Jack Sawyer has more on his mind than the irrelevancies suggested by a dream voice's having uttered the word "policeman" in baby talk. These matters, too, he wishes he could send away by the execution of a magic trick, but the wretched matters refuse banishment; they zoom about him like a tribe of wasps.
All in all, he is not doing so well, our Jack. He is marking time and staring at the eggs, which no longer look quite right, though he could not say why. The eggs resist interpretation. The eggs are the least of it. In the periphery of his vision, the banner across the front page of the La Riviere Herald seems to rise off the sheet of newsprint and float toward him. FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN Nope, that's enough; he turns away with the terrible knowledge of having brought on this Fisherman business by himself. How about IN STATEN ISLAND or IN BROOKLYN, where the real Albert Fish, a tormented piece of work if there ever was one, found two of his victims?
This stuff is making him sick. Two dead kids, the Freneau girl missing and probably dead, body parts eaten, a lunatic who plagiarized from Albert Fish Dale insisted on assaulting him with information. The details enter his system like a contaminant. The more he learns ¡ª and for a man who truly wished to be out of the loop, Jack has learned an amazing amount ¡ª the more the poisons swim through his bloodstream, distorting his perceptions. He had come to Norway Valley in flight from a world that had abruptly turned unreliable and rubbery, as if liquefying under thermal pressure. During his last month in Los Angeles, the thermal pressure had become intolerable. Grotesque possibilities leered from darkened windows and the gaps between buildings, threatening to take form. On days off, the sensation of dishwater greasing his lungs made him gasp for breath and fight against nausea, so he worked without stopping, in the process solving more cases than ever before. (His diagnosis was that the work was getting to him, but we can hardly blame the captain for his astonishment at the ace boy's resignation. )
He had escaped to this obscure pocket of the countryside, this shelter, this haven at the edge of a yellow meadow, removed from the world of threat and madness, removed by nearly twenty miles from French Landing, removed a good distance even from Norway Valley Road. However, the layers of removal had failed to do their job. What he was trying to escape riots around him again, here in his redoubt. If he let himself succumb to self-centered fantasy, he would have to conclude that what he had fled had spent the last three years sniffing his trail and had finally succeeded in tracking him down.
In California, the rigors of his task had overwhelmed him; now the disorders of western Wisconsin must be kept at arm's length. Sometimes, late at night, he awakens to the echo of the little, poisoned voice wailing, No more coppiceman, I won't, too close, too close. What was too close, Jack Sawyer refuses to consider; the echo proves that he must avoid any further contamination.
Bad news for Dale, he knows, and he regrets both his inability to join the investigation and to explain his refusal to his friend. Dale's ass is on the line, no two ways about it. He is a good chief of police, more than good enough for French Landing, but he misjudged the politics and let the staties set him up. With every appearance of respect for local authority, state detectives Brown and Black had bowed low, stepped aside, and permitted Dale Gilbertson, who thought they were doing him a favor, to slip a noose around his neck. Too bad, but Dale has just figured out that he is standing on a trapdoor with a black bag over his face. If the Fisherman murders one more kid Well, Jack Sawyer sends his most profound regrets. He can't perform a miracle right now, sorry. Jack has more pressing matters on his mind.
Red feathers, for example. Small ones. Little red feathers are much on Jack's mind, and have been, despite his efforts to magic them away, since a month before the murders started. One morning as he emerged from his bedroom and began to go down to fix breakfast, a single red feather, a plume smaller than a baby's finger, seemed to float out of the slanted ceiling at the top of the stairs. In its wake, two or three others came drifting toward him. An oval section of plaster two inches across seemed to blink and open like an eye, and the eye released a tight, fat column of feathers that zoomed out of the ceiling as if propelled through a straw. A feather explosion, a feather hurricane, battered his chest, his raised arms, his head.
But this . . .
This never happened.
Something else happened, and it took him a minute or two to figure it out. A wayward brain neuron misfired. A mental receptor lapped up the wrong chemical, or lapped up too much of the right chemical. The switches that nightly triggered the image conduits responded to a false signal and produced a waking dream. The waking dream resembled an hallucination, but hallucinations were experienced by wet-brain alcoholics, drug takers, and crazy people, specifically paranoid schizophrenics, with whom Jack had dealt on many an occasion during his life as a coppiceman. Jack fit into none of those categories, including the last. He knew he was not a paranoid schizophre
nic or any other variety of madman. If you thought Jack Sawyer was crazy, you were. He has complete, at least 99 percent complete, faith in his sanity.
Since he is not delusional, the feathers must have flown toward him in a waking dream. The only other explanation involves reality, and the feathers had no connection to reality. What kind of world would this be, if such things could happen to us?
Abruptly George Rathbun bellows, "It pains me to say this, truly it does, for I love our dear old Brew Crew, you know I do, but there come times when love must grit its teeth and face a painful reality ¡ª for example, take the sorrowful state of our pitching staff. Bud Selig, oh BU-UD, this is Houston calling. Could you Please return to earth immediately? A blind man could throw more strikes than that aggregation of WIMPS, LOSERS, AND AIRHEADS!"
Good old Henry. Henry has George Rathbun down so perfectly you can see the sweat stains under his armpits. But the best of Henry's inventions ¡ª in Jack's opinion ¡ª has to be that embodiment of hipster cool, the laid-back, authoritative Henry Shake ("the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook of Araby"), who can, if in the mood, tell you the color of the socks worn by Lester Young on the day he recorded "Shoe Shine Boy" and "Lady Be Good" and describe the interiors of two dozen famous but mostly long-departed jazz clubs.
. . . and before we get into the very cool, very beautiful, very simp¨¢tico music whispered one Sunday at the Village Vanguard by the Bill Evans Trio, we might pay our respects to the third, inner eye. Let us honor the inner eye, the eye of imagination. It is late on a hot July afternoon in Greenwich Village, New York City. On sun-dazzled Seventh Avenue South, we stroll into the shade of the Vanguard's marquee, open a white door, and proceed down a long, narrow flight of stairs to a roomy underground cave. The musicians climb onto the stand. Bill Evans slides onto the piano bench and nods at the audience. Scott LaFaro hugs his bass. Paul Motian picks up his brushes. Evans lowers his head way, way down and drops his hands on the keyboard. For those of us who are privileged to be there, nothing will ever be the same again.
"My Foolish Heart" by the Bill Evans Trio, live at the Village Vanguard, the twenty-fifth of June, 1961. I am your host, Henry Shake ¡ª the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook of Araby.
Smiling, Jack pours the beaten eggs into the frying pan, twice swirls them with a fork, and marginally reduces the gas flame. It occurs to him that he has neglected to make coffee. Nuts to coffee. Coffee is the last thing he needs; he can drink orange juice. A glance at the toaster suggests that he has also neglected to prepare the morning's toast. Does he require toast, is toast essential? Consider the butter, consider slabs of cholesterol waiting to corrupt his arteries. The omelette is risky enough; in fact, he has the feeling he cracked way too many eggs. Now Jack cannot remember why he wanted to make an omelette in the first place. He rarely eats omelettes. In fact, he tends to buy eggs out of a sense of duty aroused by the two rows of egg-sized depressions near the top of his refrigerator door. If people were not supposed to buy eggs, why would refrigerators come with egg holders?
He nudges a spatula under the edges of the hardening but still runny eggs, tilts the pan to slide them around, scrapes in the mushrooms and scallions, and folds the result in half. All right. Okay. Looks good. A luxurious forty minutes of freedom stretches out before him. In spite of everything, he seems to be functioning pretty well. Control is not an issue here.
Unfolded on the kitchen table, the La Riviere Herald catches Jack's eye. He has forgotten about the newspaper. The newspaper has not forgotten him, however, and demands its proper share of attention. FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN, and so on. ARCTIC CIRCLE would be nice, but no, he moves nearer to the table and sees that the Fisherman remains a stubbornly local problem. From beneath the headline, Wendell Green's name leaps up and lodges in his eye like a pebble. Wendell Green is an all-around, comprehensive pest, an ongoing irritant. After reading the first two paragraphs of Green's article, Jack groans and clamps a hand over his eyes.
I'm a blind man, make me an umpire!
Wendell Green has the confidence of a small-town athletic hero who never left home. Tall, expansive, with a crinkly mat of red-blond hair and a senatorial waistline, Green swaggers through the bars, the courthouses, the public arenas of La Riviere and its surrounding communities, distributing wised-up charm. Wendell Green is a reporter who knows how to act like one, an old-fashioned print journalist, the Herald's great ornament.
At their first encounter, the great ornament struck Jack as a third-rate phony, and he has seen no reason to change his mind since then. He distrusts Wendell Green. In Jack's opinion, the reporter's gregarious facade conceals a limitless capacity for treachery. Green is a blowhard posturing in front of a mirror, but a canny blowhard, and such creatures will do anything to gain their own ends.
After Thornberg Kinderling's arrest, Green requested an interview. Jack turned him down, as he declined the three invitations that followed his removal to Norway Valley Road. His refusals had not deterred the reporter from staging occasional "accidental" meetings.
The day after the discovery of Amy St. Pierre's body, Jack emerged from a Chase Street dry cleaner's shop with a box of freshly laundered shirts under his arm, began walking toward his car, and felt a hand close on his elbow. He looked back and beheld, contorted into a leer of spurious delight, the florid public mask of Wendell Green.
¡ª Hey, hey, Holly ¡ª . A bad-boy smirk. I mean, Lieutenant Sawyer. Hey, I'm glad I ran into you. This is where you have your shirts done? They do a good job?
¡ª If you leave out the part about the buttons.
¡ª Good one. You're a funny guy, Lieutenant. Let me give you a tip. Reliable, on Third Street in La Riviere? They live up to their name. No smashee, no breakee. Want your shirts done right, go to a Chink every time. Sam Lee, try him out, Lieutenant.
¡ª I'm not a lieutenant anymore, Wendell. Call me Jack or Mr. Sawyer. Call me Hollywood, I don't care. And now ¡ª
He walked toward his car, and Wendell Green walked beside him.
¡ª Any chance of a few words, Lieutenant? Sorry, Jack? Chief Gilbertson is a close friend of yours, I know, and this tragic case, little girl, apparently mutilated, terrible things, can you can offer us your expertise, step in, give us the benefit of your thoughts?
¡ª You want to know my thoughts?
¡ª Anything you can tell me, buddy.
Pure, irresponsible malice inspired Jack to extend an arm over Green's shoulders and say:
¡ª Wendell, old buddy, check out a guy named Albert Fish. It was back in the twenties.
¡ª Fisch?
¡ª F-i-s-h. From an old-line WASP New York family. An amazing case. Look it up.
Until that moment, Jack had been barely conscious of remembering the outrages committed by the bizarre Mr. Albert Fish. Butchers more up-to-date ¡ª Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer ¡ª had eclipsed Albert Fish, not to mention exotics like Edmund Emil Kemper III, who, after committing eight murders, decapitated his mother, propped her head on his mantel, and used it as a dartboard. (By way of explanation, Edmund III said, "This seemed appropriate. ") Yet the name of Albert Fish, an obscure back number, had surfaced in Jack's mind, and into Wendell Green's ready ear he had uttered it.
What had gotten into him? Well, that was the question, wasn't it?
Whoops, the omelette. Jack grabs a plate from a cabinet, silverware from a drawer, jumps to the stove, turns off the burner, and slides the mess in the pan onto his plate. He sits down and opens the Herald to page 5, where he reads about Milly Kuby's nearly winning third place at the big statewide spelling bee, but for the substitution of an i for an a in opopanax, the kind of thing that is supposed to be in a local paper. How can you expect a kid to spell opopanax correctly, anyhow?
Jack takes two or three bites of his omelette before the peculiar taste in his mouth distracts him from the monstrous unfairness done to Milly Kuby. The funny taste is like half-burned garbage. He spits the food out of
his mouth and sees a wad of gray mush and raw, half-chewed vegetables. The uneaten part of his breakfast does not look any more appetizing. He did not cook this omelette; he ruined it.
He drops his head and groans. A shudder like a loose electrical wire travels here and there through his body, throwing off sparks that singe his throat, his lungs, his suddenly palpitating organs. Opopanax, he thinks. I'm falling apart. Right here and now. Forget I said that. The savage opopanax has gripped me in its claws, shaken me with the fearful opopanax of its opopanax arms, and intends to throw me into the turbulent Opopanax River, where I shall meet my opopanax.
"What is happening to me?" he says aloud. The shrill sound of his voice scares him.
Opopanax tears sting his opopanax eyes, and he gets groaning up off his opopanax, dumps the swill into the garbage disposal, rinses the plate, and decides that it is damn well time to start making sense around here. Opopanax me no opopanaxes. Everybody makes mistakes. Jack examines the door of the refrigerator, trying to remember if he still has an egg or two in there. Sure he does: a whole bunch of eggs, about nine or ten, had nearly filled the entire row of egg-shaped depressions at the top of the door. He could not have squandered all of them; he wasn't that out of it.
Jacks closes his fingers around the edge of the refrigerator door. Entirely unbidden, the vision of lights reflected on a black man's bald head.
Not you.
The person being addressed is not present; the person being addressed is scarcely a person at all.
No, no, not you.
The door swings open under the pressure of his fingers; the refrigerator light illuminates the laden shelves. Jack Sawyer regards the egg holders. They appear to be empty. A closer look reveals, nested within the rounded depression at the end of the first row, the presence of a small, egg-shaped object colored a pale and delicate shade of blue: a nostalgic, tender blue, quite possibly the half-remembered blue of a summer sky observed in early afternoon by a small boy lying face-up on the quarter acre of grass located behind a nice residential property on Rox-bury Drive in Beverly Hills, California. Whoever owns this residential property, boy, you can put your money on one thing: they're in the entertainment business.
Jack knows the name of this precise shade of blue due to an extended consideration of color samples undertaken in the company of Claire Evinrude, M. D. , an oncologist of lovely and brisk dispatch, during the period when they were planning to repaint their then-shared bungalow in the Hollywood Hills. Claire, Dr. Evinrude, had marked this color for the master bedroom; he, recently returned from a big-deal, absurdly selective VICAP course of instruction at Quantico, Virginia, and newly promoted to the rank of lieutenant, had dismissed it as, um, well, maybe a little cold.
Jack, have you ever seen an actual robin's egg? Dr. Evinrude inquired. Do you have any idea how beautiful they are? Dr. Evinrude's gray eyes enlarged as she grasped her mental scalpel.
Jack inserts two fingers into the egg receptacle and lifts from it the small, egg-shaped object the color of a robin's egg. What do you know, this is a robin's egg. An "actual," in the words of Dr. Claire Evinrude, robin's egg, hatched from the body of a robin, sometimes called a robin redbreast. He deposits the egg in the palm of his left hand. There it sits, this pale blue oblate the size of a pecan. The capacity for thought seems to have left him. What the hell did he do, buy a robin's egg? Sorry, no, this relationship isn't working, the opopanax is out of whack, Roy's Store doesn't sell robin's eggs, I'm gone.
Slowly, stiffly, awkward as a zombie, Jack progresses across the kitchen floor and reaches the sink. He extends his left hand over the maw at the sink's center and releases the robin's egg. Down into the garbage disposal it drops, irretrievably. His right hand switches the machine into action, with the usual noisy results. Growl, grind, snarl, a monster is enjoying a nice little snack. Grrr. The live electrical wire shudders within him, shedding sparks as it twitches, but he has become zombiefied and barely registers the internal shocks. All in all, taking everything into consideration, what Jack Sawyer feels most like doing at this moment . . .
When the red, red . . .
For some reason, he has not called his mother in a long, long while. He cannot think why he has not, and it is about time he did. Robin me no red robins. The voice of Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, the Queen of the B's, once his only companion in a rapture-flooded, transcendent, rigorously forgotten New Hampshire hotel room, is precisely the voice Jack needs to hear right about now. Lily Cavanaugh is the one person in the world to whom he can spill the ridiculous mess in which he finds himself. Despite the dim, unwelcome awareness of trespassing beyond the borders of strict rationality and therefore bringing further into question his own uncertain sanity, he moves down the kitchen counter, picks up his cell phone, and punches in the number of the nice residential property on Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills, California.
The telephone in his old house rings five times, six times, seven. A man picks up and, in an angry, slightly drunken, sleep-distorted voice, says, "Kimberley . . . whatever the hell this is about . . . for your sake . . . I hope it's really, really important. "
Jack hits END and snaps his phone shut. Oh God oh hell oh damn. It is just past five A. M. in Beverly Hills, or Westwood, or Hancock Park, or wherever that number now reaches. He forgot his mother was dead. Oh hell oh damn oh God, can you beat that?
Jack's grief, which has been sharpening itself underground, once again rises up to stab him, as if for the first time, bang, dead-center in the heart. At the same time the idea that even for a second he could have forgotten that his mother was dead strikes him, God knows why, as hugely and irresistibly funny. How ridiculous can you get? The goofy stick has whapped him on the back of the head, and without knowing if he is going to burst into sobs or shouts of laughter, Jack experiences a brief wave of dizziness and leans heavily against the kitchen counter.
Jive-ass turkey, he remembers his mother saying. Lily had been describing her late husband's recently deceased partner in the days after her suspicious accountants discovered that the partner, Morgan Sloat, had been diverting into his own pockets three-fourths of the income from Sawyer & Sloat's astonishingly vast real estate holdings. Every year since Phil Sawyer's death in a so-called hunting accident, Sloat had stolen millions of dollars, many millions, from his late partner's family. Lily diverted the flow back into the proper channels and sold half the company to its new partners, in the process guaranteeing her son a tremendous financial bonanza, not to mention the annual bonanza that produces the interest Jack's private foundation funnels off to noble causes. Lily had called Sloat things far more colorful than jive-ass turkey, but that is the term her voice utters in his inner ear.
Way back in May, Jack tells himself, he probably came across that robin's egg on an absentminded stroll through the meadow and put it in the refrigerator for safekeeping. To keep it safe. Because, after all, it was of a delicate shade of blue, a beautiful blue, to quote Dr. Evinrude. So long had he kept it safe that he'd forgotten all about it. Which, he gratefully recognizes, is why the waking dream presented him with an explosion of red feathers!
Everything happens for a reason, concealed though the reason may be; loosen up and relax long enough to stop being a jive-ass turkey, and the reason might come out of hiding.
Jack bends over the sink and, for the sake of refreshment internal and external, immerses his face in a double handful of cold water. For the moment, the cleansing shock washes away the ruined breakfast, the ridiculous telephone call, and the corrosive image flashes. It is time to strap on his skates and get going. In twenty-five minutes, Jack Sawyer's best friend and only confidant will, with his customary aura of rotary perception, emerge through the front door of KDCU-AM's cinder-block building and, applying his golden lighter's flame to the tip of a cigarette, glide down the walkway to Peninsula Drive. Should rotary perception inform him that Jack Sawyer's pickup awaits, Henry Leyden will unerringly locate the handle and climb in. This exhi
bition of blind-man cool is too dazzling to miss.
And miss it he does not, for in spite of the morning's difficulties, which from the balanced, mature perspective granted by his journey through the lovely countryside eventually seem trivial, Jack's pickup pulls in front of the Peninsula Drive end of KDCU-AM's walkway at 7:55, a good five minutes before his friend is to stroll out into the sunlight. Henry will be good for him: just the sight of Henry will be like a dose of soul tonic. Surely Jack cannot be the first man (or woman) in the history of the world who momentarily lost his (or her) grip under stress and kind of halfway forgot that his (or her) mother had shuffled off the old mortal coil and departed for a higher sphere. Stressed-out mortals turned naturally to their mothers for comfort and reassurance. The impulse is coded into our DNA. When he hears the story, Henry will chuckle and advise him to tighten his wig.
On second thought, why cloud Henry's sky with a story so absurd? The same applies to the robin's egg, especially since Jack has not spoken to Henry about his waking dream of a feather eruption, and he does not feel like getting involved in a lot of pointless backtracking. Live in the present; let the past stretch out in its grave; keep your chin high and walk around the mud puddles. Don't look to your friends for therapy.
He switches on the radio and hits the button for KWLA-FM, the UW¨CLa Riviere station, home to both the Wisconsin Rat and Henry the Sheik the Shake the Shook. What pours glittering from the cab's hidden speakers raises the hairs on his arms: Glenn Gould, inner eye luminously open, blazing through something by Bach, he could not say exactly what. But Glenn Gould, but Bach, for sure. One of the Partitas, maybe.
A CD jewel box in one hand, Henry Leyden strolls through the humble doorway at the side of the station, enters the sunlight, and without hesitation begins to glide down the flagged walkway, the rubber soles of his Hershey-brown suede loafers striking the center of each successive flagstone.
Henry . . . Henry is a vision.
Today, Jack observes, Henry comes attired in one of his Malaysian teak forest owner ensembles, a handsome collarless shirt, shimmering braces, and an heirloom straw fedora creased to a fare-thee-well. Had Jack not been so welcomed into Henry's life, he would not have known that his friend's capacity for flawless wardrobe assemblage depended upon the profound organization of his enormous walk-in closet long ago established by Rhoda Gilbertson Leyden, Henry's deceased wife: Rhoda had arranged every article of her husband's clothing by season, style, and color. Item by item, Henry memorized the entire system. Although blind since birth, therefore incapable of distinguishing between matching and mismatching shades, Henry never errs.
Henry extracts from his shirt pocket a gold lighter and a yellow pack of American Spirits, fires up, exhales a radiant cloud brightened by sunlight to the color of milk, and continues his unwavering progress down the flagstones.
The pink, back-slanting capitals of TROY LUVS MARYANN! YES! sprayed across the sign on the bare lawn suggest that 1) Troy spends a lot of time listening to KDCU-AM, and 2) Maryann loves him back. Good for Troy, good for Maryann. Jack applauds love's announcement, even in pink spray paint, and wishes the lovers happiness and good fortune. It occurs to him that if at this present stage of his existence he could be said to love anyone, that person would have to be Henry Leyden. Not in the sense that Troy luvs Maryann, or vice versa, but he luvs him all the same, a matter that has never been as clear as it is this moment.
Henry traverses the last of the flagstones and approaches the curb. A single stride brings him to the door of the pickup; his hand closes on the recessed metal bar; he opens the door, steps up, and slides in. His head tilts, cocking his right ear to the music. The dark lenses of his aviator glasses shine.
"How can you do that?" Jack asked. "This time, the music helped, but you don't need music. "
"I can do that because I am totally, totally bitchrod," Henry says. "I learned that lovely word from our pothead intern, Morris Rosen, who kindly applied it to me. Morris thinks I am God, but he must have something on the ball, because he figured out that George Rathbun and the Wisconsin Rat are one and the same. I hope the kid keeps his mouth shut. "
"I do, too," Jack says, "but I'm not going to let you change the subject. How can you always open the door right away? How do you find the handle without groping for it?"
Henry sighs. "The handle tells me where it is. Obviously. All I have to do is listen to it. "
"The door handle makes a sound?"
"Not like your high-tech radio and The Goldberg Variations, no. More like a vibration. The sound of a sound. The sound inside a sound. Isn't Daniel Barenboim a great piano player? Man, listen to that ¡ª every note, a different coloration. Makes you want to kiss the lid of his Steinway, baby. Imagine the muscles in his hands. "
"That's Barenboim?"
"Well, who else could it be?" Slowly, Henry turns his head to Jack. An irritating smile raises the corners of his mouth. "Ah. I see, yes. Knowing you as I do, you poor schmuck, I see you imagined you were listening to Glenn Gould. "
"I did not," Jack says.
"Please. "
"Maybe for a minute I wondered if it was Gould, but ¡ª "
"Don't, don't, don't. Don't even try. Your voice gives you away. There's a little, whiny topspin on every word; it's so pathetic. Are we going to drive back to Norway Valley, or would you like to sit here and keep lying to me? I want to tell you something on the way home. "
He holds up the CD. "Let's put you out of your misery. The pothead gave this to me ¡ª Dirtysperm doing an old Supremes ditty. Me, I loathe that sort of thing, but it might be perfect for the Wisconsin Rat. Cue up track seven. "
The pianist no longer sounds anything like Glenn Gould, and the music seems to have slowed to half its former velocity. Jack puts himself out of his misery and inserts the CD into the opening beneath the radio. He pushes a button, then another. At an insanely fast tempo, the screeches of madmen subjected to unspeakable tortures come blasting out of the speakers. Jack rocks backward into the seat, jolted. "My God, Henry," he says, and reaches for the volume control.
"Don't dare touch that dial," Henry says. "If this crap doesn't make your ears bleed, it isn't doing its job. "
"Ears," Jack knows, is jazz-speak for the capacity to hear what is going on in music as it unfurls across the air. A musician with good ears soon memorizes the songs and arrangements he is asked to play, picks up or already knows the harmonic movement underlying the theme, and follows the transformations and substitutions to that pattern introduced by his fellow musicians. Whether or not he can accurately read notes written on a staff, a musician with great ears learns melodies and arrangements the first time he hears them, grasps harmonic intricacies through flawless intuition, and immediately identifies the notes and key signatures registered by taxi horns, elevator bells, and mewing cats. Such people inhabit a world defined by the particularities of individual sounds, and Henry Leyden is one of them. As far as Jack is concerned, Henry's ears are Olympian, in a class by themselves.
It was Henry's ears that gave him access to Jack's great secret, the role his mother, Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer, "Lily Cavanaugh," had occupied in life, and he is the only person ever to discover it. Shortly after Dale introduced them, Jack and Henry Leyden entered into an easy, companionable friendship surprising to both. Each the answer to the other's loneliness, they spent two or three nights of every week having dinner together, listening to music, and talking about whatever came into their well-stocked minds. Either Jack drove down the road to Henry's eccentric house, or he picked Henry up and drove him back to his place. After something like six or seven months, Jack wondered if his friend might enjoy spending an hour or so listening to him read aloud from books agreed upon by both parties. Henry replied, Ivey-divey, my man, what a beautiful idea. How about starting with some whacked-out crime novels? They began with Chester Himes and Charles Willeford, changed gear with a batch of contemporary novels, floated through S. J. Perelman and James
Thurber, and ventured emboldened into fictional mansions erected by Ford Madox Ford and Vladimir Nabokov. (Marcel Proust lies somewhere ahead, they understand, but Proust can wait; at present they are to embark upon Bleak House. )
One night after Jack had finished the evening's installment of Ford's The Good Soldier, Henry cleared his throat and said, Dale said you told him your parents were in the entertainment industry. In show business.
¡ª That's right.
¡ª I don't want to pry, but would you mind if I asked you some questions? If you feel like answering, just say yes or no.
Already alarmed, Jack said, What's this about, Henry?
¡ª I want to see if I'm right about something.
¡ª Okay. Ask.
¡ª Thank you. Were your parents in different aspects of the industry?
¡ª Um.
¡ª Was one of them in the business end of things, and the other a performer?
¡ª Um.
¡ª Was your mother an actress?
¡ª Uh-huh.
¡ª A famous actress, in a way. She never really got the respect she deserved, but she made a ton of movies all through the fifties and into the mid-sixties, and at the end of her career she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
¡ª Henry, Jack said. Where did you ¡ª
¡ª Clam up. I intend to relish this moment. Your mother was Lily Cavanaugh. That's wonderful. Lily Cavanaugh was always so much more talented than most people gave her credit for. Every time out, she brought those roles she played, those girls, those tough little waitresses and dames with guns in their handbags, up to a new level. Beautiful, smart, gutsy, no pretensions, just lock in and inhabit the part. She was about a hundred times better than anyone else around her.
¡ª Henry . . .
¡ª Some of those movies had nice sound tracks, too. Lost Summer, Johnny Mandel? Out of sight.
¡ª Henry, how did ¡ª
¡ª You told me; how else could I know? These little things your voice does, that's how. You slide over the tops of your r's, and you hit the rest of your consonants in a kind of cadence, and that cadence runs through your sentences.
¡ª A cadence?
¡ª Bet your ass, junior. An underlying rhythm, like your own personal drummer. All through The Good Soldier I kept trying to remember where I'd heard it before. Faded in, faded back out. A couple of days ago, I nailed it. Lily Cavanaugh. You can't me blame for wanting to see if I was right, can you?
¡ª Blame you? Jack said. I'm too stunned to blame anybody, but give me a couple of minutes.
¡ª Your secret's safe. When people see you, you don't want their first thought to be, Hey, there's Lily Cavanaugh's son. Makes sense to me.
Henry Leyden has great ears, all right.
As the pickup rolls through French Landing the din filling the cab makes conversation impossible. Dirtysperm is burning a hole through the marzipan center of "Where Did Our Love Go" and in the process committing hideous atrocities upon those cute little Supremes. Henry, who claims to loathe this kind of thing, slouches in his seat, knees up on the dash, hands steepled below his chin, grinning with pleasure. The shops on Chase Street have opened for business, and half a dozen cars jut at an angle from parking spaces.
Four boys astride bicycles swerve off the sidewalk before Schmitt's Allsorts and into the road twenty feet in front of the moving pickup. Jack hits his brakes; the boys come to an abrupt halt and line up side by side, waiting for him to pass. Jack trolls forward. Henry straightens up, checks his mysterious sensors, and drops back into position. All is well with Henry. The boys, however, do not know what to make of the uproar growing ever louder as the pickup approaches. They stare at Jack's windshield in bafflement tinged with distaste, the way their great-grandfathers once stared at the Siamese twins and the Alligator Man in the freak show at the back of the fairground. Everybody knows that the drivers of pickup trucks listen to only two kinds of music, heavy metal or country, so what's with this creep?
As Jack drives past the boys, the first, a scowling heavyweight with the inflamed face of a schoolyard bully, displays an upraised second finger. The next two continue the imitations of their great-grandfathers having a hot night out in 1921 and gape, idiotically, mouths slack and open. The fourth boy, whose dark blond hair beneath a Brewers cap, bright eyes, and general air of innocence make him the nicest-looking of the group, gazes directly into Jack's face and gives him a sweet, tentative smile. This is Tyler Marshall, out for a spin ¡ª though he is completely unaware of it ¡ª into no-man's-land.
The boys glide into the background, and Jack glances into the mirror to see them pedaling furiously up the street, Sluggo in front, the smallest, most appealing one in the rear, already falling behind.
"A sidewalk panel of experts has reported in on the Dirtysperm," Jack says. "Four kids on bikes. " Since he can scarcely make out his words, he does not think Henry will be able to hear them at all.
Henry, it seems, has heard him perfectly, and he responds with a question that disappears into the uproar. Having a reasonably good idea of what it must have been, Jack answers it anyhow. "One firm negative, two undecideds tending toward negative, and one cautious positive. " Henry nods.
Violent marzipan-destruction crashes and thuds to a conclusion on Eleventh Street. As if a haze has blown from the cab, as if the windshield has been freshly washed, the air seems clearer, the colors more vibrant. "Interesting," Henry says. He reaches unerringly for the EJECT button, extracts the disc from the holder, and slips it into its case. "That was very revealing, don't you think? Raw, self-centered hatred should never be dismissed automatically. Morris Rosen was right. It's perfect for the Wisconsin Rat. "
"Hey, I think they could be bigger than Glenn Miller. "
"That reminds me," Henry says. "You'll never guess what I'm doing later. I have a gig! Chipper Maxton, actually his second in command, this Rebecca Vilas woman, who I am sure is as gorgeous as she sounds, hired me to put on a record hop as the slam-bang climax to Maxton's big Strawberry Fest. Well, not me ¡ª an old, long-neglected persona of mine, Symphonic Stan, the Big-Band Man. "
"Do you need a ride?"
"I do not. The wondrous Miss Vilas has attended to my needs, in the form of a car with a comfy back seat for my turntable and a trunk spacious enough for the speakers and record cartons, which she will be sending. But thanks anyhow. "
"Symphonic Stan?" Jack said.
"A knocked-out, all-frantic, all-zoot-suit embodiment of the big-band era, and a charming, mellifluous gentleman besides. For the residents of Maxton's, an evocation of their salad days and a joy to behold. "
"Do you actually own a zoot suit?"
Magnificently inexpressive, Henry's face swings toward him.
"Sorry. I don't know what came over me. To change the subject, what you said, I mean what George Rathbun said, about the Fisherman this morning probably did a lot of good. I was glad to hear that. "
Henry opens his mouth and summons George Rathbun in all his avuncular glory. " ¡®The original Fisherman, boys and girls, Albert Fish, has been dead and gone for sixty-seven years. ' " It is uncanny, hearing the voice of that charged-up fat man leap from Henry Leyden's slender throat. In his own voice, Henry says, "I hope it did some good. After I read your buddy Wendell Green's nonsense in the paper this morning, I thought George had to say something. "
Henry Leyden enjoys using terms like I read, I was reading, I saw, I was looking at. He knows these phrases disconcert his auditors. And he called Wendell Green "your buddy" because Henry is the only person to whom Jack has ever admitted that he alerted the reporter to the crimes of Albert Fish. Now Jack wishes he had confessed to no one. Glad-handing Wendell Green is not his buddy.
"Having been of some assistance to the press," Henry says, "you might reasonably be thought in a position to do the same for our boys in blue. Forgive me, Jack, but you opened the door, and I'll only say this once. Dale is my nephew,
after all. "
"I don't believe you're doing this to me," Jack says.
"Doing what, speaking my mind? Dale is my nephew, remember? He could use your expertise, and he is very much of the opinion that you owe him a favor. Hasn't it occurred to you that you could help him stay in his job? Or that if you love French Landing and Norway Valley as much as you say, you owe these folks a little of your time and talent?"
"Hasn't it occurred to you, Henry, that I'm retired?" Jack says through gritted teeth. "That investigating homicides is the last thing, I mean, the last thing in the world I want to do?"
"Of course it has," Henry says. "But ¡ª and again I hope you'll forgive me, Jack ¡ª here you are, the person I know you are, with the skills you have, which are certainly far beyond Dale's and probably well beyond all these other guys', and I can't help wondering what the hell your problem is. "
"I don't have a problem," Jack says. "I'm a civilian. "
"You're the boss. We might as well listen to the rest of the Baren-boim. " Henry runs his fingers over the console and pushes the button for the tuner.
For the next fifteen minutes, the only voice to be heard in the pickup's cab is that of a Steinway concert grand meditating upon The Goldberg Variations in the Teatro Col¨®n, Buenos Aires. A splendid voice it is, too, Jack thinks, and you'd have to be an ignoramus to mistake it for Glenn Gould. A person capable of making that mistake probably couldn't hear the vibration-like inner sound produced by a General Motors door handle.
When they turn right off Highway 93 onto Norway Valley Road, Henry says, "Stop sulking. I shouldn't have called you a schmuck. And I shouldn't have accused you of having a problem, because I'm the one with the problem. "
"You?" Jack looks at him, startled. Long experience has immediately suggested that Henry is about to ask for some kind of unofficial investigative help. Henry is facing the windshield, giving nothing away. "What kind of problem can you have? Did your socks get out of order? Oh ¡ª are you having trouble with one of the stations?"
"That, I could deal with. " Henry pauses, and the pause stretches into a lengthy silence. "What I was going to say is, I feel like I'm losing my mind. I think I'm going sort of crazy. "
"Come on. " Jack eases up on the gas pedal and cuts his speed in half. Has Henry witnessed a feather explosion? Of course he hasn't; Henry cannot see anything. And his own feather explosion was merely a waking dream.
Henry quivers like a tuning fork. He is still facing the windshield.
"Tell me what's going on," Jack says. "I'm starting to worry about you. " Henry opens his mouth to a crack that might accommodate a communion wafer, then closes it again. Another tremor runs through him.
"Hmm," he says. "This is harder than I thought. " Astonishingly, his dry, measured voice, the true voice of Henry Leyden, wobbles with a wide, helpless vibrato.
Jack slows the pickup to a crawl, begins to say something, and decides to wait.
"I hear my wife," Henry says. "At night, when I'm lying in bed. Around three, four in the morning. Rhoda's footsteps are moving around in the kitchen, they're coming up the stairs. I must be losing my mind. "
"How often does this happen?"
"How many times? I don't know, exactly. Three or four. "
"Do you get up and look for her? Call out her name?"
Henry's voice again sails up and down on the vibrato trampoline. "I've done both those things. Because I was sure I heard her. Her footsteps, her way of walking, her tread. Rhoda's been gone for six years now. Pretty funny, huh? I'd think it was funny, if I didn't think I was going bats. "
"You call out her name," Jack says. "And you get out of bed and go downstairs. "
"Like a lunatic, like a madman. ¡®Rhoda? Is that you, Rhoda?' Last night, I went all around the house. ¡®Rhoda? Rhoda?' You'd think I was expecting her to answer. " Henry pays no attention to the tears that leak from beneath his aviator glasses and slip down his cheeks. "And I was, that's the problem. "
"No one else was in the house," Jack says. "No signs of disturbance. Nothing misplaced or missing, or anything like that. "
"Not as far as I saw. Everything was still where it should have been. Right where I left it. " He raises a hand and wipes his face.
The entrance to Jack's looping driveway slides past on the right side of the cab.
"I'll tell you what I think," Jack says, picturing Henry wandering through his darkened house. "Six years ago, you went through all the grief business that happens when someone you love dies and leaves you, the denial, the bargaining, the anger, the pain, whatever, acceptance, that whole range of emotions, but afterward you still missed Rhoda. No one ever says you keep on missing the dead people you loved, but you do. "
"Now, that's profound," Henry says. "And comforting, too. "
"Don't interrupt. Weirdness happens. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. Your mind rebels. It distorts the evidence, it gives false testimony. Who knows why? It just does. "
"In other words, you go batshit," Henry says. "I believe that is where we came in. "
"What I mean," Jack says, "is that people can have waking dreams. That's what is happening to you. It's nothing to worry about. All right, here's your drive, you're home. "
He turns into the grassy entrance and rolls up to the white farmhouse in which Henry and Rhoda Leyden had spent the fifteen lively years between their marriage and the discovery of Rhoda's liver cancer. For nearly two years after her death, Henry went wandering through his house every evening, turning on the lights.
"Waking dreams? Where'd you get that one?"
"Waking dreams aren't uncommon," Jack says. "Especially in people who never get enough sleep, like you. " Or like me, he silently adds. "I'm not making this up, Henry. I've had one or two myself. One, anyhow. "
"Waking dreams," Henry says in a different, considering tone of voice. "Ivey-divey. "
"Think about it. We live in a rational world. People do not return from the dead. Everything happens for a reason, and the reasons are always rational. It's a matter of chemistry or coincidence. If they weren't rational, we'd never figure anything out, and we'd never know what was going on. "
"Even a blind man can see that," Henry says. "Thanks. Words to live by. " He gets out of the cab and closes the door. He moves away, steps back, and leans in through the window. "Do you want to start on Bleak House tonight? I should get home about eight-thirty, something like that. "
"I'll turn up around nine. "
By way of parting, Henry says, "Ding-dong. " He turns away, walks to his doorstep, and disappears into his house, which is of course unlocked. Around here, only parents lock their doors, and even that's a new development.
Jack reverses the pickup, swings down the drive and onto Norway Valley Road. He feels as though he has done a doubly good deed, for by helping Henry he has also helped himself. It's nice, how things turn out sometimes.
When he turns into his own long driveway, a peculiar rattle comes from the ashtray beneath his dashboard. He hears it again at the last curve, just before his house comes into view. The sound is not so much a rattle as a small, dull clunk. A button, a coin ¡ª something like that. He rolls to a stop at the side of his house, turns off the engine, and opens his door. On an afterthought, he reaches over and pulls out the ashtray.
What Jack finds nestled in the grooves at the bottom of the sliding tray, a tiny robin's egg, a robin's egg the size of an almond M&M, expels all the air from his body.
The little egg is so blue a blind man could see it.
Jack's trembling fingers pluck the egg from the ashtray. Staring at it, he leaves the cab and closes the door. Still staring at the egg, he finally remembers to breathe. His hand revolves on his wrist and releases the egg, which falls in a straight line to the grass. Deliberately, he lifts his foot and smashes it down onto the obscene blue speck. Without looking back, he pockets his keys and moves toward the dubious safety of his house.