“Oh God, oh God!” Roy swiped his sleeve across his mouth and staggered around the room twice before he stood before them, hands thrown wide. “It’s Doris and Porky and their little kid, too!”
“What? What?” Delphine grabbed his shoulders and shook him so hard his head snapped back and forth.
“Hold off!” Roy slumped onto the bed, held his hand out for the whiskey bottle, which Cyprian put instead to his own lips. With a feral swift movement Roy tried to grab the flask, but Cyprian plucked it out of his reach and brandished it high.
“Who are Doris and Porky?”
“And their little… what… boy?” added Delphine. She knew the family, but not that well. Her friend Clarisse was a relative. In fact, Clarisse had told her a few things about Portland “Porky” Chavers, Delphine now remembered. Things so bad that she couldn’t feel sorry for him, at least.
“They were guests,” Roy said in a tranced voice. “At the funeral party.”
“Whose funeral?”
“Your girlfriend Clarisse’s dad. Friend of mine too, of course. He wanted a party, not a funeral, because he’s a Strub. I was the only one who would throw him a party instead of your typical funeral proceedings, which he’d attended all his life. I was the only one who would do it.” Roy paused, then spoke rather pompously. “You could call it an act of corporeal mercy.”
“Only you would think of that,” said Delphine.
“I was an extremely gracious host. We had tubs of beer,” Roy said in a longing, confessional hush.
“Bought with the rent money,” said Delphine in utter fury.
“It doesn’t matter about the beer,” said Cyprian. “Tell us about Doris and Porky.”
Roy gulped like a dutiful and panicked child, nodded, and went on.
“Weeks after, we did notice they were gone.”
“We who? Your stinking hobo friends?”
Roy gave Delphine a look of deceitfully gentle reproach, but he was too much in shock to carry out a more detailed act.
“Kozka and Waldvogel, Mannheim and Zumbrugge, all of those. Of course we wondered where they went. Porky wasn’t at the singing club. They just left everything. Their house was abandoned. Everything. Even their dog… it came back looking for them. It wouldn’t leave the pantry. Oh God! Now I know why!”
Roy bent double and began to weep, though with a soft intensity for which he needed no audience. “And here we thought they went down to Arizona,” he said softly, over and over.
Delphine and Cyprian felt themselves thump down like wooden beings, right on the bed, felt the breath leave their bodies. They tried to retrieve some sense, but it was too soon. Their nerves were shot. Cyprian went into the hotel bathroom, turned the bathwater on, and motioned to Delphine to enter. He tossed the whiskey bottle out to Roy and then they locked the door shut on him.
“Let’s not think,” Delphine counseled.
Cyprian didn’t even answer. He made the bath very, very hot, and he added some strawberry bubbles that he’d bought at the dime store. While the water was getting good and deep he took off all Delphine’s clothes, then he took off his own. As he balled them up and laid them in the corner, he said, “We’re going to burn these.” They got in and with great care and speechless tenderness they washed each other, then they soaked themselves sitting cupped together for comfort. They kept the water going in and out. Their skin got very soft, then spongy white, wrinkled as a toad’s. Once Roy knocked, but then he mumbled some vague apology and went away.
“I never want to leave this tub,” said Delphine.
Cyprian added more strawberry bubbles, more hot water, and they sat there and sat there until the water drained out, then they sat there some more.
NOW THEY HAD the problem of who to tell and what to do — there was family, there must be family for Doris and Porky, and, unbearable to contemplate, their child. And there was the infuriating prospect of getting the entire story out of Roy. They questioned him the next morning. He gave out bits and pieces. They learned, for instance, that he’d wandered off during the wake itself and slept in the abandoned coop that once housed the black rosecomb bantams that Delphine used to keep. In his grief over Cornelius Strub, father to Clarisse, he’d gone to live in the bum’s jungle down by the railroad tracks. Weeks had passed there, he thought, and when he returned he was so wrecked he was hallucinating. So he may have actually heard pounding, even awful noises coming from the walls and floors of his house, but at the same time, as he was plagued by the usual visions of snakes uncoiling from the lamps and dripping from the walls, he disregarded these noises.
“The noises finally went away,” he said in a small, flat voice that trailed off weakly. “As noises will do… and I said to myself I must be coming out of the delirium!”
“That’s it, we’d better go to the sheriff,” said Cyprian, grim-faced.
“Won’t they arrest Dad?”
“As long as he didn’t lock them in… you didn’t lock them in the cellar, did you?”
Roy sat bolt upright, rigid. His mouth fell open and he looked so vacant that for a moment Delphine was sure he was falling into a fit. Then he snapped his mouth shut suddenly and stated that he positively knew he had done no such thing.
“I don’t think they’ll prosecute. It looks to me, anyway, as though the whole thing was an accident. Maybe Doris and Porky got curious and went down there to show the old cellar hole to their”—Cyprian shut his eyes saying it—“little boy. Someone knocked those jars off the shelves and hit the ring in the floor. They got sealed in sometime at the wake.”
“I didn’t have a drop down there,” said Roy. “Not a single drop.”
“Well, who knows, then.”
The three ate a very tense, morose breakfast before walking over to the sheriff’s office.
SHERIFF ALBERT HOCK was a striking combination of fragility and mass. His delicate features were surrounded by great soft rings of flesh plumped into cheeks and chins. The pale brown hair on top of his head was a thin froth but the hair on his face was vigorous. His beard sprouted into stubble as soon as he shaved it. His mouth was grubby as a little boy’s and often smeared with juice or chocolate, but he had a precise way of putting things. The spinning hysteria of Roy Watzka caused him to tip away from his desk and go still in the wheeled chair. Impassive, his face was a mask of patient contempt, although when he blinked at Delphine his look was tender as an old dog’s.
“I want those bodies out of there!” said Roy in outrage.
From his attitude, one would have imagined the pitiful hulks in his cellar had invaded on purpose and died there to spite him. He glared at the sheriff as if Hock himself were responsible, which was, Cyprian thought, a very bad ploy.
“Here, sit down,” Cyprian advised Roy, whispering into his ear that he should also shut up. “We’d best go over this from the beginning.”
“Please do,” said Sheriff Hock, pulling himself back to the small wooden desk. He drew a brown paper blotter toward himself and folded his beautiful fingers around a pen. He smoothed his left hand over a record book bound in moss green fabric, into which he jotted information that people from the town brought to him. “You may proceed.” He nodded, opening the book.
Delphine took up the story. She and Cyprian then alternated the facts, relating everything in as much detail as they could recall, pausing politely as the sheriff copied their words. He seemed prepared to take down every single nuance and waited while they sought the best, most accurate, way to describe each step of their experience. With his hand poised, arrested in the air, and his eyebrows lush as sandy caterpillars, drawn in thought, he listened. The quality of his attention brought things out — the exact time of day, the light sources, the peculiar power of the odor, their own theories, their concern over Roy. By the time they took the sheriff up to the present moment, Delphine and Cyprian felt that they had participated in a monumental task. They were exhausted, and yet there was still so much before them.