Fatal Obsession Read online

  On a sudden impulse I stopped beside the high school and went through the door nearest the gym. There was no one around except a janitor pushing dust down an empty hall. I tried to peek inside the gym but the doors were locked. I made do with the trophy case instead.

  I was still there, in the form of a photograph of me in my football uniform that had been carved into a little statue with my name and position printed on its base. But the statuette had been knocked onto its side, and the look on my face was more pathetic than heroic. A layer of dust dimmed both my features and my exploits. Wearing a number 30 on my chest and holding a ball, I looked absurdly young and well-groomed and almost pretty, silly and stupid and happy. I hadn’t been particularly happy at that time in my life, partly because of Sally Stillings and what we’d put each other through, but also because of my growing sense that I was not quite what everyone assumed me to be, that I was worse and I was less and I was blameworthy because of it.

  But things are relative. If I had inflicted more punishment on myself than necessary I had also reaped more rewards than were deserved. I had been what, in those days, everyone wanted to be. It hadn’t been enough, but it had been something—a time, the only time, when things I did were cheered. Somewhere a bell sounded and the hall filled with kids and I backed quickly out of the building, feeling like a trespasser who had glimpsed an ancient, cursed thing.

  It was some time after that, after I’d passed the drive-in where we’d congregated after we were old enough to drive, when I realized I was being followed. It was nonsensical, this hint of big-city intrigue in little Chaldea, but after a few twists and turns through the dirt roads that wound among the impoverished shanties at the south end of town, I confirmed that it was real nonsense all the same. The car was blue and plain, the man within it thin and balding, his features blurred by the scrim of his windshield. I didn’t think I had seen him before, but I was certain I would see him again.

  I could have lost him—I retained a sense of the town’s streets at least that good, acquired during those endless hours of cruising—but there seemed no point in doing it. Instead, I stopped at the bakery, then drove to Gail’s and watched the blue Fairmont pull to the curb a half block away. A more precise identification of the driver was prevented by the shade from the huge sycamore that loomed like a parachute above him.

  There was another car in Gail’s drive—a pearl-gray Continental with Illinois plates—and its owner was the first to greet me as I entered the house. Matt had doubled in size since I’d seen him last, but it was a hard, sculpted poundage, the weight of power, not sloth. He squeezed my palm and pounded my back and blared his pleasure at seeing me again, and even though there wasn’t an ounce of pure feeling in his words I smiled and patted him in return.

  Matt was eight years older than I was, so he’d been more an icon to me than a brother, someone to observe and marvel at but not to know. For his part, Matt had ignored me entirely except for periodic production numbers he would stage, usually in the presence of a new girl friend, when I would be lavished with games and toys and stunts that usually ended with my being tossed to the ceiling or hung by my heels. Matt had been a promotor even then, a congenital salesman perpetually selling himself, and he must have gotten every single one of those genes our parents possessed because neither Curt nor I nor Gail had any at all. Matt was a bullshitter but he wasn’t dull. Good bullshitters never are. Within a minute he’d told me a joke and a lie, and had me laughing.

  Matt dragged me into the kitchen where Gail and another woman were standing beside the stove, talking in quiet tones. Between and around them was the smell of gingerbread. Gail was wearing a wool pants suit and some silly little boots and I knew she thought she was dressed up, but beside the other woman she looked like she was ready to slop the hogs. And the other woman knew it and was glad.

  Matt pulled me within two feet of the strange tall woman and introduced us. She was Pilar, his wife. She was half Spanish. They’d been married in Mexico two months ago, and had honeymooned in Acapulco for three weeks afterward. They still had their tans. According to my brother, she was the best thing that ever happened to him, he still couldn’t figure how he’d been lucky enough to snare her, and on and on like that.

  For her part, Pilar smiled tolerantly and silently at both of us, looking bored by the words and the man who uttered them. I felt in the presence of the heir to a toppled throne and from his antics so did Matt. “Pilar’s a singer, Marsh,” Matt went on. “Earns three hundred a night or better. Has gigs in all the best clubs in Chicago—Palmer House, Playboy Club, you name it. You should hear her do ‘Tangerine.’ Man, oh man.”

  To her credit, Pilar seemed annoyed at the tout, and Matt finally wound to a quiet halt. It suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea what Matt was doing for a living.

  “How was the hotel?” Gail asked me.

  “Okay,” I answered. “Met some people in the coffee shop this morning, then took a little stroll around the square.”

  “The square. Pilar, you’ve got to check that out,” Matt said. “A real relic. You’ll think you’re on another planet.”

  Gail frowned. “It’s not that bad. Really. It’s not. We have some real nice shops, Matt.”

  I spoke quickly. “I bumped into Chuck Hasburg uptown.”

  Gail raised her brows. “Oh? How’s Chuck? I haven’t seen him for months.”

  “Not so hot. Lost his job. He and Carol split. He doesn’t look too good. I think he’d been drinking.”

  “That’s too bad. I heard he took it hard, the divorce I mean. I always liked Chuck,” Gail said firmly. “I had a real crush on him once.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “You weren’t supposed to,” Gail replied, and we both laughed. Then Gail’s voice dropped. “They say Carol’s changed a lot.”

  Carol and Chuck had been high school sweethearts. I don’t think either of them had ever dated another person when they got married the day after graduation. Over the years of their courtship Chuck had told me everything about Carol, from the make of her shoes to the taste of her body. In some sense she had been, vicariously, the first girl I ever began to understand, even though I’d never had a conversation of more than ten words with her.

  “They had a child, didn’t they?” I asked Gail.

  “A girl. Retarded. She’s in a special school of some kind up in Cedar Rapids. They bring her home at Christmas, or they did before the divorce. She used to be a cute little thing, but she’s almost thirty now. Kind of wild-looking. They say she won’t live past forty.”

  My stomach began to ache during the story. Suddenly it seemed that Chaldeans bore more heartache than anyone should have to. Or was it just that I knew about it all, knew more of people here than I did in San Francisco, where so much life dances by dishonestly under a tent of gaiety and flash.

  I turned and walked into the living room and sank onto the couch that had once been my parents’, thinking of Chuck and Carol and of Sally and me. Chuck and Carol had been King and Queen of the Prom. They’d been solid and steady, confident, predictably betrothed, what Sally and I had struggled and failed to be, ending only in bitterness and tears. My tears, my bitterness. If Chuck and Carol hadn’t made it, no one could expect to.

  Matt came in and sat beside me and slapped my knee. “Hard to believe we spent eighteen years of our lives in this burg, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  “People in Chicago don’t believe it when I tell them where I’m from, that a guy like me came out of a place like this. Probably the same for you in Frisco, huh?”

  “Not really.”

  Matt pushed his blue velour sleeves above his thick forearms. The bracelet on his wrist writhed like a viper.

  “What you doing these days, Marsh? Still a gumshoe?” Matt’s laugh was raw and slanderous.

  “Still a gumshoe.”

  “I never understood why you quit being a lawyer. Hell, you were drawing down over thirty K, weren’t you? That w
as decent money ten years ago.”

  “It wasn’t decent enough,” I said.

  “Hell,” Matt scoffed. “I bet you don’t net that now.”

  “True, but that’s not what I meant by decent.”

  Matt shook his head. “You always were weird, Marsh. But hell. To each his own. What you doing with your investment capital these days?”

  “Spending it.”

  “I’m serious, Marsh.”

  “So am I.”

  Matt slapped me on the knee again. I had an urge to punch him in the face and dump him at Pilar’s thin and perfumed feet. “You always were tight with a buck, Marsh,” Matt went on. “I know you got something stashed away. And even if you don’t, hell, when we unload this fucking farm we’ll all be in clover.”

  “Will we?”

  “Sure. Hundred grand apiece, minimum. And I got just the place for you to put your share.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Oh, this little limited partnership I’m working up. Can’t miss, Marsh. Immediate write-off of eighty percent, against a return of twelve points sure.”

  “What’s the asset of this money machine?”

  “Mobile-home parks. Ten of ’em, eventually. Hell, Marsh, with the price of housing what it is, mortgage rates, your double-bottom mobile home is the only affordable habitation source for a whole hell of a lot of your middle class. A hell of a lot. And I’m talking people earning twenty, twenty-five K a year, not some poor slob just swam across the Rio Grande looking for a pear to pick.”

  “Sounds swell,” I said as Matt caught his breath. I worked to keep from laughing.

  “These aren’t your tacky roadside numbers, either, with a pickup and a bleached blonde beside each unit. I’m talking Caravan Towers, Marsh. Landscaped perimeters, semipermanent installation, foundation skirts, pool and rec center. The works. You know who got rich this same way?”

  “Who?”

  “Barbi Benton’s husband.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Plus we go him one better,” Matt said eagerly.

  “How’s that?”

  “High rise. Build a steel frame with catwalks and lift two-thirds of those babies off the ground. Triple rent per space. It’s revolutionary.”

  “It sounds it.”

  “You in? Not that I need you. Just doing you a favor.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Come on. Twenty units at a K apiece. Give yourself a break.”

  “Thanks anyway, Matt.”

  “Jesus,” Matt spat. “No one ever could do anything for you, you simple shit.”

  I was silent, trying to think of something that would calm Matt down, when I was saved by the doorbell. Since Matt and I were the only ones in the living room, I hopped up to answer it.

  The man standing on the porch was my brother Curt, but if I hadn’t known he was coming I wouldn’t have recognized him. “Hello, Marsh,” he said, his voice almost inaudible.

  “Curt. It’s good to see you.”

  “You, too.”

  “Come on in. Matt’s here.”

  “I heard.”

  I stepped back to let Curt enter, then involuntarily reached toward him because I thought he was going to fall. He was wearing work boots and bib overalls and a flannel-lined denim jacket, and from his manner it looked like he’d been performing convict labor since I had seen him last. Each movement seemed to occupy him entirely, all his muscle, all his mind. Curt was sick, and from what Gail had said it was a sickness of the heart. Someone should have cried for him.

  Curt walked to the center of the room and stood there, gripping his hunting hat in his hands as though uncertain of what to do or even who we were.

  “Jesus, Curt,” Matt blurted from the couch. “You look like hell. You sick, or what?”

  Curt’s smile was feeble, though he tried to make it otherwise. I had a sudden urge to leave Chaldea, flee Curt and Matt and everything else I’d seen since I’d come back, so I could remember it all as it had been once, not as it was and would be for all time. There was the farm, of course, the money, but I didn’t really need it. More than that, I probably shouldn’t take it. Some of the most screwed-up people I knew were the ones that got rich quick.

  Matt and Curt shook hands like a pair of fighters past their prime and fearful and addled because of it. Matt didn’t even mention Pilar, or drag Curt off to meet her, or evidence anything but disgust for his younger brother. Curt seemed oblivious to everything but breathing and whatever it was that had damned him.

  Eventually Gail brought Pilar in and made the introductions. Pilar and Curt looked at each other without comprehension, across an unspanned gulf. As the discomfort grew, Pilar finally pivoted on a pump and headed back to the kitchen, a glint of something close to terror in her eyes. Gail followed her out of the room.

  Curt was fearsome, somehow, a man out on a ledge, beyond reason or entreaty. With all our eyes on him he walked to the couch and sat silently, still fingering his cap, an Okie at the palace of the prince. Above his socks his ankles were as white as bleached bone. “How’s Laurel?” I asked, to give him something to do besides think.

  “Not too well, Marsh. She wasn’t up to coming in. She sent her best,” Curt added lamely, as though her best were never now enough.

  “You’re living in Glory City, I hear. How is it out there?”

  “Quiet.”

  “You farming?”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “Laurel still work at the bank?”

  “No.”

  “I’d like to see her before I leave, if she’s feeling better.”

  Curt simply nodded, his wife’s health beyond words or cure. Matt kept glancing sideways at him, each time edging farther away. “How’s Billy?” I asked, looking at Curt.

  “Fine.” Curt’s word was barely audible, perhaps a plea that I say nothing more. If so, I didn’t heed it.

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “We don’t see Billy anymore,” Curt explained simply.

  Matt chimed in. “Living out on the farm, isn’t he? That’s what Gail said.”

  “Gail would know better than I would,” Curt mumbled. “Gail knows everything.”

  There was resentment in his words. And I was making matters worse because I had no idea how to make them otherwise. I grasped silently at straws but hadn’t caught one by the time Gail came back into the room, this time alone.

  “Pilar wants to rest awhile,” she said to Matt. “She’s gone upstairs. I thought this might be a good time to talk. Then maybe after we eat we can all go out to the grave. Can we? I bought a new wreath.”

  Three heads nodded slowly, eyes downcast, thoughts on the long-time dead.

  Six

  We sat in silence for a time, we Tanners, more alien to each other than we had ever been. We had never been talkers, not at home, not about personal matters, matters of sex or rage or pain. There were things you did, and things you didn’t do, and the distinction was unquestionably inherited, not taught. I tried for a moment to recall something intimate about any of the other three, something I knew that no one else did, and came up with nothing. The silence thickened and I floated on it, untethered to person or idea, depressed.

  Matt would be the one to start it, and after a couple of minutes more he did. “Let’s sell the damned thing,” he said bluntly, his eyes shifting from one of us to the other.

  “I agree,” Curt murmured.

  “Curt,” Gail admonished sadly. “You don’t mean that. You can’t. You’re a farmer, Curt.”

  “Not anymore.” Whatever Curt was seeing was not in the room.

  Matt stood and began to lumber from wall to wall. His white Italian footfalls caused the floor to tremble. “So it’s two to one. Under the will it takes three to sell. Right?”

  “Right,” Gail said.

  “So how about it, Marsh?” Matt challenged, his chest and his chain heaving high above me.

  I took a deep breath. “Who do you plan to sell to?” I as
ked.

  “The highest bidder,” Matt shot back.

  “Who’s that likely to be? That newspaper article made it sound like everyone in town wants the place.”

  Matt looked at Gail. She looked at me. “I guess I know more of the answer to that than anyone,” she said. “I’m here, where they can all get at me, and believe me, they have.”

  “Who?” I repeated.

  “First, there’s the city. They want an industrial park out there, so they can put up a building and offer the package cheap to this business they’re courting.”

  “What business?”

  “No one knows. It’s a big secret, but supposedly they’ll employ almost three hundred people. That’s what the city’s after, the jobs. We lost two factories in the past year.”

  “And the hardware man is the city’s negotiator in the deal?”

  “Norm Gladbrook. Right. He’s chairman of the Chaldea Development Committee.”

  “What’s the city willing to pay?” Matt asked.

  “Not much, I don’t think,” Gail answered. “Since they’re going to have to practically give the land away to entice this company to come in here, they can’t afford much of a price. The figure I heard was a hundred an acre for a fifty-acre parcel.”

  “Five thousand bucks,” Matt scoffed. “Peanuts.”

  “Maybe we could sell fifty acres to the city and the rest to someone else,” I said.

  “Possibly,” Gail said, “but there are some problems with that. The fifty acres the city wants is some of the prime farmland, the flat part, and also the parcel with the best access to the highway and utilities and all that. If we sold that parcel off it would isolate the rest of the farm and leave whoever bought it vulnerable to the city’s access requirements. Be sort of risky, I think.”

  I was impressed with Gail’s analysis, unused to seeing her as more than a sister. I wondered what else she knew that I didn’t.

  “So much for the city,” Matt growled. “Who else?”

  “The man who farms next to us. The one who works it on shares now.”

  “How much?” Matt asked again, arms folded, eyes bright with the polished glint of greed.