White Horses

  Teresa didn’t hear her, or she didn’t listen; she kept right on walking, the collie following behind, and after a while Harper went back inside. She felt sadder than she would have ever expected; she knew this third remedy wouldn’t do any more than leave Teresa’s dreams as empty as glass. And when she found the sapphire necklace in her mailbox later in the week, sealed inside a plain white envelope, Harper still found herself somewhat afraid of the necklace, she imagined that in taking it she was also challenging whatever it was that kept Teresa under a deep, dreamless spell.

  It took a day or two, but after that Harper began to laugh at her own superstitions; she began to wear the necklace. On a Friday night, when she was off from work, she stood in front of her bathroom mirror and fastened the chain around her throat, and she stared at the ice-blue stone before she made up her eyes. Then she went out dancing; in a club in Forestville she spent all night in the arms of a stranger, a man with blue eyes, who bent down and kissed her just after midnight. She found herself thinking of Teresa and for a giddy moment she ran from the dance floor, to tear the necklace off and get rid of the blue stone that had been a part of Teresa’s illness. But once she was in the ladies’ room and she had combed her hair and doused her face with cold water, Harper felt herself grow calm; what Teresa had wasn’t catching, Harper wasn’t even certain it was real. And before she went back to the man who waited for her on the dance floor, Harper looked in the spotted mirror above the sink and for a moment it seemed that the stone she wore now looked green, the exact color of her eyes.

  When Joey found the rosemary under Teresa’s pillow he had the sense that he had been betrayed. And by the time Teresa returned from the grocery store in town she found Atlas shut out of the trailer and her packed suitcase outside the front door. When she went inside Joey was sitting in the easy chair, three empty beer cans in front of him.

  “It’s too cold for Atlas to be out there,” Teresa said.

  Joey held up the packet of rosemary. “What the hell is this supposed to be?” he asked her.

  Teresa put the bag of groceries down and began to place the cans of soup and beans in the cabinets. She tried to think of a place to go if Joey kicked her out, but she couldn’t come up with one answer, she couldn’t think of one step farther than the trailer’s front door. Joey came over to her and grabbed her arm.

  “I asked you what this is,” he said, and he pushed the rosemary toward her.

  “All right,” Teresa said. “I got it from Harper.”

  “Oh, great,” Joey said. He walked away from her. “I told you I didn’t want you seeing Harper.”

  “I just wanted to try some of her cures,” Teresa explained.

  “Her cures!” Joey cried. “She’s a waitress from Maryland who thinks she knows the secrets of the universe, and you’re going to her for cures?”

  It had begun to rain again and Teresa could hear Atlas whining softly at the door. “I had nightmares,” she said in a small voice.

  “Joey went over to her then and put his arms around her. “Baby, you’re supposed to come to me when something’s wrong.”

  “Okay,” Teresa whispered.

  “Come to me,” Joey told her. “Otherwise I don’t see any point in us living together.”

  “All right,” Teresa agreed. Beneath the sink were the three glass bottles which had held three remedies, and on a shelf, behind the coffee and the tea, was a tin containing the last of the valerian root.

  “You can go,” Joey said. “I won’t make you stay with me. You can still walk out.”

  Outside, Atlas clawed at the door, and the wind was rising off the river, leaving its watery scent everywhere: in the pine needles, all along the wire fence that surrounded the trailer camp, on each one of the saffron-colored weeds that grew around the trailer.

  “I don’t want to walk out the door,” Teresa said. And at that moment she believed there was no point in waiting for Silver any more, there hadn’t been since the night he had chosen to leave her alone in the small bedroom at the rear of the house and go back to Lee.

  “We don’t need anybody else,” Joey told her. “Least of all Harper and her goddamn cures.” He walked over to Teresa, he held her, he unzipped the yellow rain slicker and unbuttoned her blouse; he held her breasts so tightly that she nearly lost her breath, he bent and licked her nipples, and even though his tongue was hot Teresa felt a chill moving along her skin.

  “I want us to get married,” Joey told her, and his voice sounded urgent and thick.

  Teresa looked away from him; if the window of the trailer hadn’t been boarded over she could have seen her suitcase, out there in the rain; she could have seen past the wire fence around the camp to the road that snaked through the hills, one way leading to Santa Rosa, the other to the Pacific.

  “Married?” Teresa said.

  “I want to be with you forever,” Joey said. “I want to take you into Santa Rosa to buy the most beautiful dress you ever saw.”

  “I wouldn’t have to go to Santa Rosa,” Teresa said, not wanting to get within ten miles of Divisadero Street. “There’s a dress shop in Guerneville.”

  Joey smiled and kissed her on the mouth. “You’re saying yes,” he crowed.

  Teresa went to the door and opened it; Atlas came in and shook himself dry. A little farther west there were pelicans and gulls with dark wings, but before that, on a street in Guerneville was a store where there were dresses trimmed with blue ribbon, shawls made of ivory lace. From where Teresa stood that evening, by the open front door, she couldn’t see any farther than the edge of the road; there was no traffic, no headlights cut through the rain, no wolves stood on the ridgetop and threw back their heads to howl, frightened by the sound of hoofbeats on the damp earth. Teresa closed the door then, and turned back to Joey.

  “I’ll marry you,” she told him. “I’ll do it whenever you say.”

  That night Teresa made dinner, she washed all the dishes, and she made love with the man she had just agreed to marry. And later, when Joey held her in his arms, Teresa didn’t answer when he whispered her name. He was sure she was dreaming—of the dress she would buy, of shoes with gold buckles, and the day of their wedding. But all that night, Teresa thought about loneliness and the disappointment that follows a lifetime of waiting, and long after Joey had fallen asleep Teresa was still awake, and in spite of herself she found herself wishing that Silver would find her. Now, before she went to Guerneville to buy her wedding dress, right now, because if he didn’t take the road outside the trailer park soon Teresa was certain he would never be able to find his way, not even on a night when there was a full moon, he wouldn’t be able to see past the wooden boards that shuttered the trailer’s windows, and even if he changed his mind and finally drove up to find her, he’d never see that she was stranded deep inside.

  SIX

  LATE IN THE EVENING, on the last day of February, a man wearing a black linen suit stood on a street corner and thought about revenge. He had decided that revenge was not particularly sweet; instead it was cold, it was like a wave that took him far beneath the water line. He could hear it whisper to him, a foggy voice, words spoken from the mouth of a perfect seashell. Nothing fast, it told him, and this he already knew; he had spent four years in a jail cell where a footstep outside his locked door often seemed a more terrible fate than a cleanly broken neck. Nothing obvious, it told him, and he knew this, too; he had been following Silver for nearly eight months and he could still count the times he had let Silver see his face. Something soon, it urged him, and he had just begun to realize that if he did not make a final move in the next few days he might wind up following Silver for the rest of his life, always one step behind, always waiting for the perfect moment—a moment centuries long, a time when the sidewalk and the skies came together in a flash of blinding white light.

  Silver began to see him everywhere. If he went to a neighborhood restaurant for dinner, Angel Gregory was at the next table; in the morning, when he boiled water for
coffee, he could look out the kitchen window and see Gregory behind the wheel of the parked blue Falcon; at night Gregory was stationed right across the street, he stood beneath a street lamp, not bothering to hide any longer, and when he reached out to light a cigarette the red dog on his arm showed long blood-colored claws. It did no good to stand out in the middle of the street and yell at him to get the hell off the block, there was no point in pulling the kitchen curtains closed or walking from one restaurant to another. Silver had tried all these things and Gregory continued to follow him, and at night Silver found himself dreaming about the red dog, he was tracked through marshland where there were no flowers and no trees, he could hear the dog following behind him, his jaws inches away from Silver’s ankles.

  Silver no longer went to Vallais’s apartment on Russian Hill, he no longer drove across the city to sell cocaine and hashish; he stayed home, he paced through every room, the sound of a pigeon flapping its wings on the windowsill was enough to send chills down his spine. Without Lee the apartment seemed huge; the closets were half empty, there was no food in the kitchen cabinets, no toys littering the floor, no clean sheets. Silver had realized that Lee wasn’t coming back after only a few days, and it seemed right to him that she should stay away, the air in the apartment seemed cleaner, less cluttered by perfume and smoke. Even the walls seemed whiter, and the bare hangers in the closet looked somehow just right. He didn’t bother to telephone Lee at her mother’s house in Santa Rosa; he assumed they were settled in, they weren’t missing him one bit. Lee had already unpacked, she slept in the same room she had climbed out of to meet him so long ago, her gold watch had been tossed onto a white lacquered dresser. Silver was sure that Jackie had his own room in the attic, high in the eaves; he would have begun to know the names of the streets in Santa Rosa by now, he probably watched the fog cover the grass on the lawn each evening at dusk.

  Before long, Silver had stopped thinking about Jackie and Lee altogether; it was as if they had never existed. Everything was much simpler now. Silver no longer bothered to use anything in the kitchen except for one spoon and one cup, each of which he washed every time he used them. It was as if he had forgotten that there were cupboards full of dishes, drawers full of knives and spoons, just as he’d forgotten that there had once been a time when an enemy wasn’t waiting right outside his door. It seemed years since Silver had left the house, but it was only two weeks; two weeks without going as far as the back porch to breathe in some fresh air, two weeks of being afraid to walk out the front door. He felt as if his apartment were under siege; he sat by the window and watched Gregory by the hour, he stared until Gregory appeared in front of him each time he closed his eyes. He ran out of food, he ran out of cigarettes, when the telephone rang he didn’t answer, he began to imagine that he could hear blood moving through his own body, it pounded in his ears and left a soft humming in his head.

  And then something happened; one day, after those two weeks of hiding, a wild kind of daring came over him. All at once he was able to imagine his own death; he could see the sort of knife Gregory would use and the exact hour of the day, he could see a thousand and one scenes of his last minutes on earth. And now he became unafraid of what would happen—he wanted to meet Gregory face to face and get it over with. What had been exhaustion now turned into blind courage; suddenly he was even more reckless than he had been as a boy. He unlocked all of the doors in the apartment, and he dared Gregory in a hundred ways to come after him: he began to leave the apartment again, he wore white shirts that glowed under the moon, he opened all the windows and let fog come in and coat ceilings and the floors with a mist so thick he could barely find the walls, let alone discover an enemy in his own front hallway. He kept the gun with him at all times, in his jacket pocket or in the glove compartment of the Camaro. Everywhere Silver went he seemed to leave a trail of cinders behind, his eyes were huge, black as saucers, and he knew that the time was coming when he would have to face up to everything in his past, because the past seemed to swallow him a little more each day.

  It was then he started to think about Teresa, and he was reckless even in his thoughts. He no longer tried to convince himself that nothing would have ever happened between Teresa and him if he hadn’t been drunk—now he believed it was simply meant to be. He allowed himself to imagine making love to her in rooms that were filled with sunlight; he thought about buying her diamonds, red high-heeled shoes, bouquets of orchids. There would be a bedroom with thin curtains where Teresa would sit by the window and comb her hair, wearing nothing but a white slip, a violet ribbon around her throat. He imagined tying her to their bed with strips of lace, making love to her over and over again until he was too tired to do anything but look at her, and even then he thought he wouldn’t have had enough of her. He began to care very little about the way things looked, the way they seemed—to himself or anyone else, and he had begun to believe that he had to see Teresa right away, as soon as possible. The nearness of his own death drove him nearer and nearer to desire, and so one night when Gregory was outside the front door, less than a hundred yards away, Silver called information and got Arnie Bergen’s phone number. He took a deep breath before he dialed the detective’s number, and he knew that this call was only the first step, that he had begun something he could never stop; he was going to find Teresa.

  Bergen had gotten himself a dog. It was an accident, he had never wanted a pet; when the canary had died in its cage he hadn’t mourned for a minute, he had always believed that birds were never meant to be pets in the first place. The dog was a puli, a Hungarian sheepdog; it had belonged to the third-floor tenant who had skipped out without paying the rent, leaving behind no forwarding address, no furniture, nothing but the puli. Bergen had tried to ignore the whining and the clickety clack of nails on the ceiling above him. But finally he had gone up and opened the door, and although the detective had placed an ad in the Examiner trying to contact the old owner, in less than a month Bergen had given the dog a new name—Bobby—and had bought him a collar and a leash.

  The odd thing was that having Bobby made Bergen miss Dina more than ever. When he combed the dog’s long tangled hair and pinned it out of his eyes with a clip, he did so because he knew Dina would have hated the tangles. He spent hours in the bedroom where Dina’s belongings were stored; even when he played poker he thought of her, even in his dreams he saw that beautiful girl who had run away on a summer night, that woman who wrote him nightly letters in purple ink. He wished that Teresa hadn’t stopped calling him; then they could have walked with Bobby and Atlas down to the bay on warm days, the dogs could have had matching leashes, he and Teresa could have talked about Dina’s preference for tomatoes and sunflowers rather than asters and beans. He expected that one day Teresa would call him again; he was careful to keep Dina’s set of china boxed and ready for Teresa to take with her as soon as she had the space and the time. But it was Silver who called, not Teresa, and Bergen was most surprised at how different Silver’s voice sounded, how dangerous, how soft.

  “You know why I’m calling you,” Silver whispered.

  Bergen was sure that Dina’s son wanted the money from the sale of the house in Santa Rosa. The detective had sold the house more than a year before, but he still hadn’t touched a cent; he was keeping it for Teresa, and now he had to admit that it wasn’t fair to give so much to one of Dina’s children and so little to the other.

  “I’ll give you half the money from the house,” Bergen told him.

  “The house?” Silver said. “I don’t care about the house. It’s Teresa. I want to know where she is.”

  “I thought she was living with you and Lee,” Bergen said, and he began to worry, he began to wonder if he shouldn’t have tried to contact Teresa even after she had told him she didn’t have time to see him any more.

  “Has she called you?” Silver asked. “And don’t bother to lie to me.”

  “Listen, I’ve got Dina’s dishes waiting for her, I’ve got boxes of stuff, if
I knew where she was I wouldn’t be using my bedroom for storage.”

  After that first call, Silver continued to phone the detective once a week. Silver was sure that it was only a matter of days before Teresa contacted Bergen, and each time, after he had hung up the phone, Bergen grew more certain that he wouldn’t have told Silver where Teresa was even if he knew. Bergen liked to imagine that Teresa wasn’t really missing, he liked to think she had taken their last talk to heart and had moved away from her brother; she might even still be in San Francisco, living in an apartment near the marina, spending each morning watering the asparagus ferns that grew around a redwood deck. But there were other times when Bergen had an uneasy feeling that something awful had happened; he grew afraid that Teresa might be missing for years, just as Dina had been. But because Silver was so sure that if Teresa contacted anyone it would be the detective, Bergen soon believed that, too. He bought an answering machine to hook up to his phone so that he wouldn’t miss her call if it came while he was out walking Bobby or in the shower. When she finally did call, in early March, Bergen wasn’t expecting her. The phone rang when Bergen had already put on Bobby’s leash; the detective was wearing his raincoat, the dog was scratching at the door, and Bergen was in a hurry when he reached for the phone—he was certain it was the gas company bothering him again, insisting they still hadn’t received last month’s check. When he realized that it was Teresa’s voice at the other end of the line, Bergen couldn’t answer right away; he sat down and unbuttoned his raincoat, he forgot all of Silver’s urgent phone calls, the only thing he felt was pleased.

  Teresa was standing in the phone booth outside the general store in Villa Lobo. On the way home from shopping she had stopped to call Bergen impulsively, and when she heard how delighted he sounded she wished she hadn’t waited quite so long to call.