The Fiend (34 page)

He passed the paper company where he worked. A light was burning in the office and he went over and peered into the window, hoping to see Mr. Warner sitting at his desk. But the office was empty, the light burning only to discourage burglars. Charlie was disappointed. He would have liked to talk to Mr. Warner, not about anything in particular, just a quiet, calm conversation about the ordinary things which ordinary people discussed. To Mr. Warner he wasn't anyone special; such a conversation was possible. But Mr. Warner wasn't there.

Charlie went around the side of the building to the loading Zone, which was serviced by a short spur of railroad track. He followed the spur for no reason other than that it led somewhere. He took short, quick steps, landing on every tie and counting them as he moved. At the junction of the spur and the main track he stopped, suddenly aware that he was not alone. He raised his head and saw a man coming toward him, walking in the dry, dusty weeds beside the track. He looked like one of the old winos who hung around the railroad jungle, waiting for a handout or an empty boxcar or an even break. He was carrying a paper bag and an open bottle of muscatel.

He said, “Hey, chum, what's the name of this place?”

“San Félice.”

“San Félice, well, what do you know? I thought it seemed kinda quiet for L.A. It's California, though, ain't it?”

“Yes.”

“Not that it matters none. I been in them all. They're all alike, except California has the grape.” He touched the bottle to his cheek. “The grape and me, we're buddies. Got a cigarette and a light?”

“I don't smoke but I think I have some matches.” Charlie rummaged in the pocket of his windbreaker and brought out a book of matches. On the outside cover an address was written: 319 Jacaranda Road. He recognized the handwriting as his own but he couldn't remember writing it or whose address it was or why it should make him afraid, afraid to speak, afraid to move except to crush the matches in his fist.

“Hey, what's the matter with you, chum?”

Charlie turned and began to run. He could hear the man yelling something after him but he didn't stop until the track rounded a bend and a new sound struck his ears. It was a warn­ing sound, the barking of dogs; not just two or three dogs but a whole pack of them.

The barking of the dogs, the bend in the tracks, the smell of the sea nearby, they were like electric shocks of recognition stinging his ears, his eyes, his nose. He knew this place. He hadn't been anywhere near it for years, but he remembered it all now, the boarding kennels behind the scraggly pittosporum hedge and the grade school a few hundred yards to the south. He remembered the children taking the back way to school because it was shorter and more exciting, teetering along the tracks with flailing arms, waiting until the final split second to jump down into the brush before the freight train roared past. It was a game, the bravest jumped last, and the girls were often more daring than the boys. One little girl in particular seemed to have no fear at all. She laughed when the engineer leaned out of his cab and shook his fist at her, and she laughed at Charlie's threats to report her to the principal, to tell her par­ents, to let some of the dogs loose on her.

“You can't, ha ha, because they're not your dogs and they wouldn't come back to you and a lot of them would have babies if they got away. Don't you even know that, you dumb old thing?”

“I know it but I don't talk about it. It's not nice to talk about things like that.”

“Why not?”

“You get off those tracks right away.”

“Come and make me.”

 

For nearly an hour Virginia had been standing at the window with one corner of the drape pulled back just enough so that she had a view of the front of the Brant house and the curb where the black Chrysler was parked. She had seen Gallantyne and the lawyer getting out of it and had stayed at the window watching hopefully for some sign of good news. Minute by minute the hope had died but she couldn't stop watching.

She could hear Howard moving around in the room behind her, picking up a book, laying it down, straightening a picture, lighting a cigarette, sitting, standing, making short trips to the kitchen and back. His restless activity only increased her feeling of coldness and quietness.

“You can't stand there all night,” Howard said finally. “I've fixed you a hot rum. Will you drink it?”

“No.”

“It might help you to eat something.”

“I don't want anything.”

“I can't let you starve.”

For the first time in an hour she turned and glanced at him. “Why not? It might solve your problems. It would certainly solve mine.”

“Don't talk like that.”

“Why not? Does it hurt your ego to think that your wife would rather die than go on living like this?”

“It hurts me all over, Virginia. Without you I have nothing.”

“That's nonsense. You have your work, the company, the customers—you see more of them than you do of me.”

“I have in the past. The future's going to be different, Vir­ginia.”

“Future,” she repeated. “That's just a dirty word to me. It's like some of the words I picked up when I was a kid. I didn't know what they meant but they sounded bad so I said them to shock my aunt. I don't know what future means either but it sounds bad.”

“I promise you it won't be. I called the boss in Chicago this morning while you were still in bed. I didn't mention it to you because I would have liked the timing to be right but I guess I can't afford to wait any longer. I resigned, Virginia. I told him my wife and I were going to—to adopt a baby and I wanted to spend more time at home with them.”

“What made you say a crazy thing like that?”

“I hadn't planned to, it just popped out. When I heard my­self saying it, it didn't seem crazy. It seemed right, exactly right, Virginia.”

“No. You mustn't—”

“He offered me a managerial position in Phoenix. I'd be on a straight salary, no bonuses for a big sale or anything like that, so it would mean less money actually. But I'd be working from nine to five like anybody else and I'd be home Saturdays and Sundays. I told him I'd think about it and let him know by the end of the week.”

She had turned back to the window so he couldn't see her face or guess what was passing through her mind.

“Maybe you wouldn't like Phoenix, Virginia. It's a lot bigger than San Félice and it's hot in the summers, really hot, and of course there's no ocean to cool it off.”

“No—no fog?”

“No fog.”

“I'd like that part of it. The fog makes me so lonely. Even when the sun's shining bright I find myself looking out to­wards the sea, wondering when that gray wall will start moving towards me.”

“I guarantee no fog, Virginia.”

“You sound so hopeful,” she said. “Don't. Please don't.”

“What's wrong with a little hope?”

“Yours isn't based on anything.”

“It's based on you and me, our marriage, our life together.”

She took a long, deep breath that made the upper part of her body shudder. “We don't have a marriage any more. Remember the nursery rhyme, Howard, about the young woman who ‘sat on a cushion and sewed a fine seam, and fed upon strawberries, sugar and cream'? Well, the sitting bored her, the cream made her fat, the strawberries gave her hives and her fine seams started getting crooked. Then Jessie came to live next door. At first her visits were a novelty to me, a break in a dull day. Then I began to look forward to them more and more, finally I began to depend on them. I was no longer satisfied to be the friend next door, the pseudo-aunt. I wanted to become her mother, her legal mother. ... Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you, Howard?”

“I think so.”

“I saw only one way to get what I wanted. That was through Dave.”

“Don't say any more.”

“I have to explain how it happened. I was—”

“Even if Phoenix is hot in the summer, we can always buy an air-conditioned house. We could even build one from scratch if you'd like.”

“Howard, listen—”

“We'll look around for a good-sized lot, make all our own blueprints or hire an architect. They say it's cheaper in the long run to hire an architect and let him decide what we need on the basis of what kind of life we want and what kind of people we are.”

“And what kind of people are we, Howard?”

“Average, I guess. Luckier than most in some things, not so lucky in others. We can't ask for more than that. . . . I've forgotten exactly what the phoenix was. Do you recall, Vir­ginia?”

“A bird,” she said. “A bird with gorgeous bright plumage, the only one of his kind. He burned himself to death and then rose out of his own ashes as good as new to begin life again.” She turned away from the window, letting the drape fall into place. “Lieutenant Gallantyne is leaving the Brants' house. Ask him to come in here, will you, Howard?”

“Why?”

“I want to tell him everything I didn't tell him before, about Jessie and my plans for her, about Dave, even about the twenty dollars you gave Jessie. We can't afford to hide things any more, from other people or each other. Will you ask the lieutenant to come in, Howard?”

“Yes.”

“It will be a little bit like burning myself to death but I can stand it if you can.”

She sat down on the davenport to wait, thinking how strange it would be to get up every morning and fix Howard's breakfast.

 

The girl was coming toward him around the bend in the tracks. She was taller than Charlie remembered, and she wasn't skipping nimbly along on one rail in her usual manner. She was walking on the ties between the rails slowly and awk­wardly, pretending the place was strange to her. She had a whole bundle of tricks but this was one she'd never pulled before. The night made it different, too. She couldn't be on her way to or from school; she must have come here deliberately looking for him, bent on mischief and not frightened of any­thing—the dark, the dogs, the winos, the trains, least of all Charlie. She knew when and where the trains would pass, she knew the dogs were confined and the winos wanted only to be left alone and Charlie's threats were as empty as the cans and bottles littering both sides of the tracks. She always had an answer for everything: he didn't own the tracks, he wasn't her boss, it was a free country, she would do what she liked, so there, and if he reported her to the police she'd tell them he'd tried to make a baby in her and that would fix him, ha ha.

He was shocked at her language and confounded by her brashness, yet he was envious too, as if he wanted to be like her sometimes:
It's a free country, Ben, and I'm going to do what I like. You're not my boss, so there
— He could never speak the words, though. They vanished on his tongue like salt, leaving only a taste and a thirst.

He stood still, watching the girl approach. He was surprised at how fast she had grown and how clumsy her growth had made her. She staggered, she stumbled, she fell on one knee and picked herself up. No, this could not be pretense. The nimble, fearless, brash girl was becoming a woman, burdened by her increasing body and aware of what could happen. Danger hid in dark places, winos could turn sober and ugly dogs could escape, trains could be running off schedule and Charlie must be taken seriously.

“Charlie?”

During her time of growing she had learned his name. He felt pleased by this evidence of her new respect for him, but the change in her voice disquieted him. It sounded so thin, so scared.

He said, “I won't hurt you, little girl. I would never hurt a child.”

“I know that.”

“How did you find out? I never told you.”

“You didn't have to.”

“What's your name?”

“Louise,” she said. “My name is Louise.”

Gallantyne let Mac off in the parking lot behind police head­quarters.

Mac unlocked his car and got in behind the wheel. The ugliness of the scene with Brant, followed by Virginia Arlington's completely unexpected admissions, had left him bewildered and exhausted.

“Go home and get some sleep,” Gallantyne said. “I don't think you were cut out for this line of work.”

“I prefer to function in the more closely regulated atmosphere of a courtroom.”

“Like a baby in a playpen, eh?”

“Have it your way.”

“The trouble with lawyers is they get so used to having everything spelled out for them they can't operate without con­sulting the rule book. A policeman has to play it by ear.”

“Well, tonight's music was lousy,” Mac said. “Maybe you'd better start taking lessons.”

“So you don't approve of the way I handled Brant.”

“No.”

“I got through to him, didn't I?”