The Body Of Jonah Boyd (12 page)

So the bond was established. When the Ridges moved to Florida, Susan—tired of Dallas—decided to follow them. Her mother had
recently died. She, too, felt ready for a change, and being an orphan, saw no reason why she shouldn’t, as it were, “adopt”
the Ridges as her parents. They were no longer young. Although Bruce had children from an earlier marriage, none of them lived
nearby; two were in California and the third, amazingly enough, in Katmandu. Also, through her former husband, Susan had made
some lucrative investments in the stock market, and had a little money to spare. So she quit her job, packed up her kids,
and bought a house in Tampa, where she found work at a law firm. She tried to visit the Ridges every weekend. Not only was
she growing ever closer to Anne, but also to Bruce, whose departure from Kansas, she soon learned, had been hastened by something
far less benign than a simple desire for better weather. For it seemed that one of the cloverleafs Bruce had designed had
collapsed, due to a structural defect, killing seventeen people. Bruce could not reconcile himself to the idea that what was
in essence a mistake in his own calculations had cost these people their lives. He gave up his work, gave up teaching. In
Tarpon Springs, he grew increasingly absentminded, and spent as much time as he could sitting on the shores of lakes and sinkholes,
painting burnished tropical sunsets and water­scapes in which alligators and manatees figured prominently. He painted flame
trees. He painted snarky woodlands. Florida kitsch. So childlike had Bruce allowed himself to become that when Anne was diagnosed
with lung cancer, she elected not to tell him, though she told Susan. The cancer, it seemed, was of a particularly pernicious
variety; to combat its inevitable spread, her doctors were counseling surgery—removal of one lobe of Anne’ left lung—to be
followed by intensive chemotherapy and radiation. But Anne would have none of it. Of late she had been studying alternative
therapies: herbal remedies, acupuncture, and Chinese medicine. She started taking ginseng, Echinacea, and vitamin E in quantity.
Then one night she had a dream in which a voice speaking from a turtle’ mouth gave her instructions as to how she could cure
herself. Following the turtle’ directions, she temporarily left Bruce, and rented a small cottage on stilts on the Atlantic
coast, near Saint Augustine. It was July. Every day Anne lay on the beach in her bikini, a wizened woman of sixty-five who
would rise from her sun worship once an hour only to wade out into the tide carrying a little plastic telescoping glass, which
she would dip into the sea. Then, while the other beachgoers gaped in amazement, she would gulp down eight ounces of seawater.
For this was what the turtle had prescribed. Every day for three months Anne lay in the sun, and drank glassfuls of the Atlantic.
And at the end of this period, when she returned to Tarpon Springs, what did the skeptical doctors discover? That the cancer
had gone into remission. The bizarre cure, for reasons that remain inexplicable, had worked.

After that Anne lived for five more years—far longer than the six months she had been given when her doctors made their initial
prognosis. During that time she never once submitted to any conventional treatment. After she died, Bruce suffered several
small strokes. His memory was sketchy: Though he could recognize, for example, the faces of his own children, as well as photographs
of his wife, there were many days when he had no idea where he was. After a bizarre accident in which he nearly ran down a
poodle, he lost his driver’ license. Susan continued to visit him every weekend. She brought her daughters. Marching into
his house on a Saturday morning with her retinue and a bag of groceries, she tried to be a reminder that even for an old man
who was responsible for seventeen deaths, life could still contain many pleasures. She would cook him a good meal and then
drive him out to the lakes he so loved, and which he could no longer get to on his own. Then he would sit on the shore and
work on his paintings. Only when it came to painting had Bruce retained any of his old sharpness; brush in hand, he could
at least achieve the clarity that eluded him in the negotiations of ordinary life. A hideous clarity, but a clarity nonetheless.
It was during one of these visits—they had just returned from the lake, her daughters outside in the pool—that I called, and
Susan answered.

We have spoken many times since then. On two occasions, she has visited me in Wellspring. I have visited her once in Tampa.
Next month we plan to take a vacation together in Hawaii. Susan is a tall, leggy woman inclined to wear bold colors and big
hats, the sort of woman often asked to give inspirational speeches to underprivileged girls. (At least, she was asked to give
such speeches before the stock market crashed and her fortune shrunk to nearly nothing, obliterating her independence.) In
her upright stance, if not in her demeanor, she is the spitting image of her father.

It was, I suppose, as much for her sake as for the sake of truth, or history, or whatever abstraction you wish to invoke—as
much to ensure his daughter’ future as to redeem Jonah Boyd’ past—that I finally decided to confront Ben. By then two months
had passed since I’d read
The Sky.
Ben had moved into his parents’ house, and started teaching. Believe me or not as you choose: My intention, when I went to
see him that day, was never to make ultimatums. My intention was merely to learn the truth. For I was not so foolish as to
assume that what I assumed was necessarily what had happened. I only had the roughest sense of things. Nor had I said a word
to Susan about my suspicions. I wanted to be sure before I did.

It was a Saturday morning in October. I didn’t call first. I just showed up. The front door, not the back. When Ben answered,
he seemed only mildly surprised to see me. He was wearing jeans and a blue Oxford shirt much like my own, only in his case
untucked. He was drinking orange juice. “Denny,” he said with a smile. And then he invited me in.

To start with, he gave me a tour of the house, as his mother had once done. The carpeting was gone; we walked on yards of
oak herringbone parquet, buffed to a high gloss and still faintly redolent of polyurethane. Absent the gold-hued shag of the
old days, the rooms seemed at once more elegant and less cushioned than I remembered them being. Otherwise Ben had done a
remarkable job of re-creating the decor of his childhood. The black leather sofa in the living room might have been the same
one from which Jonah Boyd had held forth thirty years before; likewise the Danish modern chairs were the same, except that
neither had cat pee on it. “Most of this stuff I found at auctions,” Ben said, “and it cost a pretty penny. Much more than
my parents paid for it when it was new. What fools Daph and I were to have sold it so cheap! Oh, and do you recognize the
piano?”

I observed the fluted legs. Another Knabe. “That’ amaz­ing,” I said. “It’ almost identical.”

“It’ the same one. I tracked down the people who bought it at the estate sale, and they sold it back to me. And here"—he led
me into the kitchen—"although this isn’t the same tulip table, it’ virtually the same. Nostalgia is expensive; this one cost
nearly a thousand dollars. I don’t know if you remember that Daphne kept the original. I tried to talk her into sending it
back, but she won’t.”

I sat down. Aside from a new refrigerator and range, the kitchen looked pretty much as it always had, the only difference
being that the cabinets, once robin’ egg blue, were now yellow. “The Shoemakers were responsible for that,” Ben said, “but
I liked it, so I decided to keep it. Can I make you some coffee? Or would you prefer orange juice? It’ fresh squeezed. I won’t
show you the study or the bedrooms because I haven’t done anything there. I have to wait until I’ve got some more cash. Have
to finish my book, and for the first time in my life, I’ve got writer’ block. Can’t write a word. Just looking at the screen
gives me a headache. So predictable. As for the garden—well, if you look out the window, you’ll see that where the koi pond
used to be, there’ this horrible sort of flagstone patio.” He shook his head. “I could throttle Clark for that. . .”

He handed me a mug of coffee, then sat down across from me. As he did, I laid my copy of
The Sky
on the polar white surface of the table.

“I read this,” I said, indicating the book.

His face remained placid. He looked as if he had been expecting this.

“I’m surprised you managed to find it,” he said after a moment. “Copies are, to say the least, rather hard to come by.”

“So I discovered.”

“You were either lucky or tenacious.”

“Both, probably. Did you take the copies from the li­braries?”

“Libraries?”

“The university library and the town library. Both are missing.”

“Some of my fans can be a little . . . well, overenthusiastic. Where did you get yours?”

“From the Strand.”

“Oh, my old place of employment! Isn’t that ironic? It fits, actually. It’ all starting to fit.”

“How so?”

“Just. . . the pattern.” He leaned across the table. “So now you’ve got the book, and you’ve read it, even though I asked
you not to.”

“Correct.”

“Okay . . . So what do you want? Have you come to blackmail me?”

It had never occurred to me that Ben might think I meant to blackmail him. Now I wondered if I did.

“But blackmail implies that I’m here to ask you to give me something,” I said, “or do something, in exchange for my keeping
quiet. And I’m not.”

“Then why
are
you here?”

“Because I read the novel, and of course, from the first line, I remembered Jonah Boyd.”

“What business is this of yours?”

“It’ my business if I’m the only person to recognize the truth.”

“And what truth would that be, pray tell?”

“That you stole Boyd’ novel.”

“Do you have any evidence to prove that?”

“No.”

“Then why should I even dignify your charge with a reply?”

“But if what I’m saying is so ludicrous, then why did you instantly jump to the conclusion that I’d come to blackmail you?”

Ben turned away. It was a better question than I’d realized, for it silenced him. Suddenly I saw that he had no program, that
he was winging it, changing his tactics entirely in response to what he was able to deduce, from what I said, of what I knew.
Guesses at how much I had guessed. Which meant that the calm demeanor with which he had greeted my setting the book on the
table was a pose. Under the surface he was quaking.

“No one will believe you. Why should they?”

“It’ not as if there aren’t other people who were there that night. Glenn Turner, for instance. Or Daphne. From what you’ve
told me, you’re not her favorite person right now. And of course, we have no idea who else Boyd read his chapter to.”

“For someone who claims not to be a blackmailer, you certainly sound like one.”

“I’m just pointing out that you’re wrong to assume I’d have to have hard evidence to get people to take me seriously.”

“Okay, fine. But you still haven’t told me what you want. You’ve got to want something.”

“Just an explanation.”

“What’ your hunch?”

“That you stole the notebooks.”

“I didn’t steal them.”

“Okay, then that you found them, after the fact, and just . . . failed to give them back.”

“That’ not what happened, either.”

“Then what did happen?”

He slapped himself on the forehead. “Oh, all of this is my own fault, my own lunacy! I’ve set the dogs on myself. I must have
wanted to, somehow. Otherwise why would I have told you not to read
The Sky,
which is tantamount to saying, ‘Read it! Read it!’? I guess I was afraid. It all seemed too good to be true. Back in Wellspring,
a great job . . . the only trouble was, you were still around. That was the first thing I checked. I found out you’d retired.
I hoped you’d moved away. But you hadn’t.”

“No.”

“Of course all along I worried about you figuring it out. You, or someone. But as time went by, and nobody said anything,
it just seemed less and less likely that anyone was ever going to. And then, fairly quickly, the book faded into obscurity.
And now I come back, years and years later, and lo and behold, here you are on my doorstep with the damned thing in your hand
. . . Well, it figures you would have found one of the only damn copies floating around. Remember what I said when we had
dinner about predestination? About how my getting this job, my getting this house, all seemed like part of some plan? I still
believe that—only now I’m not so sure that the force behind the plan was benevolent. Maybe the point was to ruin me, to punish
me. I mean, look—here I am, where I’ve always wanted to be, and I can’t write a word. And now here you are, with that book.”

“You seem to have totally forgotten Jonah Boyd. It could be argued that the loss of his novel was what killed him.”

“Anne never believed that. We spent a lot of time together, when I was at Bradford. He was dead by then, of course. You know,
that was one of the principal draws of Bradford for me, the chance to take a workshop with Boyd, but he died the winter before
I started. Still, I hung out with Anne. We talked.”

“What did she say?”

“Just that he jumped on the bottle so fast, she didn’t believe it was
only
because of the notebooks.”

“Did you know that Anne is dead? I spoke to Boyd’ daughter.”

“Oh, you’ve really done your homework! Which one?”

“Susan.”

“Yes, Anne was closer to Susan than to the other one.”

We were silent for a moment, as if to honor Anne’ passing.

I noticed that Ben’ glass was empty. He was drumming his fingers against its surface. And then, quite suddenly, he got up,
in a way that startled me. What was I afraid of, that he was going to pull a pistol out of his pocket, grab a knife from a
drawer, and lunge at me with it? Nothing like that happened. “Follow me,” he said, and left the kitchen.

“Where are we going?”