Smoke Page 35

  “You don’t want to go there in the daytime. What was the other thing you learned, Freddie?”

  Long silence. Very long silence. How bad could this bad news be? And then at last he said it: “Well, Peg, what they told those other guys, this situation is permanent.”

  She stared at the road, appalled. Out there, five drunken teenage boys, flopping around beside the road, made some hopeless attempt at hitchhiking; she didn’t give them a second’s thought. “Permanent?”

  “What they say now,” came his deeply gloomy voice, “was that the thing they told me was an antidote wasn’t an antidote, so they lied to me from the very beginning, it was their other experiment, and they never figured to put those two experiments together, so they’re trying to put it around it’s my fault.”

  “Your fault! Doctors!” Peg cried, curling her upper lip, a thing she rarely did because it didn’t look good on her. “Blame the patient!”

  “That’s it. They lied to me before about it being the antidote, and they told their pals they were gonna lie to me about it being permanent. So the only way I can trust those guys is when they don’t know I’m around.”

  “That’s probably true of all doctors,” Peg said. “But what about it, Freddie? Why not get a second opinion?”

  “I wouldn’t trust anything they said to me.”

  “From a different doctor, Freddie. Have a different doctor examine you, as best he can.”

  “Peg, those are the guys made up those experiments, they’re gonna know better than anybody else what’s what with them.”

  Peg scrinched up her face, as though at a bad taste. “So you really think they’re right, huh?”

  “Well, Peg, I’ve had this thing a month now, with no booster shots or nothing like that. If it was gonna wear off, wouldn’t it start by now?”

  “I guess. Probably.”

  Another silence, each of them alone with troubled thoughts, and then Freddie said, “I know what you got to do, Peg, and I don’t blame you. I’d do the same. I mean, with men, a woman’s looks are more important than a man’s looks to a woman. Imagine if I couldn’t see that nice face anymore.” Then, perhaps realizing the other implication of what he’d said, he added, “I mean, if you were invisible.”

  “I know, Freddie.”

  “Here, but I couldn’t see you.”

  “I know, Freddie.”

  Something touched her right forearm; she couldn’t help it, she flinched, but then immediately pretended she hadn’t. Freddie said, “This doesn’t change anything, Peg, not between you and me. You still got to go away, see how you feel, get away from this situation for a while.”

  She sighed, long and sincere. “Yeah, I do, I really do.”

  “We can still talk on the phone, you can still come up and see me—Jeez, Peg, the language is full of land mines—you can come up and visit me when you want, we won’t have to worry about what happens long-term, just take it one day at a time.”

  “Okay, Freddie,” she said, grateful to him and loving him and sorry for him and absolutely unable to go on living with him—not right this minute, anyway.

  Some of their silences together were comfortable, but not this one. It was with a real grinding of gears being shifted that Freddie suddenly said, in a bright new artificial voice, “Well, anyway, did you get me a car?”

  “I got you wheels,” she said.

  “What do you mean? It isn’t a car?”

  “No no no, it’s a car.”

  “It’s not a truck, or a hearse, or a school bus.”

  “Come on, Freddie, I’m not going to get you anything stupid. It’s a car, okay?”

  Did you ever have that feeling, even though you can’t see anybody, you know eyes are watching you?

   

  * * *

   

  “What is it?”

  “It’s called a Hornet. An American Motors Hornet. It’s eighteen years old, and in perfect mechanical condition, except the right window doesn’t roll down.”

  “It’s green, Peg.”

  “So?”

  “The green Hornet, Peg?”

  “You worry too much, Freddie,” she told him.

  This was Saturday morning, around eleven o’clock. Yesterday, when they’d gotten home, Freddie had taken a long hot tub, he’d had two big cheeseburgers and two ears of corn on the cob and two bottles of beer from Pennsylvania, and then he had slept until eight that evening, and woke up just in time to eat his way through a complete dinner, after which he’d announced he was beginning to feel a little better.

  This morning, Peg had called the dealer over in Putkin to be sure the car was ready, which it was. Freddie, in Dick Tracy mode, then rode in the van with Peg to Putkin, left her there outside the used-car lot, and drove on back to the house. Half an hour later—even when the dealer says it’s ready, it isn’t ready—Peg showed up in this thing.

  The green Hornet was very low, about elbow height, and small, with two doors and a backseat just big enough for two bags of groceries and one—not two—six-pack. The front and rear windows were both so steeply slanted they almost looked straight up. The rear and side windows were covered with smoky film, and even the windshield had a faint coppery gray tinge to it. The interior was very hard to see. Freddie said, “What’s with the windshield?”

  “It’s bulletproof. All the windows are.”

  “Who owned this thing? Al Capone?”

  “It’s not that old, Freddie. I’ve got the car’s whole history, and it only ever had one owner, and she was a little old lady—”

  “Who only drove the car once a week.”

  “Well, yes,” Peg agreed.

  “To go to church on Sunday.”

  “Well, no,” Peg said. “Actually, to go visit her son the ax murderer in the state penitentiary.”

  “That’s what the dealer told you.”

  “He showed me the newspaper clippings,” Peg said. “There’s a law, there’s a lemon law, if a car has anything unusual in its history that you oughta know about, like a bad accident or a dead body stuffed in the trunk for a couple months, anything like that, the dealer has to tell you.”

  “I’ve heard of a lot of laws,” Freddie said, “and none of them have ever made a hell of a lot of sense, if you want my personal opinion, but that one there is just about the dumbest yet. You’re makin a law that mice can fly.”

  “Nevertheless,” Peg said, “he had to tell me the history, and that’s why the car was so cheap. Three hundred bucks. With a one-year guarantee on everything except tires.”

  “Peg,” Freddie said, “there’s bumps all over this car, dents and bumps.”

  “Well, according to the news clippings,” Peg said, “the ones the dealer showed me, the people in the neighborhood hated the family, especially because the mother always kept saying her son was a good boy—”

  “They always do.”

  “So people would throw rocks at the car every time she went by. That’s why the bulletproof glass, too. And that isn’t the original paint.”

  “No, I could see that,” Freddie said. “You don’t usually get brush marks on a factory job. Peg, when I drive this thing around, people are gonna throw rocks at me?”

  “No, no, this all happened in Maryland. They had to move the car far away to a different state so they could sell it at all. When they auctioned it.”

  “Who auctioned it?”

  “It was a consignment from the state of Maryland. Apparently, this dealer in Putkin is the only one even put in a bid.”

  “How come it was up for auction? What happened?”

  “Well, the son’s prison time was up, so they let him go.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “And he went home.”

  “And?”

  Peg shrugged, looked away, looked back. “And,” she said, “he took the ax to his mother, so now he’s back inside forever, no parole, and the car came on the market.”

  “The car came on the market,” Freddie
echoed, looking at the lumpy green Hornet.

  “It’s a very hard sell, all in all,” Peg said. “But I figured, a guy like you, a story like that wouldn’t bother you.”

  “Oh,” Freddie said. “Right. Not a bit.”

  Peg smiled fondly on the little green monster. “And if you don’t think about its history,” she said, “it’s perfect, right?”

  “Right,” Freddie said. The Dick Tracy head nodded and nodded. “Perfect,” he said.

  47

  The worst thing was knowing they’d never be invited back.

  Well, was that the worst thing? Wasn’t the worst thing losing Freddie, the invisible man, twice? This time, no doubt, for good? Wasn’t that the worst thing? And if not that, then wasn’t the worst thing losing their funding for their melanoma research and having to do the bidding of a monomaniac out of James Bond, who wanted to genetically alter the human race so he could sell cigarettes? Wouldn’t that be the worst thing on a whole lot of lists?

  Well, yes, of course. And both of those are extremely bad and terrible and horrendous and unfortunate. But nevertheless, when you come right on down to the nitty-gritty, the worst thing was knowing they’d never be invited back.

  Not that Robert and Martin displayed by the merest iota of a scintilla that anything was even the teeniest weeniest bit wrong. They were as polite and civilized as ever, or almost; the destruction of their landscape had necessarily dimmed their sparkle somewhat.

  And there had been an extra moment of trouble, unfortunately, when Peter—and then David, just a few seconds later—had tried to limit the damage by insisting that none of the thirty-four guests soon to arrive for the dinner party should be told about the invisible man. “And just what,” demanded Robert, waving a hand that quivered over the moonscape of his former lawns, “am I supposed to say happened here? A remake of All Quiet on the Western Front?”

  “You can say,” Peter suggested, “you’re redoing the exterior.”

  “And that wouldn’t be a lie.”

  But there was no hope for it. Even if the physical evidence hadn’t been so extreme, there was the fact that the eleven people already present were absolutely bursting with the story, bubbling over with it, half-wanting to end the weekend now so they could go away and regale someone who hadn’t been here. If gossip is the fuel of social interchange, this was rocket fuel, and no power on earth would keep it from going off.

  “All I ask, then,” Peter said, when everything else he’d asked for had been refused, “is to make the announcement. At dinner, let me tell the story.”

  “When at dinner?” Robert asked, suspicious. “Over coffee? Believe me, everybody will know by then.”

  “No no no, before dinner is served.”

  Dinner would be buffet-style, and announced, so people could get on line. Peter said, “They’ll be waiting for you to announce dinner, so announce me instead, and I’ll tell them what happened, and then we’ll have dinner, and that will be that.”

  “Please, Robert,” David said. “Our future hangs on this. Robert, Martin, you’ve always been dear friends, you know how horribly we feel about what happened here, please let Peter tell everybody in his own fashion.”

  “Put his spin on it,” Robert suggested.

  “If you like,” Peter said, who would have agreed with anybody about anything at that point.

  Well. It was easy to refuse Peter, no problem, but everybody had always found it hard to refuse David, so it was finally agreed, with great reluctance, that no one would tell the new arrivals anything about the invisible man before Peter stood up and made his general announcement.

  And that, a few hours later, was what he did: “Thank you, Robert, thank you, Martin. Thank you for a lovely weekend, as usual, for charming and exciting guests, for a dinner that we already know is going to be superb. And thank you both for being so understanding and sympathetic and forgiving about an experiment that went so very very wrong.”

  Peter sipped his vodka. There was so little grapefruit juice in it by now it looked pretty much like the invisible man himself. Peter went on: “You all saw that horrible destruction outside, when you came in.”

  They had. The murmuring the last half hour had been about nothing else, with those privy to the story merely giggling or sighing or shaking their heads, saying only, “We promised to let Peter tell.”

  So here it came: “As most of you know, David and I are scientific researchers, and skin cancer, melanoma, is the area of our research. An experiment on a willing—and I must emphasize willing—volunteer subject went terribly awry. It affected his body in the way, well, somewhat in the fashion we’d expected and hoped, but it seems to have, well, affected his mind as well, making him angry and mistrustful, and possibly even violent. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to tell you a wolfman story here, but the fact is this fellow, who happens to be a convicted felon, by the way, and his name is Freddie, is, well, he’s, you can’t see him.”

  Everybody looked around. Can’t see whom? So what?

  Robert called out, “Say the word, Peter, say the goddam word!”

  “Oh, all right!” Peter cried, and finished his vodka, and announced, “He’s invisible! All right? He came here because he knew we were here, and he wanted us to help him stop being invisible, and we can’t! And he’s, he’s extremely angry! And he had a, he had a cohort here—”

  “Peter,” David interrupted, “I don’t think one person can be a cohort.”

  “I don’t care!”

  The newcomers were wide-eyed, disbelieving, asking quick whispered questions, getting quick whispered answers, yes, yes, it’s true, it’s all true, an invisible man, in this very room!

  Peter drank from his empty vodka glass, rolled his eyes, took a deep breath, and said, “This man, this Freddie, is invisible. Yes, he is. He was here, and now he’s gone away, we don’t know where, we wish we could help him—”

  “Oh, yes, we do!” David cried.

  “—but we can’t, and he’s probably gone for good, and we’re just so sorry that Robert and Martin’s beautiful house and beautiful grounds were just so wantonly, wantonly, that everything here was so, so, so . . .”

  Peter was floundering by now, which Martin saw and understood, so he got to his feet and stood in front of Peter, faced the openmouthed guests, and said, “Peter and David asked if they could invite this person here, this man who’d been a volunteer in their experiment and was turned invisible, and we said yes, of course, because nobody realized, and certainly not Peter and David, just how much trouble this individual would be once he understood that the effects of the experiment were irreversible. It did upset him terribly, and I’m sure we can all sympathize with what he must have been going through, even while we do regret the certain amount of damage that resulted. And now that’s the whole story, and I believe dinner is served, and now we can forget all this and go on and discuss other things.”

  Not one word was said, on any other topic, the entire weekend.

   

  * * *

   

  “A fantastic weekend,” David said, on Sunday afternoon, as he shook Robert’s hand and then Martin’s, out by the cars in the sunshine. “You rose to the emergency so well.”

  “And so did you, David,” Martin assured him. “And Peter, too.”

  Robert, with a gruff and hearty false laugh, said, “The landscaping was due for a makeover anyway. You get tired of the same old fountains.”

  Peter said, “We still feel terrible about the whole thing. You two have always been such dear friends, I’d hate to think of something like this coming between us.”

  Martin, with his sweetest smile, said, “Peter, please, don’t think another thing about it.”

  Smiles; air-kisses; waving farewells. Peter and David climbed into the red Ford Taurus, which seemed smaller and nastier than on Friday, in a more garish and plebeian red. In silent misery, they put on their yachting caps.

  David was driving, for the return to the city. He s
teered out to Quarantine Road, made the turn, and Peter said, “That Martin. What a slimy creep he is. Nurse Martin indeed. Did you hear him? At least Robert comes out and tells you what he thinks.”

  “No, he doesn’t,” David said.

  “You know what I mean. ‘Don’t think another thing about it,’” he simpered, mimicking Martin. “You know what that’s all about. Don’t think you’re ever coming back here.”

  David sighed, but saw no point in discussing their ouster from Eden any further. They were on County Route 14 now, and he looked at the remains of a bicycle by the side of the road; it must have been in a truly ghastly accident. I’d hate to have been riding that bike, David thought, trying to find somebody in the world worse off than himself.

  “And now the story’s out,” Peter complained.

  “Oh, not really,” David said. “That part doesn’t worry me. Already it’s just an anecdote. People who weren’t there won’t really believe it, they’ll think it’s just another of those urban legend things.”

  Peter brooded. “I’d like to see that Freddie now,” he growled.

  David sighed. “Well, that’s the problem in a nutshell, isn’t it?” he asked.

  48

  Sunday afternoon. No more stalling. It was time to leave. “Freddie,” Peg said, looking mournfully at Frankenstein’s monster, “I wish you’d chosen another head.”

  “This didn’t seem like anybody else’s moment, Peg.”

  She should have left here yesterday, after she’d done the test spin with Freddie in the green Hornet and he’d pronounced himself pleasantly surprised with its comfort and handling. But somehow neither of them could permit it to end there, just like that. They stood on the driveway blacktop beside the new car, Freddie at that time, yesterday, still in his Dick Tracy mode, and they hemmed and hawed together for a while, and at last Freddie said, “I have a little idea, Peg. Come on to the pool.”

  “What for? I’ve seen you swim, it’s the only time I can see you, or something like you.”

  “Just come along, okay?”

  His Playtex hand took her hand, and she allowed him to lead her around the house and up the slope to the pool, where he carefully closed the door in the fence and said, “Come on in the pool, Peg.”