Vintage Ford

  8

  In the days that followed there was to be a great deal of controversy. The police conducted a thorough and publicized search for the person or persons who had assaulted little Léo. There were no signs to conclude he had been molested, only that he’d been lured into the bushes by someone and roughed up there and frightened badly. A small story appeared in the back pages of France-Dimanche and said the same things, yet Austin noticed from the beginning that all the police used the word “moleste” when referring to the event, as though it were accurate.

  The group of hippies he’d seen from Joséphine’s window was generally thought to contain the offender. It was said that they lived in the park and slept in the clumps and groves of yews and ornamental boxwoods, and that some were Americans who had been in France for twenty years. But none of them, when the police brought them in to be identified, seemed to be the man who had scared Léo.

  For a few hours following the incident there was suspicion among the police that Austin himself had molested Léo and had approached the guardian only as a diversion after he’d finished with the little boy—trusting that the child would never accuse him. Austin had patiently and intelligently explained that he had not molested Léo and would never do such a thing, but understood that he had to be considered until he could be exonerated—which was not before midnight, when Joséphine entered the police station and stated that Léo had told her Austin was not the man who had scared him and taken his clothes off, that it had been someone else, a man who spoke French, a man in blue and possibly gray clothing with long hair and a beard.

  When she had told this story and Austin had been allowed to leave the stale, windowless police room where he’d been made to remain until matters could be determined with certainty, he’d walked beside Joséphine out into the narrow street, lit yellow through the tall wire-mesh windows of the gendarmerie. The street was guarded by a number of young policemen wearing flak jackets and carrying short machine pistols on shoulder slings. They calmly watched Austin and Joséphine as they stopped at the curb to say good-bye.

  “I’m completely to blame for this,” Austin said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. There aren’t any words good enough, I guess.”

  “You are to blame,” Joséphine said and looked at him in the face, intently. After a moment she said, “It is not a game. You know? Maybe to you it is a game.”

  “No, it’s really not,” Austin said abjectly, standing in the cool night air in sight of all the policemen. “I guess I had a lot of plans.”

  “Plans to what?” Joséphine said. She had on the black crepe skirt she’d worn the day he’d met her, barely more than a week ago. She looked appealing again. “Not for me! You don’t have any plans for me. I don’t want you. I don’t want any man anymore.” She shook her head and crossed her arms tightly and looked away, her dark eyes shining in the night. She was very, very angry. Possibly, he thought, she was even angry at herself. “You are a fool,” she said, and she spat accidentally when she said it. “I hate you. You don’t know anything. You don’t know who you are.” She looked at him bitterly. “Who are you?” she said. “Who do you think you are? You’re nothing.”

  “I understand,” Austin said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about all of this. I’ll make sure you don’t have to see me again.”

  Joséphine smiled at him, a cruel, confident smile. “I don’t care,” she said and raised her shoulder in the way Austin didn’t like, the way Frenchwomen did when they wanted to certify as true something that might not be. “I don’t care what happens to you. You are dead. I don’t see you.”

  She turned and began walking away down the sidewalk along the side of the gendarmerie and in front of the young policemen, who looked at her indifferently. They looked back at Austin, standing in the light by himself, where he felt he should stay until she had gone out of sight. One of the policemen said something to his colleague beside him, and that man whistled a single long note into the night. Then they turned and faced the other way.

  Austin had a fear in the days to come, almost a defeating fear that deprived him of sleep in his small, risqué apartment above the rue Bonaparte. It was a fear that Barbara would die soon, followed then by a feeling that she had died, which was succeeded by a despair of something important in his life having been lost, exterminated by his own doing but also by fate. What was that something? he wondered, awake in the middle of the night. It wasn’t Barbara herself. Barbara was alive and on the earth, and able to be reunited with if he wanted to try and if she did. And it wasn’t his innocence. That had been dispensed with long before. But he had lost something, and whatever it was, Barbara seemed associated. And he felt if he could specify it, possibly he could begin to pull things together, see more clearly, even speak to her again, and, in a sense, repatriate himself.

  Not to know what that something was, though, meant that he was out of control, perhaps meant something worse about him. So that he began to think of his life, in those succeeding days, almost entirely in terms of what was wrong with him, of his problem, his failure—in particular his failure as a husband, but also in terms of his unhappiness, his predicament, his ruin, which he wanted to repair. He recognized again and even more plainly that his entire destination, everything he’d ever done or presumed or thought, had been directed toward Barbara, that everything good was there. And it was there he would need eventually to go.

  Behind Joséphine, of course, was nothing—no fabric or mystery, no secrets, nothing he had curiosity for now. She had seemed to be a compelling woman; not a great object of sexuality, not a source of wit—but a force he’d been briefly moved by in expectation that he could move her nearer to him. He remembered kissing her in the car, her soft face and the great swelling moment of wondrous feeling, the great thrill. And her voice saying, “Non, non, non, non, non,” softly. That was what Bernard could never get over losing, the force that had driven him to hate her, even humiliate her.

  For his part he admired her, and mostly for the way she’d dealt with him. Proportionately. Intelligently. She had felt a greater sense of responsibility than he had; a greater apprehension of life’s importance, its weight and permanence. To him, it had all seemed less important, less permanent, and he could never even aspire to her sense of life—a European sense. As Barbara had said, he took himself for granted; though unlike what Joséphine had said, he knew himself quite well. In the end, Joséphine took herself for granted, too. They were, of course, very different and could never have been very happy together.

  Though he wondered again in his dreamy moments after the fear of Barbara’s dying had risen off and before he drifted to sleep, wondered what was ever possible between human beings. How could you regulate life, do little harm and still be attached to others? And in that context, he wondered if being fixed could be a misunderstanding, and, as Barbara had said when he’d seen her the last time and she had been so angry at him, if he had changed slightly, somehow altered the important linkages that guaranteed his happiness and become detached, unreachable. Could you become that? Was it something you controlled, or a matter of your character, or a change to which you were only a victim? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure about that at all. It was a subject he knew he would have to sleep on many, many nights.

  ROCK SPRINGS

  Edna and I had started down from Kalispell, heading for Tampa-St. Pete where I still had some friends from the old glory days who wouldn’t turn me in to the police. I had managed to scrape with the law in Kalispell over several bad checks—which is a prison crime in Montana. And I knew Edna was already looking at her cards and thinking about a move, since it wasn’t the first time I’d been in law scrapes in my life. She herself had already had her own troubles, losing her kids and keeping her ex-husband, Danny, from breaking in her house and stealing her things while she was at work, which was really why I had moved in in the first place, that and needing to give my little daughter, Cheryl, a better shake in things.

  I don’t know what was be
tween Edna and me, just beached by the same tides when you got down to it. Though love has been built on frailer ground than that, as I well know. And when I came in the house that afternoon, I just asked her if she wanted to go to Florida with me, leave things where they sat, and she said, “Why not? My datebook’s not that full.”

  Edna and I had been a pair eight months, more or less man and wife, some of which time I had been out of work, and some when I’d worked at the dog track as a lead-out and could help with the rent and talk sense to Danny when he came around. Danny was afraid of me because Edna had told him I’d been in prison in Florida for killing a man, though that wasn’t true. I had once been in jail in Tallahassee for stealing tires and had gotten into a fight on the county farm where a man had lost his eye. But I hadn’t done the hurting, and Edna just wanted the story worse than it was so Danny wouldn’t act crazy and make her have to take her kids back, since she had made a good adjustment to not having them, and I already had Cheryl with me. I’m not a violent person and would never put a man’s eye out, much less kill someone. My former wife, Helen, would come all the way from Waikiki Beach to testify to that. We never had violence, and I believe in crossing the street to stay out of trouble’s way. Though Danny didn’t know that.

  But we were half down through Wyoming, going toward I-80 and feeling good about things, when the oil light flashed on in the car I’d stolen, a sign I knew to be a bad one.

  I’d gotten us a good car, a cranberry Mercedes I’d stolen out of an ophthalmologist’s lot in Whitefish, Montana. I stole it because I thought it would be comfortable over a long haul, because I thought it got good mileage, which it didn’t, and because I’d never had a good car in my life, just old Chevy junkers and used trucks back from when I was a kid swamping citrus with Cubans.

  The car made us all high that day. I ran the windows up and down, and Edna told us some jokes and made faces. She could be lively. Her features would light up like a beacon and you could see her beauty, which wasn’t ordinary. It all made me giddy, and I drove clear down to Bozeman, then straight on through the park to Jackson Hole. I rented us the bridal suite in the Quality Court in Jackson and left Cheryl and her little dog, Duke, sleeping while Edna and I drove to a rib barn and drank beer and laughed till after midnight.

  It felt like a whole new beginning for us, bad memories left behind and a new horizon to build on. I got so worked up, I had a tattoo done on my arm that said FAMOUS TIMES, and Edna bought a Bailey hat with an Indian feather band and a little turquoise-and-silver bracelet for Cheryl, and we made love on the seat of the car in the Quality Court parking lot just as the sun was burning up on the Snake River, and everything seemed then like the end of the rainbow.

  It was that very enthusiasm, in fact, that made me keep the car one day longer instead of driving it into the river and stealing another one, like I should’ve done and had done before.

  Where the car went bad there wasn’t a town in sight or even a house, just some low mountains maybe fifty miles away or maybe a hundred, a barbed-wire fence in both directions, hardpan prairie, and some hawks riding the evening air seizing insects.

  I got out to look at the motor, and Edna got out with Cheryl and the dog to let them have a pee by the car. I checked the water and checked the oil stick, and both of them said perfect.

  “What’s that light mean, Earl?” Edna said. She had come and stood by the car with her hat on. She was just sizing things up for herself.

  “We shouldn’t run it,” I said. “Something’s not right in the oil.”

  She looked around at Cheryl and Little Duke, who were peeing on the hardtop side-by-side like two little dolls, then out at the mountains, which were becoming black and lost in the distance. “What’re we doing?” she said. She wasn’t worried yet, but she wanted to know what I was thinking about.

  “Let me try it again.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, and we all got back in the car.

  When I turned the motor over, it started right away and the red light stayed off and there weren’t any noises to make you think something was wrong. I let it idle a minute, then pushed the accelerator down and watched the red bulb. But there wasn’t any light on, and I started wondering if maybe I hadn’t dreamed I saw it, or that it had been the sun catching an angle off the window chrome, or maybe I was scared of something and didn’t know it.

  “What’s the matter with it, Daddy?” Cheryl said from the backseat. I looked back at her, and she had on her turquoise bracelet and Edna’s hat set back on the back of her head and that little black-and-white Heinz dog on her lap. She looked like a little cow-girl in the movies.

  “Nothing, honey, everything’s fine now,” I said.

  “Little Duke tinkled where I tinkled,” Cheryl said, and laughed.

  “You’re two of a kind,” Edna said, not looking back. Edna was usually good with Cheryl, but I knew she was tired now. We hadn’t had much sleep, and she had a tendency to get cranky when she didn’t sleep. “We oughta ditch this damn car first chance we get,” she said.

  “What’s the first chance we got?” I asked, because I knew she’d been at the map.

  “Rock Springs, Wyoming,” Edna said with conviction. “Thirty miles down this road.” She pointed out ahead.

  I had wanted all along to drive the car into Florida like a big success story. But I knew Edna was right about it, that we shouldn’t take crazy chances. I had kept thinking of it as my car and not the ophthalmologist’s, and that was how you got caught in these things.

  “Then my belief is that we ought to go to Rock Springs and negotiate ourselves a new car,” I said. I wanted to stay upbeat, like everything was panning out right.

  “That’s a great idea,” Edna said, and she leaned over and kissed me hard on the mouth.

  “That’s a great idea,” Cheryl said. “Let’s pull on out of here right now.”

  The sunset that day I remember as being the prettiest I’d ever seen. Just as it touched the rim of the horizon, it all at once fired the air into jewels and red sequins the precise likes of which I had never seen before and haven’t seen since. The West has it all over everywhere for sunsets, even Florida, where it’s supposedly flat but where half the time trees block your view.

  “It’s cocktail hour,” Edna said after we’d driven awhile. “We ought to have a drink and celebrate something.” She felt better thinking we were going to get rid of the car. It certainly had dark troubles and was something you’d want to put behind you.

  Edna had out a whiskey bottle and some plastic cups and was measuring levels on the glove-box lid. She liked drinking, and she liked drinking in the car, which was something you got used to in Montana, where it wasn’t against the law, but where, strangely enough, a bad check would land you in Deer Lodge Prison for a year.

  “Did I ever tell you I once had a monkey?” Edna said, setting my drink on the dashboard where I could reach it when I was ready. Her spirits were already picked up. She was like that, up one minute and down the next.

  “I don’t think you ever did tell me that,” I said. “Where were you then?”

  “Missoula,” she said. She put her bare feet on the dash and rested the cup on her breasts. “I was waitressing at the AmVets. This was before I met you. Some guy came in one day with a monkey. A spider monkey. And I said, just to be joking, ‘I’ll roll you for that monkey.’ And the guy said, ‘Just one roll?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ He put the monkey down on the bar, picked up the cup, and rolled out boxcars. I picked it up and rolled out three fives. And I just stood there looking at the guy. He was just some guy passing through, I guess a vet. He got a strange look on his face— I’m sure not as strange as the one I had—but he looked kind of sad and surprised and satisfied all at once. I said, ‘We can roll again.’ But he said, ‘No, I never roll twice for anything.’ And he sat and drank a beer and talked about one thing and another for a while, about nuclear war and building a stronghold somewhere up in the Bitterroot, whatever it was, whil
e I just watched the monkey, wondering what I was going to do with it when the guy left. And pretty soon he got up and said, ‘Well, good-bye, Chipper’—that was the monkey’s name, of course. And then he left before I could say anything. And the monkey just sat on the bar all that night. I don’t know what made me think of that, Earl. Just something weird. I’m letting my mind wander.”

  “That’s perfectly fine,” I said. I took a drink of my drink. “I’d never own a monkey,” I said after a minute. “They’re too nasty. I’m sure Cheryl would like a monkey, though, wouldn’t you, honey?” Cheryl was down on the seat playing with Little Duke. She used to talk about monkeys all the time then. “What’d you ever do with that monkey?” I said, watching the speedometer. We were having to go slower now because the red light kept fluttering on. And all I could do to keep it off was go slower. We were going maybe thirty-five and it was an hour before dark, and I was hoping Rock Springs wasn’t far away.

  “You really want to know?” Edna said. She gave me a quick glance, then looked back at the empty desert as if she was brooding over it.

  “Sure,” I said. I was still upbeat. I figured I could worry about breaking down and let other people be happy for a change.

  “I kept it a week.” And she seemed gloomy all of a sudden, as if she saw some aspect of the story she had never seen before. “I took it home and back and forth to the AmVets on my shifts. And it didn’t cause any trouble. I fixed a chair up for it to sit on, back of the bar, and people liked it. It made a nice little clicking noise. We changed its name to Mary because the bartender figured out it was a girl. Though I was never really comfortable with it at home. I felt like it watched me too much. Then one day a guy came in, some guy who’d been in Vietnam, still wore a fatigue coat. And he said to me, ‘Don’t you know that a monkey’ll kill you? It’s got more strength in its fingers than you got in your whole body.’ He said people had been killed in Vietnam by monkeys, bunches of them marauding while you were asleep, killing you and covering you with leaves. I didn’t believe a word of it, except that when I got home and got undressed I started looking over across the room at Mary on her chair in the dark watching me. And I got the creeps. And after a while I got up and went out to the car, got a length of clothesline wire, and came back in and wired her to the doorknob through her little silver collar, then went back and tried to sleep. And I guess I must’ve slept the sleep of the dead—though I don’t remember it—because when I got up I found Mary had tipped off her chair-back and hanged herself on the wire line. I’d made it too short.”