Phantom Nights (14 page)

Not waiting for her to reply. He backhanded his mouth as if the candy was making it water again and got out of the car, walked around the side of the house calling jovially to his dogs. Three in all. They had girl names, "Tootsie" being one Mally caught. The bitch Catahoulas romped along their concrete run, sensing release from boredom, the far-ranging freedom of an imminent hunt.
Mally felt a shrinking of her heart as she crossed arms over sore breasts. Thinking about what she would have to do soon to Leland Howard. Wondering if she had the nerve.

B
obby Gambier walked into his house at five minutes to two in the morning. The power was still off. Hurricane lamps burned in the parlor and the downstairs hall. His loved ones and his mother-in-law, he supposed, had long since gone up to their beds. He picked up the lamp from the cedar hope chest and continued to the kitchen, opened the fridge and pulled out a beer.

He sat at the table with the bottle in one hand, staring at the lamp flame and his reflection in the chimney. Then he looked at Alex's wastebasket on one of the ladderback chairs around the table. After a couple of minutes he reached for the wastebasket and inventoried what was in it without touching anything. Shriveled apple core, couple of seeds like mouse eyes staring at him, pencil shavings, wadded pages of yellow copy paper that had been typed on, greasy tissues, and the nearly empty jar of petroleum jelly. Bobby got up, opened a cabinet drawer where they stored grocery sacks from the Piggly Wiggly, and dumped the contents of the wastebasket into the sack, which he folded down from the top a couple of times. The kitchen door wouldn't open; a key was stuck in the lock. He went outside by way of the front door and put the Kraft paper sack on the back seat of his station wagon, which had been his father's and nearly new the night of the fire that had buried Sheriff Robert beneath charcoal beams in the cellar and, days later, finally killed Bobby's mother, who was lying comatose and wrapped like a mummy for delivery to the saints in a room of the Baptist hospital in Memphis.

The Packard had been parked in a carport beside the house, but volunteer firemen had rolled it to the street before it burned up too.

Lights in the neighborhood came back on while he was in the driveway. When he returned to the kitchen, Cecily was there, elbows on the table, holding an icepack against the right side of her head.

"I heard you come in," she said. "Can't sleep."

Bobby kissed her and was aware of a whiff of vomit on her breath.

"Bad one?"

"Yeah. Bobby, did you—?"

"No sign of him." He pulled a sack of potato chips out of the breadbox, sat down at the table opposite her. Cecily could barely open her eyes; they looked as if they were drowning in headache pain. He drank the rest of his beer, looking sympathetically at her.

"Alex will turn up, won't he?"

"Sure."

"What then?"

"Tell me what he did to you, Cece."

"Grabbed me. On my arm."

"That's all?" Bobby said, wolfing chips.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"He, I think it was, he wanted to get my attention. I was already off the deep end, you know how I—"

"But he didn't hurt you."

"Bobby, what difference now? It's what he did upstairs that matters. That was deliberate. As if he's totally lost his mind."

Bobby pushed the potato-chip sack aside, rolled the beer bottle between his palms.

"What time has it got to be?" Cecily asked.

"After two."

"Everything's closed, even the pool hall. Where could he have gone?"

"I don't know. Do you care?"

"Please don't take that attitude. We have to do something about him.
For
him. I know Alex isn't a mean kid, but if he's having these—wrong impulses, where he can hurt somebody or maybe himself, then we have to get help for him right away."

"What has your mother had to say about all this?"

"When she calmed down and we talked it out, she agreed with me. Just a question of money, Mom told me, don't give it another thought. She's ready to write a check tomorrow for professional help, you know, psychiatric care in a
good
place, not the awful asylum over there in Bolivar."

Bobby put the beer bottle down and rubbed smarting eyes with a knuckle, feeling overcome by a grim sense of inadequacy and fear for his brother.

"If you love me," Cecily said, "and you love Brendan, then you have to do what's right."

"Got to find Alex first."

"You're not thinking about going out again?"

"No. The deps on the twelve-eight are on the lookout for Alex. Maybe he'll show up here. What the hell, I don't know. Let's go to bed, Cece."

"I'm so nauseated. I was this morning too. Bobby, I'm not sure yet, but I may be pregnant again." She laughed, then sobbed, looking to him for help, for his love. His eyes were no longer bleak, just amazed and a little bewildered. A daddy times two.

"Now you quit that, you hear?" Bobby said, smiling and blinking away a tear of his own.

"Listen to w-who's talking."

Bobby got up to kneel at her side and cradle her head in the hollow of his shoulder.

M
any caught Leland Howard on the right side of his head with the heavy, butt end of the brass fireplace poker. He'd been standing sweaty naked with his back to her getting a cigar going. He hadn't fucked her this time in his own bedroom—not sure of the condition of the sheets—but down on a blanket thrown over some davenport cushions in the living room. Just before she struck him he had a rosy look of satisfaction, puffing away with head tilted to the ceiling, no doubt pleased with his stamina and her own spiritless compliance. Quite sure he'd worn her out as she lay there with a lax hand lying on her pudenda. Facing the brick fireplace.

So Mally reached out and lifted the sooty poker from the rack of fireplace tools, reversed it as she twisted around in a catlike crouch, uncoiled with her well-aimed swing. Years ago William had shown her how to hit a baseball. The same principles applied. There was a loud, meaty smack but no underlying deadly crunch of bone in his hard skull. The blow staggered Leland sideways, cigar flying from his fingers. He fell on one knee, then pitched against the wall, beside the fireplace, his eyes haphazard, closing as she crouched again, taut and wild, with the poker raised and back for another swing.

But he was out, and the only sound she heard was a slow fart as Leland's body settled inertly, knees under him, head upright in the angle made by the wall and the side of the fireplace.

The surge of adrenaline, her heart knocking, then the contents of her stomach coming up. Mally projectile-vomited, and for a minute afterward was so dizzy she had to sit down on the cushionless davenport to collect herself, fright stirring up her mind. What if she'd killed him? She stared at a blue welt an inch below his temple, blood oozing from the ear on the side where she had hit him. Then at his chest, which rose and fell in a shallow rhythm. Her gaze dropped to her own body, knees wide apart, the mess clabbering her inner thighs, her blood and his dribbled stuff. She choked and thought she was going to heave again, her sore stomach trying to turn itself inside out.

In the kitchen she wet a dish towel and held onto the counter with one hand while she cleaned herself. She wanted to lie down somewhere and just go to sleep. Instead she tossed the bloody towel into the sink, ran water again and filled her bitter mouth from the tap, rinsed and spat three times.

When she returned to the living room one of his legs was moving and an eye had peeped open like a speck of blue sky in his grayish face. Mally was terrified. He was looking at her but not as if he knew who she was or what had happened to him. Mally had attended to enough accident victims during her hospital training to know that he was a long way from being fully conscious and ambulatory, which helped her calm down.

She dressed quickly while Leland Howard continued to stir ineffectually and make hurt little moans. Then she went through his jacket and trouser pockets looking for her car keys. Couldn't find them. Terror again. Leland's head lolled and his eyes opened wider but remained insensate.

She came across the money in the envelope he'd baited her with, hesitated, then took one of the bills, enough money to get her to Nashville and the safety of her father's house. Safe for a few days at least, while they decided what she must do.

If she couldn't drive her car, then he wasn't going to drive it to chase her down either.

Outside she plunged a bread knife from the kitchen into bald spots on the old front tires. Retrieved her sandals, kept the knife, and jogged down the farm road, calculating how far it must be to the highway. Not more than a mile. She had good wind and felt that she could cover the distance, dodging mud puddles, in under ten minutes. No hope of transportation, a bus, so late at night. She would have to find herself a cabin on another farm, friendly folk to take her in.

The stars were out, the night quiet except for the harried sounds of her breathing, slip-slap of sandaled feet. The cooled air freighted with sharp wild odors of fields and low-standing water and her own, human heat and mistings that only a hound's nose could raise. She could see the moon bobbing out of the corner of her eye at the level of scarecrow trees along the owl-haunted slough. Careful about her footing, but she slipped twice and muddied herself. Tasted a swallow of blood from her tongue. She had to pause, once the farmhouse was well behind her, and snatch some breath, leaned-over and holding her knees, fear using her up faster than she had anticipated.

Mally looked back once and saw nothing, looked back again as she resumed her jog and saw the Catahoula dogs coursing in her tracks, coming twice as fast as she could hope to run in mud-caked sandals. Not a sound out of them, only the icy wolfen shine of their eyes by bold moonlight, and that was the horror of it.

Past tangled barbed wire in a pasture to her left she glimpsed a tree she could climb and a few cows standing beneath its low boughs. She tore her flesh getting over fence line the dogs would leap across with ease and ran for the sanctuary of the spreading oak as the cows, alert to her fear and aware of dogs on the hunt, began to lumber off. Mally stumbled over a snakelike root and fell into cowshit, lost her grip on the bread knife. She groped for it, jumped up again thinking that if she could only get her back against the broad trunk of the tree, then—

A
lex woke up with a chilling start when a cockroach skittered across a bare instep. He shook his foot and heard the Pontiac's engine rev up with a series of roars as if the man driving was stomping-mad about something. After turning the car around he cut out of there spewing gravel from beneath the whitewall tires. A small rock skipped over the top of the garbage pit, hitting Alex near the left temple. The pain and injustice of being unexpectedly struck again caused him to flood.

When he had cried himself out and thought it was safe, Alex got up to retrieve his bicycle from Mally's porch. He didn't know what time it was and couldn't locate the moon; it seemed to be low behind the trees, west of the house. He heard a car on the highway as he was taking his bike down the steps. His blood turned cold enough to start him trembling. He dropped the bike and crouched beside the steps, but the car went past. He recognized one of the homely '49 Fords from the sheriff's department, important-looking chromed bullet lights above the windshield. Momentarily he thought it might be Bobby out looking for him. More likely it was only one of the rookie deputies on the boring midnight-to-eight-a.m. shift.

As he was about to get on his bike, it occurred to Alex that he didn't have anywhere else to go. Dead of night, he was nine miles from the house on West Hatchie and at least a million miles from anyone's good graces. Tired as he was, still he'd manage to peddle to the house, but then what? Would he be given a chance to justify himself? The older he got the more he needed to speak, and the more distant that possibility became. He hadn't tried for over a year, and then, prompted by the goodwill of a teacher he had admired and wanted to please, he had strangled on a single syllable in a roomful of tittering classmates. Turned red and just died there in his seat, furious, helpless.

All he could think of was that he might have given Cecily a bad scare, but it wasn't as if he purposely had sneaked up on her in the kitchen.

Reminding him: What was his wastebasket doing there? What did she mean,
I found it?
The expression on her face like he was in the habit of doing dumps in his own wastebasket.
For Chrissake
, as Holden Caulfield would have put it. Alex had recently discovered Holden as a soulmate, and, although
Catcher in the Rye
was six days' overdue at the library, he was reading it for the second time.