SIX
NINE OF CUPS, REVERSED FALSE FREEDOM
Shielded from the porch by a clematis-coated trellis, and sweltering beneath a blistering white sky, Jake could very well have been hallucinating the laughter. It came in staccato shock waves, then disintegrated into giggling. The mind played funny tricks, because it sounded very much like Maggie Dawson.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s see what you can do.”
There was the tinkling of ice cubes against glass, then the beeping of the cordless phone. In a moment, Emma’s voice rose up. “I’d like to place an order.”
Jake saturated a tenon joint with carpenter’s glue, then fit it in the mortise. He turned over the bench and set it down for the first time on three-inch thick legs. Doug had not specified an arm or leg design, and Jake wished he had. Because left to his own devices, Jake might very well carve in the point of an elbow and sculpt bracelets around slender wrists. He might taper the legs and chisel feet into the bottom. If it got any hotter, he might paint the tips ruby red.
Every weekend and every evening, Savannah Dawson went straight to the garden. She hiked her skirt up around her hips and dug her bare feet into rich soil. Every few minutes, a note would sail down from the upstairs window, and she would pick it up. Cut back the lily of the valley, Doug Dawson would have written. Use fish fertilizer on the chamomile, diluted to two tablespoons per gallon. For a moment, Savannah would hide beneath the shade of whatever hat she was wearing and cradle the note as if it were the last healthy piece of her father. Then she would raise her face to the bedroom window and smile. She would pick up the pruners and go get it done.
Sasha followed her everywhere, out of her mind with devotion. By nightfall, her silver fur smelled of lemons and Juicy Fruit gum, and on the drive home Jake let her ride in the cab. He ignored fur heaps and ripped floor mats just to breathe in that unlikely mix of tang and sweetness.
“Twenty-four in turquoise blue,” Emma said. “Absolutely. Overnight them.”
Both Emma and Maggie laughed, then there was the tinkling of more ice. Jake stepped out around the trellis, and Maggie jerked her head up and eyed him suspiciously.
“How long have you been there?”
Both she and Emma were holding tall, frosted glasses of lemonade. Emma had on short shorts and a tank top; above her eyes were two striking curves of blue eye shadow. She was glaring at Jake, too.
“I was hoping I could get something to drink.”
Actually, he wasn’t the slightest bit thirsty, despite the heat, but he wouldn’t mind a little of what they were having. It was obviously making them giddy. Emma turned her back on him and spoke into the phone.
“One more thing. The birdbath mailbox. Again in blue.” She listened, then looked at Maggie. “There’s a twenty-dollar additional shipping charge.”
“That’s outrageous. They’re bleeding me dry.”
“That’s all right,” Emma said into the phone. “Bill the Discover card.”
Maggie stood up. “I’ll get you a glass,” she told Jake, and went into the house.
Emma hung up the phone and turned back to him. She rolled the frosted glass along her forehead. “Grandma says you’re a psycho.”
Jake laughed as he walked across the patio and sat on the stoop beside her. He was impressed when she didn’t even flinch. They both heard Savannah from somewhere in the front garden, making up jingles. He wished she would just stop. Lately, he’d found himself mumbling refrains of “flowers blooming, sunshine’s looming,” until he was certain the ghost was laughing his guts out.
“What do you think?” he asked.
She checked him over from head to toe, then finally stared right in his eyes. “I think you’re in love with her.”
Jake went absolutely still. If he strained really hard, he could hear Sasha moaning in ecstasy whenever Savannah stroked her, which she did every few minutes. He was fairly certain he heard his own heart skipping.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.
Emma snorted, then stood up. She walked to the trellis and ripped off whole branches of jackmanii clematis. She made a point to walk on the tender thyme between the flagstones, squashing them flat. She was out to ruin something, that much was obvious, and at her age the real danger was that it would end up being herself.
“Look,” she said, “I don’t give a fuck, all right? But if you want my advice, don’t go anywhere near my mom. One day with her and you’ll feel like you’ve gorged yourself on too much cotton candy. She’s not real. You know what I’m saying? She can’t fall in love with you, because that would mean there’d be nights she’d stay up late worrying if you’d make it home all right. She’d have to cry herself to sleep every time you left without saying you loved her, and Mom’s not gonna do that. Not for a million bucks.”
Maggie came out with a glass of lemonade and set it down beside Jake. “Isn’t she something?” she whispered. “I tell you, I love that girl.”
Jake took the glass and stood up. All of a sudden he was parched. He downed the lemonade in one gulp, but it was sour, and it left him thirsty for more.
He whistled for his dogs and Sasha, as always, was the last to come. Jake waited by the truck until she trudged up next to him, her head down and pouting.
“For crying out loud,” he said, but he still let her sit in the cab. He was going to retreat to his mountain and not come down for a week. He was going to get away before Savannah cast a spell on him, too.
He was clear to his driveway before his lips lost their pucker from the sour lemonade. He took a deep breath of cool mountain air and held it in until it stung. He was just starting to feel better when he walked into his cabin and saw the locked gun cabinet standing wide open. The rifle had not been moved, but all of a sudden the hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He whirled around, expecting to find an intruder behind him, but all he found was his old wallet, the one he’d tossed into the bottom of the cabinet thirteen years ago, thrown open on the dining room table.
The dogs were outside howling, and he knew why. The ghost was out there blowing smoke in their eyes. He’d sidled up next to them and now they were on their backs, rubbing off something awful. The ghost was trying to drive them all crazy, and it was starting to work.
Jake walked across the room and picked up the moldy wallet. Amazingly, it still reeked of fish and stale water after all this time. The single credit card and laminated driver’s license were stuffed in the flap, along with a yellowed letter.
Even before he looked at the fireplace, he knew the key to the cabinet would still be hanging on the hook by the mantel, undisturbed. He knew, if he checked the cabinet for fingerprints, he would find only his own. He listened to his dogs howl, then he picked up the letter that his mother has forwarded him thirteen years ago.
Dear Mr. Grey:
I found your wallet in December, washed up in Mesquite Cove. I swear all the money had disintegrated. There was nothing in it but your driver’s license and the credit card, along with the oddest thing, a cream-colored tooth.
There’s been some crazy things going on here lately, but I ain’t no busybody. I’m not asking any questions, and I’m not saying anything, unless, of course, somebody asks. Sincerely,
Donald Reed
The dogs stopped barking. They came in one after the other, their fur standing on end. Jake put the letter back in the wallet, then the wallet in the gun cabinet, and locked it.
Probably, he’d opened the gun cabinet during a nightmare last night; he’d done it before, though not in years. If the ghost had really been set on haunting him, he’d have managed to get a hold of that tooth Jake had flushed down the toilet thirteen years ago. He’d put a bloated body on the front doorstep. He’d stop messing around.
Jake walked out to the driveway and looked up. The ghost was not on the roof, but the air still reeked of tobacco. There was a godawful chill to the air.
He had one hell of a headache, and it got worse when the phone rang.
He didn’t go to answer it; he’d never bothered with an answering machine and sometimes, if he was lucky, whoever was calling just gave up. This time, though, the ringing wouldn’t stop. Finally, he walked back inside and picked it up.
“Jake Grey,” he said.
“They’re draining the lake,” a woman’s voice said.
Jake leaned against the wall. “Mom?”
There was no answer. Whoever was on the other end had already hung up.
Cal Bentley liked to say he’d grown with the town. Back in 1959, when Prescott had one hardware store and less than ten thousand people, he’d been twenty-two years old and one hundred fifty pounds. Fresh out of the police academy in Phoenix, he’d been amazed society trusted him with a gun. He came from a long line of cops, but he was also young, and so in love with the prettiest girl in Prescott, anything could happen. If she left him for a richer man, he might lose his head and go on a shooting spree. If she stopped loving him, he might very well turn that gun on himself.
With thoughts like that, he was often amazed disaster never struck. If anyone had told him at twenty-two that he was going to get everything he wanted, he would have told them they were crazy, that no one had such luck.
He married Lois Akerman on June third, 1960. He gained weight right along with her when she got pregnant with their boy, Mike, and two years later, their girl, Lanie. She exercised most of hers off, but he grew accustomed to her blueberry pies, and he just kept growing. Now, nearly forty years after he showed up as a deputy sheriff in Yavapai County, he was chief of police and two hundred fifty pounds. Lois had tried to get him on all kinds of diets—all-protein, high-carb, Slim-Fast, Jenny Craig, but the truth was, being big worked to his advantage. Most of the punks he picked up for drunk driving or possession of marijuana knew he could smash them flat if he chose to, and because he hardly said a word, they could never read his intentions. They had no idea he wished they’d just go home and sleep off whatever was happening to them. They had no idea he felt guilty just looking at them, because the only difference between him and them was love and circumstance and plain old-fashioned luck.
He’d put away kids for life who were no worse than his own, and watched slick rapists walk away free. Forty years ago, he’d known black from white, he’d flashed his gun half a dozen times a day. In the last three months, he hadn’t taken it out once. He was cutting people slack left and right and if someone asked him why, he’d have to state the truth: He wanted to even up the playing field. Everyone was a little criminal, even himself.
He started going bad two years ago, when he went to arrest a sixteen-year-old for prostitution. She’d been hanging out by Teton’s Bar, propositioning anyone who looked like he could pay her twenty-five dollars. Cal had shown her his badge as soon as she got in the car, and she hadn’t even tried to get away. She just slumped against the door and said “Fuck.”
Her legs and arms were spindles, but her stomach was already melon-sized and hard. He estimated she was six months along.
“You got parents?” he asked.
“Not as far as I’m concerned.”
Cal nodded. He had been fifty-nine years old at the time, and aiming to retire at sixty-two. He didn’t need this shit anymore. Both his kids had gone to college, married decent people, and made the trek home for Christmas every year. He knew how good life could be when people did what they were supposed to.
He drove to the corner, parked, then reached over and opened her door. “Get out,” he said.
“You serious?”
He sat staring straight ahead until she’d gone. Then he drove back to Teton’s, ordered an iced tea, and made sure she didn’t come back.
Since then, he’d let everyone from dope fiends to graffiti sprayers to runaways go. He was risking everything, his ample retirement and the respect of every sheriff on the force, and he didn’t give a damn. The problem was, he’d spent too much time with criminals. He’d begun to see their side.
In forty years on the force, he’d shot only one man, and even then he’d just knocked the automatic out of the thief’s hand. In the hospital afterward, the man, a forty-year-old accountant who’d orchestrated a string of burglaries in the area, had flipped him off with his bandaged finger.
“Some cop,” he’d said. “Can’t even shoot straight.”
Cal had leaned over the man and his nostrils flared. He’d smelled the same rank breath hundreds of times before, the kind that came from way down deep, where a man had begun to decay. It rose up on the breath of people who would never amount to anything and knew it. Men who based their lives on get-rich-quick schemes and women who hoped a man would save them. Every time Cal got a whiff of them, he thanked God for Lois and the kids. He thanked God he’d been lucky enough to live a long, boring life, and he worried that he was due for catastrophe.
“You’re a sorry mess of a man,” he’d said. “You’re not worth the stain I’d get on my conscience from killing you.”
Cal had a tally of arrests while on the force. Three hundred twenty for rape. Thirty-three hundred burglary charges. A remarkable ten thousand two hundred DUIs. It sounded bad, but in nearly forty years, in a county that had grown to one hundred and fifty thousand, it was about average. He’d closed every case in town, except one, and that one wasn’t on the books. It was the mystery of Jake Grey.
Cal had met the man when he showed up in Prescott fifteen years ago and went to work for Ivan Olak, the cabinet maker. Lois had wanted new cherrywood kitchen cabinets, and he’d gone to Jake’s apartment on the edge of town to pick up the estimate. When Jake opened the door and noticed Cal’s uniform, he held out his hands, as if he were under arrest. His palms were up, revealing a scar on his left hand, puckered and blue. It had never been tended, that much was obvious. When Jake turned his hand slightly, Cal saw the scar on the other side too, a nice clean bullet wound, from the looks of it.
Over the years the scar would fade, but so would the man. Cal would watch Jake slowly cover up his face with a beard, and his life with dogs and deadwood, with no clue how to stop it.
“You’re Jake, right?” he asked. “Ivan sent me out for the estimate.”
Jake dropped his hands. He went for the estimate and held it out with his damaged hand.
“That’s quite a scar there,” Cal said.
Jake looked up. He wasn’t scared, as far as Cal could tell. He was waiting. And in fifteen years, Cal had not changed his mind about Jake. The man was still waiting. More than anything, it seemed, he wanted to be found out.
Cal had tried to oblige him. He’d run him through the computer and come up with a social security number, previous jobs, driver’s licenses. He’d discovered Jake had been born in Phoenix to Cheryl and Paul Grey. There was a death certificate on file for Paul Grey in 1972, cause of death cardiac arrest. Jake would have been eight at the time. Cheryl Grey remarried ten years later, her new husband a plumber named Roy Pillandro.
There was one outstanding bill on Jake’s account, to Smith’s Jewelers in Glendale. A half-carat diamond ring had never been paid off, and was eventually repossessed from its owner, Joanne Newsome.
The only other interesting piece of information was the missing persons report filed on Roy Pillandro in 1985, the year Jake turned up in Prescott. Roy was last seen on his forty-foot houseboat on Wawani Lake. He’d taken a single suitcase with him, and had not been heard from since.
Cal might have mentioned this, but that would have spoiled his afternoons at Jake’s cabin. If there was something bad in his friend’s past, he just didn’t want to know about it. Better to stand silently on Jake’s deck listening to the wind boomerang off Kemper Peak. When lightning flared, he didn’t run for cover. He didn’t even consider the fact that he could lose everything. He just stood on the highest point of Jake’s deck and drank one of his friend’s beers in pure silence. He watched the maniac dogs run in circles. When the fireworks fizzled at dusk, and hummingbirds swooped in, mistaking his old high-school ruby ring for nectar, he was
struck by the truth: He was a lucky man.
“What is he to you?” Lois often asked him. “What on earth do you do up there, because I know for a fact, Cal Bentley, that that man never says a word.”
Cal couldn’t answer, because if he did, he would break his wife’s heart. Jake was the man he would have been if he hadn’t fallen in love with her. He did not tell her that sometimes, despite all his luck, he looked in Jake’s eyes with pure envy.
So that was why the fax still sat on Cal’s desk. He stood with his back to it, staring out his office window at a day that had begun with frost on the ground, and was ending in steam rising off the high desert floor. Earthquake weather, they called it in California. Here in Prescott, though, only people got shook up. Within a few hours, when the storms moved in off Kemper Peak, the calls would start coming in about juveniles terrorizing the neighborhood and honest men up and leaving their wives. If dry lightning sprang up, it was entirely possible all hell might break loose.
The fax was from Dan Merrill, a deputy assigned to Wawani Lake now that they were draining it for the new Desert Sky Reservoir. Desert Sky would provide water for homes from Phoenix to Las Vegas, turn the desert into a sea of green lawns and golf courses. Cal had never said a word about this, but when he’d picked up two environmentalists on charges of tree spiking up by Thumb Butte, he’d listened to their plan of dynamiting the new reservoir, and set them free.
Cal walked back to his desk. He picked up the paper and his stomach began to churn.
Lake draining turning up some interesting things. Found an inordinate number of dead dogs. Beer bottles. Condoms. Nobody’s swimming anymore, I can tell you that, but the kids are hanging out, doping up, searching for wreckage. Best of all, found one of those ID bracelets, pretty corroded, but could still make out the letters, ROY. Records show a missing persons report filed fifteen years back. Roy Pillandro. Once we fill up the new reservoir and drain this baby out, I have a feeling we’re going to find our man.
The Wishing Garden Page 10