by April Smith
The terror comes from Slammer’s incarceration in the Mississippi Training School, the type of state-run correctional institution for juveniles where they strip you naked and throw you in a freezing cell, hogtie you, and withhold medical care. Slammer had a toothache so bad and so unattended, the abscess ate into his jaw. He was put there in sixth grade for being chronically late to his regular school. This was because his birth mother was an alcoholic and slept all day. When he was released, he hitchhiked west to live with his father. The Mississippi Training School is currently under federal investigation.
“You did not complete the mission,” Stone replies, “you ungrateful little shit.” Now his eyes seem pinched and tired.
“I am grateful. You got me off the streets, man.” He bounces around the kitchen, flinging his arms.
“I gave you a job, to kill Herbert Laumann,” Stone says philosophically. “You failed.”
“Hey, I’m still up for the Big One.”
Slammer thinks he is showing loyalty by endorsing the bandit’s mysterious plan—“the Big One” that will “bring down the house.” Now he takes up another of the bandit’s themes.
“I didn’t do it because the FBI is watching us, dude. They’re tapping our phones, following us around—”
“Someone surely is. But the larger point I’m trying to get at,” Stone says, “is that people around here do what I tell them to.”
Discipline.
“Of course. That’s a given.” Slammer smiles with fine white teeth. The sight of his smile is beautiful and rare, like an eagle in flight. “You’re the Allfather.”
“I gave you a gun,” he says. “I gave you my trust. You abused it.”
“They weren’t home!” Slammer protests, thick lips blubbering. “I would’ve done it — but they weren’t home!”
“Come with me. I am the tax collector,” Stone says.
“Hey, what about the ice cream?”
“Put the ice cream away.”
Slammer may be wildly thinking of attack or escape, but in the end, he goes quietly. The bandit did not even have to show the gun.
It is dark when Sara and I get back from picking Megan up from the airport after Lillian’s memorial service. We took along a new black-and-white kitten we’d adopted in order to cheer Megan up. I am driving. I take my eyes from the road for an instant — to smile at Sara’s pretty profile as she teases the little guy with a tassel on her bag — when she looks up and shrieks, “Oh my God!” and I slam the brakes.
The tires kick up gravel and the pickup fishtails to a stop. In the white glare of the headlights we see Slammer’s head sticking out of a hole in the ground, in which Dick Stone is burying him up to the neck.
Slammer’s garish face is red and contorted and stained with tears. At eye level with the chassis of the truck, he has been screaming for us to stop.
We rush out of the car like fiends let loose, washed out almost to transparency by the hot light, all three of us shouting and reaching through ribbons of iridescent dust to stop it, stop him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Megan bellows at Stone as I grab for the shovel.
“He’s a traitor.”
We wrestle for the handle, and he’s strong, flailing wildly, like someone beating at the bars that imprison them.
“I gave him a gun. He didn’t do the job.”
“What job?” Megan cries, pulling futilely on his shirt. “What job? What job?”
“The boy has turned on me,” says Stone. “The FBI is all around us. What is he? A cocksucking little wimp ass piece of shit.”
“Talk to me, Julius,” I gasp, watching Sara emerging from the dark with a heavy pitchfork. “What do you want?”
Stone’s voice has dropped to a mocking growl. “Tell them about the atrocities. Tell them about the lies.”
“Help me,” Slammer sobs, twisting futilely in his grave.
Sara tries to dig the hard-packed dirt.
Megan is still tugging on Stone’s shirt, sliding her arms around him from behind. “It’s safe,” she croons. “We’re here on the farm and we’re safe. Let’s calm down.”
Stone’s is the grating voice of madness, coming from a hollow gourd: “Direct action is nothing to take lightly. Government lackeys have to die.”
My hands still grip the shovel. “Government lackeys like Herbert Laumann?”
“I want Laumann to die like a pig. Cut his throat, cut it like a pig’s—”
“He can’t hear you,” Megan gasps, wild-eyed.
Stone’s manic desperation short-circuits my ability to think. I have to fix it, take it in, do what it takes to relieve his confusion and pain, as I always did with my grandfather, Poppy.
“All right, all right. You want Herbert Laumann dead. You’re mad at Slammer because he didn’t kill him. It’s not his fault. Leave the kid alone. He can’t do it, but I can. I’ll do it for you, Allfather. I will shoot the guy, okay? I’ll shoot him fifty-two times, until he’s dead, really dead, okay? Give it to me! I can do it.”
He jerks the shovel away from me and raises it to strike, throwing Megan back.
“Darcy, watch out!”
“You’re a liar, too!” Stone tells me.
“I will. I promise! I know what it’s like. I once killed a man.”
Panting, we eye each other in the screaming headlights.
“And I’ll tell you something else!” I’m pointing the finger, dancing with a kind of hysteria. “You think Slammer betrayed your trust? You are not the only one, pal. I know what that’s like, too. When someone you are stupid enough to fall in love with turns on you and completely undermines you and destroys your life and there’s no way back and you have to kill him.”
Even through the blinding paranoid rage, he can see the truth of what I’ve done. What Darcy’s done. Stone lets the shovel drop.
“Come on, baby,” Megan whispers. “I have you, safe and sound. Come on now. You’re with me,” and she guides him through the shadows.
Sara and I dig Slammer out. Encrusted in damp earth for long, torturous hours, he has fouled himself.
We help him to his feet.
Sara is crying. Slammer’s arms are around us both, leaning heavily on our shoulders. As he walks, he sheds loose rocks and torn roots, a man so debased, he is made of dirt.
“We can’t stay here,” Sara whispers, but then she hears the kitten crying from where it is hiding under the truck, and thinks of the orchard of hazelnut trees, and the rescued ducks and goats, and Sirocco and the white foal, Geronimo, all living peacefully on the farm. She can’t understand the contradictions.
“God — I’m so sorry — I couldn’t see you until the last minute.” My voice is genuinely shaking. “What was he doing?”
“He said it was a test. Of fire and ice.”
A light is on upstairs. We move toward the house.
Twenty-seven
A trial of fire and ice. That’s the way you might describe my grandfather’s visit, when he flew out from California to attend my swearing-in as a new agent from the FBI Academy. Steve Crawford and I were in the same graduating class, of course, and had naïvely planned to announce to our families that we were getting married, anticipating that our excitement, on top of graduation, would make it one hell of a bang-up weekend celebration for all.
My grandfather was booked into the Days Inn at the very same mall where I would play out Darcy’s first contact with the counterfeiters when I returned more than ten years later for undercover school. Back when Poppy stayed there, the motel was newly built and did not smell of urine under the stairs, and behind the property there was just the Dairy Queen, where I would devour that memorable double cheeseburger — not a full-blown shopping strip with a multiplex and gym.
I spotted Poppy from the pool area, striding along the upper deck of the motel. You could tell he was in law enforcement by his sporty disregard of the surroundings (I’m here; get out of my way), an authority he always carried, licensed or not in that particular
locality, as if the special nature of his calling extended worldwide supremacy to Everett Morgan Grey. Never mind the only felons were shrieking boys, cannonballing into the pool with huge atomizing splashes; my grandfather’s eyes were fixed on the door of his room with intention to prevail. He wore a white Panama hat, a brown suit, and a sport shirt open at the neck, exposing a freckled chest. His ham hand swung my mother’s old lacquered suitcase as lightly as if it still held dresses for my dolls.
The boys charged off the edge of the pool, gleaming bellies white as those of frogs. I did not jump up and wave at my grandfather. I did not want to leave that lawn chair, ever. It wasn’t just the considerable fear of telling him about Steve, which, by extension would be a statement that I’d actually had sex with a man and was continuing to do so. Even though I had barely left the grounds of the Academy, I realized there in those hothouse corridors, I had finally seized on a clear identity, and in that clarity was liberation. I was free to fall in love, to make mistakes, be harangued and harassed, but they never shut me down. Just the sight of my grandfather threatened my new pride in being Ana; I knew he would turn my achievements into competition with him. Already I was looking back on new agent training as a bright moment of independence, in whose light I was able to shine because I had been on the other side of the country, away from Poppy.
There was a kamikaze scream and tepid water rained on my sandals. You did not just enter Poppy’s world. You surrendered to it. I forced myself out of the chair and headed for the pool gate.
“No running,” I told the boys.
I knocked. The curtain peeled back and there was the man who had raised me, not giving anything to the steamy morning light but a glimpse of grizzled cheekbone and a shank of nose, squinting between the brown folds of fabric like the beat cop he had been forty years ago, cagey as ever.
But then the door opened wide and the sun found his quick blue eyes.
“Annie!” He grinned and crooked an elbow around my neck, pulling me close. His leathery skin smelled of barbershop spice.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Goddamn airlines” was his reply.
The door swung shut. He had not turned on the lights, and the suitcase sat unopened on a shiny quilted bedspread the color of ripe cherries. It occurred to me I had never been in a hotel room with my grandfather.
“Want some ice?”
“What for? It’s cold as a witch’s tit in here.”
“Poppy. Don’t. That kind of talk exploits women,” I announced crisply.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It didn’t matter; I liked the sound of my brave new voice. I had endured. I was almost an FBI agent. I could make pronouncements now.
“You sure you don’t want something from the soda machine?” “What’s the hurry? Take a load off.”
I plunked down on the bed. The frame wobbled like Jell-O, dipping me up and down as Poppy unpacked the old suitcase that had belonged to my mother, Gwen. It matched a makeup case she used to own, “a train case,” they called it, with unfolding trays that would rise up and present their treasures as you opened the lid. She died of liver cancer when I was fourteen. My father was an immigrant from El Salvador, a man I barely knew. I remember my mom as a passive and defeated person, but she must have had moxie to fall in love with a brown-skinned man in the 1960s. It would be years before I understood the circumstances under which my father, Miguel Sanchez, disappeared.
At a moment like this, you crave completion — parents, aunts and uncles and cousins, noisy and embarrassing, to shower you with affirmation and envy. Steve had a ton of family coming down from West Virginia; it was unsettling to be in that ice-cold motel room with Poppy, alone.
“So,” I asked him, “any words of wisdom as I go out into the big bad world?” He considered. “My father always told me, ‘Wear a rubber.’” “Nice.”
“What’s the matter?” he teased. “Does that exploit women, too?” Just outside the window was a poisonous-looking tree with ugly hanging clusters of lavender blossoms and long green pods — something that belonged in a swamp, something out of a southern horror story, whose evil perfume had the power to put you in a stupor.
Maybe that was it.
“That advice sure comes in handy with my new little artist friend from Venice,” he mused, not wanting to let it go.
“You have an artist friend?”
“Very friendly,” Poppy insisted. “But she dropped me because she wanted a younger guy. Can you believe that?” Poppy laid a hand towel on the sink and carefully set out the double-edged razor that screwed open, a shoehorn, and the black leather brush that strapped into the palm of his hand, with which he curry-combed his immaculate white crewcut.
I watched sulkily.
A few weeks before, at midnight, the supervisors had rounded up the new agents and led us to a room lit only by candles. We stood in a silent circle, sweating it out. They pulled that stuff all the time: We know, and you don’t. A supervisor wearing black stepped to the center of the circle and ceremoniously drew a dagger from his belt. A second supervisor was handing out sealed envelopes. There was an ominous pause. Now what? Kill your partner? As the dagger passed from hand to hand, we were allowed to open our envelopes — and cheers and shouts filled the room. It had been the Bureau’s memorable way of letting us know our first field assignments.
“I’ve been assigned to Los Angeles,” I told Poppy finally.
He did not acknowledge the joy of having me close to home. “Do whatever it takes to get on the bank robbery squad,” he advised. “Hottest spot in town.” “I know.” I took a very deep breath. “The only problem is, my boyfriend has been assigned to Miami, so we don’t know what to do.” “You have a boyfriend?”
I broke into a great big smile. “Yes, his name is Steve.”
“Do I have to meet this cracker?”
I had not yet understood that the more I wanted love from Poppy, the more he would withhold it.
“Steve is not a cracker. He’s very intelligent.”
“What about common sense?”
“He has that, too.”
As a lieutenant with the Long Beach police department, Poppy had liaisoned with the Bureau on hundreds of bank heists. Now he was hanging his full-dress lieutenant’s uniform on the rod that passed for a closet.
“Is that what you’re going to wear to the graduation?”
I couldn’t help it. I was touched.
“Damn right. Show those FBI bastards where you come from,” he said.
When we arrived on campus, he was curious about everything.
“Why do they have a bust of Jefferson? When did you say these buildings were built?” He took pictures of the brick corridors. He took a shot of the grass where our groundhog lived. He stood a long time by the wall commemorating FBI service martyrs. He read every one of their plaques.
“Those are the real heroes,” he whispered reverentially, too awed to encroach upon their dignity with a photo flash.
The Academy had shed its austerity to become a college campus on visiting day, where awkwardness and pride prevailed. We who wore the uniform (same old tactical pants and polo shirts) beamed at one another in fraternal spirit. Traffic in the hallways puddled and slowed. You could no longer charge around the corners, there were too many soft-bellied moms and dads wearing bad clothes. Civilians. I felt a sloppy love for all of them — these were my people now, whose freedom I would soon swear to give my life to protect.
Out of the dark, frigid motel room, out now in the mix, I was able to recover the sense of myself that had been growing steadily those past fourteen weeks, and here it was: I had been inducted into the elite. The brothers and sisters with whom I had shared the crucible were at that moment closer than blood. We had secret ceremonies and hidden powers those innocent visitors crowding the steamy glass atrium for coffee and cookies knew nothing about. All of them — including Poppy — were outside the cult. I was glad of it. I forgave them for it.
And I was filled with happiness.
“Here he is!” I exclaimed as Steve Crawford, ramrod straight and youthfully muscled beneath the tight polo shirt, emerged from the crowd. I introduced him as “my boyfriend,” which sounded soft and girlish and out of sync in that military environment.
Steve and I smiled at each other encouragingly. I had tried to prep him, but my convoluted descriptions of Poppy’s hot-and-cold behavior only made him totally uptight, afraid to step on a land mine. As a result, Steve drew up tall and presented as a locked-jaw FBI newbie — exactly the kind of condescending fed who rolled over Poppy on the job.
I noticed I had stopped breathing when they shook hands.
“My folks don’t get here until tomorrow. Let me treat you to dinner, Lieutenant Grey,” Steve offered.
“My treat. You two are the star graduates,” my grandfather added resentfully, eyeing us back and forth.
It was early evening when we pulled into Fredericksburg, the sun a fireball behind the hickory trees. We crossed a bridge where flame-tinged water dragged over shallows of black stones.
I had been to town only once, for somebody’s birthday, even though it was just twenty minutes from the Academy. We had so much studying, we rarely left. The Board Room, a cafeteria by day, became a full-on bar at night, in order to minimize the need for outside contact.
The tidy Colonial churches and side-gabled homes in the historic district of Fredericksburg were enchanting — until you got out of the car and staggered through the lifeless heat. All the quaint little stores were closed. Poppy, Steve, and I moved at half speed, but not fast enough to avoid a plaque at the site of a famous five-and-dime store, where, back in the sixties, a young African-American woman had been the first to sit at a white’s-only lunch counter.
My stomach was hurting even before Poppy went into a tirade about “good-for-nothing blacks.” I prayed none of the midwestern tourists, materializing slowly out of the spongy air, could hear his words.
But Steve did.
“If you don’t mind, sir, I don’t appreciate that kind of talk. I have a cousin married to an African-American doctor, and he’s a terrific guy.” “I used to be like you,” my grandfather replied, “until I was a patrol officer in the worst neighborhood in Los Angeles.” “We don’t want to hear it, Poppy,” I said.