William Gay - Little Sister Death

He felt inadequate, and he knew she was right. He could feel cold sweat along his sides, the beginnings of a headache, and for the first time a worm of doubt wriggled into his consciousness. He could see Corrie through the glass front of the market, and he wondered how long it would be until she was asking the same questions.

The book’s coming along great. Anyway, I work better with my back against the wall. I get complacent if I’m not on the edge.

You’d know more about that than I would. But we’re not talking about Moby-Dick here, or Remembrance of Things Past . All I suggested was a little thriller you could knock off to tide you over until you could get back to work on your novel.

I know that.

When can you send something along?

I’ll try to get you three or four chapters and an outline in a week or so.

Whenever you can. If it’s good enough maybe we can go for a quick paperback sale.

Pauline?

Yes?

I want you to find me a book. There’s no way I can do it here, and New York City is the best place in the world to find an out-of-print book.

There was a pause, he guessed she was getting a pen and scratchpad.

Okay, what is it? Let’s have it.

I don’t know the title. The author’s name sounds something like Sunderson, and he’s a doctor of something. Probably a psychiatrist. The book is about the Beale haunting, and it’ll probably have reference to that in the title.

If you need it, I’ll do my damnedest. Do you know who published it, or when?

Or that it was, he thought to himself. No, he told her. It would have been about nineteen forty-four or forty-five.

All right. I’ll try.

Thanks a lot.

He rang off and came out of the phone booth wringing wet with sweat into a day not much better. He hurried into the air-conditioned market.

You about ready?

More than. What did Pauline say?

She wants my typescript. She thinks she might sell it from an outline.

He got a six-pack of beer from the cooler, a Playboy and Esquire from the magazine rack, a tin of aspirin at the counter.

She drove, and he opened his shirt to the breeze, felt the wind drying the sweat to a glaze of salt, drank one of the beers ice cold and took three aspirin. They must have helped, for by the time they wound up the chert road home his headache was gone and he was thinking about the book again, blocking out the first scenes and planning what to begin typing.

She turned from putting away the groceries. You didn’t say anything about my hair.

In fact he hadn’t noticed it, but he said, I was just teasing you. It’s very becoming. I like it.

Did you know that they actually have dances around here? Just a few miles down the road?

I didn’t know that.

In a country schoolhouse that was closed when the county schools were consolidated. The Sinking Creek School. I’ll bet it’s real old. There’s a band and everything, a fiddle player. A caller for the square dances.

In the living room Stephie had turned on the television set, put a videocassette of Winnie the Pooh into Binder’s VCR. It sounds very nice, he told Corrie noncommittally.

I don’t suppose you’d want to go, would you?

Tonight?

Well, yes, she said, knowing already that he wouldn’t but not really disappointed, not really expecting it. After all, he was working, not sitting in a bar in Chicago drinking beer. The bills had to be paid. She was thinking about the videocassette recorder, too: one of David’s seven-hundred-dollar toys. Where the money went.

I need to work tonight, Corrie. I have to do it when I can do it. I can’t explain it to you. But I promise you I’ll take you this summer. Do they have them every weekend?

I believe so. They were talking about it in the beauty shop. Will you really go?

Sure I’ll go. It might be interesting. Binder hated dances but privately he thought he might be able to use it for the book, and if not this one for another. When he was working he always felt hypersensitive to stimuli, to things he ordinarily wouldn’t even notice, and later in his manuscripts he would come across things that brought back moments of remembering, bits of conversation he had overheard, or simply the way someone had looked.

David?

He looked at her.

When we moved here, did you know that a man had murdered his family here and then killed himself?

No, I didn’t. All I knew was the Beale legend. I heard about it in town today, but God’s sake, Corrie, it was fifty years ago. What difference could it make?

None I guess, now. We’re already here.

I’ll tell you what I will do today. I’ll take you swimming.

A real big spender, she said, smiling again.

With the remainder of the Cokes and a picnic basket of sandwiches, the three of them went down a footpath west of the house, came out on an old wagon road cut deeply into the earth, grown over with the lowering branches of enormous beech and sycamore, the road itself faint and vestigial, the ghost of a road. Off to the right was an area clear of underbrush, the earth mossy and damp, dark with shade broken by columns of light falling through the cathedrallike trees, the ground dappled with points of sun like strewn coins.

The haunted dell, he said.

What? She had dropped his hand.

Virginia Beale was called the Fairy Queen of the Haunted Dell. I think this is it.

She smiled at him, but a brief smile and one abruptly taken back.

You’re always on, aren’t you?

He shrugged. When I’m working, he said. Sorry. I always make the mistake of assuming the rest of the world is as interested as I am in what I’m working on.

You have a positively grotesque ego.

They came out of the bowered wood where the creek widened and deepened and a shelf of limestone rose out of the water, a table of rock fifteen or twenty feet long, the creek deep and bluelooking near the stone.

She ran ahead and waded out until her dark head vanished, only a forearm and waving hand showing, then surfaced, laughing and shivering, sleek hair plastered to her skull. She climbed onto the hot slab of limestone.

My God, it’s icy, she said. I swear there are ice cubes floating in it.

He dove from the shallows and swam underwater across the pool, eyes open, the tabled rock floating past squared and geometric like some ancient structure hewn from stone. A rainbow trout turned in the sundrenched water, spun broken points of light at him. He rose toward the light, broke the glasslike surface of the water, dogpaddled to the shelf of rock.

Jesus, he said. It must be ten or twelve feet deep. And every bit as cold as you said.

He spread the beachtowel on the hot stone, lay back on it. This whole creek goes underground not a quarter mile from here, he said. It all roils around and funnels down into the ground. There’s a big cylinder of rock with sides worn smooth as glass. It pours spewing down into the ground, and you can hear it churning around down in there. That’s why they call it Sinking Creek.

You know a lot about this place for a novice.

I don’t think I’m a novice anymore. I’ve covered a lot of ground around here in the last few days.

Exactly why escapes me.

Well, if you work at it, you’ve got to.take an interest.

She did not reply and he turned to study her face in repose, pillowed on a towel, her eyes closed, the sun throwing highlights of amber in her dark tousled hair. Delicate blue tracery of veins in her eyelids.

It’s going to storm, he said suddenly. There was no response. Perhaps she slept. He turned to look at Stephie. She had waded out of the shallows, was gathering wildflowers on the far bank. Don’t go in the woods, he told her.

Can I go just far enough to get those blue ones? she asked.