by John Prindle
“Okay.”
“Get some rest,” I said.
“Uh-uh. Pretty soon rest is all I'll be getting. I'm gonna watch me some good movies. Maybe some old Clint Eastwood Westerns.”
“Hang 'em High.”
“Yeah,” Dan the Man said. I said goodbye and he said goodbye, and we hung up, and I pictured him sitting on the couch with his oxygen tank and mask, watching an old Western where the bad guys are always bad, and the good guys are always good.
I wrote down the names and addresses, and then I ran all of the paperwork on Mark Mason through my shredder. I went online and bought a red-eye flight to Phoenix, Arizona. I hate red-eyes, but I bought the ticket anyway. It was two hundred bucks cheaper, and I told myself that I would sleep on the plane. I've never slept on a plane. Not with any real success, anyway. I packed a bag, and then I stopped by Bullfrog's and borrowed his last Nikon D4.
Any time I travel on business, I go under the name of George Chapman. Way back, after I hit Al Da Paolo, Eddie set me up with a guy who dealt in papers. The best of the best. An old Frenchman who worked out of an antique shop. Eddie had known him for years, and he drove me into the city and walked me down narrow alleyways until we reached the shop. Eddie handed the old Frenchman an envelope stuffed thick with five thousand dollars.
The old man struggled up a painfully steep staircase. Me and Eddie looked around the dusty shop for a few minutes. There was a sink and fridge right in the main room, where the old Frenchman served himself whiskey and sodas (and never offered them to anyone else). There were cases with old police badges. Binoculars that hadn't touched eyes in fifty years. There were Asian dolls. There were hopeless pocket watches, rusty knives, military medals, and brass opera glasses. Everything looked worn down, like a hundred different hands had gripped onto each one for dear life, only to slip away into the nothingness without their treasures.
The Frenchman returned with a manila envelope containing a Passport, a State ID, two identical Driver's Licenses, and two identical birth certificates.
“Where were you born?” Eddie said as I thumbed through the stuff.
“Andover, Kansas.”
Eddie laughed. “See. That's good work right there. Andover. Some hack would've used Wichita for sure.”
The Frenchman nodded a few times.
“There ain't nobody better,” Eddie said, kind of stroking the Frenchman's ego. But I could tell when Eddie meant something, and he really meant it. “Hell, you could probably get on board Air Force One with that passport. It's just as real as the real thing.”
The Frenchman smiled and sipped his whiskey and soda.
“George Chapman, eh?” Eddie said, looking over my shoulder at the passport. The Frenchman had taken my picture in the backroom of the antique store a few weeks prior. I'd picked my name that day, too. Eddie had told me to be careful about it. Real costly to ever get new stuff made, and there was no one as good as the Frenchman.
“How'd you come up with that one?” he said.
“There was a George Chapman in London… eighteen eighty-eight,” I said. “He poisoned three wives… he was a Jack the Ripper suspect.”
“Sounds like a swell guy,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, well, it was the only thing that came to me,” I said. “So do I look like a George Chapman, or what?”
Eddie touched his chin and leaned back. “More like an Adam Henry.”
“Adam Henry?”
“That's cop-code for a real asshole.”
“Where'd you get that?”
“I know a lot of cops,” Eddie said.
I can still smell that musty antique shop and hear the ticking of the mantelpiece clocks. The old Frenchman died a few months after I met him. Eddie said I was the luckiest guy in the world to get some of his final work.
I took the red-eye to Phoenix. I didn't sleep. But the fat guy next to me snored the whole flight, and even tried to use my shoulder as a pillow.
I drove the two hours and checked into my motel room in Sedona. I tailed Mark Mason the first two days and found an elegant way to dispose of him. He ran every morning, out in the dry desert hills, and he always went to the same remote spot. Frank wanted it to look like an accident. That's not my usual style, but I wasn't going to argue with Frank Conese.
The night before the job, I set myself up with a bucket of ice and some unsweetened iced teas. Somehow it's always more fun watching television in a motel room. I spent that night flipping channels and trying to sketch a self-portrait on the motel stationary. I'm a pretty good artist, but I've never been able to draw myself quite right. A shrink would have a field day with that.
Just when I was about to turn off the television, I flipped the channels one last time and caught the last half of a Leave It To Beaver episode: the one where Larry and Beaver smoke coffee grounds out of a Meerschaum pipe. That perked me right up, and I almost forgot that I had to kill a guy at seven in the morning.
I was up on the trail at dawn, with Bullfrog's camera around my neck so it looked like I had a good reason to be there so damn early. A photographer waiting for sunrise. I said hello to Mark Mason as he jogged by. He gave me a quick wave and a friendly nod.
Then I ran up behind him and pushed him off of the ledge.
He cried out. There was the flutter of heavy cloth hitting stones, a quick snap of bones, and then the desert swallowed the sounds.
I walked to the edge and stood there looking down at him for quite a while, watching the morning light crawl over him and cast long shadows out from the twisted body. And the sand beneath him turned a fiery orange, and it felt like the world was some huge dragon waking up to examine this itchy bug that had died in one of its folds. When the light was just right, I aimed the camera down and snapped a few photos, placing the corpse into various corners of the frame according to the rule of thirds.
There are only two temperatures for motel rooms. Hot as hell, or ice cold. Mine was ice cold when I got back from the job. I opened the window and turned off the AC, and I lay down and fell asleep. It was a deep sleep, but I had to spend the bulk of it running away from a lot of angry ghosts. I was in a grocery store. All of the employees were guys I had killed. They gave me dirty looks from the top of their mops, or over their boxes of produce. Ricky Cervetti was putting iced teas into the top of the cooler, and I had to go right up to him and ask if I could grab one. And when I finally made it up to the counter to pay for my items, the clerk was Mark Mason. There was sand in his hair and his face was bruised, and it took him a long time to count out my change with his bent arms and broken fingers.
I flew to New York and met Frank Conese at Calasso's, where the same attractive woman waited on us again; and when I looked around at the other employees, it was nothing but fine women and handsome men. Calasso must've had a strict hiring policy: no ugly slobs allowed.
“She's something,” Frank said as the waitress walked away. He leaned a little closer to me. “But she's a dyke. Not the kind that wears a tool-belt or anything, but she's got a girlfriend.”
“What's her girl like?” I said.
“Amazonian. And she's got pink hair. You ever seen a girl with pink hair?”
I told him I had. I could still see Dan the Man, healthy, strong, hunched over, combing his pen through that dead girl's hair.
“Remember that show, Wonder Woman?”
“Sure,” I said. “Linda Carter.”
Frank took out his cigarettes and fitted one into the holder. Sparrows chirped in the trees that grew up from the open squares in the sidewalk. “I used to fantasize about that show. I was a slave on this island full of beautiful broads, and they'd all use me and pass me around and treat me like an absolute dog.”
Some shrink would have a field day with that, too.
“Leila would fit right in on that island of mine,” Frank said, striking a match.
Mudcap turned a page of his newspaper, and it rustled as he smoothed it out.
“He can read?” I said to Frank.
Mudcap shook his head and licked his bottom lip.
Frank asked me about the Mark Mason job. I opened up my camera bag and took out the D4. I scrolled through the five images I'd snapped and picked my favorite one, and then I passed the camera over to him.
He squinted at the LCD screen.
“That's him,” I said.
“Dumb prick. You know the sweetest part of the deal? I bought up a half-dozen Masonfields from a New York gallery. Now they'll go up. His untimely death is the best thing he ever did for his career—and mine. I'm gonna double or triple my money.”
“You're into art? Eddie's wife has some real nice Thomas Kinkade plates.”
Frank looked like he'd just smelled a dead skunk. Then he laughed. He turned to Mudcap. “This guy's a riot. Thomas Kinkade.” He laughed again. “You serious?”
“In the kitchen.”
“Poor Eddie.”
“Thomas Kinkade?” Mudcap said.
“The Master of Light,” Frank said with disgust. “He's got a whole team of people he trained to paint his crappy paintings, and he signs them and collects the dough.”
“Smart guy,” Mudcap said.
“Not anymore,” Frank said. “He's dead.”
“I gotta hit the head,” I said.
I walked down the dark hallway inside of Calasso's and bumped into Leila, walking up from a creaky cellar stairwell. She was carrying a burlap sack full of coffee beans. She nearly dropped it.
“What's your name?”
“No thanks,” she said.
“Huh?”
“Listen, creep. If I had a dollar for every guy tries to pick me up, I could quit working here.”
She rolled her eyes and started to squeeze past me, but the hallway was small and I moved and blocked her.
“How'd you like a swift kick in the balls?” she said.
“Listen, you got me all wrong. I'm happily married, with three kids.”
“Four, three, two, one…”
I held my hands up, like someone was robbing me. Then I took out one of my business cards, and offered it to her. “I really need your help.”
“I bet you do,” she said, and reluctantly took the card.
“Call me. There's money in it for you. Lots of money.”
I hit the head, and then I walked back outside, nervous that she'd come storming out there and say something to Frank. But she dropped off the check without a word.
THE BALANCE WHEEL
Mr. Nelson Scott's Illinois Bunn Special Railroad Grade pocket watch wouldn't run. I unscrewed the caseback and poked at the gleaming innards with a wooden skewer, and the balance wheel wobbled like an old drunk.
The balance wheel of a mechanical pocket watch makes eighteen thousand revolutions per minute. This weighted wheel is the fragile heart of the watch, able to regulate the immense energy of the tightly wound mainspring and convert it into the precise ticking of a second hand, a minute hand, an hour hand. A well-timed watch from the early 1900s can still be accurate to within a minute per week. Will one of our modern electronic gadgets have such worth, such longevity, such innate beauty a whole century after its birth?
I got some books on watch repair from the local library, and I tried a trick for getting a watch ticking again: you hold it firmly in your hand and give your wrist a quick snap. This is supposed to trigger the balance wheel (if the staff isn't broken). But nothing would convince Mr. Scott's watch to run again. It was frozen at 9:04, the time of the watchmaker's death.
I obsessed over that pocket watch. I longed to understand how it worked, to fix it, to bring it back to life. But my reading on the subject only discouraged me, as watchmaking and pocket watch repair is the kind of slow skill that one acquires only through years of labored study.
So I found a local guy, a clockmaker, and I met him at a coffee shop and brought the watch along with me. When he asked about its history, I told him that the watch belonged to my grandfather, and he called him a man of good taste.
This clockmaker was a slight man, perhaps seventy years old, with wisps of white hair along a shiny bald head. He wore an argyle sweater.
“What I do is a total restoration and cleaning,” he said. “I disassemble every part, clean each one, peg the pivots, clean the jewels, reassemble everything—then time and adjust it in three positions.”
The clockmaker spoke in the joyful tone of a man who loves his work.
“It's our job,” he said, “as stewards of these pieces, to keep them running; to care for them and pass them on to the next generation.”
He pawed the watch, rolled it over in his hands, held it up into the light of the coffee shop window. He unscrewed the caseback, took out a jeweler's loupe and studied the insides with a squinty grin.
“This cost a pretty penny back in 1913.”
“1913?” I said.
He scooted over closer to me—the legs of his chair squeaked in rebellion, and some patrons turned their heads. The clockmaker twitched and pointed into the watch movement, showing me the serial number. “1913. Railroad grade. Twenty-three jewels. Highly accurate.”
He pulled the loupe out of his eye socket, and blinked repeatedly to clear the tired eye.
“The balance staff is broken. That's a delicate job.”
“How much?” I said.
He hesitated, rubbed his thumbs gently along his forefingers. “Three-fifty. But that's for everything. Cleaned, timed.”
“Done,” I said.
He was quite pleased. “Now here's a young man who knows a thing or two. Appreciates real craftsmanship. This modern world continually confounds me. Nowadays, no one just enjoys their piece of cake. First they gotta take a picture of it with their mobile phone. And for what? Who knows.”
I signed some paperwork, shook the old man's hand, left the pocket watch with him, and walked out of the coffee shop. I drove for a while, past rows of dreary apartments where kids sat on bikes, and sad skinny men hobbled down the sides of the road carrying plastic bags full of groceries. I got onto the highway and let the yellow lines pull me along, and they pulled me toward Dan the Man's house. Dotty had called me last night and made me promise to stop by as soon as I was done with my morning appointment. I thought about the balance wheel of a pocket watch, spinning back and forth eighteen thousand times a minute.
I parked, ran across the street and up the few steps to the front porch, and knocked on the door. Dotty answered. She was easy on the eyes for an older lady, but she wore too much make-up. She kind of chuckled and wiped a hand across her face, and she gave me a big hug. Her eyeliner was running.
“Ask him in for Christ's sake!” Dan the Man said from inside of the house. His voice sounded like it was being broadcast through an old radio speaker.
Dotty loved ferns and there were plenty of them. The house almost felt like an afterthought, like the ferns were there first and some architect had carefully built a house around them. Dan the Man was sitting on the couch, a blanket over his knees, gripping a steel bar with his left hand. There was the whirring of a motor. There was a clear mask over his mouth and nose. He pulled it to one side and said, “this is some real Darth Vader shit, huh?”
He put the mask back on, seized a few breaths, and took it off again.
“Damn, Ronnie. I thought you crawled into a hole and pulled the hole in with you.”
“What do you mean?” I said, not looking right at him.
“Hell, you never stop by. Eddie stops by.”
“Daniel,” Dotty said like a schoolteacher.
“Sorry, Ronnie,” Dan said.
“For what?”
“I look terrible. Smell terrible, too.”
“You always smelled terrible,” I said, and sat down in a rocking chair near the couch. There was a cut-crystal jar with a lid on it sitting on the marble-topped coffee table. Inside were some of those colorful jelly candies, so coated with coarse sugar you could use one to sand a rough board. Dotty caught me look
ing at them, and she rushed over and opened the lid for me. I was put on the spot, so I ate a yellow one. It was awful. But I looked at Dotty and nodded and smiled.
The whole room seemed to spin around, like it was sitting on a giant Lazy Susan. Then it stopped spinning. The vertical lines where the walls turned into corners went diagonal. I took a deep breath. Dan the Man looked worse than Mister Z. His skin was gray and blotchy. I tried to pretend that it didn't bother me, but he could see right through that.
“Poor Dotty,” he said. “She's gotta look at me every day.”
Dotty walked over and kissed his cheek, told him that he was being ridiculous, and then she turned her face from me and walked off down the hall. I heard her sobbing. Then I heard her banging some pots and pans around out in the kitchen.
“I look like one of them aliens from that Roswell Predicament in nineteen-forty-seven.”
“Roswell Incident,” I said.
He took a drag on the oxygen mask. “Predicament, too.”
“What about the chemo?”
“All it done was made me barf. This shit kept spreading. Guess I taste pretty good to a cancer cell.” He laughed, and choked and coughed, and he slid the mask back on and gulped the air like he'd finally swum up from the bottom of a lake and broken the surface.
“I got a nurse here half a day, every day. And she ain't here to make me better. She's one of them hospice ladies that help you die. Built like a linebacker. Just my luck. But she's good to me.”
We sat for a while, no one saying anything. Dan the Man took hits of oxygen from his machine, and I stared at the ferns and the bright-colored candies in the crystal jar.
“I always knew it,” Dan said. His eyes got bright and he looked over his right shoulder to make sure Dotty couldn't hear, and he whispered, “all them guys I killed are getting even.”
I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.
“How was the sunshine state?” Dan the Man said. Then he coughed, long and painful, with a hand held tight against his chest.
“I was in Arizona,” I said.
“Ain't that the sunshine state?”
“Nope. Florida.”