The Green Eagle Score

7

I’m not upset about Parker any more,” Ellen said. “Oh? Very good.”

“All I feel for him now is dislike,” she said, and she knew her voice was calm with her certainty.

“I’m glad things are simpler now,” Dr Godden said. “What made the change?”

“Different things,” she said. “I know that. There was a time when I would have known only one of them, but now I know there’s others.”

“What’s the one you would have known?”

“What he did with the guns,” she said. Then, realizing she’d started somewhere in the middle and he couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about, she hurried on, “You remember Wednesday I told you he’d gone somewhere and gotten a lot of money. The money to finance things.”

“Yes. I found that very interesting. The reasons for getting the financing on the outside and so on.”

“Well, yesterday,” she said, “he got the guns. They’re in toy boxes, model auto racing sets and like that.”

“How many guns?”

“Two machine guns and four pistols. All so innocent, packed up in toy boxes. Stan said he got them from a man who runs a hobby shop as a cover for selling illegal guns.”

“And the guns bothered you?”

“Not the guns,” she said. “What he did with them”

“What did he do with them?”

“He put them on the shelf in Pam’s closet.” Ellen closed her eyes, hugged herself closer. She could see them sitting there, on the shelf in her baby’s room, surrounded by truly innocent toys, all that lethal metal hidden away inside cardboard boxes covered with bright colors and gay lettering and pictures of happy things.

“Don’t you see?” she said, but she kept her own eyes closed. “He’s using Pam. Not just me, not just my house or Stan or even Marty. He’s using Pam, making her innocence hide his—filth.”

“You feel violated,” Dr Godden suggested.

She opened her eyes, studied the patterned carpet as though the twisting lines would only form letters and words and sentences if she could but look at them right, as though the carpet could tell her something of great importance that would make everything clear and easy and possible. But the pattern remained only twisting lines.

“Not violated,” she said, “not exactly violated. It’s as though I didn’t matter, as though whether I was even alive or not had no meaning at all. He doesn’t care. I’m a worm to him, less than a worm. Nothing to him. Not even worth feeling contempt toward.”

“In other words,” Dr Godden said, “for the first time you’ve met someone else who has the same attitude toward you that you have. The attitude you think is the only thing you deserve.”

She frowned at the rug. “Is that it?”

“Of course,” he said. “But when you treated yourself that way, you always knew you had the choice, you could stop treating yourself that way whenever you wanted. But when this man Parker gives you the same treatment it’s out of your control. He isn’t even doing it to expiate your guilt. Your guilt has nothing to do with the way he acts.”

“He doesn’t care what I think,” she said. “He doesn’t care. Everybody cares. You might hate somebody, but you care what they think, you want to know what they think.”

Dr Godden let the silence stretch this time, and she knew that meant she was supposed to look inside and see if there was anything else there, anything she was trying to hide from herself. “It isn’t really Pam I’m angry about, is it?” she said. ”It isn’t even me, not the real me.”

“No?” he asked gently. “What is it, then?”

“The mask I’m wearing,” she said. “Motherhood. You know, the good mother bit, the whole cop-out to make up for everything I’ve done wrong all my life. You know, how now I’m a mother and I hide behind that. And Parker doesn’t pay any attention to the mask. He goes ahead and puts the guns in Pam’s closet and doesn’t even ask me. The whole mother mask doesn’t mean a thing to him.”

“You think he sees through it?”

“I think,” she said, “I think he doesn’t give a damn.”

“What about Stan? Do you think he cares about Stan?”

“Parker? He doesn’t care about anybody except his own sweet self.”

Dr Godden said, “Then perhaps he’ll arrange the robbery so he’ll be the only one to get away.”

“Do you think so?” she said, alarmed.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

She studied the question, trying to be fair, and finally said, “No, that isn’t how he’d be. He’s cold and ruthless and he doesn’t care about anybody, but that’s because he cares about things. Not even the money, I don’t think. It’s the plan that really matters to him. I think the thing that counts is doing it and having it come out right. So he wouldn’t want anybody else to be caught.”

“It would be unprofessional.”

“Yes. Oh, they found a hideout.”

“Did they?”

“Out Hilker Road. A hunting lodge up near the border that got burned down a couple of years ago.”

“Andrews’ Lodge?”

“I don’t know, I guess so. They went up there yesterday to look it over.”

“Then the plan is set?”

“Not entirely, I don’t think. Maybe in Parker’s mind it’s all set, but they haven’t talked about it all yet. I guess they’re waiting for the others to come in.”

“How many more?”

”Three. They’re supposed to come in by Monday night, I think. So I guess I won’t have much to tell you next time. But lots on Wednesday.”

“That’s when they’ll be doing it.” Dr Godden said.

Ellen shivered.