He never really knew when his thoughts lost all coherence, merging with troubled dreams of puzzlement and loss, and then suddenly he started awake, cramped and uncomfortable in his grandfather’s chair, to discover that it was almost one o’clock, that he had drunk at least half the whiskey, and had to talk to Jan.
Getting out of the chair hurt. So did standing straight. The small of his back felt run over by a tractor and he had forgotten what his knees were for. The captive glowworm in the light fixture overhead poked angry fingers into his eyes.
He stumbled across the room to the desk phone. He had written her number on the cover of the directory. He dialed it clumsily. She took a long time to answer.
At last she said sleepily, “Hello?”
He’d been going to ask something about Mrs. Howard but suddenly wasn’t sure just what. He surprised himself by saying instead, “Does it really matter?”
He listened to her breathing, gathering her wits.
He explained impatiently, “Whether my grandfather was or was not the unfeeling old bastard he always seemed.”
“Oh. Dave. What time is it?”
“Twelve fifty-eight.”
“Oh.” Her voice was faint but behind it connections to the real world were being made. “No, I guess not. It might make a difference to how you think of him. What makes this so important at twelve fifty-eight?”
“... Nothing, I guess. Listen. Right after we talked before, something weird happened. I got mad. Real red fury, first time in my life. I thought I was mad at you, now I’m not so sure. I poured me a little drink and swallowed the whole distillery. Fell asleep in a merciless armchair, woke up with a broken back. I think someone’s been tramping through my head replugging half the wiring. Nothing makes much sense.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re not mad at me. Who’re you mad at? Your granddad?”
“Why bother?”
“Your getting mad is quite a breakthrough. Getting mad at him would be a bigger one. You’ve been mad at him most of your life. Isn’t that why you worked so hard to be like him, beat him at his own game, replace him?”
“You’ve been reading tea leaves again.”
“If you’re finally getting mad at your grandfather, maybe it’s because you’ve started seeing him as a failure at loving instead of a success at tyranny.”
“Why’re you so hung up on my grandfather?”
“I didn’t make this call, the agenda’s yours, you brought him up. If there’s something else can it please wait till I put Barbara on the school bus at ten past eight?”
“... I guess so.”
“I’ll bet what we did talk about was more important. Good night.”
The disconnection came a heartbeat after the last word. She didn’t want any smart replies. Or any thoughtful or analytic ones. Not that he could think of any. Maybe he was still half drunk or hungover.
The nearest bed was in his grandfather’s room.
This time the dreams were goading, thwarting. They played against a dim roaring background that touched everything with the anxiety of developing nightmare.
His grandfather was alive and wouldn’t say where his checkbook was and knew all about Dave and Jan in the basement and in a voice like setting ice warned against the flow of hormones and emotions, regretting his failure to instill in David a due appreciation of the joys of intellection until Dave burst out, feeling insignificant against the grandeur of the Heavens and the old man’s glacial certainty, “God damn it, I’m thirty-one and I’ll screw whom I like,” and naked teenage Jan was recoiling from him like grown-up Jan, eyes huge and dark in a pale pointy face and his grandfather, all thoughtful calm, was trying to throttle him with a hand that felt like a bundle of dry twigs but was amazingly strong—
He struggled to sit up, coughing. His eyes stung. Through smoke that filled the room he saw a lurid red line under the bedroom door. He smelled gasoline.
He had slept in his clothes under a heavy quilt. He kicked free of it, stepped into his shoes, and blundered to the door. It was too hot to touch. The light switch didn’t work. His mind skipped around like water on a hot skillet, the rest of him beginning to fumble along after it in the hope of guidance. It’s called panic, son. Don’t think. Just get your ass out of here.
He felt his way along the footboard of the bed to the window. The chest of drawers blocked his way. He hooked both hands around its rear edge and hauled. It scraped across the floor like a rusty gate until it hit the bed — but had given him access to the window. He tripped the shade. It rattled up. He grabbed the sash lock but couldn’t move it.
Beginning to cough in earnest, he pulled a narrow top drawer from the chest of drawers and drove it through the window. Broken glass flew and cold air hit him in the face and the drawer stuck halfway through the flyscreen. He sawed it violently in and out, glass flying, until the screen gave way and the drawer fell to the ground. Someone outside was shrieking something but he had no time to listen. Something to get — no! — two things.
He got his quilted jacket from the bedside chair, put it on, and zipped it up against self-inflicted abdominal surgery when he shoved himself through the window. Then he felt for the walk-in closet door and opened it. Fire was already eating through the wall from the middle of the house. He scooped up the luckless gray lockbox and carried it to the window and threw it out. Then, ignoring the remaining spikes of glass still in the frame, he reached beyond the window to the sill and hauled himself through the opening.
A three-point landing — hands and forehead hitting the cement walk at the same time — knocked him silly. He was vaguely aware of struggling to get up until someone turned him over on his back, grabbed his wrists, and dragged him away from the house. The godawful roaring, grinding noise was the first fire truck arriving.
The cops questioned Jan first, and then the paramedics gave her a blanket to wrap around her dressing gown and told her to go home and get into a hot bath. She tucked Dave’s gray wooden box under the blanket and left. With Dave the paramedics were brisk and professionally sympathetic and stuck a big Band-Aid at an angle above one eye. The cops were noncommittal and very interested in how much drinking he’d done and when. His head had begun aching badly by the time they let him go. The firemen were still busy.
Dave crossed the street to the Tarquin house — the Ford house. The front door was locked, of course: Her kid was there and paranoid habits were compulsive. He knocked briefly. She opened the door at once. She had cranked up the heat but was still wrapped in the blanket. Her shadowed eyes looked bruised. He smelled coffee.
“You don’t have to invite me in,” Dave said, “I can—”
Her response was sharp, impatient, with a tendency to stutter.
“Oh, for Christ’s s-sake, don’t g-give me that crap, you’re as cold as I am. There’s coffee. Warm up while I soak in the tub.”
He followed her into the kitchen. She stopped suddenly, irresolutely, in the middle of the floor, eyes focused somewhere else. She hugged the blanket tightly about her. A red dressing gown and two pajama-pants legs poked out below it, and feet in wet muddy bedroom slippers.
She waved vaguely at the breakfast nook. The coffee pot and cups and saucers and the brandy bottle waited on the table. The gray box sat on one of the chairs.
“When I came squirting out of that window and landed on my head,” Dave said, “you didn’t waste any time dragging me away from the house. Pretty good, for someone who hates touching and being touched.”