In any case, Part Three. Something has ended. Is it Three of Three or Three of Four? If three, a sonata: A B A. What would that mean, back to the woods? If four, a symphony? Statement, funeral march, scherzo, finale. We have a crime, a victim, a reaction, and a so far unsuccessful search for the killers. She thinks, she thinks: will Tony Hastings be destroyed or redeemed? A bad happy ending would ruin everything, but it’s hard to imagine what a good one would be.
Nocturnal Animals 16
When Bobby Andes did not answer his letter, he sent another.
Repeat: I hope you are actively pursuing these men, not just waiting for something to fall into your lap. I hope you urged Ajax to pressure Adams to name his accomplices. The case warrants the attention of police nationwide, and I hope you have made the proper moves toward getting such attention. This is a matter of utmost importance to me. I hope you do not regard it as routine or insoluble.
In his car driving home late on a flowered May day, he lectured to himself. Other drivers thought he was cussing the traffic. He said, It’s not the clotty rush hour nor drivers tailgating. Not boys throwing softballs at cars. Not the evil editorials of the morning papers, nor greedy students trying to get away with something, nor disgusting Frank Hawthorne. Not even greenhouse or nuclear war. There’s but one crime, one evil, one grievance. It was you who did it to me, no criminals or devils but you. Everything else is distraction.
He thought, if Bobby Andes finds the letter provocative that’s all right. If it annoys him, so much the better. Two weeks passed, and he realized again there would be no answer. Tony Hastings in pain, waiting for word from a detective in Pennsylvania who had the care of his health and hope of rescue in the month of May. The green of his yard was bright and full of yellow, the green weeds invaded the old brown. There were bright sky days, lawns mowing, gardens digging, but not Tony Hastings, resisting with last summer’s business. He preferred the night, when you couldn’t be seen looking out the darkened windows.
Since he knew what he wanted, he could wait. Be less disagreeable to innocent people. He pointed it out to Francesca Hooton at lunch. “I have been blaming a lot of wrong people. I know whose fault it is now.”
“You’ve finally decided to be angry?”
Alone in his big house he talked on, perfecting a rage. He said, You think it’s easy to become Tony Hastings? It takes forty years. It needs loving mother and intellectual father, a summer place, lessons on the back porch. Sister and brother to fence temper and create sensitivity to others’ distress. Years of reading and study and wife and daughter to force pain into habit and make a man.
But it’s even harder to become Laura Hastings. Assembled in the long accumulating day by day as Laura Turner, by Meyer Street and Dr. Handelman, with Donna and Jean, the lake in the mist and the death of Bobo and the studio, Laura Hastings is not completed but just begun in her forty years of life. Laura Hastings is (was) not the life she lived but the forty years yet to be lived, as promised.
Beasts, do you think it easier to replace Helen Hastings? Hers is the longest lifetime of all, fifty to sixty years just begun, extracted from the outgrown child by the growing world, from the original Laura-Tony germ to sleepy song and Little Golden Book, momdad and doggie love with notebooked poems to the unbreakable contract of a grownup Helen-in-the-world.
Nothing, beasts, is harder to build or more impossible to replace than the unlived years of these three. Not your cars, your cocks, your sleazy girlfriends, your own ratty little souls. Tony Hastings imagined those cars, cocks, girlfriends and souls. He lived among them, looking for words to make his hatred overwhelming. A story, an account sufficiently degrading. Of stupid grown men who got this notion from movies or television and school bullies of how to be a man by pushing people around. Let’s go out on the road and scare the squares. No more teachers’ dirty looks, let’s get the prissy girls and the tight-assed schoolmoms, give em a taste. If you get in trouble, knock them off. Tony Hastings looked for words adequate to his rage. Vile, wretched, cowardly. Low, vicious, despicable. Not eviclass="underline" that word gave them too much dignity. The words he sought were lower and worse than evil. With such rhetoric he tried to replace the soul he thought he had lost.
The telephone in the afternoon: as he went to it he already knew what it was. He heard the harsh distant voice materializing his thought, “I’m calling Tony Hastings, is this Tony Hastings?” He was right, they were both right. “Andes, here.”
He heard. “You want to identify somebody else?”
“Who is it?”
“I ain’t telling. I ask if you want to tell me who it is?”
“When? Where?”
“Soon as you can come. Here. It’s Grant Center this time.”
So he prepared for another trip. Not to fail this time. This time I’ll see and know who it is, Ray or Lou or again Turk. Going overnight, he packed his bag wild with excitement, took one plane and stepped off another, a little commuting one, at a small airport in a valley. Bobby Andes was waiting behind a fence. He got into the car and they drove past fields and woods and under the edges of hills. Return to the land of terror.
“That was a couple insistent letters you wrote,” Andes said. “You really want them guys?”
“What happened?”
“You tell me first. You going to mouse out on me again like before?”
“I meant what I said in my letters.”
“How come the change?”
“It’s no change. I want those guys caught.”
“You don’t want to give no false identifications, you know. I’ll tell you what we got. We got an attempted holdup of a supermarket in Bear Valley Mall just before closing time. We got one guy caught and one killed. We got one guy got away, just like the other time.”
“How did that happen?”
“I’ll tell you. There was three guys, dumb jerks, two in the store, one in the car outside. They don’t see the manager in the back. The cashier puts her hands up like they say, the manager comes down the aisle with his gun, yells, ‘Drop that gun!’ The idiot turns and shoots without looking, hits the Wheaties boxes, Wheaties shower. The manager shoots back. The manager’s a good shot. Got the guy in the chest, knocked him down, out of contention. They operated on him in the hospital. Twelve hours later he died.”
Tony Hastings quiet, wondering who died, not sure if good news or bad. “What about the others?”
“Wait. The other guy in the store, he runs. The manager runs after him. He tries to get into the car, but a cop comes tearing around the corner. Manager calls, cop shouts warning, guy in the car starts up, other guy never does get in. The cop shoots out the tire, the driver of the car surrenders, but the running guy gets away.”
“How did he manage that?”
“Disappeared. Took off running when the cop started to shoot, ducked behind a car somewhere, I don’t know. Not enough manpower to follow, don’t know where he went.”
Tony asked, “What do you want me to do?”
“See if you recognize the guy we caught.”
“You want to tell me why I might recognize him?”
“Later, later.”
They were coming back to where it began, the fields and hillsides, still in early green infiltrating the brown and gray winter that had fallen between. He recognized nothing until they drove into the police lot with the motel across the way.