She said, “How about some coffee?”
He laughed but said, “Sure, Ma.”
She stopped at the doorway to the kitchen. “I know you’re feeling bad, hon. I know. But it’s good to have you home with us.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, Ray.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LOST WEEKS OF watching television. Sometimes with Bart, sometimes with Theresa. Nature shows. Muscular cats stalking in a rage through long grass. Travel shows, small, neat women walking along brick streets in walled cities in Tuscany, taking dainty bites of mushroom and boar sausage under trees that looked like gauzy green spearheads. Ray got into a rhythm; reading the paper every day, eating little, his stomach cramping and sometimes blood in his shorts at the end of the day.
He woke up in the middle of the night tangled in his sheets and trying to explain himself to someone in uniform. Hot cramps knifed his thigh, and he threw the covers off and stood up, massaging his leg and leaning heavily on the night table. He walked stiff- legged into the bathroom and snapped on the light, taking stock in the mirror. His beard was streaked with white now, and his long face had the angular, distracted features he had seen in photographs of Civil War veterans staring into the middle distance of daguerreotypes, one pinned sleeve empty.
Anyway, he thought, they came home and went to work. Plowed fields and raised families and counted themselves lucky, no doubt, though they walked nightly over the dead bodies of friends and enemies and felt somehow apart from everyone who hadn’t been where they’d been and done what they’d done. Still they got on with it.
He sat down in the living room in his underwear, clicked on the TV, and turned down the volume. He was watching the news without seeing it when he saw a familiar face and turned up the volume. It was an older woman, mousy brown hair. It took him a minute to remember. The house in Fairless Hills. The woman was in handcuffs. There were shots of evidence tape, a policewoman holding a blanket- wrapped bundle. Pictures of the yard-bird Heston that looked like old arrest photos, shots of the police knee deep in fresh holes in the yard. Digging something up.
RAY WENT OUT the front door and blinked, leaning heavily on the cane. The street was empty; the sun was high and hot. Ray stretched and tried to enjoy moving more than the few steps from the bedroom to the kitchen to the living room. He tried to find a rhythm with the cane, popping the bottom out and then leaning into it, but he broke out in a sweat before he reached the sidewalk. September was winding down and it still felt like August. He made his way around to the car and opened the door, burning his hands on the hot metal of the door of Theresa’s beat- up old Dodge. When he dropped into the seat he was panting like a dog and bathed in sweat.
He drove up 611, not knowing where to go. He passed school buses and saw one tree with leaves the red of clotted blood in astand of oaks and maples on Street Road. The air conditioner gave a sigh and stopped with an exhalation of white mist, so Ray cranked the window down and breathed in the smell of road dust and exhaust and fried food from the Wendy’s at 363. He was halfway to Doylestown before he realized that was where he was heading.
At Main and Court he turned right and made a slow loop on side streets, passing the court house, brick row homes converted to law offices, Victorian houses set back from the street. There were people out’men in business suits on cell phones, kids on cell phones, harried- looking moms pushing strollers and talking on cell phones. He realized he was looking more at the young mothers than at the girls preening in front of the Gap and thought of it as a sign of maturity. The street he was on ended, and he turned right and then left and wound up at the end of Pine Street. There the remains of the old county prison had been turned into an art center overlooking the local library. He parked and then tapped his way to the library door, his leg on fire.
Inside was a cool, quiet space filled with light, and the sweat dried on his arms as he moved slowly from shelf to shelf, canting his head and looking at titles. He worked his way through the westerns, finding a collection of Elmore Leonard novels he’d been wanting to read, working on the mechanics of carrying the books he was collecting while still using the cane at least some of the time.
He sat at a table with a stack of newspapers and made his way through them, starting with the day he and Manny went to the farm. There were pictures of fire engines and yellow evidence tape strung from trees, articles about biker clubs like the Pagans and the Angels and the dope business. He found more articles about the shooting and fire out in Kulpsville, and finally he sat and read about the man with white hair who had been shot by the men trying to take him on the street in Doylestown. The town hadn’t seen violence like that in de cades, and the story played over days on the front page. When he thought it had run its course, the articles getting thinner and the police having less to report due to the random nature of the act, there was a different kind of story about the man who had died.
His name had been Edward Gray, and he’d been a lawyer. In the days after he died, articles began to run about money missing from accounts and clients who had beefed to the local bar. There were increasingly confused quotes from his daughter, apparently his only surviving family; a spiky indignation in the early days smearing into anger and obvious shame. There was a picture that caught her getting out of a car and looking exhausted and empty, dark lines under her eyes.
He read other things, too. Announcements of weddings and obituaries, a kid getting a scholarship for football. He had a sense of life going by, a stream running while he sat on the bank and watched. He read the classifieds, then closed the paper and went back to the car and drove downtown.
There was a bookstore on State Street, half of a Victorian, and he sat in the car at the curb and looked at the window at a sign: for sale.
The next day he went for the first time to the storage place in Willow Grove and angled the car in front of the door and picked through the keys on his ring, feeling the heat against his back. He found the key to the lock and snapped it open with a metallic ping and clumsily dropped to a knee to pry the door up. He had to put his back into the effort, his legs shaking and blood pulsing at his temples. The door groaned and lifted, and he lowered himself on a cracking knee to look inside.
Empty.
Or not quite. On the floor a pen or something, beyond the hard boundary of sunlight reaching under the open door. He bent closer, reached for it. A needle.
Manny.
RAY DROVE UP Street Road, letting the car take him, not sure what to think or feel. He crossed 263 and almost sideswiped a van that cut him off making a left into the diner, so he pulled into the parking lot of the bowling alley and went inside to think, figuring it was one place he wouldn’t know anybody.
Inside it was bright and loud. He went into the small bar and sat at a chipped Formica table and let a Miller Lite go flat while he watched some kids clustered in one of the lanes. Two boys stood close to each other, knuckle- punching each other’s arms and grimacing while a girl with braces shook her head and called them retards.
He knew he should feel angry, cheated, but that wasn’t in him now. He’d wanted not the money but the freedom it might bring, but he knew in losing it he’d been relieved of a burden, and he’d never have been able to spend it on himself anyway. Part of him wanted to take it off Manny, not to keep it, but to keep Manny from killing himself with it. Yet he knew he wouldn’t do that, either. What ever Ray was doing, wherever he’d end up, he knew Manny wouldn’t be there, that he was as gone as the money, as what ever he’d been feeling when he racked the slide on his Colt and kicked in the door of the dope house in Ottsville. What they were to each other had a shape bordered by dope and guns, being desperate and hopeless and going down swinging, and none of that was in Ray anymore.