“No, not really.”
“Then you don’t know. For some men—perhaps all men—it’s almost a necessity to do insane things from time to time: to confront the wild boar alone, spear in hand, to see the world from the top of an unscalable mountain, to risk one’s entire fortune on the turn of a card. I think it’s true of all men, personally, though nowadays most try to get along on risks taken by deputies—deputies in the boxing ring and on the football field.”
“You mean … they have to test their manhood.”
“Oh, it’s not as simple as that, Mrs. Kennesey. When a man sets out to do something like this, he’s not testing his manhood. He’s testing the universe itself—he’s testing the gods, if you will. He’s finding out where he stands in the order of things. To best the rabbit or the deer means nothing, tells him nothing. But while he stalks the boar, he puts his fate to the test: he lives in the hands of the gods.”
“And if the boar wins?”
“Ah, that’s the whole point, Mrs. Kennesey. If the boar wins, then he dies in the hands of the gods.”
“I don’t understand.”
“To die falling off a ladder or being run over by a drunk means nothing. But, for the man who lives and dies at risk, who puts his fate in the hands of the gods, death is never meaningless.”
Ellen gave the ice in her drink a shake and took a sip of it. “You’re quite a philosopher, aren’t you?”
John Dee acknowledged her irony with an ironical little bow of his own. “Once long ago I was a physician, Mrs. Kennesey,” he said.
“Since then I’ve been many things, including a philosopher.”
As the plane circled on its approach to Eppley Field, Ellen was surprised to see that Omaha, by its lights, seemed a vast metropolis. She closed her eyes uneasily. She preferred flying by night, when nothing but reflected faces could be seen in the windows. The lights of the city reminded her that only a fragile skin of metal separated her from the gulf below. She smiled, remembering how safe her life had seemed just a few days ago—and how fragile the skin separating her from catastrophe had been. A single seam had weakened and split, and the whole flimsy structure of her life had burst apart.
David had always maintained that, despite her veneer of liberal enlightenment, she secretly believed that all misfortune was fundamentally racial or ethnic—that three-fifths of the world wouldn’t be in economic or political turmoil if it had had the good sense to be born white and Anglo-Saxon. She saw now that there was more than a little justice to the charge; if all this were happening to one of her African-American acquaintances, she would be horrified—but not really surprised.
At last she felt the reassuring kiss of wheels on runway, opened her eyes, and sighed. She’d put off till now thinking about the confrontation to come. Ordinarily she worked out all possible lines of attack and defense well in advance of an encounter expected to be hostile or contentious. But now, as she made her way through the airport toward the cab that would take her to the Holiday Inn, she realized that nothing could be worked out in advance—nothing. David might embrace her in hysterical relief, might gape at her in astonishment, might knock her down in fury.
What was it the officer at the police station had told her—good God—just this morning? We’ve got to take this one step at a time.
A protocol for a life in upheaval.
Room 262, the young man at the front desk told her, and gave her directions.
As she approached the door on slightly wobbly legs, she felt a spring being wound up in her stomach; it was like a coil of sharpened bamboo that, when released, could slash her to pieces.
She knocked and heard a muffled exchange of voices inside. Her second knock a few moments later seemed to provoke a low snicker. Looking down at the door handle, she realized that the door wasn’t actually closed. She pushed it open.
The breath went out of her as though she’d been punched in the stomach. Her knees gave way.
Grinning up at her from the bed was the ferret-faced man who’d called himself Detective Wolf.
Consciousness dissolved around her like a bubble bursting in slow motion.
CHAPTER 22
When Tim phoned from Runnell at eleven that night to say that Ellen hadn’t returned, Howard told him to sit tight and call again in the morning.
“Should I go to school?” Tim asked.
“Good God, no. You stay by that phone.”
After making the boy renew his promise not to leave the house without calling him, Howard got ready for bed.
Unlike Ada, who could be dead to the world ten seconds after saying good night, he needed help falling asleep; over the years this help had taken the unvarying form of a large whiskey and a book, which he read till he was virtually comatose. Tonight he opened the book but didn’t read. He was contemplating the only genuine mystery that had ever come his way: the mystery of the disappearing parents. It was as though David and Ellen Kennesey had simultaneously—or nearly simultaneously—gone crazy. The French had a name for it: folie à deux. Insanity for two; an infection of madness.
Tim said he’d wondered if his parents hadn’t met secretly at the gas station where he’d been left behind. A lunatic idea, of course … unless they really were lunatics. Was it thinkable that they’d actually conspired to orphan their own son?
When David Kennesey phoned them in Runnel, Tim had heard only his mother’s side of the conversation. Had she reported the other side honestly?
How would she have reacted if what David had actually said was: Ellen, I’ve had some time to think now, and I see what’s wrong. I just can’t cope with the responsibility of it all—wife, child, mortgage, job. I’ve just got to shed the burden. But I don’t want to shed you. Let’s run away, chuck it all, start over again someplace new.
Would a normal woman go for a pitch like that?
You didn’t ordinarily think of nice, conventional, middle-class folks reasoning that way; but then you didn’t ordinarily think of nice, conventional, middle-class folks keeping tidy records of the number of Jews gassed in camp today either.
Strange things could happen to people.
Or maybe it really was an infection of madness. David takes off, thinking, well, this is a shitty thing to do to Tim, but, what the hell, Ellen will look after him. But then, after a few days of looking after Tim—of thinking of the long years of lonely responsibility ahead—Ellen says, hey, why me? I’ve got a life to lead too, you know. If it’s all right for David to walk away from it all, why not me? Who says I have to bite the bullet here just because David doesn’t want to bite it?
It was conceivable. As he drifted off on the tide of whiskey, something stirred in memory, and he thrust it back, for the sake of sleep.
Folie à deux.
The folly of duels.
A duel of swords
A deuce of swords. Adieux swords.
Adieux wards.
An orphan.
A boy.
Sleep.
–––
The next morning a ringing telephone dragged him up from the bottom of an ocean of sleep, and he was only half awake when he stumbled across the room and picked up the receiver. Before he could get out a hello, the phone rang again. He took the receiver from his ear and gazed at it stupidly until he realized that there was another phone ringing somewhere. He turned around and stood facing the south wall of the apartment.
It was crazy: the ringing seemed to be coming from Ada’s massive old sideboard.
He frowned and shook his head; his brain felt heavy and sodden, as if it had spent the night soaking in sludge. He was sure there was some sense to be made of this, but it was just out of reach. Thinking about it, he vaguely recalled that, at one time, he’d had a second phone.
The ringing went on tirelessly.
He was trudging over to the sideboard to open its glass-paned doors when he remembered: there had been two phones in the apartment they’d had before Ada died. One in the living room and one in the kitchen. The one in the kitche
n had been wall-mounted, blue.
Suddenly it all flooded back: Ada.…
In a panic now that he’d be too late, he shouldered the sideboard aside, threw open the ancient door, flung himself across the kitchen, snatched the phone off the hook, and barked out an urgent hello.
“Well, well, sleepyhead,” Ada cackled dryly. “It sure takes a lot to get you outta the sack nowadays.”
“Ada,” Howard croaked. “Where are you?”
“Where am I? You doped up or something, Howard? I’m at my sister’s, of course.”
“Your sister’s?”
“Geez, honey, wake up. My sister who’s having the baby, remember?”
“Oh,” Howard muttered, an ancient memory stirring sluggishly. “Yes. I remember now.”
“Look, honey, I called ’cause I gotta bawl you out about something.”
“About what?”
“About that boy.”
“Boy?”
“You know—Tim.”
To Howard, standing in this kitchen and talking to Ada, the name belonged to another time and another world, and it was a moment before he realized who she was talking about.
“I don’t understand, Ada. What am I supposed to do about Tim?”
“You’re supposed to look after him, Howard.”
“I am looking after him!” he protested.
“I know that, honey. I’m not bawling you out about what you been doing. I’m bawling you out about what you’re gonna do.”
“And what am I gonna do, for God’s sake?”
“You’re gonna turn the kid down.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Ada.”
After a pause, she said, “You listen to me now.”
“I’m listening.”
“You got some traveling to do, old man.”
“Ada, what are you talking about?”
“I don’t want to hear any excuses, any arguments. I don’t want any crap from you. You take the boy where he needs to go.”
“All right, Ada,” he said with a sigh. He still didn’t understand, but this acquiescence made him feel strangely serene.
“You take care of him. You hear?”
“I hear.”
“Good. Now go answer the phone.” Howard frowned, confused. “What?”
“The other phone, Howard.”
He turned his head to the door to his apartment. “It’s not ringing, Ada.”
“Howard, go answer the goddamn phone!” she shouted and slammed the phone down with an ear-jolting crash. Shaking his head, he went back to his apartment, shoved the sideboard back into place, and turned to the phone.
As he gazed down at it, it blasted into shrill life.
Grabbing the receiver, he snapped, “Yes?”
“Howard?” It was Tim, sounding startled by Howard’s abrupt greeting. He was calling because he’d received something odd in the mail from his father—a check for a huge amount of money. Not exactly from his father, from a hotel in Las Vegas. But it had to be from his father, didn’t it? Howard, feeling unaccountably jarred, couldn’t understand why the boy was calling, couldn’t grasp what he was saying. It seemed impossibly complex, completely muddled with some weird dream he’d been having when the call woke him up.
“Tim,” he said, interrupting the boy in mid-sentence, “I’ll call you back in a few minutes. I want to think this thing over. Okay?”
“Sure,” Tim said, puzzled.
It was a lie. Howard didn’t want to think anything over. He wanted to go back to sleep. He felt as if he’d left half his brain back in the bed, as if this abrupt awakening had shattered him. Half an hour’s sleep seemed to reassemble him only partially, and he took a long shower to calm down. He realized that he now knew the meaning of that cliché about jangled nerves: the nerves in his spine and at the back of his neck were clanging like wind-chimes in a thunderstorm.
Getting dressed, he stewed over what Tim had told him.
So he got a check in the mail from his father—or from someone in a hotel in Las Vegas. What’s that got to do with me? Am I some kind of welfare agency suddenly? I mean, enough is enough. I got problems of my own. I can’t go running clear across the goddamn continent just because Tim got a check in the mail. He’s a smart boy. He’ll be able to understand that. Having settled the matter in his own mind, he breathed a sigh of relief, reached for the phone, and started to dial the number in Runnell. Midway through the sequence he paused and replaced the receiver. After staring thoughtfully into space for a few moments, he reached for the telephone directory, looked up the number of the Greyhound depot, and called to get some information on bus connections between Runnell and Chicago.
Then he redialed Tim’s number.
He asked him if he knew where to catch the bus in Runnell; he did. Howard told him to pack a bag and, after a bit of pondering, dictated a detailed note to be left behind in case Ellen showed up while Tim was gone.
Having repeated his instructions, he hung up, went back into the bathroom, and shaved. Then, after breakfast, he got his suitcase from the closet and packed. On his way out the door, he decided to be safe: he went back to the closet and dragged out his shabby old raincoat.
He met the boy at the Chicago bus station at one, and an hour and a half later they were on board a jet headed west.
Three hours later, if they’d known just where to look on the highway below, they could have seen the westbound car in which Ellen rode as an unconscious passenger.
CHAPTER 23
Driving at seventy miles an hour, it had taken David twenty minutes to outdistance Runnell, to escape the uncanny feeling that the town might still reach out and snatch him back. Then he turned onto southbound 31 and, knowing he was safe at last, eased his speed down to the limit.
After a few minutes he felt a thrill building on the back of his neck and shook his head to kill it.
No feelings, he told himself. Not tonight. No remorse, no guilt. No relief, no exultation. Nothing till tomorrow.
And so he drove like a robot, watching familiar landmarks slide by and thinking, “I’ll never see that again.…” The glow of the sunset melted away as he swept around Indianapolis and left the last of the landmarks behind. From this moment on, it would all be new.
Not yet, he reminded himself. No feelings yet.
He turned on the radio and let the country singers whine at him about their heartaches for a while, then, realizing he was punishing himself, turned it off.
He had dinner at a steak house in Terre Haute, then went on to Vandalia, where he found a motel with a cocktail lounge. He checked in, dumped his suitcase in the room, washed his face, and went to the bar. A few salesmen were trading jokes and lies at the tables. A few local cowboys were guffawing at one end of the bar. David sat down at the other end, ordered a double bourbon, and listened to a juke-boxful of Willie Nelson’s sorrows, feeling nothing.
That night he dreamed of Soshal—short for Antisocial—a big, fat gray cat they’d had for many years and lost to a careless driver the summer before. A haughty creature, she’d felt degraded by her human associations and hated to be held by anyone. In the dream, set in the bedroom at home, David had perversely picked her up, plunked her down on the bed on her back, and started jumbling the fur of her belly—an activity that particularly infuriated her. She struggled to get out from under his hand, but he held her down, pretending she was really enjoying herself. Finally she got away, scrambled off the bed, and stood up on her hind legs, trembling with rage over her confinement. Then David saw that it wasn’t really Soshal at all; it was a fur-covered boy. The boy picked up something from the floor and, glaring furiously, flung it at David’s head. The boy was not a figure of Tim but of David—of the wild side of himself that he had held imprisoned for so long.
When he awoke, he found he’d willed himself another day without feelings. He wasn’t free yet; the band that held him to Runnell hadn’t been stretched far enough to break. He thought another five hundred
miles might do it. Meanwhile he no longer had to keep reminding himself: he was so completely numb that he wondered if emotion would ever return. Sitting in the motel dining room, he felt insubstantial, ghostly, and was mildly surprised when the waitress acknowledged his existence by bringing him a breakfast menu.
It was like that the rest of the day, as he shot westward across Missouri and two-thirds of Kansas to Hays, where he repeated the previous night’s routine exactly. Dulled by a couple of drinks, he wondered if Ellen had remembered the appointment he’d made to have the tires on her car rotated. Good tires, those were; a little over their budget, but they’d gotten a good price on them. He’d have to remember to remind her about it when he—
He smiled, having caught himself preparing for his routine away-from-home phone call.
Hi! How was your day?
Did you remember to get the tires rotated?
How’s Tim? Still campaigning to spend the summer at that wilderness-survival camp in the Catskills?
Of course he would be. The brochure he’d written away for made it look genuinely testing, even a bit dangerous, and this worried Ellen, though she didn’t like to admit it. She preferred to argue that it was in some mysterious way “out of character” for Tim to be scaling rocks and camping out, and therefore not to be considered. So far, David had stayed out of the controversy, giving the subtle impression he agreed with her. But eventually Tim would back her into a corner and she’d pass the buck to David, expecting him to play the heavy. She’d smoulder for a while when he pulled the rug out from under her and said …
He was like a reformed smoker reaching for a package of cigarettes that wasn’t there.
Before he went to bed he opened the windows wide, and at four in the morning a gale roaring down off the continental divide plucked him up out of sleep. Standing at the window with the wind gusting in his face, he felt the prison doors rumbling open, and the hair rose off the back of his neck. Without turning on the lights, he gathered up his things, threw them in the car, and climbed behind the wheel. At a touch, the headlights pierced the darkness like a probe into a hidden universe.