Summer of Night (30 page)
His mother sighed. "I can't remember your little friends' names, Jimmy, but I did hear from them. At least from their mothers. They're all very worried. That nice lady who works at the A and P was especially concerned."
"Mrs. O'Rourke," sighed Harlen. "But Mike or the guys haven't come by?"
She folded up his hospital pajamas under her arm, as if cleaning them was a priority. As if his dirty pajamas and underwear hadn't laid around on this very floor for weeks before he went into the hospital. "I'm sure they have, darling, but I've been… well, busy, naturally, what with spending so much time in the hospital and having to look after… other things."
Harlen tried to roll over on his right side; the cast was an awkward protuberance on his left arm, bent at the elbow but heavy and stiff. He felt the codeine beginning to carry him away. Maybe he could con her into leaving the whole fucking bottle so he could take care of the pain himself. The doctors didn't care if you hurt; it was no skin off their noses if you woke up in the night scared and hurting so bad that you wanted to piss your pajama bottoms. Even the nice nurses who smelled so good didn't really give a shit; they'd come when called all right, but then they squeaked their shoes down the tile hall, went off duty, and went to screw some guy at home.
His mother kissed him and he smelled Bozo's cologne on her. He pulled his face away before her cigarette breath and Bozo's spoor made him sick.
"You sleep well now, dear." She tucked him in like he was a baby, except the cast didn't fit under the blankets and she had to sort of poke the covers around it like a Christmas-tree skirt. Harlen was floating on the sudden release from pain, the numbness that made him feel more alive than he had been all week.
It wasn't dark yet. Harlen allowed himself to fall asleep when it was daytime… it was the goddamn dark he hated. He could nap a bit before he woke to his silent sentinel duty. Trying to be alert in case it came.
In case what came?
The medication seemed to free his mind, as if the barriers to what had happened-what he saw-were ready to come down. The curtains ready to open.
Harlen tried to roll over, came up against the cast, and moaned fitfully, feeling the pain as some detached thing, like a small but persistent dog pulling at his sleeve. He wouldn't let the barriers come down, the curtains open. Whatever it was that woke him every night, sweating, heart pounding, he didn't want it to come back.
Fuck O'Rourke and Stewart and Daysinger and the rest. Fuck them all. They weren't real friends anyway. Who needed them? Harlen hated this whole fucking town with its fat, fucking people and its fucking stupid kids.
And the school.
Jim Harlen fell into a fitful doze. The sulfur yellow light shifted to red on his wallpaper before fading to darkness as the storm growled its approach.
Several blocks east on Depot Street, Dale and Lawrence sat on the porch railing an hour after nightfall and watched the heat lightning illuminating the dark sky. Their parents relaxed in their wicker porch chairs. Every time the silent lightning flashed, Old Central would be revealed through the screen of elms across the street, its brick and stone walls painted an electric blue by the strobe. The air was still, the wind in front of the storm having not yet arrived.
"Doesn't feel quite like tornado weather," said Dale's dad.
Their mother sipped her lemonade and said nothing. The air was thick, heavy with the approach of storm. Each time the silent lightning illuminated the school and playground and Second Avenue stretching south toward the Hard Road, she flinched slightly.
Dale was fascinated by the sudden explosions of light and by the strange color they imparted to the grass, homes, trees, and asphalt of the streets. It was as if they were watching their black-and-white Sylvania Halolight TV and suddenly it had begun transmitting, at least intermittently, in color.
The lightning rippled around the eastern and southern horizons, flickering above the treetops like a fierce aurora bore-alis. Dale remembered stories his Uncle Henry had told about artillery barrages in the First World War. Dale's dad had served in Europe in the more recent war, but never spoke about it.
"Look," said Lawrence softly and pointed toward the schoolyard.
Dale bent closer to follow his brother's pointing arm. When the heat lightning flashed, he saw the furrow across the playground ball diamond. There had been a few such furrows visible there since school had let out, as if someone had been laying pipe. But neither Dale nor anyone else in the family had seen men working in the schoolyard during the day. And why would they lay pipe to a school that was going to be torn down any day?
"Come on," whispered Dale, and he and his brother jumped from the railing to the stone steps, from the steps to the front lawn.
"Don't go far!" called their mom. "It's going to rain." "We won't," Dale called over his shoulder. They jogged across Depot Street, jumping the low, grassy ditches on each side which substituted for storm sewers in town, and ran beneath the outstretched branches of the giant sentinel elm across the street from their house.
Dale looked around, realizing for the first time what a solid barrier the giant elms made. While it was simple to walk between them onto the playground, the effect was a bit like passing through a fortress wall into the courtyard of a castle. And Old Central looked every bit the brooding castle this night. Lightning flickered and was reflected from the un-boarded windows on the high dormers. The stone and brick looked oddly greenish in the light. The arched entranceway shielded only darkness.
"There," said Lawrence. He had stopped six feet from the mole-burrowish furrow which cut right across the playground. It was as if someone had laid a pipeline from the school-Dale could see where the mound touched brick near a basement window-straight through second base toward the pitcher's mound. But they had stopped halfway across the playground.
Dale turned and looked down the direction the furrow would take if it were extended farther. He was staring at his own front porch thirty yards away.
Lawrence let out a shout and jumped back. Dale wheeled.
In the brief explosion of light from the sky, Dale watched as the ground buckled, sods of dirt were pushed up-grass still intact-and the long line of mounded earth extended another four feet, then stopped less than a yard from his sneakers.
Mike O'Rourke was feeding Memo while the lightning pulsed beyond the curtain. Feeding the old lady was not pleasant: her throat and digestive system worked after a fashion, otherwise they couldn't take care of her at home and she would have been in an Oak Hill nursing home. But she could only eat strained baby foods and her mouth had to be opened and closed before and after each mouthful. Swallowing appeared to be more an act of choking it down than anything else. Invariably, much of the food ended up on his grandmother's chin and the wide bib they tied around her neck.
But Mike went through the process patiently, speaking to her of small things-delivering the Sunday papers, the coming rain, his sisters' exploits-during the long intervals between spoonsful.
Suddenly, between bites, Memo's eyes became very wide and she began blinking quickly, trying to communicate something. Mike often wished that she and the family had learned Morse code before her stroke; but why would they have thought they needed it? Now it would have come in handy as the old woman blinked, paused, blinked repeatedly, paused again.
"What is it, Memo?" whispered Mike, bending closer and cleaning her chin with a napkin. He glanced over his shoulder, half expecting to see a dark shape at the window. Instead there was only the darkness between the curtains, then a sudden ripple of heat lightning which revealed the leaves of the linden tree and the fields across the street. "It's OK," Mike said softly and offered another spoonful of strained carrots.
It obviously wasn't OK. Memo's blinking became more agitated and the muscles of her throat worked so rapidly that Mike feared she was going to regurgitate the evening meal. He bent closer to make sure that she wasn't choking, but it seemed she was breathing all right. The blinking became a frenzied staccato. Mike wondered if she were having another stroke, if she were actually dying this time. But he did not call his parents. Something about the pre-storm stillness outside had invaded his motions and emotions, freezing him in his chair as he bent toward Memo with spoon extended.
The blinking stopped and Memo's eyes grew very wide. At the same instant something scratched against the floorboards of the old house-Mike knew that there was nothing but a low crawlspace there-the scratching audible under the floor of the kitchen on the southwest corner of the house and then moving, scurrying, quicker than a cat or dog would run, across the kitchen, across the corner of the living room and the bit of hallway, under the floor of the parlor-of Memo's room-under Mike's feet and the massive brass bed where the old lady lay.
Mike looked down beneath his still-extended arm, between his sneakers on the frayed rug. The scratching was as loud as if someone on a railed dolly had slid under the house with a long knife or metal rod, clawing at every cross brace and stud under the old floorboards. Now it became a pounding, a chipping away, as if that same blade were being used to hack away at the boards between Mike's sneakers.
He stared down, open-mouthed, waiting for whatever it was to rip its way through the floorboards, imagining bladed fingers emerging and seizing his leg. One glance told him that Memo had quit staring andhad closed her eyes as tightly as they could shut.
Suddenly, immediately, the clawing stopping. Mike found his voice. "Mom! Dad! Peg!" He was shouting, not quite screaming. His hand holding the spoon was still extended, but shaking now.
His father came in from the bathroom just across the hall, suspenders Hanging loose, his massive belly and undershirt far out over the waistband of his trousers. His mother came in from their room, belting her old robe. A clatter on the stairs announced not Peg but Mary, leaning on the doorframe and peering into the parlor.
There was a cluster of questions snapped at him. "What in the hell are you screaming about?" his father repeated when there was a pause.
Mike looked from face to face. "You didn't hear it?"
"Hear what?" asked his mother in her voice that was always harsher than she meant it to be.
Mike looked down at the carpet between his sneakers. He could feel whatever it was down there. Waiting. He glanced back at Memo. Her eyes were still shut tightly, her body rigid.
"A sound," said Mike, hearing how lame his voice sounded. "A terrible sound from underneath the house."
His father shook his head and lifted a towel to dry his jowls. "I didn't hear anything in the bathroom. Must be one of those godda-' He glanced at his frowning wife. "One of those darned cats again. Or maybe another skunk. I'll go out with a flashlight and broom and shoo it away."
"No!" cried Mike, much louder than he had meant to. Mary made a face and his parents looked at him quizzically. "I mean, it's going to rain," he said. "Let's wait till tomorrow, when it's light. And I'll go in there and get it out."
"Watch for the black widow spiders," said Mary with a shudder and pounded back up the stairs. Mike could hear rock-and-roll music from her radio.
His father went back into the bathroom. Mike's mother came in, patted Memo's head, felt her cheek, and said, "It looks as if Mother has drifted off to sleep. I'll wait here to feed her when she wakes up if you want to go up and get ready for bed."
Mike swallowed and lowered his shaking arm, bracing it on a knee that wasn't that steady. He could feel something down there, separated just by three-quarters of an inch of wood and a forty-year-old carpet. He could feel it down there in the dark, waiting for him to leave.
"No," he said to his mother. "I'll stay and finish it." He gave her a smile. She touched his head and went back into her room.
Mike waited. After a moment, Memo opened her eyes. Outside, the heat lightning flashed silently.
It did not rain on Sunday night, nor on Monday, although the day was gray and thick with humidity. Duane's father had set Wednesday for Uncle Art's cremation in Peoria and there were details to be taken care of, people to notify. At least three people-an old army buddy of Uncle Art's, a cousin he had known well, and an ex-wife-insisted on coming, so there was to be a short memorial service after all. The Old Man arranged it for three o'clock in Peoria at the only mortuary which did cremations.
The Old Man tried to call J. P. Congden through much of Monday, but the man was never home. Duane stood in the doorway and eavesdropped that afternoon when Constable Barney drove up with a complaint.
"Well, Darren," Barney had said to the Old Man, "J. P."s telling everybody that you killed his dog.”
The Old Man had shown his teeth. "The goddamn dog was attacking my boy. It was a big stupid Doberman with a microscopic little brain about the size of Congden's dick."
Barney shuffled his hat in his hands, running his fingers along the slick sweatband. "J. P. says that the dog was inside his house. That he found its body in the house. That somebody broke in and killed it."
The Old Man spat in the dust. "Goddamn it, you know that's as much of a lie as most of J. P. Congden's traffic arrests. That dog was inside when we knocked. Then when my boy and I came back around the shed after looking at Art's Cadillac… which by all rights shouldn't be there, you know. It's illegal for a third party to buy a wrecked vehicle before the accident's completely investigated. Anyway, the dog jumped "Duane after we went into the backyard, which means that piss-ant Congden let it out knowing that it would attack us."
Barney looked the Old Man in the eye. "You don't have any evidence of that, do you?"
The Old Man laughed. "Why did he send you after me? Does Congden have evidence that I was the one who killed that Doberman?"
"He said that the neighbors saw you."
"Bullshit. Mrs. Dumont lives next to Congden and she's blind. The only other folks on that block that'd know me is Miz Jensen, and she's up in Oak Hill with her boy, Jimmy. Besides, I had a legal right to be on that property. Congden illegally impounded my brother's car and then tore the doors off it so the true nature of his accident wouldn't be revealed.”
Barney set his hat on his head and tugged at the bill of it. "What are you talking about, Darren?"
"I'm talking about two missing doors on the driver's side of that Cadillac that hold evidence of the accident. Red paint. Red paint like the paint on the truck that tried to run my boy down a week ago today."
Barney removed a notebook from his pocket, wrote in it with a stubby pencil, and looked up. "Did you notify Sheriff Conway?”You're goddamned right I called him," said the Old Man. He was agitated, rubbing his cheeks. He had shaved that morning and the absence of stubble there seemed to disconcert him. "He said he'd 'look into it." I told him he'd damn well better look into it, that I was going to file charges against him as well as Congden if they didn't carry out a thorough investigation."
"So you think there was a second vehicle?"
The Old Man glanced back at Duane standing in the doorway. "I know that my brother didn't drive that Cadillac into the bridge at seventy miles an hour on his own," he said to Constable Barney. "Art was a damned fool about obeying speed limits, even out on shitty roads like Jubilee College Road. No, somebody ran him off the road."
Barney walked back to his car. "I'll call Conway and tell him I'm checking into it as well."
Behind the screen door, Duane blinked. The town constable had no part in investigating deaths on county highways. What he was doing was a favor, pure and simple.
"Meanwhile," said the constable, "I'll tell our justice of the peace that his neighbors must have been mistaken. Perhaps the'dog died of natural causes. The mean sonofabitch has gone after me a few times." He extended his hand to the Old Man. "I'm damned sorry about Art, Darren."
Surprised, the Old Man shook the constable's hand. Duane stepped out and stood next to his father while they watched the car recede down the long drive. Duane thought that if he turned to look at his father right then, he would find tears in the Old Man's eyes for the first time since the accident. He did not turn to look.
That evening they went to Uncle Art's home to get a suit to take into the Peoria mortuary the next morning.
"Damn fool thing," muttered the Old Man as they drove the four miles in the pickup. "They're not going to show him off, just incinerate him and the coffin. Art might as well be nude for all it matters to him or us."
Duane recognized the grumbling as the sign of another day without alcohol as much as grief or general bad temper. The Old Man was nearing a record for the past couple of years.
This trip was what Duane had been waiting for. He hadn't wanted to make a big deal out of searching for signs of whatever book Uncle Art had found and was bringing over to share when he was killed, but he knew the Old Man would have to go over there before the funeral.
It was dark when they arrived. Uncle Art lived in a small white farmhouse set back several hundred yards from the road. He leased the house from the family who still farmed the surrounding fields-set in beans this summer-and only the vegetable garden behind the house was Uncle Art's handiwork. The Old Man looked at the garden a moment before they went in the back door, and Duane knew that he was thinking about how they'd have to come over and tend it. In a few weeks they'd be eating the tomatoes that Uncle Art loved so much.
The house wasn't locked. Duane blinked and adjusted his glasses as he entered, feeling the grief and sense of loss strike him anew. He realized that it was the scent of Uncle Art's pipe tobacco in the still, trapped air. In that second Duane realized how temporary life was, how fleeting any person's presence was: a few books, the scent of tobacco that a person would never enjoy again, a few clothes that would be used by others, the inevitable snapshots, legal papers, and correspondence that would mean so much less to someone else. A human being on this world, Duane realized with a shock of recognition approaching vertigo, made no more permanent impression than does a hand thrust in water. Remove the hand, and water rushes in to fill the void as if nothing had ever been there.
"I'll be just a minute," said the Old Man, almost whispering for a reason neither understood but both obeyed. "You can stay in here." They had walked through the kitchen into the darker 'study."
Duane snapped on a light and nodded. The Old Man disappeared into the bedroom. Duane heard the closet door being opened.
Uncle Art's house was small: only a kitchen, a 'study' converted from the unused dining room, a living room barely big enough to hold a BarcaLounger, many bookshelves, two armchairs on either side of a table with a chessboard-Duane recognized the game he and Uncle Art had been playing three weekends earlier-and a large console television set. The small bedroom was the last room. The front door opened onto a small cement porch that looked out on about two acres of yard. No visitors ever entered or left by the front door, but Duane knew that Uncle Art had enjoyed sitting on the front porch in the evening, smoking his pipe and looking out north over the fields. One could hear traffic on Jubilee College Road easily enough, but the cars were not visible because of the hillside.
Duane shook himself out of his reverie and tried to concentrate. Uncle Art once had mentioned that he kept a journal-had kept one every year since 1941. Duane thought that whatever book he had mentioned on the phone was gone-ta ken by Congden or whoever-but there might be some mention of it.
He clicked on the lamp on Art's cluttered desk. The dining room had been the biggest room in the house, and the" study" was floor-to-ceiling bookcases holding mostly hardcover editions and more low shelves in the center of the room on either side of the huge door Art had used as his desk.
The desk held bills, the telephone, stacks of correspondence which Duane only flicked through, clippings of chess columns from Chicago and New York papers, magazines, cartoons from The New Yorker, a framed photograph of Art's second wife, another frame holding a drawing by da Vinci of a helicopter-like machine, a jar of marbles, another jar of red licorice-Duane had raided that jar for as long as he could remember-and scraps of paper holding old shopping lists, lists of fellow union members from the Caterpillar plant, lists of Nobel Prize winners, and a myriad of other things. No journal.
The desk had no drawers. Duane looked around the room. He could hear the Old Man going through drawers in the bedroom, probably finding underwear and socks. It would only take another minute.
Where would Uncle Art keep a journal? Duane wondered if it was in the bedroom. No, Art wouldn't write in bed. He'd fill his daily entry here, at his work desk. Only there was no book here. No drawers.
Books. Duane sat in the old captain's chair, feeling how the varnish had been worn away by his uncle's arms. He would write in the journal every day. Probably every evening, sitting here. Duane extended his left hand. Uncle Art was left-handed.
One of the low bookshelves near the left trestle-base of the big door of a desk was within reach. It was actually a double shelf, with books facing outward and others-more than a dozen untitled volumes-facing inward, almost invisible in the darkness under the desk. Duane pulled one of the books out: leatherbound; heavy, quality paper; about five hundred pages. There was no printing within, only a tight script written with an old-fashioned pen. The script filled each page and was not only illegible, it was unreadable. Literally.
Duane spread the volume open and leaned closer under the lamp, adjusting his glasses as he did so. The entries were not in English. The tightly scrawled pages looked as if they had been written in some hybrid of Hindi or Arabic, a solid wall of scribbles, loops, arabesques, and squiggles. There were no separate words; the lines were one inseparable, indecipherable tangle of unknown symbols. But at the top of each column of text there were numbers, and these were uncoded. Duane looked at the top of this page and read 19.3.57.
Duane knew that Uncle Art had often said that Europe's-and most of the world's-way of writing the date with the day, then the month, then the year, made more sense than the American way. "Littlest to biggest," he'd said to his nephew when Duane was six. "Makes a hell of a lot more sense that way." Duane had always agreed. He was looking at his uncle's journal entry for March 19, 1957.
He set the book back, pulled out the one set farthest to the left. The one easiest to reach. The first page of scribbles read 1.1.60. The last page, unfinished, lay under a heading of 11.6.60. Uncle Art had not made an-entry on Sunday morning, but he had written in his journal on Saturday evening.
"All set?" The Old Man was standing in the doorway, holding a suit still in the dry cleaner's cellophane, with Uncle Art's old gym bag in the other hand. He stepped into the circle of light near the desk and nodded at the book which Duane had instinctively closed. "Is that what Art was bringing you?"
Duane hesitated only a second. "I think so."
"Bring it along then." The Old Man went out through the kitchen.
Duane turned out the light, stood thinking about the other eighteen years of personal thoughts held in the volumes under the desk, and wondered if he was doing the wrong thing. Obviously the journals were in some sort of personal code. But Duane was good at breaking codes. If he broke this code, he would be reading things that Uncle Art had not meant for his eyes, or any eyes, to see.
But he wanted me to know what he found. He sounded excited about it. Serious, but excited. And perhaps a little scared.
Duane took a breath and lifted the heavy book, sensing his uncle's presence all around him now in the smell of tobacco, the familiar mustiness of the hundreds and hundreds of books, the scent of leather on the cover, even the slight, pleasant scent of his uncle's perspiration-the clean smell of a work-ingman's sweat.
It was very dark in the room now. The sense of Uncle Art's presence was a bit unnerving, as if the ghost of the man were standing there behind Duane, urging him to take the book, urging him to sit down there now, turn on the light, and read it with the spirit leaning over him. Duane half expected a cold touch of a hand on his neck.
Walking, not hurrying, Duane went out through the kitchen to join his father in the truck.
Dale and Lawrence had played ball all day despite the threatening clouds and cloying humidity, and by dinnertime they were saturated with dirt that had turned to mud where their sweat had run in rivulets. Their mother saw them coming out the kitchen window and made them stand in the back stairway and strip to their Jockey shorts before she'd let them enter. Dale got the job of carrying the clothes down to the back room of the basement where the washing machine sat.
Dale hated the basement. It was the one part of their big old house that made him nervous. It was OK in the summer when he almost never had to come down here, but in the winter it was his job to come down every evening after dinner and shovel coal into the hopper.
The stairs to the basement were each at least two feet high, made for someone with a greater-than-human stride. The huge concrete stairs wound to the left as they went down between the outside and kitchen walls, and the effect was that the basement seemed much farther down than it should be. Dungeon stairs, Lawrence called them.