“The Gray Man,” Laura said.
Mama nodded convulsively, her back turned. “You could call him that. I saw him once. One time only. Just before we left Pittsburgh. We were riding on the streetcar—I had some shopping to do. Karen, you were in school; but I had Laura and Timmy with me. And he got on the car.
“Timmy looked straight at him… both children seemed to recognize him. And I looked at him, too.
“I knew there was something wrong with him. He made me think of somebody who had been hurt somehow. When I was a girl we used to see veterans who had been gassed in France: he reminded me of that. He moved his head oddly; he had strange eyes under that old slouch hat. I thought he might be, you know, simpleminded.
“But then he sat down and looked straight at the kids and I saw them looking at him, and he smiled, and it was a horrible smile, and his eyes lit up in a terrible hungry way… and when I saw Tim smiling back at him I just felt faint, the way you would feel if you saw your child playing with a rattlesnake or something. I grabbed the kids and rang the bell and we got off at the next stop—ran off is more like it.”
Laura said, “We moved after that?”
“I told Willis about it… and yes, we moved pretty much directly after that.”
“Every time we moved, was it because of the Gray Man?”
“I think so. Mostly. Willis never talked about it.”
“You never asked him?”
“Hardly ever. And he wouldn’t answer.”
We never talked, Karen thought. Nobody ever talked.
Laura said, “I wonder if this Ben Williams is still alive. Maybe there’s somebody in Burleigh who would know… Mama, do you think so?”
Mama said, “You’re determined to go stirring this up?”
“I don’t think we have a choice.”
“Well … I doubt that you’ll be able to find anybody who can help. Most of that Assembly congregation must be scattered by now. The mill closed down years ago. A few of the men knew what happened that night when you three were taken from Ben and his wife. But they never seemed liable to talk about it. In a town of gossips, that is one thing people kept to themselves. And who else is there?”
Karen said, “There’s Daddy.”
Laura looked at her. Mama regarded her with obvious surprise.
“Your father,” Mama began, “would never—”
But then there was the bang and rattle of the big front door, and Michael rushed into the house.
Chapter Thirteen
Karen found her son in his room, cross-legged on the bed and breathing hard. He looked up sharply when she came through the door.
“Michael?” She closed the door for privacy. “Michael, what is it?”
“Willis,” he said.
Michael had been out in the hills south of town, he said, and Willis had picked him up and driven him back here. Willis wasn’t drunk but he was angry. Willis had accused him of practicing witchcraft or raising demons or something… Willis had tried to hit him.
Karen felt a sudden chill. “How do you mean, tried?”
My son, she thought. My father.
Michael said, “I didn’t let him.” “Michael, that’s silly … if he wanted to hit you, he would have.”
“I stopped him.”
Willis might be older now but he was still strong and he was twice Michael’s size. “How could you possibly stop Daddy?”
But Michael didn’t answer, and Karen—thinking about Michael and Daddy alone in the car—guessed she already knew.
“You wait here,” she said.
She asked downstairs, but Daddy hadn’t come in yet. So she went out through the side door into the cold, hugging her sweater around herself and breathing icy plumes.
The garage door loomed open. It was not a garage so much as it was a shed, a barnboard box leaning cockeyed against the north wall of the house. The seasons had put big gaps and rents in it. The interior was dark in the wintry light.
She moved cautiously around the pitted chromed fenders of the Fairlane, along a wall lined with rust-flecked garden tools.
“Daddy?”
No answer. But there was a flicker of light in the car: Willis’s cigarette as he turned toward her.
“Daddy,” she said, “I’m cold.”
He hooked open the right-hand car door with a weary gesture. “What do you want?”
“To talk,” she said.
The door hung open.
Trembling a little, Karen slid inside.
Willis sat crammed against the driver’s side, one arm up to cradle his head, the other resting on the wheel. The car was full of cigarette smoke. A crushed pack of Camels lay on the dash.
Karen looked at him, at his face. It took a certain amount of courage just to keep her eyes on him. She had seldom truly looked at her father; she had learned a long time ago that it was better not to. In her memory he was not a thing seen so much as a presence, a voice, a rumbling imperative. He was something fundamental, like lightning or thunder—and you can’t stare down the weather.
But he was an old man in an old car—that, too.
She said, “You tried to hit Michael.”
Willis exhaled and butted out the cigarette in the door tray. “He went running to Mommy—is that it?”
“I asked him about it.”
“You ask him anything else about it?”
“No… should I?”
“Maybe. For instance maybe you ought to ask him what he was doing up in those hills this afternoon.”
There was no way to avoid this anymore. She cleared her throat and said, “Daddy, I know what he was doing.”
Willis looked at her once, startled… then turned away. His big hands gripped the steering wheel. He said after a time, “I used to think you were different. But you’re not, are you? You’re just like the other two.”
It made her want to yell. I am, she wanted to say, I am different, you made me different! I’m what you wanted—Christ, look at me! But she forced away the thought and took a deep, deliberate breath. “I tried to bring Michael up to be normal. I really did. But he can’t be forever what he’s not.”
“Well, what is he, then? Have you given any thought to that?”
No, she hadn’t, but… “That’s why we came here. To find out what Michael is. And what we are.”
Willis just shook his head bitterly. “He threatened me. Did he tell you that? He threatened to drop me down a hole into Hell. And I…”
He seemed to stall in the recollection.
Karen said, “You believed him?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Daddy, you scared him.”
“He’s like your brother. He’s about as respectful. Less. Oh yeah… you did a great job on him, all right.”
She said, “But I never hit him.” “Well, you should have.”
No, Karen thought. I’m a grown-up woman now. I know better. “Maybe Tim was right,” she said.
Willis regarded her angrily.
Karen said, “Maybe we should have hated you. Maybe the problem is we never did. You beat us and we loved you anyway. It was like loving a rock, but we did. Laura did, even though she won’t admit it. Maybe even Tim did. At least when he was little. But you know what? If I had a neighbor who treated his kids the way you treated us, you know what I’d do? I’d call the police.”
She was saying this and thinking it at the same time; it surprised her as much as it seemed to surprise Willis. He said, “You came here to tell me that?”
“I came here to save Michael’s life!”
He frowned.
Karen said, “Daddy, the Gray Man almost took him. And there was a little girl killed.”
Willis winced. “Christ Jesus.” He shook his head. “You never told me …”
Karen said, “Who was Ben Williams? Who were our parents? Daddy, do you know?”
But he didn’t speak. He stared at her and then he reached over and took a second pack of Camels from the glove compartment. H
e crumpled the cellophane and dropped it into the shadows at his feet, drew out a cigarette from the package, struck a match, and inhaled deeply. He held the smoke a moment and then said, with a meekness she did not recognize at all, “Your mother told you about this?”
Karen nodded.
“Well, shit,” Willis said.
“But not the important parts. Daddy, we need to know.”
He was silent for another long while. He smoked his cigarette down to the filter. Karen was about to give up and go back to the house when Willis suddenly opened his door. The overhead light flashed on in the car and the glare was sudden and harsh. He stepped out onto the concrete.
He stood hitching up his denims in the light of the garage. “You come with me,” he said.
He took her up to the bedroom he shared with Mama.
It was a private place; Karen had not been in here even to help change the sheets. But she recognized the old oak dresser, the yellowing muslin curtains, the sailing-ship picture on the wall. They had owned these things forever. Daddy bent over the bottom drawer of the dresser, rummaged a moment, and then came up with a brown, ancient photograph, one that had not been included in Mama’s shoe box.
Karen took it from him with a dawning sense of wonder. It was a church picnic photo. Men in shirt sleeves and hats, women in billowing sundresses, all lined up stiffly for the camera.
“That’s him,” Willis said. “Second man in the back row. That’s Ben Williams.”
Karen inspected this faint, small image of her natural father.
Ben Williams was a tall man with wide, bewildered eyes. His skin was pale and his hair was long and tousled. He held a leather Bible absently in one hand.
“The woman next to him,” Willis said tonelessly, “is his wife. That blond one, there—you can’t see her too well. The babies were off in the grass.”
The babies, Karen thought. Me and Laura and Tim. We were there on this day—before everything changed.
Karen regarded the sad eyes of the man in the photograph. “Did he die?” “Yes. He died.” She thought about it. “Tell me,” she said.
Willis said, “Are you certain you want that?” She was not certain at all. But she nodded her head yes.
“All right, then,” Willis said.
Well, Willis said, we always knew they were strange.
They had a look about them. We took them for DPs because of their accent and all. Reverend Dahlquist told them there was a Greek Orthodox church downtown in Burleigh—he thought that must be more along their line. But they said no, the Assembly was what they wanted. They were friendly and they joined the church and they tried to fit in, and after a while nobody thought much about it.
Not until that night.
(Karen, open the window. Your mother hates it when I smoke in here. But right now I need to.)
You understand, I wasn’t there for the beginning of it. I heard some of this from Reverend Dahlquist. What happened is that Mrs. Williams came by the parsonage one night with her three children in tow— this was well after dark. She knocked for five minutes until the Reverend came down in his nightshirt and opened the door for her. Here, Reverend, she says, please keep these children safe, just for a little while, just for the night—please? Reverend Dahlquist said how come, but Mrs. Williams wouldn’t say. Reverend Dahlquist wasn’t pleased. But he told me later he took the children because he feared for them; Mrs. Williams was obviously scared half to death. He guessed Ben had maybe gone on some kind of rampage or was drunk or something. Not what you would have expected from Ben, but it was not too uncommon in that place. The Reverend fed the kids a late dinner and bedded them down. Might have gone to bed himself but he kept thinking of Mrs. Williams’s face, how scared she had looked, and finally he started to worry that something might happen to her, maybe if Ben was that badly off he would hurt her in some way. So he telephoned a few of the church men and suggested we should drive out by the Williams place to have a look.
It was late to be driving but Charlie Dagostino and Curt Bloedell came by in Charlie’s big Packard and picked me up. The three of us rode out there in the dark. Curt Bloedell had a little.22 caliber squirrel rifle with him, but I don’t think he ever expected to use it. In fact, he didn’t, not seriously—though maybe he should have.
We got to the Williams house at something past midnight. The house was dark.
Charlie argued that we should head back home.
Obviously nothing was wrong. I agreed with him, but Curt Bloedell wanted to knock and find out for certain —Curt always did love poking his nose in other people’s business. We argued and finally Charlie said okay, we’ll knock for Christ’s sake, I want to go home and get in bed. And so we three went up the slatboard front walk together.
It was not a big house and in fact it was mostly a shack, one of those shanties you might see out along the county road. Tar-paper roof and it had a coal stove for heat in the winter. But Ben had fixed it up as nice as he could, and his wife had filled some old truck tires with creek dirt and planted them with morning glories and lily of the valley, which had bloomed. We weren’t scared, except maybe of what Ben might say when we woke him up. None of us took this too seriously—Curt left his.22 lying in the car.
But before we could knock, the door opened.
A man stepped out.
He wore a gray trench coat and a gray hat. He looked foreign. He had a funny smile, standing in the doorway of that darkened house.
Maybe you know who I mean.
And I suppose then we ought to have been scared or at least suspected something had happened. But the strange thing is we did not. He looked at each of us in turn, at me and Curt Bloedell and Charlie Dagostino —in that order—and he just smiled and said “Good night!” in a childish kind of way, and then he walked down to the road and was gone in the shadows while we watched. We didn’t ask who he was or what he was doing there. I swear I don’t know why. My guess would be that he put some kind of spell on us. I could not say this to Curt or Charlie and they never hinted at any such thing to me. But as soon as this man was out of sight we all shook our heads and began to have the feeling that something was terribly wrong. And we were scared then for the first time. Curt Bloedell kept muttering “Jesus, oh, Jesus,” and Charlie wanted to climb back in the Packard and run for home. But I said we had come to check on the Williamses and we should do that, and we were all thinking how strange it was that we could stand there talking out loud on the doorstep of the house and no one heard us, what was wrong? So I stepped inside and felt for a light switch because I knew the electric lines had been installed out here recently and so there would be light, at least. And I found the switch and I turned it on. Well, they were dead.
They were worse than dead, really, because parts of them were scattered around the shack and parts of them were just missing. There was some cheap luggage on the floor and some clothes, as if they might have been packing to leave when all this happened. And some of the baby toys were lying around. And so much blood.
I can’t describe it better than that. But it was terrible.
Remembering it is terrible.
I went outside and puked into one of the planters. Curt Bloedell ran to the Packard and got his.22 and started firing it into the air. I think he might have hurt himself if Charlie and I had not stopped him. He was sobbing like a child.
And I kept thinking, Those poor children!
We would have phoned for the police from that shack if there had been a phone, but Ben had never installed one. So we rode back to the parsonage (and it is a wonder no one was killed on that ride) and we told Reverend Dahlquist what had happened and he phoned the police for us.
We decided, in the time before the police came to talk to us, that we would not mention the children.
State custody would mean an orphanage or Christ knows what, and we thought it was better to deal with it inside the church—keep maybe a little closer eye on the kids that way. Plus Reverend Dahlquist and Charlie Dagostino’s wi
fe had heard about Jeanne’s situation at home.
I suppose she told you about that, too? I see.
The police talked to us and they were suspicious at first, but of course there was no way me and Curt and Charlie could have done anything like that even with the.22, and there was no blood on us or anything. We told them about the man we had seen and how the house had looked. Reverend Dahlquist told how he had sent us out there because he was worried about Ben getting drunk and beating his wife. And the police, I think because they couldn’t figure out how or why any of this had happened, didn’t seem to want to follow it up. As far as they were concerned it was two vagabonds that had died in suspicious circumstances— no more to be said. And none of the three of us talked about it after that.
But even now—even now I have dreams about it sometimes.
Karen didn’t know what to say. It was too shocking, too horrible.
Willis said, “I don’t understand it. I don’t pretend to understand it. But I know what I felt the first time I saw Timmy doing that little trick of his. He was out in the backyard on Constantinople one summer night with fireflies all around him. You girls were inside and Jeanne was running a bath and I was out there watching the baby. He was chasing the fireflies. He would run across that lawn laughing and grabbing out. And then all of a sudden he reached out his little hand and drew a circle in the air. And the circle was full of that firefly light. And there were shapes in that light. Faces and bodies—things with wings. And it might have been anything but I thought—I was certain—it was Hell itself Timmy had opened up. And I could only think of that man in the gray hat and his eyes looking at me and Charlie and Curt Bloedell, and then of the blood and the parts of human beings in that shack.
“I took him—Timmy—and I beat him nearly senseless.”
Karen said nothing.
“It gave me no pleasure,” Willis said flatly. “I wanted him to be afraid of it. If that meant being afraid of me, then so be it. Whatever he had done, I knew where it led. It led back to that shack—those bodies.”
“But it didn’t work,” Karen said softly.