My family was there to tell me that I was to live again. To seek some sort of peace and normalcy after the forced march of these past eleven years.
“I love you so much,” I said aloud to each of them, and wept all the more; “I love you so much.”
And then I slept.
vii
“I talked to the district attorney,” Slocum said in the coffee shop the following morning. “He says it’s very unlikely there will be any charges.”
“He really thought Dexter was armed?”
“Wouldn’t you? A piece of trash like Dexter?”
I stared at him. “You know something terrible?”
“What?”
“I don’t feel guilty.”
He let go with one of those cigarette-raspy laughs of his. “Good.”
Then it was his turn to stare at me, there in the hubbub of clattering dishes and good sweet coffee smells and bacon sizzling on the grill. “So what now?”
“See if I can get my job back.”
“At the university?”
“Umm-hmm.”
He kept staring. “You don’t feel any guilt, do you?”
“No. I mean, I know I should. Whatever else, he was a human being. But—”
He smiled his hard Old Testament smile. “Now, don’t you go giving me any of those mousy little liberal ‘buts,’ all right?”
“All right.”
“You just go back and live your life and make it a good one.”
“I owe you one hell of a lot, Slocum.”
He put forth a slab of hand and a genuine look of affection in his eyes. “Just make it a good one,” he said. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
“And no guilt?”
“No guilt.”
He grinned. “I knew I could make a man out of you.”
viii
Her name was Anne Stevens and she was to dominate my first year back at the university. Having met at the faculty picnic — hot August giving way to the fierce melancholy of Indian summer — we began what we both hoped (her divorced; me not quite human yet) would be a pleasant but slow-moving relationship. We were careful to not introduce real passion, for instance, until we both felt certain we could handle it, about the time the first of the Christmas decorations blew in the gray wind of Harcourt Square.
School itself took some adjusting. First, there was the fact that the students seemed less bright and inquisitive, more conservative than the students I remembered. Second, the faculty had some doubts about me; given my experiences over the past eleven years, they wondered how I would fit into a setting whose goals were at best abstract. I wondered, too...
After the first time we made love — Anne’s place, unplanned, satisfying if slightly embarrassing — I went home and stared at the photograph of my wife I keep on my bureau. In whispers, I apologized for what I’d done. If I’d been a better husband I would have no guilt now. But I had not, alas, been a better husband at all...
In the spring, a magazine took a piece on inflation I wrote and the academic dean made a considerable fuss over this fact. Also in the spring Anne and I told each other that we loved each other in a variety of ways, emotionally, sexually, spiritually. We set June 23 as our wedding day.
It was on May 5 that I saw the item in the state newspaper. For the following three weeks I did my best to forget it, troubling as it was. Anne began to notice a difference in my behavior, and to talk about it. I just kept thinking of the newspaper item and of something Slocum had said that day when I killed Dexter.
In the middle of a May night — the breeze sweet with the newly blooming world — I typed out a six-page letter to Anne, packed two bags, stopped by a 7-Eleven and filled the Volvo and dropped Anne’s letter in a mailbox, and then set out on the interstate.
Two mornings later, I walked up a dusty flight of stairs inside an apartment house. A Hank Williams Jr. record filled the air.
To be heard above the music, I had to pound.
I half expected what would happen, that when the door finally opened a gun would be shoved in my face. It was.
A Cobra.
I didn’t say anything. I just handed him the news clipping. He waved me in — he lived in a place not dissimilar from the one Dexter had lived in — read the clipping as he opened an 8:48 A.M. beer.
Finished reading it, he let it glide to the coffee table that was covered with gun magazines.
“So?”
“So I want to help him. I don’t want him to go through what I did.”
“You know him or something?”
“No.”
“Just some guy whose daughter was raped and killed and the suspect hasn’t been apprehended.”
“Right.”
“And you want what?”
“I’ve got money and I’ve got time. I quit my job.”
“But what do you want?”
“I want us to go after him. Remember how you said that I’d changed and that I didn’t even know it?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, you were right. I have changed.”
He stood up and started laughing, his considerable belly shaking beneath his Valvoline T-shirt. “Well, I’ll be goddamned, Robert. I’ll be goddamned. I did make a man out of you, after all. So how about having a beer with me?”
At first — it not being 9:00 A.M. yet — I hesitated. But then I nodded my head and said, “Yeah, Slocum. That sounds good. That really sounds good.”
The Wind From Midnight
For Ray Bradbury
Even with the windows open, the Greyhound bus was hot inside as it roared through the rural California night. Plump ladies in sweat-soaked summer dresses furiously worked paper fans that bore the names of funeral parlors.
Plump men in sleeveless T-shirts sat talking of disappointing baseball scores (“Them goddamn Red Sox just don’t have it this year; nossir they don’t”) and the Republican convention that had just nominated Dwight Eisenhower. Most of the men aboard liked Ike and liked him quite a bit. These men smoked Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields and Fatimas and more than a few of them snuck quick silver flasks from their hip pockets.
In the middle of the bus was a slender, pretty woman who inexplicably burst into tears every twenty miles or so. It was assumed by all who watched her that she was having man trouble of some sort. A woman this pretty wouldn’t carry on so otherwise. She’d been deserted and was heading home to Mama was the consensus aboard the Greyhound.
Traveling with the pretty woman was a sweet-faced little girl who was obviously the daughter. She was maybe five or six and wore a faded white dress that reminded some of First Communion, and patent-leather shoes that reminded others of Shirley Temple. For the most part she was well-behaved, the little girl, stroking and petting her mama when she cried, and sitting prim and obedient when Mama was just looking sadly out the window.
But fifty miles ago the little girl had gone back to use the restroom — she’d had a big nickel Pepsi and it had gone right through her — and there she’d seen the tiny woman sitting all by herself in one corner of the vast backseat.
All the little girl could think of — and this was what she whispered to her mama later — was a doll that had come to life.
Before the bus pulled into the ocean-side town for a rest stop, the little girl found exactly four excuses to run back there and get another good peek at the tiny woman.
She just couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
A lot of passengers hurried to get off the bus so they could stand around the front of the depot and get a good look at her. In the rolling darkness of the Greyhound, they hadn’t really gotten much of a glimpse and they were just naturally curious, this kind of people.