We Were The Mulvaneys Part 36

"If you don't trust I can do this right. If you're having second thoughts."

"Hey Pj., no."

"Forget that 'P.J.' c.r.a.pY' Patrick said. He'd meant to make a joke, a species of joke only another Mulvaney would get, for its daringly mutinous tone, but his voice was quavering. He went on, hurriedly, in the schoolboy-pedant style he'd developed at the Mulvaney kitchen table, impressing his family with his precocious ways, even as he'd made them laugh, "We didn't get legal justice. We couldn't. Dad tried, and failed. Because the legal justice system isjust a social inst.i.tution, and it's inadequate as an expression of morality. The way of 'legal justice' is to apply to a third party elevated above the 'victim' and the 'perpetrator' and their respective families and sanctioned by the people-the State. The State administers justice. But who is the State?Just more people. Specimens of h.o.m.o sapiens. And why should these specimens be elevated over others? Why should we grant to strangers a moral authority beyond our own? I've given a lot of thought to this, Judd. I'm not acting impulsively. Always at the back of my mind I see Marianne-abused, vilified, exiled even by her family. Like we're some primitive tribe, for Christ's sake! Like our sister has become a carrier of taboo! It's ridiculous, it's intolerable-I won't tolerate it. I'm not a Christian any longer but by G.o.d I'm a Protestant-a rebel. I'll execute my own justice, because I know what it is." Patrick paused, embarra.s.sed at the pa.s.sion of his speech. Such talk, aimed at his kid brother. "Judd? Hey, sorry-are you still there?"

Judd must have been moved by Patrick's high-flown words. He said, quietly, "I'm always here, Patrick. Count on me."

Back in his apartment Patrick stood for a while at his window, fearful of returning to bed. The sheets would be damp and twisted, smelling of animal panic. That unmistakable sweat-smell. He thought ofJudd, a casualty too of Zachary Lundt's rape of Marianne. The poor kid stuck at High Point Farm in its waning, disintegrating days. He and Mike had cleared out, and Marianne was exiled, and Judd, the baby of the family, was left behind. In the past several months, in these nighttime telephone conversations, Patrick had grown closer to Judd than to anyone else in the world-except, maybe, Marianne. (He loved Marianne intensely. But with Marianne you didn't speak directly, couldn't speak the kind of truth a brother could speak to another brother.)

Strange:growing up with Judd, Patrick hadn't taken him seriously. Aimost, he'd never looked at him. A kid brother is just someone who's there. Difficult to think of a kid brother as an individual with a life, his own secret thoughts, motives. But now, at the age of sixteen, Judd wasn't a child any longer and he'd become Patrick's friend and ally. Patrick liked him-very much. And respected him for his integrity and courage. Respecting a kid brother-what a novelty!

Yet Patrick wondered if, living together at High Point Farm, face-to-face, always, as in any family, competing for the attention of their father and mother, they'd be capable of such frankness and intimacy as the telephone allowed.

Sitting now at his desk, papers shoved aside. Head, which ached dully, in his hands. Jesus, what a close escape. Almost suffocated in that black muck. It had been, possibly, tar-molten tar-the tar he'd worked with, summers, on Dad's roofing crews. (What grueling, demeaning work. Laboring like slaves, for hourly wages, bare-backed on roofs.) But it was also, he seemed to see, a bog-a bog off Route 58, going toward Yewville. That dismal swampy area where a shallow creek emptied into the Yewville River north of Mt. Ephraim. Cattails and jungle vines and those brilliant purple wildflowers-phlox? loosestrife?-grew there in profi-sion in summer but most of the trees had been dying for years, as the water table rose, bark peeling off their trunks in tatters. At any hour of the day patches of sickly mist hovered over the bog. There was a pervasive odor of rot, of sewage. Just possibly, raw hog sewage seeped into the bog from a large corporate farm a few miles away. As a boy Patrick had never explored the bog, nor had anyone he knew. It was much too far to have bicycled to, from High Point Farm. Even in bright sunshine it retained a look of sinister desolation. In warm weather it was teeming with birds, frogs, water snakes, insects-microorganisms in unfathomable numbers. Now, in April, in the spring thaw, the liquidy black muck would be stirring into life after its long winter hibernation.

"Jesus!"-Patrick shuddered, feeling a pang of nausea. He rubbed, rubbed, rubbed his eyes where something was sticking to his lashes.

THE HANDSHAKE.

He won't want it, maybe? This is just to test me?

Noon ofApril 16, the Sat.u.r.day before Easter Sunday 1979, the brothers met at the spot Patrick had designated: an unpaved stretch of Stone Creek Road, near a railroad embankment, ten miles east of Eagleton Corners. The area was mainly scrubland, no houses. In deer-hunting season men in fluorescent-orange hunters' d.i.c.keys came in carloads to prowl through the woods but it wasn't deer-hunting season now.

When Patrick drove up in his battered, mud-splotched Jeep, there was Judd anxiously waiting in the Ford pickup with the.22-caliber Winchester rifle, wrapped in a strip of canvas, on the pa.s.senger's seat beside hjni. Judd's heart lifted at the sight of his brother whom he hadn't seen for some time. If this was a test of Judd's loyalty and faith in Patrick, he knew he'd done well.

So far as Corinne knew, Judd was on an errand to a farm supply store in Eagleton Corners. Neither Corinne nor Michael Sr. had any idea that Patrick was anywhere near home.

Patrick slowed the Jeep but continued past the turnoff where the pickup was parked. Deftly turned in the road, and drove back to park close by Judd, facing the opposite direction. He swung open his door as Judd opened his but neither brother climbed out of his vehicle. In these quick confused seconds Judd had absorbed the significant fact that both the front and rear license plates of Patrick's Jeep were partly obscured by mud. "How's it going, kid?" Patrick asked. The voice was not Patrick's voice. From their many telephone conversations Judd had come to know Patrick's voice as intimately as his own but this voice, loud, aggressively cheerful, was not that voice. Chill sunshine fell from directly overhead through the Jeep's not-very-clean windshield and onto Patrick's pale, sharp-chiseled face. He looked older, scarcely recognizable. He was wearing wire-rimmed sungla.s.ses so dark as to appear black and his jaws were covered in whiskers of approximately a week's growth. He was wearing an army fatigue jacket and his hair was completely bidden beneath a dark woolen cap pulled down low on his forehead. Judd stared, fascinated. "What's wrong, kid? Don't you know your old brother Pinch?" Patrick seemed pleascd.

"You do look sort of different." "That's my intention."

"Well. I brought the-what you wanted."

"Great! Give it here."

Stone Creek Road was empty of traffic in both directions, so far as Judd could see. He handed Patrick the ride in its canvas wrapper and Patrick exaimned it on his lap, behind the steering wheel. He stroked the polished stock and drew his fingers slowly along the long slender barrel. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, aimed it beyond Judd's head, frowning through the scope. Judd steeled himself preparing for Patrick to pull the trigger. Who knew if Mike's old rifle could even fire, after so many years? Judd hadn't dared to test it, himself. Patrick had said he didn't want the rifle fired, no evidence of recent use, if that could be avoided.

Weird:Pj. with a beard. How Mom would laugh. Though she'd say Patrick was handsome, too. Any new thing the brothers did, like Mike slicking his hair back oiled in high school, or P.J. getting his round wire-rimmed eyegla.s.ses instead of those Morn had selected, she'd make a fuss initially, declaring she'd never get used to it, what an unsettling sight, then come around after a few days to marveling how handsome her sons were, after all. As if she'd made the choice, not them. And maybe she'd remember it, she had.

Watching Patrick, Judd began to recognize something. Those bristly brown whiskers. The tight-lipped expression. Patrick reminded him of one of those Hebrew prophets from their Sunday school Bible cards! They'd been given so many of them, as children, at one or another of the churches their mother had taken them to. Judd's favorite when he'd been a little boy was someone named Amos because on his card, in bright primer colors, Amos was tall, manly, sharp-eyed and fanatic in his bushy beard and herdsman's clothes and the caption beneath his picture was The LORD will roar from Zion. Amos 1:2.

Judd was saying, "I was worried I wouldn't be able to locate the key to the cabinet but it was in the kitchen drawer, Mom had tagged it. 'Cabinet, family room.' Just like Mom."

Patrick didn't reply. He was examining the rifle like a finicky customer. He'd opened it, peering at the bullets; extracted a bullet to hold it to the light. Judd saw, or believed he saw, that his brother's hands shook slightly. Patrick said, "Did you bring any more bullets?"

Judd had forgotten; a box containing two dozen bullets, never opened, he'd found in one of the cabinet drawers. "Oh, yeah. Here."

"I doubt I'll be using them, but-" Patrick smiled, taking the box from Judd, "-you never know. 'Chance follows design' but not invariably."

'Chance follows design'-what's that mean?"

"You make careful plans, and 'chance' seems to favor you. Things go your way that look to a neutral observer like luck. But it's luck you've engineered."

"That sounds good."

"But not int'ariably. Because design can collapse, no matter how carefully it's been planned."

Patrick shut up the rifle, covered it with the canvas and laid it on the seat beside him; put the box of bullets into theJeep's glove compartment. His movements were brisk, methodical. He was preparing to drive away. They'd been together scarcely five minutes. Judd felt a stab of panic-wasn't there more to be said, explained?

He thought If it's only a test it can end now.

Patrick named another out-of-the-way location, about equidistant from Mt. Ephraim and High Point Farm, where Judd could retrieve the rifle the next day. This was the old abandoned cemetery on Sandhill Road, surrounded by a crumbling Stone wall where, at the rear, if you approached it from the rear, there was a niche the gun could be shoved into beneath the wall. Patrick said, "You'll be going to church with Mom? You won't be able to get away until later but pick up the gun as soon as you can. If there's any change of plans I'll try to call you. But it should be all over by then."

How lightly it sounded on Patrick's tongue. But what did it mean, exactly?

Patrick lifted his dark gla.s.ses to look at Judd. His eyes were startling-not eyes that went with the beard but young eyes, quizzical and alert. "How's the sale of the farm coming along? Any luck?"

Judd shrugged. It was too painful to talk about somehow in the open air. "Mom says we can buy it back sometime. She says that at least once a day."

"But is anyone interested in buying?"

"Sure, people are interested. A doctor and his family drove out from Yewville last week. If we're home, the realtor tries to keep out of our way. Usually we're not home. Mom makes it a point not to be home. So weird to see people you don't know, strangers, being shown Judd's voice trailed off, weird was so juvenile and inadequate a word to express what could not be expressed but only endured.

"How's Mom taking it?"

"She's all right. She's the one negotiating on the phone, mainly."

"Does Marianne know yet?"

"She must know."

"I didn't tell her."

"Well, she must know. Mom's always saying Marianne should be 'realistic.'

"And Dad, what about Dad? He's 'realistic'?"

"He's negotiating to move the business to Ma.r.s.ena, unless he's negotiating to file for bankruptcy. He isn't home much but when he is he's on the phone with lawyers."

"Is he drinking, much? How's he behaving to Mom?"

Judd thought What about to me?-the other day, he'd asked his father please not to shout at his mother and his father had come close to striking him in the face. "Look, Patrick, drop by and see us sometime. It's only ninety miles from Ithaca, it isn't the dark side of the moon."

Patrick looked away. He said, quietly, "Not just yet. Not for a while."

"Yeah. You said."

"I can't forgive them, for Marianne. Him, especially. It's never going to be the same again and Mike feels the same way. I was talking to him a couple of weeks ago-he feels the same way."