The Secret History (63 page)

Her guest that evening, though it was several moments before I realized it, was William Hundy. He had on a suit—not the blue
leisure suit but an old one the likes of which a rural preacher might wear—and he was talking authoritatively, for some reason I did not immediately understand, about Arabs and OPEC. “That OPEC,” he said, “is the reason we don’t have Texaco filling stations anymore. I remember when I was a boy it was Texaco stations all over the place but these Arabs, it was some kind of, what you call, leverage buyout—”

“
Look,
” I said to Charles, but by the time I’d got him to glance up from his stupor they’d switched back to “Jeopardy.”

“What?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“Jeopardy,” “Wheel of Fortune,” back to “MacNeil-Lehrer” for kind of a long time until someone yelled, “Turn that shit off, Dotty.”

“Well, what you want to watch, then?”

“
 ‘Wheel of Fortune
,’ ” shouted a hoarse chorus.

But “Wheel of Fortune” was going off the air (Vanna blowing a glittery kiss) and the next thing I knew we were back in the simulated farmhouse with William Hundy. He was talking now about his appearance the previous morning on the “Today” show.

“Look,” said someone, “there’s that guy runs Redeemed Repair.”

“
He
don’t run it.”

“Who does, then?”

“Him and Bud Alcorn both do.”

“Aw, shut up, Bobby.”

“Naw,” said Mr. Hundy, “didn’t see Willard Scott. Reckon I wouldn’t have known what to said if I had. It’s a big operation they got there, course it don’t look so big on the TV.”

I kicked Charles’s foot.

“Yeah,” he said, without interest, and brought his glass up with an unsteady hand.

I was surprised to see how outspoken Mr. Hundy had become in just four days. I was even more surprised to see how warmly the studio audience responded to him—asking concerned questions on topics ranging from the criminal justice system to the role of the small businessman in the community, roaring with laughter at his feeble jokes. It seemed to me that such popularity could only be incidental to what he had seen, or claimed to see. His stunned and stuttering air was gone. Now, with his hands folded over his stomach, answering questions with the pacific smile of a pontiff granting dispensations, he was so perfectly at
his ease that there was something palpably dishonest about it. I wondered why no one else, apparently, could see it.

A small, dark man in shirtsleeves, who had been waving his hand in the air for some time, was finally called upon by Liz and stood up. “My name is Adnan Nassar and I am Palestinian-American,” he said in a rush. “I came to this country from Syria nine years ago and have since then earned American citizenship and am assistant manager of the Pizza Pad on Highway 6.”

Mr. Hundy put his head to the side. “Well, Adnan,” he said cordially, “I expect that story would be pretty unusual in your own country. But here, that’s the way the system works. For everybody. And that’s regardless of your race or the color of your skin.” Applause.

Liz, microphone in hand, made her way down the aisle and pointed at a lady with a bouffant hairdo, but the Palestinian angrily waved his arms and the camera shifted back to him.

“That is not the point,” he said. “I am an Arab and I resent the racial slurs you make against my people.”

Liz walked back to the Palestinian and put her hand on his arm, Oprah-style, to comfort him. William Hundy, sitting in his mock-Shaker chair on the podium, shifted slightly as he leaned forward. “You like it here?” he said shortly.

“Yes.”

“You want to go back?”

“Now,” Liz said loudly. “Nobody is trying to say that—”

“Because the boats,” said Mr. Hundy, even louder, “
run both ways.
”

Dotty, the barmaid, laughed admiringly and took a drag off her cigarette. “That’s telling him,” she said.

“Where your family comes from?” said the Arab sarcastically. “You American Indian or what?”

Mr. Hundy did not appear to have heard this. “I’ll
pay
for you to go back,” he said. “How much is a one-way ticket to Baghdad going for these days? If you want me to, I’ll—”

“I think,” Liz said hastily, “that you’ve misunderstood what this gentleman is trying to say. He’s just trying to make the point that—” She put her arm around the Palestinian’s shoulders and he threw it off in a rage.

“All night long you say offensive things about Arabs,” he screamed. “You don’t know what Arab is.” He beat on his chest with his fist. “I know it, in my heart.”

“You and your buddy Saddam Hussein.”

“How dare you say we are all greedy, driving big cars? This is very offensive to me. I am Arabic and I conserve the natural resource—”

“By setting fire to all them oil wells, eh?”

“—by driving a Toyota Corolla.”

“I wasn’t talking about you
in particular,
” said Hundy. “I was talking about them OPEC creepos and them sick people kidnapped that boy. You think they’re driving around in Toyota Corollas? You think we condone terrorism here? Is that what they do in your country?”

“You lie,” shouted the Arab.

For a moment, in confusion, the camera went to Liz Ocavello; she was staring, without seeing, right out of the screen and I knew she was thinking exactly what I was thinking,
oh, boy, oh, boy, here it comes …

“It ain’t a lie,” said Hundy hotly. “I know. I been in the service station business for thirty years. You think I don’t remember, when Carter was President, you had us over such a barrel, back in nineteen and seventy-five? And now all you people coming over here, acting like you own the place, with all your chick peas and your filthy little pocket breads?”

Liz was looking to the side, trying to mouth instructions.

The Arab screamed out a frightful obscenity.

“Hold it! Stop!” shouted Liz Ocavello in despair.

Mr. Hundy leapt to his feet, eyes blazing, pointing a trembling forefinger into the audience. “
Sand niggers!
” he shouted bitterly. “
Sand niggers! Sand—
”

The camera jerked away and panned wildly to the side of the set, a tangle of black cables, hooded lights. It wavered in and out of focus and then, with a jerk, a commercial for McDonald’s came on the screen.

“Whooo-hoo,” someone shouted appreciatively.

There was scattered clapping.

“Did you hear that?” said Charles, after a pause.

I had forgotten all about him. His voice was slurred and his hair fell sweaty across his forehead. “
Be careful,
” I said to him in Greek, and nodded toward the barmaid. “
She can hear you.
”

He mumbled something, wobbling on his bar stool, all padded glitter-vinyl and chrome.

“Let’s go. It’s late,” I said, fumbling in my pocket for money.

Unsteadily, his gaze locked on mine, he leaned over and caught hold of my wrist. The light from the jukebox caught and glinted
in his eyes, making them strange, crazed, the luminous killer eyes that sometimes glow unexpectedly from a friend’s face in a snapshot.

“Shut up, old man,” he said. “Listen.”

I pulled my hand away and swung round on the stool but just as I did it I heard a long, dry rumble. Thunder.

We looked at each other.

“It’s raining,” he whispered.

All that night it fell, warm rain, dripping from the eaves and pattering at my window, while I lay flat on my back with my eyes wide open, listening.

All that night it rained and all the next morning: warm, gray, coming down soft and steady as a dream.

When I woke up I knew they were going to find him that day, knew it in my stomach from the moment I looked out my window at the snow, rotten and pocky, patches of slimy grass and everywhere drip drip drip.

It was one of those mysterious, oppressive days we sometimes had at Hampden, where the mountains that lowered at the horizon were swallowed up in fog and the world seemed light and empty, dangerous somehow. Walking around campus, the wet grass squishing beneath your feet, you felt as if you were in Olympus, Valhalla, some old abandoned land above the clouds; the landmarks that you knew—clocktower, houses—floating up like memories from a former life, isolated and disconnected in the mist.

Drizzle and damp. Commons smelled like wet clothes, everything dark and subdued. I found Henry and Camilla upstairs at a table by the window, a full ashtray between them, Camilla with her chin propped in her hand and a cigarette burning low between her ink-stained fingers.

The main dining room was on the second floor, in a modern addition that jutted over a loading dock in the back. Huge, rain-splashed panes of glass—tinted gray, so they made the day seem drearier than it was—walled us in on three sides and we had a prime view of the loading dock itself, where the butter and egg trucks pulled up early in the morning, and of the slick black road that wound through the trees and disappeared in the mist in the direction of North Hampden.

There was tomato soup for lunch, coffee with skim milk because they were out of plain. Rain pittered against the plate glass
windows. Henry was distracted. The FBI had paid him another visit the night before—what they wanted he didn’t say—and he was talking on and on in a low voice about Schliemann’s
Ilios
, the fingertips of his big square hands poised on the table’s edge as if it were a Ouija board. When I’d lived with him over the winter, he would sometimes go on for hours in these didactic monologues, reeling off a pedantic and astonishingly accurate torrent of knowledge with the slow, transfixed calm of a subject under hypnosis. He was talking about the excavation of Hissarlik: “a terrible place, a cursed place,” he said dreamily—cities and cities buried beneath each other, cities torn down, cities burnt and their bricks melted to glass … a terrible place, he said absently, a cursed place, nests of tiny brown adders of the sort that the Greeks call
antelion
and thousands and thousands of little owl-headed death gods (goddesses, really, some hideous prototype of Athena) staring fanatical and rigid from the engraved illustrations.

I didn’t know where Francis was, but there was no need to ask about Charles. The night before I’d had to bring him home in a taxi, help him upstairs and into bed, where, judging from the condition in which I’d left him, he still was now. Two cream cheese and marmalade sandwiches lay wrapped in napkins by Camilla’s plate. She hadn’t been there when I brought Charles home, and she looked like she’d just got out of bed herself: tousle-haired, no lipstick, wearing a gray wool sweater that came down past her wrists. Smoke drifted from her cigarette in wisps that were the color of the sky outside. A tiny white speck of a car came singing down the wet road from town, far away, twisting with the black curves and growing larger by the moment.

It was late. Lunch was over, people were leaving. A misshapen old janitor trudged in with mop and pail and began, with weary grunting noises, to slop water on the floor by the beverage center.

Camilla was staring out the window. Suddenly, her eyes got wide. Slowly, incredulously, she raised her head; and then she was scrambling out of her chair, craning to see.

I saw, too, and jumped forward. An ambulance was parked directly beneath us. Two attendants, pursued by a pack of photographers, hurried past with their heads bent against the rain and a stretcher between them. The form upon it was covered with a sheet but, just before they shoved it through the double doors (long, easy motion, like bread sliding into the oven) and
slammed them shut, I saw, hanging down from the edge, five or six inches of yellow rain slicker.

Shouts, far away, downstairs in Commons; doors slamming, a growing confusion, voices shouting down voices and then one hoarse voice, rising above the others: “Is he living?”

Henry took a deep breath. Then he closed his eyes; and exhaling sharply, a hand to his chest, he fell back in his chair as if he’d been shot.