by SUZAN STILL
Calypso could see that Icepick was completely flummoxed, as if she had somehow manifested his mother’s ghost in the room.
“You were just a poor kid doing what had to be done. It was dog eat dog. Probably no one ever told you so but you were a hero. You saved your family that day. And you’ve paid a heavy price for it. I know in my heart that your mother was proud of you.”
If she had fired a handgun into her opponent, she could not have reduced him further. Icepick shifted his feet, settling out of attack stance, and sagged against the wall as if he had taken a bullet. He lifted eyes heavy with tears that had needed shedding for over sixty years. His voice, although still soft, had lost its seductive menace.
“You think so?”
“I’m absolutely certain of it.”
Calypso resisted the urge to go to him. To touch him. He was too much the wounded animal. So she followed up her advantage with another blow to his defenses.
“I need you, too, Icepick. I need you to be heroic for me. I’m in a bad spot and I don’t know the rules here. I don’t know how to defend myself. Would you defend me?”
She surprised herself with the depth of her plea. It came from a place not of fear but of newly roused compassion for Icepick. In those few instants, she had seen him vulnerable, undefended, as he must have been before and just after his first kill.
In every human, she realized, there is a Before and After persona, one innocent and principled, the other bruised and defensive. Somehow, through the grace of the locket and its dream, she had touched the pulse of the former.
Icepick straightened, and with a flick almost too quick to register, pushed the icepick up his sleeve like a magician. Calypso had not even seen it in his hand. A wave of weakness swept over her and instead of gripping the chair like a weapon, she leaned into it for support. They stood staring at one another, each trying to imagine how to go forward from this unexpected juncture.
§
Suddenly they both flinched in alarm. With a tremendous crash, the door flew violently inward. Lone-R was revealed in the weak light from the hallway, his leg still descending from the mighty kick he had delivered. He rushed into the room, crouched in a fighter’s stance, his scarred and leathery knuckles up, his torso weaving.
“You son of a bitch!” he screamed, and he lunged for Icepick, who retreated behind the table.
“Get out! Get out!” he yelled, and Calypso didn’t know if he was telling her to run or if he was trying to eject Icepick.
Lone-R caught the edge of the table in one hand, flipped it on edge, and used it as a battering ram to press Icepick against the wall.
Icepick did not fight back. His shoulders and head hit the wall with a sickening thump, and he raised his arms in a gesture of surrender.
“Lone-R!” Calypso shrieked. “No! Stop!”
“This son of a bitch came here to kill you!”
Lone-R slammed the tabletop over and over into Icepick’s body, using the full force of his massive body. Calypso was reminded of a bullfight she had attended years before, in which the bull trapped the matador against the bullring wall with one horn and then crushed him repeatedly with its vast chest.
Calypso burst into tears. “Lone-R, please! Please stop!” she sobbed. Icepick’s eyes were unfocused and she could see he was nearly unconscious. “Please! You’ve got to listen to me! Stop for God’s sake!”
Something in her tone finally broke through Lone-R’s killing rage. He kept the pressure on Icepick, but ceased ramming him. He turned to Calypso with a look of consternation.
“He’s gonna kill you, don’t you understand?” he asked, shaking his huge head, as if her reaction were too naive to comprehend.
Calypso dashed her tears with the back of her hand.
“We were just negotiating a truce,” she panted. “Ask him.” She waved her hand at Icepick and then collapsed into the chair, lifting the hem of her long skirt to wipe her eyes.
Lone-R turned again to Icepick and, shoving the tabletop against him with less vigor, snarled, “Well? What about it?”
Icepick tried to answer but couldn’t speak. Lone-R backed the pressure off a trifle and Icepick wheezed, “Broken ribs. Can’t breathe.”
“This a trick?” Lone-R eyed him warily.
Icepick shook his head, his face gone completely white.
“Throw down the icepick then.”
He released the pressure of the table, allowing Icepick a small space in which to lift his hand. Icepick fumbled at his wrist, produced the weapon, and let it drop to the floor. Glancing at Calypso, Lone-R jerked his head at it.
“Go pick it up.”
Calypso did as commanded and only then did Lone-R drag the table away from Icepick, who slumped against the wall, groaning.
“Let’s get him on the bed,” Calypso said, moving to support Icepick. Lone-R joined her and they lifted him carefully. “Do you have a doctor here?” Her tone was urgent but Lone-R was slow to respond in kind.
“Yeah. Bones.”
“Go get him.”
“I don’t wanna leave you alone with him.”
“Just go, Lone-R. The poor man can scarcely breathe. I hope a rib hasn’t punctured his lung.”
Lone-R picked up the icepick and handed it to Calypso.
“If he makes a move, you stick him with this, you hear?” Then he spun toward the door and took off running.
§
It was several minutes before Lone-R came racing back with Bones. In the meantime, she made Icepick as comfortable as possible, stoked the fire against the chill of the coming dawn, and then pulled the chair beside the bed and bent over the patient solicitously.
“How are you feeling?”
Icepick nodded, looking grim. “Alive,” he wheezed.
Calypso smiled at him. “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” she said reassuringly.
She gazed into the fire, debating with herself, and finally asked, “Why did you do it? You had a chance. Lone-R, I mean. I saw how open he was. I saw the icepick in your hand. Why did you put it away?”
She looked at Icepick with something close to affection.
“And of course, don’t answer. Talking will only make things worse. I just want you to know that I know. You sacrificed yourself willingly—again.”
She wanted to touch him, to soothe him, but refrained. Instead, she began to hum a tune from her childhood, hoping that Icepick might be touched by Dvorak’s sad and lilting song.
“Songs my mother taught me/in the days long vanished/Seldom from her eyelids were the teardrops banished…” she sang in a soft, almost whispered soprano, accompanied by the reedy wail of wind beyond the sill.
When tears began to slide down Icepick’s face, she bent close to him.
“Do you want me to stop?” she whispered.
He rocked his head on the pillow, no.
Calypso kept singing and humming until she heard footsteps pounding down the hall.
“They’re here,” she whispered, and wiped away his tears with the hem of her skirt.
§
Calypso stood before the assembled Ghosts. Even Icepick, his ribs bound, was propped in a chair among the others, his place guarding the door next to Lone-R taken by El Lobo.
“This room,” Father Keat began abruptly, “was the court of the Inquisition. The Jesuits believed in the power of the Inquisition and that was one of the beefs the king had with them. But the ones who built this place weren’t about to quit. They would kidnap notorious people from town or local Indians and torture them. Most often, they ended by putting them to death. It’s all in the journals they kept. So we all feel right at home here, right brothers?”
The men nodded their agreement. Father Keat shot a crafty look at Calypso.
“How’s that make you feel?”
“Queasy.”
“Too much blood and guts for you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s time, then, to tell the rest of the story. Haven’t you been wonderin
g why we’re wearing these monk clothes?”
“I have been.”
“Okay. Here’s the deal. I bought this place for a reason. I bought it with money I got running a secret CIA operation in Africa. They pay well for somebody to do their dirty work. All that was involved was to fly over certain villages in this plane they set me up with and drop incendiary bombs.
“No problem, right? So I fly over, drop the bombs, the villages go up in flames, and I just circle around, and watch as people run out of their houses with their clothes on fire. Or their hair. Or they’re dragging the bodies of old people who can’t walk. Or their children who are injured or maybe dead.
“I’ve got Willy Nelson singing on a tape deck and I’m thinking about how I’m going to go on a big drunk when I get back home. And all of a sudden, it hits me.
“I look down and I see—really see—the damage I’ve done to innocent human beings. I get this rush of sickness and I up-chuck all over myself. I feel like I can’t breathe. Like I’m wearing a shirt of fire myself. Only it’s not going to kill me—it’s just going to eat away at me for the rest of my life.
“When I got back, I knew I’d never be able to do that work again. So what the hell was I going to do? That was when I met El Lobo in Dallas and he told me about this place in Mexico where he’d been hiding. And it came to me: I was going to buy it and make a home for retired killers. I knew other guys who were getting too old for it anymore. They were tired. They wanted out.
“So that’s what I did. We fixed the place up and we established our perimeters. The only people we had to worry about were the local Indians, and they won’t come near the place because they think it’s haunted.
“There’s the occasional hiker. We used to just kill them and bury them out back to fertilize the fruit trees. But as time went on, we started not feeling good about that.
“So we switched to Scopolamine. If we can catch them on the boundaries of the property and give them the drug, like we did you, we just lead them away and when the drug wears off, they don’t remember a thing.”
“Why didn’t you do that with Hill and me?”
“Because El Lobo couldn’t track you past the cave. And you told him when the drug took over that you’d come through the cave from the Urique Canyon. He knew that was impossible and he couldn’t figure out how you could still be lying, with the Devil’s Breath in your system. So he brought you here.”
“And Hill, too?”
Father Keat didn’t respond.
“So you present a challenge to us,” he continued. “Frankly, we don’t know what to do with you.”
“I’d rather not fertilize any fruit trees.”
“That’s understandable.”
“May I ask a question?
“Of course.”
“You’re a group of killers. Don’t you have internecine conflicts? I mean, what keeps killers from killing one another? I had a roommate once and before we were through, I wanted to kill her!”
She smiled for the first time since her capture, and she thought she caught the wraith of a guffaw rising from the Ghosts.
Father Keat nodded.
“We’ve had our problems, especially at the beginning. We came down here, a bunch of freewheeling guys, and we worked hard but we partied hard, too. We drank. Did some coke. Brought in some women.
“Pretty soon, all sense of discipline broke down. A couple of the guys started a feud and ended up killing each other, one with a knife, the other with a gun at point-blank range.”
“Did you bury them under the fruit trees?”
“We did. The orchard was just getting started. Birdman went under an apple tree and Saw made the orange tree take off like crazy.”
Calypso couldn’t stifle her smile.
“I see. So what happened to change things?”
“We knew it would never work unless we got some control over things. So we started having assemblies. We talked until we thought talking might be a new form of torture. We made some rules. Things started to settle down.”
“There must have been people who didn’t like the new rules.”
“In the end, there were only a couple of hardcore guys who couldn’t adjust.”
“Apple trees?”
“A mango and a date palm, if my memory serves me.”
“Killing seems to answer most of your needs.”
“It used to. Over the years, we’ve changed, most of us. Transformed is maybe a better word. We’ve recognized our guilt. We’ve experienced our shame. We’ve taken vows not to do harm anymore. We practice martial arts. We meditate. We eat clean food and don’t do drugs or drink—much anyway.
“Finally, we realized we’re nothing but a bunch of monks. A brotherhood of ghosts. So we bought ourselves some monk robes and here we are.”
Calypso nodded.
“Very admirable,” she said drily.
§
Father Keat called Lone-R to witness again.
“Tell her what happened to you,” he commanded.
Lone-R folded his hands in front of him and dropped his head to stare at them.
“I was in LA after San Quentin,” he began, his baritone softened by remembrance, “and I gots a job. It was just shovelin’ dirt. Day labor. But I was tryin’ to go straight.
“I was workin’ with a bunch of Mexicans and they thought I didn’t know Spanish. So they started makin’ cracks about black men, callin’ me names. All under their breath and then everyone’d laugh. It went on all day, and I was gettin’ madder and madder. Then one of ‘em who’s workin’ next to me throws a shovelful of dirt right in my face and I just exploded.
“I swung my shovel back and I caught that guy right in the arm, and I heard the bone break. I hit him again—brought the edge of the shovel down on top of his shoulder and just about cut his arm off. Blood started to squirt everywhere.
“The other guys were paralyzed. Just starin’. The guy was on the ground but I hit him again in the head. And then I just kept beatin’ and beatin’ on him, until he was a bloody mush.
“Finally, the other guys came for me. I hit a couple of ‘em and they dropped. Before the others could get to me, I just threw my shovel and ran. They chased me for a couple of blocks but I was too fast.
“Finally, they gave up, but I kept runnin’ until I came to the beach. I ran across it straight into the surf and I stayed in there, scrubbin’ off the blood ’til I thought it was safe to come out. Then I went down to the rail yard, hopped a freight goin’ east and ended up in Dallas.
“I probably wouldn’t of cared about killin’ that guy except that when I was cleanin’ myself off there was this gob of stuff plastered to my cheek, and when I peeled it off, it was some of his brains, all white and slimy.
“It made me puke. And I thought about how just a few minutes ago that guy had been thinkin’ with that white slime. Thinkin’ bad thoughts but still he was able to think. And now he was just a bunch of jelly, layin’ in a pile of dirt.
“Somethin’ clicked in me. Like I was in the dark and I flipped the light on. I don’t want to kill no one ever again.
“I came here and I grow vegetables. I gots tomatoes nine feet tall in the summer. Right now it’s fall, so I only gots greens—chard and kale and some lettuce and cilantro. Maybe I can show you later.”
Lone-R concluded with such a note of boyish pride that Calypso felt a stab of compassion toward her jailor.
Father Keat nodded. Lone-R went back to his post at the door and The Knife took his place up front. He looked at Father Keat with the forlorn eyes of a dog left out in the rain and Father Keat gave him a nod.
“Well, like I said before,” The Knife began, “I was a hired killer for twenty years and proud of it. I bought a shop for my dad and my mom had a car. I helped my brothers and sisters go to college. They all got good professions because of me. It never occurred to me that what I was doing was wrong because it was always making everything right.
“But one day I was doing a jo
b. All I had to do was shoot this guy from a distance with a sniper rifle. So here he comes down the street and I aim and pull the trigger, and just at that very instant, this little girl darts out in front of him and I’m watching through the scope as the top of her head explodes.
“Jesus Christ! I’m ready to throw myself off the rooftop! I couldn’t live with myself. I found out who her parents were and I sent them all the money I had, a hundred thousand dollars, anonymously. I tried to buy my conscience quiet but it didn’t work.
“I was ready to shoot myself when Keat, here, calls me up and says he wants to talk to me. So you can guess the rest. I never married. It was easy to fold up shop and plant my ID on a bum I found dead down by the river.
“Well, okay. No. I didn’t find him dead. I killed him. But it was a mercy killing, believe me. Then I had to cut off his head and hands so they couldn’t ID him. It was my last job. I don’t want to kill anyone again, ever. I swear to you. I’m done. So I came here and I do the cooking, and I try to make my peace. You know. With the guy upstairs.”
The Knife looked close to tears, his bald head bent, his shoulders sagging. “And the worst part is,” he said in a voice that choked back a sob, “I had to leave my old dad without saying goodbye and him with cancer, too. I swear to God, I’d die every death I ever meted out, if I could just have seen my father before he passed. Christ! What a mess I made of my life!”
The last words were squeezed out in a rasping whisper. Then The Knife dropped his head to his chest and wept.
§
Lone-R came from the door, put his arm around The Knife’s shoulders, and lead him back to his chair.
The room was more than silent. It was as if the torrent of The Knife’s shame had swept them all into a whirlpool that was sucking them down into the darkest moments of their lives, moments filled with blood and violence and the irredeemable selling of their souls.
As if on cue, the sun ducked suddenly behind a cloud and the room went dark. With a rising shriek, wind slammed the wall of windows and rain fell in a racketing deluge. An icy draft swept through the room and the fire guttered on the hearth.