Equipment

by Hesse Caplinger

  3.

  His hair was short and autumn brown, the high ridge of his nose bore a hitch like a dog’s muzzle, and a single furrow creased his brow, indelible as a scar of concentration. He bore night sky and cool pavement air in the eave of his lapels, and an old leather coat: weather-beaten and clean, and all once and uniformly black. Edmund LeFrance had sealed the paper, put the shag to the barman’s match, and was working in the first clean draw when he appeared. He’d come and tugged the next stool over and slipped in, all of a motion, and was unloading Sherman’s from a brown shoulder box onto a cocktail napkin when LeFrance had turned to look. He ordered a double whisky from an untapped bottle and had carefully set out five Maduro wrap cigarettes and a lighter when it came. They lay straight and even as the teeth of a comb, with a black and silver lighter beside, and LeFrance and the barman shared their bemused fascination with a glance.

  The man visited his whisky and considered this arrangement, and LeFrance and the barman watched him consider it. Hours of cards and drink and lack of sleep had worked a greasy delirium over LeFrance, and when at last this new curiosity would not hold he said, “I’m guessing you’ve done this before.”

  “I have,” said the man without hesitation, and removed a cigarette from the arrangement and lit it. The lighter closed with a keen dry-fire snap, and LeFrance admired the sound.

  “What does it mean?” asked LeFrance. “Warding off evil spirits and bad liquor?”

  “It’s a special occasion,” said the man, returning LeFrance’s provocative grin. “I’ll have to try it on bad liquor.”

  “What’s the celebration?”

  “That isn’t the word I’d choose,” said the man, and offered LeFrance a cigarette with a gesture.

  “You wouldn’t mind?” asked LeFrance. “What about your . . . symmetry?”

  “Fearful symmetry? A ceremony of measure, I suppose. It’s difficult to put a sense of dimension to one’s doings. Also, I don’t like the taste of bar top. You’d ease my burden,” said the man. LeFrance bobbed with a breezy but grateful affirmation, collected a Maduro cigarette from the small napkin and moved to light it against the burning end of his handroll when the man interrupted.

  “Please. Please. Allow me,” said the man, and lit LeFrance with the lighter and a two-handed concentration. “It’s an odd thing, a cigarette that isn’t squarely lit: it never gets right.” LeFrance carefully pressed out the handroll for later. He felt struck by an accent, an occasional chord played on black keys, fluid and elusive—but he couldn’t train the sound to a certainty.

  “What’s the wine for this fish?” asked LeFrance.

  “Oban,” said the man, “do you know it?”

  “Not personally.”

  “No? That’s a matter to remedy,” said the man, and summoned the barman with a snap of his fingers.

  “Like Macallan?” asked LeFrance.

  “Macallan’s for cleaning brushes. Oban for my neighbor, please,” said the man to the barman. “You must know it in your time.”

  “It’s not necessary.”

  “I disagree,” said the man.

  “Really.”

  The man turned at LeFrance now with a spontaneous gravity: “I think . . . it’s the least I can do,” he said.

  LeFrance resigned with a snigger and watched the man until the fresh glass was set up beside the old. When it came, he put back his dregs with a jolt and took up the Oban, but again the man intervened with a hand poised above LeFrance’s wrist: “Don’t cut that with diesel—let that set!” said the man, with an irritated urgency that brought to mind August’s protestations over his tools.

  When he was satisfied the man lowered the hand and raised his glass and LeFrance repeated the gesture. “Partus sequitur ventrem,” said the man. “Prosit.”

  “Which means . . . what?” asked LeFrance.

  “May it benefit your health.”

  “The other, I think,” said LeFrance.

  “It means: that which is brought forth follows the womb.”

  “Latin?” asked LeFrance.

  “The words.”

  “You know it?”

  “As the drone of liturgies and mausoleum script,” said the man.

  LeFrance smiled and drank. “You seem a literate sort,” he said.

  “No,” said the man, who grew a smile so broad then it chapped his cheeks with creases and his eyes glittered wildly and LeFrance felt himself leaning imperceptibly away. “Oh no, I’m utterly reformed,” he said. “No,” he repeated, staving a feral mirth LeFrance thought would surely overtake him, “literature is merely romance reading for men, overfilled with emptiness, and punctuated by masturbations of hardship.” The man snuffed his cigarette in the flanks of his ashtray and drank and took up another which he lit with the jarring snap of the lighter. “I’ve no idea how anyone survives it,” he said.

  There was the chatter of cutlery on plates, the door rapping closed with the spasms of early crowd, the feminine score of conversation, automobiles in the street, and the man’s gaze, which LeFrance broke to chalk his own cigarette. “They’re nice,” said LeFrance.

  “Be my guest,” said the man.

  LeFrance took another cigarette and the lighter. It was more substantial than he’d imagined: lacquer panels, knurled thumb-wheel, hinged lid with a chirping valve and deliberate action. He put the cigarette on the slender blue flame and played the lighter over in his hands. There was a mar in the bottom finish that snared against his thumb and engraving near the lid: S.T. Dupont, Paris.

  “Though, I think you may be,” said the man.

  “Maybe what?” asked LeFrance.

  “A literate sort.”

  “I don’t think so,” murmured LeFrance, and shook his head. But the mouth feel of speaking had oddly and unexpectedly gone, and he lost the certainty of having spoken at all and studied the man then for proof.

  “The Rilke says otherwise. Or that was just laying about?” said the man, and he indicated the chapbook atop the envelope at LeFrance’s elbow.

  IX.

  Marek Hussar labored some time in the stultifying full wet of the barn before firing up the car and laying headlamps on his work. He closely inspected the second trench of turned and overfilled earth, noted the burdened heel marks to be cleaned, and checked the time. In the light he rest and appraised his cultivations. Two rectilinear troughs of harrowed earth, new beside old—both tilled and fertile and sown. Strange ripe bulbs to put up dark flowers, thought Hussar. He imagined a music which played over his deep and quiet spaces as he worked—Joe Zawinul, pressed out strains of “In a Silent Way,” pressed out flat block organ-chords with two ten-fingered hands. It played in crisp, full color from the stores of memory; but the idle of the sedan, which he’d run for a few minutes of true light, had thrown up a drape of noise which perturbed it, and made him deaf to the low clatter of rain on the shingles and in the field of bent grasses, and he clipped the lights and stilled the car and returned to the gap in the high doors to survey all this again.

  The rain had persisted some thirty hours by his counting, rung directly from the air and shiftless slate of sky. And this too preyed on his attention. It played on the roof and the field and granule-fine on the leaves of the far trees as camouflage, an acoustic veil that hung everywhere in palpitating shelter that prolonged his earthworks with vigilance. But within the resumptive low patter, his tune took up again, bounded into the open, filled the barn and the clearing and the inky brushwork of wild spaces, just as it had coursed over his exertions in the trunk, the chuff of spade-bites, and the scuttle of soil on ninety inches of bag; on heels; on spangled clutch.

  The ill-fated phone had become a litter of pieces about the city, the battery and SIM card and bits of handset had been drawn and quartered and cast off. The fateful call, as it turned out, had gone unanswered, too brief for voicemail, and the irrita
tion of waste had lingered with him—like big-game trophies, or great sharks in mackerel drags; like defiled sculpture.

  Hussar stood in the door with his music, and when he finished surveying the out of doors, he studied his gloves; studied their leather palm and spine. And he reflected on three layers of medical booties over his shoes—regarded their stupidity; their practical ugliness; imagined a catalogue for such things; an great human inventory; a genealogy—all I need’s a rubber nose; a Chaplin cane, he thought—and shook his head at the indignity; resolved himself to the murk of the interior and turned himself back upon the earthen furrows and the re-dressing of hay and other cares. And when he’d finished he admired the great mound of straw, straked with mold and fragrant with common decay, and he smiled upon his work. “Whomsoever may object to this union,” he said softly, “speak now!”

  2.

  In the days which followed, February endured in its wet, cool, and humid color—a mirthless oil-spill plumage that would neither lift nor break, and Hussar marveled at its dark and adamant featurelessness. He busied himself with the mundane gestures of his work. He restocked perishables, took coffee in fine porcelain cups, and sat in silence and music before the altarpiece façade of the stereo. And he received the key.

  It arrived by post, as they generally did—stamped and postmarked and unremarkable: a modest envelope containing a fresh-cut key, sharp and bright and urgent with the capital of new-minted coinage. It was the third such key he’d received in St. Louis, in fact—the second at Creveling—and it belonged, as they always did, to the address which preceded them by text. The first key had fitted a box at the Deco brick of a post office in University City; the second a box in Clayton; and this, the third, fitted a box on Market street—across veneered marble thresholds, and through portals of brass and glazing, and low beneath grand New Deal murals of riverboat authors and lions of newsprint, traders, and trappers, and threadbare provincial generals illustrious in their abolitionist blues. There were his footfalls sparkling into vacancy, a column of postage tables fixed in optimistic permanence and lighted in smoky eye-shadow noir—an emerald jewel in an urban-pothole setting, thought Hussar, a powder magazine for convictions all spent in its care.

  There was the toothy rough-saw of the key. Whine of the tumbler screw. Clatter of the aluminum paddle of door on dry hinges. And there was the vessel for the key—the envelope itself. It was a system comprised of three ingredients: the address of the post office box, which arrived via text message in thin lines of green-pixilated script; the post office box key, which arrived typically by mail; and the key-envelope’s return address—a business in a tidy secretarial hand—which in its house number, contained the very number for the PO Box—a box number he’d quietly scanned from the Market street block of them, the folded slip of envelope in hand. And there was the package—or packages: three sealed one in the next like nested dolls. Three fragile paper vaults, all in the service, not so much of perfect confidence, but transmissional certitude: not a secret kept, but delivered; an agency of will conveyed; made manifest. These levers of agency came in many forms: travel itineraries, conference addenda, notices of delegatory appointment, psychological profiles, articles and glossy photos with earnest grease pencil loops. In this particular case that manifestation came as an uncharacteristic revision—a modification to the matter and manner of the first and original key, the key that had brought Hussar to St. Louis seeking its mated box to begin with. And the form of that modification came as a place, a date and time; a geo-chronological overlap of coordinates representing an end to watchful waiting. It was an escalation request.

  3.

  Hussar visited and reviewed the location, at different times and for different intervals, and set about his preparations. He bought buckets and paint rollers and nitrile gloves and fetched and arranged items from the flight cases cached in the garage.

  He visited the gym; weights and pool, and fed down the narrow-dark and crooked passage to the untended locker room within: a long, moist gauntlet opening upon a quarter lighted in heat lamp and cared after like bus stop latrine. Littered a blight of blue-veined tumescence, unflushed turds, and Asian centenarians come to bathe their balls in the warmth of hand dryers.

  He observed treadmills, and untold squads of fettered cyclists in laborious captivity: thought of calories—lamentable kilojoules; bristling watts of power exhausted in malodorous brine and fevered loathing. He thought of ancient Egyptians; masons; traded copper implements for diet pills and row-machines, and left off pyramids for sacrificial offerings in righteous vanity: self-improvement. Wheat fields turned ornamental gardens. Pharaonic deification swapped for coital fingerings of personal immortality: and with it, two splendid new follies bought for the labor of one. This is what he thought where he slipped into the pool, and carried it with him the fourteen feet to the abrasive floor. He dropped beneath a bandolier of diving weight and watched in meditative calm as the thought left him in tear-away sheets and the sweeping second hand of his wristwatch clicked off formidable sixty-second ingots, all in accumulated fine-shaven intervals.

  Like the extra-physical martial art of car-craft, or sunning in the sonic arc-light of the stereo, this of the drowning—the immersion, too, had become a pleasure. But unlike the others, this ecstasy—two minutes, eleven seconds at the hypoxic edge of carbon dioxide saturation, of chlorine salts and dim green bathwater for breath—was a stillness advanced from terror. Not a perceptual or psychological fear, but a horror, pure and primal. Physical. Reflex. A panic of the body: that intravenous death-shudder; a sort of writhing certainty of crocodile teeth on skull plate. Overcoming this was no matter of measured pacifying gasps, of mollifying the senses one placid touch upon the next; but the stern rode and precipitating anchor of self-abnegation: of smiling death; of thrilling to foretake the fit limb that it may not later be taken. A full depth of watercolor pigments in blue-green silence; a chest taught with spoiling and unbreathable vapors; the heart feeding them in slowly tiring hammer fells; atria of the mind dilated in wheezing, asthmatic starvation; the second hand of the watch, knocking as though it might be pressed against his ear, marking out the edges of his diminution, sounding the curtain-draw in the brief calendrical lozenges of mechanical perfection: and all the while, however tenuous and ephemeral—a vesicular home. An absolution.

  4.

  The morning of March 14th opened in low and heavy turbid cloud, and trained in swift procession across the splintered window frame. Wind lapped at the soiled curtain-tails, drew them out through the fractured glass, and for a time the room hummed and buffeted with something like air. Marek Hussar was installed in the front room of an apartment house on Keokuk at Nebraska; third from the corner; second floor. He was suspended in waiting, but at pensive distance from its pleasures, and far from the forms of home. The half block leaned shoulder-to-shoulder in huddled vacancy, brown-toothed and abandoned: a weather-softened rain catch to the open roof of sky, and occasional hotel suite for those in search of private accommodation for their needled dusk. Battered saplings put up in window hems and the daylight gaps of floorboards. Feral droppings were everywhere near at hand, and Hussar had the sense that every surface had been somehow graced by a sputum of tubercular hackle.

  Hussar had watched the hooded morning rise—night turned blustery scrim of day; had watched the belt-fed day unfurl; and a shoal of rain, not so much heavy as large—cold, full rain-stones cast down in spite. He had watched this pass a sort of snowflake mist that tumbled in doorways and spun up window frames. He had sat deep in the room on a milk crate, back against the wall seeping dew and cream-white base. He sat in the curried stink of mildew, the crawling nasal sting of desiccating lime dander, the ammonia-scented fold of carpet. He’d held this vigil through all the hours of the cool, still night which followed, and in the early hours of the fifteenth, he’d set the bipod legs of the Barrett G82 on the flank of an overturned bookshelf; queued up three five-round magaz
ines—AP and two Raufoss—and trained the scope through the narrow portal of window and onto the broadside of the building above and beyond the remnant of service station, and some eighty meters from his sights.

  At 8:00 Hussar checked the green-fluorescing markers of the Sea-Dweller, locked the suppressor over the muzzle break and rose from his many hours of listless hibernation. Some four hundred sixty feet above sea level—high-center of the Midwest, second floor; still, his undiluted mood remained a depth-pressure fully half the watch’s four thousand foot dive rating. At 8:30 Hussar glanced at the shims he’d fixed to bar the door. He strung a set of muffs round his neck, thread the suppressor to the USP, advanced a round, and rest the pistol within easy reach in the case of an attempted entry. He tested the reach; practiced it twice for feel, and then he briefly rest his eyes. After long hours silent in wind and rain and the passing of rain, it was in this short crush of velvet dark that a small piece of Brubeck flickered into the low corners of his thought.

  A large white Dodge truck crept to a stop near the building on Nebraska. A hulking extended cab dually; even opposite the service station, some two hundred sixty feet from Hussar and through the window frame across the room, he could hear the tappet-clatter of diesel at rest. For some fifteen minutes it rest.

  Generally Hussar would be cycling his breathing by now, minding his heart rate, slowing it—feeling for the downstroke of its interstitial track. But at eighty meters little beyond the force of habit was required; perhaps not even that. On a still day, as it had become, eighty meters was reaching out and placing a thumbtack; pressing it home. Yesterday had been blustery—ten to twenty east-northeast turning east; today, a steady one and a half to three, northeast; over this distance it was a motion six hundred ninety-six grain .50 BMG would fail to notice. 8:45 the faint noise of tappets stopped and four men quit the truck for the apartment. They were: one middle-height in heavy corded sweater; a stocky figure with hands jammed in his coveralls; one tall and sloped at the shoulder—bald with a short wreath of hair and black topcoat; and one middle-built with a full head and face of close-shorn stubble and flight jacket; and Hussar watched them move with directed ease up and into the building.