Screams rose from the pool. They could have been the shrieks of a hyperkinetic child at play or the frantic cries of a drowner. Marty Cable didn't turn to see which. He still seemed to be focused on Glenda.
"Physics was his worst subject. He had to get a tutor Saturdays. The guy was a sleaze."
"This was who made the pass at him?" Glenda asked. "The tutor?"
"Tried to convince Mike there was nothing wrong with swinging both ways. Mike got another tutor, but this guy kept calling him."
"You remember the name?"
"No."
"Not even the first name?"
"No. Mike, he got another tutor, passed physics. But you stop and think about it, what was all the trouble for? He's never going to go to State after all, is he? He might've been better off just forgetting about physics and screwing his brains out. Better use of what time he had left."
"With that attitude, then what's the point of doing anything?" Glenda asked.
"Is no point," Cable said, as if he thought she was agreeing with him. "We're all meat." To Chase, he said, "You know how things really are — you were in Nam," as if he himself understood the horrors of the war thanks to his monthly subscription to Rolling Stone. "Hey, you know how many nuclear bombs the Russians have aimed at us?"
"A lot," Chase said, impatient with the boy's cynicism.
"Twenty thousand," Cable said. "Enough to kill every one of us five times over."
"I'm not too worried until it's six times."
"Cool," Cable said with a small laugh, impervious to sarcasm. "Me neither. Not worried about a damn thing. Take what you can get and hope you wake up in the morning — that's the smart way to look at it.'
As a pair of squabbling crows flew low overhead, the lifeguard tilted his face toward the sky. The sun was a ferocious white fire on his mirror glasses.
Lora Karnes apparently didn't believe in makeup. Her hair was cut short and carelessly combed. Even in the July heat, she wore loose khaki slacks and a long-sleeve blouse. Although she must have been in her early forties, she seemed at least fifteen years older. She perched on the edge of her chair with her knees together, her hands folded in her lap, hunched forward like a gargoyle that was queerly disturbing yet insufficiently grotesque to be used on a cathedral parapet.
The house was as drab and quiet as the woman. The living-room furniture was heavy and dark. The drapes were shut against the July glare, and two lamps shed a peculiar gray light. On the television, an evangelist was gesticulating furiously, but the sound was muted, so he seemed like a crazed and poorly trained mime.
Framed and hung on the walls were needlepoint samplers with quotations from the Bible. Mrs. Karnes evidently had made them herself. Curiously, the quotations were obscure and enigmatic, perhaps taken out of context. Ben couldn't make much sense of them or quite grasp what spiritual guidance they were supposed to offer:
I WILL LAY MINE HAND
UPON MY MOUTH
— Job, xl, 4
PUT THEM IN MIND…
TO OBEY MAGISTRATES
— Titus, iii, 1
BLESSED IS HE,
WHOSOEVER SHALL NOT
BE OFFENDED IN ME
— Luke, vii, 23
AND JACOB SOD POTTAGE
— Genesis, xxv, 29
The walls also featured framed portraits of religious leaders, but the gallery was an eclectic mix: the pope, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham, a couple of faces that Chase recognized as those of tackier television evangelists with more interest in contributions than in salvation. There seemed to be a wealth of religious feeling in the Karnes house — but no clear-cut faith.
Harry Karnes was as drab as his wife and the room: short, only perhaps ten years older than Lora but so thin and prematurely aged as to be on the verge of frailty. His hands shook when they were not resting on the arms of his Barcalounger. He could not look directly at Ben but gazed over his head when speaking to him.
On the sofa beside Glenda, Ben figured that visitors to the Karnes house were rare indeed. One day, someone would realize they hadn't heard from Lora or Harry in a while and, upon investigation, would find the couple sitting as they were now, but shriveled and shrunken and long mummified, dead a decade before anyone noticed.
"He was a good boy," said Harry Karnes.
"Let's not lie to Mr. Chase," Lora admonished.
"He did well in school, and he was going to college too," Harry said.
"Now, Dad, we know that isn't truthful," Lora said. "He went wild."
"Later, yes. But before that, Mother, he was a good boy," said Harry."`
"He went wild, and you'd not have thought he was the same boy from one year to the next. Running around. Always out later than he should be. How could it end any way but what it did?"
The longer that Chase remained in the warm, stuffy house, the chillier he became. "I'm primarily interested in this physics tutor he had back in the beginning of the year."
Lora Karnes frowned. "Like I said, the second teacher's name was Bandoff, but I don't remember the first. Do you, Dad?"
"It's in the back of my mind, Mother, but I can't quite see it," said Harry Karnes, and he turned his attention to the silently ranting preacher on the television.
"Didn't you have to pay the man?" Glenda asked.
"Well, but it was in cash. Never wrote out a check," said Lora Karnes. She glanced disapprovingly at Glenda's bare legs, then looked quickly away, as though embarrassed. "Besides, he only tutored for a couple of weeks. Michael couldn't learn from him, and we had to get Mr. Bandoff."
"How did you find the first tutor?"
"Michael found him through the school. Both were through the school."
"The high school where Mike attended classes?"
"Yes, but this teacher didn't work there. He taught at George Washington High, on the other side of town, but he was on the list of recommended tutors."
"Michael was a smart boy," Harry said.
"Smart is never smart enough," his wife said.
"He could have been something someday."
"Not with just being smart," his wife corrected.
The Karneses made Ben nervous. He couldn't figure them out. They were fanatics of some sort, but they seemed to have gone down their own strange little trail in the wilderness of disorganized — as opposed to organized — religion.
"If he hadn't gone wild like he did," Lora said, "he might've made something of himself. But he couldn't control himself. And then how could it end any way but how it did?"
Glenda said, "Do you remember anything at all about the first tutor — where he lived? Didn't Mike go there for the lessons?"
"Yes," said Lora Karnes. "I think it was in that nice little neighborhood over on the west side, with all the bungalows."
"Crescent Heights?" Glenda suggested.
"That's it."
Turning away from the television, looking over his wife's head, Harry said, "Mother, wasn't the fella's name Lupinski, Lepenski — something like that?"
"Dad, you're right. Linski. That was his name. Linski."
"Richard?" Harry suggested.
"Exactly, Dad. Richard Linski."
"But he wasn't any good," Harry told the wall past Ben's left shoulder. "So we got the second tutor, and then Michael's grades improved. He was a good boy."
"Once, he was, Dad. And you know, I don't blame him for it all. Plenty of blame for us to share in it."
Ben felt their weird gloom sucking him down as surely as if he'd been caught in a whirlpool in a dark sea.
Glenda said, "Can you spell that last name for me."
"L-i-n-s-k-i," said Lora.