The Extinction Event

by David Black

  “It’s a float,” Robert said.

  When Jack looked at him skeptically, Robert added, “Made to look like William Holden at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard. One of my father’s least successful business ventures. Along with the bobble-head Katharine Hepburn car doll.”

  In the sky, a thunderhead veined with lightning looked like an electrified brain.

  “Down the rest of the steps,” Robert said, “and through the door.”

  The crack of thunder made the glass in the window vibrate. Rain spattered against the side of the house.

  Naked, side-by-side, Jack and Caroline continued down the stairs to the first floor and out the massive door, down the steps outside, and onto the driveway. “Robert,” Jack asked, “did you ever hang out with your sister?”

  “Half sister,” Robert said. “Once or twice.”

  “Did you do drugs with her?” Jack asked.

  “Once or twice,” Robert said.

  “Did your father know?” Jack asked.

  “No,” Robert said. “Are you constructing a motive for murder, Jack?”

  “Did you ever fuck her?” Jack asked.

  Caroline shot a glance at Jack.

  Robert sucked his thumb where he’d bitten off a strip of flesh.

  “Nervous?” Jack asked.

  Jack felt Caroline’s hand searching for his.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Robert said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  1

  Clutching Caroline’s hand, Jack led her into the shadows under the huge trees, inching his way forward, feeling his way, one hand stretched out—like one of the plaster lawn jockeys.

  Halfway to their car, Jack and Caroline stopped and dressed.

  While kneeling to tie his shoes, Jack looked back at Robert, who was filling his car—a dark blue Honda Accord—from an old-fashioned Esso gas pump outside the property’s six-car garage.

  With his free hand, Robert flipped open his cell phone, punched in numbers, with his thumb hit call—and blew up in a fireball that splintered the high window and filled the air with a black, hot, gasoline-smelling cloud.

  2

  “A spark from his cell phone,” Jack said.

  The air stank of burning chemicals and rubber, scorched metal, which made Jack and Caroline’s eyes sting and their throats burn. Caroline put her left hand on Jack’s shoulder to steady herself as she leaned sideways, away from Jack, and retched.

  The breeze blew the hair hanging forward from her forehead, the locks moving like snakes.

  Under the other smells was the aroma of cooked meat. Sweet. Like pulled pork. Robert’s flesh.

  Once more, Caroline retched.

  She straightened up, wiping away a thread of spittle hanging from the side of her mouth with the back of her hand.

  Without looking at her, to give her privacy, Jack handed her his pocket handkerchief.

  The wind swept the sky clear of curdled clouds.

  Directly above them, at the pivot of the sky, were Vega and the other stars that suggested the two parallel lines, the two strings, of the constellation Lyra.

  To the north was Draco, the Little Dipper, the Big Dipper—more familiar to Jack than Lyra. To his right were constellations he didn’t recognize.

  Jack kept staring at the sky until he thought Caroline had a chance to collect herself. They were walking away from the burning car. The stench was less powerful.

  Caroline swallowed.

  “Do we call the police?” she asked.

  “I’ve had enough to do with the police lately,” Jack said. “And I’m not ready to explain why we came.”

  Caroline hesitated—both in answering and in walking toward their car.

  “Are you?” Jack asked. “Ready to explain?”

  “I don’t think I could,” Caroline said. “What about our fingerprints?”

  “We’ve been here before,” Jack said. “There’s nothing to tie us into tonight.”

  They were at their car. Upwind of the fire.

  Caroline gulped air.

  “But Robert—,” she started.

  “He’ll be found soon enough,” Jack said. “There’s nothing we can do for him.”

  “And Keating?” Caroline asked.

  “There’s nothing we can do for him either,” Jack said.

  Caroline ducked her head to slip into the car. Her shoulders heaved. She started sobbing.

  Lightly, Jack rested his hand on her back. Felt her body shake.

  He forced himself to say nothing.

  She stopped crying as suddenly as she started. And swung around to sit in the car.

  Moonlight, shining through the windshield, bathed her left cheek. Turned her face into a half-dark moon.

  She turned her head more to her right. To look beyond Jack at the trees, Jack thought. Maybe at the sky.

  And more of her face was shadowed. Her cheek was now only a sickle moon.

  Diana, Jack thought. The Virgin Goddess of the Hunt.

  Diana killed Orion, Jack couldn’t remember why. Caroline would know, though this wasn’t a good time to ask.

  Jack searched the sky for the constellation of Orion. The three stars that made up his belt, but Jack couldn’t find them.

  As a kid, Jack wanted to know all the stars, the names of all the plants, all the creatures around him.

  Diana also killed Actaeon.

  Jack remembered that story because in his old mythology book with the orange cover there was a picture of Actaeon, his dogs at his heels, peering through the trees at Diana, who was bathing, naked in a stream.

  In the illustration, Diana had small breasts and a hairless crotch.

  Because of the hairless women in Greek and Roman mythology and in the statues of goddesses he saw when he was taken on a class trip to a museum in Springfield, Jack wasn’t prepared for his first girlfriend’s pubic bush, a dark, curly, moist tangle that delighted him.

  But he thought Actaeon got a raw deal.

  Being turned into a stag and torn to pieces by his own dogs just because he stumbled on a goddess.

  No, Jack changed his mind—that seems right.

  Every time in his life that he had stumbled on a goddess—in the guise of girls or women he’d fallen in love with—there always came a time when he felt the girl—the woman—would sic his dogs on him if she could.

  3

  Caroline faced front in the car. The moonlight made her face silvery. A metal mask. Expressionless.

  Jack shut her door and came around to the driver’s side, opened his door, slipped in, glanced once at Caroline whose face was immobile, now all in shadow. A cloud had covered the moon. He turned on the ignition, put the car in reverse, backed in a semicircle, put the car in forward, and descended the long drive away from the Flowerses’ house.

  Part Three

  KEATING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  1

  As the car bumped down the long rutted road from the Flowerses’ house to the highway, Jack saw through the trees, on a ridge, backlit by the moon, the silhouette of a giraffe followed by two elephants.

  Caroline followed his eyes and said, “They’re from the next farm. It belongs to one of the Ringlings. The circus family. They used to have eight elephants. They’re down to two. You know, retired from the ring. There’s always something in the papers. Usually some animal-rights group. I’m surprised you don’t know about them. Could you go a little slower? God knows why they keep them up here instead of Florida.”

  A quarter of a mile down the road, Jack saw what looked like two centaurs. From their human waists to their horses’ hocks they were masked by tree branches, but above and below they were clearly visible: Their heads and naked chests—his chest hairy, her small breasts mango shaped. The horses’ elegant legs picked their way through the woods.

  “Are they from the Ringlings’ farm, too?” Jack asked.

  Startled, the centaurs reared and galloped away. No longer half hidden behind tree branches, t
hey lost their magic—just two people, riding naked in the night.

  Why not? Jack thought.

  As the riders disappeared into the trees, Jack saw a mist rising, swirling as if turning to face Jack, who shivered.

  A hawk, its wings crimped up at the tips, swooped over the trees from the left and sailed ahead of them.

  “Dixie always said hawks coming from the left are a bad omen,” Caroline said. “But leading you is a good omen.”

  As they turned onto the highway, they saw on the road’s shoulder a dead stag, probably hit by a truck, its intestines coming out of its side like toothpaste from a tube.

  “What kind of an omen is that?” Jack asked.

  2

  At Dixie’s house—Caroline’s house—Jack parked in the wide driveway leading to the garage, beside a battered Volvo and an old but well-kept Mercedes.

  The house, much smaller than Keating’s, had its own eccentricities: turrets and bay windows, gingerbread details, a wraparound porch.

  On the way back to Mycenae, Jack and Caroline had been silent. Neither one turned on the radio.

  The car passed phallic cattails. Vaginal-looking split milkweed pods.

  Caroline let them in through the unlocked side door into a mud room, the floor cluttered with clogs and boots and sneakers; two unmatched ski poles leaning in the corner; pegs hung with a brown corduroy jacket, a denim jacket, a tweed sports coat, two identical gray hoodies with large blue lettering, so hidden by folds Jack couldn’t make out what the letters spelled, a black watch cap, a battered fedora, a cracked straw planters hat, furry red ear muffs, leftover from the previous winter or waiting for the next winter.

  In the kitchen, Caroline took a kettle off the old stove—although none of the appliances was newer than the mid-Fifties, all were in impeccable condition—and held it under a faucet that was fitted with a cylindrical Brita filter.

  “Do you want some tea?” she asked.

  Jack asked, “Where do you keep the liquor?”

  “Through the pantry,” Caroline said, “on the side table in the dining room.”

  The pantry—an old-fashioned butler’s pantry with glass-fronted cupboards, plates zipped up in quilted cloth storage bags, and a collection of glasses: cut crystal and old jelly containers, tumblers—one with Foghorn Leghorn, another with Bugs Bunny—a Hopalong Cassidy teacup, and a Flintstones mug.

  “You haven’t been here before, have you?” Caroline asked.

  Blue ceramic canisters, with Scotch-taped labels—sugar, brown sugar, lentils, flour, whole-wheat flour, granola, French, Viennese, Colombian coffee beans—were lined up below the cupboards on a wide shelf that also held mixing bowls, a food processor, an old Hamilton Beach blender, two juicers—one ancient lever-action—the other modern and motorized—a new four-slice toaster, a bright brass La Pavoni espresso maker and its companion coffee grinder.…

  In a shelf corner, plugged into a three-pronged outlet, was a circuit-breaker strip with a staring red light.

  Another wall had open shelves, filled with canned goods, pasta, staples.…

  “Are these your leftover Y2K emergency supplies?” Jack asked.

  “Dixie’s still waiting for the apocalypse,” Caroline said.

  Below the shelf were more cupboards—with wooden doors one of which, warped, didn’t quite close.

  The recently polished oak floorboards had a matte finish. Jack could smell the wax. Which mixed oddly with the taste of pennies leftover from the burning car.

  The pantry hadn’t been painted in decades. But it was immaculate.

  Old money, Jack thought.

  In the center of the long and narrow dining room was a wooden table that would easily seat twenty. The centerpiece, on a blue-and-red cloth placemat, was a large blue vase holding a dozen or so dying, drying red roses. A few brown-fringed petals had fallen to the table.

  Nineteen chairs were antiques with scroll backs and fraying gray-and-rose silk seats. The twentieth chair was relatively new, wooden, straight back, cheap, from Walmart, Jack figured.

  To the right of the dining room table, loomed a ceiling-high breakfront with more dishes and glasses, a random mixture of old, expensive china and new, plain plates. On top of the breakfront were a silver toast holder, an unmatched collection of candlesticks—silver, wooden, glass—and a Chinese urn with a thousand-deer pattern.

  To the left stood a massive sideboard displaying polished silver chafing dishes.

  Above the sideboard was an oil painting in a gilt frame of an elderly man in a three-piece suit, gold watch chain, wing collar.

  “My great-great uncle,” Caroline said, watching through the two pantry doors from the kitchen, where she stood at the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil. “Under-Secretary of Something in the second Cleveland administration.”

  Caroline’s great-great uncle, the Under Secretary of Something, had lush, silver hair, bushy eyebrows, smiling eyes behind circular steel-framed glasses, a fleshy nose, and a mustache and goatee, both darker than his hair.

  “He looks like Colonel Sanders,” Jack said.

  “Do you always have to be so negative?” Caroline said.

  “Getting fired helps,” Jack said. “So does getting beat up. Getting shot at.”

  “You’re not the only one who was shot at,” Caroline said.

  “We don’t know you were shot at,” Jack said.

  “Fuck you, Jack,” Caroline said.

  “You’re not negative,” Jack said. “You’re Little Mary Sunshine.”

  The kettle Caroline was watching sent up a trail of steam, which to Jack, from the dining room, looked like the spectral mist in the woods.

  Jack took another look at the Under Secretary of Something.

  “When I was a kid,” Jack said, “my great-uncle stood up—he’d been sitting on the side of the bed, shaving with an electric shaver, that was his one big luxury—and hit the floor. Just toppled. Face first. Broke his nose when he landed. He was hemorrhaging—a stomach ulcer. We got him to the hospital. The doctor said he needed a transfusion. Fast. He had an hour, maybe two. He was in the Carpenters Local. He said, I don’t want no scab blood in me. You find me a union donor—and I want to see his card—or you let me bleed to death.”

  “You think anyone with money is corrupt?” Caroline said. “Don’t you?”

  “What’s the old line?” Jack asked. “Behind every great American fortune is a great American crime…”

  “Then,” Caroline said, “I’m an accessory after the fact. My great-great uncle, Voorhees—”

  “That his name?” Jack asked, looking back over his shoulder at Caroline. “Voorhees?”

  “—didn’t have any children. That’s where I got most of my money.”

  “How much money do you have?” Jack asked.

  “Next,” Caroline said, “are you going to ask my age?”

  “Don’t get coy with me, Five Spot,” Jack said.

  Caroline shot Jack a curious look.

  “You haven’t called me that for a while,” she said. “Are you trying to apologize or pick a fight?”

  “Apologize for what?” Jack asked.

  Using a purple oven mitt, Caroline took the whistling kettle off the stove.

  “Sometimes,” Caroline said, “you can be a real prick.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re the one trying to pick a fight,” Jack said.

  On a low table under the far window, facing the street, between garnet-colored drapes, was a silver platter holding half a dozen bottles: three Scotch—Lagavulin, Teacher’s, and Talisker—Six Grapes port, Calvados, Wild Turkey. Beside the tray was a bottle of B & B.

  Jack took the bottle of Wild Turkey by the neck. As if he were about to ring a bell.

  On his way back to the kitchen, he grabbed a jelly glass from the cupboard.

  3

  They were both silent as Caroline steeped her tea and Jack sipped his bourbon.

  “Why the hell am I drinking tea?” Caroline said.

&n
bsp; Jack poured another four fingers of bourbon into his glass.

  Caroline opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer, which she put on the table next to her teacup. She turned back to the fridge and, leaning over, found another two cans of beer on the bottom shelf.

  Jack realized he was staring at her ass.

  “You planning a party?” Jack asked, as Caroline straightened up and popped open a can. “A little game of beer pong?”

  “In LA,” Caroline said, “we used to call it Beirut.”

  “Why?”

  Caroline shrugged.

  “Maybe it was less offensive than calling it Baghdad?”

  “Why not call it Bel Air? Or Passaic?”

  “Why don’t you go home?” Caroline said.

  She had glugged the first beer and had popped open the second.

  “I don’t need a baby-sitter,” she said.

  Jack poured another glass of bourbon. He eyed the bottle.

  “I hope you’ve got more of this in this great, big house,” Jack said.

  Caroline had a dimple in the left corner of her mouth, and her right eye was slightly crossed.

  Jack had never noticed that before.

  “You really want me to go?” Jack asked.

  Caroline’s shoulder-length hair was a little darker in the part, not dark enough to suggest she’d changed her hair color. Jack didn’t think she was the kind of woman who’d dye her hair.

  “You’re too drunk to drive now,” Caroline said.

  Jack went back into the pantry and studied the rows of cans.

  “You shouldn’t have hit Robert,” Caroline said.

  From the open shelves, Jack took down a can, Dinty Moore beef stew, and read the label.

  “Nutrition facts,” he said aloud. “Total fat ten grams.”

  “Did you think that would make him cooperative?” Caroline asked.

  “Cholesterol thirty milligrams,” Jack read.

  “That was a real smart move.”

  “Sodium nine hundred seventy milligrams.”

  “Hurt him—”

  “Total carbs. Six percent.”

  “—humiliate him—”

  “Dietary fiber one gram. Protein eleven grams.”