Wolf at the Table, page 6
“Am I wrong to assume your spineless daddy ain’t comin’ back anytime soon?” Duke murmurs sweetly.
“I stopped waitin’ up for him a few weeks back,” Nan says.
“Has he even called?” Duke asks her.
“No.”
Duke takes a seat at the kitchen table and bounces Drew on his knee a few times and the baby promptly starts wailing. The noise is incredible, like some Midwestern tornado siren that’s gotten stuck. Nan takes the baby from Duke and holds him to her breasts. He is immediately quieted and Alec is astonished by her power over the child. She doesn’t even need to feed him; the proximity of her flesh has rendered him dumb. Is it a smell? Or something else? The drunkenness of anticipating warm milk? Did Alec’s mother have this power over him? Ava Larkin, that tall, righteous, God-fearing bitch.
Alec notices another dusting of freckles along Nan’s collarbone, her shoulders. He longs to cradle one of her bare feet in his hands.
During a lull, a wave of cicadas surges. A sadness seems to have passed over Duke’s face.
“I’m gonna go change his diaper and put him back down,” Nan says, hoisting Drew onto her shoulder. She gets up and walks toward the hall with him.
As they pass by Alec, he can smell the baby’s mess. A door opens and closes. Moments later, faint calliope music can be heard.
“Drew’s father disappeared a month after the baby was born,” Duke explains. “Cowardly fuck.”
“Did you know him?”
“Yeah, I knew him,” Duke says. “He’s my son.”
The idea of Duke having a son is so startling to Alec that he has to resist the need to sit on the floor. Duke’s never mentioned any kids. Alec has always imagined him entirely singular, unattached to anything or anyone.
“Do you know where he is?” Alec asks.
“If I did I’d be there with a cattle prong.”
Nan returns and sits. She’s tied her hair back. She exhales and dabs at the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.
“Full-time job,” Duke says.
“Yep,” Nan agrees, “but minus the salary.”
She asks Duke for a cigarette and he produces his pack of Pall Malls and taps one out for her. She uses the stovetop to light it and draws from it heavily. The calliope music continues wheedling from the baby’s room.
“Here,” Duke says, and pushes a hefty wad of cash toward Nan.
It’s folded in half and secured with a rubber band. Alec can’t decipher the amount, but it seems to be all twenties. It’s probably more money than he’s made the entire summer.
“That should help get you over the hump.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Nan says, squeezing Duke’s forearm.
The calliope music fades and is replaced by the cicadas, whose incessant throbbing seems more organized now, as if they’re closing in on the house.
“We better head out,” Duke says to Alec.
Alec gets up from the table. When Nan also rises he is seized by the desire to make every moment count. Their farewell has to be movie-like.
On the front porch, Nan and Duke hug again. This one goes on longer than their first. Duke clearly loves the mother of his grandson. Alec has walked to the car, allowing them privacy, though he can see Nan kiss Duke’s cheek.
“You gotta get this porch fixed,” Duke says. “Someone’s gonna sprain their ankle.”
She thanks him again for the money.
As Duke walks away, Nan remains on the porch, the light from her living room window casting her figure in silhouette. She looks spectral, only half there, a perfect ghost.
Just before they load into the Bonneville, Nan raises her hand and waves goodbye to Alec. Their farewell should’ve been more intimate. The disappointment settles in his jaw. He would have liked a few words and a hug. He even felt a pang of jealousy during her embrace with Duke, like a faint blow to the kidneys. He raises his hand and waves back. Then Nan pivots and goes into the house.
In the car Duke doesn’t turn the radio on. For several minutes he seems remote, inaccessible.
Alec asks him if everything’s okay.
“Everything’s fine,” he says. “I just love the hell outta that little boy.”
A QUARTER OF AN hour later they arrive in Frankfort. It’s after four a.m. in the small town and all but the traffic lights are off. The variety store is outfitted with a metal security gate, just as Duke described. Above the store is an apartment with three windows, the curtains drawn.
Duke parks across the street and kills the engine. “You stay put,” he says. “Only come and get me if you see any lights go on in her place.”
Duke disembarks from the Bonneville and calmly walks around to the back, not sneaking, not ducking, as if he’s about to enter his own house.
Alec can’t stop thinking about Nan. About sitting across from her in her little kitchen with the needlepoint picture of that clown high on the wall. Her thin wrists and fingers. Her red hair and freckled skin. The ease with which she carried her infant son down the hall…
A light above the store flicks on. It’s the second window. Alec watches it for several breaths before registering what Duke had tasked him to do. Now another window is illuminated—the one on the far right. Alec gets out of the car and jogs across the street and around the back of the store. Loose change jingles in his pockets and he throws the coins into the unmown grass at the side of the store. But for some reason he halts at the back door, unable to go through it. Feeling the acute need to urinate, he unzips and relieves himself against the cement foundation. His urine smells like ammonia and Jim Beam and he realizes he’s hardly had a thing to eat all day.
By the time he finally enters the back of the shop, things have already gone too far. The overcrowded variety store has been completely ransacked. Vintage clothes and books and knickknacks are strewn everywhere. The cash register is wide open and empty, and the shelves under the main display case have been pillaged. The old lady from upstairs is pleading with Duke. She has thin white hair and pale, translucent skin and wears a cream-colored terrycloth housecoat bearing a floral pattern. She is trying to stop Duke from hunting through the bottom of another display that showcases belt buckles, turquoise rings, leather wallets.
The old lady tries to grab him around the neck, from behind. Duke turns, seizes her by the shoulders, and flings her away from him like she’s an unwanted, crazed cat. She crashes against a standing radiator, falls into a heap, and cries out. Duke grabs a brass bookend and brings the heavy, sharp object down onto her head repeatedly. After the third blow her skull empties onto the floor and an arc of blood sprays onto a Virgin Mary statue dressed with many colorful beaded necklaces.
Unseen by either of them, Alec turns and exits through the back door and runs as fast as he can to the Bonneville. It feels as if his legs have been pulled off and haphazardly put back on. He flings himself into the driver’s side. He could leave. All he has to do is turn the key, which Duke left in the ignition. Just turn the key, Alec thinks. Turn it! But he can’t. Instead he wrests himself out of the car and shuffles over to the passenger’s side. His ankles have been pulled off too—pulled off and reattached—and he almost falls twice. He manages to open the passenger’s-side door and gets back in. His hands are shaking so bad he has to sit on them. He feels like he might vomit. He opens the door and leans his head out and retches, but nothing comes up.
Moments later Duke is walking toward the car from behind the shop with several cigar boxes stacked up against his vast torso, somehow keeping them in place with his chin. He hip-checks the passenger’s-side door shut, then sets the boxes down on the pavement near the trunk and calmly walks around the front of the car and grabs the keys from the ignition. He heads to the trunk, opens and closes it, and returns holding three Dutch Masters boxes.
“There’s around a grand in each of those,” Duke says, shutting the driver’s-side door and handing Alec the three cigar boxes.
Alec opens one and simply stares at the cash, which is neatly arranged in tight stacks of twenties and tens. “What about your cut?” he says.
“I just put four of those in the trunk.” Duke starts the engine and they drive away.
Frankfort blurs by Alec’s window. A gas station. A pawnshop. A church with a white steeple. This is a town where things like this happen, Alec thinks. A man drives three hours in the middle of the night and robs an old lady and bashes her skull in.
“Where are we goin’?” Alec finally asks.
“Bus station,” Duke says. “We have to split up.”
“Are you gettin’ on a bus?” Alec asks.
“No,” Duke says, “you are.”
When they arrive at a stoplight Alec asks Duke where he got the key to the back of the variety store.
“I’ve always had it,” Duke replies. “I used to live with the old lady who owns the place.”
“She rented you a room?”
“Somethin’ like that,” Duke says. “Here,” he adds, handing Alec a handkerchief. “Your nose…”
Alec brings the handkerchief to his nostrils, which are gushing blood. Since he was a kid, his nose has always bled easily, especially at the sight of anything disturbing. Once when he was a boy, the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Kaminski, accidentally backed her Plymouth over her poodle, Skipper, whose skull popped like a plastic bag. Alec and his sister Myra saw the whole thing. Alec’s nose immediately started bleeding. He’s reminded of the night the Mulerts were murdered in their home, and the same thing happened to him then, and Myra noticed and the shame sent him jogging back to the house, plugging his nose as he ran.
When they finally arrive in the parking lot of a small bus terminal, Duke shifts the car into park, taps out a cigarette, and lights it. “My advice would be to head west,” he tells Alec, exhaling.
“Where are you gonna go?”
“Far away from here,” Duke says. “It’s better if you don’t know. And if I were you I’d stuff that money in the bottom of your duffel bag,” Duke adds.
“Okay,” Alec hears himself say.
“Do it, then,” Duke says.
Alec opens his father’s duffel bag, removes a blob of unfolded, yeasty smelling clothes, packs the three cigar boxes, re-stuffs the clothes, and secures the top.
“Maybe try the Midwest,” Duke says. “People are nice there.”
Alec gets out of the car with the duffel bag and closes the door.
Through the open window, Duke adds, “And remember what I said to you earlier. About bein’ smart with that money.”
Duke pulls away. Alec watches the Bonneville until it turns left at the next intersection. The engine fades and is overtaken by cicadas.
Inside the small bus terminal a large, standing fan oscillates with a sound louder than a lawn mower. There is only one other person in the waiting area: a young kid in a military uniform who’s fallen asleep with his face in his hands. The attendant behind the fiberglass ticket booth is watching a small black-and-white TV. A rerun of Bonanza. Lorne Greene looks like an apparition, like some damned, minor ghost trapped forever on the Ponderosa. The clock high on the wall says that it’s almost 4:35 a.m.
“When’s the next bus?” Alec asks the attendant, who is covered with a gluey film of sweat.
“Thirty-five minutes,” he replies, fanning himself with a bus schedule.
“Where’s it going?” Alec asks.
“New York City.”
Alec hoists his duffel bag onto his shoulder and asks if there are any buses heading west. The attendant tells him that the next westbound bus departs at six a.m.
“How far west does it go?” Alec asks.
“It’ll take you all the way to California if that’s what you’re lookin’ for,” the attendant says. “You want one of these?” He proffers the schedule he’s been using to fan himself.
“No thanks,” Alec says, and heads back outside, where even in the dark the heat rises out of the asphalt as if by its own will. Walking in it is like wading through a warm pond. Everything on this side of the state wants to slow you down. It’s as if the night gives nature permission.
Alec can’t shake the images from the variety shop: the old lady’s body crashing into the radiator; then Duke or Jerry or whatever the hell his name is staving her head in with that brass bookend; her skull opening up like a cantaloupe; that arc of blood spraying against the Virgin Mary statue… Alec finds that he is weeping, that the grotesque images have awakened a fragility, some childlike weakness. It’s the sound he used to produce when he sang in the choir as a boy. Warm air sluices into his mouth and down his throat and almost chokes him. Although his nose has stopped bleeding he’s still clutching Duke’s blood-soaked handkerchief. He blows a gout of bloody snot into his bare hand and wipes it with the handkerchief.
The cicadas surge feverishly. There’s a relentless trance in their song. It’s as if they’re trying to keep you in one place, Alec thinks, to stop you from moving forward, so they can eventually take over.
He digs in his duffel bag and opens one of the cigar boxes. This is a moment, he realizes. You only get a few of these, maybe two or three in a lifetime. It’s like a door rising out of the earth, the simplest of doors, wooden, with a tarnished brass knob. You either grab hold of it, turn the knob, and walk through the fucking thing, or you don’t. Should he call the police and turn Duke in? Should he get rid of the money?
Alec goes back inside the terminal and from the attendant he purchases a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. As he parts with the cash his hands tremble so intensely he can feel a rattling in his elbows.
Just before dawn, Alec boards a westbound Greyhound whose final destination is Los Angeles, California. There are two others on the bus—a pair of older, mannish nuns in black-and-white habits, sitting beside each other, just behind the driver. One of them is clutching a rosary, the other is reading a paperback. They seem bemused by their own tranquility, a seemingly permanent mild form of joy afforded them by the Holy Spirit, no doubt. They smile at Alec as he passes them with his father’s duffel bag hoisted on his shoulder. Alec tries to return a smile but his face doesn’t seem to be working properly.
The heat has finally lifted a bit and the bus lurches through the modest neighborhoods of Utica and toward Interstate 90. The dawn, blue as a goat’s eye, is starting to climb up the eastern horizon. Through his lowered window Alec can hear birds chattering. Just like that, the cicadas are gone, replaced by the shrieks of crows, skylarks, and swallows, repetitive and maddening, but Alec is comforted by the fact that he has over three thousand dollars to his name.
3
ELMIRA, NEW YORK
DECEMBER 24, 1965
LEXY
WAKE UP, SLEEPYHEAD,” ED says, pulling his station wagon into the Larkins’ driveway.
Lexy feels his soft full lips on her forehead. He shaved that morning and his smooth face smells of English Leather. The three-and-a-half-hour drive from Poughkeepsie has left a taste in her mouth. She wants a Coke, which she most certainly won’t find here, as her mother has always frowned upon carbonated soft drinks. The best thing she’ll get from the Larkin refrigerator is a glass of whole milk or a serving of her mother’s virginal holiday eggnog.
Lexy met Ed at a mixer in New Haven, back in early September. He is from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They made eyes across the Dwight Hall ballroom as the Whiffenpoofs, Yale’s elite glee club, sang Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets.” Before the end of the final chorus, the lanky, broad-shouldered, six-five junior, who resembled a young Gregory Peck, had sidled up to her. Without saying a word, Ed offered his hand and Lexy took it. By New Haven standards it was an unusually warm September evening and they wound up taking a walk through campus. She loved his voice, his slow, loping gait, and the ease with which he moved.
Before she boarded the bus back to Poughkeepsie, they shared a chaste kiss at the threshold of the New Haven Green, then spent nearly every day of the following week talking on the telephone about how they couldn’t wait to see each other again, which happened the next weekend, when Ed drove his ’58 Ford Country Squire station wagon two hours north to the Vassar campus, a trip he’s repeated each weekend since.
Lexy’s first few weeks at Vassar were nothing less than thrilling. She quickly established herself as the star freshman on the volleyball club team and she’s grown particularly fascinated by a twentieth-century literature course, which introduced her to the haunting Albert Camus novel The Stranger. She’s been carrying the slim book around in her purse and often rereads early sections, casting herself as Meursault’s girlfriend, Marie, imagining them making love, swimming in the Mediterranean, walking through the sun-soaked streets of Algiers, eating in the cafés, and riding the trolley cars. Although she’s always gotten along just fine with her mother, Lexy’s time away has made her feel like an adult (finally!), with real freedoms. Beyond keeping her side of her dorm room picked up there are no chores. And she hasn’t gone to church a single time since she’s been at school; it’s been almost four months of unencumbered Sundays. When she was home for Thanksgiving she lied to her mother, assuring her that she hasn’t missed Mass.
As Lexy and Ed approach the house with their weekend bags, it begins to snow. The flakes seem almost synthetic as they descend through the floodlight attached to the garage.
“Right on cue,” Ed says of the snow.
The trees of the neighborhood, looming bare and arthritic, take on a sudden luster. The dead leaves on the colorless lawn are silvered anew in their misshapen drifts. Leaves this late into the year suggests that her father’s arthritis has gotten worse. Maybe she’ll ask Ed if he’ll offer to do some raking. It would certainly impress her mother. The ancient sycamore—the tree Lexy and her siblings climbed and ran around and read beneath for years—looks thin and blighted, as if it survived a bombing. The old tire swing hangs from it like an afterthought.
Inside the house it is warm and smells like cooking: ham and stewed mustard greens and her mother’s famous cheesy garlic butter rolls and something cinnamon. Ava Larkin has no doubt been at it all day, and the promise of the Christmas Eve feast gnaws at Lexy’s stomach.
