Homeplace (45 page)

They looked up at her, dully surprised, as if she were a spectral materialization. She had not been back in the little house since the night she had met Bayard Sewell here. She supposed she might look like a madwoman; she had not combed her own flyaway hair, and the clothes she had put on were the same ones she had thrown down beside the bed the night before. She realized dimly that she was barefoot.

“Mikie?” DeeDee said tentatively.

“It killed him, you know,” Mike said. Her voice surprised her; she might have been talking of the weather. “I don’t know if that’s what you planned or not, but it
killed him as surely as if you’d put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Congratulations, DeeDee. It couldn’t have worked out any neater for you. The timing was perfect. You got the house down and the old man out of the way in the same afternoon. When does the road come through?”

They did not protest or pretend that they did not know what she was talking about. Duck said nothing, but put his coffee cup down on the varnished tabletop, to which a dismal collection of breakfast effluvia was stuck in the morning heat. He clasped his hands together on the table and watched her, his hooded eyes drooping almost closed. DeeDee’s mouth sagged into a great rictus, like a child’s heartbroken wailing, and fresh tears spurted down her vast cheeks, and the breath came and went in her throat in great sobs, but for a moment she made no sound. Her enormous shelf of bosom, unbound at this hour, heaved up and down atop her stomach as she struggled to get her breath. Finally she did, and her words poured out on her strangling sobs, a lava of woe: “I didn’t mean for him to
be
down there! We didn’t know he knew what day it was! I didn’t think he could move … I thought it would just be over, and then he wouldn’t care anymore about the rest of the land! Oh, Mikie, I loved my daddy, and I didn’t think he would
care …”

“Well, he cared himself to death, DeeDee,” Mike was implacable; her sister’s grotesque anguish did not touch her. “God, I can’t believe you! I’m not surprised at Duck; I should have known about Duck. But you … DeeDee, you were his baby; you were his pet! Didn’t you ever know him at all? Even a little bit? How could you think he wouldn’t
care?”

“He’d had the stupid house all his life,” DeeDee sobbed through laced fingers. “The famous, wonderful homeplace. He wasn’t ever going to use it again; it had just stood there all those years. Just stood there. He
hadn’t even been down there for months. And he’d
had
his life, and you’d been gone all that time, and you had such a fine, great life, and you weren’t ever coming back again, and I … I haven’t ever had anything! Not ever
anything!
And it was my land anyway …”

Mike saw, as if for the first time, though Priss had hinted of it, that DeeDee must have hated her for every by-line, for the imagined life of luxury, privilege, and excitement, for the ersatz glamour of the great cities of the world, for the prosperous husband and the exemplary daughter and the fancied warm, secure marriage.

She’s never once known the truth of me, either, any more than I knew hers, Mike thought. Far down, the rage quivered.

“It wasn’t your land yet,” she said to her sister. “And it might not have been for a good while.” Her voice began to tremble. “Couldn’t you have waited? You must have know he couldn’t last forever. Couldn’t you have
waited?
Did you have to make him
watch
it?”

DeeDee said nothing, but cried harder.

“What’s the harm, Mike?” Duck said, smiling winningly at Mike. It was the old smile: slow, insinuating. It crawled over Mike. “The land was just sitting there. The old house was falling in. It wasn’t like he was ever going to even see it again, and all along it was going to be ours … DeeDee’s … anyway. We never meant for him to know when the old heap was going down. I don’t know how in the hell he found out … but the chance came, Mike. It wouldn’t have come again. The investors were there, they had the money ready, and they wanted to move. You have to move when you see the chance. We’d have lost it if we’d waited. Hell, John would
want
the people he loved to be provided for, his daughter, his grandchildren. He’d have given them anything in the world …”

“Maybe there was something else he wanted to give
them,” Mike said. The rage was beginning to eat through the ice. It frightened her.

“What?” Duck Wingo said. “He didn’t have anything else. Christ, it was just an old house …”

Mike screamed suddenly. The world around her reddened. “Well, by God, it was
his
house! It’s not right! What you two did is
monstrous!
It’s
evil
, it’s wrong!
It was his house! Nothing justifies it!”

DeeDee was on her feet in front of Mike, rocking on the tiny, grubbing thongs, her teeth clenched and bared, her furious breath bubbling in her clogged little nostrils.

“Don’t you dare call us evil, Mike Winship!” she shrieked. “Miz Micah Gotrocks Winship Singer! It wasn’t our fault; it wasn’t our idea! You want to call names, you call the right one! You talk to your dear, sweet lover baby, Bayard Sewell! Oh, yeah, we know about that; everybody in town knows about that! Who do you think came to us with the proposition; who do you think found the backers all the way up there in Boston, and put the package together, and offered us enough money to fix us up for the rest of our lives? Who’s going to put the world’s biggest cat food plant and a whole industrial mall right in the middle of that land, once the road goes through? And who’s going to be a partner in the whole thing? Who do you think got that road through the legislature in the first place? Bay Sewell has been screwing you more than one way this summer, baby sister!”

“You are a goddamned liar,” Mike said. DeeDee sucked in a breath so quick and deep that her chins quivered, and slapped Mike across the face. Then she began to laugh.

“DeeDee, sugar …” Duck Wingo said. He heaved himself to his feet and put his hand on DeeDee’s arm. She whirled and slapped him, too.

“Don’t you ever touch me again, you sorry son of a
bitch.” She choked on the bubbling laughter, and he stepped back, his hand going to his cheek. DeeDee’s laughter slid swiftly over into tears.

Mike stood still, her ears ringing with the slap. As soon as DeeDee’s words were out, she realized she had known the truth ever since J.W. had awakened her, and perhaps long before that. Like misted breath over a glass, love vanished in that instant as if it had never been. There was not, then, any pain, only the ice of rage. She turned and walked out of the terrible little house and got into the car. DeeDee’s spiraling wails followed her. Mike shut the door of the Cadillac and the wails stopped abruptly. She drove home to Pomeroy Street. Somewhere along the way the rage sank back, but the ice remained. She wanted, simply, to take a bath and go upstairs and crawl back into her bed and go to sleep.

When she walked into the kitchen, Bayard Sewell was standing at the counter, immaculate and beautiful in a dark gray suit and white shirt and yellow tie, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

“The screen door was open, so I came on in,” he said, smiling his wonderful white smile at her. “Priss made coffee and went home to feed her cat. I was worried to death when she said you weren’t upstairs in bed. Where’ve you been this early?”

She swallowed in remembered pain at the sheer beauty and treachery of him.

“I’ve been to DeeDee’s.”

He set his cup down and came over and put his hand gently beneath her chin, and lifted it until she looked directly into his eyes. “Couldn’t you sleep?” he said. “Neither could I. I thought all night about you up there in that bed alone, what you must have been going through. God, I wanted so badly to come to you …”

Mike turned away and sat down in one of the
kitchen chairs and put her head down on the table on her folded arms.

“DeeDee told me all about your little real estate venture,” she said.

There was a long silence, in which Mike watched the blackness behind her eyelids turn to dark red and pin-wheel with parabolas of white light. Then he said, in a voice that was Bay’s familiar deep voice, and yet different, “Well, I wish she hadn’t done that. I hoped you wouldn’t have to know about that for a while, Mike, and maybe not ever. Maybe it would have been better all the way around if you could have gotten away to New York and let things down here just … be. Though I was serious when I said I wish you could have stayed, too. I think, if DeeDee had kept her mouth shut, we could have really worked something out. Now, of course, it’s all spoiled.”

Mike’s heart, which she had thought frozen, dropped, cold and leaden, as if through fathomless black water. She had, she realized, hoped that he would deny it.

She lifted her head and swiveled around to look at him. He looked back, his handsome face grave but very faintly amused, hands in his jacket pocket. He looked like a sketch in
Gentleman’s Quarterly
.

“Why have you been fucking me all summer?” she asked. Her voice in her ears did not sound like her own. “DeeDee was going to get the land all along, not me.
Has
got it, now. Why not just bang her? She’d have loved that. And Duck would have sold tickets, if you’d wanted him to.”

He chuckled. It was a merry, companionable, incredible sound.

“Can you imagine anybody humping DeeDee? You’re light-years out of that class, Mike. No, you were my information pipeline. And I wanted you on our side. It was you he wanted to come down here when he had
the stroke; you he kept asking for. Not DeeDee. We were going to get you to persuade him to deed the rest of the property over to her, once it was all over and he’d lost the appeal. We thought he might be glad just to get it off his mind. And then he was getting fond of you; we all saw that. And cold to DeeDee. I had to warn her off coming over here. That worried us. Who’s to say what you two might have cooked up, between you? You’d already gone over. And he was a crazy old man, there at the end.”

“Yes, he was,” Mike said. “He really was a crazy old man. Well, Bay, he saved you all a lot of trouble by checking out, didn’t he? Too bad he didn’t die right off when he had the stroke. He could have spared you a lot of sack time.”

The old smile flashed at her, crazily, in all its gay charm.

“Oh, I didn’t mind that part,” Bay Sewell said. “You’re a fantastic piece of ass. Must be all that foreign travel. I’ve never had anything like that.”

She screamed at him, the same words she had screamed at DeeDee and Duck Wingo:
“Couldn’t you have waited?”

“No,” he said earnestly. “The syndicate was ready to move. You almost queered it all when you started in with him on that crazy letter-writing campaign; I had to fly to Boston and try to put that fire out, and for a while there I thought we’d blown it all. Or you had. I practically signed my life away. But it’s done now. I’ve already got a big chunk of the money. They wired it last night. The rest comes when we break ground. Winship Farms Industrial Park we’re calling it, just like he was going to. You know he’d like that, Mike. Look, you have to move when the time is right. I’ve known that all my life. I’ve lived by it. It’s going to take me all the way. You have to take your chances when they come. You took yours, Mike, when you left me …”

The rage burst. “When I left you! Goddamn you, Bay Sewell, you stood right here in this house and cast your lot with him! With him and his money! I watched you do it! And you—you just can’t keep your hands off what’s his, can you? Whether it’s his money, or his land, or his daughter …

“You’ve hated me for a long time, haven’t you, Bay? You and DeeDee and Duck. All this time …”

He looked down at the linoleum. “I certainly never hated you, but you shouldn’t have put me in that spot,” he said. “Everything was all set up. You had no business doing that to me.” Suddenly his dark face contorted. “You were my ticket out of here, Mike,” he said softly, but with such venom that she stepped instinctively backwards, out of his range. “My air fare. Don’t you know what a town like this does to winners? Do you think I didn’t know what I was, what I had, what I still have? I could have made the world shake … out there. You could have helped me. His money was going to kick us off. But you ran out, and I’ve been stuck all these years with a drunk and a crazy old bigot and two fools. And it’s been
your
name in all those magazines and all those newspapers. And all the time I was the smart one; I was always the best one …”

“You could have left anytime,” Mike whispered.

“No. His money had me tied here like Gulliver. His money put me through school. His fucking land started my business. Jesus Christ, he even picked out my wife!”

“He
helped
you, Bay!” Mike cried.

“No. He bought me. The real estate business and wife were how I paid him back for going to school. Those, and a life lived here in nowheresville in his shadow. But that debt’s cleared now. It’s off the books.”

She looked up at him for a long time, at his chiseled face, his good hands, his beautiful eyes, not, perhaps, quite fully sane.

“Did you ever love me?” she said.

“Of course,” he said, surprised. “You were the first thing I had ever owned. And I still do love you. If you’d inherited that land … or if you’d gone along with us … I’d have been married to you in a year.”

“I see. And how were you going to manage that? Was Sally going the way Daddy did?”

“God, Mike, I won’t have to kill her, no more than I did your father. Can’t you see she’s doing it herself? She 11 be dead before Christmas.”

His mouth continued to move; he was saying something more, but Mike did not hear him. She turned and went upstairs and got into the bathtub, filling it as full as possible with scalding hot water, and stayed there a long time. She closed her eyes and thought of nothing at all.

When she came back downstairs, Bayard Sewell was gone and Sam Canaday was sitting in his accustomed place at the kitchen table, finishing up the coffee and eating doughnuts from a greasy white sack in front of him.

“Don’t you ever lock your door?” he said. He was dressed in the blue blazer and gray slacks, and his tie today was dark blue with a thin red stripe. His fair hair shone almost white in the overhead light, and his sallow-tanned face was not as grayed with weariness as when she had last seen him, though the yellow-green wolf’s eyes were ringed with darker saffron. He smelled of soap and some kind of piny aftershave.