by David Arnold
Utterly confused, I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Zuz tried to pull it out.” The room turns to me while I recount the rest of the evening: how Zuz rushed over to Uncle Les, tried to pry the antlers out of my uncle, thinking maybe it wasn’t too late; how we cleaned Jamma’s face, changed her clothes, put her to bed, and rushed out the back door just as the police arrived; how we burned her bloody nightgown in a trash can back at the orchard; how we told Baz what had happened and stayed up all night, trying to figure out what to do.
Bundle shakes his head. “It was Baz’s DNA on the murder weapon, not his brother’s.”
“Was it an exact match?” asks Vic. No one says anything at first; I think we’re all surprised at the question. “Brothers have similar DNA profiles, don’t they?”
Mendes puts both hands to her temples, rubs in tiny circles. Bundle, sensing his case crumbling, is all kinds of flustered now. “Fine,” he says. “The Blythe case, then.”
“He’s in a coma,” says Mendes.
“We have evidence.”
“Circumstantial at best,” says Mendes. “No weapon, no prints, no eyewitnesses. None who aren’t in a coma, anyway.”
Bundle stares at Sergeant Mendes for a second, his face red and puffy. He tilts his head a little, turns, and storms out of the room.
“Why do you need Zuz’s DNA?” I ask.
“What?”
“In the hallway, you sent officers to get Nzuzi Kabongo’s DNA.”
“We’ll need it to run against what we found at the crime scene. If you’re telling the truth, it should be a closer match, which would more or less negate our evidence against Baz.” Mendes sighs, picks up the digital recorder. “Do me a favor, you two. Don’t leave town for a while, okay? I’m sure we’ll have some follow-up questions.”
I look at Vic and can tell he’s thinking the same thing. “We’re not going anywhere without Baz.”
She stands there, staring at the recorder in her hands, opens her mouth like she’s about to say something, then stops herself.
“You knew he was innocent, didn’t you?” says Vic. “Earlier, when you mentioned Nzuzi’s twin sister, Nsimba—that would’ve taken some digging. I’ve been trying to figure out why a sergeant with an airtight case would go to the trouble. It’s because you knew he didn’t do it.”
“I had suspicions,” she says. “Our department has been under a lot of pressure lately—there was a lot riding on closing this quickly. The DNA from the antlers matched that in the CODIS database, which seemed pretty solid. Throw in the hat—all evidence pointed to Baz Kabongo.”
“But you said so yourself.” Vic points to the hallway. “Just now. You said you should have pushed harder. Which insinuates you pushed at all.”
Mendes smiles a little, and I wondered if she didn’t see in Vic what I saw: a scary realness. “I was right about you, Vic,” she says. “You’re smart. And kind of a nerd.”
She starts for the door when Vic says, “Can you keep pushing, Miss Mendes?”
She turns and sighs, and I wonder when she last had a full night’s sleep. “There are plenty of people who still need to talk to Baz, not to mention a mountain of paperwork to get through. This kind of thing takes time and you should be prepared for that. But yeah, I’m gonna push. Listen, you guys got anyone you want us to call? Someone who can come get you? Vic, we’ve had zero luck getting ahold of your mom but—”
“Sarah.” Detective Ron is in the doorway; I can almost see the tail between his legs.
“Ron,” says Mendes. “What have I told you about sidling up like that?”
“Sorry, it’s just—I called the hospital.” His face is a portrait of perpetual frustration, and in that frustration I find exactly what I’m looking for: our plan worked. “Olivia Chambers disappeared this afternoon. No one knows where she is.”
(LAST NIGHT)
VIC
Winter could not find us down here.
Nothing could. But then, that was the point.
As it turned out, the ex–grease trap in the kitchen floor of Napoleon’s was just large enough for five people. We sat facing one another, on either side of the compartment, our backs against the walls, our legs across the floor, interlocked like shark’s teeth or a backgammon board. We sat watching one another in the flickering light of a candle, bags in our laps and heaviness in our hearts, wondering if this was the last time we would all be together. And how strange: I’d only been with the group one week. But one week was all it took. I was no longer the straggler with the broken wing.
I was part of the miraculous gaggle.
The grease trap had two vents on opposite walls. One of them used to lead to floor drains around the kitchen, Margo had said before shutting us in. She went on to explain that when the new grease trap had been installed outside, they’d closed up that particular vent in order to reroute the drains to the new trap. The other vent led to an old dishwasher, one they never used anymore but had yet to get rid of. It was this second vent that provided just enough air for us to breathe. We’d removed our coats, hats, and gloves long ago, and took turns sitting in front of the vent.
Oxygen: the superest of all racehorses.
“I hate it down here,” said Mad.
I held her hand, but not too tight. Mad’s bruises were still fresh, a rainbow of pinks and blues.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re in cramped, dark quarters with limited oxygen and minuscule hopes of survival. Throw in Tom Hanks, and this is basically a space shuttle.”
Mad smiled and I died, per usual.
“I still can’t believe it,” she said, her smile already gone. “I can’t believe we left her there.”
. . .
“We had no choice,” I said.
She looks right at my face as if seeing me for the first time. “What if they arrest her?”
“They won’t arrest her, she’s an old lady. They’ll assume what anyone else would—that she couldn’t have done it. I mean, I saw her do it, and I barely believe she did it.”
Mad shook her head. “Old age, dementia, none of it gets her off the hook. Jamma can’t go to prison, Vic. She’d never last.”
“We cleaned her up. Plus, she was wearing those mittens, so they won’t find anything on the antlers. They’re not going to arrest her, Mad. Baz is right. The plan is going to work.”
Mad nods in a daze, reaches down, pulls something from her pocket, and hands it to me. “Here. I almost forgot.”
It was a photo of her sitting on a street curb, looking sideways like she didn’t even know she was being photographed. It must have been a windy day. Her hair was all over the place.
“A picture of you with no one else in it,” I said.
“Hardly seems important now.”
“It is. Even more so. Thank you.”
She smiled at me, put her head back against the vent, and I’m not entirely sure she didn’t fall asleep on the spot.
Consider this: a billion tiny happenings, the tenacious molecules of chance—a gust of wind here, a trip on the sidewalk there—pushing our plot, constructing our setting, building our character, until we are who we are, where we are, how we are.
Who and where were easy:
Kids of Appetite.
Grease trap.
How was far more complicated:
This morning, the Record—and presumably the radio, Internet, and television—reported the crime, announcing the police had fast-tracked a warrant for the arrest of Baz Kabongo based on DNA found at the scene.
We were all worked up over this, Mad especially. “DNA found at the scene?” she kept saying. “Baz wasn’t even at the scene.” Baz only responded with a small sad smile. It was the same smile he used when he told the story about the broken air conditioner at the Cinema 5, and the severely uninformed employee who wrongly assumed Baz was
from the jungle. That story made me shake my head, but this—this made my head spin, slowly at first, gaining moment like helicopter rotors until my head popped right off my shoulders and into the unjust ether.
Within hours the police swarmed the streets of New Milford like locusts, carrying photos of Baz around, knocking on doors—Have you seen this man? We did not wait around for what would surely be a triumphant response from Gunther Maywood.
The first place we went was Babushka’s. Norm offered to hide us in his back room for a while but was hesitant to let us stay too long. He said police had been roaming the Chute, asking if anyone had seen Baz, offering immunity to nonviolent criminals should their efforts aid the police in the manhunt. Given his store’s dangerously close proximity to the Chute, we couldn’t blame him for not wanting us around. There, in the dangling shadows of slaughtered swine, we spent the day discussing our options. “We could just leave,” Coco had said. “Skip town, and never look back.” Mad shot down the idea, saying she wouldn’t leave Jamma. I didn’t say anything, but I didn’t have to. I think Baz saw it in my eyes. Mom was still Mom, even if I barely recognized her anymore. There was no way I could leave, not permanently. After hours of talking in circles, Baz suddenly looked very pleased, smiling around at all of us. “There have been times—so many times I’ve lost faith. But I am sure of it now, friends. We are blessed by the Living God.” Without another word, he walked over to Norm’s desk, picked up the phone, and dialed a number by memory.
Baz: “Christopher.”
. . .
Baz: “Yes, we are fine. Sorry, I can’t talk. We need your help. Can you get away from the Parlour for a while?”
. . .
Baz: “I don’t know. Days, weeks, maybe more.”
. . .
Baz: “Thank you. Pack a bag. Tomorrow, be at St. Bart’s on Bridge Street at four p.m.”
. . .
Baz: “You are welcome.”
And he hung up.
It was the “you are welcome” that struck me as odd. Such an outlandish request on Baz’s part should surely necessitate a reversal of niceties. But that was not the case. From our brief time together at the Parlour, I’d gathered how much the kids meant to Topher—but this was an altogether different level of loyalty. Baz asked Topher to put his life on hold indefinitely, to which Topher not only agreed but did so thankfully.
Baz stood there, his hand resting on the phone. After a beat he picked it up, dialed another number by heart.
Baz: “Rachel Grimes, please. Yes, I can wait.”
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
Baz: “Hi, Rachel. Yes, I am fine. Listen, I don’t have time to explain much, but . . . we need your help. You should have a new patient by the name of Olivia Chambers, probably arrived late last night, maybe early this morning. . . .”
He proceeded to hand out complex instructions in a calm and commanding tone. What he asked of Rachel, should she get caught, would surely cost her her new job. But like the conversation before, the call was concise and successful.
Rachel agreed to the plan.
Baz placed one more call, this time to Margo Bonaparte, whose phone number lived in his pocket in perpetuity. The conversation was also brief, and when he hung up, Mad asked how he knew Jamma would be at Bergen Regional.
“I didn’t know for sure. But after such trauma, I thought maybe the police would take her to a hospital,” said Baz. “Bergen Regional is closest to your house.”
It occurred to me that Baz’s belief in God’s providence was not unlike my own belief in bumps—that someone might just as easily attribute coincidence to the Almighty as they would mathematics. Mad’s grandmother happened to be taken to the very hospital at which Baz’s ex-girlfriend had recently acquired a job. Whether we were all tiny red lights bumping into one another, or simply playing out the design of Baz’s Living God Himself, I had to admit I was impressed.
We waited for the cover of dark and crept six or so blocks, where we met Margo behind Napoleon’s. Per usual, she had her run of the place near closing. She led us inside the pub, instructed us to “take a good long piss,” then directed us into the back kitchen, where she doled out six candles, matches, various breads, cheeses, and bottled waters from the pantry (with a warning not to drink too much, as we’d have to hold it for quite some time), and with a bon appetit!, she shut us in the grease trap.
I suspected a large part of Margo Bonaparte’s eager-to-help attitude was motivated by her desire to have sex with, and produce babies for, Baz Kabongo.
But hey.
I wasn’t about to complain. When called upon, each Chapter had come to our aid, and done so mightily.
We spent much of the night drifting in and out of sleep, in and out of conversation; time passed until we lost track of it. As promised, Margo returned before opening the following morning to let us out for a bathroom break. Afterward, we took five minutes or so, stretched our legs and backs, then descended into the grease trap once more. An overwhelming sense of doom set in, like reaching the finish line of a marathon only to hear the starting gun. Margo double-checked our stock of goods, assured us she would return at the agreed-upon time, and shut us in.
“Smells like a beaver’s anal secrets down here,” said Coco.
Nzuzi snapped once.
I didn’t point out the fact that technically, castoreum smelled like musky vanilla, hence its use in perfumes and foods. Even so, I had to agree with the spirit of Coco’s comment. The grease trap may have been inactive for some time, but it still smelled like the sweat mark in the armpit of a sideways hug.
We would definitely stink for some time.
Before long, Mad was asleep, slumped on my shoulder. Nzuzi sat by the vent, also asleep, his head against the wall. Across the cramped quarters, Coco lay sideways, fast asleep in Baz’s lap.
Baz was asleep too. But not peacefully. Sweat poured from his forehead and face, and he mumbled in the same language from the last time I’d heard him talking in his sleep. This went on for a few minutes, and then, just like that . . . he woke up. There was no scream or jolt; he simply opened his eyes and began talking.
The candle burned low, and as he talked, I went to my Land of Nothingness. There, I saw a different burning: the hell Baz and Nzuzi had lived through.
* * *
“One evening a neighbor comes to our house, says armed civilians, rebels, are going door to door with a list of political enemies. Many people are on this list, my family among them. Soon, we hear bombs and gunfire, explosions closer and more frequent. What could we do? We ran. We left our home with the bare minimum, eventually joined by thousands of others, a sea of people afraid for our lives.
“When I asked my mother who was leading us, where we were going, she quoted Exodus 13:21: ‘And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light. . . .’ She said it so many times, it came to sound like a poem.
“We followed the road to the Deep South, stopped in many villages, slept in abandoned homes when we could, or else on the road. At some point, it was decided we would head for Kinshasa, in the DRC. There were skirmishes among us—I was too young to know what they were about, but old enough to be afraid. It went on like this for three months. Three months of eating mostly cassava leaves, of watching the sick being pushed in wheelbarrows, of stepping over bodies—people who had dropped dead of exhaustion, malnutrition, dehydration. My mother insisted our conditions have no bearing on how we treat others. She recited Luke 21:3–4: ‘Truly I say to you that this poor widow has put in more than all; for all these out of their abundance have put in offerings for God, but she out of her poverty put in all the livelihood that she had.’
“Mother loved the Bible, but other books too. She loved introducing her students to new characters and i
deas. She used to say, We are all part of the same story, Baz, each of us different chapters. We may not have the power to choose setting or plot, but we can choose what kind of character we want to be. Once a day, while we walked, she picked someone out of the crowd, pointed to them, and said, Baz, you see? There. That child with the dirty face. In this chapter, you shall be her brother. Or, There, the woman with the sad eyes. This is not a sad-eye chapter. Let’s make her smile. We made many smiles, and I had many brothers and sisters, and the Chapters multiplied.”
. . .
Baz stopped talking for a moment; just when I thought he was done, he continued.
“We crossed the Congo River early in the morning, our canoes bumping into bloated corpses along the way. It could be us soon, we knew. Some time later, we reached Mbanza-Ngungu, where we stayed in a refugee camp. Death was everywhere. It likes to make itself known, and soon enough it made itself known to my father. He died in a clinic in Mbanza-Ngungu. Later we learned he had been secretly dividing his meals among us, eating hardly anything at all. And still, even after Father’s death, my mother repeated, ‘Lean not on your own understanding. . . .’
“A week later we boarded a truck to Kinshasa. I was eleven, Nzuzi and Nsimba were four. We stayed on a compound with an old friend of my mother’s—I never knew the woman’s name, we only called her Mama. Here we dreamed our lives were not over. We registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was a start, but Mother had her heart set on paying rent, which meant finding income. She suggested selling cassava leaves to local fishermen. Kinshasa is an urban city, but there are fishing villages on the outskirts. During our months of walking, she had developed unique ways of preparing cassava leaves and asked what I thought of her idea, if I thought the fishermen would pay. I said I didn’t think it was a good idea. Maybe it is our turn to be someone else’s Chapter, I said. Mother nodded, said, Maybe, Baz. Maybe. Our Chapters were beyond helping themselves. For them the end of their story was so near, they could not see any other way. Tell me, Mbemba Bahizire—have we reached the end of our story? I thought about this a moment, then stood and ran to the door. I’ll fetch the leaves, Mother! It was the last time we laughed together.”