Songs in Ordinary Time (72 page)

“Oh, Carol, don’t. Oh please don’t.”

“No, listen. This is important, Sonny.”

As she spoke, he tried to let his mind wander. He had three patrolmen assigned downtown tonight. Two on foot and one in the car. If that didn’t work…Her sadness tore him apart.

“You see, I know everything,” she was saying. “That’s what happens.

Part of me’s way up there, the good part…”

“No, the good part’s here,” he whispered, taking her small hard hand in both of his.

“Now, you just listen. I know how sad you are. You don’t think you’re a good man anymore, do you? But you are. You are! I know you are.”

“No, I’m not,” he said as he moved closer, holding her hand to his mouth, and now it all came out, his carelessness at work, his men’s disappointment in him. Another store had been broken into since Joey Seldon’s mugging, Hardy’s Records, and though he was certain that punk Mooney was involved, he couldn’t seem to prove it. There was some malevolence in the air, a heaviness he could smell and taste. He woke up dreading it and fell asleep dreading it.

“But it’s not your fault, Sonny.”

350 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Yes it is,” he said. “Things just stopped being important anymore.”

“What things?” she whispered across the pillow.

“I don’t know.” He thought a minute. “Rules, I guess. Seemed like being careful didn’t matter anymore. All that time and always trying to keep one step ahead, you know, and what the hell, look what happens.”

She didn’t say anything. He heard the catch in her breathing.

“You don’t mean me, do you, Sonny?”

“’Course I mean you! What do you think I mean?”

“Eunice. That’s what you mean.”

They lay in silence. He stared at the ceiling. He needed to tell how Eunice had pursued and seduced him, how by taking advantage of his grief she had betrayed her sister-in-law, her closest friend. For the first time now, he realized how much he hated her. Women like that left their poison everywhere.

“She always made sure she was right there, right ready and available,”

he began, but she stopped him. She didn’t have the energy for it. What she meant by part of her already being up there was that she saw things differently now. “At first, it hurt real, real bad. But then I tried to stop caring, because I couldn’t do both. I couldn’t hate the two of you and still die. The hate was keeping me alive.” She touched his cheek. “And besides now, in a way, I’m relieved. I don’t have to worry so much about you and Les being alone. I can just concentrate on this.”

“This?” But he knew what she meant.

“I just want to go now. I could, you know, honey. I could do it tonight if I wanted.”

“What do you mean?” he cried. He jumped up and turned on the light.

She cringed away from its glare. He pulled open the nightstand drawer, then all the dresser drawers. He was looking for bottles. She had pills hidden somewhere, pills or poison. That’s what she meant. He picked up the bottle of Lysol from the windowsill and peered at the label. He searched through her closet, repelled by the stale odor of her unworn clothes in the airless heat.

“Don’t, Sonny, please don’t,” she kept saying as he rummaged through the shoe boxes on the top shelf. Letters, photos, dried corsages whose brittle rusty petals crumbled when he touched them.

“You can’t do that,” he said, fumbling in her bureau drawers, through lace panties, silk slips, garter belts, and stockings she would never wear again. He kicked aside the scatter rug and ran his hand under the dresser.

This was a familiar role. He took the chintz cushion from the rocker, unzipped it, and felt inside. He knew exactly what to do here. Many’s the time he had conducted similar searches, looking for money, a gun, some evidence of malfeasance, in this case the damning proof of his own sins. In failing his family and his community he had failed himself.

“Sonny, please stop. You think you can control everything, but you can’t!”

He stood in the middle of the room, looking around. It was in here somewhere, mocking him. Here under his own roof it had spread, tainting SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 351

them. But he would not be that easily defeated this time. He would fight back and he would keep on fighting, protecting what was his. She held up her hand as he stepped closer. The lamp lit her face with a penetrating lu-minosity, the bones glowing through her flat white pallor.

“Don’t, please don’t,” she whispered as he stuck his hand under the mattress. He pulled out three waxed-paper sandwich bags filled with cap-sules and tablets.

She begged him to put them back. They were all she had. Didn’t he understand? Just knowing they were there was often comfort, strength enough.

This was wrong. He had no right to take this from her. If he really loved her he would at least allow her this one last choice she could make for herself. Didn’t he understand how much she needed this final freedom?

No, he protested, not freedom, but despair. To do this would make a mockery of her life.

“Of your life, you mean,” she sobbed as he went across the hall. He emptied the bags into the toilet and pressed the lever, watching the swirl of colored pills gurgle safely away down and out through the sewer pipes under the wide rain-soaked front lawn to the road, deep below the street, all the streets, safely, safely away.

T
he rain had turned to drizzle, the lightning sporadic and distant. The faint rumble of thunder came like the weary aftermath to a wild party, chairs pushed into place, a couch dragged back, rugs rolled out. Smiling, Astrid Haddad lay in bed with her hands clasped behind her head. Beside her, Bob slept soundly. He’d just invested a lot of money in a business tailor-made for her show-business background. The minute Bob said the name Omar she recognized it as that mysterious guy Marie Fermoyle knew but would never talk about. He’d come into Bob’s office and sold him a franchise in a business Bob said would more than double the money she made now.

When she thought of poor Marie struggling to make ends meet, she realized how lucky she was to have sweet Bobby Haddad.

He’d stood behind her last night smiling as she removed her makeup; then he’d tossed the certificate of franchise onto her dressing table and told her to quit both jobs in the morning. Don’t even worry about giving notice.

This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, the merchandising wave of the future.

Imagine getting paid for giving parties. It would be like Vegas in a way.

Balloons, she thought, picturing the ceiling a mass of white balloons floating like soapsuds. Her color scheme would be pink, silver, and white. She saw herself on a little platform in one of her shimmering cocktail dresses. She’d open every party with a song. “Bobby, wake up,” she whispered, nudging him. His eyes opened heavily and he curled his bandaged hands to his chest.

“Listen to what I just made up.” She’d forgotten about his hands, but she wanted him to hear this before she forgot. She leaned over him, singing in a husky whisper. “Don’t you ladies just sit and mope. Sparkle up your lives with Presto Soap.” He fell back to sleep, smiling.

352 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

There was so much to do, and she couldn’t tell anyone. Omar Duvall had told Bob they should keep it to themselves for a while. First, she’d call Mr.

Briscoe in the morning and tell him she was through. She sighed, relieved that she wouldn’t have to spend every day afraid of seeing Norm Fermoyle.

She looked over at Bobby, ashamed now of all her fooling around. The poor guy had worked his hump off to do this for her. Out every night lately, and coming in so tired sometimes he trembled and cried out in his sleep.

Tonight he’d come home not only soaking wet but with bleeding hands.

He’d cut them on the old metal desk that he’d been moving to make room for her Presto Soap material. With her first profits from the soap business she’d surprise Bobby with a brand-new executive mahogany desk like her boss at the casino had.

I
t was almost three in the morning. Omar dozed on the couch until the front door creaked open and Alice tiptoed inside. He watched her shadow pass over him. No doubt of what she’d been up to, he thought, grinning, as her door closed upstairs. He waited until the only sound in the house was the drip of the kitchen faucet; then he crept up the stairs and opened Marie’s door. She reached up to stroke his arm as he unbuckled his pants and let them drop to the floor. She lifted the sheet. The minute he crawled in, her legs scissored around him.

“Oh you woman,” he moaned.

“Shh,” she panted in his ear as he rolled on top of her. “Shh, shh, shh,”

she kept imploring him.

The certainty of Earlie’s death had spawned this amazing passion. At first he’d thought it was fear, which in his younger years had always been a galvanizing force. But now with all that blind energy turned inward, his course was no longer set by that frenetic voice in his head telling him to run, but by desire, and all that he desired was here.

He understood now that this had been the mission. All his life he had been headed here, to success and the love of a strong woman. Benjy wanted his mother’s happiness more than anything else, so Omar knew the boy would not betray him, if
betray
was even the proper word, because truly he could not even now recall the actual moment, the blow, the thrust—if there had been one. For how could so pure a heart have taken a life? Impossible.

He could not comprehend such an act in the face of this desire. No, no, no, came the rhythmic pounding of his heart over hers. Because he would have this, have this, have this, this, this, this!

“What?” she gasped in his ear as she pulled him down to her.

“All of this,” he whispered.

“I love you,” she whispered.

The knife, he thought, turning his head for air. Other than the boy, it was the one connection to him.

When she was asleep and the sky beginning to lighten, he crept from the house, hurrying to the end of the puddled street where the woods began.

He carried a bag and rags to clean the blade.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 353

B
lue Mooney initialed the sign-out sheet for the seventy-five retreads he’d just loaded on his truck. Waiting on his dashboard was a cup of steaming-hot coffee and a jelly doughnut.

“Hey, Mooney,” Colter called as he headed out of the office. “See if they got any extra snows up there, and if so, grab ’em.”

“Yes sir!” Mooney answered with a brisk nod.

Colter’s weather-beaten face softened with a grin. Both for his boss’s benefit and for the ritual it had become, Mooney walked around his truck and gave the two chains securing the tires one last yank. He flipped his keys in the air with a quick glance back at the platform, where Colter was talking to one of his salesmen. That might not be a bad life, he thought, noting the salesman’s shirt and tie, the shoeshine, yes, and a girl like Alice Fermoyle waving goodbye every morning.

“Blue?” a familiar voice inquired. He spun around to see Sonny Stoner getting out of his cruiser with one of his cops, Jimmy Heinze.

“What do you want? What’re you doing here?” he asked. Colter had to be watching.

“Roll up your sleeves,” Sonny said. “Okay, now let me see your hands.

Hold ’em up.”

“Why? What do you want?” he kept asking as Sonny examined his hands and arms.

“Where’d you get those cuts?”

“What cuts? I don’t know. I always got cuts.” He looked at his hands, just old nicks and scratches.

“Someone broke into Marco’s Pharmacy last night.” Sonny’s blue eyes swam over him.

“Yah, so?” he said, pulling down his sleeves and trying to button the cuffs. His hands were shaking. No. No. Colter was heading down the ramp.

“They broke a cellar window to get in,” Sonny said.

“And they must’ve cut themselves because we found blood,” Heinze added.

“Well, it sure as hell wasn’t me, Chief.” He ignored Heinze. “Look, these are dirty old cuts….”

“Where were you last night? You gonna tell me this time? ’Cause now I’m going to have to start looking beyond certain things. Now I gotta go on my instincts, Blue. And my instincts tell me you’re heading out of control.”

“I was at my mother’s.”

“Oh yah!” Jimmy Heinze snorted. “Sure!” He kept pacing back and forth behind Stoner.

“All night?”

“All night.”

“Jimmy, go get Hildie Carper.”

“She ain’t there now.”

“You said—”

354 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“I stayed there last night. She said I could. Only she and my brothers went to Saratoga.”

“Hey, Sonny, how you doing?” Colter said as they shook hands. “What’s going on?” He looked at Blue.

“I just gotta talk to him for a minute, Jake, in private if you don’t mind,”

Sonny said.

“Is there some kind of problem?” Colter asked.

Sonny gave Blue a quick look. “Nothing I can’t handle, Jake.”

“Well, that’s good to hear,” Colter said, smiling, though his flinty eyes shot from face to face. “Blue’s a good worker. One of these days I’m gonna hate like hell losing him to the Corps.”

Heinze rocked back on his heels and chuckled. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Mr. Colter…”

“Jimmy!” warned the Chief, but the words had already met the air.

“…seeing as how they drummed him out.”

The three men stood there looking at one another.

“What’s he talking about, Blue?” Colter asked.

But he couldn’t answer. Arms at his sides, head up, gaze level, jaw clenched, he did not, could not, dared not move or speak.

A
s Howard Menka came down the street early in the morning with his landlady, Lucille, he saw the rectory door fly open. Unshaven and red-eyed, Father Gannon was fastening his clerical collar as he ran toward the church, late again for Mass. Howard felt bad. He usually tried to wake Father Gannon up in time, but he’d taken the day off. Today was a special day.

He and Lucille were on their way to the depot. He tried not to walk too fast. The first bus to Burlington left in twenty minutes. He and Jozia always got to the depot an hour early. Waiting was half the fun. They’d buy candy bars from the vending machines and eat them on the bench in front of the door where they sat watching the buses come and go with all their passen-gers. But Lucille said her nerves were in a bad way and she didn’t want to sit in a depressing terminal any longer than she had to. He’d been both pleased and bewildered to find her so dressed up this morning. She wore a white dress, a big black picture hat, and white high heels that made her walk funny—like her pants were wet, he thought.