An Occasional Hell Read online

  “I was wondering if I could talk with you a few minutes today,” she says. “I need somebody … experienced, I guess.”

  “I honestly don’t think I could be of much help,” he says.

  “The thing is, the police have this idea in their heads.…”

  “Have you been charged with anything?”

  “They’re convinced I did it,” she says. “Or that I planned it or something ridiculous like that.”

  The cheese is oozing out of the folded eggs now, filling the skillet bottom. Curling up. Turning brown. “But you haven’t been charged,” he says.

  “It just isn’t true,” she tells him. “I can understand how, to them, it might look like the truth. But it isn’t!”

  It seldom is, he thinks. The ham is burning now too, the scent of charred flesh. Everything is burning. “I can put you in touch with a good agency,” he says. “Or maybe your lawyer can recommend somebody.”

  “My lawyer was my husband’s lawyer. He was Alex’s friend so.… Anyway, I don’t have a lawyer.”

  At what temperature will butter combust? But there is probably no butter left in the skillet by now, an unpalatable brown crust, brown stink. He says, “This is out of my league, Mrs. Catanzaro. Even when I was investigating, and that’s a good while back, I never got involved with anything like this. I was strictly third-rate. I’m sorry.”

  He should not be eating eggs and butter and cheese anyway, at least not all at once, not in the overdose quantity there in that skillet. He shouldn’t but the hell with shouldn’t, he wants an omelet this morning, damn it.

  “I just thought that since you and my husband were colleagues, that you might take a more personal interest in it. Because you knew each other. That you were friends or … whatever.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve never even spoken with your husband,” he says.

  There is a long pause. “I got your number off his desk blotter. It’s on his calendar in no fewer than six places.”

  “I’ve never once spoken to him,” he says.

  “Then I don’t.… But apparently he must have intended to call you. I mean, why else would he have written down your name and number so many times?”

  Those are his last three eggs and there is nothing left to eat but cold cereal. The kitchen stinks of burned, still burning peppers and cheese and ham, and he is going to have to start the day with toast and corn flakes.

  “I’m sorry, but I really don’t see how I could be of any help. I honestly didn’t know your husband at all, I wish I did. And as for the investigative work, I’ve been out of that for too long. I’m in no shape for it anymore, believe me. Not for something as important as this.”

  Elizabeth Catanzaro says nothing. Her silence is anything but silent, he can hear the fear inside each breath, the terror of helplessness in each inhalation. He had once made a career out of listening to silences and in learning to differentiate them, to discern their weight and depth, and hers is the kind he always liked least to overhear. There is no anger in it nor expectation nor any emotion that might eventually lead her somewhere. It is a dead-end silence because there is nowhere left to go, it is the silence at the end of the road, the silence at the bottom of the well. It is a dead-end silence here in his sunny kitchen stinking of the smoke of incinerated food.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Catanzaro. I wish I could help. But it’s just impossible. I’m sorry.”

  She says nothing and he knows that that is the end of it. She will stand there in silence holding the phone to her ear until he gives her a reason to stop.

  “If you decide you want the name of that agency,” he tells her, “or the name of a lawyer you can trust, call me back. I should be here most of the morning.”

  Again he tells her he is sorry and that he is going to hang up now, but he holds onto the receiver another thirty seconds, he knows she is doing the same. He doesn’t want to let her go too brusquely, doesn’t want her to think he doesn’t sympathize, he does. He has been gutshot himself and he knows some of the effects. But he slips the receiver into its cradle finally. He feels embarrassed; he has an urge to wash his hands.

  Instead he goes to the stove and shuts off the flame. There is not a salvageable bit of food left in the skillet. He stares at the charred scab of egg, a blackened clod. Cowflop. With a metal spatula he tries to scrape the omelet into the trash but the omelet and the Teflon are one now, indivisible. It is an old skillet anyway, already scratched and dented, the handle loose. He has a habit of holding onto things too long.

  He cools the skillet with cold water in the sink, the metal hisses at him, spits hot black spit. When the skillet is silent he drops it in the trash.

  Now if he wants any breakfast he will have to eat cold cereal. But he does not want any breakfast now. The smoke or stench or silence of the bright summer morning has turned his stomach.

  “Hang up the goddamn phone,” he says, and he stands there a long time waiting for it to happen. He stands there a long time listening, as if he will somehow hear that other phone unknown miles away being replaced. As if he will hear in the distant click of finality something to change the way he feels.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Alex says, “Are you hungry yet, baby?”

  And Jeri says, “A little, I guess. Are you?”

  “I’m starved. Slip your dress on and we’ll go.”

  “Why can’t I just go like this?”

  “You go like that and the produce manager is going to jump you in the melons.”

  “Maybe that’s what I’m counting on.”

  At the Shop & Save in Pawtawney, fifteen miles upriver, Alex Catanzaro purchases a quart of orange juice, a halfpint container of artichoke salad, a half-pint of Tahitian fruit salad, one rye bagel, one jelly doughnut, two peaches and two large cups of coffee. The receipt, containers, and uneaten portions of food will be found in the grocery bag in the back seat of the car. The cashier who rang up the purchase at approximately 10:45 AM can not state emphatically that Catanzaro shopped there every Saturday morning, but she and other store personnel have definitely seem him on more than one occasion. No one can recall having seen the girl.

  “Did you get my jelly doughnut?” Jeri asks when he returns to the car.

  “They were all out of blueberry. You’ll have to settle for raspberry this time.”

  “And what else?” she asks.

  He hands her the bag. “One of these days you’re going to have to start eating right, you know.”

  She holds up the container of artichoke salad. “I suppose this oily mess is your idea of eating right.”

  “The only reason I buy that stuff is because it makes my tongue slippery.”

  “Hurry up, take a real big bite.”

  Later, driving back toward the river, he tells her, “Open up one of those coffees for me, okay?”

  She punches down the V-shaped flap on the lid, then hands the cup to him. Coffee splashes out of the cup and onto his trousers. “Ouch, damn it,” he says.

  “Oooh, it didn’t burn him, did it? You want want me to blow on him and cool him off?”

  “Keep it up and I’ll spill the rest.”

  They return to the spot where they had earlier parked, at the end of the narrow private lane a quarter-mile from the highway, the lane dead-ending where the river forms a shallow inlet. On the landward side of this lane are thickly clustered oaks, maples, chokecherry and sassafras trees, here and there a black walnut, long-reaching slender-armed scarlet sumac, an occasional fir tree or pine.

  These woods continue for another half-mile behind where the car sits, the woods ascending in a rise of two hundred feet over that half-mile, bordering finally but not subjugated by—in fact threatening to reclaim—the grassless dooryard of the Jewett family. It was Clifford Jewett who posted the NO TRESPASSING sign at the mouth of the lane, Clifford Jewett who owns all the property from the inlet upward to his sunless clapboard house.

  Except for the encroachment of the inlet itself, flanked on both sides
by a curtain of cattails—the center of the cattail wall cut away as an entry to the inlet, a place to sit on a maple stump and fish for bottom feeders, bass and catfish; an entryway wide enough for the launching of a rowboat—this lover’s rendezvous is concealed too from the pleasure boats which traverse the wide brown river May through September. Along the river grows a collonade of slender birches and other young trees, their trunks all but hidden in the tangle of choking weeds that spring from the flattened matting of previous years’ growth, of decayed foliage regularly added to by the floods of April and October.

  Close all around the inlet and lane, between the car and the woods behind, between the car and the river birches, grow thin blonde straws of scrubgrass, clumps of weed, Indian tobacco, elderberry bushes and Queen Anne’s lace.

  Remember smoking Indian tobacco when you were a boy, DeWalt? How old were you then—ten? eleven?

  Older. Everytime you’d smoke you would get an erection. The smoking made you want to throw up but there was something very sexy about it.

  Maybe you should smoke some Indian tobacco now.

  Maybe you should concentrate on the job at hand.

  What’s the matter, DeWalt—afraid of your memories?

  Memories are the hemorrhoids of the mind, DeWalt. What good are they except to annoy, intrude, interrupt? They keep a man from being who he has to be. From doing what most needs done. If a man could live without memories, DeWalt.…

  Ten feet in front of the car, close enough so that Alex Catanzaro must be careful not to drive over it, is a fire pit built of seven rounded stones. The pit is full of ashes and charred wood, fish scales and bones, the ringtabs of beer cans.

  On sunny warm days a buzz of insects resonates from the grasses around the inlet. Water skippers and tadpoles and sometimes a sluggish gray bass hug the shadows beneath the cattails. Redwing blackbirds flit from one cattail to the next. Dragonflies skim the water.

  On this morning, the 16th of August, the sky is not sunny. Even when Alex picks Jeri up behind the courthouse, nearly three hours earlier, already the sky is gray, low with cumulus clouds. Now, with their early lunch from the Shop & Save finished, the car parked again in its weed-trampled space, facing the fire pit, the river, with Jeri Gillen’s dress again neatly folded and laid atop the rear seat, Alex’s clothes beside hers, even more meticulously folded, there is a wind in the sky now, a wind as blue as serge, scratchy and hot. The clouds look like Brillo pads thumbsqueezed flat, oozing dirty suds. From these clouds come growls of thunder; muffled detonations. The air is as thick as silt, so muddied with heat that all the car windows are rolled down despite the gnats and other biting insects harried by the scent of rain.

  Alex thinks to himself that it is probably raining already in Menona, the storm is coming from that direction. During these latter sessions of lovemaking, after the early madness and then lunch and then a slower, more measured consideration of pleasure, at these times he often finds his mind wandering, distracted from the damp and sticky gleam of her skin, his thoughts turned to other concerns, to needs not so easily gratified.

  She is a wonderful girl but inexperienced in everything but this, and their conversations are not what he would term meaningful, they are of trivial matters, of movies and television shows she has seen, of gossip about other professors and students who frequent the restaurant where she works.

  The only thing she is especially good at talking about is sex. She is as good talking as she is doing. She can make a double entendre from any phrase he utters, whether she understands the phrase or not, and even though she has no idea what double entendre means. She could turn that term into a double entendre too, just by the arch of her eyebrows, the suggestive curl of smile.

  He supposes he loves her in a way but he can never separate the thought of her from the idea of sex and he can not imagine being with her and not fucking her. He likes the way she says fuck and the way she asks for it and the ways she tells him what she is going to do to him. She is easy with all the words that he, even after three martinis and in the company of his colleagues, can not say without a consciousness that they are novelties for him, words at most times foreign to his mouth.

  She is for him the embodiment of sex. He loves her for this and even loves the need she invokes in him, loves being addicted to her despite and maybe because of the danger of the addiction.

  In fact during the latter half of these mornings he can be aroused more easily by the abstractions of sex than by the physical proximity or the palpable textures of it. When she wants to make love again but he is not yet ready, he will ready himself not by touching or being touched but by playing with the knife of possibilities.

  “When we finally get the chance to spend a whole night together,” he says, “maybe even go away somewhere for a weekend, what are we going to do with all that time?”

  “Guess,” Jeri says.

  “Tell me. What do you like to do best?”

  “I don’t want to do anything except fuck.”

  “That might get boring after a while.”

  “Not the way I do it.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “You’ll see when the time comes.”

  “I want to hear about it now.”

  And so she relates to him in exquisite detail all the joys of her tongue and mouth and ass and cunt, of how hard she will fuck him and how deep and fast and slow and of the times he will come in her mouth and the things she will wear and touch him with and the improbable positions and acrobatics of love. He will see these things in his head while smelling her very real perfume and the perfume of their earlier union, and he will feel her body moving again, excited by her own promises, and he will be ready for her once more.

  And now he does not see the rain as it begins to fall in fat heavy drops, pocking craters in the loose dirt of the lane, splashing crowns of moisture from the river’s surface. He does not heed the thunder nor the sudden bursts of light and noise as startling as discovery. Perhaps he feels the coolness of rain as it blows in through the open windows, he feels the spray across his naked legs and back, but he does not heed this breath of wind, he does not rise in time to look, to flee from whomever it is now standing there outside his door. He has no time to defend himself, to run. He sees and heeds none but the last of the signs, the final lightburst, the gunshot itself, that culminating explosion of censure he has always expected and feared but never in a form so conclusive.

  Whether imagination, delusion, or actual memory, DeWalt could not name it; he knew only that when this intrusion came upon him, it ruined him for the rest of the day. It always came without announcement, as unexpected as a cluster headache, as damaging, a kind of internal movie from which he could not look away. Usually it came at night, a brief nightmare preceding sleep. But occasionally it came in full daylight, which somehow made it all the worse. If he were to describe it to someone, and he never would, he would compare it to a petit mal seizure. An observer would probably not even notice it, but DeWalt would notice, and it would leave him shaken and weak for the remainder of the day.

  This time when it happened he was halfway to Elizabeth Catanzaro’s house, the afternoon sun glaring off the windshield. His left forearm rested on the windowsill, warm air streaming past his face. Miles Davis was on the tape player, the elegiac “Sanctuary” cut. There was nothing happening that should have set DeWalt off again and yet suddenly there it was, that imagined or remembered thing.

  He is in the ambulance and the ambulance is cold and he can feel through his back the speed and vibration of the vehicle’s rush to the hospital. He can feel his heart trying to push itself out beat after beat through the holes in his belly. He is aware of all this, even aware of being aware of it, as if he is experiencing everything now from two perspectives, in first and third person. Then there is a click in the back of his head and the first person awareness disappears. His nostrils are no longer clogged with the paste-thick scent of blood on a Turkish carpet in a room that smells of sandalwood
incense. Now he smells nothing at all.

  Moving in silence, the pain still there but different somehow, more like a heaviness than a piercing throbbing ache, a weighty kind of numbness, he stands up in the back of the ambulance. The two attendants, both male, do not seem to be looking at him. He turns to the rear door and pushes it open. The doors swing out wide and he jumps clear, landing hard, rolling on the pavement, and he wonders how he knew to tuck and roll like this, how does the body know to do such a thing?

  When he rights himself and on his hands and knees looks up, there is not a sign of the ambulance anywhere, no wink of red taillights, no fading whine of siren, no stink of exhaust. He looks around and does not know this place, this stretch of road bare of buildings and people and empty of all traffic. “Where were those bastards taking me?” he wonders aloud.

  He is somewhere outside the city, somewhere so far from the city that he has never seen this place before. The ambulance must have been moving very fast, he must have passed out awhile, because it is early in the morning now, the light is gray and the fog just beginning to lift from the road, a macadam road, blacktopped, smooth, newly surfaced.

  Before and behind him the road continues without turn between two broad fields of wild mustard, fields stretching uninterrupted to each far horizon. He is resting on his knees on the left edge of this road, his feet in the soft clean dirt of the shoulder. The fog is thinning quickly. He can distinguish through this haze the ripe golden clusters of mustard seed. There are no trees in any direction, only the wide yellow field with the black road cutting through it. There is a song in his ear like the plucking of a guitar string, a high metal whine, short, stiff, a single note repeating.

  Approximately two hundred yards behind and then the same distance in front of him the road gently lifts onto a ridge, blue-gray morning all around. He is lying in the lowest part of a shallow basin, its field of yellow flowers appearing at its farthest points as uniformly colored as a pool of golden water, a sunset lake.