The Night Archer

by Michael Oren

  She whistled through it as a kid whenever she talked, which wasn’t often, or rounded the bases, which was. So they called her Whiffle. A wisp of a girl through which winds seemed to pass, flapping the hand-me-downs her body never filled. Whiffle, a weightless ball easily pitched and smacked.

  Her real name, not that anybody remembered it, was Emma. But that didn’t fit the tomboy who preferred baseball to Barbie dolls and warmed to the company of roughnecks. Not brilliant—never finished ninth grade—but able to distinguish bad from criminal, sinister from the merely wrong. Yet even that skill was beaten out of her by a drunken father who appeared sporadically to do just that, and a mother too addled by Superglue to be one. Whiffle grew, wild and vulnerable, surrounded by semi-siblings either in or on route to jail, doomed by poverty, ignorance, and abuse.

  Years on the force, Beecham heard a thousand stories like hers. His own was almost identical. The same rain-pierced trailer rusting on cement blocks, the same thrift store jeans and premature exposure to life. He learned to drive before turning eleven, to hotwire pickups at twelve, and lost his virginity without quite understanding he possessed it. His rap sheet, at sixteen, would have haunted him at thirty if he hadn’t skirted the law. If he hadn’t grown up to enforce it.

  But Beecham was smart, not school smart, but wise in the ways of survival. He early on identified a system made to be sidestepped and exploited. Others might be crushed by it or paralyzed, but he could manipulate it and come out on top which, for him, meant joining the state police. With authority in his badge and punch in his gun belt, he could cash in and leave trash like Whiffle to pay for it.

  And Whiffle was born to pay, her purpose in a curt existence utterly shorn of details. For she remembered little of it—thank the H and the rotgut—especially not the night of the murder. Beecham did, though, with a clarity that would beam from the pages of a report that would galvanize the jury. His testimony, the judge revealed, proved critical in reaching the verdict.

  “It was raining,” Beecham begins. “It was always raining,” only to be cut off by a retching sound from the Boonton Butcher’s cell, followed by a bray of expletives. Betsy Rae curses her with words that could shame a trailer park, and the guards swear back, warning them both to shut their traps or forfeit their dose of pentobarbital. Beecham resumes, “And the field was mud.”

  Pale lids descend over his eyes, shuttering for a moment the lusterless blue that serves him as a kind of passport. Flashing it, together with a naturally gleaming smile, enabled him to escape the fixes of his youth and divert the blame to others. “You were out there, though. You and Chaz Lo Duca.”

  “Raining, you say? Mud?”

  The orange ball unfurls. Emerging is a woman who, though puffed by prison fat, remains waif-like. Words still hiss through her teeth. “Chaz?”

  “Charlie. Chucky. Lo Duca,” he refreshes her. “But we just called him the Duke.”

  A pinch of lip appears in the gap in her teeth as she chews. On hands and knees, she crawls past the bunk, the sink and the toilet, to press her face to the bars. “Tell me more.”

  “The Duke. Sole supplier for our park and the others around it. A liar, a cheat, a bastard who’d steal the rags off your back—off your mother’s back—if that’s all you had for collateral.” Without being asked, Beecham describes the man. Five-foot-eight and rangy, scraggly black hair, pitted skin gone yellow. Breath like an open grave. A shame the court photo showed him in his Sunday best, the one Sunday out of hundreds he wasn’t dealing.

  “But he liked me…”

  “Liked you, yeah, like a fisherman likes fish.” Beecham’s smile turns cynical. “He wanted your money, Whiffle. He wanted your life.”

  “And you protected me.”

  She says this and her expression is again that amalgam of adoration and awe that he, several years older and keen to such things, had noticed whenever they were together as kids. Yes, he protected her, kept her from being used too liberally by the other boys, shielding her from her father whenever he showed up, controlling as best he could her passage from pot to the hard stuff. Fed her ham and cheese. To him, alone, she was My Little Whiffle, his sidekick, his charge, if never his lover. No, Beecham had calculated when still in their teens, their connection had to be pure.

  “True, true,” Beecham lies. Fact was, she defended him, furnishing an elder brother’s cover almost as complete as his uniform’s. For who would believe that the tow-headed youth who watched out for Whiffle was also preparing her downfall? Who would doubt his version? And who could suspect that he, with those guileless eyes and smile, the badge and the boots, was secretly running the Duke?

  “I did my best,” he continues with a shake of his buzzcut head. “But then…”

  “But then what? It’s so hard to remember.”

  Then she got into debt and the Duke didn’t suffer debtors indefinitely. And Beecham couldn’t stomach his stealing. It threatened first his reputation in the parks and ultimately his freedom when the pusher, once squeezed, threatened to turn him in. Such drastic situations called for radical remedies, he knew, and he’d been brewing one since childhood.

  “Then that night in the field. In rain, the mud.”

  That’s where the Duke did business, with trailer lights glistening in the mist. And there he waited for the payoff from Whiffle, alone, unarmed, an innocent man unsuspectingly meeting a woman who often forgot what month it was, much less the sums she owed.

  “You went without a coat, without the cash. Carrying only that ax.”

  It belonged to her father, for the fires he never got around to lighting. For safety, Beecham gave it to her—“Just in case”—along with an extra fix. The plan was to have her confront the dealer while Beecham watched in the dark, waiting to make the arrest. Or so he told her. “Don’t you worry, My Little Whiffle, I got your back.”

  The prisoner’s hand flails the air in front of her face, as if to ward off flies. “And you were…? Remind me, please.”

  “On the interstate.” He says this with a widening of the eyes intended to broadcast blue. “Patrolling.”

  She nods as if to indicate, “Of course.” For the rest of that night is a blank. Nothing shook her memory of it, not even the photograph of the Duke looking much different from the first, with his head and half a torso shredded.

  An anonymous phone call brought a local cop to the scene. The rain had removed most of the evidence, the boot prints, the blood. But there was the Duke all divvied up and Whiffle cradling the weapon. She offered no resistance, only a sigh as she submitted to the cuffs, that came out sounding like a whistle.

  That was one sound more than she made during the trial. Flaccidly she sat while the prosecution presented its case. This was so compelling that the trial might have ended swiftly if not for Beecham’s taking the stand. The tale he spun under oath—of addiction and larceny and blackmail—was commonplace in the parks, he said, and the life of the accused was no different. But while these woes might have moved the jurors to pity, its ultimate benefactor was Beecham. There were other choices in life, he attested, alternative paths, and as evidence cited himself. The comparison he struck, rather than saving the defendant, conclusively established her guilt.

  Whiffle, alone, didn’t know that. Blurry of thought, bereft of any memory that might link her to the murder, she believed that Beecham still had her back. Her single emotion was gratitude to him, which she showed with a gap-toothed grin even as the sentence was read.

  And she is indebted to him still, pressing childlike fingers through the bars. “Thank you.”

  Even Beecham can be taken aback. “For what?”

  “For helping me remember. For making sense of all this.”

  Betsy Rae howls like a gutted dog while a different stink pervades the row, from the excrement coating her cell. The guards hose it down, cursing and threatening to go light on her potassium chloride. The Boonton Butcher gurgles and spits. Evil congeals around Beecham.

  Whiffle contin
ues, “Otherwise, I’d be punished for a crime I can’t remember.” She grants him one last view of that gap. “Like it was committed by somebody else.”

  He touches his fingers to hers, clammy with ham and cheese, and wonders if she might yet recall the truth. Whether the chemicals that convey death through her veins can also stimulate memory. Would he, seated among witnesses as he promised, hear the whistle of her final recollection?

  “No need to thank me,” Beecham says with an affidavit of smile and eyes. “Anything for My Little Whiffle.”

  The Book of Jakiriah

  “Goddammit!” Jakiriah cried, and his agony echoed through canyons. “Goddammit,” he hissed while hauling his foot by its ankle upwards toward his butt and, with his free hand, plucking the thorn from his heel. Up to the blazing sun he held the thistle, examining it with one rheumy eye, then ranted, “You! You made this!”

  “That,” the sky suddenly admitted, “and the carbuncle, the kidney stone, sciatica, and toe fungus. I created them all.”

  Hearing these words, Jakiriah might have his fallen on his face and prayed. Instead, he waxed indignant. “You make it sound like something good,” he spat and flicked the thorn heavenward. “You sound like you’re actually proud of it.”

  “Proud?” The clouds seemed to shrug. “Not proud, just factual. I made everything. Remember, in Genesis, the chaos that preceded creation? Who do you think made the chaos?”

  “Then why didn’t you make me what I wanted to be?” the man, crusty and unkempt and far more aged-looking than his years, shook a horny fist. “What I was born to be?”

  “What makes you think I didn’t?”

  Jakiriah sneered. “I see now why we’re your chosen people—always answering questions with questions.” He gathered his rags around him and squatted, the heat of the sand roasting his haunches. To the south he saw the Valley of Zin with its conical peaks like unspun potter’s clay, and to the north, the vast plain of Uvdah stretching as far as Azazel in a punishing strop of flint. And to the East there was, well, the East, with its ravenous empires—Persian, Babylonian, Assyrian.

  The holy man continued, “Why do I think you let me down, I’ll tell you why. I do everything I’m supposed to do—warn about war and exile…”

  “It’s a timing issue. The Philistines are currently tied up with the Greeks.”

  “Keep the commandments, study the sacred texts. Not once has a razor touched my head.”

  “I was meaning to say something,” the voice interrupted. “High time for a haircut and a shave.”

  “I wear sackcloth.”

  “That’s got to itch.”

  “I eat locusts.”

  “I’m not even going there.”

  “And what do I get?” Jakiriah lamented. “One passing mention in the Bible? A book in Prophets? I mean, not even in the minor Prophets? What’s Habakkuk got that I haven’t?”

  “A ludicrous name?”

  “Well my name’s not ludicrous.” Protesting, he pounded the bars of his chest. “Jakiriah—Precious of God. My parents gave it to me. Perhaps they were as comical as you are. Maybe they were in on the joke.”

  The desert grew motionless for a moment; not even the tumbleweeds stirred. The world seemed steeped in introspection. “You know what is a joke?” Jakiriah was finally asked. “You folks assign me all sorts of human qualities—compassion, wrath, even jealousy. But there’s one characteristic you never give me. You never say I’m funny.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Jakiriah smirked, “you’re supposed to have a sense of humor?”

  “Ever seen a blobfish?” came his answer. “A platypus?”

  As if toward an incomprehensible child, Jakiriah shook his head.

  “Take Abraham,” the voice continued. “I tell him, bind up Isaac, your beloved son, put him on a bunch of sticks and sacrifice him to me. I say that to him, and the guy actually does it, grabs this poor little boy and nearly slits his throat—would have, too, if I hadn’t sent somebody to stop him. Abraham—the Ur Push-Over, I call him—couldn’t even take a joke.”

  “Okay, okay. So you’re compassionate, wrathful, jealous, and hysterical,” Jakiriah tried to run fingers through his long, matted hair. Tried, but failed. “Abraham, at least, so loved you that he was willing to sacrifice his only son for you. That’s a lot more than you’re willing to do for us.”

  “Not so fast,” cautioned the voice. “Give me seven centuries.”

  “I haven’t got seven days.” The mendicant began to stomp his foot but, remembering the thorn, thought better of it. “I’ve wandered out into this desolation without food, without water, in order to meet you. To pray to you and beseech you.”

  “And, look, your prayers have been answered.”

  “Yeah and so where’s my revelation?”

  “This is your revelation.”

  “That I’m not good enough to make it into the canon? I don’t cut it, is that what you’re telling me?”

  He felt the desert staring at him, the very air taking a breath. Long moments passed before he finally merited a response:

  “I’m telling you that whether you’re in the Good Book or not isn’t the point. Ever hear of Avimelekh?”

  “If memory serves. Killed his seventy brothers.”

  “There you go. And Haggai ben Yuktiel? Heard of him?

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Best man ever to tread Canaan, trust me. But you won’t find him in any concordance.”

  “Why not?” Jakiriah was shouting again, a madman railing against the void.

  “Because the Bible is not about who’s good enough to be included and who isn’t. It’s about who can make its readers better people. It’s about making you love me so that you can love one another.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re the world’s bestselling author.” These words Jakiriah muttered into the cinders, as if no one else could hear them.

  “It’s about knowing, not renown. About wonder and inspiration and hope.”

  “But I can do inspiration.” Jakiriah puffed up his chest. “Walk in my ways, sayeth the Lord of Hosts, walk in my paths of righteousness.” Scrofulous arms flung out toward the canyons. “Virgins of Jerusalem, strike the timbrel and dance, for the day of our deliverance is here!” Those same arms now folded over their owner’s ash-encrusted chest, vaunting.

  “Nice but derivative,” came the comment, sotto voce, followed as if on the wings of some wilderness bird by, “Alas, Jakiriah, you are a not-for-prophet.”

  The ascetic scratched his scalp hard enough to feel it. “You’ve lost me…”

  “Sorry. Works in a later language.”

  “You created the thorn,” Jakiriah, returning to his original complaint, fumed. “Impetigo, famine, depression, death—you created them all. Can’t you at least make a patriarch of me?”

  The answer was: silence.

  “Can’t you justify my suffering? I’ll be dust soon, can’t you at least leave my name on the lips of men?” In the midst of the desert, alone and unwashed, Jakiriah thrashed. His rags flailed around him unheralded. “Goddammit, will I never be blessed?”

  And the answer was barely detectable, a mere titter above the clouds. A lilting beyond the canyons, bitter and keen. Laughter.

  Dead of Old Wounds

  “What?” Geoffrey gasped, as if gazing at his own distorted reflection. But, instead of a mirror, he was looking into the x-ray the doctor at the hospice held up. And the image he encountered was not of himself but the pelvis of his dying father. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “You tell me,” the doctor responded, genuinely perplexed. “Did he ever mention anything?”

  Geoffrey brought his eyes closer to the film, superimposing them over the bones. “I don’t believe this,” he mumbled before answering the doctor. “No, not a word.” He paused for a moment and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Well, once, a real long time ago—I was a kid—he said something about landing on Normandy.”

 
Now the doctor was really perplexed. “Normandy? Once?”

  “He didn’t like talking about it,” Geoffrey shrugged. “Said he was in the war for all of forty seconds before…”

  “Before what?”

  “Before,” the patient’s son studied the floor. “Getting hurt. Wounded, I guess. But he never said how or where.”

  The doctor’s hand, the one he used for bedside reassurances, found Geoffrey’s shoulder. “Now we know.”

  And, then, for several quiet seconds, the two of them stared at Mr. Gorelik’s ilium, or hip bone, and at the thumb-sized object embedded in it. Conical at the top, ragged at the tail, it pointed downward toward the coccyx like a rocket aimed at an asteroid. But, in contrast to the rest of the ilium, which was stellar white, the area around the rocket was space-black, indicating infection.

  A half-hour of counselling and waiver-signing passed before Geoffrey emerged into the waiting room and the impatient glare of his wife, Helen. “Don’t look so sad,” she greeted him. “He’s ninety-three and going peacefully. You should be thankful.”

  Geoffrey cut her off, “My father’s been shot.”

  Helen’s magazine slapped down on her thighs. “Shot, right. By who? The night nurse?”

  He plopped into the plastic seat next to her. “The Germans.”

  She closed a skeptical eye. “On Normandy Beach,” her husband continued. “Dad landed there, you know, during the invasion, and was wounded right away. Shot in the hip, turns out.” He gazed blankly at the vending machines, at the gleeful art on the hospice walls. “And the bullet’s still in there, they never took it out. That’s what’s causing the sepsis, the doctor told me. The bullet’s moved.”

  “Jesus,” Helen, with the magazine, hammered her knees. “Je-sus.”

  Two weeks later—eight days after the funeral—the last of the guests finally departed. Geoffrey’s brother, Richard, a retired English professor, flew back to Oregon with his new Vietnamese wife and assorted step-kids, and the Gorelik’s two children, Amy and Charles, returned to their jobs in the city. The house, a Dutch-style multiplex that felt half-vacant even when crowded, suddenly seemed cavernous.