The Boy With Penny Eyes (19 page)

He'd seen a lot of other changes in people since then, especially in the ones who had seemed to change so completely during the 1960s and 1970s. When the pendulum swung way out one way, it often swung back to the other extreme. Student activists became stockbrokers, revolutionaries opened trendy ice cream parlors or sold car insurance.

But it had always seemed to him that Mary was immune to that. She was a quiet woman, but underneath that seemingly frail exterior he had always found a source of strength. She believed in him, in their life, and, if she believed in God, it was one of her own making, one that suited her. Jacob had never thought that the other, older, demanding God would rise up within her to reclaim her.

But that's just what seemed to have happened. The pendulum had swung back for his wife, owing to shock or shaken beliefs or whatever, and he was now seeing a new, frightening side of her. It was almost as if all the doubts and frustrations he had endured the past months had been lifted from his shoulders and dropped squarely on hers. And she had cracked under the weight.

"Mary, how can you—"

"That,"
she said, pointing a shaking finger at the newspaper that lay open on their bed.

Once again, Beck looked at the article on page 43:

STRANGE DEATH

Curtis Maynard, an itinerant, was found dead just inside the entrance to Willard Street Park this morning by a passerby. Police say Maynard frequented the park at night and was often seen in the vicinity of the entrance, where he usually slept.

Though it was determined that Maynard had consumed at least one quart of whiskey and was legally drunk at the time of his death, police said that the direct cause of death was asphyxiation. Maynard was found with an empty bottle of scotch in his mouth, the neck of the bottle shoved halfway down his throat. "It looks like he tried to swallow the bottle itself," Officer Frederick Ripkin said.

Maynard had no close relatives . . .

"That's the man," Mary said, "that I saw Billy looking at that night in the park."

 
"But Mary—"

"I knew he was going to be hurt," she told him. "I could feel it."

"Mary," he answered rationally, "can't you understand that all you saw was an old alcoholic taking a pee and a little boy smoking a cigarette? What in heaven's name did you expect to see at eleven o'clock at night in a public park? Kite flyers?"

"I felt it!"
she screamed, and for a moment a wild, fanatic light shone in her eyes before she suddenly began to sob and collapsed into Jacob's arms.

This came just when Jacob thought he was making progress with Billy. The boy had come out of his shell a bit, had even gone with him to a high school football game the previous weekend. Jacob had even gotten the boy to admit that he was still smoking cigarettes, but that he would try to quit.

"They help me concentrate," was the boy's way of explaining his habit.

He'd even completely dismissed the incident in the boy's room, realizing that he had been tired and could very well have imagined it.

And there was the matter of the boy's mother. He had located and talked Mrs. Potter into coming for her son. He thought this would solve everything (except, possibly, his own feelings for the boy, since, for the first time, he knew how much he really wished he had a son). Instead, it had seemed to solve nothing. Billy hadn't even acknowledged Beck's statement: "Your mother is coming for you, Billy." In a way he understood, since Mrs. Potter for some reason, out of guilt or because he was a minister, had spilled her guts out to him over the phone, talking for an hour and a half about Billy's father running out on her and her own alcoholism and negative feelings for the boy. She had sworn that she was no longer drinking. Beck had believed her, and though there was a curious tension beneath her words when she promised to come and "try" to take him back, Beck had thought the woman meant well and would do just that.

The fact that Billy might soon be leaving them had done nothing for Mary, either. She had merely shook her head and said, "That will solve nothing." Only Christine seemed genuinely pleased, saying sarcastically, "Now I can have my father back."

Jacob tried to gently pull his trembling wife away, but she clung to him. "I love you, Jacob. No matter what, even if it was wrong for me to leave my mother and to stop my readings, I know that it could never have been a bad thing for me to love you." A long shiver passed through her body. "But that boy is Satan. And he has a hold on you. He has a hold on your heart."

"Mary," he soothed.

"Now I know my mother was right. For a long time, especially after I met you, I fooled myself into believing that she was a hard, bitter old woman and that she was wrong about life. But she was right. There's only one thing in this world to watch for, and that's Satan. And now he's come. Just like my mother told me he would. I wasn't positive. Even after I read that boy, some small part of me told me I must be wrong, but that small part of me, in my heart, was run by Satan himself." She sounded almost as if she were in a trance. "My Aunt Stella always told me Satan played tricks. He played his tricks on Aunt Stella, and on me, but I've found him just the same. He's a little boy who smokes cigarettes. And God still won't tell me what to do."

She sobbed against him, shaking as if taken by a violent chill. "Oh, Momma, I wish you were alive so I could tell you I'm sorry."

From downstairs came the sound of the front door opening and loud sobbing.

"Christine?" Jacob shouted, pulling away from Mary and running for the stairs. He heard Mary cry out and follow.

When he reached the hallway, he found his daughter sobbing helplessly, hugging herself, a young policeman standing awkwardly at her side.

"What happened?" Beck asked, looking from his daughter to the cop.

"There was an accident," the police officer began.

"Oh, Daddy," Christine sobbed, her eyes red-rimmed, and then she ran to him.

Behind them, Mary stood in the doorway.

"Christine," he said, gently pushing her away from him with his hands on her shoulders, "tell me what happened."

"It was . . ." she said, and then recoiled at some memory.

The policeman said, "Your daughter is all right, Reverend Beck. She and her friend had quite a shock, I'm afraid."

The young officer looked as though he had had quite a shock also.

"I'll tell him," Christine said in a low, courageous voice.

Beck sat her down at the kitchen table and held her hand. "Tell me," he said.

"Annie and I were walking home from school," she said haltingly. "We were on the south side of Sullivan Street. Annie said she wanted to go to Manny's deli for a candy bar."

She took a shuddering breath and went on. "So we crossed over. We went into Manny's and Annie got a Clark bar and we looked at the magazines. Then we walked outside."

A shiver passed through her and she stopped speaking. Then she said slowly, "When we passed the alley next to the deli, Annie heard a noise. I heard it, too. It sounded like something was scraping along the ground."

"Go on, baby," Jacob said in a soothing voice.

The next words came out in a sobbing rush. "We looked into the alley and one of the garbage cans near the entranceway was sliding toward the street like something was pushing it. Then it fell over. Danny French was behind it. And he was . . ."

"Christine, baby—"

"Maybe I should—" the police officer interrupted.

"I'll tell him!"
Christine shouted. She sobbed, staring up into her father's face. "Daddy, there was a knife stuck into his eye right through the other side of his head!"

"Oh, God," said Beck, a coldness passing through him as he pulled his daughter closer.

When Jacob Beck had thanked the policeman and saw him out, he returned to find Mary still standing rigid in the doorway.

"Tell your father what you told me," she said to Christine.

Beck went to her, and Christine let him rock her in his arms before she stiffened. When she looked at him, her eyes were hard. "Billy had a fight with Danny French in the school yard today."

"Christine—"

"The boy is evil, Jacob," Mary said from her spot in the doorway. Her gaze was level, her voice quiet and assured. "He killed that old man in the park, and he killed Danny French. He killed Allie Kramer. The other mysterious suicides in the paper—he murdered them all. He'll kill us, too."

She looked at her husband with a calm conviction that turned Beck's insides icy. "Billy Potter is Satan, Jacob." Her eyes were hard as stones when she next spoke.

"God will tell me what to do."

Emily Potter made it to Tulsa. At Tulsa, where they had a half-hour stopover, she wandered restlessly from the train station into the sunlight. The sun hurt her eyes. She shaded them with her hand, and walked until she found a main street. Proceeding to one end, she did not find what she was looking for, so she retraced her steps, checking with her eyes the shops across the street, and walked the other way.

At the near end of the street, near a highway overpass, she found what she sought. Only then did she tell herself that this was what she was looking for. I'll put it away, she thought, and I won't look at it. I'll give it to Reverend Beck.

There was a little bell over the door that jangled as she went in. For a brief moment she was blinded, her eyes still used to the bright daylight outside. Also, she was confused. It had been a long time.

But it all came back to her. There were bottles set in familiar rows along one wall. She went to one with a label she knew and lifted it from its shelf and brought it to the counter. She checked her watch. In ten minutes the train would leave.

The store proprietor seemed in no hurry to wait on her. He was dusting a line of liter Chablis bottles in the back. He hummed to himself. The counter had a green mat on it, the kind that was made of textured rubber so things wouldn't slip off.

She was about to clear her throat when the proprietor turned and saw her. "Be right with you!" he said brightly. He continued his dusting for a moment longer, then tucked his duster into his belt and shuffled over to the counter. She saw that there was something wrong with his legs—one was shorter than the other and he moved with an unconscious grimace each time he took a step.

"Just this, please," she said when he had reached the back of the counter, knowing that if she did not say that, he would ask her what else she wanted. He looked like the kind of man who would say that, then go on to the weather and maybe politics before getting around to telling her about a wonderful red wine that had just come in from Uruguay. He looked like the kind of man that went into barbershops and stayed there all day when he wasn't working, talking and talking.

"You know—" the storekeeper began. She repeated, "Just this, please."

He shrugged and took her twenty-dollar bill, ringing up the sale on an old wooden cash register. The drawer didn't open, and he clucked and banged the side of it. It still didn't open. She looked at her watch and saw that there were only five minutes until the train left. She didn't want to miss it and be stuck here. She said, "That'll be fine," and took the bottle, tucking it into her shoulder bag. At the doorway, as the little bell tinkled above her, she heard the proprietor call out behind her, "Miss, your change!" as the cash-register drawer opened with an old, muffled
ding
.

She went back out into the sunshine, again holding her hand over her eyes.
Such a long time,
she thought.
So long.
As she walked briskly toward the train station she felt the hard bottle hitting against her side through the shoulder bag. She took the bottle out and held it tightly under her arm.