Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [84]
“Mom, not again,” Shelly said. “How was he? Was he high? Did he act drunk or crazy or anything? Wild? You know-broken connections?”
“How would I know? No, I don’t suppose. He was just this slick smooth buttery same old thing like a salesman, only with all that hair and those clothes. He scares me, Shelly. He’s sick. He ought to be in an asylum.”
“You don’t understand him,” Shelly said. “He’s got a thing about gentleness. He wasn’t, wild though? He talked straight enough?”
“I don’t suppose what you’d call wild, no,” Ada said.
“Did he say anything else? What was it he could explain, did he say?”
Ada shook her head.
“He didn’t say anything about the night I left.”
“He knows better than to try explainin’ to Dad and me, I guess.”
With her hip Shelly shoved the file drawer shut. Her hoarse voice had been toned down, almost hushed, while she questioned Ada. Now she said in a full bass-baritone, “Oh, Christ, I guess I might as well go down and see him and be done with it.”
Ada moved her bulk dramatically across the doorway. “Shelly, don’t you do it! That man’s dangerous.”
“Yes, Ma,” Shelly said with resignation, and to me, flashing a little grin, “Mom thinks he’s dangerous because he threatened to cut my throat once.”
“I thought he had a thing about gentleness.”
“He does. When he lets the bennies alone he’s really nice. He thinks, you know? He isn’t taken in by all the shit.”
“Look what he’s done to you!” Ada said, furious. “I wash my hands of it.”
Shelly regarded her mother, started to say something, swallowed it, shrugged, said to me, “I never took the threat seriously. He was on a black crazy trip. I don’t think he’d slept for three nights. He never even remembered it when he came back.”
I sat thinking how little I needed any of this. I said, “I can call the police if you’d like.”
Shelly was truly surprised. “What for? All he’s done is come asking where I am.”
“I was assuming you’d left him for some reason. It wasn’t threats, then.”
“I told you, I never took that seriously.”
“You better,” Ada said. “If you listen to me, you sure better.”
“Oh, I don’t know!” Shelly said violently. “Maybe I shouldn’t have left him. Maybe it was just my middle-class indoctrination blowing back in my face. I just . . . Yakh. I guess I wish he’d just go away. Maybe he’ll go quicker if I see him than if I don’t.”
“Do you think that?”
“I don’t know. I guess not To her mother she said, ”Did he see you come up here?”
“He saw me go out. I went right past him, he’d have been blind if he didn’t. I told him I had to go look after Mr. Ward, and I hoped he’d just swallow that you’d left him, and not make any trouble.”
“He’s still down there then.”
“Unless Dad’s run him off.”
“Dad shouldn’t mess with him. He might try to get even.”
“That’s what I said, he’s dangerous.”
“Oh, not by attacking anybody. He just has these really maniacal notions of what’s funny. He plays they’re jokes, but they draw blood. And he doesn’t respect property at all, he thinks the earth ought not to be owned. He’s bound to hang around if he thinks I’m here. He’ll pop up from behind bushes, he’ll leave these cannibal tracks in the sand for us to see, he’ll get us all looking over our shoulders. I won’t dare walk the Goddamned path.”
I reached into the saddlebag and got out the aspirin bottle and shook two pills into my hand and washed them down with the dregs of a bottle of Coke on the window sill. “I agree with Ada,” I said. “I don’t think you should see him.”
“But he really isn’t the way I just said,” Shelly said, and scowled at me, thinking. “I mean, he’s really O.K., he’s got a good head, he has these theories of a better system and he isn’t afraid to live by them. And I guess he’s fond of me. If he wasn’t he wouldn’t have come hunting me.”
“But you’re scared hell hang around and leave cannibal tracks,” I said. “If he does, if he practices any philosophical trespass around here, I will call the cops. I haven’t got time to spend on cannibal tracks, and I doubt you have.”
“Don’t you even get mixed up in it the teeniest bit,” Ada said. “We’ll just have to find a way of cleanin