The Trapdoor

  He sat behind his desk and gestured me to a chair.

  “I won’t be long,” I said. “I’ll stand.”

  Summers nodded once. “That’s fine. State your case and get out.”

  “All right. My case is this: you’re crooked. You’re dirty. You’re a bought man. The electric trains are coming to Grant Valley and there’s big money to be made in land, and you’re the one making it, and you’re not making it clean. Capstandard and all those other companies, they’re coming into the county and chewing it to pieces. And you hold the door for them, and they tip you as they go.”

  Summers’s mouth had become a thin, white line. “Is that right?” he said.

  “Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is. I knew the second I saw the Capstandard office park that it was going to pollute the swampland under it. But your engineering firm helped it get a clean environmental report. Then you make pretty speeches at the legislature about how you wouldn’t cast a vote but it was A-OK with you. That’s nice. It’s smart. It’s subtle. And I’ll bet it’s lucrative too.”

  Summers just stared at me.

  “I spent some time at county hall today. I tracked down some of those other companies your firm has worked for. You were on the Zoning Board of Appeals when United Metals got a variance on the access road laws. If that place ever blows up, and it well might, there’s no way a fire truck could get to it. You brought the board around, Mr. Summers, you were the deciding vote. Not as subtle, but I’ll bet it was just as lucrative. And then there’s American Regions—”

  “What exactly are you waiting for, Mr. Wells?” Summers said. “A confession?”

  The controlled tone of his voice unnerved me, but I tried to keep pace. “Go ahead. Humor me,” I said.

  “Your reputation around here isn’t worth a thin dime. You print this garbage and it’ll be lining bird cages before it’s even read.”

  “I don’t think the State Investigation Commission keeps birds,” I said.

  He smiled thinly. “Nice try, Mr. Wells,” he said. “Nice bluff. But all my votes and reports are public record. I have nothing to hide.”

  “Nothing but the money.”

  He stood up. “Then when you find it,” he said, “let me know.”

  I cursed silently. I made my last stand. “I will,” I said. “Sooner or later, I will.”

  “Well then, you’d just better get busy right away then, hadn’t you?”

  Alice and Michael Summers were both sitting in the living room when I passed through again. This time neither of them smiled at all.

  35 When I got back to my hotel room, I threw my coat down on the bed angrily. I went for the desk, for the bottle I kept there. I needed a drink bad. A drink and a cigarette. I poured one, lit the other. I thought about calling Bird but it seemed out of the question now.

  As I sat down, I noticed the message light on my phone was blinking.

  “What the hell do you want?” I asked it. I snapped up the phone and rang the desk.

  “Oh, yes. Mr. Wells,” said the night clerk. Her voice was cracked and harsh. She managed to sound arrogant and incompetent at the same time. For some reason, I hadn’t really been a welcomed guest since the police hauled the dead dog out of the woods. “Yes, there was something for you. I wrote it down. Here it is. A woman named Sandra Burr.”

  “Chandler Burke. When’d she call?”

  “Oh, not long ago. I don’t remember exactly. Oh … here’s another. She called twice, that’s right.”

  “She leave a message? A number?” I said through my teeth.

  “Uh, something … She says she’s at a hot line.”

  “What about?…”

  “And that it’s urgent.”

  “Great. Anything else?”

  “No. Oh. Well, I guess you could say so.”

  “Let’s.”

  “Someone called a couple of times asking for you. But he wouldn’t leave his name.”

  “A man?”

  “Yes. At least, I think so. It was hard to tell.”

  “All right. Thanks,” I said. I pressed down the plunger. I rang Chandler. I was surprised. No busy signal: a ring on the first try. She was there. “It must be a slow day for despair,” I said.

  “I’ve been keeping the lines open. I’ve got an emergency on my hands and I’m here by myself.” I waited. “A boy named Chris Thomas is suicidal.”

  “What?”

  “Then you do know him.”

  “Yeah, he sent me to you.”

  “Oh, I thought … Well, I didn’t know. Anyway, that explains it. I haven’t been able to keep him on the line. He says he has to talk to you. He says you’re the only one who understands. He hasn’t been able to find you all day, and he’s in a real panic. He’s talking about slashing his wrists.”

  “Oh man. Is he serious?”

  “I’d say so, yes. I promised him I’d track you down. It was the only way I could hold him back. He’s supposed to call again in half an hour.” I heard the relief in her breath. “I wasn’t sure I’d find you in time. I thought you’d call.”

  I let that pass. “Did anything happen? To Chris, I mean. To set him off.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Just a conversation he seems to have had with you. He said something like, you shouldn’t have brought him back to reality. That it’s worse than the nightmare.”

  “Oh swell.” I hesitated. “Can you get him to call my hotel?” I asked her.

  “He says he won’t do it anymore. He says the receptionist was nasty to him. He says she’ll listen in on the conversation if he calls. Frankly, I talked to her, too, and I tend to agree with him. I’ve called four times in the past hour or so and I’ve only gotten an answer twice. If there were some foul-up …” She paused. Softly, she said: “I hate to drag you out here, John. But he’s on the very edge.”

  I’d already grabbed my coat.

  36 My nerves were shot. Grant Valley had been bad for them. I longed for the peace and quiet of Manhattan. Or a night’s sleep. Or anything but being under siege on hostile ground.

  The drive to St. Andrew’s didn’t help much either. I kept seeing headlights appear and reappear in my rearview mirror. I thought about Death, pulling out of the mist, running me off the road. My nerves were shot. I shook my head. I kept my eyes forward. I lit cigarette after cigarette as I drove on.

  The lights behind me were gone by the time I reached the church. There was only the dark. I parked the car beneath the crumbling shadow of the place. I got out and hurried over the gravel path to the door. Once again the door creaked when I opened it. I didn’t laugh at the melodrama this time. This time I wasn’t in the mood. I entered the blackness of the chapel. Even the stained-glass windows had faded to gray shapes tonight. I stood still, my heart beating heavily, waiting for my eyes to adjust so I could move forward.

  There was a flash. “John!”

  I spun toward the sound, my fist cocked. I saw Chandler standing by the curtain near the altar. She was holding a flashlight in her hand. She leveled it over the pews. I went toward her.

  “We can’t afford to light the upstairs yet. This is S.O.P. for arriving shifts.”

  I tried to make a laughing noise. Even I wasn’t convinced.

  Chandler played the flash over my face. “You look beat,” she said.

  “I’m too old to have an entire county gunning for me.”

  She reached up and kissed me. “I’m on your side,” she said.

  “Well, then we’ve got ’em outnumbered.”

  She led the way down the stairs to the little room that housed the hotline.

  The place was empty, silent. Two of the three phones on the table were off the hook.

  “You here alone?” I asked.

  “Yes. It still happens more than I’d like.”

  She smiled at me. It was a thin, weary smile. I wanted to kiss it, but I didn’t. I wanted to breathe in the scent of her, but I moved away. If I relaxed now, I would collapse. I wanted to collapse, but
I said, “What do I need to know?”

  Chandler spoke slowly, softly. “Just listen to what he says,” she told me. “Try not to judge him. Don’t tell him to cheer up, or that things aren’t so bad. Things are bad. Let him tell you about it. Ask questions if he won’t talk. Remember: he’s in trouble, but he did make the call. He must want to live. Let him talk, help him find that out, help him look at his options, help him find his way.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  “It’s not. You’ve got a real chance of losing him.”

  The phone rang. I jumped a little. Chandler picked up. She spoke into the receiver almost tenderly. “Hello, may I help you?” She listened. “Chris, I’m glad you called back. He’s right here. He wants to talk to you.”

  She handed me the phone.

  For a moment I couldn’t lift the thing to my ear. I stood there with the transmitter pressed to my chest in my shaking hand. It seemed to me in some way that I’d spent a long time waiting for this to happen. And now that it was here, I dreaded it. I closed my eyes and took a breath. Behind my eyelids it was there, it was all still there. My daughter, my Olivia, in the port-red death robe she never wore. The scaffold above her that never was. The trapdoor, the sound of the trapdoor, the finality of it. Still there. All of it. Still there.

  I brought the handset to my ear quickly. “Chris. How’s it going, pal?”

  He tried to say my name. He couldn’t. He was crying too hard. I let him cry. It went on for a minute, a minute and a half. I reached into my coat pocket for a cigarette. There were none left. I brought out the empty pack and crushed it.

  “I can’t …” said Chris. It was a painful sound. It hurt me.

  “Where are you?” I asked him—but Chandler waved her hand at me, shook her head. “Try and tell me what’s wrong.”

  Through the sobs, the words came out in a rush. “I don’t know, I don’t know. It’s just like … there’s too much of it, too much.”

  “All right. Too much what?”

  “The dying,” he said. He grew quieter. “The dying. The losing people. I can’t stand it. My old man, my father, Michelle. I can’t … What’s the point of it anyway?” I didn’t have the answer to that one. I just waited. “You know, before … before I talked to you … in the graveyard and all … it was like … there was Death, I could see him. There was Death in the woods. It was like, I was on some kind of mission or something like in the movies: to get him, to stop him. But that’s not real, is it? It’s just a man in a mask, right? You told me that. You can’t stop death. Not really. It just keeps coming, and whenever you love somebody … Oh God, it hurts so bad, Mr. Wells. It hurts like fire.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I sounded hoarse. “Yeah, it does.”

  “I loved her. You know? Michelle. She talked to me. I loved her. Why did she die? Can you tell me that? Why did she have to die?”.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. My mind felt jammed up. I felt panic rising in my belly. I didn’t have the answers. I was going to lose him.

  “Can you tell me?” he repeated.

  “No. No one can tell you that. Not in the way you mean.”

  I heard him take a trembling breath. He was still crying. “Well, then what the hell’s the point, you know what I mean? I mean, everything everybody says is just a lie then, isn’t it? I mean, all the speeches people make, and all the, all the ideas they come up with, and all the terrible things they do to each other. They’re just scared, aren’t they? Everybody. They’re just all scared because they know it’s all just, it’s all just dying and dying.”

  “Maybe so,” I said.

  “All those people on TV, you know, smiling, and all the priests and the president and all the teachers and everybody. They’re just smiling and saying stuff … ’cause they don’t really know anything, do they?”

  I held the phone in my left hand for a moment. I wiped my hand on my pant leg. I wiped my brow with my sleeve. I glanced up at Chandler. She was sitting on the edge of the desk, watching me closely. I saw pity in her eyes.

  And then, over the phone line, from wherever he was, Chris Thomas cried out in anguish, “Do they? Do they?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re right. They don’t really know anything.”

  And then softly: “You either.”

  “Me either,” I said. And I thought: maybe me most of all.

  There was a long pause. When Chris spoke next, the tears were gone. In their place was a quiet certainty that chilled me. “I want to get it over with,” he said. “I just want to die. I’m going into the woods tonight, into the caves where no one will find me. I’m going to cut my wrists, and then it won’t hurt so much anymore. Because I can’t stand it, Mr. Wells. I tried, I really did. But it’s all real, you know. It’s all real. And I can’t stand it.”

  I wanted to talk. I wanted to say something. Anything. Everything. Instead I was silent. My eyes passed desperately over the jumble of newspaper stories covering the walls. The room was filled with my silence. And the silence was filled with the sound of a trapdoor.

  “I’m going now,” said Chris, still quiet, still certain. “I guess—I guess I just wanted to say good-bye because … because I know you hurt too. I know it.”

  I still could not answer him. I was paralyzed by a sense of failure. Why couldn’t I do anything? Why couldn’t I help him? They die so young, so young, and what do we have to offer them to keep them here? If I had been there, I thought in my confusion … If I had been there with her when she walked into the woods, when she climbed the scaffold in her port-wine robe, when she stood on the trapdoor—would I have been silent then as I was now? I was her father, for God’s sake. I should have been there. How, having failed her so terribly, could I presume to sell the world to Chris?

  The silence stretched out. I could feel him on the other end of the line. He was holding on, still holding on, still hoping I would come up with something, anything, that would give him a reason to fight it out. I didn’t have his life in my hands; only the next minute, the next hour, the next day. But if I could come through for him, that might be all he needed.

  And I stood there, silent, thinking: I should have been there, Olivia. I should have been there.

  “I guess I just wanted to say good-bye,” Chris said again.

  My eyes went desperately to Chandler. But she was not looking at me now. Her face was lifted to the ceiling. Her body was tense. Her head was cocked in an attitude of listening. Her eyes were wide in an expression, half puzzled and half afraid.

  She moved to her desk. Grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil. She scribbled something.

  “Chris,” I said, just to say something. “Tell me more.”

  He didn’t answer. For a second I thought he was gone. Then I heard him let his breath out, as if he’d made up his mind.

  Chandler stepped across the room and handed me the piece of paper. On it she’d scribbled the words: “Someone just drove up to the church.”

  37 “Okay,” Chris Thomas whishpered sadly. “Good-bye, Mr. Wells.”

  On the syllable of my name, I heard him move the phone away from his lips. He was going to hang up.

  I shouted, “Wait, Chris! Wait! There is something!”

  I gripped the phone hard. I listened to dead air. I waited for the click and the tone.

  “What?” said Chris Thomas.

  I caught my breath. I was desperate. I had no idea what I was going to say. I took the pencil out of Chandler’s hand. I wrote on the scrap of paper: “Cops. Now.”

  Chandler nodded and moved to one of the other phones.

  “Chris,” I said. “Are you still there?”

  The pause seemed to last forever. In that pause I heard the sound of the church door creaking open upstairs. I glanced at the ceiling. I ran my fingers through my hair. My hair was wet with sweat.

  “Yeah,” said Chris, uncertain. “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Then listen,” I said. And as I spoke, something gave way in me, something t
hat had been there for a long time. I felt it break like a dam at floodtide, and finally the words came. “Everything you say, I guess it’s true,” I told him. “Everybody’s talking all the time, making pronouncements and everything. But nobody—nobody really knows much of anything in the end. The president and the movie stars and the, the music people you guys like. They’re just as scared as you are. And me. Maybe … Maybe the thing is … maybe they’re trying to convince themselves that there’s a secret, that life is a fair deal that can be worked out. Maybe they think, you know, that if they handle things just right, get right with God or whatever, it’ll all turn out okay.” I shook my head. The room was blurring in front of me. Beside me I heard Chandler murmuring into the phone to the police. Above me I heard the church door swing shut with a thud.

  But the words kept coming. They weren’t my words, I realized now. They were my daughter’s. They were the words she’d written to me in her last letter, the truth she’d learned but couldn’t live by. They were her legacy, I guess. A legacy I’d never accepted. Now, though, I fought to speak clearly, to come to grips with it, to pass it on. “It isn’t fair, buddy,” I said. “It doesn’t turn out okay. It isn’t fair or unfair or nice or not nice. People live and they die and if there’s a reason, it’s more than I can tell you. It just is. It’s just the way it is.

  “I guess you have to play it that way, just for what it is, just for the fact that it is. You got to play it down the line, with all the dying and the pain of it, and the good-byes and the hurting inside. I mean the thing is, kid, you don’t have to kill yourself to die. You can trust me on that. I’m an expert. If the hurt is bad enough, you can bury yourself alive. You can bury yourself a thousand ways. Believe me. I know most of them. But maybe, if you play it out, if you play it for all it’s worth … maybe it isn’t fair or unfair or anything like that … but maybe it’s sweet, you know? Maybe it’s sweet as wine. Maybe it’s just worth it. Maybe it just is.”