By the time Sharon finished telling me everything, I felt a little like throwing up myself.
Joseph had a different take. ‘Malcolm X was right,’ he told me. ‘White people are the devil.’
And at that moment I couldn’t figure out a way to disagree with him.
No one expected Lynette to get pregnant. And when she did, no one expected Lynette to keep the baby. And when she did that, no one expected her to be smart enough to hide it from Henderson.
But all of that was in the past. In the present, there was a baby.
‘Let me ask you this,’ I said to Sharon, after I settled my stomach a little, ‘why is it that your father wants this baby so bad, really?’
‘I don’t know.’ She was all out of steam.
I turned to Joseph. ‘Is it really plausible,’ I asked, ‘that a guy like this Henderson is really going to care about this baby one way or another without some weird ulterior motive?’
‘Maybe you should know something,’ Joseph piped up. ‘We – that is, the Seminole tribe here in this town – we’re about to have our whole area of the swamp, about five hundred and seventy thousand acres, declared a national preserve. That has something to do with all this.’
‘Like a park?’ I asked. ‘They’re going to make John Horse’s house a national park.’
He shook his head. ‘A preserve is different. This will be the first one.’
‘The first one what?’
‘This will be the first national preserve in America,’ he told me. ‘It’s different from a park.’
‘How different?’
‘Well, for one thing,’ he said, ‘we’ll be allowed, the Seminoles will be allowed, to keep our traditional hunting and grazing rights. You can’t do that in a national park.’
And at this point, Joseph smiled a little.
‘There’s more,’ I said, seeing that smile.
‘Yes,’ he told me. ‘In a national park you can’t drill for oil. But in a national preserve, we can.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said.
‘John Horse and Mister Redhawk have been working on the deal, like, with Congress – for a while. You know Mister Redhawk is a lawyer, right?’
‘A lawyer?’
‘University of North Dakota. Started the Indian Association there, sometime in the 1960s. Last year he helped to start the National Native American Bar Association. He’s a big deal. And, as a lawyer, he will kick your ass.’
‘I have to admit,’ I said, ‘he looks the part, now that you mention it. But here is something I have wondered: am I ever going to know his first name, or is that something disrespectful or wrong?’
‘His first name?’ Joseph seemed momentarily confused. Then he smiled that smile again. ‘Oh. I see. You don’t get it, but you already know his first name.’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said in no uncertain terms.
‘Yes, you do,’ he insisted. ‘You say it all the time. It’s Mister.’
This cracked me up. ‘The guy’s first name is Mister? This is excellent. Excellent. He’ll always get respect from anyone who has to use his name.’
Joseph nodded, smiling even bigger.
We might have gone on for a while, admiring the genius of Mister Redhawk’s parents, but instead the door of the office suite exploded inward and a raving lunatic in the person of one McReedy appeared in the room, a gun in each hand.
I thought we all reacted well under the circumstances. Sharon screamed and took a dive under her desk. My startled response kicked in so dramatically that I dropped the pistol I was holding, and it made a really loud noise on the floor. Joseph fell backward in his chair and landed like a turtle on his back, flailing for his own sidearm.
McReedy had an insane look in his eye. He was dressed very dramatically in a full-length trench coat, one pistol trained on me and the other pointed at Joseph’s crotch. In my experience, there was no better way to get a man’s attention than to point a pistol at his crotch. Joseph was very still. So was Sharon, who was trying to be silent underneath her desk, but she kept making little squeaking noises. Fear hiccups, I called them.
So it fell to me to be the spokesman.
‘I can see that you’re upset,’ I said to McReedy in my most soothing voice. ‘But there’s really no need for you to be. I’ve seen Lynette and her baby. They’re fine. Everybody’s healthy and pink. Lynette is even straightened out from the junk, so there’s that too.’
I was banking on a lot. I was banking on a fatherly sentiment that, for all I knew at this point, McReedy did not possess. But I figured, if Henderson had used Lynette to manipulate McReedy, maybe it was worth a shot for me to try the same thing.
Alas, McReedy only said, ‘Shut up.’
‘It’s true, man,’ Joseph said from where he was lying on the floor. ‘I’ve been watching out for her. John Horse got her off the dope, and healed the baby too. Everybody’s OK. They’re in the swamp.’
It was hard to tell, but I thought I saw a few of the black clouds clear away from McReedy’s eyeballs. It was obvious to me that he was loaded. My guess would have been coke, based on the takes-one-to-know-one school of observation, but his eyes were so vacant I thought maybe he’d been shooting speedballs.
A speedball was a dangerous thing to run into, because when you mixed coke and heroin in the same syringe, you got a person who was really messed up and who was also wide awake. It was a good combination for McReedy, because it kept him alert, but it also prevented him from giving a damn about almost anything on this earth. So he could aim and fire with clarity but his conscience wouldn’t even wake up, not for a second.
So I just continued with the program, hoping for the best. ‘It’s true what Joseph, here, says. Your daughter Lynette is safe in the swamp.’
McReedy laughed. It was not a happy sound. ‘Crap!’ he said. ‘She’s not safe there. She wasn’t safe there when she was three, and she’s not safe there now.’
‘You are referring to the fact that your employer, Mr Henderson, sent in the U.S. Army to get you back in fifty-seven,’ I said calmly, ‘when you and Maggie were living there, happy as the proverbial clams.’
Sometimes this worked – you could make a junkie think that you knew him, and that he knew you. It could confuse him, or it could make him think, or it could even encourage him to assume that you were his friend. Anything along those lines would have been good. It would keep him from pulling the trigger. Or, in this case, triggers.
‘Shut up,’ he told me again, but with less conviction than before.
So I kept it up. ‘Then, when you got out of the joint from the desertion rap, Henderson got your kid addicted to drugs because you wouldn’t do what he told you to do.’
That was mostly based on what Sharon had told me.
‘You.’ That’s all McReedy could come up with. Then he shook his head, trying to clear it. ‘You found Lynette and took her to the hospital.’
‘And then we came to get her to hide her from Henderson,’ Joseph chimed in.
‘And, frankly, from you,’ I said to McReedy. ‘If I may say so, you’re kind of a terrible father.’
That was obviously a risk, because it could have made him mad all over again. But I had seen many times in Brooklyn what could happen to a guy on the edge of a speedball, and very often he would get sad and sentimental. This was the heroin. Or sometimes the oldsters used morphine in a speedball, but McReedy looked more like the skag type to me, and I knew from recent experience that skag was readily available in Fry’s Bay.
I kept my mouth shut, giving McReedy time to think about what I’d said. But I was also eyeing the gun I’d dropped on the floor beside my foot, and I could see that Joseph was edging his hand toward his shoulder holster.
McReedy did, indeed, have a faraway look in his eye. And he was beginning to lower his guns.
Unfortunately, it was very dusty in our office, especially under the desks, and dust wreaks havoc on a person’s nose. In short, Sharon sneezed.
McReedy
didn’t mean to fire. He just did. A bullet barely missed me and went into Sharon’s desk. She screamed. A bullet from the other gun hit Joseph in the fleshy inner part of his right thigh, but missed anything important, as luck would have it.
Joseph moved faster than any human being I had ever seen. He rolled, he pulled out his gun, and he popped three direct hits right into McReedy.
McReedy grunted.
For a second, that was all that happened. We were all frozen, trying to assess the damage.
Then McReedy dropped both his guns.
‘Shit!’ he said, and he zoomed past me to Sharon’s desk.
Sharon crawled out from under the desk, but she didn’t look so good. She had a lot of blood on her face.
Joseph was on his feet, and blood was soaking his jeans.
I finally managed to motivate, and I scooped up the gun that I had dropped, stood, and kicked McReedy’s pistols toward Joseph.
‘Jesus, Sharon.’ McReedy was pulling her up into her seat. ‘I didn’t mean … I really didn’t mean to shoot you. Please don’t be shot.’
He said it like maybe he could make time go backwards.
You couldn’t see Sharon’s face because of the blood, but she was moving and waving her arms, so you could see she wasn’t dead yet.
‘Damn it,’ she swore. ‘Damn it.’
She was trying to wipe the blood out of her eyes.
I couldn’t figure why McReedy hadn’t gone down yet. Joseph’s bullets really had hit him fair and square.
‘Sharon.’ McReedy took off his trench coat and wrapped it around Sharon. Then he used the arms to mop at her brow.
‘I’m OK, I’m OK,’ she snapped, sounding anything but OK. ‘I hit my head on the metal under the drawer. Twice. Once when I sneezed and then again when you shot at me.’
He stopped mopping. ‘You bumped your head?’
‘I sneezed,’ she repeated, a little defensively.
McReedy was still for a second, and then he busted out laughing, like it was the best joke he had ever heard.
‘I didn’t shoot you? You hit your head?’
‘Yes, damn it,’ she confirmed.
It was about then that I registered McReedy’s vest, the good old-fashioned bulletproof kind. It was a little ruffled where Joseph’s bullets had hit, but otherwise very dapper.
‘That’s a lot of blood from a sneeze,’ I said.
Again McReedy laughed.
Joseph was a little less jolly. ‘You shot me in the leg, you son of a bitch,’ he said to McReedy.
This is when we noticed that Joseph had his pistol pointed right at McReedy’s head. I took a step back, to give Joseph a clear shot.
McReedy dropped the sleeve of his coat that he’d been using to clean up Sharon’s face.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You want me to look at it?’
‘I’d rather you just stay right there by Sharon,’ I said, waving around my gun.
I moved over to Joseph, who kept his pistol trained on McReedy.
‘It actually doesn’t hurt that much,’ Joseph told me softly. ‘But, I’m pretty stoned.’
‘So, it might hurt more later,’ I said to him. ‘But you’re lucky in part; the bullet went right through the flesh. Clean. Let me see can I stop the bleeding a little.’
I went to my desk because I had, in my bottom drawer, a package of industrial size bandages. I pulled them out.
‘I got these from Maggie Redhawk a while back,’ I said to Sharon, ‘when we went over and got that Tolliver kid whose father was roughing her up, remember?’
Sharon nodded.
I moved back to Joseph. ‘Do you want to take your pants off or do you want to rip them up? I have to put one of these bandages on your wound, right next to the skin, you understand. Not over jeans.’
He lowered his voice. ‘I don’t have on any underwear.’
‘Ah.’ I nodded. ‘Maybe you can un-tuck your shirt and it’ll hang down—,’
But he didn’t let me finish. ‘Not far enough. It won’t hang down far enough.’
‘Oh,’ I said, a little louder, ‘look who’s got a big opinion of himself. But, OK. Take off your jacket and use it like a skirt or a kilt or something.’
This, he went for. He was out of the jacket in two seconds, eyes always on McReedy.
But McReedy was, it would seem, more amused by the situation than anything else. This, also, was partly the speedball. The heroin was giving the guy a very nice sense of well-being. I figured McReedy was relieved that he didn’t shoot the daughter of his employer and so was having a little flood of jollity. Plus, the ballet with Joseph was amusing, even under the circumstances.
‘When you’re done there,’ McReedy said, smiling, ‘maybe you would toss me a bandage to put on Sharon’s head.’
‘Absolutely,’ I said, taking out a sealed pad about three inches square and tossing it to him.
In short order, I had bandages stuck on Joseph’s thigh, and Sharon had one on her forehead.
I was standing by Joseph holding two pistols, and he was holding two pistols, and McReedy was beginning to look a little disoriented.
‘What just happened?’ he mumbled, to no one in particular. ‘Wow.’
‘Let’s take this one step at a time,’ I said to him. ‘Let’s back up to why you want to kill me, which you have failed to do three times now.’
He nodded. He sighed. He sat himself down on Sharon’s desktop. ‘Maybe my heart’s not in it. I’m usually good at this.’
‘Your heart’s not in it?’ I asked.
‘You were trying to help Lynette,’ he said, like it was the answer to everything. ‘I could see that.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes that is exactly what I was doing. And she really is safe now. You should see her. And the baby: cute as a bug’s ear.’
‘Hey,’ Joseph lit up. ‘This guy really is a grandpa!’
I nodded. ‘Joseph says this because earlier he called me “grandpa”, but he meant it in a derogatory manner. In this case, he means it in a more familial way. Correct me, Joseph, if I am wrong.’
‘McReedy has a little granddaughter.’ Joseph seemed to be trying to figure that out.
‘You need to think about your life,’ I said to McReedy, using my mother’s best scolding voice. ‘You need to take stock.’
‘John Horse got your daughter off heroin,’ Joseph said, very sweetly, ‘and he could do the same for you.’
And it was about then that I realized Joseph was kind of amazing, because he had been with me every step of the way as I attempted to get all psychological with McReedy.
‘Joseph,’ I said to him, ‘you are a very perceptive young person.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘But, if I may return to a more pressing matter,’ I told McReedy, ‘you attempted to kill me a lot. Are you going to keep that up? Because I have in my hand the very gun which you tried to use on me only a short while ago.’
I held up the gun again for all to see.
‘Henderson tells me what to do,’ McReedy said, despondently. ‘I do it.’
‘But why?’ I asked. I thought this a reasonable question. ‘I mean, really, why?’
‘Where should I begin?’ McReedy was getting vague, which meant that the coke was slowing down and the junk was taking over. McReedy, theoretically, could have been about to nod off.
‘Why don’t you start when you deserted the American Army in Korea,’ I suggested.
‘I was never in Korea,’ he said, but his voice had gone all hollow. ‘I didn’t make it out of boot camp in Columbus, Georgia. I smacked a sergeant and took off. They caught me. I got court marshaled as a deserter.’
‘Why would that be?’ I asked. ‘Seems a harsh sentence just for smacking a guy.’
‘I was in the Airborne School on Main Post. I was going to be an Airborne Ranger. They have these big free towers that they use to train paratroopers. There used to be four. Then, on March fourteenth in 1954, there was a tornado. A big tornado
. The sergeant wanted us up on the towers anyway. He said that we had to get used to a little wind. I took three jumps and almost died. He probably didn’t know it was building into a tornado, but when it hit, it took down one of the towers. With two guys on it. They both died. I told the sergeant that I was going to report the incident, and he went nuts. We got into it. He lost. I left. Went to a bar in Columbus to cool off. Next thing I knew, I was hauled into the stockade. I have no idea how the two dead guys were handled. I don’t even remember their names. All I know is that I was given the world’s fastest court marshal and shoved into the Columbus stockade for good.’
‘But you escaped fairly quickly,’ I said.
‘You don’t know anything.’ He was getting dark, which was not a good sign. ‘Six months in that place was like a lifetime in hell. You know how I got out? I ate rat poison. I thought it would kill me. Instead it got me to the infirmary. My guts were on fire for a week, but I got out. I got out at night. I stole a Jeep. I made it as far as Fry’s Bay.’
‘You came here on purpose,’ I said. ‘You thought you might have a relative here. A cousin or something named Pascal Henderson.’
‘I knew that Pascal had a place here, for some reason,’ he told me. ‘I’d never been here before that. I knew it had something to do with establishing a residence in a state that didn’t collect income tax, and something to do with Humble Oil. I didn’t care. I just wanted traveling money. I had no idea if he’d be here or not. I was desperate.’
‘But he was here, and I think I know the rest of the story from Sharon.’ I stretched. ‘Well, this is certainly a day for the surprises.’
‘My leg is starting to hurt,’ Joseph mumbled.
I looked around the room. All of a sudden I had the same sensation I had previously experienced in the swamp, to wit; I was having another surreal moment. Previously, it had to do with being surrounded by Seminoles and hearing Benny Goodman. This time, it had to do with a wounded accountant, a sympathetic hit man, and my evil boss. I thought to myself, You’re the one who needs to take stock, pal – at least as much as McReedy does.
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