The New City

by Stephen Amidon

  The strange thing was that even though he never slept on those nights, he was almost always dreaming. Maybe that’s why he could go with so little sleep—the dreams were able to rest his weary mind without ever overtaking it. He’d prop himself in a chair of sandbags he’d built in front of an M-60 or Claymore det cords, facing whatever direction needed checking out, a canteen and a ration can next to him, .45 on his hip. If it was monsoon season he’d make a tent out of his poncho. And then, once everything was secure, he’d begin to dream. Eyes wide open. The visions would come half willed and half random, quickly becoming as real as the jungle night. He could be making love with Irma back in Germany and before long her sharp odor would come to him, that heady mixture of talc and sweat and cheap PX perfume. He could feel her soft, goose-pimply flesh. Whole conversations with her would ring in his ears. It was as if she were superimposed on the hot Vietnamese night. Or suddenly his daughters would be in his arms, their soft insistent limbs entwining him. He could conjure the laugh of a Tu Do whore or the smell of a Frankfurt beer hall and in an instant he would be right there, transported by the warm jungle air and the incessant madrigal of insects. The dreams would sometimes run for hours, as fully faceted as Hollywood films. And yet they never affected his ability to guard his post. His reactions were still as sharp as the concertina around him. In the early days, when sappers would try to bust through, Truax would snap to so quickly that the invaders would be routed before the other grunts could even get off a round. It wasn’t long until the enemy ceded those My Song nights to Truax.

  The dream he called upon most often was an almost forgotten memory from his days posted at Fort Bragg, in the quiet years between Germany and Vietnam. Susan was ten, Darryl seven and Irma happy to be finally stateside, not yet understanding how little of the country’s bounty had been reserved for her. It was late January, the time of ice storms that would leave the Carolina countryside strewn with frosted branches. A rare blizzard had come the day before, dusting the central-state plains with four inches of wet snow that partially melted at dusk and then turned to ice overnight. The next morning, Susan reported excitedly that kids were sledding on a hill at the southern end of the base. She was desperate to join them. Because Irma was afraid it would be dangerous, Truax went with her. The problem was that he had no sled. They’d had a beautiful, hand-tooled toboggan in Germany but had been forced to give it to one of Irma’s grasping cousins when the army put a weight restriction on their homebound consignment. Truax swung by the PX but the few measly aluminum saucers they had in stock were long gone. He went to the hill anyway, thinking that maybe they could borrow something there. But what few Flexible Flyers there were among the hundred-odd kids gathered at the top of the hill belonged to the children of officers, spoiled brats who’d been taught not to share with enlisted kids before they left their mother’s tit.

  Truax stood in the cold wind with a bunch of grunts and their fidgeting children, watching the sons and daughters of majors and bird colonels soar down the hill. He had to admit, it was one hell of a slope, reminding him of Killer Hill back in Johnstown, where he and his brother Luke used to spend long days plummeting at breakneck speeds. Five hundred yards long, easy. Fifteen-, maybe twenty-degree gradient. No boulders or trees. Lots of braking room at the bottom. The kids lucky enough to own sleds were flying down the slope. Whooping and laughing. Having the time of their lives. Ashamed and freezing, Truax wanted nothing more than to get out of here. But the look on Susan’s pink face bore such pure desire that he realized he had to do something. Already beginning to suspect that her life would be full of big disappointments, he’d fallen into the habit of doing what he could to mollify the small ones.

  Then he saw the empty storage shack, situated among some fir trees by the big perimeter fence, a hundred yards along the crest of the hill. It was one of the hundreds of meaningless structures dotting the base. Nobody in authority cared enough to order it demolished; nobody else wanted to catch shit for tearing it down. Truax told Susan to wait where she was. It didn’t take him long to liberate a three-by-six-foot sheet from its rusted bolts. It was lighter than it looked and miraculously free of significant warps. Time had shaped one end into an aerodynamic curl. Yes, this would provide a ride of the first order. When he returned from the woods he could see the embarrassment on Susan’s face. Truax smiled at her and told her that it would be all right. Because he was her father, she followed him to the edge of the hill.

  Other kids and enlisted men gathered around as Truax dropped the metal sheet on the ground. He knelt beside it and scooped up a handful of pine needle–ridden snow, rubbing it hard along corrugations, cleaning and icing them at the same time. They would make perfect runners. Some of the officers’ kids snickered. A corporal from supply jokingly asked if he had the right requisition forms for that equipment. Truax ignored them as he carefully slicked up every inch of metal that would touch the snow. When he was done he flipped the sheet over. Its warped end faced downhill. It would never bite. He could feel his sled strain for the bottom of the hill beneath his steadying boot. He turned to Susan. Dread gripped her frozen features. She looked like she wanted to be far, far away. Truax held out his hand. His still-good hand. And because she was his little girl, she took it, braving the ridicule that blew through the winter air more sharply than those freakish winds. He carefully situated her in the sled’s exact middle, then settled in snugly behind her, pinning her in with his outstretched legs. That curled front rose a few inches higher.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She nodded weakly. Two of the officers’ boys rushed from the crowd and dropped their Flexible Flyers on either side of them, ready to race. There was laughter and a catcall. Somebody shouted Go and Truax pushed off with his gloved hands. His toboggan moved sluggishly. The sleds shot ahead of him. Derisive laughter spilled over them. Truax could feel his daughter’s shoulders stiffen in shame.

  But then they began to pick up speed as the corrugated runners found their depth in the snow. After twenty yards the Flexible Flyers were no longer pulling away from them. Twenty yards after that Truax was gaining on them. By the time they passed the officers’ kids it looked like they were standing still. The shame left Susan’s shoulders. Her small hands grabbed his shins for support. Their speed seemed to double by the second, the gaps beneath the sheets serving as aerodynamic foils. By the halfway point they were going so fast that Truax began to wonder if this was such a good idea after all. But there was no stopping. He did what he could with his body weight to keep them on an even keel, even though he knew they were at the hill’s mercy. They must have been going forty by the time they reached the bottom. They raced across a short icy plain and then began to climb a mild incline. The sled was finally stopped by a bank of snow, not unlike the runoffs on highways for trucks with blown brakes. They rolled harmlessly through the soft snow, winding up lying next to each other. Cheers echoed down from the top of the hill. The Flexible Flyers were nowhere in sight. Truax looked for fear in his daughter’s face. But she was smiling, her eyes as bright as the sun-soaked snow around them. And then she said the breathless words she used to say when he played with her as a toddler, words he hadn’t heard in years and was never to hear again.

  “Again, Daddy,” she said. “Again.”

  And so they did, time and time again, racing past the store-bought sleds like they were nothing more than parts of the landscape. They must have made thirty runs before she’d finally had enough. That night a warm front moved in and the snow melted. By the time another storm came Truax was half a world away from his daughter. And yet the memory lived on, almost as strong as the real thing, filling his tired mind as he waited out those long jungle nights at My Song, ready to kill anything that moved outside the concertina. Again and again, John Truax and his daughter would race faster than anyone else down that long slope.

  Wooten finally emerged from the apartment. The woman, still dressed in her colored robe, stared after him from the doorway with eyes that tol
d Truax everything he needed to know. He slid to the back of the Dumpsters, listening to the heavy scuffle of Wooten’s steel-tipped boots as he passed no more than ten feet away. He gave him sixty seconds, then set out in pursuit, cutting back through the woods. It felt good to be moving with stealth through the cover. The city was finally beginning to make sense.

  He raced ahead of Wooten, arriving back at his Cutlass thirty seconds before the builder reached the Ranchero. Truax watched as he pulled a U across Newton Pike. He was heading back to Mystic Hills. Truax fell way back, following him as far as Merlin’s Way before turning off onto Rhiannon’s Rest, the curving side street that ran into the undeveloped land behind Wooten’s house. It was where Truax kept his Cutlass while he was in the treehouse. Building had yet to begin here—flagged lot markers, exposed fireplugs and the hieroglyphic scrawl of surveyors were the only signs of civilization. From here, it was just a few hundred feet to the treehouse. Truax pulled himself up the rope ladder in time to watch Wooten moving across his upstairs bedroom. He came down a few minutes later, dressed in a sports coat and carrying a suit bag. He was leaving town. Truax felt grim satisfaction as he raced back to his car. Today’s report would be a full one. He picked Wooten up on Merlin’s Way and followed him until he joined the interstate near Cannon City. He turned east, toward Baltimore. Truax wondered if they would wind up in a bad neighborhood. He suddenly regretted not getting his .45 out of the basement. He followed at a safe distance, letting cars intervene. They’d gone nearly twenty miles before Truax saw the sign for BWI and realized they weren’t going to the city after all. Of course. The suitbag. The tie. Wooten was flying off.

  Truax tightened up the tail when they reached the airport—he didn’t want to lose Wooten in its labyrinth of lanes. After watching the Ranchero enter the long-term lot he sped back to short-term, driving so fast that he almost slammed into a Pinto. Careful, he thought. Steady gets you there quickest. And it gets you there alive. He picked up Wooten at the entrance to departures, hanging back behind a bank of pay phones as he checked in at the United desk. After that it was easy to follow him to the gate. Wooten was in a hurry—the plane was boarding. Truax waited until they pulled back the ramp, just to make sure. Then he went to inform his boss that Earl Wooten was on his way to Chicago.

  17

  Swope watched Truax walk quickly up the twilit cul-de-sac toward Merlin’s Way. He’d parked his car somewhere out of sight, even though this was not part of Swope’s instructions. The man was definitely showing some serious initiative. He had a strangely anonymous way of moving along the sidewalk, Swope noticed, deflecting attention from himself without making any real effort to hide. Something in his carriage, in the set of his shoulders, creating his own pocket of negative space. Swope doubted passersby would remember a man walking away from the big house at the bottom of the road. This guy was a gem, festering hand notwithstanding. Loyal. Discreet. Uncomplaining. And without doubt the most dogged human being Swope had ever met. He pitied the poor fucking VC who’d tangled with him back in that idiotic war. The gamble of hiring him was already paying off.

  If only the information he’d brought wasn’t so cataclysmic. Wooten was going to Chicago. No ifs, ands or buts. He was in the air that very moment. Flying the friendly skies. Which could mean only one thing—they were going to offer him the job. Maybe not today. But it was going to happen. There was no other reason he would be going out for a solo trip. Not in secret. Swope couldn’t believe it. Earl Wooten had lied to him. After five years of partnership, he had planted a knife squarely between Swope’s shoulder blades. Just like that. No qualms, no hesitation. Monday night had been nothing more than the first little twist. More painful thrusts were to come. You spend half a decade thinking you know a man and then this happens.

  Well, it wouldn’t stand. It would not stand.

  Truax was gone, somehow vanishing before reaching the end of the road. Swope went back to his desk and stared at his blotter for a moment, where he’d jotted down the information he’d just been given: Bldg 5. #27. After a moment he picked up the phone and dialed the Wooten home. Ardelia answered on the second ring.

  “Ardelia, Austin here.”

  There was the slightest pause. Undetectable—unless you were listening for it.

  “Oh, hello, Austin.”

  “Earl isn’t around, is he? I’ve been trying to chase him down all afternoon.”

  Another pause. This one a nanosecond longer. An infinity in the chronology of deception.

  “No, Earl had to fly off to Atlanta on short notice.”

  “Atlanta?”

  “His sister has taken ill. You know, the youngest one. Dolly.”

  “No. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it’s all that serious. But having Earl there makes her feel a lot better.”

  “As it would anyone. The man is a walking, talking tonic to the ill and the downhearted.”

  Ardelia laughed stiffly, the usual good cheer absent from her voice.

  “I can have him call you from there. …”

  “No. It’s nothing that can’t wait. Let him look after his sister.”

  “He should be back tomorrow night.”

  “If you could have him call me that would be great.”

  “As soon as he gets in.”

  Swope hung up. Ardelia Wooten lying—it was as improbable as Teddy captaining the crew up at Harvard. But though that pause in her voice may have been subatomic in duration, it was as eloquent as a speech by Martin Luther King himself. Unbelievable. All that righteous, vice-principaled propriety chucked out the window as soon as it became an obstacle to climbing the greasy pole. Swope shook his head in astonishment. These people were supposed to be his friends. And now they were betraying him. He felt like such a fool, such an absolute fool. He’d confided in the man. Let him into his life. Given him gifts. Defended him against bigots and back stabbers every inch of the way. Believing that they were deep down the same. A couple of hardworking outsiders trying to grab a slice of this freshly baked pie. Two men who knew that if you were willing to sweat and sacrifice, you could build a life from the ground up. But all the while Wooten was just another jackal waiting for the right moment to pounce and take what wasn’t his.

  What a fool I’ve been, Swope thought.

  He reached forward and set three of the cradle’s balls in motion. It was a remarkable thing, this contraption. He didn’t understand the science behind it—something about the conservation of energy. Or maybe inertia. Teddy had offered to explain it but Swope told him not to bother. Not that he didn’t like listening to his son wax lyrical on the nature of reality. It was just that he liked some things to remain mysteries.

  He looked up at the rows of law books lining the twelve-foot walls of his home study. His collection. His pride and joy. There were just under two thousand of them, worth at least fifty grand. Statutes and codes of the federal government, the District of Columbia and the State of Maryland. Case histories in property law that detailed disputes over boundaries and good title, inheritance and right-of-way. Judgments rendered, precedents established. An entire corpus of law and tradition bound in the best leather. It was easily the best law library in Cannon County, probably in all of central Maryland. Collecting legal books was Swope’s hobby, started a decade ago when he’d nabbed some redundant copies about to be shitcanned by Barger, Green. More than once some local mouthpiece had asked to borrow something from the collection. Jill Van Riper in the county attorney’s office always had something out. Swope was only too happy to oblige them. A favor, after all, was a favor. And these were no window dressing, either. Swope had read them all. Well, almost. Anybody off the street could come in here and randomly choose a case and the odds were good that Swope would be able to quote chapter and verse on it. Because that was what he did. He read, he learned and he remembered. In law school at Ann Arbor, as an associate, even as a partner, when he could have farmed out the work to paralegals—Swope hit the books. And w
hen he became general counsel for Newton, his reading became even more exhaustive. Obsessive, if you listened to Sally. During these last five years he’d studied nearly every case that related to property law as it was practiced in Maryland. He became the master of his brief. Lawyers from Frederick and Aberdeen called him up at a hundred bucks a pop to ask him arcane questions about land clearance or zoning; the Cannon County magistrate, Lon Spivey, merely waved a weary assenting hand when Swope offered to quote precedent in the countless cases he’d brought before the local court. He had recently figured out that if he’d spent five hours a day dealing with the written law (a conservative estimate) during three hundred working days per year (archconservative), that meant in the twenty-two years since he’d matriculated at Michigan he’d devoted thirty-three thousand hours of his life to learning, interpreting and applying the law.

  The killing irony, of course, was that he’d never really understood a word of it until five days ago, on the afternoon of his forty-fourth birthday, when Roger Tench had dropped his bombshell. That call had begun Swope’s true legal training, a lesson that had concluded a half hour ago when John Truax sat at this very desk and informed him that Earl Wooten was flying secretly to Chicago to steal the job that was his and his alone. With that, Swope suddenly understood the fundamental principle supporting every edict, ordinance and statute he’d ever read. It was simply this—the law was a steaming load of crap. You could write it in the highest of the King’s English and bind it in the finest Spanish leather, but it was still just so much gobbledegook. Big dogs kicking the shit out of little dogs. When all was said and done—the motions filed and precedents read and judgments rendered—that was all there was. Cunning backed by force. It was a principle Swope had unwittingly put into practice countless times these past five years while dealing with frightened and ignorant landowners. Hiding behind a scrim of legality when all he was really doing was pushing around people who knew in their bones that they were being wronged and couldn’t do a damn thing about it; small-minded, weak-willed losers who didn’t understand that the laws ruling their lives derived not from eternal principles of justice but rather from the simplest, oldest precept of them all—Fuck you. It was the men with the biggest balls and the steeliest vision who wrote the law, who wove its seemingly intractable principles to fit them like a silk suit. Always had been, always would be. Millennia ago this had meant clubbing some poor schmuck and taking what he thought was his. Centuries ago it meant using blue smoke and mirrors to hoodwink enough peasants into doing your bidding. Nowadays it meant being able to stir the sheriffs and the marshals away from their doughnuts long enough to kick ass and transfer titles. Same difference. It was the man with the money and the guile and the will to get the job done who determined what was held up by those fine spines staring down at Swope. Everybody else was just waiting for a knock on the door.