Ghost Story (59 page)

Don closed out his account and took his remaining money away in cash; he could not sleep, even when he drank too much; he knew he was falling back into the patterns of his breakdown after David's death. Each morning, he taped the big knife to his side before walking to the park.

If he did not act, he knew, one day he would not be able to leave his bed: his indecision would spin back into every atom of his life. It would paralyze him. This time he would not be able to write his way out of it.

One morning he motioned to another of the children, and the little boy shyly came up to him.

"What's the name of that girl?" he asked, pointing.

The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said, "Angie."

"Angie what?"

"Don't know."

"Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?"

The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding that he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupping his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. "Because she's
awful."
He scampered away, and the girl swung back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher, uncaring.

Angie.
Sitting inside his sweaty clothes under a warm eleven o'clock sun, he froze.

That night, in the midst of some harried dream, Don fell out of bed and staggered to his feet, holding a head which felt as though it had fractured like a dropped plate. He went into the kitchen for a glass of water and aspirin, and saw—imagined he saw—Sears James sitting at the dining-room table playing solitaire. The hallucination looked at him disgustedly, said, "It's about time you straightened out, isn't it?" and went back to its game.

He returned to the bedroom and began throwing clothes into a suitcase, taking the Bowie knife from the top of the dresser and rolling it up in a shirt.

At seven o'clock, unable to wait any longer, he drove to the park, went to his bench and waited.

The girl appeared, walking across the damp grass, at nine. She wore a shabby pink dress he had seen many times before, and she moved swiftly, wrapped as ever in her private isolation. They were alone for the first time since Don had thought of watching the playground. He coughed, and she looked directly at him.

And he thought he understood that all of these weeks, he sitting rooted to his bench and fearing for his sanity, she obliviously, concentratedly playing by herself, had been part of her game. Even the doubt (which still would not leave him) was part of the game. She had tired him, weakened him, tortured him as she had surely tortured John Jaffrey before persuading him to jump from the bridge into a freezing river. If he was right.

"You," he said.

The girl sat on a swing and looked across the playground to him.

"You."

"What do you want?"

"Come here."

She stood up off the swing and began to march toward him. He couldn't help it—he was afraid of her. The girl paused two feet in front of him and looked into his face with unreadable black eyes.

"What's your name?"

"Angie. Nobody ever talks to me."

"Angie what?"

"Angie Messina."

"Where do you live?"

"Here. In town."

"Where?"

She pointed vaguely east—the direction of the Hollow.

"You live with your parents?"

"My parents are dead."

"Then who do you live with?"

"Just people."

"Have you ever heard of a woman named Florence de Peyser?"

She shook her head: and maybe it was true, maybe she had not.

He looked up toward the sun, sweating, unable to speak.

"What do you want?" the girl demanded to know.

"I want you to come with me."

"Where?"

"For a ride."

"Okay," she said.

Trembling, he left the bench. As simple as that.
As simple as that.
No one saw them go.

What's the worst thing you've ever done? Did you kidnap a friendless girl and drive without sleeping, hardly eating, stealing money when your own melted away ... did you point a knife toward her bony chest?

What was the worst thing?
Not the act, but the ideas about the act: the garish film unreeling through your head.

Don opened his eyes and saw the open-air restaurant about him, the gilt lettering across the street. David sat across the table, still handsome, still radiating concern, but dressed in a moldering sack which once had been a suit; the lapels were gray with fine dust, the seams sprouted white threads. Mold grew up the sleeves.

His steak and a half-f wineglass were before him; in his right hand he held a fork, in his left a bone-handled Bowie knife.

Don freed a button on his shirt and slid the knife between his shirt and his skin. "I'm sick of these tricks," he said. "You're not my brother, and I'm not in New York. We're in a motel room in Florida."

"And you haven't had nearly enough sleep," his brother said. "You really look like you're in terrible shape." David propped one elbow on the table and lifted the smoky aviator glasses off his eyes. "But maybe you're right. It doesn't unsettle you so much anymore, does it?"

Don shook his head. Even his brother's eyes were right; that seemed indecent, that she should have copied his eyes so exactly. "It proves I was right," he said.

"About the little girl in the park, you mean. Well, of course you were right about her. You were supposed to find her—haven't you worked that out yet?"

"Yes. I did."

"But in a few hours little Angie, the poor orphan girl, will be back in the park. In ten or twelve years, she'll be just about the age for Peter Barnes, wouldn't you say? Of course, poor Ricky will have killed himself long before that."

"Killed himself."

"Very easy to arrange, dear brother."

"Don't call me
brother,"
Don said.

"Oh, we're brothers all right," David said, and smiled as he snapped his fingers.

In the motel room, a weary-looking black man settled back into the chair facing him and unclipped a tenor saxophone from the strap around his neck. "Now me, of course, you know," he said, putting the saxophone down on a bedside table.

"Dr. Rabbitfoot."

"The celebrated."

The musician had a heavy, authoritative face, but instead of the gaudy minstrel's getup Don had imagined him wearing, he dressed in a rumpled brown suit shot with iridescent threads of a paler, almost pinkish brown; and he too looked rumpled, tired from a life spent on the road. Dr. Rabbitfoot's eyes were as flat as the little girl's, but their whites had turned the yellow of old piano keys.

"I didn't imagine you very well."

"No matter. I don't take offense easy. You can't think of everything. In fact, there's a lot you didn't think of." The musician's breathy confidential voice had the timbre of his saxophone. "A few easy victories don't mean you won the war. Seems like I be reminding folks of that a lot. I mean, you got me here, but where did you get
yourself?
That's an example of the kind of thing you gotta keep in mind, Don."

"I got face to face with you," Don said.

Dr. Rabbitfoot lifted his chin and laughed: and in the middle of the laugh, which was hard and explosive, as regular as a stone skipping over water, Don was in Alma Mobley's apartment, all of the luxurious objects in their old places around him, and Alma was seated on a cushion before him.

"Well, that's hardly new, is it?" she asked, still laughing. "Face to face—that's a position we knew many times, as I remember it. Top to tail, too."

"You're despicable," he said. These transformations were starting to work: his stomach burned and his temples ached.

"I thought you got beyond that," she said in her glancing, sunshiny voice. "After all, you know more about us than nearly anyone on this planet. If you don't like our characters, at least you should respect our abilities."

"No more than I respect the sleazy tricks of a nightclub magician."

"Then I'll have to teach you to respect them," she said and leaned forward and was David, half his skull flattened and his jaw broken and his skin broken and bleeding in a dozen places.

"Don? For God's sake, Don ... can't you help me? Jesus, Don." David pitched sideways on the Bokhara rug and groaned with pain.
"Do
something—for God's sake ..."

Don could not bear it. He ran around his brother's body, knowing if he bent over to help David they would kill him, and opened the door of Alma's apartment, shouted
"No!"
and saw that he was in a crowded, sweaty room, a nightclub of some sort (It's only because I said
nightclub,
he thought, she picked up the word and yanked me into it) where black and white people sat together at small round tables facing a bandstand.

Dr. Rabbitfoot was sitting on the edge of the bandstand, nodding at him. The saxophone was back on its chain, and he fingered the keys as he spoke.

"You see, boy, you
got
to respect us. We can take your brain and turn it to cornmeal mush." He pushed himself off the stand and came toward Don. "Pretty soon"—and now, shockingly, Alma's voice came from his wide mouth—"you don't know where you are or what you're doing, everything inside you is all mixed up, you don't know what's a lie and what isn't." He smiled. Then in the doctor's voice again, and lifting the saxophone toward Don, he said, "You take this horn here. I can tell little girls I love them through this horn, and that's probably a lie. Or I can say I'm hungry, and that sure as hell ain't no lie. Or I can say something beautiful, and who knows if that's a lie or not? It's a complicated business, see?"

"It's too hot in here," Don said. His legs were trembling and his head seemed to be spinning in wide arcs. The other musicians on the stand were tuning up, some of them hitting the A the piano player fed them, others running scales: he was afraid that when they started to play, the music would blow him to pieces. "Can we leave?"

"You got it," said Dr. Rabbitfoot. The yellow around his pupils shone.

The drummer splashed a cymbal, and a throbbing note from a bass vibrated through the humid air like a bird, taking his stomach with it, and all the musicians came in together, the sound hitting him like an enormous breaker.

And he was walking along a Pacific beach with David, both of them barefoot, a seagull gliding overhead, and he didn't want to look at David, who wore the dreadful moldering gravesuit, so he looked at the water and saw shimmering, iridescent layers of oil sliding through the pools around them. "They just got it all," David was saying, "they watched us so long they know us right down to the ground, you know? That's why we can't win—that's why I look this way. You can get a few lucky breaks like you did back in Milburn, but believe me, they won't let you get away now. And it's not so bad."

"No?"
Don whispered, almost ready to believe it, and looked past David's terrible head and saw behind them, up on a bluff, the "cottage" he and Alma had stayed in, several thousand years before.

"It's like when I first went into practice," David explained, "I thought I was such hot stuff, Don—Jesus, I thought I'd turn the place upside down. But the old guys in that firm, Sears and Ricky, they knew so many tricks, they were smooth as grease, man. And I was the only thing that got turned upside down. So I just settled down to learn, brother, I apprenticed myself to them, and I decided that if I was ever going to go anywhere I had to learn to be just like they were. That's how I got ahead."

"Sears and Ricky?" Don asked.

"Sure. Hawthorne, James and Wanderley. Isn't that what it was?"

"In a way it was," Don said, blinking into a red sun.

"In a
big
way. And that's what you have to do now, Don. You have to learn to honor your betters. Humility. Respect, if you like. See, these guys, they live forever, and they know us inside out, when you think you got them pinned down they wiggle out and come up fresh as flowers—just like the old lawyers in my first firm. But I learned, see, and I got all this." David gestured encompassingly around, taking in the house, the ocean, the sun.

"All this," Alma said, beside him now in her white dress, "and me too. Like your saxophone player says, it's a complicated business."

The patterns of oil in the water deepened, and the sliding colors wrapped around his shins.

"What you need, boy," Dr. Rabbitfoot said beside him, "is a way out. You got an icicle in your belly and a spike through your head, and you're as tired as three weeks of a Georgia summer. You gotta get to the final bar. You need a door, son."

"A door," Don repeated, ready to drop, and found himself looking at a tall wooden door upended in the sand. A sheet of paper was pinned to it at eye level; Don trudged forward and saw the typed letters on the sheet.