Rainbow’s End

20

All the cars were still there, but we parked and went inside. I went back to the kitchen to get her something to eat, but she put her arms around me and edged me back to the living room. “I’ll take over,” she said. “You’ve been put through the wringer — sit down and I’ll bring you something.” A fire was built and I lit it. Pretty soon she came in with some lunch — a couple of ham sandwiches, some pie, milk, coffee. We sat there eating, and one by one the cars left, the officers ringing the bell, to tell me “stand by,” as usual, and to wish her luck with her looking, in a most respectful way.

Bledsoe did the same, being much upset still, and then Santos was there, after supervising his men, as they shoved something wrapped in a tarp into his dead wagon. He checked it over with me, the cemetery lot we had, that Mr. Howell was buried in, the kind of casket I wanted, and so on. He gave it to me quick, the arrangements they’d made for the inquest, “which will now be kind of a double.” While he was talking, Knight rang the bell to explain it to me from his angle. After he left Jill showed, from the path that led from the ranchhouse, York behind her, but they got in their cars and drove off without ringing the bell.

When Santos left, that seemed to be all, but when Mother finished eating she jumped up and picked up the phone, saying: “I have to call Sid and get him over here.”

“What for?” I asked, sounding sour in spite of myself.

“The money,” she answered.

“To hell with the money,” I snapped, “and once more, to hell with her. Who’s paying you to get it back? She’s not, I promise you.”

“It’s not her. If who took it is who I think, they’re a Giles from Flint, and turned on her the selfsame way they turned on other Gileses three years and more ago. I have to get them for that.”

“And Sid knows who they are?”

“Sid knows everything.”

“I could do without him.”

“I couldn’t, not today. I need him.”

She had dialed and now someone answered, a child from what I could hear. Sid wasn’t married, but he had what he called a housekeeper, kind of a fleshy-looking woman who had a couple of children. My mother asked for Sid, and the answer seemed to be he’d gone to Marietta. She left word if he should call, then hung up and came back, to sit with me on the sofa. She picked up my hand and kissed it, and all of a sudden the day melted off, and it was just her and me, in a moment of beautiful peace. I said: “Well, here we are.”

“Yes, darling. And I love it.”

“Me too — but who are we?”

“What do you mean, who are we?”

“We know who you are, of course, but who am I? Mother, who is my father?”

She closed her eyes, as though in pain, and when she opened them didn’t look at me, but stared straight ahead. Then: “Dave, your father’s a very big man, one you’re going to be proud of, when he finally makes himself known. But my lips have been sealed all these years, on account of his wife — this girl he had married shortly before he met me, who got sick almost at once, and after that wasn’t a wife, but an invalid dependent he couldn’t turn his back on — at least as he thought. She was dying. She still is — 22 years have gone by, and she’s still dying, Dave. She had a stroke that made her as helpless as a baby and she stays out there in Arizona, where she lives with her nurse.”

She closed her eyes again, beat her knee with her fist, and moaned: “I shouldn’t talk that way. I sound as though I want her to hurry up, and I mustn’t! And yet I can’t help it, I do! I want him! I want him all to myself! I want an end of this secret we have!”

“Why doesn’t he get a divorce?”

“He won’t cast her off.”

“It doesn’t matter to her — not so good for you. Why should he put her ahead of you?”

“I asked him that once; I screamed it at him. I can be pretty rotten. I come from Flint, West Virginia. He shut me up, though. So I had to calm down, and did. Know what he said, Dave?”

“What?”

“ ‘She has to die.’ ”

“That shuts me up, too.” And then: “You’re going to be married, though, soon as she does die?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t you know?”

“Dave, we discuss it often. You have to understand. We live together. We have a beautiful home on the river in Indianapolis. He introduces me to his friends. We entertain them together. Of course, for how it looks, I have a house of my own, next door, so I’m just a friend. I have no reason to fear, to suspect him at all, and yet — I’m a woman, Dave. I’ll believe it when I see it, when I’m looking at that ring he puts on my finger.”

Sid called about that time. When I answered, he talked quite friendly, as though he’d forgotten about our run-in or at least didn’t hold it against me. Then I called her to the phone and she talked friendly too: “Sid, I have to see you! Something’s happened. It’s about Little Myra, but I can’t tell you what on account of this phone. It’s bugged, as we know, so I have to mind how I talk. But I have to see you, Sid. I’d rather you come out here.” She broke off then and listened, and he talked for some little time, apparently trying to find out what she was talking about. She kept coming back to how the phone was bugged, and after a while, told him very nice: “Thanks, Sid. I knew I could count on you. I wouldn’t ask it if I didn’t feel I had to.”

Pretty soon she hung up, but didn’t come back, with me on the sofa. She started walking around the room, and I sat there admiring her shape and the way she walked, kind of limber-kneed, so she halfway floated, and you noticed it, how willowy she was. Suddenly I said: “You didn’t tell him she was dead.”

“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

It didn’t seem to be something she’d have to hold back on account of the bug on the phone — and especially not if there was no bug on the phone. Little by little I figured it out, that so long as he didn’t know, he’d have to come to find out how things stood. I began to wonder if Sid was the guy she was after.