ELEVEN

 

 

 

 

The man who helped escort Rose from the birthday gathering introduced himself as John Fury. He was short and squat and dressed in an expensive, albeit crumpled, white suit. By pro­ fession a lawyer, he said he was now the head of a firm in Los Angeles. He was also a shareholder in a horse farm in Santa Ana, thirty miles outside the city. As a boy Harold had owned a pony, which persuaded him that he and Fury had something in common. They discussed pedigrees, famous races, illustri­ ous mounts.

Rose waltzed about, shadowy under the trees, skirt flap­ ping. For once, she didn’t butt in. Harold found it invigorating, conducting a conversation without being subjected to her banal interruptions.

It was a pity time was so short. Fury had an important case to prepare, something to do with fraud, and planned to drive off at first light. He was making for a homestead in the Salmon River mountains to question a woman who was thought to have relevant information.

Harold said, ‘It’s great to travel, isn’t it? Shaking off famil­ iar things livens the mind.’

‘It sure does,’ agreed Fury. ‘Why, yesterday I had the most . . .’ He stopped short and smiled sheepishly. Pushing back the brim of his cap, he rubbed his forehead.

‘The most what?’ prodded Harold.

‘Odd experience . . . a sort of spiritual awareness. I guess it sounds crazy.’

‘Not so,’ Harold assured him.

‘I stopped the car . . . it was in the afternoon . . . near a church. The building was nothing special, yet for some reason I felt impelled to go inside. I’m not a religious man . . . I mean, I believe in God, kind of, but I don’t get worked up.’

‘Me neither,’ Harold said. He was aware that Rose had stopped dancing and was staring at them.

‘There was some kind of service in progress,’ continued Fury, ‘and the organist was playing Bach’s Mass in B Minor. You know the one I mean . . .’ He began a melancholy humming.

‘Not well,’ Harold admitted.

‘It was played at my father’s funeral. I confess it reduced me to tears, but then I was very fond of my old man . . . you know how it is.’

‘No,’ said Harold. ‘I had too many—fathers, I mean.’ Rose was grinning.

Fury bent forward on his stool. He said, ‘I felt a pressure on my back, as if someone was touching me, urging me to stand, and when I did I felt such an overwhelming feeling of light­ ness that I thought I’d left my body behind.’

He stood up, arms outstretched on either side as if prepar­ ing for flight. Then, abruptly, he hunched over, chin on his chest. ‘Seconds later,’ he said, ‘an incredible heaviness seized me, as if I was being pushed into the earth.’

Harold remained silent, unsure as to a proper response. He didn’t look at Rose.

‘Then I imagined I knew what it was . . . I was facing the Judgment seat . . . being weighed in the balance . . . and found wanting.’

‘Jesus,’ murmured Harold, but he wasn’t thinking of God.

‘The feeling’s still with me,’ Fury confided. ‘Now I look at something quite ordinary, that stone, for instance—’ he kicked the ground, dislodging soil, ‘and realise it’s just as important as myself. I told you it was crazy.’ He was still massaging his brow, as if smoothing away thoughts. From the clearing beyond rose the sound of voices raggedly singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in honour of Saucy Sue.

Harold stayed mute. For the life of him he couldn’t fathom how a man interested in horses could possibly talk such non­ sense. Hearing the whine of a mosquito, he hurried to find his insect spray and spent some time in the camper making sure his skin was adequately protected.

When he returned, Rose was sitting cross-legged at Fury’s feet. He was spouting politics.

‘. . . in 1964, McCarthy was elected Senator for Minnesota by the largest majority ever achieved by a Democrat. A man both bold and easily bored, he spoke of giving it all up and going back to being a college professor. Do you know he once referred to the Senate as a leper colony?’

Rose asked, ‘Have you heard that song about a park in a rainstorm?’

Fury stared at her.

‘MacArthur’s Park is singing in the rain,’ she warbled, ‘I don’t think that I can take it, for it took so long to bake it . . . oh no . . . la, la . . .’

Fury said, ‘Though he has a cynical streak, he alone has always been nail-hard against the shoddy thinking in which our foreign policy is rooted, the muddy language in which it is justified—’

‘It isn’t explained what he was trying to cook,’ Rose inter­ rupted, ‘particularly out in the open.’

‘. . . the bloody consequences to which it has led,’ persisted Fury. ‘Vietnam, not least. He was a great friend of the poet, Robert Lowell . . . You’ve heard of him?’

‘Who hasn’t?’ said Rose.

‘He wrote verse himself. Do you know the lines: “Searching in attics and sheds of life, salvaging shards and scraps of truth, parts of dead poets, pieces of gods . . .”’

‘Yes, yes,’ she enthused. ‘Who could forget a word of Mr. Lowell’s.’

‘Lowell didn’t write that,’ corrected Fury. ‘McCarthy did.’

Perched on his stool, Harold nudged Rose with his foot. She was smiling broadly, as she had been doing most of the evening. It was obvious she found Fury something of a joke, as amusing as that bigoted shit with the red face. To his relief she got to her feet and strolled into the trees. ‘Not too far,’ he warned, ‘animals on the prowl.’ Not that she deserved protection.

Fury wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He confessed he found it uncomfortable sleeping in his car and had arrived too late to rent a cabin. He had a tent, but tents were prohibited on account of the grizzlies. He said he preferred to stay up all night, if Harold had no objection.

‘None at all,’ he said.

To his relief Fury kept off the subject of spiritual awareness and concentrated on McCarthy’s merits and faults, that and the equally complex personality of Richard Nixon.

‘He’s come close, time and time again, to paranoia, but he never quite gives in to it. His style, don’t you agree, is a per­ fect mixture of rage and caution?’

Harold said, ‘Sure, but I still hate him.’

‘He’s been loathed ever since he tried to link Adlai Stevenson to Alger Hiss.’ Suddenly, in the middle of expand­ ing on this, Fury broke off. Looking into the darkness, he asked, ‘I’m right, aren’t I? She’s older than she sounds.’

‘Yes,’ Harold joked, ‘by about fifteen years.’ He hoped Rose wasn’t listening.

‘What’s the connection? You and she sure as hell don’t have much in common.’

‘I hardly know her,’ he admitted, ‘but we’re both looking for the same person . . . a mutual acquaintance from the past.’

‘Someone important?’

‘To her, yes.’

‘Unfinished business, perhaps,’ said Fury. He was again rubbing his forehead.

‘I have aspirins,’ offered Harold. ‘Would they help?’

Fury protested that he wasn’t in pain, merely conscious of the discolouration of the skin above his left eye. He removed his hand and leaned closer. Harold adopted a sympathetic expression, although truth to tell he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

Fury said, ‘I happened to be in Dallas the day JFK was killed. Business, you know. I had a client whose wife had set fire to their house in order to claim the insurance. She was one of those females who dislike men for their superiority. You know the sort?’

Harold grunted recognition.

‘Leaving the court, I took a cab downtown only to find the street to the airport closed. I joined the crowds on foot, caught a brief glimpse of the motorcade, heard two shots and turned in time to hear a third. If I hadn’t looked to my left, at a small boy who was bent down to quiet his dog, I’d have had a bullet through my head. As it was, it just grazed my temple. Luck, I guess.’

‘I guess . . .’ Harold said. He had an image of Oswald, eyes squeezed into slits, finger whitening as it tightened on the trigger.

‘I wasn’t called to give evidence. It was held that there was no need, the Oswald guy being caught so fast. Then Jack Ruby wrapped it all up and the whole business was consid­ ered closed. Not that it’s done much good. If you need a sympathy vote you can’t do better than climb on top of an assassinated brother, which is why Bobby will get the black vote . . . on account of Luther King. Sudden death does a lot for politics.’

Harold said, ‘Though not much for anything else.’

‘I lost the case,’ said Fury. ‘The woman was too handsome, if you go for that sort. I don’t. Too masculine . . . a touch of the Joan Crawfords.’

In his head, Harold saw Dollie’s aquiline nose, the firm set of her jaw.

‘Was she in that film,’ he asked, ‘in which a woman ran into the sea to end things . . . not from cowardice, just that she couldn’t see the point any more?’ The words out of his mouth, he was astonished at how like Rose he had sounded.

She came out of the darkness and without speaking climbed into the camper. She closed the door behind her.

‘I’d be careful of that one,’ Fury said. ‘She could get you into trouble.’

He left at four thirty, just as light was beginning to leak into the sky. Before he drove off he gave Harold his address in both Los Angeles and Santa Ana.

‘We see eye to eye,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in town around the second of June. Look me up.’

 

Harold brewed himself a cup of coffee and sat for an hour or more, conscious of the squawking of birds in the ceiling of trees. Then he went for a shower. On his return he found Rose up and dressed, though it was probable she’d slept in her clothes. To his surprise she’d cleared away the beer cans from the night before and was frying slices of bacon.

‘Good to see you’re hungry,’ he said.

‘Where are we going to next?’ she asked. ‘I’m worried there’s not much time left.’ She appeared subdued, quite unlike the giggling girl of yesterday.

He spread out the map and showed her the route he intended to follow: Salt Lake City, Salina, Panguitch, St. George, Barstow and then LA. ‘Barstow’s in the desert,’ he said.

‘Desert?’ she squealed. ‘Aren’t deserts dangerous? What if we run out of petrol?’

‘It’s not the Sahara. There’s plenty of ghost towns and gas stations.’

‘Ghosts?’ she bleated.

‘Just empty houses sinking into the sand.’

‘How far away are we now from that place in Malibu?’

‘Eight, nine hundred miles . . .’

‘Oh heck,’ she moaned, forking out the bacon and stuffing it between slices of bread, ‘we’ll never find him in time. He’ll have moved on. He’s always one step ahead.’

‘Remember what Mirabella said,’ he reminded her. ‘If it’s true that he’s got something to do with the Democratic cam­ paign, he’ll be in Los Angeles for sure. And I reckon Fury will be of help. He’s the sort of guy who’s got connections.’

She said, munching on her sandwich, ‘He was deeper than most, wasn’t he? I liked him.’

‘You sure didn’t show it,’ he snapped. He wanted to say more but a memory of his last visit to Salt Lake City took hold. He and Dollie had gone there to celebrate the birth of her sister’s baby. That day, on a snow-capped Capitol Hill, John Kennedy had been sworn in as the youngest president ever. They had stayed in a hotel, and a cat had got into their room and slept on their bed. Later that night he had climbed onto Dollie’s body, but she had shrugged him away; on the second evening she had given in, lain submissive, then, violently, she’d drawn up her knee and jabbed him in the balls. She said the cat was to blame; it had stretched out a paw and scratched her ankle. Seeing the night was cold and they were under the covers, that didn’t seem to touch the truth. The radio was on and above his cry of pain he’d heard Kennedy declaiming, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. He’d got up and hurled the cat into the corridor and she’d accused him of cruelty to animals.

‘You should have a nap,’ Rose said, tapping his arm with greasy fingers. ‘You look very tired.’

He said, ‘I’m not sure if that’s a good idea.’

‘Try not to dream,’ she cautioned.

It was disconcerting the way she understood his fears.

 

Foolishly, he disregarded Rose’s advice before taking to the road. Twice she had to thump his leg to keep him from nod­ ding off. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep that made him dozy; the unrelenting sunshine skittering off the silvery landscape dazzled his mind.

Then in late afternoon—they had got beyond Springfield in the state of Utah—there was the smallest of thuds followed by a shadow flash of something black beyond the windscreen. He braked abruptly. If he hadn’t been slumped in his seat, he’d have been flung against the dashboard. Sitting up, he regis­ tered a yellow tractor in a flat field drenched in sunlight, a house, white paint peeling, and a woman in green overalls standing beside a wooden fence. She was holding a brush dripping red paint.

The body slid across the slope of the hood and flopped out of sight. Rose was bent over her knees, making funny noises. He climbed out of the camper. The dog lay on its back, one paw raised, one eye fearfully alive. It was making the same sort of noise as Rose. Then it died.

Rose stumbled out onto the road. ‘Is it dead?’ she asked, clutching at his arm. He shrugged her away and, picking up the animal, walked towards the woman in the overalls. Rose followed him.

The woman’s expression was sullen; she had hair on her lip. When he held out his burden she didn’t look at it, just stuck out her hand and ground her thumb against her fingers, nails stained with globs of red paint. Harold struggled to take out his wallet. Not a word was said. The money handed over, the woman grabbed the dog by its back legs, stared at its dangling corpse, then slung it into the ditch beside the fence.

Walking back to the camper Rose said, ‘She was an ignorant woman. You’re not to take it to heart.’

He didn’t reply. He climbed into the driving seat and sat there staring at the shimmering field.

She said, ‘Some years ago, when my mum died, I had to go to the mortuary and look at her—’

‘I thought it was a bundle of tumbleweed,’ he interrupted.

‘Just to say goodbye. Most people have to do that . . . not to identify them, just to send them on . . .’

‘I wasn’t given the chance,’ he said. ‘Chip Webster saw to that.’

‘My mum was lying in a sort of Easter egg . . . paper frills all round her. I bent down to kiss her . . . her cheek was so cold that my tears bounced off onto the floor.’

Dismissively he waved his hand and leaned forward to start the engine.

‘I’m not lying this time,’ she said. ‘It really did happen. And I noticed her nails were messy, so I went and bought some red nail varnish and coloured them.’

‘To be ready for the next world,’ he said. ‘Thoughtful of you.’

‘The good thing it did for me,’ she persisted, ‘was to make me believe that there’s something beyond death. Her body was there but her soul wasn’t.’

‘Soul,’ he spat, as though it were a swear word.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Which had gone . . . and that’s what made her dead.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he muttered, and then drove at speed past the unfinished fence and the woman with the paint brush.

Darkness descended as the camper devoured the miles, nothing to be seen but black stretches of road stabbed by head­ lights. Then, out of nowhere, Harold recalled an afternoon in childhood when a man had taken him onto a beach some­ where near San Francisco, hand on his shoulder in a gesture of parental steering. The memory induced an odd lightness, a sensation of floating akin to the uplift of the expensive kite he’d tossed into the sky. Almost at once the paper aeroplane had swooped downwards and crumpled into the sand.

He braked, got out and bent over his knees. He was drift­ ing towards a splayed body spread across paving stones. He heard the word ‘Wicked’ resound in his mouth and vomited. Rose didn’t interfere. He supposed she thought his upset was due to the mowing down of the dog.