Michael sees the fear in her face, the flush of blood in her cheeks, over-blinking eyes and a little lip bite. “Yeah, so the disability payments aren’t going to happen,” he says. “And the hospital bills, they’re on you too. Oh, and the car? You can stick that right up your ass while you’re at it.”
“Wait a minute,” Ron says. “Maybe I exaggerated my injuries a bit, but I did get hit. The car’s totaled. It wasn’t my fault.”
“What are you doing driving a sixty-thousand-dollar car, Ron? This is a nice house, but that car was a little out of your price range, wasn’t it? Smells like a scam. Smells like you got into the car and couldn’t get out. Totaled would get you out from under it and a disability claim would help cover this mortgage. I know you lost your job.”
“Because of the accident.”
“Liar,” he says coolly.
“It was a hit-and-run,” says Mrs. Anderson. “They never found the other car.”
“No, they didn’t,” says Michael hating these people, “But I did.”
He waits for the news to sink in.
“Here’s where you’re supposed to act surprised and say something like, ‘Where was it? Who was it? Did you call the police?’ Oh my!’” He stares at their blank faces and shakes his head.
“Otto’s wrecking,” he says. “You owned the car that hit your other car. What a coincidence, right? I can prove it if I have to. And no, I haven’t called the cops. Yet.”
He looks at Ron’s flushed face and Paula’s trembling chin and tosses his cigarette into a glass of ice water beside the pill bottles. He snaps his computer closed and stands up.
“So long,” he says. “Tell your lawyer to withdraw everything by tomorrow or the next sound you hear will be the Marshals.”
“Uhm…” sputters Mrs. Anderson.
“Listen,” says Michael. “I’m not here to judge. Normally, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about an insurance company, but they’re paying me now, so I have to.”
“We’ll pay you,” says Ron.
“To forget all this?”
He nods.
“And get in bed with you? Not a chance, Ron. You’re bad at this.”
“Please,” says Mrs. Anderson. “We’ll be ruined if we don’t get the money.”
“Poverty isn’t so bad,” Michael says. “It’s better than jail.”
“No it’s not,” she says.
Michael takes in the custom slate tile floor in the foyer before turning back to the couple.
“I know poor, and I know jail,” he says. “Poor is better. But if you don’t believe me, be my guest. Try your hand. I’ve shown you mine. All aces.”
They stare.
Michael goes on. “You’re done. Either way, you’re done. I’m doing you a favor. Plus, I save the company some legal fees, and the state some cell space. It’s a win-win-win. Whoopie for me.”
Mrs. Anderson starts to cry.
Ron ignores her.
Michael sees his eyes flash to a desk by the door. A desk with drawers. Drawers with surprises.
“You haven’t got it in you,” Michael says.
Ron’s jaw drops open in surprise.
“Remember what I said,” says Michael at the door. “And, you’re welcome.”
He wants to be mad at the Andersons for being so stupid, and he wants to admire them for the guts to try what they did, but once outside walking to his car, he feels nothing for them or their situation.
He doesn’t know if he is doing them a favor or not. They might benefit from the trauma of a trial and jail. It might make them better people. Smarter, maybe. More interesting at least. But even if he cared enough to burn them, for their own good or otherwise, he knows the company would never push it that far. Everything would end in a back room long before any judge read a word of legalese about it. Neater that way. Neater still to have him settle the whole thing for them on a Saturday morning.
At his car, he sees an old woman shuffling from her door to her mailbox, her daily exercise, fifteen feet from door to curb and back again. The houses are new but they are graves. Even with the Anderson’s youthful early thirties, the average age of the residents has to be approaching seventy if not eighty-years old. The ancient woman waves at him.
His phone rings.
“Hi Maggie,” he says.
“That bad huh?”
“No actually I just wrapped up the Anderson thing.”
“Which thing?”
“St. George. American Casualty. Tell them it’s over.”
“What about the Timberline Fire?”
“That’s Idaho.”
“And?”
“And I’m practically in Arizona.”
“You asked for it,” Maggie reminds him. “You said you needed the payday.”
Michael digs a finger into a new hole in the seat, feeling for the hot cigarette ember that made it, but of course, it was long dead, only the hole was left.
“I do. I need something to do. Something interesting. I’m in a rut.”
“Roy has noticed. You’ve got to go to Idaho.”
“Is that Spencer break-in still open? You know the one outside of Cedar City. That’s in Utah.”
“Yeah. But Idaho—”
“What does the Cedar City thing pay?”
“Ten percent of recovered. But you’re the investigator of record for the Timberline thing.”
“How much was taken?”
Maggie sighs. “The Spencer thing? One fifty.”
“So fifteen thousand for, what was it? Coins?”
“Doubloons. Private collection.”
“Maybe I’ll drop by on the way to Idaho. Idaho. Goddammit.”
He looks up and smells heat, ashes, and decay.
The old woman is gone. Where she stood there is another. A black woman, bare chested and wild-eyed. She raises her arms above her head, her palms together, fingers to heaven. She pauses and then opens her arms, waving them in a broad circle that tricks his eyes to see echoes of her arms before her hands clasp again below her waist.
“By the hook you will know the family,” she says. “By the throat you will have the sign.”
Michael’s breath catches.
He coughs and gasps. His eyes sting and he rubs them. In the retinal flashes, he sees the stripes of burning tigers. Five of them. He imagines them in a small house, their shrieks humanlike and cut short. Flames, orange as divine fur, hot as hell’s own breath. One is a tigress with two cubs in her belly. All are dead in a moment of breathless burning suffocation and heat. Distant tigers flee in all directions. One remains and watches too long. He is noticed. His stripes are counted, and his tail is marked.
Michael opens his eyes and blinks. She is gone. Where the woman had been there is only a spindly tree by the curb, yet her image burns in his mind as an afterglow. He stares past where she’d been, through the houses, into the mountains and beyond.
“Oswald. You still there?”
Tigers.
“Oswald?” comes the voice from his phone. “Oswald, are you there?”
“West,” he says. “What’s west?”
“West? You want to go west?” Maggie sighs. “Okay, uhm, here’s one. Assurity put a bounty out for a missing truck in Nevada—Vegas. That’s west and south of you. I guess.”
“What is it?”
“Ten on a million dollars; for recovery or no-claim.”
“What was taken?”
“Cargo, plus a new seventy-five thousand dollar Peterbilt with an air-conditioned trailer.”
“The whole truck?”
“Yeah, driver’s gone too. There’s a five-hundred-dollar reward for information about him. His family wants him back.”
“Tell me about the cargo.”
“Let me see… Yeah, uhm. Looks like a mishmash. He was a regular courier service that run, but the prize was a medical laser that was going to Phoenix.”
“Send me the file.”
“It’s in the opposite direction from where you nee
d to be.”
“I’ll be quick,” he says.
“Oswald, don’t you already have enough to do. Roy says you’re overworked.”
“How the hell would he know what I am?”
“From results?”
“I just finished up this American Casualty thing, remember? The Andersons are pulling their claim.”
“You weren’t even assigned to that.”
“What were they paying?”
“If I remember, a flat ten.”
“Well that’s ten thousand results, isn’t it? Send half my check to Carla and deposit the rest for me, will you? And tell Roy to stay off my back.”
“I’ll try,” she sighs.
They hang up. He takes a deep breath and stares at the tree, small and struggling. It’s some kind of maple with the starry leaves; no kind of tree for the desert. He notices the smell of ashes is gone, the waft of death passed away.
He thinks of Idaho and Roy. Then he starts his car and makes a choice. He turns southwest, but he’ll be damned if he can say why.
Chapter Two
Michael lives out of his car. His address is a post office box in Draper, Utah and a Gmail account in cyberspace, but in Vegas he’ll splurge for a cheap motel with a hot shower, clean sheets, and a night’s sleep where he can stretch his legs—a luxury the backseat of his car doesn’t afford him.
He was not referring to his current situation when he told the Andersons he knew poverty. It is his choice now that he lives the way he does. He could live better, if only a little, if he chose to. No, what he meant was when he used to live on government hand-outs, buying food with stamps instead of money, wearing used shoes and bearing the constant contempt of people who lived better.
He has memories from that time. A couple anyway. Flashes, like summer lightning, distant and without clear sound. He sees himself with a stranger, his newest foster mom, dressed in thrift store twice-hand-me-downs, arguing to buy beer on the government dole. It was before the Dormitory. He was about seven years-old. He was so angry that day. That’s the core of that flashing memory—anger. He can still see the indignant grocer humiliating his foster mother for trying to buy a six-pack of pain relief. He sees it still in red choking fury.
Then his memory lapses and he’s eight and in the Dormitory, then nine and ten. And then a family who doesn’t need the government stipend collects him at the gate: The Oswalds. He was a different person then, and that was the beginning of the life he has now.
The desert highway promises shimmering lakes ahead, cool ponds and puddles, moist relief just a few more miles ahead. Always just a few miles ahead. Cars blow by him on the right and he’s flying—nearly ninety miles-per-hour, but he might as well be parked when a red blur, possibly a Ferrari, shoots by and disappears into the mirage just a few miles ahead.
He rests the air conditioner and rolls down the windows. Burger wrappers whirl in cigarette ash cyclones and blow out the window like demons fleeing hell. The air is too hot to be considered fresh, but it’s better than the stale chemical gusts his condenser blows at him. He slows down to seventy-five—the minimum that won’t draw fingers from his fellow travelers—and sets it to cruise. He’s in no hurry. Nothing waits for him
And he leaves nothing behind.
His last fixed residence was a condo in Salt Lake City, a split level in the middle of town where the winter smog pooled and painted the snow yellow-black in the inversions. He’d had furniture then, things left him after the divorce, and new things too, most assembled from Swedish kits. He’d had a TV to watch football when he cared about such things. It didn’t take long for that TV to become just a piece of light absorbing modern art, unwatched and unwanted. TV was a window into the “giant circle-jerk of pretended meaning” that was his society. He could phrase it that way then, when he cared enough to name it. When he was still there.
After the divorce, his condo was new and hopeful, a little sad perhaps at night when the shadows fell on the empty side of the bed, but not the tomb it became later when Carla and Warren took the kids and moved to Colorado.
She’d taken most of his things, and at the time he had things to take. She liked things. The accumulation of things made her happy, if only for a little while. When she had everything, she set about improving the things she had with upgrades, remodels, and trade-ins. First her clothes, then her hair, and her shoes. Then the house and car. And finally, inevitably, her husband.
Considering his start, Michael was a goddamn Horatio Alger success story, but it hadn’t been enough for her. She started middle-class and needed more. He wonders again if there had been something early in her life that had spooked her, some vision of poverty or deprivation that had touched her, scarred her, and festered inside. Maybe it was an African relief commercial. Maybe it was a relative. Maybe it was just in her, born and bred into her psyche, the American disease of consumption. But whatever the reason, it haunted her. And cost him.
He hadn’t understood it at the time. Five years after the divorce, on a road like this, after the bank had taken his condo and he was glad of it going, he came to an understanding about Carla. It was a class thing. It was a fear thing. Enough was never enough. How could it be? Enough was temporary. She needed excess. It filled a vacuum in her soul, at least for a while. And that was something.
It had been years since Michael had found anything to fill the hole in himself for longer than a night. Always temporary relief. A deception he believed until the next morning when the hangover put it to the lie.
He’s glad that Carla has something.
He has this desert and this car and a hole that is all that is left of a life he never got used to.
The desert flies by, lonely cactus and tawny sand, a cloud of buzzards rising on invisible thermals—distant circling specks, black against a turquoise sky. The roaring wind through the window, deafening and hot, drives him to long neglected places in his mind.
Twenty-seven months in a juvenile dormitory—don’t call it jail—had shaped him to become the man that Carla thought would take her where she wanted to go.
He remembers little of what he was before that, not the faces of his previous families, absolutely not the faces of his real one. But he thinks they might be there in his memory somewhere, locked and forgotten. Strange he hasn’t gone looking before.
Consecutive memory begins somewhere in the Dormitory when he worked in the garden and had money and used it to buy a pair of shoes. They would not let him spend his money on candy, which is where he wanted to put it. So he had bought shoes instead, and stolen the candy.
When he left the Dormitory, he was raised by his longest and last foster family. After a year, they adopted him. He’d been only “Michael” before then, but at twelve years-old, he became Michael Oswald. From troubled youth to honor student in thirteen months.
Gale and Adam Oswald got the son they never had. Gloria Oswald got the little brother she never wanted.
Michael’s grades quickly put him on the honor roll, a strange award given to the rare breed of student who actually did his homework. He tried out for the high school baseball team and got center field. His adopted parents were prouder of him than their own daughter. Gloria began to struggle in school and one day she just ran away with Bobby Chandler. A few years later she and Bobby were killed in a Pasadena Quick-In Motel during a botched drug deal. Michael was in college then, married to Carla, Peter still in diapers. His parents were devastated. Mercifully, both died shortly thereafter in a car accident.
When he got the promotion to sales, Michael quit school and spent two weeks of every month on the road, selling insurance and making the kind of money Carla liked, and he wanted to give her. Between Peter and Tiffany’s birth, Carla made a splash in marketing, selling attack ads during an election cycle that made national headlines. It paid well and introduced her to Warren Burke, Michael’s later replacement.
“We married too young,” she rationalized.
The kids seem happy with their new
father and Michael is glad of that, or at least as glad of it as he can bring himself to be. Unlike most of his generation, he didn’t relish being a father. Once they could walk, read and reason, he wanted them to be independent and felt no need to direct their lives or their thinking one way or another. Whenever he did, whenever he disciplined them for stealing or acting out, lying or subterfuge, he felt misplaced. Another reason perhaps that Carla left him, but he can’t bring himself to worry about that. His kids, once they were no longer kids, were their own people and who was he to intervene? Who was he to champion one thing and not another when he himself was not convinced? There comes a moment when children become adults and the best any parent can do is to leave them on their own. Michael has his hands full with his own ever-depleting life. No reason to poison their outlook with the stark empty realities he’s encountered. But Carla—she has other ideas.
Motivated by guilt she has no reason to feel, at least not for his sake, Carla “keeps him in the loop” with regular phone calls about his erstwhile family. He liked the calls at first, eight years ago when they divorced, but now he resents them. She was right: they married too young. Peter was in utero at their wedding. Tiffany came three years later, and Carla’s affair with Warren began six years after that. Three years later, Michael gets a condo. Six again and he’s living out of his car.
He thinks of death in the desert. And he senses, not for the first time, that it is near. He knows he’s diminishing. He’s not suicidal, but if death were to come for him it would not be unwelcome. There should be a reason to keep going, but he doesn’t have one. It is habit, the waking and driving and working. The breathing. It is all just habit. Where once this life of his had its own momentum, it is stalled now and rolling backwards.
The dark woman he imagined in St. George crosses his mind unbidden, not for the first time. He tries to place the face, see it again, assign it to someone in his past. He thinks he knows her. Was one of his foster families black? Asian? Indian? He feels an affection for the apparition, which is strange because the image was terrible.
He leans his head out the window and feels the blast of seventy-five mile-per-hundred-degree-hour air shoot into his lungs.
What Immortal Hand Page 2