by Ben Winters
Bridge didn’t laugh. He waited in silence until, in the same even tone, I said no, I hadn’t gone to Whole Wide World yet, because it was nighttime and they weren’t open, and I doubted I would gain much ground by B and E. In daylight I would go over there and find out what special shipment poor Winston was forced to arrange so Jackdaw could be put on it. From there I could find out who took delivery, find out where—find out and find out until I found out the man himself, found him out and called him in, and then Bridge’s white vans would roll up in their rough government splendor and bear him away.
As I gave my report and we laid our plans I could hear Bridge’s fingers rattling on his keyboard, and I could feel his happiness buzzing and popping, crackling along the cables and down the invisible waves between us. His pink bureaucratic heart was alive with pleasure. Another file, almost ready to be closed.
“Okay,” he said, “very good,” getting ready to be done, and I said, “I got one more question about the file.”
“Do you?”
“Where’d he come from?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s nothing here on the record of acquisition. It says he’s been in service for nineteen and a half months. So what about before that? He’s twenty-three years old. His patrimonial and matrimonial lines are question marks. All his stamps before the current one are blacked out.”
Bridge didn’t answer right away. Somewhere in the darkness below me, a car stuttered and started. I tried to guess what kind of car it was based on the tenor of the engine noise and the shape of the lights: the high whine of the engine said it was something cheap, subcontinental. Bridge, in his office, was frowning at his screen, scrolling through his own copy, seeking out the relevant portion of the record.
“Perhaps he was inherited,” he said finally. “Maybe he was a gift. Maybe he was won in a card game.”
I finished my Baba and flicked it out into the lot. “Does that still happen?”
“Everything happens.”
I scowled. A dark feeling was fighting up in me like a living thing, clawing up from my stomach, pushing its way from the inside out. “Well, can we find out?”
“I will look into it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I will look into it.”
And there it was: for the first time in the years I had known him—except of course I had never known him at all—Mr. Bridge had raised his voice. A change in tone, almost but not quite below the level of notice. He had…insisted. He had emphasized.
Castle’s eyes would get so wide in the dark.
Castle’s bright and beautiful white eyes, like twin planets. His eyes were all I could see when it was just Castle and me under our shared blanket, on our shared cot, in our cabin, which was the one closest to the northernmost chain fence. There was no light in the cabin except the moonlight coming from one high window, but even under the blanket I could always see Castle’s eyes. He was my brother. He’d wake me up when the other ones were all sleeping. The Old Man and the others of us as well. In the middle of the night, almost every night, he would shake my shoulder till I woke. This is starting when I was…God, I don’t know—six years old? Seven? It feels like I was so little, except I was on the pile already when he started it, which means I was done with the school, so I had to be eight or more, and Castle was off the pile—he was indoors, on the kill floor. One step up from where I was. Same thing had happened when we were babies: when I was done with the breed lot and into the school, he was already done with school and on the pile.
“Carburetor.”
“What?”
My sleepy little head. I remember how it felt to be so tired, looking up into Castle’s eyes, big and white, like I was dreaming them.
“Go on. Try and say it. Carburetor.”
“Carburetor.”
He was ten, and I was eight. We were little boys. I don’t know how he trained his body to wake, but he did, and he’d shake me till I woke up, too, and then he’d tell me stories and teach me words.
The dead-to-life breathing of the other ones, a darkness filled with sleep. The fat, shuddering snores of the Old Man. Just me and Castle, alive together in the dark.
“Good, honey. Right on. A carburetor is a little part of a car, or of a tractor. Or of one of the small carts, you know, them the working whites putter around on. It’s a little part in the engine, helps get it started.”
“Oh.” My head drifting back toward the pillow, Castle flicking me with his fingers, going, “No, love. No, honey, no. Eyes open, now. I got more for you.”
I huddled together with him underneath our scratchy blanket, sleep swimming in and out of my head. Murmuring car parts and cities.
“Montreal.”
“Montreal.”
“Chicago.”
“Chicago.”
From the near distance, on the opposite side of the farm, came the mournful night songs of the cows, mooing in their lairages.
Castle told me stories, too: a man who got eaten by a whale and came swimming out fine. A boy and a girl who fell in love and killed a witch and ate her.
We had to be real quiet, of course, whispering back and forth so soft it was almost like just thinking. Obviously lying there talking in bunk you could get charged: Theft of Rest. Bad Use of Time. There had been a man in our Family named Bones, one of the older of the youngers, a skinny broomstick of a man with sharp elbows. Someone flagged him for being a masturbator—Theft of Rest; Bad Use of Time; Act Against God; Act Against Mr. Bell. We all got woke in the dead of night from him hollering as they were dragging him out for it. They charged him right there and took two witness statements in the presence of a Franklin, who certified the verdict, then they hauled him to the shed. The shed was just a few yards from where our cabin was along the fence, and you could hear Bones in there weeping and whatnot, right till morning.
“Betcha he ain’t playing with his little thing about now,” said Harbor. “Not with his hands bound up behind him.” Harbor had a hard smile like a knife slit that showed up when others were suffering. “No, I betcha he is not.” I never wondered who had whispered against poor Bones.
But we kept nice and quiet, Castle and me, and we were all right. Our Old Man in those early years, he was a heavy kind of sleeper, and once he was down he was down till the rooster. Harbor never heard us, I guess, and no one else did, either. We were charmed in some way: just me and Castle in a private world, beneath the blankets, with only the dimmest glow of moonlight in there with us, like we were somewhere under the sea.
There were certainly many of those nights when I did not care to be woke. By the end of the day I ached all over from tending that pile. Head aching from the sun, back aching from crouching, arms aching from the hauling: dung buckets, rumen buckets, hay, and straw. Raking it and raking it. Last thing I wanted sometimes was to be shook awake, feel all the ache of my body again while Castle whispered me words. His wide white eyes hovering in the dark above me were unwelcome as searchlights, sometimes, and I’d complain bitterly, whisper hotly at him to leave me be.
“Listen, honey,” he would say when I moaned. Never getting cross. Never even the littlest bit. Only one of us I knew who never did. “Listen, love. Deep nighttime is the only time we got. This is our opportunity.”
“Our opportunity.” My tongue was thick with exhaustion.
“That’s right. We crazy we don’t take it.”
“What about all these, then?” I blinked, gummy-eyed in my tiredness, looked around the room at the other ones.
“What about ’em?”
“They crazy?”
“No, no.” He wouldn’t ever say that. He would never talk down on any man. “They just—my love, you know, they not us.”
That always got me. It was nice to be us. I’d ease myself up on my aching elbow, blink furious till I came full awake, and listen to my good, good brother talk.
I was six months on the pile, a year, maybe, when I saw a pale glea
m of yellow in there. You would see things, of course, in the pile. A lot of times. Cows’ll eat things, or goats will, and it’ll pass right in and through and they’ll never know. Stones; glass; once, I swear, a bedspring. Now this, though, now this, peeking and winking out from the pile, in among all the mud browns and dull vegetable reds: a tiny plastic sheath, smaller than a thumb and bright yellow like a bird’s beak. I nearly didn’t see it, but then I did, and it called to me and I lifted it and felt there was something inside.
I popped it out. A single piece of paper, folded and folded and folded again until it was a tiny hard rock. I hunched in the shadow of the pile, crouched like a goblin and unfolded the paper.
There were no words on it, only pictures, black figures with their hands raised in fists, tugging apart their chains. Black figures seizing guns from white figures, white figures with their heads cut off, perfect black teardrops of blood spurting up out of their necks. I couldn’t read the words, only the punctuation: a big red exclamation point. Exclamation points were on signs all over Bell’s Farm: don’t go in there, must wear masks in here, only overseers and staff may pass. I knew what exclamation points meant, and I knew about blood, and I did not know what the paper meant, but I stared at it and felt from it a queer power, a sparkling panic passing over me, like something melting.
I folded it back up carefully, jammed it back into the balloon how it had been, hid it in my cuff, and hurried back to my labor, busied my fingers and bent my back for the rest of the day. Someone fed that balloon to one of our cows. Someone did it on purpose. I was stunned by that purposefulness. I carried the paper in my cuff all day and brought it to Castle, and I gasped with grief later on, in the johns, when he told me he’d destroyed it.
“You gotta be crazy, boy” is what he said, and though his voice was still kind, I had never heard him say anything like it. It was in the supper line that I had slipped it to him sly, out of my cuff and into his palm. “Could you read it?” I asked him in the johns, and he didn’t say whether he had or not. He told me only that I was crazy. He told me he had taken that piece of paper and flushed it away and never to bring him nothing crazy like that again.
Castle forgot to wake me that night, but my body woke itself, and I saw him. I never told him that I had seen him, but I did. I saw him like a vision, clinging to that single sheet of goldenrod, staring at it in the darkness with his big white eyes.
I don’t know if it was ten minutes after I got off the phone with Bridge or five hours, but when I came around out of it I was in the middle of the room with my hand clamped over my mouth, breathing hard and heavy through my nose.
Castle! Jesus Christ, what was I doing thinking about Castle? I had not thought about him, not the man or even the name, had not wondered about where he had ended up—not in years. In years.
But here I was, all of a sudden; I was just surrounded by those memories. Just swarmed, man, just absolutely fucking fly-bit, like I was right back there, hip deep in that stinking fucking pile. When usually I was able never to think of it at all. When I wasn’t thinking on my cases, turning over the pages of files, I kept myself busy with enjoying the world, with savoring freedom, breakfast buffets and hotel sheets and birdsong and my MJ tapes in the Altima. Even though I knew they were down there in me, all those scenes and feelings, beating just behind my heartbeats, rushing through my veins behind my blood. Like all I had to do was get cut and they’d come oozing out, a thick pulp of bad memories.
I worked so hard to keep everything inside, but now here I was. A poor boy at the Crossroads Hotel, pacing the thin flowered carpeting, feeling the squish of old blood beneath my feet, feeling blisters on my toes burning in my boots.
I don’t know when or how I fell asleep. I must have at some point, but I know I lay awake in my bed a long hour, many long hours, just working that shit out of my system.
10.
“Mr. Dirkson? You better get up. Come on and wake up now.”
I opened my eyes, and there he was, legs kicked up on the rickety hotel desk, eyes bright with laughter. The cop from the restaurant. The black one. Car number 101097.
He saw that I was up and he raised his eyebrows and his smile widened, crocodile wide. “You’re mumbling in your sleep there, man,” he said. “You having some bad dreams?”
I found Mr. Dirkson’s voice before I opened my mouth: timid fellow, nervous, waking up confused from a restless slumber. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. I said. Fumbled for the spectacles that he wore, which I’d kept folded by the bedside clock. “Officer? What—what seems to be the problem?”
The cop chuckled and swung his legs off the desk, planted his sturdy brown patrolman’s shoes on the carpet. He palmed his chin and leaned forward. I slipped the glasses onto my nose and pushed them up, my eyes darting from his eyes down to his belt, to the service pistol snug against his hip. A Glock. A lot of major metro forces, they carry Glocks.
His skin was moderate chestnut, sunflower highlights, number 145. When my eyes found his face again, he was smiling, but his eyes were no longer laughing.
“Now, Mr. Dirkson,” he said calmly. “We need to have us a little talk, don’t we?”
I thought, Goddamn it all to hell, but what I said was, “Goodness gracious.” In Mr. Dirkson’s mouse voice, eyes widening with surprise. “Am I in some kind of trouble?”
“Funny thing about that question,” said the cop. “Any time anybody ask if they in some kind of trouble, they know that they are. And they usually know what kinda trouble they in, too.”
He laughed; I could tell from his face that the man liked to laugh. He was a handsome devil, this grinning young cop. Nice nut-brown skin and nice white teeth, nice big, expressive eyes, nice neat Afro, short and sharp. He sat tipped back on the chair, fingers laced behind his head, amused as all heck, waiting for me to say something. I wondered how far he had gotten. Did he know simply that I was not Jim Dirkson and that I had no wife? Or had he gotten as far as Mr. Bridge? As far as Gaithersburg, Maryland? Had he cracked the trunk of the Nissan, broken into the double-locked false bottom, and found the bag of fake IDs and hundred-dollar bills?
I wondered, too, if there was a silencer on the Glock. That wasn’t standard equipment for a policeman’s gun, but there are plenty of cops who put ’em on.
Car number 101097 stood up and scratched the back of his neck, advanced casually toward me across the room. On the notepad on the bedside table was a ballpoint pen, and there was a way to drive it through a man’s trachea, but he would drop me first with the Glock. He had reflexes. I could see it in his movements, graceful and self-controlled, like a ballplayer.
“I’m sorry, Officer, but I’m uh…well, I’m a bit confused. What is it that I can do for you?”
I half rose out of the bed, and he motioned with two hands, palms down, stay where you are. He sat right next to me.
“You had supper a couple nights ago with Father Patrick Barton, the parish priest of Saint Catherine’s Church on Meridian Street.”
He said this as a grand announcement, like I was supposed to be amazed already by how much he knew, and so I took it that way, letting my mouth drop open.
“You ate down at the Fountain.” He winked. “I do believe you had the fish.”
“Oh, my goodness,” I said. “How did you—”
“I was there, brother.” He grinned, his face practically glowing with satisfaction. “Love that place.” He patted his stomach. “Love it a little too much, I think. Anyway, I caught the basic gist of your conversation, know what I’m saying?”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Are you—are you watching Father Barton?” Then I furrowed my brow and leaned in, catching a hunch, trusting a feeling. “Are you with Father Barton?”
“You got it.” The grin widened. “Fact, you might say I’m more with Barton than Barton is.”
My racing heart slowed a little. Poor old Jim Dirkson remained flummoxed and uncertain, licking his lips and adjusting his glasses, but inside I was perf
orming a series of recalibrations. Thinking that what was emerging here might, in fact, be a positive development.
“So you’re like a, a what—a bodyguard?”
“Bodyguard? Shit.” The cop made a sour face. “Let’s say I keep an eye on the man, okay? Keep the shepherd from coming into any harm while he’s doing the work of the Lord.”
“Wait, wait.” I snapped my fingers, scratched my chin, put up a little playlet called Man Remembering Something. “There was another officer…”
“White man? Big thick neck? That’s Officer Morris. He’s my shift partner sometimes. We have dinner most nights, so I take him along when I’m babysitting, ’cause he’s a simple man. If I begged off, he might get his feelings hurt. Start asking questions.”
“So he doesn’t know that you’re…you’re…?” I left it there, wide-eyed and tentative.
“That I’m moonlighting with a flight crew? Running peebs up out of the Hard Four? Shit.” This time he slow-danced with the word, pulling the vowel sound out like taffy: Shiiiiiiit. “Officer Morris wouldn’t know he was on fire ’less a pretty girl told him so.”
“So—so, I’m sorry, Officer,” I said and shrugged meekly. “I don’t understand.”
This cop got up suddenly from the bed and stared down at me. The grin shut down to a tight line, the eyes stopped twinkling. “I heard your whole pitch, man, and I know that the padre shot you down. ‘You got the wrong man, nuthin’ I can do for you,’ the whole dog and pony. And he’s just being cautious, is all, because that’s how we do. Especially because…” He hunched forward and raised his brows. “Especially because we just did one.”
My Dirkson eyes grew big and wide, but behind them was me thinking, I know that, brother, I know that you just did one. There’s a poor suffering child of God named Jackdaw, and he managed to drop through the floor of an Alabama cotton house on Sunday night, and y’all scooped him up and brought him north on an invisible plane, and now he’s stashed somewhere in this proud, busted northern city. And I’ve got Barton, and I’ve got Barton’s workroom, and I’ve got Winston Bibb and Whole Wide World Logistics, and now I’ve got you, you laughing idiot, and I know we will find him. Bridge and me. Goddamn Bridge and goddamn me.