A Stranger in My Grave (11 page)

It was brief. As reported in the December 5th edition, Camilla was found to have died of a knife wound, self-inflicted while in a state of despondency. Witnesses were few: the police patrolman who discovered him, a doctor who described the fatal wound, and a pathologist who stated that Camilla had been suffering from prolonged malnutrition and a number of serious physical disor­ders. The time of death was fixed at approximately 1:00 a.m. on December 2.

Probably,
Pinata thought,
Daisy had read all this in the newspaper at the time it happened
. The pathos of the case must have struck her—a sick, starving man, fearful (“This ought to pay my way into heaven”), rebellious (“You stinking rats”), despairing (“Born too soon. Died too late”), had sent his final message to the world and committed his final act.

Pinata wondered whether the stinking rats referred to specific people, or whether the phrase, like the grumbling of the girl in charge of the library, was an indictment of life itself.

The girl was jangling her keys again. Pinata switched off the projector, thanked her, and left.

He drove back to his office, thinking of the money Camilla had left in the envelope. Obviously the police hadn't been able to prove it had come from a robbery, or Camilla wouldn't be lying now under his stone cross. The big question was why a destitute transient would want to spend $2,000 on his own funeral instead of on the food and clothing he needed. Cases of people dying of malnutrition with a fortune hidden in a mattress or under some floorboards were not common, but they happened every now and then. Had Camilla been one of these, a psychotic miser? It seemed improbable. The money in the envelope had been in large bills. The collection of misers was usually a hodgepodge of dimes, nickels, dollars, hoarded throughout the years. Further­more, misers didn't travel. They stayed in one place, often in one room, to protect their hoard. Camilla had traveled, but from where and for what reason? Had he picked this town because it was a pretty place to die in? Or did he come here to see someone, find someone? If so, was it Daisy? But the only connection Daisy had with Camilla was in a dream, four years later.

His office was cold and dark, and although he turned on the gas heater and all the lights, the place still seemed cheerless and without warmth, as if Camilla's ghost was trapped inside the walls, emanating an eternal chill.

Camilla had come back, quietly, insidiously, through a dream. He had changed his mind—the sea was too noisy, the roots of the big tree too threatening, the little bed too dark and narrow—he was demanding reentry into the world, and he had chosen Daisy to help him. The destitute transient, whose body no one had claimed, was staking out a claim for himself in Daisy's mind.

I'm getting as screwy as she is,
he thought.
I've got to keep this on a straightforward, factual basis. Daisy saw the report in the newspaper. It was painful to her, and she repressed it. For almost four years it was forgotten. Then some incident or emotion triggered her memory, and Camilla popped up in a dream, a pathetic creature whom she identified, for unknown reasons, with herself.

That's all it amounted to. No mysticism was involved; it was merely a case of the complexities of memory.

“It's quite simple,” he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice was comforting in the chilly room. It had been a long time since he'd actually listened to himself speak, and his voice seemed oddly pleasant and deep, like that of a wise old man. He wished he could think of some wise old remarks to match it, but none occurred to him. His mind seemed to have shrunk so that there was no room in it for anything except Daisy and the dead stranger of her dreams.

A drop of sweat slid down behind his left ear into his collar. He got up and opened the window and looked down at the busy street. Few whites ventured out on Opal Street after dark. This was his part of the city, his and Camilla's, and it had nothing to do with Daisy's part. Grease Alley, some of the cops called it, and when he was feeling calm and secure, he didn't blame them. Many of the knives used in brawls were greased. Maybe Camilla's had been, too.

“Welcome back to Grease Alley, Camilla,” he said aloud, but his voice didn't sound like a wise old man's anymore. It was young and bitter and furious. It was the voice of the child in the orphanage, fighting for his name, Jesus.

“All those bruises and black eyes and chipped teeth,” the Mother Superior had said. “You hardly looked human, half the time.”

He closed the window and stared at his reflection in the dusty glass. There were no chipped teeth or bruises or black eyes visi­ble, but he hardly looked human.

“Of course, it's a very difficult name to live up to. . . .”

THE CITY

10

But there was love, Daisy. You are proof there was love. . . .

 

Through all of
Fielding's travels only one object had remained with him constantly, a grimy, pockmarked, rawhide suitcase. It was so old now that the clasps no longer fastened, and it was held together by a dog's chain leash which he'd bought in a dime store in Kansas City. The few mementos of his life that Fielding had chosen to keep were packed inside this suitcase, and when he was feeling nostalgic or guilty or merely lonesome, he liked to bring them out and examine them, like a bankrupt shopkeeper taking stock of whatever he had left.

These mementos, although few in number, had such a strong content of emotion that the memories they evoked seemed to become more vivid with the passing of the years. The plastic cane from the circus at Madison Square Garden took him back to the big top so completely that he could recall every clown and jug­gler, every bulging-thighed aerialist and tired old elephant.

The suitcase contained, in addition to the cane:

A green derby from a St. Patrick's Day party in Newark. (Oh, what a beautiful binge that had been!)

Two pieces of petrified wood from Arizona.

A silver locket. (Poor Agnes.)

A ukulele, which Fielding couldn't play but liked to hold expertly in his hands while he hummed “Harvest Moon” or “Springtime in the Rockies.”

A little box made of sweet grass and porcupine quills by an Indian in northern Ontario.

A beribboned cluster of small gilded pine cones that had been attached to a Christmas present from Daisy: a wristwatch, later hocked in Chicago.

Several newspaper clippings about exotic ports on the other side of the world.

A package of letters, most of them from Daisy; the money orders which had been enclosed were long since cashed.

A pen which didn't write, made of gold which wasn't real.

Two train schedules.

A splinter of wood—allegedly from the battleship
West Virginia
after it was bombed at Pearl Harbor—which he'd got from a sailor in Brooklyn in exchange for a bottle of muscatel.

There were also about a dozen pictures: Daisy holding her high school diploma; Daisy and Jim on their honeymoon; a framed photograph of two identical middle-aged matrons who ran a boardinghouse in Dallas and had inscribed across the pic­ture “To Stan Fielding, hoping he won't forget ‘the Heavenly Twins'”; an enlarged snapshot of a coal miner from Pennsylva­nia, who looked exactly like Abraham Lincoln and whose chief sorrow in life was that Lincoln was dead and no advantage could be taken of the resemblance. (“Think of it, Stan, all the fun we could have had, me being Abraham Lincoln, and you being my Secretary of State, and everybody bowing and scraping in front of us and buying us drinks. Oh, it just makes me sick thinking of all them free drinks we missed!”)

Another picture, mounted on cardboard, showed Ada and Field­ing himself and a ranch hand he'd worked with near Albuquerque, a handsome dark-eyed young man called Curly. On spring days, when dust storms obscured the range and made work impossible, the three of them used to play pinochle together. Ada had been a good sport in those early times, full of fun and life, ready for any­thing. Having a child had changed her. It was a year of drought. During the months of Ada's pregnancy more tears had come from her eyes than rain from the skies.

He brought the suitcase out now and began unpacking its con­tents on the big round table under the green-shaded ceiling light.

Muriel came in from the kitchen, the only other room in the apartment. She was a short, stout middle-aged woman with a hard mouth and eyes soft and round and pale green, like little mint patties with a licorice drop in the middle. She snorted at the sight of the open suitcase. “What do you want to go dragging out that old thing again for?”

“Memories, my dear. Memories.”

“Well, I've got a few memories myself, but I don't go spreading them out in the middle of a table every couple of weeks.” She leaned over his shoulder to get a closer look at the picture taken at the ranch. “You look like you were a real lively bunch.”

“We were, thirty years ago.”

“Oh go on, you haven't changed so much.”

“Not as much as Curly anyway,” he said grimly. “I looked him up last time I went through Albuquerque, and I hardly recognized him. He was an old man already, and his hands were so crippled by arthritis he couldn't even play pinochle anymore, let alone work cattle. We talked about old times for a while, and he said he'd drop in on me next time he came to Chicago. But we both knew he'd never make it.”

“Well, don't
dwell
on it,” Muriel said brusquely. “That's the trouble with your poking around in the past like this—you get to dwelling on things. You mark my words, Stan Fielding. That old suitcase of yours is your worst enemy in this world. And if you were smart, you'd take it right down to the pier and chuck it in the briny with a farewell and amen.”

“I don't claim to be smart. I'm thirsty, though. Bring me out a beer like a good wife, will you? It's a hot day.”

“You're not going to make it any cooler by lapping up beer,” she said. But she went out to the kitchen anyway, because she liked his reference to her being a good wife. They'd only been married for a month, and while she wasn't passionately in love with him, he had many qualities she admired. He was kinder, in or out of his cups, than any man she'd ever known; he had a sense of humor and good manners and a fine head of hair and all his teeth. Above all, though, she appreciated his gift of gab. No mat­ter what anyone said, really educated people with brains, Stan could always top them. Muriel was proud to be the wife of a man who had an answer for everything even though it might be, and often was, wrong. Being wrong, in a classy way, was to Muriel every bit as good as being right.

His easy manner of conversation had encouraged Muriel and emboldened her. From the taciturn and rather timid woman he'd met in Dallas she had developed into quite a loud and lively talker. She knew she had nothing to fear from him no matter what she said. He took all spoken words, including his own, with a grain of salt and a shrug. To written words his attitude was different. He believed absolutely everything he read, even flat contradictions, and when he received a letter, he treated it as if it were a message from a king, delivered via diplomatic pouch and much too special to be opened immediately. He always spent at least five minutes turning it over, examining it, holding it up to the light, before he finally slit the envelope.

When Muriel returned with his beer, she found him hunched over one of the letters, looking tense and anxious, as if this were the first time he'd read it instead of the fiftieth.

Most of the letters from Daisy he had read aloud to her, and she couldn't understand his excitement over such dull stuff: The weather was warm. Or cold. The roses were out. Or in. Went to the dentist, the park, the beach, the museum, the movies . . . Probably a nice girl, this Daisy of his, Muriel thought, but not very interesting.

“Stan.”

“Eh?”

“Here's your beer.”

“Thanks,” he said, but he didn't reach for it immediately, as he usually did, and she knew this letter must be one of the bad ones he didn't read aloud or talk about.

“Stan, you won't get the blues, will you? I hate when you get the blues. It's lonesome for me. Bottoms up, eh?”

“In a minute.”

“Hey, I know. Why don't you show me the picture of the guy that looked like Abraham Lincoln? He must have been a real card, that one. Tell me about him, Stan, about how you would have been Secretary of State, wearing a top hat and a cutaway—”

“You've heard it before.”

“Tell me again. I'd like a good laugh. It's so hot in here I'd like a good laugh.”

“So would I.”

“What's stopping us, then? We've got a lot to laugh about.”

“Sure. I know.”

“Don't get the blues, Stan.”

“Don't worry.” He put the letter back in the envelope, wishing that he hadn't reread it. It had been written a long time ago, and there was nothing he could do now to change things. There was nothing he could have done then either. What bothered him was that he hadn't tried, hadn't phoned her, written to her, gone to see her.

“Come on, Stan. Bottoms up and mud in your eye, eh?”

“Sure.” He drank the beer. It had a musky odor, as if it had been chilled and warmed too many times. He wondered if he had the same odor for the same reason. “You're a good woman, Muriel.”

“Oh, can that now,” she said with an embarrassed and pleased little laugh. “You're not so bad yourself.”

“No? Don't bet on it.”

“I think you're swell. I did right from that first night I saw you.”

“Then you're dead wrong. Stone cold dead wrong.”

“Oh, Stan, don't.”

“There comes a time when every man must evaluate his own life.”

“Why pick a time like this, a nice sunny Saturday morning when we could hop on a bus and go out to the zoo? Why don't we do that, eh, go out to the zoo?”

“No,” he said heavily. “Let the monkeys come and look at me if they want a good laugh.”

The fear in her eyes was turning into bitterness, and her mouth looked as though it had been tightened by a pair of pliers. “So you got the blues, you got them after all.”

He didn't seem to hear. “I let her down. I always let her down. Even last Monday I walked out on her. I shouldn't have walked out on her like that without an apology or an explanation. I'm a coward, a bum. That's what Pinata called me, a bum.”

“You told me that before. You told me all about it. Now why don't you forget it? If you ask me, he had his nerve. He may be a bigger bum than you are for all you know.”

“So now you're calling me a bum, too.”

“No, honest, I didn't mean it like the way it sounded. I only—”

“You should have meant it. It's true.”

She reached down suddenly and pounded her fist on the table. “Why don't you keep that damned suitcase locked up the way it ought to be?”

He looked at her with a kind of sorrowful affection. “You really shouldn't scream like that, Muriel.”

“And why not? I've got things to scream about, why shouldn't I scream?”

“Because it doesn't become a lady. ‘The Devil hath not, in all his quiver's choice, an arrow for the heart like a sweet voice.' Remember that.”

“You've got an answer for everything, haven't you, even if you got to pinch it from the Bible.”

“Lord Byron, not the Bible.”

“Stan, put the suitcase away, will you?” She picked up the chain leash from the floor and held it out to him. “Let's lock everything up and put the suitcase under the bed again and pretend you never opened it, how about that? I'll help you.”

“No. I can do it myself.”

“Do it, then.
Do
it.”

“All right.” He began replacing everything in the battered suit­case, the photographs and letters and clippings, the petrified wood and circus cane and box made of porcupine quills. “I'm fifty-three,” he said abruptly.

“Well, I know. I must say you don't look it, though. You've got a fine head of hair. I bet there's many a man not forty yet who envies—”

“Fifty-three. And this is all I have to show for all those years. Not much, is it?”

“As much as most.”

“No, Muriel, don't try to be kind. I've had too much kindness given to me in my life, too many allowances and excuses made for me. I don't deserve a good girl like Daisy. And then to think I walked out on her, didn't even stay to say hello or to see how she looked after all these years. She used to be such a pretty little girl with those big innocent blue eyes and a smile so shy and sweet—”

“I know,” Muriel said shortly. “You told me. Now, have you got everything back in here? I'll close it up for you.”

“Any decent father stays with his children even if he doesn't get along very well with his wife. Children, they're our only hope of immortality.”

“Well, I'm fixed then. I've got two hopes of immortality chas­ing cows back in Texas.”

“When my time comes, I won't completely die, because part of me will keep on living in Daisy.” He wiped a little moisture from his eyes because it was so sad thinking of his own death, far sad­der than thinking of anyone else's.

“If you're such a bum,” Muriel said, “how come you want part of you to stay alive in Daisy?”

“Ah, you wouldn't understand, Muriel. You're not a man.”

“Well, I'm glad you've noticed it. How about you notice it a lit­tle more often?”

Fielding winced. Muriel was a well-meaning woman, but her earthiness could be embarrassing, even destructive at times. When he was on a delicate train of thought, such as this one, it was a great shock to find himself suddenly derailed by the sound waves of Muriel's powerful voice.