An Affair of Sorcerers

by George C. Chesbro

  With the exception of my parents and Garth, Statler would become the most nurturing influence in my life. He’d seen in me possibilities as a performer that no one else, most particularly me, would ever have thought of. I’d eventually become a star attraction with the Statler Brothers Circus, a headliner as a kind of funky gymnast and aerialist bouncing and flying his way through a succession of visually spectacular stunts involving fire and ice.

  I parlayed my developing physical skills into a black belt in karate, and used the money I earned to finance my doctorate in criminology. With my advanced degree in hand, I retired from the circus and took up a post as an associate professor at NYU.

  By this time Garth had joined me in the city, where his own considerable talents had led to his rapid advancement in the NYPD. As for me, I’d left the circus when I was on top and was settling into a career in academia … and I still wanted more. I wasn’t certain what I wanted more of, but it seemed I needed constantly to test myself against new challenges. Garth called it overcompensation, and I couldn’t argue with him.

  I acquired a private investigator’s license, well aware that no sane person was likely to hire a dwarf as a private detective and that I’d probably never earn a penny in this particular corner of the marketplace. Surprise. I didn’t get a lot of business, but the business I did get was certainly challenging; like some kind of bent, psychic lightning rod, I seemed to attract only the most bizarre cases. No matter how simple or straightforward an investigation might appear at the beginning, it almost inevitably ended up with people shooting at me, or worse. By now I’d achieved a certain degree of notoriety, a state of celebrity which NYU looked upon with distinct disapproval. However, I was still teaching—and I was still investigating, whenever a case came my way. The dual careers had kept me busy, reasonably satisfied, and reasonably happy.

  Until now.

  Now it was all escaping from me. All my successes, my very sense of self, was imploding under the pressure of memory. I was losing my center, feeling like a frightened, angry defiant—and worthless—dwarf child again.

  My brother grunted softly, a kind of warning. I looked up from the ground and saw the gaunt figure standing on the hillside, partially eclipsing the sun. His features were blacked out, but the shape of the boy had grown into the shape of the man. I would have known him anywhere.

  “Coop Lugmor.” The name in my mouth tasted like sickness. “The man’s got a great sense of timing. I wonder what the hell he wants here?”

  “I’m afraid we’re about to find out.”

  Lugmor was over six feet, almost as tall as my brother. He was lanky, with arms too long for his torso and hands too small for his arms. His greasy black hair was long for Nebraska, and hung in strings around his long, pinched face. The smell of rotgut whiskey hovered about him like poison gas. I could feel tension spring from the group behind me, almost as palpable as a prod in the back.

  Lugmor nodded sheepishly in the direction of my family, then fell into step beside me. His eyes darted nervously, slyly, all around, as if searching for hidden enemies, but never quite met my gaze. “Hello, Robby. Garth.”

  Garth and I said nothing.

  “I sure am awful sorry about what happened.”

  We kept walking.

  “Robby, can I talk to you?”

  “Call my office for an appointment the next time you’re in New York, Coop. My number’s in the Manhattan directory.”

  A hand jerked into the air like a broken bird; grimy fingers with black nails gripped my shoulder. “Robby, I gotta talk to you!”

  Lugmor’s hand on my shoulder had much the same effect as a steep shot of liquor on an empty stomach; heat flashed across my face. I had a sudden, immensely gratifying vision of the man writhing on the ground with a broken kneecap. Then I remembered my mother and father walking behind me, my sister and brother-in-law with their grief, Tommy’s corpse in the ground. I said quietly: “If you don’t take your hand off me, Coop, I’ll break something in you.”

  Lugmore laughed nervously and quickly snatched his hand away. “From what I hear tell about you, I actually think you could.”

  “Believe it,” Garth said evenly.

  “Robby? Please?”

  He wasn’t going to leave, and the palpable force of discomfort pushing on my back was growing stronger; I decided that the least I could do was remove Coop Lugmor from the immediate vicinity. I nodded toward a nearby copse of ragged fir trees and stepped off the path.

  “Mongo …?”

  “It’s all right, Garth, I’ll handle it.”

  “I’ll wait for you in the car,” Garth replied as he slowed his pace in order to walk with the rest of the family.

  “They really do call you ‘Mongo,’” Lugmor said nervously as we reached the chiaroscuro shade of the trees. “Just like it says in the papers and newsmagazines.”

  “Some of my friends call me that,” I said pointedly. “Not you.”

  Lugmor slipped his hands into the torn pockets of his baggy overalls and looked down at the tops of his stained rubber boots. “You’re still mad at me even after all these years, aren’t you, Robby?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Coop, whatever gave you that impression?”

  He winced as if my words had been a physical blow, stared at me with brown, bloodshot eyes. “We were just kids, Robby, and you were the only dwarf anyone around here had ever seen outside the county fair freak show.”

  My first instinct was to hit him, my second to laugh. I laughed. Coop Lugmor, one of the two great monsters caged in my memory, was beginning to seem a very small and pathetic beastie indeed. It made me wonder how much I had distorted all the other memories; it occurred to me that, if I stayed around Peru County long enough, I might find all the monsters rolling belly-up in the surf like Lugmor, and I would go back to New York a paragon of mental health. “You always had such a way with words, Coop,” I said evenly.

  “I’m trying to say I’m sorry.”

  “Why don’t you try saying why you want to talk to me?”

  Lugmor slowly drew his hands out of his overalls. He balled one hand into a fist, punched his opposite palm. “Your nephew and my little brother weren’t having any fag love affair, Robby, and they didn’t have any suicide agreement.”

  “How do you know?”

  Lugmor stared hard at me, frowned. “Because Rod wasn’t a fag.”

  “Tommy was?”

  “I don’t know, Robby,” Lugmor said evasively. “I’m not accusing Tommy of anything; I’m just saying Rod wasn’t a fag.”

  “Coop,” I sighed, suddenly very tired and very sad, “what difference does it make?”

  He flushed, thrust out his lower lip. “It makes a difference!”

  “They’re dead, Coop. How they felt about, and what they did with, each other isn’t important.”

  Lugmor shook his head like a dog trying to rid itself of fleas. “Don’t you care that people are saying they were fags and that they had a suicide agreement?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I do! Rod was my brother!”

  “That’s your problem.”

  He smacked his lips in frustration, worked his mouth about, finally forced some words out. “Robby, I’m telling you Rod wasn’t a fag; if he wasn’t a fag, then he and Tommy weren’t having a love affair; if they weren’t having a love affair, then Rod didn’t shoot Tommy and then kill himself.”

  “The county sheriff and coroner say he did.”

  Lugmor hawked and spat; that made me wince. “The coroner ain’t no doctor, and he’s a bigger drunk than me. Jake Bolesh may be county sheriff, but he’s on the take. He does and says whatever that big Goddamn company wants him to.”

  “I thought Jake Bolesh was a friend of yours. I seem to remember the two of you as being inseparable, especially when you were beating up on me.”

  “He’s no friend of mind anymore, Robby. I tell you he’s lying!”

  “As far as I know, nobody else thinks so.”
<
br />   “Horseshit! What does anyone around here know?! They’re a bunch of farmers who’ll believe anything a guy with a badge and a uniform tells them to! This ain’t New York City, Robby. We don’t have many murders around these parts.”

  “Or homosexuals?”

  “Everybody just wants to forget about it as quick as possible, Robby! They want to forget it for personal reasons, and they want to forget it because the company wants them to! Nobody cares!”

  “There were letters.”

  “Phony letters! That was a lot of crap they printed in the newspapers. Those letters were typed, and there were no signatures!”

  “They were typed on your brother’s typewriter.”

  “No!” It was an anguished howl.

  “Coop, you think somebody else killed them?”

  “Yes!”

  “Who would want to kill two fourteen-year-old boys?”

  He shrugged, shuffled his feet.

  “Why would anyone want to kill them?”

  Another shrug, and then he mumbled something I couldn’t quite catch. I asked him to repeat it.

  Lugmor swallowed hard. “I said, that’s what I’d like you to find out.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah!” Now his words came quickly, bumping into each other. “There’s always a lot about you in the local newspaper, Robby. You may not be interested in us, but we’re sure as hell interested in you; you’re the hometown boy made good. I know all about you being an important college professor who’s some kind of doctor, and I know all about you being a private detective. I want to hire you. I don’t have much money right now, but—”

  “To do what?”

  “To find out the truth!”

  “As far as I can see, you’re the only person who doesn’t believe we already know the truth. Let me tell you something straight, Coop; I loved my nephew very much, but he was nuttier than one of Jesse Braxton’s fruitcakes. Sometimes that goes with the territory when you’re a very bright kid. Maybe he would have grown out of it, maybe not; we’ll never know. My sister accepts the fact that Tommy and most of his friends were a little crazy. Why can’t you?”

  “Because Rod was no fag!”

  “Oh,” I said quietly. “Coop, you know how muddled a dwarf can get, so let’s see if I have a line on where you’re coming from. You’d like me to root around, keep the dust and my family unsettled, and probably end up looking like the village idiot you always thought I was, on the off chance I might be able to prove that someone in your family wasn’t a homosexual. Have I got it?”

  “Robby, I—”

  “I thought so,” I said, starting to walk away.

  “Robby, please! Wait a second!”

  Wheeling around, I placed my stiffened index and middle fingers squarely over the center of Coop Lugmor’s solar plexus, pressed slightly. “Stay!” I snapped, and he did.

  2.

  We finished the lunch my mother had insisted on making. My parents, Garth, Janet, and I sat in silence at the table, staring into our empty coffee cups. Sparkling motes of dust floated in beams of golden sunlight, and the muffled laughter of a horde of young nieces and nephews could be heard outside in the yard. John Dernhelm, Janet’s husband, emerged from the kitchen, wiped his eyes, then went out the door. Two burly uncles sat in a corner of the adjacent living room, talking in low voices, discussing weather and corn prices. Their wives sat at opposite ends of a worn sofa, crocheting.

  My father disappeared for a few moments, then returned with a jug of corn liquor, surprising me, since I had never seen him or my mother drink so much as a glass of wine. He poured small glasses half full for everyone. My second surprise came when I drank the potion and came to an instant, complete understanding of why such stuff is called white lightning. My father offered me a second helping, and I covered my glass with a hand that already felt numb.

  “To everything there is a season,” my mother said softly, daintily touching a linen napkin to her thin, trembling lips.

  “Amen,” my father added in a voice that rumbled out of his chest like distant thunder but was also, always, gentle.

  “To everything there is a season,” Janet repeated in a small voice. “This, too, shall pass.”

  It meant that a kind of unofficial mourning period had passed, following Tommy into the ground. Now we could speak of other things. Farmers don’t have a lot of time for things like grief or self-pity; there are always animals to be cared for, crops to be tended. Fences to be mended.

  “I would like to say something,” my mother said in a voice so low it could barely be heard. She paused, pushed back a stray, gossamer strand of silver hair with a frail, liver-spotted hand. She turned, looked at me with her faded, violet eyes, and a smile wreathed her face. She reached across Garth and took my hand in hers. “It’s so good to have Garth and Robby with us. I’m sorry it has to be such a sad occasion that brings you here, Robby, but it’s wonderful to have you home after so many, many years.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I mumbled at the tablecloth.

  “Your mother wasn’t looking for an apology, son,” my father said. “All of us understand. Nobody’s ever written more letters than you, and you’ve brought us to New York many times. She’s just saying that we love you, and we’re very proud of you.”

  Garth, sensing that I was close to tears, came to my rescue. “Poor Mongo’s just a social cripple,” he said, somberly shaking his head and winking at Janet.

  “Stop that, Garth!” my mother said, whacking my brother on a broad shoulder. “And what is this ‘Mongo’ business? Robby is Robby. You, of all people, shouldn’t talk like that about your brother. You love him more than anybody, if that’s possible.”

  That embarrassed everyone but my mother, and for a few moments we lapsed back into awkward silence. It was Janet who finally spoke. Her voice was low, quavering.

  “Robby? What did Coop Lugmor want?”

  Garth and I exchanged glances. I looked down at the table, shrugged. “Nothing. He was just drunk and feeling sorry for himself.”

  Janet sat trembling for a few seconds, then stifled a sob as she abruptly rose and rushed into a small sewing room. I went after her, closed the door. I sat down beside her on the small sofa, took her hands away from her face and kissed them. Gradually she stopped sobbing.

  “Thank you for coming, Robby.”

  “Please don’t thank me, Janet.”

  “I know how it hurts you. You haven’t been here in seventeen years.”

  “It hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be.”

  “Still.”

  “Tommy was very special to me. You know that.”

  Janet nodded. Tears welled again in her eyes, but she didn’t sob. “And you were certainly special to him.” She pressed my hand to her wet cheek. Long, fine hair the texture and color of corn silk fell across my wrist. “We’ve never been close, Robby, have we?”

  “I feel close to you now.”

  “It was my fault. I was a snot-nosed kid, and as lousy a sister as Garth was good a brother. You embarrassed me, Robby.”

  “That’s all right—I embarrassed me, too.” She glanced at me quickly, her face clenched in hurt. Janet wasn’t used to my brand of humor. I smiled, added: “What’s past is past, Janet.”

  She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. “What I just said has been sticking in my throat for a long, long time, Robby. I wanted to get it behind me, and I just did. I love you.”

  “And I love you.”

  She kissed me again, then quickly looked away—but not before I had glimpsed something dark, perhaps a question, moving in her eyes. I cleared my throat, said softly: “Lugmor was bellyaching about the way Jake Bolesh handled the investigation. He doesn’t think Jake did a very good job, and he doesn’t agree with the findings.” I paused, touched Janet’s wrist. “What do you think?”

  It seemed to me that Janet considered her answer very carefully. “I haven’t had much time to think about anything but the fact that m
y son is dead,” she said after some time.

  “Of course,” I sighed, sorry I had brought up the subject.

  “Besides,” she said with a shudder. “What’s to think about? Why shouldn’t Jake do a good job? They’ve said such terrible things about Tommy and Rodney. Why would Jake lie about something like that?”

  “You’d have to answer that,” I said carefully. “I don’t live here. Can you think of any reason for Jake to lie?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “No. It’s just that everything happened so fast. Tommy disappears for a week, and the next thing you know they find both him and Rodney Lugmor shot to death near the creek on Coop Lugmor’s farm. Then they printed that … stuff … in the newspaper, and Jake was giving press conferences. Why would Jake and the reporters say such horrible things if they weren’t true?” She covered her face with her hands, but her voice came through clear and bitter. “They couldn’t even wait until those boys were in the ground.”

  I squeezed my sister’s hand, but Janet no longer needed my solace; she was angry now, not grief-stricken; in some corner of her mind that wasn’t flooded with tears, she had obviously been doing a lot of thinking. “Did you ever find out where Tommy had been for that week, or why he’d gone?”

  Janet shook her head. “He called me once, just to say he was all right and not to worry. He said there were things he had to sort out in his mind before he made a decision.”

  “Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”

  “No.” She got to her feet and began to pace. The starched black material of her dress crackled like flames from a combustible mixture of rage, confusion, and grief. She abruptly stopped pacing and turned to me. I thought she would burst into tears again, but she didn’t. “Robby,” she said hoarsely, “you know how to find out about things. Would it be possible for you …?” Maybe …?”

  “Janet, please sit down.” She did. I stroked her back, continued: “Let me tell you what a private detective does; he runs up a big phone bill and he spends a lot of money for good shoes to walk around in. All the time he’s talking to people he knows, contacts in important places like the police department, Motor Vehicle, the telephone company, and a dozen different licensing agencies. Private detectives need friends; if not friends, people who think they may be paid back someday in bits and pieces of information. You can move almost anything—certainly nations, and probably the planet itself—if you have a strong enough lever of information.”