max, she thought.

  He stirred, opened his eyes, smiled up at her. “I must have fallen asleep,” he said.

  “You were snoring,” she called down.

  “I never snore. Physicians know how not to snore. It’s a special skill they learn as interns. It’s rude to snore during an operation even if you’ve slept only three hours out of the last forty-eight. We learn that in the first year.”

  Louise leaned against the handrail. A wood dove went flapping past in a flurry of falling pinecones.

  “If you meet me in the kitchen, I’ll make some coffee,” she said.

  “Agreed.” Max got to his feet. Louise went downstairs. In the kitchen she filled the coffeepot with water and placed grounds in the basket.

  Max wandered in, the book tucked under his arm. He yawned, shook his head. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Three-thirty.”

  Max sat at the table. The angularity of his body always amused Louise; at times he gave the impression of having more limbs than he knew what to do with. He spread his long fingers on the surface of the table and his wedding ring glinted.

  “Where’s Denny?” he asked.

  Louise shook her head. “I was beginning to wonder about that. He didn’t come back for lunch.”

  Max leafed through some pages of his book in an idle way. “‘Was it the sound a blue spruce makes/ in the wind at night, owls huge among its needles/ or was it the echo of a footfall/ springing among wet leaves and cedar boughs/ on the river-bank?’”

  “What’s that from?” Louise brought coffee to the table.

  “This book of poems. Somebody called Lewis Turco.”

  “When did you start reading poetry?” she asked.

  “I’m full of surprises,” Max answered.

  “Aren’t you just?” She looked at her husband a moment. The whites of his eyes were faintly pink. Suddenly she caught the scent of his breath—there was a trace of stale scotch. Last night he’d consumed about five or six good-sized shots. Maybe what she smelled on his breath was the aftermath of that. Unless—unless he’d been drinking again today while she was upstairs working. She had never known him to drink more than one glass of liquor at any particular time and certainly never during the day. What the hell, it was part of the process she’d described to Denny as unwinding. Max was like a little kid playing hookey. Nobody was going to call him about an urgent appendectomy in the middle of the night, were they? Nobody was going to have to be rushed to the hospital at 3 A.M. for a cesarean. It wasn’t as if he had to be stone-cold sober for his patients.

  “Somebody left this book in the reception room,” he said. “I just happened to pick it up.”

  Louise sipped her coffee. She looked at the title, American Still Lifes. She put her cup down and thought about her son. “I guess he’s okay,” she said.

  “Who? This Turco person?”

  “You know I’m talking about Denny. He’s bound to he hungry.”

  Max sighed. “He can’t be too far away. Maybe he ran into Frog. Maybe Frog’s regaling him with tales of forest lore or reminiscing about the glorious sixties.”

  “Maybe,” Louise said. She gazed through the kitchen window at the rectangle of sky visible over the tall pines. She had the sudden impression that the forest went on without any end, mil
e after mile of dark trees stretching to infinity.

  “I’ll go out and look for him if you like,” Max offered.

  “It’s strange he didn’t come back for lunch.”

  “Kids don’t know about time,” Max said. “Time doesn’t exist for them. He never wears the watch I gave him last Christmas because he says the band makes his wrist sweat. That’s how much he thinks about time.”

  Louise drained her coffee. “He doesn’t usually miss meals, though.”

  She was silent for a while. She felt an echo of a dread she had intended to leave behind in the city. Out here it was different, she told herself—there’s only the safety of the trees, nothing else. But how was one small boy managing to amuse himself out there for such a long time? There were only so many trees you could climb, after all.

  Max touched her hand. “Look, Louise. Green trees. No city street corners. No dark alleys. Just trees and sky. What could possibly happen to a kid out there?” He paused. “There are no child molesters in the forest, my dear. No stranglers. Nothing.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t thinking about the Strangler. I was thinking about accidents. Like falling out of trees. Tripping on something and maybe breaking an ankle. You never know.”

  For a moment she imagined these woods alive with weird characters—moonshiners, hillbillies with hunting rifles, madmen on the run from the law, sinsemilla growers, crazed trappers, all kinds of loonies who scratched out some kind of living among the pine trees. She imagined Dennis encountering any one of these creatures.

  You imagine too much, Louise. What are these bizarre figments except rustic extensions of the Strangler?

  She walked into the living room, carrying her coffee. Max followed her slowly. They sat down together on the sofa. She thought, I have to learn how to silence the tiny screams of anxiety. These woods mean no harm to anyone.

  Max said, “He’ll come bounding through the door at any moment telling us how he got lost. Louise, it isn’t like Deliverance out there, you know. You’ve got to turn down the pilot light of your imagination, sweetheart.”

  “I’m okay, Max. Really.” But she wasn’t altogether okay—she imagined Denny lying in a ditch with a broken leg and it struck her that she wouldn’t know where to begin looking for him. There were no street signs in the forest. There were no haunts where a child might hang out.

  She got up from the sofa and wandered to the window.

  As she did so she saw a car turn into the driveway and she felt an odd icy clawing around her heart. The vehicle was a cop car. A beige sedan with unlit roof lights.

  For a second Louise couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Cop cars belonged someplace else, not up here in the forest. Not here. They belonged in humid San Francisco nights, their lights flashing and sirens screaming. They belonged where there was blood, a homicide victim tossed into a dumpster or a young kid strangled on a vacant lot.

  Denny. Something to do with the boy.

  She looked a moment at Max; her expression was one of confusion. And then she was hurrying out of the room, Max striding after her. When they went outside on the porch a cop was emerging from the sedan and gazing toward them with a smile.

  They don’t smile, Louise thought, if it’s bad news. They look grim then, don’t they? They look like morticians when it’s something bad.

  The cop took a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and lit one casually. He wore a crumpled chocolate-brown uniform but no cap, no hat.

  Louise said, “Is something wrong?” She was conscious of the forest stirring—a quick breeze fluttered through it and for a second the sound of branches whispering suggested secretive voices carrying a message she was too dumb to understand. She felt Max’s hand against her arm, the pressure of his fingers. Denny, she thought. Why else would this cop be here?

  Her world tilted. She was conscious of gray sky, the path of a bird, the sun concealed by a cloud.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked again. She couldn’t keep the shrill edge from her voice. And then she was trapped on a downward spiral of panic and recrimination, a flood of guilt: I could have been watching out for my son. I could have kept better track of him.

  The cop shook his head. “Hell, no. What could be wrong?”

  “I imagined …” Louise said, with an intense rush of relief.

  “I know,” the cop said. “People see me and they always imagine the worst. They seem to think I don’t do anything but deliver bad news. Sometimes I feel like a messenger of doom. It’s an unfair image.”

  He stuck out his hand and Louise shook it. She heard herself utter a small shrill laugh, a nervous sound. Max took the cop’s hand next.

  “Name’s Metger,” the cop said. “And no, I don’t have bad news. I found out in town you were renting this place and I thought I’d say hello. Nothing more sinister than that.”

  Louise laughed, a little too sharply. She introduced herself, then Max, and she realized that relief had brought a breathless quality to her voice. She glanced at the police sedan. The side panel had the word SHERIFF in dark blue letters.

  “Nice to know you,” Metger said. His hair was the color of sand and his muscular body filled out his uniform. “How long are you figuring on staying?”

  “The summer,” Max said.

  “A wise choice. You don’t want to spend a winter up here.” The cop glanced at the house a moment. He had an open, honest face. The eyes suggested some kind of inner strength; it was the face of a man who knew his own limitations. It was also deceptively young. If it hadn’t been for the tiny lines around the edges of the eyes, you might have supposed him to be in his mid-twenties.

  “You’ve got a son, I understand,” Metger said.

  “When you drove up that was my first reaction—that something had happened to him,” Louise said.

  Metger smiled. “Is he around?”

  Louise made a vague gesture toward the pines. “He should be,” she said. “He went for a walk. He’s a little late. You know how kids can be—”

  Max said, “Why don’t you come inside? We’ve got some coffee.…”

  The cop shook his head. “I’ll take a rain check on that if you don’t mind. I don’t have the time right now.” He was looking at the front of the house again. “Good-looking place. I expect you folks are comfortable here.”

  Louise said they were.

  Metger looked upward at the roof of the property. He had the cop’s practiced manner of casually taking things in, his eyes deceptively lazy now, almost glazed. He tugged at this belt buckle. Louise noticed the weight of his gun shifting.

  Then he turned his face toward the trees for a moment. It was almost as if he were searching the landscape for something. The breeze came again and the pine branches whimpered and then there was silence.

  Louise had a strange impression just then—that this cop hadn’t come here to introduce himself, he hadn’t come out here just for the purpose of getting acquainted—it was something else altogether, only she couldn’t think what. The way he looks at the house, the way he studies it. He is like a man trying to compare reality with a memory.

  He put his hands on his hips and his body swayed a little. “It’s good to have a family out here for a change. The last guy who lived here had this place all to himself. Joe Lyons. I always wondered what he did with himself in a place as big as this. If it was me living all alone out here, I think I’d go crazy. Especially in the winter.” He smiled, then started to walk back toward his car, where he stopped. “Your boy like it out here?”

  “I think he’s getting used to it,” Louise said.

  “Maybe next time I’m out this way I’ll get to meet him,” Metger said. “This could be a good place for a kid. So long as he’s careful.”

  Careful? Louise wondered. She was about to ask him what he meant by that, but he was already climbing into his car. She saw the cop wave, then watched as the car backed out of the driveway. For a long time the sound of the engine reverberated through the air before the silence came
back again. She leaned against the porch rail. She was drained. You overreact, Louise. Sometimes it’s too much. There’s nothing wrong with Denny. Christ. You take a tiny flame and fan it and before you know it you’ve got a whole goddamn bonfire burning in your mind. She placed a hand over her heart, which was still kicking against her ribs.

  “Our friendly sheriff,” Max said. He had his hands stuffed into the pockets of his brown cord pants. “Did you really think he was coming to tell you something bad about Denny?”

  Louise smiled thinly. “It crossed my mind.”

  “Save your imagination for those books you illustrate. At least you get paid for that.” Max placed his hands on her shoulders and drew her toward him.

  She said, “We still don’t know where Denny is, do we—”

  Even as she asked the question there was the sound of laughter from the side of the house and the boy appeared around the corner.

  He wasn’t alone.

  Dennis introduced them as Dick and Charlotte Summer. There was a curious similarity between the two old people, such as you see on the faces of couples who have been married for a lifetime. Dick had thin white hair and an easy smile that turned his face into something resembling a crumpled map; he wore dark brown suspenders outside his plaid shirt and his gray flannel pants were baggy and one of the fly buttons was loose, hanging a little awkwardly. Charlotte’s hair matched Dick’s in color, but hers was still thick, held in place by orange barrettes at the sides of her skull, which gave her an odd girl-like quality, Louise thought. Her shapeless dress was of pale green wool and she had sandals on her white, veined feet. A trace of lipstick was visible on her tiny mouth. Both Dick and Charlotte had bright blue, almost youthful eyes, watchful as those of a bird.

  Dennis was babbling as he introduced the couple. You should see their house. You should see the old things they’ve got. There’s this ancient pickup truck and Dick says I can help repair it and Charlotte bakes all this wonderful stuff and they’ve got old tools like I’ve never seen before and old books and old photographs …