by James Sallis
One thing Graves did, he paid attention.
The beer had gone half warm but he drank it anyway, in a long swallow. Moments later he felt dizzy. From one damn beer. Another of the many delights of aging.
As it alit on the rim of the fake fountain that Graves always forgot to fill with water, a grackle screeched, stabbing its curved beak to the right and left. An appeal? Indignation? Warning other birds off? Lonely?
Who the hell knew.
He set the empty bottle on the glider arm, rocked to see how far or fast he could go before the bottle fell.
Maybe he was making too much of it. The scene in the courtroom and that night in the jail cell had shaken him, no doubt about it. So maybe he wasn’t thinking quite right. Still jazzed, or still beat down. Or both at the same time.
When the bottle fell, the grackle fixed him with its black eyes and squawked loudly enough to wake people three houses down. The bottle rolled and rolled, bouncing on the seams between floorboards.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A PIED-À-TERRE. A foothold. Something he wouldn’t need for long, but for now it would do him well. When had he last had a fixed address of any sort?
What with not having to find motel rooms and be on the move, this meant one less thing to deal with. Of course, in taking the apartment he had become marginally visible. But no one—another of course—was looking. Or would have reason to do so.
The kid was out there playing chess by himself at the picnic table under the lemon tree. He had what Christian surmised was a fake cell phone. He’d make a move, speak into the phone, reach across to move the other player’s pieces, then make his own move. Then back to the phone.
Christian picked the apartment for its proximity to a coffeehouse whose Wi-Fi he could piggyback. The ad had been on the bulletin board there, small free-standing apartment, furnished, private. One of those bottom fringes of phone numbers to tear off, but no one had.
It was half a garage behind the house, flanked on one side by bushes, on another by a sloppily mortared wall of slump block, on the third by palm trees, cholla and ocotillo. The garage half was only used for storage, the woman said. There was a good single bed with linens, a sturdy Formica-topped kitchen table, a couple of chairs, a battered black-and-white TV, a bureau with four drawers and mismatched handles, shelves on L brackets on two walls and above the toilet in the bathroom. The front window looked toward the house, rear window onto the palms and narrow alley behind.
Late afternoon now, what would be his favorite time of day if he had one, and Christian was lying on the bed, atop a plaid bedspread, counting holes in the acoustic-tile ceiling.
As a young man he’d done a single stretch in jail, in a bohunk Arkansas prison that served as warehouse for offenders of every sort, murderers to drunks and wetbrains to the seriously disturbed, from all the small towns around the state that had no place to put them, a square mile of real estate jammed to the gills with residents, equal part army barracks, high-school locker room, and killing field. This was not long after he got out of the service, when he was pretty messed up. He took his lesson from that residence: stay off the radar, fly near the treetops—always.
It was a sad excuse for decent human habitation, paint thin on the walls as though merely smeared on in passing, nothing close to plumb, cement floors crumbling away like stale crackers. Whatever contractor bid the job had pocketed a lot of money. The guards didn’t look much better constructed or more durable than the walls or floor. Over the years they’d got real good at staying out of the way.
First night there, two guys held him down while another one, a squat crew-cut guy with arm muscles like Popeye’s, raped him.
Staying off the radar wasn’t the only thing he learned in that prison. That was also where he took to heart the virtues of planning. He bode his time, watched without looking, took notice. Where the men were, who they hung out with and when, work details, cellmates, pastimes.
First one, he caught in the auto shop. He, Boyd was his name, wasn’t supposed to be there alone, but he had a deal with one of the guards. Christian put him out with a tire iron, tied him down. Then he put a funnel in his mouth and poured in a mix of battery acid and industrial solvent. Afterward, the funnel sat there cockeyed beside Boyd’s head like the Tin Man’s hat.
Jaco, the second, had his throat slit late one night in his bunk. The cell lock had been slipped with a thin sheet of metal. The cut was ragged, torn as much as slit. Chisels will do that. No one else in the cell saw a thing.
Christian waited for the third, the rapist himself, giving the man time to put it together, letting it build. He didn’t kill that one, who went by the name Jade. He taped Jade down with duct tape as he slept, sat on his face, and took off his genitals with a loop of guitar string and two wood handles.
After that, he hadn’t had any more trouble.
Late enough now that shadows lurked in corners, moving when he looked away, invisible when he looked straight on. Christian arched his back against the bed, trying to ease aching hips. Vertebrae in his neck and upper back popped in sequence, like a line of firecrackers going off.
Stay off the radar. Planning. That was what he’d learned. Things always went wrong, sure they did, but you learned to cope. To adapt, to improvise, to dodge, to divert.
But this?
Through usual channels you get the contact, the interview, the job. You compile information, reconnoiter, keep eyes and mind open. You’re never able to get all the ducks in a row, but you line up as many as you can, the ones you have eyes on, the ones you suspect may be quacking about offstage. You know the location, how you’re getting in, how you’re getting out, your timetable. You step up—and someone else has just taken down your target.
What kind of sense does that make?
An insect—a spider carrying prey, he thought at first, then realized it was a beetle of some kind, with its wing case sprung open on one side—came from the corner about a third of the way across the ceiling and stopped there, just over the bed.
A freakish coincidence that Rankin was shot moments before Christian closed in? Freakish, he had no problem with. That’s how life was. Coincidence, though …
That was hard to swallow.
Difficult to believe that someone else had randomly targeted Rankin. Or that chance circumstance had brought the shooter into Rankin’s presence at the very moment that Christian was stepping up.
Okay. So where did that take him?
He’d been thinking that he was still invisible, that no one would come looking for him, no one would even know to look for him. But what if he was wrong?
What you always had to do was stand off, try to see it all from a different angle. It wasn’t about you. He’d spent most of a lifetime doing just that.
But maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was about him. He was in the equation—so maybe he was an integral part of it.
He got up and walked to the window, looked out to where the kid was setting up another game, and went back to the bed.
The beetle had retreated to its corner. How long had it lived here in this room, with that crushed wing and case? What did it live on?
None of them suffered, he thought as he began to fall asleep. He could feel his mind break loose of its moorings, start to float free. None of them suffered, they all went quickly. Too much suffering in the world already. The problem comes when you start believing that the suffering, all that untold, endless suffering, has to have meaning.
A wash of images ran through his mind as he settled further into sleep. Faces, hands, his fifth-grade classroom, a sunrise he once viewed in Kentucky, a deer’s body bloated and boiling with maggots at roadside, people taken over and rendered emotionless by aliens, villagers with torches climbing toward the castle, narrow corridors down which he scampered lost and late for appointments, the tunnels back in ’Nam, the ceiling above the bed in the room where he grew up.
That stained plaster ceiling gave way to this one as he drifted up out of sleep,
seeing again the man’s face that had turned to him from within the car outside Rankin’s house, the man he’d seen back in Rankin’s hospital room.
The man wasn’t searching for Rankin, or keeping tabs on him. He knew where Rankin was. And from the look of things Rankin wouldn’t be going anywhere.
He had been looking for Christian.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
WHAT YOU WOUND UP REMEMBERING, what kept coming back to you, were not the whacked-out, bizarre crimes, the hatchet murders, double homicides, bunco and bank jobs, but simple things. The look in a father’s eye when you told him that his son had been killed while buying a Pepsi at the AM/PM on the corner. The trumpet case that had sprung open when its owner got shot in a drive-by, and you stood there noticing the way the bell of the horn was crumpled in on itself. The half-finished castle of building blocks in an abused child’s room. The suicide letter of words and phrases cut and pasted from favorite books, a crazy quilt of fonts and sizes, the books themselves put back in their places on the shelves.
Some years back he’d gone on a call to Maryvale. Caller said he was worried about his neighbor but wouldn’t give any details, wondered if the police could just go by and check on him.
Man’s name was Morris Hibley, and he came to the door in pajamas, blue slippers and an apron.
“If you don’t mind …,” he said, beckoning. Sayles followed him to the kitchen, where Hibley plucked a skillet off the flame and gave the contents a quick roll clockwise. “Pulling breakfast together for my wife. Coffee should be ready”—he turned his head to glance at the coffeemaker—“if you’d like some, Officer.”
Sayles accepted, and sat on a stool at the counter drinking it as Hibley went on with his cooking. He explained why he was there.
“Can’t imagine why any of them would do that,” Hibley said, sliding an omelet onto a plate. “Good to have neighbors watching out for you, though. Doesn’t happen a lot anymore, does it?” He wiped the plate’s rim with a hand towel, though it looked fine to Sayles. Alongside the omelet went sliced tomato, sauteed mushrooms, an English muffin.
Nothing was out of place. Skillet and pans square on the burners, countertop spotless, canisters for dry goods an inch apart. Even the coupons and photos on the refrigerator were straight and evenly spaced.
“I’ll just run this up to Patricia and be right back,” Hibley said. Minutes later he returned. The contents of the plate were untouched. Hibley made no mention of that, simply walked to the sink and scraped it all into the trash bin beneath, after which he turned and asked if Sayles would like more coffee.
Sayles thanked him and declined. “But I do need to have a quick word with your wife before I head back to the station.”
“Certainly, go right up. Second door on the right. I’ll just get her bath things together.”
Everything, of course, was in order. The room smelled mysteriously of powders and fragrances. Pale blue drapes matched the bedspread and area rugs, as well as towels, washcloths, and wallpaper glimpsed through the open bathroom door. Darker blue candles on bureau and bedside table. Slippers like Hibley’s own peeking out from beneath the bed skirt.
The bed was empty.
His wife, it turned out, had died eight months earlier. All this time, Hibley had been—in his mind—still taking care of her. Food, baths, medications. He never gave it up. They carted him off to the hospital for observation, then to court, and finally let him go, and he was still asking about her, insisting he needed to be with her. For all Sayles knew, he was over there in Maryvale fixing Patricia’s breakfast right now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WHERE WAS HE?
He had been dreaming. Squeezing his strange body through narrow spaces, standing outside a half-open door, looking down the line of people ahead of him marching toward—something.
Then he was in a jungle, with what looked to be hundreds of monkeys all chattering at him angrily from the trees, the sour smell of his own body washing up to him in waves.
And when he woke, it was beneath a ceiling that was not his, surrounded by unfamiliar sounds, the bed’s headboard scraping at the wall as he turned to look out a window showing the grayness of early dawn, then back at the ceiling across which a beetle with a crushed wing case solemnly marched.
Jimmie closed his eyes. When he reopened them, he was back in his room, but elsewhere still in his thoughts.
His thoughts?
No way.
Walking streets where tables filled with wares, books, CDs, watches, jewelry, glassware, had been set up outside all the shops. Germany, judging from snatches he caught of the language.
Then cobblestones, and twisting, narrow corridors between houses.
An old man wandering, head down, about the front yard.
And faces. Dozens of them, some distinct, set against walls, framed in windows, peering down from high places and out of passing cars, others floating up from the gray of sleep without surround or context.
Gray in the window, gray in his head.
He swung his feet off the bed and sat. The nail of the big toe on his right foot was broken into the quick, the others badly needed cutting. Which reminded him—the pain in his hand? He lifted it, feeling nothing at first, a dull throb slowly starting up as he put it back down on the bed.
Someone was knocking at the front door.
He made his way to the window, peered out. Two twentyish, well-dressed men in identical black pants, white shirt, and tie, carrying books close to their chests. Bibles, he assumed. Kind of early for that. Or was it?
Not according to the clock, which informed him he’d slept through till noon.
He switched on the computer, grabbed a Coke, and got back in the saddle just as the computer finished booting up. Looked at the string of headlines his search parameters had found crawling along the Web. Three, he sent to a save file. Quite a collection building up in there.
Dog Hair May Be Clue to Cancer Cure
Nude Arrested at Museum
Suicidal Planet Spiraling Toward Star
Deleting the rest of the headlines, he started a quick swing through his regulars, first the general sites, then the ones he cruised for plunder (flagging four items to keep watch on, buying a stoneworker’s chisel inlaid with the Masonry emblem), finally setting down at the Traveler site. He hadn’t been on for some time, and there were lots of fresh postings, most of them familiar territory. Interpretations of the canon, nitpicking and condemnations, cries in the wilderness. Then, near the end—it had been posted shortly before—he found:
Things have changed here.
I want to come back.
They will not allow it.
Someone’s twisted notion of humor, right? Almost certainly. But the posting’s simplicity and seeming candor, the spareness of it, took root in his imagination and wouldn’t let go, left him wondering. There’d be months of back-and-forth about the posting, of course, on the site; he suspected that for a time there’d be little else.
But he had work to do.
He got supplies from the closet, brown paper, collapsed boxes, tape, bubble sheets, and spent the next hour wrapping items for shipment. He had run off labels on the computer earlier. He stacked the packages on the hall table, e-mailed FedEx for pickup tomorrow.
Now if he didn’t hurry he’d be late to the hospital.
He always came in and put the book he was reading to them on the hall table, but Candles for Chance wasn’t there. As he dressed, he tried to think what he might have done with it. Then, glancing at the clock (he could just make it), Jimmie picked a book at random off the shelf on his way out.
Pedalling hard, he remembered the dream of an endless line of people plodding forward, and how strange it had been to wake so disoriented, unsure where he was, unable at first to feel or control his own body. Scary, true. But kind of cool too.
A larger group than usual today, the line of parked walkers extending fully half the length of the far wall. Jimmie pulled the book out of his backp
ack as Mrs. Drummond in her pocket-sprung black suit was saying what a fine boy he was and that he had something special for them today as always. This should be interesting, Jimmie thought. Reading a book to them that he had not read himself, and knew nothing about. His Monkey Wife, by John Collier. He took a long breath and started.
If thou be’st born to strange sights and if you don’t mind picking your way through the untidy tropics of this, the globe, and this, the heart, in order to behold them, come with me into the highly colored Bargain Basement Toy Bazaar of the Upper Congo. You shall return to England very shortly.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THERE WERE PICTURES SOMEWHERE, photographs of the two of them happy together and young, or happy and healthy at least, but he couldn’t find them. He hadn’t been one to care for photos, never saw the point of taking them, all those people showing off endless snapshots and slides of their vacation, or their kid throwing up for the first time, or their dog. If he didn’t have the memory in here, he’d say, and point to his head, it wasn’t a memory at all, and had no value. But now he found himself at two o’clock in the morning looking for photos.
Something was fading, something was going away from him, something he couldn’t put a name to and didn’t want to lose.
Sayles tried to remember when he’d last slept. Two nights back, he’d finally passed out around dawn, exhausted, but you could hardly call that sleep, and what he remembered of it was like a huge room with bodies, faces, and objects of every sort crashing about everywhere, so that you could never take any of it in, never get a hold on it. He woke drenched in sweat, pulled off his clothes, and draped them across a chair back. He turned on the box fan by the couch, lay there with it blowing on him. Feeling a familiar tug and tightness, he looked down to see an erection.
He laughed. What a sad old fart I’ve turned into.