This, she understood, was something that her will could not fail. She could take him, all of him, all his years and his exhaustion and his disease, all his desire and his dreams, and she could accommodate them. She could absorb and absolve. She could take in and transform. She could will the death right out, and the life right into him.
Power.
“Merci.”
“Keep your eyes closed.”
“It’s falling out, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
She reached over and turned off the lamp.
“Come on,” she said. “Follow me.”
At four in the morning Hess awoke to the sound of cats screeching somewhere out in the grove. Merci breathed deeply and didn’t move.
He lay still and remembered: fishing with his uncles, his dad making pancakes on Sunday mornings, the creases on the back of his mother’s blouse as she walked, Barbara’s expression as she came down the aisle in the church where they were married, his first dog, what the world looked like from the tail gunner’s position of a B-29 thirty thousand feet above Korea. He had no idea why he thought of these particular things. It felt like they were lining themselves up for his inspection. This is what we were.
Eight more years, he thought. Seventy-five years.
He set a hand on Merci’s back. He thought of standing in front of her bathroom mirror a few hours ago, looking at his new head. He remembered her hands kneading his scalp and the hair falling lightly onto his face, and later, the shower they took together when she shampooed it away by the handful.
It was a strange moment as he stood there, naked and still wet, newly bald and thoroughly exhausted, with Merci naked herself under a towel, this large and quite lovely woman who had just made love to him, dark moles on creamy skin, the strands of black wet hair on her shoulders, crowded right up close in the steamy little bathroom to look in the mirror with him. She had actually smiled. He had felt the heat of her on his skin, through the towel. They had shaved off the remnants. Eyebrows gone, too. He looked like a giant baby.
Hair or not, it seemed too good a thing for him to be here now, still alive in the world, still touching and touched by it all. And he was thankful for it in a way he could not express.
He got up and walked through the warm old house, looking through the windows to the dark groves and the moonless sky littered with stars. The floorboards creaked under his feet and a clock ticked echoes across the living room at him.
He sat for a while and wondered how he could use the rest of his life in the best way possible. He had no specific ideas, but the general concept of using his years to live well was a good place to start. It was certainly a new concept, that much was for certain. Use the years to live well.
He made coffee and took a cup back to the bedroom. He stood beside the bed and looked down at Merci Rayborn as she slept. Her hair was tangled with shadows and her face was pale as cream against the darkness. He saw the rise of her hip under the sheet, the way her fists came together at her chin. He wondered what might have happened if he could have met her forty years ago.
In the kitchen he turned on the light over the stove, got out his blue notepad and pen and wrote Merci a letter about what he was feeling at four-thirty in the morning in her house in the orange grove. Hess considered himself a clear but dull writer, and as he composed the letter to her he read it quietly to himself. It was clear and dull. That was okay, he thought: the purpose wasn’t to entertain or divert. The purpose was just to tell her how much she meant to him and how she had inspired him enough to write her about it. It came off sounding like a thank-you card, but he was thankful. So what?
Dear Merci,
I wish we’d have met when we were both young. But you weren’t born then and I would probably have been too witless to do you right anyway. I feel happy now and blessed by the years, by circumstance and by you.
Sincerely,
He left it on the kitchen table with one of the snapshots Hjorth had taken of them together, to use up his roll of film. The picture caught Hess attentive and Merci scowling at the camera. A few minutes later he was dressed and looking down at her again. Her face was lost in hair and pillow and she was snoring lightly, the sheet halfway down her back.
He locked the door on his way out and walked across the driveway toward his car. Cats scattered in fractional starlight. Sunrise was still an hour away and Hess wondered why it always seemed darkest just before dawn.
Thirty-Six
Colesceau parked outside the old Santa Ana Courthouse. You could park two hours for free, and he liked the imposing old building with its heavy stone architecture because it reminded him of torture and executions. It was early Wednesday afternoon and the smoggy heat hung over the county like the mist along the Olt. Thick enough to hide your thoughts in, Colesceau thought, but not quite thick enough to hide your body.
Too bad about that, he thought, seeing them from a block away. They were gathered outside the entrance to the Parole Board building with their cameras and cables and lights and vans. The pushy, preening reporters. The shooters. The techs. The Grant Majors of the universe. And more folkish demonstrators with their signs and placards and candles. Lots of them. Some of them were from his neighborhood, some were new converts. He looked for Trudy Powers but couldn’t find her.
You can’t even serve out your sentence without a TV show about it, he thought. America really is crazy.
He sidled down a busy side street and found a pay phone behind the old courthouse, called the Sheriffs and asked for Merci Rayborn. She answered. He used his American accent to introduce himself as John Marshall over at Federal Airborne in Santa Ana with a package for her they couldn’t deliver. Similar to the accent he gave to the Bianchi promotions fellow, but a bit of a Texas twang to it.
“Parcel got damp back east, address smudged up in transit,” he explained. “Your phone numbers were still on the sticker.”
“Who the hell’s it from?”
“Let’s see here... Bianchi International in—”
“—What’s your number there?”
He heard the rudeness in her voice, the reflexive caution, the automatic defense.
He sighed and read her the number off the phone. “You’re going to need the parcel number.”
He gave it to her and she hung up. Thirty seconds later she called.
“Federal Airborne, Marshall.”
“Merci Rayborn again.”
“What do you want us to do with this—”
She interrupted and gave him her home address, hung up.
Colesceau smiled, slid the pen back into his pocket, firmed his clip-on necktie around his neck and tried to put some resolve into his step. In the glass of a building front he saw himself: dark Kmart slacks, short-sleeve white shirt, plump and unremarkable body. He looked hunched and harried. He carried a brown paper grocery bag in his right hand and a vinyl briefcase in his left. The bag had gifts for Holtz and Carla Fontana, and the briefcase just a few pencils and paper clips. He brought it because it made him feel as if he had something meaningful in reserve.
They spotted him crossing the street and they bristled with readiness. He was barely onto the sidewalk when they were upon him, the reporters with their mikes brandished and their questions popping, the shooters gunning him in silence, the protesters yapping at him like toy breed dogs you could impale beautifully on a hat pin.
He stopped and looked at them and tried to compose himself.