by Ron Hevener
Sighing, he watched the geese gathering for their morning swim, sending ripples out in tiny waves. “Peaceful here, he smiled. “Easy to see things a different way. Those little waves out there, for instance. They just keep goin’ till somethin’ bigger gets in their way. Are you getting’ in my way, Kid?”
“It was you who reported Wembly to the Feds, wasn’t it?”
Trimble started back to the car. “He was going to quit paying, Kid. He was going to do the one thing Ezra couldn’t. I kept my mouth shut, but he said it didn’t matter how Ezra got the money back then. I kept my mouth shut. But I knew better.”
“You had them beat me up!”
“DeCroy had to learn a lesson!”
“You had him killed!”
Without the slightest show of remorse, spoken as one who holds himself above the law because he understands it and all the catch-22s, Trimble just said, “I had to teach you the same thing.” Without fear, regret or moral responsibility, Trimble took hold of the door handle of his meticulously waxed and polished car and looked directly into Ben’s face. “How did you know?” he asked, the cock-sure lawyer unable to resist a missing clue.
“One of the guys who beat me up that night was yelling at you the day I stopped by your office,” Ben said. “I recognized his voice. I heard the same voice the night they set fire to the barn.”
“Well, I guess you got it all figured out then, Kid. Murder. Assault. Arson. Quite a list! Too bad you didn’t get the message the first time, though. Get outta my way.”
Ben had to do something—say something! Desperate, he remembered Aunt Sarah saying Trimble wrote checks to Ruthie. “The fund!”
At last, Trimble’s eyes narrowed. “Nothin’ left,” he said. “DeCroy closed it out tryin’ to get away from the Feds.”
At last, it was all starting to make sense. “No, Mr. Trimble. Not that one. I’m talking about the mother lode. Ruthie doesn’t have a claim on it—and you don’t know the code.”
Theodore Trimble, Esq. could have sizzled a hole right through Ben’s chest at close range and thought nothing of it. “You’ll never find it,” he said.
“But, I’m a Lucky One,” Ben said.
Without another word, Trimble opened the car door and Ben felt the eyes of a stranger on every part of his body. Almost! Almost! Trimble made a move to speak. But a hand with diamond rings on every finger pulled him back. The door closed. Ben heard the lock click shut.
“I’ll expose you!” Ben hollered, slapping the roof of the car, its windows and pulling at the door handle. “All of you!”
The car waited.
It didn’t start.
It didn’t move.
Slowly, the window buzzed down just a crack and Trimble spoke. “A minor inconvenience, Hoover. A brief delay.” Secure in his ability to get away with anything he wanted, in spite of being fired like he should have been long ago, the ancient lawyer didn’t hear anything more as the black limo pulled away, grinding gravel into the dirt like so many lives crushed beneath his feet.
“Did he see me, Teddy?” the woman beside him asked, holding up her compact mirror as Phantom Lake shrank into the distance.
“I don’t think so.”
“He’s more handsome than I remember,” she said.
“Determined, too,”
“You made him mad, Teddy! What did you say out there that made him so mad?”
“Nothing important.”
“I’m the one who decides what’s important to me!” she snapped.
“I stand corrected,” he said.
She smiled. It was nice when people did what she wanted. It was nice to gaze out the window at trees becoming fields; at scattered clumps of brush turning into patches of grass. After a while, she asked the driver to stop at a particular clearing she remembered.
“You never get tired of this place,” he said. “Do you?”
“Never!” she said with a deep and abiding anger. After a while, she began humming a melody. Childlike, she took a sharp breath and blurted out—“The lilac bushes! Can you see them?” she pointed to lilac bushes that weren’t there. “I know someone who plays there,” she said, as if he hadn’t heard the story a thousand times.
“I know her, too,” he said gently.
“That’s her church. Right over there,” she said, pointing to nothing. “She sings in the choir.”
“Yes,” he said sadly. “She’s the only voice her daddy hears.”
Suddenly, she laughed and looked at him with perfect clarity. “Teddy,” she said. “Do you really think I don’t know it’s all gone?”
Jolted, he looked at her strangely. “But…”
“But, what?” she said, thinking of the church that once stood there. “You think I like it here. Well, I do, Teddy. I think it’s the most beautiful place I ever saw…now that nothing ruins the scenery.”
“We left a bitter man back there,” Theodore said about Ben.
“Bitterness is an acquired talent,” she smiled. “Bitter hearts are made, not born. Steitzburg made the rules. They said an eye for an eye, Teddy. And look at him! It didn’t stop with just me.”
Her delicate, pale hand, seasoned with the years, rested reassuringly on his, lovingly, as one does with an intimate accomplice. Lifting her chin slightly, she said, “You know, I never told you this, but there used to be a dove nest in those lilac bushes. Every year, the same dove would build a nest and raise her babies. Until one year, somebody shook the bushes so hard her babies fell out of the nest. Right in the dirt. They were the ugliest looking things, squirming around and screaming like they did. Ugly!
“Somebody I knew—probably that girl I was telling you about—tried picking them up and putting them back in the nest. But the old lady who took care of her knew a lot about stuff like that. Don’t you dare touch those babies! They’re wild!” She turned to him now. “Well, the Hoovers are wild, too, Teddy.”
“What’s your point, love? You have so many,” he said, with a touch of sarcasm he couldn’t resist.
With a look of worldly wisdom, her perfectly painted red lips became suddenly hard. “Come here,” she said to the man who had served her so long and so well. Slipping her arm through his, she said, “The dove raised her babies without a nest, Teddy. Even the one with the bloody wing. That’s what she did. Her babies didn’t need what the other little birds had. Her babies were different. Which proves, Dear One, you can raise kids even if your whole life falls apart, as long as you keep a good eye on them, like she did.” She smiled. “You can raise them. But you still have to do something about the ones who wreck your nest. Justice is, after all, justice.”
“She could have flown away, found a mate and started over,” he said. “Birds do that all the time. Don’t they?”
“But she wasn’t like other birds, Teddy. She wasn’t one bit like other birds. She could think! She could figure things out!” She smiled. “Thanks to some funny-looking rocks along the Ridge and a trip to the library, she figured out why you and Jake Zimmerman wanted the Miller place so bad. And you know what all that led to,” she laughed.
He had been reminded so often, it didn’t even sting anymore.
“It took somebody with brains and time on her hands to come up with a wildlife park so you could dig all you wanted and cover it with the perfect insulation—water! You got the uranium you wanted and you’ve been grateful ever since, dear. Haven’t you.” She sparkled a diamond at him.
“So have you,” he said.
“Momma wants more,” she said.
“It won’t be easy with a Hoover standing in the way.”
“We’ll see,” she purred confidently.
“Without Ezra, it’s not the same for us.”
“Meaning?”
“We can’t blackmail this one,” he said.
“I thought you were listening to my story!”
“I was!”
“Well, listen again!” she slapped his arm. He had long become accustomed to it.
H
e was used to the sudden outbursts of temper. He knew all too well where she was going with the dove story: “Ben is in charge of the Brotherhood now. Everybody else is gone. He needs me.”
“What makes you so sure?”
For the first time, she seemed surprised. “Because he wants something. Happiness. And until…”
“Until what?”
Weary, she took a deep breath and her head drooped just a little. “Until he finds it…until he gets her love. Or,” she laughed that wicked Ruthie laugh of hers, “until he tells her off for running out on him—that’s what I would do—until then, that’s what he lives for. I know. A mother knows.”
“Will he ever get the chance?”
“That, Dear Teddy—haven’t you figured it out yet?—all depends on how much his mother wants the same thing!” She laughed again.
He looked differently at the lilac bushes that weren’t there anymore now. “What if they meet and the kid hates his mother?” he said.
She looks at him like he’s stupid. “Then he’ll remember every word she says. And she’s got a lot to say.”
“You haven’t changed since that train ride with Daddy, have you?” he said. “You got everything you wanted. Destroyed a church and brought a town to its knees. That’s what it’s all about. Power. It was never about uranium. It was about seeing what you could get away with. Enter Wembly DeCroy and his band of merry men in case things went too far. Sound about right?”
“Wembly always said a woman’s gotta keep her ass covered.” She smiled. “I’m the one who said, ‘Unless she doesn’t want to.’”
It was his turn to smile now. Good or bad, he couldn’t get enough of her. “I thought your motto was ‘leave well enough alone.’”
“NO! No! That’s HER!” She raged. “How many times do I have to tell you! HER! Why do you always get so mixed up?” She slapped him again. This time on the face. “SHE talks like that. Not me! ‘I’ only leave things alone when they’re going my way!” Suddenly kittenish, she added, “Which, darling, is most of the time.”
“No wonder Ezra stood by you,” he said, hand to his cheek. “You probably scared the hell out of him.”
“Daddy stood by me because we were exactly alike,” she said, glancing down at her fingernails, reveling in their deep luster. Her favorite color. Her voice, classy and sophisticated only minutes ago grew distant and pouty now. “They’re chipped, Teddy…I hate when they’re chipped,” she whined. “They have to be perfect. Benjamin’s going to see me sometime. I have to be perfect.”
He watched her raise her hands for a better look, spreading her fingers wide, twitching them, licking her tongue across each one smoothly. Tapping them meditatively against the car window now, she gazed hypnotically past all that had been her youth, bidding farewell to phantoms driving her to darkness. For her, there was no more inner light, no calling to a greater, uplifting destiny. “Darling?” she asked in a small voice after a while.
“Yes, Love?”
“Is God really watching us, like my song says?”
“Many gods are watching us,” he said.
“But, whose side is He on, Teddy? I always wanted to know that.”
“Ours,” he said, with conviction. “Without a doubt.”
She was more quiet now…just a little girl afraid of the future. “You mean it?” she finally said, her voice quivering.
“Of course, I mean it,” he reassured her. “We did something great, didn’t we? All this time, there’s been a lot of talk, but nobody started an all-out nuclear war—not even the crazies when they got the uranium—and all because of us!”
Curious, she asked, “Yeah? How did we do that?”
“Ezra started The Brotherhood to help people in Steitzburg and we made sure he did it! The whole Phantom Lake thing scared him shitless. Once you told him about the uranium, he bought up The Ridge and broke it into mortgages and leases, so nobody could ever get their hands on enough of it to make a difference. He would have done anything to keep that land safe. And he died thinking it was.”
“But it isn’t,” she said.
“Oh, yes, it is. Just because a country has the ability to do something, doesn’t mean it will. A certain lady—mastermind that she was—knew there were people who would never let the house of cards fall down around us. You got your money and bet everything you had on that young man back there, Ruthie. He’s strong, Baby. Like you. He’s got the world on his shoulders and he can handle it.” Ever the realist, Theodore Trimble, Esq. knew what to say, and when. “All it took was for us to slip it to the press that his precious, Brotherhood was mixed up in a national scandal…it was brilliant. He had to deal with it.”
Snapped out of her reverie, she pulled the lapels of her red fox coat tighter. Suddenly cold all the way through, as if a chill had blown through her mind, she looked again at her nails. For a long time, she didn’t say anything. But, as always, he noticed the medicine wearing off.
“I’m tired,” she answered slowly, her sharp intellect clouding. “I just wanted to see him, that’s all. My baby.” Looking out the window, trees became fields, became roads. “Teddy?” she asked now.
“Yes?”
“We showed ’em. Didn’t we? We showed everybody.”
Lovingly, he looked at her. As always, her clarity had dimmed too soon and he wondered if this would be the last time his eyes would be filled with her. He was getting older now and she didn’t see it. She was older, too. Smiling gently, he pretended the lump in his chest wasn’t really there, or the sting of his eyes that came so easily now. He touched `her hand. “Yes, Ruthie,” he said. “We showed everybody.”
For a second, she almost saw him now—really saw him. For once, her eyes were almost trusting. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, with a smile of encouragement. He signaled the driver. “Home, please. Ruthie needs her rest. She has a performance tonight.”
As had become their weekly custom, the black limousine breezed away from the wildlife park for tourists and generations unborn that owed itself to the wayward Mennonite girl who wanted to be a star. Driving through the grand entrance of her residence now, with its manicured lawns and secluded mystery, each flower and tree seemed to welcome her home. It was one of those special places that go from fathers to sons, from mothers to daughters. Protected mansions with beautiful gardens that never change. There was no political intrigue behind these gates. No hunger. No threat of diminishing natural resources to worry about. There were no street people living in cardboard boxes. No beggars except those begging so desperately to make sense of their past and be set free of it. Like a baby dove, she had fallen from the lilac bushes. Like the wild geese of Phantom Lake, she had spread her wings only to fly back to where it all started. As they drove through the gate, she almost smiled at the irony of it all.
CHAPTER 20
Fashion Statement
New York City
Like most scandals, the public fascination with Ben, Sidney and the rest of it quickly faded and became old news. The Brotherhood of Gold had served its purpose and nobody noticed when it was disbanded, any more than they had noticed when it was born. The public could remember only so much from one week to the next of the latest darling movie star to kill her lover or respected artist to skin his cats alive or fabulous singer to chain a male escort to the wall and whip him silly. Life went on for wildebeest herds like it always did. Flocks of sheep in America aren’t much different.
Without Wembly, DeCroy’s wasn’t the same. Like most businesses after the founder is gone, the stores seemed to lose something of their luster and magic. Even the bodacious floor manager who had been there fifteen years didn’t quite seem to have his usual bounce and snap anymore. Black Melvin went on to other pictures. Aunt Sarah got her trainer’s license and the Mattison horses won a few races at the track. Mary had long since faded away. Sidney Leigh was the model of expectant motherhood and Esther read romance novels waiting for yet another baby to raise. Maybe she’d get it right t
his time.
Ben did his best to follow in his mentor’s footsteps, but a certain enchantment had disappeared. Without its purpose as the crossroads and hunting grounds for international business investors, DeCroy’s had no further meaning.
Night after night, Willie hid in the shadows now, thinking. Just an old man in rags, searching for an important job to match the one he had never forgotten. Night after night, he stayed by the store where they had come and gone for their meetings. Where they had selected the beautiful armor by which they would know each other in a world that had moved on. A world that didn’t see him, no matter how important he had once been, or what he knew.
“Close the bank! Go home and wait!” He could never forget those words or how different things might have been if Ezra had answered his call. He could never forget his stomach when it was Mary who picked up the phone that night so long ago.
“He ain’t here,” she had lied. “And he ain’t never gonna be, neither! I know what you done. You took the money and you want Ezra to pay for it. Well, it aint gonna be like that!”
“But he doesn’t know the plan. I have to tell him—I have to tell him what to do!”
“You don’t have to tell him nothing!” she fired back and he could feel her tears. “He’s sleeping and I won’t wake him. I won’t!”
“But—he doesn’t know about the other banks! Everybody’s working together! Tell him that. Tell him!”
“I ain’t tellin’ him nothing! You took everybody’s money and now we’re to blame!” she said, hanging up.
Trying to talk with somebody who hangs up on you isn’t easy. But Ezra wasn’t sleeping like Mary thought he was. Too wise about their relationship to mention anything, he did what anyone in his situation would do: He waited for Mary to silently pack her bags and leave, hoping for the call which never came again…which is how Fenstamacher was stranded in New York…which is how Ezra ended up being at the secret meeting of bankers that night in November, 1929, at Fenstamacher’s house built in 1856 that eventually became the residence of Mattison Farm. Which is how everything had become a golden net spreading wider than he had ever hoped, and more desired than he had ever feared.