The Summer Soldier (11 page)

Sitting behind the wheel with the window
rolled down, listening to the birds chirp, he tried not to think
about anything, but that was impossible. A couple of kids went by
on bicycles (Guinness wondered for a moment why they weren’t in
school and then remembered that it was a Saturday) and a squirrel
was carefully picking his way over the roof gable of the Episcopal
church. The noon whistle sounded; Guinness checked his watch and
frowned at the unrelieved ugliness of life.

After thirty-five minutes Murray Harrison
came back out into the sunshine, and Guinness could tell by the way
he walked that Creon had at the very least strongly intimated that
he had a favorite suspect all picked out.

That evening, in Murray’s room, Guinness
twisted apart the seal on a bottle of Jack Daniels he had smuggled
into the hotel in a paper shopping bag marked “Kepler’s Books.” He
poured a good three fingers each into two stubby water glasses from
the bathroom, and the two men sat together in the filtering
twilight, silently drinking.

It wasn’t until about two thirds of the way
through the second glass that Murray began to cry. Small and
birdlike, with his white hair falling down around his ears and his
Adam’s apple pumping up and down, he sat on the edge of the bed,
rocking back and forth in time to the spasms of his grief.

“I dunno,” he whimpered damply, “I just dunno
who coulda done a thing like that.” His eyes were on Guinness in a
way that suggested he might be afraid of what sort of an answer he
would receive. Guinness only shrugged and freshened the old boy’s
drink. After all, to him the question of who could have killed
Louise was technical rather than moral; it contained no element of
outraged surprise.

After a tentative sip, Murray brought the
glass down to rest on his thigh and uttered a kind of wheezy groan.
He took a couple of panting, carefully separated breaths and then,
for a moment, didn’t seem to breathe at all. “Well, at least she
didn’t suffer,” he said at last. “At least we have that to be
thankful for.”

Guinness could think of no appropriate
answer, or at least not one that he would care to give to a
ravaged, half ¬drunk old man, so he simply made a small
noncommittal sound that his father in law would be free to
interpret as agreement if he wished. Anyway, Murray was probably
correct from a medical point of view—an ice pick in the medulla
oblongata probably wouldn’t leave one with any time to suffer. But,
God, what must have preceded it. It didn’t bear thinking about.

But he did think about it. How could he help
but think about it? Over and over, almost compulsively, Guinness
had, like a man suffering through his wife’s birth pangs, lived his
way over Louise’s final twenty minutes or so of helpless existence.
It must have been horrible: the fear, the certainty of death, the
crazy pointlessness. The stranger with his fingers buried in the
flesh under her jaw, keeping her head straight as she knelt on the
bedroom carpet. Out of the corner of her eye, just at the limit of
her field of vision, she must have seen his hand raised to
strike.

Only a Murray Harrison, a man with no
imagination, a man who had passed his life conducting inventories
of his rubber band stock, could suppose the absence of pain any
kind of comfort. More terrible than pain was the prospect of pain,
and more terrible still the prospect of death. Pain was nothing,
just a fact of existence like passion or bereavement; it could be
accepted and overcome. Fear was the final enemy, the crucible in
which intelligence, dignity, any sense of oneself as a human
creature were melted down into a numbed wretchedness infinitely
worse than any mere anguish of the flesh.

“Do you know who did this?” Murray both
sobbed and shouted, in a kind of capitulation from the comforting
fact of death’s painlessness. “Ray, do you have any idea who coulda
done this?”

The real question, of course, the one he
wanted to ask, was, “Did you do this?” There was something like an
implied forgiveness if he would only confess and relieve an old man
of his intolerable burden of uncertainty.

Guinness drained his glass in a single
swallow, setting it down on the tiny circular table next to which
he was sitting in a low armchair, the back and arms of which were a
single curve of red naugahyde, and with the same hand he poured
himself another three fingers, holding the bottle by the neck.

“No, Murray, I don’t know who could have done
it, but believe me when I tell you it wasn’t me. I know what you’re
thinking, but Creon is full of shit.” With a smooth, careful
movement he reached across the perhaps four feet of space to where
his father in law was sitting and refilled his glass.

“Here, you need this worse than I do,” he
said quietly, suddenly heavy with compassion for a sorrow that was
no less real because it had been yielded to.

As if unaware of its existence, Murray took a
sip of the whiskey. You might have thought the operation performed
by some agency independent of the will. The drink had its effect,
though, and with a slight shudder the angular, storklike figure on
the bed seemed to come back into focus.

“I never really believed you did it, boy. Not
really. But still it’s a comfort to hear you say so.”

“Yeah.” Guinness rose to go back to his own
room, leaving the bottle of Jack Daniels behind him. “Good night,
Murray.”

“Good night, Ray.”

For most of that night Guinness lay awake,
staring up at a ceiling hidden in darkness. He didn’t even try to
sleep; he was past that.

Instead of numbing him, the whiskey had
produced a version of clarity all its own, difficult but
persistent. He didn’t drink usually, and now he could remember why:
the stuff made you feel melancholy and self pitying and at the same
time left behind sufficient intellectual detachment with which to
deplore such maudlin excesses. It was like being two people at
once, and they didn’t like each other.

Louise and her father. The shame of the
clever child for the weakness of her parent, whose love is rather
like conventional piety and chiefly operates at weddings and
funerals.

Still, Murray wasn’t a bad man just because
his emotions had been patterned into clichés. Louise had been wrong
to turn her back on him, even if he hadn’t noticed.

But so what? It didn’t matter anymore—Louise
was dead—and who the hell was he to criticize? He hadn’t himself
been precisely what one would call a model son. He hadn’t seen or
had contact with his own parent in twenty-two years, not since his
sixteenth birthday had ended her legal obligation to support him
and they had parted with mutual relief.

Mother. At the time he had felt—what?
Distaste, resentment, a whole series of confused, hostile
sensations, no two of which fitted perfectly together. He had been
glad to get away from her, to be on his own (that would pass soon
enough), but angry that his mother should be glad to see him go.
Somehow your mother didn’t have the right to be tired of supporting
you.

God, that woman, how he had hated her. She
had been, at least at the time, the embodiment of everything he
wanted to put behind him, of everything from which the effortless
dignity of academic life would protect him. A dark haired, bony
vulgarian who made her living and his by tracing parallel lines in
whitewash around the bells of crystal water goblets in a glass
factory in an ugly little town named Newark, Ohio. The lines served
as guides for the cutters and were washed off when the design was
complete. She would place the goblet upside down on a little
potter’s wheel on the table in front of her, wet the tips of her
brush that looked like a pair of navigator’s compasses, fit the
brush into its vise, and turn the wheel. Day after day for years,
the same thing. It must have been maddening.

She was a woman who perceived her life—and
perhaps rightly—as a series of unprovoked calamities, and of these
her son Raymond was by no means the least. It wasn’t that he was
perverse or unusually stupid (she credited him with these failings,
but they were not the source of her grievance against him); it was
merely that he existed. In himself, by virtue of the fact that he
needed to be fed and clothed and put up with, he was a burden she
most emphatically did not need. He was expensive and a distraction;
these were his sins. And she never forgave him.

Guinness returned the compliment.

He remembered her as a coarse skinned,
scowling figure with knuckles the size of golf balls, leaning
against the refrigerator, holding a dark brown bottle of
unidentifiable beer delicately by the neck between her first finger
and thumb. In recollection she was enormous, but that had to have
been a carryover from childhood; she couldn’t have been more than
five feet four, and even at sixteen Guinness would have towered
over her. How old had she been then? Late thirties, perhaps—no
more.

Of his father he knew nothing. He had been
merely The Deserter, a figure of myth, and Guinness couldn’t even
be sure whether he and his mother had ever been divorced. Or even
married, for that matter. Perhaps even she wasn’t sure who he was.
Perhaps, except in a purely chromosomal sense, he had never
existed.

So that left Murray Harrison down the hall,
mourning for his butchered child. Father and daughter had appeared
little concerned with each other alive, although that again might
have been nothing more than an impression, and Murray’s grief was
no doubt largely compounded out of a sense of propriety, but so
what? It was there. It is the emotions that create one person’s
responsibility to another, and they are, after all, finally
something more than the sum of their ingredients.

So, what the hell. Guinness slipped his arms
into the sleeves of his coat and prepared to depart. Today he would
bury all the family he had left in the world—except the mother and
the daughter on whom, at various times, he had turned his back; and
could they have been any less dead to him than Louise was now?—and
then Murray would get on a plane and go back to his condominium and
his pinochle games and his scrapbooks of life in Chico, and the
whole issue would become academic.

He walked to his father in law’s room and
tapped lightly on the door with the joint of his first finger.

“Come on, Murray. It’s time.”

7

It was laundry day. Exactly a week had passed
since the Belmont Police Department had packed his suitcase for
him, padlocked his front door, and driven him to the hotel of his
choice, and he was running perilously low on underwear.

Guinness hadn’t been inside a laundromat
since his bachelor days, but the only change he could perceive was
that the washing machines seemed to take fifty cents now instead of
thirty-five. Otherwise, everything was the same. The same long,
narrow room with the washing machines against one wall and huge,
vatlike driers built into the other. Even the molded plastic chairs
where you sat transfixed before the drier windows, watching your
clothes tumble past like the characters in some particularly
repetitious television show, were exactly the same, linked together
in groups to make it harder for aficionados of vulgar furniture to
rip them off.

It wasn’t a very entertaining way to spend
time, but time was suddenly something Guinness had plenty of, so it
didn’t matter. He was officially on leave from his university—paid
leave, which provided some measure of how badly they wanted him out
of the way.

The day after Louise’s death, just half an
hour before he was nearly blown up in his car, he had found a note
in his department mailbox that the dean would appreciate a word.
Not the chairman, but the dean. In the six years of his tenure at
Belmont State, Guinness could remember only one other private
encounter with that august personage; a rather perfunctory welcome
on his first day. Perhaps it was different in the prestige schools,
but at Belmont State the deans were like gods, powerful and
distant. You were thankful if in their brooding majesty they left
you alone, because a summons from that quarter usually meant you
stood in violation of some particularly serious tribal taboo.

The dean in this case was also a former
chairman of the English department, an intimidating gentleman with
spectacular gray eyebrows and an almost mandarin sense of his own
personal significance. He drove a Mercedes, as befitted his
position in the world, and had served his country faithfully and
well during the Korean conflict as a member of the Military Police,
making something of a specialty out of harassing enlisted
homosexuals.

His office was on the highest floor of the
Humanities Building, so Guinness took the elevator up and stepped
into the dean’s waiting room, which, like his office, was paneled
in wood. His secretary picked up her telephone and whispered
something into the mouthpiece, and within five seconds the dean
stepped out smiling, his right hand extended in greeting. Guinness
took the offered hand only to have the other clapped on his
shoulder as he was propelled into the inner office.

“Sit down, Dr. Guinness,” the dean said,
sliding into his own chair. “Please let me express my own very
sincere personal condolences on the tragic death of your wife.”

Guinness muttered something that sounded like
“thank you” and made a vague depreciatory gesture with his left
hand, and for a moment there was a tight silence. As if to break
it, the dean picked up a long yellow lead pencil that had been
lying on some papers and began a nervous, rhythmless tapping of the
eraser end against the sheet of glass covering his desk top. It
must have made more noise than he had intended, because after only
six or seven taps he stopped, stared at the eraser for a second or
two, and then gently set the pencil back down. He kept his hand on
it for just an instant, as if to make sure that it wouldn’t begin
to roll, and then settled back in his chair, letting his finger
tips rest against each other and smiling kindly. They always smile
at you like that just when they’re getting ready to screw you.