The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (36 page)

I was the only one who'd felt my absence, probably. All the familiar things seemed new again. The colony of mice living in the alcove just by the dartboard--I couldn't remember their making such a racket before. And the bargemen's wet boots on the flagstone floor, had they always scraped like that? And all the dank smells--mold and candle wax and things secretly fermenting on floors and walls--rushed in on me now, as though I were dipping my head down an unused well.

And there was Patsy, swiping the remains of some ham hocks into her apron and quietly finishing off a mechanic's hard cider for him. I could almost believe I was watching her for the very first time.

"Evening, Gus," she said, evenly.

"Evening, Patsy."

"Landor!" cried Benny, leaning over the counter. "Have I told you the one about the fly? Which lands in the three gentlemen's drinks? Well, mind you, the first gentleman is English, so he just pushes his drink away, being a priggish sort of fellow..."

Benny's voice, too, that felt new. Or else it was working on me in a different way, not through my ears but through my skin, a sort of razzing prickle.

"Now the Irishman, why, he just shrugs his shoulders and drinks the beer anyway, doesn't he? What does he care if it had a fly in it?"

I tried to hold his eyes, but I couldn't, they were too hot. So I stared down at the counter, and I waited, with a dire patience.

"But the Scotsman," cried Benny in his grave raucous voice, "why, he picks up that fly, and he screams, "Spit it out, you bastard!""

Jasper Magoon roared so hard he coughed up a finger of gin, and a bargeman caught the laugh and threw it to the outer part of the room, where it was taken up by the Reverend Asher Lippard and passed round, from hostler to drayman. The tin ceiling and the flagstone floor rang, and the laughter spread until it was a weave of sound, flawed only by a single off-color thread, a high thin squiggly laugh that burst through the others like the call of a famished turkey. A laugh I spent some time trying to identify before realizing it was mine.

Poe and I had planned to meet as if by accident, so when he got there, at some twenty minutes to midnight, it was all "Why, Mr. Poe!" and "Why, Mr. Landor!" and looking back, I'm not sure why we bothered. Patsy already knew he was working for me, and the rest of them wouldn't have cared. Indeed, they would have been hard pressed to distinguish Poe from all the other sodden, red-eyed cadets who rolled in night after night. No, the only person who could have troubled us would have been another cadet, and Poe was, fortunately enough, the only one to stop by that evening. Which meant that instead of lurking in some dark corner with a snuffed-out lantern, he and I could sit by the fire and help ourselves to Benny's pot of flip, and we could approach the feeling we enjoyed in my hotel room: the mutual ease of two old bachelors living out their term.

That night, Poe chose to talk of Mr. Allan. The inspiration for this, I believe, was a recent letter in which Mr. Allan had made mention of visiting--provided, of course, he could find a boat to take him up the river and a boatman who wouldn't skin him of half his fortune.

"Do you see?" Poe cried. "It's always been like this, from the time I was a child. Every expense to be spared. Or if not spared, then scrutinized and--and interrogated and begrudged for the remainder of time."
From the day he had taken Poe into his house, Allan had refused to clothe or educate him in the manner of a gentleman. In a million ways, large and small, Allan had denied him, and when Poe had needed help publishing his first volume of verse, hadn't Allan been the one to say, "Men of genius ought not to apply to my aid," and when he'd had needed fifty dollars to pay his Army replacement, hadn't Allan balked and hedged for so long that to this day, Sergeant Bully Graves was demanding payment (as relentless as any creditor, was Bully), and it wasn't right, it wasn't just, that a sensitive young man should be plagued in such a way.

Said Poe, taking another taste of flip:

"I tell you, Landor, there is no consistency in the man. He teaches me to aspire to eminence, then sets about blasting my every hope of advancement. Oh, yes, it's always "Stand on your own two feet' and "Never fail to your duty," but really, Landor, really, it's "Why should you get what I did not?" Do you know, Landor, when he sent me to the University of Virginia, he left me so impoverished I was forced to leave after only eight months!"

"Eight months," I said, smiling thinly. "You said you'd studied there three years."

"I did not."

"You did, Poe."

"Landor, please! How could I have been there three years, when the man was already squeezing me from the moment I arrived? Do you see this drink in my hand? I tell you, if Mr. Allan had been the one to buy me this, he would now be demanding it back in the form of urine."

I thought then of Benny's Scotsman, trying to get his beer back from the fly, and I had some idea of repeating the joke to Poe, but he was already standing and, with a boy's smirk, announcing that he had to excuse himself. " To add my bit," he said, "to the river tide."

He tittered then and took a long stride toward the door, nearly colliding with Patsy, to whom he apologized at great length and to whom he made to tip his hat before remembering he had no hat. Patsy, ignoring him, made straight for our table and, after a moment's pause, began clearing away the thousands of crumbs and small puddles that had piled up in the short time Poe and I had been there. She wiped with long placid strokes, the same industrial precision she had shown in my kitchen. I had forgot what an enchantment it was.

"You're quiet tonight," I said.

"I hear better that way."

"Oh," I said, "why bother with hearing when you can"--my hand groped under the table-- "when you can feel..."

I was stopped by her arm. Not the piece of her I was seeking, and yet it was enough--just the one square of skin--to set me aching from toe to ear. The memory of our last time came over me... her ripe white fullness... her cedar scent, never to be mistaken. I will know it a thousand years on, if I still have a nose. I sometimes think that what people--people like Poe--call a soul comes down to nothing more than this. A smell. A cluster of atoms. "Christ," I said, under my breath.

"Sorry, Gus, I can't stay, there's... the kitchen's a terror tonight..."

"Could you at least look at me?"

She raised those lovely chocolate irises toward mine. In a second, she drew them away again.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

Her shoulders formed a ridge against her neck. "I don't think you should have taken that job," she said.

"Don't be ridiculous," I answered. "It's a job, that's all. Like any other."

"No," she said, half turning away. "It's not." She cast a look at the bar. "It's changed you. I can see it in your eyes, you're not there anymore."

The quiet came over us like a wind, and there we were, and you see how it can be, don't you Reader? You think something has settled into a certain position, and then it turns out it was never in that position at all...

"Well, then," I said. "The change must lie in you, not me. I don't pretend to understand it, but I can--"

"No," she insisted. "It's not me."

I studied her averted head. "I suppose that's why you haven't sent for me."

"I've had my hands full with my sister, you know that."

"And your cadets, Patsy. Have they had their hands full, too?"

She didn't flinch. In a voice so soft I could scarcely hear, she said:

"I would have figured you for being too busy yourself, Gus."

I half rose in my chair. "Never so busy I can't--"

And that was as far as I got before Poe sprang on us. Giggling with cold and burning with spirits, heedless of everything and everyone beyond himself. He straddled the back of his chair and rubbed his hands together and groaned, "Good Lord! My Virginia blood shall never be thick enough for these winters. Praise God for flip. And praise God--just a splash or two, many thanks--praise God for you, Patsy! How you brighten these dreary, wasted hours. I must write you a sestina sometime."

"Somebody should," I said.

"Somebody," she agreed. "You're right. That would be lovely, Mr. Poe."

He watched her go with a long whistling sigh. Then he bent his face over his glass and muttered:
"It's no good. Every female I meet, no matter how--how pulchritudinous, only sends me spiraling back to Lea. I can think of no one but her, I can live for no one but her." He let the liquid bubble for a moment in his throat. "Oh, Landor, I look back on the poor benighted creature I was before I met her, and I see a dead man. Marching in all the right directions, answering when spoken to, fulfilling all his appointed rounds, but dead all the same. And now this woman has awakened me, and I am alive at last, and at what cost! What pain it is to be among the living!"

He lowered his head into the cradle of his hands.

"Would I ever conceive of returning, though, Landor? Never! Better to have this agony multiplied a thousandfold than to be led back to the land of the dead. I cannot go back, I will not. And yet... oh, God, Landor, what am I to do?"

I emptied my glass. Set it on the table and pushed it away.

"Stop loving," I said. "Don't love anyone."

He would have been insulted if he'd been soberer, or if he'd had more time to answer. But it was at that moment that the Reverend Asher Lippard came bursting through the back door.

"Officer! Landward!"

With that, Benny Havens' establishment... I was going to say erupted, but that wouldn't convey the orderliness of it. This was at least a weekly event at Benny's. One of Thayer's "blues" would swing by on a surprise raid, and whoever was stationed closest to the door-- tonight it was Asher-- would sound the alarm, and whichever cadets had chosen that night to "run it" would be bundled out the front door and herded straight up the riverbank. So it was with Poe on this night. Patsy threw him his cloak and hauled him to his feet, Benny dragged him from the fireplace to the door, and Mrs. Havens gave him one final push and slammed the door after him. He was borne along like a stone skipping over water.

The rest of us had our own part in the drill. We were to remain in our places until the officer appeared, and we were to present him with fat dumb faces when he asked if any cadets had been there. The officer, if he was new to this, would mumble darkly at us and leave the premises on his own time. (One or two might have a drink before going.)

We waited, then, for tonight's officer... but the door never budged. It was Benny himself who finally pushed it open--from the inside. Took a step into the night, craning his head.

"No one there," he said, frowning.

"You don't suppose they cut him off at the river, do you?" cried Jack de Windt.

"Oh, we would have heard something. Come, now, Asher, tell us, what made you think you saw an officer?"

Asher's mouse eyes sharpened. "What made me think? Christ, what do you take me for, Benny? You don't think I can recognize a bar as well as anyone?"

"A bar, you say." "Why, certainly. He was holding his lantern up--like this--and the bar, why, it was plain as a pimple. Right there on his shoulder."

"And did you see anything else?" I asked. "Anything but his shoulder?"

The sureness began to leak from Asher's face. His eyes flicked from side to side. "No, Gus. It was the lantern. The way he was holding it, I mean. You could only see the bar..."

** *

A fine-bladed, icy rain had begun to fall--the same rain that had been falling the night Ballinger was killed. It had already sheathed the knob on Benny's door and beaded the hemlock branches... and formed a glistening skin on the steps leading up to the main road.

I set my foot on that first step. I waited. Or maybe just listened, for the night was silvery with sound. The sifting sound of the wind and a batlike rustle in a sugar tree, and, just above me, in a half-bald birch, a crow--black against black--knitting and creaking.

Dark! The only light came from the torch outside Benny's door and the torch's reflection in a puddle of frozen water, captured by a clump of juniper. A near-perfect mirror, that puddle: I found Landor soon enough. I was still staring at him when the sound came clattering down the steps like a rolling marble.

Not a noise Nature would make. Too human. Too much like someone running away.

And maybe if I'd been trained for some other trade, if I hadn't worked half my life as a constable, I wouldn't have given chase. But when you've done what I did for a living, and a fellow's running from you, why, there's nothing for it but to follow.

I crawled up those ice-bound steps on all fours and stood once more on the road to West Point. To the north, I could see--no, it was nothing like seeing--I could feel a stirring, a commotion within the darkness. Legs and arms and head. No more than a hunch, really, but as I crept up the road, I was soon given all the proof I needed: a squelch of boots.

With no lantern at my call, I had only this sound to lead me, but it was as sure a guide as any. I stole along, trying to keep that dark figure in my scope, trying to match my tread to his. I must have been drawing closer, for the sound was growing louder... and then, above the tramping, came the snort of a horse, not twenty feet off.

Hearing that changed everything. I knew once he'd climbed on that horse, there'd be no bringing him to ground.

And I knew this, too: I'd be a fool to jump him now. Best to wait until the exact moment of mounting--the point when any rider is most vulnerable--before taking my chances.

This time, at least, I wasn't as blind as I'd been in Artemus' closet. My eyes had won a few minutes to adjust to the dark, and I could see now the purple flanks of a horse, shaking ice from its withers, and the outlines of another figure, more human, bracing itself against the pommel.

And something more: a white stripe, splitting the dark. And because it was the most definite part of the picture, it was this stripe I threw myself at and I wrapped my hands round. And when I felt the stranger's body give way beneath mine, this stripe became my anchor.