Flight to Darkness (14 page)

Her lips weren’t tender, they weren’t savage,
they were Norma with Leda lurking off in the shadows with the
yellow shorts in her hand.

I drew away slightly and Norma’s arms were
taut and warm around me. Then I held her close because her breasts
were good and her body was warm and more demanding than
yielding.

She breathed hard now, with her face hard, and
she wasn’t crying at all that you could see, only way inside she
wept and screamed with it, with her eyes dry and hot like a
flame.

“
Yes, damn you,” she said,
breathing it out with her eyes hot and dry and wide
open.

The open door of the sedan flapped gently in a
soft gentle wind which came breathing along over the lake among the
trees, with warm Florida smells of humid dampness between the
singing shadows that swooped black and blinding and full of harsh
and bitter pain. The open door of the sedan swung gently and all
the red yelling of the blood cleaved through the shadows. The open
door of the sedan swung gently, to and fro. Wild and with unseen
tears in the sunny afternoon.

I hadn’t been near Cypress Landing in a good
while. It had grown some, changed. The main street glittered with
chrome and plate-glass windows, fresh sidewalks, and newly laid
road. People on the streets looked more browned by the sun and they
wore more white than I recalled. The cars seemed longer and shinier
and they traveled faster.

Modernity was settling in and I realized there
were a lot of tourists. Even in summer. It hadn’t been that way. We
passed the sheriff’s office and I supposed Clyde Burkette still
lounged behind the scarred desk in that room of many smells. Clyde
had never liked me much, though he did like my brother Frank. The
whole town knew how Frank and I hated each other. I wondered if
Frank would be at home with Mother now.

Norma and I had quit the bottle. But we still
felt the liquor. I certainly did and she’d hit it harder than I
had.

She motioned out the window.
“Look.”

On the right side of the street a sand-colored
building façade of planes, angles, and plate glass supported a sign
of heroic dimensions reading: “FRANKLIN GARTH.”

The sign said nothing else.

“
He’s gone great guns.”

I nodded. “Yeah.” Nothing else. Just Franklin
Garth. He was that well known and the building had cost money. I
tried not to think of that.

Leaving the business section, small and tidy,
the smoldering lethargy of oldness set in. The streets were relaxed
and quiet as they had always been; the houses crouched and heat
flaked beneath spreading shade trees and supple palms awaiting God
knows what without impatience but maybe with a kind of careless
scorn.

Then that changed as we struck the beaches.
New developments again. White and green and mauve and pink and tan
cement-block cubicles baked in an ash-like wasteland of sand,
breasting the Gulf of Mexico. Trees had been uprooted. New palms
withering and sparse and crippled, rooted like dead men with one
arm raised, fingers clawing at the sky, burned out, hellish and
forlorn. The mark of civilization—like fly specks in an erratic
line across the sticky side of a postage stamp.

Here and there the richer places, beautifully
landscaped, carefully kept, but sided by sand and somehow
sad.

“
I want to go to my place,” I said.
“The barn. Remember the barn?”

Norma had wept afterward at the lake and we
hadn’t talked since. I hadn’t wanted to talk because of Leda; she
was like an iron clamp on my mind.

“
Yes, I remember the barn. It’s a
mess, Eric. Needs cleaning. I used to go there sometimes and
sit.”

“
Oh.”

“
Don’t worry. I’m all right now.
Nobody else ever went near the place, unless maybe that man—Lenny.
He went there sometimes.” She paused. “I saw him looking in the
window once. Looking at that statue you made of a modern
Venus.”

“
How is Lenny?”

“
He’s come up in the world some.
Nobody knows how. Still lives in the same place, only rebuilt. He
drives a car and dresses real sharp.”

“
I told you about his collection.
You ever see it?”

“
You kidding?”

“
Sure.”

“
My God, I wouldn’t touch him with
gloves on.”

She turned off the main highway and pretty
soon we reached the barn. It was badly in need of paint and the
grass was waist-high.

“
I just used to walk down and look
around, see that nobody had broken in, sort of,” Norma
said.

“
Thanks.”

She looked at me, trying not to let me see the
pain in her eyes. “Forget it.” She sat there a minute. “You going
inside?”

“
Not now.”

“
Look,” she said. “You take my car.
Go on home like you want. I’ll clean the place up.” She looked
away.

I didn’t say anything.

“
Go ahead,” she said. “You take the
car, anyway. My shop’s just up the road. A beach shop. Get more
trade that way. I can walk easily. I walked over here
lots.”

“
Oh.”

“
You go ahead.” She got out of the
car. “I’ll kind of clean it up inside.”

I looked at her. “You know where the keys
are?”

“
The same old place,” she said. She
patted the purse she took from behind the driver’s seat. “I put ’em
here. So nobody could get ’em.”

“
All right.”

“
You go on, then.”

She turned and stared at the barn. It had a
skylight but that was covered over, and the cypress plank sides
made it look like a sun-bleached backwoods shack. But I knew it
wasn’t too bad inside.

“
You didn’t have any luggage, or
anything?”

“
No. All right. I’ll borrow your
car.”

“
Yes.”

I left her standing there like that. I turned
the car around and headed for the main road. I was going
home.

Chapter 10

Here and there, but not very often now, the
old, old places could be seen, set well back on the inlands side of
the road, or reached only through ageless growths of banyan,
cypress, and gum, by sand or clay roads hewed clean by Negro slaves
a hundred years ago. And kept clean by Negro men today.

The Garth home was such a place.

Backed by a small, key-dotted bayou, joined to
the Gulf by a length of man-made, cement-walled canal in which the
hulls of two sailboats rotted, the house hovered hugely above a
front lawn a quarter mile in length.

But it was freshly painted. The front gallery
no longer leaned and the white columns were new and
straight.

There’s money here, thought the viewer. What
else?

There were two cars in the long U driveway. I
parked Norma’s sedan behind a shiny black Lincoln, got out, and
started up the gallery steps. The door opened and there stood my
brother Frank.

He looked as if he’d been struck with a board
across the face when he saw me. His eyes widened, his face went
deep red, then he calmed. It was an abrupt calm, fought down,
leashed.

There was no greeting. “I knew it,” he said.
“Somehow I knew it.” His voice was as loud as ever and very
Southern. Dressed in a milky Palm Beach suit with a brilliant
hand-painted tie of orange and purple, he looked even more assured
than when I’d seen him in Alabama.

His brightly brown impatient eyes roved
quickly over me and dismissed me. And the contempt was in his
voice. “I thought you were—”

“
How’s Mother?”

He stood with his back to the doorway and
said, “We haven’t heard from you, as usual. How— Never mind.” Again
the contempt, the restless eyes.

“
How in hell could you hear from
me? How’s Mother?”

“
She’s dying, Eric.” His hands were
nervous now. “She’s not at all well.”

“
Why didn’t you let me know?” I
said. I was seeing my brother now. All right, what are you going to
do about it, Garth? You’re looking at him and it’s Frank. How about
that? Did you kill him once or a million times?

“
Look,” I said. “Why didn’t you
write, do something? I had to break out of that place. Is that
funny?”

His lips paled slightly. He shook his head.
“She’s dying, Eric. Hanging on just like Father. The doc says any
time at all.” He cleared his throat, and his eyes danced around,
searching, searching. It was almost as if he were looking for some
place to run. “I’m not glad to see you. I couldn’t tell you that
then. I want you to know that. Up there in Alabama, it was
different.”

“
Mutual feeling,” I said with a
nod.

“
Mother’s been asking for you a
lot.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew Frank, and he
was plenty disconcerted about something. His eyebrows were hiked
with slow amazement.

“
Where’s your luggage?” He smiled.
Another habit modified, but not broken. Prompted by fear, possibly,
he had always laughed to take the edge off scorn.

“
Haven’t any. I told you I broke
out of there.”

“
Wandering rooster come home to
roost, with only a shirt on his back. A cheap shirt, too.” He was
groping for something. I eyed him, then shoved by him into the cool
shadows of the front hall.

His voice was nervous, filled with rabid
noise. “The doctor’s with her now. You won’t be able to see her,
Eric. He’ll be with her, and he’s left orders. Nothing must disturb
her, Eric—”

I kept walking, up the long stairway, down the
hall toward the large front bedroom where she would be. Frank was
right behind me. I paused, looked at him. There was stark cold
fright in his eyes, the most horrible example of naked fear I’d
ever seen. “You can’t see her, Eric. She’s sick, dying.”

“
All right.”

He pulled at my arm. His touch made me furious
and I flung his hand down, started for the large front
room.

His voice was tired, resigned. “She’s not in
there.”

“
How come?”

He shrugged, motioned toward a partly open
doorway across the hall. This was what had once been a guest room,
one of the guest rooms.

A slim, white-haired man in a gray suit, with
a stethoscope around his neck and twirling gold-framed glasses in
his hand, stepped into the hall. He blinked at me, then moved
lightly up to Frank.

“
How is she?” I asked.

The doctor ignored me. “She keeps asking for
Eric,” he told Frank. “Talking about him, as always.”

“
This is Eric,” Frank said. His
voice sounded peculiar. “Dr. Bantram.”

The doctor put on his glasses, nodded as he
looked at me. “Then it’s all right now.” He shook his head at me.
“There’s nothing I can do. A matter of time and not much of that.
The slightest shock—” He snapped his fingers. “Her heart’s like a
crippled butterfly wing.” He nodded. “Anyway, maybe she’ll feel
better now with you here. No more pretense, eh, Frank?”

“
No.” Frank’s voice was
hollow.

“
What do you mean?” I
said.

The doctor nodded at me, patted Frank’s arms,
and walked swiftly down the stairs. At the first landing he turned,
called back softly. “Going over to the hospital. You can reach me
there. I’ll be back around seven this evening.” He went on
downstairs.

Frank shoved his hands into his pockets. “You
came at an opportune time,” he said.

I stared at him. He slowly dropped his
gaze.

For a long moment she was not recognizable to
me. The blinds were drawn and she lay in the pale saffron shade of
the old four-poster, canopied bed. She lay in the exact center, her
nearly shoulderless body and gray head propped by three huge
pillows. Suddenly she was terribly old, much older than she should
have been. Her thin white face, strong-browed, resigned, was
utterly without expression. Only her eyes, agate-like, proved the
old hard strength. Her hands were folded over the smooth white
counterpane.

“
Here’s Eric, Mother,” Frank
said.

“
I can see, Franklin,” she said.
Her voice was kind, smooth, alert, but filled with a nervousness.
And death squatted patiently on that bed with an obviousness that
was disturbing. “They were all right,” she said. “They told me at
first, then they didn’t tell me anymore. You’re alive and
well.”

I went over beside the bed table laden with
medications and took her hand. “Hello, Mother. Of course, I’m all
right.”

Without moving her head, she looked at me from
the corners of her eyes. Her cool, thin hand pressed mine lightly,
then unfolded like a leaf.

“
You weren’t one to write,” she
said. “Like your father. But you probably couldn’t write. Were you
in a prison camp?” She paused while I groped blindly for an answer.
“I wrote you often, had Frank mail the letters. Did you get any of
them? Up until the time you disappeared?”