Muller, Marcia - [11] Trophies and Dead Things(v1.0)(html) (47 page)

I went over to the kids and
squatted down, smiling. They regarded me solemnly. Both had black
hair and dark shoe-button eyes; their clothing, while old and
patched, was clean. They couldn't have been more than five
and six. I said, "Hi, what're your names?"

The girl stuck her finger into
her mouth and merely stared. The boy—who was the older of the
two—finally spoke. "That's Mia. I'm Davey."

D.A. Taylor's children, then.
People who name their offspring after themselves always make me wonder.
Too much ego, or too little? In Taylor's case, I thought I knew.

Remembering Ross's caution that I
should try to talk to Mia Taylor before approaching her husband, I
asked, "Is your mom around?"

Davey shook his head. Mia Junior
took her finger out of her mouth and said, "She went to Petaluma with
Aunt Chrissy. Aunt Chrissy's having a baby, maybe right now."
 

"Well, that's nice," I lied,
feeling a flash of sympathy for the newborn who would be brought home
to this place. "Is your dad here, then?"

The two exchanged a look. It
said,
Daddy. Uh-oh.

I said, "It's okay. Do you know
Mrs. Ross?"

Davey nodded. "Libby."

"I'm a friend of Libby's. She
asked me to come see your dad." My job necessitates a fair amount of
fabrication, but I'm always vaguely uncomfortable when I have to do so
to children.

Mia and Davey exchanged another
look. This was the "can we trust this adult?" one. Finally Davey
pointed toward the row of cottages. "Ours is at the end."

"Thank you." I got up and started
down the path.

I hadn't gone more than a couple
of yards when two men materialized from the first cottage. Heavyset men
with shaggy black hair, wearing the oilskins of fishermen. They stood
together, blocking my way.

"What you want, lady?" the
heavier one asked.

"D.A. Taylor. Are either of you
him?"

Silently they shook their heads
and remained in front of me.

"Look, Libby Ross sent me."

"Sure she did," the man said.

"Call her and ask her if you
don't believe me."

"Why would that bitch send
somebody?" the other man, who sported a straggly mustache, asked. "She
checking up on D.A. again?"

"No. I don't think she's too
interested in him these days. She told me where to find him, though."

"What's your business with him?"

"Private."

"D.A.'s family. What's
his
business
is ours."

I hesitated, glancing back at
Taylor's children. They had not resumed their play, were watching
intently. I didn't think the men—their uncles, or whatever—would do
anything violent in front of
them. Finally I said, "If that's so, why don't you come with me while I
talk with him?"

They exchanged a look; it seemed
to be the primary mode of communication around here. This one I
couldn't read so easily, but it contained an element of relaxation.
After a few seconds the heavier man stepped aside. "What the hell—go
ahead. Last cottage. You'll probably find him on his dock, staring at
his island."

"His island?"

He grinned nastily. "Hog Island.
D.A. don't really own it, but he's got it into his head that he does.
He's never owned nothing, except in his head. And that's about
all
that's
in there anymore."

Some family D.A.'s got, I
thought, moving past the men and walking along the crushed-shell path.
I heard the two laugh, as if the remark had been terribly witty, but I
ignored them. The dogs ignored me as I stepped over and around them.

Toward the end of the path the
land came to a barren point, a rubble-strewn slope falling away to the
wind-whipped gray water. I could see the island from here— rocky,
cypress- and eucalyptus-crowned, treetops wreathed in fog. Hog
Island—reputedly named for a bargeload of pigs that had briefly been
marooned there at some dim point in history—was now owned and
maintained in its natural state by the Audubon Society. No one lived
there, and the only man-made addition was the ruins of a house built by
a German family in the 1800s. I wondered why D.A. Taylor took such a
proprietary interest in the isolated wildlife preserve.

Taylor's tiny cottage was the
shabbiest of the seven I'd passed, with broken and patched windows and
virtually no paint, but a tub of pink geraniums stood next to the door.
There was an old tricycle parked beside the flowers. I knocked on the
torn screen door, received no answer, and went around the cottage to
where
a spindly dock leaned over the stakes of the oyster beds.

A man—tall, thin, with black hair
that fell to the shoulders of his faded denim jacket—sat at the very
end of the dock, looking across the bay toward Hog Island. I started
out to him, stepping over and around places where the boards were
splintered or missing. The dock trembled under my weight. The man
turned his head and watched me approach.

At first he appeared perfectly
normal, but when I came within a few yards of him I saw his eyes. They
were black and dead-looking—pits where the fires no longer burned,
containing nothing but ash. When I reached him he didn't speak, merely
continued to watch me without a hint of interest or curiosity. I asked,
"Are you D.A. Taylor?" and he nodded and looked back at the bay.

The man was in another world, as
Ross had said he would be. I didn't know if that particular place was
accessible to others, but I had to try to reach him. I sat down on the
edge of the dock, drawing my knees up and hugging them with my arms.
Taylor didn't even glance my way.

I said, "That's a nice island out
there."

No reply.

"Wonder what it would be like to
live on it."

Now he turned his strange eyes
toward me. I thought I saw a flicker somewhere in their depths, but it
could just have been a trick of the light. "Someday I'll know," he
said. His voice was mellow, the syllables flowing gently.

"Oh? You planning to move out
there?"

Again he looked toward the
island. After a long moment he said, "Who are you?"

"My name's Sharon McCone. I've
just come from Libby Ross's."

"Libby. Libby of the beautiful
violet eyes." He paused, then added, "Libby of the evil tongue."

"The way she tells it, you and
she are friends."

"Friends can be cruel when they
tell the truth." After my encounter with his relatives, his
educated, somewhat formal diction was more of a surprise than his
sudden lucidity. I'd known other people like Taylor: substance abusers
who seemed perfectly rational at one moment, then could flip over into
disconnected raving or protracted silences the next.

"What does Libby tell the truth
about?" I asked.

Silence.

I let it spin out a few moments,
watching a fishing boat circumnavigate the island. Smells rose from the
oyster beds—brackish, fishy—and were borne away on the chill breeze.
Finally I said, "What about Perry Hilderly—was he a truth teller, too?"

Taylor turned his head slowly.
This time I could see that the flicker in his eyes was real. "Perry
believed implicitly in the truth. He had high ideals. He placed the
sanctity of life above all else. I looked up to him and loved him like
a brother. He was a better man than I. Than any of us."

"And Jenny Ruhl?"

I hadn't thought anything could
alter his trancelike state, but at my mention of the name, a wave of
pain crossed his face. "Jenny. All these years dead. It was so
unnecessary. All of it was so unnecessary."

"All of what?"

He looked down at his fingers,
which were splayed against his denim-covered thighs.

"What about Tom Grant?" I asked.

"Who's that?"

"You don't remember him? Thomas
Y. Grant?"

"I don't. There's a great deal I
don't remember anymore. But it's the wrong things that stay with me.
Always the wrong things."

"Bad things?"

"Very bad. No matter what, I
can't shake them."

"Tell me about them."

He shook his head violently,
long straight locks flaring out, then falling back to his shoulders. ,

Before he could close up
completely, returned to the subject of Hog Island. "When do you plan up
go there?" I asked, gesturing toward it.

His gaze followed my hand. "When
it becomes too much here. So far I'm all right. You know I drink?"

"Yes."

"Of course Libby would tell you.
She also told you about the drugs. That's all quite true. She despairs
of me, but she understands. My wife doesn't understand; her despair is
painful to watch. When it becomes too painful, then I'll go."

"And do what there?"

"Be at peace."
 

It dawned on me that the man
wasn't talking about becoming a hermit. Or about
living
on the
island at all. He meant to kill himself out there. Despite the fact
that I barely knew him, a coldness clutched at me. I pictured his
children: their young-old faces, their shared conspiratorial looks.
What would his suicide do to them, to the wife I'd yet to meet? To
Libby Ross, who pretended to have washed her hands of D.A. Taylor, but
in reality cared too much?

I watched him wordlessly for a
moment, studied his rugged, hawk-nosed profile, wondered what had made
him this way. As if he could hear my unvoiced question, he said, "I've
never been a strong man. But I'm not insane, at least in any classical
sense. I just slip in and out of touch with reality. Out is better."

"Why, D.A.?"

"Why not?"

I could find no reply to that.

After a moment he said, "I
suppose you saw Harley and Jake on your way in."

"The men in the first cottage?"

"My cousins. My self-appointed
caretakers. When Mia's gone, it's their duty to watch over old D.A.,
make sure he doesn't do anything crazy. There
has been trouble with the sheriff, you see. Trouble with the customers
at the restaurant. Did they try to stop you from coming out here?"

"Yes."

"What did you do to convince them
otherwise?"

"Damned if I know."

Taylor actually smiled—a brief
upturning of the corners of his mouth. "They probably decided you
looked as if you could take care of yourself. And they know I'm not
really violent, just bizarre and unpredictable. I insist to Harley and
Jake that I actually own Hog Island. They're convinced I believe that.
I've always had a perverse streak when it comes to my cousins.
Stupidity brings it out."

"Are they stupid?"

"Moderately. My father's side of
the family never had too much going for it. Their capacity to choose
smart, strong women is all that's allowed them to survive." Again the
small smile flickered. "Listen to me. I claim to be so smart, but what
have I ever done right but marry Mia? And now I'm destroying her,
little bit by little bit."

I decided to let that issue go
for now. "You're well educated. Where did you go to school?"

"U.C. Berkeley—in its Golden
Age." His wry expression made me think of Hank's when we'd spoken of
those days.

"I went there myself, but several
years later. Was that where you met Perry Hilderly and Jenny Ruhl?"

He nodded.

"Libby, too?"

"Yes."

"But you still don't remember Tom
Grant."

He considered. "No, not even now,
and I'm much more clear-headed than when you came out here."

"Let me describe him: he's a tall
man, well built. Thick gray hair, but it would probably have been brown
back then. Handsome, but he has a scar on his left cheek. I told Libby
it looks like something he got in a duel—"
 

Taylor's face went very pale,
then flushed. His eyes came alive, fires rekindling in those previously
dead pits. He put his hand on my forearm, grasping it hard enough to
create five small epicenters of pain.

He said, "Right man!"

I grabbed his fingers, trying to
ease their pressure. "What?"

"Right man!"

"Who
was the right man?"

"The right man," he said for the
third time. He laughed bitterly, the sound harsh, as if his vocal cords
had not been used for any kind of laughter in years. "The right man was
the wrong man."

"I don't understand."

Abruptly he let go of my arm and
slumped forward, staring down at the brackish water of the oyster beds.
"Neither do I," he said.

"Who was the right man?" I asked
again.

He didn't reply, his breath came
fast and ragged.

I touched his arm. "D.A.?"

He remained silent for several
minutes, his breathing gradually returning to normal. When he raised
his head and looked at me, his eyes were as dead as before.