A Garden of Earthly Delights (20 page)

“Fucker.”

It was a groan, coming from his gut. The ball of spite-snakes rousing themselves. He was looking for her—his daughter—that one daughter—the only person he had ever loved—he wanted to understand this, and he wanted these witnesses to understand. They were judging him, and he wanted them to know he was a Walpole, and the name Walpole signified a certain kind of man, a man who honored his family even to the grave.

But he felt these facts sliding away. Memories he should have sorted out years ago so that when the time came he could put them
all together.
Of account
these were. He could not die because that would mean all these things would be lost—who else was there except Carleton Walpole to bring them together? Everything— everyone—was joined in him. Like Jesus on his cross, these things came together in you, piercing and spiking you in place. Only in Carleton Walpole. He was the center of it, without him everything would melt away into nothing. Already he was losing their names, that were familiar to him as his own. And he had a new baby now back at the camp, he had to live for her. And Clara who'd run away with a man he had never seen.
Pa no. Pa don't hit me. Pa!
He held back his hand, he had not struck her. It was the others he wanted to hit, the others he wanted to murder.

Struggling to pull off his shoe, goddamn he was angry: threw the shoe at the nearest of the stained-glass windows but it struck the wall, and fell harmlessly to the floor. Carleton heaved himself to his feet. Grabbed whatever it was—a heavy iron stand for a candle— reared it up and swung with it, striking one of the long-robed statues, a female it appeared to be in a long blue and white robe, and a halo around her waxy face, Carleton laughed at the expression in the face as he swung and struck and battered and crumbled the thing and it fell in pieces at his feet. Turning then, panting and partially blinded, bits of grit in his eyes, he swung the iron stand in wild arcs striking the pews, denting the hardwood pews but not otherwise injuring them, he stumbled in the aisle uncertain which direction to take as at a crook in the road where there's no fuckin sign you can't make a decision, yet finally you do, he was laughing stumbling toward the door, he had one shoe on and one shoe off and his knee was numb, the pain had abated, as in his gut the tiny snakes were taken unaware, and could not stop him now. At the front of the church he swung and toppled in single strokes two fountain-looking things, milk glass on pedestals that held water, and the shattered glass went flying, and the water went flying. And a voice called out—“Stop! Stop!” and Carleton turned to see someone hurrying toward him, and ducking, wordless, remembering to breathe through his nose, Carleton swung the thing in his hand and caught the man on the side of the head, the man went down like a shot duck, hit the stone floor with a soft moaning sound, and Carle-
ton dropped the iron thing beside him, and stumbled away. Both his hands were throbbing with sensation but it was a good sensation. Outside then in the sunshine, stumbling along the pavement one shoe on, one shoe off. Witnesses would think he was a drunk well fuck them let them think what they fuckin want. He saw faces regarding him with astonishment. White faces like his own yet regarding him with astonishment. In a sudden rage he tore a whiplike thing from a car, a metal strip it was, he'd use it like a whip, he was striking at people's faces who came too close, warning
Get away! Get away I'll kill you!
and it seemed to him not even himself any longer who was doing this, it was the whip-thing in his hand that was alive, and there came a youngish thick-bodied man in a policeman's uniform, bulldog face yet astonished behind curved dark glasses—
Mister lay down your weapon, I am warning you mister lay down your weapon
—and in his hand was a pistol cocked and aimed at Carleton's heart and Carleton felt the trigger jerk as he rushed his enemy wielding the whip, swinging it until something exploded into his chest and his vision went out, and his brain went out. And that was all.

II.
L
OWRY

“Kid, you don't cry much, do you.”

It wasn't a question. It called for no answer. Lowry had no questions to ask of Clara, or of anyone. He was a man who knew the answers to questions, not one who depended upon others to supply them.

He likes that
Clara thought.
A girl who doesn't cry.

Those long dreamy hours driving with Lowry, sitting beside him in the front seat of his shiny-dark new-looking sedan, drinking Colas they stopped to buy—Clara was the one to run into the store, clutching coins Lowry gave her—and sometimes he let her have a few swallows from a bottle of beer, driving those hours Clara had no thought of any destination. Just to be in motion: to escape. Watching the sun shift in the sky behind the scrub pines beside the highway Clara thought nervously, fiercely
Nobody's going to get me now. He isn't going to, ever again.
Observing the nameless road before them that the man named Lowry overtook always at the same speed, trying to imagine it running back beneath them and into the days preceding: the distance and time her father would have to conquer if he were to get her, claim her. Lay his hands on her. And she saw Carleton Walpole blundering, failing. For he could not overtake the younger man whose face in profile was the sharp-etched face of the jack of spades on a playing card. And so she smiled. She laughed.

See? I don't need you, goddamn you. No more.

Dozing off and waking to his upraised hand, his actual fist, seeing the scabby knuckles before his hand struck …

“He made my face bleed,” she'd told Lowry in a thin, outraged child's voice. Her anger was for that sensation of being helpless, a sight to be pitied by others. “He never hit me like that before. He hit my brothers but not me, I could taste the blood and some people were watching, and—” She would shudder, raising her knees to catch her heels on the car seat, hug her knees tight against her chest
as a boy might do, staring through the bug-splattered windshield at the road that had no name for her, as the places through which Lowry drove had no names and were fleeting, inconsequential. Sometimes she would turn to peer over her shoulder, to see the highway moving back steadily behind them, misty in the morning light; and something about the way it disappeared so swiftly frightened her. Lowry said, “You're afraid your old man will find you. But you're afraid worse he won't.”

Lowry laughed, and Clara felt her face burn.

“Goddamn it ain't that way. No.”

But Lowry just laughed, and reached out to squeeze her knee.

Like you'd squeeze a dog, the nape of its neck. Out of fondness that was superior, condescending.

Sometimes, Clara told him
Go to hell.
Muttered so maybe he heard and maybe he did not hear and she climbed over the back of the seat clumsy and indignant and stretched out in back to sleep. That weird sensation of lying flat in the back of a car as the car is moving, you feel the vibrations, a shivery feeling between the legs sometimes, and thoughts coming like long slow flat shapes and in her sleep she heard a child sobbing and her heart was filled with contempt for such weakness.
You don't cry much, do you.
Waking then she was confused not knowing where she was, maybe on one of the buses, then she realized the moving vehicle was small, contained: only just Clara lying on the backseat amid Lowry's things, and shimmering green outside the window flowing past like water, and there, the back of Lowry's head, the blond hairs that were different shades in the sunshine, some so pale they appeared silvery, others darker, almost brown, and he wore his hair long, straggling to his collar, and almost Clara could not recall his face, staring fascinated at the back of his head feeling calm now thinking
There he is. He hadn't ever gone away.

Stopped at places along the road. Small restaurants, taverns. Lowry, entering such places, seemed always to be recognized: if not his actual face and name, his Lowry-self. The way he smiled, knowing that people would smile back at him; knowing they were grateful to see his smile, and not something else. He said, in the way of a man
speaking to himself, to reason out a thought to which Clara Walpole was a witness only by chance: “You're a certain size, people look at you a certain way. Say I'm on crutches. Say I'm in a wheel-chair. These same fuckers looking at me, think they would respect me like they do? Or if I was a woman.”

Clara said, sly and mean, “If you were a woman, there'd be some bastard drives a car just like yours and the same color hair as yours to knock you on your ass every time. Wipe that look off your face.”

Lowry laughed. He liked it when Clara spoke to him in a certain brash way long as she didn't cross over into something else. Like a dog that's been trained to rush barking to the very edge of his master's property, but not to take a step over. Or he'd regret it.

In the places they stopped, Clara ran to use the rest room and fixed herself up. So happy! Sometimes she thought
Just to pee. Just to wash my face. Just to run water, it don't need to be hot.
She slapped her cheeks that looked pallid, sallow, to get some color into them, like she'd seen Nancy do. Wetted her eyes to make them clear. Smiled at herself in the mirror in that way she had not needing to show too much of her teeth, and thinking that she looked all right, she had a hopeful-seeming face, nobody would wish to hurt that face.

Smiling because there was Lowry out there waiting for her.

(And what if Lowry was gone and left her? She knew, this might be. Any place they stopped it might be. And so walking out there she had to appear hopeful and happy like a girl who'd never had such a mean thought.)

Lowry might tease when she returned breathless to slide into a booth across from him, “Kid, I was worried where you'd gone: thought you'd fallen in.” Or, to make her smile and blush with pleasure, all the more if a waitress was there looking on, “Kid, you look like a million bucks. That's my girl.”

She wasn't, though.

She wasn't Lowry's girl. Not the way Carleton would think, or Nancy. Or anybody who saw them together, maybe.

If Lowry was in one of his moods, it was like Clara did not exist. Or she was some kind of thing tied to his ankle, or a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, a weight, a burden but not too much of a burden;
for Lowry wasn't the kind of man who endures much of a burden.

“What's he, some kind of ex-soldier? Marine? Good-looking guy.”

Women asked such questions of Clara when Lowry was out of earshot. Cutting their eyes at her thinking
What's so special about you, he chose you? What about me?

Waitresses, bar girls, shifting their shoulders just-so, in Lowry's presence. Must be an instinct like a cat arcing its back to be petted, a female displaying her breasts for a man's drifting eye.

Clara stroked her small hard breasts in secret. Pinching the nipples to make them grow.

“Naw,” she'd say, keeping a straight mouth, “he's just out of Leavenworth, y'all know what that is?”

The looks on their faces! If, say, Lowry was playing pinball or dropping coins in a cigarette machine, hearing Clara giggle he'd glance around to see the woman startled and fearful-looking backing away quick.