I found him the next county over. He was sitting through a western double feature with Also “Lash” La Rue and Monte Hale. I’d never cared for these gentlemen. “Lash” was a little too ornate for me; Monte, I’m sorry to say, always looked a little dense. Pug had been kind enough to park out in front of the theater, making it easy for me to see his license plate.
On the drive back, he said, “I got t’get me one of them whips. Like that Lash La Rue.” He was holding up family tradition: food stains on his work jacket, shirt, and trousers, and a dab of mustard on one cheek.
“I can see where that’d come in handy. A bullwhip like that.”
“Bet cousin Cliff’d like one too.”
I was so used to people calling him Cliffie, Cliff sounded strange.
“Cliff told me I didn’t have to go to that there hearing unless I wanted to,” he said. “And I didn’t want to.”
“You’re in violation of the law, Pug. You have to show up. You be nice to the Judge, and she’ll be nice to you.”
Pug snorted. “Cliff always says, “I wouldn’t screw that old bitch with your dick, Pug.”” He giggled. “That Cliff.”
“Yeah,” I said. “A million laughs.”
He was still giggling. “Hell, who needs Jackie Gleason when you got Cliff around?”
As soon as I dropped Pug off at
Judge Whitney’s office, I went straight to Mary’s house. The street was sunny and lazy in another Indian summer afternoon. A small girl in pigtails rode a rusty old tricycle furiously up the cracked sidewalk. Then she stopped. She wanted to watch me walk up to the Traverses’ door.
She could have been Mary or Pamela fifteen years earlier, that smart little face, that clean but mended dress. The good ones in the Knoll never gave in to the temptation to go around dirty. Maybe they had little money and even less hope, but by God they were clean.
Miriam Travers had gotten old before her time. Life hadn’t been easy. She’d lost a brother in the big war and a son in Korea, and now her husband had serious heart problems and her daughter was missing. The face was still pretty, the body still slender, but there was a defeated air about her, like a village that has been sacked by a particularly brutal army.
“Did you find her?” For just that moment, with hope in her lovely gray eyes, the hair was girlishly dark once more and the faded housedress a stylish frock. Miriam Travers was a young woman again, and life ahead looking happy.
“I’m afraid not, Miriam.”
She hadn’t said hello or invited me in.
She’d just burst out with her hopeful question before I could speak or move. And now there was a death in her, one of those deaths you experience every time a phone rings and you plead with God that the news will be good.
She collapsed into my arms. There’s no other way to express it. She didn’t put her arms around me, she just fell forward. I held her. I didn’t try to move her back into the house. I simply held her. She smelled of coffee and a faint perfume. She didn’t cry or tremble or even move much. She was trying to hide. She needed to put her face deep into a darkness where she could not be reached by any more bad news.
Then Bill Travers was behind her, a wraith in a robe. He’d been a ruddy and robust man just a few months ago. The heart attack had taken both qualities from him. He’d lost at least forty pounds and moved uncertainly, like a bad actor playing a withered old man. His loose slippers slapped the floor and a bronchial-sounding cough filled his throat.
He slid his arms around her, and she turned with great sudden grace inside his embrace. And then she began crying. Sobbing.
“I’d like to go up to Mary’s room,” I said to the pale man impersonating Bill Travers.
He nodded. By the time I reached the narrow staircase, he was leading his wife carefully to the couch.
Time travel.
I remembered the day. Who didn’t? Very-Just Day. End of the long and murderous war. Dad coming home. Six hundred thousand dads coming home.
There were Mary and I in the army caps our fathers had sent us, tiny American flags in our mitts, grinning at the camera. We had our arms over each other’s shoulders.
There were other photos of the two of us: dances, bonfires, horseback rides, hot afternoons at the public swimming pool; later on, hot afternoons at the sandpits, high school beer cans glinting off the sunlight.
And Mary evolved in each one. More and more beautiful and graceful. A cutup, to be sure -clowning in a sport coat of her father’s as a ten-year-old me watched; smoking a cigarette at her thirteenth birthday party (a very sophisticated lady until, as Miriam had predicted, she rushed to the john and threw up), me looking gawky and dumb in the background, shorter even than most of the girls; Mary in a talent contest lip-synching (as I recall) to “Music! Music! Music!” by Teresa
Brewer, dressed up in a tux and top hat-and yet always with those wise and sober blue eyes. The Knolls and its despair and its violence had taught her, as it had taught too many of us, things we shouldn’t have known at such tender ages, things that marked us forever.
Time travel.
I sat on the bedspread in the pink room, looking at the pennants and dolls and silly carnival gifts she collected over the years, at the desk where she’d done her straight-A work at the bookcase jammed both with classics and the occasional John D. MacDonald or Peter Rabe I’d given her. The room was scented with sachet and sunshine and memories. The autumn leaves brushed the open window. I could reach out and pluck one, like taking a plume of fire. I walked over to the desk and started going through the drawers.
I found it under a stack of papers: an envelope from the Dearborn County Courthouse, Dearborn, Iowa. It was a number-ten white business envelope with a window. The window was empty. I had no idea to whom it had originally been addressed. The postmark read December 2, 1955. Nearly two years ago. I turned it over. I recognized Mary’s handwriting immediately. She had learned the Palmer Method well.
328-6382
Susan
I stayed a few more minutes, found nothing more.
I stood in the doorway, overwhelmed with her, no thoughts of anybody but her.
I went downstairs.
“I put Bill back to bed. He shouldn’t have gotten up in the first place. It was my fault for carrying on the way I did. I’m sorry.”
Miriam sat on the edge of the couch. I sat down next to her. Slid my arm around her.
“You ever see this before?” I showed her the envelope.
“No. Where’d you find it?”
“Mary’s room. She ever tell you about writing the Dearborn Courthouse for anything?”
“Not that I remember.”
I put it back in my pocket.
“You think it means something?”
“Probably not. But it’s the only thing I found I couldn’t explain.”
She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You’re such a good boy, Sam.”
“And you’re a good woman, Miriam.”
“If anybody can find her, I know it’ll be you.”
“Oh, I’ll find her all right, Miriam,”
I said.
“I’ll just keep saying prayers. I want to light some candles as soon as I can.”
I gave her a squeeze and stood up. She started to stand too. “No need. I’ll be fine.”
I walked to the door. “I saw that Very-Just Day photo up there.”
She smiled. “You kids were so cute.”
“That was a happy day.”
“I still think of it,” she said, “whenever I need a little cheering up.” Then: “But we were so na@ive back then. I remember your mom and I talking about how all our troubles were over. You know, after the war, nothing would ever seem like much trouble at all.”
Then: “I didn’t figure on Bud being killed.”
It was a sad, defeated house now. I needed to get out of there.