Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  “It’s difficult to ... yes ... I see. ‘Such penalties will henceforth be served by the office of Judge’—now he’s crossed out what was written and added, ‘who will be picked from the Warrens by the cocksucker Harlan Bishop or the shit that comes from his privy if he’s busy being dead.’ The, um, colloquialisms notwithstanding, um, the intent of the document is clear. If the Judge perishes or vacates the office, he will be replaced at the earliest opportunity.

  “Signed by Gideon Long for all men of his origination and signed by Warren Groves for all men of his origination. Did you wish to examine the document?”

  “No,” said Thomas. “Who will be the first Judge?”

  “Him,” said Harlan Bishop, and he pointed past Thomas to the entrance of the cave. A Warren emerged, newly made and still pale with the clinging liquid of the pool.

  “Is it done?” the new Warren asked. “Last I recall, they were conferring. I had to crawl out of that fucking cave.”

  “Who are you?” asked Thomas.

  “I drew the name Cal Borden,” said the Warren, and he held up the slip of paper he took from the hat. “The name and memories I recall immediately are those of Jacob Fortune. Where is he?”

  “Gone,” said Thomas. “They’ve all gone but me.”

  “Was it signed?” Cal wondered aloud.

  Thomas did not answer with words. He turned his back and began to descend the terraces. Gideon stepped forward, a bright smile upon his face.

  “Congratulations, Cal Borden,” said Gideon Long. “You are the first Judge of the Covenant.”

  Cal’s arms fell to his sides, and his mouth hung open in dismay. After some time of staring he sat down upon a rock and hung his head.

  “Shit,” he said, although nobody by then was listening.

  1951

  The Judge

  CHAPTER ONE

  I was Warren Groves, the originator, the first of my kind. I was brought to this against my will. I stood atop the black rocks and howled into the desert night. I navigated a red river without conscience.

  I was Benjamin Dent. I drew my name from a beaten hat and set out west across New Mexico to forge a new life. I hated my brothers. I turned my back on killing. I dug gold in California and lost a finger to a Chinaman. I was a mean drunk and reminded myself of Abraham Nunn.

  I was Jacob Fortune, who rose from the water and yearned for the life of Benjamin Dent. I called myself by his name and sought him out, and I fantasized of bashing in his brain and taking his wife for my own. I recoiled from my fantasies of murder. I retreated to the cave and confessed my thoughts to my brothers. The Covenant was born of my actions, but I despised it.

  I was Cal Borden, the first Judge. For my flag I hunted Spanish in the Philippines. For the Covenant I hunted my brothers. I was shunned and disliked. When I could not bear my deeds any longer, I forsook the office of Judge and took up as a deckhand on merchant ship and grew to loathe the steadiness of land.

  I was Wilton Brisk, and I emerged with the scent of the ocean filling my nose. I became a lawman of Missouri, well liked and respected. I ascended to the office of mayor and then to congressman. I saw my wife run down by a carriage. In despair I lived alone and apart from the world. I fell and broke my neck and lost movement in my arms or legs. I begged the nurses at the state hospital to let me die, but they would not.

  I was Grant Agnew, Bull Whitman, Max Holden, Donald Hendricks, Franklin Wise, Ian Bendwool, and other names only briefly. I was a policeman in Atlanta, I fought in the trenches of France, I learned books, traveled foreign lands, and saw the moon reflected in the water of the Indian Ocean. I loved and I was loved. I was unrequited and unhappy, and I drank. I watched lives ending and beginning, but I never could sire another son or daughter. All of these memories, all of these men, flowed together as tributaries of my river until, in 1934, I emerged from the pool. I was thrust into this world, becoming not just water and intent, but the man named Casper Cord.

  My dreams were haunted by half-remembered names and lives I could only clearly recall while sleeping. Between these scenes of filial Americana were gaps—dark spaces filled with oily black. There were memories in those spaces once. Strange memories I was made to forget, memories that in nightmares clenched my heart and awoke me with the sound of my own screaming. I even began to forget the Indians I encountered in the desert with their gray cloaks and arrows made from bone.

  Sometimes there was only the grasshopper. It was black and polished like the skin of an automobile. I dreamed we talked, but it did not speak in words. I dreamed it took flight above me, and its black wings assumed the cruciform shape upon the ceiling of a cave. That place was gone, a tomb of rubble for the black grasshopper idol, but I will not forget the texture of its shell or the hollow, articulated limbs filled with the threads of past integuments.

  The grasshopper thing lived, as surely as a rabbit or a dog or a man, and by the nature of the Pool I feared this fallen idol would live again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thanks to Sgt. Hector Flores of the Los Angeles Police Department I began my day with a dead girl. The headlights of the squad cars formed pools of color in the brittle gray morning. The poolful of the dead girl’s colors had my attention: milk-white skin, the blue of her overcoat, red hair, red waitress’s dress, and a red stream that flowed out onto the highway’s gravel shoulder.

  She was sprawled on a stretch of Dairy Valley blacktop some surveyor had decided to call Cranford. I’d never seen this stretch, or I’d seen it a thousand times and it had never left a mark on my brain. It was a lonely place to end up. Quiet and cold in the early morning.

  The crowd around her was keeping me from getting a good look. There were a couple of Cranford sheriffs in brown uniforms, a couple of LAPD cops, and some overcoats and big hats all blowing steam and waiting on the meat wagon.

  Flores was beside me, looking like branches cinched up in a cop belt. He was a good lawman, better than me, though he wasn’t much fun and never smiled beneath his drooping mustache. Good cops don’t laugh too much, and Flores never laughed. I could tell by the way he was biting his lip, he was hot about something.

  “Out with it,” I said.

  “You didn’t wear a tie,” he said in that deep-down voice of his.

  A glance at the rumpled front of my shirt confirmed his accusation.

  “Kapinski’s here,” he foghorned, “and he’s gonna kick your bung out.”

  Now, there was a thought. I’d long ago outgrown being afraid of men like Kapinski, which made life easier as whole but made keeping jobs much trickier. The smaller the Kapinskis of the world, the more tenuous their hold on authority, the more they pound their chests and kick over tables and make sure you get run out of a job.

  “My head hurts, it’s cold, and I gotta see my doctor this morning.”

  “You okay?”

  I was yawning when he asked, so I nodded and waved to him before answering. “Old war wound. We all got ‘em. Just cut it out with the Emily Post routine and tell me why you dragged me out here.”

  “Found this.” Flores pushed two fingers at me. Pinched between them was a stub of white paper. I took it and unfolded it. My name and telephone number and the word Help were scrawled in ink by a feminine hand. Not what I was expecting.

  “Help?”

  “Too late.” Flores pointed up the road to the heap of laundry and bent curves. The wind was charming snakes from the dead girl’s hair. Her overcoat was flapping against white legs twisted up all wrong. She wore an unfashionable brown loafer on one foot, and the other foot was bare. Dirty and bare. I couldn’t see her face.

  “Does Kapinski know about this?” I waved the slip of paper with my name on it.

  “Just me,” Flores said. “I found it in her purse. Thought I’d cover your ass for some stupid reason. Go take a look. Tell me if you know her.”

  He snapped his fingers for me to return the stub of paper. I gave it up. Over the years I have honed my detective’s mind so that I am abl
e to memorize key details like my own name and telephone number.

  Kapinski was piled up under a broad-brimmed white hat holding court with the badges. He liked to jowl his way through his theories. I could hear the story as I approached, dumb as a little paste-eater.

  According to Kapinski, the dead girl’s name was Holly Webber. Didn’t spark any fires. Kapinski thought she took the wrong bus from El Segundo, tried to walk to one of the subdivisions, and got creamed by a trucker. There and there, look at the tire scraps. Someone tried to brake. Thump. Guy gets out and realizes what he’s done to this beauty. Gets back into his truck, wheels back around there, and takes off east. Not going to be any witnesses out in the desert.

  “But what about the money?” Kapinski wondered aloud.

  “What about the money?” I asked, joining the loose circle of cops and dicks surrounding the dead girl.

  One of the Cranford sheriffs gestured to a rough line of wild brambles along the side of the road. There was a deputy over there picking through the bushes. I watched him pluck a bill from a branch and stuff it into a cloth sack.

  “Casper Cord.” Kapinski spit out my name like an olive pit that had just cracked a molar. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Looking for a golf ball.”

  Kapinski eyed my open collar with disgust. He likes to see a dressed neck. “I’m sure I told you I never wanted to see you sniffing around real detective work again. We’ve got no time for freelance boozers.”

  “If you see any real detectives, let me know, and I’ll clear out.” His face went red, so I backed off. “Come on, Rudy, don’t give me the high hat after all these years. Let me take a look, see if I know the stiff.”

  I knelt down beside the body. The blue overcoat was soaked with blood and sized to be the girl’s. One of the cops had laid it over her face.

  “Tell me about this money,” I said.

  I lifted the overcoat from the dead girl, and whatever Kapinski had to say bounced off my skull. My immediate concern was that against all of my expectations I did recognize this girl. I’d been looking for her face in every crowd and passing car for three-quarters of a century. Sometimes I glimpsed her, only to be proven wrong by a second look. This was different. This was no passing resemblance.

  Damned if I wasn’t looking at the face of my long-dead wife, Annie Groves. Dead all over again.

  Couldn’t be, right? That’s what I thought.

  I had to be sure she was real. I touched her cheek with my fingertips. Her skin was cold. The wind wrapped fat locks of her hair around my arm and slipped silk ribbons of it between my fingers. I leaned in closer, still not believing my eyes. Her perfume smelled like tangerines.

  She was slack with death. Her face was younger than I remembered and her body longer and more voluptuous beneath the draped overcoat. The only injury to her face was a single droplet of tacky blood in one of her nostrils. Her full lips were parted slightly as if she was speaking. Her blue eyes were open wide, but their luster was dulled by the wind. I turned her head so she seemed to be looking at me.

  Hands grabbed me and lifted me up from the pavement. I guess I was pretty caught up in her, because I just went right on staring, ignoring whatever the brunos were saying. Finally one of them got between me and her and grabbed me by the lapel of my coat. It was Kapinski.

  “Answer me, you goddamn drunk. Who the hell is Annie Groves? Some name she gave you?”

  “No, it’s nothing.” I shook off the coppers holding my overcoat. “It’s not her. I’m mistaken.”

  “Her name is Webber.” Kapinski held up a vehicle license. “Her purse was in the ditch over there. Christ Almighty, do you stalk car accidents looking for girls to lie down on? No, never mind. Get out of here. Leave it to the real police.”

  He gave me a shove. Who was I to argue?

  I took a last look at her face before they covered it up with the overcoat. It was her. Goddamn it all, it was her. Dead all over again. She’d been full of sunshine and giggles before I knew she existed, and here we meet again, and she’s as useless as a rock in a lake, only this rock had my name written on the bottom.

  I staggered back to my car. I tried to have a few words with Flores, but my mouth was full of molasses, and things were coming out all wrong. Kapinski was scowling at him, and Flores wanted me out of there in a hurry. He bundled me into my car.

  “You okay to drive?” he asked.

  I nodded. All kinds of strange reels were slipping through my projector. The world was flickering and stuttering on me, but I had to think it through.

  Maybe those Gideon sons of bitches had figured out some way to bring her back, even though that goddamn Pool never worked that way. Never did what you wanted. Fooling around with sticking dead things into that lousy soup was the most forbidden of the forbidden. Dead things came out alive but empty. They were worse than animals. The Pool somehow knew they were bad, because it dragged them back and never made dupes.

  I was going at it from the wrong angle. I wasn’t equipped to unravel some metaphysical mystery posed by my long-dead wife showing up on a lonely strip of Cranford highway. I knew how to glue the pieces together when it concerned earthly enigmas. I knew how to bust cheating husbands and work a source with sweet talk or chin music. I knew how to find people and answers.

  And I knew Kapinski was as wrong as a blondJap girl. I saw the evidence on my way back to the car. Holly Webber’s missing shoe was lying in the dust a hundred feet from the road. Pretty girl like that doesn’t go wandering in an empty lot out past the subdivisions. She definitely doesn’t lose her shoe in the middle of an empty lot and keep going.

  Unless she is being chased.

  I killed time at a boondocks chow house called Dandy’s that was anything but. A slab of gristle in a paper hat was chasing breakfast around a griddle in back as if it owed him rent money. I asked Doris, the only waitress, to scrape a couple of layers off their pot of tar and call it coffee. The place was empty except for one table of men in flannel shirts quietly talking, probably laborers from one of the developments going up.

  I left a dime on the counter for Doris and retraced my course to the scene of the crime. The coroner had taken away the body. Kapinski and his boys were gone too. The only sign that this stretch of road was any different than the stretch leading it up to it was the dark stain attracting flies by the side of the road and about a hundred cigarette butts.

  The full light of day clarified the scene. There was a dirt road perpendicular to the highway about fifty yards from where Holly Webber’s body was found. It led off past a long-gone farmhouse, the dusty field containing Holly Webber’s shoe, and a collapsed barn. Opposite the abandoned farm was a low hill covered in desert grass and topped with an assortment of parched trees. The cops had used the first few yards of the dirt track as a turnaround, but I could make out fresh tire tracks running all the way to where it dead-ended.

  I followed the dirt road on foot. A decrepit mailbox leaned into the road and marked the overgrown drive of the farmhouse. The door of the mailbox was missing. The rusty metal hinges were snapped and showed silver. The mailbox was empty.

  I wasted about ten minutes wandering around the farm, doing my best not to twist my ankle in one of the weed-covered holes concealed like traps on the property. There were some impressions in the weeds, as if maybe somebody had walked from the road to the sun-baked lump of a tractor. I searched the weeds around it for a few minutes and turned up nothing.

  Feeling defeated, I tapped out a smoke from a fresh pack and sat my ass down on the hitch of the tractor. The weather-beaten metal protested and shed a patina of red flakes. I gazed out across the field I’d just crossed and beyond the dirt track to the hill. The dry copse atop it was rattling away an accompaniment to the wind. A sickly elm shook its leaves, swayed back and forth, and moved just enough for me to catch a glimpse of blue peeking out between the branches.

  That blue was the body of a motor scooter. It was a Cushman, fairly new, in a
design and color appropriate for a pretty young girl who preferred driving herself to relying on a man with a car. No bus from El Segundo for her. I hunched over the scooter, wheezing from my jog up the hill. Felt like I had gravel in my lungs. Too old and too worn out to be running up hills in Cranford.

  I scribbled the Cushman’s tag in my black book. There was a pair of heels and a balled up pair of nylons in the scooter’s foot well. The shoes were bright red but sensible, the sort of thing a doll who was on her feet a lot would wear. Work clothes, no good for crawling around in the bushes.

  Most of the prints were made by her loafers. There were footprints from a man’s shoes, as well. These overlapped the woman’s in places and seemed to pursue her toward the highway. I managed to follow them about halfway from the hill to the highway, but I lost sight of them. I backtracked to the Cushman and followed the man’s footprints the other way, up and over the hill. The trail disappeared in a dry creek bed littered with round stones.

  The Cushman and the shoes ruled out Kapinski’s nonsense about the wrong bus. Holly Webber came out here with a purpose, and it was important enough to push a hundred-pound scooter up a hill and hide it in some trees. There was a white crash helmet atop a tree stump. The inside of it smelled like Holly Webber’s tangerine perfume.

  She’d been camped out behind a heap of yellow stones. It was a good spot to overlook the farmhouse and the mailbox. No campfire, but I kicked a ball of paper from a burger joint, and that led me to the peel of an orange, an Ellery Queen novel, and a pair of military-surplus binoculars.

  Holly Webber definitely came out to this miserable scab of Dairy Valley with a purpose. She was dropping off or picking up money, using the mailbox with the freshly-snapped hinges. Based on those footprints around the scooter, she was caught flat-footed by a man who pursued her to her demise. Run down by his accomplices, and some or all of the cash ended up in the bushes.

  Nobody had to pay me for the job I now planned to do. Holly Webber had spelled out Help in blue cul-de-sac curlicues on a scrap of envelope. Flores was right. I was too late to save her. But the story didn’t have to end with Holly Webber dead on the pavement. There were other ways a man like me could help. I knew a thing or two about revenge.