Brambleman

by Jonathan Grant

  “That’s true.”

  “Mom said you broke into his house and threatened him, and you’re going to spread lies about him if he doesn’t give you a bunch of money. She says you heard about the deal on his farm, and you’re trying to get a cut.”

  “That’s what she’d say.”

  “Are you?” she demanded.

  “I find your question offensive. Did she tell you the nature of these so-called lies?”

  “She says you stole something, too.”

  “Something? Ask her what I stole, Susan. Ask her what I stole.”

  “So you did take something.”

  “Nothing that belonged to your grandfather.” He liked his answer, nice and legalistic.

  “You’ve been going downhill for over a year, ever since that thing with the Rebel flag on the Fourth of July. This grudge you’ve got is insane. This is the second time you’ve been up there, even though you’re not welcome. That’s stalking, Charlie. You’re mentally ill! The phone’s been ringing off the hook! The Atlanta police are looking for you. Hang on. There’s another call.”

  Charlie hummed the Jeopardy theme as he drove, checking the mirror for black cars. Susan came back on again: “That was the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. An agent wants to talk to you.”

  “I’m sure you gave them my number.”

  “I had to. Hang on. Another call.” Click.

  Please remain on hold while your life is destroyed.

  “That was the Forsyth County Sheriff’s office. They’ve got warrants, plural, out for you.”

  “That was quick. Pays to have connections.” So much for going back to Cumming to swear out one of his own. Unless … “I suppose it would be too much to ask if you’d post bond.”

  “I’ll say it is. You’ve turned against my family. I can’t have that. If you come here, I’ll have to call the police. I’ll tell you this, too. Stay away from the kids, or I’ll file charges.”

  He didn’t bother to ask “what charges?” He knew she’d think of something. “How much money are they giving you? Or do you have to wait for the land sale?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “All right. Détente is done. Just one thing: Don’t let Beck and Ben near your grandfather ever again. He may be old, but he’s dangerous.”

  “You are so full of shit, Charlie. You’re going to jail. I hope you rot there.”

  Susan hung up. Charlie slammed his phone on the dashboard. After that, he drove around aimlessly, checking his mirror to see if he was being followed. He figured Uncle Stanley had called in the GBI, and they’d triangulate his ass or catch him using some other nefarious method that involved both technology and varmintry. When the cellphone rang again, he shut it off.

  He traveled on the Perimeter for a few miles, then exited at Hanover Drive. He didn’t know why he was being drawn toward Thornbriar, but he turned left at the George Bailey Bridge, as he now called it, and passed the gutted shell of the Pancake Hut, where this madness had started. A few blocks away, he stopped at the Nights Inn. After stomping his cellphone to death in the seedy motel’s parking lot, he checked into a second-floor room that smelled of booze and disinfectant. It took him ten trips to haul up his stuff from the van, which was, due to its cardboard window, no longer secure. Again, he didn’t spill a drop of blood. Apparently, it would not abandon him.

  He sat down on the bed, rubbed his face, and reflected on his sorry state. He was on the run, homeless, nearly broke, and completely screwed, with what was left of John Riggins as a roommate. He picked up the jar and examined it carefully. Had to be the man’s middle finger. Charlie bet that raising it in Ike Cutchins’s face had been the last thing Riggins did on this earth. He put the jar on the bedside table. It didn’t distress, haunt, or scare him. Indeed, what was left of Riggins was Charlie’s new best friend.

  He grabbed a towel from the bathroom and covered up Riggins, to keep him snug. “I’m gonna take care of you now. Good night, John,” he said, then patted the jar reassuringly.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When Charlie left the auto body shop, workers were admiring the shotgun pellet marks on the van’s rear door. “Check out the roof!” he shouted through cupped hands from the parking lot.

  A few seconds after he reached the curb, a MARTA bus stopped to pick him up. It dropped him off right at the motel, too. He wondered: Did he, like Trouble, now have special bus powers?

  Back in his room, Charlie checked first for his computer under the bed, then for the Mason jar, which he’d stashed in a duffel. To his great relief, both were still there—as was the blood vat, hidden in the closet underneath a jacket. He brewed courtesy coffee, put the laptop on the table, jammed his knees under it—and then listened to an argument between the Hispanic prostitute next door and her client, a middle-aged man in a business suit Charlie had seen slinking up the stairs. After some bilingual yelling, a door slammed.

  In the silence that followed, Charlie realized that a momentous change had occurred. By snatching that Mason jar, he’d inserted himself into the story. Ergo, American Monster was now a memoir. And so he started rewriting, from page one: “On the night after Christmas I met Kathleen Talton. I was newly destitute, trudging through the rain with a man whose name I still don’t know. She had prayed for a miracle. What she got was me.” He would keep out the story’s supernatural elements, however. (He knew that some people would argue that if he was the answer to someone’s prayers, then there was no God.)

  After a few minutes of tapping away, his thoughts drifted to the jar. He pulled it from the duffel and placed it on the table. In the lamplight, the formaldehyde seemed to take on a radioactive glow. When he picked up the jar, the finger touched bottom and moved as if tracing an answer on a Ouija board. Charlie watched it, entranced. In a less-than-lucid moment, he said, “What is it, John? Is the story trapped in a well?”

  He shuddered, realizing that his mental hygiene (as Susan called it) was slipping.

  Never mind that. There were decisions to make. Being dispossessed, exiled, and hunted, Charlie figured that pulling a disappearing act was the best thing to do. He couldn’t go to jail. He’d lose his stuff1—and what was left of John Riggins. To avoid that, he would stay underground until the book was finished. Unfortunately, he had no cash, and if he didn’t get the second half of the publisher’s advance soon, his house of credit cards would collapse. When he got the money from Fortress, he’d rent an apartment. And where the hell was that check, anyway? He reached into a pocket for his cellphone, then remembered he’d killed it to elude capture.

  So be it. If the world conspired to keep him holed up in a motel with John Riggins’s finger and his computer, then he had nothing better—and little else—to do than work on the book. He returned to his task, writing American Monster at a furious pace, without regard to time or creature comforts, of which he had much and few, respectively.

  At 4:00 a.m., the prostitute next door and her client broke the bed with a mighty crash. Charlie paused to listen to their laughter, then resumed his writing.

  * * *

  For three days, Charlie stayed in his room and pounded the laptop’s keyboard, recasting American Monster as his own story, sticking his head out the door only for Papa John’s pizza and Mongolian beef from the Hungry Wok. By the time he called the body shop and learned that his van was ready, he’d completely rewritten the first ten chapters.

  Charlie stashed away his valuables and stepped outside, blinking in the sunshine. He crossed the street to wait for the bus. It appeared immediately. He accepted his good fortune with a nod to the sky as he boarded the vehicle. The female bus driver, who nodded at him, looked just like the one that had picked him up with Trouble that night outside the Pancake. Then again, the motel was on the same route. Still, his life was weird. No doubt about it.

  He picked up the van1—now unblemished, repainted royal blue, and boasting a new rear window1—and charged the repair, whistling at the cost. He drove b
ack to the motel and checked out. At Southern Trust Bank, he smuggled the Mason jar under his jacket into the vault and placed it inside his safety deposit box, which was, fortunately, the largest available. Still, there was barely room for the purloined digit.

  Not a proper burial, but at least John was secure for now.

  He’d spent a couple of nights out on the street after Kathleen had pulled a knife on him, but that now seemed like some kind of urban camping trip. This time, Charlie fully embraced his homelessness. He rented a post office box at Mailbox Decatur, then went to Cellular USA and bought a prepaid phone with a new number. He immediately used it to call his editor at Fortress.

  “Where have you been?” Joshua Furst asked, his voice hitting a high note on the last word. “I’ve been trying to reach you all week. People are threatening me.”

  “I’m hiding out. I’ve been shot, burglarized, shadowed, threatened, and, to top it all off, maligned—by my wife, of all people.” The unkindest cut of all.

  “I called your cellphone and there was no answer.”

  “It died a violent death in a motel parking lot. As so many of them do.”

  “Then I tried another number. They said you were evicted. What gives? Where are you now?”

  Charlie gave him his cellphone number and his new address.

  “You live in a post office box?”

  “Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”

  “Anyway, some attorney calls and tells us he’s going to get a cease and desist order and prevent us from publishing your book. His name is, hang on a minute … Stanley Cutchins.”

  Charlie broke out laughing. “He’s an insurance agent! He’s a legislator, but I assure you that he is not burdened by a knowledge of the law.”

  “What is his problem? This stuff happened a hundred years ago. It’s like somebody getting pissed off at a book about the Titanic. I searched through the manuscript and the only thing about a Cutchins I found was a quote from some guy born in 1912.”

  “They’ve got the book confused with something I’m working on now. Uncle Stanley will have plenty to yelp about later.”

  “Uncle Stanley?”

  “By marriage. Long story … and I’m not proud of it, OK? Let me just point out that if they’re trying to block publication, well, you simply cannot buy publicity like that.”

  “I agree. Sadly, Legal says we must have threats in writing before we can advertise them.”

  “By the way, I’ve got another manuscript to show you.”

  “Oh. Hmm. Another book, eh? I should warn you: Things are in flux.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have a new publisher. Now isn’t the time to approach him with another book.”

  “Who’s the new publisher?”

  “Evans Barclay, of the Las Vegas casino Barclays. I think he may have won us in a poker game. He says we paid too much for Flight. Called it a bad bet. He’s looking to cut losses. Know when to fold ’em—”

  “Wait a minute!” Charlie struggled to control his anger.

  “Don’t worry. We’re going to publish Flight. I got the galleys in, and I need to send them to you for proofing. And you need to compile an index.”

  “If you’ve got the galleys, I should have been paid already!”

  “I’ll send them. You get them proofed. Gotta go. There’s a call on the other line.”

  “When am I gonna get paid?” Charlie demanded. “Am I gonna get paid?”

  But Joshua had already hung up.

  At least Charlie now knew he needed to find a different publisher for American Monster. But there was a bright side. Hopefully, Uncle Stanley would keep harassing Fortress, barking up the wrong tree. The critter that Cutchins wanted to kill would come crashing down on him from a completely different direction.

  Charlie then drove to Store-All, where he rented a closet-sized unit and stowed away his stuff: tools, bicycle, spare clothes, cot, boombox, papers, even the van’s two bench seats, and the vat (nearly full of blood), keeping only a few days’ worth of clothes and what he needed to write, including his printer. That night he went to a multiplex cinema and after watching a movie, camped out in the van at the periphery of its parking lot.

  He slept fitfully until daybreak, waking with a stiff back. He washed up in a nearby supermarket’s restroom, then bought a cup of coffee, bagels, cold cuts, fruit, bottled water and a bag of ice for the cooler. He still wasn’t ready to write because his van was not yet home—or office. He drove to the Store-All and got his tools, then to Home Depot for lumber, hinges, and a lock, putting all the purchases on his credit card. There would be hell to pay when the bill came, but he pushed that thought out of his mind. He built a locker and shelves for the van, along with a frame to secure the cooler. After eating turkey on a bagel for lunch, he bought an air mattress at Target. He inflated it in the back of the van and laid his sleeping bag atop it, then admired his work. Van sweet van.

  To throw his enemies off his trail, Charlie did something sketchy. When he saw a red Caravan that looked like his in a shopping center parking lot, he switched license plates with it while repeatedly murmuring his mantra: No cops. The next day, he came across a similar vehicle and repeated the process. If they wanted to swear out warrants and try to tail him in a black car, then he’d play Three-Van Monte with them. His new motto: Drive safely, damn it.

  Then he shifted his operations to the north side of town. The next morning, he exercised and showered at the Dunwoody Y. He worked in the local library branch until closing, then set up shop in a coffeehouse, enduring the raucous conversations of rival high school cliques. After the shop closed, he drove away and found a secluded place to park in a strip mall. He sat in the rear of the van, resting his back against the passenger seat, and typed away on his laptop until the battery died.

  The next day he bought a car charger for his laptop battery. Now he could write until he maxed out his MasterCard and ran out of gas.

  * * *

  Charlie arrived at Minerva’s house while she was cooking supper—fish, mashed potatoes, and green beans—and she invited him to eat. Takira was there; Charlie noticed the girl wasn’t showing yet. He shuddered to think that the poor child was carrying Pappy’s great-great-grandchild in her womb—if she was still pregnant, that is. Charlie didn’t mention Pappy or her pregnancy while they ate. Instead, he listened to Takira talk about school. Apparently, her middle school was a hellpit, but he’d heard from other parents that most of them were.

  After dinner, Takira left to see a new friend in the neighborhood. Minerva and Charlie stepped out on the front stoop. It was a clear, cool evening. Minerva sat in the rocker bundled in a sweater, and Charlie, wearing a tan jacket, leaned against a wrought iron support as they watched the girl walk down the street. Recalling Demetrious’s habit of lurking, Charlie scouted the shadows. “You seen your grandson lately?”

  “Not for a couple of days. Sometimes he comes by to eat. That’s why there was extra tonight.”

  “It was good,” Charlie said. “Thanks again.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  A minute passed before she sighed and said, “Well, I know you didn’t show up just to eat my food. I tried calling you, but your number didn’t work.”

  “I got a new phone.” He wrote down his new number and gave it to her.

  “Some woman said you didn’t live there anymore.”

  He laughed. “Which woman?”

  She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Men. They’re all the same. What’s your new address?”

  “Actually, I’m looking for a place.”

  “Where are you staying now?”

  “Here and there.”

  “Hmm, as Arsenio used to say. So, are you going to give me the news about my father?” She clucked her tongue. “Seventy years ago, and it’s the news.”

  Charlie cleared his throat. “There were eight men involved in the murder of John Riggins, and it was over the land.”

  “I’d always he
ard that he was lynched by a mob.”

  “I’d say that’s true. One of them is still alive. He owns the land your family held.”

  She leaned forward, her good ear cocked toward him. “Go on.”

  “The sale’s on record, with John Riggins’ signature, but it’s bogus, since it was dated after his death.”

  “My father’s death,” she said. “So the man stole it.”

  “I know the man who did it, the main one.” He stepped off the porch, then stepped back up, since the small stoop offered little room for pacing. “His name is Isaac Cutchins. He’s the one who’s still alive.”

  “What do you mean, you know him?”

  “I married his granddaughter.”

  She looked like she’d been slapped in the face. “Ain’t that a revelation,” she said, putting her palms to her temples. “He and you are mixed in your children.”

  “Yes,” he said, feeling a pang of longing for the little varmints.

  “My Lord, he must be nearly a hundred years old.”

  “He is nearly that. And spry.” Charlie looked across the street, recalling how close he’d come to being shot by the old man. Twice.

  She raised an eyebrow. “You’re still going ahead with it, though?”

  “Yes.” He gave her a crooked smile. “I never liked him, anyway. The whole family is going to try to stop the book.” Charlie sighed. “It’s gotten quite ugly.”

  “But it’s your family. The blood is all mixed up.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “I’m estranged from all of them. I’m an exile now, and I have a job to do. One of those ‘die trying’ things.”

  She narrowed her eyes, but then a look of pity crossed her face. “What about your own people? Your parents still around? Brothers and sisters?”

  “All gone. I’m an only child of only children. Well, I had a brother, but he died before I was born. He fell off a cliff when he was with Dad, out in the woods. My mother died of cancer right after I graduated from college.”