Clay Hand (22 page)

At the bar, Phil played blackjack with Nichols for an hour. He called a tune now and then for the pianist. Nichols and McNamara exchanged bawdy jokes, some of the men shuffling up to listen occasionally. Finally Phil pulled himself up. He did not want to drink. He did not want to sleep. He did not want to wait. But they were all waiting. At the house, the widow and Margaret were waiting, too.

He put on his coat and nodded to Nichols and McNamara. The street was the lonely captor of the wind, a scavenger down its length that flung its find of debris against the darkened store windows. He walked on to Lavery’s, reluctant still to turn up to the widow’s house. At the railway station, he saw two men parading the length of the platform and back, their breath showing in the cold damp of night. Deputies, probably. He walked on, remembering the old man as he walked through the mobsters… “what they need is peace…” and Rebecca Glasgow that morning weeping, and who would be glad to see her husband hang…

He was moving along the road toward the magician’s house, where the light in the window beckoned him, a will-o’-the-wisp. How many times had Dick followed it—warmth and a gentle word in Winston. How much greater his need, perhaps.

Two more men were pacing the road in front of Clauson’s driveway. He saw them first as shadows in the pale moonlight, as they must also have seen him. One of them flashed a light on him, and turned it out, recognizing him. They turned from him without speaking, and he walked up the drive.

Abreast of the house, he saw three people inside. Glasgow was home. The old man was in his chair, the shawl about his shoulders. While Phil moved closer, Glasgow went to the stairs and up them. After a moment, and a muffled sound as though he might have called her, Rebecca rose from the chair where she had been sitting opposite her father and laid a book on the table. She brushed his cheek with the back of her hand as she left him, the magician not looking up until she was gone. He sat for a long time, his eyes beyond the open book. His shoulders began to quiver then, and soon he raised his hand to brush each cheek beneath his eyes. Phil turned away from the sight of an old man weeping, and returned to the town.

Even from Lavery’s corner he could hear the piano at the tavern. Across the town, at the Sunnyside, no doubt the juke box was yielding what it had of music—there Slavic dances, the schottische instead of the jig.

The storekeeper was locking up, padlocking the door from the outside. When Phil called a greeting to him, he called back: “Are you going up home?”

“Yes,” he said, although the words put him in mind of the song of the night before. He felt far from home, indeed.

“I’ve a kitten here for the old lady. Take it up under your coat.” He went back into the store and returned in a moment with the small animal. “Mind you tell her to put butter on its paws the minute you get in the house. I don’t want it back here in the morning.”

The kitten nestled against him, and before he was halfway up the hill he could feel the vibration of its contented purring against him. He slowed his pace to enjoy it—warmth, trust—things as fragile as the animal that gave them to him. “It will take you a while to become a mouser,” he said aloud. “It takes all of us a while.”

The cat purred.

There was a light in Margaret’s room, and as he came near the house he could hear the radio blaring. The kitchen was darkened. The back steps creaked as he went up them. Laughter came through the living room window, the long, dry laughter of a stunt-hypoed radio participation audience. He fumbled for the back-kitchen door, and opening it, felt the presence of light where there was no light. The spring door closed behind him, nudging him in.

A giant green figure stood in the corner a few feet from him, all shimmering and aglow in the darkness, and seeming to move toward him. He leaped away from it to the kitchen door, and looking back, realized that movement was part of the illusion. He flung the kitten into the house and went back, catching the uncanny figure in his arms. It tangled on the washtub and crashed it to the floor. The substance went out of the figure and he found his arms enmeshed in a weblike cloth that glowed only sometimes, like a firefly on a summer night. He pulled the candescent cloth into the house after him. There was no doubt in his mind that he had found Nat Watkins’ lady with green wings.

He went directly to the living room. The two boarders looked up at him stupidly, angrily, and the radio blared on. “Shut that damn thing off,” he shouted.

“Who are you giving orders?” The widow got up on her cane.

He held the gauze illusion up. It was no more than a flimsy green rag in the full light of the room—a rag daubed with fluorescent paint. “Where did this come from?”

“Anna found it in the tool shed this afternoon—one of the chicken’s been hiding her eggs…”

“Where’s Anna now?”

“She’s home to her bed. Are you drunk, man? What’s the matter with you?” She turned and waved her cane at the two boarders. “Go up to your beds and stop gawking. Will you turn that blasted thing off?”

The men got slowly to their feet. They had to wait at the foot of the stairs, for Margaret was coming down. The widow strung out her abuse of them… “Sitting here, night in, night out, their mouths gaping like guppies. I’m the unfortunate woman to be burdened with the likes of them in my poverty…”

Phil was examining the illusion. Beneath the cloth was a large, doll-shaped balloon, deflated now. It had collapsed when it caught on the tub. Inflated, it would give buoyancy to the whole thing, and hooked in its back was a short string. A sickening realization came to him that Fields had found the rest of it in the room where Kevin Laughlin died.

“Phil, what’s wrong?” It was Margaret, in the room now, doll-like herself, in a quilted housecoat.

“He’s losing his reason,” Mrs. O’Grady said. “What’s that thing at all? It near frightened Anna out of her wits.”

Phil flung it on the couch. “When were you last in the tool shed, Mrs. O’Grady?”

“I haven’t been near it for months. Do you think I’ve the legs…”

“Who has been there?”

“The scraper’s there for the chicken droppings. It’s three weeks since the place was cleaned till today. I made Anna go…”

“Who cleaned it last?” he interrupted again.

“The dear one that’s gone. He was always helping me round the place.”

“Do you keep the shed locked?”

“Why would I lock it when there’s not a key to the house?”

Phil lit a cigaret and turned his back on them. In his mind’s eye was the picture Rebecca Glasgow had painted, the one hanging over the fireplace, with the little lights in it. A fool could see what might be made of it. Jerry Whelan would be carting the story to the pub, or telling it there this minute. He wheeled on the widow. “Did you ever see Dick with that?”

“I never laid eyes on it,” she spat. Her voice changed then to the crooning tones. “Is it some of their magic, Philip? It looks like something you’d use on a stage.”

“Do you remember the youngster at the inquest? Do you remember his lady with green wings everybody laughed at? It wasn’t the church angel he was imagining. This is what he saw in Dick’s arms.”

Margaret laid her hand on his arm. “What does it mean, Phil?”

He drew away from her touch. “All I know is that it means trouble.”

The widow’s eyes darted from where she had been watching Margaret’s hand to his face. He met them. “Why didn’t you send word to the sheriff?”

“For what? It’s a harmless rag in the daylight.”

“Then you’ve seen it in the dark?”

“Wasn’t it in the back kitchen when I went out a few minutes ago for a drink? Are you making me out a liar?”

“Do you have a bag I can put it in? I’m going down to the sheriff now. I’d lock the door if I were you tonight, Mrs. O’Grady. The men are flaming mad.”

“I’ve seen them flame and sputter and die,” she said with contempt. “What caused the explosion?”

“They don’t know yet.”

The kitten came into the living room and stretched out beneath the stove. The widow pointed her stick at it. “Where did that come from?”

“I brought it up to you from Lavery.”

“Is that what he expects to catch mice?”

“You can train it.”

“It’d be a sight easier training the mice… There’s a bag back of the breadbox you can put that magic in, and get it out of the house.”

Phil didn’t move. “Mrs. O’Grady, what do you think caused the explosion?”

The widow cocked her head. “Wasn’t it the gas?”

“Then why did you ask me what it was?”

She grinned. “You’re coming to life now, are you? The shaking up you got down there must of stirred your brain. I’m asking because of the one blast. There was never a gas explosion there yet didn’t go off like a bucket of firecrackers all through the place.”

Margaret stretched lazily. “Poor Phil,” she said, drawling the words with a silken patronage.

This time he checked the angry retort.

F
IELDS EXAMINED THE ILLUSION
carefully. He turned off the lights, and saw it glow in the darkened room. Lighting them again, he took the piece of string from his desk and compared its texture with that hooked onto the cloth. He glanced at Phil once or twice, but whatever was going through his mind he kept to himself.

“It’s us have the imagination, and not  the kids,” he said finally. “And me thinking I was so damned smart figuring that angel. The closed mind is a sprung rattrap. It don’t catch a damn thing.” He put the string back in his desk. “It wasn’t any accident Laughlin was in that room. He got lured there.”

He put on his coat and called up the stairs to Krancow that he was going out. In the front, two boys of twenty or so were playing casino in the light of the funeral parlor night lamp, the blessed St. Veronica kibbitzing over them from her gilt frame, Phil thought irreligiously. Immediately it occurred to him that a death in Winston now would be an inconvenience to more than mourners. He shook his head at the weird, grim humor that had overtaken him.

Fields must have been pondering the same thing. “We’d be in a fine way here if Krancow was to get a sudden business call. Jimmie!”

The boys looked up.

“For your deputy’s pay,” the sheriff said, “I’d like you to keep an eye on McNamara’s. One of you go down there every fifteen minutes. Mind now. You’re responsible if there’s a disturbance there. We’re going from here to Watkins’ and then out to Clauson’s. Call Krancow if you need him. Otherwise let him be. Somebody needs to get some sleep around here.”

There was the one light in Watkins’, the father sitting beneath it, his feet on the fender of the kitchen range. He, at least, was one man not at the tavern, Phil thought. They went to the back door.

“I’d like to talk to Nat, Mr. Watkins,” the sheriff said. “I know it’s late, but something just come up.”

“Come in and close the door then. What’s he done now?”

“Nothing at all,” Fields said. “He’s a fine, observing lad.”

Watkins made a noise of disgust. He went to the hall and roared the boy’s name at the top of his voice. The hell with whoever else in the house might be sleeping, Phil thought.

Fields warmed his hands over the stove. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he grew up to be a policeman,” he said, trying to ease the father’s annoyance.

“He’s going down with me as soon as they’ll take him. That’ll take the starch out of him.”

Or put it in, Phil thought.

The boy came in, a sweater pulled over his underwear, his eyes full of sleep, and then of apprehension. “Go and put on your pants,” the father roared.

“I don’t think there’ll be any women around,” Fields said. But the boy had already fled. He returned in a moment tucking the sweater into his overalls.

“You’ve brought us a fine piece of trouble, haven’t you, with your smoking and hookying?” said Watkins.

“Don’t yell at me, Pa.” He was learning to fight back. He would not be bullied much longer.

The father lifted his hand, but dropped it again, and slumped into the chair.

Fields got to the point immediately. “Nat, you told us at the inquest of seeing Mr. Coffee with a woman that looked like she had green wings. Did you see a face on her?”

“No sir. It was almost dark. I wasn’t very close.”

“How did you know it was Coffee then?”

Nat thought about that. “It’s funny, I can remember seeing him just as plain.”

“Was that under the cliff?”

“Yes sir.”

“Which way was he going?”

“He went down to the road and across it, back of Lavery’s, only I couldn’t see him any further than that.”

“Could you say the way he was coming?”

“He came around the cliff. I was looking that way.”

“Now Nat, tell me, was the woman walking?”

“He was sort of helping her.”

Fields brushed his hand across his mouth thoughtfully. “Now think about this careful, lad. Can you try and remember the day that was.”

The boy screwed up his mouth, as though that might help him think. “It wasn’t a school day,” he said finally, “and I had my old pants on. I wasn’t afraid of squatting down on them. So it must of been a Saturday.”

“Was it before or after Laughlin’s death? Do you remember that?”

“It was after. Pa wasn’t working.”

“Are you sure of that, Nat?”

“Yes sir.”

“How can you be so sure when you can’t remember from the school to the house what page your homework’s on?” the father said.

“You were rolling your own cigarets then, Pa,” the boy said quietly.

“You’d of remembered if it was last Saturday,” Fields said. “You found Coffee the next morning.”

The boy nodded.

“Then it was a week last Saturday. Good boy. Go back to your sleep now. You’ve been a great help. My thanks to you and your father.”

In the car, Fields entered the information in his notebook without comment. He let the car slide into gear, and started across the town. Passing McNamara’s, he lowered the window. The tinkle of the piano rose for an instant above the sound of the motor. They could see the crowd of men in the smoke-clouded bar.

“As long as they keep that piano playing, I’ll feel easier,” Fields said.