An Occasional Hell Page 15

  DeWalt had always intended to learn the Psalm but too many other things had affected his ability to memorize it. Still, he found its rhythm soothing. Maybe, DeWalt, that is the value of prayer. Maybe people are soothed by their own voices and they do not realize it. They are comforted by the poetry of their fears.

  “It’s good your kids have a place like this to grow up in,” he told her. “You weren’t serious about selling it, were you?”

  “I was angry when I said that. I guess I’m still angry, though.…”

  He did not say anything. There was warmth and comfort to the feel of her body against his. He had not held a woman for a long time now. If he let himself think about this it could destroy him for tonight and for a long time after but he had gotten past thinking about such things. Just as he had gotten past thinking he should respond to Elizabeth’s uncertainty with some reassuring platitude or abstract axiom of promise.

  “What do you remember best from your childhood?” she asked. “What’s the one moment that stands out clearest in your mind?”

  He was not convinced there was any value in this either but the memory was already there. “The winter I was eight years old,” he said.

  “The whole winter?”

  He smiled, and shook his head. “It was during Christmas vacation. After Christmas but before school had started again. I was downstairs in the basement, supposedly practicing with my new roller skates. But what I was really doing was fooling around with the coal furnace. Something I’d been warned a thousand times not to do. But there I was with the furnace door wide open, burning pieces of wood, broomstraws, anything I could find. And I ended up setting a whole pile of cardboard boxes on fire. With me wedged into the corner behind them. I knew I’d done something terrible, so I didn’t start yelling for help until it was almost too late. The flames were as high as the ceiling. Then I heard my Dad’s footsteps pounding down the wooden stairs. Then his bare arms coming reaching through that wall of fire. He just stepped right into it, grabbed me and yanked me out.”

  “My god,” she said. “Were you badly burned?”

  “I remember Dad’s shirt being scorched. And how all the hair on his arms was singed off. He never complained that he was hurt but I’m sure he must have been. His arms were red for several days. But I was fine. Untouched, in fact.”

  “You were lucky,” she said.

  “He beat my butt until it glowed,” said DeWalt. “But later that night, when he thought I was asleep, he came into my room and sat on the edge of the bed. I figured he was still angry, so I didn’t move a muscle. He laid his hand on my back, and then he just sat there. After a while I heard him crying. At first I didn’t know what the sound was, because as far as I knew, my old man had never shed a tear in his life. He cried pretty hard that night, though. And I didn’t know what to make of it.”

  DeWalt stared across the yard to the treeline. The playhouse was lost now in the darkness. Everything lost. “‘Don’t you ever play with fire again,’ Dad whispered. ‘Don’t you ever do that. Please honey, don’t. And don’t ever drive a car.’ he said. ‘Don’t fight in a war. Don’t climb trees, or swim in the ocean, or play football. Don’t ever do anything dangerous where you might get hurt. Don’t take chances, son, please. Just stay home, stay right here in this house with your mother and me. Just stay here forever, it’s safe here, you won’t ever have to leave. Please, son,’ he said. ‘Please, God. Please, don’t ever let my boy get hurt.’”

  Elizabeth said nothing for a while, for too long. And then, finally, “Children change everything.” Her voice was as soft as his father’s hand lifting away had been. DeWalt had never before let anyone into this room with his father and him but now he had brought Elizabeth Catanzaro in and it seemed to be all right. He could feel the dampness of her cheek against his shoulder.

  “We stop hurting for ourselves and start hurting for them,” she said. “I think that’s the hardest thing a parent has to overcome. That desire to protect your kids from everything that can possibly go wrong.”

  For some men it is not so hard to overcome though, is it, DeWalt? Some men die young enough to overcome everything. Some men disappear just when their sons are beginning to look at them closely.

  That’s enough, DeWalt. You can’t fill up the emptiness with memories. You’re getting heavy with it. Cold rain-soaked wet to the skin soul-drenched heavy with remembrance. You’ve got to cut this shit out, DeWalt. You’re not a green stick anymore. You’re not a spring twig, you don’t bend, you don’t float. You are waterlogged and soft, old man. Get out now or sink.

  She raised his hand to her lips then. He barely felt the kiss.

  “You know what I think?” she said. “I think the only mercy God ever bestows is the mercy we give each other while waiting for God to get started.”

  He tightened his arm around her shoulder and momentarily drew her closer. There were new locks on all the doors but he and Elizabeth were outside the locks and all the doors were open. It had been a long time since DeWalt had been in a place like this. He was here now, unexpectedly, unintentionally, and although it was a surprise he did not allow the darkness to fool him into believing that Elizabeth Catanzaro had come here for the same reasons.

  “Put me to bed, Ernie,” she said a minute later.

  “You only say that because you’ve been drinking.”

  “I’ve been drinking so I would have an excuse to say it.”

  He did not move or consider a reply too quickly. “There are reasons why you think you want to do this,” he told her.

  “I know all the reasons, Ernie. I’ve thought about them all. But what difference does it make what the reason is? I need to have you close to me tonight. I need you to want me.”

  She stood, holding his hand, waiting for him to decide.

  Sometimes, DeWalt, we sharpen the blades of our memories. But sometimes we have to blunt them.

  He stood and followed her upstairs.

  There were no lights on in her bedroom and very little moonlight filtered through the window. He watched her undress as a shadow and come to him. He felt the cool shadow of her breasts against his chest and her hands in the small of his back. He tasted her mouth and the warm sweet wine of her hunger for him.

  Now in the darkness he realized that she was drunker than he had first thought. There was no steadiness to her now, there was only need and no attempt to conceal or control it. Her hands were on his belt and clumsily working to free it, but he stopped her hands and held them together in his and kissed them once. “First this,” he told her, and leading her to the bed helped her to lie down. He lifted her ankles and kissed them and placed them on the mattress. He leaned over then and put his mouth to her breast, he took the nipple into his mouth and felt it firm against his tongue, his hand on the warm flesh of her thigh. He kissed one breast and then the other, her skin so sweet and warm he could have lain his head against her and slept, so healing and tender her submissiveness, her trust in him an affirmation he had told himself he would never again experience.

  His mouth worked its way down over her belly and he felt her stomach muscles quiver, her hands on the back of his head. He moved down the length of her until he was between her legs. With his hands beneath her buttocks now he lifted her toward him as he knelt at the foot of the bed, her legs falling over his shoulders and crossed at the ankles, heels against his spine. With his first taste of her and the gasp as she pushed against him he imagined that everything might change, that the scented pull of her thighs and the salty heat might finally put an end to the uncertainty of his own body, might end that debate once and for all.

  Her pelvis established a rhythm which he with the langorous slippage of his tongue reaffirmed, a slow eager beat he wanted to prolong forever, forever consuming the taste and scent and heat that encompassed everything now. Her pace quickened but then slowed again, deliberately stalling, holding back, extending the pleasure until it would not be held back, this racing of the heart, this warming, filling,
aching empty almost dissolution of the self, this slow falling away into nowhere, into everywhere at once, until her hands pulled at his head pulling him into her and her legs pulling him in and the wings of her shadow opening wide to enfold and pull him in and down with her into the long fast moaning slide into nowhere.

  Her legs held him for a few moments as her body quivered. He felt the spasms in her thigh, the twitching muscle. Finally she unwrapped her ankles. He slid up beside her and held her in his arms. She was still breathless and she clung to him as if she might again fall away somewhere. After a while her breath softened and he could tell that she was drifting away. He kissed her lightly on the cheek.

  “You get undressed now,” she murmured, but her voice was weak with sleep, drowsy with too much wine.

  “Soon,” he told her, and he kissed her a final time.

  He lay beside her for nearly an hour, even after she in her sleep turned her back to him and curled up on her side. He lay there thinking things out in every direction. He felt that he had walked fleshless past the unfinished framework of her need and that he had snagged his heart on a nail. To move in any direction would only rip the muscle further. Finally he admitted that there was no way of thinking of it that was not destructive. He moved away from her. He stood and covered her with a blanket.

  In the hallway he paused for a moment outside the boy’s room. The bed was small but he thought he could be comfortable there. It would be good to sleep as a child again and surrounded by the baseballs and heroes and plastic toys of a child’s world. It would be good but that would be impossible too. He had a routine to carry out and it was time for it again. He was supposed to create a sterile field for himself and his hardware but that wasn’t always practical. Anyway it does not matter because I am a sterile field myself, he thought.

  He went downstairs and outside to his car, and from the trunk he took a bag of dialysate. In the house again, he watched the empty plastic bag fill, and then he emptied the new bag into himself and he rebuttoned his shirt and was finished.

  In the kitchen he sampled the flan; it was the color and consistency of milk and it was not going to gel, she had done something wrong. He locked the new deadbolts and then lay uncovered on the sofa. In four to six hours he would have to make another bag exchange. Some routines, DeWalt, are more accomodating than others. He could smell the leftovers on the dining room table. He could smell the souring scent of wine.

  The copper light of morning filled his eyes, a coppery taste upon his tongue. The sky looked like pounded metal. Sometimes this dichotomy of opposites, the beauty of a morning and the ugly feelings he had for himself and his life, sometimes they did not simply cancel each other out, sometimes they exacerbated one another. Now, as he drove home in the dawn light, still sleepy and chilled, the quiet beauty of the morning hurt him deeply.

  Inside his small house he prepared to dialyze himself again. There had been only one spare bag in the trunk of his car, so he had had to come home for another one. He wanted to get back to Elizabeth’s house before she woke up. It would be bad enough when she awoke, but worse if she found him gone. He had this to do first and then he would return.

  There was no morning inside his house. It was as warm and bright there as a fire that has gone out. Even with all the lights on there was no true brightness.

  Sometimes he felt like disconnecting himself permanently. He was a prisoner to the tube and bag. He was chained to it. Every six hours he would reach the end of the chain’s limit and be jerked back to the beginning. Sometimes he thought the inescapable repetition of it would suffocate him. When he tried to think into the future, to make plans or to entertain improbable ambitions, and he felt the chain dragging behind him, always shortening, growing heavier with each forward step, he actually became short of breath.

  His body confined him and boxed him in. It had become what the Buddhists call an occasional Hell, had hardened around him like the lump of ore taken from a mine in Derby, England, a rock which when split open released a toad, barely but still alive.

  Or like the split block of stone on display at the Smithsonian Institution, from whose solid center a horned lizard was freed; unconfined, the lizard lived for two days.

  Or like the fossilized form of the extinct newt found in a chalk quarry by a geologist from the University of Cambridge. When placed on a piece of paper in the sun, the newt began to move. When placed in a pond, it promptly swam away.

  And maybe someday someone will free you from your occasional Hell, DeWalt. Maybe after the rock has formed around you so solidly that you can not even wiggle a toe, maybe after you have survived in dormancy for half a million years, conscious of nothing but your pain and your past, maybe after you have had sufficient opportunity to reflect upon your mistakes, someone will serendipitously excavate you and expose you to the sun. You can take a startled breath then and stretch your atrophied muscles and then you will probably die. You will be released from this occasional Hell and if you are very lucky and good the one in your next life will not be so restricting.

  Finished now with the bag exchange, finished for a while, DeWalt wound the thin plastic tubing twice around his waist and flattened the empty bag atop it. He reached for a clean shirt and pulled it on. His hands felt numb. There was no feeling in the skin, no awareness, sensitivity. Nothing felt right when he held it; not the tube, not the shirt buttons. It came and went, this numbness, here now for no apparent reason. He flexed his fingers—chalksticks; twigs. His hands, neck, kneejoints, lower back, they were all turning against him, going their own way. He couldn’t count on anything anymore. Not his body, not his mind. Not deduction nor reflex nor perspicacity nor hunch. Not the cautionary instincts of a tired, battered heart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jan 6:

  Notation on Alex’s desk calendar, “Call D, ext. 236”

  Jan 19:

  Alex’s note, “Call D, 236”

  Feb 11:

  Alex’s note, “Call D, 236”

  Feb 18:

  Alex’s note, “Call D, 236”

  Mar 25:

  Alex’s note, “Call D, 236”

  Apr 3:

  Report of Fort Erie discoveries, New York Times

  Apr 7:

  Alex withdraws $2500 State Teachers Retirement System

  May 28:

  Firebombing of Kinetics rehearsal garage

  July 10:

  Alex withdraws $4500 STRS

  July 15–16:

  Catanzaro family vacation in Niagara Falls

  July 21:

  Robbery of Fort Erie, Toronto Times News

  Aug 16:

  Alex Catanzaro murdered

  Two entries on DeWalt’s calendar of events kept drawing his attention. He was sitting in the Catanzaro kitchen in a chair pulled close to the telephone on the wall, waiting for the telephone to ring, prepared to snatch the receiver off its hook the very moment the ringer sounded. It was nearly ten AM but he did not want the telephone to wake Elizabeth. Before leaving his own home earlier that morning, DeWalt had made a call to Trooper Abbott, and he had given Abbott the Catanzaro number as the place he could be reached for the next few hours. At his feet was a plate smeared with honey and the crumbs of a blueberry muffin; the browning core of a Macintosh apple.

  April 7, he read again. Why would Alex withdraw money from his retirement fund a month and a half prior to the firebombing of the Kinetics’ garage? Had the time span between the two events been a matter of days, even a week, the connection would be tighter, more easily made. And why, just a few days before this withdrawal, had Alex ceased admonishing himself to call DeWalt? DeWalt could come up with only two reasons why Alex had been so insistent and yet so negligent to speak with him: He wanted to confer with DeWalt the writer; or, he wanted to confer with DeWalt the investigator.

  The first explanation seemed the most plausible. “Hi, Ernest, Alex Catanzaro here, over in the History Department. Listen, the reason I’m calling is, I read your book and I reall
y enjoyed it, and the thing is, I’m writing a book of my own. It’s a historical novel, set in the early 19th century, but even so I felt I could benefit from the insights of a professional writer such as yourself. The truth is, I’m having a bitch of a time working certain things out.…”

  That would have been a fairly simple call to make. Other people certainly had no qualms buttonholing DeWalt for free advice, a peek at their manuscripts, the name of a good agent. From the look of Alex’s papers, though, he had barely yet begun to write the book. Maybe he was aware of his inability to get the book started, but he was embarrassed to admit it.

  But Alex’s repeated notations to call DeWalt seemed more than mere reminders. There was an escalating urgency to them. Was it mere coincidence that the firebombing had occurred only a few days after the final and most emphatic notation? DeWalt didn’t think so.

  Had Alex toyed with the idea of hiring DeWalt to somehow investigate Rodney Gillen? Perhaps even to harass, intimidate, or actually harm the boy? Of course it was possible: an erection will make a fool of any man. And it was not at all unusual, DeWalt knew, for people to assume that private investigators are well-versed in shady activities. Suffer No Fools had been riddled with violence and deceit. Had Alex made the all-too-common mistake of ascribing a book’s personality to its writer?

  This would explain, at least, why Alex, despite his own insistence, had been remiss in calling DeWalt. Alex, if he made the call, would be requesting an illegal service, or a service that would expose to another individual an adulterous affair that could wreck Alex’s marriage.

  Okay, DeWalt. Let’s assume that Alex wanted you to do a job for him. A job on Rodney Gillen. A job he eventually took care of himself. What, then, was the purpose of the firebombing? Obviously, to frighten Gillen or one of the other band members. A message. And what might that message have been—please play “Hunka Hunka Burning Love”?