by Ron Hevener
“That must have been…a bitter pill. So you and Sidney felt it necessary to leave the country. Did you really think you could hide?”
“We already had honeymoon tickets, Diane. But can anyone really hide from terrorists once they’ve marked you? The truth is, we did drop out of sight for a while. Understand, I wasn’t about to give up. But what good was I dead by my own hand or anybody else’s? I tried getting publishers interested in an expose’ or a documentary. But nobody wanted it. If your show had been airing at the time, I would have come to you right away.”
“So, what brought you back home?” she asks.
He grins. “My lovely wife is, shall we say, impatienty pregnant. And she forced my hand.”
He smiles at Sidney.
* * *
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1990
Nobody wanted the story, but Rio was a great place for a honeymoon.
Even with its favela slums, it was a great place to think, and an even better place to write an exposé of corruption and danger of uranium smugglers intent on destroying all that was beautiful and pure. But nobody would touch it.
Terrorists?
Boring, they said.
Bank fraud?
Now, that might be interesting.
Great Depression?
Who cares any more?
Ben folded the latest rejection slip and felt nothing. Even a story by The DeCroy Man didn’t arouse much interest now unless he was exposing the sleazy side of fashion.
Where was that roll of masking tape he was looking for?
Ah! There it was. On the table where Sidney had been wrapping a few things to send to friends in the States. He’d borrow it, and be careful to put it back exactly where it came from. Organized Sidney Leigh. As for himself, these days he was suspicious of anything organized.
He finished taping the rejection letter to the bathroom wall, indicative of what they could all do to themselves, or what he could do to them.
What was he doing here?
Maybe he and Sidney should have stayed with Aunt Sarah.
“Write the story, Bennie. Take some time and find a way to get it out there.” Sidney could be persuasive when she wanted to be. Washing away the night with ritualistic practice, he tried not to disturb her now with his watery sounds. Let her rest, he thought. Let her blanket her eyes of Nassau blue with a soft movie screen where souls fly with the wild geese of Phantom Creek and rejection letters don’t matter anymore. Maybe the editors were right about the story. Maybe he should leave well enough alone, like Ruthie said about so many things.
He walked out onto the patio now with its potted vines and leafy plants. It was his own smoky dance floor at times like this, when mist rose from the clay-tiled roofs nearby. Not exactly New York, but it was a good place to step back and rest a while.
He sensed the hungry streets, kissing the feet of morning joggers, and his mind drifted back to last night. The mists were see-through sheets over the skin of lovers like Sidney and himself so many times. Bedsheets, dripping over hills and valleys of fleshy landscape mounds and curves and crevasses. Last night—all the nights before—all the way back to when they were kids and he knew she was the only one he would ever love, but found out differently. He would love many. He would love them for different reasons and he would know love was a feeling from the heart, not below it.
He and Sidney Leigh had a game then, a game that someone was always watching them. They pretended a giant, a great giant of a man in the sky, observed everything they did. Was it God? Was it a giant artist and were they just painted on a canvas?
Whoever the all-seer was, he knew every secret little thing.
They tried getting away from him. They tried hiding, but he was too powerful. But he wasn’t great enough to find them in the darkest places, where they played like no one ever knew.
When they couldn’t find such places, being watched made it all the more exciting. Ben felt the Giant Man’s presence now, saying “Everything I can illuminate is mine. Even you.”
He looked up now, half expecting to see a giant crazed scientist gazing down at him through the lense of a cosmic microscope. Maybe he was just living in a droplet of life on a glass slide clipped neatly in place, wanting to hide from the insignificance overwhelming him. Would Sidney object to a voyeur? He would ask her.
The bedroom door was closed. Maybe he would find her still sleeping. Maybe he would touch her hand lying on the pillow and kiss it tenderly. Even without a flicker, she would know he was there.
Is this seat taken? his spirit would ask hers. May I join you, beautiful dancer, as you dream the ballet? Can I lift you in the air, you in your dancer’s dress and me in tights so revealing?
She wouldn’t answer, but, in whispers soft and warm, he would announce the decision made somewhere between taping the latest rejection slip on the bathroom wall and morning mist as it lifted from the village rooftops. He would whisper, “It’s time for us to go home, Sidney,” but he knew without knocking that she wouldn’t be there stretching and moaning at the pleasure of his voice today. He knew if she was hearing or sensing him, it was from someplace far off now in their journey. The eyes—Look! The water is just as blue as your eyes, Sidney!—but, they wouldn’t be opening for him now. Afraid, his heart dropped to the floor, unable to go in, thinking how much he dreaded the moment all lovers do and never speak about to each other.
To the far side of the moon’s mysterious smile, she had gone. Dancing in the shadows without him, laughing victoriously with her Great Scientist in the sky.
Don’t leave me, Sidney! I can’t stand it if you leave me!
As life went into rewind, its players flinging their hands in Chaplin-like comedy, his mind threw itself over the wall of the patio, down the hill—rolling, scratched and bleeding over dry rocks and prickly branches. In spite of the laughing man behind the giant microscope in the sky, he turned the knob and pushed open the door.
No note.
No body.
No Sidney Leigh.
* * *
Pennyslvania Dutch Country, Mattison Farm
Mornings in Rio were far away from Sarah standing by the window of her office, breathing in contentment as she watched her horses grazing in the upper pasture.
She could barely make out the weanlings frisking there, young and full of racing promise as she, herself, had once been. Reluctantly, she reached for the pair of glasses tucked in her shirt and made an impatient face. To think she depended on two pieces of glass to see her foal crop on the other side of the pond that she, herself, had helped to dig was almost an affront to her dignity and self-worth. The horses had kept her gong after Ezra died. But who would take care of the horses when she was gone? Sid? It wasn’t horses as much as the lifestyle Sidney loved. Well, Sid was home and Ben wouldn’t be far behind.
With an upward tilt of her head, she studied the foals. There was a bay filly. Looking like the rest, as her stallion’s foals always did, but particularly interesting. This one was out of Zetka, daughter of a Russian stakes winner and herself a runner of great promise. As Sarah had planned, the breeding had clicked and the filly was a born racer. As a yearling, she would be presented in the show ring to become accustomed to crowds. As a two-year-old, it was harness work for serious chest, back and hindquarter development. After that, riding on the mountain trails, and finally the racetrack in Delaware.
Unlike a lot of racing fans, Sarah believed there was a great deal more to a runner than inheritance or black-type pedigrees. Only because she was an old-timer in the business now did anyone take seriously her charges that, beyond the physical structure provided by a horse’s pedigree, its racing ability was a matter of training.
“I never said a horse can’t inherit the basics,” she would say. “That’s stupid. What I’m talking about is drive—the will to run! To win! You’re a rat’s ass if you think you can breed for that.” Then she’d cock her head to the side, give a tender laugh and say, “And, you gotta love ’em. No amount of fe
ed or vet care or farrier work in the world is gonna make that horse want to run unless he wants to please you. And to make him want to please you, it takes love. And lots of it.” That was Sarah Mattison for you, and what she had learned in her years with horses.
Admired in the racing community in spite of her views, thriving among investor syndicates based strictly on the finish line, growing purses and stud fees, Sarah believed no matter what a racehorse started with, it had to be polished like a jewel to shine in the spotlight.
Jewels. Show ring costumes. Diamonds. Remembering Wembly, she swayed for an instant that seemed like an eternity. Picking up her leather-bound riding crop wrapped in ribbons of ivory for sand, teal for water and maroon for blood, she tapped it against her leg. Racing, like life, was her passion.
“Nothing like a good race to stir up the blood, Bennie! Gambling? Sure, it’s gambling. So is everything else. What’s your gripe?”
If life was a gamble, it was also an orchestra, and Sarah Mattison was conducting a racing dynasty. She thought again of Zetka, on lease to Mattison Farms for a foal. Born at Tersk in Russia before the Soviet collapse, racing both there and in Poland, their paths crossed in Delaware. Breeding problems discovered after importation left her owners with no choice but to keep running her to recoup their investment. During a breeze, she was great. But in the race itself, she didn’t seem to care. Winning just enough to keep everybody happy, but nowhere close to the potential her size and power hinted at.
“She needs a break,” Sarah told the trainer up from Florida for the race meet. “I understand women like her. Let me lease her from you.”
“I was told to keep her running till she pays herself off,” the trainer said.
“Too much stress. Give her some time off at my place and I’ll get her in foal.”
“They already tried,” came the answer. “Sheikhs can afford the best and that’s what she got over at Rigby Farm. Plenty of grass and open pasture. No stress. Everything she needed.”
“Too bad,” Sarah said. “I like her.”
It wasn’t long before the mare arrived at Mattison Farm for “everything she needed.”
Finding her checkbook now, Sarah reached for a pen in the green Roseville vase holding a thousand sentimental attachments and wrote out a figure. That should please them, she thought to herself. Surely it was more than they paid for her. Hand against her breast, she remembered private races of her own. Ezra. Why didn’t you marry me? You could have married me. Folding the check now and sticking it under her belt, she shook the thought away. Coffee was waiting in the kitchen, horses were in the pasture and Sarah knew what she was doing it all for.
* * *
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
At the airport, Ben’s battered suitcase was already checked in. It wasn’t easy traveling without Sidney Leigh. Surely, in her organized way, she would have known the plane wasn’t leaving for another two hours and he wouldn’t be sitting around like this, waiting.
For entertainment, he watched the other passengers and played a guessing game. She belongs to him. They have three children, but he has two more with a secret lover. Those two have known each other thirty years—no, better! They’re newlyweds! They belong to each other heart and soul, and you, Benjamin Franklin Hoover, belong to a hot-headed Taurus named Sidney.
Onboard now, he thought about how much planes scared him. How often before the Big Dive? Only a matter of odds, he figured. The thought of big dives brought him to Wembly and what he must have been thinking in those last moments, scratching for life as he fell onto the subway tracks. Could it be so different, falling from the sky? “Benjamin, I’d like you to meet Melvin. He will be your photographer” … “Black Melvin, honey!” Voices from the past. That was a jump into the unknown, he thought.
Put it out of your mind, he told himself, remembering a game Wembly used to do on long flights like this. “Want to play some numbers, Benjamin?” Wembly would ask en route to Brussels, Madrid or Rome.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked, as Wembly wrote from one to nine across the top of a paper.
“Numerology,” Wembly called it, writing the alphabet and lining up the letters in neat rows beneath the numbers. It was fun, figuring out their numerical vibrations.
Finishing the alphabet now on a scrap of paper, Ben spelled out his nickname, Lucky One. 33328 155. Added together, the numbers reduced to 3.
Then, remembering Wembly spelling it “Lucky 1,” he used the number instead of the word. Spelled that way, it came out to 33328 1…333281… Why did it seem familiar?
His attention drifted out the window now. He recognized the lights of Philadelphia just as the stab of knives poked into his ears. GOD!
“Everything OK?” a stewardess asked.
“Ears!”
“Try swallowing,” she said, and walked away.
* * *
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Suffering through the landing, cursing himself for not taking a sinus pill before the drop in altitude that always did this to him, he made it through carry-on luggage, shoving into strangers—who cares, you’ll never see them again—baggage. Aha! There you are, brown suitcase.
Passing through Customs, Ben soaked up American flavors forgotten so quickly. Clothing. Speech patterns. New sounds on the radio. If he took the Metro into town, he could pick up something for Aunt Sarah; maybe find a peace offering for Sidney. He’d head for South Street, as revolutionary today as the ones who founded it hundreds of years ago. The Metro was a time machine, blurring him to Liberty Bellville honking with cars now instead of horses; dirty air instead of dirty streets. He wanted to feel South Street; take the pulse of the city.
In the galleries, he saw one-dimensional cartoon men climbing ladders screaming Keith Haring. Please, Ben thought. Don’t tell me he’s an icon now. I knew the guy.
It was starting to drizzle. Walking faster, he thought he heard someone holler, “Yo! Yo!” He turned around—big mistake. “I’m talkin’ to you!”
Looking around, there was no one in sight. “Me?” he said.
“You bet I am!”
“Where are you?”
“You know where I am!”
“No!” Ben called out. “Really. I can’t see you!”
“Yes, you can!” Insistent bitch, wasn’t she. “Down here!”
“Down here” indicated a stack of cardboard boxes trashed on the sidewalk against the side of an abandoned store. One of them, a long, narrow carton meant for fluorescent office lightbulbs, wasn’t empty anymore. It wasn’t empty because it was a house. And it was talking to him: “I want a cigarette!”
Ben walked over to the boxes, leaned down and saw the face of a woman looking back at him. “I don’t have any,” he said.
“Yes, you do!”
“No, I don’t” said Ben, feeling ridiculous at the idea of anybody seeing a grown man arguing with a cardboard box on the sidewalk like this.
Angry silence from the face in the box. “I got fifty cents,” she/it said.
“Fifty cents won’t cover it. Good-bye!”
“Motherfucker! Goddam motherfucker! You go to hell!”
‘Here!” Ben said, reaching in his pocket and offering a pack of peanut butter crackers he was saving for later. “Take these.”
“Crackers! I ask for cigarettes and he gives me crackers. YOU’RE a cracker, White Boy!”
A downpour of rain, a downpour of profanity. Welcome to Philly.
A few blocks later, police on horses. Three guys spread-eagled against a brick wall. Black. Why? But then, a lot of Philly was Black, so those were just the odds. Drugs had no prejudice.
Jewelry store ahead. Something for Sidney.
Another beggar. White this time. “Excuse me…I need help,” the kid said politely. “Where’s the nearest church?”
“I’m not from here,” Ben said. Was that blood coming out of the kid’s nose?
“I need help,” the kid said, looking straight into Ben’s eyes as he pull
ed up his shirt. The hole in his stomach was the size of an orange.
“Taxi!” Ben hollered. “Taxi!” Shoving a twenty to the first cab that pulled over, he helped the kid into the back. “Get him to an emergency room!”
Suddenly, he missed Wembly. He missed Sidney Leigh. He missed Aunt Sarah. He missed Ezra. He missed Ruthie.
Mother! How could you know that by staying away, it’s you I’d miss the most!
There, on the streets of Philadelphia, Benjamin vomited.
*
Time machines and flashbacks grew wings and became the Lancaster shuttle to Pennsylvania’s famous Dutch lands. Clean, orderly, traditional…America’s version of old Europe…a country within a country, complete with its own architecture, its own language and its own disappearing culture.
“Bennie! Bennie!” Sarah came running to him at the baggage claim. “Give your aunt a hug!”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the baggage clerk shrug. No brown suitcase this time. Welcome to America, Mr. Hoover.
* * *
Pennsylvania Dutch Country
On the way to the farm, passing once-familiar sights, so different and fresh now, it almost seemed like Ben had never seen them before. They passed the Renaissance Faire at the old Mt. Hope Winery on Route 72…breezed through Quentin with its beautiful horse show grounds and made a right onto Route 419 for the last dash to home. She was a fast driver, Aunt Sarah, and her red convertible made him feel like they were living in Star Trek. “Straight ahead, Captain! Yes, Hoover! I see it now!”
“Bennie!” It wasn’t Captain Picard. He blinked and landed back in the red convetible with a jolt, an Earthling once again.
“I was daydreaming,” he said.
“You’re in good company,” she said. “Some of the greatest minds in history were daydreamers.”
He laughed appreciatively and pulled a small paper bag from his jacket. “I got a present for you on South Street,” he said.
“South Street? Oh, I haven’t been there for ages!” she said, removing a handmade brooch of cut paper from the bag. “How lovely,” she said, holding it up to the light while she drove and admiring its originality, lacquered into permanent folds and crumbles by the street artist who made it. “South Street,” she said softly. Twisting the mirror for a better view, she said, “Pin it on my hat.” He did as he was told, and she smiled. “Snappy! I love it!” Then she grew quiet. “You haven’t asked me, yet.”