Page 21 of Going Home in the Dark

Of course even in the process of her personal enlightenment, Rebecca understood and didn’t even slow down as they passed Bobby’s rental car. She knew that when he was an infant, the Pinchbecks had taken him into their home and fed him and clothed him, but hadn’traisedhim. It had been like living with ghosts who drifted silently through the days as if lost between worlds.

“If the Pinchbecks were still alive,” he said, “I wouldn’t go to visit them while we’re here. I swear I wouldn’t. Those people made me crazy.”

Spencer had driven his own Genesis SUV from Chicago. He was reluctant to accommodate his songwriter friend. “If he loses control of his bowels and bladder, I’d have to junk the car.”

“He isn’t going to lose control,” Rebecca said. “He’s not in a coma. He’s in some kind of stasis. I’ll take him in my car.”

As Bobby piloted the wheelchair to Rebecca’s rental, he said, “Are we really sure Ernie’s not dead?”

“Yes,” said Spencer at once, even as Rebecca said, “Hell yes, we’re sure.”

Bobby looked sheepish. “Okay, yeah, right. We’d feel it if he was dead, know it psychically, spiritually, somehow, some way.”

“We’re still thefouramigos,” Rebecca declared.

“Amigos now and forever,” Spencer said.

Ernie’s head lolled to one side, but that was merely gravity at work, not a nod in recognition of the abiding friendship and mutual defense treaty to which the amigos had long ago sworn allegiance.

Bobby and Spencer muscled Ernie from the wheelchair and into the front passenger seat, dropping him only once in the process and managing to wrestle him off the blacktop with Rebecca’s assistance. He was loose-limbed, like a big cloth doll stuffed with dry beans. When he was in the car, the safety harness held him more or less erect.

As Spencer took back his porkpie hat and fitted it to his head, he made a small sound of satisfaction similar to the thin whimper of delight that might escape a dog when it found a missing toy and was able to paw it out from under a sofa.

When Rebecca closed the car door, Ernie tipped to the right as far as the harness would allow, knocking his forehead against the window. Although his eyes remained closed, his pale face was like that of an exotic fish pressed to the wall of an aquarium, curious about the awkward, ambulatory creatures beyond the glass.

Through all of that, vehicles cruised slowly by as the drivers searched for convenient parking spaces, and a few people passed on foot. No one stared directly at the trio struggling with a limp man at the open door of the rental car, but warily noted it with their peripheral vision. Neither did anyone slow down as though to offer help or otherwise intervene.

After all, this was America midway through the third decade of the twenty-first century, which often seemed to be an alfresco asylum where one out of four individuals was an impassioned but tedious neurotic. Another one in four was likely to be a flat-out lunatic who would tear your face off for the offense of being somewhat satisfied with yourself and your life. It was best to pass through every day as if you were a tourist in Jurassic Park: Stay in the electric tram; do not make loud noises; in a crisis, remember stillness is essential because the T. rex can recognize you as prey only if you move; expect something to go terribly wrong at any moment.

They were staying at the Spreading Oaks Motor Hotel, where they would rendezvous later, but trying to stash Ernie there, moving him from room to room to elude the housekeepers in the morning, was not an option that Rebecca could approve. That was like the action in an English farce, which would never work in the United States, where humor was increasingly viewed with deep suspicion by federal law-enforcement agencies.

Applying the plotting ability of a successful novelist, Bobby said, “There’s only one place that makes sense. We have to take him back to his house.”

“Really?” Spencer said with a note of disbelief. “Are you serious? His own house?”

Spencer Truedove had a sensitive nature. However, he possessed zero ability to recognize deception, duplicity, and chicanery in others because he had no capacity himself to deceive or betray. He wasn’t as sweet as Ernie Hernishen. No one was. But Spencer was an honest and forthright soul who was perpetually surprised by the radical life-changing decisions of others. Even before her sudden enlightenment, Rebeca understood this naivete was why Spencer had failed to anticipate that his mother would go to New Orleans and become Constanina, that his father would divorce her and marry the stripper, Venus Porifera, or that his dad and Venus would buy the strip club, convert it into the tax-exempt Church of the Sacred Erogenous Revelation, attract four hundred parishioners who were devout degenerates, and leave Spencer to live alone, at fourteen, in the former family home on Mayfield Avenue. Therefore, Rebecca wasn’t surprised that Spencer failed to see the wisdom and cunning of stashing Ernie in his own home.

“It’s one of the first places they’ll look,” Spencer objected. “Especially if they think they were wrong to declare him dead, that maybe he’s alive and walked out of the hospital on his own.”

Rebecca was not in the least dubious, because she had starred in productions with grossly improbable twists in the storylines that were nonetheless well received by viewers. As the gentle breeze flounced her brunette wig and the oblique sunlight made gemstones of her blue eyes behind the phony eyeglasses, she said, “If they go to his house, it’ll be a quick search, calling out to him,glancing in rooms. They aren’t going to look in places like an old steamer trunk or a freezer.”

Aghast, Spencer said, “We can’t put Ernie in a freezer.”

“We can if we unplug the thing and throw out what’s already in it and jam the latch open so he can escape easily if he comes back from ... from wherever he is.”

Considering that Spencer was an avant-garde artist praised by critics for producing incomprehensible images of a unique and often disgusting nature, he was being surprisingly close-minded about the freezer. “No. I won’t be party to putting Ernie in a freezer.”

“So we slide him under a bed,” Rebecca said.

Bobby said, “Or stand him upright in a broom closet and brace him so he doesn’t fall out.”

“Or lay him in a guest room bathtub,” Rebecca suggested, “and pull the shower curtain shut.”

Bobby said, “Sit him up in a corner of the attic and pile junk in front of him.”

“No, no, no,” Spencer objected. “It’s summer. It’ll be hot in the attic, very hot.”

Rebecca said, “You know, Spencer, Ernie’s not in a coma. He isn’t even breathing. He won’t know it’s hot. He’s in some kind of suspended animation. We’ve seen this before.”

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