Gary Brandner Read online

  But she could do this, and she was doing it. Moreover, deep down somewhere Brian knew it was right. Whatever they once had together wasn't there anymore. It had gotten misplaced somewhere, without him ever really noticing. The strain of the last month had just emphasized the bad situation that had existed for a long time.

  He stood aside and watched silently as his wife went out and closed the door behind her. The latch fell into place with a click of finality.

  Left alone in the silent house, Kettering walked around turning out lights that nobody was using. That made it too dark, so he walked around again turning them back on. The house seemed not so empty with the lights on. He went into the kitchen, opened the liquor cupboard, and stood for a moment contemplating the Wild Turkey.

  For a moment he savored the image of himself sitting there putting down the bourbon, wounded, alone, aloof and mysterious. When Mavis came back he could roll his lip back over his upper teeth like Bogart in Casablanca and say, "I saved my first drink to have with you."

  No good. He was no Bogart. He was not a solitary drinker, and he was not a misery drinker. Kettering admitted to plenty of faults, but careless use of booze was not one of them.

  He closed the liquor cupboard and walked into the den. There he sagged wearily into the old recliner. It creaked and settled in the familiar way, but this time the chair failed to deliver the old reassurance.

  Kettering grabbed the remote-control unit and punched on the television set. He found a rerun of the old Three's Company sitcom, muted the sound, and sat watching Suzanne Somers's breasts while he thought back over the years that had brought him to this melancholy place.

  In almost twenty years of marriage he could summon up only a handful of vivid memories.

  There was his first sight of Mavis in the city hall of Columbus, Ohio. It was in the cafeteria. Mavis was carrying her lunch on a tray, and she looked so pretty and so vulnerable that Brian's heart lurched in his chest.

  She was a secretary in the district attorney's office and he was a rookie policeman. He was fresh out of Ohio State, feeling like a real hotshot with his brand-new police science degree and his shiny new badge and pistol. He had plans for his future that did not include immediate marriage. Such plans, he soon learned, had a way of going awry.

  He made it a point to arrange a casual meeting. She was seated behind her IBM Selectric when he walked in with some excuse to see the D.A. They made small talk. The earth did not move. His knees did not shake. But he could not get her out of his mind. His thoughts, if not poetically romantic, were at least to the point: a great-looking chick. I wonder if she can be had.

  It turned out she could, but not without a promise of marriage. To Brian's surprise, he found himself delivering such a promise on their fifth date.

  Another surprise was the birth of their first and, as it turned out, only child. Kettering was just beginning to attract attention in the department, they were living fairly comfortably on their combined salaries. Unlike Mavis, who craved motherhood, Kettering was in no hurry to add to his responsibilities a small, loud, damp, demanding stranger. Mavis was supposed to be on the pill, but she "forgot" a time or two, and what do you know, it was too late. Hello baby, good-bye romance.

  Kettering rubbed his eyes, thinking back. What else was there? Good things to remember. A few trips together that were enjoyable: Yellowstone, British Columbia, the Grand Canyon, and once back to Columbus to watch the Buckeyes crush Purdue for Homecoming. Add scattered moments of shared joy or sorrow: his winning the job with the West Valley Police Department, and the move to California, promotion to Sergeant, the death of Mavis's father.

  How few the memories were. How little they all meant now. Like photos in an album of people you barely remembered.

  He was in a remembering mood, but thinking about his marriage only depressed him. Kettering sank deeper into the recliner and put his thoughts on rewind, all the way back to Prescott, Indiana, and the childhood that shaped the man he was ...

  ***

  After the death of the Reverend Kettering, Brian's mother had showed unsuspected strength as she gathered her children about her and went to work rebuilding their lives. The house was paid for, so they continued to live in it, though Brian never again felt really comfortable there.

  His mother used the reverend's life-insurance money to open a card and book shop in the small downtown business section. Brian and Jessie helped out in the shop after school, and it soon began to show a profit. There was never any extra money in the Kettering family, but none of them went hungry.

  The children discovered that they were treated differently after the death of their father. Although officially it was called natural causes, an aura of something strange clung to the tragedy. Brian's vagueness about what he had seen was viewed with some suspicion by his friends.

  He no longer talked to anybody about the day of the picnic. He tried not to think about it, but sometimes in the dark of night he would stare up at the ceiling and the unwanted thoughts would come into his head. His father's voice. The angry, ugly words. The other, not-quite-human voice. The blurry scene through his front window that made no sense. And, oddly, the pizza wagon parked where it had no business being.

  At first he had tried talking to people about the little he did remember. His mother was too distracted to listen. Jessie had never paid attention to her little brother and was not about to start now. His friends thought it was all a game, something he was making up. He was known as an imaginative boy. Before long Brian could see it wasn't doing him any good to talk about it. He saw the knowing glances that bounced back and forth when he entered a room. It's the Kettering kid. He's been a little weird ever since his father died. Still, reality, imagination, weirdness, whatever it was, the day of the picnic continued to haunt his dreams.

  As for Jessica, she seemed even more tainted by the sudden, unexplained death of her father than was Brian. Girls who had been her close friends offered the expected sympathy right after it happened, then dropped her like a hot rock.

  The whole family felt the stigma. Irrational though it was, people treated them as though the Reverend Harlan Kettering had died during the commission of some heinous crime. Everybody was polite enough to the family, but kept them at a distance. Because it was he who had seen the death, even though hazily, and reported it, Brian felt that he was responsible.

  ***

  Kettering started forward, cranking the recliner to the upright position. He saw that the muted Suzanne Somers and her breasts were gone from the screen, replaced by a lovable, blow-dried family who mouthed silent wisecracks at each other. He thumbed the television screen to darkness and wandered out to the kitchen to see what was available to eat.

  Chapter 7

  Except for the liquor cupboard and the tool drawer, the kitchen was unfamiliar territory to Kettering. It was Mavis's domain. It was she who decided where things ought to go, and she saw to it that they stayed where they belonged. This arrangement got no opposition from Kettering, who had never been comfortable around kitchen utensils and uncooked groceries.

  Now he was hungry, and no one was there to provide him with something to eat. He rummaged around on the shelves until he found a can of vegetable soup.

  "I ought to be able to manage this," he muttered to the empty house.

  It took another five minutes to locate a can opener. He handled that task without cutting himself, poured the contents into a pot, and added a can of water as instructed on the soup-can label. He set it on the gas range and turned up the burner.

  "Nothing so tough about cooking," he said, then went out and forgot about it until he smelled scorched aluminum.

  "Shit!" he said, burning his hand on the pot as he hustled the smoking mess from the stove to the sink. He ran the cold water and let the pot sit there with the gummy mess soaking in the bottom. What the hell, he decided, he wasn't all that hungry anyway.

  Kettering turned away from the sink and walked to the liquor cupboard. There were t
imes, he reflected, when even a dedicated nonabuser of alcohol had to adjust to extraordinary circumstances. He poured himself a generous shot of bourbon, dropped in ice cubes, and wandered off through his house with the drink in his hand.

  He should be feeling more deeply the imminent breakup of his marriage, Kettering thought, and the dissolution of his home. There should be pain. Guilt. Regret. But he felt strangely numb.

  He wandered around touching the furniture, trying to remember when the different pieces were bought, trying to feel some emotion about them. No good. All he felt was that he did not like most of the stuff to begin with, and only agreed to buy it because Mavis wanted it. Aside from his taped-up old reclining chair, there was not a stick here that he felt was really his. Nothing he would miss if he never saw it again.

  He carried the drink to the back of the house and into their bedroom. The bed was neatly made, as always, and cold looking. On Mavis's dressing table everything was arranged with geometric precision. In contrast, the top of the bureau that held his clothes was littered with the jetsam of a man's pockets. Coins, matchbooks, receipts, paper clips, business cards, crumpled scraps of paper. Mavis had long ago given up on keeping that area uncluttered.

  He walked back out and down the short hallway to Trevor's room. It was here that a sense of loss and loneliness finally hit him.

  His son's room was not at all like Brian's when he was a boy. There, in the upstairs bedroom of the solid brick house, he had had model airplanes, pictures of baseball players - mostly Chicago Cubs - sports equipment, comic books, assorted toys and games. Trevor's room reflected another generation. There was the elaborate stereo system, of course, with the newly added compact-disk player. Records, tapes, and CDs lay everywhere. They were recorded by groups with names like Twisted Sister, Maniac, The Grateful Dead, X. Wild, pounding music that disgusted the father but must have said something to the son.

  When he was a boy, Kettering had never been much interested in music. Had his father lived, he probably would have encouraged his children to listen to Pat Boone. And like the rest of the nation's youth, young Brian would probably have opted for Elvis.

  The sounds he liked to listen to now were the big swing bands, led by men now dead. When Brian was born at the end of World War II, the big bands were already on their way out. The singers and small combos were crowding them off the record racks, shortly to be followed by early rock 'n' roll.

  Although he was not personally around for the heyday of Benny Goodman, Harry James, the Dorsey brothers, and the rest, Kettering felt a kinship with their music. Straight, clean chords. Uncomplicated rhythms. Harmonic but exciting.

  Kettering sighed and looked around his son's room. Clothing was draped here and there without organization, but not really messy. There was a framed poster of a red-lacquered Corvette, another of a teenage television star looking determinedly sexy. There was a rubber monster mask from last halloween. A Day-Glo orange skateboard. A video game that had never worked properly. A Sony Walkman.

  Almost nothing here that Brian Kettering could relate to. And yet he felt there was something of himself in this room. Something of him in his son that neither the man nor the boy had been able to bring out. If they ever did, he wondered if they would recognize it. Or admit it.

  Trevor's closet contained far more clothes than his father's had ever had. Peer pressure, even on boys, seemed to dictate an entirely new wardrobe every year. If your jeans or your running shoes were last season's brand, your social life was in the toilet.

  There were a few books. John D. MacDonald, Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King. There might still be hope for the kid. At least he could read.

  So Trevor wasn't the perfect son. Kettering sure as hell was no Ward Cleaver as a father. He hadn't wanted the kid in the first place, and during the infant years, he had stayed away from home on the slightest excuse and let Mavis do the dirty work. Small wonder that when he did start to take an honest interest in his son, the boy wanted no part of him. Was there still time, he wondered, or was it already too late?

  He considered for a moment giving the room a thorough shakedown. He knew all the hiding places where a kid would stash his dope paraphernalia. No, he decided, Mavis was right about that. You had to stop being a cop somewhere.

  Kettering left the boy's room and carefully closed the door. He returned to the kitchen and refilled the glass, which had somehow been drained on his stroll through the house.

  The emptiness of the place closed around him like a fog bank. He went back to the patched old recliner. The chair received him like a longtime friend.

  Kettering settled back, sipped the bourbon, and closed his eyes. Was it possible to think of nothing? Make your mind a void? He tried it. Think blackness. Think silence. Think ...

  The blast of cold hit him in the face like the icy wind of an Indiana winter. Kettering sat up fast, his eyes snapping open. The cubes rattled against the glass in his hand. What the hell?!

  His left leg began to quiver. He looked down at it and it began to shake, the foot bouncing up and down in a crazy hopping dance. It was like the thing didn't even belong to him. Kettering dropped the whiskey glass and grasped his thigh with both hands. He strained, his fingers sinking into the quadriceps muscle, but he could not keep the limb still. A hoarse voice shouted, echoing through the empty house. It took him a moment to recognize it as his own.

  Abruptly as the jerking had started, it stopped. The leg rested inert, quiet. Gradually, cautiously, he relaxed the grip of his fingers. He could feel the bruises they left on the thigh.

  What the fuck is happening to me? Damn good thing Doc Protius hadn't seen that, he thought. He'd have me on medical leave before I could hiccup.

  He was sweating? Sweating? A minute ago it felt like an arctic blast was blowing through his house. Kettering looked down at the spilled glass of bourbon. Booze had never hit him like that. Anyway, he had barely tasted it. A dream? Something like that. It had to be. Stress. Good old stress, this season's answer for what's wrong with you if you don't have a clue.

  He sat back and took half a dozen long, slow, deep breaths. Okay, he was in control again. Nothing to worry about. Nothing really happened.

  Except that his right thigh ached like hell, and he knew that when he dropped his pants tonight there would be blue-black bruises where he had gripped it.

  Chapter 8

  Kettering picked up the fallen glass. He rubbed the gooseflesh down on his arm. The temperature in the room was back to normal. Had it really chilled, or was it his overwrought imagination? Like hell! It had got inexplicably cold in here and his leg had started to jump. The causes he could worry about later; it was enough now to know it really happened.

  He carried the empty glass over to the mantle. There he set it down next to the family picture taken when Trevor was six years old and the three of them had driven to Yosemite on his vacation. That would have been what, ten years ago? Eleven? Were they really a family then? Kettering studied the smiling faces in the photograph and tried to remember.

  Mavis wore her hair longer then. She had on shorts and a loose cotton top. She smiled big into the camera. Trevor, uncomfortable in a stiff new pair of jeans, looked as though he badly wanted to be doing something else. Kettering himself wore an unconvincing grin as he squinted into the sun.

  He could not remember who took the photograph. One of the park rangers, he thought. Kettering sent his mind back through time to recapture the emotions of ten or eleven years ago when he stood with his wife and son posing for the thirty-five-millimeter camera. With some surprise, he realized that his feelings when that long-ago shutter snapped were not all that different from what he felt today. Despite the affectionate hand on Mavis's waist, he had been thinking just then about a persistent pain in his back and how it would affect his upcoming annual physical. The pain turned out to be a small kidney stone that later flushed out naturally, but worrying about it had put a chill on the entire vacation.

  Mavis had wanted to go that year
to Hawaii or Acapulco or somewhere exotic where they had resort hotels and swimming pools and fruity rum drinks with little parasols in them. Kettering had explained the hard financial reasons for choosing Yosemite, but she had never warmed up to the idea. As for Trevor, all he cared about was how soon they would get back home so he could return to his TV cartoons.

  Kettering replaced the eleven-year-old photograph and took a critical look at the face in the mirror, matching it to his younger self. He was a little heavier in the jowl, the hair had a peppering of gray, but was still thick. In the eyes he saw a wisdom and a sadness that had not been there before. He looked down beside his reflection to the glass with the droplets of Wild Turkey clinging to the sides.

  "What the hell are you doing?" he asked himself. "Here you sit drinking alone, getting cold flashes and the shivers, wondering where everything went, while your marriage crashes around your ears."

  For almost nineteen years he had been a married man. Not what you'd call nineteen years of bliss, but that many years of anything shouldn't be tossed away like an empty beer can.

  Impulsively, Kettering carried the whiskey glass into the kitchen and set it in She sink. He spooned coffee into the Mr. Coffee filter, added water to the machine, and went to take a shower while it brewed.

  While he soaped his body in the shower, the memory of Charity Moline slipped in with him. Damned if he wasn't getting a hard-on thinking about her. He had a crazy impulse to walk out stark naked and dripping wet and call her. He swallowed the urge and forced his mind back to his resolve to do something about his collapsing marriage. His hard-on wilted.

  Kettering dressed in a soft shirt, slacks, and the gray suede Hush Puppies he hardly ever wore. They felt good on his feet, but if he had to kick in a door or mash somebody's shinbone, they couldn't match good reinforced leather. Back in the kitchen he poured a cup of fresh coffee and sat down to work out what he would say to Mavis when she came home.