As Havermeyer made his way down the aisle, smiling a lead pipe smile with no joy behind it, rolling Gloria along next to him, and Mr. Johnson after her, jolly as Fred Astaire fox-trotting with one helluva girl (“Have a great day everybody!” he sang), without a word to anyone, chins held at the exact angle Hannah held hers while salsaing with her wineglass to Peggy Lee’s “Fever” (or at dinner, pretending to be interested in one of their meandering stories), one by one, the Bluebloods rose and paraded down the aisle, disappearing into the bright bland day waiting for them.
I’d forgotten to tell Dad it was a half day, so I hurried down the deserted first floor of Hanover to use the pay phone.
“Olives,” I heard someone shout behind me. “Wait up.”
It was Milton. I wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of chatting with him — who knew what sort of abuse I’d have to endure, unleashed by that tepid memorial service — but I forced myself to stand ground. “Never retreat unless death is certain,” wrote Nobunaga Kobayashi in How to Be a Shogun Assassin (1989).
“Hey,” he said with one of his sloth smiles.
I only nodded.
“How ya doin’?”
“Great.”
He raised his eyebrows at this and shoved his big hands into his pockets. Yet again, he took his Grand Ole Time with conversation. One Ming Dynasty rose and fell between the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he said.
I didn’t say a word. Let the big ninja do the talking. Let him scrounge around for a few sentences.
“Well.” He sighed. “I don’t see how she coulda killed herself.”
“Not bad, Quiet Man. Now why don’t you tie that notion into a noose and see if it’s strong enough to hang yourself?”
He looked stunned, maybe even flabbergasted. Dad said it was nearly impossible to flabbergast a person in this tawdry day and age, when “kinky sex was mundane,” “a flasher in a trench coat in a public park, routine as cornfields in Kansas,” but I think I’d done it to this kid — I really did. Obviously, he wasn’t used to my tough ranchero tone of voice. Obviously, he wasn’t used to the new Blue, Blue the Conqueror, the Hondo, King of the Pecos, Blue Steel, the feral Born to the West Blue, that Lucky Texan, that Lady from Louisiana, who shot from the hip, sat tall in the saddle and rode the lonely trail. (Obviously, he’d never read Grit [Reynolds, 1974]. It was what Buckeye Birdie said to Shortcut Smith.)
“Want to get the hell out of here?” Milton asked.
I nodded.
I suppose everyone has his/her Open Sesame, his/her Abracadabra or Presto Chango, the arbitrary word, event or unforeseen signal that knocks a person down, causes him/her to behave, either permanently or for the short term, out of the blue, contrary to expectation, from nowhere. A shade is pulled, a door creaks open, some kid goes from Geek to Glamour Boy. And Milton’s Hocus-Pocus, his Master Key, happened to be a flowy sentence in Mr. Johnson’s generic speech, a speech Dad would call “stirring as a wall of cinder blocks,” indicative of the “Hallmark fever infecting our politicians and official spokesmen of late. When they speak, actual words don’t emerge, but summer afternoons of draining sun and tepid breeze and chirping Tufted Titmice one would feel gleeful shooting with a handgun.”
“When he said that thing about Hannah bein’ like a flower,” Milton said, “like a rose and all, I felt kinda moved.” His big right arm lumber-rolled on top of the steering wheel as he edged the Nissan between the cars and out of the Student Parking Lot. “I couldn’t stay angry ’bout what happened, ’specially not at my girl, Olives. I tried telling Jade and Charles it wasn’t your fault, but they’re not seein’ straight.”
He smiled. It was like one of those Viking ships in amusement parks, swerving up onto his face, dangling there for a few seconds nearly vertical to the ground, before swinging off again. Love, or more accurately, infatuation (“Take as much care with words expressing your sentiments as you will crafting your doctoral dissertation,” Dad said.) was one of those no-good drifter emotions. After everything that had happened, I didn’t think I felt a thing for Milton, not anymore; I assumed my feelings had skipped town. But now he smiled, and there they were, those old sweaty sentiments slinking down the road again, waiting for me to acknowledge them by the bus station in a greasy wife-beater, cowboy hat, muscles frighteningly potholed and slick.
“Hannah told me I had to take you to her house when we got back from the camping trip. I figured we’d head over there, if you can handle it.”
I glanced over at him, confused. “What?”
He let my words sit on the dock of the bay for at least thirty seconds before answering.
“Remember Hannah had those private conversations with each of us hikin’ up the mountain?”
I nodded.
“That’s when she said it. I forgot about it ’til a couple of days ago. And now—”
“What did she say?”
“‘Take Blue to my house when you get back. Just the two of you.’ She repeated it three times. Remember how crazy she was that day? Orderin’ everyone around, screamin’ off mountaintops? And when she said it, I didn’t even recognize her. She was mean. Still, I laughed it off and said, ‘I don’t get it. You can have Blue over anytime.’ Instead of answering directly, she only repeated the sentence. ‘Take Blue to my house when you get back. You’ll understand.’ She made me swear I’d do it and that I wouldn’t say anything to the others.”
He switched on the radio. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his elbows, so when he shifted gears, the cute burnt toes of the tattoo angel became visible like the edge of a seashell peeking out of sand.
“What was strange,” he continued in his buffalo voice, “was that she said you. ‘When you get back.’ Not when we get back. Well, I’ve been thinking about the you. It can only mean one thing. She never planned to return with us.”
“I thought you didn’t think she committed suicide.”
He seemed to tobacco-chew this for a minute, squinting in the sun, shoving down the sun visor. We were speeding along the highway now, barreling through the thickened sunshine and the limp-rag shadows of the trees standing stiffly on the shoulder of the road. They held their branches high in the air — as if they knew the answer to an important question, as if they hoped to be called on. The Nissan was old and as Milton shifted the gears it rattled like one of those famished motel beds one feeds quarters to, a bed I’d never seen firsthand, though Dad claimed he’d counted seven within a one-mile radius in Northern Chad. (“They don’t have running water or bathrooms, but never fear, they have beds that buzz.”)
“She was sayin’ good-bye to us during those talks,” he said, clearing his throat. “She told Leulah, ‘Never be scared to cut your hair.’ And Jade. She said, ‘A lady should be a lady even when she removes her little black dress’—whatever the hell that means. She told Nigel to be himself, then somethin’ about wallpaper. ‘Change the wallpaper as much as you like and screw how much it costs. You’re the one who has to live there.’ And she said to me, before the thing about you, she said, ‘You just might be an astronaut. You just might walk on the moon.’ And Charles — no one knows what she said to him. He refuses to say. But Jade thinks she confessed she loved him. What’d she say to you?”