by James Sallis
“This is really good of you. Thank you.”
“Well, you know how it is, all that’s involved, you can’t make just a few.”
“Good timing, too. This’ll be dinner. Mom’s working late tonight.”
“She do that a lot?”
“Some. I’ll be sure and get this pan back to you.”
“No hurry, I have lots more.” She turned, went through the door, turned back. “It’s Jimmie, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She looked at him a moment and smiled. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her smile before. “You ever need anything, your folks aren’t here, I’m right up the street, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am. And thanks again.”
He watched her go, remembering how once when he’d stopped to talk to her in her garden, he’d called her Miss and she had corrected him. It was Mrs., she said. Mr. Flores had gone back to Mexico. Jimmie was thinking that seemed the wrong direction to him, but what did he know. “That man always did the opposite of what made good sense,” she went on. “So here I am, alone.” And had been alone, by Jimmie’s reckoning, close to forty years.
He shut the door.
One of the things he knew was that the day had to have structure. Another thing he knew was that it didn’t much matter what that structure was, TV shows that had to be watched, repetitive tasks, to-do lists, small ceremonies, anything. But without that, hours and days and weeks got away from you, nothing seemed to matter anymore, every minute was like every other.
Nights weren’t a problem. He slept, his mother always said, the sleep of the young and guiltless. Well, except for the dreams. He’d had another one last night, something about a box, or a shipping crate. And fires. Gunfire. A jungle somewhere.
But his mother had trouble with both. Days with all those empty hours waiting, holes you could fall into. Nights when she’d sweat and speak in a steady whisper and pace the house for hours at a time, turning on lights as she went. One night toward the end when he’d gone to check on her she’d held up a jar to show him, an old mason jar, God knows where it came from, and if you got up real close and looked in, there were mosquitoes in there, half a dozen of them maybe. “It’s been a good night,” she said. “I’ve been busy.”
She loved straightening things, catching insects, turning on lights, and paying bills. The last year or so, that was about all she did.
He never knew what happened, whether she had left or his father had put her away somewhere, in some hospital or care center. He never asked; they had stopped talking about his mother a long time before. Within the year, his father was gone, too. Jimmie didn’t know about that either. Had he just broken and run? Things had been piling up on him for a long time. Watching him, you could see that, the way days and events pressed down, so that it seemed he struggled sometimes just to keep breathing. And if there’d been an accident, if he were dead, then surely someone would have come to the house.
Not that it mattered much. Change was the law. One went on with whatever life one had. When he thought about it at all, Jimmie recognized the legacy his parents unwittingly had given him. Finding his way among the cracks of his mother’s oddness and his father’s resignation, he had quite early caught on that it was up to him to map the borders and furnish the rooms of a life he could live inside.
When he’d first been left alone, he would sneak out some Friday nights and walk over to the retirement home on Madison. He thought of it as sneaking out, even with no reason to sneak. They had a fish fry every Friday, family night, so there were always kids around, and everyone assumed he was with one family or another, including the occasional resident who seemed to think he was there with them, a grandson maybe. The third or fourth night he’d done that, he met Mr. Burkett sitting at a table with a woman Jimmie thought was his mother but found out was his wife. Mr. Burkett had been in what he called materials management.
“Vendor wanted to be sure he had stock to fill orders, with maybe even a safety bump, he wanted it maintained with no fuss, no bother, I was the one he called. Needed something fast, I had the lines in place … You sure you’re interested in this, boy?”
Jimmie wasn’t, but it kept attention away from him, helped him blend in.
When Mr. Burkett shut the shop down, when his wife got sick, he’d gone into the mail order business on his own, buying in quantity for resale. Toys, shoes, health and leisure products. That sort of thing, he said. And he was as excited to tell Jimmie about this as he’d been about materials management. Where he got supplies, how to package most efficiently and cheaply, how to arrange trades, shipping. All this as he sat holding his wife’s hand and feeding her.
Neither of them knew at the time that Jimmie was sitting there at Harbor Rest getting schooled.
And today was Friday. Hospital day, when they’d roll in, or escort with hands cupped on elbows, a dozen or so residents, some with moist red lips, others with skin so parchment-dry it looked as though it would crumble if touched, walkers waiting at idle in a row against the wall.
He’d worked hard at first to try to find what they liked. He’d bring a bag full of books, read a little from each, watch their eyes. They liked stories in which things happened; that seemed to be the most important thing. Travel books, silly mysteries with schoolteachers or grandmothers solving crimes, historical novels, it didn’t much matter, as long as events kept moving. They liked best the stories that reassured them the world was as they thought it to be, or as they wished it to be. Children’s books and young adult novels always went over well.
“I hope you know how much we appreciate your doing this,” Mrs. Drummond said, as she did every week. “It gives them something to look forward to.” Every week the same words. Then she’d go on to praise him for never missing a Friday, for being on time, for being such a fine young man. Then she’d go off to wherever her Activity Director office might be, wearing her black suit shiny in the seat and pocket-sprung.
This week he’d brought something different.
Jimmie had quickly caught on that most fantasy, and much popular science fiction, had at its heart some kid—a genius if it was sf, a magical prince or princess unaware, if fantasy—who saved the world. This novel, pitched to young adults, which was bookspeak for adolescents, was a parody of that whole thing. It featured a thirteen-year-old whose parents had mysteriously disappeared, who lives with a family she refers to only as The Strangers, and who feels she never has fit in or belonged anywhere. (That sounded like every kid he’d ever known, Jimmie thought, but never mind.) She just kind of blunders into this face-off between Good and Evil, the last showdown, which takes place right out back of the food court at the mall, and they’re so pissed at this kid showing up, they get to rue-ing up one side of the cinderblock walls and down the other and decide to put it off till next time. With the help of another weirdo from school she figures out what’s going on, decides that’s not gonna happen, and spends the rest of book on this mission where, always with the best of intentions and often with near-heroic action, she’s just messing up one thing after another, making things worse and worse.
“Candles for Chance,” Jimmie announced, then the author’s name, settling in.
He read in what they called the common room, which was also where the residents ate and which reminded him of nothing so much as his old elementary-school gym that, with folding tables set out, doubled as cafeteria. To the familiar smells of staleness, anxiety, sour food, and sour bodies were added new ones: cleansers, medications, heavy perfume worn by many of the women, the acrid sting of their permanents.
After trying a variety of chairs, Jimmie had settled on a wheelchair that seemed always to be there in the room’s corner and never made use of. It had no stirrups, no leg supports. He’d plant his feet flat and roll back and forth in place as he read.
Someone had put a dead chicken in Carrie’s mailbox. Not a real chicken, a rubber one, but still. And it was decidedly dead, with filmy eyes and a floppy beak. She’d gone out th
ere hoping to find the abacus she’d ordered last week. Definitely didn’t expect a rubber chicken. Old Mr. Cody down the street had told her about them, offered to show her how to use it if she could find one. They sounded cool, and it took her almost eight minutes on the Internet to locate a source, some guy up in Maine who cut his own wood. His Web site was bottom-heavy with slogans and quotes about getting back to a simpler life, government intrusion and wars she’d never heard of.
The chicken was a message, she guessed—but of what? And from whom?
Carrie looked around. She saw the mail truck sitting down by the corner, heard the little dog in the house next door (the one that looked like cotton candy according to her dad) yipping.
That was Tuesday. Her parents had been missing for a week.
An hour later Jimmie looked up and saw Mrs. Drummond’s face floating at the back of the room, behind his listeners. She appeared hesitant to interrupt, he thought, and when she said “Thank you, James, our time is up for this week,” the others protested and begged her to let him go on.
“James has to get back to school,” she said. “They excused him just to come and read for you. And it’s activity hour now. But we’ll pick up there next week, won’t we? Let’s thank this fine young man.”
None of them responded, they just looked straight ahead. Jimmie understood that this had nothing to do with him, that it was the only channel of expression left them. Several smiled as he tucked the book in his backpack and said good-bye.
Wind was rising, sky hazy in the distance, out over Camelback. Most likely another dust storm making its way toward the city. Jimmie unchained his bike, plopped the backpack on the front fender, and wound the straps around the handlebars. The bike was a prize, a forty-year-old aluminum-frame Schwinn in mint condition that had involved a series of complicated trades originating at a vintage bicycle site and spilling through several others.
Over by a tree, three birds with long hooked beaks like thorns raucously did their thing. One repeatedly stepped away, then raced back in with wings spread and head low as though it were flying. Another mainly squawked and jabbered, looking around the way people do when they’re making a spectacle of themselves and need to see if anyone’s watching. The third just looked confused.
Two men sat in a car nearby, the driver slouched, the other upright, both facing forward, one of them speaking. When the car started up, all three birds froze for a moment. When it pulled away, off the parking lot and past them, the two aggressive birds flew off, leaving the third beneath the tree.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THING IS, you don’t forget the first kill. Bodies are messy things. And after that kill, he never looked at bodies the same—not a woman’s, not those he turned and walked away from, not his own.
They had fascinated him from childhood. All that wet, heavy stuffing, kidneys, stomachs, bladders of various sorts and sizes, miles of plumbing, pints of blood, the whole of it held in by a bag of skin scarcely thicker than a grape’s. How tentative it was, how tenuous a balance. The tiniest well-placed tear, a wandering virus, and it all—in agonizing months, or in an instant—came undone.
Someone had given him, as a child, a Book of the Body. The pages were cut into horizontal strips, and as you brought the strips over one by one, a person appeared piecemeal before you: spine, organs, muscles, vasculature, flesh. He couldn’t put the book down, and soon went looking for others. By the time he was twelve he knew systems and diseases better than he knew his classmates’ names, would walk the schoolyard or sit on the hard gym bleachers with bones and body regions (tibia, humerus, peritoneum, sclera) tumbling about in his head. Teachers and parents alike assumed him to be among the rare ones who find direction early in life. At age seventeen he entered college on full scholarship, declaring premed. Two years later he was drinking beer for breakfast as he looked out at rain in mangrove trees and tried not to think about the blisters on his feet. Another jungle there: rich growths of fungus.
They’d gone through the village twice. No dugouts or tunnels they could find, and no evidence of anyone having lived there recently. It was abandoned, only a pig and a few birds dead in the cage remaining as evidence of the generations raised here. Christian had come around the last hut and was almost to the trees when the kid, not more than ten or twelve, sprinted out of them with a swing blade raised over his head. Without thinking, in a single motion, he swung the M-14 around on its strap and shot. The kid exploded—like a dropped watermelon. “Full of gas,” one of the older guys told him. “They get that way, from malnutrition, from eating grass because that’s all there is. Boy was next door to dead before you ever laid eyes on him.” As they moved back into the jungle, he looked up and saw birds circling above the trees. Carrion crows would be first, then others, thrushes, tree swifts, greenfinches, coming to feed on the insects drawn first to the carnage itself, then to the droppings of the birds.
Still awake, he turned his head toward the window, exposing his right ear so that the drip from the tub in the bathroom sounded even louder. The faucet, made of silver-colored plastic, had split, and the drip came not from the tip, but from where the faucet joined the tub; a bell shape of rust and mineral deposits showed it had been that way awhile.
He wasn’t accustomed to not knowing what to do.
He was a planner, an engineer at heart, he supposed, not a creative filament anywhere within him. He thrived on order, on having the next step in place and following it to its conclusion.
A professional, yes—but he’d seen too many professionals to take comfort in the word, too many people who’d lost touch with the simple doing of the thing, the skill, the execution, and had gone off in search of The Big Picture, some grander frame. There was no big picture. Not for this, not for anything else.
The other side of the coin was that what you did, your profession, could so easily become routine, workaday, all pride and pleasure in doing, all feeling, drained away.
You had to find some passage, some between.
Windows rattled from the thumping bass of a passing car. Speakers must be the size of Marshall stacks, for that. Music never made much sense to him; he just didn’t get it, though as a teenager he listened to all kinds, classical, jazz, rock, trying for a connection, if not with the music itself, then with everyone else, to whom it seemed so important. The car moved away, sound narrowing to little more than rhythm, like distant talking drums.
He didn’t know what to do.
Nothing got put in writing. For a time he’d kept it all on one of those personal pocket-size computers, but after leaving the thing behind in a Dallas motel room and barely getting back in time to retrieve it, he stopped. He wrote the details down, only as an aide to memorizing them, then destroyed the paper. Driver’s license, passport, Social Security card, all had been obtained under false names. He had no fixed address, received no mail, had no family or acquaintances, paid cash. His life was undocumented. Once he was gone there’d be virtually nothing left behind, nothing to show he’d existed.
The contact had come via the Internet, by referral, as all his work came. He’d tapped in at a cybercafé in San Diego, a place the size of a small barn with tables so far apart the patrons may as well have been marooned on islands.
I have been introduced to your work by a mutual friend and would like to discuss the possibility of purchasing a custom doll.
Dolls, because that was what first came into his mind years ago when setting up the system. He had no idea why. He’d always found dolls creepy. An old woman he knew as a kid had a house full of them. You’d look up as you passed through a doorway and one would be staring down at you with rosy cheeks. They were on shelves and windowsills, in glass cases, lined up in polished wooden chairs against the baseboards.
In subsequent days he had bounced the client around various blinds on the Net before directing him to a post office box rented an hour earlier. Three days later he was waiting outside and hit the box with the first rush, walking out, package in hand, alongs
ide women in crisp business dress and old men in ill-fitting pants, polyester shirts, and sweaters. That night just before closing, from a library in Carlsbad, he sent a message: Your order has been received and is being processed. Thank you for your business.
Sitting at the particleboard desk in his motel that night, fresh from the shower and still undressed, he began. The desk was pushed up right against the window, overhanging the window ledge and air conditioner vent by inches; meager, barely chilled streams of air blew up to the desktop, then onto him. Kids were skateboarding on the sun-warped paving of the parking lot across the street, riding those small waves. Their cries reminded him of jungle birds.
John Rankin. Fifty-one years old. Worked at a mid-level accounting firm in central Phoenix with a client list of real estate brokers and small businesses, owned an old but spacious and well-kept home in the area where Tempe and Mesa rubbed shoulders. Wife did social services (whatever that meant) at a retirement home. No children. Transplants from the Midwest, one of Chicago’s pilotfish suburbs, lured to Phoenix (he surmised) by one of that city’s periodic housing booms. Photos had Rankin waist-up in a suit whose coat came close to fitting, sharp-collared white shirt without tie, belt buckle recently let out a couple of notches so that the old half-circle hoofprints showed; Rankin in close-up profile, worried or sleepy, it was hard to tell; and Rankin full face looking bland and characterless, as though he’d just gotten up from a chair and left his personality behind.
Christian looked out at the kids across the street and wondered, even then, as an altercation broke out and the smallest among them kicked off, grabbed his board and swung it two-handed at another, why anyone would want this man dead. The board connected, the big kid went down, and everyone scattered. Thirty seconds later, the lot was deserted save for the kid lying there.