“I know. Thank you for taking time to say so.”
I said nothing.
“Please. I don’t mean to be rude, but could you go, now? I’d like to sit here alone and just be kind of quiet for a while.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, either, but I need to ask you some questions.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know about your friend. Mr. Thomas. Room twelve?”
Her face went pale, or tried to, under the tan. She rose and said, “I’m going in the house, now.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No…”
“Then sit back down on the swing.”
“I won’t…”
“I talked to him last night. Your aunt asked me to. To tell him to lay off you.”
“She did. And what did he say?”
“He said you had the hairiest tight little pussy he ever dove into.”
Her mouth fell open in a kind of horror and she covered it with one cupping hand and sat back down on the swing and began to weep, convulsively.
It wasn’t a nice thing to say, and was of course a lie; but it got her attention.
“He isn’t a nice man, your Mr. Thomas.”
“Neither… neither… neither are you.”
“That’s true. But I’m not here to fuck you.”
“Do you… have to use language like that?”
“I know some of my words aren’t pretty. Neither is the world, sometimes. Neither was the sight of your aunt at the bottom of those steps with her neck broken, I’d imagine.”
“Oh, please… please stop.”
I sat on the swing by her. I reached out to touch her shoulder, then thought better of it. I tried to put the intent of that gesture into the sound of my voice.
“I want you to tell me what happened this morning,” I said. “Something happened between you, your aunt and Mr. Thomas. Tell me what it is.”
She looked at me with big, beautiful wet blue eyes. They grabbed at me somewhere, in the back of my throat or in my stomach or somewhere, where I didn’t know I could be reached anymore, and held me and I had this crazy urge to reach out to her, to hold her, and not for any reason remotely sexual, but then the urge passed, and I was glad it did.
“How did you know?” she said.
“I didn’t,” I said. “Not for sure. Until you confirmed it just now.”
“Please… please don’t play any more of these games with me.”
“No games. I had a good idea something happened. It might have happened just between your aunt and Mr. Thomas, without you around. But when I saw you, here, on the swing, I could tell. I could tell you were there.”
“I wasn’t there when it happened. I didn’t know my aunt had… fallen… until I saw her, when Charley and I, we found her, this morning. But I was there, earlier, when…” And she shuddered.
“Go on.”
“I got up this morning. About seven. And I went over to Paul… to Mr. Thomas’s room, and knocked. And went in. And…”
“And you went in and did some things.”
“Yes.”
“And your aunt came around and barged in on you two?”
“Yes. That’s about it.”
“Then what?”
“She was pretty mad. I thought she’d have a heart attack. I was really worried. Mr. Thomas was very calm, though. He sort of took it in stride, didn’t raise his voice to her or anything. He got out of bed and used this reasoning tone with her and at the same time was getting his pants on… it was, I can’t think of any other way to put it, it was kind of impressive.”
Turner had practice getting caught in bed with women. He had his act down pat; he’d be a cinch on the Amateur Hour, if Ted Mack wasn’t dead.
“My aunt told me to go home, to go back to bed and… she said
… and sleep this time. Real sarcastic. I almost… I hated her when she said that. That’s the part that hurts, isn’t that silly? That for a second I hated her and I think, I think maybe I even consciously thought it, thought, I wish that fat bitch would go off someplace and die, and… she did.”
The girl looked at me blankly, but the blankness quickly dissolved into more tears and I let her cry a while.
“So they were arguing when you left,” I said, when it began to let up.
“Yes.”
“You know that your friend has flown the coop.”
“Yes. I went up to his room. It looked like he left in a hurry.”
“It sure did. Then what do you think really happened?”
“I don’t know. It was an accident, it had to be. They were arguing and she went storming out of the room and lost her step and… just fell. Maybe? Or… God. Or they came to blows and he accidently slapped her or something and she fell or… I don’t know. It’s upsetting. It’s scary as hell, too.”
“Well he’s gone.”
“Maybe I don’t blame him. For going. No. No, that’s not right. I do blame him. I wish…”
“What do you wish?”
“I wish I could hate him.”
“You want some free advice?”
“I think maybe I could use it.”
“Forget about this. It was an accident.”
“Do you really think that?”
“I don’t know. But I just talked to Charley, and he’s very shaken by it He said he wished this wasn’t an accident, so he could have somebody to blame. If he knew about your Mr. Thomas, I’m afraid he’d go looking for him. And kill him.”
“Oh… oh. Oh.”
“And you wouldn’t want that.”
“No.”
“So sit there and swing and think and then forget.”
“And then what?”
“How do you feel about Charley?”
“I’ve been living with them… Wilma and Charley… for over a year. Since my folks split up. Charley’s been good to me. He’s a nice man.”
“Then help him put his life back together. Help him run that place across the street. For a year or two, and then go about the business of putting your own life together.”
“You’re a funny one.”
“Oh?”
“I think, my aunt was right about you. You come on strong, but you’re not so tough, really.”
“Anything you say. You going to be okay?”
“I guess.”
“Okay, then. I’ll see you later.”
“Will you? I’m going to see if I can’t get Charley to open for business again, in a day or so. Come in and maybe we can find out each other’s name.”
“Maybe. I probably won’t be in for at least a week, though.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve got some business to attend to.”
Some business named Turner.
11
I’d forgotten the cold, back when I was on the porch talking to Wilma’s niece, but as I walked home a chill wind blew in off the still half-frozen lake and reminded me. I’d been living in southern Wisconsin for four or five years now, and was used to winter extending itself well into what should’ve been spring; still, this was unusual weather: by the time I reached my A-frame I’d seen perhaps a dozen fat flakes of snow fall heavily to the ground, fat wet flakes that hit like bird droppings. Somebody didn’t know it was April.
It was cold inside the A-frame as well. I built a fire in the conical metal fireplace that took up the far corner and went over to the couch beneath the overhang of the loft and sat.
The stack of girlie magazines (the ones I’d found in Turner’s room) I’d been carrying rolled up and stuck under my arm. I now flopped them onto the coffee table in front of me, and a bare-breasted girl with dark hair and very brief bikini bottoms that didn’t completely conceal more dark hair was grinning at me with considerably more than friendship in mind, below the word Hustler. This was the cover of the magazine on top of half a dozen others, and I started flipping through them, and they were interesting, in a gynecological way, and in one of them I came across an interview with a director of pornographic films.
His name was Jerry Castile.
I glanced at the cover. It was dated May, of this year. Meaning it was the current issue.
I wondered if the story Turner had told me, about his being here to kill Jerry Castile, had been a spur of the moment thing, fabricated out of Turner’s recent memory of having seen this particular article. The page where it began had its upper right corner folded down. Perhaps this was part of Turner’s research into the mark…