Flight to Darkness (16 page)

“
She’ll be all right, Eric,” he
said. He stared at her for a moment. Then something touched his
face; something reached him, as she gasped. His features dissolved
with fright.

I shoved him toward the door. “The doctor—get
him!”

“
Yes, yes. All right.” His voice
wavered. “She’ll be all right.” He hurried from the room, his feet
pounded along the hall.

At her side, I didn’t know what to do. But
inside—I was crazy. If Prescott could have had a look into my mind
just then, he’d have slapped me in a strait jacket.

I didn’t know what to do.

“
Your father,” she said. Her voice
was very faint. “Frank—” she said.

“
Lie still,” I told her. “It’s all
right now.”

Her eyes came open. She gazed startled about
the room. She tried to breathe, through the white pain that showed
in her eyes, for a long while without success.

The jay screamed five more hellish times and
ceased.

Chapter 11

I walked slowly out of the room, down the
hall, until I reached the head of the stairs. I stood there and
watched Frank come up from below. His flagrant hand-painted tie
streamed over his shoulder. He held a fresh unlit cigar in one
hand.

“
Is she all right?” he said. “I got
Bantram. He’ll be right over.”

Something inside me began to expand. Blood
pulsed and pounded in the back of my head.

Nearing me, Frank thrust his face out, brown
eyes glittering. “You did this,” he said. His voice was hoarse.
“It’s your fault, coming home this way. Why didn’t you stay up
there? We don’t want you here.”

Then I saw it. He was scared. Fighting to
attain a dominance over things that had long since left him. The
big brother who wasn’t a brother at all, but still trying to wish
himself off as a god, preparing the ritual in his mind so you could
see the cogs working. Scared way down to the soles of his feet, his
eyes all sick with sudden belligerent hope. Because he knew I knew
plenty. And he had to play his hand out, fast, before the man on
the other side of the table opened his eyes any further. But it was
too slow.

“
All right, all right,” he said.
His voice was strained, fast, and pleading. He tried to fight the
pleading down and attained an abrupt brass. “So I faked the
telegram. Who’s to know? Who can change it? What difference? Why
not?”

“
Why not?” I said.

“
I told them she’d had illusion,
dreamt it. Told them to agree with her in their presence. Nobody
doubted. Told them no telegram had come. It was no harm, because
you won’t have the money. It’s not yours. You’ve done nothing but
whore around all your life.” He was talking so fast the words stuck
together head and tail. He knew he was going to get hurt and he
didn’t like the idea. “So I faked the telegram. What you going to
do about it? Nothing. You can’t do a thing.” He was wild with it,
wild with the thought that he could succeed. “And all the rest,
too. Think you’re so damned smart. By God, I’ll show you what’s
smart.” He was almost crying because the walls of his majestically
foolish scheme were crumbling so fast he couldn’t escape getting
hit by a few bricks. Maybe a whole wall. He wasn’t sure. It wasn’t
nice to watch.

“
So you faked a telegram?” I said.
“And all the rest?”

He hesitated, paling. “Yes.”

I lifted my fist from the floor. Everything I
had was behind that blow. It connected flush with the side of his
jaw. His cigar flew in a savage spiral. I hadn’t known whether I
would strike. Now I wanted to hurt him.

His feet left the stairs in wild groundless
running. He crashed against the banister, scrabbled cursing onto
the first landing. On his knees, he faced me. Then, standing, he
started toward me, red-faced, enraged, and hoping he wouldn’t lose
face.

I started down. “She’s dead,
Frank.”

“
Dead,” he said. “Dead. . .
.”

“
Yes. That’s what happens to
people. Are you afraid of the word? Would you rather I coated it
with sugar so you could swallow it without choking?” None of this
was any good. It would cure nothing. It could never save Mother.
But I had to do it and at the same time all the fear that was
inside me welled up to the surface. The pain in my fist was far
from agony—it was sweet.

“
She’s dead,” he whispered. “You’ve
killed her.”

He stood there saying that and I hit him
again. Again he sprawled down to the first landing. This time he
came at me like a dazed but furious bull.

We stood face to face on the landing. He was
breathing hard. He started to say something, then swung. I caught
the blow on my left forearm and got in a straight, hard right. He
went over the banister, clinging, and pawed himself back onto the
stairs. “She’s dead up there!” he shouted. “This is
sacrilege.”

His face was twisted now, his bright eyes
blinking. He stood there hunched over, licking off his lips. The
whites of his eyes slowly turned pink. This was what I wanted. I
wanted him as mad as he could get.

“
Your pretty suit’s getting
bloody,” I said.

He glanced down. I kicked for the point of his
chin. He nailed my leg and twisted. He had weight and he was in a
hell of a lot of better condition than I’d figured. Pain spun into
my belly and we took the rest of the stairs fighting.

I wanted to break him like I’d break rock.
Change that contemptuous face—tear that smile away.

We crashed into the hallway with him on top.
He bubbled at the mouth and sobbed a little as he slammed at
me.

“
You aren’t fit to live, Frank,” I
said. I got one hand up between his arms and grabbed his throat.
You handle rock, your hands get hard, your fingers very strong.
Like Norma said one time, you kind of catch the hardness from the
rock. I squeezed his throat as if I closed my fingers on the handle
of a maul.

He grabbed for my hand. I swung up my left and
brought the heel down hard on the bridge of his nose. It cracked.
He let out a yell. Blood pumped into my eyes.

He rolled off, making noises in his throat. My
fingers snared the back of his coat collar. The coat ripped like a
zipper.

Then we were on our feet. He cursed me in a
concerned calm manner that was almost comical. Something—the shock
of mother’s death, the way he’d acted in the bedroom—somehow
prevented him from really fighting. And I found that I wasn’t sure
whether I wanted to kill him or not. I thought about the wooden
mallet and the battlefield in Korea and the wooden mallet hanging
on the rack in the barn with Norma there and then Leda screamed
into my mind like some wanton image of lost hope.

“
You’re no good, Frank. You’re
rotten.”

He came at me. I feinted with a left, leaned
with all I had behind my right. It caught him in the
gut.

He bowed slowly, stared at the floor,
gagged.

“
Oh, God, God, God,” he
said.

“
You’ve got what you
want.”

“
Get out of this house.”

“
I’ll go for a while. But only
because I don’t like looking at you.”

I walked down the hall and out the front door.
I left the door open and stood on the gallery a moment. Then I went
on down into the driveway and over toward the side of the house
where a length of hose lay coiled like a snake on the fresh green
lawn.

I turned on the hose and let the warm stale
water run out until it was cool and fresh and smelling faintly of
rubber. I drank and rinsed Frank’s blood off my face and hands.
Then I took off my jacket, tie, and shirt, left the shirt and tie
on the lawn and put my jacket back on. The shirt wasn’t bloody. I
combed my hair and went out back and stood there watching the sun
shimmer on the water.

I felt wrong inside. I wished I hadn’t started
anything with Frank. But I had and I felt wrong inside about it. It
had been kind of good in a way, though. Some of his affectation had
left him. But there was no real satisfaction anyplace. I didn’t
know any more really about myself than I had back there in
California. Except that I hadn’t killed him. But maybe that was
because there wasn’t a wooden mallet handy. I knew my mind was
working like a sick mind, sometimes. Anyway, if I knew Frank at all
his affectation would return quickly enough. Fake telegram or not.
There was no point in wondering about it.

Frank would be lost without his front. But
that front was only paper now, not even a good grade of cardboard.
It had become more than a mere front. It was his nature. He
probably didn’t even realize it was false anymore. I wasn’t sure
I’d broken his nose although the cartilage had made a good noise. I
hoped I’d broken his nose. I hoped that.

He didn’t know what fear was.

I glanced up at the rear bedroom window where
she would be lying up there in bed. The black arm of a pine limb
reached almost to the window ledge with a spike clump of green leaf
on the tip and three cones. That’s where the jay had
been.

At the front of the pine was a wooden bench. I
went over and sat down. I hated Frank as I had hated no one in the
world, and I tried to reason. Don’t rationalize, Prescott had said.
View it all objectively. Hell. There was nothing but hate, white
and hot. Yet I knew death alone wasn’t a thing you blamed anybody
for, exactly, and not this kind of death for sure. Mother had been
a good woman and she’d lived, but not much, only she hadn’t known
of any other way to live. Maybe that was wrong, too. Because you
never did know what went on in another person’s mind—the little
things that went to make up the dream. Leda and Frank and Norma and
Lenny and you and me.

We all did a little carving, trying to shape
that silver image into something closer to reality, or what we
wanted as our reality. Only the knife was dull always, because the
one true image remained. And it died with you if you didn’t allow
it to walk out of your head. If you tried to change the silver into
gold, or alter color, or shape, or poise, you weren’t you, really.
Because the one image remained. And that was you. Bastard, king,
warrior, bum, or just the guy who shoves molded dough into an oven
and brings out bread. . . .

A small boat with an outboard motor went
phut-phut-phuttle-phut by close to shore. A man balanced with both
feet, one on either gunwale, holding a gig. Somebody had told them
flounder would be along here. But not in the afternoon they should
have said. At night. And the tide was wrong. The one operating the
motor waved to me, then the one with the gig, and I waved. The
sound of the motor went echoing across the tiny keys of snarled
mangroves.

I heard a car coming along the drive pretty
fast. I went around front. It was Dr. Bantram in a hurry up the
front step of the gallery. He saw me, paused, blinking behind his
glasses with his black bag hanging.

I turned off the hose and went up to him. We
climbed the steps and stood by the front door.

“
How is she?”

“
She’s gone,” I said. “She was gone
before Frank called you. He didn’t know. Will you take
over?”

“
Yes. I’m sorry, Eric. It had to
happen. It was due, any time.” But there was that look in his eyes
of complete unconcern about death with slight wonder about me
because I was the town bum once. He went back to his car and
dropped the black bag into the front seat, then returned to the
open front door where I waited.

“
Her heart was never strong. She
survived three bad attacks somehow, so it had to be this
time.”

At the end of the hall Frank was coming down
the stairs.

“
Does Mrs. Garth know?”

“
Mrs. Garth?”

“
Yes. Your brother’s
wife.”

So here it was. Not sharp—dull realization and
finality. Almost relief, maybe. The sudden sickness was almost
nepenthe. Leda and certainty.

“
Here she is now,” the doctor
said.

A yellow convertible was speeding up the
drive, flashing through patches of sunlight and shade like the
revolving blades of an electric fan. A woman was at the
wheel.

The car stopped behind the doctor’s. The woman
stepped from the car and my heart rocked then. She wore white
shorts and a fuzzy white short-sleeved sweater.

Frank was in the doorway. He didn’t look at
me, but he had washed up and he had a on a clean shirt. The mess
he’d made in the front hall was gone. Frank’s face was badly
bruised and his lip was cut and swollen.

“
Frank!” she said, seeing his face.
“Frank. What’s going on?”

Sunlight streamed on her as she came up the
steps. Everything went out of me, even knowing. I hadn’t believed.
It hadn’t been what it was, even knowing. Knowing all these months.
Sure of something like this, yet denying it.

Inside I turned to mush, swearing all the time
that it wasn’t so and knowing it was. Leda.

She paused. I hadn’t moved, the muscles in the
backs of my legs went so rigid they ached. She paused for only a
second, not smiling, just seeing me and telling me to shut up, be
still, with her eyes gray and abrupt. It was like looking into
burned-out twilight—seeing the night back there. Everything went
foggy. I heard Frank speaking as I moved away.