Radiant Days (25 page)

Rob Kampfert smiled. “Yeah. He was the best.”

I recalled what David had said, that Ted and his brother had started the Deadly Rays in high school; that they hadn’t spoken for years. “Was he—do they know what happened?”

“Yeah, probably. They still have to do an autopsy, but the ER doc said it was alcohol and exposure.” For a moment he shut his eyes. “Business as usual. Asshole.”

“I’m sorry.” I started crying. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry….”

Officer Pieri poked his head into the room. “Everything okay in here?”

Rob nodded. “Yeah, thanks, I’m about done.”

Officer Pieri withdrew. Rob Kampfert touched my shoulder and got to his feet. “Thanks, Mary—”

“Merle.”

“Right, Merle.” He stopped, slid a hand into his jacket, and pulled out a scroll of paper. He unrolled it and held it up: my portrait of Ted. “You do this?”

I flushed. “Yeah. Last night.”

“No shit. Huh. That’s really good.”

“Thanks.”

“It was in his pocket when they found him. That and a couple of fish hooks. My brother loved to fish. Fishing and the guitar, that was pretty much his whole life. And booze,” he added. “But this is a great picture. I’ve got photos of Ted but they’re mostly old ones. When we were both kids. And a bunch with the band. But your picture, you really nailed him.” He laughed. “And my brother is a hard guy to nail down.”

I thought he was going to return the drawing to me. Instead he rolled it back up and slid it inside his jacket.

“Thanks for talking to me,” he said. “There’s going to be some kind of memorial service, probably Saturday. Maybe you can make it.”

He nodded at me and left. I waited a few minutes, gathered my bag, and did the same.

Officer Pieri gave me a perfunctory wave as I passed his
office. My steps slowed as I approached the waiting room: I had no idea what to do now—where to go, how to get enough money for food and a place to live. The notion of going back to Norville was the only thing worse than that of spending a night out on the street, alone. I could continue to search for the lockhouse, but I couldn’t bear the thought of being there without Arthur or Ted.

And suddenly it hit me that I’d be spending the rest of my life without them. Ted Kampfert was dead, and Arthur as well—unless time really did flow backward and forward, something that was impossible to believe in with both of them gone. I wiped my eyes, determined not to walk through the waiting area in tears, and stared resolutely at my feet as I strode across the room.

I was halfway out the door when someone ran up breathlessly alongside me.

“Merle! Hey, Merle, wait up—”

I stared in disbelief. “David?”

“Jesus, I waited in there for like an hour, and then you almost got away!” He hugged me, so tightly I could smell his musky aftershave.

“But how’d you find me?”

“I heard what happened when I went to get coffee. A guy said Ted had OD’d or something, and that the police had brought in a girl for questioning. I remembered seeing you last night and, I dunno.” He hugged me again. “I just had a feeling. I’m so sorry, Merle.”

“Thanks.” I drew back and winced. “I must smell awful. I haven’t had a shower in—well, you don’t want to know.”

David laughed. “Yeah, I figured that when I saw you last night. You and that guy, you seemed like you had other things on your minds. And Ted, too—God, that’s so sad. Were you with him? Do you know what happened?”

I did my best to fill him in as we walked. I left out the more arcane details, though I did mention seeing that odd green flare in Ted’s eyes as he played. When I was done, David took out a joint and lit it, tossed the match to the curb, then took a long hit. “Man, you had quite a night. All I can say is, it sounds like Ted went out with a bang. I mean, at least he died happy, right?”

“I dunno. Did he? Does anyone actually die happy?” I kicked through a patch of brown leaves. “I just can’t believe he’s dead.”

“What about Arthur? Does he know?”

“Probably not. I mean, no. He just … took off.” I gestured vaguely in the direction of the Key Bridge. “I doubt I’ll ever see him again.”

“Hey, you never know.” David passed me the joint, but I waved it away. “But what you said about Ted’s eyes, that weird green thing—I’ve seen that.”

“You have?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Ted was the one who set me up with John Waters, did you know that? Well, no, you wouldn’t, but he did. I always felt that he was always sort of out there, pulling strings in this weird way. Other people have told me shit like that about him, too. Couple guys in a band, this girl who went to New York to study acting with Stella Adler. Ted always seemed to know someone who could help you out.”

“Well, he didn’t know someone who could help me,” I said with a trace of bitterness.

“That’s why I’m here, darling.” David put his arm around me. “Listen—there’s this little room at my place, it was like a maid’s room or something. I’ve just got boxes in there now, books and stuff, but there’s a daybed, and you’re small enough you could sleep on it.”

“Oh, David, really?” I grabbed his neck and kissed him, over and over. “Oh my God, you’re an angel—”

David pulled away, grinning. “Be warned, it’s a tiny room. Peter said I should use it as a closet, but I wanted to see about making it into some kind of office or something.”

“Is Peter the guy you were with last night? Does he know about this—is he going to mind if I crash at your place?”

“Yeah, he’s the guy. And no, he won’t mind. I don’t think so, anyway,” he said vaguely. “He’s paying for my place, but he doesn’t live there—he’s got a house up in Tenleytown. I’m a kept man, Merle.” He burst out with that goofy foghorn laugh. “At least until I get work in another movie and become famous.”

David wasn’t lying—the room was tiny. But I would have been happy with a broom closet, if it had access to hot water and a pillow. As soon as we arrived I dumped my bag on the floor and took a shower, getting out only when David barged in and announced I’d used up all the hot water.

“Here.” He held out an armful of clothes—jeans and corduroys, flannel shirts and T-shirts, and a sequined vest. “Something in there’ll fit you. We can go down to the Junior League Shop or
Goodwill later and find some girl clothes if you want.”

“I don’t need girl clothes.” I grabbed a Roxy Music T-shirt, a pair of black drainpipe jeans, and a silky black polyester shirt covered with purple medallions. “I’ll take these.”

“Here.” David tossed me a long cotton-candy-pink scarf. “A token girl thing. So your neck doesn’t get cold. Come on, I made breakfast.”

We went through an entire skillet of scrambled eggs and chives, a platter of bacon, toast, and coffee, and orange juice. Afterward I was so tired I could barely walk to my room without stumbling. David had removed most of the boxes and stuck an old Windsor chair beside the daybed. He’d saved one carton as a makeshift nightstand with a lamp balanced precariously atop it.

“Good night, sweet princess,” he said as I crawled under the covers and groaned in pure joy. “I’ll be out for a couple of hours—see you when you get up.”

When I woke, the room was filled with a lavender glow, the trees outside the window etched black against the twilight. For a moment I was disoriented, my mind clicking through all the places I might be—the squat on Perry Street, Ted’s boat, the lockhouse, Paris….

I bolted up in a panic: where was my bag?

Then I saw it on the carton beside the bed. I snatched it to my breast, thought of Ted and whispered,
“Oh, thank you thank you.”

David was still gone. I foraged in the fridge for something to eat, and returned to my room. I sat on the daybed with my satchel and meticulously
began to remove its contents.

There was the sketchbook with all my drawings of Clea; there was my notebook. There were my charcoal pencils and the prismatic array of oil pastels—violet, indigo, crimson, saffron, black. There was the very first sketch of what became my tag, fractal stars exploding into the eye of the sun.

Nearly everything was arrayed before me on the bed. I stuck my hand into the bag one last time, in case I’d missed a pencil or gum eraser, and my fingers closed around something unfamiliar—a paperback book.

I pulled it out, trying to remember if I’d stuck a book in there in the last few months. On the cover was a black-and-white reproduction of an old photograph. Something about the image was familiar. I stared at it, frowning, then snatched my hand back, as though the book might burst into flame.

It was a photograph of Arthur. Not the round-faced fifteen-year-old I’d first met in the lockhouse, but the young man of a few months—for me, a few hours—later. His mouth was tight-lipped, almost grim; his tousled hair swept back from a high forehead. He wore a dark suit jacket and high-collared shirt with a knotted tie askew at this throat. It was inconceivable.

But it was him. Those pale eyes were unmistakable, staring at some impossible thing, unseen by anyone else: an unblinking gaze, and utterly cold.

My neck prickled, and I skimmed the back copy.

I opened the book. There were French words on the left-hand pages, English translations on the right.

I continued to leaf through the book.

My hand shook as I turned the page.

“Hey, you’re up!”

I turned.

David stood in the doorway, his brow furrowed. “You okay, Merle? Did something happen?”

I said nothing, just stared at the book in my hands. David walked over and took it from me, glanced at the cover, then nodded in approval. “Rimbaud! He’s incredible, isn’t he?”

“You—you’ve heard of him?”

“Yeah, sure. He was amazing. A total rock star. All the Beats were into him—Kerouac, all those guys. Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan. He was gay—Rimbaud, not Dylan—he was living with this guy named Verlaine, another poet. Verlaine tried to kill him, shot Rimbaud in the hand. Crazy as shit. Rimbaud wrote some
stuff after that, but then he gave up on poetry and disappeared. He worked for the emperor of Abyssinia as a gunrunner.”

He paused and gave me an odd look. “That French guy I saw you with last night—his name was Arthur, too, right?” He gazed at me expectantly. I remained silent, and finally David shrugged. “Just seems kind of weird, that’s all.”

I nodded. “Yeah, weird.” I pointed at the book. “What happened to him? Rimbaud. How—how did he die?”

David frowned. “I’m not sure. Cancer, I think. He died kind of young. But the insane thing is that he was so young when he wrote all this stuff. By the time he was nineteen, he was finished.”

“Nineteen.” I stared at the charcoal pencils and oil pastels on the bed. After a moment, David moved these aside and sat beside me, thumbing through the book.

“Here.” He handed it to me. “Read that.”

“He was only sixteen when he wrote that,” David said. “Can you believe it? Sixteen fucking years old.”

I remembered Ted’s words.
“The poet must be a thief of fire.” Someone I know said that.
I handed the book back to David.

It was too much to even begin to think about: like learning the guy sitting next to you in class was Shakespeare, or Picasso. I remembered the drunken boy who’d read his poems to me beside the C&O Canal, the boy who’d said, “We are children of the moon,” and pressed his bloody palm against my own; the same
person who watched, rapt, as a man drowned in an icy river, and later wrote a poem about it.