Dear Digby (19 page)

He stood facing the window, remembering. “I didn’t understand right away what Matthew had in mind with Spin the Bottle—when I saw he was
serious,
it was too late, you were already rolling over each other on the floor. I saw you pick up the .22—and then I knew what was going to happen.”

I found my voice. “Why didn’t you try to help me before that?”

He poked at one of the cushions with the barrel of the .22. “I was afraid. And I stayed afraid, all the days afterward—I never gave anyone my account of what happened.”

He stabbed at the cushions with the .22. “And then it all moved so fast. They hushed it up—they had an autopsy but no inquest. Even the coroner, I guess, didn’t want criminal charges brought. They all said it was an accident.”

“It
was
an accident.”

“No,” he said, “it wasn’t. I was there in the tent. They just hushed it up, and pretty soon everyone had forgotten or moved on. I was the only one who remembered—and I remembered everything. I heard you went off to college, became an antiwar activist, broke with your dad. Then I heard you worked for a famous magazine in Manhattan. I heard gossip about all these things—by now I was a professional photographer for a magazine that made its
name
on gossip.

“One day I was walking back to my offices from lunch and I heard someone say, ‘I’m Willis Digby,’ and there you were among the mail sacks. And I knew immediately that you were hurt by something and I knew what it was. I knew it was that childhood death. I
did
follow you. I
did
watch you, yes, because I wanted to see who you’d become. Mostly, I liked you.” He laughed. “I mean, you could have been a
jerk.”

“It wasn’t necessary to spy on me.” I waggled my feet up and down to keep the circulation going. “Why didn’t you just call me up and introduce yourself? Why did you try to scare me?”

He laid the .22 on the floor beside him.

“It wasn’t my intention to scare you.” He touched my knee, then quickly pulled his hand back. “I told you, I thought that writing you letters was a gentle way to enter your life. I thought you’d begin to like me, to answer my letters. We’d get to be friends. I wouldn’t just crash through the door and say what I had to say.”

“Oh, yeah, perish
that
thought.”

He bowed his head. “I saw your father right before he left for Vietnam. The
day
before.”

I felt a chill.

“Yeah.” His face tightened and he ran a finger along the gun barrel. “I went to see him. My life was really screwed up right then. I was depressed and flunking out of school and I wanted his advice. I wanted to enlist. I thought I’d try and be a military man like my dad.”

“Oh, yeah? Did he give you the rah-rah ‘you too can be a second lieutenant’ rap?”

“No. As a matter of fact, he didn’t. He remembered me right away, and he remembered that my father had died a few years before. We went out and had a drink. Well, we had a
few
drinks. I told him that I was ready to go to Nam. I didn’t give a shit if I died. He grabbed my arm.
‘Don’t enlist,’
he said. ‘Do anything but enlist, and if they try to draft you, run. Go to Canada, go to Mexico. Don’t go over there and get killed in that stupid, wasteful, pointless war.’”

There was a long silence. “You’re quoting
my
father?” The .22 was lying maybe two feet away from me now, but I couldn’t seem to move. I was trying to imagine the conversation: my father and this skittish young madman.

“He said he was going over there to assist with the withdrawal process, and he had to appear publicly to support it. He asked me if I ever saw you, and I lied and said I did. In fact, I may have even made it sound like we were
close.”
He glanced over at me. “He told me to tell you something. He said to tell you that you were right about the war. And that he couldn’t admit it to your face. But he was on your side.”

“I saw him too, just before you did. Why wouldn’t he have told
me
all this? He was
Patton
when
I
was there.”

“Maybe he
tried.
He told me that when he saw you, he asked you for
mercy.”
He put his head down and began to cry. “I should have found you and told you this long ago. Especially after I heard he went over there and died.” His whole face dissolved in tears.

I felt clearer-headed suddenly. “Untie my hands and feet,” I demanded. He looked up. He loosened the bandanna around my ankles.

“Wait. There’s one last thing.” He got up with the rifle in one hand and kicked the bottle into motion again. Then he kicked one cushion on top of the another. He was shaking visibly—he held his left arm across his stomach and bent over slightly, as if he’d been socked in the solar plexus. Suddenly he straightened up and pointed with the .22.

“You were like
this,
you and Matthew.” His voice broke. “Get it? Do you get it?” He looked frantically at me for affirmation. I nodded. “On top of each other and you were
rolling.
It was absolutely quiet and you rolled over and over. First I’d see his face, then your face. You looked so
desperate,
God!” He turned his head away. I thought he was going to weep, but he caught himself. He pointed with the rifle again. “Each time your face flashed by, I thought you were looking at me, crying,
‘Help me, why don’t you help me?’”
He put his head down, controlled himself. “I couldn’t get my
aim,”
he cried. “It was so hard to get a clear shot, and then when I got it”—he lined up, sighting the two cushions—“I heard your .22 go off a fraction of a second before I shot—then
I
shot Matthew Kallam dead in the left side. Then
your
gun went off one last time, into the air, as it fell free. Everybody was screaming; right after that, everybody was confused.”

Then he pulled the trigger; the top cushion blew apart, lifting right off the bottom one; the side split open, stuffing pouring out. The windows shook in their frames for a while; the sound echoed through the apartment and out into the hall. He stepped back, the smoking gun at his side, and knelt before me. He held his palms out flat,
voilà.
He was still shaking.

I tried to speak.
“You
killed Matthew Kallam? You never told anybody?”

“Only one other person. I told your father that night.”

I felt dizzy. “What did my father say?”

The phone started ringing again. My neighbors were calling to ask what the noise was. I made no move to answer.

“First I thought he was going to strike me. Then he sat there and he put his head in his hands. He told me to tell you but
carefully.
He said not to spring it on you all at once. And he told me to go to the authorities. But I couldn’t do that. All these years I was trying to get to
this.
To do what he asked me to do outside the tent that night: to watch out for you.”

I stared at him. I thought I heard the apartment door open, but I was too far gone to pay attention.

“One spring I went up to Carlisle,” he said. “I used my press credentials, and I gained access to the autopsy file photographs at the morgue. I managed to get a copy of one, don’t ask me how.” He produced a large manila envelope from his prop bag. A black-and-white 8 by 10. Matthew. A few hours after death, lying on a steel table, his arms folded calmly across his chest. Just before the electric saw, I thought, and held on. He looked so small and forthright, his eyes wide open, looking at me. Absolved of all his eleven-year-old terrors: a little kid. He had a broad forehead and wide-set eyes, but they were the door to an unformed face. He still had baby fat on his cheeks and arms. The only adult thing about him was the silver dog tags around his neck. His father’s, from some war or other. Blood had congealed on his collarbone, where a bullet had grazed him. Under his left armpit there was a much larger, black wound; blood still seeped from it. “Upper thoracic, entry from the left,” Danny pointed out, over my shoulder. “You don’t need a degree in ballistics to read that story.” I looked for a long time at the perfect concentration of his childish features, the disappeared light in his eyes. After twenty-three years I wept for him, someone’s little boy, lost forever.

“What I need is someone to forgive me,” Danny said. He looked at me and reached out for the photograph. Then we both jumped as the Japanese screen fell over with a crash. Iris Moss stood in the doorway framed by light. Her rolling eye caught a beam like clear glass marble, and her strange mouth opened and closed, hissing. She was talking to herself. On her head was the Afro wig and on her body was a gold Lurex running suit with spangled epaulets. She held the .38 at an odd angle in her prosthetic hand.

“Don’t move!” (“molve,” in fact) she cried to Danny, who reeled to his feet in shock and horror, turning to run. I watched Iris take a cop-show stance, legs apart, brace-hand. I was screaming at her to stop, but she didn’t hear; she took aim and shot—the bullet hit a brass music stand my mother had given me, then ricocheted, whining, struck The Watcher plumb in the left buttock.

“I’M CONVINCED
NOW
that Death looks like Crazy Eddie,” Page said. We were jogging down the old West Side Highway. The sun was setting over New Jersey. We had started at 59th Street and were running to the West Village. We were about at 34th Street.

It was two days after my showdown with The Watcher. I was just starting to feel normal again. I was glad Page had suggested this jog. She was trying to be discreet, but discretion was hardly her natural style. She kept shooting odd interrogatory looks at me as she chatted breathlessly. Because she was talking so much, each mile seemed to get a little harder for her; every so often she had an attack of little hiccups.

“As I was drifting off to sleep the other night, he was on the tube, casually sledge-hammering a nineteen-inch color TV. I had a dream that he was an archangel and his job was to sneak to the room where the person was dying with dignity and smash the TV screen. Then God would appear on the cracked screen and thank Eddie, as if he were an Oscar emcee, and then God would give a commercial for heaven. I don’t remember much about heaven, but there was a Tiki village colored-water fountain and mariachi bands.” She pushed her sweatband back on her head and grimaced.

“Who did God look like?” I asked.

“God looked exactly like Margaret Rutherford.”

“I don’t think Death looks like Crazy Eddie, and I don’t think you see a light that asks you questions about your conduct. I think it’s all chocolate pudding after they pull the plug,” I said.

“You came pretty close to the Big Dessert the other night.” She glanced sideways at me. She’d finally brought the subject up. She’d called the cops after Minnie had
insinuated
a form of my message about PAPARAZZI to her. But when she’d arrived at my apartment building, there was a police cordon outside in the street, and they wouldn’t let her in. I’d spent the whole following day with police and Brookheart people—this was her first chance to catch up, beyond what had been on the news and a brief phone conversation, wherein I’d given her The Watcher’s background.

“When I saw Iris with the .38, I thought we’d all bought it,” I said. We slowed down a little, settling into a “long talk” stride.

“But then, after the smoke cleared, I checked Danny’s wound—his name is Danny Hayburn—and it looked superficial. I got him some bandages and tried to clean it out. He was kind of in shock and moaning a lot. Iris was just standing there, holding the gun with both hands, looking
amazed.
After I stopped the bleeding, I went over to her, and she told me she had only meant to fire a
warning
shot, like the cops do—she said she was trying (for some reason) to hit the
stereo.
I took the gun and emptied the bullets out—and then all hell broke loose. Whizzer came crashing in, then the police, then Lupé with about fifteen Witches.”

Page slowed down again and pushed at her sweaty headband.

“What about Terence? Where was
he?”

“All night long I’d been waiting for him to throw open the door and beat his chest and swing in on a vine. Right after the play was over, he was due at my apartment, which was, ironically, right around the time Iris
did
arrive.”

“So what happened?”

“What happened? What happened was that he
drove
the play, he told me, about a hundred and fifty miles per hour. He cut the last act short, so short the other actors were left without lines in place. They were
furious.
There was murmuring in the audience, he said, even a boo or two. He raced off the stage at three minutes after ten—he’d taken
nine minutes
off the time. He put his head in the sink to get the makeup off—he wasn’t even going to shower—grabbed his bag and hit the dressing room door. There was a man standing there, blocking it, he said, very distinguished-looking, foreign. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the guy, ‘I’m trying to get somewhere
fast!’
The guy said, ‘Yes, I noticed. I’ve never seen so much frantic energy onstage before, you were
obsessed!
’”

Page looked at me. “Okay. Who
was
he?”

“Miloslav Kuchera, the famous Czech film director.” Page stopped running. I stopped running and we faced each other.

“He told Terence he had only an hour or two before flying back to Prague. He had never seen such a performance, and he wanted to talk to Terence, over drinks,
just for a moment,
about the possibility of Terence appearing in his new film.”

Page began to laugh. I began to laugh. We leaned against each other, laughing.

“What time did he finally get there?”

“Midnight.”

“Jesus.” She hiccuped, out of control.

“Yeah.” We started jogging again. “I was so
ready
for him to walk through that door, I was going to let him have it. Iris was still with me. The cops decided to let her stay, in my guardianship, till the Brookheart personnel got there, which was much later. They took Danny with them, limping and weeping—Whizzer left, the Witches left, Iris and I were having a beer. So Terence walks in, saying, ‘What’s happening?’”