17
A G A G G L E O F teen-aged girls joggled across Southworth Prep’s green quadrangle in the bright Sunday morning sun. Fletch was waiting on the sidewalk outside an empty dormitory house.
As he came closer he saw the resemblance between the oldest girl, the only one not a teenager, and Enid Bradley—except that she was not at all overweight and her slit shorts and running shoes were not a bit out-of-date.
“Roberta?” he asked.
The girls were huffing along the sidewalk, pounding up the steps to the porch and into the house.
“Showers, everyone!” Roberta said. “Be ready for chapel in half an hour!”
She looked at Fletch.
“Roberta Bradley,” Fletch said.
“Have we met?” she asked. She wasn’t at all out of breath.
“We’re just meeting now,” Fletch said. “For probably the first and last time, no foolin’. I’m Fletcher.”
“So?”
“I.M. Fletcher.”
“You already said that.”
“The jerk who wrote the piece in the newspaper Wednesday about Wagnall-Phipps.”
“Oh, I see.” Her look was not at all unfriendly. “You want to talk. It isn’t necessary.”
“I wanted to come by …”
She glanced at the clock in the church tower across the quadrangle. “I like to run another couple miles while the little darlings use up all the hot shower water. Mind running with me?”
Her pace was faster than it had looked. She had long, skinny legs and a long stride. They got off the sidewalk and went behind the school buildings and along a dirt road.
“I run just to get a few minutes alone,” she said.
“Sorry. Pretend I’m part of the landscape, if you want. Rock, tree, tumbleweed.”
“The little darlings at Southworth Prep never give me time to go exercise Melanie. Dad’s horse.”
“You still keep your father’s’horse?”
Roberta ran silently for a minute or two. “Guess nobody’s made a decision about it yet,” she said. “Look, what do you want from me?”
“ ‘Pologize, I guess. I screwed up. Must have been a shock to you.”
Her face looked more annoyed than poised. “Why is everybody making such a big deal of this? Weirder things have happened in the world. You wrote an article about Wagnall-Phipps and referred to my father as chairman. So what? You were just out of date, that’s all.”
“Still …”
“That three-piece suiter from the newspaper came over the other night, sat Tom and me down and gave us solemn apologies from the News-Tribune. Said mistakes happen. Don’t you suppose we know mistakes happen? Jeepers!”
“It shouldn’t have happened.” Fletch’s feet were raising bigger puffs of dirt than her’s. “I hear Carradine had some nice things to say about me!”
Roberta smiled at him and waggled her head. “Boy, if you’re half as bad as he says you are, you’re awful! Incompetent, fool, compulsive liar, wow.” She stretched her leg just slightly to avoid a rock embedded in the road. “Nice of you to come by, though, I suppose.”
“I can’t explain how it happened.”
“No need to. You screwed up. So what? Last week I handed out a French test to a roomful of kids who were supposed to be taking a Spanish test. Would you believe two or three of the kids actually started to do the French test? No one should ever believe teachers or newspapers entirely.”
“Your dad’s dying in Switzerland and all … Your mother taking over the company in his absence … then he died … your mother keeping the chair warm for your Aunt Francine …”
Roberta appeared to be listening carefully.
“There was some confusion,” she said.
“Yeah. I guess you could say that.”
“You can’t understand everything that happens,” Roberta said. “I tell that to my students. You can try to understand, of course. You can even act like you understand, when you don’t yet. But some things …”
“What are you saying?”
“I hear jogging’s good for the soul. Turns you philosophical.”
“Especially on Sunday mornings.”
“Here, we go back this way.”
They ran together in silence for a while.
“Nice of you to come by,” she said again, finally. “There was no need to. Do you intend to see Tom, too?”
“Yes.”
“I wish you wouldn’t. He’s busy with his premed studies, you know. What a grind! How that kid works! Let’s just consider this incident closed. Okay?”
“Trying to do the decent thing.”
“Well, you’ve done it.” They were approaching the dormitory house. She said, “I’ll be sure and tell Tom you stopped by.” Then she said again, “Okay?”
Fletch said, “Was that really two miles we just ran?”
“Two measured miles. You can go around again, if you want.”
They stopped in front of the house.
“No, thanks.”
She was looking him over. “Looks like there’s an envelope about to slip out of your pocket.” She pointed to the back pocket of his jeans.
“Oh, that. Thanks.” He slipped the sealed envelope containing the ashes deeper into his pocket.
The house reverberated with giggles and shouts.
“Good thing you didn’t lose it,” she said. “You’d have to run around again to find it.” She took the porch steps two at a time. “Thanks for coming by. I’ll tell Tom.”
“You want to see Tom?” The responsive, open face of Thomas Bradley Jr.’s college roommate was almost as wide as the dormitory room door he held open to Fletch. “He’s here but he’s gone.”
At Fletch’s puzzled expression, the roommate said, “We keep him in the bathtub.”
He led Fletch around scrungy doorways to a scrungy bathroom.
In the bathtub, back and head resting on pillows, was a twenty-year-old man. His hair stuck up in stalks; his thin whiskers stood out from his chin and cheeks in patches, his eyes were closed. He looked a sad young man seriously contemplating the state of the universe.
“Figure he can’t hurt himself so much in there. It’s hard for him to get out. Hard for him to climb the sides, you know?”
“What’s he on?”
“Downers, man. Downers all the way.”
The roommate leaned over and opened one of Tom Bradley’s eyes with his thumb. “Hello,” he said. “Anybody home? Anybody in there?”
Fletch had told the roommate he had wanted to see Tom Bradley on family business and the roommate had said, Somebody’s come at last, thank God.
“Hey, man,” Fletch now said. “He can’t live this way.”
“Well, he does. Mostly. Sometimes he’s cleaner than others. Gets up a bit, goes home, gets money. This is a new down.”
“When did it start?”
“Friday. Two days ago. Was that Friday?”
“Shit. I was told he was a hard-working premed.”
“Never was, really. He’s always goofed. Came back to school last fall without much decision left. Attended classes irregularly a few weeks. Kept it up until, I guess, November—long after there was any reason to, he was so far behind already.”
“So how come he’s still living at the college?”
“What are we gonna do with him? Tried mailing him home, but the post office said he was too bulky a package. No, seriously. We carried him—physically carried him to the infirmary one night. Next day he was gone.”
“When was that?”
“Way back before Christmas. Showed up here two weeks after New Year’s all beat up. Looked like he had walked the jungles of Borneo. So we let him drive the bathtub some more. I went out to his house in Southworth—his mother’s house. I told her she has a problem. Tom has a problem. At first, she looked frightened out of her wits. Then she denied everything I said. She said Tom shows up at the house every week or two, and I guess he does. She said he’s just tired from his studies. Bullshit. Said he’s been under heavy strain lately.”
“What strain?” Fletch asked. “Did she say what strain?”
“Said something about his father’s death.”
Supposedly that was a year ago.”
Kneeling by the bathtub like a child playing with toy boats, the roommate looked up at Fletch. “Why do you say ‘supposedly’?”
“He’s got a pretty nice sister,” Fletch said. “Healthy.”
“Ta-ta? Yeah, I’ve talked to her, too.”
“What does she say?”
“She says this is a world in which everybody’s got to go for himself. She’s a wind-up toy, and she thinks everybody else is, too. She says there’s no understanding some things. There’s no understanding her.” Leaning over the tub side, the roommate slapped Tom Bradley’s face a few times, lightly, until Tom opened his eyes. “Hey, Tom. Person to see you. Says his name is Satan. Wants to interview you for a job as a stoker.”
Tom Bradley’s glazed eyes were aimed at the ceiling. They darted to his roommate’s face.
“Come on, Tom. You awake?”
Tom’s eyes passed over Fletch and settled about a half meter to Fletch’s left.
The roommate stood up. “Get somebody to do something about this kid, willya? I feel like someone who inherited an aquarium, you know? I have to take care of it and keep looking at it, when I’m not a whole lot interested, you know?”
“I don’t know what I can do,” said Fletch. “Not much, right away.”
“Besides,” the roommate said at the bathroom door. “I like to take a bath, you know?”
After Fletch heard the outer door close, he sat on the edge of the tub, near the faucet.
“Tom, people call me Fletch,” he said. “I’ve talked with your mother and your sister. Wanted to talk with you.”
As Fletch had moved, Tom Bradley’s eyes had remained looking a half meter to the left of Fletch’s head.
“I wrote something about your father in the News-Tribune the other day. Some sort of a mistake. I don’t know whether that’s what’s throwing you, or not. I suspect it didn’t help any.”
“My father?” Tom braced his neck against the back of the tub. His voice was louder than Fletch expected. “You going to tell me my father’s dead again?”
“Hey, man.”
“You talked to my father, lately?”
“Could I have?”
“Sure.” Tom’s smile came slowly, and his words were coming slowly. “Just go to the mantelpiece over the fireplace, open the little box, and say what you want to say. Or …” His unreal smile broadened. “You could use the telephone.”
“Tom: is your father dead?”
“Sure.” Again the response was overly loud. “Everybody says so. Even he says so.”
“What’s the joke, Tom? Come on, tell me.”
After a long pause, Tom Bradley said, “My father’s dead. He’s worse than dead. You know?”
“No. I don’t know. What’s worse than dead?”
“He killed himself.” Tom made the motion of sticking a knife into his stomach and rooting it around there.
“I see. He’d tried suicide before, hadn’t he?”
Tom looked warily into the space beside Fletch’s head.
“Tom, where did he die?”
“Southworth in the Spring. Vienna.”
“France?”
“No. Not France.”
“Switzerland?”
“Yeah. That’s it. He died in Switzerland. Of blood cancer. Many, many operations.”
“Okay, Tom. Why do you blame him for his death?”
Tom’s eyes went around the small bathroom very, very slowly. “He didn’t like.”
Fletch waited until Tom’s eyes settled back to the left of Fletch’s head. “He didn’t like what?”
Tom Bradley’s eyes closed. “No. He didn’t.” Tom muttered, “That’s the surprising thing, you see? Where does that leave me?”
“Where does that leave you?”
Tom’s eyes opened, seemed to focus on the faucet between his legs, and closed again. He answered, “In the bathtub.”
“Tom. One more question.”
“I haven’t heard any questions.” With his eyes closed, Tom spoke more quickly.
“Where was your father born?”
“He wasn’t. I guess he wasn’t born. People only thought he was born.”
“Where was he brought up?”
“In purgatory, he says. You know the word, purgatory?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s where he was brought up.”
“In what town. What town is your father from, Tom?”
“Let me think.”
Fletch waited until he believed Tom Bradley was gone into space again, and then stood up.
“Dallas, Texas,” Tom Bradley then said.
For a moment, Fletch stood over him. Then he said, “Tom? Can you hear me?”
“No.”
“Tom, I’m gonna try to help you. You don’t need this thing—whatever it is. It might not look like I’m helping you. And it may even hurt. But I’m gonna try to help you.”
After a while, Tom Bradley, Junior said, “Good bye.”
“Later, Tom.”