With an Extreme Burning

ONE

He awoke at his usual time, seven-thirty, and as usual in the first groggy seconds he reached out for Katy on her side of the bed. Then he remembered. Even before his fingers touched the cool, empty sheets, he remembered.

His grief was easing now, after more than three weeks; he felt one small twist of pain, nothing more. He rolled onto his back, opened his eyes. Sunlight in the room, slants and patches of it. The quality of light told him it was going to be hot again today. What day was it? Saturday. Another long weekend. Almost the end of August, though. Next weekend was Labor Day, and right after that fall classes started … first week of September this year. Easier, then—a little easier. Not so much time alone. He had better see Elliot Messner right away, before it was too late to take on an extra class or two, maybe teach a couple of rudimentary history courses in the university's extension program to fill up weeknights or Saturdays. Work and plenty of it was what he needed, at least for this semester, until more time built up between himself and the accident.

He lay listening to the quiet. There were usually birds in the big heritage oak outside the bedroom, that damned mockingbird that was worse than an alarm clock sometimes, but not today. The silence beyond the open window had a flat, padded quality. He could smell the heat gathering, absorbing the early-morning coolness; smell dust and the dry brown grass on the hillside above. For some reason, the smells made him remember an exchange during the excessive heat of early July. Katy: “Dix, I'm worried about fire this year. It's so dry up on that hill.” Him: “The grass has been mowed, there's no real danger. Why worry about things that aren't likely to happen?”

Like accidents and fire.

Like dying in flames so hot they reduced five and a half feet of flesh, skin, and bones into an unrecognizable four-foot lump of charcoal—

There was a curtain in his mind, as thick as metal, forged over the past three weeks; he yanked it down now, locked it tight. Abruptly he swung himself out of bed. In the bathroom he used the toilet and then put on his swim trunks and robe. Downstairs to the kitchen. Grind some beans, start the Mr. Coffee. And then down to the bottom level, out onto the rear terrace.

Mist in the valley below, a thin, floating strip of it that would be gone in another hour or so. At this hour and from this height, the town had a somnolent look except for the broken ant-stream of cars on the freeway that cut through the south end. Los Alegres. Population: 32,000 and growing, thanks to tract-home developers consuming east-side farmland at alarming rates. He'd been born and raised here, spent nearly all of his life here. Just seven of his forty-one years away, beginning with his army service in North Carolina during the 'Nam years. (Some people seemed puzzled when he told them he'd never left U.S. soil, much less fought in Asian jungles; it was as if they thought every male who had been drafted in those ugly days had been immediately shipped overseas, leaving the homefront military bases entirely in the hands of over-aged officers and National Guard weekenders.) Then four years at UC Irvine, earning his master's with a thesis on post—Civil War Reconstruction in the border states. And when it came time to choose a teaching post, straight back to Los Alegres to accept a position on the faculty at Balboa State. Just a country boy at heart, Katy would say, forgetting that Los Alegres was little more than an hour from San Francisco and hadn't been “country” in thirty years. My roots go deep, he would say. Trite but essentially true. Katy's had gone just as deep: She'd been born and raised here, too, and never left for more than a few months at a time. Never would, now.

When they'd bought this house eight years before, just affordable on their combined teaching salaries thanks to the $50,000 cash bond her father had left them, it was an ascension in more ways than one. High on the hillside above the town and the valley: trees that had sprung tall from their deep roots. For him, a symbol that he'd Made It. One acre of the Ridge, one acre of the American dream—and to go with it, a full tenured professorship, A Darkness at Antietam accepted for publication, a happy marriage. No children, because Katy couldn't carry to term, but that was a small regret. Now eight years had passed, eight rapid years. And even before the accident, it had all gone just a little stale.

Teaching didn't fulfill him quite as much as it had when he was younger. Living on the Ridge didn't seem to mean as much. A Darkness at Antietam was still his only published, only completed novel; he couldn't seem to get a second one to jell properly. The marriage to Katy had not been quite as good either. Nothing either of them could pin down; they'd tried once last year, when Katy decided to quit full-time counseling and teach part-time—one of those let's-get-it-all-out-in-the-open-so-we-can-fix-it discussions. The problems were just too nonspecific. A vague restlessness on both sides, small dissatisfactions, little frictions that couldn't be identified much less resolved. It was a case of two people married for seventeen years, entering middle age, comfortable with each other, still able to communicate verbally and sexually (although even sex had grown somewhat mechanical), yet discontented, bored. Tolerably bored, to be sure, but bored nonetheless. Maybe it was like that for most long-married couples, he'd thought. Midlife crisis in tandem. But he was sure they'd weather it somehow. Work through it. Divorce was never discussed, never a consideration. Kathleen and Dixon Mallory were fated to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary, possibly their golden as well; to grow old together up here on the Ridge. He'd never had any doubt of that. Never a moment's doubt.

Until the two highway patrol officers showed up at ten-forty P.M. on Friday, August 6.

Until they told them in their bleak, clumsy fashion that Katy was dead.

He turned away from the view, went to the back part of the terrace. He pushed the button to roll back the automatic pool cover, then shed his robe and dove in cleanly. The water was cool but not cold, just the right temperature for swimming laps. He swam fifty without stopping, counting each one off in his mind, using both crawl and backstroke. When he was done, his arms and legs ached but he was not badly winded. Getting proficient at this. One hundred and fifty laps per day now, in three sessions. Helped him get through the daylight hours, helped him sleep at night. He rubbed himself dry with one of the pool towels, noticing without satisfaction that his paunch was almost gone. Nearly fifteen pounds overweight on Friday, August 6. Twenty-two days later he was almost as trim as he'd been in his army days. Katy had been after him to eat less, exercise more; it had taken her dying to get him to do it.

Showered and shaved and dressed, he was pouring coffee in the kitchen when the telephone rang. It kept on ringing: He'd left the damn answering machine off again.

There was no one he cared to talk to. And condolence-bearers and misguided Samaritans bent on easing his sorrow by inviting him to lunch, dinner, or some little get-together depressed him. He'd tried to make it clear at the funeral, politely but firmly, that for the time being he didn't want visitors or callers; he wanted to deal with his grief in his own way. Most of his family and friends respected that, but a few were tenacious because they thought they knew better than he did what was good for him. Mrs. Tarcher, down the hill, for one. Jerry Whittington. His sister Claudia …

Still ringing. Let it ring, he thought. But he was one of the breed who is constitutionally incapable of ignoring a ringing phone, and the noise was becoming an irritant. “All right,” he said aloud, “okay.” He went to pick up the receiver. “Yes? Hello?”

Somebody breathed at him. That was all.

Oh Christ. This bastard again.

He said hello twice more; the line stayed open on the other end, the breathing slow and steady, just loud enough to be audible. “Let me tell you something,” Dix said. It was an effort to control his anger, keep it out of his voice. “You're committing a crime, do you know that? You can go to jail. Understand? Jail.”

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

Dix hung up. Gently, curbing an impulse to jam the receiver back into its cradle.

Disturbed personality, probably sociopathic. Read in the Herald about the accident, was getting his kicks by tormenting the recently bereaved husband. It had started too soon afterward, the day after the funeral, for it to be a random thing, coincidental. There was no other purpose to it that he could see, this continued calling; four times now that he knew about, when he'd picked up the phone, and God knew how many hang-ups when the machine had been on. It certainly wasn't sexual. He'd never heard of gay men playing sick telephone games, and it was not that sort of breathing anyway. What was it that Burke, up at the university, had called this type of head case in that psych book of his? Tormentors, that was it. One of the chapters had been titled “The Age of the Tormentor.”

Well, if it happened one more time, he'd get the number changed and keep the new one unlisted. Enough was enough. He had already suffered more torment than any man ought to have to endure.

Elliot invited him to his home in Brookside Park for drinks that evening. He didn't want to accept, but he couldn't think of a way to refuse gracefully. He was asking for a favor, and Elliot meant well, and there was a certain amount of protocol that had to be observed when you were dealing with your department chair. At least Elliot didn't offer any advice on how to cope with his loss or his life; judiciously refrained from mentioning Katy or the accident. Besides, he liked the man. They weren't exactly friends—too many attitude and lifestyle differences—but they were friendly, and Elliot could be stimulating company when he was in an expansive mood. So Dix said yes, he'd come, and five o'clock would be fine.

He spent most of the morning in the garage, working on the white oak sideboard. He'd always liked to noodle with wood, and a few years ago he had decided to take up furniture-making. He'd made the mahogany armoire that was in the bedroom and then started on the sideboard for the dining room. Six months of intensive work. But the sideboard hadn't been turning out the way he'd envisioned it, and finally he'd lost interest and abandoned it. It had sat in a corner of the garage, hidden away under a tarp, until two weeks ago. He'd been out there looking for something to occupy his time, and found and uncovered it, and saw immediately where he'd gone wrong in its original design. He'd worked on the sideboard every day since, sometimes for five and six hours at a time. It was nearly finished. Laboring with wood was the only activity he'd been able to sit still for. He couldn't write, or read, for more than a few minutes; his normal powers of concentration were nil. When he was working with table saw and jigsaw and planer and sander, he could shut his mind down. His hands became independent entities, performing their appointed tasks with skill and precision. They didn't even seem part of him at times.

Shortly before noon he ran out of fine-grade sandpaper for the mortise and tenon joints he was fitting. He didn't mind; it gave him something else to do. He got into the Buick and drove downtown to Ace Hardware.

There was not much traffic on Main Street—officially Los Alegres Boulevard for the past twenty-odd years, but only newcomers and visitors called it anything but Main Street. Not many residents traded downtown these days; most preferred the air-conditioned malls on the east and north sides. There were more antique shops and trendy restaurants on Main than anything else, and they catered to the tourists who came to gawk at the Italianate Victorian buildings—wood, brick, and ironfront, most of which were well over a century old—and to walk along or ride on the river. Dix shopped here because he always had and because he preferred the old to the new in most ways and things. Katy had told him once that he was inclined to be stuffy on the subject of the past. His standard comeback was that he'd made his living for nearly twenty years on the study and analysis of American history and was entitled to wallow in the past if he felt like it. Besides, he said, dead people were a hell of a lot more interesting than most live ones he knew.

Not so funny, that remark, even then. Unfunny now.

He lingered in Ace, though he bought nothing more than a new supply of sandpaper. Outside again, he was approaching the Buick when a woman's voice called his name. He relaxed when he saw that it was Cecca. Francesca Bellini, Cecca to her friends. Pronounced “Cheka,” like the old Russian secret police—an Italian diminutive that had survived the transition from girlhood to adulthood. One of Katy's closest friends, one of his favorite people.

“Dix, hi,” she said. She caught both his hands in her small ones. “I thought it was you.”

“Out on an errand,” he said.

“That's good. That you're getting out, I mean.”

“About time I did.”

“It's good to hear you say that. Good to see you. You know, I almost called you on Thursday. I was showing a house on the Ridge and I thought, well, maybe you wouldn't mind if I stopped by for a minute or two.”

“I wouldn't have minded. Thursday was one of my better days.”

“Then I'm sorry I didn't call.”

Her eyes probed his face, as if trying to read it by the lines and creases. She had wonderful eyes—round, luminous, so black they were like polished opals. Her own face was unlined, even though they were the same age. He'd thought, when they were both seventeen, that she resembled a pocket-size version of Annette Funicello, and for most of that year he'd been passionately in love with her. Chet Bracco would no doubt have broken his jaw if he'd tried to do anything about it. Chet and Cecca: They were planning marriage even then.

“Dix,” she said, and stopped, and then said, “I wish I knew how to say how sorry I am.”

“You've already said it. And I really am okay, or will be pretty soon. As soon as school starts.”

She squeezed his hands. “I'm on my way to the Mill to meet Eileen—lunch at Romeo's. Why don't you join us?”

He wasn't ready for that. Eileen Harrell was a determinedly cheerful woman, another of Katy's close friends, and the restaurant would be crowded … no, not yet. “Raincheck, okay? I've got a nearly finished sideboard waiting for me.”

“You're working on that again?”

“Yes.”

“I'm glad. That armoire you made is lovely.”

He smiled and nodded.

“Well,” Cecca said, “I'd better run. Let's not be strangers.”

“We won't be.”

Another squeeze, and she was hurrying away from him. He watched her until she crossed the street to the Mill's entrance. He thought again, as he had several times over the past four years, that Chet Bracco was a damn fool for cheating on a woman like Cecca and then walking out on her. The thought stirred a vague anger, and this surprised him. Maybe he was starting to come out of it, to feel again. Old feelings, old sympathies, for others besides Katy and himself.

Even with the doors up and the fan going, it was stifling inside the garage. Ten minutes at his workbench and he was soaked in sweat, his mouth and throat parched. A cold beer, he thought. Maybe something to eat, too; he was almost hungry. Another hour or two out here, as long as he could stand the heat, and then his afternoon fifty in the pool. By then it ought to be time to get ready for his evening with Elliot.

He was taking a bottle of Miller Draft out of the refrigerator when the telephone bell went off.

He'd forgotten again to put on the machine. Two rings, four rings, six rings … and his feet carried him across to the counter and the phone.

“Hello?”

Breathing.

The tormentor again. Twice in one day—escalating it.

You weren't supposed to provoke people like this; you were supposed to be calm, rational, so they wouldn't think they were getting to you. But he'd had enough. Too much. “Listen, damn you, don't you understand that I lost my wife recently? Don't you have an inkling of what that's like? Don't you have any decent human feelings? If you don't stop bothering me, you'll regret it. I mean that. Stop bothering me!”

He would have hung up then, banged the receiver down. Almost did. He was just starting to take it away from his ear when the voice jumped out at him.

“Don't hang up.”

The words were sharp, commanding, but the voice had an unnatural quality, as if it were being electronically altered or filtered. It made Dix's scalp crawl.

“So you can talk after all,” he said. “All right. You want to say something to me finally? Go ahead, say it.”

“I want to tell you about your wife.”

“… What?”

“Your wife. I want to tell you about her.”

“You don't know anything about my wife.”

“I know something you don't know.”

“The hell you do.”

“Oh yes,” the voice said. “She was having an affair. A very torrid affair. For a little more than three months before she died.”

“That's a goddamn lie!”

“It started on May second, at two o'clock in the afternoon, at La Quinta Inn in Brookside Park. After that, usually twice a week. Monday and Friday afternoons, when you thought she was studying with Louise Kanvitz. That is what she told you, isn't it?”

Dix's larynx seemed to have undergone a temporary paralysis. He made an inarticulate sound.

“The usual meeting place was a motel. Not always the La Quinta; different ones in different locations. Once in a field off Lone Mountain Road. And more than once in her car, in the backseat, dog-fashion.”

You son of a bitch! he thought. But he couldn't say the words; he was like a mute trying desperately to speak.

“Shall I tell you some of the other ways she liked to do it? No, I'm sure you already know most of them. I will tell you who her partner was. You'd like to know that, wouldn't you?”

Lies, lies!

“I was her partner,” the tormentor said. “I'm the man who was fucking your wife.”

The verbal paralysis left him all at once. Words came spewing out like vomit. “You sick lying bastard how can you do this to me what kind of man are you—!”

He was shouting into a dead phone.