The Witch Tree, page 11
“Time,” he said. “I win.”
“You think?” Eli shot back. He was testing the silky, champagne material in a low cut teddy.
“Hi there,” he said, and Buck all but replied, “Hi, yourself–” when he realized Eli was talking to a woman back of a heavy column, a Perche No? bag at her feet, as if she were shopping.
“And, to your right,” Eli said, “you got mystery shoppers numbers three and number four.”
A man in a blue uniform came out of an unmarked door. It was a scalding moment – right out of a recurring nightmare he had, one in which he found himself back at St. Mary’s.
Singing, naked in the courtyard, and Mother Kate trying to beat the Indian out of him.
Given an escort, they were shown out of the building. Eli started the car and pulled away from the curb. He waved to the guard on the sidewalk, who gave them a thin-lipped smile. A block or so up Nicollet, he reached into his boot and pulled out a camisole. Pink with lots of little straps.
“I should bring you more often,” he said, and winked. “You make a good decoy. You bein’ so tall and Indi’n.”
He was humming. He poked Buck with his elbow and, with a grin, dug into his breast pocket.
“Sales receipt,” he said, and slapped it on the dashboard. “I bought the camisole when you were in Sports. Showed ‘em right off, before they even took you into that room.
“They make you drop your drawers, too, brother?”
He wasn’t about to dignify that with an answer, even though Eli was trying to be funny.
“Only, you know what bothers me the most?”
“No,” he said, sullenly, “what?”
“That even you, after everything,” he said, “you still assumed I’d stolen this–” And he lifted up the camisole. “Didn’t you?”
Out front of The Evergreens Eli brought the car to a stop. They sat in the dark saying nothing, and The Evergreens, ramshackle wreck that it was, looming over them, an indictment.
“So, cough it up,” Eli said.
Buck reached into his pocket. He lay Lester’s envelope on the dashboard. Newly minted twenties.
Eli glanced over. “You keep that,” he said, “but don’t forget, we are part of the problem, brother.”
It was a plea for forgiveness, but he was in no mood to grant it, wouldn’t, least of all to himself.
“So, we’re in this together, right?” Eli said.
They got out of the car and he thought to go inside, get something to eat, but there wasn’t time.
“Got something to take care of,” he said, and he spun on his heel and headed up the street.
Behind Byerly’s, a grocery store off Hennepin, he found an unlocked Regal, one with a full tank. He had it started in seconds and, checking the rear view mirror, turned south onto Lake.
At Sears, he bought a set of feeler gauges and a small rat-tailed file. Allen wrenches, a Swiss Army knife with a pick, and a few feet of # 6 bell wire. He bought wire cutters, and threading wire caps, and a pry bar. And he bought a day pack, the kind students used.
Going out, he paused at the door, looked up the street, then opposite. Just more traffic.
22
A half hour later, in Minnetonka, amid restaurants and boutiques, he parked the Buick away from the street lights. Behind him was a camera place, Moto-Foto, lit in red neon across its façade – One Hour Processing, 24 Hour Service Guaranteed! All Day Every Day All Year!
What, he thought, could anyone need one hour processing for? And all day, every day?
He got out of the Buick, found the Fisher Stars, and from them the North Star, then got his bearings.
West, he thought, and strode across the lot.
He moved quickly, the pack slung over his shoulder, followed a long, curving arm of Lake Minnetonka into the Millers’ subdivision. He’d been here before, had driven a moose down with the doctor, though, the pines he remembered as being small were now towering and dark.
On a hillside, up and back of the service road, he crossed a small park, then stood overlooking the Millers’ arm of the lake.
He climbed an embankment to his right and, at the top, stood with his hands on his hips and caught his breath.
The house dwarfed the lot, now a monstrosity of additions, all arches, and gables. He looked for security cameras, and found none. There was a guest house in back, and an empty pool, leaves piled like sodden time at the deep end of it. On the near side were tennis courts, around them an elaborate wrought iron fence and cement statues of Greek goddesses.
There was a forlorn and malign excess in it, a showiness, as if all of it had been borrowed from elsewhere.
Carol Miller appeared at the kitchen window. She was washing dishes in the sink. It was only in the thirties, and chilly, but he’d worked himself into a sweat, climbing. Waiting for Carol to move from the window, he took off his jacket and knotted the arms around his waist. Set his pack at his feet.
Go, he thought. What was she… doing? She was supposed to be out of the house by now, he thought.
But here Carol was, her hair spun gold under the light, and it occurred to him, in that moment, why he had always avoided her at the lodge after he’d returned from his time playing ball–
– a thought that struck him so forcefully that he was, for a moment, overwhelmed by it.
Evelyn Giancono he’d met during Spring Training in Tampa, his last year with the Indians. Beautiful and bored, she’d appeared at his motel pool one afternoon, bright and polished as a cameo. He recognized her – game nights, in Cleveland, she’d sat in the press box, in dark glasses and wearing brightly colored scarves, ones she’d waved, cheering.
“Come out,” she’d said, “I’ll show you around the city,” and she had.
Evelyn laughed easily. She drove a white convertible Chrysler with reckless ease, her hand draped over the wheel at the wrist. She wore short-shorts and halter tops, her perfume something rose.
Later, she cried sometimes when they made love. She bit her fingernails until they were raw.
“Back in Cleveland, I’m so bored I can’t stand it,” she said one afternoon. “Are you bored?”
“No,” he said. “How could I be bored?”
“You’re the only thing that doesn’t bore me,” she said, and ran her fingers down his face, studying him.
“You’re beautiful, in all the ways my husband isn’t,” she said. “But you know that, right?”
One weekend, when Evelyn’s husband was in Atlanta on business, and the Indians were playing a game in Minneapolis, they drove to Duluth, then along the north shore of Lake Superior to Grand Marais.
Headed back, Evelyn insisted they go through Red Lake, and he humored her, thinking, why not? Everywhere, stands of first-growth pine and pristine, mirror bright lakes, granite buttes, but, too, gutted early model cars, refrigerators upended, and washing machines tumbled here and there, ones blindingly white, and all of it scattered like remnants of a battle long before lost, men in worn khaki, and women in braids and calico skirts, walking the needle-covered, loamy dirt roads, heads bent, as if under some crushing weight.
Still, each, upon recognizing him, excitedly tossed up a hand in greeting, some calling out,
“Boozhoo, Doden!”
“You’re famous!” Evelyn said, “everybody knows you up here, right?!” a brittle cheer in her voice.
Without realizing it, he’d slunk down in his seat, all but pulled the bill of his cap over his face, until Evelyn poked him, laughing.
“Well, you sure showed them how you’re different, didn’t you? I mean, didn’t you just?” she said. “You don’t belong here at all!”
Her having said it, and his having not replied – This is exactly who I am, darling, don’t you see me? – hurt.
But the reservation behind them, they teased each other and listened to the radio, and things were good again. Only when they made love, after, it was with a kind of desperate abandon, a hunger. And back in Cleveland when she attended games, she dressed exquisitely, and he pitched as if possessed, shut down games, a shoe in for the Cy Young Award, and Jack, Evelyn’s husband, there with Evelyn, broad, square forehead, Ray Bans, and always in a dark suit.
Still, when the end came, it took him by surprise.
That afternoon, they’d stayed at a motel in Fairport Harbor at a resort north of Cleveland. He’d been given a bonus, and they’d been celebrating, though Evelyn was acting strangely. She tore and scratched at him, kissed him as she’d never done, as if to turn him inside out, to take him inside her. And he, drawn into it, a rage to bridge the distance that had come between them, responded in kind, the two of them, bruising each other, in love.
In the middle of it, she slapped him, hard, across the face, said, “So, is that the way you people do it?”
She said it as though she’d finally gotten to something in him. Something she’d been looking for, had needed to find.
Later, when he tried to call her, she hung up. He drove the Mercedes convertible he’d bought with his bonus to the club she frequented. Evelyn came outside, rolled her eyes at the car, traffic roaring by loudly behind them. He threw the door open for her, but she didn’t get in.
“I got it for you,” he said, “so… we could be seen out now, okay? Like real people.”
“Listen,” she told him, “and I want you to listen good. Be ‘seen out’? I don’t ever want to see you again, not here or anywhere,” she said. “Didn’t you get that when I didn’t answer your calls?”
She went back in and he stood on the sidewalk, the summer sun a furnace-hot weight on his head.
A window opened a few stories up. The facade of the building threw down a terrible yellow light.
A toilet flushed. Someone was vomiting. Then weeping, “Oh, god....” she was saying, “Oh, god, please…” He recognized the voice. Evelyn’s.
Carol turned off the kitchen light, and minutes later she eased her Lincoln from the garage, the door closing.
When she’d gone up the block, he went around to the back, worked the feeler gauge blade between the door and molding. Depressed the spring-loaded plunger. No wires. No alarm. Not even a dead bolt. Clearly, the doctor believed himself so protected from his business as to be untouchable, and Carol, thinking herself secure in the suburbs, was oblivious.
He swung the door wide and stepped inside, struck by the quiet, and dark, and the smell of lemon. Polish, that’s what it was. He had, thanks to Carol, almost no time, when he’d wanted a good hour. He thrust his gloves into his pocket, then thought to wait for his eyes to adjust, but was too rushed. He stumbled over something on the carpeting. One of those kids’ big-wheeled tricycles, and he set the tricycle to the side, the room coming into focus.
A big sofa. Fireplace. A table in the corner – a pool table.
He’d been in countless houses just like it, he thought, on the North Side of Chicago, and, earlier, in Cleveland.
Knew where a safe would be kept, where cash would be hidden or stored, documents safeguarded against fire.
He moved into a bedroom. No safe in the wall. Turned down a carpeted hallway into yet another room, a guest bedroom. No safe. Checked a third bedroom, no safe, then the master bedroom. Again, he looked for a recessed panel, some hiding place, or access.
Nothing. He went down a hallway to yet another bedroom, this one having been lived in, but not recently.
It was dusty, and smelled of paper. He checked the shade over the window, then hit the light.
Clustered on a dresser were framed photos of Dr. Miller’s son, Allen, in his Cadillac convertible. In each, Allen grinned uneasily into the camera, on the glass dust long settled.
He swept up the nearest, peered into it. He didn’t have time for this, but couldn’t help himself.
In the photo, Allen, at the wheel of his car, smiled up at the photographer, on his face a cockeyed grin. “Live fast, die young,” he’d often said, “and leave a nice corpse, right?” Alongside Allen, Buck sat shotgun, a wry, too-wised up look on his face, even cocky. Allen he’d met at the lodge, when the Millers vacationed, and they’d been fast friends, Allen four years older and, at the time, out of a life he couldn’t so much as imagine, the Millers “traveling,” to Europe, and to Hawaii, and to Bermuda, places that had been, to him, as distant as the moon, and Allen talking out the side of his mouth, joking, from his teen years a drinker, one favored by girls with lacquered nails and loud voices, a few of whom Buck got to know, he and Allen and “the girls” out joyriding nights. They’d had “father problems” in common, which, discussing them, amused them no end.
“You’d be high strung, too, if you’d been a POW in a Nazi camp,” Allen told him one night, “I kid you not. He’s certifiable.”
Toward evening, they’d made a circuit of off-reservation watering holes, from The Sportsman’s, to The Wigwam, to Jasper’s, but always ending at The Ramblers, on Massacre Point. Following last call, they’d drive the rollercoaster roads to the lodge, top down and wind howling.
Which was how Allen had died, Buck pitching an away game, one rescheduled due to rain.
Coincidence that he hadn’t been in the car for Allen’s head-on collision with the logging truck. And, thinking it, he spun into the bathroom, drew down the shade and switched on the light. Opened the medicine cabinet and searched for a storage space. In the cabinet, Percodan. Valium. Lorazapam. Carol Miller, Take… – the labels read. A few of them were the doctor’s, penicillin, and Lipitor. On the bottom shelf a bottle of Tums Extra Strength.
On the inside of the mirrored door was a note, in a nearly illegible script: Good morning, Carol! Don’t forget your meds.
Dr. Miller had drawn a heart under it, in his uncertain hand something ruinously conciliatory.
A clock chimed the hour in the living room, and he ducked into the garage, a car in the far stall, the Seville. Hung, on the cinderblock wall over it, were orange life preservers, and in the ceiling joists, a canoe on cables
No walled off storage space, no cabinets, no hinged sheet metal access panels into the foundation.
He went down a flight of stairs to the basement and switched on the light. Washer and dryer to his right. Shelves against the walls, paint cans, and boxes, and books. Clothes hanging from the ceiling joists – too wide lapel suit coats, a silver satin ball gown, and a much faded Army uniform, an untenable version of someone Dr. Miller’d once been.
Under which sat a desk, alongside it a file cabinet. With his tools, he had the drawers open in seconds. Desk – nothing. Then the cabinet. Top drawer. Manila file folders. Util, Elec, Gas, Auto Ins.
An electric motor whirred upstairs – the garage door – and he yanked out the second drawer.
Real estate. And more of the same in the third.
He tore through the bottom drawer, in it photo albums. Christmas, 1966-70. Lake Cabin, 1964-66. Hunting, Wyoming, 1963, 64. At the bottom was the oldest, and he pulled it out. Fishing – Red Lake, Knife Lake, Sabaskong Bay Lodge, and, of all things, Baseball 1961.
He threw the album open, here photographs taken at Metropolitan Stadium. Felt his breath catch–
Upper left, a pitcher in a red and white uniform, number 8, back bent, blur of arm and hand overhead, too fast for the shutter, a smear of white headed for the plate, a baseball. Himself, throwing a changeup. Below it another, in it his father, in his canvas hunting jacket, beside him Bear smiling for all the world, a white and red Indians cap on his head.
Leave it, he told himself – then, yanking the mouth of his pack wide, he jammed the album in.
He charged up the stairs, bolted across the rec room to the rear door, a rhythmic thump of feet coming down the stairs, and Dr. Miller calling out, “Carol! Carol?! Did you leave a window ajar?!”
He got the door open, then ran with the pack held up behind his head. Crossing the yard, there was a gun shot, and he was knocked on all fours, the pack nearly torn from his hands.
But he was in the trees now, and he scrambled to his feet.
23
Some time later, he stopped at Archie’s on West Lake, an enormous, fat-bellied, tuxedoed frog on the roof. The spot lights along the gutters had been aimed at the frog in such a way it grinned malevolently from under its black top hat. He bought hamburgers and the works, for two, and the bag under his arm, he strode toward Dupont, whistling, still trying to calm himself.
Whistling, he recognized the tune, which stopped him cold on the sidewalk. One and the same he’d sung at St. Mary’s. And, now, for Sally.
He sat in the car with her, nursing his coffee. The moon came up, and it hung heavy over the horizon, pale fire and quivering nearly to bursting. Sally bent into the windshield.
“What do you call it?” she asked.
“The moon,” Buck replied, and laughed. Only tonight Sally, frowning, wasn’t having it. “Tibik-gisiss. Night-sun,” he said.
Now, she wasn’t drumming on the wheel, or shaking one leg or the other, as if she might break.
“You can say it,” Sally said.
“Say what?”
“That I seem… sort of like something else, right? Different?”
He set his back against the door, faced her, wondering what she was getting at. “Are you?”
Sally shot him a smile. “Ta-da!” she said, throwing out her hands, “I’m the new Floor Monitor!”
“Wonderful,” he said. “And, tell me now, Sally, just what does the Floor Monitor do?”
“I make sure everyone’s ‘On Task.’”
Why, he thought to himself, was he sensing trouble here? “You’re still making the dentures?”
“Sure.”
“And who gave you this… step up?”
“She calls herself ‘Kitty,’ but I call her the Dragon Lady,” Sally replied, a certain mischief in her voice, “because she glares, like this–” Sally pulled a face, making eyes at him.
“You watch out for her,” he said, and when Sally’s brows knitted, he added, “Oh, I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
