by Farris, John
"So do I. But she loves politics."
Sharissa ate a bite of egg, spread thick maple syrup over her French toast, and looked up at me speculatively. Her eyes, in that smooth tanned face, could still startle me. I felt certain that no artist had ever lived who could duplicate so subtle and ravishing a color, or combination of colors, because her eyes were ever-changing, according to the light; and I felt with a wrench of the heart that perhaps I was seeing my daughter, in this season of unexpected and violent trouble for the Walker family, at the peak of her freshness and beauty.
"After you woke me up," Sharissa said, "I went to the bathroom. I heard you and Mom talking. She sounded . . . depressed." Sharissa paused and put her chin on her folded hands, wanting me to confirm her suspicions.
I decided to tell her about our aborted evening out, the close call with Mrs. Roxanne Sullivan and her pathetic delusion.
It shocked her. Sharissa had no further interest in her breakfast. Tight-lipped, she blinked at me, as if she were trying to communicate in code.
"Mom must have been petrified. What about you?"
"Sure, I was scared. Having another gun aimed at you so soon after being shot is not an experience I'd recommend."
Bobby Driscoll appeared at the kitchen door and looked in through the screen.
"Hey, Sharissa! Morning, Mr. Walker. Am I interrupting anything?"
Sharissa glanced at him. "No, Bobby. I'm ready. Would you mind waiting for me in the truck?"
She got up and scraped her plate in the DisposAll, picked up her gym bag, then came over and hugged me.
"Don't let Mom . . . you know, crash-dive again. I don't think I could stand it."
I held her for a few moments. I thought I could feel her heart beating. Or maybe it was two hearts together.
The bandage came off and the stitches came out of my forehead. Jesse Fernando had done a neat job of sewing the big flap of scalp back. He told me that after a few months, a year at most, the scars would barely be noticeable—a thin, white, sealed doorway into the brain.
I had continued with my physical therapy. Jesse, always cautious, did a full physical workup before he would let me run again. Some of the test results obviously troubled him, although he wouldn't tell me what they were over the phone. I wasn't feeling badly—a touch of vertigo now and then had been my most serious complaint—but I was worried when I sat down with him in his office at the medical center across the street from Sky Valley Memorial Hospital.
"What is it, Jesse?"
He pushed his reading glasses up on the crown of his head and glanced at me, then smiled at my expression.
"Nothing to be alarmed about. Your EEG was fine; some slight but probably not significant abnormalities in the regions affected by the bullet fragments." He looked through the folder in front of him for other test results. "It's your blood screens I wanted to discuss with you. Specifically, a very high cholesterol."
"Oh-oh. High cholesterol's not good for me, is it?"
"Depends on which form of cholesterol we're talking about. There's high-density lipoprotein, HDL, and low-density lipoprotein. HDL is the good form of blood cholesterol. It probably prevents the clogging of the arteries that cause most heart attacks. An HDL level above forty milligrams per deciliter of blood plasma would be ideal for most of us. Your HDL level is more than five times that high."
I shrugged. "Good news for me. I guess."
"The best news is your LDL level—low-density lipoprotein, the 'bad twin' of the set. It's about ninety milligrams. One hundred sixty milligrams is considered outstanding for someone of your size and age."
"What all this means is, my brain could use a little work but I have one hell of a healthy heart."
"There's more to it than that, Greg. An HDL level as high as yours is an extreme medical rarity. I ran your test results by a colleague of mine at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. They have a lab there for the study of cholesterol abnormalities at the molecular and genetic level. He confirmed that an HDL level of four hundred or better indicates the presence of a variant gene that no one's been able to isolate yet. Dr. Pensky called it the 'Methuselah gene'."
I smiled. "If I have this gene, it means I'll live to be nine hundred years old? Come on, Jesse."
"Well, considering the state of the environment and the stress we all live under these days, maybe nine hundred years is asking too much. If you continue to take good care of yourself, and don't get in the way of any more stray bullets, the odds in favor of you cracking a hundred are very damned high. The real test is how long members of your family have lived—mother, father, grand-parents on both sides. If we know their respective ages, then we can tell which side is passing along the gene variant that's raised your HDL level so high."
"I don't know who my parents were, and I have no interest in trying to find out."
Jesse looked perplexed. "Even after what I've just told you? Look, Greg, there may be more than one mutated gene at work here. Genes that literally have saved your life. Here you sit across the desk from me with only a bad haircut to show for getting shot, when I ought to be looking at a man in a terminal coma. Or looking at your grave."
"It was pure luck, Jesse. Or the grace of God, or both."
"I don't want to use any words with bad connotations—"
"Like 'Guinea pig'?"
Jesse knotted his smooth surgeon's hands together, locking down his urge to be relentless in pursuit of scientific truth. "If you could give the people at Bethesda just a few days a year, who knows what they might find out?"
I stared at him for several seconds. "I see myself as an ordinary man, Jesse. Nothing unusual about me, in spite of what you say may be hiding out in my bloodstream."
"What I believe is there could ultimately save hundreds of thousands of lives a year, the lives of the genetically underprivileged, once the lab guys find the gene or genes that make you unique and learn how to duplicate them."
"Now I'm unique? I thought I was just a rarity, like your average two-headed calf."
He accepted my surly humor with forbearance, blinking mildly.
"Would you give this serious consideration, Greg? Maybe we can talk again in a month or two."
"In the meantime, I suppose my case will be turning up in medical journals all over the country. Or on the front page of The New York Times. I'd better change my phone number."
"You know I'll respect your privacy, Greg," Jesse said firmly, as if I had, finally, hurt his feelings. "I haven't given your name to anyone else, even Dr. Pensky."
I nodded. I tried to think of a way to explain, to expiate my rudeness.
"I'm a den animal," I said. "I've never craved attention. I resist anything that complicates my existence or will give my family notoriety they don't want."
"I understand that. And you've been through a severe trauma. It's natural for you to want to retreat and close all the doors while your emotions catch up with events." He closed the file. "This goes in a locked drawer. I'll only bring it out again with your permission. Your blessing."
My hair was growing faster in some places than others; not enough yet to shape, but at least I could have it neatened on all sides. I was in the middle chair at Pete's on the square when Detective Sergeant Butterbaugh caught up with me. After Pete had me looking presentable without the necessity of hiding my head under a Braves cap, I walked down the street with Butterbaugh, and we stopped in at the Peacock for midmorning coffee.
Butterbaugh took three heaping teaspoons of sugar in his. I didn't say anything.
"Mild hypoglycemia," he explained. "Doesn't affect my work." Then he said, "I dropped by Burger King last night. It was slow; had the chance to talk to Sharissa for a few minutes." He seemed proud of this, almost as if they'd been on a date. I was getting the feeling that he had become one of the family, insinuating himself like a stray dog who won't budge off your porch.
"What did you talk about?"
"Oh, mostly tennis. Sharissa sai
d she's been getting scholarship offers since she was fourteen. Vanderbilt's package is worth $80,000 for four years?"
"Something like that."
"Maybe Sharissa ought to consider the pro tour, like Capriati? Some of those kids are worth millions, and they're not old enough to vote."
"She'd have to have the national ranking, which means you work at tennis full-time, a one-track program at a good tennis academy where the competition is really first-rate. Maybe we could have scraped together the money for Bolletieri or Rick Macci's. No way Caroline and I could have started over in Florida, so we wouldn't have seen much of Sharissa during some very important years. We let her make up her own mind, but I'm damned glad she decided her home and family and education was more important to her than a pro career."
"Sharissa's one in a million," Butterbaugh said, almost reverently. "Very analytical mind. She wants to be a federal court judge some day."
"I know," I said. "We've talked about it. We talk about everything."
Butterbaugh had a couple of sips of coffee. He was one of those people who can't drink quietly from a cup. He decided to add more sugar. Then he noticed that his watch had stopped, and he took it off to wind it. He treated the old Hamilton with loving care.
"They don't make them like that anymore," I said.
"No, sir. This one belonged to my father's father. I probably shouldn't wear it on the job. I've got another one, an Elgin officer's model from World War I, those came with detachable shrapnel covers. But the jewels are worn and it loses too much time every day." He strapped the watch on, lifted his cup and swallowed noisily. "You look a hundred percent, Greg. That's not a word of a lie. My maternal grandfather did some boxing, trying to make ends meet during the Depression. I expect he took his share of jabs to the head. Died years later of an embolism nobody was aware of."
"That's something to look forward to," I said, a little coldly.
"I wasn't drawing any parallels," Butterbaugh said hastily. "I've been thinking about how fragile the human brain is. Or the human mind. I went down to the mental health center to see Mrs. Sullivan."
"Do we have to talk about her?"
He looked a little surprised. "Why not?"
"I've been trying to put that—distasteful business at the Ovenbird out of my mind."
"I just thought you might like to know, we've come up with a few things."
"I suppose she's still claiming that I'm her husband."
"Oh, no, she's not talking. Can't or won't, nobody can be sure. They've diagnosed her as catatonic schizophrenic. It used to be the most common form of the disease, in the horse-and-buggy era. Nowadays schizophrenics tend to be paranoid—everybody's out to get them, aliens are programming their minds, that kind of thing. The more technologically complex our society becomes, the more paranoids we have. But Roxanne Sullivan is just the opposite. She's unreceptive, unresponsive. I saw her. Gave me a chilly feeling. As if the soul had shed the body and left it like a snake leaves its skin hanging on a bush somewhere. Snap your fingers in front of her face, she doesn't blink. Long rope of saliva hanging down from one side of her mouth."
"C.G.! For Christ's sake."
"Sorry. Anyway, this is the same mental illness that put her in an asylum in Canada for years."
"How do you know that?"
"LETS."
"Let's what?"
"Law Enforcement Teletype System. We know everything Canada had on her in a few hours. Mrs. Sullivan was a borderline alcoholic most of her life. But when her husband, what was his name—?" I looked blankly at him. He scratched an eyebrow and the name popped up in his mind. "Frederick, walked out on her, she really hit the sauce hard. We couldn't locate much in the way of family up there, nobody willing to be responsible for her. Frederick and Bonnie were her immediate family—"
"Bonnie?"
"Their daughter. Adopted when she was a couple of years old. Mrs. Sullivan couldn't bear children."
"You did a very thorough investigation."
"Almost everything about an individual who's lived during the past forty years is in somebody's computer somewhere. You'd be amazed. Getting back to Frederick Sullivan: Frederick apparently wanted a child more than she did. He wanted a girl, too. Had to be a little girl. We don't have actual proof of any child abuse, but Mrs. Sullivan complained to a social worker that Frederick and Bonnie's relationship was a little too intimate, once Bonnie reached puberty." I must have grimaced. "Maybe it was jealousy. The story is, Roxanne used to beat the girl up when she'd been drinking. An all-too-familiar domestic situation. But Bonnie obviously cared more for her adopted father than she did for Roxanne. She split with Frederick after he cleaned out the bank accounts he had with his wife. That was a few days before Bonnie's sixteenth birthday. Nobody wanted him for anything; he had a few old misdemeanors on his record. He was just another good-looking low-life, according to all reports."
"But he had something that Mrs. Sullivan continued to fantasize about, for almost twenty years. Until her fantasy got the best of her."
"It's sad, when you see her where she is now. On the other hand, she might have killed you. The love-hate thing. There's a ten-dollar word for it. Erotomania? Something like that."
"What's her prognosis?" I asked him.
"They've tried a couple of the new psychoactive drugs. No results yet. What's for certain is, her liver's failing. All the years of boozing it up. So at best she's got another eight, ten months to live."
"Oh. What do you think happened to her husband and the girl?"
"They probably could be traced, if somebody had the time or the motivation. Why bother now?"
"No reason," I said. I looked at my wristwatch. "I'd better get back to the store. That new Sam's Wholesale Club out on Old Alabama has me in a discount bind. My repair business is falling off, too."
"They just make them too good these days."
I paid for our coffees and we parted company on the sidewalk. He started across the street to the municipal building at Second and Ramer, then called back to me, "I forgot to tell you, I found out what was in the locket."
"Her favorite snapshot of Frederick?"
"No, a lock of hair. Dark brown."
"The girl's?"
"Bonnie Sullivan was blonde. I have all of those Sullivan family photos in my office, if you're curious as to what Bonnie looked like."
A car turning the corner almost hooked him with a fender, and he skipped out of the way, backing up. "I'm not," I said.
"So it must be Frederick's hair. See you Friday night!"
"You will?"
"Sharissa invited me to dinner!" Butterbaugh said, and he went whistling on his way back to work.
The next morning, Wednesday, Caroline could barely lift her head from the pillow. Exhaustion from her long days and nights on the campaign trail, combined with a summer cold. We had a brief argument about her staying home for the day, which I think she was happy to let me win.
I fixed breakfast for Caroline, but when I took it up to our room on a tray she was sound asleep again.
"Mom's not feeling well?" Sharissa asked me when I returned to the kitchen. She was wearing a silvery tank top and feather-weight, bright red Nike shorts.
"She's about run herself into the ground. Claude ought to be able to get through one day without her. I'll call campaign headquarters in a little while."
I put plastic wrap over the glass of orange juice I'd squeezed for Caroline and placed it in the refrigerator. The eggs wouldn't keep, but I could make a sandwich of them for my own lunch.
"How's the roadwork coming?" I asked Sharissa.
She looked a little grim. "First week's the hardest."
"Bobby's not showing you any mercy?"
"No, but I wouldn't want him to." A minute later we heard his truck in the driveway. Sharissa grabbed her gear and gave me a quick kiss. "'Bye, Dad."
"You're limping," I said, as she went out the door.
"It's just a stone bruise. No problem."
I g
ot out the bread, made myself a fried egg sandwich, and added a carton of fruit juice to the brown-bag lunch. When I went upstairs to our bedroom I saw that Caroline hadn't changed her position. She was still snoring lightly through a stuffy nose. I left her a note, explaining that I would call in sick for her.
The Zeiss binoculars, my Christmas present of two years ago, were on the shelf in the hall closet. I took them with my lunch outside and, after a few moments' consideration, decided to drive Caroline's old Volvo. One hundred sixty thousand miles on it. Cartons of campaign literature on the backseat, but she wouldn't be needing any of that today. As usual, the Volvo could've used a wash job and was low on gas.
By the time I'd filled the tank and gone through the free car wash at the Amoco station four blocks from our home, it was close to seven-thirty and the day was already heating up. Sultry and hazy. I knew it would be cooler beneath the big trees of King Forest, along the trails where Sharissa jogged with Bobby Driscoll. I'd run there myself, although it probably had been a couple of years. A little too far to drive when I was busy. Weekdays, early, you could run for half a mile or more through the glades without encountering anyone. On weekends the trails were well populated with nature hikers, too many of whom didn't pick up after themselves.
Bobby and Sharissa were seventeen minutes ahead of me. Too far ahead to catch up if I wanted to run with them. But exercise wasn't my reason for going to King Forest today.
There were a couple of lots for public parking at King Forest. I located the blue Chevy Maxicab with the provocative bumper stickers (which someone has characterized as "one of the few native American art forms, along with Navaho blankets and comic books"), drove by Bobby's truck, left the lot, and took a narrow blacktop road to the top of the modest mountain that afforded an overview of much of the forest: the swimming lake, almost invisible beneath a blanket of mist, the campgrounds and winding trails through the lowland sections. There were tougher hiking trails in wilder parts of the forest, but I was hoping that Bobby and Sharissa would stay on the well-beaten paths where the mileage was conveniently marked off.