Part Two 4 page

I couldn't see her face clearly, but I knew from the tone of her voice what it would look like. Eyes impassive, but her lips would be turned down at the corners, and after a while she would start to blink a lot. It was her silent sign that she wanted to be touched and held. As soon as you did, she clutched you twice as hard, and it made you sad and it made you wonder if you had the strength at the moment for both of you – which was what she was demanding.

"Are you okay, babe?" I cupped the back of her head and felt the clean smoothness of her hair.

"Yes, but just don't talk now. Hold me, please, and don't talk."

It had already happened before. Some nights she would get small and scared, convinced that anything good in her life was about to disappear and she wouldn't be able to stop it. I called it her "night fears." She was the first to admit that they were stupid and that it was pure masochism on her part, but she couldn't help it. She said the worst part was that they'd come most often when she was either completely happy or in-the-pits sad and depressed.

While I held her, I wondered if I'd done something to bring them on this time. I went through a two-second instant replay of the night at Anna's house. Uh-oh; the cold shoulder from Anna. The lousy food. No definite answer on the biography. The casual flirting between Anna and me. What a schmuck I was. I hugged Saxony to me and kept kissing the top of her head. The rubbing and touching and guilt made me want her very much. I rolled her gently onto her back and slid her nightgown up.

The next morning the sun sneaked into the room and on across the bed about seven o'clock. It woke me with its heat on my face. I hate to get up early when it's not necessary, so I scrooched around and tried to find a shady spot. But Saxony had Scotch-taped herself to me during the night, so moving was hard.

To top it all off, the door creaked open, Nails trotted in, and leaped up onto the bed. I felt like the three of us were on a life raft in the middle of the ocean, because we were all three huddled up together in the middle of the bed, leaning on the nearest body. I haven't mentioned my claustrophobia before, but sealed in between two hot bodies, the sun frying my head, the sheet wrapped around my feet… I decided that it was time to get up. I patted Nails on the head and gave him a little push. He growled. I thought that it was just a little morning grouchiness, so I patted him again and pushed him again. He growled louder. We looked at each other over a thin pink wave of blanket, but bull terriers have absolutely no expression on their faces, so you never know what's what with them.

"Nice Nails. Good boy."

"Why is he growling at you? What did you do to him?" Saxony cuddled a little closer, and I could feel her warm breath on my neck.

"I didn't do anything. I just gave him a little push so that I could get up."

"Wow. Do you think that you should do it again?"

"How do I know? How do I know he won't bite me?" I looked over at her, and she blinked.

"No, Thomas, I don't think so. He likes you. Remember yesterday?" She sounded convinced.

"Oh, yeah? Well, today's today, and your arm's not in jeopardy."

"Then do you plan on staying here all morning?" She smiled and rubbed the flat of her palm across her nose. Thank God she'd snapped back from last night. "Tommy is a chick-en…"

I looked at Nails and he looked at me. A standoff. The tip of his prune-black nose poked up from behind one of his paws.

"Mrs. Fletch-er!"

"Oh, come on, Thomas, don't do that! What if she's still asleep?"

"Too had. I ain't gonna get bit. Niiiice Nailsy, good boy! Mrs. Fletch-er!"

We heard footsteps, and a second before she popped her head into the room, Nails jumped off the bed to greet her.

Saxony started laughing and pulled the pillow over her head.

"Yes? Good morning."

"Good morning. Uh, well, Nails was up on the bed and I gave him a little push because I wanted to get up, you see, and, uh, he sort of growled at me. I was afraid that he might mean it."

"Who, Nails? Naah, never. Watch this." He stood next to her but kept looking at us on the bed. She lifted a foot and gave him a little shove sideways. Without looking at her he growled. He also kept wagging his tail.

"What do you two want for breakfast? I decided to throw it in for you on your first day. I bet you haven't done any shopping, have you, Saxony?"

I sat up and pushed my hands through my hair. "You don't have to do that. It's easy for us –"

"I know I don't have to do anything. What would you like? I make good pancakes and sausages. Yeah, why don't you have my pancakes and sausages."

We decided to have pancakes and sausages. She left the room and Nails jumped back up on the bed. He climbed over my legs and settled down halfway across Saxony's stomach.

"Are you okay this morning, Sporty?" I asked.

"Yes. I just get crazy at night sometimes. I start thinking that everything is going to go wrong, or that you'll go away soon… things like that. I've been doing it all my life. I think it's just because I'm overtired now. Usually the next morning everything is okay again."

"You've got a little split personality in you, huh?" I pulled a lock of hair away from her eyes.

"Yes, completely. I know what's going on in me when it happens, but there's nothing I can do to stop it." There was a pause, and she took my hand. "Do you think I'm crazy, Thomas? Do you hate me when it happens?"

"Don't be ridiculous, Sax. You know me by now – if I hated you, I would have gotten away from you. Stop thinking that way." I squeezed her hand and stuck out my tongue at her. She pulled the pillow over her head, and Nails tried to shove his head under there with her.

I looked out the window, and the garden was all sunny and moving back and forth in the wind. Bees hovered over some of the plants, and a redbird lit on the porch railing not three feet away.

Early morning in Galen, Missouri. A few cars drove by, and I yawned. Then a little kid passed, licking an ice-cream cone and running his free hand along the top of Mrs. Fletcher's fence. Tom Sawyer with a bright green pistachio cone. I dreamily watched him and wondered how anyone could eat ice cream at eight o'clock in the morning.

Without looking either way, the boy started across the street and was instantly punched into the air by a pickup truck. The truck was moving fast, so he was thrown far beyond the view from our window. When he disappeared, he was still going up.

"Holy shit!" I snatched my pants off a chair and ran for the door. I heard Saxony call, but I didn't stop to explain. It was the second time I'd seen someone hit by a car. Once in New York, and the person landed right on his head. Going down the porch steps two at a time, I thought how unreal these goddamned things looked. One minute a person's there, talking to a friend or eating a green ice-cream cone. The next thing you know you've heard a fast thump and there's a body sailing away through the air.

The driver was out of the truck and stooped over the body. The first thing I saw when I got there was the green ice cream, half-covered with dirt and pebbles and already beginning to melt on the black pavement.

No one else was around. I came up to the man and hesitantly peered over his shoulder. He smelled of sweat and human heat. The boy was on his side on the ground, his legs splayed apart in such a way that he looked as if he'd been stop-framed, running. He was bleeding from the mouth and his eyes were wide open. No, one of his eyes was wide open; the other was half-shut and fluttering.

"Is there anything I can do? I'll call an ambulance, okay? I mean, you stay here and I'll go call the ambulance."

The man turned around, and I recognized him from the barbecue. One of the cooks at the grill. One of the big jokers.

"All this is wrong. I knew it, though. Yeah, sure, go get that ambulance. I can't tell nothin' yet." His face was pinched and frightened as hell, but the tone of his voice was what surprised me. It was half-angry, half-self-pitying. There was no fear there at all. No remorse either. It had to be shock: horrible events make people act crazy and say mad things. The poor fool was probably realizing that the rest of his life was now shadowed, no matter what happened to the boy. He'd have the guilt of having run over a child to live with for the next fifty years. God, I pitied him.

"Joe Jordan! It wasn't supposed to be you!"

Mrs. Fletcher had come up from behind us and was standing there with a pink dish towel in her hand.

"I know, goddammit! How many things are going to fuck up before we get this straightened out? Did you hear about last night? How many things've there been already, four? Five? No one knows nothin' anymore, nothin'!"

"Calm down, Joe. Let's wait and see. You going to call that ambulance, Mr. Abbey? The number's one-two-three-four-five. Just dial the first five numbers. That's the emergency line."

The boy began gurgling and his legs jumped and twitched involuntarily, like a frog touched by an electric prod in a biology experiment. I looked at Jordan, but he was looking at the boy and shaking his head.

"I'm telling you, Goosey, it wasn't supposed to be me with this!"

As I turned to run to the phone, I heard Mrs. Fletcher say, "Just quiet down and wait."

The pavement was hot under my bare feet, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the melting ice-cream cone again. I ran by Saxony standing on the top step of the porch, holding Nails by his thick leather collar.

"Is he dead?"

"Not yet, but he's in bad shape. I've got to call the ambulance."

When it came, a few people were standing around and watching from a distance. A white police car was in the middle of the street with its row of busy blue lights on the roof flashing back and forth.

The short bursts of people's voices from its radio filled the air with a staccato crackle that was both adamant and annoying at the same time.

We watched from the porch while they gently lifted the flaccid body onto a stretcher and slid it into the back of the van. When it was gone, Joe Jordan and the policeman stood in front of our house and talked. Jordan kept running his hand across the lower part of his face, and the cop rested both hands on the front of his wide black belt.

Mrs. Fletcher moved away from a bunch of onlookers and joined the two men. They talked for several minutes, and then Jordan and the policeman drove off together in the patrol ear. Mrs. Fletcher stood there and watched them go. After a while she turned around and waved me over to join her. I walked down the steps and across the warm flagstones.

"You saw it all, eh, Tom?"

"Yes, unfortunately. The whole horrible thing."

The sun was high and directly over her shoulder. I had to squint to look at her.

"Was the boy laughing before he got hit?"

"Laughing? I don't know what you mean."

"Laughing. You know, laughing? He was eating that pistachio cone, but was he laughing too?"

She was totally serious. What the hell kind of question was that?

"No, not that I remember."

"You're sure about that? You're sure that he wasnt laughing?"

"Yes, I guess so. I saw him right up until he got hit, but I wasn't really paying that much attention. No, I'm positive about that, though. Why is it so important?"

"But he was touching the fence with his hand, right?"

"Yes, he was touching the fence. He was touching the top of it with his free hand."

She looked at me. I felt very confused and uncomfortable. To get out from under those X-ray eyes, I looked around, and everyone was staring at me with that same impassive gaze that had made me feel so squirmy the day before at the barbecue.

An old farmer in a rust-red Corvair, a teenager with a bag of groceries under his arm, a doughy-looking woman with her hair up in hot pink curlers and a cigarette dangling unattractively from her lip. All giving me the gaze….

About an hour later, Mrs. Fletcher and Saxony went off to shop for groceries. They said they wouldn't be back until the early afternoon. I secretly wanted to go along with them, but they didn't ask me, and I've always felt strange inviting myself to things. Anyway, I thought that it would be good for us to be separated for a while. I wanted to work on some notes that I'd had floating around in my head since we'd arrived. First impressions of Galen and all that. I also wanted to start reading some of the literary biographies we had brought along to see how it was supposed to be done.

I changed into a pair of corduroy shorts, T-shirt, and sandals and got another cup of coffee from the kitchen. Nails followed me everywhere, but I was already getting used to that. I had all but decided that no matter what happened with this book, as soon as I got back to Connecticut I was going to buy one of these loony dogs. Maybe I'd even buy one here and have a relative of one of Marshall France's dogs. If I couldn't have a biography, at least I could have a bull terrier.

I sat down on one of the rocking chairs and put the coffee cup on the floor within easy reach. Nails tried a tentative sniff or two at my java, but I gave him a bop on the head and he lay down. I opened the book and began reading. I had gotten through about half a page when the image of the boy lying in the street floated up into my mind and stayed there. I tried to think of Saxony, of Saxony in bed, of what my book had just said about Raymond Chandler, of how nice a day it was, of what it would be like to go to bed with Anna France… but the boy in the street refused to leave. I got up and walked over to the porch railing to see if I could make out the spot where he had been hit. To see if there was still blood or any other sign that an hour ago we'd all been out there watching him die.

I remembered that I'd also been sitting on a porch when I heard that my father had been killed. The night before, I'd been on the living-room floor of Amy Fischer's house with Amy Fischer watching him in Mr. & Mrs. Time. I was much more interested in undressing Amy than in his performance, which I'd seen countless times. Since Amy's parents weren't there, she let me do whatever I wanted. The whole time we were at it, I kept hearing his voice behind me, and I even laughed once or twice because it felt strange screwing in front of my father. The gray-white from the television washed in different, changing patterns over our bodies, and when we were done we lay side by side and watched the end of the film. The next morning Amy decided that we should have breakfast out on the porch. We set the table together, and she even brought out her portable radio so that we could listen while we ate. "Massachusetts" by the Bee Gees was playing, and I was slumped down into the hammock when the news bulletin cut through the song and announced that Stephen Abbey's plane had crashed in Nevada and that there were no survivors. I didn't move when the last part of the song came back on. Amy walked out of the house with a frying pan full of scrambled eggs and Canadian bacon. She called me over to eat. She hadn't heard the bulletin yet, and as I said, you end up doing strange things when something horrible has just happened to you. What did I do? I sat down at the table and ate everything on my plate – I even had seconds on the eggs. When I was done I put my fork down beside my empty orange-juice glass and said, "My father was just killed in an airplane crash." Those were the days in prep school when every other word out of your mouth was cynical, so sweet Amy Fischer shook her head at my bad taste at the breakfast table and went on eating.

Whenever I turn on the television and Mr. & Mrs. Time is playing, the first thing that comes to mind is that disgusted look on Amy's face and the way she kept eating her yellow scrambled eggs.

It was several seconds before I realized that a car had stopped in front of the house. I couldn't see the driver, but I could see a big white blob of something pressing its nose against the half-open glass of one of the back windows. The car was an old gold-and-white Dodge station wagon like the one Leave It to Beaver's mother used to cart the family around in. I tried to focus on the driver, but the white bull terrier was now hopping back and forth from the front seat to the back, and I assumed that it was Anna and Petals. The driver's door opened and that perky head of black monk's hair emerged. She shaded her eyes and looked toward the house.

"Hi!"

I waved my book at her and felt embarrassed about my shorts and T-shirt. I don't know why, because I've succeeded so well at repressing my childhood self-consciousness that I'm usually indifferent to what people think of the way I dress.

She stood against the door and talked with one hand cupped to the side of her mouth.

"I came over to see if you two survived last night. I'm so sorry that I had to leave like that."

Petals pushed her nose up against a window and started barking in our direction. Nails perked up his ears but didn't look overly thrilled by the sound. He stayed where he was.

"Oh, that was okay. It was a fine night, Anna. I was going to call and thank you." For the chicken а la Dead Sea Scroll, the bum's rush out the door…

"Well, then, I don't feel so guilty. You are telling the truth, aren't you?"

Petals disappeared from the window, and then Anna disappeared down into the car. There was some scuffling and slurred voices, and then the dog was out and flying up the garden path, full tilt. She tried to leap too many porch steps with one bound and fell flat, but she was up in a flash and on her way over to her boyfriend. Nails's indifference disappeared and the two of them waltzed back and forth across the porch in a leaping frenzy of delight and bites. They barked and bit each other's heads and kept falling down every three steps.

"Petals is cuckoo for Nails. Mrs. Fletcher and I take them over to the high-school football field once or twice a week and let them run all of that energy out of their systems."

She stood at the bottom of the porch steps and beamed up at me. She was wearing a scarlet T-shirt that said CODASCO across its front. The shirt accused her of having much bigger breasts than I had originally thought. A pair of faded blue Levi's that were tight in a nice, sexy way, and ratty blue tennis sneakers that were holey and comfortable –looking.

I was about to say something about how good she looked when she pointed at me. "What does your T-shirt say?"

I looked down at it and unconsciously put my hand over the huge white letters. "Uh, 'Virginia Is for Lovers.' I, um, a friend gave it to me."

She stuck her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. "So you are a lover, huh?" She said it with a naughty-nasty smile that made me feel two feet high.

"Yes. Very famous too. I'm written up in Ripley's Believe It or Not."

"I don't." Her smile got bigger.

"Don't what?" Mine got smaller.

"Believe it."

Appropriately, Nails chose that moment to start humping Petals, and I was embarrassed but glad for the distraction. I pulled him off. He growled. I think both of them growled.

"Where is Saxony?"

"She and Mrs. Fletcher went shopping."

"That's too bad. I was going to ask if you two would like to come swimming. It's going to be a hot day."

"I'm not really in the mood for it, to tell you the truth. Did you hear about what happened here this morning?" I pointed the book out toward the road.

"The Hayden boy? I know. That was terrible. Did you see it?"

"Yes, the whole thing." I put the book down on the railing and crossed my arms over my chest. The dogs had collapsed a foot away from each other and were panting like little steam engines.

"Then why don't you come out for a ride with me? I'm sure that it will take your mind off things. We'll take the dogs with us."

The two of them jumped right up, as if they understood.

"Okay, sure, that would probably be very nice. Thanks, Anna."

I went back into the house, got my wallet and keys, and wrote Saxony a note. I didn't know how she'd take my not being there when she came back, so instead of rubbing salt into the wound by saying that I was with Anna, I wrote only that I was going out with Nails for a while. Anyway, why not? And why should I feel guilty?

Weren't we here to write a book on Marshall France, and so wasn't all contact with his daughter helpful? Bullshit – I felt guilty writing the note because I was excited about whatever was going to happen with Anna today, and not only because she was his daughter.

The car was full of things. Empty cardboard boxes, a yellow garden hose, an old soccer ball, a case of Alpo dog food. The dogs got in back, and Anna pressed a button which lowered the window in the tailgate for them.

"I think that the population of Galen has increased by ten people in the last few years." She took a piece of bubble gum out of her pocket and offered it to me. I said no, and she started peeling it for herself. "Farming is about the only thing that people can do around here, but like so many places, the kids don't want to farm anymore. As soon as they get old enough, they go to St. Louis and the bright lights."

"But you've stayed?"

"Yes. I don't have to work because the house was paid for a long time ago. The royalties from my father's books are more than I need to pay for everything else."

"Do you still play the piano?"

She blew a bubble and it popped almost as soon as it came out of her mouth. "Did David Louis tell you that? Yes, I play once in a while. I had a passion for it at one time, but as I've gotten older…" She shrugged and blew another bubble.

She chewed the gum like a kid – mouth open, popping and cracking it until I thought that I would go crazy. Women look terrible chewing gum. Any woman, I don't care who she is. Luckily, she took it and threw it out the window.

"I don't like gum when the taste's gone. Did David tell you about the other man who came here and wanted to do a biography of my father?"

"Yes, the man from Princeton?"

"Yes, what an ass. I invited him to dinner and he spent the evening telling me how heuristic The Land of Laughs was."

"What does that mean?"

"Heuristic? You're the English teacher, you should know."

"Oh, yeah? I don't even know what a gerund is."

"Isn't that terrible? What's our educational system coming to?"

I rolled down my window and watched a bunch of healthy-looking cows whisk flies away with their big ropy tails. Far off behind them, a tractor worked its way across a flat brown field, and an airplane moved at a pinpoint crawl.

"We'll be there in a few minutes."

"Where? Am I allowed to ask where we're going?"

"No, you'll see. It's a big surprise."

We drove on for three or four more miles, and then, without putting on the blinker, she took a sharp left off onto a narrow dirt road and into a forest so thick that I couldn't see more than fifteen feet into the trees on either side. The car became cooler, and a rich, full smell of wood and shade took over. The road got bumpy, and I could hear rocks banging up into the wheel wells.

"I never thought of Missouri as being very foresty."

Sunlight sneaked in and out of the trees. A deer appeared and disappeared through the trees, and I looked over at Anna to see if she'd seen it too.

"Don't worry, we're almost there."

When she stopped, I looked around but saw nothing.

"Let me guess: your father planted all the trees in this forest, right?"

"No." She switched off the motor and dropped the keys on the floor.

"Uh… he used to go walking here?"

"Now you're getting closer."

"He wrote all of his books on that stump?"

"No."

"I give up."

"You didn't try hard enough! Okay. I thought that you would like to see where the Queen of Oil lived."

"Where she lived? What do you mean?"

"Aren't people always asking writers where their characters come from? Father got his Queen from someone who lived in these woods. Come on, I'll show you."

Getting out of the car, I started phrasing the whole passage in my mind for the biography. "The road that led to the Queen of Oil's house snaked its way through a forest which appeared out of nowhere. France had discovered the main character for The Land of Laughs in the heart of a woods that should never have been there in the first place."

Boy, that was pretty bad. While Anna led the way into Sherwood Forest, I tried to come up with a couple of other beginnings, but then gave up. The dogs ran everywhere after each other. Anna walked about ten feet in front of me, and I divided my time between watching where I was going and watching where her very nice rear end was going.

"I keep expecting to see Hansel and Gretel out here."

"Just watch out for wolves."

My mind moved over to the time my father went hunting in Africa with Hemingway. He was gone for two months, and when he came back my mother wouldn't let him in the house with all the rhino heads and zebra skins and whatnot he had brought home to be mounted.

"There it is."

If I'd been expecting a gingerbread house with smoke from the chimney that smelled like oatmeal cookies, I was wrong. The house, if you could call it that, was a crudely built wood thing that sagged to one side as if a giant had leaned on it. If there had been glass in the two windows, it was gone now, replaced by pine boards nailed across in an X pattern. There was a crude porch missing several floorboards. The step leading up to it was split in half.

"Watch your step."

"You did say that no one's living here now, didn't you?"

"Yes, that's right. But it was very much like this when she was alive, too."

"And who was she?"

"Wait a minute and I'll show you."

She pulled out one of those long old-fashioned keys and stuck it into the lock under the rusted brown doorknob.

"You need a key to get in?"

"No, not really, but it's better this way."

Before I had a chance to ask her what she meant, she had shoved the door in and a huge smell of dampness and clean decay moved out to meet us. She started to go in but then stopped and turned to me. I was right behind her, and when she turned we were face-to-face. She moved back half a step. My heart did a hop when it realized how close we'd been for half a second.

"Stay here for a minute and I will light a lamp in there. The floor is full of holes, and it's very dangerous. Father once sprained his ankle so badly that I had to take him to the hospital."

I thought about holes in the floor and snakes and spiders, and I yawned. I usually yawn when I'm nervous, and it either makes people think that I'm very courageous or stupid. Sometimes I can't stop yawning. When I thought about it, it was ridiculous: one of the great moments of my adult life – going with the daughter of Marshall France to the house of the person who had inspired him to create his greatest character in my favorite book… and I was yawning. Before that I was scared, and before that I was thinking about her ass. Not about Anna France, daughter of… , but about Anna's ass. How did biographers ever manage to keep their lives separate from their subjects?

"You can come in now, Thomas, everything's all right."

The walls were covered with newspaper turned yellow and brown from dampness and age. The kerosene lamp and light from the open door made the newsprint look like whole colonies of bugs walking around the walls. I'd seen Walker Evans's photographs of Southern sharecroppers who had "decorated" their houses the same way, but when you were faced with the real thing it all became sadder and smaller. A raw wood table was in the center of the room, and two dying chairs were neatly shoved up to it on either side. In one corner was a metal cot with a gray wool blanket folded at the foot and a thin uncovered pillow at the head. That was it – no sink, no stove, doodads, plates, clothes on hooks, nothing. The home of a recluse on a big diet or a madwoman.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 474