Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  “I’m waiting for Thomas,” she said. “The police told me to wait.”

  Dickie watched her for another moment. He looked at the photo one more time before slipping it back into the box.

  * * *

  Spassky didn’t appear for the final game of the match. The previous day’s contest had been adjourned without a winner, but now Spassky had sent a message from his hotel before the game’s resumption, forfeiting the championship. There was footage of the anticlimax from a camera someone in the audience had hidden in a bag. A shot of the stage, the table and two chairs, one empty. The forfeiture was announced over a loudspeaker. There was stunned silence, then applause from the audience in the hall. Fischer remained in his chair, sitting back, his long legs splayed out at odd angles, his chin resting in his hand, looking at the pieces on the board, still set from the previous day’s game. The broadcast cut to shots of the jubilant crowd outside the building, then a cheering group watching the match at a rec center in New York, newscasters shouting into microphones, gap-toothed kids waving at the camera. Then back to Fischer, still sitting in his chair. His unwillingness or inability to exit. It was the most compelling moment of the whole match, waiting for Fischer to leave the room. Would he or wouldn’t he. Hannah leaned forward in her seat, bending toward the television. Fischer’s hand at his chin, at his forehead, while the crowds cheered. She understood what he was doing. The game had changed but he was still playing. He was still calculating the moves, straining to see the future. Following the chain, the sequence of potential actions. What would lead to the safe path amid all the other possibilities that simply led to the end.

  * * *

  She was talking about Thomas. The match had been over for a while, the TV was off, and she wasn’t sure why she’d started talking, what Dickie had asked that she was responding to. She was talking about the last time she saw him, over a year ago now. She’d walked in through the front door of the house in Oakland and Thomas was sitting on the living room floor with a fingertip pressed to a railway map. And she’d thought, Oh God, this is how it will be forever. Thomas as a young man, Thomas as an adult, as an old man. Sitting on floors with his fingers in maps. She’d wanted to turn and run from the whole thing, again. She’d never felt so scared and ashamed and then he’d looked up at her and said, Hello, sis, just like that, just like any younger brother would say it, jaunty and a little playful, smart-alecky, Hello, sis, and Hannah had stood there, openmouthed, as if he’d started reciting the Bill of Rights or War and Peace, but no, this was even more shocking, recognizing her as she’d come in the door, acknowledging her with what seemed like a little joke. This was the most incredible thing she could imagine coming from him, greeting someone when they entered a room.

  She was telling all of this to Dickie and then she wasn’t saying anything, there was something in her throat, some kind of hard blockage, and she swallowed and choked and then she was sobbing, she couldn’t get a handle on it, it was out of her grip, flooding the room, covering her, covering everything. She could hear herself moaning, making some god-awful sound she’d never heard before, a primal wail, shuddering and sucking air, and she stood because Dickie stood, she wanted him to stay away, she didn’t know what was happening to her, it felt like she was losing control of her body, and she backed out of the room, through the kitchen and into her bedroom, kneeling beside the bed, shuddering and sobbing and terrified of this thing that was coming out of her.

  She could barely hear him. He was saying her name. He was beside her and she was pushing him away but he was stronger now, he’d gotten stronger, and he lifted her up onto the bed and she curled against the wall, holding her legs in tight, pressing her forehead to the cinder blocks. Still shaking, that sound still releasing from her. His hands were on her shoulders and she could feel the bed sag with his added weight. Could feel his body pressed to hers, his arms around her, one hand on her hands, one hand between her forehead and the wall. Breathing slowly, deeply, his chest rising and falling and how that must hurt, how that must feel in his ribs, guiding her body to take air with him, keeping her head from the cinder blocks, his weight wrapped around her, his voice close in her ear.

  Just breathe.

  * * *

  They were out of coffee and milk and she needed to get out of the building, onto the street, go somewhere. He didn’t want her to go. At first she thought he was worried because of her display the previous night, her breakdown, but then she could tell there was something else, an external concern. He wouldn’t say what, he just didn’t think it was a good idea. It was getting late, it would be dark soon. But she needed to get out, so he insisted on going with her.

  They walked up the boulevard, past garages and gas stations, a couple of small markets. Dickie walked close, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of the new cardigan, a burgundy knit that looked nice with his beard. She could see his eyes moving, scanning the path in front of them, the cars passing at their side. She had a sudden impulse to hook her arm through his but then she thought that this was a fairly crazy idea. She kept her hands in her own pockets. The grocery store was at the end of the boulevard, maybe half a mile away, and they walked slowly, favoring his bad knee.

  The light changed against them, so they waited at the corner. Headlights on now; taillights smearing in the drizzle that had begun to fall. Dickie’s eyes moving this way and that. She wanted to say something about the night before but didn’t know what to say. It didn’t seem like he was expecting anything, any show of gratitude. There was something comforting about him, despite the circumstances of his arrival, despite the pills, the incident with the wine bottle. She knew that this was beyond all logic. He’d told her that he’d done things that still came back to haunt him and yet she still had no fear. There was no explanation for this. She didn’t know what this was.

  She heard it first, a low buzzing, what sounded like a woman’s voice, electronically filtered, and then they turned as someone joined them at the curb. A teenager in a hooded sweatshirt, pressing a small radio to his ear. He was singing under his breath, swaying, dancing a little.

  Dickie’s hand was at her elbow, then down around her wrist, tightening slowly.

  The boy was really dancing, it was something to see, popping out quick explosions of moves and then still again, then in motion, then still, staring straight ahead the whole time, watching the crossing signal on the opposite corner, the radio to his ear, singing along in a whispery falsetto.

  Ready, ready? Six, nine, six, eight, three, four, five.

  Dickie pulled her arm, jarring her out of her stance, and then they were heading back down the sidewalk the way they’d come, Dickie almost dragging her until she could catch up to his hurrying limp. He looked back over his shoulder every few seconds, his eyes like when she’d found him in the gallery, fear-filled and wide.

  Hannah said, “What the hell?”

  The boy was still back at the corner. The light changed, but he didn’t cross, just stood where he was, watching them. Dickie yanked Hannah again, pulling her along, jogging now, their boots splashing in the quickly forming puddles.

  Back inside the gallery, he checked one more time, the sidewalk, the cars parked at the curb, and then he locked the front doors. They were both wet. He stood with his back to her, water dripping from his beard, staring at the seam where the two doors met, his mind racing, she could tell, struggling with a choice, which way to go.

  “What did you see?” she said.

  He leaned forward, a hand on each door. He spoke, finally, and she didn’t know if he didn’t face her because he was afraid to face her or because he wanted to face the doors, if he was standing between her and something outside.

  He said, “I have something to tell you and I need you to hear me out, no matter what.”

  She didn’t want him to go any further. She thought that if she didn’t respond they could just stay like this, motionless in this spac
e, perched but not yet falling.

  He set his forehead against the doors, dripping rain, breathing hard.

  She didn’t want to hear anything. She didn’t want to know.

  She said, “Tell me.”

  3

  Into the blare and shine of the airport terminal. Moving sidewalks, careening baggage carts, directional signage a cryptographer couldn’t decipher. Jimmy squints at arrows, stops to swivel at intersections. At each stage of the trip he has been asked if he needs assistance, if he requires a wheelchair, help finding his seat, an elbow to hold on his way to the lavatory. If he would like an attendant to contact someone in his destination city so they can be waiting at the gate when he arrives.

  He rents another car, drives past the airport sprawl, out through Santa Fe. Night in the desert. Into a little two-lane town, stopping at the first bar he sees. Hutch’s Blue Room. He orders a drink, another, standing instead of sitting, trying to get some circulation back into his legs after the flights, letting the pain fall, slowly, from his crotch to his feet.

  He checks into a motel, cash, one night, using Squires’s name. The room is the room, stale carpeting and mesa-print wallpaper, a pair of double beds, cool to the touch. There are only a few hours until morning but he leaves the beds undisturbed, sits at the desk with the miniature bottles of whiskey he hoarded from the flight and the Gideon’s Bible he found in the bedside table.

  Elaine became religious in her final months. It was something Jimmy couldn’t agree with, but he held his tongue. She was a smart woman, but desperate. She needed to believe this wasn’t all there was, that her life wasn’t being cut short so much as she was moving on early. So Jimmy kept his mouth shut, sat silently in the hospital room while the priest placed the Eucharist on her dry tongue.

  Jayne was born-again, had found Jesus ten years before she’d met Jimmy, in the exact moment between the swing and connection of her first husband’s fist with her left cheekbone. She saw everything in that moment, she said, her life before and her life to come, her mistakes and her possibilities, and by the time his fist shattered the bone she was already gone, at least in spirit, already packed and away, starting her new life. The first night they went to dinner she told Jimmy her whole story, and then she asked if he was ready to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Jimmy looked across the table at this woman, twenty years his junior, one eye drooping slightly, but the clarity in her face when she asked the question, that quiet certainty, was something he thought he could find comfort in, so Jimmy said, Yeah, sure, why not, I’ve accepted everything else to this point.

  On vacations Jayne brought books, handbags full of romance novels, but if there was a Bible in the hotel room she’d read it before bed. They’d drive out to the coast, little beach towns and tourist traps, wherever she wanted to go. Jimmy didn’t care, was happy to make the reservations and follow along. She was always moving, even in the house, room to room, cleaning, arranging, settling rarely, for meals, a phone call, but then back up and over to the laundry room, downstairs to change the bedding in the guest rooms even though they weren’t expecting guests. She made the trip down the mountain almost every day, weather permitting, shopping or lunch with friends or meeting with her Bible study group. It was easy for Jimmy to see that she was still trying to outdistance something, but at least now she was running from one safe point to another. At the end of the night, when she was finally motionless in bed, Jayne’s face would compose into that calm look of certainty, that belief in something greater, and if that was the last thing Jimmy saw before he closed his eyes then he didn’t have so much trouble getting to sleep.

  He sat in the motel room, waiting out the night. The bottles and the Bible. He didn’t believe what Jayne believed, but he hoped the arithmetic of the situation was enough, her faith canceling his doubt.

  He had an envelope of cash he’d taken with him from the house. Jayne wouldn’t notice it was gone, not right away. He’d invested his pension well, was the recipient of off-hours phone tips, calls from men he’d worked with who still needed to go to an office every day and had moved to the private sector. Men still terrified of the man Jimmy hadn’t been in a decade. He took no pride in it. It was no way to make money, talking on the phone, writing checks, opening mail. Any idiot with a pulse and a few well-connected acquaintances could do it.

  He opened another bottle. He thought of Henry March in a room like this, waiting. March in some in-between place. March the mystery, how a man could disappear so completely. Jimmy had come out of that room, past that monstrosity of a door, and March was nowhere to be found. His ledger nowhere to be found. Clarke in hysterics. They’d been livid back east, and terrified. They didn’t trust Jimmy with much after that. He still got calls, but it was mostly strong-arm stuff, intimidation work, nothing like the apartments on Telegraph Hill. Excommunicated. Henry March’s escape was seen as his fault. Many times he’d thought about going to the house in Oakland and beating something out of the wife, the retarded son. But March wouldn’t have told them anything. He would understand that knowing nothing would keep them safe.

  There was a hound on the trail and Jimmy had been sent to hunt the hound but then who would be sent to hunt Jimmy? He was little more than another loose end, he knew this, despite all of Squires’s bullshit. There would be another engine in the system soon, waiting for Jimmy to do his job before taking Jimmy out. Or maybe they knew more than they let on, Squires and his superiors. Maybe they had talked to Jimmy’s doctors, seen his test results. Maybe they knew that Jimmy had brought his own hunter with him.

  He greeted first light with a final drink, the Bible still closed on the desk. He made a couple of phone calls back east to some of those old acquaintances, looking for an address north of Santa Fe. He left the room as he’d found it. Stopped at a pawnshop on the way out of town for a pistol, thirty bucks cash, a battered silver L that had been much used, easy in his hand, a thing with its own weight of memory, that carried its own dark history.

  * * *

  The house was in an unfinished subdivision below a smooth rise of bare hills. Only a few completed hacienda-style homes among the other unbroken lots. Cactus and manicured sand in the front yards, foreign cars in the driveways. Jimmy heard coughing from behind the house, let himself through a side gate onto a back patio dense with vegetation. A small fountain burbled somewhere unseen. Jimmy moved through the growth to the center of the patio, the man on his knees there, his hands deep in soil, repotting.

  “Doctor,” Jimmy said. “You look well.”

  Clarke stopped digging, stared at the plant in front of him. After a moment he stood and turned. He was still a handsome man, tanned and fit. His hair was white now. A clipped white mustache sat on his upper lip.

  “Nice place,” Jimmy said. “Quiet. Are we alone?”

  “My wife is away for the weekend.”

  “First? Second?”

  “I’ve been married a few times.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Clarke’s hands hung at his sides, dirty to the knuckles. He reached for a towel on the edge of the fountain, wiped the earth from his fingers.

  “You weren’t hard to find,” Jimmy said.

  “I stopped hiding years ago. I realized it wouldn’t make any difference. Anyone can be found.”

  “Not quite anyone.”

  Clarke refolded the towel, lifted a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket.

  “When was the last time you spoke to Henry March?” Jimmy said.

  “I speak with him every day.” Clarke shook a cigarette from his pack. “Don’t you? I plead with him for a few more years of silence, to allow me to finish out my days undisturbed. You look sick, Jimmy.”

  “Is that a professional diagnosis?”

  “What do you have?”

  Jimmy looked back over his shoulder, past the distant roofs of the rest of the subdivision, the purple hills beyond.


  “Let’s go inside,” Clarke said. “Have a drink.”

  “It’s early.”

  “Since when?”

  Jimmy turned back to him. “You keep a gun in the house, Chip?”

  Clarke lit his cigarette, hands shaking.

  “We’ll stay out here for now,” Jimmy said. “When was the last time you spoke to the flesh-and-blood Henry March?”

  “You know when.”

  “Nothing since?”

  Clarke shook his head.

  “Spoken to anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “A lot of years,” Jimmy said. “A long time to keep quiet.”

  “I’ve never told anyone, Jimmy.”

  “No?”

  Clarke shook his head.

  “One of those wives?”

  “No.”

  “Somebody else?” Jimmy said. “Middle of the night. Another secret.”

  “I’ve never told anyone.”

  Clarke pulled anxiously on his cigarette. Jimmy watched, wanting one for the first time in years. He hadn’t smoked since Elaine’s doctor had given them the test results, as if Jimmy quitting could somehow change her diagnosis. As if there was a balance to things, a zero-sum accounting.

  “I expected this years ago,” Clarke said. “You coming, someone coming. I’ve watched it all on TV. The protests, the marches. My son went to New York for that concert in the field. Do you remember, one of the johns talked about rolling around in the mud? We gave him STORMY. The man sat naked on the bed, talked about it for hours. Then I turned on the television and saw a hundred thousand people rolling around in the mud. My son in there with them, somewhere.”

  Jimmy looked back past the garden, the nearest house maybe a hundred yards away.

  Clarke put the cigarette to his lips, took a shaky pull, lowered his hand again. “We let something loose into the world,” he said. “I expected you years ago.”