A Quiet Belief in Angels

  My heart stopped. For a while I couldn’t breathe. I tried to say something but nothing came out.

  “You found the Perlman girl,” Dearing went on. “Several of the victims were found very close to your house. There was even the possibility raised that the fire was set by you to direct the focus of attention elsewhere.”

  “What?”

  “It’s just nothing, Joseph . . . it’s just scared folks with more fear than common sense. That’s how any kinda prejudice is gonna start. People get afraid, ignorant people mainly, and they have nothing to do with their time, and then the time fills up with anxieties. It’s an easy thing . . . look at the way it goes with Negroes. Anything goes missing, well it’s gotta be a Negro. Someone hears that someone’s house got broken into, well it’s gotta be a Negro. You sure ain’t doin’ yourself any favors in Augusta Falls, and I gotta be the one to tell you because sure as hell no one else is going to.”

  “I don’t believe this!”

  “You gotta understand what’s happening here, Joseph. This has been going on for years, and people are scared. They want to know what’s happening. They don’t want to hear about the number of leads we’ve followed, the rumors we’ve heard. They don’t want to hear about the vagrants we’ve dragged out of boxcars and held for two days and nights before they were sober enough to answer questions. They want us to bring them a child killer’s head, and that’s all.” Dearing sighed exasperatedly. “Anonymous phone calls. Jesus, you want to hear about anonymous phone calls, and every one of them, every single one of them, has to be followed up.” He closed his eyes. “The thing that you have to appreciate, Joseph, perhaps more than anything else, is that you have to abide by other folks’ expectations or there’s going to be a prejudice.”

  “This is insane, Sheriff,” I interjected. “This is just so beyond—”

  “Just calm yourself there,” Dearing said.

  I was gripping the arms of the chair so hard my hands were hurting.

  “This isn’t an accusation, Joseph. This isn’t anything but hearsay and rumor and tittle-tattle out of the mouths of people who should know better. People who have lost daughters, and want some answers as to who’s responsible . . . and when you have scared people talking together their natural instinct is to look toward anyone who’s a little different, a little out of the ordinary.”

  “You can’t tell me that people honestly think that I might have had something to do with murdering little girls?”

  “What people think and what’s the truth ain’t the same thing, believe me. All I’m saying is that when Gunther Kruger was here they saw a foreigner, a German, and a little girl with bruises on her arms. There was a war going on. There was already sourness in the atmosphere, and someone managed to convince themselves that Kruger was their man. I know it wasn’t you that fired the house. I don’t think you got a murderous thought in your head. But now Kruger might as well have disappeared from the face of the earth, and people have got nothing. So what they gonna do, ’cept look for the next one who stands out, the one who looks a little different.”

  Dearing paused to gather his breath.

  “And you let them think this?” I asked, incredulous that I was even involved in such a conversation.

  “Christ, Joseph, who d’you think I am? You think I have the slightest influence on what people think in their own time? No one’s breaking the law by having their own thoughts, and if they get talking over a few beers, if the women at these quilt-making circles start winding each other up, then what the hell am I supposed to do? You figure I should get myself invited to every social gathering in Augusta Falls just so I can overhear any slanderous words about Joseph Vaughan and give them a piece of my mind?”

  I shook my head. I felt anxious and aggravated, I didn’t know what to say.

  “All I’m telling you is that you gotta take some slight degree of responsibility for how other people see you. You understand what I’m saying? You’re not a child, Joseph. You ain’t one of them Guardians any more. You’re all grown up and people take you as they see you, nothing more or less than that.”

  I looked directly at Dearing. I could feel how the blood had drained from my face. I imagined I looked like a man haunted, maybe the ghost doing the haunting. “You’re saying that I have to fix myself so I look and behave like everyone else. Either that, or someone might come and torch my house while I’m sleeping. And while they’re at it, hell, they might get the schoolteacher as well, and that don’t matter a damn ’cause she’s nothing more than the child killer’s punchboard anyway.”

  Dearing frowned and shook his head. “Shee-it, boy, you have a mouth full of piss and vinegar, don’t you?”

  I leaned forward. I was tired. Resolve was diminishing, like the pressure in a tire with a slow puncture.

  Heart like a fist that was clenched just for show. This fist wasn’t planning on connecting with anything.

  “What?” Dearing asked.

  I frowned.

  “Look like you’re set to—”

  “Kill someone?” I said, my tone sarcastic and bitter.

  “You said it,” Dearing replied.

  “But you put the idea in my head.”

  “Devil puts ideas like that in folks’ heads, Joseph.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Reckon it is.”

  I nodded, looked toward the door. “You have an inside line with him? He tell you to come talk to me?”

  Dearing shook his head. Mouth turned down at the edges like he was going to fold it up and pack it away. “Now you’re talking plain crazy.”

  “Well, if I killed some little girls and set fire to Gunther Kruger’s house . . . oh hell, we can’t forget leading the schoolteacher astray and—”

  Dearing raised his hand. “We’re not having this conversation, Joseph. I know you better than you think. I know you didn’t kill no one. I know you didn’t burn the Kruger house, and I never said you did. I’m looking out for you, boy. I’m telling you that people get scared. These folks ain’t the smartest, eh? That friend of yours, Reilly Hawkins. He sure as hell ain’t the brightest light in the harbor, but he’s pretty much the smartest one you know. All it takes is a word. You know the kind of thing I mean: Joseph Vaughan . . . hell, he don’t look right . . . You hear about him and the schoolteacher? Sweet girl like that, looking after all them little kids. Heard he drove her out to Clinch County and done things to her in the back of a truck and Burnett Fermor had to come down and caution him . . . You get where I’m going with this, Joseph, or did you get out at the last crossroads?”

  I nodded. I felt beaten down. I knew what was happening. I knew Dearing wasn’t railroading me. I resented the fact that who I was had to be challenged, that I had to change my appearance, my manner . . . hell, I resented the fact that I couldn’t just be whoever I wanted to be without people interfering.

  “I understand,” I said quietly.

  “Good,” Dearing replied. “I’m sure glad you do.”

  “I can go now?”

  “You can. I’ll trust we’re still on speaking terms, Joseph?” Dearing rose from his long-suffering chair and extended his hand.

  I took it and we shook. “Sure we are, never been otherwise.”

  “And you’re gonna take a look at things and maybe—”

  “Figure out how to convince people I ain’t a child killer?”

  Dearing’s eyes narrowed. He tilted his head sideways and looked at me askance. “Not so much humor, Joseph . . . not the kind of humor folks around here can understand. You can’t forget that you’re a handful and a half smarter than most of them. They don’t get sarcasm. You say things they can’t figure out and they just get mean.”

  “It’s okay. I’m tired. I’m gonna go home.” I stood up and turned toward the door.

  “You come see me if there’s any difficulties, okay? Feel it’s my duty to keep an eye on you considering what happened to your folks.”

  “I appreciate that, Sheriff, but I don’
t think you need to worry.”

  Dearing smiled. “It’s the worry that keeps me so young-looking.”

  I shaved my beard. I hacked at it with scissors and then lathered my face with coal tar and razored it all away. The man that looked back at me had lost several years. I looked like the teenager I was.

  For the week that Alex was away I pretty much stayed inside. I wrote a great deal. Sentences, paragraphs, random thoughts. I filled a notebook and then started writing on loose scraps of paper.

  On January fourth I drove out to the bus station to collect her, and she did a double take when she saw me standing there.

  “Your beard,” she said.

  I smiled. I felt awful young. She had on a silk dress—pale blue with ivory-colored trim on the hem and cuffs. She didn’t look old, but older than when she’d left. The gap between us seemed to have widened.

  We hugged in the cabin of the pickup. She felt warm and real and tangible. Loneliness did not suit me.

  “I need you to cut my hair when we get home,” I said.

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “Democracy.”

  “Democracy?”

  “A state of society characterized by tolerance toward minorities, freedom of expression, respect for the essential dignity and worth of the human individual with equal opportunity for each to develop freely to his fullest capacity—”

  “Joseph!” she snapped. “Enough . . . what is this? What’s going on?”

  “Democracy, what we’re supposed to have in this country.” I told her about my meeting with Dearing the day she’d left. “So you see,” I added, “after the disappearance of Gunther Kruger I became Public Enemy Number One.”

  She laughed. “Drive home,” she said.

  I shook my head. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand that you’ve been alone for a week. I understand that you have existed on root beer and hamburger, that you’ve more than likely stayed up all night scribbling furiously, that you need a hot bath, a damned good fucking, and then what comes out of your mouth will sound an awful lot less crazy and paranoid.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  Alex turned and looked at me. She raised her eyebrows and tilted her head to one side. “Drive,” she said matter-of-factly, shooing her hand toward the windshield. “Shut your fool mouth and drive.”

  The following day I went on an errand into town. I stopped at the public library, asked for newspapers dating back three years. I found those columns devoted to Rebecca Leonard and Sheralyn Williams. They told me nothing but the fact that they’d been found dead. I tore those pages out and stole them. Later, at home, I cut out the columns and put them in the box. Eight clippings. Eight dead girls. I imagined what Dearing would say if he searched my house and found them.

  U.S. forces arrested Ezra Pound in Italy and returned him to the States. He was declared insane and committed to St. Elizabeth’s Asylum in Washington, D.C. Rumor had it that fifty thousand English girls would be sailing into America, all of them “war brides” of GIs posted overseas. There were riots in Paris over shortages of bread. The U.S.S.R. reported the discovery of one hundred and ninety thousand dead bodies in Silesia. They were believed to be Russian, English, Polish and French prisoners of war. Those Nazis who’d escaped trials at Nuremberg were seeking refuge in Argentina. I read the newspapers. I watched the world as it struggled away from the horrors of war. Such events were the mileposts of my life; the staccato punctuations that interrupted the rhythm of my existence.

  I continued to work outside, mending fences, helping with seed-drilling and harvest. Alex and I spoke of moving away from Augusta Falls, but then she agreed to another two years’ continuance at the school. We did not argue about this decision, despite the fact that it seemed to contradict what we had envisioned. The truth was simple: though I had thought to move, I had also realized that there was nowhere to go. Without a destination there had never really been a plan. Without a destination there was no disappointment.

  When I wasn’t working I stayed home and wrote. I wrote a short story about a man who missed death by inches, and forever after considered he had cheated Death of his due. He imagined he saw Death in the shadows, “his eyes yellow, rich yellow like a sulfur flame, and about him the brackish snap and tang of hot metal, in His hands such offerings as pneumonic fever, pellagra, strangulation, gangrene, a suffocating fall from some interminable height . . .” and when the story was done I posted it to the New York Review . They sent me forty-five dollars and published it in the third week of June. I received one reader’s letter, forwarded from the office of the Review, and the reader, one Mr. Repentant Lamb of God, explained to me in no uncertain terms that I was advocating and furthering the work of Lucifer by supporting such a publication; and quoting from Ezekiel, “Because you have made your guilt to be remembered, in that your transgressions are uncovered, so that in all your doings your sins appear . . . a sword is drawn for the slaughter, it is polished to glitter and to flash like lightning . . . you shall be fuel for the fire, you shall be no more remembered . . .” I thought to write back and ask how Mr. Repentant Lamb of God had come by his copy of the Review, but I did not. I kept his letter with the one from the Atlanta short story adjudication people. They were evidence that I had somehow reached the world, and the world had replied.

  Toward winter I spent more time with Reilly Hawkins, who now seemed to age two or three years for every one of mine. His eyes were quiet and reflective as if long-exhausted from an unending burden, as if a daughter had vanished, or a wife departed in the company of some lesser man. Reilly had neither possessed nor lost either, but still his eyes spoke of some spiritual hunger never satiated.

  “I had a sister too, you know?” he said one time. We were seated in his kitchen.

  I frowned. “A sister? I thought there was just you and Levin and Lucius.”

  “Nope, we had a sister too. Just the one.” Reilly smiled nostalgi cally. “Real good-looking. Sandy-colored hair. Got hit by lightning when she was a kid.” Reilly looked up at me and smiled. “After that if you put a watch on her the hands would just travel backwards. Strangest damn thing you ever did see.” Reilly shrugged. “Hope . . . that was her name. Hope Hawkins.”

  “And where is she?” I repeated.

  “Hope? She’s dead too.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Fell off of a horse and busted her neck. Eleven years old.”

  “Jesus, Reilly, why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  Reilly lowered his head and exhaled slowly. When he looked up his eyes were glazed and rheumy. “Seems to me there’s some things you train your mind not to remember.”

  I thought of how I had gradually erased my mother from my everyday thoughts. She would catch me unawares every once in a while. A smell, a sound, something at the back of a drawer, some small object of no consequence suddenly possessing sufficient power to return a memory in full color with all attendant emotions. Such things occurred, but as I’d grown older I believed I had made them occur with less and less regularity.

  “I know how that is,” I ventured.

  Reilly smiled. “I know you do,” he whispered. “I know you do.”

  We didn’t speak of Hope again, or of Levin. We drank some lemonade and then rigged a pulley in the barn to hoist the engine out of his tractor.

  Later, Reilly said he’d read my story, that Alex had given him a copy of the New York Review.

  “You should follow the light,” he said.

  “The light? What light?”

  “Some people got a light, Joseph . . . like a path, a reason for being. Something like that is rare, and when you got one you should follow it. Your story made a great deal o’ sense to me. You can string all manner of words together in such a way as people can understand it. That’s what you should be doing, not getting filth and grease under your fingernails fixing motors with me.”

  “I like helping you,” I said. “I like fixing motor
s.”

  Reilly nodded. “Suit yourself, Joseph.”

  He didn’t say anything else, but later I spoke with Alex.

  “So write the book,” she said.

  “The book?” I replied, and thought of how I had started something so long before. I thought of Conrad Moody, of Providence and the Three Sisters.

  “The one that’s always inside people like you,” Alex said.

  I laughed.

  “I’m serious,” she said. She rose from her chair at the kitchen table. She came around and stood behind me. She massaged my shoulders and I felt the tension of the day drawn out like water. “Everyone has a book inside them,” she said. “Some people have two or three or twenty. Most people know it but they can’t do a great deal about it. You can, and so you should. If you don’t you’ll be upset with yourself, the kind of upset that comes back time and again to remind you that it isn’t going away.”

  The following morning I drove across the state line into Florida and found a three-story bookstore in Jacksonville. Bought a copy of Hartrampf’s Vocabularies, Polti’s The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, a book called Plotto: A New Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction by William Wallace Cook. I sat in a soda shop on the corner of Cecil and Fernandina. I drank a 7-Up, read some paragraphs, tried to convince myself that this was what I would do; I would write a book: The Great American Novel by Joseph Calvin Vaughan. My confidence lasted a little more than twenty minutes. I bundled the books together and dropped them in a trash can on the facing sidewalk. I walked aimlessly for another hour, and then I drove back to Augusta Falls.

  I got back late that afternoon, a copy of Mademoiselle magazine in hand for Alex, and learned that another girl had been murdered.

  It was Thursday, October tenth, 1946, the day before my nineteenth birthday.

  SIXTEEN

  THE IMAGE OF VIRGINIA GRACE PERLMAN INVADED MY DREAMS.

  . . . like the sound of a heavy stick dragged along a picket fence, or down the stairs, but heavier than that, like somebody whacking something . . .