An Occasional Hell Read online

  “That’s the way I make cookies too.” She looked at him and smiled. “I’ll make you a batch sometime.”

  So now it was time to leave. Without realizing it he had closed half the distance between them. That was a bad sign. Reminiscing about cookies was a bad sign. Dinner was going to be dangerous. “I’d better get to work,” he said.

  As he opened the screen door, she asked, “What exactly are you hoping to find out there?”

  Yes, DeWalt, what are you hoping to find? It’s a simple enquiry, give us a simple answer. Tell the lady what you’re after here. Tell her what you will not admit even to yourself.

  “Connections,” he said.

  “That’s one thing the police overlooked, you know. The connection between you and Alex. Your phone number appearing so often, I mean.”

  “That’s one of the things I want to explore.”

  “Do you think it’s related?”

  “At this point, knowing nothing, I’ve got to assume that everything is related.”

  “Good luck,” she told him.

  He had no choice but to believe that she meant it. “Give me a holler when dinner’s ready.”

  The study above the garage was as stuffy as an attic, but DeWalt did not turn on the air conditioner. Instead he opened all the windows. He wanted to smell the field-scented air and to hear the crows. The sterile white noise of an air-conditioner would make him too comfortable, almost drowsy, but what he needed now was a fidgety kind of alertness, the tickle of sweat on his skin, the fragrance of memory, sadness, a jabbing caw of alarm. Without external stimulations, even annoyances, there was always the danger of getting too close to your material, blurring the small print. And he did not want to miss anything this time around. That metal one-note song was still pinging in his head, a reminder that there was something he should know but didn’t, something he should remember but couldn’t. There was something he had looked at but had not seen, and this time he meant to discover it.

  The first thing he did was to make a calendar of the dates Alex had intended or had reminded himself to phone DeWalt. DeWalt’s office extension was noted five times on the desk calendar, starting in February and ending in May, always on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. Apparently Alex had gone to the trouble of looking up DeWalt’s teaching schedule. Also, there was a pencil dot beside DeWalt’s home number in the faculty directory, but DeWalt could ascribe no date to this.

  When satisfied that Alex had made no further reminders to himself to call DeWalt after the last one in May, DeWalt put the calendar aside.

  Okay, DeWalt. Now what? Now what do you look for?

  He picked up the large manila envelope in which Alex had kept his business receipts for the current year, and he dumped these receipts onto the desk. Most were typical deductions: receipts for floppy disks and printer ribbons, postage stamps, books and magazines and photocopying services. There were hotel and restaurant receipts from Niagara Falls, plus the stub of an admission ticket to Fort Erie. All legitimate business expenses related to Alex’s research for his book, no doubt. Except that the hotel bill was for a double room for four people, the restaurant stub for four also. Alex, Elizabeth, and the kids, thought DeWalt. A combination business trip and family vacation. Easily verifiable.

  Then DeWalt found something to pique his interest. Two withdrawal slips from Alex’s account with the State Teacher’s Retirement System. In mid-January he had withdrawn $2500. In May, another $4500. DeWalt laid these receipts aside. He sorted through the remaining pieces of paper, found nothing else of particular interest, and finally returned the manila envelope to the desk drawer.

  From another drawer he lifted a bulging accordion-type folder. This folder contained magazine tearsheets, photocopied pages from texts and other books, newspaper clippings, plus Alex’s typed or handwritten notes to himself; all, upon first look, seeming to pertain to the War of 1812: disparate pieces of research, descriptions of uniforms and weaponry, chronicles of naval engagements and ground battles and the comic political maneuvers that precipitated and perpetuated that meaningless war.

  Upon his second examination of this material, however, DeWalt discovered three newspaper clippings that seemed somehow anomalous; in a sense, anachronistic.

  The first was a New York Times announcement that an archeological dig at Old Fort Erie had unearthed the remains of several soldiers killed during the northern campaign of 1814. In addition to human remains, a small cache of “medical and military artifacts” had also been recovered.

  The second clipping, this one from the Toronto News and dated over two months later, told of a burglary of the Fort Erie Museum, the theft of several unspecified items on display with artifacts “unearthed during a recent archeological study.”

  DeWalt added the dates of the dig and the museum robbery to the calendar of events he was compiling. He then searched through Alex’s desk until he found a map detailing the geographical arena of the War of 1812. This map confirmed that Niagara Falls, where Alex had taken his family on vacation shortly after the archeological discovery, was located just across the Niagara River from Fort Erie.

  The third newspaper clipping, its news unrelated in even the most tenuous way to Alex’s research, made DeWalt’s breath sit heavy in his chest. The clipping, from the local newspaper, had been printed last May. In it was a brief account of the fire-bombing of a privately owned two-stall garage on Arlington Avenue. A garage used as rehearsal hall for a rock band called The Kinetics, who, said the report, had been in the garage at the time of the fire-bombing. A Molotov cocktail made from a Pepsi bottle had been thrown through one of the glass panels on the garage door. It exploded on the concrete floor, causing serious injury to the lead guitarist, Robin Janicki. He suffered third degree burns about the right arm, chest and abdomen. Motive for the attack was unknown. Police were investigating.

  “I hollered three times so far,” said Elizabeth Catanzaro from the threshold. She was smiling, holding a wine glass in one hand, holding to the doorframe with the other, swaying just slightly, her body framed in fading light. “Are you ignoring me, or do you prefer your dinner ice cold?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I guess I was involved in this stuff.”

  “Find something interesting?” She walked over to him and, standing close, placed a hand on his shoulder. Her weight and her warmth went inside him. The kitchen scents, the scent of her hand. Her hip touched his shoulder, leaned into him. He wondered how many more glasses of wine she had drunk. Her hand slipped around to the back of his neck. There was something hard and heavy in his lungs.

  “First things first,” he said as he swept the newspaper clippings into a drawer. He picked up the sheet of paper on which he had made his calendar of important dates, folded it three times and shoved it into his shirt pocket.

  He slipped out from under her hand, stood beside her, caught her as she swayed, held her gently by the arm. “Let’s eat,” he said.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A soft summer evening. One of those quiet August dusks which, quite unexpectedly, resonates October. DeWalt hoped to do nothing to disturb it. As he and Elizabeth walked back to the house from Alex’s office he felt it, the hint of October, a gathering readiness for change.

  She held lightly to his arm as they walked, a deliberate lightness, a lightness to belie the lethargy of her other movements. Her eyes looked heavy, eschewing of distant glances. Her mouth was formed in that vague kind of smile impossible to assess, a reflection of hope; fear; ineffable sadness. What it probably indicated was an excessive consumption of wine. But how much is too much, DeWalt, for a woman in her situation? In this case maybe there is no such thing as too much. In this case maybe any amount that does not induce unconsciousness is not enough.

  The crows were silent now. Somewhere off to DeWalt’s left, a mourning dove purled from a telephone line.

  All through dinner the October feeling stayed with DeWalt. He understood it to be—assumed, in any case; never trusting wholly the intel
lectual explication of emotion—a kind of sickroom melancholy; a moribundity evoked from the information newly gleaned from Alex’s papers, the half-information that had not yet jelled but surely suggested a diversion of accepted truths.

  For tonight anyway, DeWalt resolved not to worry it. He would allow the information to settle; by tomorrow, perhaps, some of the murkiness might have cleared.

  But still he could not shake the feeling that something was about to be lost, something else gained. He sat across from Elizabeth at the rectangular dining room table—she had used the china, a pair of silver candlesticks with white candles, a slender crystal vase holding three tiger lilies—and looked past her through the wide bay window to the backyard and the woods beyond. Every indication was of a summer in full ripeness, the grass a verdant green, the fields lush, the multigreened thick-leafed branches of the trees. But in this house and all around it a new Fall had begun.

  As if to confirm this, a chill rippled through DeWalt. He looked at Elizabeth as she too-delicately cut a bite of chicken breast; her face was flushed, a thin glistening line of perspiration on her forehead, another in the hollow of her chin.

  Behind her, the sun settled deep inside the woods, was resting on the forest floor. Its soft fire burned through the irregular collonade of trunks. But there was no smoke and the fire dimmed instead of grew. It was a cold fire that would eventually put itself out.

  She had asked if he had found anything important in Alex’s papers and he had said it was too early to tell. She let it go at that because she did not wish to talk about it anyway, did not want to think about the violence or betrayal or any of the other virulent ways people hurt one another. He complimented the dinner and so as not to offend her ate more heartily than was his habit. She ate delicately, with an appetitie diminished by more than wine alone. She kept her movements deliberate and slow, but they were unsteady nonetheless. He hoped he was wrong about what he thought he sensed from her tonight, and yet all the while guarded against the possibility of being right. If what he expected to happen actually happened, he would have no appropriate defense for it. He felt more than a little unsteady himself; shaky with desire, weak with the heaviness of resistance.

  “Tell me what it’s like to live alone,” she said.

  Yes, it was coming. He would have to be very careful with her tonight.

  “You needn’t worry about that,” he told her. “School starts in a couple of weeks, right? So the children will be coming back soon.”

  “I was asking what it’s like for you, though.”

  “Boring,” he said, and smiled.

  She smiled too but his answer did not satisfy her. She picked at her food a moment longer, then pushed the plate aside. She reached for her glass of wine.

  “Do you believe there’s a God?” she asked.

  The abruptness of her question startled him, that tone of challenge, the invitation to controvert her own suspicions. He looked at the vase filled with tiger lilies, the leaves softly curled, three fluted orange chalices that would soon be closing for the night.

  “Somebody you care about dies,” she said, “especially the way Alex died.…”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “What makes it so hard is that I don’t even know what I want to believe. If I accept that God exists, I have to also accept that he allows things like this to happen. But I can’t. I won’t.”

  “Nor do you want to accept that there is no God. No truth or purpose whatsoever.”

  “You know what I see every time I close my eyes?” she said. “Alex’s coffin. With him inside it. I just can’t stand the … finality of that.”

  “If it is final,” he said.

  “You have your doubts?”

  “Doubts or hopes, whatever you want to call it.”

  “Then … you believe there’s a heaven?”

  “I’m afraid I have my doubts about that too.”

  “What do you think, then, becomes of the dead?”

  “I think they live in the grief of the living.”

  “And who grieves for the living, Ernie?”

  “Maybe God, I don’t know. Or maybe we’re supposed to grieve for each other.”

  She shook her head. “If there is a God,” she said, “he’s not what we think. Not what I used to think.”

  Judging by the grip she had on her wine glass, the grim set of her mouth, he guessed that she was about to heave the glass at a wall. He understood such a response and would not have tried to restrain her. A certain amount of breakage was inevitable.

  But she did not. Her grip relaxed. “Tell me what you really believe, Ernie. You’re a smart man, and I respect you. So tell me what you really believe so that I can believe it too. I need something to believe right now.”

  He waited a moment; tasted the bitterness of his words. “My belief won’t do you any good.”

  “I want it anyway.”

  He held her gaze as long as he could. “I guess I believe that, if God does exist, we can’t count on him for much.”

  She smiled. He wished he had had something else to give her. Confidence; even arrogance. A revivifying lie.

  “We’re supposed to accept it all on faith,” she said.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Faith.” It was a word she felt no fondness for. “Just have faith, people, and everything will turn out fine. But oh oh, look out, everything isn’t fine. Well, have faith anyway, have faith and it will all work out. But you know what? It can’t work out, not unless people can come back from the dead. Well, gee, have faith, it’s all part of God’s plan and it’s not for us to question. Because if we don’t have faith, things will really turn out bad. Maybe not in this life, though, because in this life the faithless prosper. Am I right, Ernie?”

  “It’s a pretty mean set-up, I agree.”

  “It stinks.” She drank off the rest of her wine. She looked at her glass a moment. She pushed back her chair and stood. “Time to open another bottle.”

  “Do you really think you should?”

  “Absolutely.” She dragged her hand across the back of his neck as she walked past him into the kitchen. “It’s what we have instead of God.”

  It’s what you have, he thought. You and Hemingway, who said it first. DeWalt liked that she had read Hemingway and could quote him unobtrusively. Not that DeWalt was looking for a reason to feel affectionate toward her. Not that he needed one.

  From the kitchen she said, “I almost forgot, I made a coconut flan for dessert. I don’t think it’s set yet though. You might have to eat it with a straw.”

  There was a tremulous quality to her voice and it told him not to leave her alone for even a few moments now. When you have given up on God even an unjelled flan can move you to despair. Once you have given up on God, God becomes an enemy, no repository of hope, and all such resentment only further distances you from reconciliation. It is an unproductive place to be; a difficult place to find your way out of. DeWalt had been to all those places already. He did not want any company there.

  He went into the kitchen and took her by the arm. “Let’s go sit on the porch awhile.”

  The rhythm of the porch glider brushing slowly back and forth on metal tracks had a salutory effect on him. He eased down into himself; the darkness softened his thoughts. Elizabeth sat close, their hips touching. He could smell her wine and the cooking scents on her clothing. He thought them wonderfully natural scents and he was glad she had not tried to suffocate them in an unnatural fog of perfume. After a few minutes of gentle rocking she leaned into him and drew her feet up, turned sideways at the waist so that her feet rested on the glider and her head on DeWalt’s shoulder. He slipped his arm around her. He smelled the clean fruity smell of her hair, not an apricot-scent as he had imagined but the nostalgic fragrance of watermelon. They watched across the dusk-filled yard at fireflies twinkling in the trees beyond the driveway.

  The dark shell of the children’s treehouse stood out high in the darkness. He could not s
ee the board ladder or even the trunk to which the boards were nailed, but the outline of the small empty house was clear to him, a shadow upon a shadow.

  When Elizabeth spoke he knew that she had been looking at it too. “I miss the kids so much,” she said.

  He could not respond to this in any honest way, and so he said nothing. If he was aware of an emptiness in his own life it was not the same kind of emptiness Elizabeth Catanzaro must have felt. In fact every emptiness is different, he told himself, no matter what similarities they might share. And he had never found anything to be gained by the public display or comparison of private emptinesses.

  “Did you use to catch fireflies when you were a kid?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I guess all kids do. Christopher likes to fill up a jar with them, and then when he goes to bed he sets it on the nightstand so that he can fall asleep watching them.”

  “I used to do that too.” He would lie atop the cool sheets, wearing only his undershorts, and he would watch the green winking lights and he would listen to his father across the hall, his father taking off shoes and trousers and shirt, kneeling beside the bed and the bed creaking as he leaned into it, The Lord is my sheperd I shall not want … he maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Sometimes Ernie and his mother would say the Lord’s Prayer together or she would look in and remind him to say it, and he did without fail because he was afraid not to say it, until, that is, after his father had died and then Ernie found the courage necessary to stop.

  But his father’s prayer had been the Twenty-Third Psalm. Even as a child DeWalt had liked his father’s prayer better than the Lord’s Prayer. It seemed at once more poetic and more realistic; more adult. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.… Not the valley of death but the valley of the shadow of death. Even now he did not understand why the writer had made that distinction, except for poetic reasons. It gave a beauty to fear. A luminosity to human ignorance.