He realized that Nathan was talking. What was he saying? Something about realizing that he wasn’t their father. He tried to listen, but he couldn’t; he felt too woozy and tired to listen. So he sat staring down at the foot of the bed, while Nathan talked.
If I could just get back, he thought. Please. Nothing else. Just back. With my Elsie. Driving my pick-up truck. Doing the shopping, laying pipe for the ducks’ water trough — anything. Scrubbing the bathtubs and sinks and toilets, carrying out the garbage… 1 don’t give a good god damn what it is. Please.
Fuck it all, he thought. It’s all gone. I’ll never get back; I know that. I’ll never see that house again, never in a million years. And this other guy, this snot-nose, will walk in and take it all, and have it the rest of his life.
I ought to kill them all, he thought. Her and him, and that warped creep of a brother, him and his lurid pulp story that he whipped together to get sadistic pleasure out of reading to me. That nut. A family of nuts. A world of them. Like the flying saucer nuts over in Inverness Park. The pack of them at work as a team, like the Eisenhower-Dulles team.
God damn it, he thought, I will get back there, and when I do I’ll get them. Even if! don’t get back there– I’ll still get them. I’ll get them anyhow.
“Listen,” he said. “You know who I am? I’m the one person in the world –the only one– who can save you from that fucking woman. Isn’t that right? You know it. Right? Right?”
Nathan said nothing.
“Nobody else can do it,” Charley said. “You can’t, your wife can’t, Doctor Sebastian that old fuddy minister can’t, her nutty brother can’t, the Fineburgs can’t — nobody in Marin County or Contra Costa County or Sonoma County can except me, because it would take killing her, and by god you know I’ll do that. So you better pray for me; you better go home and sit in your parlor and watch tv and wait and pray for me to get home and live long enough, because you’re the one who’s going to benefit; you’ll benefit and nobody else will. And ten years from now –hell, ten days!– you’ll be so god damn glad. You really will be. And something in your mind tells you that. It’s your subconscious. So go home. Don’t mix in where it doesn’t concern you. When she phones you up, don’t answer the phone. When she drives up in front of your house and toots her horn, stay indoors. Ignore her. For one week.” He shouted the words. “One week, and you’ll be okay! And then you can go on and get your degree and become whatever it is you want to be — otherwise you know what’ll become of you?”
Nathan said nothing.
“I don’t have to tell you,” Charley said, and in him it was the greatest sense of triumph and joy that he had felt in all this, in everything that had happened. It was almost a mystical sense. He did not have to say, because the expression on Nathan’s face showed that he already knew. “Do you know what that means?” Charley yelled at him. “That means I was right. If I wasn’t right, you wouldn’t know. It’s not in my mind. It’s the truth. We both know it. We know about her, both of us, you and me. So that proves it; it’s true. Right?”
Nathan said nothing.
For the first time, Charley thought. I can see it clearly and know she really is that way; it isn’t in my mind. She really is a grade A number one bitch, because I can read this boy’s face, and he can read mine, and it’s in both of us.
Thank god, he thought. I can know for sure.
“Right?” he repeated.
Nathan said, “I went into this recognizing her defects. When I first met her I wasn’t pleased by her. I saw all these qualities.”
“In a pig’s ass,” Charley said. “You fell for her the moment you laid eyes on her.”
“No,” Nathan said, glancing up. And Charley saw that he had been mistaken. I lost him again, he thought. Damn it.
“So you had an inkling,” he said. But he had said the wrong thing, and he could not get it back. “It just shows that underneath you realize I’m right.”
Nathan said, “I’ll see you.” He opened the door, left the room, shut the door behind him.
After a time Charley thought, Maybe he’ll go through with it. Stick by her. The stupid son of a bitch.
I am sick, he thought. It’s true. What can I do if he decides to take me on? Before my heart attack I could have handled him with one hand; I could have split his skull. But now I’m too weak. In fact between the two of them, with her keen mind, her alertness, and his physical attributes, they’ll have me. Between them they’re a match for me, the way I am now. The jerks.
The trouble with me, he thought, is I’m a stupid man. I can’t talk good enough, not like they can. I fucked it up.
(fifteen)
While in my bedroom sewing a rip in Elsie’s blue skirt I heard the doorbell and then Bing barking. I went on sewing, expecting Jack to go to the door, but finally I realized that he had shut himself up in his room and wasn’t hearing the doorbell, so I put down my sewing and hurried through the house to the door.
On the porch stood Maud Mayberry, from Inverness Park, a large florid woman whose husband works down at the mill near Olema. I knew her from the PTA.
“Come in,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you right away.”
We sat down at the dining room table and had coffee; I sewed on Elsie’s skirt while Mrs. Mayberry chatted about various events around north west Marin.
“Have you heard about the saucer group?” she said presently. “Claudia Hambro’s bunch?”
“Who cares about those nuts,” I said.
“They’re predicting the end of the world,” Mrs. Mayberry said.
At that I put down my sewing. “Well, I have to hand it to Claudia Hambro,” I said. “I take off my hat to her. Just when I get to thinking that my own life is a mess and I’m an idiot and can’t handle the simplest situation, then I hear about something like this. They’re psychotic; they really are. They ought to have medical attention.”
Mrs. Mayberry went on to tell me details. She had gotten them second hand, but she seemed to think they were accurate. In fact, they had come from the wife of the young minister living in Point Reyes Station. The saucer group evidently expected to be whisked away to outer space just before the calamity. It was the most far-out crap I have ever heard in my entire life; it really was.
“They ought to cart that Claudia Hambro away,” I said. “She’s spreading this contagion like the plague. Next thing, everybody in north west Marin County will be going up on Noren’s Acres and waiting for the saucer. I mean, this is going to get written up in the newspapers. This is what you read about. This happens once in a decade. I never thought it would happen with people I actually know. My good god — Claudia Hambro’s little girl was over here only the other day, with the Bluebirds. My good god.” I shook my head; it was really the end. And this was what my brother had gotten mixed up in.
“Your brother’s in the group, isn’t he?” Mrs. Mayberry said.
“Yes,” I said.
“But you’re far from sympathetic.”
I said, “My brother’s as nutty as the rest of them, and I don’t care who hears me say it. I just wish I hadn’t brought him up here. Hadn’t let Charley persuade me to bring him up here.”
Mrs. Mayberry said, “Do you know about the story your brother wrote for the group?”
“What story?” I said.
“Well, according to what Mrs. Baron said –that’s who I get it from– he did some automatic writing under hypnosis, or under the telepathic influence of their spiritual leader… who lives, as I understand it, down in San Anselmo. Anyhow, he brought this story to the group, and they’ve been reading it and passing it around, trying to get at the symbolistic meaning beneath it.”
“Christ,” I said, fascinated.
Mrs. Mayberry said, “I’m surprised you hadn’t heard about it. They had a couple of special meetings about it.”
“How would I hear about it?” I said. “When do I get out? My good god, I have to go down to S.F. three days a week, and now that my husband’s in the hospital –”