The Lions
SHORTLY AFTER JOHN Wildstrand moved into the house with Maggie, the baby boy was born. In those dazzling moments after the birth, he had a vision. The baby looked like Billy. Stage Billy, tall Billy with no ass to speak of, Billy with big feet, who looked like he could hardly lift a water canteen. Billy’s heart was pierced by thorns. Was there anyone more magnificent than Billy? John Wildstrand saw that Billy Peace was a kind of Christ figure, or a martyr like those in the New Testament. Only he was thrown to the lions in the cause of their happiness. Wildstrand had thought that, in his new life, Billy might grow in strength and valor and be exactly the person who Neve believed had abducted her. Now he saw that Billy already was that person and Neve had known. He also saw that Billy had told his sister about the kidnapping. All of this was depicted in the face of the tiny new infant. Wildstrand looked closer, and tried to see whether Billy would live or die. But before that picture came clear, the baby opened up its mouth and bawled. Wildstrand put the baby to Maggie’s breast and when it latched on, he tried to touch the baby’s hair. Maggie pushed away his hand with the same gesture that his wife had used to say good-bye, and he sank back into the hospital chair. He was dizzy with spent adrenaline. For a long time, he watched them from across the room.
The Garage
ONLY TWICE DID John Wildstrand visit Pluto. The first time, he brought a trailer and loaded into it all that Neve had not disposed of — she’d thrown a lot of things away. But physical objects had ceased to matter to Wildstrand. He was sleeping out in Maggie’s garage, by then, in a sleeping bag spread out on a little camp cot. He cuddled up next to the used car he’d bought. Maggie argued with him every day about going to the police, turning him in for the kidnapping.
“You’ll lose everything”—Wildstrand waved his arm—“this house. And Billy will go to jail. Would you like that? You’ll be out on the street. And what about little Corwin?”
Maggie had named the baby after her brother’s best buddy in boot camp. He was now in Korea, stationed close to the DMZ. Billy was in danger and wrote weekly letters about his visions. Apparently, he was being contacted by powerful spirits who saved him time after time, and who promised to direct his life.
“He’s never been religious,” Maggie wept, “in his whole life. Now look at this! Look at what you did!”
Wildstrand despaired. There was no getting away from Billy; he would always control the situation, no matter where he was. Billy, with his bristle-headed army cut and unknown eyes, with his army boots and rifle. Now that he was a soldier and visited by angels, there was no hope. Even if nothing happened to him. In the months after his son’s birth, Wildstrand had come to understand that he would never be forgiven for engineering the kidnap scheme, and he had lost Maggie’s love. She was icy-angry — she implied that he was just like his Indian-hating grandfather and now spent all day caring for the baby and cleaning the house. Every so often, she would thrust a shopping list at Wildstrand, or make him help with heavy lifting. Beyond that, she didn’t like him to get close to either her or the baby. He moved around the small house like a ghost, never knowing where to settle, never comfortable. He made a sorry den for himself in the basement, where he would go whenever it was too cold to sleep in the garage. Otherwise he stayed out there, listening to music, reading the newspaper. He’d found a job at the same insurance agency he’d always used, a low-level job assisting others in processing claims.
The Entryway
ONE DAY, A homeowner’s claim from his old address crossed his desk. Neve had filed a claim on everything that he had taken from the house, his own things, which she had pressured him to come and clear out. There were his expensive hand tools, each engraved with his name and an identification code, and records with their expensive record-playing equipment, even a brand-new television. Looking at the list, Wildstrand felt a glimmer of heat rise in his throat. His ears burned. He took his coat from the back of the office door, went back to the house that his and Neve’s retirement money had bought, and packed up everything he’d kept in the garage. He drove back to Pluto with a full car and parked in the driveway of his former house.
After a while, Neve came to the window. She looked at him as he got out of the car, and he looked at her, through the window, which was like the glass of a dim aquarium. When she vanished, he was not sure whether she would come to the door or be absorbed into the gloom. But she did open the door at last, and beckoned him inside. They stood in the entry, quite close. Her hair had gone from gray to silver-white. A pulse beat in her slender throat. Her arms were stick thin, but she seemed to generate an unusual light. Wildstrand could feel it, this odd radiance. It seemed to emanate from her translucent skin. It occurred to him that he would sink down at the feet of this beautiful, wronged woman and kiss the hem of the wide-skirted dress that she was wearing.
“You filed a claim on all my stuff. I’m bringing it back,” he said.
“No. I want the money. I need the money,” she told him.
“Why?”
“We’re sunk. They’re not going to buy the bank out. They’re opening a new one next to it.”
“What about your father’s accounts?”
“He’ll live to be a hundred,” said Neve. “John, he told me that you were seeing another woman all along.”
“I don’t know where he got that idea.”
Neve waited.
“All right. Yes.”
Her eyes filled with terrible tears and she began to shake. Before he knew it, Wildstrand was holding her. He shut the door. They made love in the entry, on the carpet where so many people paused, and then on the bench where visitors removed their boots and shoes. His remorse and shame was confusingly erotic. And her need for him was so powerful it seemed that they were going over a rushing waterfall together, falling in a barrel, and at the bottom Wildstrand cracked open and told her everything.
He had to, because of Billy Peace. On the entryway floor next to the boot rack, Wildstrand realized with utter instinctive certainty that Billy had helped himself to his wife’s body when she was tied up and utterly helpless, kidnapped, on the mattress beside the junked pots and cast-off clothing. Wildstrand clung to Neve with the blackness washing over him, and talked and talked.
“I know he violated you,” Wildstrand said, after he’d spilled everything else.
“Who? That boy? He was just a twerp,” said Neve. “He never touched me. I said all of that stuff out of desperation, to try and make you jealous. Why, I do not know.” She sat up and eyed him with calm assessment. “Possibly, I thought you loved me way deep down. I think I believed there was something in you.”
“There is, there is,” Wildstrand said to her, strangling on a surge of hope, touching her ankles as she got to her feet.
“When the snow was covering me, out in the ditch, I saw your face. Real as real. You bent over me and pulled me out. It wasn’t the farmer, it was you.”
“It was me,” said Wildstrand, lifting his arms. “I must have always loved you.”
She looked down at him for a long time, contemplating this amazing fact. Then she went upstairs and called the police.
A Shiver of Possibility
IN THE YEARS after he was caught, tried, found guilty, and sentenced, Wildstrand was sometimes asked by friends he made behind bars, and other lawyers (of course, I asked him myself), what had caused him to admit what he had done. What caused him to tell Neve and, to boot, assume all responsibility? Sometimes he couldn’t think of a good reason. Other times, he said that he guessed that it would never end; he saw that he’d be kicked from one woman to the other until the end of time. But after he gave his answer, he always came back to that moment he had opened his door to Billy Peace, and thought of how, when he saw the boy standing in the shining porch light, in the snow, with the dull gun and the sad face, he felt a shiver of possibility, and said, “Come in.”