1968. Part 24

Spider didn't know the half sister existed; he didn't even know his grandfather had been married twice, a dark family secret.

The police didn't give Spider any trouble about his car. They even offered him a lift out to the private lot in College Park where it was impounded, pending auction. He had to pay the lot $58 for towing and storage, but they did help him jump-start the car.

He ga.s.sed up with the engine still running and took it out to the Beltway for a half hour of highspeed aimlessness, just charging the battery andmoving. Then he drove back to Riverside and parked it on a hill overlooking the Goodwill store.

The lady there was apologetic that she couldn't just give him his things back, under the circ.u.mstances.

She did let him have anything he was sure was his for half price. He found the suitcase with his name on it and a few changes of clothes, including a set of fatigues left over from Basic Training, and almost all of his books except for the science fiction. The microscope was long gone; she remembered it selling the same day it came in.

The whole thing came to $28, but she only took twenty. She said she would pray for him and things would get better if he would only try to look on the good side. He thanked her and lugged the suitcase and box of books up to the car. When he opened the trunk a very skinny rat jumped out.

The car started okay. He drove downtown to Ninth Street and got lunch from a hotdog stand, then wandered from p.a.w.n shop to p.a.w.n shop for a couple of hours, looking at guitars and trying them out.

He finally settled on an old F-hole Silvertone, mainly because the guy behind the counter was a fellow Vietnam vet. They saw each other's bra.s.s bracelets and traded a few tales, and he offered to knock twenty bucks off the $60 price tag.

Spider drove back toward Maryland and stopped at a' bar that looked halfway clean, and took the suitcase in. He ordered a beer and went into the John to change clothes. School clothes with a sport coat; that should be good enough for talking with a bank clerk. He combed his hair and briefly considered shaving. No. With the beard he just looked sort of like a student, hair not long enough for a hippy. The beard would be less conspicuous than the scars.

He drank the beer standing up and bought a roll of breath mints from the bartender. Three o'clock; better move along.

He sucked on the mints as he drove slowly down Wisconsin Avenue. He didn't really want to talk to the woman at the bank. What could she tell him that was good news? Sorry, it was all a mistake, your mom and dad are vacationing in Florida, it was somebody else's house we were supposed to gut and paint and put on the market. I'll just open the vault here and let you take all you want, okay? Feel better?

Florida. That's where Killer was from. They were going to meet in Tampa and go down to the Everglades and hunt alligators. You could make a lot of money and it would be a d.a.m.n sight easier than humpin' the boonies.

He parked on the street a block from the bank and checked the name he had written inThe War With the Rull. Mrs. Daint.i.th. A woman with an extra t.i.t, right in the middle of her name. His hands were shaking.The bank was all marble and dark wood and bra.s.s. High heels clicking and echoing, the smell of expensive cigars.

He found Mrs. Daint.i.th's cubicle: Mortgages. She was a fairly young woman, attractive, trying to look neither. No makeup except lipstick, small square eyegla.s.ses, ash-blond hair pulled back in a bun, dark blue dress with high neck and long sleeves. Spider tapped on the wood and she looked up over the rims of her gla.s.ses. "May I help you?"

"I'm John Speidel. I called you this morning about my house, my parents-"

"Yes. Please sit down." Spider perched on the hard wooden chair and she flipped through the manila folders on her desktop. "Here, Speidel. You have identification?"

Spider fumbled with his wallet and handed over his driver's license. She studied it and looked at him and then looked at the picture again.

"I was sixteen then; I look a lot-"

"Do you have some other ID? Draft card?"

"No, they took that when I got back from Vietnam."

"Oh," she said. "Ah." She looked at the license again and pa.s.sed it back. "I guess this will do. How can I help you?"

"I just want to know what happened to my parents. I was in an accident and they put me in a hospital up in Baltimore, and by the time I was able to call home, n.o.body answered the phone. I got back this morning and the house is empty and for sale. What happened?"

"Have you talked to relatives?"

"There aren't any."

She studied the file. "I'm afraid I can't be of much help. All I can tell from this is that your parents stopped paying their mortgage three months ago. They didn't respond to letters or phone calls. A loan investigator went out and found the house deserted."

"So you put it on the market? Just like that?"

"No, first some inquiries were made. Police, hospitals, funeral homes. We found that your father had emptied out his savings account, and the checking account was overdrawn. So yes. We put the house on the market."

"But they owned it for fourteen years!"

Mrs. Daint.i.th took off her gla.s.ses and folded them. She didn't look at Spider. "John, you don't understand. Your parents never owned the house. The bank owns the house. Your parents paid fourteen years of a thirty-year mortgage. Some people put insurance on their mortgage, so that if something happens to them it will be paid off. Your parents didn't do that."

She tilted her head toward him. She had lovely blue-gray eyes, almost purple. "Is it possible that yourfather lost his job?"

"More than possible. He was fu. he was not showing up, not making any sales. My mother was worried."

She shrugged. "Something happened. I'm sorry." She closed the folder and tapped it to even the papers inside. "If I were you I'd go to the police and file a Missing Persons report. You might run an ad in the Personals section of thePost."

"Look, what if I got a job-could I pay off the missing three months and then pick up the mortgage payments until they came back?"

"If you were twenty-one and had a power of attorney. You aren't and don't, though. I think your best bet is to find your parents before the house is sold."

He sagged back in the chair. "Yeah, maybe. No. They didn't even tell the neighbors. Just left."

"I wish I could help. oh, there is one thing." She opened the file again. "It's not much. Here." She opened a white envelope and took out three certificates. "Your father bought savings bonds for you on your birthday in 1958, '59, and '60. They're worth $92.16, if you want to cash them in."

"Hey, yeah, I'd forgotten about that." He looked at the ornate doc.u.ments. "These'll get me where I'm goin'."

"Where is that?"

"Florida," he said, making up his mind.

The universe is queerer than we can imagine Beverly and Spider were in Bethesda at the same time, and they both got money from their parents, at the same bank.

She showed up at her parents' house right at noon, without Lee. Noon because she wanted to catch her mother in a good mood (it took her a few hours to get moving), and because her father would be out to lunch and unphonable until one-thirty or so.

They had a tearful reunion and Beverly related a sanitized, not so terrifying, version of what she had been doing the past five months. No abortions or police brutality. Her mother had been a secret fan of Robert Kennedy, so they had that sadness to share, and she'd always wanted to go to California. (Her husband called Bobby Kennedy the White n.i.g.g.e.r and thought California was part of the Soviet Union.) The big news was that, on their drive back from Chicago, Lee had asked her to marry him.

That threw her mother for a loop. She was pouring coffee, and the spill gave her a chance to do something before responding. She rushed to the kitchen and came back with a whole roll of paper towels.

"But darling. " She carefully stripped off two towels, setting one on the small puddle of coffee on the end table and using the other to soak up the coffee that had splashed into the saucer. "Darling, how can that possibly work out? Your father says that he's a, a h.o.m.os.e.xual.""Oh,Dad! Like, I would know if anybody did."

"You mean you've been. "

"Of course we have, Mother. What did you think?"

She blushed. "I guess I, guess I just didn't want to think about it. I mean, I know you're a modern girl and all, and I guess Iknew, but you know. You're still my little girl."

She hugged her mother, feeling manipulative. "Always will be, Mommy."

"But your father got it from John's father, who talked to John's doctor at Walter Reed."

"Got what?"

"About your Lee, that he was h.o.m.os.e.xual."

"What would a doctor at Walter Reed know about Lee? He's never been in the army."

"John's father said that he was in the army but he was kicked out because he was queer."

"No. Not possible. I mean, maybe he could lie to me about being in the army, but he couldn't lie about liking girls. I mean, obviously." Her mother nodded, looking at the floor. "And he just wouldn't lie. Not about the army, not about the other thing. He's fiercely honest, which doesn't make him the easiest man to live with, but I love him."

"None of them are easy, baby." She looked up with a strained expression. "I can't tell your father about this. He'd go after him with a shotgun."

"I know. That's why I came over when he wasn't home."

"What can I do? Do you need money?"

"Well, Lee has a job. But it won't start for a couple of weeks. And I'm going back to school." That was mostly true: Lee had an outside job coming up with Larry in a couple of weeks, but Beverly would be painting alongside him. She was going back to school, yes, but only night school, one math course. When they'd saved enough she would go back full-time.

"I'll write you a check. I'll make it out to cash, so don't you carry it around. Go straight down to the bank and cash it."

"Dad won't find out?"

"He never looks at the checkbook anymore. He was always making mistakes." She took the checkbook out of her purse and scribbled quickly. "Let's call it a wedding present." She handed it over. "Give me a call when you set the date. Make it a weekday so I can come?"

"Of course I will." She kissed her mother and sneaked a look at the check. Three hundred dollars!

The phone rang. "That'll be your father. Run along now. Keep in touch."Beverly said she would, and meant it, and went out to steer the Thing toward the Bank of Bethesda. If she had disobeyed her mother and dawdled for a couple of hours, she might have met Spider there. But they might not have recognized each other, him all bearded and s.h.a.ggy, her tanned and blond, long hair swept back into a barrette to cover the shaved spot and scar from the nightstick.

She couldn't wait to tell Lee that he was a queer.

Travel broadens The great trek south didn't require much advance preparation. Spider changed the oil in his car and got a pup tent, mess kit, sleeping bag, and a small cooler at an army surplus store. Some munchies and c.o.kes.

He went across the District Line to buy a couple of cases of beer and, on an impulse, a bottle of Old Crow. What would the drinking age be in Florida?

Spider hadn't been able to get his VA check early; didn't really expect to, but they did agree to send it to him c/o General Delivery in Tampa. He didn't know one part of Florida from another, but on the map Tampa looked far enough south for winter not to be a problem. He thought he would check out the state and national parks; just camp out for a while. Maybe go down to the Everglades, like they'd planned.

Pity he didn't know Killer's real name. He could look up his parents. The last time I saw your son, a Chinaman in black pajamas blew his brains out with an AK-47. But that's okay; I think he was already dead.

He pulled the car over onto the shoulder and sat for a few minutes with his eyes closed, forehead against the steering wheel. He got a Valium out of his shaving kit and cracked a beer to wash it down. When he felt steady enough, he drove across town to Route 1 and headed south.

Spider didn't quite make two hundred miles the first day, but he wasn't trying to break any reeords.

There was a fish camp outside of Emporia, Virginia, that had a few campsites and a million mosquitos.

The grizzled black man who ran the camp sold him a mosquito net and a serviceable old folding cot to keep his sleeping bag off the damp ground. The pup tent was a lot more complicated than the hooches they'd slept under in Vietnam, but he managed to get it standing, after a fas.h.i.+on, just before dark. He built a small fire and drank whiskey, swatting mosquitos, while he warmed up a can of spaghetti.

He went to bed feeling pretty good, but woke up just after midnight with a growing sense of panic. It was too dark. He could hear things rustling in the woods.

He got a bright fire going and fed sticks to it while he drank beer. A dark form loomed out of the night and Spider jumped up, expecting the man with no face, but it was just the old black guy, who said he was checking to see if anything was wrong.

Spider gave him a beer and they talked about the army for a while. He'd been in an all-Negro battalion in World War II. Fought in France, got a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, and came home to find that his wife and kids had flat disappeared. It took him two years to track her down, and by then he didn't care much about her one way or the other. He took a job at this fish camp, and when the white owner died, he left it to him in his will.

Spider got up at dawn and used an improvised Sterno stove to heat a canteen cup of water for coffee.

While he was taking down the tent, the old man came out with some ice for his cooler and a souvenir postcard, a faded aerial photo of the camp.The weather was perfect, clear and cool, and Spider figured he could angle over to the interstate and make it to Georgia by dusk. He didn't, quite. After a long day of cruising along uneventfully at 60 to 65, the engine started to make a loud clattering sound and various idiot lights glowed.

He pulled over and popped the hood. The fan belt was intact and the engine didn't seem to be overheating, but that just about exhausted his car repair expertise. He left the hood up and trekked back a mile to the Bamberg exit. There was a service station right there, and the mechanic was glad to come down and have a look.

He listened to the clatter for one second and told Spider that the engine was a total write-off; it had sucked a valve. You could rebuild the engine, but it would be cheaper to just pull it and drop in a replacement. Maybe seven or eight hundred bucks. When Spider said he didn't have that kind of money, the mechanic offered to hold on to the car until he could come up with it. Alternatively, he could buy the car as a junker, two hundred bucks, no, two-fifty.

The guy looked honest, and he offered to let Spider call around town to see whether anybody could come up with a better deal. I'll take the two-fifty, Spider said, if you throw in a ride to the bus station.

What the h.e.l.l; he'd expected something like this to happen. He just wanted to get to Florida and start living.

It wasn't too bad a deal, he told himself. He only had about eighty dollars left; he'd probably have to sell the car in Tampa, anyhow.

The mechanic pulled a fat roll of greasy bills out of his pocket and counted the money out in damp twenties, tens, and fives. They emptied his stuff out of the car into the back of the tow truck and made a b.u.mpy U-turn across the median gra.s.s-legal in South Carolina, the mechanic said, grinning-and went into town, where there was a Greyhound pickup point at a Sh.e.l.l station. A bus to Jacksonville, Florida, was due in about two hours.

Spider watched his car roll away and then set about trying to consolidate his pile of possessions. He managed to stuff the whiskey bottle and six of the beers into the suitcase, and another half-case of the beer into the sleeping bag, zipped up into its canvas bag. He took the rope from the pup tent and lashed the rolled-up tent and sleeping bag to the bottom of his suitcase. Most of the mess gear fit in the cooler.

So all he had to leave behind was a case of beer and the cot. He sold the beer for half price to the Sh.e.l.l gas jockey, but he didn't want the cot.

So when the bus pulled in, Spider staggered up like a poorly loaded beast of burden: suitcase in one hand, cooler in the other, sleeping bag strapped to his left shoulder and guitar to his right. He checked everything to Jax except the cooler and the guitar, and sat in the dark of the back of the bus, strumming softly and drinking beer. He felt pretty good about the trip, all things considered. It was probably a good thing that he would never know that, tomorrow morning, the mechanic would spend thirty minutes adjusting his car's valves and then sell it for a thousand dollars.

Settling in Beverly and Lee were able to rent the upstairs of a small old house for $75 a month, provided they would clean it up and repaint the inside. It was a shabby mess, but re-claimable, and Lee had two weeks before his job started. The rental agency, which occupied the floor below, put up the money for paint and cleaning supplies, and asked that they keep the noise down during the day.Lee found out in a local bar that the place had been a wh.o.r.ehouse until it was busted in 1966. That explained why the pile of debris in the living room included five moldy mattresses. He borrowed a pickup from his former and future employer Larry, and was able to take all of the garbage to the dump in two trips.

They spent two days scrubbing the place down and then another three days painting. Lee rented a floor sander and buffer; the old wood flooring was comically warped, but had a beautiful grain. They got most of their furniture from the Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, but sprang, so to speak, for a brand-new mattress. The landlord provided a small refrigerator and gas range, which had to go into the living room.

Wh.o.r.ehouses don't have kitchens.

They had five days' rest between finis.h.i.+ng the apartment and starting work. They made a lot of use of the mattress. Beverly set out to become pregnant. She knew it was partly atonement for the abortion, partly wanting to bond Lee to her with more than a piece of paper. Most of it was that she wanted to be a mother, and she wanted it now.

They were married by a justice of the peace in Hyattsville, with Beverly's mother and six a.s.sorted hippies in attendance. Her mother took them all to lunch at a decent Italian restaurant, but declined to attend the reception, at the Chillum Heights crashpad where Bev and Lee had once lived in sin, perhaps rightly intuiting that there would be a lot more marijuana than champagne involved.

Once they were settled in, Beverly called Spider's parents to see how he was doing, and was surprised to find the number no longer in service. Information didn't have a new number for them. There was a new listing for John Speidel, but she called and it was an old man, not Spider.

In a mood for detective work, she called Walter Reed, and was surprised to find out that Spider had been released about the time they left for California. She checked her diary and found that it had actually been the day before they left. She called the guy who owned the old crashpad and he said yeah, Spider'd come looking for her the day after they left. Had a joint with him; he seemed pretty shook.

She called the university and found out that he had begun the registration process for summer cla.s.ses but hadn't turned in the completed forms.

So he could be anywhere. She felt a little guilty. If they'd stayed in town another day or two, she could have talked it out with him.

Maybe, like her, Spider had wanted to stick around College Park even though he wasn't enrolled. She calledThe Terrapin, the college newspaper, and arranged for a week of spider call beverly, followed by her phone number, in the Personals section.

That was all she could do for the time being. She'd keep her eye out for him around campus, but no telling what he looked like now. He'd looked so strange in the hospital, drawn and pale. And in one of his letters he'd said that as soon as he got out of the army, he was going to grow a beard.

Expensive beer Spider's beer ran out just be-fore Jacksonville, so when he arrived in Tampa, at noon the next day, finding a bar was high on his list of priorities. He stashed his gear in a locker at the bus station after putting half his money in the suitcase, and went outside.

In Maryland it had been cool and dry, a few leaves starting to turn. Tampa was a sauna, 90 degrees andmuggy. It wasn't unpleasant, though, with the salt sea smell-actually Tampa Bay-mingling with a whisper of tropical flowers. He could learn to like this kind of winter.

Second order of business, buy some shorts. First, find a bar.