The Autumn Dead

Chapter 28

Ft. Wilson had been built during the final economic boom of the sixties, when so — many dead young Americans over in Nam meant so many live jobs over here, and it had been designed, by an architect who was too tricky by half, with a waterfall between the two main sections of the rambling two-story brick structure, a comic imitation of Frank Lloyd Wright.

It was nearly ten-thirty and people were drifting out to their cars in the lot. They were middle-aged with middle-aged flesh and an air of middle-aged dreams. At forty you don't take night-school courses because you've got an eye on glory; all you've got an eye on is the next rung up in some vast drab institution somewhere. Level Six, as the people in Personnel might say, the exception being classes such as Creative Writing, where glory is still possible, even if said glory does only come in the form of a fifteen-dollar check for your first professional sale to a magazine promoting the likelihood of an imminent alien invasion or the possibility that Liberace has joined James Dean and John Kennedy on an island in the Pacific known only to an ancient race of henna-skinned religious cannibals.

The inside of the high school was almost lurid with fluorescent light and the odor of cleaning solvent. The main hall was jammed with people heading for cars. I asked one of them for directions to Mr. Roberts' room and she told me.

When I got there, he was sitting on the edge of his desk, smoking a cigarette and talking earnestly to a plump woman in a yellow pantsuit that had gone out of style with Jimmy Carter. She was smoking, too.

Watching him, I had the sense that he must be a good teacher, taking everybody just as seriously as he took himself, looking for the same talent in his students he sought in himself, and probably finding it in neither.

He stuck out a Diet Pepsi can for the woman to push her cigarette in and then he said, "All you need to remember, Mary, is that it's better to put in the things about your childhood later on, after you've got the reader hooked on the story line itself. I'd start out right off with the ambulance scene. It's really gripping."

The way she smiled, she might just have discovered the real meaning of life.

"Oh, Gary," she said, "I just love taking your class."

"You're doing very well, Mary. Very well."

She pulled a purse big enough to hold a Japanese car over her wide shoulder, picked up a pile of schoolbooks, nodded good-bye, and left the room. On her way out, she saw me and smiled. "He's wonderful, isn't he?" And he was-patient, caring, taking pleasure in her pleasure.

I smiled at her and her enthusiasm. She was my age maybe, and she radiated a high, uncomplicated passion for life. And that's something I've always only been able to envy, that kind of simple and beautiful enthusiasm for things. I'm always too busy worrying about what can go wrong or wondering what the guy really meant.

Gary still hadn't seen me. He was busy pushing papers and books into a briefcase as scuffed as his shoes always were. I watched him there amid all the empty desks, like lifeboats on a mean vast ocean, his graying hair pulled back into a ponytail, his jeans still bell-bottomed, his eyeglasses rimless. He was the last of the species hippie. At his funeral somebody would probably read something from one of the Doors' songs.

I said, "How long were you having an affair with Karen, Gary?"

He didn't look up. He knew exactly what had been said and he knew exactly who'd said it.

I came into the room. He still hadn't looked up.

I put the manuscript on the desk. The room was painted the dull green of most institutions. It seemed to hush us with its terrible powers to disintegrate personalities. Finally, I said, "I didn't get a chance to read it all. But I read enough of it."

All he said was, "Susan know about this?"

"Jesus," he said. "I really have fucked things up, haven't I?"

"Yeah, I guess you have."

"The only other time I was unfaithful was back in the sixties. At some kind of English teachers' seminar. This woman with a face that reminded me of Cherie Conners. You remember Cherie Conners?"

"Sure."

"I always wanted to screw her. That's sort of what I was doing with this woman at the English teachers' convention. Closing my eyes and pretending she was Cherie. You know she died of an aneurysm a few years ago? Cherie, I mean?"

"I heard that. She was a nice woman."

"It's all crazy bullshit, isn't it, Dwyer?"

"Yeah, it is."

"You going to tell Susan?"

I kept staring at him. He was treating this as if I'd caught him in nothing more than a simple case of adultery. But Karen had been murdered, and so, earlier tonight, had a sad woman named Evelyn.

"What time did your class start?"

"Eight o'clock."

"Little late for night school, isn't it?"

"We took a vote the first night of class. Everybody wanted eight o'clock." He took out his cigarettes. Lit one. "You gave 'em up, huh?"

"Yeah, almost."

He coughed, as if for emphasis. "Wish I could."

"You know a woman named Evelyn Dain?"

For the first time I could see that he was lying. He just sort of shrugged.

"She was killed tonight. Murdered."

"I'm sorry to hear about that. She a friend of yours?"

"She was obsessed with the idea that Karen Lane killed a boy named Sonny Howard. This was the summer we were going into senior year."

He talked with smoke coming out of his mouth. "Well, that's bullshit."

I picked up the twenty-page manuscript. It was sloppily typed, with many strikeovers, many words written in the margins with pencil. "The Autumn Dead. It's about Karen, isn't it?"

"In ways. It's my version of Holly Golightly, too. Very selfish but very fetching. A woman you need to get rid of but can't. She had a story of her own, her own True Life Tale, as she called it. She said we could turn it into a good novel if we collaborated. She said all it needed was a good second draft. She never got around to showing it to me, though."

"Karen tell you everything that happened to her?"

"She told me some of the things."

"Such as?"

"Oh, about her brother. Things like that."

"What about her brother?"

"He's kind of a bastard. She's always tried to help him but it hasn't helped much."

"She ever mention anything about blackmailing anybody?"

He laughed. "God, Dwyer, being a cop really screwed up your mind, didn't it? We're talking about Karen Lane here. She was a cheerleader, she liked to go shopping, she got very sentimental over Barry Manilow records-" He shook his ponytail, trying to rid his eyes of tears. They were big and silver, the way his wife's had been earlier.

I didn't say anything for a time.

He turned away from me and sometimes he snuffled and sometimes he smoked but mostly he just kept shaking his head, his ponytail bobbing, as if to awaken himself from a terrible dream.

I said, softly, "It started when she moved in, you and her, I mean?"

"No. A few months before."

"How'd you keep it from Susan?"

"We just sneaked around a lot. Motels, I guess. Karen had credit cards." He turned back to me. "I knew she was keeping something from me."

"Any idea what it was?"

"No. It was-almost as if it was the central part of her personality. You know, like missing the one vital clue in a mystery. If you knew what she was holding back, then you could understand her. But. . " He shrugged. "She had nightmares a lot."

"She ever talk much about Ted Forester or Larry Price or Dave Haskins?"

"Price came to see her one night."

"What?"

"Yes. He came to the door and asked if she would come out to the car with him."

"She went?"

He nodded. "When she came back, I could see a welt on her cheek. As if he'd slapped her."

I said, "Was this about the time you started hearing from Evelyn?"

This time he sighed, acknowledged he knew her. "Yes. She started calling me and said she wanted me to help her prove that Karen had killed a boy named Sonny Howard. She scared me, this Evelyn. Really a crazy woman."

"You didn't go to the reunion?"

"No, I didn't. Why?"

"Curious."

"Jesus, you think I had something to do with Karen's death?"

"Possibly."

"Christ, Dwyer."

I touched the manuscript again. The parts I'd read detailed how a middle-aged man falls miserably in love with a beautiful woman from his past and pleads with her to run away with him. "You were in love with her."

"Yes. In a very positive way." He exhaled blue smoke. "We were going to go away together."

He said it so easily, so confidently, that it wasn't half as funny as it should have been. She'd been with many men, good and bad, but they'd had one thing in common, and that was the power of their money to protect her from her demons.

She and Gary Roberts would have lasted maybe three months.

"You don't believe me?"

"I believe you," I said.

"I gave Karen things nobody else ever had."

"Tell me more about Larry Price."

"What about him?"

"He ever come around again?"

"No. But he called."

"When?"

"A few weeks after he came over. She was very upset, sobbing, when she hung up. Then she went out to see her brother."

"She didn't say why?"

"No.

"I need to say something here and I'm going to come off sanctimonious," I said.

He looked at me with his middle-aged eyes and said, "I know."

"'You've got a fine wife."

He nodded. "Don't you think I feel like shit?" Then, "So you're not going to tell her?"

"Of course not."

"Thanks."

"You can still patch it up."

"I want to. It's just-" He shrugged. "It was like being a teenager again. It really was. I mean, we made love everywhere possible. Wrote notes-" His laugh was sour. "While all the time Susan was at home being a good wife."

I set my hand on his shoulder and thought of us as young boys playing ball one summer, and how I could never have predicted that thirty-five years later we'd be standing here having this conversation. We were part of the same generation, falling away now, some of us, to be joined later by the rest of us, our moment on the planet vanished, the sunlight on baseball grass shining for different generations.

I felt sorry for him and angry with him and even half-afraid for him, a marriage being not so easy to put back together again, and at last I said, "You're a goddamn good teacher, you know that?"

"Really?"

"Yeah. I stood in the doorway watching you with that last woman. You're really good."

"Well, thanks. I mean, I'm not sure I'm ever going to sell anything as a writer. But as a teacher-"

I said, "Why don't you go home and take her out somewhere nice."

"Tonight?"

"Hell, yes, tonight."

"Why will I tell her we're going?"

"Tell her because you just realized all over again how much you love her."

He laughed. "You should write sappy greeting cards, Dwyer. That's a great idea."

"Nobody's ever accused me of that before."

"What?"

"Having great ideas."