Brambleman

by Jonathan Grant

  Nearly all the cars were gone, but two children sat in the open side door of a cargo van. He blinked and tried to focus his eyes. Those were the kids he’d helped. The tiny girl saw him and called out, “Hi, Charlie. Are you hurt?”

  “Hey,” he mumbled, unable to remember her name. He was about to say he had been injured when he realized he was beginning to feel better. He took a step toward the van, then saw it wasn’t the seedy enchantress who’d been with them before. This woman was black. Older and rounder. Ah, of course. “Are you their mother?”

  “No, their momma went out with Redeemer,” she said. “There they are, coming back.” She pointed toward Memorial Drive just as the red Cadillac came barreling into the lot.

  Charlie stood dumbly as Tawny exited the car with a bag of groceries and sang out to the kids, “We got food for tomorrow.” She stood in a halo underneath a streetlight by the building’s corner.

  Redeemer climbed out of the driver’s side and said, “You can’t keep doing it the way you been. Here, take this.” He handed Tawny something small. “What I promised.”

  Tawny glanced Charlie’s way but didn’t seem to notice him. She turned and walked over to her kids.

  “She’s a whore,” said a grimy whitish-gray man through a faceful of hair. He was sitting down, his back against the building. “Not judgin’, just sayin’. She works the stoplight down the street. Bunch of ’em do.”

  Charlie turned to stare at the guy. “Have you seen … Trouble?”

  “Nuthin’ but,” the man responded. Charlie turned back to watch the family for a moment. Weird: That little girl was the only person who cared what had happened to him. He couldn’t remember her name, but he knew that she deserved saving from this terrible world she lived in. Not that he could do anything about it, since he was no better off. He left, gingerly stepping and ouching his way across the gravel, taking the shortest route to the sidewalk.

  Once he had escaped the torturous parking lot, Charlie cast a backward glance at the woman named Tawny, the one Trouble had been screaming about. The whore. He felt like his mind had been poisoned against her, but he was also filled with desire for the woman underneath the mascara. Anyway, if Trouble hated her, she couldn’t be all bad.

  The side street was empty when Charlie climbed into the Caravan. His crotch was wet and cold, and he could smell the taint of homelessness upon himself. Since the Y was closed and he couldn’t afford a motel room, there was no shower in his immediate future, so he did what he would be forced to do more and more frequently in the days to come—change into dirty but dry clothes, put on secondhand sneakers, and wipe down his body with moist towelettes. Pantless, he crouched low as a cop car passed by.

  Charlie drove off and stopped at a service station to use the restroom. He recoiled in horror when he saw his face in the mirror. Tracks of dried blood ran down each cheek. His eyes were beyond bloodshot. They were pools of red. The bastard had nearly blinded him. Correction: had blinded him, but he’d recovered, somehow. He wanted to kill Trouble, if such a thing were possible.

  He ran water and splashed his face with both hands, then looked around and realized there were no paper towels, only a hand dryer. He left the restroom shaking his head like a wet dog.

  Having missed two meals already, Charlie looked for a place to eat. The supermarkets he drove by were closed; so were the restaurants he passed. Finally he saw a Pancake Hut and despite his misgivings, pulled into the lot. He sat at the counter of the otherwise empty diner and waited. Fifteen minutes later, he realized the waitress, like Lil Bit, was intent on ignoring him. He left without getting so much as a glass of water. As he departed, the cook hollered, “Thanks for taking the hint, you homeless fuck.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  November 30: DNA Day. According to lab results, there was a 99.989 percent certainty that Demetrious Jackson was related to Isaac Cutchins. Charlie attributed the .011 percent (one ten-thousandth) ambiguity to incest-related mutation. He put the results in his safe deposit box alongside the Mason jar containing Riggins’s finger, which spent its days circling endlessly in its dark prison. It was a sad, awkward moment. Before locking the door on his box, Charlie apologized to the lonely digit for breaking the news that way. “Sorry, John. Sooner or later, you had to know.”

  That afternoon, Charlie checked his mail in Decatur. The only piece was his dreaded credit card bill. He hadn’t kept track of expenses, and his fingers trembled as he opened the envelope. When he saw the total, he despaired, slumping against the wall of the store and sliding to the floor. Nearly thirty-two hundred dollars! Shocking! There it was, his life on paper: Fast food, gas, coffee, the first DNA test, camping gear, a duster coat and wide-brim hat to keep off the rain—all of it piled onto the previous balance. Being homeless was more expensive than he’d realized. He’d have to get a cash advance on his card and buy a money order to make a payment, putting off the day of reckoning for another month. Unfortunately, he was close to his credit limit; he wouldn’t make it to the end of the year unless he signed up for another card—or two. But one blood-soaked contract was enough. He’d left Bayard Terrace without getting paid for his past month of caretaking for Kathleen, but in truth he’d done little to earn it, so he didn’t press the issue.

  Now he only had fifty bucks left in his checking account. He desperately needed money. Across the street at Java Joe’s, he called Fortress.

  “Mr. Furst no longer works here,” said the woman who answered Joshua’s extension.

  “Who is my editor, then?” Charlie asked, stomping the floor in frustration and rattling the table, sloshing coffee on his legal pad.

  “That depends. Who are you?”

  “Charles Sherman. I wrote Flight from Forsyth.” Silence. “You are publishing it, aren’t you?”

  “Could I put you on hold?”

  “No! Absolutely not! I demand—”

  Click. Charlie listened to The Impossible Dream for three minutes before hanging up. He feared he’d entered into a contract with the very worst sort of devil, one who refused to keep its end of the bargain. In other words, a publisher.

  * * *

  Facing grim financial prospects, Charlie had to sell American Monster. Fortress was out of the question, due to lack of interest (or editor) and its abominable payment policies, which vacillated between slow pay, no pay, and what, me pay? He needed an agent to protect him from such deadbeats. Following a marathon espresso-driven indexing session for Flight at Java Joe’s, he wrote a query letter that, due to his increasingly paranoid state, read somewhat like a Nigerian confidence e-mail:

  Dear ____________:

  I have been shot and my house has been ransacked twice. I need to send what I’ve written someplace where the people who are looking for me can’t find it. Perhaps I could pay you a storage fee. But I have heard you are a bright and resourceful agent and recognize an excellent opportunity when you see it. I will finish my book by the time you read this letter and I am quite sure it will sell a million copies, maybe more. It is all true and documented. There are things I can’t say yet, but when the time comes I will turn my evidence over to the authorities. First I must tell the story and force them to do their jobs. Their ancestors are involved, so good luck with that—this is what I tell myself.

  This is the true crime I have documented in American Monster: My wife’s grandfather, Isaac Cutchins, 95, lynched a black farmer in 1937. Then he raped the dead man’s wife and stole his victims’ land, which is now worth $20 million. The woman who was raped gave birth to a light-skinned daughter, whose life is plagued by her seventeen-year-old gangsta wannabe grandson.

  By the way, Cutchins raped his oldest daughter 150 times while he sent his wife and other children out for ice cream during the early 1950s. That’s six hundred cones! The victim showed up at her mother’s funeral to spit on the dead woman’s face and curse her father to hell. My wife and I stopped by the dry cleaners and missed it, but I tracked down the woman and heard her terrible nightmare s
tory.

  This is the family I married into, and American Monster is the story I was chosen to tell the night I agreed to edit a dead man’s book—Flight from Forsyth, soon to be published by Fortress, I think. I have built a strong case and the killer knows it. When I confronted the man on these issues, he tried to kill me. His family—my family—has turned against me. I’ve been banned from seeing my children. I am on the run. I write this letter from a coffeehouse with a liberal electric outlet policy and it closes in ten minutes, so I must be brief. I know this all sounds insane, but it is the story of murder and greed and it’s all true. I’m an excellent writer. Read the sample I’ve enclosed. You will see for yourself. Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  Charles Sherman

  * * *

  The next day Charlie rewrote the query, making it more coherent, though it still wasn’t completely sane. On the way to Java Joe’s that gray, cloudy morning, he stopped to consider his image in a plate glass window. He was turning into a ghost—or, upon further reflection, a zombie. He had dark circles under his eyes and looked gaunt; he’d lost more than fifty pounds in less than a year—although that, in an of itself, was a healthy thing. It was his psyche that was suffering most. Living on the street had exacted its toll in sleeplessness and constant hunger; his drifter’s loneliness grew heavier on his heart each day.

  But there was work to do. He printed American Monster’s first three chapters at a copy shop and mailed them with his semi-sane letter to Barbara Asher, the only literary agent who had not rejected Thoracic Park. (Actually, she’d never responded, but Charlie took his omens where he could find them.)

  He received a letter that day from Fortress demanding the galleys and index. Angry, he called the company; the receptionist refused to put him through to the publisher. Charlie hung up, convinced he’d seen the last dime from that hellbound outfit. Still, he’d finish Flight from Forsyth because it would have his name on it and prove he existed, matters of no small importance to a man in danger of falling off the face of the earth.

  * * *

  Having worked double-time to put the final touches on Flight, Charlie grunted in triumph as he shoved the galleys and index into a big envelope. After he mailed them to his publishing company, that worthless pack of bastards, he turned his full attention to American Monster, where his head and heart already were. He wrote quickly and well, even obsessively. His fingers flew over the keyboard like he was Chico Marx playing piano.

  He was protective of his Monster, of course. He wasn’t just the book’s author, he was also its bodyguard, Secret Service, and Army of One. He locked away notes, hid copies of disks and flash drives, and e-mailed chapters to himself, leaving them safely on Hotmail, he hoped. He shadow-boxed in preparation for throw-down time, and when he came across a dinged-up aluminum baseball bat at the Goodwill Store, he bought that, because if he had to go down, he’d go down swinging.

  His attempts to contact the living relatives of John Riggins’s other lynchers yielded three denials, including a terse, awkward one from Cecil Montgomery, who wanted to know where Charlie was calling from, two “no comments,” and an anonymous death threat, all of which he wrote into the story. Forsyth County officials weren’t very helpful, either. Tempting fate, Charlie had tried to contact District Attorney Eric Stockwell to talk about the case, but the prosecutor didn’t return his calls. (Charlie thought that was weird. After all, he was jailbait. Didn’t Stockwell know or care that the sheriff’s office was holding warrants for his arrest?) He’d mailed questions about John Riggins’s death to Pappy, with a copy to Uncle Stanley, requesting a written e-mail response to his Hotmail address. If he got none, then Pappy’s denial, lie, and spit would be the family’s final word on the matter.

  Unless, of course, they killed him. Then Trouble would have to dig around in a Dumpster for another writer, wouldn’t he?

  * * *

  After a parking attendant called the cops on him, Charlie fled Atlanta again, traveling even farther south than Clayton, hiding in Butts County, of all places, camping out in a state park, cooking hot dogs on a black-grated grill, and rubbing his hands together over it like it was his very own barrel fire. He refused on principle to roast marshmallows until his children returned to him.

  As winter approached, Charlie had the park mostly to himself. Sometimes he slept in the van, other nights in the tent he’d pitched for appearances’ sake. Fueled by instant coffee, Gatorade, peanut butter sandwiches, fresh fruit, and yogurt smoothies, Charlie wrote and edited almost constantly. For a break, he’d go for a walk with his computer, talking to bare trees and fearless squirrels. Sometimes he’d rent a boat and, ignoring the danger involved, row the laptop back and forth across the park’s lake like he was on a cheap date. The ascetic writer had become closer to his computer than the most fervent porn junkie. After the sun set, he kept writing and editing until words became blurs on the screen.

  One day, while he was out for a walk, a state trooper came by and checked out his vehicle at the campsite. Charlie hid behind a pine tree and watched. After a few minutes, the trooper drove on. It was good to know the license plate hadn’t been reported stolen.

  Nevertheless, he packed up his tent and vacated the park, shifting even further south, down to Indian Springs State Park in Middle Georgia. Along the way, he saw a likely looking Caravan, so he switched plates again.

  Sitting by a campfire, he finished the first draft of American Monster, concluding with this epilogue:

  As I write these final pages, I am homeless. I have been banned from seeing my children. I cannot afford an attorney. Whether this account ever sees the light of day is out of my hands now. I made a solemn vow, a covenant, to do this, as distasteful as it has become. It is important, because people—living and as yet unborn—need to know the truth about their past. The problem isn’t so much that, as Shakespeare put it, “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interr’d with their bones,” but that the evil becomes the unchallenged norm, and is eventually mistaken for good. The lie becomes the truth.

  We ignore the past and think that those who suffer do so because of some inferiority on their part, and we take strange comfort in that. And when we prosper we are certain we are blessed due to our innate goodness and superiority. Our ignorance of history and refusal to take responsibility for the past—as well as our acceptance of unfair benefits we derive from it—allow these evils to thrive.

  Five minutes later, he began his rewrite. Time enough for rest in the grave.

  * * *

  On the verge of completing his third and final draft, Charlie drove up to Decatur to check his mail and found a letter from Barbara Asher. “Is this for real?” the agent wrote. “You seem very strange, but the samples are great! Mail me the manuscript and I’ll look at it over the holidays, if you give me an exclusive.”

  “Yessss!” Charlie shouted, pumping his fist in the air, jolting the slacker clerk from his customary elbows-on-counter torpor.

  He didn’t go back to Indian Springs. Instead, he spent the night in a Decatur parking lot. On the cold, overcast morning of December 24, he finished work on the 275-page manuscript in the special collections room of the Decatur library, completing it a week ahead of his self-imposed deadline.

  He went to the bank and rented another large safety deposit box so that he could stash his most crucial papers Flight from Forsyth and all of those for American Monster. Desperate to see a friendly face, he drove over to Virginia Highlands and lugged a duffel bag containing his writing gear into Bay Street Coffeehouse. The place was decked out with wreaths. Charlie breathed in the doubly invigorating mix of pine and coffee. Jean rushed around the counter to hug him. “Where have you been?” she cried out. She wrinkled her nose at him, but she was too polite to mention why.

  “Finishing another book,” he proclaimed. “I’m done.”

  “So soon? How prolific of you!” She stepped back and frowned. “You’re skinny now.”

  “Yeah. I’v
e got authorexia.”

  “You.” She smiled, showing a dimple in her chin he’d never noticed before.

  “I need to borrow a cup of electricity to print it up.”

  She laughed. “Sure. By the way, people have been asking about you. I don’t remember who, though a couple of them acted like detectives.” She gave him her most potent gaze, her head cocked to the side. “I told them I know nothing. Nothing!”

  “Good.” Charlie hoped he didn’t look as scared as he felt right then. “I’ve been hiding out. But that part of my life is just about over. I’m looking for a place,” he said, trying to sound properly ambitious.

  “Where have you been staying?”

  “Here and there.”

  She pursed her lips, appearing deep in thought. “I know a guy who wants to sublet his loft. I’ll talk to him.”

  “That might work,” he said, although he had no idea how it would, since he was flat broke and thousands of dollars in debt. He gave her his phone number, anyway.

  Coffee was on the house in celebration of his grand achievement—and in recognition of his poverty, which, he assured Jean, was about to end. “Somebody owes me money,” he explained.

  Charlie finished printing the manuscript shortly after noon and slipped the manuscript into a box and hand-printed the address. He asked Jean to watch over his stuff while he went to the post office, where he stood in line behind procrastinating holiday shippers.