church for women and a prison for you.”
He stopped. Lloyd was gone. Worse still, he had never been there. The drinks had never been there. Only the people in the booths, the people from the costume party, and he could almost hear their muffled laughter as they held their bands to their mouths and pointed, their eyes sparkling with cruel pinpoints of light.
He whirled around again. “Leave me-”
(alone?)
All the booths were empty. The sound of laughter had died like a stir of autumn leaves. Jack stared at the empty lounge for a tick of time, his eyes wide and dark. A pulse beat noticeably in the center of his forehead. In the very center of him a cold certainty was forming and the certainty was that he was losing his mind. He felt an urge to pick up the bar stool next to him, reverse it, and go through the place like an avenging whirlwind. Instead he whirled back around to the bar and began to bellow:
“Roll me over
In the clo-ho-ver,
Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.”
Danny's face rose before him, not Danny's normal face, lively and alert, the eyes sparkling and open, but the catatonic, zombielike face of a stranger, the eyes dull and opaque, the mouth pursed babyishly around his thumb. What was he doing, sitting here and talking to himself like a sulky teen-ager when his son was upstairs, someplace, acting like something that belonged in a padded room, acting the way Wally Hollis said Vic Stenger had been before the men in the white coats had to come and take him away?
(But 1 never put a hand on him! Goddammit, 1 didn't!)
“Jack?” The voice was timid, hesitant.
He was so startled he almost fell off the stool whirling it around. Wendy was standing just inside the batwing doors, Danny cradled in her arms like some waxen horror show dummy. The three of them made a tableau that Jack felt very strongly; it was just before the curtain of Act II in some oldtime temperance play, one so poorly mounted that the prop man had forgotten to stock the shelves of the Den of Iniquity.
“I never touched him,” Jack said thickly. “I never have since the night I broke his arm. Not even to spank him.”
“Jack, that doesn't matter now. What matters is-”
“This matters!” he shouted. He brought one fist crashing down on the bar, hard enough to make the empty peanut dishes jump. “It matters, goddammit, it matters! “
“Jack, we have to get him off the mountain. He's-”
Danny began to stir in her arms. The slack, empty expression on his face had begun to break up like a thick matte of ice over some buried surface. His lips twisted, as if at some weird taste. His eyes widened. His hands came up as if to cover them and then dropped back.
Abruptly he stiffened in her arms. His back arched into a bow, making Wendy stagger. And he suddenly began to shriek, mad sounds that escaped his straining throat in bolt after crazy, echoing bolt. The sound seemed to fill the empty downstairs and come back at them like banshees. There might have been a hundred Dannys, all screaming at once.
“Jack!” she cried in terror. “Oh God Jack what's wrong with him?”
He came off the stool, numb from the waist down, more frightened than he had ever been in his life. What hole had his son poked through and into? What dark nest? And what had been in there to sting him?
“Danny!” he roared. “Danny!”
Danny saw him. He broke his mother's grip with a sudden, fierce strength that gave her no chance to hold him. She stumbled back against one of the booths and nearly fell into it.
“Daddy!” he screamed, running to Jack, his eyes hugs and affrighted. “Oh Daddy Daddy, it was her! Her! Her! Oh Daaaaahdeee-”
He slammed into Jack's arms like a blunt arrow, making Jack rock on his feet. Danny clutched at him furiously, at first seeming to pummel him like a fighter, then clutching his belt and sobbing against his shirt. Jack could feel his son's face, hot and working, against his belly.
Daddy, it was her.
Jack looked slowly up into Wendy's face. His eyes were like small silver coins.
“Wendy?” Voice soft, nearly purring. “Wendy, what did you do to him?”
Wendy stared back at him in stunned disbelief, her face pallid. She shook her head.
“Oh Jack, you must know-”
Outside it had begun to snow again.
29. Kitchen Talk
Jack carried Danny into the kitchen. The boy was still sobbing wildly, refusing to look up from Jack's chest. In the kitchen he gave Danny back to Wendy, who still seemed stunned and disbelieving.
“Jack, I don't know what he's talking about. Please, you must believe that.”
“I do believe it,” he said, although he had to admit to himself that it gave him a certain amount of pleasure to see the shoe switched to the other foot with such dazzling, unexpected speed: But his anger at Wendy had been only a passing gut twitch. In his heart he knew Wendy would pour a can of gasoline over herself and strike a match before harming Danny.
The large tea kettle was on the back burner, poking along on low heat. Jack dropped a teabag into his own large ceramic cup and poured hot water halfway.
“Got cooking sherry, don't you?” he asked Wendy.
“What?… oh, sure. Two or three bottles of it.”
“Which cupboard?”
She pointed, and Jack took one of the bottles down. He poured a hefty dollop into the teacup, put the sherry back, and filled the last quarter of the cup with milk. Then he added three tablespoons of sugar and stirred. He brought it to Danny, whose sobs had tapered off to snifflings and hitchings. But he was trembling all over, and his eyes were wide and starey.
“Want you to drink this, doc,” Jack said. “It's going to taste frigging awful, but it'll make you feel better. Can you drink it for your daddy?”
Danny nodded that he could and took the cup. He drank a little, grimaced, and looked questioningly at Jack. Jack nodded and Danny drank again. Wendy felt the familiar twist of jealousy somewhere in her middle, knowing the boy would not have drunk it for her.
On the heels of that came an uncomfortable, even startling thought: Had she wanted to think Jack was to blame? Was she that jealous? It was the way her mother would have thought, that was the really horrible thing. She could remember a Sunday when her Dad had taken her to the park and she had toppled from the second tier of the jungle gym, cutting both knees. When her father brought her home, her mother had shrieked at him: What did you do? Why weren't you watching her? What kind of a father are you?
(She had hounded him to his grave; by the time he divorced her it was too late.)
She had never even given Jack the benefit of the doubt. Not the smallest. Wendy felt her face burn yet knew with a kind of helpless finality that if the whole thing were to be played over again, she would do and think the same way. She carried part of her mother with her always, for good or bad.
“Jack-” she began, not sure if she meant to apologize or justify. Either, she knew, would be useless.
“Not now,” he said.
It took Danny fifteen minutes to drink half of the big cup's contents, and by that time he had calmed visibly. The shakes were almost gone.
Jack put his hands solemnly on his son's shoulders. “Danny, do you think you can tell us exactly what happened to you? It's very important.”
Danny looked from Jack to Wendy, then back again. In the silent pause, their setting and situation made themselves known: the whoop of the wind outside, driving fresh snow down from the northwest; the creaking and groaning of the old hotel as it settled into another storm. The fact of their disconnect came to Wendy with unexpected force as it sometimes did, like a blow under the heart.
“I want… to tell you everything,” Danny said. “I wish I had before.” He picked up the cup and held it, as if comforted by the warmth.
“Why didn't you, son?” Jack brushed Danny's sweaty, tumbled hair back gently from his brow.
“Because Uncle Al got you the job. And I couldn't figure out how it was good for you here and bad for you here at the same time. It was…” He looked at them for help. He did not have the necessary word.
“A dilemma?” Wendy asked gently. “When neither choice seems any good?”
“Yes, that.” He nodded, relieved.
Wendy said: “The day that you trimmed the hedges, Danny and I had a talk in the truck. The day the first real snow came. Remember?”
Jack nodded. The day he had trimmed the hedges was very clear in his mind.
Wendy sighed. “I guess we didn't talk enough. Did we, doc?”
Danny, the picture of woe, shook his head.
“Exactly what did you talk about?” Jack asked. “I'm not sure how much I like my wife and son-”
“-discussing how much they love you?”
“Whatever it was, I don't understand it. I feel like I came into a movie just after the intermission.”
“We were discussing you,” Wendy said quietly. “And maybe we didn't say it all in words, but we both knew. Me because I'm your wife and Danny because he… just understands things.”
Jack was silent.
“Danny said it just right. The place seemed good for you. You were away from all the pressures that made you so unhappy at Stovington. You were your own boss, working with your hands so you could save your brain-all of your brain- for your evenings writing. Then… I don't know just when… the place began to seem bad for you. Spending all that time down in the cellar, sifting through those old papers, all that old history. Talking in your sleep-”
“In my sleep?” Jack asked. His face wore a cautious, startled expression. “I talk in my sleep?”
“Most of it is slurry. Once I got up to use the bathroom and you were saying, 'To hell with it, bring in the slots at least, no one will know, no one will ever know. ' Another time you woke me right up, practically yelling, `Unmask, unmask, unmask. ''
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and rubbed a hand over his face. He looked ill.
“All your old drinking habits, too. Chewing Excedrin. Wiping your mouth all the time. Cranky in the morning. And you haven't been able to finish the play yet, have you?”
“No. Not yet, but it's only a matter of time. I've been thinking about something else… a new project-”
“This hotel. The project Al Shockley called you about. The one he wanted you to drop.”
“How do you know about that?” Jack barked. “Were you listening in? You-”
