Part 7 (1/2)

”You know, Dave,” Geoff began. ”I'm glad you dropped by just now. It strikes me that your own research is similar to mine in enough aspects that you might have some fresh insight into some problems I've run into. If you'd care to take time, I'd like to go over some of my notes with you, and see what you think.”

”I don't think you'll have time,” smiled Froneberger. He reached for Geoff's empty coffee cup, dropped it into a pocket of his lab coat.

”What do you mean?” asked Geoff thickly, coughing suddenly. There was pain deep, deep in his throat. Another racking cough filled his mouth with blood.

And he knew what Froneberger meant.

Where the Summer Ends.

*I*

Along Grand Avenue they've torn the houses down, and left emptiness in their place. On one side a tangle of viaducts, railroad yards and expressways-a scar of concrete and cinder and iron that divides black slum from student ghetto in downtown Knoxville. On the other side, ascending the ridge, shabby relics of Victorian and Edwardian elegance, slowly decaying beneath too many layers of cheap paint and soot and squalor. Most were broken into tawdry apartments-housing for the students at the university that sprawled across the next ridge. Closer to the university, sections had been razed to make room for featureless emplacements of asphalt and imitation used-brick apartments for the wealthier students. But along Grand Avenue they tore the houses down and left only vacant weed-lots in their place.

Shouldered by the encroaching kudzu, the sidewalks still ran along one side of Grand Avenue, pa.s.sing beside the tracks and the decrepit sh.e.l.ls of disused warehouses. Across the street, against the foot of the ridge, the long blocks of empty lots rotted beneath a jungle of rampant vine- the buried house sites marked by ragged stumps of blackened timbers and low depressions of tumbled-in cellars. Discarded refrigerators and gutted hulks of television sets rusted amidst the weeds and omnipresent litter of beer cans and broken bottles. A green pall over the dismal ruin, the relentless tide of kudzu claimed Grand Avenue.

Once it had been a ”grand avenue,” Mercer reflected, although those years had pa.s.sed long before his time. He paused on the cracked pavement to consider the forlorn row of electroliers with their antique lozenge-paned lamps that still lined this block of Grand Avenue. Only the sidewalk and the forgotten electroliers-curiously spared by vandals-remained as evidence that this kudzu-festooned wasteland had ever been an elegant downtown neighborhood.

Mercer wiped his perspiring face and s.h.i.+fted the half-gallon jug of cheap burgundy to his other hand. Cold beer would go better today, but Gradie liked wine. The late afternoon sun struck a s.h.i.+mmering haze from the expanses of black pavement and riotous weed-lots, reminding Mercer of the whorled distortions viewed through antique windowpanes. The air was heavy with the hot stench of asphalt and decaying refuse and Knoxville's greasy smog. Like the murmur of fretful surf, afternoon traffic grumbled along the nearby expressway.

As he trudged along the skewed paving, he could smell a breath of magnolia through the urban miasma. That would be the sickly tree in the vacant lot across from Gradie's-somehow overlooked when the house there had been pulled down and the shrubbery uprooted-now poisoned by smog and strangled beneath the consuming ma.s.ses of kudzu. Increasing his pace as he neared Gradie's refuge, Mercer reminded himself that he had less than twenty bucks for the rest of this month, and that there was a matter of groceries.

Traffic on the Western Avenue Viaduct snarled overhead, as he pa.s.sed in the gloom beneath-watchful for the winos who often huddled beneath the concrete arches. He kept his free hand stuffed in his jeans pockets over the double-barrelled .357 magnum derringer-carried habitually since a mugging a year ago. The area was deserted at this time of day, and Mercer climbed unchallenged past the rail yards and along the unfrequented street to Gradie's house. Here, as well, the weeds buried abandoned lots, and the kudzu was denser than he remembered from his previous visit. Trailing vines and smothered trees arcaded the sidewalk, forcing him into the street. Mercer heard a sudden rustle deep beneath the verdant tangle as he crossed to Gradie's gate, and he thought unpleasantly of the gargantuan rats he had glimpsed lying dead in gutters near here.

Gradie's house was one of the last few dwellings left standing in this waste-certainly it was the only one to be regularly inhabited. The other sagging sh.e.l.ls of gaping windows and rotting board were almost too dilapidated even to shelter the winos and vagrants who squatted hereabouts.

The gate resisted his hand for an instant-mired over with the fast-growing kudzu that had so overwhelmed the low fence, until Mercer had no impression whether it was of wire or pickets. Chickens flopped and scattered as he shoved past the gate. A brown-and-yellow dog, whose ancestry might once have contained a trace of German shepherd, growled from his post beneath the wooden porch steps. A cl.u.s.ter of silver maples threw a moth-eaten blanket of shade over the yard. Eyes still dazzled from the glare of the pavement, Mercer needed a moment to adjust his vision to the sooty gloom within. By then Gradie was leaning the shotgun back amidst the deeper shadows of the doorway, stepping onto the low porch to greet him.

”G.o.dd.a.m.n winos,” Gradie muttered, watching Mercer's eyes.

”Much trouble with stealing?” the younger man asked.

”Some,” Gradie grunted. ”And the G.o.dd.a.m.n kids. Hush up that growling, Sheriff!”

He glanced protectively across the enclosed yard and its ramshackle dwelling. Beneath the trees, in crates and barrels, crude stands and disordered heaps, lying against the flimsy walls of the house, stuffed into the outbuildings: the plunder of the junk piles of another era.

It was a private junk yard of the sort found throughout any urban slum, smaller than some, perhaps a fraction more tawdry. Certainly it was as out-of-the-way as any. Mercer, who lived in the nearby student quarter, had stumbled upon it quite by accident only a few months before-during an afternoon's hike along the railroad tracks. He had gleaned two rather nice blue-green insulators and a brown-gla.s.s c.o.ke bottle by the time he caught sight of Gradie's patch of stunted vegetables between the tracks and the house that Mercer had never noticed from the street. A closer look had disclosed the yard with its moraine of cast-off salvage, and a badly weathered sign that evidently had once read ”Red's Second Hand” before a later hand had overpainted ”Antiques.”

A few purchases-very minor, but then Mercer had never seen another customer here-and several afternoons of digging through Gradies's trove, had spurred that sort of casual friends.h.i.+p that exists between collector and dealer. Mercer's interest in ”collectibles” far outstripped his budget; Gradie seemed lonely, liked to talk, very much liked to drink wine. Mercer had hopes of talking the older man down to a reasonable figure on the mahogany mantel he coveted.

”I'll get some gla.s.ses,” Gradie said, acknowledging the jug of burgundy. He disappeared into the cluttered interior. From the direction of the kitchen came a clatter and sputter of the tap.

Mercer was examining a stand of old bottles, arrayed on their warped and unpainted shelves like a row of targets balanced on a fence for execution by boys, and a new .22. Gradie, two jelly gla.s.ses slos.h.i.+ng with burgundy, reappeared at the murkiness of the doorway, squinting blindly against the sun's glare. Mercer thought of a greying groundhog, or a narrow-eyed pack rat, crawling out of its burrow-an image tinted grey and green through the s.h.i.+mmering curvatures of the bottles, iridescently filmed with a patina of age and cinder.

He had the thin, worn features that would have been thin and watchful as a child, would only get thinner and more watchful with the years. The limp, sandy hair might have been red before the sun bleached it and the years leeched it to a yellow-grey. Gradie was tall, probably had been taller than Mercer before his stance froze into a slouch and then into a stoop, and had a dirty spa.r.s.eness to his frame that called to mind the scarred mongrel dog that growled from beneath the steps. Mercer guessed he was probably no younger than fifty and probably not much older than eighty.

Reaching between two opalescent-sheened whiskey bottles, Mercer accepted a gla.s.s of wine. Distorted through the rows of bottles, Gradie's face was watchful. His bright slits of colorless eyes flicked to follow the other's every motion-this through force of habit: Gradie trusted the student well enough.

”Got some more of those over by the fence.” Gradie pointed. ”In that box there. Got some good ones. This old boy dug them, some place in Vestal, traded the whole lot to me for that R.C. Cola thermometer you was looking at once before.” The last with a slight sly smile, flicked lizard-quick across his thin lips; Mercer had argued that the price on the thermometer was too high.

Mercer grunted noncommittally, dutifully followed Gradie's gesture. There might be something in the half-collapsed box. It was a mistake to show interest in any item you really wanted, he had learned-as he had learned that Gradie's eyes were quick to discern the faintest show of interest. The too-quick reach for a certain item, the wrong inflection in a casual ”How much?” might make the difference between two bits and two bucks for a dusty book or a rusted skillet. The matter of the mahogany mantelpiece wanted careful handling.

Mercer squatted beside the carton, stirring the bottles gingerly. He was heavy-set, too young and too well-muscled to be called beefy. Sporadic employment on construction jobs and a more or less adhered-to program of workouts kept any beer gut from spilling over his wide belt, and his jeans and tank top fitted him as snugly as the older man's faded work clothes hung shapelessly Mercer had a neatly trimmed beard and subtly receding hairline to his longish black hair that suggested an older grad student as he walked across campus, although he was still working for his bachelor's-in a major that had started out in psychology and eventually meandered into fine arts.

The bottles had been hastily washed. Crusts of cinder and dirt obscured the cracked and chipped exteriors, and within were mats of spider web and moldy moss. A cobalt-blue bitters bottle might clean up nicely, catch the sun on the hallway window ledge, if Gradie would take less than a buck.

Mercer nudged a lavender-hued whiskey bottle. ”How much for these?”

”I'll sell you those big ones for two, those little ones for one-fifty.”

”I could dig them myself for free,” Mercer scoffed. ”These weedlots along Grand are full of old junk heaps.”

”Take anything in the box for a buck then,” Gradie urged him.

”Only don't go poking around those G.o.dd.a.m.n weedlots. Under that kudzu. I wouldn't crawl into that G.o.dd.a.m.n vine for any money! ”

”Snakes? ” Mercer inquired politely.

Gradie shrugged, gulped the rest of his wine. ”Snakes or worse. It was in the kudzu they found old Morny.”

Mercer tilted his gla.s.s. In the afternoon sun the burgundy had a heady reek of hot alcohol, glinted like bright blood. ”The cops ever find out who killed him?”

Gradie spat. ”Who gives a d.a.m.n what happens to old winos?”

”When they start slicing each other up like that, the cops had d.a.m.n well better do something.”

”s.h.i.+t!” Gradie contemplated his empty gla.s.s, glanced toward the bottle on the porch. ”What do they know about knives? You cut a man if you're just fighting; you stab him if you want him dead. You don't slice a man up so there's not a whole strip of skin left on him.”

*II*

”But it had to have been a gang of winos,” Linda decided. She selected another yellow flower from the dried bouquet, inserted it into the bitters bottle.

”I think that red one,” Mercer suggested.

”Don't you remember that poor old man they found last spring? All beaten to death in an abandoned house. And they caught the creeps who did it to him-they were a couple of his old drinking buddies, and they never did find out why.”

”That was over in Lonsdale,” Mercer told her. ”Around here the pigs decided it was the work of hippie dope fiends, ha.s.sled a few street people, forgot the whole deal.”

Linda trimmed an inch from the dried stalk, jabbed the red strawflower into the narrow neck. Stretching from her bare toes, she lifted the bitters bottle to the window shelf. The morning sun, spilling into the foyer of the old house, pierced the cobalt-blue gla.s.s in an azure star.

”How much did you say it cost, Jon?” She had spent an hour scrubbing at the bottle with test tube brushes a former roommate had left behind.

”Fifty cents,” Mercer lied. ”I think what probably happened was that old Morny got mugged, and the rats got to him before they found his body.”

”That's really nice,” Linda judged. ”I mean the bottle.” Freckled arms akimbo, sleeves rolled up on an old blue works.h.i.+rt, faded blue jeans, morning sun a nimbus through her whiskey-colored close curls, eyes two shades darker than the azure star.

Mercer remembered the half-smoked joint on the hall bal.u.s.trade, struck a match. ”G.o.d knows there are rats big enough to do that to a body down under the kudzu. I'm sure it was rats that killed Midnight last spring.”