Middle Age (37 page)

Marina’s eyelids were so suddenly heavy, the book slipped from her fingers, falling hard, striking her ankle, waking her rudely.



J C O

A    she saw it: the dark-furred creature of the night.

The thing that settled on her chest in the night. So warm, so seductive.

Comforting and smothering.

It was utterly still. Silhouetted against one of the large clay-colored boulders, in the wan, whitish sunshine of November. An intricately marked large cat, far too large to be an ordinary domestic cat, a wild cat or a lynx, with upright tufted ears, a flattish owl-like face, clearly discernible whiskers, and alert tawny eyes. Marina was in her kitchen, and crouched low to watch the creature through a window. Her heart caught at its beauty. The way wind rippled its fur. A dark-mahogany fur, that would be smooth to the touch. And the plumelike smoke-colored tail.
Looking for a
way in
.
It knows what it wants
. After a moment the cat made its way through fallen leaves close beside the house, Marina could hear it, this, too, was a sound she heard frequently in the night. How lithe the great cat was, how stealthy; it did not trot as a dog or wolf would, but glided with an uncanny grace; its head and body remaining level while its supple legs moved. Almost, there was something cartoon-like and comical in this movement of the legs while the body remained level as if motionless.
The
way it moves in the night
.
No one to see
. Marina followed the cat around a corner, and at a dining room window, too, quickly lifted her head, the cat must have seen her for its eyes seemed to glare, in an instant it had turned away and ran, and vanished into the woods.

“Damn.”

The beautiful dark-furred creature had come to Marina’s door, and like a fool she’d frightened it away.

She set chicken scraps out for it near her back steps, in an aluminum plate. Within a few hours the scraps were gone.

“ N”   call it. For its fur was so dark, even in sunshine it was clearly a creature of night. “What we see of it, in the day, isn’t fully
it
.”

She seemed to be explaining this to Adam. He was frowning, noncom-mital. You couldn’t predict, with Adam. There was that side of him so rational, so sane; argumentative in the service of truth, like his master
Middle Age: A Romance

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Socrates; yet there was the other side of Adam, of which Marina hadn’t known until after his death, the left-hand side of secrecy, of darkness and outright lies, unexpected wealth and Vegas casino coupons and lurid sexy photos and false names, how many false names had the man used, and of exactly what use, when you come to think of it, is a false name . . .

“Night” she would call it.



I M. T’ tubular box at the Damascus Crossing post office, mail accumulated, most of it forwarded. One of these forwarded items was an envelope with the return address , ,  

,   ,   , --,

 . Marina had time to wonder, as so many of us wonder, why lawyers’ names in the aggregate sound like the punch line of a joke.

“Oh,
why!
”

Hurriedly she stuffed the envelope with other items of mail into her shoulder bag, or maybe into a pocket of her khaki jacket; her cheeks burned as if she’d been slapped. For why did the man persist in trying to contact her! She’d resigned her position as Adam Berendt’s personal executor, an assistant of Roger Cavanagh’s had been hired in her place, surely there was no official reason for Roger to write to her.

Marina drove home, annoyed. She supposed, if Roger Cavanagh was pursuing her, it was to revenge himself upon her. One day.
He will make
me love him, he will seduce me into making love with him, and then in triumph he will repudiate me
.
I know
. Yet this happened, so strangely: when Marina returned home, and unpacked her things, and emptied her pockets onto the plank table in the kitchen, though other pieces of mail were there, the envelope from Abercrombie, Cavanagh, Kruller & Hook was missing.

Marina searched for it in the Jeep, on the driveway, amid fallen leaves by her front door, that damned envelope from Salthill she didn’t want, and in so not-wanting had somehow willed out of existence, and of course now she felt guilty, and remorseful, for perhaps she was being irrational in her dislike of Roger Cavanagh, or was it fear of Roger Cavanagh, his eyes hungry upon her, the hurt in his face when she’d struck him, in her fury she’d struck at him, oh, never would she forget, what shame, what an exposure of Marina’s crude animal appetite, and her



J C O

clawing at the man, in sexual misery, never would she forget, never could she forgive herself.

And never would Marina find the envelope.

T  a sudden frost. An encrustration of fine feathery white in the tall bent grasses, and in the piles of dead leaves. A new sharpness in the air, an urgency.

Dragged to the back door, the partly devoured remains of a young rabbit. The head was missing, the torso clawed open. When Marina first saw it, and the trail of blood through the frost, she’d imagined it must be a wounded animal that had crawled to the house in the clearing, seeking help. When she looked more closely, she saw
Of course, it’s prey
.
The
remains of prey
.

She was stricken with pity. She may have felt a touch of panic. In newspaper she wrapped the poor mutilated flesh, and carried it away to hide behind the barn.

( Y    a memento. Part of a newspaper page smeared with the rabbit’s blood. What does it mean, such a design. Imprinted upon print. As print is imprinted speech.)
Night,
the predator.

Night,
that brought her such bloody prey.

Night,
that could not be predicted! Neither summoned, nor kept away.

Night
with tawny-lemony eyes.
Night
with sharp razor teeth.
Night
the carnivore, muzzle smelling of blood.
Night
leaping onto her chest.
Night
the heavy furry weight pressing her soft breasts against her ribcage.
Night
she could not lift her arms to push away.
Night
that made her moan softly, a sob catching in her throat.
Night
whose snout she dreaded, wet, whiskery, pressing into her partly opened mouth, her parched lips, in the paralysis of sleep the horror of
Night
sucking away her oxygen.



“ J  . To see the sky.”

Restless! Driving aimlessly along mountain roads. Roads with unfamiliar names. Avoiding busy highways, avoiding commercialized strips:
Middle Age: A Romance

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   ,    ,  

 . In spirals descending toward the river. Those small scattered towns on its banks whose names intrigued her: Dingmans Ferry, Bushkill, Welshtown, Shoemaker, Echo Lake. “The names of romance, Adam.”

Though these little crossroads towns were never so romantic as their names.

She stopped to take Polaroid shots. Mountains, sky, Delaware River.

That sullen leaden light on the river. And the river choppy, sinuous. As if a living organism. Deadly to enter. She was fascinated by the limestone out-croppings rising above her, vertical, steep, raw and wet, looking sharp as gigantic claws. “Silver Thread Falls. There’s a lovely name, Adam, yes?”

There was also Kane’s Mills and Foxboro. Marina took photos of long-abandoned glove, textile, canning factories on the river. “These are beautiful. Not the kind of beauty that hits you in the eye, but . . .”

Give me up, Marina, dear
.
I’m a dead man, you know
.

But I’m not dead, Adam
.
Have faith in me
.

“A I   I am not.”

The ring probably wasn’t an amethyst.

Crafty Beverly Hogan hadn’t claimed it was.

It
was
beautiful, obviously an old ring. But no older than the century.

Probably what Marina had mistaken for an amethyst was just attractive purple glass cut to resemble a precious stone. Buying the ring for Beverly Hogan at a farm auction, how typical of Adam Berendt, one of the man’s impulsive acts of generosity.

Still, Marina couldn’t bring herself to return to County Line Realty.

Not just yet.

“ M T, ’! How ya doin, huh?”

How ya doin
. Marina had no idea but always she smiled and indicated with her mouth
Fine!

The greeting was exuberant, with an undercurrent of something aggressive, insolent. A cross between a yodel and a sexual assault with a blunt weapon. Each time Marina pulled the Jeep into Pryde’s Gas & Auto Repair to get gas, and lowered her window, she steeled herself for it.

For there came the old-young  (name stitched onto the bib of his



J C O

grease-stained coverall) with hot resentful eyes, dragging his bad leg and calling out his loud greeting. “Fill ’er up, Miss Troy, ma’am?”

“Yes. Thanks, Rick.”

Unless Marina bought gas elsewhere, which was inconvenient, she had to endure Rick Pryde. She’d come to be fascinated by Rick Pryde. And of course she was intimidated by Rick Pryde. Beverly Hogan had warned Marina that the Prydes knew by extrasensory perception if you bought gas or had your car serviced elsewhere, and they’d let you know they knew, it was the way of Damascus Crossing that everybody knew everybody else’s business for better or worse.

Rick seemed always to be lurking behind the steamy windows of the service station, when Marina pulled up to the gas pumps. (She seemed to know, too, that Rick observed her making her few, furtive telephone calls in the phone booth beside the garage.) Rick was mysteriously crippled, with a pronounced limp and alarming scalded-scarred skin.
Like Adam’s
.

But so much more disfiguring
. He had a jocose jack-o’-lantern grin, big crooked nicotine-stained teeth, and a full droopy dark moustache and wiry whiskers hiding a weak chin. Rick never hurried to service any vehicle yet managed to give an impression of alert and earnest and determined courtesy. Rick grinned and grunted to indicate the effort he was putting in to clean Marina’s broad front windshield and her outside mirror with a rag that left greasy smears on the glass. Always he was chewing a big lump of something very juicy that required him to frequently pause and spit, with a look of concentration, a jet of brown liquid that might have been acid; then he swiped at his mouth with the back of his big-knuckled grimy hand, smiling at Marina who wanted to avert her eyes yet somehow could not. Marina wondered if the hot-eyed old-young man was the son or younger brother of the gruff, taciturn elder Pryde who owned the service station.

One afternoon while Rick was pumping gas into Marina’s Jeep he said unexpectedly, “I see you looking at my freaky face sometimes, Miss Troy?

And my leg? I should explain how I got in this condition, I guess!” He laughed good-naturedly at Marina’s look of distress. Clearly he was enjoying his power over her. He told her he was the only Damascus County ca-sualty of the Persian Gulf War. He’d been a Marine sniper. Marine snipers were the best of the best. But you had to pay for being the best of the best and he’d paid, and was paying. He’d had skin-graft surgery on his face and six operations on his leg and if Marina was thinking, hell, those operations
Middle Age: A Romance

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didn’t work worth shit, she’d be wrong, ’cause he’d been in a helluva worse condition before the operations, his own dog wouldn’t of recognized him.

Rick asked Marina offhanded and sly if she could recall the dates of the Persian Gulf War.

Marina’s face heated with blood. Her mind was swept blank.

A decade ago? Or more? In the nineties.

Rick said, baring his chunky discolored teeth in a semblance of a smile,

“Ma’am, don’t be embarrassed,
nobody knows
. Except poor bastards like me an’ their folks. And the Iraqis. They’d remember, I guess.” A mischievous boy, Rick laughed. He chewed at the lump in his mouth, leaned over to spit carefully between his boots, swiped at his stained moustache, and continued to smile at Marina. “January  to March. The dates.”

“That long ago!” Marina sighed.

“Bet you can’t guess how old I am.”

It was a challenge. Marina squirmed uncomfortably. Rick was both a boy and a ravaged middle-aged man. If you glanced at him, on the street, in passing, taking note of his scabby skin and pronounced limp, you might have thought him forty-five years old.

“Thirty?”

Rick’s mouth twitched. He smiled, a little. “Pret-ty close, ma’am. You got sharp eyes. But you can figure, , how old I’d of been then.”

“No! You look young.”

“Well, I’m
not
.”

Rick laughed. The numerals on the gas pump whirled. Marina wondered uneasily how long this interrogation would last.

“I’m sorry, Rick. You must have undergone terrible pain . . .”

“Pain’s the least of it, Miss Troy, ma’am. But hell, I ain’t complaining, see I’m alive, and I’m here. That can’t be said for some of my close buddies.” His mouth twisted as if he were getting ready to spit, but he didn’t, not at the moment.

“I’m sorry.” It wasn’t adequate, but it was all Marina could find to say.

The words like soiled cotton batting in her mouth.

Rick shrugged, “Us guys were kind of cocky, I guess. Our motto was

‘Put us anywhere, and we can put it in the head at eight hundred yards.’ ”

He paused to see the effect of this remark on Marina, who winced as you’d expect a sensitive woman to wince. “But hell. It’s ancient history now.”

Rick removed his grimy cap and brushed his black hair back in a swift savage gesture. In that instant, Marina felt a stab of something like sexual