Unreliable
Page 28
“What the hell is going on?” fumes Gibson. “No one in this city can drive! Graves just texted me and he’s really scared. He thinks they’re going to find him.”
“Who’s going to find him?”
She falls silent, unwilling to betray her brother’s confidence. But noncompliance right now isn’t an option, and so I press harder. “Listen, I need to know what I’m getting into here. If Graves is mixed up in the Lee statue getting blown up and we help him in any way, then guess what? We become accomplices after the fact and we’ll go down with him. Do you want to get dragged into the Bastard Sons?”
“How do you know about them?”
“That doesn’t matter. The point is, you have to tell me what you know. I’m not willing to go to jail because of suburban revolutionaries who don’t have a clue. And you already might know too much, by the way, so you need to be extra careful.”
She sighs bitterly, smart enough to realize I’m right but too stubborn to give me any credit. She takes the only legal avenue that makes sense, which is also infuriating. “In that case, I don’t know anything.”
“Is that so? You seem to know something about what’s going on.”
“I don’t.”
“What about the Bastard Sons?”
“I’ve never heard of the Bastard Sons.”
It’s a virtuoso performance of plausible deniability on par with the Reagan administration. I get the impression that not even waterboarding could make her spill the beans on Graves. Again, from a legal standpoint, she’s on solid ground. But from my perspective, I still know next to nothing. But soon one of my secrets is revealed. Her feet plop down from the dash and fall to the floorboard, where she bumps into something. She reaches down and picks up Giap’s pistol and holds it gingerly, with her fingertips, like it’s been dipped in battery acid. I’d neglected to move it to a more secure location.
“Oh my God!” she cries. “Is this yours?”
“Put it down! Gently, please.”
She complies, my heart pounding away in terror. “It’s like the biggest one I’ve ever seen. Where’d you get it?”
“From the basement.”
She smirks in apparent appreciation. “Good. We might just need it.”
Suddenly the traffic clears and we start to gather speed as we head toward the river. Why is it that I can conceal nothing while Gibson is able to remain enshrouded in mystery? Once more she’s leading me on a fool’s errand to do her bidding against my better judgment. But I press on, in the name of saving the wedding, which by now might be irredeemable.
When we reach Belvedere, where I put on my left-turn blinker, I think: it’s funny my mother hasn’t called me back.
22
The venerable St. John’s sits atop Church Hill, a district that in my childhood was known for being the epicenter of urban blight. But no longer. Like Oregon Hill, Church Hill has undergone profound changes that have brought in bistros, art galleries, and boutiques. Evidence of the eighteenth century remains very much at the fore, but now with a veneer of twenty-first-century cool. As Gibson and I approach the wooden church by ascending the steep embankment at 24th Street, I ask her where we should look for Graves, as the grounds of St. John’s take up an entire city block.
“I’ll text him,” she replies. As we wait at a traffic light, I notice a familiar car parked on Grace Street opposite from us: it’s the same Isuzu pickup truck that I’d seen in the driveway when I’d first arrived home, owned by Avery, if that’s his name. The kid Graves wasn’t supposed to be hanging out with.
“Hey, isn’t that Avery’s truck?” I ask, and Gibson looks up, spooked by words.
“Where?”
“Right there.” I point, and she responds by ducking down low in the front seat.
“If he sees me, we’re dead.”
“What?”
The light turns green and I freeze. “What should I do?”
Gibson is texting away in her defensive posture, which would tax a yoga instructor. “Take a left.”
There isn’t much traffic now and unimpeded we proceed west on Grace Street for two blocks, where she then tells me to take a right. I keep looking in the rearview mirror to see if Avery is following, but as far as I can tell, the truck is still parked in the same place. We’re now slowly rolling down a narrow lane, past an ordinary building that houses something called ChildSavers. Irony abounds at all times, even if we mostly ignore it.
“Graves is not replying,” Gibson moans in agony. “I wonder if they already found him.”
“Who, Avery? I thought Avery was his friend.”
“Avery has no friends, dude. Take a right.”
I do what I’m told and we now climb up East Broad Street and pass Patrick Henry’s Pub & Grille. The stately if not pugnacious church again comes into view, as fittingly Gibson leans over and picks up the gun from her feet. My eyes bug out of my head at the sight. What brash plan is cooking inside her pulchritudinous skull? What has my pilfering unleashed?
“Whoa, hold on,” I say in my most paternal tone, omniscient and annoyed. But Gibson brushes me off with a shrug.
“Just drive, okay. That asshole isn’t winning this time.”
“There’s another time? Why can’t we just call the cops? This is madness.”
“Park there.” She means on the street beneath a leafy maple tree.
“Why?”
“Just do it. And keep the car running.”
The needle on the gas tank is pushing E. I follow her instructions, and as soon as we’re parked, she jumps out before she can explain even the rudiments of her scheme. I watch as Gibson goes hurrying off toward the backside of the white church, whose spire rises gracefully over the old city. She’s stuffed the gun into a shoulder bag, and soon she rounds a corner and is gone. Still no word from my mother, not to mention Lola…all of this feels so wrong. I’d call 911 myself, except for the obvious reason that my own crimes prevent me from reporting this outrageous showdown in the shadow of a hallowed ground. Any second I expect to hear gunfire, which, back in the day, when Richmond was the murder capital of the country, a shoot-out on Church Hill was a regular happening. I don’t have much time left as a free man, and spending it this way, filled with dread instead of in Lola’s arms, strikes me as unfairly absurd. The powerlessness of waiting…all day I’ve been chasing down ghosts in a city surfeited with them…maybe Bev was right after all…there was no reason to return here, to come to Dixie…my mother could visit us in Ithaca, which she refused to do because she knew Bev hated Richmond…the two women in my life, constantly sparring, at war, with me the collateral damage.
Minutes slice by, chopped by the savage knife of Time. How much more can I endure? I should call Detective Voss back and beg him to come arrest me, though he’d be the most surprised homicide flatfoot in history since there are no charges pending against me. But he could also bail us out of this mess before it’s too late and I have to tell Mead his children are dead…
There they are! Finally something has gone right tonight! Gibson and Graves come sprinting down the sidewalk, and on Graves’s face is a grin that can only be described as joyous, while Gibson remains stoic as usual, unreadable, because she gives the world nothing for free. If only I could be as strong as she is for one minute of my miserable life! One second! To be aloof and untouchable! I crawled up into an ivory tower thinking I’d find solace in scholarship, in seeking the truth…but pleasures of the flesh proved more powerful.
They pile into the car, with Gibson shouting at me to step on it.
“Come on, we need to haul ass!”
I try to accelerate but, like me, the Honda’s best days are behind it. This is most likely her last road trip before she is turned out to pasture in a junkyard. So many memories in this interior. Bev gave me a hand job in this very car, on our third date, after we saw a Billy Corgan solo set—Bev had a thing for Billy Corgan, which in retrospect was a dead giveaway that she lacked discernment in men. Because guess what? Igor lo
oked just like Billy C of the Smashing Pumpkins! How had I failed to make that connection until now, when it’s too late?
“Floor it!” Gibson exhorts in frustration, as the Honda struggles to make it up Church Hill.
“I am! This car is old, okay? And it’s almost out of gas.”
“Duck!” she snaps at her brother, reaching into the backseat to squish him down. Once Graves is hidden from plain sight, Gibson too crouches into a semi-erotic position, with her face inches from my groin, not unlike the posture Bev assumed during the aforementioned hand job. And the first time Lola took a ride with me in this car, it was to see Magic Mike at the Ithaca Mall…no, bad joke. The truth? Sure, why not. Here’s the truth. On our very first car trip together, Lola and I went to the drugstore and I watched her buy Trojan Magnum XL condoms, while pretending to look at hearing aids near the cash register. The clerk was a young woman, pudgy and pimply, and I swear she handled that box of condoms with a heartrending tenderness. Or maybe she was spooked by my proximity. Or I wanted her to react, for Lola to giggle, anything, but it was just a plain cash transaction (I’d paid, of course), a simple transfer of funds in the sputtering engine of Capitalism. Later, Lola would put an XL condom on some chemistry major named Derrick and snap off a series of photos for our sordid amusement…
“What’s happening?” I ask, a poignant question that has multiple applications. I might be referring to the present moment that involves the three of us, but I also could be speaking just about myself and my own existence, or that of every living thing on the planet.
“Don’t say anything, Graves. Not a word, ever, to anyone.” Gibson would make a great Mob lawyer. The ice water in her veins could cool the atmosphere and reverse global warming. Graves is panting like a golden retriever in the backseat, as though he’s just come from a romp at the doggie park.
“You should turn around,” he tells me between gasps for air. “In a few blocks you’re going to enter Chimborazo and if they’re following us, we’ll be trapped.” He’s referring to a hilltop Civil War battlefield that is now a park and medical museum. That part I know; the “if they’re following us” is what I don’t get.
“Avery? That’s who you’re talking about?”
“Don’t answer that question!” Gibson orders. I almost refute her with an “Objection, Your Honor,” but I just take a right to circle back around to Main Street. We fall into an awkward silence, not unusual when a family takes a car trip. I’d seen Avery’s oddball truck, and so there was no getting around the fact that the kid is here somewhere, possibly out for blood. Why would he have turned on Graves? The simplest explanation is that Graves somehow has become expendable or a danger—perhaps he wanted out of the plot, a charitable interpretation that invests Graves with a moral center. At the opposite end of the spectrum is that Graves wanted to blow up more stuff in Richmond and Avery was the one who vowed to stop him. Obviously these two views are antithetical and it really matters which is correct, unlike most academic arguments, which focus on splitting hairs no one cares about.
“If you want out,” I say humbly, with avuncular concern, “you can get out. Nothing is impossible.”
“We can’t talk about this,” Gibson rebuffs me.
“I’m just offering the wisdom of someone who’s been in and out of hot water,” I tartly reply. “If Avery is coming at you because you know this entire plan is ridiculous, then you can simply call the police and make a deal to save your hide.”
“I’ll never do that,” he says calmly. But to which moral system is he adhering? The one of honor or the one of revolution? The honorable man never snitches, and the revolutionary never quits.
“So what do you want me to do? Take you home? What?” I don’t hide the anger in my voice, because they need to know that they are pissing me off. I never asked to be dragged into this maelstrom of misguided mayhem, and apropos of Poe, at that very moment we drive by the great writer’s house, on the 1900 block of East Main Street, now a museum where during high school I’d drop in just to feel his spirit. “Just tell me and I’ll do it. But if you had anything to do with blowing up the Lee statue, I’ll call the police right now because that was total horseshit.”
“He didn’t,” Gibson answers for him.
“How do you know that?” I challenge her, but she retreats into her inscrutable silence.
“I can’t go home,” says Graves nervously. “They’ll look for me there. That’s the first place they’ll go.”
My mother hasn’t called me back yet—because she’s being held at gunpoint? The image of that horror explodes in my mind with the ferocity of a rocket-propelled grenade. “They might be there already!” I yell in exasperation, stepping hard on the accelerator. “Are you that stupid? What did you expect them to do, send an Uber car for you?”
“Cool out!” Gibson chides me.
“No, I won’t cool out. My mother hasn’t called me back in an hour and she won’t answer the phone, even though we said we’d talk again in minutes. Do you see the problem here? Don’t tell me to cool out. We have to get back there right now.”
“If I’m not there, they’ll leave,” Graves assures me. But his voice catches, indicating that he doesn’t completely believe himself.
“Can you hear yourself? You sound like an idiot. Shut up, both of you, and let me handle this.”
“I didn’t blow up the statue,” Graves pleads, gripping the headrest and pulling it back so that my body inches toward him. “I was never down with that, never. A pointless gesture that wouldn’t bring us closer to taking this entire system apart.”
“What system?”
“The one where the rich get to steal and the poor get to starve.”
I don’t know that I believe his protestation of innocence, but now isn’t the time for a doctrinal dispute about the revolutionary vanguard. “I hope you’re telling the truth. So who did it then? Do you have firsthand knowledge?”
“I think Avery is following us,” Gibson blurts out, gazing into the side-view mirror. I check the rearview, and she’s right. The battered truck is on our tail. But he might not know that Gibson and Graves are in this vehicle, as Main Street is a major road that connects east and west and courses through downtown and the Fan. I need to conduct a little experiment to test the hypothesis.
“Hold on, I’m turning up here.” At Shockoe Bottom I hang a quick right at 13th Street and continue on up toward the State Capitol building, designed by Mr. Jefferson himself. The truck must’ve moved on, because now it’s nowhere in sight. At Broad Street we wait at a light for a left-hand turn.
“Good job,” Gibson offers, giving me a high five.
“That was just like The Fast and the Furious, huh?” I chuckle, enjoying this brief triumph. I try calling my mother again but get no answer. If Avery’s here, he can’t be there at the house…unless there are other coconspirators.
“He won’t give up that easy,” sighs Graves in dejection. “He thinks I’m going to rat him out, but I hate the cops as much as he does. Maybe more. Honestly, he just likes to destroy things, including people’s lives. It’s a game to him.”
“Is there someone else who might be looking for you?” I ask pointedly, as we pass by the Dungeon of all places, scene of Gibson’s earlier musical apotheosis. We keep coming full circle and retracing our footsteps, as though we’re trapped in an ungodly Möbius strip.
“I guess. I doubt it, though. Avery’s the one to worry about.”
“You need to tell the police what you know.” I slap the steering wheel for emphasis, but the manly gesture seems not to move the needle.
“That’s not happening.”
“You can’t endanger my mother’s life like that! If anything happens to her…”
“Nothing will happen!” they both shout at me in tandem, voices shrill in abnegation, despite the fact that evidence to the contrary is staring us in the face.
“Eddie, I promise you, your mother is fine. Don’t forget our dad is at the same house, you
know, and so it’s not just you with a dog in this fight.”
“Stop acting like Graves did something wrong,” Gibson protests while lighting up a cigarette. “He’s the one who flexed. This is all on Avery.”
“I don’t know that the cops would agree. Where did the bomb come from? It wasn’t an RPG?”
“It was, but I didn’t get it for them. They got it on their own.”
“It didn’t come from the basement?”
“Hell no. See, that’s where it all started, when I wouldn’t hook them up. Then Avery started acting like I was a traitor. I thought he was going to kill me last night when he stopped by. Then you showed up. Probably saved my skin.”
“See?” Gibson pounces. “Graves isn’t the bad guy.”
But I’m not easily swayed by simplistic explanations, and if I had a red marker in my hand, I’d be gashing this essay to shreds. “I never said he was, but you have knowledge of a crime and you’re bound by law to report it.”
“What law? The law that lets billionaires buy elections? Whatever. I’m following Thoreau’s advice on this. The only place for a just man is prison.”
“I think that might be a misunderstanding of his philosophy.”
“Man, I’m not telling the cops anything, but if you want to call them, be my guest.”
I pull into a gas station at the corner of Broad and Thompson. Neither Graves nor Gibson offers me any gas money. Again, I have to remind myself that these two aren’t my problem. By some miracle I’m actually returning them home, safe and sound, where they can wake up tomorrow and ready themselves for the wedding. My mother will have no clue of what I endured to deliver these two hellions to her doorstep, and she doesn’t need to know. I owe her that much. And anyway, Lola has never strayed far from my thoughts, and the sooner I can deposit Mead’s children in Traylor Estates, the sooner I can resume my search for my bride—yes, bride! I intend to pop the question! I want to make her my wife, now that we have nothing to hide and our love can bloom in the July sunshine. Dahlia’s disgust means nothing anymore, and her disapproval of me will wither on the vine.