He nodded. ‘I guess I do.’
‘You guess you do. Good. Don’t come back here. And don’t go snooping around after my boys anymore or I’ll have the sheriff on your tired old ass before you know what hit you. Have yourself a real nice day, Ludlow. You know where the door is.’
As he walked out into the hall he saw a woman stopped midway down the stairs and he paused and looked at her and he guessed that the woman was McCormack’s wife, the boys’ mother, and that she’d heard at least that last part of what they’d said because she looked at Ludlow as though Ludlow were a thief slipping away with some precious thing that she owned, as though somehow Ludlow were breaking her heart. A pretty woman once, he thought, though not anymore despite the expensive clothes and jewelry. And he wondered about the woman in the Lincoln Continental that afternoon. And he wondered if he should feel bad for her as he walked toward the door.
Sixteen
There were times after Mary’s and Tim’s death he’d drink himself to sleep. He allowed himself permission to do that for quite some time.
He’d rise late those mornings and the dog was used to eating early. The dog had a clock in his belly unfixed to Ludlow’s sorrow. The dog had come up with strategies to wake him, heavy head or not, and these were progressively more insistent. He would begin by licking Ludlow’s face and much of the time the warm wet tongue was enough. If Ludlow turned his face to the pillow and continued to pursue his troubled sleep the dog would burrow beneath the covers and with his cold wet nose seek out the back of Ludlow’s neck.
If he still would not relent the dog would walk on him.
There would be dreams he would not wish to part with in favor of the furious empty day ahead of him or else the ache in his head was fierce enough so that he would sometimes rise and smack the dog hard across the rump and send him yelping off the bed. Those mornings he would wake up angry at the dog and at himself. The dog would cower until he was reassured. It would rarely be long before he would do so. He couldn’t stay angry at the dog. There was no meanness in the dog, only an innocent hunger. The dog looked forward to the day even if Ludlow didn’t.
And in the long run Ludlow believed those mornings and those strategies had brought him back. The dog would not permit Ludlow his indulgences and self-pity and finally neither would he. It was a matter of fairness to the animal and an affront to simple pride that the dog should know so much more of life than he did. He stopped drinking and stopped relying on Bill Prine so much and got himself back to work. He took Red fishing on the weekends or they would go for a drive and hike up into the mountains or they would do what he was doing now here in Ogunquit. Alone without the dog for the first time.
His father, Avery Allan Ludlow Sr, was four months shy of ninety. He had endured angioplasty and a double bypass yet still insisted on his pack a day, the directors and nurses of the Pinewood Home be damned. His father was smoking now, sitting on the porch-swing with Ludlow and Ludlow watched his hand move away from his mouth with the cigarette half finished. The hand he watched had held an axe or a two-handed saw or a tool of some sort practically all his father’s working life. He had been in the bucking and logging industry up in Somerset County ever since he was a boy and the hands were still the most vital parts about him save his eyes and his thinking and his sharp tongue. With illness and inactivity the muscles of his legs and arms and trunk had withered inside him so that his flesh hung on him, outsized for his body.
Ludlow thought him still a handsome man. So, he gathered, did the ladies of the Pinewood Home.
‘Pop,’ he said. ‘I think I might be going to do something stupid.’
Ludlow told him about Red and the shooting and the rest of it and what he was thinking of doing and by the time he was finished his father had smoked two more Winstons and flicked them off the porch into the hedges. They rocked back and forth on the swing listening to the chains creak and ladies laughing behind them in the house and his father nodded and his eyes swept over the fresh-cut lawn in front of them and then across the hill to the road that led through town and past that, to the sea.
‘It’s not stupid,’ he said. ‘Hell, blood’s blood. You ever taste an animal’s blood? It tastes exactly like your own does. You tell me why’s a man’s blood is any better or any more precious than a dog’s blood? It sure ain’t to the dog. Me, I could never see the sense in it. Red was family to you. I figure you owe something to family. And you do too or else you wouldn’t be out here wanting to talk to me.’
‘I’ve been thinking. I don’t talk to Billy though, do I? Never.’
‘Billy who.’
‘Your grandson.’
‘I know who he is. I also know what he did. And that what he did damn near broke you. Red ever do anything like that to you? Or me? Or Allie?’
‘No.’
‘So don’t go getting all guilty and stupid on me. We’re your family. Like your mother and Tim and Mary were your family. Hell, you’ve sorted this out for yourself already. Or else . . .’
‘Or else I wouldn’t be here.’
‘Right. You only need somebody to tell you you’re not just howling at the moon right now. Well, you’re not. Or else I am too. And so’s pretty much everybody else I like or ever did like and as far as I’m concerned, we can go right on doing it just for the pretty sound it makes. To hell with what people think.’
He stood and the weight of him missing off the porch swing on the other side was hardly any weight at all. He put his hand on Ludlow’s shoulder and for all its wide mass that too seemed lighter than it ought to have been.
‘Go on about your business, son,’ he said. ‘Come see me again sometime before my birthday. You can be a worrisome difficult son of a bitch but I don’t mind your company, not at all.’
Seventeen
It took him nearly a week to find the boy the way he needed to find him, in the situation he needed. It was costing him at the store but Bill Prine didn’t seem to mind the extra time and there was no other way he could think of to do it. He spent his days haunting the boy, parking a block or two back from the house until he came out in the morning or afternoon and climbed into his car and drove off.
He didn’t worry too much about being seen. He was figuring seeing the truck would rattle the boy and that was how he wanted him.
Many days, the younger boy, Harold, was with his brother and they would drive to Cedar Hill Road and pick up Pete and the three of them together would take the highway out to Portland and once to Yarmouth and the time they went to Yarmouth three young girls got in the car with them in the center of town by a drugstore and they drove to a mall and hung around all day at the arcades and ate pizza and at night they went to a movie. The girls spent most of their time laughing and talking together in secret and so did the boys but the boys seemed to aim for more subtlety, feigning the assured stance of adulthood, though with none of its tired wisdom.
Portland was no good to Ludlow nor was Yarmouth. He needed the boy in Moody Point. He needed him there under specific circumstances and he began to despair it would ever happen. The boy would stop at a store for cigarettes and then pass through town on his way somewhere else or the three of them would stop at a MacDonald’s outside of town and then drive on. But a pack of cigarettes was not what he needed to see in Danny McCormack’s hand.
On the morning of the fifth day into this he was coming out of Bill Brockett’s bakery with a cup of coffee and a cheese danish and saw Harold McCormack leaning with his back to Ludlow’s truck near the driver-side door, his skinny arms folded across his bony chest half-obscuring the Macintosh Computer logo on his teeshirt. He walked over.
He set the coffee on the hood of the truck to let it cool a while and took a bite out of the danish. The boy looked skittish, scuffling his feet and moving back and forth across the truck’s door like he was scratching an itch.
‘I saw you parked here,’ he said finally. ‘Danny didn’t.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Down the stree
t at Bowman’s Auto.’
‘He know you’re here?’
He shook his head. ‘I told him I needed cigarettes. He’d be pretty damn mad if he knew I was talking to you.’
‘Would he?’
‘Hell, yes.’
‘He get mad a lot, your brother?’
He took another bite of the danish and then sipped the coffee. It was still too hot so he put it back up on the hood again.
The boy sighed and shook his head. ‘Listen, Mr Ludlow. I’m not gonna say everything’s all buddy-buddy between Danny and me. But that’s not the point.’
‘What is the point, then?’
He shifted against the truck. Ludlow thought that what he really wanted was to be allowed to climb inside there and have Ludlow on the outside so they could quit talking altogether. But the boy had called this.
He took another bite and looked at him.
‘I wanted . . . I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. About your dog. For what we did. That’s why I’m here. To say that.’
Ludlow just looked at him a while. Letting him listen to his own words hanging in the still air. Then he nodded.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘Of course, the one I need to hear it from most’s your brother. I’m still glad to hear it from you, though. The question is, what now?’
‘Huh?’
‘You going to keep on lying for him?’
‘God! What do you expect me to do? You ask me in front of my fatherl You get this on TV!’
‘I expect you to tell the truth, son. Just like you’re doing now. I expect you to tell your father and I expect you to tell the police if it comes to that.’
The boy shook his head again. ‘You don’t get it,’ he said. ‘You don’t understand. That’s just not gonna happen.’
‘Then suppose you make me understand.’
He stood there, calm in front of him and sipped the coffee. The boy kept shaking his head, moving back and forth against the truck. It was something to hear this from the boy. Something but not enough.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I gotta go. If Danny sees me here . . .’
He started to move away.
‘Who’re you afraid of, Harold? Your brother? Your father? You were man enough to come down here and say what you just said to me. I figure that already makes you a bigger man than your brother. Maybe your father too. I don’t think you have all that much to worry about from either of them. Do you?’
Harold smiled. It wasn’t a good smile.
‘Mr Ludlow, believe me, you haven’t got a clue.’
Ludlow watched the boy walk off down the street swinging his lanky arms and wondered if he wasn’t maybe right about that. He was only seeing part of the picture, he was aware. For all he could tell the boy’s home life might be a nightmare or it might be the same as most people’s lives, some good, some bad, mostly neither one. But you went on what you did know no matter how little and you tried to find out the rest if possible. It was all you could do.
He finished the danish and opened the car door, still watching the boy and saw him stop and turn around and then walk back to the truck again. The boy looked hurt and angry now.
‘You saw Carla?’ he said. ‘You saw our maid?’
He nodded.
‘You saw her hand?’
‘Sure.’
‘I want you to consider why my father would hire a maid with a crippled hand, Mr Ludlow. Out of all the help available around here, my father chooses her.’
‘I figure she must be pretty good. Despite the hand.’
‘Oh, she’s good enough, all right. But it’s not that. It has nothing to do with that. And it’s not out of the kindness of his heart, either. Just think about it, Mr Ludlow.’
He spun on his heel and walked away.
Ludlow picked up his coffee, got in and started the truck, wondering what the boy was talking about. Trying to tell him something about the maid that was important to him.
Power, he thought. Something about power. Had to be.
He wondered how often McCormack found some way to remind the woman about her withered hand or even how he might choose to go about it. If with regard to McCormack he was dealing with the ordinary smug superiority of the rich or whether it was cruelty.
In either case he’d take what the boy said in the spirit in which it was given.
He’d take it as a warning.
Though he guessed it didn’t change anything.
The following day he followed them to the high school playground. It was late afternoon.
The three of them were playing baseball with five other boys Ludlow didn’t recognize, four men to a team. He watched them in the distance from his truck for over an hour and then went to Arnie Grohn’s to have himself a late lunch and when he came back they were still playing as he had thought they would be. He thought that Harold wasn’t a bad batter for his size nor was Pete Daoust. Though Pete had a tendency to go for pitches that were high and outside, he had a home-run heft to him and he used it effectively.
The real surprise was Danny.
As a pitcher he was fine. He had a strong right arm and he was accurate and he fielded the ball with ease. But at bat he swung with ever-increasing passion at pitches Ludlow thought no one with any sense would even want to think about, high and low and inside and outside, whatever was thrown to him. It was as though he couldn’t stand to see the ball get by him.
A group of teenage girls had gathered watching them and at first Danny was showing off for them, grinning from the pitcher’s mound and frowning and shaking his head when he missed one in the batter’s box as though he were just having a real bad day, inexplicably, like he really couldn’t understand what had suddenly come over him. As things grew worse he seemed to forget about the girls completely.
He seemed to have no eye for the thing at all. Of the eight times Ludlow watched him he struck out four times, popped out twice and got a pair of singles distinguished only by how hard he had to run in order to reach base before the ball did. The veins stood out in his neck as he swung.
It was better than Ludlow had dared hope for. At bat Danny McCormack appeared like a man with a mission, the nature of which he barely understood and who could fill the gaps of his understanding only with will and fury.
No one laughed at him, though they might have. Not even the girls, who grew more and more silent as the game went on. He was bigger than all but two of the players on the other team and perhaps he was older but Ludlow thought that would not necessarily account for their deference to him. He thought that Danny was not a boy you laughed at. And that the others knew it. He wondered how much pleasure that subtracted from the game and why these boys would even want to engage him.
Perhaps it was a way of getting even, he thought, a judicious humiliation he was watching, played out on the neutral ground of a ball field where the game itself permitted his rage to go only so far and no further.
After a time, the fourth man on Danny’s team looked at his wristwatch and shook his head. It was over. The girls had already drifted away.
He watched Danny take two of the metal bats out of the dirt behind the backstop and toss them into the rear seat of his car. He got in on the driver’s side with Pete Daoust beside him and Harold in the back. They turned out of the lot and drove towards town.
Ludlow waited, then followed.
In town they pulled up in front of the Anchor Restaurant across from Fleury’s drugstore and Ludlow knew he had them now, if Danny would take the bait.
He stopped his truck beside the driver-side door just as Harold was getting out the back and cut his engine and said, ‘Hey.’
Danny was closing his door and he turned and Pete Daoust looked up over the roof at him and scowled and slammed his door.
‘You,’ Danny said. ‘This goddamn old man again. You been following us, haven’t you?’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
‘We’ve seen your truck.’
‘It’s a small
town. I suppose you would now and then.’
He got out of the truck and closed the door and walked to the curb and stood there in the sun.
‘We saw you over in Portland.’
‘That’s possible too.’
‘You better cut it out.’
‘Cut it out?’
‘Following me. You know what I’m talking about. I’m telling you right now to cut it out’
A pair of men in overalls and old Boston Celtics caps walked out of the Anchor and looked at the old man and the three boys standing by the curb, two of the boys standing well behind the other, and then they crossed the street.
‘Are you threatening me, son?’
‘I’m telling you.’
The two men turned midway and glanced back at them and then continued on.
‘I wouldn’t be threatening anyone if I were you. Not unless you can fight a whole lot better than you can swing one of these things.’
He nodded toward the bats on the car seat, bringing them to the boy’s attention. He let his gaze stay there a while.
‘You stupid old son of a bitch. What are you doing out there watching us? Spying on us? Who the hell do you think you are?’
‘Let’s just take off, Danny,’ Harold said. ‘Let dad handle things.’
‘Yeah. Fuck this jerk,’ Pete said.
Ludlow heard the uncertainty in Pete’s voice. It was what he’d been hoping for. The heavyset boy was the wild card. Now he knew it was a card that wasn’t going to get played.
‘You’ve got a nice swing, Pete,’ he said. ‘Good eye too. Not like Miss McCormack here.’
‘You fuck!’
And then Danny was diving through the open window reaching in and the other two boys stepped back as he came out with the metal bat clutched in his fist. Ludlow almost smiled it had been so easy but knew it would not do to smile. Plus, for all he knew the boy might be better at this than he looked.
He moved fast up onto the open sidewalk in front of the restaurant with his back to the boy as though he were trying to get away from him, retreating, knowing that the sight of his back would encourage him as it would almost always encourage a coward. When he felt the boy close enough behind he spun into the bat as it arced down and let it have the outside of his upper arm halfway through the swing.