An Occasional Hell Page 6

  Draper Jewett looked like a sickly twin to his older brother—Clifford being fifty-four years old, Draper fifty-two—both men bald but for their horseshoe fringes of stiff black hair, both men squinting at DeWalt through the sweat-filmed lenses of black framed glasses.

  Draper’s pot gut was not appreciatively smaller than his brother’s but in fact appeared more distended, grotesque, because of his scrawny limbs; he weighed forty pounds less than his brother’s 195. And Draper’s chest heaved even as he watched DeWalt walking toward them; he seemed to be struggling to pull another breath from the dank air. Yellow threads of perspiration shone on his forehead, another clustered above his upper lip, another in the hollow of his long lupine chin. His skin was several shades darker than Clifford’s but it was not a healthy coloration, a saffron shade of jaundice. He had the face of a yellow stone, the mouth a mere scratch, empty gouges for eyes. Clifford, on the other hand, despite his more robust physique, his round bulb of head with features too small, features undeveloped like those of a fetus, his coloring was more than merely pallid, it was achromatic.

  DeWalt smiled at both men. He was about to call out a greeting when a loud pop sounded behind him; he felt his stomach turn, felt for just an instant all the strength flee from his legs. Then the sound registered and he knew it had not been a gunshot and he turned to look at his car; a dead chunk of branch had dropped onto the roof, scratching the finish. He looked at the Jewetts and saw them grinning, Draper’s sneer broad and wolfish, showing yellow teeth; Clifford’s thinlipped smile as tight as a scratch.

  DeWalt laughed uneasily. Jesus, he thought, your nerves are shot. You don’t belong out here anymore.

  “Howdy,” he called then, and immediately regretted it, knowing they might think his rhubarb greeting a mockery, patronizing.

  Because it is patronizing, he told himself. You better watch your step, buster.

  No sooner had DeWalt walked past the front porch than a tiny brown blur came streaking through a tear in the screen door, a short-legged low-slung streak of teeth and noise, yelping shrilly, charging for DeWalt’s leg. As near as DeWalt could determine it was a cross between a Dachshund and a Chihauhau, a frenetic hairless thing that seemed all belly and teeth, a short stub of tail and pointed bat ears. It seized the cuff of DeWalt’s trouser, and, drooling spittle, whipped its rodent head back and forth, growling, nearly standing on its chin as its hind legs scrabbled air.

  “Unless you give him a good kick,” said Draper Jewett grinning, “he’s not about to let go of you.”

  DeWalt watched the dog a moment longer; the animal appeared to be generating energy rather than expending it. Or perhaps DeWalt was feeling weaker by the minute, unprepared for falling branches and laughable attack dogs, unprepared for the incessant absurdity of life beyond his small house, his classroom.

  He slipped the toe of his right foot under the dog’s belly finally and exerted a gentle pressure upward, lifting until all four stubby legs were pumping air. The dog unbuckled its teeth from DeWalt’s cuff, flipped off his foot and onto the ground, righted himself and attacked DeWalt’s other leg.

  “Tippy!” Clifford Jewett growled. “Goddamn you mutt, get away from there.” He picked up a clump of dirt and threw it. The clod struck the ground just short of DeWalt, exploding in a spray of small wet chunks. Tippy turned and looked at him.

  “Go on, get out from there!” Clifford said. Tippy retreated to the top porch step, where he turned, faced DeWalt, and launched into a chorus of highpitched barks.

  “Leta!” Clifford called toward the house. “Come and get your goddamn dog out of here before I bash him with a shovel!”

  Aleta Jewett came to the door then. She held open the screen and said, not loud, without a glance in DeWalt’s direction, “Come on here. Inside now.” Then both she and the dog disappeared from view.

  DeWalt had had but a glimpse of her but enough to be surprised by her age, which, to his eye, was close to seventy years; surprising because, according to the Menona policeman he had spoken to an hour earlier, the only woman who lived with the brothers was neither mother nor sister, but Clifford’s wife.

  Now, with the dog gone, DeWalt felt engulfed by the silence. He was perspiring heavily and his clothes felt heavy on him, trousers dragging on his waist, thin shirt pulling on his shoulders. This damn humidity plays hell with a man’s dignity, he thought as he hitched up his trousers. Then, having tugged them too high, he had to free them from his sticky crotch.

  He forced a smile. “Good watchdog you got there.”

  “Beats the shit out of a German Sheperd,” Draper said. “Strikes quicker and eats less.”

  Nodding agreeably, DeWalt approached the ragged edge of the wide hole in which both Jewetts stood, their heads perhaps two feet below his own. He tried to keep his expression free from any reaction to the rich warm scent rising up from the hole.

  “Full up, is it?” he asked.

  Neither Jewett replied. Clifford had ceased smiling.

  Now DeWalt hunkered down on the edge of the hole. “My name is Ernie DeWalt,” he said, and held his smile. “I’m doing a little work for Elizabeth Catanzaro.”

  “Who’s she supposed to be?” Clifford asked.

  DeWalt kept smiling. “The name Catanzaro doesn’t sound familiar to you?”

  Again the men said nothing. The lenses of their glasses seemed smoked, fogged with the film of dried sweat.

  DeWalt said, “Alex Catanzaro was the fella who got himself shot a few days ago on that piece of land of yours down by the river. Elizabeth is his wife. Or widow, I guess, to be exact.”

  “Who says it’s my land?” Clifford asked.

  “Court records.”

  Clifford stared at him a moment longer. Then, leaning the shovel handle against his chest, he removed his glasses. With the soiled tail of his tee-shirt he cleaned the lenses, all the while studying DeWalt. Clifford’s eyes surprised DeWalt. They were as green as a lizard’s and just as protrusive: bulging, naked eyes, unshaded by eyelashes or even transparent filaments of hair. And when he blinked, as he did but once during the next full minute, the action was unnaturally slow, a lugubrious rolling of naked skin over the bulging green balls, so slow that DeWalt could actually see the eyeballs roll upward in their sockets. DeWalt looked away then, he looked at the yellow ground, until he saw peripherally that Jewett had replaced his glasses.

  “What I was wondering,” DeWalt said, “is if any of you folks up here might have heard anything unusual that day.”

  “I heard a rabbit fart,” said Draper. “Now that’s something you don’t get to hear too often.”

  DeWalt smiled and picked up a small clump of sticky earth. He squeezed it between his finger and thumb until it broke apart. “But you didn’t hear a gunshot? Or maybe a woman screaming? It would have been around eleven AM or so.”

  Clifford said, “The state police already took down everything we know about that.”

  “I just thought you might have remembered something new since then.”

  “That’d be pretty hard to do if there’s nothing new to remember.”

  DeWalt nodded, then broke another clod of dirt.

  Clifford said, “I haven’t been bustin’ my ass here just so that you can knock dirt back into this hole, you know.”

  DeWalt looked up. Clifford’s lenses were still opaque. “Catanzaro and his girlfriend spent every Saturday morning for the past year and a half parked down there on your property. How is it that none of you were aware of that?”

  How is it that you let yourself get talked into this, DeWalt?

  “Seems to me,” DeWalt said, “that in all that time, it being your property and all, one of you would have wandered down there at least once and maybe caught them going at it.”

  “Seems that way, don’t it,” Clifford said.

  “What do you folks usually do on a Saturday morning? Not last Saturday in particular. Any Saturday morning.”

  “We mind our own business,” Clifford said.
“What do you do?”

  DeWalt looked at Draper now. “That’s a nice little inlet down there. What’s the biggest bass you ever pulled out of those cattails?”

  Clifford said, “She’s still claiming she didn’t do it, is that it?”

  The stink from the septic tank stung DeWalt’s eyes. “You folks were home last Saturday morning, weren’t you?”

  “What’d we tell the police?” Clifford asked.

  They had told the police that at or about eleven AM on August 16th, Clifford Jewett was underneath his pickup truck in the front yard, repacking the ball bearings in the rear axle. Draper and Aleta Jewett had spent the entire morning inside, making piccalilli relish and putting it up in canning jars.

  “It just seems to me,” DeWalt said, “that if somebody was down there in that hollow, probably screaming her head off, you would have heard it up here.”

  “What makes you so sure she was screaming?” asked Clifford. “Maybe she never made a peep. Maybe she’s the one shot him, you ever think of that?”

  “I have thought of that, yes. But then I have to ask myself, if she did shoot him, why would she go running off naked, leaving even her shoes behind. Where could she go like that?”

  “There’d probably be lots of places happy to take her in looking that way. How about it, Drape?”

  “Wouldn’t even charge her admission,” Draper said.

  “That path that leads from the inlet?” DeWalt said. “Up through these woods of yours? I guess the police found a couple strands of her hair snagged on one of those tree limbs.”

  Clifford laughed and said, “And I guess you’re full of shit.”

  “So how do you know she didn’t come up that path? Wouldn’t you, if somebody were chasing you?”

  “Not barefoot and naked, I wouldn’t. If you saw that path you saw all the vines and stickers too.”

  “I doubt she’d be overly concerned about a few scratches, seeing as how she’d just watched her lover’s head get blown off. And probably figured that the same thing or worse was going to happen to her too.”

  Draper chuckled. “What’d be worse than taking a steel ball through the forehead?”

  “For a woman, lots of things.”

  “Like what?”

  DeWalt only smiled.

  “Well,” Clifford said, “if she’s still around, somebody’ll spot her sooner or later. In the meantime, this shithole isn’t digging itself out.”

  DeWalt smacked the dirt from his hands. “And I’ve taken up too much of your time already.” He put his hands to his knees as if to push himself up, but stopped.

  To Draper Jewett, whose skin seemed the color of congealed chicken fat, DeWalt said, “How long have those kidneys of yours been on the fritz?”

  Draper said nothing, surprised.

  “Mine went bum on me about five years ago,” DeWalt told him. “They work a little bit, but not enough to earn their keep.”

  “I was born with just the one,” Draper said.

  “And what happened to it? Infection?”

  Draper shrugged. “It started acting up on me awhile back, so I took a bunch of pills Aleta had laying around. But that just seemed to make things worse.”

  Antibiotics, thought DeWalt. You poor dumb sonofabitch, you overmedicated yourself. “You on dialysis?”

  “Fuck no. Nobody’s plugging me into some damn machine.”

  “It’s not like it used to be,” DeWalt said.

  “I don’t give a shit what it’s like.”

  “You’ve got to keep your blood cleaned out though. Otherwise you can be poisoned to death by your own blood.”

  “Fuck if I care.”

  “You might, one of these days.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Because you could die.”

  “You think you can’t?”

  DeWalt smiled. “How about I come and take you into the dialysis center some day? Let you see for yourself there’s nothing to it.”

  “The day I decide to do that, I’ll put a gun in my mouth.”

  “That’s what I used to think too.”

  “Yeah, well you ain’t me, are you?”

  DeWalt chewed the inside of his cheek. He tasted blood. Finally he pushed himself erect, knees stiff, leg muscles quivering and sore. As he stood, the charnal reek assaulted him again, and this time it showed on his face.

  Clifford Jewett grinned. “I got another shovel if you feel like pitching in.”

  “Thanks,” said DeWalt. “But I don’t think I want to be within sniffing distance when you take the lid off.”

  “Stick around. The honeydipper’ll be showing up any time now.”

  DeWalt felt sick to his stomach, he felt lightheaded, body-heavy. He smiled a last insincere smile and said, “Thanks, it sounds like fun. Maybe next time.”

  As he turned away he heard the thrust of Clifford’s shovel, the blade stabbing into the earth, and he felt the impact in his stomach, his mouth tasted dark and wet. Inside his car he sat motionless for a moment, closed off, not looking in their direction. His neck and back ached but it felt good to let the sunwarmed leather seat support them.

  You went soft fast, he told himself, seeing those eyes in the rearview mirror, fast because now it did not seem like another man’s life to him, that past, did not seem like somebody else’s memories inadvertently telegraphed into his head. It was his life and it had not been so long ago after all.

  But you went downhill fast, he thought as he drove toward the highway. You went soft, DeWalt, and you got rusty, and your reflexes are shot to hell. And worst of all, he thought as he opened all the windows and turned the air-conditioner fan to high, man oh man, DeWalt, you stink.

  Sometimes you get hold of a truth you would rather not lay hands on. You do not know what to do with it and it is probably not good for anything. Finding it suddenly in your hands is like being at a dinner party and surrounded by the hostess and her influential guests. You are recounting a wonderful anecdote and they are hanging on your every word. But your nose is itchy, so you reach up to scratch your nose and something from inside your nose comes off on your finger, not a little something either but as long and elastic as a worm pulled from wet ground. Now it is there on you finger, and right in the middle of your very witty story. You are stuck with it and you have to do something. None of your choices is droll.

  Such was the kind of impractical truth DeWalt was handed in Alex Catanzaro’s office on the second floor of the garage. Here Catanzaro had his desk and word processor, a short box sofa and a telephone. Here he kept his notes and research for the book he was writing, plus a small cassette tape recorder and several tapes containing information he had dictated or read, a stack of students’ papers to be corrected, numerous magazines and books, maps of Lake Erie and the fortifications and the sites of naval battles.

  Along one full wall was a glasstop display case containing Alex’s collection of Civil War artifacts: cartridge belts and powder horns, knives, bayonets, a blue serge jacket, a confederate cap, buttons and other insignia, a 135-year-old train schedule, photos of weaponry plus two handguns (both reproductions), and a broadside proclaiming Brown’s victory over evil at Harper’s Ferry. The display case was locked and its contents neatly arranged, with no indication that any item, especially one as large as a musket, had been removed.

  Once an item was placed in the display case, Elizabeth Catanzaro had told him, her husband seldom moved it. He had looked at his collection often and enthusiastically showed it to visitors, but he rarely allowed the items to be touched or handled. He certainly would not have had a loaded musket in his possession, nor would he have allowed even the handgun reproductions to be fired. He prized his collection for its historical relevance. That the individual items had no practical application in today’s world was precisely why he valued them.

  On floppy disks he had stored the first seventy-two pages of his historical novel. DeWalt scrolled through it, reading paragraphs at random. It was competent writi
ng but dry, filled with the minutae academics adore. Maybe it could have been published by a university press if Alex had promised to make it required reading for all his classes. There were a lot of facts in it but the piece had no lungs, it did not breathe. It was all head and no heart. Just the opposite, DeWalt thought, of Alex Catanzaro’s other abiding passion.

  And such was the irony of Alex Catanzaro’s life: that the passion he lived by and with, his passion for history, for an era he must surely have considered nobler and more civilized than his own, an era reflected in the sobriety of his dress (pinstripe suits on class days, nothing more casual than a tweed jacket on any other), reflected too in his southern civility and charm (although he had been born in New Jersey), and reflected even in his home, this gentleman farmer’s estate, that this first passion had conspired with a second one, a passion by all appearances the shadow reflection of the first—that is, prurient and vulgar and anything but noble—that these two passions, embodied in the heat of a young woman and in the cold lead of a musketball, had acted in concert to bring about Catanzaro’s death—DeWalt considered this an irony of the highest form. But was it irony contrived by man or God?

  “Ready for the rest?” Elizabeth asked after DeWalt had leaned away from the word processor.

  He looked up at her. Nothing he had read or seen so far had been particularly illuminating, except as it applied to Henry James’s theory of character illumination. But the quality of Elizabeth’s voice now—she sounded like a child who, wanting to appear brave as the doctor raises the innoculation needle to her skinny arm, says, “Sure, let me have it.”—this tone of forced insouciance signaled to him its opposite.

  He wished she would turn on the air-conditioner before revealing anything new. The temperature was at least ninety degrees in the small closed room; his breath did not come easily.

  “Show me what you’ve got,” he said.

  She went to the corner of the display case then, sank to her knees and ducked beneath the case. Her fingers slid along the wall to its intersection with the case’s bottom. Here there was perhaps a half inch of space between the display case and the garage wall. Looking down from the top of the case, no space was discernible. But it was large enough to conceal what Elizabeth soon brought forth: three cassette tapes and a packet of photos.