Уильям Макгиверн - Summitt

When the bus dropped him off, Selby realized he had seen no police anywhere, no traffic cops, no patrol cars, not even guards at crossings.

His brother’s apartment faced an immaculate lawn crisscrossed with gravel walks. Beyond the low brown and beige buildings Selby saw the green shine of a lake. The wind made a rustling in the trees, but that was the only sound in the empty street.

It was a significant moment for him, a prelude to knowledge and insights he had sought and puzzled over much of his life. Selby didn’t know what lay beyond that burnished door to his brother’s home, like the king in the old play, he thought, returning from some war or other, unaware of what the audience knew was waiting for him...

Sarah would know what he was thinking about; she had studied those classics, savoring the sound of Greek names sounding on the still waters of the Kennebec. Her parents had wanted a place like Dowell for Sarah, humanities, fine arts, anything that was gentle and secure, different from what they had known in Germany.

A girl in a tennis dress opened the door. “Hi, I’m Jennifer,” she said. “Come in, please. You’re Harry, of course, you couldn’t be anybody else, now could you?”

She opened the door wide and looked up at the sky. “My, what a lovely day!” Her tone was approving, congratulatory, in fact, as if the sun and air and clouds had been presented for inspection and she was pleased to give them good marks. “Jarrell’s still showering, so how about some coffee?”

“That would be fine.”

Jarrell’s living room was bright and airy, with an exposed stone chimney and rounded glass walls that gave on the lake. His brother’s girl friend went into the kitchen and began looking through cupboards, making a clatter of pots and pans.

Skylights under solar panels filled the house with sun. A partitioned extension from a bay window served as a decorative greenhouse. It contained shelving and trellises and a lush profusion of potted herbs and asparagus ferns. From overhead sprinklers, an irrigating spray created a fine mist around the bright foliage of emerald-ripple peperomia (which he’d read about) and a pair of tall, broad-leafed ficus lyrata, which fanned out behind a crop of varied crotons, green and white leaves striped in red or trimmed in sharp purple.

The colors and textures of the plants were in a nice balance, Selby thought; even the misting waters added a harmony of their own, sharpening the air pleasantly with the fragrance of some kind of citrus fruit.

A bedroom door opened and Jarrell’s head appeared through drifting layers of steam. A running shower sounded behind him.

“Make yourself at home, Harry. Be with you in a minute.” The door closed, puffs of white steam outlining the edges.

Selby’s tension eased somewhat, because that much was over; he had seen him at last, in the flesh, a misted figure, a branch cut from his own genetic roots.

Opening cupboards, Jennifer said, “Jarrell told me this is the first time you’ve ever met, that you didn’t even know about each other. I think that’s exciting, starting without any preconceptions. You’re from the east, Pennsylvania?”

“Yes, about forty miles from Philadelphia.”

“What do you do there? Do you mind my asking?”

“No, of course not. We have about forty acres, but it’s not a working farm. We board a few horses, and rent a meadow out for heifers.”

“I grew up in New York, on the Island. There was no room for horses, we rode at a stable in Smithtown, but we had a boat. I still miss that.”

She looked like she would have a boat, he thought, and a big lawn from where they would watch the Sound on warm afternoons. Jennifer had blond hair and without make-up her features were small and handsome, and symmetrical except for her lower lip which was rather full and added an attractive sensuousness to her expression.

“Jarrell told me about your wife. Do you mind my mentioning it?”

“No, that’s all right. It was a rainy day and the car lost traction. It was Spain,” he said, as if that explained the rest of it.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes.”

She pushed a strand of hair away from her forehead and looked in frustration at the open drawers and cupboards.

“Can I help?” he asked her.

“No, no, I’ll find it.”

Watching her opening and closing drawers, the sun on her slim, brown legs, Selby let out his breath slowly. To speak only of the rain and the tires and the slippery road put the horror at a remove. It was the way he and Davey talked about it when they had to. (Shana never talked about it at all.) If you just thought of the guard rail breaking, and the little car going through it on the curving sea road between Cadiz and Malaga, if you imagined only the blue Fiat crashing and exploding and burning on the rocks below, it was possible to push away the thought that Sarah had been trapped inside it.

The door to the bedroom opened and Jarrell joined him. Tall and rather slenderly built, he wore jeans and a yellow sports shirt. He was smiling.

“So. My directions okay?”

“Fine,” Selby said, and they shook hands.

“Good. It’s easy to get turned around coming out of Memphis. It’s a pretty big place, half million or more people, I guess. You met Jennifer, of course?”

His brother’s smile, Selby noticed, didn’t quite touch his eyes, or smooth away the worried frown between them; he seemed distracted as he glanced quickly at Jennifer and then at his wristwatch.

In the kitchen Jennifer asked him something, and Jarrell nodded to a shelf of matched yellow canisters.

“I’ll meet you at the commissary for lunch,” Jarrell said to Selby. “You and Jennifer can take a walk, if you like, the shopping mall’s just a few minutes from here.”

Jennifer held a canister and was measuring coffee into the mesh cup of a percolator.

“A walk sounds fine,” Harry Selby said. “We can talk at lunch then.”

His brother didn’t answer, and Selby noticed again the persistent frown that formed a crease between his eyes.

Jarrell’s hair was light brown, almost blond, and fitted like a smooth cap above his narrow, angular face. His eyes were a pale blue.

There was very little family resemblance. Selby was taller than Jarrell, and thicker through the arms and shoulders. His hair was a reddish brown, and his eyes were darker, a deep gray.

But the most obvious difference between them was in the cast of their expressions. Harry Selby’s features were blunt and hard, and something about them usually suggested either coldness or indifference. The look was deceptive, stemming in part from an injury, a triangular scar or groove on his right cheekbone. At certain times, and in certain lights, the slight indentation added a not always intentional belligerence to his appearance.

After Jarrell said goodbye and left for work, Jennifer brought Selby a cup of coffee and went into the bathroom to change.

Summitt City had received its corporate charter from the Tennessee State Legislature in 1972. Prior to this — Selby learned from a brochure his brother had given him — Harlequin Chemicals had operated the facility at Summitt in accordance with the municipal codes of neighboring townships, paying taxes on a per capita basis for police and fire protection, and school services. Summitt City was now fully autonomous, a city of slightly more than five thousand, functioning on a self-contained environmental system, and as an independent municipal entity. A third of Summitt’s population worked in the Harlequin Chemical plant, another third was made up of dependent wives and children, while the remainder consisted of maintenance crews, teachers, police and fire personnel and the staffs of local shops and markets.