Edward Gorman - The Autumn Dead

And then I remembered how he'd shifted somewhere in college, telling me about it one night behind a couple of joints and some wine, how popular fiction had started to bore him, how it was "genius" or nothing. So now he had a tract home and graying hair in a ponytail and he took the efforts of his heart and mind and burned them. Much as I liked him, and felt sentimental watching him now, he seemed alien to me somehow, aggrieved in a way that he wanted to be literary but which came off as merely pathological.

One of those awkward silences fell between us, until Susan said, "Jack thinks Karen's in some trouble."

His head snapped up. His blue eyes looked agitated behind his rimless glasses. "What kind oftrouble?"

"I'm not sure," I said. "Something to do with a missing suitcase. Do you know anything about it?"

"Nothing about a suitcase," Susan said.

"Gary?"

"No. Nothing," But his air of anxiety continued. He reminded me of how Glendon Evans had acted earlier that afternoon.

"Kids," Susan said.

"What?"

"That's her trouble. No children."

Gary said, "That isn't hertrouble."

"No?" I asked.

"No. Her trouble is that people think she's one thing when she's another."

"What is she, then?"

He flushed, seeing how seriously I'd taken his statement.

Then he put on a big party smile. "You shouldn't pay any attention to a forty-two-year-old man who's gotten more than two hundred rejections in his time."

I wasn't going to let him go so easily-I wanted to press him on his remark-but Susan said, "I'm afraid you drove out here for nothing."

"Not for nothing. I got to see you."

"You should take a few pointers from Jack, Gary."

He put out his hand again. "Well, I'm going to try to squeeze in a few more pages before dinner. Hope you'll excuse me."

"I really would like to see some of your work."

"Sure, Jack." Then he sort of cuffed me on the arm and left.

We watched him go inside. When he was gone, Susan said, "He has a surprise coming."

"What?"

"The detective story he thought he burned. He set it on fire in the fireplace, but I got most of it out. It's only singed."

"You've read it?"

"Not yet. But I know it'll be good. I'll send it in even if he doesn't want me to. Am I being a bitch?"

I laughed. "Somehow, Susan, I can't imagine you ever being a bitch."

"You always idealized me."

"I guess it's your eyes and your hands. They were always exceptional."

"Well, I can't tell you how nice it is to hear things like that. If I didn't have to go get dinner, I'd ask you to keep right on talking."

I said, "So you don't know anything about a suitcase?"

"No. She's never mentioned anything."

"And nobody's tried to break into your place?"

She said, "My God, no. Now you've really got me scared."

"I'd just keep everything locked up tight."

She looked a bit older now, her brow tense with worry. "What's going on, Jack?"

"I don't know."

"She really is in trouble, isn't she?"

"Yes. But as usual, she only gives you half the facts, so you can't be sure what's going on."

"She's my friend, as I said, but she can be a very frustrating woman."

"Yeah, I seem to remember that."

"I felt so bad for you. You know, the way she treated you back then."

I smiled. "I appreciate that-but it was probably a good experience for me. Taught me about things."

"You know, I've never believed that. I think a part of you should stay naive and unhurt all your life. I've never understood why pain is supposed to be good for you."

I laughed. "Now that you mention it, neither do I. But you've been lucky. You've always had Gary, and he's always had you."

"I'm sure we've both been tempted. Even up here. Among all the unfashionable Highlands people-" saying this with just the slightest sardonic touch-"adultery is the favorite. Until AIDS came along, most of my best friends were always having affairs while their husbands were at the factories. But there was so much pain-" She shook her head. "I suppose it's exciting-"

"Take my word for it, you haven't missed anything."

"Somehow I believe you."

She'd picked up the sheet again; smelled it. Dusk was a gauzy haze in which you could hear the suppertime laughter of children and the stern voices of TV anchormen enumerating the terrors of the day. Setting the sheet back, she said, "I'm glad you finally found some excuse to come up here."

"Yeah, me, too."

"I always liked you. Is that okay to say?"

"That's wonderful to say."

Then the pain was back in her eyes. "We were going to the reunion tonight, but Gary backed out. The last few months. ." She shook her head. "Maybe you could take him out for some beer some night. Cheer him up. I can't seem to do it."

"I'd like that," I said, and I would, though I knew I'd never do it. "I'd like that very much."

She stared at me then. "You've been lucky."

"Pretty much."

"You got out of the Highlands."

"It's not so bad."

"You know better." She frowned. "He should've let me work. I could've helped us find a house somewhere else. Living here-it does something to you. You know how it is here, Jack. I just keep thinking maybe he would really have turned out to be a writer if we hadn't lived here. You know?"

I kissed her on the cheek, caught the scent of the clean wash again, and left. "Maybe he'll be a writer yet."

She smiled. "You know what his problem is?"

"What?"

"He isn't a boy anymore."

"He's nearly forty-three. He shouldn't be a boy."

"But he should still have some fun. He never has any fun. He just writes stories and tears them up and says they're not good enough."

I let her lean into me and we stood a moment, the air fresh with her laundry and the smell of new grass, and hamburgers grilling on the back porch next door.

"Can you believe we're twenty-five years older?" she said. "Sometimes it's scary, isn't it?"

"That's the right word for it, Susan. Scary."

I hugged her and listened for a time to the children in the dusk, their laughter like pure water, and then I went and got into my car and started back through the maze of streets. I had one other person I wanted to talk to about Karen, somebody I was not looking forward to seeing at all.

I was halfway there when I happened to glance in my rearview and found that not all my paranoia is unjustified.

Somebody in black leather on a black Honda cycle was accompanying me.

The highlands has a shopping district of four blocks, stores that even back in the forties looked old, two-story brick jobs mostly, with the names of their original owners carved in fancy cursive somewhere near the roof, the names running to Czech and Irish, with the polysyllables of an occasional Italian name also being included. Growing up, I'd come here with my parents to shop for groceries or to buy something from the hardware store or the auto-parts store or to get a shirt from the secondhand store (when you really had dough you went to Penney's), but shopping centers had killed all that off now-you drove out to one of five malls on this side of town that had taken the place of the merchants who had settled and helped build this area since as far back as 1849, when six thousand people migrated up here from the Virginias. Now you didn't have merchants, you had tavern-owners. That's all that was left now, bars advertising naked women and country-Western music and big-screen Bears games, with a store that sold fancy cowboy clothes or a concrete lot filled with the sad hulks of used cars thrown in to serve the workingmen who bring their paychecks and their beaten hopes down here. When you come here at night, it's not so bad, with workers from the slaughterhouse a mile away and their Czech girlfriends wandering from tavern to tavern like people out of a John Steinbeck novel. But in the daylight you see how everything needs paint and how the walks are cracked, and you see all the names spray-painted on the sides of the taverns, lurid reds and blacks and green on whitewashed surfaces; KILL QUEERS! NIGGERS SUCK! MEXES STAY OUT!