"I didn't, but I warned them. I told them no good would ever come out of letting the pair of you in. I said nothing but trouble would ever come out of it. I told my dad that, and I told the Chief, too, it was an awful idea.
"I couldn't know then exactly what form the trouble would take, what repercussions there'd be. I must confess it didn't cross my mind that somehow your joining some day might form the basis for a tax evasion case, which seems to be the way they're heading. But there was no doubt in my mind that some day, sooner or later, something bad was certain to happen. Now my ugly premonition seems to be coming true.
"I want to emphasize that none of this was personal. It was not that I had a thing against you. Even though wed had that confrontation over the Humphrey candidacy, that was irrelevant. Nor had I anything against Dan Hilliard, or anyone who'd gotten where he is today by means of his own good hard work. More power to him, I say. I just knew that trouble was bound to come out of it some day, if your applications went through. My father and the Chief knew it too. I suspect you both knew, regardless of whether you admitted it to yourselves, that the two of you did not belong at Grey Hills. You didn't have the stuff.
"By rights you didn't have the means, the resources, to be members. How you came by them, I don't know, and I don't want to. I do know some kind of shady business was involved. Had to be; you had no other way, no honest way, to have laid your hands on that amount of money that fast. Sixteen or seventeen thousand dollars? An assistant clerk of courts and a state rep on the lower rungs of power? I'll give you your due: you were cute. No one's ever found out what you did or how you did it. But cleverness purifies nothing: the dirty politician's still like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight: so brilliant, and yet so corrupt, he shines, and stinks."
Merrion glared at him. "You piece of yellow shit," he said, 'getting me in here to say that to me. The next time we meet where some of my friends're around, so I'll have witnesses, I'm gonna call you out, dare you to repeat that. If you don't I'm gonna call you a fuckin' coward, and spit on you. And if you do, you'd better have a friend with you to hold your fancy bridgework or you're gonna swallow it."
Pooler smiled. "Sorry, Amby, but there's no other way of putting it, wasn't then and isn't now, and your reaction to the statement of that fact just proves it: you're not Grey Hills material and you never were.
Neither of you ought to've been allowed to place yourselves in the position where you'd have to do whatever it is you've done to meet the obligations membership entailed. As the fix you're now in proves conclusively. But back then, no one would listen to me."
He nodded, pouching his cheeks with air like an industrious squirrel with a cargo of acorns. "And now the day of reckoning has come, just as I predicted. But now it's too late for my cautions to do any good."
Merrion said to Hilliard: "I considered getting up and winding up and letting him have it, popping him one in the chops. Pasting him six or eight good ones, glasses and all, right in his smug little, fat little, face. Hair on the walls and blood on the floor; teeth in the nap of the rug. Change his nose from convex to concave. But I restrained myself. For one thing I don't want his yard-man to wind up behind the wheel of my car, using my house as an equipment shed. Particularly since I'd most likely still be in jail when he won the civil suit turning all of my goods over to him. Besides, my impression is that at least until one of us belts him, he's at least got to pretend he's on our side."
"Hell, if you think about it," Hilliard said, 'he may actually manage to get us to agree with him about Grey Hills. He's a third generation member. He's never seemed to use his membership much; I've seldom seen him there. But up 'til now I've always assumed it was because he was working all the time. Or else he just didn't like golf. There are people like that, you know. But now you've got me wondering: Maybe it's fear of rubbing elbows with riffraff like us, using showers that we've used, that's made him scarce up there. Is he really that petty?
If he is, he's right saying we're not fit to be members. What kind of asshole'd pay money to hang out with him? The very idea's disgusting.
Fine mess you got us into, Ollie, you and your grandiose ideas."
"Hey," Merrion said, 'my intentions were good. I'd had an unexpected bit of good fortune. Shared it with a friend."
"Yeah," Hilliard said, 'well, so whaddaya think? Myself I think I'd have to say the two of us by working hard've paved the road to Hell damned well."
TWENTY-FOUR
"I think the bastard actually liked explaining it all to me," Merrion told Hilliard after dinner in the dim dark-panelled bar at Grey Hills.
"Listening to him… I sat there and he talked and I heard what he was saying and it was like I'd stepped outside myself, and what I wanted to do more'n anything in the whole world was stand up and whack him one.
It was the same feeling that I had the day I went back with my mother to see the specialist, the "geriatricist" sounds like a circus act, guy who rides a bike naked onna high-wire, something. Her regular doctor sent us to him, see if he could figure out what was going on with her.
"Have him run a few tests." Duck when they say "a few tests"; they're warmin' up to tell you you're doomed.
"The idea was to find out why she was forgetting things, who she was or where she lived; why she mattered in the world and who she mattered to.
Naturally my dear brother Chris's nowhere to be seen; that's a family tradition. I can tell when the fat's inna fire: Chris's long-gone an' hard to find.
"She went outdoors one cold morning, late November, in her nightgown, barefoot. Went for a stroll down the street. Eight-thirty or so. Lots of people must've seen her, going off to work in their cars, coats on and the heaters going, barefoot lady in her nightgown walking down the street, but nobody stopped and tried to help her, or called the cops, their car-phone. They didn't care if something happened to her, nobody they knew; just ignored her and drove right on by. She got about a mile before someone who knew her from the bakery stopped her car and hollered at her, snapped her out of it, thank God; drove her home and called me. She'd only done it that once, but even once gets you worried. Next time she might not be that lucky, wander off and freeze to death, do something else and get hurt.
"And both of us already… it wasn't like we didn't have an inkling what was going on. We didn't know the details but we had a pretty good idea. She was gradually losing her buttons. We'd seen it happen to other people. Her mother, Rose; then they called it "hardening of the arteries." "Her brain isn't getting enough blood she's getting old, and simple, too." Before wed heard of senile dementia and Alzheimer's.
When she was lucid, which she was most of the time she had a pretty good idea that when she wasn't quite right, that was probably the explanation.
"But we didn't want to have that pretty good idea, you know? We didn't like having it. And her doctor, Paul Marsh, dead himself now: the reason that he sent us to this baby-faced specialist — looked like he was about fourteen was because he didn't want it to be what we all knew it was. He was the family doctor. He'd been treating her for years,
"taking care of all of you," was what he said. She was as much a friend of his as a patient. He didn't want her to have what she had, and for damned sure he didn't want to be the one to tell her. This new guy would do that. Wouldn't bother him; he didn't know Polly from a load of goats. We were seeing him to spare Paul. I suppose it was in a good cause.
"So they did those few tests they had in mind to do on her, and that took quite a while. "A few tests" is quite a lot, you find, when you start taking them. And then they told us to go home until they could "just get all the results back here, take a look at them so we can see what they mean." Give us a few more days or so to make-believe and hope that what we knew was going on was not. Then they had us back again and this time he sees us in his nice office, about sixteen diplomas on his wall and the kind of smooth white face you'd expect to see on your executioner. The vet we took our last dog to, have him put to sleep: he had a kinder face, I swear he at least pretended he felt sorry it hadda be done. But this assassin sits us down and quite pleasantly informs my mother and me that one by one, a few here, few there, she's begun to lose her marbles. And there's nothing he can do.