Man Down

by Roger Smith

  Turner walked away from the kitchen and the booze, away from the sleeping females, to his bedroom on the far side of the house.

  The day they moved in, the PoolShark making Turner wealthy enough to buy this bizarre confection—the seller needing cash to avoid prison for his role in a Ponzi scheme—Tanya had flung open the door to the remote guest room with its cramped en suite and said, “This will be yours.”

  Without waiting for his reply she’d stalked off to supervise the movers who were carrying the double bed into what was to become her room.

  After Lucy was born Turner and his wife had continued to share a bed but they hadn’t had sex in years, so this banishment had come as no surprise.

  It had been a relief to Turner.

  His wife’s meager body and the unpleasantly acrid odor that shrouded her no matter how many times a day she showered, or how fragrant the soap she used, had become repulsive to him and he couldn’t look at Tanya without being reminded of what she knew about him and how she wielded that knowledge like a weapon.

  Turner entered his room and shut the door.

  The bedroom was as different from the squalor of his bachelor cottage in Johannesburg as any room could be.

  A wooden floor polished to a high sheen.

  A single bed covered by a white comforter.

  A bedside table on which a hardcover copy of John Cheever’s short stores sat squared away with the edge.

  A shaker chair and an ironwood closet.

  The only decoration an unsigned watercolor of the desert he’d inherited from the previous owner and had grown fond of.

  No mirrors.

  Clean.

  Sterile.

  Almost monastic.

  He sat on the bed and thought of Grace, sick with the knowledge that if he lost her he would finally, irrevocably, break. That his nerves were not of a gauge strong enough to freight the pain that would come with such a loss: all the years of excess, coupled with the vast reservoirs of sublimated guilt and dread, had left him too fragile.

  He tried to talk himself out of what he was about to do but he could not.

  Standing, he crossed to the closet and opened the door, its oiled hinges making no sound.

  Reaching up to the top shelf he found a shoe box behind a stack of neatly folded sweaters.

  He opened the box and removed a chunky disposable cell phone.

  Turner knew the phone’s battery would be dead and he took it across to the table and mated it with his BlackBerry charger.

  The phone grunted and a baleful red light blinked and after a few seconds its face glowed a sickly yellow.

  Turner went to the window, looking out at the pallid moon that floated like a weather balloon over the Martian landscape.

  There was still time.

  He could take the foundling phone through to the garage and beat it with a hammer, spilling its innards on the concrete floor.

  But, of course, he didn’t do that.

  He lifted it, still attached to the charger, and pressed the one number in its memory.

  The phone rang for a long time and Turner was starting to believe, with some relief, that it would not be answered, when a man’s voice said: “Englishman.”

  4

  Turner headed south, leaving behind the junk food chains and gas stations as he drove the Lexus into the Sonoran desert.

  The disposable cell phone lay on the seat beside him, its blank gray face animated by starbursts of hard sunlight piercing the window glass of the car.

  The first time he’d seen the phone, three years ago, it had been lying in the same position.

  Turner, out hawking the PoolShark to retailers in Tucson had stopped at a 7-Eleven on Miracle Mile to buy a club soda, not bothering to lock the Lexus that he left in the meager shade of a dusty palm tree.

  He’d returned within a minute, cracking the tab of the soda, taking a slug as he slid behind the wheel, already hitting the ignition button to fire the air-conditioner.

  It was when he set the can in the cup holder that he saw the strange cell phone that had manifested on the passenger seat.

  Burping gas, Turner stared at the phone.

  It rang, startling him. The phone had a shrill ringtone and it bleated and flashed until Turner was forced to seize it and jab at the green button.

  “Yes?” he said, scanning the surrounds: a rundown motor court and a windowless titty bar housed in a vast, low-slung bunker about as inviting as a battery chicken shed.

  “Englishman?”

  That one word, delivered in an American drawl that did nothing to disguise the identity of its speaker, had Turner’s balls shriveling in his skivvies.

  Chris Bekker, who—contrary to the mantra-like reassurances Turner had repeated to himself over the years—was neither dead nor running a brothel in Cambodia, said, “No names, Englishman. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Turner surveyed the parking lot and the street, seeing only a tired-looking redhead—a stripper between shifts?—dressed in a lilac strappy top and faded blue jeans, listlessly puffing on a cigarette as she watched a little black dog squirt piss at the wall of the motel.

  “What’s wrong?” Turner asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Then what do you want with me?”

  “Just to let you know you’ve got a guardian angel watching over you.”

  “How did you find me?”

  Bekker laughed.

  “You left footprints, Englishman. Listen, I can’t talk for long—places to go, people to see, wah, wah, wah. Keep the phone charged. Anything happens that’s of, shall we say, mutual interest, you dial the number that’s in the memory. Yeah?”

  “Wait.”

  But Bekker was gone and Turner was left watching the woman walking away with her dog down the sun-seared road that seemed to him way more sad than miraculous.

  Maybe you’d had to be there in the fifties.

  He drove home, eyes on his rearview, even though he knew that if Bekker followed him he’d never allow himself to be spotted.

  Turner had dumped the phone in the shoe box in the back of his closet and, over time, he’d thought less frequently of it and of Chris Bekker.

  Until last night.

  Now he was heading toward the Mexican border, as Bekker had instructed during their brief conversation, telling Turner to leave Tucson at 10 a.m. and drive south and wait for his call.

  As he drove Turner checked his mirrors, seeing a scatter of pick-up trucks, semis and SUVs.

  He clicked on the radio and found himself plunged headlong into a talk show. The strident, hectoring voices of the callers, gabbling about cartels and coyotes and illegals had Turner changing channels.

  After a blast of static the cabin of the car was filled with thumping reggaetón—Latinos chanting hoarsely about gasolina. He guessed the song was an anthem to sex but it prompted an unwelcome image: the Lexus, with Turner still strapped behind the wheel, ablaze on a vast creosote pan, oily black smoke staining the bleached sky where vultures circled like twists of burned paper.

  As Turner killed the radio the phone rang.

  Despite the blasting air-conditioner he was sweating and the phone skidded away from his damp fingers, falling to the floor beneath the dashboard. Leaning forward to grab it Turner drifted into the next lane, earning a blaring horn and a raised middle finger from a chunky woman crammed into a Japanese hatchback.

  Over-correcting the drift too vigorously, Turner brought the cell to his ear and it smacked against the arm of his Aviators, leaving the sunglasses askew on his nose.

  “Yes?”

  “Take the next exit,” Bekker said, “then turn left. After a few clicks the blacktop gives way to dirt. Keep going until I call again. Got that?”

  “Yes.”

  Turner followed Bekker’s directions and when the asphalt ran out a dust cloud pursued the Lexus into a ragged landscape where only the occasional tuft of brush and the ever-present looming saguaro broke the endle
ss expanse of sand and stone, small rocks pelleting the underside of the car.

  Even though the windows were closed Turner tasted dust in his mouth, like the dry vestiges of the communion wafer—his mother a sometime Catholic—that he’d been forced to eat when he’d been bribed with comic books to attend Sunday mass on rare visits to the city.

  When 110 degrees Fahrenheit clicked up on the Lexus’s dash display, Turner realized that he was powerfully thirsty and he’d forgotten to bring water.

  “How could you be so fucking dumb?” he said out loud.

  And he heard Tanya’s determinedly South African voice correcting Lucy: “You mean stupid. We say stupid. They say dumb.”

  Constantly hectoring the child, berating her, in a futile attempt to quarantine her from any taint of Americanization.

  The sun glinted off something in the distance and Turner, squinting, realized it was the tail of jet plane, rising from the sand.

  When he spotted a tube of mangled fuselage with one sheared wing sprawled in the dust like a broken bird he thought he’d stumbled across some long-forgotten air disaster.

  Then, cresting a rise, he saw the carcasses of dozens of other jets and realized he was in one of the aircraft boneyards that littered the deserts of the Southwest, the dry, clear air preserving the planes while they were dismembered and stripped of their parts.

  The phone rang and Turner lifted it to his ear.

  “Stop your car,” Bekker said.

  Turner stopped.

  “Kill the engine, ditch the phone and step out. Walk a couple of paces away from the Lexus.”

  Turner obeyed, standing up into a blanket of dry heat that left him breathless.

  He heard the burp and rumble of a big engine and a black Jeep Wrangler emerged from behind one of the wrecked planes, stopping a few yards from him.

  The engine was cut and a door opened and Chris Bekker stepped down.

  He wore a white T-shirt, dazzling in the sun, and a pair of black jeans over brown boots.

  He was still lean but looked buff, as is if he’d been working out, the T-shirt tight on his sun-bronzed arms.

  His black hair, untouched by gray, was cropped shorter than it had been a decade ago and he sported a thick horseshoe mustache.

  Bekker held an automatic pistol in his hand and after he looked Turner over he holstered it at his hip, under the T-shirt, and walked closer.

  “Englishman.”

  A barrage of bloody memories rocked Turner and he was ready to sprint for the Lexus and flee.

  Only the certain knowledge that a stunt like that would earn him a tight grouping of hollow-points between the shoulder blades kept him standing facing Bekker, using his fear to dam up the deluge of flashbacks.

  “The cowboy and the construction worker going to join us?” Turner asked, faking a smile.

  “Hilarious,” Bekker said as he stroked the glossy mustache.

  “So, are you going to make me strip?”

  “Well, now, that depends.”

  “Depends in what?”

  “On whether you want me to or not.”

  Turner shrugged one shoulder.

  “Are you wearing a wire?” Bekker spoke full-on American now, with a drawl that turned wire into “wahr”.

  “No.”

  “Good. Keep your clothes on.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yep. Just like that.” Bekker spread his arms. “What can I say? We used to live in a more paranoid world.”

  He looked Turner up and down.

  “Jesus, Englishman, what the fuck happened to you?”

  “Ten years happened to me.”

  “Christ, I know that, but a fuckin golf shirt and chinos? Did I just pull you off the back nine?”

  “And you? When did you start talking like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like an American.”

  “I am an American.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m livin the dream.”

  “Where are you based?”

  “Phoenix.”

  “You followed me to Arizona?”

  “Isn’t that a bit grandiose of you? To think my life is chained to yours?”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I’m telling you it’s a coincidence.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidence.”

  “Well, Deepak Chopra, believe it because it’s true. When I left South Africa I headed to Miami but that was so fuckin last century. I looked for better options and settled on Phoenix. City of the future, man.”

  “Drugs? Hot money? Sex slaves?”

  “You make me sound so glamorous. I’m just a businessman, Englishman, thriving in the dollar economy.”

  “But you’re no longer Chris Bekker?”

  “No, I’m no longer Chris Bekker.”

  “So, who are you? Now?”

  “Just a guy at the end of a phone line.”

  “Why did you give it to me?”

  “The phone?”

  “Yes. The phone.”

  “It seemed the neighborly thing to do. Hell, I always liked you, Englishman, you know that.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Bekker took a pack of Luckies from his hip pocket and offered one to Turner who shook his head.

  “The phone was a warning, wasn’t it?”

  “A warning how?” Bekker said, firing up his cigarette.

  “That you were watching me.”

  Bekker shrugged, staring up at the amputated wing of an American Airlines DC-10, the torn metal bleeding hydraulic fluid into the sand.

  “What do you want, Englishman?”

  “I want to divorce my wife.”

  “You dragged me all the way out here to recommend a good divorce lawyer?”

  “No. Tanya won’t give me a divorce. ”

  “She can’t stop you.”

  “She can. Because she knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “She knows what happened ten years ago.”

  Bekker watched Turner, smoke curling from his mouth.

  “How does she know?”

  “I told her.”

  “You told her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything.”

  “Jesus.”

  Bekker sighed smoke and flicked the cigarette away, following its trajectory to the sand.

  Then he looked back at Turner, his dark eyes hard and cold.

  “Fuck, Englishman, why?”

  “She came to my cottage when I got back that night and I just freaked out and told her.”

  “Why did she protect you?”

  “To control me.”

  “She’s held that over your head?”

  “Every fucking minute of every fucking day for the last ten years.”

  “There’s another woman?”

  “Yes, there’s another woman.”

  “She knows about this other woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she’s saying if you leave her she’ll talk?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she means it?”

  “Yes, she means it.”

  Bekker nodded, tapped another cigarette from the pack and lit it.

  “I feel for you, Englishman, but why should I give a shit? I’m way, way under the radar.”

  “But the Lawn Jockey isn’t.”

  Bekker, staring out over the destroyed aircraft, blinked like a lizard in the sun.

  “You know what I think?” Turner said.

  “Tell me,” Bekker said, meeting his gaze.

  “I think you and the Lawn Jockey are still joined at the hip.”

  “He’s long ago and far away, Englishman.”

  “In this fucking global village he’s the boy next door.”

  Bekker smoked, saying nothing.

  “I hear he’s being groomed for the presidency?” Turner asked.

  “So they say.”

  “Even though there
was that corruption thing, a few years back?”

  “Allegations. Nothing was proved.”

  “No, because you fell on the grenade.”

  Bekker shook his head. “Now you’re just reachin for the low-hanging fruit, Englishman.”

  “He paid you to take the fall, didn’t he?” No response. “And he’s still paying you. Part of that is babysitting me. To make sure I don’t open my mouth.”

  “You’ve already opened your mouth.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You wouldn’t talk to the law.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you talk to them and you sink with us.”

  Turner nodded. “But Tanya . . .”

  “Yes, Tanya.” Bekker exhaled, his eyes never leaving Turner’s face. “Time to shit or get off the pot, Englishman. You want me to kill your wife, don’t you?”

  There it was. The line in the sand.

  Turner crossed it.

  “Yes. I want you to kill my wife.”

  Part Three

  Man is fully responsible for his nature and his choices.

  ― Jean-Paul Sartre

  1

  Dragged upward by the elevator Grace Worthington felt the relentless press of gravity, certain it would crush her bones and squeeze her heart to stillness.

  Gasping, her forehead greasy with sweat, she grabbed her sad little box of things and escaped when the elevator docked, hurrying to her apartment, slamming the door after her, dumping the box and running for the bathroom where she knelt at the toilet and retched into the bowl.

  Emptied, she sat shivering on the tiled floor. After a long time she got to her feet and stared at herself in the mirror and wondered how the hell she’d let this happen. How she’d just stood and looked on while her life had jumped its tracks.

  Shutting down these thoughts she got busy with her electric toothbrush, its nagging whine and jackhammer vibration drawing her attention to the headache that had hold of her temples.

  After fleeing John’s house Grace had been unable to face the thought of this anonymous furnished apartment and she’d stopped off at a bar on 4th Avenue where the jukebox—stocked entirely with lovesick old country songs—had provided a perfect soundtrack to her little ten-tissue weepie.