Читаем Blood Money полностью

He felt better now, now that he could have confidence in his son again. But that ice cream, which had gone down so smooth, so easy, so cool and refreshing, the damn stuff was churning in his stomach, making him feel queasy. All of a sudden he was nervous, and it almost made him laugh. Worrying about his son being nervous had got him that way.

Funny, Walter thought, where the hell did that outburst come from? His father had been sitting there for an hour, looking so calm it was unnatural, as though he were on pot or something. And then out of nowhere the old man had let go with this practically hysterical lecture. Walter was stunned; he never would have suspected that his father’s placid surface was hiding such turbulent undercurrents.

Not that he hadn’t had the notion that something was (how should he put it?) wrong with his father. Right now he was wishing he could summon courage to look at his father, to study him, observe his behavior. (Walter was a business major, but he’d taken several psychology courses as electives.) He wondered now, as he’d wondered more than once in the past few weeks, if his father was, well, sane.

Up until this uncharacteristic outburst of a moment ago, the old man seemed normal enough to Walter: quiet, self-sufficient, a hard but not unaffectionate man. But Walter knew these were superficial judgments, biased judgments from a child who desperately wanted to love and respect a father. He had never known his father all that well, really. Dad had been gone so much of the time, the business had been so demanding. Walter had felt much closer to his mother, and if she were still alive today, the situation would most certainly be different, to say the least.

The distance between Walter and his father had been shortened only these past months, these last several weeks especially. The old guy was no longer the aloof, godlike, benevolent family dictator, but a human being, a man willing to meet his son as an equal... or at least as a peer.

Walter liked that. It was a new experience and he liked it, even now, even sitting in this car waiting to... to do what they were going to.

This last week, at the lodge at Eagle’s Roost, had been wonderful and terrible. The memories the place aroused were double-edged, pleasant this moment and painful the next. Like a fire, nice to look at until you got too close. He at times felt he and his father were ghosts haunting the empty old lodge, perhaps in search of other ghosts who could share remembrances of other, better times. He could hear the voices, his mother, his sister, his father, too, and once he heard himself, a high-pitched voice, pre-puberty, and he laughed; he heard all these voices, especially late at night and early in the morning, he really heard them, but then of course he was trying to hear them. He sat in the main room downstairs, that huge open-beamed, high-ceilinged room, dark wooded, dominated by the black brick fireplace and the elk head above it. There were three brown leather sofas arranged in a block C that opened onto the fireplace, forming a room within the room, an area before the hearth where throw rugs and pillows were scattered for lounging. But the pillows and throw rugs were gone now, and when he and his father arrived, the sofas, like all the other furniture, were covered with sheets. Walter had uncovered the center sofa, where he sat and stared at the fireplace, as though it were warm and roaring rather than cold and barren. They uncovered the long table in the dining area to the left of the sofas, and he and his father sat alone together at the table, eating TV dinners and canned food and other survival rations that didn’t jibe with the memories of sumptuous feasts at this same table. On the other side of the room, where Mother’s sewing table still stood, covered of course, and faded areas on the wood floor where card tables had been, for playing Clue with his sister, and, later, Monopoly, was the window seat, the same plaid cushions he remembered. Once again he sat and watched the trees bend slightly in the breeze, their needles shimmering, and if he leaned close to the window, he could still get that same good view of the lake, blue and sparkling where the sun hit it, pink, bobbing swimmers close to shore, the sails of skiffs white along the horizon.

And sitting there in that window seat, his mind flooded with memories, he could not keep himself from wondering what this stranger who was his father, this stranger and guns and robbery, had to do with his life.