Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  He places the barrel on his mouth, taste of metal and oil, not entirely unpleasant. He yawns for some absurd reason. Tired old man. The doorbell rings again. He remembers the TV in the living room, still on. Leave it, something to keep the dog company until the police arrive. He imagines sirens climbing the hill, taking the curves, getting closer by the second. Do it, already. He pictures the mess, quickly, how many times has he seen it before, brains and blood, but that’s somebody’s job, it’s covered in the homeowners’ insurance, he’s already checked. Money earmarked for cremation, ashes to be spread near Elaine’s grave, one final selfish wish, no way of knowing if Jayne will honor it.

  Enough already. Do it, old man. He turns the key in the ignition. The engine thunders to life, unbelievably loud in the sealed garage. It’s not enough. He flips on the radio, an orchestra wailing now, full volume, any noise to fill the space, to give him the balls to do what needs to be done. The fog clearing here and there through the windows, blowing around the driveway. Enough, already. Be sorry one final time and then do it.

  The fog swings away from the windows to reveal a man standing in the driveway. The man is not a cop, not a paramedic. He looks like a door-to-door salesman, gray hat and trench coat, and he’s peering into the garage, gloves cupping his face so he can see through the glass. Their eyes meet and the man smiles, a quick flash of teeth. The man disappears from sight and then the garage door lifts and the man steps inside, stomping his shoes on the cement floor.

  “Jimmy Dorn,” the man yells, loud enough to be heard with the car windows up and the radio on. He smiles even wider. “Jesus Christ. Looks like I almost missed you.”

  * * *

  They sit in the living room in front of the muted TV. The dog ambles in, lies down. Jimmy had poured himself another drink, bourbon and new ice, something to steady his shaking hands, and when he turned the man was standing there holding out the telephone. Jimmy calls the police and tells them he’d made a mistake, he’d forgotten to take his medication and had called in his own death, premature, but now he’s taken his pills and a friend is over, everything’s under control. They know him in town, he and Jayne, he gives money to the cops every year, the Police Benevolent Fund. Harmless old man.

  He hangs up the phone and they sit across from each other in the living room, the third quarter beginning silently on the TV between them.

  “You must be the new-model asshole,” he says.

  The man smiles. He’s sitting on the couch, self-satisfied, happy with the circumstances of his arrival. “This is some place,” the man says. “Isolated.”

  “We like it that way.”

  “So quiet my ears are ringing.”

  “They should have sent someone I could talk to.”

  “We would have sent one of your contemporaries, but they’re all dead. Either that or wasting away in homes, diapered and drooling. You’re it, Jimmy. The last of the Mohicans.”

  “They give you names anymore?”

  “Bud. Bud Squires.” The man looks like he’s withholding massive laughter, like he could erupt at any moment. “That’s some hill. My rental car almost gave up the ghost on the climb.”

  “I should have built further up.”

  “It’s just nice to be away from the office. I rarely venture out. I’m a systems man, plans and planning.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Numbers, mostly,” Squires says. “Budgets. I add things up and move them around, launch equations into the ether. Six months later I read about the end result in the newspaper. Page twelve or thirteen, second section. Wire report, no byline. The kind of story that’s designed to be skimmed over on your way to the comics. The kind that makes you say, ‘Where the fuck is that country, anyway? Does that place even exist?’”

  “But you were sent.”

  “I’m here in a very unofficial capacity.” Squires shakes his head. “Jimmy Dorn. You’re one of those countries on page thirteen. Does that place even exist?”

  Jimmy takes a long swallow of his drink, pushes the dog from his feet.

  “A while back, I was transferred to the Black Line Squad,” Squires says. “That’s what we called it. A demotion. The last stop, probably, before getting fired. There were five of us in an office with Folgers coffee cans full of black markers, redacting documents. Squeak, squeak, squeak. Drawing lines through official correspondence, unofficial correspondence, memoranda for the record. Paperwork going back ten, twenty years. Ask me how many times I drew a line through the name Jimmy Dorn.”

  “I’ve got a short window to bullshit,” Jimmy says. “The police will be here soon.”

  “You called them off.”

  “They’ll come anyway. Old man talking about his own death. What else do they have to do?”

  “You want to hurry me along.”

  “You’re the systems man.”

  “I came all this way.” Squires looks hurt. A whine threatens to overtake his voice. “Driving for hours down into the boondocks and then here, finally, up the mountain.”

  “You came to hear stories?” Jimmy says. “What? You came to blackmail?”

  “I can’t believe this. Your quiet life. Dead in the car. Last of the great white hunters.”

  “They’re coming now. I can hear them. Sirens climbing the hill.”

  “Hurry me along.”

  “I want you out of my house.”

  “Now. You’ve decided this.”

  “Yes.”

  “Sit down with a drink, dog at your feet, and now you want me out of your house.”

  “Yes.”

  “Should have left you in that car, spread out across the back windshield. What’s it say in those letters? One to the wife. One to the son.”

  “Talk fast.”

  “Real tearjerkers. Let me open one. Early Christmas present.”

  “Out.”

  “He’s up, folks. He’s out of his chair.”

  “I want you out.”

  “No dice, Pops.”

  “Shotgun’s still loaded.”

  “No dice.”

  “They make you bulletproof now?” Jimmy says. “Plans and planning? The Black Line Squad?”

  Squires stands and that’s all it takes, the height and breadth, the young man in the old man’s room.

  “I’m the new-model asshole,” Squires says. He walks to the end table, the television clicker by the ashtray. “Now, do you mind if we turn off the goddamn TV and get down to brass tacks?”

  * * *

  “You can’t imagine the boredom,” Squires says. “I’m not a history buff. I live in a region of northern Virginia lousy with preserved battlegrounds, registered buildings. Before I quit smoking I had to sneak out of my house on weekends, sit in my car and inhale. I’d watch the tourists tramp through the fields, these paunchy dads with Confederate infantry hats and period maps, oblivious to their hapless families trailing along behind. Falling to their knees to dig in the dirt for musket balls and shrapnel. I had no interest. History made no sense to me. Disconnected events. The documents I scribbled on never added up to anything. They were random samplings. Random saplings.” He smiles at his turn of phrase, pleased with the clever surprise.

  “About a year ago I was given another assignment,” Squires says. “I was back in the good graces, liquidating documents. Sometimes, black lines aren’t enough. The paperwork I was destroying was very specific. It pertained to a project from long ago. That project and its ensuing subprojects. I couldn’t help, on the way to the incinerator, looking at the files. Natural curiosity. And then this particular job became less boring. Things started to piece together. There was a thread. And there was a name that kept popping up, a familiar character, the star of my old Black Line days. The great redacted Jimmy Dorn.”

  Squires remained standing after Jimmy sat back in the chair. He has taken the
place of the television, Squires; he is the room’s sole source of entertainment. The police never arrived.

  “I do more reading than burning. Weeks and months. I enter the office early in the morning and leave late at night. I stop talking to my family. I spend my time at home sitting, staring, thinking about what I’ve read. I quit smoking, or, rather, I forget to smoke and the habit follows. I’m piecing together that story, Jimmy, memo by memo, I’m deciphering poor penmanship and faded ink, I’m translating the typewritten correspondence of what appears to have been an entire fleet of dyslexic secretaries. But a story is forming and it is well worth the effort.”

  Jimmy can feel another piss coming on, a bonus piss, one he never thought he’d take. He shifts in his seat, pushing the feeling away.

  “I follow the story through to the end,” Squires says. “The end of the documentation, at least. Last folder into the fire. I’m a little overwhelmed. I have trouble sleeping, which I’ll go out on a limb and assume is a shared trait between us. And I’m far from an idealist, Jimmy. I’m not a blind patriot. I do not spend weekends on my hands and knees pawing in the dirt for lumps of bloody lead. So when a decision was made to reestablish contact, I volunteered. I demanded. I wanted to be the one to stand face-to-face with Jimmy Dorn.”

  “This was over long ago,” Jimmy says.

  Squires takes a drink. “I wouldn’t be here if that was true.”

  * * *

  Late afternoon. The fog pressing at the windows again. Jimmy has poured two more drinks. They sit at the dining room table, the long wooden slab. Squires has a folder he’s produced from somewhere, the folds of his coat. Papers on the tabletop, memos and correspondence, unaltered, free of black ink. Jimmy looks at the names on the bottoms of memos, signatures and initials, and faces come back to him easily. He’s surprised how quickly they return. What has he been doing up here in the mountains? Waiting.

  “How do you know he’s alive?” Jimmy says.

  “We don’t.”

  “But there is a man already out there, looking.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your man?”

  “No.”

  “Who does he belong to?”

  “I couldn’t say with any certainty. He’s just the hound. We have the hound, and now we need the hunter.”

  Jimmy stands from the table, throws a log into the fireplace, sets it alight. He prefers this to the house’s lazy central heating. He chopped this wood himself, and he can remember each piece he tosses in, the individual battles against knots and knobs.

  “I can get you a ticket to Los Angeles,” Squires says. “First class, tonight. Change in Atlanta, change in Dallas. Arrive first thing in the morning.”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll call you a cab to take you back to town,” Jimmy says. “Rent another car. Leave yours.”

  “No.”

  “I handle it or I stay right here, watching football.”

  Squires bites his lip. He seems to be getting drunk fast. Wouldn’t have survived half an hour here last night with the golfers.

  “How will I contact you?” Squires says.

  “I’ll contact you.”

  Squires produces a small note pad, tears off a blank sheet of paper. “Here are my phone numbers. Home and work.”

  Jimmy takes the paper, tosses it into the fireplace. “Find another one. A pay phone, nowhere near your office. I’ll call your home number once and you’ll give me the new number. We’ll go from there.”

  Jimmy calls a cab and they wait, drinking silently at the table. When the driveway bell rings, he walks Squires to the door.

  “There’s a legacy, Jimmy,” Squires says. “I guarantee that you have not been forgotten. I can tell you about a location in West Germany. I can tell you about a location in the Philippines. I promise you that the men in those rooms know your name.”

  “Give me your keys.”

  Another ring when Squires tops the driveway. Jimmy watches the cab start back down the hill, disappear into the fog. He moves to the dining room table, looks across the memos and dispatches, touching the raised ink on the pages.

  Henry March. Jimmy has thought of the man every day for how many years now? The loosest of ends. He scans the newspaper headlines every morning for an old story that has been exhumed. He holds his breath when Jayne calls him into the living room to see a news story on TV. This man and what he knew. His disappearance had turned Jimmy into a dirty secret. Jimmy imagining his son or Jayne reading about the days in San Francisco. Imagining Elaine, if she were alive. No one would understand. No one understood what their lives and families cost, what they necessitated. Everything here is free. In this country, they spit on soldiers returning from war.

  He gathers the papers into the folder and then tosses it into the fire. Everything but a couple of photographs, a few addresses. He sits at the table and composes two new letters, one for Jayne, one for Steven. They come easier this time, the apologies. He goes into the bathroom, stop-start, stop-start, thinks of Elaine, remembers sitting by her hospital bed, the aquamarine light, her hand in his, just cold bones and skin. He walks through the house, touching railings, straightening the pictures on the walls. Returns to the dining room. He’ll let the fire burn down, it’ll keep the dog warm. He fills a bowl with kibble and another with water. Washes and dries the bourbon glasses, puts them away in the cupboard. Pulls on his coat, gloves, hat, shoes. Quite a process. He goes out into the garage, pushing the dog back into the house. The original letters on the dashboard are gone. Squires must have taken them. Jimmy sets the new letters on a shelf where they’ll be seen. Puts the shotgun, the rubber tubing, the pills all in the trunk, then drives out toward the top of the hill, the garage door closing behind him.

  2

  Hannah sat across the worktable and watched him eat, macaroni and cheese from a box that she’d cooked on the hot plate. He ate like he was starving, gripping the fork in his fist, shoveling bright yellow pasta. He wouldn’t look at her. He kept his eyes on the food, embarrassed of the way he was eating, possibly, but unable to stop. She let her own plate sit untouched, knowing he would need it when he finished his own. One hand around his fork, the other around the beer can she’d set next to his plate. A territorial animal. A haunted man. Alcohol, drugs, probably; something else.

  He finished his pasta. I’m so sorry, he said, shaking his head, and she stood and walked around the table and cleared his plate and set hers before him and he said, Thank you, I’m sorry, yes.

  Digging in again.

  * * *

  She had found him on the bus-stop bench outside the gallery. It was going on into evening, and she’d stepped outside for a cigarette, some air. She’d been working all day, cleaning, waiting. The phone had only rung once, at about noon, and she’d run to the receiver to hear the voice on the other end of the line asking after someone in Spanish, another wrong number.

  The man on the bench was not one of the usual faces, the wandering souls who stumbled into her gallery, who hovered over the bus-stop trash can looking for food scraps. He was not one of the men she gave sandwiches to, or cigarettes, or an occasional beer if she had one on hand. He was about her age, tall, heavy but not yet fat, bearded and maned like a lion. He was not particularly dirty. His clothes were in decent shape. His hair looked semirecently washed. He had a bruise shining at the corner of his mouth, a cut on his forehead. He was grabbing his right knee in his sleep. A bloody hole in his jeans there. His body twitching, his arms and legs hanging over the ends of the bench.

  When she first saw him, she’d thought he was Thomas. She had been expecting to find Thomas on a bench like this, Thomas sitting in a park, sleeping in a doorway. He was about Thomas’s size. She could imagine Thomas bearded, his hair long from neglect. She’d known almost immediately that it wasn’t him, but now she couldn’t shake what remai
ned of that feeling, some kind of connection to this man.

  The streetlights on the boulevard came to life. An older Mexican woman with a purse in each hand stood at the stop and got on the bus when it came. Hannah finished her cigarette and walked around to the front of the bench, watching the man’s face while he slept. She crouched down, put a hand on his shoulder, said, Hey, Hey.

  * * *

  He ate his macaroni and cheese, drank his beer. He looked exhausted and scared. She asked him what his name was and when he said Dickie Ashby she told him that he didn’t sound so sure. He apologized, said that it had been a long day, one that had included getting hit, pretty hard, by a car. She smiled, nodded, not wanting to push him further.

  * * *

  His ribs on his left side, his knee. The bruise at his mouth, the cut on his forehead. She had iodine and bandages in her bathroom for dealing with the slices and punctures that came while cutting mattes, hammering frames. He sat on the closed toilet and she stood over him, pressing alcohol-soaked gauze to the cuts. Bruises on his elbows, the palms of his hands. He had a tattoo on the inside of his wrist that looked fresh, that said Sons. He smoked while she worked, a cigarette from the flattened pack in his back pocket.

  She said, We should really get you to a hospital, and he’d responded quickly, assuring her that he’d be fine. There was no serious injury. A bruised rib, maybe, something out of whack in his knee.

  She wanted to look at the knee but he couldn’t roll his jeans high enough, so she told him to stand and take them off. Knowing this would have been inconceivable in a previous time, what now seemed like another life, before the drive to Oakland. She hadn’t found Thomas, but she had found this man. A month ago she would have given him a sandwich or a cigarette, but that was no longer enough.