Smoke & Mirrors

by John Ramsey Miller

  “How are you feeling this morning?” Natasha asked the bright-eyed boy as she checked the chart hanging at the foot of his bed. His color was good, his vitals strong, and if she hadn’t performed the operation herself, she wouldn’t know he’d been at death’s door less than twelve hours earlier. Children were amazingly resilient.

  “My stomach hurts,” he replied sullenly.

  Natasha watched as the small face twisted in on itself and tears streamed down his cheeks. She set the chart down, put her hand under his chin, and sat on his bed.

  “You’re going to be fine very soon,” she told him tenderly.

  “You’ve been such a good boy,” his mother added with forced cheer.

  “He’s worried that his soccer career is over,” his father said.

  “That’s not a problem, Josh. You’ll be back running around and playing ball in a couple of weeks like this never happened.” She handed him a tissue from the bedside table and waited until he wiped the tears away.

  “Can I have it?” Josh asked.

  “Have what?” Natasha asked.

  “The palendix,” he said. “In a jar. So I can have it to keep.”

  “I’m sorry, Josh,” Natasha said. “We didn’t keep it.”

  “What did you do with it?” he asked, curious.

  “We incinerated it.”

  A look of confusion grew on his face. “What?”

  “We didn’t know you wanted it. When we remove things from people, we are required by law to burn them in a furnace.”

  “You cremated my palendix?”

  Natasha smiled. “Yes.”

  “We cremated Buster,” Josh said. “In a hot, hot fire.”

  “Buster was our Labrador,” Mr. Wasserman explained.

  “Mr. Murphy runned over Buster in a car,” Josh said.

  “Ran over,” Mrs. Wasserman corrected.

  “He ran over him. I wanted a new dog, but I’m getting a new sister instead. I wanted to bury him, but Daddy said our yard was too little. Our yard is all brown and crunchy because the police won’t let us put any water on it.”

  “It’s very dry where I live, too,” Natasha said.

  “Where do you live?” Josh asked.

  “I live way out in the country, north of here,” she replied.

  “Do you have a dog?”

  “We don’t have any pets. But we do have deer, squirrels, raccoons, and possums, and lots of birds.”

  “You live on a farm and you don’t got pigs and cows?”

  “We don’t live on a farm. We live in the woods.”

  “Do you live with your daddy and mommy?”

  “My mommy and daddy live in Seattle, Washington. That’s a long way from here. I live with my husband.” Natasha braced herself for the next question.

  “Do you have any little boys and girls?”

  “No,” Natasha said, smiling.

  “Kids like to live in the woods. You and your husband don’t have to live alone, you know.”

  “Josh,” Mr. Wasserman said, “you shouldn’t pry into Dr. McCarty’s personal life.”

  “Well…she could,” he whined nonsensically.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Josh,” Natasha said, rubbing his head.

  “When can I go home?”

  “In a few days,” she said.

  Natasha was near the nurses’ station, dictating her notes for transcription, when she saw Dan Wheat in the hallway. One of her partners, Dan had the bedside manner of a mortician. She didn’t know why he’d gone into pediatric medicine, since he seemed to view children as troublesome monkeys. He was rail-thin with a roving eye and a legendary bag of tired pickup lines. Natasha had once overheard one of his young patients tell him he had stinky breath. Dan immediately ordered a spinal tap for the offender before he went off in search of mints.

  “Natasha,” he said, waving her down. “You see my new wheels?”

  “No.”

  “I broke down and treated myself to a top-of-the line Benz SL550 two-seat convertible in jet-black. It’s a bitch to keep clean, so I run it wide open to blow the dust off. Claire is making me buy her a new car as an act of revenge because I won’t let her drive the Benz, so I was thinking maybe a simple Lexus SUV like yours so she can haul the kids around in fair style. You buy it, or do you lease?”

  “Ward bought it for me.”

  Daniel barely paused for breath.

  “Oh, did Edgar talk to you about my little brother? The boy’s got hands like mine, and he aced medical school. We should get him here before he gets an offer he can’t refuse in some major city far, far away.”

  “I didn’t know we needed a sixth partner,” Natasha said.

  Natasha had met Dan’s younger brother. If such a thing were possible, William Wheat was half as impressive as his older brother. He was short and stocky, and his half-open eyes made him look like he was in the process of passing out. Natasha hadn’t wanted Dan brought on board, but she hadn’t opposed her partners. He was typical of what was coming out of medical schools: very intelligent, aggressive, competitive, and greedy. He saw each patient as a business opportunity, and his billings were off the chart because he ordered every test the insurance company would pay for.

  “Perhaps we should discuss this at the next partner’s meeting,” she said noncommittally. “I hate to break this off, but I haven’t slept in two days.”

  “Does Ward get fed up with your hours? It drives Claire crazy that I’m always working.”

  “Ward doesn’t complain.”

  “Well, keep William in mind. We’re getting busy as hell, and it would help you and Ward to spend some more time together.”

  After she’d finished in the hospital, Natasha got into her Lexus SUV and headed home. Although it was just after ten A.M., she hadn’t been able to fall asleep after the Wasserman surgery, which had finished around ten-thirty the previous evening.

  Twenty minutes later Natasha was turning into her driveway. Ward’s eight acres had been a wedding present from his father. He and Natasha had selected a ridge, cleared the trees from it, and built a four-thousand-square-foot, split-level modern house. Other than their driveway and the mailbox, there was no sign at all that a house sat back in the woods. The asphalt driveway wound through the trees and curved in front of the house. The home’s facade of raw textured concrete and floor-to-ceiling windows had been built with its back facing an elevated ridge.

  Natasha used the remote to open her bay in the three-car garage and pulled in. She went into the kitchen, poured herself a glass of pinot grigio, and carried the bottle into the den. She put the bottle on the Noguchi coffee table, took a long swallow from the glass, went into the bedroom, and took a long, hot shower. After slipping into a robe, she got a blister pack of Ambien and went back to the den.

  She stood at the couch and stared out at the grounds, feeling again the unease she’d become all too familiar with. Her eyes caught a motion in the shadows and she searched the treeline for the source of the movement. A chill ran up her spine as her discomfort grew. A wild animal, or perhaps someone’s house cat foraging for field mice. Of course, with the new subdivision up the road, it was possible that kids were playing in the woods. They’d seen evidence of people having been in the woods over the past two years—soda bottles and candy wrappers—but had never caught anyone close to the house. Ward had the standard posted signs on the property line, but such signs were only suggestions to all but the reputable.

  Since the house faced north and the rear overlooked a wall of large trees on the top of the slope, there had been no need for curtains to block the sun or to give the McCartys privacy. For the past weeks, though, she’d been toying with the idea of having blinds installed. She had even gotten an estimate, which had been staggering since the entire forty-five-foot wall was comprised of four-by-eight double panes of thick glass.

  Natasha reclined on the couch and chased an Ambien with a quarter glass of the chilled wine.

  3

 
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

  THE HOTEL SHUTTLE DEPOSITED WARD MCCARTY AT the airport to catch his flight home after three days of crowds, bulging tote bags, crowded sales booths, and insincere smiles. He hated trade shows, but had to attend them in order to keep up with new suppliers, new materials, gimmicks, manufacturers, and his competition.

  After standing in a long line, Ward showed his North Carolina driver’s license and ticket to the female guard; slipped off his shoes, belt, cell phone, and watch; and put them all in a plastic tray. He felt naked in his stockinged feet, and he hated holding up his loose khakis with one hand so the cuffs didn’t drag.

  At the other end of the conveyor belt, a burly guard with a buzz cut opened his briefcase and had Ward turn on his laptop to make sure it wasn’t actually a clever computer bomb. Ward looked over to see an elderly woman standing calmly while a guard ran a wand up and down over her stooped body. Satisfied, Ward’s guard lifted out a bubble-wrapped envelope from the briefcase and slipped out a small blue die-cast race car. As he studied the five-inch-long toy, his eyes grew noticeably larger.

  “Man,” he said, “a 1969 Petty Roadrunner die-cast in near mint. You are one lucky devil. That was a one-year deal, that car.” He looked at the underside. “Aw, it’s not marked on the bottom. It’s a damned nice counterfeit. Isn’t that illegal?”

  “It’s a prototype. It was never produced. One of a kind.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, where’d you get it?” He placed it back into the envelope.

  “It’s been in my family for a very long time,” Ward said, which was true. The little model car had been in his family several years longer than he’d been on earth.

  “Have a good day, sir,” the guard told him, as he put the padded envelope into Ward’s briefcase beside his computer and closed it.

  Ward reached his assigned concourse through a maze of temporary signs, sheetrock dust, scaffolding, plastic sheeting, and constructive pandemonium.

  At his gate Ward spent the time waiting for his flight by staring at an open novel he’d bought before leaving Charlotte, trying to absorb the words and make sense of the sentences. When he traveled with paperback novels, he always tore out the chapters as he finished them and threw the pages away, which served to both mark his place and make his load lighter. After he finished the chapter he was working on, he ripped the pages out and put them on the seat beside him, then slowly realized that he had no idea what the discarded chapter’s author had tried to convey.

  Ward was bothered by the lack of clocks at the gate, which meant that passengers had to have watches, or cell phones, in order to know how long they had until their planes boarded. Of all of the things he didn’t like about Las Vegas—and there was nothing he did like—he most disliked the city’s denial that time passed there. Sitting in a leather chair with his carry-on bag and briefcase at his feet, he looked out through the windows at the Strip—the city’s main street, filled with the best known casinos—easy to spot from the monstrous glass pyramid and the giant sphinx with its lion ass backed up to it.

  Opening his cell phone, Ward called Natasha to explain the delay, but got their home answering machine. He had spoken to her only once in the three days he’d been away, when he’d called from the airport upon arrival there for the memorabilia-suppliers trade show. Of the six or seven times he’d called since, he had left short messages. He wasn’t alarmed, because Natasha often turned the phone’s ringers off, or ignored them. She carried a cell phone but rarely turned it on unless she needed to answer her emergency beeper.

  Sudden jazzy notes of youthful laughter froze Ward, and he turned slowly to see not the young boy he expected but a young girl of eight or so playing tag with a smaller child. He exhaled loudly and looked down at his paperback, feeling the sudden tears running down his cheeks. Several times each day for the past year, something brought Barney into his mind, and, with that trigger, a choking gloom descended over him like a wet curtain. It could begin with a familiar odor like iced tea, a flash of a red shirt, sudden movement in his periphery, a flag snapping in a brisk wind, a child with blond hair, a bicycle lying on a lawn—just about anything at all. Any thought of Barney brought Ward back to the memory of clutching a small, limp body in his arms as hell closed in on him.

  Barney’s given name had been Ward McCarty III, but he chose the name Barney himself at the age of five because he so admired that unidentified person who dressed in an insipid purple dinosaur suit.

  Often there were the dreams—some of which included a cameo by Barney, or, if Ward was very lucky, a starring role. Those double-edged dreams were sweet torture, leaving his soul lacerated and leaking some essential nectar. He always woke with an odd feeling of being both full and empty at the same time.

  What consumed a great deal of his waking hours was the thought that every decision a creature made led to a path with unknowable consequences. An animal’s choice of an action—or path—might find them a mate, shelter, or food—or the possibility of becoming another animal’s dinner. By the same token, some bean counter with a sharp pencil might choose to install a less expensive—and less protected—electrical outlet in a garage, which could lead to the tragic death of an angelic child. Ward thought about this faceless man in some generic office day after day. He saw no relief to being forever haunted by the avalanche that began with the simple decision of a budget-conscious man.

  Sometimes, when Ward McCarty looked at animals, he wondered if they ever dreamed alive their dead the way people did.

  Thankfully, as a contrast to the 116-degree Vegas heat of the day, it was cool inside the wide-bodied craft. When Ward arrived at his assigned row, he found the center seat already occupied by a young girl with blond hair accented with bright red and blue streaks, who was plugged into an iPod. He opened the overhead compartment and somehow managed to wedge in his carry-on.

  The girl looked up at him, and when he met her dull green eyes, she smiled, showing small teeth with silver wire braces. Ward pointed to the window seat beyond her, whereupon she unplugged her earphones, got up, and moved into the aisle to let him pass, leaving her cloth tote bag on her seat.

  Sitting, Ward pushed his briefcase under the seat ahead of him and buckled his seat belt. The girl returned to her seat and put the iPod’s earbuds back in place. He figured her age to be somewhere between thirteen and seventeen. She was barely five feet tall, and the dull yellow too-large-by-a-mile sweatshirt had the famous “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign screen-printed on it, which contrasted with her red shorts and blue flip-flops. He couldn’t help but notice that each of the nails on her fingers and toes was painted a different color.

  Ward spent the first two hours alternating between watching the movie on a small screen in the ceiling over the aisle and, out of the corner of his eye, observing the electronic activities of the girl beside him.

  The black tote bag in her lap contained an assortment of electronic devices, and like a child with a short attention span, she went from her iPod, to a Game Boy, to plugging a set of airline earphones into the armrest to watch the movie, then back to the iPod. Just when he had decided that she was closer to seventeen than thirteen, she took out a DVD player and watched a cartoon clearly geared to very young children. She watched intently, laughing melodiously here and there as the cartoon played.

  Thirty minutes out of Charlotte, he dropped his tray, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out one of the monogrammed index cards he carried to list things to do. As he lined up his thoughts, Ward began sketching a small, familiar face in one corner of the card.

  “Hey,” the girl said suddenly, interrupting his drawing.

  As she stared down at the card on the tray, she pulled her earphones off.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked.

  “Thinking,” he replied.

  “You’re a good drawer,” she said. “Could you draw me?”

  Ward studied her round face and reproduced her likeness in less than two minutes, all while her eyes moved from
his face to the drawing and back, like someone watching a tennis match. Ward had the ability to sketch what he saw, and faces were what he drew best.

  When he finished the sketch, she smiled. “Cool. Are you a professional artist?”

  He answered, “No. I do some light designing.”

  A confused look briefly took over her features. “Like what kind of lights do you design?”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling. “My company makes and markets NASCAR memorabilia. Cars, hats, T-shirts, mugs, key chains.”

  “No shit?” she said, too loudly. The word earned her a frown from the man beside her. “My mother is a race-car fan.”

  Ward reached down, took out his briefcase, and opened it, taking out the model car to show her.

  “My father had it made in Japan. Nowadays, they are made mostly in China. See, we take pictures of a real car from several angles, and a factory makes the model from the pictures, which they produce, box, and ship to us, and we distribute them from our warehouse. We just change the art on the car depending on whose car it is, since every race team has different sponsors.”

  “This is so fucking cool. Could I get one?”

  “Well, not this one. This one is the first one my father had made,” he explained. “This is the prototype. He didn’t have a lot of money, and that car raced only one year. As it turned out, he made other models and they did sell and so he ordered more, but this one was handmade. Mostly he used it to show to bankers and investors, who weren’t all that impressed. In those days, NASCAR was popular with only relatively few people.”

  He started to tell her why he had it with him, but didn’t. What he did say was, “I can get you a new one—driver of your choice.”

  “No shit?”

  “Absolutely none.” He took another note card and scribbled his office number on it. “Call and ask for Kelly, and she’ll send one to you for your mother. We have thousands of them in our warehouse.”