Ohhh, Jesus. His head. They picked it up and stuck something cold and slippery under it. A magazine. She's worried about her rug. Sorry, lady. I'd have made it to your bathroom if I could. At least I'd be closer to a drink of water.
There was more talk but Lesko could only get pieces of it from far away. His fifteen thousand. He could kiss that off. Then something about his notes, and something else about the old dame's brother and a gun. A while later, Lesko wasn't sure how long, it struck him again that he might be dead because now it was him who was floating. He was flying. He was flapping his arms and he was hovering right in front of Dancer, who was grunting and gasping like he was trying to move a couch up a flight of stairs. Wait. They were moving him outside. It must be because Lesko felt cold and snow was hitting him in the face. He opened his mouth to get some of it on his tongue, but they twisted him away and threw him into a thing that smelled like oil and rust and old rubber—a trunk. Mr. Makowski's trunk. It had to be. Who else's car would stink like this.
Lesko knew for sure when he heard the ignition and felt the whole car quiver with effort until a blast from its exhaust exploded under his head like a firecracker in a metal drum. He felt his body press forward as the car hissed down the long driveway, and he banged his head once more as it braked at the gate before turning left onto Round Hill Road. It was so cold. He heard voices through the ringing in his ears. Arguing voices. Dancer. Lesko groped in the darkness, feeling for something he could use, a jack handle maybe, if his fingers were still working when they opened up the trunk again.
The drive back toward Greenwich from Lyndhurst was agonizingly slow, but Jonathan Corbin would never remember it. He would not remember the two accident scenes he'd come upon, or the spin-out of another car, which he'd caused in avoiding it, or the state policeman who'd tried to flag him down and had to leap for his life across a guardrail. The storm through which he was burrowing was nothing compared to the one inside his head. Both Tilden's emotions and his own whipped and twisted in a maelstrom of visions. On Tilden's part, though it was hard to separate them fully, Corbin felt the same sting of torn knuckles, the burning face and ribs, the numbness of forearms and kidneys that he'd felt that day in the garage under the Drake Hotel. He understood that Tilden was with him then as well, but he did not know why nor did he dwell on it.
Through one set of eyes he saw only darkness, but if he extended both his arms he could feel cold brick walls on three sides and a door of steel and planking on the fourth. He knew it was a jail cell because his ankle was attached to an iron bed by a length of chain just long enough to let him reach the wooden bowl of some kind of stew and the small pail of water that were shoved through a trap door once each day. How many bowls had there been? Ten, at least. Perhaps twice that number. The scabs on his cuts had fallen off, their healing work done, but his voice was gone from the screaming and raging he had done at the sound of other distant voices and at the opening and slamming of other doors. Gould had done this to him. There had been no trial, no judge, probably no charges, either. Gould had called some friendly constable or deputy and had him buried alive.
Margaret. What could she be thinking? She, and perhaps Laura as well, afraid to go abroad in Greenwich and just as afraid to remain unseen by that idiot with his camera. What fears must be working upon her mind? That I am dead as well as buried? That I have abandoned her? Go to her, Jonathan. Tell her I am safe and well. Tell her that I will come home again.
Corbin tried to shake away this pleading voice. The memories were one thing, the voice another. He could accept that since his birth he'd carried visions of the things Tilden Beckwith had seen and felt, but the soul he carried was his own, not Tilden's, and the voice must therefore be the invention of his mind. He was having his own visions, and they troubled him more than Tilden's ancient memories. The frightened woman he was seeing was Gwen Leamas, not Margaret Barrie, except that she wore a dress that made her look like Margaret but for the color of her hair. She was standing in the doorway of his house, of Laura Hemmings's house, and she was peering into the night at two men who stood in the driveway—Harry Sturdevant and the one from yesterday, the one in black who seemed to keep appearing everywhere they walked; he was back again and he had a rifle in his hands and he was staring back at her with a terror that only the face of death should have caused. Get to her, Jonathan. Get there quickly.
Corbin cleared his eyes and focused once more on the road, but then other faces drifted up into his field of vision. One man, rough-looking, like the one called Bigelow. And just like Bigelow in Corbin’s last memory of him, this one was lying with his face against the floor and he had crooked little streams of blood running across it. Corbin bent closer. He knew that face. He'd seen it yesterday, Saturday. When he and Gwen had just left her apartment building and a corner cigar store changed into a saloon called O'Neill's and this man was watching them through its window. Then he'd seen him again this morning, he thought. No. He`d felt him. When he and Gwen left her apartment the second time after picking up her things and he felt that this face was still watching them, but Corbin shrugged it off because he seemed to know that this man was not a threat. Maybe it was Tilden who knew that.
But he knew differently about these other faces. There was another Bigelow type. This one had gray hair worn in a crew cut and a face that was both cruel and stupid. And there was a little miniature of a man who was perspiring sort of awkwardly, as if sweat was a new experience for him, and he had a bloodstain on his trouser leg. And a woman. An old woman. Corbin blinked and looked closer. If he didn't know better, if he took away fifty years of lines and wrinkles and put her on a New York street in a snowstorm a hundred years ago ... Never mind. It couldn't be the same woman.
Except there was Tilden, not in his cell anymore, standing in the middle of the room next to the man on the floor and looking straight at her, his eyes very cold, and she was acting as if she could feel him there. She'd stare back, not directly at Tilden but around him, as if she were searching the room for him. Then her eyes dropped to the knob of the cane she was holding and she touched the blood on it. The blood must have belonged to the man on the floor, but she seemed confused about that. She looked up again at the space that Tilden occupied and her eyes grew wider. She could not see him, Corbin was sure, but she seemed to feel that he was there. And now Tilden, too, was bleeding from the head. Her eyes opened wider still. She remained standing this way long after the other faces were gone from the room.
To New England, the road sign said.
Corbin tested his brakes before entering the ramp that curved down onto the Connecticut Turnpike. A part of him wished that his mind could bring summer again so the road would be faster. He quickly shook off the thought. If the wish made it happen, he'd find himself with neither the road nor the Datsun under him. Just keep moving. Just get back to Gwen. He realized, with a faraway sadness, that it was too late for Margaret. Margaret was gone. She'd been gone two full days before Teddy Roosevelt knocked on her door.
”I cannot just leave,” Margaret answered Laura Hemmings, “not knowing whether Tilden is dead or alive.”
“You cannot stay,” Laura insisted. “Look at you. You're becoming a wreck and you stand a very good chance of giving yourself away in your condition. All I am proposing is a vacation far enough that no one could possibly know you, where your fears can mend, and most of all where your mind will be kept busy.”
“But Chicago is so far.”
“Minutes away by telegraph. I will wire you the moment there is news of him.” The suggestion Laura made, which she'd couched as a needed favor, was that Margaret and the child, Jonathan, make a pilgrimage in her stead to the national headquarters of the Women's Christian Temperance Union at Evanston, a village just north of Chicago. Laura had been scheduled to go there as a delegate to a committee that was advocating legislation by Congress prohibiting the on-the-job consumption of spirits by railroad employees. It was an important mission, she argued, but one that cut dreadful
ly into her preparations for the opening of her school that coming fall. Further, Margaret would be the more suitable delegate. Had she not, after all, lost a husband in a train wreck caused by drunkenness? Who could think it amiss if she departed from Greenwich for such a purpose?
Lucy Stone, the housekeeper, lent her own voice to the argument that the change would do Margaret good. And Peggy Gannon shared Laura's view that Margaret should have been elected their delegate in the first place. Margaret hesitated two more days, even as Laura began packing for her. Her depression steadily deepened. Nearly a fortnight had passed without word from Tilden, and Anthony Cornstock was now railing on street corners about the hidden pustules that still marred the shining face of Greenwich. Margaret, in turning to avoid him the day before, had nearly collided with Inspector Williams and his wife, who were walking up Main Street. She felt a burning on her neck, as if he had turned and was staring after her. By the day that followed, Margaret had not so much agreed to make the journey as she'd allowed herself and young Jonathan to be put aboard the train. Laura gave the conductor a half dollar, asking him to take care of the poor woman and keep a special eye on the boy if she dozed. Margaret would do more than doze, Laura knew. She made her swallow two full ounces of Dr. King's New Discovery for Pain. By the time the train reached Albany before turning west, Margaret could probably have had a tooth extracted without complaint.
Another two days passed, time enough for Margaret and Jonathan to be met at Union Station and escorted to Evanston, before Teddy Roosevelt appeared at the Maple Avenue address and encountered a very startled Lucy Stone. There were few men living who could intimidate Lucy Stone, least of all a man half her size, but she was not prepared for the arrival of a well-known political figure with a most forceful personality who also had the reputation of being slightly mad. He asked politely enough for an interview with Margaret, then quickly became agitated upon Lucy's nervous insistence that she knew nothing of Mrs. Corbin's whereabouts. It was a foolish lie but a protective one. She had no knowledge of Roosevelt's relationship with Tilden and even less confidence in the motives of any politician. For his part, Roosevelt began to imagine still another sinister disappearance and began shouting his demand that she tell him all she knew at once. Thoroughly frightened, Lucy pointed down the road in the direction of Laura Hemmings's house and indicated, before slamming the door, that the white woman who lived there might have more time to talk to him.
Teddy's interview with Laura was even less fruitful. Laura, unlike Lucy, was aware that Tilden and Roosevelt were friends of long standing, but she did not know how much he knew of Tilden’s relationship with Margaret or of Margaret's history. In any case, after working so hard to get Margaret out of harm's way, she was not about to undo it all on the very day Margaret was unpacking in Evanston. She told Teddy that Margaret had been suffering from melancholy of late and had gone, she believed, to Wilkes-Barre, where she and her child were visiting the family of her late husband. Roosevelt, this time, saw the lie in her eyes. But he also realized that Margaret was clearly being protected and was probably in no danger at all. As for her true location, Wilkes-Barre or elsewhere, he imagined he'd learn it soon enough. He did not know why she'd gone but, in his heart, he could not dismiss the notion that a permanent estrangement might be for the best all around. It was a relationship, as it stood, that promised more pain than pleasure. Teddy thanked Laura Hemmings for her time and returned to the station, where he entrained for New York.
Wherever Tilden was, whatever harm had befallen him, Roosevelt had no doubt in the world that Jay Gould was behind it. But he could not risk confronting Gould without evidence. Gould would simply answer him with silence and then cover his tracks all the more. He was grinding his teeth over this dilemma as he stepped through the front door of his house at 6 West Fifty-seventh Street and was met by a wide-eyed housekeeper who told him that three plug-uglies were waiting in the parlor. She had told them that they must wait out on the sidewalk, but the biggest one had simply picked her up and kissed her forehead and told her that a cup of tea would be very nice indeed, especially if she was to pour a nip of good whiskey into it.
“Who are they?” he whispered, stepping to his umbrella stand and choosing a sword cane from the instruments there.
”I don't know, sir,” she said in a hushed tone. “But they are Irishmen. The one called Sullivan says his name prouder than Christ himself would say his own.”
Teddy was still grinning hugely as he stepped into his parlor and offered his hand to John L. Sullivan, to his dear old friend John Flood, and to a third battered-looking tough who was introduced to him as Mr. William O'Gorman.
Roosevelt had seen nothing of the champion since his seventy-five-round drubbing of Jake Kilrain nearly two years before and not a great deal more of John Flood, who had helped get him in shape for that fight and would soon begin drying him out again if the much-talked-about challenge by young James Corbett was taken. At another time, they would have sat and talked boxing right through supper, but Teddy knew that this was not a social visit no matter how welcome.
”I think maybe we found him,” John Flood said after all hands were shaken. “Mr. O'Gorman here posted a hundred dollars for the man who found Tilden's trail. It was claimed yesterday by one of Jay Gould's groundskeepers who saw what he thought was a dead man of Tilden's description being hauled away from Gould's place up on the Hudson a fortnight ago. Billy then sent six men up to Westchester to scout the hospitals and the jails. Two of them went to a lockup in a town called Ardsley. One went in, the other waited outside. The first never came out. The second ran for his life when he saw a constable with a bleedin' nose come outa the jail house and come at him with a cosh in his hand. This was this mornin'. He told Mr. O'Gorman here and Mr. O'Gorman found me at the gym with John. John says he's throwin' in with us because he's been wantin' to take apart a jail house since they put him in one down in Mississippi after the Kilrain fight, especially if Tilden's inside it. I figured we better have a little law on our side too and you're the closest thing to it we know.”
“I'll have my carriage brought around.” Teddy squeezed the sword cane in his fist.
Tilden was indeed in the Ardsley jail. Teddy knew it the moment their carriage stopped outside and he heard a bolt being thrown on the door of the constable's office. Billy O'Gorman touched John Flood's arm and pointed to a single black wire, which ran through a hole drilled in the brick at one end of the small building and on up to the crossbars of a utility pole. Flood gave a sign, and Billy O'Gorman severed the phone wire with a knife cut so fast as to be almost unseen. If that were a man's throat, John Flood knew, he'd still be standing there wondering why he couldn't talk no more. Flood was less subtle. He took one long step and smashed a shoe against the point where he guessed the bolt to be. The entire door fell in, held only by its bottom hinge. Flood caught a glimpse of two armed men ducking down behind a desk before he slid sideways out of the line of fire. He also saw a telephone set on the wall, its ear horn dangling uselessly.
“This is Theodore Roosevelt of the state legislature,” Teddy called. ”I am coming in and you will hold your fire.”
“You come through that door,” came a voice from inside, “and you'll never go through another.”
“And this, God damn it, is John L. Sullivan himself,” the champion roared. His voice made even Roosevelt flinch.
“The hell you say.”
Sullivan held up a fist in the open doorway. “Don't try my patience, boys. Unless you have a cannon bigger than this, put down those things and start behaving like goddamned gentlemen.”
“Next you'll tell me that's Jake Kilrain out there with you.”
“It's a better man than that, by God. That was John Flood who stove in your door.”
“John Flood? The Bull's Head Terror?”
“The same.”
“Is that so? Is that you, John?”
“It is.”
“Then show yourself.”
Floo
d stepped full into the door.
“It's him, by God,” the deputy inside said to the other. “It's John Flood himself.”
John Flood cocked his head toward Sullivan and shrugged an apology. Teddy Roosevelt sighed. The basically simple process of breaking into a jail now required a vote on the personal popularity of the men breaking in. Sullivan's expression was just on the edge of a sulk.
”I seen you fight.” The deputy stood up. ”I seen you fight Joe Goss.”
John Flood entered the office, followed by Teddy and O'Gorman. Sullivan followed, muttering something about how Goss would have fared against his maiden aunt.
The deputy lowered his shotgun but held it ready. “Keep your distance, boys. Even you, John Flood. I ought to arrest you for what you done. I'd admire the company for a few days.”
Flood pointed to a barred steel door behind the other deputy. “Who you got back there, lad?”
”I can't tell you that, John.”
Billy O'Gorman cupped his hands to his mouth. “Larry Donovan? Are you in there?”
“Who's that?” came a distant and filtered voice. “Is that you, Billy?”
Time Out of Mind Page 48