by David Downie
Inspecting the glinting jagged edges and the vicious twist of the bladelike metal, his reading glasses perched on his nose, James was reasonably sure the type was identical to the wire that had shredded his skin and punctured Taz’s artery. He wished for the first time in years that he had a camera or a smartphone, a phone like the one he had used when an active member of society, not a powerless recluse. Better still, he thought to himself, stooping and scooping up a snippet of the wire glinting in the dust, then thrusting it into his pocket with the nub, better still than an image was a sample.
Pocketing his glasses, he surveyed the yard, trying to trace out the most direct way back to the hole under the fence. The light was brightening dangerously, but the fog had grown thicker. He stole into it, heading toward the ocean and the roaring surf, trying to retrace his steps, listening for the thrumming growl of a helicopter, remembering Beverley’s description of the fat, lazy sharpshooters hunting feral hogs from the sky.
Pausing to orient himself, as if in a waking nightmare, James heard and felt something, the same vibration and roar he had heard and felt in the parking lot. Now he knew what it was. The ’copter had followed the line of the beach, picking up his footsteps in the sand, and was closing in for the kill, its searchlights making the fog throb and glow but also, James knew, blinding the pilot and crew, like the high beams of a car driving through a snowstorm. Racing toward a skeletal shape nearby, he threw himself underneath the chassis of a broken-down lumber wagon. Closing, closing, then hovering overhead, prowling, then moving again, this time slowly, very slowly, inching inland, the blinding glow of the hellish eggbeater helicopter lit up a rusting hangar a football field away from where he hid. James stood and ran.
Stumbling on the tall, tenacious weeds filling the lot around him, he fell forward, landing on his palms. Breathless, as he pushed himself upright he heard another noise, a different noise, the distant tinkling and panting and scrambling of paws. So, there were guard dogs after all, he said to himself, primed, ready to fight, but with what weapon he did not know. Would they be German shepherds or mastiffs or Dobermans, their teeth as sharp and deadly as razor wire, or would they be bloodhounds, the kind the sheriff used to track men or hogs on the run?
Gunfire rang out as the helicopter spun around, its beams searching for prey.
Bent double and sprinting toward the fence, James turned and stumbled again, falling hard on his side. Up again, drenched in sweat, aching and dizzy, he rushed forward, hearing the growling and snarling noises closing in from behind, and the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of semiautomatics tearing through the air, fired from the glowing gunship thrumming above. The path he had first taken through the weeds appeared before him and he charged along it, his windbreaker flapping, no longer bothering to stoop or hide. Tripping, stumbling, gasping, he glimpsed the breach below the fence. About to dive in, he swiveled and saw not three feet behind him a mastiff-sized wild pig, its spittle-flecked tusks jutting on both sides from a massive, wagging, piebald head. Seeing James in that same instant, the hog let out a keening oinking snarl, butted him out of the away, and slipped as if greased into the hole under the fence, followed by six squealing piglets.
“Holy god,” James gasped, seeing them disappear down the ravine to the beach, “my freaking god, what have I done to deserve this?” He sank to his knees by the fence, slipped underneath it into the saw grass, and, lying in the ravine with his arms covering his face laughed out loud, the laughter mixed with sobs of anxiety and exhaustion as the helicopter sped away overheard, gunfire strafing the sand around him and the fleeing, terrified hogs.
FIFTEEN
Strange, after months of writing by hand, typing on this borrowed laptop seems strange. The keys are unfamiliar, the screen is too bright, the letters too small, the typeface unreadable. Times New Roman? Where will my words wind up, in a cloud or in the cloud?
Stranger still, Taz told me that since just about anything with a Wi-Fi chip in it can be used as a mike, and any camera including the one built into the housing of this laptop can be hacked and used for spying, I have disabled all such devices, disconnected the Wi-Fi, and covered the lens and mike with sticky putty, the belt below the suspenders. The next step in terms of security, Taz said, is to put everyone’s smartphone and tablet device in the microwave oven. Only in there can the signals of hackers be completely cut off.
Strangest of all, for me at least, on my return journey from the mill, was the sight of Taz leaning out of the mansion’s top-floor bedroom window, his bedroom it turns out. Feeling a hundred years old and looking like a dead man, I stood on the beach below the concrete buttresses and read his reply to the text message I had sent him a quarter hour earlier. “Come up, Grandma went into town so it’s safe.” The time stamp was 8:07 a.m.
Pointing to the mouth of the creek, Taz flapped his paddle-like hand then shouted, “Over there!”
Thinking of Beverley and her obsession with the number seventeen, for the first time in my life I counted the treads of the stairway, the same “stairway to heaven” I used a thousand times in adolescence, repaired here and rebuilt there, yet essentially the same as in the 1970s and early ’80s. It turns out to have thirty-nine cracked, half-rotten steps from the sand to the first landing. The coincidence seemed unlikely, straight out of Hitchcock or Buchan, so I was about to climb down and count again, but Taz came out on the deck, unlocked the head-high security gate, and waved me up the last flight. He was wearing his usual blue hoodie, this time paired with Hawaiian shorts and flip-flops. I couldn’t help staring. The tattoos I’d partially seen in the doctor’s office for the first time actually covered both his legs, starting just above the knees then spreading up his thighs. They showed coiled snakes, not just bones and skulls.
“I thought your grandmother was retired,” I remarked, out of breath, as I crossed the porch and followed him around to the front door, unsure whether to say something about the tattoos and the obvious danger of the authorities linking the skulls to the cage and bones.
“Hut-uh,” he said, “she, like, works part-time at city hall, so we can get insurance.”
“You said you didn’t have insurance.”
“I don’t but I will if, like, she hangs on another year, I think. She usually goes in two or three days a week and on Saturday mornings.”
I asked him how his leg was and he seemed surprised, he seemed to have forgotten the wound. Looking down he said he was fine, he guessed.
Luckily, he didn’t ask me how I was, because after my tour of the mill’s grounds, complete with apocalyptic helicopter accompaniment, I felt as weak and jittery as ever I have. Clearly, it was time to leave town. But I wanted to say a proper goodbye, and I needed to get into the mansion one last time.
The oaken door swung open with a strangely familiar creaking sound. Inside, the house felt overheated and damp. But Taz said it was always cold and clammy, especially in winter, when the beach fog and the river mist formed dense cloud banks. I was about to say, “I remember them well,” but I hadn’t decided yet whether to tell all.
I felt I should tell him the whole truth, especially if I was leaving. I might not see him again. So, I bought time and said, “Maybe if you put on warmer clothes the house wouldn’t seem so cold.”
“Maybe,” he answered in his default noncommittal way. “This is the only place I can wear shorts. I always wear long pants outside, so no one sees the tattoos,” he added.
“Then what’s the point?”
“The point?”
“Yes, why have tattoos?”
Shrugging, nodding, and wagging his head, he said, “Some people see them, I see them, they’re, like, reserved for a private audience.” He smiled his disarming goofy smile and instead of looking like a thug seemed a little kid again.
Taz said he didn’t usually drink coffee, unless he was at Beverley’s, but he’d have some with me now if I made it. He wasn’t sure how the machine worked, he claimed. How a seventeen-year-old could not know how to make drip c
offee I cannot explain.
On the way to the kitchen, I glanced at the portraits on the piano and my heart skipped a beat. “Is that your grandmother?” I asked. His dyed acid-green curls whipped around when he said yes, it was, at least he thought it was his grandmother when she was two or three years old, with her parents, his great-grandparents, but it might be his grandmother’s mother, he wasn’t sure. He’d never met any of them. Had I met my great-grandparents? he wondered out loud. I said no, I barely knew my grandparents—people didn’t live as long back then.
I went over and picked up the portrait and fumbled to get my glasses on. Could it be? I asked myself, recognizing something in the great-grandparents, and in the face of the blond toddler. “They look nice,” I said. “What did they do in life?”
Taz seemed surprised and searched for an answer, admitting he wasn’t sure. “I think he was, like, a teacher or professor,” he said, “and she was just a housewife, the way it used to be, you know.”
Sitting unceremoniously on the piano stool, he unexpectedly started playing. Chopin. I’m not sure which piece, a polonaise, I think. He played from memory, beautifully, missing a beat now and then but still, it was impressive and I said so. Taz blushed and claimed he was out of practice, that he loved the romantics and wished he had more time to study and practice. His grandmother was much better than he would ever be, he added. I asked if he’d performed in public. Shaking and wagging his head faster than usual, he folded the cover over the keyboard and walked wordlessly into the kitchen. I stared a moment longer at the photo, picked it up and checked the back. A date in the early 1960s was inscribed in pencil, nothing else. A fluke, I said to myself, it couldn’t be.
The other photos on the piano showed Taz, aged probably five or six, alone against a sunlit scabrous stone wall somewhere, perhaps Mexico or Brazil. There was a relatively recent photo of him holding a pole in one hand and a trophy in the other and wearing a sports team outfit. I’d noticed the trophy on a shelf nearby. It had his name on it and a date from five years ago. “You’re a champion pole-vaulter,” I shouted in a jocular way. “Very cool . . .”
“I guess so,” Taz said from the kitchen. “It was when I was, like, young, I don’t do it anymore.”
“When you were young?”
“I mean, like, when I was younger. And I ran a half marathon two years ago . . .”
Drumming my fingers—the way Beverley does, an irritating habit I don’t want to pick up—I said as casually as I could, “No portraits of your grandparents?”
“Grandma doesn’t like having her picture taken, and I never met my grandfather,” he said, again in a matter-of-fact way. “She says, one day, Grandpa might come back, he’s not dead.” I could hear him opening the fridge and rummaging around.
I called out, “What about your parents?”
“Fuck my parents,” he shouted back, his words a vicious snarl, as violent and unexpected as the snarling feral sow at the mill. Something dropped to the kitchen floor and exploded. Taz cursed and muttered.
“Strong words,” I said, stepping into the kitchen. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
Taz nodded and shook his head in a by-now familiar gesture as he mopped up a splash of spilled milk and put a broken, leaking pickle jar into the sink. “I don’t remember my mom, and my dad left me here and never came back.”
The anger and bitterness in his voice came through, but they disappeared a moment later and his puppy-camel look returned. “Are you hungry?” he asked. Feeling my stomach growl, I nodded. Fear and tension, once gone, are the best stimulants to appetite.
The kitchen was noticeably clean, spotless, in fact, and I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t removed my boots and had probably tracked in sand or tar. “Don’t bother,” Taz said, “Grandma likes cleaning the house, she does it all the time.”
I asked if he helped her and he seemed puzzled. “Nah,” he said, “it’s, like, a hobby for her, I guess, and I’m no good at it.”
“Practice makes perfect,” I quipped, “like playing the piano.”
“I’d rather play the piano,” he said. “Or work on algorithms or fly my drone. We’re doing some cool stuff in my computer lab, it’s awesome. I have to go later this morning. If you had a smartphone, I could, like, patch you in and you could watch through my helmet camera when I ride down the highway and when we fly the police drone on the playing field.”
“That would be great,” I said, “but I’m not equipped.”
Smiling triumphantly, Taz said he could get me a smartphone cheap, a reconditioned unit, that’s what he did in his spare time. It was lucrative, he added, and they were easy to sell online, in fact, he had one upstairs if I wanted to see it, or he could put a different chip in the extra one he always carried around and sell it to me. I thanked him and said I’d kicked that habit. I really didn’t want another smartphone. Life was good enough without one.
Telling him that making drip coffee was no harder than fixing a phone or pruning roses, I showed him how to fill the tank with water, put in a paper filter and add coffee grounds, close the hatches, place the pot under the spout, and press the button. But he wasn’t really interested. He had been sending and answering text messages on both phones, I noticed, and grinning, smirking, and chuckling with a goofy laugh, our conversation of a few minutes ago already ancient history. Out of the blue, he declared that he had texted Beverley, telling her I was with him, and she had texted back with the all clear. Now I understood what she had meant about Taz, and why she had imposed her smartphone confiscation order.
“Have you eaten breakfast?” I asked, my stomach roaring by now.
“Nah,” he said, yawning. “I just got up. Your message woke me. I, like, do stuff at night, a lot.”
I checked the cupboard and fridge and looked for a mixing bowl and a whisk and a frying pan, and told him I was going to make fried eggs and pancakes, I couldn’t imagine his grandmother would mind. Taz’s eyes grew large, the lashes beating.
“Now, if you hand over those phones, I’ll teach you and then we can eat together,” I said. I could see him hesitate, calculating whether it was worth digital deprivation to eat. Silently, cautiously, he gave me the first phone, then handed over the backup unit. “Great,” I said, “now help me find an apron.”
“I’m going to put some music on first,” he said, “one of Grandma’s LPs. Got any requests?”
Without thinking I said, “I’ll bet she doesn’t have Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon.”
Taz grinned his patented Alfred E. Neuman grin and raced away to the living room. A few seconds later, I heard the LP drop onto the turntable and the music booming on the stereo. “Cool,” he said, coming back in, “that’s, like, one of our favorites.”
We ate in the kitchen at a big old wooden table in the corner by the back door, The Dark Side of the Moon playing for a second time as the sun broke through the fog and mist. The table had been repainted a glossy canary yellow, but I think it was the same one we’d had forty years ago, a leftover from the previous owners back then. I was happy and proud that the eggs over easy came out perfectly, the whites firm and cooked, the yolks nice and runny but not raw. The pancakes were on the heavy side, but with the eggs and the maple syrup and butter it seemed like a pretty square meal. It certainly helped chase away any remaining anxiety I felt about the helicopter and the mill. They’d been out hunting hogs, I decided, they’d never even seen me.
Taz drank a whole mug of coffee, eating and singing along with the album. He knew the lyrics to every tune. Again, I was impressed. The coffee had the same effect on him as at Beverley’s. He became increasingly effusive, extroverted, talkative, agitated, and ready to vault with a pole. Getting up and clearing the table, he didn’t wash the plates or put them in the dishwasher but dumped them in the sink alongside the broken pickle jar, then ran back to the living room. The second the Pink Floyd album finished, he began playing the piano again, Rachmaninov this time. I recognized the piece but, again, not
by name. The notes thundered and roared through the house, proof that an acoustic instrument can be a powerhouse.
Still wearing the apron, I stood by the piano and watched him play. His finger-spread was as wide as mine, the only obvious advantage of having such big paddle-like hands. Making the piano shake, he leaned into it, closing his eyes, transported by the instrument and the sound, the way the smartphone transported him. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the old black-and-white portrait of his great-grandparents and his infant grandmother.
“Was their name Simpson,” I asked during a lull. Taz wasn’t listening. He finished the piece and shrugged and said that sounded right, but he didn’t know for sure, they were dead when he got to Carverville. He’d ask his grandma if I wanted, he added nonchalantly. He could send her a text message right now if I gave him back one of his phones.
“It’s not important,” I said, recognizing a ploy. Tapping the piano with my fingertips, I struggled, deciding what to do—tell him or leave things as they were and hit the road. “Aren’t you curious about what happened last night, with the cage and the bones,” I asked, surprised he hadn’t brought up the incident.
Taz shook and wagged his head meaninglessly. I told him how the helicopter had lifted the cage off the beach and put it on a truck and he said, “We hear helicopters all the time, day and night, I think it’s the Coast Guard, but there’s some kind of charter service out to the oil rigs, too. Grandma says they take food out when the ocean’s too rough for boats.” Pointing to the breakers beyond the windows, he slumped into the big old armchair in the front room and put his leg up on the ottoman. The skin around the stitches was purple and puckered. “I guess it does, like, hurt sometimes, I feel kind of tired and bruised,” he said. Then, in what seemed a non sequitur, he added, “I watched the whole thing anyway, from, like, five different angles.”