Robert Bennett - The Company Man

Garvey nodded.

“She’s doing. I think she’s fraying a bit at the edges, though. Hasn’t had anyone to talk to but me, and, well. I know that can be a bit much.” Hayes looked out the window at the damp trees. “She misses you, Don.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. I can tell. I know.”

“You know, huh?”

“Yes.”

Garvey took a breath and nodded. “Well. Thank you, I guess.”

They drove for more than an hour before Garvey pulled up in front of a small white house, quaint and humble and perfect. It had a white picket fence and thriving roses that threaded through a trellis in the front yard. Small tin toys lay scattered on the lawn, still pearled from the kiss of dew. Hayes curiously looked the house and yard over. He had never been here before. “What is this place?” he asked.

Garvey got out and walked around to the back of the car and pulled out his phonograph. Then he came to Hayes’s side and said, “You stay here. You stay in the goddamn car, you hear me? Just stay here until I come back.”

“Christ, all right. Fine.”

Garvey walked up to the front door and knocked, phonograph under one arm. The front door opened and a small, pretty blond woman answered, her mouth tight and grim and her eyes cold. They shared a few words, Garvey with his head bowed. Then the woman leaned out and looked beyond him at Hayes. She seemed to shake with anger and fought to swallow it. Eventually she allowed him in and shut the door.

Hayes sat in the front seat and smoked a cigarette and waited. After several minutes he heard something. He rolled down the window more and listened. Then he got out and shrank down low and walked to the side of the house to peek in the window.

Inside was a small, cozy room with a worn sofa and old bookshelves. A homey place, with lace doilies on the end tables. In the middle of the floor was the phonograph, playing a symphony Hayes could barely remember, some mournful Beethoven piece. In the center of the sofa sat Garvey, rocking back and forth, a little blond girl in his lap with her arms thrown around his neck, head perfectly still as though asleep. To his left sat another little girl, this one older and her blond hair streaked with brown. She stared at the phonograph intently, swaying slightly with the music, as if attempting to find some hidden truth within the machine that would unlock all the secrets of the world. Garvey stood then with the little one in his arms and he began pacing around the room, the two of them dancing, and Hayes heard him humming along with the music, softly and atonally. One big, rough hand rose up her back to cradle her head, her flaxen hair slipping through his fingers.

Hayes stared in shock and then withdrew, ashamed to have witnessed such a private moment. He walked back to the car, his face burning red, and sat without moving.

There was always more, he thought. Always more to everyone. For all the moments and feelings he could pluck out of the air there were thousands more hidden closer to the heart that would never be known to any other creature except their owner, and when they passed on from this world those secrets would fade as though they had never been here at all.

Which they may never have been, he thought. Which they may never have been.

Time passed. Maybe an hour. Then Garvey came out, phonograph under his arm again, tie fixed and hat straight. He stored the machine in the back and came and sat in the driver’s seat again. “You ready?” he asked.

Hayes cleared his throat. “You don’t have to.”

“Huh?”

“You don’t have to do this. Today, at least.”

“Why not?” asked Garvey.

“You just don’t. Drop me off somewhere in the city.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

Garvey shrugged and drove back into town. The green-gray countryside melted by until it became smooth cement walls once more. Garvey steered the car to a rattling stop outside an old theater, where he pulled in under the marquee. Then Hayes got out and turned around and said, “You should go see Samantha.”

“Why?”

“It’d clean you up, I think. I’m just saying. And she needs to see someone besides me, too. She’s probably going mad.”

Garvey cocked an eyebrow at him. “All right. Come by later and I’ll have that address for you.”

“I said you didn’t have to do it today.”

“Well, I’m doing it anyway. You don’t have a choice.”

“If you’re sure. Thanks, Garv,” said Hayes. He gave him the address and saluted and walked away, weaving through the crowd with his shoulders hunched and his hands in his pockets.

Hayes had not intended to get drunk. He remembered that now, just a few hours after he’d left Garvey behind and gone roving through the streets, trying to purge that stolen image of Garvey’s children from his mind. He knew his actions often had casualties, and it was cowardly to want to ignore them, but it was no longer a question of want as much as need. After the sun had set and the temperature dropped he’d fled into an open pub to huddle next to the barside fireplace, sniffling and cursing, and he’d told the barman that he wanted one beer, and then a chaser of whisky, and no more. But then the gentleman had mentioned one or two specials, and Hayes had listened.

Now it was night and he was stumbling through the alleys of the Shanties. “McNaughton,” he muttered to himself. “Mc-fucking-Naughton. Always McNaughton.” He turned to peer at the Nail, far away, lit up by spotlights along the base. Where had the bastard come from, he wondered. Had Kulahee dreamed of it, sitting in his little hut? Had he sketched it out on parchment, and then forgotten about it? Or had it always been here, waiting to be carved out of everything else around it?

He hiccupped. Then he looked around and realized he was quite lost.

They said that when Evesden was first founded the Shanties had been no more than log cabins cobbled together with hides stretched over them, built right in the woods. Hayes could believe it. The place had the planning and the hospitality of a shabby campground, or perhaps he was just drunk. As the population of Evesden had erupted, the tenements had swelled up between the leaning homes like enormous mushrooms, dark and stinking, and they’d remained that way for the future. Massive, darkly lit buildings with strings of smaller, rambling homes clutched between their ranks.

He looked at one tenement and realized he recognized it. It was Skiller’s, smoke still oozing from the rooftop cracks. Perhaps he’d led himself here without realizing. It seemed like a ruin from some recent war left standing. He reached out and touched it to make sure it was real.

He stumbled around to the side of the building, to a little alley. It swelled and narrowed as the wall of the adjacent building warped. He walked along it and tried to imagine people living here. Tried to match this world with the one in Newton where Samantha had once slept peacefully, or peacefully enough.

Hayes stopped halfway down the alley. He heard someone just ahead, padding through the darkness. There was a snuffle, as though they were crying. Hayes stepped forward and the alley took a hard right down to the debris-filled gutter of the next building. No one was there. He looked back and around and saw no one in the little spaces between the buildings.

Then he heard it again. A child’s sob, but now it was from far behind him. He swiveled around drunkenly to look, but again there was nothing.

“Hello?” he said.

The crying stopped abruptly, but not like the crier had just stopped. It was as if the noise itself had been cut off, like the halting of a record. Then Hayes heard it again down an alley to the right, much more agitated, some little child wailing. Hayes staggered down the gap and peered into the darkness. There was nothing.