We eventually got a table in a corner and started in on Katahdin’s excellent buttermilk rolls. We talked about Rachel’s pregnancy, dissed my furniture, and caught up on New York gossip over their seafood and my London broil.
“Man, your house is full of old shit,” said Louis.
“Antiques,” I corrected him. “They were my grandfather’s.”
“I don’t care they were Moses’s, they just old shit. You like one of them eBay motherfuckers, peddling trash on the Web. When you gonna make him buy some new furniture, girl?”
Rachel raised her hands in an I’m-staying-out-of-it gesture, just as the hostess stepped up to make sure everything was okay. She smiled at Louis, who was slightly nonplussed to find that she wasn’t intimidated by him. Most people tended to find Louis intimidating at the very least, but the hostess at Katahdin was a strong, attractive woman who didn’t do intimidated, thank you for asking. Instead, she fed him more buttermilk rolls and gave him the kind of look a dog might give a particularly juicy bone.
“I think she likes you,” said Rachel, radiating innocence.
“I’m gay, not blind.”
“But then, she doesn’t know you like we do,” I added. “Still, you’d better eat up. You’ll need all your strength for running away.”
Louis scowled. Angel remained quiet, as he had for much of the day. He cheered up a little when talk turned to Willie Brew, who ran the auto shop in Queens that had supplied my Boss 302, and in which Angel and Louis were silent partners.
“His son got some girl pregnant,” he told me.
“Which son, Leo?”
“No, the other one, Nicky. The one who’s like an idiot savant, minus the savant.”
“Is he going to do the right thing?”
“Already has. He ran away to Canada. Girl’s father is seriously pissed. Guy’s name is Pete Drakonis, but everybody calls him Jersey Pete. You know, you don’t fuck with guys who’ve got a state as part of their names, except maybe Vermont. The guy’s got Vermont in his name, the only thing he’s gonna try to make you do is save the whales and drink chai tea.”
Over coffee I told them about Elliot Norton and his client. Angel shook his head wearily. “South Carolina,” he said, “is not my favorite place.”
“An official Gay Pride Day march is some way off,” I admitted.
“Where’d you say this guy’s from?” asked Louis.
“A town called Grace Falls. It’s up by-”
“I know where it’s at,” he replied.
There was something in his voice that made me stop talking. Even Angel gave him a look, but didn’t press the point. We just watched as Louis fragmented a piece of discarded roll between his thumb and forefinger.
“When you planning on leavin’?” he asked me.
“Sunday.” Rachel and I had discussed it and agreed that my conscience was unlikely to rest unless I went down for a couple of days at least. At the risk of developing a roughly Rachel-shaped hole in my body where she had gone through me for a short cut, I had raised the subject of my conversation with MacArthur. To my surprise, she had agreed to both regular drop-bys and panic buttons in the kitchen and main bedroom.
Incidentally, she had also agreed to find MacArthur a date.
Louis appeared to consult some kind of mental calendar.
“Meet you down there,” he said.
“We’ll meet you down there,” corrected Angel.
Louis glanced at him. “I got something I got to do first,” he said. “Along the way.”
Angel flicked at a crumb. “I got nothing else planned,” he replied. His voice was studiedly neutral.
The conversation seemed to have taken a turn down a strange road, and I wasn’t about to ask for a map. Instead, I called for the check.
“You want to hazard a guess as to what that was about?” Rachel asked as we walked to my car, Angel and Louis ahead of us, unspeaking.
“No,” I answered. “But I get the feeling that somebody is going to be very unhappy that those two ever left New York.”
I just hoped that it wouldn’t be me.
That night, I awoke to a noise from downstairs. I left Rachel sleeping, pulled on a robe, and went down to find the front door slightly ajar. Outside, Angel sat on the porch seat, dressed in sweatpants and an old Doonesbury T-shirt, his bare feet stretched out before him. He had a glass of milk in his hand as he looked out over the moonlit marsh. From the west came the cry of a screech owl, rising and falling in pitch. There was a pair nesting in the Black Point Cemetery. Sometimes, at night, the headlights of the car would catch them ascending toward the treetops, a vole or mouse still struggling in their claws.
“Owls keeping you awake?”
He glanced over his shoulder at me, and there was a little of the old Angel in his smile. “The silence is keeping me awake. The hell do you sleep in all this quiet?”
“I can go beep my horn and swear in Arabic if you think it will help.”
“Gee, would you?”
Around us, mosquitoes danced, waiting for their chance to descend. I took some matches from the windowsill and lit a mosquito coil, then sat down beside him. He offered me his glass.
“Milk?”
“No thanks. I’m trying to give it up.”
“You’re right. That calcium’ll kill ya.”
He sipped his milk.
“You worried about her?”
“Who, Rachel?”
“Yeah, Rachel. Who’d you think I was asking about, Chelsea Clinton?”
“She’s fine. But I hear Chelsea’s doing well in college, so that’s good too.”
A smile fluttered at his lips, like the brief beating of butterfly wings.
“You know what I mean.”
“I know. Sometimes, yes, I’m afraid. I get so scared that I come out here in the darkness and I look down on the marsh and I pray. I pray that nothing happens to Rachel and our child. Frankly, I think I’ve done my share of suffering. We all have. I’m kind of hoping the book is closed for a while.”
“Place like this, on a night like tonight, maybe lets you believe that could happen,” he said. “It’s pretty here. Peaceful too.”
“You thinking of retiring here? If you are, I’ll have to move again.”
“Nah, I like the city too much. But this is kind of restful, for a change.”
“I have snakes in my woodshed.”
“Don’t we all? What are you going to do about them?”
“Leave them alone. Hope they go away, or that something else kills them for me.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Then I’ll have to deal with them myself. You want to tell me why you’re out here?”
“My back hurts,” he said simply. “Places on my thighs where they took the skin from, they hurt too.”
In his eyes I could see the night shapes reflected so clearly that it was as if they were a part of him, the elements of a darker world that had somehow entered and colonized his soul.
“I still see them, you know, that fucking preacher and his son, holding me down while they cut away at me. He whispered to me, you know that? That fucking Pudd, he whispered to me, rubbed my brow, told me that it was all okay, while his old man cut me. Every time I stand or stretch, I feel that blade on my skin and I hear him whispering and it brings me back. And when that happens, the hate comes flooding back with it. I’ve never felt hate like it before.”
“It fades,” I said quietly.
“Does it?”
“Yes.”
“But it doesn’t go away?”
“No. It’s yours. You do with it what you have to do.”
“I want to kill someone.” He said it without feeling, in level tones, the way somebody might announce that they were going to take a cold shower on a warm day.
Louis was the killer, I thought. It didn’t matter that he killed for motives that went beyond money or politics or power; that he was no longer morally neutral; that whatever he might have done in the past, those he now chose to destroy went largely unmourned. Louis had it in him to take a life and not lose a moment’s sleep over it.