Wicked Fix (16 page)

right, it isn't. I don't think Victor killed Reuben any

more than you do. And you're wondering if I think

what happened to Reuben out there at Hillside Cemetery

--if I think that was justice."

"Something like that," I agreed. "That's part of it.

And if you do, why?"

It struck me that there were a hundred other things

Wade could have been doing, and that I could have

closed up Victor's house myself. He just hadn't wanted

me to have to do it alone.

"Let's go home," he said, "have a drink, just the

two of us in peace and quiet at the kitchen table."

"That sounds wonderful." But Wade's face was

stony.

"And I'll tell you," he finished, "a story about justice."

When Sam was a little boy, he peered curiously

at the pages of the storybooks I read

constantly to him. But no matter how often

or patiently I pointed at the words and pronounced

them, or sounded them out for him, he

couldn't learn to read.

What he liked were jumble puzzles. Every morning

starting when he was seven or so, he seized the comic

pages, located the anagram puzzle and solved it speedily

and triumphantly. Some of the words in the puzzles

were really rather difficult, but not for Sam. Yet he

couldn't decode the simplest printed sentence, a trouble

that frustrated us both.

Later I learned that the wiring in his brain was a

tiny bit scrambled. His perception problem was such

that if the letters of a word were presented to him separately,

or in jumbled fashion, he could sort them, but if

they came at him all at once or in proper order, he

couldn't.

Now, sitting alone at the kitchen table in my old

house in Maine, I thought about another little boy with

the improbable name of Boxy Thorogood. He'd had a

reading problem, too, Wade had told me; Wade himself

had been a teenager at the time, but he'd heard his

mother and Mrs. Thorogood discussing it.

Boxy's real problem, though, had been more serious.

A lot more serious.

On the table before me lay that dratted Ouija

board, which Sam and Tommy kept moving in and out

of the dining room. Idly, I fingered the planchette.

Wade hadn't remembered why Reuben Tate had

taken such a harsh view of Boxy. A foolish reason, he

said, or no reason at all. It didn't matter. What mattered

was that Reuben would do something to Boxy, to

hurt him. All the boys knew it; Boxy did, too. They just

didn't know what or when.

An only child, fatherless, skinny and small for his

age, the boy spent weeks trying to avoid his nemesis.

But each night after supper, Boxy's mother--a good

woman, but she had her habits--sent him for a pack of

Pall Malls and a half-pint of Seagram's, brooking no

argument if Boxy tried getting out of the errand.

So poor Boxy rode his bicycle down Washington

Street fast, night after night, knowing that sooner or

later Reuben Tate was going to be there to pounce on

him. He could run, but he couldn't hide; it wouldn't

end until Reuben got whatever cruel pleasure he

wanted. Reuben always did.

Then one day Reuben took Wade aside, and some

of the other boys, too. "Boxy," he said, a weird grin

spreading on his face. He took a roll of high-test fishing

line from his pocket, showed it around.

"Boxy," he repeated, and giggled. He was sixteen,

then. Wade was seventeen, and the other boys were

around that age, too.

Boxy Thorogood was maybe eleven, the same age

Sam was when I found him one afternoon in his bedroom,

sobbing. The teacher, he said, had called him

stupid. Anyway:

None of the boys who heard Reuben threaten

Boxy said anything to their parents, or to any adult.

They didn't tell Boxy, either. It was hard to explain,

Wade said, but somehow they didn't think Reuben

would really do it. It didn't seem ... real.

It got real, though, the next night as Boxy flew

down the hill on his bike. Someone had stretched a

length of high-test fishing line from one side of the

street to the other.

At the speed Boxy was traveling, the fishing line

was almost a guillotine.

"He flew off the bike," Wade reported, "hit the big

brick building at the far side of Water Street, bounced

off, landed on the sidewalk."

The building that Paddy had turned into a design

studio years later. Wade didn't see the attack, he had

added, but plenty of people did: not who'd done it, but

the result. Wade hadn't found out until the next morning.

When he got up, his parents were over at Boxy's

house already, trying to take care of Boxy's mother.

"It happened," Wade finished, "because I didn't

tell what Reuben was planning."

He looked at me. "So when you talk about justice,

keep Boxy in mind. It's why some people think the

only thing wrong with what happened to Reuben is, it

didn't take long enough."

He got up and put his hand on my hair. I reached

up and held it tightly, understanding now precisely the

depth of Reuben Tate's evil, what it had done to Wade

and would go on doing as long as he lived.

"You weren't drinking at La Sardina because you

knew he was around," I said. "You didn't want to

be ..."

"Yep. Don't want a buzz on, I see Reuben. Clear

head, plenty of self-control." He sighed deeply. "It's

the only way."

He spoke as if Reuben were still alive. "And you

didn't tell, afterwards? About Reuben and Boxy?"

His hand slipped away. "I did. The others, too. But

Reuben denied it, said we were all liars who had it in

for him, and the fact was, no one had seen him do it.

There was no proof. In the end, nothing happened to

Reuben."

The refrain was getting familiar. "Well, something's

happened to him now. Thanks for telling me

why you're not sorry. I wouldn't be, either."

It was very late. Wade hesitated. "I never told that

story before," he said finally, looking a little startled

and perhaps a shade sorry at the realization that, irrevocably,

now he had.

I thought about how I might feel, as opposed to the

idea of how I ought to. "And you'd like to be alone a

little while?" I asked. "Get used to the idea?"

His face cleared, and the look he gave me was

warmer than any embrace. "Go on," I said, "try to get

some sleep. I'll be up in a while."

Moments later I'd heard him going upstairs. I

don't know how long I sat there at the table after that,

thinking about justice and wondering what was in

Reuben's heart, at the end. And about what Terence

Oscard had said about evil: that in time it begins to

seem normal.

"Mom?"

Sam's voice startled me; coming to myself, I saw

that my hand was moving the planchette on the surface

of the Ouija board, sliding it in short arcs.

Sam stood in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas,

milk glass in his hand.

"Need a refill?" AEDAAA, my hand spelled out

meaninglessly; EEDDDAAADDD. An idle motion, like

worrying a cuticle or twisting a lock of hair.

"Yeah. Didn't know you were here. What'cha doing

with that?" He opened the refrigerator.

"Nothing. Just fidgeting. Sitting here thinking."

"Uh-huh." He frowned at me, pouring the milk.

"That thing only works with two people, I thought. Or

more. Isn't that what you told me?"

"That's what I've heard." The board's surface was

smooth and somehow relaxing under my hand. The

sliding helped me to think.

"So why," Sam asked quietly, "does it keep on

saying that?"

"Saying what?" I asked innocently, and then I saw

it. But of course Sam had spotted it first, the anagram

over and over:

DEAD DEAD DEAD.

The next morning Ellie and I drove past the

lot where the Eastport railway depot once

stood. In the nineteenth century the town

had been a hub of shipbuilding and commerce:

its society as stratified as Boston's, its culture

refined, its fads as intense and frivolous. Spiritualism--

seances, mediums, and so on--had enjoyed a heyday

here, for example, in the 1890s.

"I have no idea," I confessed, "what to think of

it." The Ouija board, I meant. The moment I'd seen

what it was spelling, it had gone motionless.

In the vacant lot, bindweed and wildflowers had

taken over the place where whalebone-corseted ladies

had stood on the rail platform, supervising imperiously

their trunks being transferred from wagon to baggage

car, while the great steam engine took on water and its

firebox expelled glowing cinders. When Franklin D.

Roosevelt was felled by polio at his summer place on

Campobello, it was from Eastport that he began the

sad journey home: to war, and into a pair of leg braces.

"I don't see," Ellie replied, "why you should think

anything of it at all."

Now the once-massive roundhouse foundation was

a circular patch of cracked concrete, grown through by

asters. At its edges you could still find clinkers from the

locomotives' fireboxes.

"After all," she continued reasonably, "just because

a thing produces words doesn't mean it's got

anything to say."

Which I thought was a little beside the point. But

her brisk commonsense tone eased my mind somewhat,

and it was a brilliant day: the sun shining, white popcorn

clouds scudding across the blue sky, waving fields

of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod so lovely you forgot

all about hay fever.

Ellie turned onto County Road, heading south

toward Sodom's Head and the water. Just before the

road slanted down to the old salt works, she made a

sharp right; moments later we were driving along the

coveside, past a few small dwellings interspersed with

unkempt pastures and abandoned cellar holes.

"I hope Mike Carpentier's got something to say." I

braced myself against the dashboard as Ellie stopped

suddenly for a pair of eiderducks waddling across the

road. When they had passed she shoved the Jeep grindingly

into gear again and trod on the gas.