Fletch tisked. “You kids. You can’t wear anything without some sort of an advertisement or a slogan on it. Wouldn’t the usual beer logo or ‘YALE’ do just as well?”
The young man stuck the piece of pipe into the back pocket of his wet jeans.
With his foot, Fletch slid the metal wastebasket from under his desk.
Apparently identifying the noise accurately, the young man turned. With a quick grin and a glance at Fletch, he dropped the pipe into the basket.
“You have your mother’s eyes,” Fletch said.
“She says the rest of me is pure you.”
“Poor you. Your boots are messing up the floor.” Up to their high-top laces they were covered with mud, manure, bits of hay.
“I always heard that father types say things like that.”
“Take ‘em off. Right where you are.” Fletch tapped his foot against the side of the wastebasket. “You’re not in a jailhouse now. No free labor here.”
Standing on one foot, then the other, the young man removed one boot, filthy, wet white sock, dropped them in the wastebasket, then the other boot and sock. He asked, “Couldn’t you say ‘Hello’ first? ‘How are you? How’s your life been?’”
“You like tuna puffs?”
“What’s a tuna puff?”
“I liked them, your age. Still do. Warm food.”
“I like warm food.”
Passing between the young man and the desk, Fletch went into the study bathroom. He returned with two towels. One he handed to the young man. The other he dropped on the mess the young man’s boots had made on the wood floor. He stirred the towel around with his foot.
“What’s your name?” Fletch asked.
“John.”
“Faoni.”
“John Fletcher Faoni.”
“True?”
“Too true.”
“What do people call you?”
“Jack.”
“Oh.”
“Sometimes I say my name is Fletch.”
“Oh. That sounds more familiar.”
“Fletch Faoni. Lots of people are called Jack.”
“Gee. And all this time I thought Crystal liked my first names.”
“Irwin Maurice,” Jack blurted.
Crouching on bent knees, Fletch finished cleaning up the mess on the floor. He picked up the towel and turned it over. “Would you believe I didn’t know you exist?”
“I know you didn’t. Mother didn’t want you to.”
Fletch looked up at the barefoot boy with cheeks wet with rain. Without using the towel, Jack had just hung it around his neck. “Why not?”
“Said I was none of your business. Shouldn’t be a burden to you. You didn’t ask for me. She conned you, entrapped you, or something. Way she tells it, she virtually had me by artificial insemination.”
“Not quite. Although I think she would have had you by parthenogenesis, if she could have.”
Jack did not ask what parthenogenesis meant.
Still crouching, wet, filthy towel in hand, Fletch continued to look up at the young man, who had not moved back, or away, across the room, who remained standing closer to Fletch than normal, as if to sense him.
Jack’s hair was curled with rain and mud. His face was streaked by dirt in dried sweat, especially in his day-old, two-day-old light beard.
He smelled of outdoors, rain, sweat, trees, hay, exertion.
Fletch said, “We made love only once.”
“She’s told me you were both naked on a bathroom floor struggling to free yourselves from a shower curtain you had fallen through, or some such ridiculous thing. And so I got born.”
“That’s about right.” Fletch smiled. “Entrapped in a shower curtain. Something like that. But she didn’t exactly entrap me. We were at a journalism convention at Hendricks’ Plantation, in Virginia. In fact, if I remember correctly, I entered the shower voluntarily. Of course, it was my shower, and I can’t remember how she happened to be in it. What’s more, it was a real case of coitus interruptus. I mean, after being interrupted by a third person, we both did return our attentions back to what apparently turned out to be your conception. She must have timed the occasion perfectly. It wasn’t until later that I realized Crystal was trying to get pregnant. By me. Crystal always was good at timing things.”
“How did you feel about that?”
“I was complimented.”
“Did you love her at all?”
“Oh yes. Crystal was charming, brilliant, witty, thoughtful, perceptive, loving, with gorgeous skin and eyes. She could have been a great beauty.”
“Except she probably weighed a ton and a half.”
“She felt she had a weight problem, yes. Does she still?”
“She weighs about right,” Jack said, “if only she were fourteen feet tall.”
“I think she hadn’t many lovers.”
“From what she’d told me,” Jack said, “Mother made love only twice in her life. Once to you, and once, long before, to a man named Shapiro.”
“Oh, yes. I remember now. That’s how I figured out what she was doing. She had attempted this selective breeding once before.”
“And was she terribly fat even then?”
“Corpulent.” Fletch dumped the dirty wet towel into the wastebasket. He stood up. “Trouble with Crystal was that she thought she was unattractive. She told everybody she was unattractive all the time. So most people saw her as unattractive.”
Jack said, “You did what you did without forethought.”
“You’re well-spoken. Yes. Without much forethought. But I could have done something else.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
Fletch cut his eyes to read the young man’s face. “Are you?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Did I make a mistake?”
Finally the young man stepped into the middle of the room. His eyes scanned the light switches. “Do the lights in this house go on automatically?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because the lights went on one by one. Fifteen minutes later you came down the road in the Jeep by yourself. What do you have, some kind of a radio switch in the Jeep?”
Fletch asked, “In which barn are your traveling companions?”
The young man hesitated. “The one further from here.”
“Do they smoke? Do they have matches, lighters?”
“They don’t smoke. I don’t know if they have lighters.”
“If they have matches they’re probably soaked and useless.”
“How did you know about them? My ‘traveling companions’? Why do you call them that?”
“I met the sheriff on the way home. There are roadblocks up. They’re looking for you.”
“Oh. And the sheriff mentioned the name Faoni to you?”
“Kriegel. Faoni. Leary. Moreno. Which one are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“The murderer, the attempted murderer, the kidnapper, or the drug grocer?”
“Attempted murder.”
“I see.”
The young man stood very straight. “I’m asking you if you are alone in the house. I know there was no one in the house before you arrived.”
“You’re trying to tell me you’ve got big, tough friends outside.”
“Yeah.”
Fletch moved some of the papers on his desk, revealing the handgun. He picked it up and put it in his belt. “You saw me arrive alone.”
The young man raised his chin a little. Still he seemed to be sniffing Fletch warily. “Yes.”
“The barns are the first places the cops will look for you, and your traveling companions. As kids they hid in barns themselves.” Jack said nothing. Pointing, Fletch said, “Uphill of the back barn, to the left, about one hundred and fifty meters, is a deep gully. There’s all kind of junk, trees, old barbed wire, fence posts, whatever, thrown in that gully as somebody’s idea of a means to prevent erosion. In a storm like this, shortly, if not already, water wil
l come streaming hard down that gully. I’m certain the cops will not go into that gully.” They will not go into that gully, Fletch knew, because as kids they learned that’s one of the places where the snakes are. He asked Jack, “Do you want to help your traveling companions escape?”
Jack said, “Yes.”
“Then go lead them up to the gully, tell them to hunker down in it, and to stay there until further notice.” Further notice will come, Fletch continued in his own mind, after your traveling companions have been thoroughly exhausted, terrified by snakes, and beaten up by rushing water beating them against trees, fence posts, and coils of rusty barbed wire. “Better put your boots back on. Outside.”
“Why are you helping me? I, we’re a danger to you. And you’d better believe it.”
“Hey. Aren’t fathers supposed to grab every minute they can get to spend with their sons? I mean, here you are, taking probably just a short vacation from a federal penitentiary; clearly you’ve gone considerably out of your way to come see your old dad…”
Narrowing his eyes slightly, Jack said, “You’re ‘mildly curious’ about me.”
“Sure I am. What with the cops looking high and low for you, we’ll have some real quality time together. Don’t you think?”
“You’re not sending me out to hunker down in a gully with the other guys?”
Fletch said, “There’s a shower in there.” He nodded to the door to the study bathroom. “Fresh towels. Down the hall, back of the house, there’s a guest room. Closets, bureau drawers. Some old clothes of mine; some left by forgetful houseguests. While you’re showering and changing, I’ll go heat up the tuna puffs. You want milk?”
“We knocked out your phones. Way down the road.”
Fletch shrugged. “Some people around here still believe that when it rains real hard like this frogs drop out of the sky. When it rains this hard, there certainly are a great many more frogs on the roads. I’ve noticed that myself.”
“What are you talking about?”
“When I come back, try to look more like a prince, will you? A little less like a frog?”
The young man tried to smile, but failed. “Why?”
“A couple of counties are about to stop by. They want to borrow the Jeep to go looking for you and your traveling companions.”
“What are counties?”
From the hall outside the study, Fletch said: “Cops.”
3
P ulling off his sneakers as he walked, Fletch went through the kitchen into the small back hall. He stepped into his thigh-high black rubber boots. From a wall peg, he took his wide-brimmed dark brown hat and put it on his head. He buttoned his long, brown horse coat to his throat.
Knowing himself virtually invisible and inaudible in the night’s hard rain, he went out the back door, and along the side of the house to the front corner.
Outside the French doors, Jack was visible in the study lights, sockless, stamping on his work boots. He crouched to lace them.
As Fletch knew he would, Jack went down the front walk, across the road, and along the graveled driveway through the home pasture to the barns.
After waiting a moment, Fletch crossed the lawn, the road, and went in a straight line over a white board fence, across the home pasture to the back fence. He sat on the top board of that fence under a tree. From there, even in that rain, even in that dark, he could see movement in the area between the barns and against the back hills. Fletch had learned that if he remained perfectly still, especially sitting, especially if he lowered his head so that his hat was backed by his shoulders, he would not be seen under such circumstances, or at least not be seen as a human.
In a moment a skinny man walked, head down, between the barns. He was headed in the direction of the gully. He took rapid short steps.
There followed a huge man, with a big egg of a head, big chest, big gut. Angrily he was waving his arms. More visible once backed by the hill, he turned. Shouting something, he ran back a couple of meters.
Suddenly, smoothly, a tall, slim, lithe figure ran forward to him, and kicked him in the crotch. The lighter man, the boy, cracked the side of his right hand against the egg of the big man’s head. The young man’s voice came through the pounding rain. “Will you shut up!” Then the young man backed up a meter and postured himself defensively.
The fourth man, shorter than all of them, fatter, came into view. Arms akimbo, he stood over the crouching big man. Fletch guessed he was talking to him, exhorting him.
While he talked, the lithe young man Fletch knew to be Jack jogged ahead of the first man Fletch had seen, who was hesitating by the gate to the pastures.
Jack climbed over the gate. He disappeared across the stream toward the back hill.
Stepping on every rung of the gate, the second man followed.
Angrily shaking the gate as he climbed it, the big man climbed over the gate.
As if puzzled by the problem of gate climbing, the fat, bandy-legged man watched him. He looked for a way of opening the gate, but in the dark did not succeed. Then, clumsily, making more of a job of it than necessary, he climbed over the gate.
Faoni, Moreno, Leary, and Kriegel disappeared across the roaring stream, stumbling and slipping uphill in the dousing rain.
“HEY, ACE.”
“That you, Fletch?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Alston just came in.” It was two hours earlier by the clock in California. “Hang on.”
Alston Chambers and Fletch went back a long way together.
Alston had started his career as a prosecutor. When his children were born he decided he needed to earn a better living than the state provided him.
He tried being a defense attorney. He did make more money.
He hated defending people he knew to be criminals.
“The difference is,” he told Fletch at the time, “between telling the truth and distorting truth, making up a barely palatable lie to fit the facts, to seed reasonable doubt.”
“Not your bowl of minestrone, eh?”
“I hate my clients! I think most of them should be hung, drawn, and quartered. How can I spend my life hating the people I work with, spend all my time with, my clients?”
“Many do.”
“It’s like being a beautician in the land of the ugly!”
“There’s always divorce law,” Fletch said. “Personally, I can tell you how profitable that is.”
“I want to put all my clients in prison!”
“Then go back to putting them in prison,” Fletch said. “You were good at it.”
So, after time, with periodic objective advice, encouragement, and a few legitimate political dollars from Fletch, Alston Chambers had risen to the position of District Attorney.
Alston came on the phone. “Can’t you let me get home, let me take off my coat, smell the stew pot, and pat the cat before making me answer the phone?”
“You’re late. You must have slowed and smirked going by the county jail again. Did any of the citizens you’ve jugged wave at you as you went by? I know how you love that.”
“Are you in a factory?”
“No. Why?”
“What’s that noise?”
“Rain on an aluminum roof. Hard rain. I’m in the smokehouse.”
“Why? Are you going to talk dirty to me?”
“Probably.” Fletch had taken the cellular phone from the station wagon into the smokehouse. Frequently, the phone did not work in the deep valley of the farm. Despite the storm, the phone was working well. Through the open door of the unlit smokehouse he could keep his eye on much of the farm. Probably he would be able to see Jack returning to the house, his dark shape moving along the white board fence. Hoping the phone would not leak, especially that his conversation would not be heard on some police frequency, he had finger-punched out Alston’s home number in California.
“Hey, Alston,” Fletch said. “Listen.”
“Never mind. Take your time,” Alston said. “We’r
e just having duck Curaçao for dinner. Those little onions.”
“I have a son.”
For a moment, Fletch thought the line went dead. It hadn’t.
“I suppose you do,” Alston said. “I never thought about it. A new son, or an old son?”
“An old son.”
“How old?”
“You remember Crystal Faoni?”
“I remember your talking about her. That was two million years ago.”
“Two and a half.”
“You were never romantically involved with Crystal what-ever-is-her-name. Were you? She’s the one female in your life I thought you weren’t romantically involved with.”
“She had a son and never told me.”
“How did she do that? Just by standing close to you? Did she catch your fumes or something?”
“We bumped into each other. Once.”
“Wasn’t she impossibly obese?”
“Corpulent.”
“You could reach?”
“Apparently.”
“Good for you. As I remember, you loved her mind, her wit, her good spirits …”
“I guess she saw something in me, too.”
“What?”
“God knows.”
“You mean, she wanted a kid by you? She set you up?”
“I could have resisted.”
“Not you.”
“I acted without forethought.”
“What, did she sneak into your bed one night when you were half drunk, or something?”
“She tumbled out of my shower. Actually, she landed on me.”
“Ah,” Alston said. ‘The oppressed male.”
“I’ve wondered why I haven’t heard from her in years.”
“Legally—”
“I don’t care about legally.”
“You never do. Where is this scion of sin?”
“Here.”
“Where?”
“At the farm.”
“And he’s locked you in the smokehouse in the pouring rain?”
“Not quite.”
“What does he look like?”
“I haven’t really seen him yet. He’s so dirty—”
“You mean ‘dirty’ as in so dirty you can’t even see what he looks like?”
“He came through this storm,” Fletch said, “under adverse circumstances. Over hill and dale, as it were. Through woods and streams.”
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