The Most Dangerous Thing

Meanwhile the Hallorans were appalled because the man was black, not that they were polite enough to use that term, or even Negro. Doris Halloran pronounced people “colored,” as if it were the enlightened thing to say, and Tim Senior-well, he liked to mix up his epithets. He seemed to think his large stock of synonyms passed for wit. Jungle bunny, coon, tar baby, spear chucker. But never nigger, which only convinced Clem that Tim was dangerously racist beneath his I’m-just-having-fun-I-dare- you-to-say-otherwise gaze. Clem wonders if he still uses those words. He doesn’t know, because he can’t bear to be in the same room with the man, not that they had spent much time in each other’s company before the night of the hurricane. Maybe at a potluck, or the progressive dinner Tally put together one time, inspired by a book she was reading to Gwen, but he wasn’t sure.

He tries to tell himself that he objected to Sean as Gwen’s first boyfriend because of Sean’s father, his fear that any apple that dropped from the Halloran tree had to be poisoned. Oh, he liked Sean as much as any man could like a teen daughter’s first boyfriend, but he was glad to see him go. In the early stages of Tally’s stalled painting, he worried it was inspired by Sean and Gwen, that she knew something he didn’t. But, no, it just can’t be. He’s a doctor. He understands, theoretically, that Baltimore is full of teenage girls having sex. But not his daughter. Not with Sean.

And then he realizes that thought is as bigoted and snobbish as anything Tim Halloran ever dared to say out loud. Every time Clem wants to think he is different from Tim, something reminds him that he is not blameless. He will never be blameless.

He starts walking back, crossing the stream, a relative trickle today, then heading up the hill. This is the steepest part of the terrain. He imagines this spot as it was in the storm, what someone would have seen from where he’s standing now. Two men, hale and sure-footed, running down the slope, then kneeling in the rushing water, a slightly older one making his careful way toward them, flashlight strafing them with light. He sees the older man bending down-but he can’t stay outside the scene any longer. He is there again, realizing that the inert object at Tim’s and Rick’s feet is a man, dark as coal except for odd patches of unpigmented skin. And dead.

“H e was dead when we got here,” Rick said.

“But Tim was ahead of you, going down the hill, he had at least twenty-five yards on you-”

“ He was dead when we got here . Right, Tim?”

Tim Halloran nodded. He was shaking all over.

“The fall killed him,” Rick said. “See? That rock, that’s where he hit his head, and he’s been lying in this stream ever since, his lungs filling up with water. Between that and the head injury, he never could have survived. It doesn’t matter what the kids did. Leave him here.”

Clem bent down, tested at the neck for a pulse, knowing there would be none. He had no obligation to the dead, had taken no oath on their part. Still, it seemed wrong to leave the man here.

“He lived in these woods. He has no family, no one looking out for him,” Rick said. “It was an accident.”

“Was it?” Tim and Rick had crested the hill before him. Clem had heard shouting, though, seen an arc of light moving wildly through the night. He wouldn’t be surprised if there was flesh and blood clinging to Tim’s flashlight, even in this driving rain.

“An accident,” Rick repeated. “There’s nothing to be done. He slipped and fell. Talking about how he came to fall, or why we were here looking for him-there’s no point. We’ll have to talk about… everything. And that’s not going to be good for anyone.”

They left him there. Clem later made an anonymous call to the police from a pay phone downtown. A week later, when Clem hiked back into the woods, the man was gone. Clem wanted to believe that his anonymous call had yielded results, that EMTs had somehow found his body. But wanting to believe it didn’t make it true.

“Did you see his guitar?” Gwen asked one night, weeks later.

“Whose guitar?”

“The man in the woods. When you found him-did you see his guitar? It was steel, it was probably ruined in all that rain.”

“Honey, there was no guitar.”

To his amazement-and to his gratification, for Gwen had seemed cool and frivolous of late-she burst into tears. But it was the last time they ever spoke of the incident. Now, only a year later, she chatters away about dates and boys and, very occasionally, about school itself. The hurricane is forgotten. Her old friends appear to be forgotten. Mickey never comes to the house, although there’s still a drawer filled with the sugary junk she loved. The Halloran boys have abandoned the woods, although Clem sometimes sees little Go-Go walking along the top of the hill, where there’s a path.

It is the old who are supposed to have memory problems. Senility, Alzheimer’s, dementia. But in Clem’s experience, no one can forget the way a young person can. He specializes in the elderly, he is himself becoming elderly, but to be interested in old age also means thinking constantly about youth. That’s the paradox. His daughter is now almost the age her mother was when Clem first glimpsed her, a beautiful, high-spirited girl. No one thought it was that outre. Yet if a thirty-two-year-old man were to regard Gwen with anything approximating lust, he would want to kill him.

Only he wouldn’t. That’s the difference between him and the Tim Hallorans of the world.

Dead when they got there. Sure, why not? Could be. The man was dead when Clem had gotten there, and wasn’t that all that mattered? He hadn’t done anything except agree to a reality that meant a little less pain for everyone. Go-Go would never have to speak to strangers about what happened to him. Tim would not be called into account for his actions, whatever they were. Clem and Rick would not be labeled accessories. And the women and the children were allowed to sleep the blissful sleep of the ignorant, protected by their men, which is what men are supposed to do, first and foremost.

He turns back, looks at the funny little cabin, comically small and lopsided from this distance. Funny, how they never connected it. The grown-ups drove past this cabin, saw something shameful, a man living like a sharecropper only a few miles from downtown Baltimore. The grown-ups saw the past, complicated and cruel. Their children saw a playhouse. The man who lived here saw a potential victim in Go-Go.

What if it were your child? Tim had asked Clem that night. To this day, Clem thinks: It wouldn’t be. He knows that’s wrong. He understands intellectually that anything can happen to anyone at any moment. Even in his world of medicine and science, there are no absolutes. People smoke their entire lives at no seeming physical cost, while someone who has never so much as held a cigarette can get lung cancer. But he has to believe that his own daughter is immune to such danger, that she never would have allowed herself to let a stranger touch her as this man touched Go-Go.

He probably was dead when Tim got there. He slipped, he fell, and his lungs filled with water when the children ran to get help. Who can fault them for not staying with him on that dark rainy night? Who would ask them to administer first aid to that monster, lying in the creek? Yes, there was the strange arc of the flashlight going up and down, instead of side to side- Stop, he tells himself. Believe what’s easiest to believe. There’s no harm in it.

He is home now, or almost there, at the peak above his house. Your dream house, as Tally always says. It is. He built a house to his taste on a site that he loved, assuming his wife and children would love it, too, but only Gwen shared his affection for the place. Now even she wouldn’t object to moving, as long as she could continue to be the queen bee of her social set at Park School.

Someone-Clem has no idea who-called children and wives hostages to fortunes. He will never see it that way. His wife and his children are his real contributions to the world. He isn’t demeaning what he has accomplished professionally. He’s good at what he does and enjoys it, the best of all possible combinations. But there is always someone to take one’s place in any profession, no matter how singular or vital. There’s no shortage of men who want to be president or discover vaccines or explore the Amazon. Only Clem can be Tally’s husband, father to Miller, Fee, and Gwen. Only he can love them as he loves them.

As he descends the hill, he realizes that as much as he hates Tim Halloran, he envies him, too. Because Halloran proved he would do anything for his children, whereas Clem couldn’t even give up this jury-rigged, imperfect house. What Halloran did was savage. But it was also love, immutable, enormous love. He killed the man