by David Downie
“What thing?”
“The helicopter and the cage, last night,” he said. “It was on social media, didn’t you look?”
“I was there in person,” I said, “why would I?”
Taz didn’t seem to have an answer, and he made his goofy face and asked for his black phone back. He said he could show me an angle I couldn’t possibly have seen from the ground. I said I didn’t want to see it again from another angle and that I’d seen enough. He said this was particularly “cool” and “awesome” and it wouldn’t take a second and then he’d give the phone back to me. I surrendered. Beaming, he tapped and stroked and held up the screen. I recognized the scene but as he had said, it had been filmed from an unusual angle somewhere along the highway. “Very cool,” I admitted, “who posted this?”
Taz said it hadn’t been posted, it was footage from the 24/7 surveillance camera on the Old Coast Highway. I said I wasn’t aware that was viewable by the public, and then he really surprised me.
“It isn’t,” he said, “I hacked in, I do it all the time, it’s, like, so easy you wouldn’t believe it, I could teach you how to do it, like, like making coffee or pancakes or pruning roses.”
“You hacked into the sheriff’s video system?”
Nodding firmly and smiling without wagging his head, he said, “I found a back door, we can watch the cameras anywhere in town.” He brought up a multiple split-screen view with a dozen or more thumbnail images.
I asked if his grandmother knew he was doing this. He did his trademark yes-no meaningless nodding wag. So, I asked if the authorities could tell he had hacked the system. “If they were any good they could,” he said, smiling in a way I hadn’t seen yet, a satisfied, wicked or malicious way, for lack of a better description. “They’re hopeless, they’re, like, pitiful.” He began toggling from one camera in town to the next, until I asked him to stop and held out my hand for the phone.
“Here’s the parking lot next to Beverley’s place,” he said, “and here’s Main and Bank from one, two, three, four different angles.” He added, “Grandma works right there, in that office, through that window . . . and here’s the last camera on the highway, on the way up to the house, by those shacks on the edge of town we drove past yesterday.”
Curiosity getting the better of me, I asked if there were any cameras up at the old mill site. He shook his head. “No, except for one at the front gate where the trucks used to go in and out years ago. See what I mean, they’re pretty dumb, like, they should have cameras inside or in other places, not at the main gate no one uses anymore.” Tickling the screen then tapping it as if it were a piano, he showed me live video from the helmet camera of a deputy pulling over a motorist on Highway 12. He hiked the volume. It was the Tom Cat.
“That’s more than enough,” I said, opening and closing my palm in front of his face. “Do you realize what they could do to you if they discover you’re doing this?” I asked, debating whether or not to tell him about penalties for hacking into law enforcement systems. He could be charged with treason and put to death. “What if they get ahold of this phone and make you unlock it?”
He fiddled and said they wouldn’t and he wouldn’t, it just wouldn’t happen, they were too stupid. Handing over the phone reluctantly, he made a goofy face, avoiding further questions and asking if I wanted to see his drone or hear another album. “I can stack three,” he said.
Waiting until my frown softened, I asked, “All right, does she have Earth, Wind and Fire, no one has that?”
Taz wriggled with delight and started singing, “Child is born with a heart of gold . . .” as he skipped over to the stereo.
“Don’t let it grow hard and cold,” I segued, misremembering, watching him dance, blissful. On top of that LP, he stacked a Led Zeppelin and The Doors and said we’d be climbing the stairway to heaven soon.
It’s not clear to me what clicked, maybe it was the talk of hacking, and that phrase, but I knew I would tell him, tell him everything I could, quickly, and then get back to the Eden Resort and clear out of town. “What are your favorite books?” I asked, shouting over the music, trying to find a back door or a side door into my tale. Then I realized that was the wrong question.
“They’re on my phone,” he shouted back brightly, “I download them all the time. I can show you . . .”
Shaking my head, I said, “How about the favorite books you have in the house?”
“You mean old-fashioned books?” he asked, shouting back. “Like printed books, you mean?”
The stereo filled the rooms with soda pop soul as Taz led me to the library and pointed to shelf upon shelf of Harvard Classics, plus the collected works of Twain, O. Henry, Stevenson, Thackeray, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others, arranged floor to ceiling on oaken shelving. “I’ve read most of them,” he said, then smiled enigmatically so that I wasn’t sure if he was joking. They turned out to have been his great-grandparents’ books. I could see there were others, hundreds of others, Orwell and Huxley and Hemingway and Golding, Sinclair Lewis and Ray Bradbury, Graham Greene and John Le Carré, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, most of them in paperback editions. An adjoining office area was where his grandmother worked, he said, and she had lots of books on childhood education, psychology, and art therapy.
Selecting and taking down a handful of incendiary works, including Eugène Ionesco’s plays, I asked Taz if he’d really read them. A few, he said. His grandma had made him study Rhinoceros.
“We put that on in high school,” I remarked, snapping my fingers and recognizing the same 1970s edition we’d used at Carverville High—I’d kept it all these years, until I left the city and sold or gave away everything. “Is that why you did that drawing on the fridge?” I asked. Shaking his head, Taz said it was the other way around. He’d done the rhino drawing in a geography class at school and later his grandmother had told him to read the play and watch out for rhinos. That’s when he drew the slash through it. “Never collaborate,” he said, as if reciting, “unless it’s a way to become a mole and undermine the system.”
This seemed promising, very promising. It indicated his grandmother was progressive and smart and he was cognizant of collaborationism—the pith of the play. But like the tattoos and hacking, it also raised another red flag. I told him that, given what had happened with the cage and the bones, and the way the authorities had reacted, according to Beverley, and the fact that he was a hacker, and I wasn’t necessarily a great person to know for too many reasons to list, it might be good if we removed some of these books and his drawing and hid them for a while, just in case.
“In case of what?” Taz asked, his eyes widening.
“In case the sheriff wants to make trouble and comes over looking for things to incriminate you with.”
“Does that mean you’re a rhino?” he asked.
Taken aback I said, “The opposite.” I reflected for a moment then added, “Will you trust me? I think we should start by hiding these books and your drawing in a place no one will ever find. I’ll show you, and it will be your secret place, in case you want to put anything else in it. Rhinos don’t do that kind of thing. Members of the resistance do.”
Surprised but clearly not alarmed, Taz seemed ready to humor me. The contrast between our intense conversation and the saccharine 1970s soul music in the background could not have been starker, at least for me. Taz didn’t seem to notice. He said hiding things was all right by him, but how did I know where to hide something in this house? “Come with me,” I said, handing him a stack of books that were now officially “un-recommended”—the word “banned” hadn’t been used yet. I unstuck the rhino drawing from the fridge door and climbed upstairs with it and into what had been a spare bedroom in my day but was now Taz’s room.
“Bear with me,” I said, opening the door to the big walk-in closet and getting the long wooden stepladder that had always been there leaning against the side of the built-in highboy chest of drawers. Taz watched me, his eyebrows raised and
head cocked, like Tom Smithson, the deputy.
“How did you know about that ladder?” he started to ask. But now it was I who wasn’t listening. I climbed six steps, pushed up the trapdoor, waited for the worst of the dust to settle, and crawled into the attic. “Bring those up,” I said, turning around and coughing, “then come on up yourself. I’ll explain.”
There was no need for a flashlight. A small dormer window, designed to give access to the roof, let in enough light that you could see across the long, low, wide room with slanting ceilings. The dust was prodigious, swirling and choking both of us. Taz coughed and sneezed and hesitated on the ladder, peering in, clearly unwilling to get dirty. I opened the window, took a deep breath and reached down, taking the books out of his arms. Then I signaled him up, offering him my hand.
The attic was almost empty. A few hanging closets made of cardboard, the kind used by moving companies, stood against one wall. I couldn’t remember if they had been ours or had always been there, even when we moved in. The floor was covered as it had been with unfinished, loosely aligned rough wooden planks laid on the crossbeams between the joists.
“Watch your head,” I said, stooping and making my way to the far corner, batting away the cobwebs. “Watch out for black widows, too,” I said. That was a mistake. I must have been thinking of the closet under the basement stairs. Taz paled and I heard him say, “Black widows?” But by then I was lifting the floorboards in the corner, flipping them one by one out of the way. I stepped to the side to let the light shine in and smiled when I saw the scrapbook was still there, where I had hidden it nearly forty years earlier when I left for college. Lifting it out, blowing and beating the dust off, I set the heavy leather-bound volume on the floor and caught a faded pink envelope that was about to fall out. Slipping it back in, I said, “Hand me those books and the drawing.” I took them one by one and laid them between the joists. “When this blows over, you can get them out. You can do the same trick with the floorboards in the big closet in the basement.” I turned to see Taz’s large camel eyes open wide, his jaw hanging slack. Then I remembered the snippet of razor wire and the burned-out end of the welding rod in my pocket, and I nested them underneath a volume of Fahrenheit 451. I flipped the planks back over and aligned them as they had been, then used the soles of my boots to smooth away the footprints in the dust. “Now let’s go downstairs,” I said, blowing my nose and taking up the scrapbook. “Storytelling time has come.” It sounded more ominous than I’d intended.
Taz was down the ladder in a shot. I paused by the window and opened the scrapbook. My mind reeled back in time. “A diary is not manly,” my father had told me, my mother standing by my side. It was not masculine. But a scrapbook, that was good. “The boy can put in baseball cards and photos of race cars and suchlike,” he’d added. “One day he’ll be happy to have it.”
Now I was happy to have it. Flipping the dusty pages, I came to the faded pink envelope and stared at the postmark, reading off a date from the start of our summer of love. I lifted the flap and extracted the card. Welcome home, she had written, I’ve missed you. XOXO M. My hands trembling, I slipped the letter into my breast pocket, closed the window, and climbed down to where Taz was waiting.
“Go on up and close the trapdoor, would you?” I asked, trying to buy time and get my emotions under control. Taz hesitated before obeying and returned beating his hands and clothes and making faces as he coughed exaggeratedly. The hard rock music booming from downstairs filled the void for the seconds I stood motionless, my eyes blurred. “Let’s sit down,” I said, pointing to his bed. “This might take a while.”
A visual aid, the scrapbook helped me illustrate what life at the house had looked like forty years ago. I started by showing him the title page. It read Property of J. Paul Adams, 27,900 Old Coast Highway, Carverville. “The ‘J.’ is for James,” I said. I showed him views of the house and beach, taken with my first Kodak Brownie camera, and color snapshots of my Mustang convertible. There was even a photo my father must have taken of me with Harvey Murphy, each of us holding a chainsaw. Because it was black-and-white film, I couldn’t tell immediately whether it was Egmont’s yellow McCulloch or some other saw.
At first Taz refused to believe me and thought it was a prank, that I was making things up, but then, seeing more and more photos, he came around and had a thousand questions—was it cold and misty then, too, most of the year, with yellow fog banks creeping down from the north? Were there as many deer, raccoons, and wild pigs, and tar on the beach? Were the kids cruel and racist bullies, the sheriff and deputies scary and dangerous? Why hadn’t my parents let me keep a diary, and why had I hidden the scrapbook and left it there, instead of taking it with me? What job had I done when I grew up, where had I gone to university and law school, and on and on and on.
I explained about my father and the hatchery job, and how the salmon were endangered even then, and how my mother had always hated Carverville for some of the same reasons he mentioned. My parents didn’t get along but had waited until I was grown up and in college, starting my junior year, and then they separated, sold the house, packed up, and moved away from each other before I could come home and interfere. I no longer had a home in Carverville, they said, we were never welcome here anyway. I could take turns staying with each of them, if I wanted, they’d added, following with a “but.” The “but” was, I was all grown up now anyway, wasn’t I, and would be going to law school, if I kept my grades up and did well enough on the LSAT exams.
During that same semester, the girl I loved had left town, and I’d never been able to find her, I told Taz, adding that I’d always wanted to come back, if for no other reason than to find closure. But I should not have come back, and now I must go. I stood up, wondering whether to take the scrapbook with me or hide it again upstairs. The music boomed below, The Doors lighting fires in LA, fires that had spread across the world all those years ago but had now gone out. I wiped my dusty hands on the apron, gave Taz back his smartphones, and turned toward the stairs to the entrance hall.
“See you,” Taz said as if in a trance, the glowing screens already his new master. “At Beverley’s,” he added, “tomorrow. I’ve, like, got to go to my computer lab now. I’m late already. You can let yourself out, right?”
“I know the way,” I said. But when I reached the landing, I froze. The music had gone off.
“Who is that up there,” asked a thin, frail-looking woman, staring up from the bottom of the stairs, her hands clutching defensively at the throat of her overcoat, her voice breaking with fear.
“It’s James from Beverley’s,” shouted Taz from the bedroom. “The garden guy,” he added, “he’s, like, totally cool, Grandma, and I’m late for class.”
She released the grip on her coat and stepped back with relief, her anxious eyes still on me.
“Maggie?” I asked as I reached the bottom of the staircase, barely able to speak, my mind racing and hands beginning to shake. “Maggie, is it you?”
I must have looked like a madman. She stared at me with pained incomprehension, scrutinizing my face, my hair, my beard, my clothes, the color draining out of her as the realization dawned. She grabbed the banister and swayed. “I don’t understand,” she began to say, “how could it—”
“It’s me,” I said, stepping up to her, “it’s JP, I’m back, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
Maggie sobbed and gasped, wagging and nodding her head yes and no, then falling into my arms, then pushing and brushing my hair and beard away from my face. “What took you so long,” she moaned, drawing a deep breath, “I’ve waited so long, JP, it’s been so long.”
SIXTEEN
Where do we start,” James asked Maggie, watching Taz limp down the front steps of the house dressed like a space-age warrior in rubber armor carrying his wheeled steed. Mounting his unicycle, he waved to them, then rolled south on the Old Coast Highway toward his computer lab session.
“How about cutting your hair,” M
aggie said with a laugh as light as a butterfly. “Your hair and your beard.” She stood with her arms wrapped around her body, brimming with contradictory emotions.
James uncrossed her arms gently, held her close for what seemed a lifetime but was only a few seconds, then took both her small hands in one of his. “Yes,” he said, pulling the pink envelope from his shirt pocket and giving it to her. “I guess there’s no point wearing the disguise now.” Pausing to watch her read the letter she had written a lifetime ago, he opened his mouth to speak but she finished his thought for him.
“Now?” she asked, stifling her emotions. “You mean, now that you’ve come home?”
“Am I home?”
She pulled him close again and hugged as hard as she could until his kidneys ached. “You are home, JP, and you’re never going to leave again, unless you want to.” She released him, pushed him back and looked up, unable to hide her revulsion. “But we’ve got to get rid of that hair and beard. They’re horrible. They’re downright repulsive, and your b.o. is pretty bad, too.”
Leading him into the echoing old tiled bathroom-cum-laundry room, she dragged out an antique folding stepladder and sat him down on the top tread. “Take off your shirt,” she commanded, sounding like a nurse. She dropped it in the washing machine in the corner of the vast room then draped a bath towel over his shoulders and pinned it together with a clothespin. “What are all the bandages for,” she asked, “and this patch?”
“Didn’t you hear about the cage and wire?”