Dead Crazy Page 13

  I pulled my collar up more snugly around my throat, secured my purse strap over my left shoulder, stuck my gloved hands in my coat pockets, and bent my head into the blowing snow like a cow.

  “Moo,” I said, and struck out cross country.

  The church basement was a black, snow-covered hump, its front door barricaded by police bulletins that I sensed, more than saw, in the darkness under the eaves. The lot next door was a white square on a checkerboard. But the snow had turned Mrs. Montgomery’s place into a gingerbread house, quaint, small, and pretty. The fact that she had apparently turned on all her lights to scare the demons away only made her house look all the more, and ironically, cozy.

  She surprised me by admitting me at once.

  “Quick!” she whispered urgently and tugged at my arms with her crippled hands. “Come inside. He’s out there. You mustn’t be out there alone. Quick! Shut the door. Lock it, lock it! Draw the curtain! He can’t see us through the curtain. But he knows we’re here. He’s out there in the snow. Did you see him? I know what he looks like. The devil drives a red car. Is it locked? Did you get them all locked! Come in, come in. Here, you sit there—he can’t see us in the middle of the room. My piggies will protect us. They have eyes everywhere. Pigs are fierce, they’ll fight you to the death; my pigs will kill him if he tries to hurt us. My, you’re a pretty thing. He likes pretty things. And ugly things like Rodney Gardner. And ugly old things like me. Tea. I have tea. Drink some tea—”

  The fact was that neither of us had moved an inch away from the front door after I had closed and locked it. She stood as if imprisoned in her aluminum walker, her eyes wild and staring all around her house. Her words poured out like tea from the nonexistent tea kettle. I touched her arm. “Mrs. Montgomery—”

  She flinched, then raised her walker, and began to clump away from me. I stayed where I was, made awkward and unsure and a little frightened by the sheer nuttiness of her behavior. I talked a good game, but the reality of being confronted by dementia was more than I knew how to handle.

  She circled slowly, painfully, in her walker until she faced me again.

  “Stay with me, girlie! My pigs will protect you. He’ll leave in the morning. The devil is afraid of the light. All we have to do is wait out the night. Turn on the lights. He’s afraid of my piggies. He knows they’re my protection. They’ll protect you, too. Have some more tea. I’ll bake some cookies. I’ll take a bath. You can sleep on the roof. It’s nice out, you’ll be warm on the roof, and you can see everything from up there, and you can tell us when he’s coming. He’s coming. He’s coming. He’s coming.”

  “Mrs. Montgomery, do you have a doctor?”

  “Doctor doctor.”

  “What is your doctor’s name?”

  “He is a surgeon with a knife. He operated on that nasty Rodney Gardner, didn’t he? Slash slash. Slice slice. Blood blood.” She began to cackle with gleeful laughter. “As my father used to say, it couldn’t happen to a nicer boy! I told them this would happen! Perry told them! But nobody listened, oh no, nobody listens to an old woman and a nice young boy—”

  “I want to call someone to come and stay with you. Mrs. Montgomery!” She was still babbling, while I tried to get her attention. “Do you have a daughter or a son? Any relatives here in town? A friend, someone to help you?”

  Instead of answering me, she lowered herself into a chair, picked up a little pig figurine, and began to stroke it and croon to it: “Sooie. Sooie. Sooie.”

  I crouched down beside her walker.

  “Mrs. Montgomery? Grace? Can you hear what I’m saying?”

  “Sooie,” she crooned, “sooie.”

  “What does the devil look like, Mrs. Montgomery?”

  “Sooie!” she cried in alarm. “Sooie, sooie!”

  “It’s all right,” I said apologetically. I began to stroke her hands as they stroked the silly pink porcelain pig. “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

  When she had calmed a little, I risked taking the time to shake my arms out of my coat and to let it fall to the filthy floor around me. The room was stifling. I looked around then until I found a pig that was painted a pepperoni red—they came in all colors and sizes—and I picked it up and held it in front of her.

  “What a pretty red pig.” I spoke softly. Her eyes moved from the pig in her hands to the one in mine. “Pretty, pretty red piggie.”

  “Sooie, piggie,” she said.

  “Was the devil’s car red like this?”

  She shook her head. Her hands began to stroke the pig again. Quickly I found another piglet, one that was painted an orangy, pimento red.

  “Was it red like this?”

  “No, no.” She was getting upset again.

  I held out a cherry red pig to her. “Like this?”

  “Red devil!” she shrieked and pointed to my pig. “Evil, evil!”

  I put the cherry red pig behind my back, out of her sight. My heart was beating faster as I said, “Who was in the car, Grace?”

  “The devil, the devil!”

  “When did you see it, Grace?”

  She looked at me with eyes that suddenly looked clear and sly with awareness. She leaned toward me and whispered, her breath foul with neglect, “The devil hates the dark. Comes the sun, the devil flees!”

  “You saw it just before sunrise? Is that right, Grace?”

  I’d gone too far. I felt like a torturer, merciless. She stared at me, wild-eyed, and began to pant like a dog that needs water. I was afraid she’d hyperventilate. Quickly I switched off the nearest lights, dimming the rooms to a more peaceful level of illumination. Then I grabbed yet another pig—this one a fat pink china sow with five piglets attached to her china teats. I began to stroke it and croon to it. “Sooie,” I sang, feeling absolutely ridiculous, and “Pretty pigs,” I whispered to the old lady, “such sweet, pretty little piggies. Sooie, sooie.” Gradually, her breathing became more normal, and she calmed down, until finally she looked at me with what seemed to be a little peace in her eyes. Not exactly sanity, perhaps, but a little peace.

  “It’s late,” I said softly. “Time for piggies to sleep?”

  She nodded, then kept on nodding, until her own eyes began to open and close in rhythm to her rocking: back, close; forward, open; back, close; forward, open. I whispered an offer to help her to bed, but she didn’t respond. Her head fell softly back against the chair, which stopped rocking, and her eyes closed. The old crippled fingers ceased their stroking of the pig in her lap. When I was sure she slept, I struggled back to my feet. My knees cracked in protest. I put “my” pig back where I’d found it, making a face of distaste at it.

  I wandered—carefully—through her sty of a house again, dodging the pigs that dangled so bizarrely from above. Curious as to how she’d affixed them up there, I peered above my head to examine one of them. She (?) had tied a noose of plain wrapping string around the pig’s neck, then knotted the other end of the string onto a decorating hook that was plugged into the ceiling. The various pigs hung down at different lengths that were probably above her head, but not all above mine. Though I tried to avoid the lower animals, still I bumped into several of them, which then clinked into other pigs. The effect was nightmarish.

  I was looking for a telephone and for the book of personal phone numbers that I hoped to find beside it.

  Her phone, it turned out, was a wall fixture (sticky to my touch) located in the hallway opposite the bathroom. Sure enough, her book of telephone numbers was beside it, a big black plastic notebook with what looked like forty years of numbers scratched out and written over. The older numbers were written in a small, fairly legible hand; the newer numbers were a large, unreadable scrawl. I looked first under the “M’s” and got lucky: there was an Anita Montgomery listed there—in a medium-sized, but still readable notation—and a Madelaine Montgomery. I tried Anita first, hoping she was a daughter, niece, or cousin who might actually give a damn.

  “Anita Montgomery?” I inquired, when
a woman answered.

  “Yes” came the suspicious reply.

  “I’m trying to reach a relative of Mrs. Grace Montgomery. Are you a friend or a relative of hers?”

  “I’m her great-niece.” The voice was no less suspicious and sounded, if anything, even more reserved. “By marriage. Who’s this? Has something happened to Aunt Grace?”

  I introduced myself and explained the predicament.

  “Shit,” the woman said wearily. “Dammit.”

  “Will you come over?” I was not prepared to take no for an answer, an attitude she may have perceived because she said, “Yes. Oh, hell, sure. Yes.” She hung up without thanking me, but then, it wasn’t as if I had done her a favor.

  22

  She arrived forty-five minutes later, a big, blowsy woman carrying an overnight case that she lugged back down the tiny hallway to her aunt’s bedroom. When she came back into the living room, she gave me the sort of look that apes direct toward zoo visitors: full of resentment and disdain.

  “She’ll sleep like that all night,” Anita Montgomery said, in a full, loud voice that would have awakened nearly anyone but the old woman. “You might as well go. I’m going to bed myself. I brought my own sheets; I’m damned if I’ll sleep in her filthy ones.” She batted a dangling pig out of her way. “Can you believe anybody lives like this?”

  For a moment, because of that question, we were survivors in the same lifeboat.

  “You’ve stayed with her before?”

  She nodded heavily and said with emphasis, “I’ve done this before.”

  “It wasn’t only the way she was acting,” I admitted to her, “it was also the idea of her being alone tonight. The suspect in that murder is still at large, you know.”

  “Oh, hell.” With an explosive oomph, the niece-in-law lowered herself into one of the faded chintz armchairs. “I could tell the damn cops who done that, and he ain’t no danger to Aunt Grace.”

  She had my attention.

  “There was this crazy guy, this nut, who used to go to our church—we all used to belong to that church used to be next door, the one where that guy got killed this morning—anyway, this nut, he must of fell off the same tree as Aunt Grace. Couple of damn Brazil nuts, they was. He claimed he heard these voices from the Bible—devils, like—and Aunt Grace, she believed every word he said; they was always whispering away in the kitchen about them damn devils. Used to give me the willies.”

  She glanced down at the scrapbook that lay on the table at her elbow and then looked meaningfully at me.

  “She show you this thing?”

  I nodded.

  “Creepy, ain’t it? Well, this nut, he used to come over all the time and cut and paste ‘em for her—”

  “But he’s—”

  She raised her chin and flared her nostrils like a haughty pig. “I know. He’s nuts, she’s nuts, and they’re cuttin’ out articles about other nuts. You tell me.”

  So it was Mob, I thought, who used those dainty scissors.

  “I know my Bible,” Anita Montgomery said, “and I know you shouldn’t ought to be talking to them devils. When I heard them talking that devil-talk, I used to start saying the Twenty-third Psalm as quick and loud as I could….” She raised her chin, and then her voice, to a shout that caused the pigs dangling nearest her to quiver in the air. “Lord is my shepherdls hall not want he maketh melie down in still pasture she ano inteth my soul—”

  Grace Montgomery stirred, as if she’d been nudged in the ribs, but she didn’t wake.

  In the middle of the niece’s shouting, I stood up. I’d had it. That was it. Enough. Get me out of here. I grabbed my coat and put it on during yeatholwalkthroughthevalleyofdeathhisrodandhisstafftheycomfortme—

  I held both of my hands up in front of me: Stop.

  “You leaving?” She looked surprised.

  “Yes.”

  She turned her stolid gaze toward the sleeping woman and said casually, “This time I’m putting her away. No ifs, ands, or buts. I don’t care what my Jim says—” She looked up at me. “—that’s my husband.” Her expression was defensive. “This time, I don’t care what anybody says. It’s not as if he takes care of her. Hell no. He’s never the one who picks her up and cleans her up, you bet. She’s not my family, for damn’s sake. Why should I do it? Nobody in her family gives a damn, so why should I? Why should I always get stuck with her? She’s going in the loony bin this time, and that’s where she belongs. Crazy old lady. Never said a kind word to me in her life, never did a kind thing for nobody, I don’t know why I’m even trying to help her like I do. She don’t deserve it.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  She turned the corners of her mouth down in disgust.

  I let myself out of the house. Released myself, was more like it. Escaped. Fled. Bolted.

  Outside, I inhaled the clean, cold air as if I’d been holding my breath under water, thrusting through wavering, distorted leagues of dark water to the surface of an ocean.

  I let the air out again in a rush that created a frosty cloud in front of my face.

  The night was full of comparisons. This time, compared with Mrs. Montgomery’s home, the outside air smelled wonderfully clean. The biting cold felt as fresh as new sheets—and I felt as if I could sleep in them for a week.

  Across the street, there were no lights showing in the windows of Rodney Gardner’s house. Either his young widow was gone, or she wasn’t afraid of the dark. The “For Sale” sign was nearly invisible.

  I walked back toward my car. The single streetlight at this end of the block was haloed in snow. My body cast its own long, thin shadow on the whiteness. Feeling a little spooked—this was a block on which a murder had just occurred, after all—I walked faster. As I was unlocking my car, a man’s voice called to me from the porch of the corner house.

  “Why don’t you give up?”

  I was so startled that when I whirled around, I dropped my keys in the snow at my feet. I couldn’t make out the face of the man who was standing in the darkness on his porch, but I recognized the resonant voice of Perry Yates. One of the neighbors I visited must have called him to tell him I was on the block. He didn’t shout at me. He didn’t have to. His words carried clearly in the cold, thin air, like a preacher’s in a deadly still sanctuary.

  “Rod Gardner wouldn’t be dead if you folks hadn’t come around,” the voice accused. I had no reply to his charge; just possibly it was true. The words were creepy, coming from a faceless man in the dark of the porch. He said, “Anytime you put maniacs in with normal folks, you’re gonna get trouble. Anybody knows that. Even MaryDell Paine. She tell you about her brother’s history? Did she? Maybe you should have asked. Maybe if you’d asked, instead of just taking her word for things, Rod Gardner would still be alive. You, and people like you, you’re responsible for this terrible thing. Now there’s a young widow, and soon there’ll be a poor little fatherless child. I’m telling you right now to get off our block.”

  I stood silently in the snow, not wanting to listen to him, but also not wanting to get down on my hands and knees in front of him and grovel in the snow for my keys.

  There was silence then. Maybe he was hoping I’d fight back, but I was only hoping he’d go inside. When he did, I didn’t see his movement in the dark, but only heard the front door quietly close. As soon as I heard that, I got down to look for my keys, trying to tell myself that the only reason my fingers were shaking was because of the cold. I found them fairly quickly and drove away, trying not to sound as if I were in any kind of a hurry.

  23

  Geof was asleep when I got home.

  Still wearing my camel wool dress, but barefoot, I crossed the gray carpet in our bedroom to sit on the edge of his side of our bed. I hated this ultramodern bed that two previous wives and a few girlfriends had slept in, just as I hated our bare, white-walled bedroom and our angular, cold-hearted house. It wasn’t so much that I was jealous of its history—although, to be honest, I was a litt
le—as it was that nothing of us seemed to stick to it. We walked through, we came and went, ate, slept, and made love, but for all the impression we left on the house, we might as well have been renting it. On this night, however, after the crazy, crowded chaos of Marianne Miller’s and Grace Montgomery’s houses, our own bare, aggressively sleek bedroom was, for once, a relief to me.

  Of course, I was digressing. It was a wonder I wasn’t hallucinating.

  I looked at my sleeping husband and felt immediately warmed and comforted. Lovely man. Intelligent, well-intentioned, humorous, handsome, loving man. Lightly snoring. Smelling of Safeguard soap and herbal shampoo and of his male self. Sleeping so sweetly.

  I showed no mercy.

  “Wake up, Geof.” I touched him lightly at his temple, with one finger. “I’m sorry.” I touched him there again. “You have to wake up.” I pressed four fingers into his bare upper arm, feeling the give of large, slack muscles. “Come on, honey.” I scratched his earlobe with my forefinger. “Wake up, wake up.” I stroked his cheek with the back of my hand. “Ow!”

  The hand that was buried in sheets suddenly shot out and grabbed my hand. Before I could retreat, he stuck my fingers in his mouth and bit them.

  “I’m sorry!” I laughed and tried to tug my hand away.

  “You’d better be.” Geof kept hold of my hand as he rolled over on his back. He closed his eyes again and mumbled, “You’d better tell me the house is on fire. Is the house on fire?”

  “Yes, and there are burglars downstairs.”

  “Oh, well.” He opened his eyes, yawned, looked at me. “All right. That’s all right, then. Why are you so late?”

  “Why are you in bed so early?”

  “I had hopes.” He grinned weakly at me, looking dopey with sleep. “I was waiting. Like the naked housewife waiting for her hubby at the front door. Only I fell asleep.”

  “Where’s the cellophane?”

  “What? Oh.” He began to laugh.

  “I do have good reasons for waking you up, Geof.”