“You’re mad,” John’s voice cracked.
“You haven’t even asked what my price was,” Thomas sulked. “Ask me what my price was.”
“You’re insane.”
“The first price was too high, of course. The first price was too impossible. It was her, naturally: she was the price. When they refused that, I would have settled for a single night with her, and when they refused that I would have settled for an hour. But she simply wasn’t part of the bargain, was she? They couldn’t have sold her to me even if they wanted because, you know, it’s a funny thing, but she had entirely other ideas about it. So finally I settled on a bottle of wine. It was a good bottle of wine. You should make that clear to others when you go back, it was a good bottle of wine. You should make sure they understand it was a bottle of French vintage that James brought back from Paris. I drank it in an hour. While I drank,” he said, “I saw her face and touched her hand, and it was hours before she left me again, before the edges of her began to dissipate in the dark until she was just a small black pool on the floor next to my bed.”
“It was that girl in London,” John said.
There was a pause that seemed momentous to John only because it was so dark, and then he heard Thomas say, “I can’t see your white flag anymore, John.”
“It was that girl in London, who brought over your daughter. And Abigail said, She shouldn’t go to Paris; and I was a fool, not because I didn’t believe her but because I knew she was right and I wouldn’t admit it. She shouldn’t go to Paris, Abigail said. If you had come to get your daughter in London as had been planned, everything would have been different. You would have gotten your daughter in London as planned and taken her back to Paris with you, and that girl would have been on the first ship back to America.”
“I can’t see your white flag anymore so I think you better go. If you stay longer, no one will be able to see your white flag. Nothing stays white here very long.”
John turned, stumbling in the dark toward the door. He grappled for it so frantically that the white flag ripped from his chest. He ran from the room clutching it in his hand; he ran down the hall of the house past the armed slaves and through the house’s entryway. He virtually leapt into the waiting carriage, jarring it so hard the horses took the impact as a signal to lurch down the road in full gallop. Half of Virginia was behind them before they stopped.
Thomas’ army moved that night. Thomas rode with James in his black carriage, chains around his wrists and clothed in an Indian blanket; the president’s militia reached the plantation in time to find squealing pigs and lingering mules as its new custodians. The slave army alternately lumbered and darted across the American countryside, disbanding in one hamlet to reassemble in another valley, engulfed by skirmishes from Virginia to Ohio to Pennsylvania and New York, back down to Maryland through the fall and into winter, never quite deciding whether to try to seize the country or leave it. Every once in a while Thomas would emerge after sundown from his carriage or tent. He would walk through the camp, directing his army’s maneuvers on their march west to the Louisiana territories while the autumn wind blew his tall frail body and tattered rags and his masters ordered him to feed the horses and clean the rifles. When the campaign’s climactic battle decimated the forces so disastrously even retreat wasn’t feasible, when America washed itself in a tide of slave blood, James chained Thomas to the carriage seat and they made their escape into a country that had no name but west. Eventually they came to an Indian village.
The village stood high on a mesa that overlooked the world for as far as Thomas could see. Abandoning the carriage James unlocked Thomas’ chains and the two men made their way by foot up the path alongside the mesa, where they were greeted by the natives, into whose arms Thomas collapsed. Two Indians carried him across a narrow stone bridge that connected the main mesa to a smaller one, so high above the ground that Thomas was overcome with the fatalistic calm of having placed his life utterly in the hands of others. He was taken into an empty adobe house, where he was set on blankets with a bowl of water beside him. When he lay down, his head hurt even more; and so for some time after the natives left he sat upright, soothing the pounding at the back of his skull against the coolness of the dirt wall. He was thirsty for some wine. He kept thinking he should drink the water in the bowl but he hadn’t the energy to lift it to his mouth, and a few moments later he regretted not having taken the opportunity when he woke in the hotel room to find the water gone, displaced by the long-forgotten scent of someone sleeping in the bed several feet away, the strange bald boy with the pictures on his body coming through the door.
Sixteen years after the murder of the unknown man in the Downtown hotel, the police arrested Gann Hurley not far from the peripheral highway where he’d been sighted for the past two months staring out at the lava fields. As it happened Polly was just crossing the fields with her two dogs on her way back to the city, and was just on the other side of the highway, when she saw the officers swoop down on Hurley and drag him to the car. She cried so desperately as she ran alongside the car that all the way back to headquarters the cops shot sullen, reproachful glances at their boss; at headquarters the girl begged them to let her see her father, until she collapsed in the hallway. The boss was unimpressed, unless one counted sheer satisfaction. Even the scar of his face appeared content.
Most of these years Mallory hadn’t really cared much about the unsolved murder, his attention entirely absorbed by Wade’s apprehension in the bowels of the Arboretum. But now the Hurley arrest represented for Mallory the final closure of an obsession that began in earnest the afternoon his face was peeled from the front of his head onto an alley wall. There were still loose ends in the matter, which Mallory might have spent the rest of his life tying up if he seriously believed there was a point; but even Mallory accepted that no one was likely ever to know exactly who the dead man in the hotel had been or what had happened between him and Sally Hemings, though whatever had transpired was presumed motivating enough for Hurley to kill him. The evidence was slim but, thought Mallory to himself, fuck evidence. It was a process of elimination, and when everyone else was eliminated Hurley was left, and his throat was as good for ramming a murder down as anyone’s. Mallory had been so relentless in his pursuits for so long he didn’t know how to stop, and he had half a mind to arrest the daughter as some sort of accomplice, if at the time of the incident she hadn’t been two years old.
Forty-eight hours after Hurley’s arrest, however, Mallory knew something was amiss. The directive came down from Primacy to move Hurley not to the penal colony, where Mallory expected to send him, but the train station. “What bullshit is this?” Mallory asked whoever was within asking range. Hurley was put back in a car and taken to Vagary Junction, where not only a train was waiting but also, on the platform, a flock of white-robed priests, more of them in one place than Mallory had ever seen at one time. Standing in the doorway of the train was Hurley’s daughter and her dogs. The rosary was removed from Hurley’s wrists and now Mallory definitely had this queasy feeling in his stomach. As he became more and more furious his face began to bleed, small red rivulets trickling into the lines and wrinkles.
His daughter threw her arms around him as Hurley got on the train, and Mallory could see them through the windows as they made their way down the aisle of the car. The priests signaled the conductor and the train responded with a lurch, and a minute later obsession’s final sweet resolution was irrevocably beyond Mallory’s reach; all that was left was the volcano in the distance and the steel rails gleaming in the Vog and the man on the other side of the track with the red books in his arms and the blue eyes floating in his glasses like crystal balls. Like Mallory, Etcher stood watching the disappearing train for as long as it was in sight, and then stepped over the rail and up the steps to the platform, where he delivered the books into the possession of the priests, and the rosary that Hurley had worn was snapped around his wrists and he was put in the police car. He was d
riven down the highway to the penal colony south of the city. Within the colony’s gray walls he was given a gray prisoner’s robe and placed in a large black cell with no windows, for which the sound of the sea in the distance, Etcher told himself, was soothing compensation.
He had his own mattress and was allowed one small bag of personal possessions as long as they didn’t include reading material. He had been in the cell an hour before he realized he shared it with other prisoners, some of them lying so still in the shadows they might have been dead. He was taken to a yard where the ground was littered with forbidden artifacts that had been seized during altar searches; on the rocks of the yard, under the watch of armed priests in black robes, the prisoners smashed the artifacts with dull mallets. Iconic carvings and blasphemous jewelry and children’s books were hammered and pulverized into pulp. First the sensual quality of the object was disfigured and then its meaning, and then its form; and when the object had been pounded into a misshapen lump of wood or mineral or paper, the remains were then beaten into the rock itself until the whole ground throbbed with heresy. Since new artifacts were being delivered every day, this work never ended. The prisoners had no conversation among themselves and gave what they were destroying no special attention.
The days passed and then the weeks. Etcher became old and exhausted by the work. He didn’t eat and in the mornings he had to be brutally awakened by the black-robed guards as though from a stupor. He opened his eyes every day to the devastating regret that he was still alive. Though visiting day was once a month no one came to visit him, nor did he expect anyone; but loneliness that he not only reconciled himself to when he lived in the volcano but coveted was now harder to bear. Though he tried very hard not to think about anything, to drain his mind of any wandering impulse, after a while he found that in the yard beneath the blistering sun he couldn’t help but occasionally gaze through the barbed wire of the penal walls to the volcano in the east and the city to the north. He told himself he had no reason for this reverie, but soon it was the thing he lived for and from which the guards interrupted him. Months went by before Etcher realized one day who it was he was looking for, as though she would appear around a bend or over a hill; and then his heart pleaded with him not to torment it. He reasoned with himself that she was safe now and free and where she belonged, that this after all was why he had made his bargain with the priests, to give back her father after having taken away her mother. He pointed out to himself that if she were to come back to the city she might never be able to leave again and would therefore only risk never seeing her father again. It was not only a preposterous hope to inflict on himself but a cruel one to expect her to fulfill.
Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but look for her. With every day she didn’t come, the wound of his heart grew a little larger and deeper and he got a little older and sicker, until one afternoon as he was slamming his mallet against a rock in the heat, trying to remember what the artifact was he had just destroyed, he realized it was his glasses. Pitching face first into his heartbreak he collapsed not into the black robes of a guard but the black arms of another prisoner.
Etcher didn’t recognize the other prisoner. That time so many years before in the hallway of the Arboretum all he’d been aware of was his own blood and the assailant’s looming form. Now when Etcher regained consciousness on the mattress in his cell, the other man was there to give him a drink of water and a bite of bread. The two of them didn’t speak for a long time. The first thing Etcher asked several mornings later was, “Did she come today?”
Wade didn’t know what he was talking about. “No,” he answered.
After a moment Etcher said, “I thought maybe she came.”
“Get some sleep,” Wade said. After that Etcher asked every time he woke, sometimes only hours apart, since in his growing delirium he lost track of the days. Wade dreaded Etcher’s awakenings, when he always had the same answer to the same question. “It makes no sense that she should come,” Etcher reasoned out loud. “She shouldn’t come.”
“You’re not well enough to see anyone anyway,” Wade said. “You haven’t moved from this mattress in three weeks.”
“I’ll get up if she comes,” Etcher insisted.
“OK.”
“Promise you’ll tell me.”
“OK.”
But of course she did not come. Soon, working in the yard, Wade found himself searching for her as Etcher had, his eyes constantly peeled for a sign of her up the road in the distance. Now he had a pretty good idea who he was looking for. And when the sun set he returned to the cell wondering whether it took more courage to tell Etcher a lie or the truth.
Etcher’s moments of cognizance dwindled. Soon he was spitting blood, and after that pissing it. With one arm the black man held the white man up over the hole in the corner of the cell that served as a toilet; in his other hand he held Etcher’s dick for him while he watched the stream of blood in the dark. When he carried Etcher back to the mattress he could hear the pieces of the man’s heart rattle in his chest. It was the sound he thought of when Etcher gave him the box.
Etcher had awakened one last time. Wade held him in his arms. Etcher barely had the strength to speak, so his eyes asked instead and Wade answered, “She came today.” Etcher gripped the other man’s arm harder than Wade would have thought he could grip. His eyes pleaded with more longing than Wade would have thought blind eyes could plead. Wade swallowed and went on. “She was here. I saw her. I talked to her a second or two through the wall. She asked about you. She’ll be back tomorrow.” It was an awful gamble. He was gambling that Etcher wouldn’t make it through the night. He was gambling against Etcher’s life that Etcher might take with him into death one last dream. Etcher pulled Wade’s ear down to his mouth.
“Listen to me,” he whispered, “there are only three things you die for. Love, freedom, or nothing.”
That was when Etcher gave Wade the box. He had Wade bring his bag of possessions and he dug it out from the bottom. It was an old black box, once very beautiful but now battered and nicked, with a rose carved on the top. Etcher shoved the box into the other man’s hands and Wade opened it as though it held something significant, the final revelation of a man’s life. But the box was empty except for some rubble that rolled in tiny pieces from corner to corner, and though Wade hadn’t the faintest idea what use he would ever make of a box, since he would never have anything to put inside, he accepted it as the momentous gift he assumed it was and held it while Etcher died, one final word rising to the dead man’s lips where it stuck unspoken. Wade knew what it was.
It was only after the priests had come for the body, wrapping it in sheets and taking it from the cell, that Wade examined the remains of the rubble in the box more closely and, piecing together several tiny fragments, realized that with a little patience he could reassemble nearly all of pursuit of happiness. And then he knew that in his possession he had the most forbidden artifact of all, and buried it so deep in his corner of the cell that he gladly risked never retrieving it again, if it meant it would never be obliterated into the ground outside.
In the yard the next day he saw, through the penal walls, the wagon come up the road. The girl at the reins had found the charred wagon out in the lava fields, its horse wandering in confusion looking for a patch of grass if not a familiar street, the blaze of the Bastille still in its eyes. Two large gray dogs ran alongside. Wade watched the wagon pass the wall nearest him, and Polly was met at the colony gates by several priests who loaded the body in the back, draped in the same sheet with which they had wrapped it the night before. If he could have talked to her for only a moment, Wade would have asked whether she had known he was dead or whether she just came a day too late; but all he could do was stand and watch her go, even as the guards barked at him to return to work. She disappeared up the road. She came to the highway that led to the city and crossed the highway, continuing on over the hard lava. She neared the volcano and was wondering how she was going to get
the body up beyond the ridge and as far as the crater when, though it might have been simply the sound of the ocean breeze, she stopped the horse to turn and see the breeze lift the sheet right off the body, because she thought she had heard someone say something.
And she watched take flight, like a black moth from his dead mouth, the name of the woman he loved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Erickson was born in 1950 in Los Angeles. He graduated from UCLA with degrees in cinema and journalism, and over the years has lived in New York, Paris, Rome and Amsterdam. He has published three novels—Days Between Stations (1985), Rubicon Beach (1986) and Tours of the Black Clock (1989)—and a political memoir, Leap Year (1989), in England, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Holland, Greece and Japan. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire and Rolling Stone, and he is currently the film critic for L.A. Weekly.
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