“Oh, Jake, I’m beat. Can’t we just go on in and pay no mind what she says to you?”
“I wouldn’t face that woman for nothing,” Jake said. “I’m scared to death of her.”
I thought that was funny. I started laughing, but stopped when he glared at me. “Why don’t you just shove a pistol in her ribs?” I said.
Oh, I was even tireder than I’d thought. Jake drew his head in sharply. Mindy said, “Pistol?”
“Lady’s crazy,” he told her. He had his arm along the back of the seat, and now he started stroking her shoulder like someone calming a cat. “Fact is, Oliver’s mom has always disliked me,” he said. “I believe she ties me up in her mind with things I never had no part in. Various misfortunes of Oliver’s. It wasn’t me put those bombs in no mailboxes, I didn’t even know him then. Didn’t know him till training school. But try and tell her that. She sees me, she thinks ‘Trouble’.”
“She’s not the only one,” Mindy said.
Their voices had taken on that clear, anonymous sound that comes at twilight. They might have been campers telling ghost stories, strollers talking under someone’s window, parents heard from far across a lawn.
“When the two of us got out of training school,” Jake said, “why, I would drop over to see him sometimes. He didn’t live all that much of a distance. He lived with his mom, who was a real estate lady. I would find him home reading, all he done was reading. We’d ride around, go out for a hamburger, you know how it is. I really had a good time with that Oliver. But only if his mom wasn’t there. His mom was so brisky and dry of voice. Never smiled unless she was saying something mean. Like she’d say, ‘Back so soon, Jack?’ She always called me Jack, which is definitely not my name. That can grate on a person. ‘Funny,’ she’d say, ‘I thought you were here just yesterday. No doubt I was mistaken.’ With this small sweet smile curling up her mouth while she was talking. I hate a woman to do that.”
“That’s how my mother did you,” said Mindy. “You just have this knack, I believe.” She told me, “My mother used to be so rude to him! Now she pretends he’s not alive and never will mention his name. I ask in my letters if she’s seen him and all she’ll answer back is how many inches of rain they’ve had. He could fall down dead and she wouldn’t tell me. To her he’s dead already.”
“Well, that explains it,” Jake said.
“What’s it explain?”
“Anyway,” said Jake, “you may laugh that I’d let Mrs. Jamison get to me but I couldn’t help it. I mean I just couldn’t help it. See, at the time my own mom was right disappointed in me too though nowhere near as mean, of course. She would just act pale and slumpy and bow her head real low over her sewing. Know how they do? I went to Oliver’s to get away from her, but met up then with Oliver’s mom. Seems I had been characterized as someone no-account. Seems I couldn’t shake other people’s picture of me.”
I gave a sudden sigh. Mindy crossed her ankles, and her dress stirred and whispered.
“Well, I run off,” said Jake. “I heard of this guy that would pay you for driving a car to California. I just wanted to get gone and so I left with no goodbyes. Not that I kept it a secret on purpose, but my mom happened to be visiting a lady down the street when I received word and what I thought was, ‘I’ve got to get free! Got to go, can’t stay here no more.’ Only they arrested me in California for running a stolen automobile. Well, I didn’t draw a sentence or nothing. It was all cleared up. But things were a little complicated on account of past troubles I’d had, and time I got home it was some months later and Oliver’d gone to Florida. I asked his neighbors. ‘Why, him and his mother packed up some weeks ago and moved to Perth, Florida, where it’s less crime she says and a better class of people, and the sun shines so steady there they give you your newspaper free on any day it rains.’ And sure enough, that Christmas and every Christmas after I would get a card from O.J., Florida-type, Santa Claus riding a surfboard, angels picking grapefruit. ‘Merry Christmas, Jake, I hope you’re well.’ And I would put some effort into answering, though let me tell you I’m not what you’d call a letter writer. Talk about all I was doing and all, spend quite some time on it. But the only thing he ever sent was those Christmas cards. Only Christmas cards. Made me feel like he was in jail, you know? Just that one card a year, maybe censored; surprised if she didn’t check my letters for hacksaws and razor blades. Well, I blame myself, really. I never should have left him with his mom like that. Why didn’t I drop around his house before I run, ask him to come on along? But I was just so anxious to get going, you see. Just so desperate to leave.”
We watched a stream of cars flow past us, colorless in the twilight, packed with wan, exhausted faces straining southward.
“The trouble is,” said Jake, “when people are thinking ill of you you just have this urge to get out, you know? You say, now if I could just gather myself together again. If I could just start my life over somehow.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“I really believe,” he told me, “that any time you see someone running, it’s their old, faulty self they’re running from. Or other people’s notion of their faulty self. But I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Then he stood up, took a few steps onto the grass, and leaned toward the door of the office. “She’s gone,” he said.
“Who’s there now?” Mindy asked.
“Nobody, looks like.”
He stood waiting, with his back to us. Mindy set her skirt out all around her. “Notice he hasn’t even mentioned supper,” she told me. “Thoughtless? And I got low blood sugar.”
“Hot dog! Here comes some other guy,” said Jake. “We can ask him. Let’s go, ladies.”
We rose disjointedly and followed him. Up the walk, up the steps, across the creaky porch. Through the orange glow of the overhead light—bugproof, supposedly, but that didn’t stop a whole herd of brown moths from puttering about near my hair.
Though it wasn’t fully dark outside yet, we had to blink when we stepped in the door. Yellow lamps lit the room, glaring off the cracked linoleum. Behind a counter cluttered with ashtrays, magazines, and sightseeing brochures, a lanky, sand-colored man with floppy blond hair stood rubber-stamping envelopes. He didn’t look up when we came in. He kept his head bent, his bony hand pacing steadily between envelopes and stamp pad as if he took real pleasure in the rhythm. “Be with you in a minute,” was all he said, in a deep, cracked voice that seemed younger than he did.
“Well, I’m hunting Oliver Jamison,” said Jake. “You know him?”
Then the man stopped working and looked up. His eyes were not so much blue as transparent, but they darkened while I watched. “Why, Jake,” he said.
“Huh?”
“You don’t recognize me.”
“Oliver?”
Neither of them seemed happy to meet. Jake had a stunned, uncertain expression; Oliver looked concerned. He said, “You shouldn’t be around here, Jake.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t you know the cops are hunting you?”
Mindy clapped a hand to her mouth. From somewhere to the rear, a woman called, “Who is it, Ollie?”
“No one, Ma.”
He set down his stamp and came around the counter. “Let’s go outdoors,” he told us. Up close I saw the white squint lines breaking up his tan, I smelled the clean smell of his pale plaid shirt. He was one of those ambling, gentle-faced men who never act startled. He seemed like somebody I might know. Or maybe it was this place we were in—clearly a home, in spite of the counter, with a tangle of baby-blue knitting abandoned in an armchair. I felt suddenly disoriented. I stumbled after him, nudged by Jake, out the door and down the porch steps, deep enough into the yard so that we could be hidden by twilight. Then we stopped. Mindy reached out and touched one finger to Oliver’s forearm. “Why would they be after him?” she asked. “Is it on account of me? He hasn’t done wrong.”
“Is that true?” Oliver said. He turned to Jake. “They c
ame by yesterday. They got my name from your address book. It was the only one in there besides the liquor store, they said, and so they tracked me down, wondered if I’d seen you. I said no. And Ma did too, of course, and Claire had no idea who they meant.”
“Who’s Claire?” Jake asked.
“My wife.”
“Wife?”
“They told me you had pulled this crazy … but you didn’t, did you?”
“Well, I don’t know. Sort of,” said Jake. He jammed his hands in his pockets and gazed off across the street.
“But … I mean, it doesn’t sound logical. Had something gone wrong? What would make you hit that fool bank for that piddling amount? And hostage! Taking a … and now who’ve you got? Who’s a hostage here and who isn’t?” he asked.
Mindy said, “Hostage?”
He focused on me. “Lord, Jake,” he said.
I felt that I was shriveling up.
“But Oliver,” said Jake, “just let me tell you. This wasn’t nothing I planned, you know. Seems like things just worked out this way. I’m a victim of impulse, right? Look, now, you’re the one last hope I have. You’re the last way open to me. Oliver? O.J.? Can’t you just give us a room to stay the night in? Sit down with me and figure some way out of this, Oliver. I’m just not up to handling things on my own right now. It’s all started getting muddled.”
“I’m sorry,” Oliver said. “I’d like to help. But Ma would call the police, you know she would. It’s not her fault; she’s old and she’s scared and she still isn’t over that mailbox business. And Claire, well, she’s having a difficult pregnancy and I don’t want her getting upset. You see my position?”
“Yeah, well. Sure,” Jake said.
“Jake, maybe you ought to turn yourself in.”
We were very quiet. A woman’s voice sailed out across the lawn. “Ollie?”
Jake said, “Your mama’s calling.”
“Think about it, Jake.”
“Why don’t you just go,” said Jake. “Your mom will be out here in two minutes flat. Just go, why don’t you, tend to that little life of yours.”
“Jake, I’m twenty-six years old now,” said Oliver.
But he didn’t get any answer to that. He waited a while, looking toward Jake with some expression that I couldn’t make out in the dark. Then he said, “Well. So long, I guess,” and walked away. A minute later I heard the screen door shut—a summer evening sound that hung on and on. The three of us stood in the yard, empty-handed. We kept on looking at the rich gold rectangle of the door, even though there was nobody there.
Then Mindy said, “Well, I just don’t understand this thing in any manner whatsoever.”
“Hush up,” said Jake. “Let me think.”
He was rubbing his forehead, over and over. His profile was stark and jutting, like something hastily cut from black construction paper. Mindy tipped forward to look at him. “Please, Jake,” she said. “Will you please tell me what is going on?”
“Hush up, Mindy.”
“I’ve got a right to know.”
“Come on, let’s get in the car,” he said.
He started toward the street. I stayed where I was. Without saying anything, he came back and clamped my arm and led me forward. Mindy followed. She kept saying, “Jake?”
The car listed under a streetlight. I was used to squinting at it in the sun and saw, now, what I had missed before: in the course of our trip we had wrecked it pretty thoroughly. Its rear end was caved in, one tail-light hollow, front bumper gone, and there were long weedy scratches across its side. Jake opened the door to a cavernous blackness, a strong cat smell, a welter of candy wrappers and potato chip bags. A Pepsi can clanged to the pavement and rolled a great distance. I jerked free of Jake’s hand and stepped back. “Get in,” Jake told me.
I shook my head.
“Please get in, Charlotte.”
“No,” I said.
“Now listen, there’s people walking up, don’t make me look bad. You want to complicate things just when I’m feeling so down? Climb on in; act natural.”
“Fool! How can she act natural when she’s a what’s-it, hostage?” Mindy asked him.
But actually, it seemed perfectly natural. I slid along the seat to my old, familiar place. Folded my hands across my purse. Jake arrived next to me, Mindy came last and fitted her stomach behind the steering wheel and closed the door. Well. Here we all were. I had never in my life felt so cramped and poverty-stricken.
“Now, let me think,” Jake told us.
“Think about this: I could get arrested for aiding and abetting,” said Mindy.
“Will you just let me figure this out?”
“I could have my baby in jail, and all for something I never had the faintest notion of.”
“Oh, shoot, Mindy,” said Jake, “anybody else would have guessed. Why’d you think I had that chain on the door?”
“For a derby, of course! For a demolition derby! You often chain the doors when you’re driving a derby.”
“Well, this is clearly not no derby,” said Jake. He jerked a thumb at the ignition key. “Start her up, please.”
“Where we going?”
“Find a place to cash Charlotte’s check. Bank that’s open Friday evenings.”
“But—”
“Do you want my company or don’t you?”
Mindy started the car. We pulled out into traffic. Everyone else was driving so wearily and steadily, it was like joining up with a river. “I sure would like to eat,” Mindy said.
“We’ll do that after,” said Jake. He was slumped in his seat, watching passing signs indifferently. “Can you figure it?” he asked me. “Guy like Oliver, used to be so cool, used to read a book in the training school, read! like nothing could ever bother him. Oliver, married. Settled. Expecting. Grown so old I didn’t know him. But he knew me, boy. You don’t see me all changed about.”
“I kind of liked him,” I said.
“You would,” said Jake. “That poor sucker.”
“Well, I didn’t think he was so badly off.”
“You just say that because you have to,” Jake said. He told Mindy, “Charlotte here is married, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” said Mindy.
“Married to a preacher.”
Mindy slowed for a stop sign.
“Isn’t that right?” Jake asked me.
I nodded. I was watching a neon martini glass that kept rapidly emptying and refilling.
“She helps in the Sunday School, teaching ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ Counsels the Youth Fellowship in how to stay out of temptation.”
“I do not,” I said.
“Her and her husband never ever argue, they just take their troubles to the Lord in prayer.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, we argue all the time,” I said.
“You do?”
“Of course we do.”
“What about?”
“None of your business,” I said.
It was silly; I was beginning to cry. I had tears in my eyes for no earthly reason. But of course I didn’t let Jake see them. I kept on looking out the side window. Crying makes me angry and so I started talking, louder than usual. “We disagree on everything,” I said. “He’s always finding fault, he says I’m … he holds the stupidest things against me. Like, one morning he was going off to Bible College and I said, ‘Don’t take any wooden nickels.’ Well, it was just something to say, I didn’t mean anything by it. But he’s never forgotten. Fifteen years ago! He imagines all these undercurrents that I had never intended. He had this revivalist speak last summer, it’s an annual thing; they set up a tent in the kite field. But Saul came back so moody and quiet, said he hadn’t enjoyed it at all, hadn’t been able to take it in; he’d continually heard my comments on every word the preacher said. But I wasn’t even there! And I would never do that, I really try to keep from … but Saul said, ‘I heard your voice. Cool, flat voice. No part of that sermon could come through to me. How am I goin
g to handle this?’ I’ve come to stand for everything bad. I think he sees me as evil. I tell him, ‘Look, I don’t have to belong to Holy Basis to be a good woman. I try my very best,’ I say. ‘Is it my fault I’m not religious?’ I never have been, not since I was seven and they gave me this book of children’s Bible stories, this jealous God throwing tantrums, people having to sacrifice their children, everybody always in the wrong. I didn’t like it. See, it’s not that I don’t believe. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t, it depends on when you ask me. What the trouble is: I don’t approve. I’d rather not be associated with it. It’s against my principles. ‘I try to manage without all that,’ I say, ‘and really, it’s harder to be good if you do it without religion. Give me an A for effort at least,’ I tell him …”
“But then how come he said all that on TV?” Jake asked.
I had trouble breaking off my train of thought. I said, “What?”
“Said you was a good woman.”
“Oh … did he? I don’t know, I guess he just meant I wouldn’t have robbed a bank.”
“Then why didn’t he say you wouldn’t have robbed a bank?” said Jake. “What his words were, you’re a good woman.”
I looked at him.
“Maybe he sees things different now you’ve left,” said Jake. “Or more likely, you just had him figured wrong to start with. I mean, it could be he really does believe you’re good, and worries what that means for his side. Ever thought of that?”
“Well, no,” I said.
“Women,” said Jake. “They can’t understand the very simplest little things.”
We rode along in silence, threading down an avenue of lights as blurred and dazzling as a double strand of jewels.
14
One morning in the fall of 1974, I was mixing Jiggs some cocoa and dreaming at the kitchen sink. My mother said, “Charlotte, I don’t feel so well,” and I said, “Oh?” and reached for a spoon. Then I said, “What, Mama?”
“I don’t feel so well.”
“Is it flu?” I asked her.
“I think it’s something more.”
“I see,” I said, and stirred the cocoa around and around, watching bubbles travel in circles. Then I said, “Well, the … yes, the doctor. We’ll go to the doctor.”