An Occasional Hell Read online

  When he looks again at the sky it is surprisingly clear, so purely blue. Wondrously so. Not a cloud. Not a bird. Unusual. Too clear, that sky. He has never before seen such a sky. So wondrously pure. It makes him sad to look at it. You will never see a sky like this again, DeWalt. The inevitable loss of it seems terrible, he can not bear it. His chest is thick with grief, his throat constricts.

  He becomes aware then of a vague ticking noise far to his right, a clicking faster than the tick of any clock. It is coming from over the ridge behind him, in the direction from which he believes he himself has come. Then something crests the hill, a slowmotion shadow in the center of the road, a blurred silhouette against the lightening sky.

  The ticking grows louder and the figure closer. It begins to assume definite shape and then color and then feature. It is a boy on a bicycle. The boy appears to be around nine or ten years old and he is pedaling very hard to reach DeWalt. Attached by a clothespin to the rear fork of his bike, so that it will click in the spinning spokes, is a baseball card. The boy wears a red baseball cap but DeWalt can not make out the insignia on it, the team’s name. The bicycle shines like new but it is a type DeWalt has not seen for a very long time, a red 24” Schwinn with fat tires and wide fenders, red and yellow plastic streamers whipping back from the handlegrips.

  The boy stands on his coaster brakes and slides to a halt beside DeWalt. “Climb onto the crossbar,” the boy says. His forehead is shiny with perspiration. There are beads of moisture above his lip.

  DeWalt flattens his hands against the cool black road and tries to push himself up.

  “We’re just going to the other side of the hill,” the boy tells him. He is short of breath but smiling, breathing hard.

  “I can’t get up,” DeWalt says.

  “I’m not supposed to get off my bike.”

  DeWalt reaches out and grabs hold of the chain guard and drags himself closer. Reaching progressively higher on the frame he manages to get to his feet.

  “Sit on the crossbar,” says the boy. “It’s not far now.”

  DeWalt drops his weight onto the crossbar. The metal is cold across his buttocks. There is no strength in his stomach or back to hold himself up so he has to lean forward over the handlebars, laying into their U, his body twisted at the waist.

  The boy turns the wheel against DeWalt’s weight and aims the bike up the center of the road. He stands on the pedal to set them moving again but they do not go anywhere.

  “You’ll have to lift your feet up,” the boy says. “Hold them off the ground. Quit dragging them.”

  “I can’t,” DeWalt says.

  “You’re too heavy, I can’t get started. You should be lighter than this.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t lift my legs. I’m cold, I can’t stop shivering.”

  “You’re not supposed to be like that.”

  “Tell me what to do if you know. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You’d better get off,” the boy says.

  “You can’t just leave me here. Can you send somebody else?”

  The boy jerks his handlebars hard to the right and DeWalt falls off, he lands on his knees and then falls forward with his hands sliding into the soft dirt. He turns and reaches for the bicycle but the boy pushes away, he glides around in a full circle so that he ends up facing the same direction as before but out of DeWalt’s reach.

  “Does anybody know I’m here?” DeWalt asks.

  The boy lifts his cap and with the flat of his hand wipes the sweat from his forehead. He resets the brim to hang low over his eyes.

  “Tell me what you smell,” the boy says.

  DeWalt does not understand.

  “What can you smell?” says the boy. “Tell me if you smell anything.”

  Until now DeWalt has not realized how congested his sinuses are, how prohibitive of scent. He shakes his head no.

  “You can’t smell the mustard seed?”

  DeWalt tries again. “I’m sorry. There’s so much of it. It’s beautiful but … I wish I could.”

  The boy looks away. He seems annoyed now; somehow disgusted; as if he has been tricked. DeWalt feels inclined to apologize again, but before he can speak the boy shoves away, pedaling hard, standing, elbows pointed out like wings as he hunches over the handlebars. The boy grows small in the distance, the steady ticktickticking fades. Then his silhouette crests the hill and then sinks out of view and the clicking of the wheel dies away so softly that it is impossible to tell when it actually stopped.

  By now the sun is bright on the fields and road. DeWalt feels the sunlight on the side of his face, warm and skin-tightening, but the warmth does not go deep enough and he can not stop shivering. The wild mustard is a brilliant yellow in the sun, a blinding beautiful yellow glare that stings his eyes finally so that he has to look away from it. He lays his cheek to the road and tries to smell the mustard seeds. The macadam is cool and a dull even black. It is all he can see for a very long time. It seems to him that he sleeps for awhile. When the coldness wakes him and he reaches for the pain in his belly, everything is white except for the woman wearing a dark blue dress and wide-brimmed blue hat who is holding his hand.

  “I couldn’t smell anything,” he tells her. She smiles and squeezes his hand, and after that he sleeps again and while he sleeps the woman goes away.

  And then that was the end of it and where it always ended. He awoke expecting to find himself in the hospital but this time he was in his car. It took him a few moments to remember what he was doing there. He glanced down at his odometer and saw that he had gone too far, he had missed the turnoff to the Catanzaro house. The postmaster in Menona had told him to drive six miles out of town and then look for a gravel driveway on his right; there would be a white mailbox with a Confederate flag on it. He turned the car around, drove a mile and a half and saw the mailbox.

  The driveway was long and gently winding and bordered on both sides by hemlocks, so tall and dense that only broken strings of sunlight reached through to the needle-matted floor. With the car window down he could smell the hemlocks and the wonderful coolness beneath their branches and he could hear crows somewhere but he could not see them. It was not until the car rounded a corner, turning at a right angle past the final hemlock, that he found the crows, four of them heading for the trees at the back end of the cornfield a couple hundred yards behind the Catanzaro house.

  DeWalt turned off his tape player. Still fifty yards from the house, he brought the car to a halt. A pleasant sense of deja vu had come over him. Emerging so suddenly from that shadowy tunnel of hemlocks, breaking into this wide sunny clearing of yard and house and cornfield, it put him forty years into his past. One of his uncles had owned a place like this, secluded and peaceful, a place that seemed to pop up out of nowhere, a parcel of order and cleanliness and reassuring routine.

  The lawn surrounding the Catanzaro home took up well over two acres, was flat and neatly mown and the two-story white frame house sat in the center of it. The near side and the rear of the grounds were flanked by fieldland, tall dusty-tassled spears of corn for as far as DeWalt could see to his right, but giving away behind the house to a stand of mixed timber, aging massive oaks, the white-barked aspens and paper birches.

  These same woods encroached closer on the far side of the house, continuing forward to the highway. The house and property were shielded then on all sides, shielded, at least, from the noise and view of the highway, if not from the more insidious contagions.

  DeWalt had spent many weekends at a place like this when he was a boy, weekends and summers with his aunt and uncle. But they had divorced when he was fifteen and a coal company bought their farm and stripmined it. The pond where he had caught frogs became a catch basin for sulphurous runoff. He had seen the place eviscerated and he had not returned to it since. The land had been reclaimed of course but that was not enough reason to return to it.

  But this place could easily have been a reincarnation of his uncle’s. Scattered behind and t
o the sides of the house were peach trees, Seckel pear trees, Granny Smith and Golden Delicious apple trees, a plum tree, a grape arbor, raspberry vines, a garden as big as a basketball court, a three-tiered strawberry patch, two bluebird boxes, a hummingbird feeder, patches of peonies, lilac, marigolds and chrysanthemums.

  “This woman has her hands full,” DeWalt said.

  It was beautiful but of a hard-won beauty and it was the kind of place where DeWalt would live if things had been different for him. He had made a lot of money from his novel but he had lived off that money too long, doing nothing. Now he lived in a small house on a quiet street filled with small houses, and he had no practical need for a place this large.

  But certain needs are anything but practical, DeWalt.

  That’s true, DeWalt. But you’re not here to enjoy the sights, are you?

  He could have let it end with the telephone conversation that morning, but all day long he had thought of her standing in an empty house holding a dead telephone receiver to her ear. It was absurd but he could not shake the feeling that she was still in that position, still waiting. So he had written down the names and addresses of some reliable people he knew and he had that paper in his shirt pocket now.

  So get to it, DeWalt. Do something different this week: do somebody some good.

  The front door was not locked but there was no answer when he knocked on it. There was a side entrance that opened onto a pantry, and here through the unlocked screen door he could see into the pantry and a portion of the kitchen. He knocked again but the house was silent. He tried not to think of her upstairs sitting on the edge of the bed with an endlessly beeping receiver in her hand. He took the slip of paper from his pocket and was about to wedge it between the door and metal frame when a couple of dogs began to bark somewhere behind the house.

  Toward the far corner of the wide backyard there was a small kennel, a doghouse the size of a child’s playhouse, with attached to it a chainlink dog-run. Elizabeth Catanzaro was inside this enclosure, had apparently just then entered it, a large bowl of dog food in each hand. Two Golden Retrievers were barking happily and leaping up and down beside her, their front paws reaching well above her head with each jump. The dogs appeared ecstatic but not once did they touch her. She set the bowls on the ground, stepped back and watched the dogs as they ate, long snouts deep inside the bowls, bowls wobbling and skidding across the packed earth, tails whipping back and forth. In little more than a minute the dogs had emptied the bowls. They looked up at her then, grinning and licking their black gums, tails snapping like whips.

  Elizabeth Catanzaro picked up the bowls and squeezed out past the gate, pushing the dogs back with her foot. She was halfway back to the house before she looked up and saw Ernest DeWalt standing there. She gasped out loud, startled, and stopped moving.

  “I’m Ernie DeWalt,” he said quickly. “Sorry, I should have cleared my throat or something,” and he smiled, hoping to elicit a smile, but did not.

  She came forward again, again looking at the ground as she walked. She knelt at a water tap attached to the rear of the house and rinsed the dogs’ bowls clean. She filled one bowl with water and set it on the ground, then filled the other bowl.

  “I just dropped by to give you this,” said DeWalt, the slip of paper between his finger and thumb. “The name and address of that agency I mentioned on the phone.”

  She cocked her head and looked at him. Cold water splashed into the metal bowl. When the bowl was full she shut off the tap and picked up both bowls and started toward the kennel again. Without looking at him, she said, “I’ll be right back.”

  She was an attractive woman but this did not surprise him. Even if he had not already seen her face on TV he would have expected her to be attractive. As a young investigator he had often wondered why men married to comely women are so frequently unfaithful, and not rarely with a far less attractive woman. But over the years he had learned that this was the rule and not the exception. The same held true for unfaithful women, of course, who often chose extraordinarily unlikely partners. It was a matter of ambition, he supposed. The attention and flattery and ego-gratification attractive people feel entitled to. There were other explanations too but it was all a matter of ego. Ego was a simplistic explanation but satisfactory because he did not require much in the way of explanation anymore. People lied to and cheated the people they loved while being inordinately kind to strangers, it was an observable fact. He did not have to understand gravity either to feel the effect of it.

  Elizabeth Catanzaro was a small woman but she walked into the kennel without fear of the two large and noisy dogs. She appeared to be maybe five feet four inches tall, maybe one hundred and fifteen pounds. The dogs yelped and leapt for the bowls but still they did not touch her, they maintained a respect she had apparently instilled in them long before today.

  She’s not the kind of woman, DeWalt hypothesized, to blame herself for her husband’s infidelity. She wouldn’t blame herself for driving him away. She would feel betrayed by him; angered. But was she capable of rage? Of a methodical exorcism of her rage?

  She scratched the heads of both Golden Retreivers as they lapped sloppily at the water. Then she stepped outside the kennel and locked the gates and came striding toward him, her step long and purposeful, legs and hips thin but certainly not shapeless in pale faded jeans, the long-tailed yellow cotton shirt not tucked into the jeans, sleeves rolled above the elbows. She wore tennis shoes and had the kind of small strong body that would look very good in tennis whites on the country club courts. It also looked very good returning from feeding the dogs—all of which made DeWalt too aware of his own body, the chronic fatigue and weakness, his paunch of half-living, half-plastic flesh.

  She had a strong chin and dark intelligent eyes, short brown hair stylishly cut although not at that moment stylishly combed, lovely small breasts and strong square shoulders. She wore no make-up and there was a natural paleness to her lips, her mouth thin and unsmiling, tired, the curve of a crow’s wings in the distant sky. She had spent too many hours in the sun as a teenager and those hours and her young laughter had etched deep lines at the corners of her eyes. Still, he admired the confidence with which she moved and the unselfconscious sureness of her body.

  She came toward him with her hands in her hip pockets, walking without hesitation but with eyes lowered until she stopped an arm’s length away, then looked up, squinting a little, squinting, he now saw, because the whites of her eyes were streaked with red.

  “Those are beautiful dogs,” he said.

  “You want them?”

  He tried another smile. “I live in town. In a house not much bigger than that kennel out there.”

  “Then maybe you should buy this place,” she said. “Make me an offer.”

  Again he held the slip of paper toward her. “This is a good agency, Mrs. Catanzaro. If they say they’re too busy to take you on, which they probably are, you mention my name. Tell them I promised you that they would take the case. They’ll call me up and give me hell for that, but I don’t mind.”

  She took the paper and even looked at it, but without unfolding it to read what he had written. She held it by a corner between finger and thumb, delicately, as if it were a butterfly perhaps, a curiosity, a captured thing.

  Still looking at its blank face, she said, “Whatever you were involved in with my husband, I think I have the right to know.” Now she looked up at him.

  “I told you on the phone. I’ve never even spoken to him. In any case, not more than a passing hello.”

  “Then why is your name and phone number on his desk calendar and in his other papers? Call DeWalt, it says, with sometimes your home number, sometimes your number at school.”

  “He never called me. Or if he did, he never reached me.”

  She studied him hard for ten seconds more. Then with a small nod she brought her eyes to the folded paper again, staring as if to read through it, to read something not written there. Almost impercept
ibly, she shook her head.

  He thought of touching her, a hand on the shoulder. He wanted to do it. But he was afraid that his hand might feel cold against her, and then how would she react? His fingertips often felt numb with cold, knuckles stiff, muscles as taut as frozen rubber bands. There was frost in his nostrils, he could smell it with every breath. Even in summer there was snow in his lungs.

  “Well,” she said, and looked up. “You came all this way out here … can I get you something to drink? Coffee? or a beer? a glass of iced tea?”

  “Thank you, no.” He looked at the field of corn behind the kennel. He could see no barn or equipment shed large enough for a tractor. Behind him and to his right was a two-story garage, but no other buildings.

  “Who does the farming?” he asked.

  “We own the property, but we lease it out to a neighbor. He lives down that way. You can’t see it when the corn’s so high.”

  “How many acres do you have?”

  “A hundred and eighty. Don’t ask me why.”

  “You don’t care for rural living?”

  She started to say something, but stopped. Finally she said, “It wears thin after a while.”

  Owning so much acreage had been her husband’s idea, that was what DeWalt read into her remark. It had been her husband’s idea but he had always been too busy to do so much as mow the lawn. The dogs were his dogs because he had thought how wonderful it would be to take them pheasant hunting on his hundred and eighty acres but the dogs had probably never even seen a pheasant unless one happened to fly past the kennel, and it was Elizabeth Catanzaro who cared for them and loved them. She had probably been a good tennis player once but DeWalt doubted that she had visited the club recently. She could have been a faculty wife getting bloated and stupid on ten AM martinis except that her gentleman farmer husband had never had time to feed the dogs.