by Dan Flanigan
She seemed to want to tell him something, but she was fast drifting away from the world. He clutched her to him until he knew she was dead and then forced himself to look into her eyes. Empty eyes. She had finally escaped them. Her father, the gunmen, O’Keefe himself. The wondrously embodied spirit they had madly, vainly tried to capture and cage would elude them forever now. “No right.” he said again, only to himself this time, then clawed with his hand at the pain that rended his lung seam to seam. The world turned gray. He swooned and keeled over, still clutching the dead girl in his arms.
Then it came to him that he was dying too, that he was going to die there with her. Good. I don’t deserve to live. They’ll find our skeletons locked together like this, like the Hunchback and Esmeralda. For so long he had so much feared the idea of death—eternal extinguishment, perpetual oblivion—ever since he had lost faith in the soul immortal and then fought in a war that had seemed to rob death of either dignity or meaning. But now, as he lay there in the blood and the dust and the sun, death came to him, lapping at him gently like a wave at low tide, and he wondered if this was how each leaf felt as it fell. But even now he was human still. Even now he did not stop wishing, or hoping either. He wished most of all that he had not helped to kill this girl in his arms. He wished too that he could have done better for the people he loved, at least told them goodbye, at least left them a note. And he hoped, in spite of all the evidence he hoped, that his body would die but his spirit would soar off to somewhere eternal. And, lastly, he hoped he would die before nightfall so he would not have to die in the cold.
CHAPTER 28
GEORGE WAS NO worrier, but on the flight home he could not stop worrying about O’Keefe. Moreover, he could not stop worrying about him the next day and the day after that, especially when he talked to Sara and found out that O’Keefe had not called in, thus breaking the sacred, unbreakable vow made by everyone who worked there, even O’Keefe. You called in every day no matter what. If you did not call in, you would be assumed to be in trouble, and someone would set about tracking you down. And this wasn’t O’Keefe’s typical case in any way, shape, or form. There was murder in this case, and O’Keefe thought the underworld was involved too. So the rule ought to be enforced now more than ever. Jarvis was apparently too lazy or stupid or timid to enforce it himself. O’Keefe, asshole that he could be sometimes, had as good as told George to get lost back there in the desert, but O’Keefe was his friend, and friends did not have to be perfect for you to take a risk for them. The risk would be that he would blunder into O’Keefe’s private, little adventure that seemed so dear to his heart and screw it up somehow. Tough shit. He made a reservation that night for the morning plane to Tucson.
THE OLD TRUCK remained in the same place he had seen it before. When he saw the dead man on the porch, he drew his pistol from his shoulder holster and stepped slowly toward the house. Through the shattered front window he saw someone dead on the couch. He recognized the corpse from the photos O’Keefe had given him. Lenny Parker. At the back of the house he found a body sprawled in the dirt. It was not O’Keefe.
A brown horse stood at the front of the corral as if waiting for someone to come and let him back into his prison. Birds made a racket in the mesquite trees. Something moved in the barn. He whipped the pistol up to chest level and aimed it at the barn door. A road runner, sauntering out of the barn like a sleepy suburbanite looking for his morning paper.
Spent cartridges at the side of the barn. M-16 cartridges. O’Keefe had an M-16. George understood now why O’Keefe had wanted to drive out here. He couldn’t get the M-16 on the plane.
George moved slowly across the clearing, past the big boulders, and onto the trail that ran along the far side of the corral. Up the path, toward the mouth of a small canyon, another body, a body that reminded him of one of those small animals hit by a car while running across the highway at night, mangled and smashed, torn flesh turning gray in the sun. The body was missing one leg and one arm. It was not O’Keefe.
He saw the palomino first, then the body lying in front of it. No, there were two bodies in front of it. The woman and O’Keefe, dried blood scabbing on the side of his head, the sun burning his upturned face. The woman was dead, but O’Keefe seemed to be breathing. Blood seeped slowly from a wound in his chest.
George ran back to the car and brought it around to where O’Keefe lay. He picked up O’Keefe and laid him in the front seat. He had to tuck up O’Keefe’s legs, knees pointing at the roof, in order to close the car door. He thought he had heard O’Keefe groan faintly when he laid him down. Good. If you could feel pain, you were still in the land of the living, your birthright intact.
He ran around the front of the car to the driver’s side and jumped in. He put O’Keefe’s head on his thigh. He jammed down the accelerator and bounced down the dirt road and onto the highway. Hold on, Pete. There’s a town down this road not very far that will surely have a hospital in it. Dumb shit. Hold on. Dumb shit. You had to go it alone. Dumb shit.
George could not remember the last time he’d cried, but, halfway to town, he started crying, and he did not stop crying until he pulled up to the emergency-room door.
THEY KEPT O’KEEFE alive at the tiny, rural hospital until the helicopter transferred him to the medical center in Tucson. He stayed conscious enough to understand that they were loading him into a helicopter, but he thought he was back in Vietnam, and he kept trying to tell them that something was wrong. It was not he they were supposed to be loading into the helicopter. It was the others, the dead and the wounded. He was the door gunner, his job to protect them on the way back to the base camp, until they installed them in beds or rubber bags tagged with their names and service numbers.
THE HEEL OF his foot healed the fastest. He could soon walk without a cane and with only a slight limp. They said they could rebuild the heel so there would be no limp at all. The bullet that had ripped off a chunk of his thigh had not hit muscle or bone, a manageable wound. A plastic surgeon reassembled his ear. The right side of his chest was a mass of scar tissue, and they told him he definitely could not smoke anymore.
Sara brought Kelly out to see him in the hospital. Sara cried when she first saw him. Kelly wanted to see his new scars.
“You told me you never carried a gun,” Kelly said. He said nothing; he did not know what to say.
“No more lies, Dad. Never again, okay?”
He nodded in agreement. A fair request.
Kelly brought a note from her mother that he read after Sara and Kelly left for the airport.
Pete,
Those days after George found you, when we all thought you were going to die, I realized that life was just too short for hatred and recrimination. It still seems a shame to me that we couldn’t have made it, but I’ve accepted it now. Take care, Pete. I don’t want Kelly to have to grow up without a father like you did. You might have been a lousy husband, but you’re a better father than you think or than I’ve been willing to give you credit for. Just take care of her. Our job is to keep her out of danger.
When Kelly, restless and bored, left the room to go browse in the hospital gift shop, Sara said. “Pete, you look like a man who’s lost his dream. I’m sorry it ended that way for you, I really am.”
“All I want to know is whether I can tear up that resignation letter of yours.”
“No. You can’t tear it up. But you can hold it. It won’t be effective until you decide you want to destroy yourself again.”
“Sara, there’s a lot of things I want to change. I’m thinking about selling the business to Jarvis. Maybe he’ll pay me at least enough to take care of the debt. Then I want to start over. With just you and me and George. Maybe then we can afford to pick and choose what we work on instead of taking every piece-of-shit job that walks in the door.”
Then came the corrosion of doubt.
“But I don’t know if we can make any money that way.”
“Well, we’ll never know until we try,”
she said.
“And if we do that, Sara, you’re gonna have to be a lot more than a secretary, because we’re not even gonna care about answering the damn phone anyway. You’ll have to work right along with me and George. You’ll have to be one of the boys.”
She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”
He laughed.
“I mean it,” she said. “Never.”
CHAPTER 29
SHE HAD WANTED to spend her eternity in Arizona, in a grave in the desert facing the mountains, but they had buried her in an old-fashioned cemetery in the family plot. The gravestone called her “Constance,” but it was Tag underneath it, and the only difference between her and him was that he had been lucky enough to have a friend and she had not. Whatever else he had been to her, he had not been her friend.
He stood there, one red rose in his hand, tears on his face. A marvel such as she surely could not be gone from the world, her brave candle snuffed out by heedless obsession. But she was. She was gone, forever beyond his wishing, forever beyond his hoping, forever beyond his foolish grasp.
Tag, if I could touch you, I’d tell you . . . But she was beyond touching or telling, and beyond forgiving him too. Since he could not ask for forgiveness, he would have to live it somehow. When they had told him he would survive, life had seemed like a sentence far worse than death, and he had wished he had died out there in the desert with her. But death was too easy an expiation. Now he would have to spend his whole life trying to give something back.
But no amend could be made to that girl in the ground. Except maybe he could carry her spirit in his heart. That was it. It was so little, but it was the best he could do now. He dropped the rose on the brown winter grass that grew over her grave.
When he turned around, Ernest Anderson was standing behind him. The two men stood looking at each other, two men standing amid the gravestones as if only the guilty still lived. Then Anderson raised his right hand like an executioner who had forgotten his axe.
“You!” Anderson said, advancing on him. “You were supposed to protect her! You filth! All you did was take advantage of her!”
No, O’Keefe thought, he had done somewhat better than that. Not much better but somewhat better than that.
Anderson tried to strike him, but O’Keefe caught his arm with his left hand, grabbed the front of his coat, and whirled him around so he would have to face his daughter’s grave.
“How does this fit into the Plan, you old warlock? Tell me how this fits into the Plan.”
He threw Anderson down on top of the grave and walked away. Behind him he heard Anderson bawling and calling to Tag. O’Keefe climbed into the van and rolled himself away. He drove through the late-afternoon twilight toward his apartment where Sara and George and Kelly and Harrigan were gathering to celebrate his homecoming. He turned on the defroster to dissolve the thin film of frost that had formed on the windshield. The bare, ravaged trees, stripped of their leaves, stood like forlorn guardsmen watching him pass. News flashes on the car radio: A group of British scientists had, for the first time, confirmed the Greenhouse Effect—that carbon dioxide and other pollutants were trapping and sealing in the heat from the earth’s surface, causing an extraordinary warming of the globe. And the White House admitted that profits from U.S. arm sales to Iran had been diverted to the Nicaraguan contras. National Security Adviser John Poindexter had resigned. His aide, Colonel Oliver North, had been fired. Immediately following these announcements, the station played that week’s #1 pop single, Bruce Hornsby’s The Way It Is. As he pulled into his driveway, he heard a horn sound behind him. Harrigan. In a new, black Jaguar.
“Now there’s some shining armor for you, buddy,” Harrigan said, pointing to the Jaguar. They hugged awkwardly, half afraid someone might be watching two men embrace. “George claims he’s a gourmet chef so get ready to barf,” Harrigan said as they walked up the sidewalk.
“That article was really something,” O’Keefe said. Harrigan had fed the mink-farm story to a friendly reporter at the local newspaper. The article had portrayed O’Keefe as some kind of hero, a lone knight errant fighting organized crime single-handedly. There would be no chance now that they would indict him or try to revoke his license.
“What a pack of lies,” O’Keefe said. “You’re incredible, Mike.”
“Not lies exactly. ‘Spin,’ they’re calling it now.” Harrigan always brushed off compliments. He couldn’t handle them. But his modesty was a little false. He knew he was better than any compliment you could give him.
“Those political contributions I’ve been making for years and wondering why came in handy too. About time.”
A fire blazed in the fireplace. A banner hanging above the mantel said, “Welcome Home, Dad.” He heard laughter from the kitchen where Kelly and Sara and George were preparing the dinner.
“Smells good,” Harrigan said. “Here, give me your coat.” Harrigan took the coats into the exercise room, leaving O’Keefe alone and unannounced in the living room. Hail the conquering hero, he thought. More like the prodigal son. It embarrassed him that they were making this fuss over him, but he had determined that he would not let his own mournfulness, his own sense of loss and diminishment, spoil their day.
Kelly came out of the kitchen. “Dad!” she said, startled. “Dad’s here!” she yelled back to the others.
He hesitated, but she did not hold back. She ran to him and locked her arms around his waist and squeezed him hard. Sara and then George appeared in the doorway. Harrigan had come back into the living room. They all smiled, but none of them seemed to know what to say. Kelly pulled back from the embrace, and Sara came to him then, huge brown eyes shining with tears. She hugged him for the briefest of moments, and when she broke away, he was a little dazed, swirling in a haze of her fragrance, the black silk of her blouse, the white of the skin on her cheek.
George stood in the doorway, an oven mitt covering his right hand, a small towel draped over his shoulder, and a goofy grin on his face. And George, all you did for me was save my life. George, who had not been willing to let him go it alone like he had wanted. O’Keefe stifled his tears. But George must have sensed danger coming, he would avoid tears and manly embraces at all costs. He said, “Welcome home, Boss,” then turned on his heel and disappeared into the kitchen.
George really had cooked the dinner. A cold celery soup. Coq au vin—plump chicken pieces roasted brown in a dark sauce with mushrooms and onions and tiny potatoes. A choice of red wine or white. White-chocolate mousse for dessert. And when the atmosphere at the table threatened to become too serious, George served up a generous portion of mirth to lighten the mood.
After they ate, they lingered for a while, talking by the fire. O’Keefe watched the others drink the Sangria that George had made from fine red wine and fresh fruit that he claimed had been flown into the city special delivery by a local chef he knew. And O’Keefe was tempted to have at least a small drink of that gorgeous brew, beckoning him from the crystal pitcher, but he just sipped at his coffee and let the feeling pass, listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos playing on the stereo. The stately music, dignified and self-assured, promised a new life if one could only embody its truths—complexity mastered, worship offered, praise given, the insoluble mystery embraced.
Harrigan kept unusually quiet. He seemed uncomfortable and out of place. O’Keefe thought his old friend looked like an exile who had been gone from home so long he was not sure he wanted to return, as if he would refuse any amnesty that might be offered him. Soon Harrigan stood up, mumbled apologies, and said he had to leave. O’Keefe walked with Harrigan out to his car, an indistinct and vaguely sinister shape in the darkness.
“What about our friend Mr. Canada?” O’Keefe said. “Mr. Jagoda, that is.”
“Well, they know who he is now because they know who those dead gunmen worked for. But they can’t tie him to the mink farm or to your little shoot-em-up out there either. I can’t believe he’d try anything against you wit
h all that publicity shining on the both of you. But . . .”
“But what?”
“Just be careful.”
Harrigan suddenly reached out for O’Keefe and hugged him hard.
“Jesus, Pete,” he said, “I almost lost you, didn’t I? What would I do without you?”
“I want you to tell me something, Mike. I want you to tell me when you’re gonna let yourself be okay.”
Harrigan said nothing. He had obviously not even considered the question before.
“You know, that Saturday in your office, you said that, when we were kids, we thought life was going to be some wonderful quest, but it didn’t turn out that way at all. Well, I know the secret now. You want in on it?”
Harrigan looked like he didn’t really want to, and O’Keefe knew that was because his friend was not ready to give it all up. “Here it is. Don’t look for the answer. There isn’t one.”
O’KEEFE WATCHED THE sleek black car glide down the street and out of sight, then he stood alone in the dark and the cold, watching the puffs of his breath disappear into the black void of the night. It’ll be okay, Mike. Like the song says, “Next time we’ll get it right.”
The others were waiting for him inside, but he felt like taking a walk, felt like wrapping himself in his loneliness in his old solitary way. Up above the full moon looked lonely too. He could see a few stars. Was Perseus, the Champion, out there? Pegasus, the Flying Horse? Andromeda, the Chained Princess? Tag. His heart went out, a sensation almost physical, groping for something across the void, a communion of some kind.
The front porch light switched on behind him.
“Dad?”
Her voice was full of apprehension.
He hesitated, lingered in the dark, looking at the night sky.
“Dad?” Kelly said again, sounding really afraid this time. He looked up again at the bright, beckoning stars, then turned away from the sky and walked toward the sound of the little girl’s voice.