The Underground Man

chapter 30

I left them together and went out into the hallway. The little boy was lolling on Willie’s knee, stunned by fatigue.

“He’s just about out for the count,” Willie said. “And I’ve got a new bride waiting for me eagerly in San Francisco.”

“Give me a few more minutes. Where’s Miss Storm?”

“In there with her son.” He pointed his thumb at the closed door of the small room under the stairs. “He’s a hardhead, which is why I’m sitting here.”

“What did he do?”

“Tried to fight Harold one-handed. Harold used to play football for the Forty-Niners.”

“Where’s Harold now?”

“Outside watching the house, in case anybody else shows up.” He made a dour face, and gave the boy a gentle poke in the ribs. “Perish the thought, eh, sleepyhead?”

I knocked on the door of the small room. Ellen told me to come in.

She was in the swivel chair. Her son was sitting on the floor beside the safe as if it was a stove that gave no heat. His face was so pale and wretched that it made his red hair and beard seem pasted on. His mouth had a nervous twitch, as if he was biting something, or being bitten.

“This is Mr. Archer,” Ellen said.

With some idea of showing friendly feeling, I asked him how his arm was. He spat on the floor in my direction.

“It’s broken,” Ellen said. “He got it set at a clinic in the Haight-Ashbury. They asked him to check back tomorrow–”

The boy cut off her sentence with a slashing movement of his good arm. “Don’t tell him anything. He was the one that made me lose Ariadne.”

“Sure I did. Also I broke your arm by hitting you on the gun-butt with my head.”

“I should have shot you.”

He was a hardhead, as Willie said. I couldn’t tell how much of the hardness was his own and how much was induced by physical and mental pain.

“He’s in trouble – I guess you know that,” I said to Ellen.

“Do you mean you have to arrest him?”

“That isn’t my job. And it isn’t my job to decide what to do with him. I’m not his father.”

“But you’re working for him, aren’t you?” Jerry said. “If you think you’re going to drag me back to Slobville–”

I turned on him: “Slobville can live without you. If you think the populace is waiting on the docks for your return, think again.”

That silenced him, but I felt a little cheap about talking him down, and a little dishonest. My mind threw up an image of Roger Armistead on the marina float, looking out to sea.

“He won’t go back to his father,” Ellen said. “I’ve been wondering if he couldn’t stay with me, at least for the present. I can arrange to get him the care he needs.”

“Do you think you can handle him?”

“I can give him shelter, anyway. I’ve given shelter to other troubled people.” Her face was open, willing without being eager.

“I don’t know what the law will have to say.”

“How does he stand with the law?”

“It depends on his record, if any.”

We both looked down at Jerry. He sat motionless, except for his twitch, like a sudden old man in the corner.

“Have you ever been arrested?” I said.

“No. I can hardly wait.”

“It isn’t funny. If the authorities wanted to throw the book at you, they could be rough. Taking the yacht could be grand larceny. Taking the boy could be child stealing or kidnaping or contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

Jerry looked up in dismay. “What do you think I did to him? I was trying to save his life.”

“You almost lost it for him.”

Jerry got his feet under him and rose awkwardly, grimacing with pain. “You don’t have to tell me that. I know I wrecked the yacht. But I didn’t steal her. Mr. Armistead left me in charge of her. Ask him.”

“You better talk to him yourself. But not tonight.” I said to his mother: “Why don’t you put him to bed?”

He didn’t argue. She walked him out with her arm around his shoulders. There was a look of acceptance on her face, almost as if she had lived too long without external trouble.

I knew it wasn’t a solution. Ellen was far gone in solitude, and he was too old to need a mother, really. He had to live out his time of trouble, as she had. And there was no assurance that he would. He belonged to a generation whose elders had been poisoned, like the pelicans, with a kind of moral DDT that damaged the lives of their young.

But I had no more time to worry about Jerry. I pulled the swivel chair around to face the phone and dialed Mrs. Broadhurst’s ranch in Santa Teresa. Jean answered immediately, in a voice that hung almost toneless between expectation and despair:

“This is the Broadhurst residence.”

“Archer speaking. I have your boy Ronny. He’s all right.”

She didn’t answer right away. Through the faint buzz and clamor on the line I could hear her breathing, as if she was the only life in an electronic universe.

“Where are you, Mr. Archer?”

“Sausalito. Ronny’s safe and in good condition.”

“Yes, I heard you.” Another silence. She said in a rather grudging tone: “What about the girl?”

“I have her safe. She isn’t in very good emotional shape.”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“But she didn’t really intend to steal your son. She was running away from the man who killed your husband.”

“All the way to Sausalito?” she said incredulously.

“Yes.”

“Who was the man?”

“A bearded type with shoulder-length black hair, wearing dark wraparound glasses. Does that suggest anyone to you?”

“There are plenty of longhairs in Northridge. Here, too, for that matter. I haven’t had many contacts with them in the last few years. I don’t know who it would be.”

“He may be one of the crazies, a random killer. I’m going to make a suggestion which I want you to act on as soon as I hang up. Call the sheriff and ask him to send a man out. Insist on having him stay there. If he won’t, take a taxi downtown and check into a good hotel.”

“But you told me to stay here in this house.”

“That isn’t necessary any more. I’ve got your boy. I’ll bring him home tomorrow.”

“Could I possibly speak to him tonight? I just want to hear his voice.”

I opened the door and called the boy. He slid off Willie’s knee and came running, taking the receiver in both hands.

“Is that you, Mommy? … The boat got sunk, but I came in on a surfboard.… I’m not cold. Mrs. Rawlins gave me her little boy’s clothes, and a hamburger. Susie bought me another hamburger in San Francisco.… Susie? She’s all right, I guess. She wanted to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. But we talked her out of it.”

He listened for a moment, his face growing sober and concerned, then handed me the receiver as if it was hot. “Mommy’s sad.”

I said to her: “Are you all right?”

She answered in an emotion-clogged voice: “I’m fine. And I’m deeply grateful. When will I see you and Ronny?”

“About noon tomorrow, I’d say. We both need some rest before we drive south.”

A short while later, after the others had left, Ellen and I put Ronny to bed in a room which she said had been hers when she was a child. An old toy phone was standing on the table beside the cot. As if to demonstrate that he never got tired, the boy picked it up and spoke into it distinctly:

“Calling Space Control. Calling Space Control. Do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

We closed the door on his fantasy and faced each other in the upstairs hall. The hanging yellow electric light, the stains of old rainstorms on the walls and ceiling, and the shadows that imitated them seemed to generate other fantasies. The rest of the world was cut off and far away. I felt shipwrecked on the dim shores of the past.

“How’s Jerry?”

“He’s worried about what Armistead will do to him. But he quieted down. I gave him a back rub and a sleeping pill.”

“I’ll talk to Armistead when I get the chance.”

“I was hoping you would. Jerry’s pretty tense about it. He feels terribly guilty.”

“What did you do with the rest of the sleeping pills?”

“I have them.”

She touched the place between her breasts. She must have seen my eyes rest there and travel down her body. Both of us moved, so that her body was resting rather sleepily against mine. I felt her hand moving on my back, giving me a kind of sample back rub.

“I don’t have a bed made up for you. You can sleep with me if you like.”

“Thanks, but it wouldn’t be a good idea. You do all your living on canvas, remember?”

“I have a large unused canvas that I’ve been saving,” she said rather obscurely. “What are you afraid of, Archer?”

It was hard to say. I liked the woman. I almost trusted her. But I was already working deep in her life. I didn’t want to buy a piece of it or commit myself to her until I knew what the consequences would be.

Instead of answering her in words, I kissed her and disengaged myself.

She looked more rejected than deprived. “I don’t sleep with many men, in case you’re wondering. Leo was the only real lover I ever had.”

She was quiet for a while. Then she said: “I gave you a false impression earlier. I was forgetting, lying to myself. Whatever I had with Leo was real – just about the realest thing in my life.” Her eyes lit up with the memory as they hadn’t lit for me. “I was in love with him. And he loved me while it lasted. I didn’t believe that he would ever stop. But it ended, quite suddenly.”

Her eyes closed, and opened again with a changed expression, of wary loss. She leaned on the watermarked wall. The night was running down like a transplanted heart.

“There’s something I want to tell you,” I said. “I don’t know if I should.”

“Is it something painful?”

“Yes. Maybe not immediately painful.”

“About Leo?”

“I think he’s dead.”

Her eyes didn’t waver. Only a kind of shadow crossed her face, as if the hanging light above her head had moved.

“How long dead?”

“The whole fifteen years.”

“And that’s why he never came to join me?”

“I think so.” It was partly true, anyway. As for the other part of the truth, I was trying to decide whether to bring up Martha Crandall. “Unless my witnesses are hallucinating, somebody shot Leo and buried him.”

“Where?”

“Near the Mountain House. Do you have any idea who might have killed him?”

“No.” After a moment’s hesitation, she said: “It wasn’t I.”

I waited for her to go on. She said finally:

“You mentioned witnesses. Who are they?”

“Martha Crandall and her daughter.”

“Did he go back to Martha?”

She raised one hand to her mouth, as if she had made a damaging admission. On the heels of it, I said bluntly:

“He was in bed with Martha when he was shot. Apparently she was the one who came back to him. Her husband threw her out.” I hesitated. “You knew about their earlier affair?”

“Did I not. I first got to know Leo through it. Martha came to me when she got into trouble.” She was silent for a moment, then said with some irony: “I interposed my body between them.”

Nearly everything had been said. But we seemed to be held together by a feeling, impersonal but almost as strong as a friendship or a passion, that there was still more to say. The past was unwinding and rewinding like yarn which the two of us held between us.

“What about Elizabeth Broadhurst?” I said. “How did a man like Leo happen to marry a woman like Elizabeth?”

“The war brought them together. He was stationed at a military base near Santa Teresa, and she was active in the USO. She was a handsome woman when she was young. Socially prominent. Wealthy. She had all the obvious qualifications.” For the first time Ellen’s face was pulled to one side by malice. “But she was a failure as a wife.”

“How do you know?”

“Leo told me all about their marriage, such as it was. She was a frozen woman, a daddy’s girl.”

“The frozen ones sometimes explode.”

“I know they do.”

I said carefully: “Do you think she shot Leo?”

“It’s possible. She threatened to. It’s one reason I left Santa Teresa and tried to take Leo with me. I was afraid of Elizabeth.”

“That doesn’t prove she’s a murderer.”

“I know that. But I’m not just being subjective. Jerry told me something as we were talking just now.” Her voice wisped off, and so did her attention, as if she was listening to an internal voice.

“What did Jerry tell you?”

“He was telling me why he couldn’t go back to Brian – to his father. Elizabeth Broadhurst came to their house one night this summer to talk to Brian. There was more than just talk involved. She was crying and yelling, and Jerry couldn’t help overhearing everything. Brian had been extorting money from her. And not only money. He’d forced her into some kind of a real estate partnership in which she put up the land and he put up very little or nothing.”

“How could he force her into it?”

“That’s the question,” she said.

Ellen went to bed alone. I got the sleeping bag out of the trunk of my car and slept across the door of Ronny’s room.

The old house creaked like a ship sailing through the dangerous world. I dreamed I was rounding the Horn.