What Immortal Hand

by Johnny Worthen

  “Oh, Mr. Tagget.”

  “Yes?”

  “How would I get in touch with Mrs. Tagget if I can help her?”

  “You have my number.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Don’t call unless it’s important.”

  “Or you won’t be happy?”

  For an answer, Tagget curls up one side of his mouth and goes into the house.

  Once off the estate and headed back toward New Haven, Michael rolls down the window to talk to the driver.

  “Where are we going?” he asks.

  “The airport. Mr. Tagget said I’m to buy you a ticket to anywhere you want to go.”

  “Give me a quarter and drop me off at the bus stop?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. You’re taking me to that Tweed airport?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s bullshit. Take me to New York. To JFK airport. I’m not sitting around this burg waiting for a connection to civilization.”

  “I’ll have to call Mr. Tagget.”

  “Do what you have to.”

  He rolls up the window and helps himself to a glass of overrated aged scotch from a cabinet beneath the seat. He drinks it warm wishing it were sweet rum.

  The traffic slows heading into New York and Michael kicks off his shoes. His mind has so much to process. He had a glimpse into another world today. He’d spent an afternoon surrounded by the trappings and manners of the ruling class. It was more than money that set those people apart from lowly orphaned boys like himself. It was a pedigree. They were born into it. It was a caste. Revolutionary slogans aside, the ancient castes are still alive and well, fully populated and thriving in America. They may be less obvious than their European counterparts—don’t wear ermine to government functions—but their circles are the same. The blood that runs through Tagget’s veins is but a cousin distant from beheaded kings and murdered czars. This is why they hide in the shadows now, and prefer to be the power behind the throne. The age of god-kings has passed but not their expected birthright.

  Strange musings for Michael. He’s not political. He must still be stinging from his altercation with Oliver Tagget. No matter how good he gave, Tagget would always win. No sharp-tongue comment, no working-class guilt trip, no matter how witty and true, would ever trump the simple and poignant gesture of Oliver Tagget turning his back on him and walking into the mansion.

  He is not incensed at the injustice. He only notes it as a fact, a detail of the natural order of the world he lives in. It’s good information to have, vital to remember. Justice is a human construct. Nature is strong and weak, predator and prey. Sacrifice and power. Only in death is everyone equal.

  “Which terminal?” the driver says over an intercom.

  They’re in Queens. An hour has slipped away.

  “Which one will take me to the bay? Directly to San Francisco. To Oakland?”

  “I thought they found you in Utah?”

  “If you had a ticket to anywhere would you go to Utah?”

  “I see your point,” he says. “Hold on.”

  He pulls the limousine behind a row of waiting taxis and gets on his phone. People walking by try to peek in through the tinted glass to see who’s in back, but Michael is concealed.

  “I got you business class to Oakland. Plane doesn’t leave for a couple hours though. It’s a six hour flight. It’ll play hell with your system; you just got here. You want me to try to get you a room for tonight instead? Leave in the morning?”

  “Mr. Tagget seemed like he wanted to get rid of me fast.”

  “Yeah, but Mrs. Tagget wouldn’t want you mistreated. She was really anxious to see you.”

  “Surprised I didn’t get invited to stay at the manor. Wasn’t I supposed to get brunch?”

  “You were going to,” the driver says. “Before Mrs. Tagget’s episode.”

  “Word travels fast.”

  “Everybody was hoping you’d put her right somehow. Are you a doctor or what?”

  “Just a guy,” he says. “It didn’t look like an episode to me. She just broke down.”

  “When she loses it like that, she goes down for days now,” he says. “She’s been messing with her brain.”

  “What does that mean? Shock therapy?”

  “Drugs, man. Drugs,” he says. “I’m only talking to you because she’s had it bad and if you can help her, we’d like that.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “We. Us. The others.”

  “Servants?”

  “We work for the Taggets, but it’s more than that. We’re like family.”

  Michael looks at the driver’s tan Mediterranean features, notes the accent in his voice, the dirt under his fingernails, and marvels at the carefully crafted deceit that engenders such loyalty from servants to master. “Like family,” he murmurs.

  “They’re good people. If you can help them, if you can help Mrs. Tagget, I suggest you do.”

  “I doubt I can. But I’ll keep your suggestion in mind. That’s too bad about the drugs,” he said. “Pills? Coke?”

  “Nah, man. Something worse than those. Something real bad. Illegal stuff. Hunter Thompson shit.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “So are you going to help her?”

  “You know what’s wrong with her?”

  “She lost people.”

  “People lose things all the time.”

  “Not things. People,” he corrects him.

  Outside the limousine a uniformed policeman directs traffic to keep moving past the terminal. Explicit instructions under the official seal of the TSA and Homeland Security prohibit stopping or standing for longer than three minutes. They’ve been there nearly fifteen. The policeman cusses out a taxi-driver in a turban who’s taking too long unloading a plaid suitcase. He cuffs the driver once on the back of his head, sending him scampering back to his cab to drive away. The cop doesn’t give the limousine a second glance.

  “Thanks for the offer of the room,” Michael says letting himself out of the car. “But I think I should leave.”

  The free hotel room would have probably been a three room suite with Jacuzzi, thousand thread-count duvet, and a terrycloth robe he could wear skiing. Instead, he waits two hours on a plastic chair before being loaded on a plane where he sits for another two hours while they trace down a mechanical fault with the plane’s air conditioning. It’s sweltering inside the cabin but the front of the plane is better than the back where the drinks aren’t free and the ice is rationed so those in business class don’t run out.

  When the plane finally takes off, he feels every minute of the delays. Muscles he’s never felt before are cramped and angry, still weak from the hospital. No amount of stretching or standing seems to help. He wants to run, needs to move, but all he can do is sit.

  Exhausted though he is, he doesn’t sleep. He tries to relax with a movie. He finds the comedy inane, the romance boring, the action untruthful. He switches it off and stares out the window at the stars. Heidi Tagget’s words echo in his mind: “You walk with Her.”

  She’d seen her. She’d called her the devil. That was as good a description as anything. If he had to give her a name, that would be one. If he had to give her a name, Mother would be another.

  And he walks with her.

  Heidi was a not a well woman. He shouldn’t put any credence into anything she said. Her visions were the ramblings of a distraught psychotic woman, drug addled and grieving, plagued by nightmares and memory. Like him.

  And he walks with her.

  He allows himself to believe that it is all connected, that his trip to Connecticut like his vision at the gravesite, is part of a greater plan, a path to destiny and discovery. An odyssey. A purpose. This does not comfort him, but it does not need to. It is interesting only, a recognition of pattern. Light against the dark. Dark.

  Within the course of a waking day, he’s seen two oceans—both sides of his country. The Pacific rises out the window as the
plane banks for approach. The sun penetrates the windows at a low and blinding angle and he shuts the shade against it.

  His VIP treatment is over once he leaves the plane. Tagget’s influence and money ends at the gate. He could have used his connections to track down Rebecca Brennan. He’s got a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers he’s been too distracted to pursue. Tagget had only to make a phone call and he could have brought Brennan to Connecticut on a silver platter. No matter. This is his quest, his destiny, and he is confident he will find her, and if not her, he is sure he will eventually find what he needs.

  He staggers into the terminal, where it is crowded and loud. He’s assaulted by the smells of rose perfume and vomit, fried food and coffee. Blank stares look through him, cast from thousands of weary travelers, local and foreign, every skin tone and accent detectable here. Crossroads of the coast, a hub of the world. It is a hoard ignored by the impatient clerks doling out seat assignments, but he is watched by suspicious cops who hold their hands on their guns as he passes.

  What is it they see?

  “Look who’s here?” she says. “Hello Jack.”

  Strangely not surprised he says, “Made it out of Vegas, I see.’

  “Hello.” She’s standing at the doors leading to the curb. It’s the same woman he met in Reno. The one who spoke in riddles.

  “What are you doing here?” he says.

  “Business.”

  “What do you do again?”

  “Whatever I have to.” She smiles and it is warm and refreshing like a morning desert breeze.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he says.

  “Good things, I hope.”

  “I got into a little trouble in Nevada. There was a uhm… I mean to say, I saw a tape at a gas station.”

  “Are you trying to make sense, Michael Oswald?”

  “You remember my name,” he says. “Why did you call me Jack before?”

  “So we would know each other.” Her eyes glisten and her smile is contagious.

  A man steps through the doors just far enough and long enough to say, “Come on already,” to Jessica.

  Michael tries to match his features with one of the men he saw in the tape in Ely or the description from the Reno waitress. It’s impossible. The video was bad, the descriptions were worse. It is only his imagination and the thinnest of likeness that connects this girl with the infectious smile to a stranger on a blurry security tape.

  “I’ve got to go,” she says. “We’re heading to Tahoe after this. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  “Maybe.”

  As she disappears through the door, Michael’s tired mind folds and falters. His vision blurs and darkens and she appears covered in black and sooty smoke. He smells ashes and tastes blood.

  Chapter Twenty

  His phone is blinking messages and the date announces he’s been in an Alameda Super 8 Motel for three days. He has no recollection of anything since he opened the door, staggered in and fell on the bed after leaving the airport.

  He’s famished and weak. He can barely peel off his clothes before tumbling into the tub. The water is cold and makes him shriek. He endures it until it warms and then burns his skin. He washes off the smell of days of nothingness from his flesh, the stink of airports and planes, cheap coffee, overpriced liquor, peanuts and nightmares.

  He’s down to one clean set of clothes. More than enough. He stuffs everything he has into his bag and pays the room charge in crisp hundred dollars bills from Tagget’s envelope.

  He breakfasts at a Denny’s and stuffs himself with pancakes and syrup, sausage and eggs until his shrunken stomach threatens to burst. A stab, or five, just there and there in his gut would alleviate the bloating.

  He breaks another crisp hundred-dollar bill and pays for breakfast. He slings his bag over his shoulder and walks out into the California sunshine thinking he needs a car. Phone calls will not do, and it’s too far to walk. There’s one Rebecca Brennan in Berkeley and one farther north in Richmond. He needs wheels.

  His mind is full of riddles, lost time, the woman at the airport, his quest and his past. He’s not paying attention to the basic rules of the street. He’s reminded of this when an Hispanic man in a black and white plaid shirt two sizes too big, steps out from behind a car. “Hey buddy. You looking to score?”

  “No,” says Michael.

  “Can you lend me a buck?”

  “No.”

  “How about a hundred?”

  Michael can’t be sure, but he might have seen him at the Denny’s. He moves to walk past him wondering about buses and California cab fare.

  The man lifts his shirt and shows a silver gun in his waistband.

  Michael steps back toward a house. There’s a driveway behind him, two cars nose to nose, and a bank of trashcans smelling of rot in front of a chain link fence.

  “Give it up,” the man says following him. “Bet you got a computer in that bag. Can I have it?”

  Esmerelda in Alturas flashes into his mind. The needle marks on her arms, the promises unkept. Her glazed eyes. Her dying breath.

  The man is barely a man. Nineteen or twenty years old. Muscular, tattooed and menacing. There is death here. Michael feels her watching. He turns and runs.

  One step. Two. Three.

  He’s at the fence.

  He’s held. The man has his bag. He’s pulling him down by the strap around his shoulder.

  The bag contains his things. They are his things. He hasn’t many but he’ll damned if he’ll let them go to a punk like this.

  He lets go of the fence and topples back. Together they tumble to the ground.

  The man slams a heavy elbow into Michael’s chest causing him to gasp, but he keeps his wind. He makes to get on top of Michael, to pin him down.

  Michael twists and writhes, and finally kicks himself over and gets to his knees. The man holds him by the shoulders and tries to twist him back around.

  Struggling against each other, they gain their feet. Michael feels a slackening on his shoulder and fans his arm upward and around and breaks the man’s hold on him.

  The man goes for his gun.

  Michael snatches his wrist and twists.

  He spins around, pulling his arm free but losing his feet. He falls to one knee and Michael hears the clatter of the heavy weapon tumbling over the concrete. He can’t see where the gun went but when the man drops to all fours and crawls toward the car, he knows it must be there.

  Michael’s on his feet. His bag’s shoulder strap is broken. He’s not hurt, nothing was taken. He could run. He has a clear path either back to the road or over the fence to disappear behind the house. He has a moment to decide and another to act, but he wastes them both watching the man retrieve the gun.

  Michael steps forward. He hears metal slide on cement and sees the flex in the arm. He has the pistol. He scoots backward, his right arm trailing under the car.

  Michael drops onto the punk’s back and whips his left arm around his tattooed neck. His right arm presses from behind and he grabs it with his left hand. The hold is complete and clean. It is a pincer. It is a vice. It squeezes the mugger’s windpipe and crushes his larynx. Michael hears the pop of cartilage, the cracking of bone, the gasps and hiss of arrested breathing.

  The man kicks and struggles, squirms and fights.

  Michael holds the headlock easily, comfortably. Naturally. He waits and squeezes, and sucks air into his own lungs like it is sweetened perfume and sacred incense. A lover’s kiss.

  The man flexes and spasms, tenses, then quivers before going limp. How long Michael holds him in the strangled embrace before he comes back to himself, he cannot tell. It might have been a moment, a minute or an hour. Time slips again. He breathes and waits. He does not let go. He knows not to let go, even though the body is still and lifeless, a stringless marionette. He holds, and breathes, and counts in his head to catch up time.

  Eight, nine, ten, eleven.

  He held Ken this same way.
Then he’d been angry, now he is calm. He remembers his foster brother struggling to pull his arms away from his neck. He recalls the smell of cheap shampoo from the back of his head, his uncombed brown hair tickling his nose. Then he went still and Michael counted.

  Eighteen, nineteen.

  Let go now and there’s still hope. Ken made it to twenty and didn’t die.

  Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.

  He’d sensed death but thought it was his own. He may have turned the table, but he hadn’t cheated death. He holds the offering in his hands.

  Forty. Forty-one. Forty-two.

  He breathes deep and steady and his head lightens from the oxygen rich euphoria.

  Fifty-six. Fifty-seven.

  Woozy. Full-on dizzy.

  Sixty-eight. Sixty-nine.

  The air is a drug. He revels in the taste of it, the feel of it, the rhythm of if filling is lungs, feeding his body, his mind, his soul. Breathing. It is all that matters. The simple constant beat of being. In and out. It is the most basic necessity of life. Breathing. You can do without food for weeks, water for days, but air only seconds.

  Eighty-nine. Ninety. Ninety-one.

  It is the natural order. Predator and prey. The man mistook the roles and so Michael took his breath so he might keep his own.

  One-hundred. One-hundred one. One-hundred two.

  But it was not required. He’d had a moment where he could have run, but he did not. He waited and watched the man get his pistol. He gave him a chance.

  One-hundred ten.

  He could have stopped him. Kicked him, subdued him. Disarmed him. But he waited. When he was armed, when he was deadly, only then did Michael strike. He gave him a chance, as Michael had had one to run. If the man had been a better mugger, a better thief—a better killer, it wouldn’t have ended this way.

  One-hundred fifteen. One-hundred sixteen.

  He could have given up the crisp hundred dollar bills and the five-year-old laptop and let this man keep his breath. He would be but little worse for it. But why should he? These are his things, and he hasn’t many. And if he were a better thief he’d have had them.