Jonah Man

by Christopher Narozny

  They drag him into the shed, prop him against a wall. A lock clicks shut.

  By the time he calls out, they are gone.

  His breathing remains labored though his heartbeat has steadied. The shed is no larger than an outhouse. With his back flat against one wall, he cannot extend his legs. Slant rays of light pass through gaps in the planks. Gazing up, he finds spider webs clogged with desiccated husks.

  He stands, peers between the beams. A vista emerges through a cluster of knurled trees—the opposite side of a mountain valley, an arid landscape showing its dullest colors in the afternoon sun. He takes a half-step back, focuses on the structure itself. The wood is dry and withered, but the planks are sturdy. There is no distance from which to launch a kick, no room to dig his way free. The hinges sit on the exterior of the door. Had they not taken his prosthetic, he might have wedged the hook between two boards, used one for leverage and prized the other loose. He might have scraped at a plank until it was thin enough to cave with his hand.

  He sits again, the back and sides of his shirt soaked despite the cold. He is schooled enough to know that the periods of lucidity will become briefer and less frequent as the substance moves through his blood stream.

  The Inspector watches the truck recede, navigate a sharp bend, disappear. Cursing, he steps onto the gravel shoulder, walks the periphery of the car. Rubber sloughs from the rim of the back right tire. He kneels, finds a thick shard of glass embedded in the sidewall.

  Stupid, he thinks, tossing his jacket atop the hood.

  Idiotic, he says aloud, lifting the spare from the sideboard.

  He crouches, lays his weight into the jack crank. His palms slip from the handle and he stumbles forward, tearing his trousers at the knee.

  All wrong, he tells himself.

  He slides a hand over his body, finds his shirt unbuttoned, his pants pockets turned out. Rising up on his elbows, he can distinguish degrees of darkness, silhouettes suggesting a distant window or lamp. He stands, scans the space in every direction, walks toward what he takes to be a crack in the masonry, though when he reaches it he discovers not a crack, but rather a thin strip of window where the gauze drape falls short. The window is small, the type one might find embedded in a door. He runs his palms over the surrounding wall, feels no knob, no hinges, no other pause in the stone and mortar. He pulls the curtain back. Outside, it is night. The light comes from a fire, a building ablaze in a large and otherwise abandoned lot.

  He turns from the window. Flickering light plays over mannequin torsos, stacks of ill-sorted fabric, a littered drafting table. He finds a light switch, flicks it on. There is a moment before the room comes fully lit. He surveys the ceiling, discovers no bulb. He surveys the walls, discovers no door. Since I am here, he reasons, there must be an entrance, an exit.

  The room ends in a burlap curtain extending from wall to wall, ceiling to floor. He starts back, stumbles over a toppled mannequin, turns sideways to pass between a heap of shoddy and rolls of cloth piled chest high. He stops at the drafting table, crouches, studies a series of drawings sketched on tracing paper—gems of all kinds and cuts, shaded with colored pencil, arranged in no discernible pattern, intended for no discernible purpose beyond the practice of sketching them.

  He passes through a part in the burlap. The light from the first room does not carry to this second room. Instead, the large open space is illuminated by a single candle set in a small iron stove. He scans the walls, looking for a door or false panel. He searches the floor, the ceiling. Nothing. His eyes land on the only object in the room apart from the stove: a cot, centered against the far wall. From across the room he can make out a flounced bed sheet, a form beneath.

  Hello, he calls.

  The form does not answer. He steps closer, distinguishes a face but not its features. He claps his hands together. The sheet does not move.

  He crosses to the stove, removes the candle—a fat chunk of wax with the wick burnt halfway down. He places it on his palm, allows the dripping wax to congeal on his skin.

  He sits on the edge of the cot. The sheet is pulled to the neck. There is no pillow. He balances the candle beside the head. The features are masculine, but the face is made up like a woman’s—false eyelashes, cheeks caked with rouge, lips painted pink, scalp covered by a blond wig. Beneath the mask is a person Swain recognizes, though from where he cannot say. He tugs the sheet up, rubs the edge against the dead man’s skin. The make-up smears. Swain takes up the box of wine, tilts it back, sniffs at the mouth. White, long since fermented. He spills a little onto a clean patch of sheet. Soon, the cheeks are bare, the lips pallid. He pulls on one set of eye lashes. The lids rise above the orbs, fall back with a slapping sound when the glue gives. A dark pupil stares up at him. Swain leans back, studying this new face, trying to imagine it animate, a voice speaking through the lips.

  There is nothing from the chin up to say how the man died. Swain grips the edge of the sheet between his thumbs and index fingers, hesitates, peels it back. The torso is bare, cast in shadow. He lifts the candle, holds it on the flat of his palm so that it hovers above the man’s chest. A surgical scar passes diagonally between the nipples; the breasts are spotted with vermiculate moles. Below the sternum, an outbreak of pimples that Swain would not have thought possible in an old man. He lifts the candle higher, watches the flame play across a livid imprint at the base of the neck, a deep and continuous bruise.

  He sinks back to the floor, sets the candle on the concrete beside him. The pace of his breathing doubles, as though he’s breathing for himself and the corpse. The longer he thinks, the more he remembers. The more he remembers, the more frequently he returns to the notion that he murdered the tailor.

  His calf muscles spasm. His mouth has gone dry. He reaches for the box of wine, swallows the dregs. Acid stings the back of his throat, clears the film from his tongue.

  He stands, leans one knee against the frame of the cot, swings his other leg over so that he is straddling the tailor’s abdomen. Hunched forward, he fits his thumbs to the blood-colored prints beneath the windpipe, wraps his splayed fingers around the gelid neck.

  Asphalt turns to dirt as the road progresses deeper into the foothills. A few miles in, he comes to the first gate. He slows, pulls off. There is nothing to say how recently the gate has been opened. The Inspector follows the side road with his eyes. A half-mile distant, maybe less, it begins its ascent, disappearing into stub-forest, then reappearing higher up. He searches for dust clouds, for a glimpse of blue between the trees.

  There is nothing to do, he thinks, but guess. At the very least, he will be able to survey the countryside from the summit.

  He leaves the gate open behind him, pushes the Packard as fast as it will go. The slope is steep. He steers around small boulders, feels the tires spin over a patch of pebbles before gaining traction. The road seems to rise toward a single destination with no turn offs or side paths.

  He reaches the vertex, stops, searches out his binoculars from the back seat. Climbing onto the hood of his car, he turns a slow 360 degrees, glassing the landscape above and below. He spots a blue pickup on the highway, speeding toward town. He loses it in the trees, finds it again, manages to fix the cab in the lenses. Two figures, two straw hats. The bed is empty.

  He grasps for the revolver in his pocket, but the truck is well out of range.

  There’s a moment before he understands that the vertical slants of light mark gaps between the shed’s laths, before his palm on the dirt means he is entombed on a mountainside.

  Hives burn his scalp. He tells himself it is OK. All symptoms will fade with the poison in his system. There are factors working to his advantage. His tolerance, for one. The only course of action is to wait. Were he to break free now, he would lose his way, fall prey to wolves, twist an ankle, end up writhing in a gulley, delirious. He will not oblige them. He will not panic.

  A sustained period of calm in which he feels his body weightless, his mind clear. Looking back, h
e is able to see large swaths of his life set within a single frame. Early days walking a guy-wire in the alley behind his aunt’s building. A summer on the boardwalk. A succession of circuits taking him from one coast to the other. Wherever his mind lands, he discovers a hope and contentment he did not experience at the time. He sees his life not as he always thought of it—as progression and regression, movement toward and away from a target—but as modulating textures composed of noise, scenery, weather.

  The question, he reasons, is not if he can forgive himself for killing Jonson, but if he can forgive himself for not killing Connor. Not the recent Connor, but the younger, more capable Connor. The quality that had kept him from killing Connor was the very quality Connor had used against him. But Swain had been young, a child. He cannot blame himself for failing to kill Connor unless he is also willing to blame the boy for failing to kill Jonson. If he were unwilling to forgive the boy, then he would not have killed the boy’s father. By extension, he must absolve himself.

  But he is not the boy. Anything he had managed to do, he had managed to do despite something fundamental in himself, something he couldn’t name but had spent his life disguising. A compulsion to be great. A conviction that he wasn’t up to the task.

  He feels his head nod forward, jerks it prone.

  Now is not the time, he tells himself.

  He wakes to find his pants soiled, the roof of his mouth cracked. He cannot tell whether the landscape has gone silent or his hearing has failed, whether the light has faded or he is nearly blind. For a moment he is back in the tailor’s room, lying on the tailor’s cot. There is a woman with him, wringing out warm towels above a vaporous basin, layering them across his forehead, his chest. He pushes her away.

  V

  The Inspector fetched a tire iron from the trunk, beat on the lock’s shackle until the hasp tore from its hinges. Jerking the door open, he spun his head at the stench.

  Swain sat with his torso hanging limp between his knees, his face in the dirt. Insects scrabbled up the back of his neck. The Inspector slapped them away with a handkerchief, raised Swain by the shoulders and set him against the wall. No breath, no pulse. Crouching, he gripped Swain’s ankles, dragged him into the light from the Packard’s beams.

  The face was rimed with blood, but the Inspector could find no wound. He spit into his handkerchief, scrubbed until the source of the bleeding became clear: Swain had hemorrhaged from his eyes, nose, ears, mouth.

  Why like this? the Inspector thought. Nobody would have questioned gunfire here.

  He wiped sweat from his brow with the heel of his palm, stood with his arms akimbo, waiting for his breath to slow. The Packard’s lights revealed a clutter of human and animal prints, his own among them. He scanned the visible ground, discovered no vials, no syringe.

  He worked the corpse back into the shed, secured the door with a small boulder. At day break he would return with the undertaker.

  He stopped at the turnoff to the cabin, exited the car, examined a flurry of tire tracks, the most recent curving toward town. Swain’s murder had served a second purpose: it kept the Inspector occupied while they crated their belongings and left.

  Wrong again, he thought.

  Armed with the vials, he ought to have arrested Swain at once. As a result of his effort to learn more, the murderer had himself been murdered; Jonson’s patrons had fled.

  He sat against the hood of his car, staring out at the desert, squinting dim patches of creosote brush into focus, trying to think of any course he might follow. There was the real estate company Mavis and the manager had spoken of. There was Jonson’s missive to the browser. The first was no doubt a front; the second provided the likely destination of his most valuable witness. As Swain had observed, the son might know what his father knew. And then there was the arson, a sentence with which to bargain.

  He paced alongside the car, an idea forming and reforming in his mind until it seemed more like a physical sensation than a thought: he could not pursue the boy. Why? Because Swain had confessed to the boy’s crime? Because he’d sacrificed himself for a vision of the boy’s future? What future could there be for a motherless child who’d discovered his father lying murdered beneath a prostitute?

  But none of that matters, the Inspector told himself, maneuvering back behind the wheel. My job is to track what has been set in motion.

  He pulled onto the road, drove as fast as the dark would allow. The hollow energy that had sustained him throughout the day was beginning to fade.

  But I do more than track, he thought. He’d left Jonson alone with a vial, stripped Swain of his supply. Now his job called for him to arrest the boy, lock him in a windowless room, perform an autopsy on his life thus far. The boy would stare blankly, as he had that night in the dressing room—a skill he’d practiced daily in his life with his father. The Inspector would push harder, challenging the boy’s notion that he had been powerless, arguing that he was at least complicit in his father’s decline. Some part of you, he’d say, wished your father dead. You’d given up on him. Did it ever occur to you that you might have helped him?

  And then, a chance for redemption: You can help others like him. Other boys like yourself. The Inspector could do this, had made himself do worse, not for the greater good, but because it was his job.

  The town’s scattered lights came into view. The Inspector steered back onto the shoulder, cut the engine, remained seated behind the wheel. He shut his eyes, saw Swain’s corpse. He shut them tighter, saw Jonson’s corpse.

  He stepped from the car, waited for shapes to solidify in the dark, then made his way to the double-strand wire fence that separated highway from ranch. Leaning his forearms on a post, he searched out the few constellations he could identify. An animal the size of a small dog jolted through his peripheral vision. He pivoted, found the brush still. Without realizing it, he began to whistle—stray, anxious notes. He made himself stop. Standing still, the air seemed abruptly colder. He stuck his hands in his pockets, felt the handkerchief filled with Swain’s vials. He removed a single vial, raised it above his head, watched the silver-blue liquid incandesce in the faint light.

  Seen from a distance, he thought, someone might mistake it for an animal’s eye.

  He prized the stopper free, drained the contents into the scrub, reached back into his pocket. He came to the last vial, held it balanced on his palm.

  He tried again to think of anything he might salvage.

  Epilogue

  He’d been with the family for half a year before they played Chicago. A taxi took them from the station to the hotel, the father and his youngest son sitting up front with the driver—the boy, mother, and older son in back. They passed through streets the boy thought he recognized, crooked blocks lined with stone row houses, stickball games breaking up to let the cab pass. But then the driver veered into a part of the city he’d never seen, a neighborhood marked by skyscrapers and elaborate vitrines, the sidewalks clogged with people.

  Their hotel sat across the street from a long and narrow park with a skating rink that served as an outdoor marketplace in the off-season. From the window of the room he shared with his stage brothers he watched a man on a bicycle weave in and out amongst the shoppers. Somewhere behind him, the mother was helping the youngest unpack. The older son crossed the room, tapped him on the shoulder.

  My father wants to see you, he said.

  Now?

  When do you think?

  Julius, the mother said, mind your tone.

  In the adjoining room, the father sat folding his show handkerchiefs into pocket-sized squares.

  Hello, son, he said, pushing a stack aside. How are you feeling ? Not tired out from the trip?

  No sir.

  Tell me, are you hungry?

  I suppose.

  How do you feel about pork chops?

  The boy scuffed at the floor with his heels, shrugged.

  Splendid, the father said.

  It was early for dinner, late
for lunch. Apart from the staff, the restaurant was quiet. They sat across from one another in a booth by the window. The waitress brought them a basket of bread and a saucer of olive oil. The father ordered a gimlet.

  This should help calm my nerves, he said. Believe it or not, after all these years, I still get jittery before a show.

  The boy nodded. Only when the main course arrived did he understand that the father had something he wanted to discuss. The boy watched him cant in his seat, drag the tines of his fork through a mass of grits.

  My wife and I have been concerned, he started.

  About my turn? the boy asked.

  No, son, he said. You’re brilliant on the boards. You must know that.

  He waited for the boy to speak or to nod as though he understood what was coming, but he only worked a pad of butter into his potato.

  You’ve been with us for almost a full season now, the father continued. We can’t help but notice that nobody has written to you. Nobody has visited you. You haven’t asked to visit anybody. Did your father have people?

  No sir.

  Is there anyone we can contact for you? Anyone you would like to see?

  The boy stared down at his plate. The father took a long swallow, patted his lips with his napkin.

  Here is what most concerns my wife and me, he said. Onstage, it’s as if there’s no house large enough to contain you. Some nights I think you’re going to fly up into the struts. But offstage... well, it’s a different story. I’m not asking you to tell any secrets, but I want you to know that we’re very fond of you. If ever there’s something you want to talk about, please know that our relationship is more than professional. Do you understand?