The Long Ride (13 page)

He went out of the bathroom, shut the door and sat down. He listened very intently. He could hear nothing for long moments. Then he was certain he could hear the faintest plop of water striking the porcelain. He sucked in his breath, trying to shut it out of his ears. He remembered how that dripping had gone on and on in that small dirty house outside New Orleans, after Charissa had attempted to see how much strength he’d gotten back. He turned that out of his mind and leaned his head back, closing his eyes.

But he still remembered the same sound, years ago…

He’d been twelve and they’d lived in that crummy Italian neighborhood, on Third Street, just off the river. Allan Garwith had been one of only a half dozen non-Italians in his grade school four blocks away. He’d tried to please, and worked hard to compete at the games. And he’d been accepted. Italians, he’d learned early, took their time accepting you; but when they had it was a lifelong acceptance. Still he had not liked that neighborhood. It was tough, dirty, and you never knew when something was going to go wrong.

But it was not really the neighborhood that was always going wrong. It was, he would later admit in moments of clear reasoning, his father, who had been a large blond man, half-Swede, half-English, with huge shoulders and large, muscular arms. The best thing he remembered about his father was a crooked front tooth that protruded slightly from an otherwise even line of large white teeth. Somehow, his father, with his short-clipped hair and athletic frame, had always seemed very handsomely young—except when he smiled. Then that crooked tooth gave him a mean look that had always frightened him, as though his father had lived an eternity and could even see right into his young-boy mind and discover any disloyalty and punish him for it.

His father was always punishing him for something. He drove a gravel truck for a city quarry. And when he came home, always with beer on his breath, he would, within an hour, find something for which to punish Allan. Allan could not even remember all the things that he’d found, but he did remember that one thing, that one particular evening when his father had come in, eyes glazed, wide mouth slack and mean-looking, that smile flickering on and off.

He’d come into the small, cramped apartment, knocking a chair over. And Allan Garwith’s mother, a large, dark, handsome Irishwoman, with a placid face and a plumply spacious figure, had appeared from the small kitchen, looking and saying nothing. Allan had been sitting on the maroon mohair sofa, playing with a gyroscope he’d gotten the day before. His father had said, “What do you think you’re doing?” Just that, and that was all, but it had been the way he’d said it.

His mother said, “Roy, don’t start on him. Now please don’t start on him.”

“I want to know,” his father said, teeth gleaming, “what he’s doing sitting there playing with toys like some damn infant when he ought to be learning how to fight.”

“What are you talking about, Roy?” his mother had said. “It’s good for him to play with that—it teaches him science. They told me that at the dime store when I bought it.”

Allan Garwith had looked at his father apprehensively, waiting for his mother to make it all right. When his father started this sort of thing, she had always made it right for him.

His father laughed nastily. “I talked to Frank Panzarri down at the Eagle Club about thirty minutes ago. Do you know what Frank Panzarri told me?”

“Why would it make any difference what Frank Panzarri told you at the Eagle Club? I’ve got dinner ready.”

“I’ll tell you what Frank Panzarri told me. He said they were teaching the kids boxing lessons down at the school today. And this little mother’s boy wouldn’t fight.”

Very quickly Allan Garwith again concentrated on his gyroscope. He looped a heavy string between his thumb and little finger, got the gyroscope spinning and then put it on the string. He had never concentrated on anything more carefully in his life.

“Why should they be teaching little boys to fight at school?” his mother asked. “Don’t they do enough of that in the streets anyway?”

“Not this mother’s boy,” his father said. His father smiled and stepped to him and knocked the gyroscope across the room. “Boy, you’re going to learn something now. Stand up.”

“Roy, you leave him alone, do you hear?”

“Get up, boy. Get up on your feet. You’re going to get your first real lesson. Right now.”

He stared at his father, blinking slowly. It was true that he’d refused to put on those oversized boxing gloves at gym class that afternoon, refused to box with Nick Panzarri. He’d been afraid to. But this was even worse. He could feel himself trembling very badly inside.

“Get up,” his father said.

“Roy, no!” his mother said.

His father reached out, grabbed his shirt and snapped him to his feet.

“Put up your hands, boy,” his father whispered. Allan Garwith watched the way that crooked tooth made his father’s smile look peculiar, so that he was even more frightened. “All right,” his father said, and slapped him hard across the cheek.

“Roy—!” his mother had called.

After that he remembered the slaps coming harder and harder, until, though he wasn’t seriously hurt, he’d fallen down. But he still had refused to bring his hands up. Then, because he knew his mother was struggling with his father, he ran. He ran like a mouse searching for an opening in a cat-prowled house. He finally found himself in the bathroom, listening to the struggling of his mother and father. He was shaking very badly. He squatted down, underneath the sink, trying to make himself very small.

He could hear the thump in the other room as his mother and father bumped into a wall. He heard the grunting, the sharp intake of breath, a crack of a hand against skin, a table tumbling over. He heard the footsteps, heavy and menacing, coming toward the bathroom. He squeezed himself even tighter beneath the sink. He saw his father’s work shoes appear, the heavy white socks, the khaki trousers. He was afraid to look any farther up, to see that look on his father’s face. Then he heard his mother coming, grabbing his father again. He held his breath and closed his eyes, listening to the struggling again as his mother pulled his father out of the bathroom.

Finally he heard a rapid swearing from his father, the slam of a door. For a few minutes it was absolutely silent. In those minutes he realized that a tap above him was leaking. Right above his head he could hear the faint plops of water striking the sink rhythmically as he huddled there shaking, waiting for his father to reappear.

At last his mother came in and pulled him to his feet. He put his arms tightly around her generous body. She had been forced to push him away, in order to examine him.

“You’re not hurt,” she said, her voice a flat, weary sound. She turned and left him. She went into the kitchen and sat down wearily at the small table. He followed her and looked at her for a while. Then he went back to the living room and picked up his gyroscope. It wouldn’t work any more. He went back and looked at his mother.

At last he opened the front door and peered out cautiously. He could not see his father on the two flights of steps that ran to the lower level of the. ancient apartment house. He ran down them swiftly. Outside he jumped to the sidewalk and ducked into a doorway and waited. He could not see his father anywhere.

He finally returned to the sidewalk, moving cautiously. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets and swaggered a little, whistling, ready to run any second. He went down the street and around the block.

And that was when he found his father. He was down the alley, struggling with someone again. Allan Garwith was prepared to run again, but he was compelled to watch. When he realized that his father had not discovered him, he pressed himself close to the corner of an old building and stared down the alley in the yellow light of a street lamp.

His father, this time, was struggling with one of the women Allan Garwith had often seen around the neighborhood, a woman who wore a lot of powder and lipstick, someone the older fellows always snickered about and said things about that Allan Garwith didn’t understand. The woman laughed, he was surprised to hear, as she struggled against his father. Suddenly Allan Garwith turned and ran. He ran all the way back to his apartment.

He came into the kitchen, puffing, sweat streaming down his cheeks. When he’d caught his breath, he told his mother, who was sitting exactly as he’d left her, precisely what he’d seen downstairs in that alley.

She didn’t say a word.

He’d thought she didn’t hear him properly, so he started repeating the description. She suddenly brought a hand hard across his mouth.

He’d been too stunned to move for several seconds. During his description he’d felt a fine feeling of discovery, of having come on to something that would make his mother love him more than ever. Now this had happened. He was barely able to turn, blindly, and stumble to bed. He lay there, eyes smarting, hating everything in the world.

He hadn’t stopped hating the next day, nor the next, nor all of them after that. His father had been killed in a truck accident a week later. He had gone to the funeral and hated him lying dead in the casket. His mother had grieved for his father a long time, which he’d also hated. And he hated her personally for being able to grieve that way. When he’d got back from New Orleans and found that she was dead, all those years later, he felt no specific hate; he simply didn’t care…

Now, in the motel cabin in Salt Lake City, as darkness came down from the mountains and blanketed the city, Allan Garwith stood up suddenly, slamming his chair back against the wall. He strode into the bathroom and shoved at that faucet. He could not stop the dripping. He walked angrily back into the room. Cicely was sitting up in bed, holding the sheet close to her chin.

“What’s the matter, Allan?”

He paced, silent, mouth and eyes grim. He kept thinking of Harry Wells. Harry Wells, on their first stop out of Cheyenne, had gone directly to the post office and tried to collect that package in his name. Harry Wells knew what was in that package, and Harry Wells was a cold-blooded killer. Oh, God, he thought, trying to hang onto his nerves.

He tried to get his mind off that. He thought of Margaret Moore. He thought of how he’d watched her walk to her cabin early this morning; it was the way her body moved, the flex of her good legs, the whole of her just plump enough to start a pounding excitement deep in his middle. He stopped pacing and looked at Cicely.

He stepped over to her and pulled the sheet from her with one snap of his hand. He looked at her, while she looked back at him, blinking a little. Then he bent down and put his mouth on hers, hard and brutally…

Minutes later he said angrily, “The hell with it, the hell with it…!”

He got out of bed, face flushed, and listened to her saying, “Allan, it’s just my fault. I’m sure of it. If you can’t—”

“Shut up!” he said, whirling.

He stood there, trembling with fury. He could hear that steady dripping, the sound that had come through to him minutes ago, when he’d thought he’d be above any kind of sound. It had gotten into his ears, his brain, and there wasn’t anything else. He’d finally given up. Now she was trying to feel sorry for him.

“Allan—” she began again.

“Stop,” he said, his voice rising. “Just stop!”

Dressed, he walked out of the cabin, shutting the door. He stood in the warm air, leaning back against the door, away from that damning sound of the dripping, tipping his head up to look at the stars sweeping across the black sky. He saw the lights in Harry Wells’s cabin go out. He knew Wells was checking him. Well, check! he thought. Check!

He shook his head, blinking, trying to shake his mind into calm. He felt stripped of all courage, trapped.

He suddenly looked in the direction of Margaret Moore’s cabin and saw the glow of a cigarette. It came up in an arc, glowed more brightly, then went down. She was standing, he realized, in the shadows, alone…

His throat tightened. He pushed himself from the door and began walking slowly across the court in her direction. What he’d lost with Cicely a few minutes ago was back with him, full force. He could not hear the dripping sound now. Nothing was bothering him, except that she was standing there, alone, in the night, and he was walking toward her…

She saw his door open, saw him silhouetted against the light from inside the cabin. Then the door was shut and he was only a dim outline in front of it. She had tired of the inside of her cabin and had come out, to the fresh air, to look at the stars, at a moon just showing along the tops of the mountains. She was calm. She felt no anxiety when she realized he was walking toward her.

When he was in front of her, she looked curiously at his face, hazy in the dim light.

“Nice night,” he said softly.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

He said nothing more for a few moments. Then she felt a faint apprehension, only instinctively. Somehow she did not like his silence, his immobility. She dropped her cigarette. He said, “I’ll get it.” When he’d ground the cigarette out with his shoe, he’d come another foot closer to her. He was directly in front of her. She suddenly moved sideways a step, toward her door. He shifted so that he was between her and that door.

“Are you feeling better?” she asked, keeping her voice very polite, knowing now that something was very wrong.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m feeling great.”

“Well, that’s very nice. I’m glad to hear that.”

She started to move again. His hand dropped on her shoulder.

She looked at him. “I think—” she began.

Then he was shoving her backward, along the wall, forcing her to the back of the cabin. She didn’t call for help because she was too surprised. She only struggled silently against the savage strength he was displaying, using his one arm.

“Don’t be foolish,” she gasped finally, as he pressed her against the back wall of the cabin. “I can call for help. I can—”

His hand went over her mouth. His body pinned her to the wall. She struggled harder this time. But he held her locked.

He breathed, close to her ear, “Don’t fight it. Do you hear? Relax! I’ll make it right for you. Don’t you understand?”