by Peter Israel
On the instructions of his client, George S. Curie III wrote, I was herewith and immediately and forevermore relieved of my duties in the matter which mutually concerned us. My services, for which I was thanked, were no longer required. The enclosed check, George S. Curie III believed, would amply recompense me, and should I have incurred any justifiable expenses I was to submit them in writing to his office. Furthermore, any and all property in my possession belonging to his client or his client’s family was to be returned to his office no later than Monday morning, and I was to consider this letter as having put me on notice of same. Finally, in closing (would you believe?) George S. Curie III hoped he would have the pleasure of working with me again on some future project!
For a minute, I confess, I had one of those you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit reactions. The miserable son of a bitch, Twink Beydon, I’d had my head handed to me mucking around for him out in the trenches and he didn’t even have the decency to can me in person, much less in his own name!
But only a minute, and maybe a good deal less.
Because it meant something else too. It meant I was a free agent again, Lonesome Cage riding out in his Mustang. It meant all bets were off. It meant, in short, that I was free to open up shop on my own, no checks cashed, women and children last.
Because what else did the letter prove in this Age of Equal Opportunity, except for the fact that Twink Beydon had changed his mind again?
Then I took a look at the package.
It had my name on it, nothing more. There was no return address on the outer wrapping and nothing inside to tell me who’d sent or delivered it. In a way though, you could say it came from the grave, and if it was a bomb, it was the kind that doesn’t explode until you’ve put on your proverbial pipe and slippers and settled down by the fire for a long winter’s read.
A handwritten bomb too, though parts of it could have been carved with a knife. More like two hundred pages than twelve, in two of those spiral notebooks they sell around the campuses, and all of it Karie Beydon. I guess you’d call it a journal at that, though there wasn’t much by way of dates and none of the today-I-had-tea-with-Lord-Rottencrotch. Karie Beydon’s journal: a journal of hate and a journal of Daddy.
It crept up on you. The first time you ran into it, about a page and a half’s worth right near the beginning, you thought: well, it’s the oldest of stories, all kids hate their fathers sooner or later, and sooner or later it’s got to come out. But around about the second or third entry, you began to say to yourself: this kid’s really hung up on her old man, and the next time: Jesus! She really means it! And it made you feel a little sick inside, more than a little, but not so much that you didn’t find yourself skimming the in-between parts so as to get back to Twink.
She tried and convicted him of every crime on the books, you name it, and she did it with a kind of shrill mockery that belonged to someone on the other side of the menopause, not a wild little number in jeans and lopped-off hair. Sometimes she wrote about them in the third person, herself included, and it was Twink and Karen, and also Nancy, and also Twink’s Silver Star brother, and someone she called Twink’s whore or, later on, Margaret. But other times it was like she’d had him right there and was laying it on him, else writing him a letter: You did this and You did that. Like: “You murdered my mother as surely as if you knifed her in the heart,” which later on became just a casual fact she referred to here and there: “before you murdered my mother” or “when Twink killed Nancy.” A lot of it was in the form of imaginary conversations between Twink Beydon and Karen, but it was hard to tell where fact stopped and imagination took over. Like Twink’s whore, this Margaret. Who the hell was Margaret? Something gave me the idea she was a made-up character, but then just before the end there was a reference to “Twink’s new whore, whose name is Ellen,” which took me to my longlost friend Miss Plager, which set me wondering whose place she’d taken in the squash court. I filed “Margaret” away in the back of my mind. And once near the end there was a sort of letter, or part of one, addressed to some brother she’d concocted for herself in a language that wasn’t far from baby talk: “Brother Twinkie, let me tell you a thing or two about our Daddy,” but by the time you were done you’d have sworn there was a Twink Beydon Jr. and, lucky lad, that his big sister had just clued him in on the more gruesome facts of life, including the one that it was Twink who’d sent their uncle Alan off to war and death.
Facts? The truth? Like I say, it was hard to tell. In places not having to do with Twink there was plenty of clinical detail, such as the description of what she called “Billy’s member” (a rather puny one, it seemed, belonging to the poet laureate Mr. Gainsterne), and another letter to Twink in which she described going over the border to Ensenada for an abortion, only to tell him in the end that she’d made it all up, and in such a way that you could hear a hard cold laugh echoing back at you off the pages. But if there was nothing there that would have stood up in court, still all that hate had to have come from somewhere, and I couldn’t help but think about the one missing fact that might have had something to do with it, that secret only Twink Beydon himself was supposed to know about but which Robin Fletcher, for one, hadn’t made up out of thin air.
If it was that, though, she never let on in the journal. It was never “my legal father” or “my stepfather” or “my fake father.” It was just Daddy Twink, loud and clear and with the blood still wet on the page.
I’ll leave that part to the head-shrinkers. Probably they’d tell you all she was doing in those notebooks was trying to get his attention, and they’d tell you the same thing about her life, and also her death, and finally that all that father hate was really only love in disguise. Which explains in a nutshell why I’ve always resisted the temptation to spend fifty dollars an hour to hear the same things about myself.
As for the in-between passages, she’d taken a stab at philosophy, and she wasn’t much good at it for my money. The same went for some pretty murky attempts at auto-analysis. There were pages of just description, nature etcetera, some quirky drawings which weren’t half bad, and others she’d written when she was stoned where the handwriting went crazy and which made no sense even when I managed to decipher some of it. On the poetry, which was dotted all through, I’ll have to let the poet laureate’s opinion stand. “More potential than actual,” he’d said. To me it was pretty heavy stuff and forced, like she’d seen too many horror movies, full of bloodshot moons and knives, animals with bleeding eyes, sex-starved cunts, etcetera. Even there though, Daddy Twink was never far away, and in one there was even a little blind bird who kept saying: “Twink twike tweek twuck.” I guess it was pretty obvious where she got her inspiration.
Like a bomb, I said. Yes, but the slow-ticking kind, the kind that never goes off but throbs dully in your brain and leaves that cold sickish tightness in your guts. I sat there holding it on the white couch, leafing back and forth through the pages, trying to put two and two together and coming up with two hundred. I could see why no father would want a last testament like that circulating—it certainly wouldn’t do much for his public image—but was it enough to send people chasing after each other for? Some of them with guns and at least one dead because of it? Maybe so, I never having been a father, that I know of, but the brand of sensitivity Twink Beydon had shown me was strictly of the Arrid Extra Dry variety. As far as the Diehls went, assuming they’d had a falling out with Twink, what use could they have made of it? Whereas rather than trying to hit them up, any corner-drugstore shakedown artist with a little intelligence would have peddled it to the nearest newspaper or magazine.
This last idea crossed my mind more than once, and it wasn’t respect for the dead which sent it out the other end, but something more valuable.
Like twelve handwritten pages. Twelve, not two hundred. Twelve sheets that could have been torn from the notebooks. A Karen Beydon sampler? Some pages had been torn out, you could tell it from the paper shreds still stuck inside the spirals, an
d except for an account of the Winnemucca adventure, her grand tour in the drugstore-on-wheels was missing entirely.
Could have been.
Or was it the other way around? Were the two hundred pages a sampler for the twelve, did the twelve tell why Karen Beydon died, and was I being set up as the agent for the purchaser? Because who besides George S. Curie III and his client would have known that I’d been “relieved of my duties”?
The phone rang.
My stomach jumped like a frog. Normally, once it’s rung three times the biddy at the answering service takes over, and normally I let her. But this time I had one of those weird gut intuitions that the next person I talked to was going to be the one.
It was Freddy Schwartz.
“I’ve been trying to get you all morning,” he grumbled at me. “Since when do you work Sundays?”
I didn’t answer.
“Whatsamatter Cage, where’s the repartee? Cat got your tongue? Hello? Are you there, Cage?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m here.”
He had some news for me all right, but he wouldn’t let me have it till he’d worked me over a little. He must’ve been sober because when he’s not, which is mostly, he takes what comes his way, no complaints so long as it’s wet. But finally he got to the point. As far as his information went, the Diehl brothers were financially solvent and then some, but the Diehl Corporation was percolating again. Word was they were fishing for capital, only it wasn’t the brothers who were making the waves. It was Twink Beydon, none other. He’d been to the banks already that week, and then just the day before one of the paper’s stringers had picked up his trail out in Palm Springs. He was closeted with oil and they were still closeted, Twink Beydon and some half dozen of the biggest goo-peddlers this side of the Sheik of Araby. And the reason, though it was more speculation than fact, wasn’t that the Diehl Corporation was bobsledding toward bankruptcy but that the timetable for Diehl City was going to be accelerated.
“Why?” I asked Freddy Schwartz.
“I thought you were going to tell me,” he said. “You seem to have a different angle.”
“I’ve got no angle,” I said.
He started to whine then, like the jew he was. He said there was supposed to be a quid pro quo between us, but so far it had been all quo. He said he wasn’t used to working one-way streets, he was a trader. He said so far all he’d gotten out of me were a lot of promises, and it was time I cashed some of them in. Etcetera. Etcetera.
Maybe I figured I was going to need every friend I had, even Freddy Schwartz. At any rate, he was the first investment I made for Cage & Cage out of the capital accumulated that last week, and not the worst either. It would be enough to keep him in booze till Yom Kippur, if he lasted that long, and with what was left over he could plant some trees in Israel.
He had nothing for me on the other questions I’d put to him. I told him to keep listening. I asked him if he’d heard anything about an aztec who’d been gunned down under peculiar circumstances a few nights before, and he said he hadn’t, that it didn’t sound like much of a story. I guess it wasn’t, because I never found an obit for Garcia in the Times, not even back in the squash section.
No sooner did I hang up than the phone rang again. It was the biddy from the answering service. While I was on, another call had come through.
“It was another one of your lady friends,” she said. She had a way of saying “lady friends” that made it sound as though I was running a hundred-dollar-a-shot call girl racket.
“Her name wasn’t Karen by any chance, was it?”
“Who? Oh that one! No, she hasn’t called in three, four days. This was another one. She didn’t leave her name. She sounded funny, I don’t know …”
“What d’you mean, funny?”
“Funny? I don’t know. Funny, y’know what I mean? She said it was terribly important she talk to you. She said it was about something she’d sent you, she wouldn’t say what. She said she’d call back sometime. But if it was that important, why didn’t she leave her name and number? And when I asked her, do you know what she did? She burst out laughing! Now what was so funny about that, I ask you?”
I told the biddy to keep listening too. If it wasn’t Karen calling from the grave, suddenly I had a pretty good idea who it had been, and I figured I’d better wait it out in case she really did call back.
So I sat there. I read Karen, and I read the Times. I thought, and I caught a few minutes of the Dodgers on TV. Sutton was pitching. I never could see Sutton. Then I read some more of Karen, and to settle my stomach I grilled myself a steak, with some scrambled eggs and hashed browns on the side and a pint of Bass Ale to wash it down.
The way I had it pegged turned out to be part right and part wrong, but I got to see another Santa Monica sunset before the phone rang again.
11
For a bad minute I was reminded of the one time in my life I’d talked across the Pacific. You could hear the waves in her voice like it was going up and down with the sea, and I kept waiting for the operator to say, “Deposit ten million yen for the next three minutes please.” Finally I figured out that she was the one who was making the waves, not the connection. In fact the connection was good, good enough to make out music in the background, and if I hadn’t recognized her I’d have thought I’d freaked out altogether. Because it was a hymn of some kind, a hymn, and voices were singing it, and behind the voices was something that sounded like an organ.
But Sister Robin Fletcher was the one who was freaked out. Whatever she was on, it sent her up and down like a yo-yo. One minute she was flying and the next crying, then laughing her head off, then cooing at me in some weird imitation of a Marilyn Monroe, then climbing up one side of me and down the other because, she said, I was no better than the rest, then telling me I’d better come get her because she couldn’t stand it any more. In between she had some coherent moments, but then the train slipped off the tracks again and went careening across the alfalfa.
“Hey sweet baby,” she said for openers, “is that you, darlin’ Cage? You get the package?”
“Yeah, I got it. Did you deliver it?”
“Friend of mine,” she said. “Hey what’d you think of the poems?
“Twink twike tweek twuck,” she said, “huis throughout. And now you want the rest of it, honh? You’d like the letter too, wouldn’t you, you greedy little baby. Greedy little monster. You gre-heedy littu monster …”
“Well let me tell you something, Buster,” she said, and her voice jumped about an octave, “what makes you think you’re the only one? D’you think you’re the only one?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”
“He doesn’t think so,” she said. “He doesn’t think so. Well let me tell you something baby, there’s a line around the block about a mile long waitin’ to get it, did you know that? An’ y’know what they’re waitin’ for? They’re waitin’ for Mommy, that’s who.
“It’s a long mother,” she said, singsonging it. “Oh it’s lo-o-ong, like it’s real lo-o-o-o-ong …”
“So how’m I supposed to get you up close to the titties? They’re only two, Brother, two poor littu boobies, poor Mommy Robin’s babies, hey did I ever tell you what their names were? Tell you what I’ll do honey, jus’ for you,” and her voice went real low, “I’ll give you a little suckie right now, right now.
“Here,” she said. “Have a little. Here’s Karen.”
And she started to giggle.
I could hear the hymn behind her.
I tried to play it straight.
“Listen Robin,” I said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but I’ve got it and I’ve read it. So what’s missing? A letter?”
“A letter? Hey listen to him now! A letter?”
The giggle went wild like a crow baying at the moon, and she started cussing me for being so dumb they ought to make me a guard at Disneyland, or such a smartass like I hadn’t read it right there, something about
a letter, Nancy’s letter, it rang a bell but I couldn’t think what, she had it all right, at least she used to, she said, and then her voice got caught in a trough between the waves and I tried to ask her who had it, did Ford have it? But that set her off again, tripping about poor baby Andy Ford, poor baby Andy Ford this and poor baby Andy Ford that, poor baby Andy Ford had gone running off with the goodies and nobody would catch him, not even Robin, but poor baby Andy Ford didn’t have the biggest goodie of all did he?, so why didn’t he come back, Andy Ford, she’d make it nice for him again, it’d be grand, he ought to know. And before I realized it, it wasn’t me she was talking to any more, it was him head-on, the blond young stud on the surfboard, the traveling pharmacist, and she was laying it all out for him, Robin Fletcher on a platter, wailing for him, aching for him, like a torch song nobody was meant to hear, not even him, and even if the record was cracked, her voice too, it almost made me blush to listen in.
Then I could hear the hymn again.
“Cage? Are you still there Cage?”
I said I was.
“You gotta get me out of here,” she said. Now her voice was flat, low. Robin’s voice. “You gotta spring me, sweet baby. Come and get me Jesus, I can’t stand it any more. There’s some kind of terrible shit coming down on me. Whatever you want, but you better come fast. Like I’m stoned, Brother, I’m zonked, can you tell?” A little giggle, then: “Jesus God, oh I’m so stoned on Jesus God. I’m gonna crash, Cage, I can tell. It’s a trap, honey, it’s a big bear honey trap, it’s like four walls and a roof, it’s like …”
“Hey Cage,” she said, like she was waking up, “you ever been locked up in stir when they won’t let you out?”
It sounded real enough, and then she started to sob and that sounded real too. I said I’d come get her. I said I’d come as fast as I could drive but she had to tell me where she was. I told her to try to get a hold of herself long enough to tell me where she was.