25
Dragging the stunned boy by his arm. As if wanting to tear his arm out of its socket. Yelling at him, punching and kicking. On the ground the boy tries to escape, crawling on hands and knees and then dragging himself as his father catches him, brings his booted foot down on the boy’s hands: first the right, then the left. Hearing the small bones crack. Hearing the boy screaming Daddy don’t hurt me! Daddy don’t kill me! and where is the mother, why isn’t the mother intervening, for the assault isn’t over, will not be over until the boy lies unconscious and bleeding and still the wrathful father will cry You’re my son! My fucking son! My son. Mine.
26
Yet it took her weeks to make the call. In fact it had taken her years.
And then, dialing the number that was suddenly familiar again to her, steeling herself hearing the phone ring at the other end of the line, she was struck by a sudden vision of the Meltzers’ house she had neither contemplated nor envisioned in years and in that instant from the side door of the Meltzers’ house she was seeing the farmhouse next door which was the house in which she’d lived and nursed her baby in a delirium of unspeakable happiness she knew now to be the only purely happy time of her life, and she began to tremble, and could not speak with the ease and clarity Hazel Jones had wished.
“Mrs.-Mrs. Meltzer? You won’t remember me-I lived next door to you eight years ago. In that old farmhouse. I lived with a man named Niles Tignor. You took care of my little boy when I worked in town, in a factory. You-”
Hazel’s voice broke. She could hear, at the other end of the line, an in-take of breath.
“Is this Rebecca? Rebecca Tignor?”
The voice was Mrs. Meltzer’s, unmistakable. Yet it was an altered voice, older and oddly frail.
“Hello? Hello? Is this Rebecca?”
Hazel tried to speak. She managed to speak, in choked monosyllables. Her heart was beating dangerously hard in her chest. The damned ringing in her ear, to which she’d grown so accustomed she rarely heard it during the day, was confused now with the pulsing of her blood.
“Rebecca? My God, I thought you were dead! You and Niley both. We thought he’d killed you, all those years ago.”
Mrs. Meltzer sounded as if she was about to cry. Hazel silently begged her no.
Edna Meltzer had not been her mother. It was ridiculous to confuse the two women. It was ridiculous to be trembling like this gripping the phone receiver so her hand shook.
At least, she was making the call in an empty house. Both Gallagher and Zack were out.
“Where is he, Mrs. Meltzer?”
“He’s dead, Rebecca.”
“Dead…”
“Tignor died in Attica, Rebecca, two-three years ago. That’s what Howie heard. He was sent away on assault, ”extortion‘-I’m not sure what “extortion’ is, some kind of blackmail I guess. None of it had anything to do with Four Corners or with what he’d done to you, Rebecca. We never saw him after that time he came to our house crazy-like wanting to know where you were, and we said we did not know! He was set to kill you, or anybody stood in his way, we could see. Saying you stole his son, and you stole his car. Saying no woman had ever insulted him like that and you would pay for it. He was like a wild man, saying he would murder you with his bare hands for betraying him, and he’d murder us if he found out we were hiding you. Howie has a shotgun, Howie ain’t one to back down, I told Howie just let it be, don’t rile the man up any worse than he is. Well, Tignor went off! Left the house like it was, mostly.” Mrs. Meltzer paused to catch her breath. Hazel saw the older woman warming to her subject, thrilled, smiling. Her voice had gained strength. It was no longer the voice of an old woman. “Such a time it was, then! But now it’s real quiet here. People moved in next-door, nice family and kids and they fixed up the house some. Oh, there never was anyone like Tignor in Four Corners before or since, I have to say.”
Hazel was sitting down. In an acid-bright patch of sunlight Hazel Jones was sitting down.
Mrs. Meltzer was asking how Niley was, such a sweet little boy, and Hazel managed to say that Niley was fine, healthy, he was eleven years old and played piano, and Mrs. Meltzer said this sounded wonderful she was so happy to hear this, her and Howie and other neighbors in Four Corners had the bad thought for years that Tignor had murdered them both and hid their bodies in the canal maybe where nobody would ever find them, and now Tignor himself was dead, probably killed by somebody like himself, they was killing one another all the time in Attica and the guards were almost bad as the prisoners, thank God the prison wasn’t any closer than it was, but how was Rebecca? where was Rebecca living now? was she married again, did she have a family?
“Rebecca? Rebecca?”
She had to lie down. She was dazed, dizzy as if he’d slapped the side of her head only just a few minutes ago, the ringing in her ear was high-pitched as a deranged cicada.
She would call Mrs. Meltzer back, another time. Only just not now.
27
“”Hazel Jones.“ A mysterious name out of the past.”
The elderly invalid leaned forward in his wheelchair to grip both Hazel’s hands in his, rather hard. She had no idea what he meant: mysterious? The man’s large glassy veined eyes of the hue of pewter gazed up at Hazel with such intensity, she was unnerved not knowing if Thaddeus Gallagher meant to be naively adoring, or was mocking such adoration of a young woman visitor. His hands gripping hers were doughy, warmly moist, seemingly boneless. Yet the man was strong. You understood that Thaddeus Gallagher was strong in his heavy upper body if not in his lower body and that he exulted in this strength, all the while continuing to smile at his startled visitor with the smiling air of a benevolent host. Hazel felt a shiver of dread that he would not release her, Gallagher would have to intervene and there would be an unpleasant scene.
Don’t let my father manipulate you, Hazel! Immediately we step into his presence, he will exert his will upon us like a fat spider at the center of its web.
The shock of meeting Gallagher’s father! Not only was the old man confined to a wheelchair but his body appeared deformed, a shapeless mass of mollusc-flesh inside weirdly jaunty tartan plaid bathing trunks and a white cotton T-shirt strained to bursting. Massive thighs and buttocks were squeezed against the unyielding sides of the wheelchair. Thaddeus’s arms were muscled while his legs hung useless, pale and atrophied. Yet his feet were large and wedge-like, resting bare against the wheelchair’s padded footrest. The big bare toes twitched in obscene delight.
An invalid! Thaddeus Gallagher! Hazel cast her companion Gallagher a look of dismay. How like Gallagher to complain of his father to her for years while neglecting to mention that the man was an invalid in a wheelchair.
Thaddeus winked at Hazel as if they shared an intimate joke, too subtle for Gallagher to grasp. “You seem surprised, dear? I apologize for greeting you so casually dressed but I swim, or try to swim, every day at this time. I confess that I also feel less constrained by decorum and fashion in my seventies than I did at your young age. My son ”Chet Gallagher,“ the prize-winning journalist and public seer, might have warned you what to expect.” Thaddeus laughed, sucking at his fleshy lips. He was reluctant to release Hazel’s hands that were damp and numbed from his grasp.