by Tom Kakonis
“Goddammed if I’ll shut up. Not this time. ’Bout time somebody said something.”
“You his wife?” Wilcox asked.
“Yeah, I’m his wife. He’d’ve listened to me, none of this would’ve happened.”
Beneath her the husband groaned miserably.
“Whyn’t you tell it to me?” Wilcox suggested.
“You bet I’ll tell ya. Was the same crazy bastard come to our house other night. Lookin’ for his kid.”
“You sure about that?”
“Goddam right I’m sure.”
“How’s that?”
“ ’Cuz he just told me. When they was bringin’ him out here.”
“He say where this person is now?”
“On his way to the Buckleys.”
“An’ who’d they be, these Buckleys?”
“Ones got the kid.”
“You got an address?”
She did. She gave it to him, along with the instructions to find the son bitch, lock him up, and throw away the key.
“See what I can do,” Wilcox said noncommittally, and he hopped out onto the asphalt and hurried to the front of the ambulance. Mrs. Quinn saw him coming. She started to say something, but he cut her off with a staying motion, a quick fanning of air.
“You get anything?” the badge wanted to know.
“Nah, was a false alarm.”
“False alarm,” he repeated doubtfully.
“That’s right.”
“Detectives oughta be here any minute now. Maybe you should be talkin’ to them.”
“Good thought,” Wilcox said, but his movements said something else. He took Mrs. Quinn by the arm, turned her around, and led her away, whispering in her ear, “Wasn’t him.”
“But where—”
Wilcox made his fanning gesture again.
“Where you goin’?” the badge called after them.
Over his shoulder, in parting shot, Wilcox called back, “Wanna thank you for your cooperation. You burb boys really know how to treat a brother officer.”
In the car he said, “Your husband’s walkin’ a high wire in a windstorm.”
She looked at him baffledly.
“He’s gettin’ himself in serious trouble,” he translated for her.
“Has he been hurt?”
“Not as far as I know. Ain’t in the meat wagon back there.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“Maybe,” was all he volunteered. About the kid he said nothing. Better to leave that one alone for now. Got enough to keep him occupied.
Not the least of which was locating the address. Fuck did he know about the geography out here? Dick is what he knew. So he took Ogden west till he saw a sign said Westmont, then swung south and wound through some residential streets till he came across the one he was looking for. He turned onto it and went two blocks, checking the ascending house numbers. Wrong fucking direction. He made a sudden bootleg and headed the other way. Finally found it.
He parked along the curb opposite the house, gave the scene a quick visual sweep. No vehicles in the drive, none on the street. Place looked quiet. No signs of trouble. Maybe he got lucky, beat the trailblazer professor over here. About time for some luck.
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here?” she asked calmly.
“What I’m gonna tell you is to stay put. No arguments, okay?”
“Is Marsh here?”
“I dunno.”
“Is my son?”
Already she put it together. Quick lady. Whole lot different from the way he remembered her, them couple times at the station. How, exactly, he wasn’t sure. “Dunno that either,” he said truthfully. “But if you wait here like I’m tellin’ you, I’ll find out.”
She deliberated a moment, not long. “I trust you,” she said. “I’ll wait.”
It was the calm, was different, and the total absence of fear or hope, either one. Was almost spooky, all that calm. All that control. Like she was putting her trust in the hands of the Lord. Him being the Lord. Some Lord.
He hurried up the walk, climbed the porch steps, and laid a thumb on the bell. Nobody came to the door, no sounds from inside. He went around to the back, saw a hose snaked out across the grass, pumping water. Didn’t much like the looks of that. Maybe got here late instead of early. Not so lucky after all.
He gazed at the house, pondering his dwindling store of moves. A shadow of a figure flitted past a window. He approached the door, pounded on it, and kept on pounding till a shaky female voice behind it said, “Who’s there?”
“Police. Open up.”
The door pulled back a notch. He stuck his shield in it. “Mrs. Buckley?”
“Yes?”
“Glenn Wilcox, Chicago P.D. Like to speak with your husband if I could.”
“He’s not here now.”
“You tell me where I can find him?”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothin’ wrong,” he lied. “Just I need to talk to him.”
“What about? Maybe I can help you.”
“I do appreciate that, but it’s him I gotta talk to.”
“It’s about Davie, isn’t it?”
“Davie’s your boy?”
“Yes.”
“He here with you?”
“No, he’s with Dale.”
“That’s your husband, Dale?”
“Yes.”
“You had any other, uh, visitors this morning?”
“No. Please tell me what’s happening. Please.”
There were tears in her voice now. Kindly as he could, Wilcox said, “Be better if you tell me where it is your husband’s at.”
Where he was just then was not, in measurable distance, all that far removed, under a mile, in fact, though if it were measured in the manic accelerating confusion in his head, he could as easily have been on the dark side of the moon. With the boy clutched tightly to his chest, he raced through the park, past the playground, around the pond, and up the slight grade to the carousel. The sun stood high in a white, luminous sky. Bars of light penetrated the branches in the thick stand of trees, seemed to sprint along with him as he ran. A towering oak, home to a chittering choir of birds, seemed to warble a medley of jeers. Everything seemed queerly slanted, warped, askew.
Nevertheless, he kept running. Arrived at last at the refuge of the ticket booth. Set the boy down, leaned over the counter, and demanded simply, “Tickets.”
“We ain’t open yet,” said a sour-looking old man, his eyes droopy-lidded, skin the bleached yellow of a withering tobacco leaf.
“Start it up. He’s gonna ride.”
“You deef? Said we ain’t open.”
Buck thrust out a hand and seized him by the collar. “What I said was start it up.”
The lids lifted, mouth twisted into an effort at accommodating mercantile smile. “Okay, okay. Guess we can get ’er rollin’ little early. You wanna let go my shirt here?”
Buck released him, yanked out his wallet, and emptied all its bills on the counter.
“How many tickets you want, anyways?”
“Many as that’ll buy.”
“How long you plannin’ for him to ride?”
“Long as he wants. All day, he wants.”
The old man stepped out the back of the booth, muttering something about loony fucks. He went over to the squat box of an engine and hit some switches. The carousel seemed to erupt in a dazzle of flashing lights and a strident blast of tinny music.
Buck hoisted Davie onto one of the smirky mounts. “What’d I tell ya?” he said triumphantly. “I say we was gonna ride?” His voice was cracked and trembling. Sweat dampened his shirt, slicked his brow.
The child looked at him doubtfully, as though uncertain if this was a question to be responded to or merely a statement of accomplished fact. He interpreted it as the latter and remained silent.
Buck signaled the old man, who pulled a lever and set the horses prancing and spinning in their closed ci
rcle. After a couple of turns Buck leaped off the platform and positioned himself, sentinel-like, at the gate in the guard rail, his feet spaced wide, fists balled, jaw rigid, eyes relentlessly shifting, scanning the park, the trees, the pond, the small clusters of people beginning to appear. Out of which he picked a figure coming up the slope, moving in a slow, forward-stooping lurch, leaving a trail of blood in the laggard shadow he tugged along behind him.
A blind spot, by ophthalmological definition, is the small area, insensitive to light, where the optic nerve enters the retina of the eye. In commonplace usage, particularly among drivers, it is that zone, also small, where one’s vision is blocked or obscured. Kierkegaard, with the philosopher’s heavily portentous assertion of the obvious, defines it simply as that which you cannot see.
By no stretch of these definitions could the black Lincoln Town Car be described as veiled in a blind spot. A quick glance in the rearview mirror would have revealed it behind him, initially little more than a smudge on the receding horizon, gradually enlarging, taking shape, shrinking the margin between them, tenacious as a whirlwind, reliable as death. But Marshall’s attention and vision were narrowed in on another vehicle, the one pulling away from the very house he was searching for, and out ahead of him now by several blocks, a man at the wheel and, unmistakably, a child in the passenger’s seat. Jeff? He couldn’t be sure.
He drove wildly, reckless of caution, squealing around corners, bolting stop signs, zooming past intruding cars, his horn a sustained rude bray. Still couldn’t seem to gain on them. Not until they turned into the lot of what appeared to be a large suburban park. He brought the Volvo to a gear-grinding stop. Through the windshield he could see the man dashing toward—of all unlikely destinations—a merry-go-round situated on a little welt of a hill on the other side of a wide pond. The child in his arms was clearly a boy. Jeff? Still too much distance to tell. He set out after them. Soon enough he’d know.
Amazing to himself was his vigor, his stamina. He felt feathery, almost buoyant, as though the ground had slid away beneath him and he were treading on a cushion of air, impervious anymore to pain, indifferent to ooze of blood. To his left was a clump of trees so dense they seemed to have embalmed the night in a shroud of branches; to his right the surface of the pond caught the light and glistened like a mirror of polished green glass; up ahead the carousel’s music, piping, shrill, allegro, floated toward him, an aural beacon, guiding him on.
Slight as it was, the incline slowed him, restored his feet ploddingly to earth. The muscles in his legs trembled. Air escaped his lungs in ragged gasps. He trudged up the hill. Like scaling a mountain of wet cement. At the summit of which stood a man whose body, square and thick, bunchy with muscle, seemed charged with energy, all its strength squeezed into a tight, belligerent knot. And who took a step toward him, scowlingly demanding, “What do you want?”
Marshall looked at him, then past him, to the cantering troop of horses, riderless but for one. And that one he recognized as his son. “Him,” he said.
“Who are you?”
“His father.”
“I’m his father! I adopted him. Legal, fair. You’re nobody. Leave us alone.”
“No. He was kidnapped. I’m taking him back.”
“You want him, you gotta come through me.”
“Then I will.”
“How you gonna do that? Look at you. I could break you in two.”
“I don’t know how. Find a way.”
But as it turned out he didn’t have to, for at just that moment the miniature rider passed behind them, and his eyes fell on Marshall. “Dad?” he called, an astonished lift in his voice. His shoulders twisted, neck craned, and on the next pass he scrambled off his mount and hopped off the spinning platform and came running toward Marshall, the shouted “Dad” transformed into a whoop of joy, no longer any question in it.
Marshall gathered him up. The child studied him guardedly. “You come back,” he said.
“Yes. I came back.”
“To stay?”
“To stay.”
The man watched them, stunned, beaten, his face twisted in an anguish of loss, as though he had just crossed the border into the bitter country of truth. Marshall considered him defiantly. “Now what do you say?”
No reply. No more threats. No remonstrances. Nothing. And in the stony vault of his heart, Marshall felt something peculiar, only dimly remembered, something approaching pity for this sorrowed man who claimed to be the father, probably nothing more than another pawn in this ugly game, remorselessly toppled. “I guess…well…I guess I’m sorry,” he stammered.
Maybe he was too. It was possible. But not sorry enough to keep him from turning away and starting down the hill, retracing his path along the trees and around the pond, wobbling a bit under the weight of his son. Who gingerly touched his bruised face and said, “You cut yourself, Dad.”
“That’s right.”
“It hurt?”
“How about if I say only when I laugh.”
“Huh?”
“No, it doesn’t hurt.”
“You tore your shirt,” the boy persisted.
“So I did.”
“Mom be mad.”
“We won’t tell her,” Marshall said, and they grinned at each other in the unuttered conspiracy of love.
But another voice, drifting toward them from behind the trees, flat as an echo ascending from the bottom of a deep well, declared, “Could be somebody else is mad, though.”
Dingo had pulled in next to the Volvo and followed him with his eyes, this meddling, soon-to-be-wormfood citizen limping and staggering through the park, barely on his feet. It had given him a certain grim, if incomplete, satisfaction, helped a little to soothe his own pain, which was like a siren gone off inside him, wailing down every boulevard and back alley of his punished body, thrumming through its farthest outskirts. Raising a godawful racket. To muffle it, get centered again, focused, he allowed himself a moment’s respite. Little intermission before the last act.
Cigarette might help. There was time. He tapped himself (taking care to avoid the damp, pulpy hole in his side) till he found a pack in a breast pocket of his jacket, irreparably ruined now, its fabric shredded and hopelessly stained. His best suit too. Another good reason why some payback was in order. And Odell DeCruz, damaged goods or not, was just the man to deliver it. Express mail.
Curiously, the cigarette pack was moist with blood. Blood flowing upward? Defying gravity? Couldn’t be. Made no sense. He examined his hands, crimson-stained and sticky. There’s your answer. Every riddle yields to analysis, reason. No mysteries. Other than the big one: what went wrong?—what mix of flawed judgment and evil luck combined to bring him to this sorry and entirely unforeseen condition? For that he had no ready answers. Puzzle it out later, after this errand was run.
He touched the glowing tip of the dash lighter to the cigarette dangling from his lips. Inhaled. The smoke scored his lungs but seemed to steady him some, hush the siren. Still was a bad habit, smoking, picked up in the Facility years ago. Have to kick it one of these days, or cut down. Meantime, though, he watched, fascinated, as the ash on this one slowly advanced, relentless as a mud slide engulfing a field of snow. Called to mind the blight unfairly cast over this life of his, so meticulously fashioned, created from nothing, woven of soaring visions and burning thirsts, and reduced in an instant, a finger snap, to a cinder heap of fractured illusions and botched plans and broken dreams. Another riddle to be addressed, unraveled.
But not now. Time to get moving now, get properly stationed. At considerable cost in lancing pain, he reached over, opened the glove compartment, removed the snub-nosed Ruger .38, and tucked it under his belt, the ungashed side. No less painful was the walk to the grove of trees, the sun beating on him, light glinting off the water like points of daggers in the eyes, the world seeming to pitch and sway beneath his feet.
He stepped into the grove’s merciful shade. Braced himself against the sturdy t
runk of a tree. In its branches, high above, a flock of birds twittered and chirped. A singing tree. Better that than the siren wail, starting in on him again, a rising screech, piercing and shrill.
It didn’t matter. He could manage, endure. He’d survive. More than survive. Prevail. All he had to do was nurture the slow, silent ferocity building in his head. And wait. Eventually the citizen would have to pass this way.
And at last he did.
“You!”
“Who else? You think I’d forget you? After this hole you put in me?”
Marshall was held mute in an instant of sickened dismay. It wasn’t fair. Come this close, this far—wasn’t fair. Yet there he was, the dancer, blanched, bloodied, rocking from side to side like some comical drunk, but coming at them all the same, mouth set in a fierce smile, eyes in cold, unblinking glare, and the weapon in his hand this time a gun. A knife you could dodge maybe, if you were nimble enough, or wrest away, if you were strong enough, or maybe outrun. Not a gun.
He backed toward the pond. Lowered Jeff to the ground and made a little shooing gesture. “Move away now,” he said.
The boy looked up at him, baffled and hurt. “Dad? You said—”
“Just get away from here. Go.”
“Squirrel stays,” the dancer hissed at him.
“What?”
“Kid. He’s a part of this too. He stays.”
“But you can’t mean to—”
“Man holding the piece can do anything he wants.”
Inarguably true. And Marshall, motionless as an insect sealed in amber, could only gaze, mesmerized, at the gun leveled on them, at the malevolent figure holding it, and then beyond him, into the space directly behind him, gradually filling with another figure, the aspirant father, coming down the hill in a bullish, legs-pumping charge. And Marshall’s eyes, loaded with wonder and perhaps a snippet of hope, gave away something; for the dancer wheeled around and got off a round just as the figure drove into him, slamming them both to the ground.
It was like watching the sluggish motion of underwater action. At the sound of the shot a tree seemed to explode with birds, blackening the sky. The gun seemed to sail through the air. The dancer seemed to be wriggling out from under the inert figure sprawled over him. Marshall heard himself calling, “Run, Jeff, run!” but the child was too terrified to move. So was he. Till the action seemed magically to accelerate, and he saw the dancer scrambling for the gun and, destitute of options, he threw himself on him and they tumbled across the grass, panting, grunting, cursing, limbs twined, bloods mingling, fused like some maddened, thrashing beast, rolling down the bank and plunging into the murky water and under it for what seemed an immensity of time. Till the grip on him loosened, and he came up gagging and sputtering. Till the head bobbed to the surface and, seething with fury, he grasped it by the throat and forced it under again, howling, “Gonna kill us, are you? See who does the killing. See.”