She’s still choking. Her skin is turning slate.
Fred grabs her by her upper arms and pulls her up. She comes easily, but when he relaxes his hold her knees bend and she starts to go back down. She’s turned into Raggedy Ann. The choking sound continues. Her sausage throat—
“Help me, Judy! Help me, you bitch!”
Unaware of what he is saying. He yanks her hard—as hard as he yanked the fishing pole in his dream—and spins her around like a ballerina when she comes up on her toes. Then he seizes her in a bear hug, his wrists brushing the undersides of her breasts, her bottom tight against his crotch, the kind of position he would find extremely sexy if his wife didn’t happen to be choking to death.
He pops his thumb up between her breasts like a hitchhiker, then says the magic word as he pulls sharply upward and backward. The magic word is Heimlich, and it works. Two more wads of paper fly from Judy’s mouth, propelled by a jet of vomit that is little more than bile—her intake of food over the last twelve hours amounts to three cups of coffee and a cranberry muffin.
She gives a gasp, coughs twice, then begins to breathe more or less normally.
He puts her on the bed . . . drops her on the bed. His lower back is spasming wildly, and it’s really no wonder; first Ty’s dresser, now this.
“Well, what did you think you were doing?” he asks her loudly. “What in the name of Christ did you think you were doing?”
He realizes that he has raised one hand over Judy’s upturned face as if to strike her. Part of him wants to strike her. He loves her, but at this moment he also hates her. He has imagined plenty of bad things over the years they’ve been married—Judy getting cancer, Judy paralyzed in an accident, Judy first taking a lover and then demanding a divorce—but he has never imagined Judy going chickenshit on him, and isn’t that what this amounts to?
“What did you think you were doing?”
She looks at him without fear . . . but without anything else, either. Her eyes are dead. Her husband lowers his hand, thinking: I’d cut it off before I hit you. I might be pissed at you, I am pissed at you, but I’d cut it off before I did that.
Judy rolls over, face-down on the coverlet, her hair spread around her head in a corona.
“Judy?”
Nothing. She just lies there.
Fred looks at her for a moment, then uncrumples one of the slimy balls of paper with which she has tried to strangle herself. It is covered with tangles of scribbled words. Gorg, abbalah, eeleelee, munshun, bas, lum, opopanax: these mean nothing to him. Others—drudge, asswipe, black, red, Chicago, and Ty—are actual words but have no context. Printed up one side of the sheet is IF YOU’VE GOT PRINCE ALBERT IN A CAN, HOW CAN YOU EVER GET HIM OUT ? Up the other, like a teletype stuck in repeat mode, is this: BLACK HOUSE CRIMSON KING BLACK HOUSE CRIMSON KING BLACK
If you waste time looking for sense in this, you’re as crazy as she is, Fred thinks. You can’t waste time—
Time.
He looks at the clock on his side of the bed and cannot believe its news: 4:17 P.M. Is that possible? He looks at his watch and sees that it is.
Knowing it’s foolish, knowing he would have heard his son come in even if in a deep sleep, Fred strides to the door on big nerveless legs. “Ty!” he yells. “Hey, Ty! TYLER!”
Waiting for an answer that will not come, Fred realizes that everything in his life has changed, quite possibly forever. People tell you this can happen—in the blink of an eye, they say, before you know it, they say—but you don’t believe it. Then a wind comes.
Go down to Ty’s room? Check? Be sure?
Ty isn’t there—Fred knows this—but he does it just the same. The room is empty, as he knew it would be. And it looks oddly distorted, almost sinister, with the dresser now on the other side.
Judy. You left her alone, you idiot. She’ll be chewing paper again by now, they’re clever, mad people are clever—
Fred dashes back down to the master bedroom and exhales a sigh of relief when he sees Judy lying just as he left her, face-down, hair spread around her head. He discovers that his worries about his mad wife are now secondary to his worries about his missing son.
He’ll be home by four, at the latest . . . take it to the bank. So he had thought. But four has come and gone. A strong wind has arisen and blown the bank away. Fred walks to his side of the bed and sits down beside his wife’s splayed right leg. He picks up the phone and punches in a number. It’s an easy number, only three digits.
“Yell-o, Police Department, Officer Dulac speaking, you’ve dialed 911, do you have an emergency?”
“Officer Dulac, this is Fred Marshall. I’d like to speak to Dale, if he’s still there.” Fred is pretty sure Dale is. He works late most nights, especially since—
He pushes the rest away, but inside his head the wind blows harder. Louder.
“Gee, Mr. Marshall, he’s here, but he’s in a meeting and I don’t think I can—”
“Get him.”
“Mr. Marshall, you’re not hearing me. He’s in with two guys from the WSP and one from the FBI. If you could just tell me—”
Fred closes his eyes. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Something interesting here. He called in on the 911 line, but the idiot on the other end seems to have forgotten that. Why? Because it’s someone he knows. It’s good old Fred Marshall, bought a Deere lawn tractor from him just the year before last. Must have dialed 911 because it was easier than looking up the regular number. Because no one Bobby knows can actually have an emergency.
Fred remembers having a similar idea himself that morning—a different Fred Marshall, one who believed that the Fisherman could never touch his son. Not his son.
Ty’s gone. Gorg fascinated him and the abbalah took him.
“Hello? Mr. Marshall? Fred? Are you still—”
“Listen to me,” Fred says, his eyes still closed. Down at Goltz’s, he would be calling the man on the other end Bobby by now, but Goltz’s has never seemed so far away; Goltz’s is in the star-system Opopanax, on Planet Abbalah. “Listen to me carefully. Write it down if you have to. My wife has gone mad and my son is missing. Do you understand those things? Wife mad. Son missing. Now put me through to the chief!”
But Bobby Dulac doesn’t, not right away. He has made a deduction. A more diplomatic police officer (Jack Sawyer as he was in his salad days, for instance) would have kept said deduction to himself, but Bobby can’t do that. Bobby has hooked a big one.
“Mr. Marshall? Fred? Your son doesn’t own a Schwinn, does he? Three-speed Schwinn, red? Got a novelty license plate that reads . . . uh . . . BIG MAC?”
Fred cannot answer. For several long and terrible moments he cannot even draw a breath. Between his ears, the wind blows both louder and harder. Now it’s a hurricane.
Gorg fascinated him . . . the abbalah took him.
At last, just when it seems he will begin to strangle himself, his chest unlocks and he takes in a huge, tearing breath. “PUT CHIEF GILBERTSON ON! DO IT NOW, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”
Although he shrieks this at the top of his lungs, the woman lying face-down on the coverlet beside him never moves. There is a click. He’s on hold. Not for long, but it’s long enough for him to see the scratched, bald place on his missing son’s bedroom wall, the swelled column of his mad wife’s throat, and blood dribbling through the creel in his dream. His back spasms cruelly, and Fred welcomes the pain. It’s like getting a telegram from the real world.
Then Dale is on the phone, Dale is asking him what’s wrong, and Fred Marshall begins to cry.
7
GOD MAY KNOW where Henry Leyden found that astounding suit, but we certainly do not. A costume shop? No, it is too elegant to be a costume; this is the real thing, not an imitation. But what sort of real thing is it? The wide lapels sweep down to an inch below the waist, and the twin flaps of the swallowtail reach nearly to the ankles of the billowing, pleated trousers, which seem, beneath the snowfield expanse of the double-breasted waistcoat, to ride nearly at the level of the sternum. On Henry’s feet, white, high-button spats adorn white patent-leather shoes; about his neck, a stiff, high collar turns its pointed peaks over a wide, flowing, white satin bow tie, perfectly knotted. The total effect is of old-fashioned diplomatic finery harmoniously wedded to a zoot suit: the raffishness of the ensemble outweighs its formality, but the dignity of the swallowtail and the waistcoat contribute to the whole a regal quality of a specific kind, the regality often seen in African American entertainers and musicians.