Strange Highways (74 page)

“What time?” she asked.

“Well, actually, I was thinking today, this evening, dinner.”

She was silent.

“But now,” he said, “I realize that isn’t much notice-“

“It’s fine.”

“Really?” His throat was tight, and his voice rose toward an adolescent pitch. He amazed himself.

“One problem, though,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I’ve already started marinating a lovely sea bass for dinner. Started preparing other dishes too. I don’t like wasting any of this. Could you come here for supper?”

“Okay,” he said.

She gave him the address. “Dress casually, please. And I’ll see you at seven.”

“At seven.”

When the connection was broken, Chase stood for a while in the booth, trembling. Into his mind’s eye came vivid memories of Operation Jules Verne: the narrow tunnel, the descent, the awful darkness, the fear, the bamboo gate, the women, the guns … the blood. His knees felt weak, and his heart beat rabbit-fast, as it had done in that subterranean battleground. Shaking violently, he leaned against the Plexiglas wall of the booth and closed his eyes.

Making a date with Glenda Kleaver was in no way a rejection of his responsibility in the deaths of those Vietnamese women. A long time had passed, after all, and a great deal of penitence had been suffered. And suffered alone.

Nevertheless, he still felt that making a date with her was wrong. Callous and selfish and wrong.

He left the booth.

The day was hot and humid. His damp shirt clung to him nearly as tenaciously as guilt.

* * *

At the shopping mall, Chase browsed in the bookstore until shortly after noon, then walked up the carpeted slope of the main promenade to the tavern. The bartender said that Blentz was expected at one o’clock. Chase sat on a stool at the bar, watching the door, and nursed a beer while he waited.

When Eric Blentz arrived, wearing a rumpled white linen suit and a pale-yellow shirt, looking even heavier than he had appeared the previous night, he was friendly and willing to chat.

“I’m looking for a guy who used to come here,” Chase said.

Blentz overwhelmed a bar stool and ordered a beer. He listened to the description but claimed that he didn’t know anyone who fit it.

“He might not have been a customer. Maybe an employee.”

“Not here, he wasn’t. What do you want him for, anyway? He owe you some money?”

“Just the opposite,” Chase said. “I owe him.”

“Yeah? How much?”

“Two hundred bucks,” Chase lied. “You still don’t know him?”

“Nope. Sorry.”

Disappointed, Chase got up. “Thanks anyway.”

Blentz turned on his stool. “How did you go about borrowing two hundred bucks from a guy without learning his name?”

Chase said, “We were both drunk. If I’d been half sober, I’d have remembered it.”

Blentz smiled. “And if he’d been half sober, he wouldn’t have made the loan.”

“Probably not.”

Blentz raised his glass and took a swallow of beer. Light sparkled on the polished edges of his silver ring. A double lightning bolt.

As Chase walked across the tavern and out the door into the mall, he knew that Eric Blentz was still twisted away from the bar, watching.

Aryan Alliance. Some sort of club, like the Elks Club or the Moose Lodge, for God’s sake, but for a bunch of white supremacists who had perhaps grown tired of running around the countryside in hooded white sheets and were looking for a more modern, urban image.

But why the hell would they want to kill a high-school boy like Michael Karnes? Why would one of these fanatics—Judge—be engaged in a campaign against promiscuous teenagers, ranting on the phone about sin and judgment? What did that have to do with making the world safe for the white race? Michael Karnes had been a white-bread boy—not a natural target for something like the Aryan Alliance but a potential recruit.

The blacktop in the parking lot was soft in places.

The summer sky was gas-flame blue. And as blind as a dead television screen, offering no answers.

Chase started the car and drove home.

No one shot at him.

In his room, he turned on the television, watched it for fifteen minutes, and turned it off before the program was finished. He opened a paperback book, but he couldn’t concentrate on the story.

He paced, instinctively staying away from his window.

* * *

At six o’clock he left the house to keep his date with Glenda Kleaver.

To avoid leading Judge to the woman and perhaps endangering her,
Chase drove aimlessly for half an hour, turning at random from street to street, watching his rearview mirror. But no tail stayed with him along his circuitous route.

Glenda lived in an inexpensive but well-kept garden-apartment complex on St. John’s Circle, on the third floor of a three-floor building. There was a peephole in her door, and she took the time to use it before answering his knock. She was wearing white shorts and a dark blue blouse.

“You’re punctual,” she said. “Come in. Can I get you something to drink?”

As he stepped inside, he said, “What’re you having?”

“Iced tea. But I’ve got beer, wine, gin, vodka.”

“Iced tea sounds good.”

“Be right back.”

He watched her as she crossed the room and disappeared down a short corridor that evidently led to the dining room and kitchen. She moved like sunlight on water.

The living room was sparely furnished but cozy. Four armchairs, a coffee table, a couple of end tables with lamps. No sofa. There were no paintings because all the walls without windows were covered with bookshelves, and every shelf was crammed full of paperbacks and book-club hardbacks.

He was reading the titles on the spines of the books when she returned with two glasses of iced tea. “You’re a reader,” he said.

“I confess.”

“Me too.”

“See any shared interests?”

“Quite a few,” he said, accepting the tea. He pulled a volume off one shelf. “What did you think of this?”

“It reeked.”

“Didn’t it?”

“All the publicity, but it’s empty.”

He returned the book to the shelf, and they adjourned to two of the armchairs.

“I like people,” Glenda said, which seemed an odd comment until she added, “but I like them more in books than in real life.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’m sure you know,” she said.

And he did. “In a book, even the real bastards can’t hurt you.”

“And you can never lose a friend you make in a book.”

“When you get to a sad part, no one’s there to see you cry.”

“Or wonder why you don’t cry when you should,” she said.

“I don’t mind living secondhand. Through books.”

“It has big advantages,” she agreed.

He wondered who had hurt her, how often, and how badly. Beyond doubt, she had suffered. He could sense a depth of pain in her that was disturbingly familiar to him.

Yet there was nothing melancholy about her. She had a sweet, gentle smile, and she virtually radiated a quiet happiness that made him more comfortable in her living room than he had been anywhere since he’d left home for college seven years ago.

“When I returned to the reference desk at the morgue and you’d gone,” she said, “I thought you were angry about being made to wait.”

“Not at all. I just remembered … an appointment I’d forgotten.”

“I’ll be back on duty Monday if you want to stop around.”

“You like working there?”

“It’s nice and quiet. Some of the reporters can be too flirty, but that’s the worst of it.”

He smiled. “You can handle them.”

“Reporters all think they’re persistent and tough,” she said. “But they’re no match for a newspaper-morgue librarian.”

“At least not for this one.”

“Where do you work?” she asked.

“Nowhere right now.”

“Waiting,” she said, instead of anything that anyone else might have said. “Sometimes waiting is the hardest thing.”

“But it’s all you can do.”

She sipped her iced tea. “One day there’ll be a door like any other door, but when you open it, right in front of you will be just the thing you need.”

“It’s nice to think so,” he said.

“Then you forget the pain of waiting.”

Chase had never been party to a conversation half as strange as this—yet it made more sense than any conversation that he’d ever had in his life.

“Have you found that door?” he asked.

“There’s not just one. A series of them. With spells of waiting in between.”

Dinner was delicious: tossed salad, potatoes and pasta layered with spinach and basil and feta cheese, zucchini with slivers of red pepper, and marinated sea bass lightly grilled. For dessert, fresh orange slices sprinkled with coconut.

When they weren’t talking in that strange shorthand that came naturally to them, they fell into silences that were never awkward.

After dinner in the dining area off the kitchen, she suggested that they adjourn to the small balcony off the living room, but Chase said, “What about the dishes?”

“I’ll take care of them later.”

“I’ll help, and we’ll get them done twice as fast.”

“A man who offers to wash dishes.”

“I thought maybe I could
dry.”

After the dishes, they sat on a pair of lawn chairs on the balcony in the warm July darkness. The garden courtyard was below. Voices drifted to them from other balconies, and city crickets made a sound as lonely as any made by their country cousins.

When at last it was time to leave, he said, “Is this a magical apartment—or do you make it peaceful wherever you go?”

“You don’t have to make the world peaceful,” she said. “It is to begin with. You just have to learn not to disturb things.”

“I could stay here forever.”

“Stay if you want.”

The balcony had no lamp, only fireflies in the night beyond the railing. In such deep shadows, Chase couldn’t read her face.

He thought of dead women in a tunnel, half a world away, and the weight of guilt in his heart was immeasurable.

He found himself apologizing to Glenda for what she might have thought was a pass. “I’m sorry. I had no right, I didn’t mean-“

“I know,” she said softly.

“I don’t want-“

“I know. Hush.”

They were silent for a while.

Then she said, “Being alone can be good. It’s easy to find peace alone. But sometimes … being alone is a kind of death.”

He could add nothing more to what she’d said.

Later she said, “I only have one bedroom, one bed. But the armchairs in the living room were all bought secondhand, here and there, and one of them is a lounger that pretty much folds into a bed.”

“Thank you,” he said.

Later still, as he sat in the lounger, reading a book from her shelves, she reappeared, dressed for bed in a T-shirt and panties. She leaned down, kissed his cheek, and said, “Good night, Ben.”

He put down his book and took her hand in both of his. “I’m not sure what’s happening here.”

“Do you find it strange?”

“I should.”

“But?”

“I don’t.”

“All that happened is—we both found the same doorway from different sides.”

“And now?”

“We give it time, enough time, and see if this is what we need,” she said.

“You’re special.”

“And you’re not?”

“I know I’m not,” he said.

“You’re wrong.”

She kissed him again and went to bed.

And later still, after he had converted the chair into its fullest reclining position, turned off the lamp on the end table, and settled down, she returned in the darkness and sat across from him. He did not hear her coming as much as feel the serenity that she brought with her.

“Ben?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Everyone is damaged.”

“Not everyone,” he said.

“Yes. Everyone. Not just you, not just me.”

He knew why she had waited for darkness. Some things were not easily said in the light.

“I don’t know if I can ever … be with a woman again,” he said. “The war. What happened. No one knows. I have this guilt … .”

“Of course you do. Good men wear chains of guilt all their lives. They feel.”

“This is … this is worse than what other men have done.”

“We learn, we change, or we die,” she said quietly.

He couldn’t speak.

From the darkness, she said, “When I was a little girl, I had to give what I never wanted to give, day after day, week after week, year after year, to a father who didn’t know the meaning of guilt.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“You needn’t be. That’s long ago,” she said. “Many doors away from where I am now.”

“I should never touch you.”

“Hush. You will touch me one day, and I’ll be happy for your touch. Maybe next week. Next month. Maybe a year from now or even longer. Whenever you’re ready. Everyone is damaged, Ben, but the heart can be repaired.”

When she rose from her chair and returned to the bedroom, she left a place of peace behind her, and Ben found a sleep without nightmares.

* * *

Sunday morning, Glenda was still sleeping soundly when Ben went to her bedroom to check on her. He stood in the doorway for a long while, listening to her slow, steady breathing, which seemed to him to have all the subtle power of a gentle tide breaking on a beach.

He left her a note in the kitchen:
I’ve got some business to take care of. Will call soon. Love, Ben.

The morning sun was already fiercely hot. The sky was gas-flame blue, as it had been the previous day, but it no longer seemed like a flat, blind vault. It was a deep sky now, with places beyond.

He returned to his apartment, where he encountered Mrs. Fielding in the front hall.

“Been out all night?” she asked, eyeing the rumpled clothes in which he’d slept. “You didn’t have an accident, did you?”

“No,” he said, climbing the stairs, “and I wasn’t bar hopping the topless joints either.”

He was surprised that he had been able to be brusque with her, and she was so startled that she had no reply.

After a shower and a shave, he sat with his notebook of clues, trying to decide what his next step should be.