The Third Silence (2 page)

“Sun roof!” the photographer hooted.

I wondered whether she had meant it that way. Three silent things… Damn, how did that poem end? I didn’t know, and the way the cop was looking at me, I had to give up. I put the paintbrush back in the indigo pot and went home.

* * *

“DARIO LUIS FUENTES,” said the obituary in the May 1969 newspaper archives online, “age 21, a college student, died at 2:57 a.m. Monday in his Sherman Street apartment.”

It didn’t give cause of death. They never do. Just data (survived by parents in Argentina and sister in New Jersey) and dates. Death and birth, both in May—

My eyes widened as I peered into the sage-green shadows of the computer screen. If Dario Fuentes had lived, he would have been fifty years old today.

I heard the kitchen door slam. I stayed where I was.

“Brad?” Yeah, it was my father, but I knew he couldn’t be off duty yet. He’d come home to check on me. And probably to lecture me.

Like Gray Braid, I gave him silence. I went on with what I was doing. He found me in front of my computer studying Dario Fuentes’s electronically transmitted face, complete with headband and long hair. Hippie, dark, and handsome—no, more than handsome. I’m a guy, I don’t usually see other guys that way, but Dario Fuentes was extreme. He was beautiful.

I felt my father standing right behind me. After a still moment I looked up at him. He stood staring at Dario Fuentes, and something old and gray in his eyes made me break my silence. “Did you know him, Dad?”

He didn’t exactly answer. He wet his lips with his tongue and let a few heartbeats go by before he said, “Did you ever notice, whatever you can handle the least, that’s the very thing the good Lord sends you?”

I nodded, watchful. When Dad switches over to one of his spiritual moods, there’s no telling which direction he’s going to blow.

All of a sudden his wind shifted to the north, angry. “Bradford, don’t you
ever
interfere when I’m trying to do my job.” Okay, he was right, I’d stepped out of line, I knew that. Dad scolded, “That should go without saying. You ought to have more sense.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“You could have put me in danger. Or yourself. Or got yourself tangled up in something way over your head.”

“Yes, Dad.” This wasn’t a good time to call the mixed metaphor to his attention.

“You’re too smart to act so stupid. Don’t do it again. Are we perfectly clear about this?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“All right.” He took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “I have to get back to work.” He started to walk away.

I yelled after him, “Dad! Where is she? In jail?”

He wheeled like an attack dog. “What did I just tell you?” he barked. “Stay out of it!”

Only thinking of a burning spear and a horse of air gave me the guts to keep trying. “I’m not interfering. I’m just asking a question, Dad.”

“Well, don’t!”

“Dad, please. I need to know.”

He spewed one of his windiest sighs, but he answered me. “I put her in the hospital. Psych ward.”

I yelped, “She’s not crazy!”

“Oh, so you’re the expert? Still telling me what to do? You
want
her in jail now?” He stormed off.

Right away, even before the door slammed, I felt ratstink bad. I sat there feeling rotten. Dad had kept her out of jail. He really was a good person and a good cop, one of the best. Yet here we were yelling at each other, because somehow this had gotten to be about him and me. Me and a blue uniform. Me and poetry.

These be/Three silent things
… Damn it all, how did it end?

I got up and phoned the hospital, psych ward, knowing I was crazy even to try to talk with her. “Could I speak with, um…” I realized that I didn’t know her name. “Could I speak with the gray braid lady? The one who painted the car?” I actually felt myself blushing, this was so stupid.

“And who is this, please?” asked a crisp white-coat voice.

“This is, um, the boy who loves poetry.”

“One moment.”

Voices in the background, and then a smoky velvet woman’s voice said, “Supposedly I am mentally incapacitated, so I must play along. What is the password?”

Hot catalpas. I squeaked, “Is it you?”

“Perhaps. I say, ‘Fergus,’ and then what do you say?”

She was so strange, I felt like I’d known her all my life, and she couldn’t have chosen a poem I knew better. How could I ever have walked past her without saying hi? I loved her. I said,

“Who will go drive with Fergus now,

And pierce the deep wood’s woven shade,

And dance upon the level shore?

Young man, lift up your russet brow,

And lift your tender eyelids, maid…”

I stopped, because I couldn’t think what came next.

She said,

“And brood on hopes and fear no more.

And no more turn aside and brood

Upon love’s bitter mystery…”

She let the words trail away.

“Mystery,” I said. “The reason I called…” It wasn’t the whole reason, really, but I went on. “Would you tell me about Dario Fuentes?”

“I already did,” she said, her voice the color of fog.

“Okay, he loved poetry, right?”

“We spent almost every evening at the coffeehouse. Candles, guitars, poetry, love.”

“And he loved the sea?”

“He loved the sea and he loved me.”

“And you loved him.”

“Western wind, when wilt thou blow? I am still in love with him.”

“But he’s dead.” Thirty years ago, and she still felt for him? I wondered whether that made her insane. She didn’t seem crazy to me.

“Yes. He’s dead. I want someone besides me to remember him.”

“How did he die?”

“What they did to him in jail,” she said. “He was never the same afterward. He hanged himself.”

* * *

My father didn’t come home till late, after Mom was asleep. I was sitting at the kitchen table when Dad came in looking as saggy as his gun belt, dead tired. “You should be in bed,” he said.

I shook my head. “Can’t sleep.”

He stood there and studied me. Looking up at him, I saw something sad in his eyes.

Finally he asked, “How much do you know?”

It was hard to keep looking up at him, so I watched my own hands lying like dead doves on the table. I said, “They were in college together, right? And it was the sixties, so everybody was protesting authority and everything. Dario Fuentes stopped his car in the middle of the square one day and locked it and painted flowers on it till the police hauled him off to jail.”

My father said, “It was different back then. A lot of tension.”

“You were, what, about ten years old?”

“Snot-nosed kid eavesdropping.”

I raised my eyes to him. “Was it Grandpa?”

He sighed and sat down across the table from me. I waited awhile before he said, “If this gets in the news…for the first time I’m glad my father is dead.”

I nodded, waiting some more.

He said, “That woman today wouldn’t cooperate. She wouldn’t even state her name. Do you know her name?”

I shook my head. “Was it Grandpa who took Dario Fuentes in?”

Dad closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead with his fingers. He said, “It made him sick, what happened.” He shifted his hands back to massage his scalp. “Yes, he took the Fuentes kid in. Longhair pretty-boy hippie blocking the square, painting goddamn daisies on his Volkswagen. Dad roughed him up some. You know how your grandfather was, an old-style cop. He and the other officers smacked the Fuentes kid around, and then they put him in the holding cell with some guys they figured would teach him a lesson.”

He stopped. Put his hands on the table like mine. I asked, “They beat him up?”

Dad shook his head. “Worse than that,” he said, not looking at me.

There was a moment like snowfall.

I whispered, “Oh my God.” My whole body clenched like a fist.

In a low voice Dad said, “My father never meant it to get so ugly. He tried to stop it, but nobody would back him up. He tried to get the kid out, drop the charges, but the captain wouldn’t let him.”

“My God.”

“They let the Fuentes kid go the next day, and everybody acted like nothing had happened.”

“Even Grandpa?”

Dad stared at the table top. “He had to, to keep his job.”

“Would you—if it happened—”

“No. I wouldn’t. But thank God, it’s not like that anymore, son.”

God, I sure hoped not. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“Your friend? Nothing much. They’ll let her go in a couple of days. The magistrate will probably fine her for being a nuisance. That’s all.”

“Her car?”

“It’s impounded. She can get it back.”

“Dad…” I stood up, because I was all nerves. Had to put the day to rest somehow. “Dad, can we go see the car?”

“
Now?
”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“You’ll see. Dad? Please?” I stretched out my hand to him.

He rolled his eyes and let out one of his hurricane sighs, but he stood up and took me to the impounding lot.

* * *

Inside the chain-link fence, under the sodium vapor lamps, the painted-up car seemed pitiful, like an old lady who’s piled on way too much makeup. Someone had put the lids on the margarine tubs and wrapped the wet brushes in newspaper and piled everything into the back seat. Dad stood reading the car while I found the blue paint and the paintbrush she had handed me.

“Penguin dust,” Dad murmured with a chuckle, and then he glanced over, saw me painting on the trunk of the car, and yipped, “
What
are you…” But he stopped himself. He just walked over to see what I was doing.

Reading, he whispered, “These be/three silent things:”

I’d remembered, finally, where I’d seen it: in my handbook of poetic forms. It was a poem called “Triad,” in the cinquain form, by the woman who’d created that form, who had the most unpoetic name I’d ever heard of: Adelaide Crapsey. I felt pretty sure Gray Braid’s name was not Adelaide. As I finished the poem, I tried at first to imitate her precise, quirky printing, but gave it up. I just let her writing be hers and mine be mine, and when I finished, the poem was still a poem:

These be

Three silent things:

The falling snow…the hour

Before the dawn…the mouth of one

Just dead.

I stood back, and we both read it over and over. Dad said nothing at all, just laid his hand warm and heavy on my shoulder.

“The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” Wallace Stevens

“Who Goes With Fergus?” William Butler Yeats

“Western Wind,” anonymous early English lyric

“First star to the right” from PETER PAN, James M. Barrie

“The rain never gets wet,” and “Thank you for reading my car,” Mickie Singer

“Fern Hill,” Dylan Thomas

“Under Ben Bulben,” William Butler Yeats

“Red Sky at Night,” anonymous verse

“Dream of pear empanadas” and “Don’t cry over chihuahua pee,” Nancy Springer

“Penguin dust” from “Marriage,” Gregory Corso

“serpent-haunted sea” from GOLDEN JOURNEY TO SAMARKAND, James Elroy Flecker

“Tom O’Bedlam’s Song,” anonymous 17th century ballad

“Triad,” Adelaide Crapsey

Edgar Award-winning author Nancy Springer,

well known for her science fiction, fantasy, and young adult novels,

has written a gripping psychological thriller—smart, chilling, and unrelenting...

available in paperback and e-book in November 2012

from New American Library

Dorrie and Sam White are not the ordinary Midwestern couple they seem. For plain, hard-working Sam hides a deep passion for his wife. And Dorrie is secretly following the sixteen-year-old daughter, Juliet, she gave up for adoption long ago. Then one day at the mall, Dorrie watches horror-stricken as Juliet is forced into a van that drives away. Instinctively, Dorrie sends her own car speeding after it—an act of reckless courage that puts her on a collision course with a depraved killer...and draws Sam into a desperate search to save his wife. And as mother and daughter unite in a terrifying struggle to survive, Dorrie must confront her own dark, tormented past.

“A darkly riveting read...compelling.”

—Wendy Corsi Staub, national bestselling author of Nightwatcher and Sleepwalker

“A fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat thriller that will have you reading late into the night and cheering for the novel's unlikely but steadfast heroine.”

—Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times best-selling author of The Weight of Silence and These Things Hidden

Learn more about all of Nancy’s titles at her website, www.nancyspringer.com.