‘No. Not yet.’ His eyes shifted to Sam. ‘Bend down. I need to whisper.’
Sam bent over the old man. Dave put a trembling hand on the back of his neck. His lips tickled the cup of Sam’s ear and Sam had to force himself to hold steady -it tickled. ‘Sam,’ he whispered. ‘She waits.
Remember … she waits.’
‘What?’ Sam asked. He felt almost totally unstrung. ‘Dave, what do you mean?’
But Dave’s hand had fallen away. He stared up at Sam, through Sam, his chest rising shallowly and rapidly.
‘I’m going,’ Naomi said, clearly upset. ‘There’s a telephone down there on the cataloguing desk.’
‘No,’ Sam said.
She turned toward him, eyes glaring, mouth pulled back from neat white teeth in a fury. ‘What do you mean, no? Are you crazy? His skull is fractured, at the very least! He’s -‘
‘He’s going, Sarah,’ Sam said gently. ‘Very soon. Stay with him. Be his friend.’
She looked down, and this time she saw what Sam had seen. The pupil of Dave’s left eye had drawn down to a pinpoint; the pupil of his right was huge and fixed.
‘Dave?’ she whispered, frightened. ‘Dave?’
But Dave was looking at Sam again. ‘Remember,’ he whispered. ‘She W … ‘
His eyes grew still and fixed. His chest rose once more … dropped … and did not rise again.
Naomi began to sob. She put his hand against her cheek and closed his eyes. Sam knelt down painfully and put his arm around her waist.
CHAPTER 15
Angle Street (III)
1
That night and the next were sleepless ones for Sam Peebles. He lay awake in his bed, all the second-floor lights turned on, and thought about Dave Duncan’s last words: She waits.
Toward dawn of the second night, he began to believe he understood what the old man had been trying to say.
2
Sam thought that Dave would be buried out of the Baptist Church in Proverbia, and was a little surprised to find that he had converted to Catholicism at some point between 1960 and 1990. The services were held at St Martin’s on April 11th, a blustery day that alternated between clouds and cold early-spring sunshine.
Following the graveside service, there was a reception at Angle Street. There were almost seventy people there, wandering through the downstairs rooms or clustered in little groups, by the time Sam arrived. They had all known Dave, and spoke of him with humor, respect, and unfailing love. They drank ginger ale from Styrofoam cups and ate small finger sandwiches. Sam moved from group to group, passing a word with someone he knew from time to time but not stopping to chat. He rarely took his hand from the pocket of his dark coat. He had made a stop at the Piggly Wiggly store on his way from the church, and now there were half a dozen cellophane packages in there, four of them long and thin, two of them rectangular.
Sarah was not here.
He was about to leave when he spotted Lukey and Rudolph sitting together in a corner. There was a cribbage board between them, but they didn’t seem to be playing.
‘Hello, you guys,’ Sam said, walking over. ‘I guess you probably don’t remember me -‘
‘Sure we do,’ Rudolph said. ‘Whatcha think we are? Coupla feebs? You’re Dave’s friend. You came over the day we was making the posters.’
‘Right!’ Lukey said.
‘Did you find those books you were lookin for?’ Rudolph asked.
‘Yes,’ Sam said, smiling. ‘I did, eventually.’
‘Right!’ Lukey exclaimed.
Sam brought out the four slender cellophane packages. ‘I brought you guys something,’ he said.
Lukey glanced down, and his eyes lit up. ‘Slim Jims, Dolph!’ he said, grinning delightedly. ‘Look! Sarah’s boyfriend brought us all fuckin Slim Jims! Beautiful!’
‘Here, gimme those, you old rummy,’ Rudolph said, and snatched them. ‘Fuckhead’d eat em all at once and then shit the bed tonight, you know,’ he told Sam. He stripped one of the Slim Jims and gave it to Lukey.
‘Here you go, dinkweed. I’ll hang onto the rest of em for you.’
‘You can have one, Dolph. Go ahead.’
‘You know better, Lukey. Those things burn me at both ends.’
Sam ignored this byplay. He was looking hard at Lukey. ‘Sarah’s boyfriend? Where did you hear that?’
Lukey snatched down half a Slim Jim in one bite, then looked up. His expression was both good-humored and sly. He laid a finger against the side of his nose and said, ‘Word gets around when you’re in the Program, Sunny Jim. Oh yes indeed, it do.’
‘He don’t know nothing, mister,’ Rudolph said, draining his cup of ginger ale. ‘He’s just beating his gums cause he likes the sound.’
‘That ain’t nothin but bullshit!’ Lukey cried, taking another giant bite of Slim Jim. ‘I know because Dave told me! Last night! I had a dream, and Dave was in it, and he told me this fella was Sarah’s sweetie!’
‘Where is Sarah?’ Sam asked. ‘I thought she’d be here.’
‘She spoke to me after the benediction,’ Rudolph said. ‘Told me you’d know where to find her later on, if you wanted to see her. She said you’d seen her there once already.’
‘She liked Dave awful much,’ Lukey said. A sudden tear grew on the rim of one eye and spilled down his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. ‘We all did. Dave always tried so goddam hard. It’s too bad, you know. It’s really too bad.’ And Lukey suddenly burst into tears.
‘Well, let me tell you something,’ Sam said. He hunkered beside Lukey and handed him his handkerchief.
He was near tears himself, and terrified by what he now had to do … or try to do. ‘He made it in the end. He died sober. Whatever talk you hear, you hold onto that, because I know it’s true. He died sober.’
‘Amen,’ Rudolph said reverently.
‘Amen,’ Lukey agreed. He handed Sam his handkerchief. ‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it, Lukey.’
‘Say – you don’t have any more of those fuckin Slim Jims, do you?’
‘Nope,’ Sam said, and smiled. ‘You know what they say, Lukey – one’s too many and a thousand are never enough.’
Rudolph laughed. Lukey smiled … and then laid the tip of his finger against the side of his nose again.
‘How about a quarter … wouldn’t have an extra quarter, wouldja?’
3
Sam’s first thought was that she might have gone back to the Library, but that didn’t fit with what Dolph had said – he had been at the Library with Sarah once, on the terrible night that already seemed a decade ago, but they had been there together; he hadn’t ‘seen’ her there, the way you saw someone through a window, or
Then he remembered when he had seen Sarah through a window, right here at Angle Street. She had been part of the group out on the back lawn, doing whatever it was they did to keep themselves sober. He now walked through the kitchen as he had done on that day, saying hello to a few more people. Burt Iverson and Elmer Baskin stood in one of the little groups, drinking ice-cream punch as they listened gravely to an elderly woman Sam didn’t know.
He stepped through the kitchen door and out onto the rear porch. The day had turned gray and blustery again. The back yard was deserted, but Sam thought he saw a flash of pastel color beyond the bushes that marked the yard’s rear boundary.
He walked down the steps and crossed the back lawn, aware that his heart had begun to thud very hard again. His hand stole back into his pocket, and this time came out with the remaining two cellophane packages. They contained Bull’s Eye Red Licorice. He tore them open and began to knead them into a ball, much smaller than the one he’d made in the Datsun on Monday night. The sweet, sugary smell was just as sickening as ever. In the distance he could hear a train coming, and it made him think of his dream – the one where Naomi had turned into Ardelia.
Too late, Sam. It’s already too late. The deed is done.
She waits. Remember, Sam – she waits.
There was a lot of truth in dreams, sometimes.
How had she survived the years between? All the years between? They had never asked themselves that question, had they? How did she make the transition from one person to another? They had never asked that one, either. Perhaps the thing which looked like a woman named Ardelia Lortz was, beneath its glamours and illusions, like one of those larvae that spin their cocoons in the fork of a tree, cover them with Protective webbing, and then fly away to their place of dying. The larvae in the cocoons lie silent, waiting
… changing …
She waits. .
Sam walked on, still kneading his smelly little ball made of that stuff the Library Policeman – his Library Policeman – had stolen and turned into the stuff of nightmares. The stuff he had somehow changed again, with the help of Naomi and Dave, into the stuff of salvation.