Handling Sin Read online

  of Knox-Bury’s Clothing Store, whose menswear manager he was. “They’re sure not here,” he said.

  “How’s Vera doing?” asked Hayes by way of initiating his departure. Pouches of flesh slid up over Mingo’s eyes as he recalled the fortune cookie’s warning about his wife Vera’s being an adulteress. It

  occurred to him that Raleigh Hayes was his best friend. At least—

  except for Vera—he didn’t have any other close friends, and hadn’t

  had since high school, and hadn’t had very many then, being fat,

  timid, and furtive. “What do you mean?” he asked with a hard look.

  He certainly didn’t want to find out that his cookie had told the truth

  and that he had lost his wife, and his only friend, the only neighbor

  who had accepted his fortieth-birthday dinner invitation, the nextdoor neighbor who could be relied upon to recharge a battery,

  explain a 1040 form, call the police if robbers started packing up his

  house.

  “How’s she doing?” Hayes repeated.

  “What do you mu…mu…mean, doing?” Sheffield stalled, hanging on to innocence.

  Hayes grew impatient. “What do you mean, what do I mean?” “You mean her diet?”

  “She’s dieting?” Hayes didn’t even much like Vera Sheffield. She

  had too many things going on at once; she was a religious maniac and

  a lewd joker at the same time. She was altogether gluttonous. She was

  almost as fat as Mingo, as fat as Hayes’s dead relatives, and not-yet-dead relatives, most of whom had ballooned off the top of his Mutual Life healthy-weight charts. She was a fat, born-again loud

  mouth.

  “She’s lost forty-two pounds,” Sheffield was saying. “She has?”

  “She had her teeth wired together. You know how they do.” “She did?”

  Mingo Sheffield relaxed with a heave at the sight of his neighbor’s unmistakable amazement. Surely, if Raleigh and Vera were having an affair, it wouldn’t have escaped his notice that her mouth was

  wired shut and forty pounds of her were missing. Now, Mingo said

  proudly, “It was a last resort and my hat’s off to her, that’s for sure.

  She’s been through all getout.” Sheffield never dieted himself, but

  slenderized vicariously through his wife’s suffering. She’d been losing

  weight for a quarter of a century, but always with a backlash. Two

  years ago she’d had Mingo put a lock and chain on the refrigerator

  door, but then had gone crazy and sawed it off while he was out at

  Chip ’n Putt. She’d even eaten the bread that had turned blue. Last

  year, after not missing a single Gloria Stevens exercise class for eight

  months, she’d tried for first prize in the Civitans’ Christmas fruitcake

  fund-raiser by buying the ones she couldn’t sell and eating them herself. “She’s doing it for Jesus,” explained her husband. “Forty-two

  pounds!”

  “Well, I hope He appreciates it,” Hayes offered in parting. “She’s not in such a hot mood,” Sheffield called after him, and

  then walked across the silent street to look at the family of picnicking mannequins he had himself arranged in Knox-Bury’s display window. Sharp-creased summer clothes stuck out stiffly from their arms

  and legs, and new shoes hung off their toeless feet. The mannequin

  mother was taking a rubber pie from an ice chest and the mannequin

  father was looking fixedly at his tennis racket as if he were wondering why he’d brought it along on a picnic when there were no courts

  in sight and nobody to play with. Lonesomeness fell on Mingo

  Sheffield; there wouldn’t be a soul to talk to in the empty store, and

  at home his wife’s teeth were wired together. He felt like climbing in

  the display window and sitting with the mannequins on the plastic

  grass and staring with them into the aluminum-foil lake on whose surface the boy mannequin’s fishing line lay tangled, as if he’d tossed it onto an ice lake without bothering to drill a hole. Mingo looked back down the sidewalk but Raleigh Hayes had disappeared. His friend was a fast walker, thought the pensive floor manager; a man

  with somewhere to go.

  Raleigh Hayes always walked fast, even if he was only walking to

  the bathroom, even if he was only walking along the beach. He hurried because forty-five years had already gotten away from him,

  because life was always two uncatchable steps in front of him, running away like a burglar with satchels full of all the things that

  should have belonged to Raleigh Hayes—like money, position, a

  home in which nothing was unrepaired, and, in general, a future,

  and, mostly, his just desserts. What our hero didn’t know as he hurried back to business was that the burglar was just now getting ready

  to wheel around and scare him to death by flinging the satchels at his

  head. That, at any rate, was his father’s plan, if a man like his father

  could be said to have formulated anything that could reasonably call

  itself a plan, which Raleigh would have denied.

  On the surface, Raleigh Whittier Hayes looked like his father,

  (ex) Reverend Earley Hayes, but the resemblance hadn’t soaked in.

  For that, the son was grateful. Indeed, he resented even the physical

  likeness. The blueness of Raleigh’s eyes, the high color of his cheek,

  the corkiness of his sand-colored hair and soft loose fullness of his

  mouth had, all his life, led people (even those who hadn’t known

  the father) to expect of the son a Rabelaisian insouciance he neither

  possessed nor approved. He was continually a disappointment to

  those who assumed he would live up to his looks, and they were a

  disappointment to him. He’d done what he could to bring his surface

  into conformity with what was inside: he’d put his eyes behind

  glasses, fretted away a little bit of his hair, and tightened his mouth.

  Raleigh’d grown tall and lean and pale, so that he’d come to look

  like Earley Hayes stretched on the rack and, consequently, bitter in

  the face.

  What was on the inside of the son belonged to the mother, second of Earley’s three (so far) wives, and the only one with any money.

  A great deal of money (well, not a great deal, but enough for a reasonable man), money that Raleigh Hayes was to inherit as soon as his father died, which should have happened a long time ago. Not that Raleigh wanted it to happen at all. In fact, he and his single sane aunt had spent the past six months persuading the seventy-year-old gadabout to enter the local hospital for the tests he was now having for his blackout spells. It was just that Hayeses rarely lived into their seventies. Most of the foolhardy gene pool had died laughing of one carelessly aggravated congenital malady or another, years and years younger than Earley Hayes was now. Somehow, Earley kept bouncing up and down on the tip of the diving board without ever slipping in. His son, Raleigh, considered himself fortunate that he’d been bequeathed only the father’s looks, for the majority of those with any Hayes blood shared a dangerously blithe character as well, and they’d horsed around as if life were child’s play until they’d toppled (unin

  sured) into early graves.

  As a life insurance agent, Raleigh was appalled by the fact that

  he’d never been able to sell his relatives a single policy. They were

  too cavalier to insure themselves and too sentimentally superstitious

  to insure anyone else. But they were glad to let him take out his own

  small policies on them, although it seemed to them a terribly dull use

  of money. Because of their calamitous genealogy, the premiums were

 
exorbitant. He sank the returns into land; it lasted longer than the

  creatures who lay under it. He now owned two beach houses near

  Wilmington, and he rented them out to vacationers, and lent them

  to his relatives. They loved the beach.

  On the twelfth floor of the Forbes Building at the Crossways (as the center of downtown Thermopylae was called), Raleigh Hayes overlooked his reflection in the glass door that bore his name and title. INSURANCEAGENT, MUTUALLIFE. The phone was ringing while he was opening the door. He couldn’t imagine why Bonnie Ellen didn’t answer it. She was his new secretary, and the reason she didn’t answer the phone was she was at home arguing with her husband about whether or not they should move to California. But Hayes wasn’t to find out why Bonnie Ellen had let the phone keep ringing until much later, because when Chief Hood came to his house to ask him if he’d killed her, he’d already left town.

  Raleigh snatched up his own receiver and announced himself. “It’s me,” said his wife, out of breath. Her name was Aura, and as a result, her sensible, if somewhat cryptic, remarks struck others as having a mystical elusiveness.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Your daddy’s gone!”

  “He’s dead. Dear God.”

  But Aura blew a puff of air into the phone. “Oh, Raleigh, no. He

  ran off from the hospital before they could finish his heart tests. When they brought in his lunch tray, there was nothing on his bed but his suitcase! Honey, I hate to say I told you so.” She didn’t explain what she had told him, but it certainly hadn’t been that his father was going to skip out of the hospital, undetected, and vanish.

  Hayes sat down without even looking for his chair. His tailbone hit the corner of the armrest and shot pain up his spine like a dart. “Why wasn’t I informed?” he asked, as if he were already talking to the hospital officials, which, in his mind, he was. “Why has all this time been lost?”

  “Honey, don’t take it out on me, if you don’t mind. The nurse thought he was down getting X-rayed.”

  “All morning?” he asked her picture on his desk.

  “Well.”

  “I’ll go to the hospital. You hold down the fort.”

  She said, “Fascinating how these macho metaphors hang on.”

  “Aura, good-bye.” But as soon as Hayes hung up and yelled, “Bonnie Ellen,” the phone started ringing again, and a man laughed in his ear. “Whatcha say, Ral pal?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Well, don’t chew up my face. It’s one of your cousins.”

  It was Jimmy Clay, son of Raleigh’s father’s sister Lovie, and a salesman at Carolina Cadillacs on the beltway. He said, “Just saying muchas grassy to a fellow Civitan.”

  “What for?” Hayes was pulling the phone cord over toward the door as if he could hang up sooner if he got closer.

  “For Big Ellie.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, Jimmy.” Raleigh’s cousin was a conversational obscurantist, and always had been. At six, he would telephone Raleigh after school and talk nonstop in his own gobbledegook language, saying things like “Oomauchow laow laow tingo fringo agaknockah.” At fourteen, he’d goose Raleigh from behind, shouting, “Hotchahotcha gotcha!”

  “Jimmy, I’m a little pressed for—”

  “Your daddy,” said Clay. “He bought Big Ellie. First thing this morning. Said he did it for you. Oogah boogah, press the pedal through the metal and tear up the roads, boy!”

  “Just a minute.” A sour Oriental taste was coming into Hayes’s throat. “Are you telling me my father just bought a car from you?”

  Jimmy Clay snickered. “A car? She’s just the biggest, purtiest, custom-built yellow El Dorado Cadillac convertible we ever had sitting for two years on the lot! Why, I myself would call that baby a lookie, nookie catcher. I sure wouldn’t pay $21,395.77 for something I just wanted to drive!”

  Raleigh’s heart socked his chest so hard he could feel his shirt jump. “Paid how?” he whispered.

  “Hunh?”

  “Paid how?”

  “Cash on the dash. Lootierootie-scootiebootie-boolucha!” In his enthusiasm, Jimmy Clay had lapsed back to his childhood lingo.

  “Cash!”

  “A check. Why, is it gonna bounce? Plus, traded in his old Chevy.”

  Raleigh leaned against the wall, then sank down it to the floor. He hadn’t sat on a floor in twenty years. His father, who had indifferently driven the same green Chevrolet for a decade, had just spent $21,395 of his money for a car, for four wheels and a motor and yellow paint and not even a top on it. Raleigh could have remodeled his basement, he could have paid off his daughters’ orthodontist, he could have bought more beach land, he could have saved it.

  “You there, Raleigh?”

  “He said he bought it for me?”

  “I said to him, ‘Uncle Earley, you sure? Kind of hard to picture old fussbudget Raleigh behind this wheel.’ Told me, ‘Said I was buying it for him, didn’t say I was giving it to him.’ You know how your daddy is!”

  “No, I don’t.”

  The insurance agent taped a note to his door that said, “Be back soon.” This proved to be a lie, but he couldn’t be expected to know that now. As he hurried down the hall, somebody invisible ran beside him and tried to screw a bolt through his temple. He stopped to bang his head once against the door to the supplies closet. Behind it, the janitor, Bill Jenkins, almost dropped his brandy bottle.

  Half an hour later, Ned Ware at Carolina Bank and Trust shamelessly admitted that he had not only transferred thirty thousand dollars from Earley Hayes’s savings account into checking, not only sold the man five thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, not only promised to have ready the cash from ten thousand dollars in negotiable bonds in an hour; he had done all this from the drive-in teller’s window! To Raleigh, that fact added unbearable insult to injuries already doing damage to every one of his vital organs.

  “Why I did it is your daddy didn’t feel like he ought to come inside,” said Ned Ware, a high-school halfback now (like Hayes) middle-aged, who’d gotten his manager’s job at the bank from the same Thermopylae Rotarians who’d sent him to college.

  “Why couldn’t he come inside?” His face wild, Raleigh bent his knees to keep from falling down in the middle of the bank, and stuck his hands under his arms to keep them from shaking. He looked as if he were about to start a Cossack dance.

  “I guess, because he was in his pajamas. Plaid ones.”

  The more distraught Raleigh Hayes felt, the more polysyllabic his language, the more sarcastic his tone; it was a way to ward off howling. Now he said, “You conducted financial transactions of that magnitude with a seventy-year-old man in his pajamas in a drive-in window!”

  “Well, first, I figured he had on a kind of a beach outfit. So I said, ‘Headed for the beach, Mr. Hayes?’ So he said, ‘Not hot enough yet to drive to the beach in pajamas.’ He had the top down, though.”

  “I presume he was in a yellow convertible?” If Hayes had known the Latin word for yellow, he would have used it.

  Ned Ware whistled through the gap in his front teeth. “I wish I was with him; God, don’t I?” He began to swing both arms fast from one side to the other. Papers blew off his desk. “Spring hits, I can’t sit still. I’d kill for a car like that on a day like this.”

  Raleigh stooped to pick the papers up off the orange carpeting, just to have something to do as he snarled, “I can’t believe you gave him that much money that fast, when even a baboon could have deduced that my father was not behaving exactly normally, without informing me first. I goddamn can’t believe it!”

  Ware nodded. “Your daddy said you’d say that. But don’t call me a baboon, hear?” He puffed up. “It’s his money and unless you can prove he’s gone non compost mennis, that’s the name of the game, and I know you’re upset, but watch your mouth, Raleigh. We’ve got women in this bank.”

  Hayes looked around the lobby. A
big swatch of orange over brown paint shot in a straight line around the walls near the ceiling. It looked like a highway to him, as if, defying gravity, his father had zoomed sideways in his yellow Cadillac right around the room, then sped out the doors, and out of town with money that was his only by accident, and belonged by right, by blood, by character, to the sole son of Sarah Ainsworth Hayes, now deceased.

  Ned Ware confessed to having not the slightest idea where Earley Hayes was headed. “All he said was, tell you when you showed up that he was taking a little trip and not to worry.”

  Raleigh’s laugh was the strangest he’d ever produced. “All right, Ned. Just don’t spread this around, will you do me that favor?” Not that Raleigh couldn’t see from the smirks on the tellers’ faces that they already knew everything. “Just don’t talk about it.”

  “You mean about the teenage colored girl?”

  Dear God, thought Hayes, let this witless blabbermouth suddenly have developed a sadistic sense of humor. Let this all be a joke at my expense.

  But the old halfback’s wide face was crumpling into solicitude. “I know. It must have been awful hard to swallow. ’Course, I figured she was a nurse or something at first, ’cause she had on, looked like a white uniform, even if she was sitting up there in the front seat, brown-bagging it in broad daylight. But when I tried to, you know, ask him about her, and your daddy told me he was planning on getting married, I swear my heart went out to you, Raleigh. I can’t help it, I mean, I’m no racist, but this little number, that blond wig and purple eyeshadow and all, well, hell, she looked like a hooker to me. She sure didn’t look like somebody I’d want for a stepmother. Bob Lane said he’d bet a dollar she’s not more than sixteen at the most. She didn’t even count those traveler’s checks, just dumped them in her overnight case.”

  Ned Ware was still talking in this vein as Raleigh Hayes turned around as if summoned by a hypnotist, and walked out of the bank. He walked down the precise middle of the sidewalk three blocks to the Lotus House, and anyone who didn’t move, he bumped against without even noticing.

  There wasn’t anyone in the Lotus House except the Shiono grandmother behind the counter, adding up on a little brass abacus the money in the cash register. Hayes pulled a shiny red menu out of the rack, found the word cocktails, and pointed to the first name under it. It was Singapore Sling. He ordered three by holding up his fingers. They came in fish bowls. As he drank the first one, he took from his pocket his fingernail clipper, and cut his nails to the quick. Putting it back, he felt the wrinkled slip of paper that had come out of his fortune cookie less than two hours ago. He read it again. “You will go completely to pieces by the end of the month.” The anonymous soothsayer had hedged his bet much too cautiously.