You have broken the law, she told him.
I got a government grant, the paperhanger said contemptuously.
Why are we here? We are supposed to be searching for my child.
If you’re looking for a body the first place to look is the graveyard, he said. If you want a book don’t you go to the library?
I am paying you, she said. You are in my employ. I do not want to be here. I want you to do as I say or carry me to my car if you will not.
Actually, the paperhanger said, I had a story to tell you. About my wife.
He paused, as if leaving a space for her comment, but when she made none he went on. I had a wife. My childhood sweetheart. She became a nurse, went to work in one of these drug rehab places. After she was there awhile she got a faraway look in her eyes. Look at me without seeing me. She got in tight with her supervisor. They started having meetings to go to. Conferences. Sometimes just the two of them would confer, generally in a motel. The night I watched them walk into the Holiday Inn in Franklin I decided to kill her. No impetuous spur-of-the-moment thing. I thought it all out and it would be the perfect crime.
The doctor’s wife didn’t say anything. She just watched him.
A grave is the best place to dispose of a body, the paperhanger said. The grave is its normal destination anyway. I could dig up a grave and then just keep on digging. Save everything carefully. Put my body there and fill in part of the earth, and then restore everything the way it was. The coffin, if any of it was left. The bones and such. A good settling rain and the fall leaves and you’re home free. Now that’s eternity for you.
Did you kill someone, she breathed. Her voice was barely audible.
Did I or did I not, he said. You decide. You have the powers of a god. You can make me a murderer or just a heartbroke guy whose wife quit him. What do you think? Anyway, I don’t have a wife. I expect she just walked off into the abstract like that Lang guy I told you about.
I want to go, she said. I want to go where my car is.
He was sitting on a gravestone watching her out of his pale eyes. He might not have heard.
I will walk.
Just whatever suits you, the paperhanger said. Abruptly, he was standing in front of her. She had not seen him arise from the headstone or stride across the graves, but like a jerky splice in a film he was before her, a hand cupping each of her breasts, staring down into her face.
Under the merciless weight of the sun her face was stunned and vacuous. He studied it intently, missing no detail. Fine wrinkles crept from the corners of her eyes and mouth like hairline cracks in porcelain. Grime was impacted in her pores, in the crepe flesh of her throat. How surely everything had fallen from her: beauty, wealth, social position, arrogance. Humanity itself, for by now she seemed scarcely human, beleaguered so by the fates that she suffered his hands on her breasts as just one more cross to bear, one more indignity to endure.
How far you’ve come, the paperhanger said in wonder. I believe you’re about down to my level now, don’t you?
It does not matter, the doctor’s wife said. There is no longer one thing that matters.
Slowly and with enormous lassitude her body slumped toward him, and in his exultance it seemed not a motion in itself but simply the completion of one begun long ago with the fateful weight of a thigh, a motion that began in one world and completed itself in another one.
From what seemed a great distance he watched her fall toward him like an angel descending, wings spread, from an infinite height, striking the earth gently, tilting, then righting itself.
THE WEIGHT OF MOONLIGHT tracking across the paperhanger’s face awoke him from where he took his rest. Filigrees of light through the gauzy curtains swept across him in stately silence like the translucent ghosts of insects. He stirred, lay still then for a moment getting his bearings, a fix on where he was.
He was in his bed, lying on his back. He could see a huge orange moon poised beyond the bedroom window, ink-sketch tree branches that raked its face like claws. He could see his feet book-ending the San Miguel bottle that his hands clasped erect on his abdomen, the amber bottle hard-edged and defined against the pale window, dark atavistic monolith reared against a harvest moon.
He could smell her. A musk compounded of stale sweat and alcohol, the rank smell of her sex. Dissolution, ruin, loss. He turned to study her where she lay asleep, her open mouth a dark cavity in her face. She was naked, legs outflung, pale breasts pooled like cooling wax. She stirred restively, groaned in her sleep. He could hear the rasp of her breathing. Her breath was fetid on his face, corrupt, a graveyard smell. He watched her in disgust, in a dull self-loathing.
He drank from the bottle, lowered it. Sometimes, he told her sleeping face, you do things you can’t undo. You break things you just can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it. And you were right, there are things only a miracle can set to rights.
He sat clasping the bottle. He touched his miscut hair, the soft down of his beard. He had forgotten what he looked like, he hadn’t seen his reflection in a mirror for so long. Unbidden, Zeineb’s face swam into his memory. He remembered the look on the child’s face when the doctor’s wife had spun on her heel: spite had crossed it like a flicker of heat lightning. She stuck her tongue out at him. His hand snaked out like a serpent and closed on her throat and snapped her neck before he could call it back, sloe eyes wild and wide, pink tongue caught between tiny seed-pearl teeth like a bitten-off rosebud. Her hair swung sidewise, her head lolled onto his clasped hand. The tray of the toolbox was out before he knew it, he was stuffing her into the toolbox like a rag doll. So small, so small, hardly there at all.
He arose. Silhouetted naked against the moon-drenched window, he drained the bottle. He looked about for a place to set it, leaned and wedged it between the heavy flesh of her upper thighs. He stood in silence, watching her. He seemed philosophical, possessed of some hard-won wisdom. The paperhanger knew so well that while few are deserving of a miracle, fewer still can make one come to pass.
He went out of the room. Doors opened, doors closed. Footsteps softly climbing a staircase, descending. She dreamed on. When he came back into the room he was cradling a plastic-wrapped bundle stiffly in his arms. He placed it gently beside the drunk woman. He folded the plastic sheeting back like a caul.
What had been a child. What the graveyard earth had spared the freezer had preserved. Ice crystals snared in the hair like windy snowflakes whirled there, in the lashes. A doll from a madhouse assembly line.
He took her arm, laid it across the child. She pulled away from the cold. He firmly brought the arm back, arranging them like mannequins, madonna and child. He studied this tableau, then went out of his house for the last time. The door closed gently behind him on its keeper spring.
The paperhanger left in the Mercedes, heading west into the open country, tracking into wide-open territories he could infect like a malignant spore. Without knowing it, he followed the selfsame route the doctor had taken some eight months earlier, and in a world of infinite possibilities where all journeys share a common end, perhaps they are together, taking the evening air on a ruined veranda among the hollyhocks and oleanders, the doctor sipping his scotch and the paperhanger his San Miguel, gentlemen of leisure discussing the vagaries of life and pondering deep into the night not just the possibility but the inevitability of miracles.
The Man Who Knew Dylan
HE WOKE IN a yellow room. Yellow walls, a print of van Gogh’s saffron sunflowers, pale winter light through the window. For a moment he didn’t know where he was, but Crosswaithe had woken in far stranger places than this one, and soon everything clicked into focus: the hissing and sighing that was keeping the woman in the bed across the room alive or what passed for it, the sallow husk of the woman herself, a foam cup half full of cold coffee on the table beside his chair.
He drank the coffee and sat watching the still form beneath the folded coverlet. He set the cup aside and wiped a hand a
cross the sandpaper stubble on his face and stood up. He approached the bed and stood looking down at the woman. What had been a woman. The skin was pulled tightly over the delicate framework of bones. The eyes were closed and the lids were bluely translucent like those of hatchling birds. He tried to feel pain, pity. If he felt anything at all it was a sort of detached interest in the way she seemed to be receding from sight. Everything was sliding from her, and nothing was coming back. Nothing mattered. No one expected her to do anything at all and whatever was going to happen was going to happen no matter what she did or if she did nothing whatever. The machine breathed on, breathed on.
He went out of the room and softly closed the door behind him. He went down a waxed tile hallway past the nurses’ station and out into the early December day. He lit a cigarette and walked two blocks down Main Street then turned right and went four down Maple to a long low building with a huge Plexiglas sign that said PETTIGREW MAGNAVOX. He unlocked the door and went in clicking on lights and walked on past long lines of sofas and easy chairs and silent flickering television sets.
In the office he put on a pot of coffee and stood before it with a cup in his hand waiting for the trickle to start and when it did he moved the pot aside and placed his cup beneath the stream. When it filled he replaced the pot and went with the cup to a desk and sat drinking the coffee and idly reading yesterday’s newspaper. After a while he looked at his watch and went into the bathroom and took from beneath the lavatory a shaving kit. He lathered his face and shaved, the face looking back at him hollow-eyed and angular and somehow sinister, like a nighttime predator’s face peering at him through a backlit window.
At five minutes before eight Crosswaithe’s erstwhile brotherin-law arrived. J. C. Pettigrew was a heavyset jowly man wearing a tan tweed topcoat and a golfing cap. He hung up coat and cap then took a folded document from the topcoat pocket. He unfolded it and slapped it hard onto the desk before Crosswaithe.
You’ve got a little run this morning, he said. He waited for Crosswaithe to look at the paper.
Crosswaithe went on drinking coffee and he didn’t look. What is it? he finally asked.
The bank sent this note back. You’ve got to go to the Harrikin and pick up that projection TV you sold that old son of a bitch with the hole in his throat. I told you that son of a bitch was no good.
He seemed all right.
You felt sorry for him because he had that hole in his throat and that damned microphone he held to it when he talked. Buzz, buzz, buzz. You sold a two-thousand-dollar television set to a man just because he had a hole in his throat.
You told me to use my own judgment.
I also told you he was a bootlegger and a dopegrower and he was no good. You assured me you’d work the note. It’s four months behind and not worked and the bank’s kicked it back. I don’t know whether it was the old man or that daughter of his that kept sidling around and showing you her black drawers. But whichever it was I want my TV.
Crosswaithe drained his cup and stood up. I’ll get your TV, he said. He folded the note and shoved it into his hip pocket.
You look like hell, Pettigrew said. What’d you do, stay out all night? Was you by the hospital? How’s Claire?
Crosswaithe shrugged. How she always is, he said. He was putting on his coat. Pettigrew was watching him. Pettigrew had tiny piglike eyes that were not liking what they were seeing. I don’t doubt you give her some disease that you picked up somewhere, he said. You only married her for what little money Daddy had. It’s a crying shame she didn’t divorce you before you run through it.
One of these days the time is going to come when I have to stomp your ass, Crosswaithe said. It’s just inevitable. I won’t be able to help myself. It may not be today and it may not be tomorrow but it’s going to come. You’re going to get sideways with me some morning before I’ve had all my coffee and I’m going to kick hell out of you. What do you think about that?
Pettigrew had taken a step or two back. You’re only here because of Claire, he said. Now get on the move. Get there and get back, the weatherman’s talking about snow.
CROSSWAITHE DROVE the company pickup truck into the far southern part of the county. A waste of a country ravaged and scarred by open-pit mines and virtually abandoned, leftover remnants of landscape, the tailings of a world no one would have. At a beer joint called Big Mama’s he stopped and asked directions and set out again. He drove on and on over rutted switchback roads. Jesus Christ, he said. He was driving into a world where the owls roosted with the chickens, where folks kept whippoorwills for pets and didn’t get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning.
The house when he found it was set at the mouth of a hollow. A tin-roofed log house canted on its stone foundation and leant as if under the pressure of enormous perpetual winds. Blown-out autos set about the yard as if positioned with an eye for their aesthetic value. A black cat elongated like running ink down the side of a crumpled Buick and vanished silently in the woods.
He knocked on the door. After a while he knocked again. A curtain was pulled aside and the girl’s face appeared. She stood regarding him through the glass. He had been thinking about her on the drive out here, remembering not individual features but the sum expression, a sort of sullen eroticism.
The door opened. Hey, she said. I remember you. Come on in.
Hey, Crosswaithe said. He had the note in his hand. I came about the television set.
What about it?
Crosswaithe was by now standing in the front room looking about. A clean simple room, cheap vinyl trailer-park furniture. The television set looked like something that been teleported there from more opulent surroundings.
Well, he said, you didn’t pay for it. I had to come pick it up. He was studying it with an eye toward handling it and loading it into the bed of the truck. It had a distinctly heavy look.
How much do I owe?
He looked at the note. A little over a thousand dollars, he said. Is your father not at home?
There’s nobody here but me, the girl said. She had long dark hair and eyes that in the room’s poor light seemed to vary from gray to a deep sea-green. Every move the girl made had undercurrents: the hip-slung way she stood too close to him, even the way she said, There’s nobody here but me. Long attuned to nuance and shadings he could turn to his own advantage, Crosswaithe picked all this up immediately but there were subtle connotations here he wasn’t prepared to deal with just yet.
Where’s he at?
Not here, she said. Come on in and let’s sit down and talk about it. I’ve got some money.
Crosswaithe at the mention of money crossed and sat with his elbows on his knees on the edge of the sofa. He was thinking that maybe he wouldn’t have to wrestle with a projection TV after all. Even with the two-wheeler it would be difficult for one man to handle it without dropping it.
She went through a curtained doorway into another room. He could hear her rummaging around, opening and closing drawers. Perhaps she was looking for money. The room was cold; he shivered involuntarily and sat hugging his knees. He wondered what they used for heat around here, they didn’t seem to be using anything today.
When the curtain parted she came back into the room carrying a whiskey bottle by the neck and in her other hand a brown envelope. She sat on the sofa beside him and laid the whiskey bottle in his lap. Get you a drink, she said. I’ve got to see how much money I’ve got here.
Crosswaithe sat clasping the bottle loosely. I’ve about quit doing this, he said.
Daddy made it, it’s supposed to be good.
Crosswaithe shook the bottle and watched the glassine bead rise in it. The girl had withdrawn from the envelope a thin sheaf of checks. They looked to Crosswaithe like government checks. He unscrewed the cap of the bottle. It’s cold in here, he said. Maybe I will have just a sip.
He drank and swallowed. He swallowed rapidly a time or two to keep it down. Hot bile rose in his throat. Great God, he said. What’s in this stuff?
br /> I don’t know. Whatever you make whiskey out of. Daddy made it, it’s supposed to be good.
Crosswaithe’s eyes were watering, he could feel it in his sinus passages. I can taste old car radiators and maybe an animal or two that fell in the mash but there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on.
She was laughing. She hid her mouth with a hand when she laughed and he wondered if her teeth were crooked. She stopped laughing and wiped her eyes. A curving strand of black hair lay across her forehead like a comma.
You’re a good-looking thing, she said. I noticed it right off the day we bought the TV. Did you sell it to us because of the way I was flirting with you?
My brother-in-law said I sold it because your father had a hole in his throat.
What do you say?
It could have been a little of both. What’s with all these checks?
She fanned them out like a poker hand. There were six of them. They’re social security checks, she said. Daddy drawed them one a month after he got that cancer. I just saved these up. You’ll have to give me a ride into town to cash them, though. None of these cars around here works and I never was much of a mechanic.
Crosswaithe was taking cautious little sips of the whiskey against the cold. His feet felt numb and he kept stamping them to keep the circulation going. The whiskey was giving him a vague ringing of the ears. Why is it so cold in here? he asked. They’ve got this stuff out now they call fire, and it’s the very thing. Have you not heard of it?
Me and my boyfriend broke up, she said.
Crosswaithe searched for some connection however tenuous but he couldn’t find one.
I’m out of wood, she said. He used to bring me a load of wood now and then but he quit when we broke up. I’m going to Florida on part of this money anyway. Somewhere it’s warm.