Long Shot (24 page)

“See, if it was someone I really loved,” he said, “I'd
never
have come this far. I'd just quietly fall apart. I'd starve to death in my own apartment. If he was really my other half, I wouldn't have gotten over it at all.”

“You ever
have
a man like that?”

He heaved a deep shrug, as if to say that was a very tall order. Then he took a deep breath and answered: “No.”

No
, he thought suddenly,
don't get pissed at her. It isn't to do with her at all
.

“Me neither,” she admitted. “Maybe there's no such thing.”

“That's what I always tell myself, whenever I'm near a mirror. Doesn't help. I'm always looking.”

“Like waiting for a break, huh?”

She meant the Hollywood kind.

He nodded: “After a while, it drives you crazy. You get so you'll take almost anything.”

On that note, as if to test him, the sky broke open. With a long moan of release, it flung down on the woodland lodge the storm it had been holding for the past two days. It probably started by degrees. While they talked by the hissing fire, there were probably spattered drops and gusts of icy wind. Doubtless, it overtook the land mountain by mountain. But somehow, they didn't hear a peep till it fell in full Wagnerian force on top of them.

The water came in sheets and hit the barn like a tidal wave. They turned to the door to listen, though it pelted all over the roof like a drum of stones. The gods, it seemed, had had enough of moods. If they wanted to talk their feelings out, then let them take their cue from the seethe of nature. You didn't come to Vermont to sit inside and castle the air with what you thought of love. You came to thrill to the wilderness. To throw your civilization off.

When they eyed each other again, it was with a certain measure of relief, she thought. They'd about used up their stock of naked questions. Drawing each other out like this, divulging all they could, they'd cut to the heart of things in record time. The rest was just a list of names.

Why bother? They had no use for chapter and verse. What they had to get to the bottom of was the whole idea of it all. Unless, she thought, it was only something
she
was partial to. She froze with a sudden pang of doubt, as they grinned at each other about the rain. Could it be that he had no theory of love?

“You want to go for a walk?” she asked.

“We'll get wet,” he said, but as if the prospect were delightful. He only wished he had a change of overalls. He didn't want to go back just yet to the pants he wore at home.

“Oh no we won't,” exclaimed Vivien, laughing openly now. She took his hand and tugged him along to the bedroom end of the room. She flung open a closet door and gestured proudly. “Compliments of the management.”

She had enough rain gear hung inside to outfit a dory of fishermen. Hip boots and bright yellow slickers. Rain hats brimmed like firemen's helmets. Amenities not included with
his
room, Greg thought, prickling slightly. It seemed like only the rich were allowed to go out in the rain.

He kicked off his field hand's mud-warped shoes and pulled down a high black-rubber boot. Out of the corner of one eye, he could see her worming the gray silk over her head. She dropped it in a heap on the quilted bed. Naked, she went to the dresser and rifled a drawer for jeans and a sweater. He knew enough not to watch her. She'd gone ahead assuming it was no big deal, whether or not they closed the door to strip. He wouldn't have tried the same with her, he thought as he wrestled the boot—in case he would seem to mock her with the specter of his indifference. She did right, he thought, to act so freely. They didn't always have to think.

He hadn't put on galoshes since he was a kid. The raincoat slumped about him like a tent, till only his fingertips showed at the sleeves. He felt like an astronaut crossed with a scarecrow. He squeaked across the floor, rubber against rubber, and laughed to get her attention. She stood at the mirror, pinning up her hair.

“Captain,” he said, “I'm going out on deck to batten down the hatches.”

And he tramped away to the door and threw it open. She begged him to wait. So he ventured only as far as the porch, while she threw on her outer gear. The force of the rain was loud as Niagara, though even as close as this, he couldn't see six inches into the night. He put out the flat of one hand beyond the shelter of the eaves. The storm, alert to the least impertinence, slapped it so hard that he drew it right back in again and held it against his cheek.

How did the seedlings stand it? Of course, they were built to bend with things, he thought. Go with the flow. Do not go counter. He flipped his hand sideways and knifed it into the rain. It held steady. He stood there a moment, mesmerized by the icy cold.

When did they say, without stretching the point, that winter was done around here? Was the cold so deep in the land that it never let one year alone before it came round the next? If Vivien hadn't bounded out toward him, leaping into the thick of it, he probably would have chickened out and rushed back in to the fire.

“Put on your hat!” she shouted out of the dark. “I'll race you to the trees!”

He wasn't in competition form, but he clamped the rain hat on his head and marched out into the whirlwind. He couldn't run out on her now. The rain set in to pummel him fiercely, as he staggered forward toward her. Surely, he reasoned, they wouldn't be out two minutes before they'd had their fill. Then they could brew up a proper toddy and talk about simpler matters—huddled close by the birchwood fire.

When he reached her side, they propped each other up as they crept ahead through the beaten grass. They couldn't see what was the path and what wasn't. One or the other slipped at every second step. But somehow, they didn't go both at once, so no one fell. They kept a precarious balance and made a little headway. He had to admit he was bone dry, in his neat cocoon of waterproof stuff. Perhaps if he'd been alone he would have turned back by now, but going arm in arm was something else again. They shared it half and half. Though the mud was now up to their ankles, they slogged ahead.

Somehow, it got them started laughing. They probably couldn't have said what the funny thing was, but it had to do with their expectations. They'd come a long, long way to front nature face to face. If they'd had any picture at all, it was sitting pensively on a rock, the view in all directions fifty miles, fixing a dreamy look on a daisy in their hands. What could they possibly contemplate here, stunned and giddy like this? They might have been in interplanetary space.

Dimly, up ahead, they could see the line of spruces bordering the woods. They ducked their heads against the sudden whip of the wind. With a tangible goal so near at hand, they made their way more resolutely—laughing all the way. They weren't going to have to talk about it, for one thing. Rain was rain. It didn't allow for a lot of contradictory theories.

Greg was beginning to tire. He had a sudden sense that this was how it went when one was drowning. He'd gotten so used to the buffeting wind and beat of the rain that, somewhere along the way, he'd started to drift. He no longer seemed to know how far afield they'd gone. Didn't even, after a certain point, open his eyes to the little he could see. It was rather like being asleep, he thought. He gripped her closer around the waist and lurched ahead again. Like being asleep, he thought, in someone's arms.

Then they bumped into the tree, hard.

His head and his knee cracked against it, both at once. Vivien struck one shoulder, wrenched to the side, and felt the pain root in her back. The situation was suddenly stood on its head. If they'd been alone here, and not so arm-in-arm, they might have stayed on their feet. As it was, they went down in a tangle.

The mud was so thick they couldn't get a foothold. They slopped around like pigs for a bit, then pulled themselves up by the bark of the tree. Greg lost his hat. By the time he retrieved it out of a puddle and stood erect again, he could feel the soak of the shirt against his skin. He looked over. Vivien's poncho was turned so the hood was up around her face. He twisted it till it was right again.

They looked each other straight in the eye. Even now, with the aches and chills, there was something close to glee in the way they smiled. It was on his lips to say they ought to go back. Yet the rain was a good deal muted beneath the tree. Having made it as far as this, they might as well have a walk in the woods for their trouble.

Which course they agreed on without a word. They nodded and bowed and stepped around the offending tree. Meeting up on the other side, they walked along on a sponge of needles.

“Have you ever picked up a guy,” he called through the rain, “and a minute later you're sorry? You just want to be alone, all of a sudden. But by then it's too late. You have to go through with it.”

“What?” she bellowed back.

“I said, I met this
boy
this morning,” Greg sang out. Maybe loud like this was the only way. He told it statement by simple statement, coloring things as little as he could. “I was walking around the college,” he called. “He was some kind of student monk. Somebody must have told him I was Jasper's brother.”

For a moment she seemed to miss a step, as if she'd sunk into a soft spot.

“That's my
cover
,” Greg hastened to clarify. “He says he knows the place I'm looking for. Which throws me a bit, because
I
don't. But see,”—and a throb came into his voice, like a trill in an aria—”I sort of had to lead him on. That's how I got him to take me there.”

Was that the way it was?
he thought. How could he get it across that a thing like this could happen without his choosing? Sometimes you met a man who'd held it in from the moment he broke through to puberty. There was this terrible need to try the darkness. You felt an obligation to it—like it needed space to thrive. So he flexed a little, as they sood and talked on the chapel steps, and hitched his pants and rubbed himself till they both were close to frantic. What he didn't know how to tell Vivien was who the poor guy looked like.

Harry Dawes.

“It's a crazy place,” said Greg, with a small jump forward in time and a change of scene. “Like a little Greek temple. Off by itself, way up in the hills. Some kind of fraternity.”

They stopped in a circle of firs. The evergreen boughs high above them were flung like the spokes of a great umbrella. Close around them, there grew a strain of pine much thicker in the branches. Each of these was tall as a man and seemed the perfect size for hauling in at Christmas. Even now, in a crashing storm, a certain stillness held.

“Well?” she said. “Did you fuck him?”

“Yes, but—”

Yes but nothing. So what if the thing was done in fifteen minutes flat? So what if the kid ran off, with a look on his face like he'd killed a man? The act was all that counted in the matter of sealing fate. The night trees stood stock still in the tempest. Next to them, the riddle of guilt and remorse was the merest phantom. In lieu of moods, the forest stuck to seasons. Cold and slow and furious, but at least they came and went without a second look.

Greg looked down at the ground, as if he were puzzling out what more to say. For no reason at all, he bent and fetched a pine cone. Perhaps he needed a souvenir before he could turn back.

“I still don't know how it happened,” Vivien said.

For a moment, he thought she wanted a bit more dirt, as to what led to what this afternoon. But just when he turned to tell her more, she went on talking herself. This “it” she couldn't figure out was something to do with her, not him.

“I suppose it was all that time on the road,” she said. “The first two years we were married, Jasper did all those secret-agent pictures. We were gone two months at a time. Late at night—didn't matter where we were—Jasper would go out hunting. Artie usually drove him. That left me and Carl. I don't know how it happened,” she said, squinting like someone whose mind plays tricks, “but I think it went on a couple of years.”

How was it, he wondered, that no one had ever said this in the press? There had always been an unwritten rule that barred a reporter from letting it out that Jasper Cokes was queer. Were Vivien and Carl accorded a kind of contiguous protection? God, it must have been awful. Worse, there was no way to get rid of him, once it was over. They still had to live as before, all together, four in a house and bound by a labyrinthine deal.

Was this supposed to be the motive? Did Carl still love her, and did he kill Jasper to clear the field? Or was Vivien merely trying to tell him why she wanted it pinned on Carl?

Greg didn't say what he thought. He let what she said suffice, just as she had with him. He watched her now, in her slick and faintly luminous yellow canvas, running her hand along a branch. She snapped off a sprig of needles and brought them up under the hood to sniff them. There was something to be said for rural inertia. One puttered about the landscape, picking up feathers and fallen fruit, telling the truth for the hell of it.

The rain was only raining now, as if somebody'd turned the volume down. They were five or six yards apart. It was ten minutes after seven. But it felt like the deep of the night, with no one awake but them for miles. They'd each let out a secret, here at the end of the earth. As to the likelihood of miraculous recovery, now that their hearts were bare, it was not a throw of the dice they were given to.

Did they solve these things, Greg wondered, by shouting them into the rain?

Not likely. The moon didn't elbow out from behind the clouds and make their faces shine. Putting it as they had in the form of a confession, it wasn't even certain that they'd got their stories straight. In fact, he thought, they were probably both a bit let down to discover how shallow the darkness was that opened off their unrepentant souls. With killers in their midst, their sins were very little.