Brambleman

by Jonathan Grant

  Charlie dreamed of waking at 4:00 a.m. He heard a revolver’s cylinder spin, and the next thing he knew, he was holding a gun to his temple. Beck and Ben were watching him, waiting to take their turns with the gun. A pile of cash lay on the table in front of him. Three men also sat at the table, strangers all, their faces lit by a dangling bulb in a dank, dark-cornered room. “Your turn,” the bald man said, then nodded to the children. “Or theirs.”

  When the alarm rang at 5:00 a.m., Charlie awoke terribly confused. Where had he been the last hour? He hit the clock’s button and looked around. The doors were closed. He touched his chest. He existed. He stuck out his foot. The floor was there. The shadow of a tree limb danced on the ceiling. The shadow was real.

  Maybe it was a witching-hour dream, maybe it wasn’t. In any case, Charlie wanted to call Thornbriar and check on Beck and Ben, but he worried that Susan would use any ill-timed communication as evidence of stalking and get the restraining order reinstated. But he had to know the kids were all right. He was due at Channel Six’s studios at seven o’clock for a live interview with Atlanta Dawn host Charlene Guy. That gave him enough time to shower, don his new khaki suit, grab a cup of coffee at the bakery, and drive to Thornbriar—not to stalk, of course, but just to check and see that everything was OK.

  And so he found himself slowly driving past the house at 6:10 a.m. A BMW larger than his sat in the driveway. Had to be a 528i. Jet black. Paid for with his child support, no doubt. Wait a minute. Why wouldn’t she park it in the garage? He drove on to the stop sign down the street and circled around in the intersection, then backtracked. As he passed by the house again, a gray-haired man in a suit was stepping out the door. Susan, in a bathrobe, kissed him. Harold? God, he was old.

  Charlie felt his face burn and fought the urge to slam on the brakes. However, he’d taken his foot off the gas, so he was just coasting away. What should he do? What could he do? The little skank was out there cheating on him publicly, with impunity! At the Hanover stoplight, he dialed Muncie’s cell.

  “What the hey,” said the groggy lawyer.

  “I want a detective to trail my wife.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m countersuing on grounds of adultery. I need documentation, I tell you!”

  “What time is it?” Muncie groaned. “Oh, no. Stalking is bad, Charlie. You’re not outside your wife’s house right now, are you?”

  “Of course I’m outside her house. Otherwise, I’d be inside it and that would be even worse.”

  Muncie spoke slowly, as if to a child. “Charlie, how far away are you from your wife right now?”

  “Infinitely far,” Charlie replied.

  * * *

  Charlie arrived at the Channel Six studio expecting a friendly interview, since he’d never heard of a guest segment on that show turning ugly. Atlanta Dawn host Charlene Guy smiled warmly at Charlie when she introduced him to the city’s largest morning audience, but the interview quickly became adversarial. Charlene started by asking if Charlie was involved in drug trafficking. He laughed off the question and mentioned the racist death threats he’d been receiving recently. She parried by asking about his “conflict of interest” in writing about his family. The interview went downhill from there: Charlene told him twice to lower his voice, and on one occasion, he suggested that she didn’t know what she was talking about.

  He staggered out of the studio greatly displeased with TV news, his cheating wife, and life in general. “Six minutes of hell,” he called the interview on his way out the door and into the sunshine. Another performance like that and he’d have to get out of town—maybe even move to Canada. In a voice hoarse from all the talking he’d done during the past few days, he’d said some ugly things about the varmints, but he meant every word, especially when he declared that Representative Stanley Cutchins “is a bad joke Forsyth County voters have been playing on the state of Georgia for the past two decades”; “Isaac Cutchins is a thieving murderer”; “My wife’s divorce petition is filled with lies”; and “The governor? Don’t get me started on him.”

  Charlie consoled himself with a leisurely breakfast at Midtown Diner. He’d just paid the check when he felt his cellphone vibrate. It was Crenshaw. He considered ignoring the call, but their relationship had reached a tipping point, and Crenshaw now gave him useful information half the time. Charlie took a deep breath and stepped outside. “What do you want?” he growled, hoping he sounded friendlier than he felt, but not caring much.

  “What do you have to say now that your monster’s dead?”

  “Say what?”

  “Isaac. Cutchins. Is. Dead.” Silence. “You don’t know? My deepest condolences,” Crenshaw added with mock sincerity.

  “Shit.” Charlie grimaced at his tasteless response. Think, think, think. Say something appropriate. Hmm. Difficult. “What was it? Heart attack, stroke? Both?”

  “Lead poisoning.”

  “Lead poisoning,” Charlie repeated dully.

  “Bullet in the brain. Through it, actually. Last night. Messy, from what I hear.”

  Charlie resisted the urge to shout, I didn’t do it! “He was murdered? Wow.”

  “No. The family says it’s a suicide. You’re to blame, you’ll be happy to know.”

  “No. Absolutely not. Pap—Ike Cutchins would never kill himself. That’s not in his nature.”

  “Your mother-in-law—Evangeline Powell … she still is your mother-in-law, right?”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “Cut the shit. I’m just checking to make sure you haven’t snuck off and gotten your divorce yet.”

  “Oh, you’ll know when that happens,” he assured the reporter.

  “Fair enough. Back to the dead guy. Your mother-in-law says, and I quote here, ‘Daddy heard about that pack of lies coming out about him, and he couldn’t live with being slandered. That man’—and here I’ll insert your name, since she refused to say it—‘may as well have stuck the gun to my daddy’s head and pulled the trigger himself.’ Now, that’s a money quote. What say you?”

  “I say it’s a homicide.”

  “Really, you think somebody read the book, got pissed off and came up here—”

  Charlie thought about Aunt Shirley. Say it ain’t so, Shirlene! “No, I’m not saying—wait. Are you up there now?”

  “Yeah. Your in-laws just finished putting on a show for the cameras. Representative Cutchins was there, and then Tant or Taint—

  “—Tantie Marie. It’s actually Marie Hastings. His sister.”

  “Whew. Thanks. I had her down as Stanley Cutchins’ wife.”

  Charlie broke out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Crenshaw demanded. “Oh, the Pulaski stuff. She’s my sister, she’s my daughter, she’s my wife.” He made a sucking noise through his teeth. “I’m not going there. Hey, there’s this huge, hulking guy with a monster truck. Everybody calls him Momo. That’s Rhett, right?”

  “Rhett Butler Hastings Jr.”

  “Ostentatious name for a mouth-breather. Well, he says he wants to kill you. Off the record.”

  “He’ll have to wait in line.”

  “Anyway, much crying, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and blaming you. You’d think they’d just go off and count their money. Look, I’m going to cut you some slack and give you a chance to act properly. So, what’s your on-the-record reaction?”

  Charlie needed a minute. He wasn’t a good mourner to begin with, and especially not in this case. While the world would be a better place without Pappy in it, Charlie figured that if it seemed he was in some way responsible, book sales could suffer, and he certainly would be sad about that. He heaved a sigh. “It’s unfortunate. My condolences go out to his family. This was a man who caused much pain to others. I hope that, before his life ended, he was able to find repentance.”

  “Rising above it all to slip the knife in,” Crenshaw said. “Nice.”

  “And bye.”

  Charlie hummed on the way back to Castlegate.
Sunny sky, God’s in heaven, all’s right with the world. It seemed like a providential plan was playing out. As he approached the lofts, he saw a spectacle: Two news trucks had collided in front of La Patisserie. Amy the baker, all in white, with her baseball cap on backwards, stood on the sidewalk, snapping photos as two TV cameramen yelled at each other and reporters—one white male, one black female—wandered around in circles, wearing dazed expressions and holding disconnected microphones. The feeding frenzy had begun. Or perhaps the End Times were near. In either case, the oblivious reporters didn’t notice Charlie, and he escaped undetected.

  A few minutes after he’d parked in the garage, he watched Charlene Guy’s face fill the screen during a Channel Six Action News Breaking News Alert. “Go ahead, Dave,” she said.

  “Charlene, Forsyth deputies are asking why a man nearly one hundred years old would kill himself, but relatives say they know the answer. This,” Decker said, holding up American Monster. “The latest effort by Charles Sherman, whose previous book on Forsyth County made waves earlier this year.”

  “It’s still making waves, jerkwad,” Charlie told the TV.

  The shot cut to Evangeline, wearing dark sunglasses. “It’s that pack of lies what did it,” she declared.

  Charlie stared in fascinated horror as Susan’s kinfolk took turns in front of the camera to trash him. He plopped on the sofa. When his cell rang, he shouted “No comment” without picking it up.

  Tantie Marie yelled off-camera: “He didn’t want to go to the nursing—”

  “Hush up,” said a voice off-camera that Charlie recognized as Stanley’s.

  Evangeline continued: “That, that—I don’t know what to call him—”

  “Estranged son-in-law,” Charlie suggested.

  “—has libeled and slandered a good man. Daddy couldn’t live with it.”

  The cellphone rang again. Charlie waited for it to quit, then checked his voicemail. “You have thirty unheard messages. Mailbox full.” Someone was giving out his number like candy on Halloween.

  When Channel Six cut to a replay of Charlie’s disastrous interview, he turned off the TV and listened to messages, deleting them as he went. One from Susan, simple and cold: “It would be best if you didn’t attend the funeral.” That was a severe understatement, considering the history of violence at varmint burials. He wondered if Shirley/Arlene—if she wasn’t in jail for murder at the time—would pay her disrespects as her father lay in his coffin. There will be spit.

  Charlie checked Amazon.com. American Monster was No. 5. People were buying Flight, too. Sales had risen into the top 100 for the first time since Charlie’s last book tour. But he really was sad that the old man had met his end this way. He would have preferred to see Pappy die in jail.

  * * *

  At least a dozen people knocked in vain on Charlie’s door that day. When he left the apartment that afternoon, he had the good sense to peer around the elevator door before stepping out into the glass-walled vestibule. He could see into the bakery and through the garage entrance to the street. The coast was not clear. While the wrecked news trucks had been towed away, a pack of reporters now camped out in La Patisserie. No way was he doing interviews when he was considered an accomplice to suicide.

  He returned to his apartment and exited the patio door, rattling down the fire escape’s iron steps. He sprinted away, running beside the razor wire-topped fence at the property’s back boundary without looking at that telltale DVD of Tawny gleaming in the sunlight. After three blocks, he slowed down. It was too hot to be on the lam. At Barista’s, he got a bottle of water and an iced café Americano. He sat on the patio under an umbrella and plotted his next move. Avoiding the media was the only tactic he could think of.

  Charlie thought he saw a reporter walking toward him and ducked behind the low patio wall, knocking his cellphone out of his pocket. When he reached down to pick it up, it spoke to him: “Charles Sherman? Are you there? Answer me!”

  He peered over the wall like a soldier engaged in trench warfare. False alarm on the reporter. Just a normal person. “Hello?”

  “Charles! Where have you been? We’ve been trying to reach you all day!” It was Randall Blaine, Brubaker’s head publicist. “I’ve got Spence Greene on the line.”

  “I hate three-way calls,” Charlie said.

  “Too bad. We’ve got the opportunity to go on national TV, but we have to act quickly.”

  “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Ike Cutchins is dead.”

  “Yes!” Greene hissed, making his presence known. “Opportunity of a lifetime!”

  “People think I killed him. I’m laying low.”

  “Why? Do people think you put a bullet in his head?”

  “They think I might as well have,” Charlie said with a hillbilly twang. “Anyway, I was on Atlanta Dawn today. The book is getting plenty of publicity without any need of putting my scarred face on TV again, especially under hostile circumstances.”

  “Not enough publicity,” the publisher grunted. “You’re not number one yet. You’ve got to get your mind right on this, brother.”

  “What show do you want me to do?”

  “Matthew Steele!”

  “No. Not Steele.” Charlie sneered. “No way.”

  “Yes. Way,” Greene said. “I heard you didn’t return the man’s phone call when he reached out to you himself. What the ef is wrong with you?”

  “That must be one of my eight hundred and ninety-five unheard messages.”

  “Five are from me,” the publicist pointed out.

  “I’ve seen that show. Not that I’m proud to admit it. I’m not going on Steele with the varmints. They’d have home field advantage!”

  “We insist,” said Greene. “Your contract specifically states that you will actively participate with the media to promote the book.”

  “Does the contract say I have to be a media whore?”

  “In no uncertain terms,” Greene said. “Look, millions of people watch the show.”

  “But none of them read,” Charlie protested. “It’s not my audience!”

  “Do it,” Greene growled. “Don’t be hard to work with.”

  “I held a news conference at my own expense. Today, I was on TV and also talked to a reporter. One I’m not particularly fond of anymore.”

  “Charles, most authors—hell, ninety-nine percent of them—would kill for this chance.”

  “Don’t you see? People think that’s precisely what I did! Let’s just—”

  “You’re going to reach an entirely new audience,” Blaine said. “People who need to know lynching is wrong, damn it! It’s like, just say ‘no’ to mob violence.”

  “So go there,” Greene said. “Lend dignity to the program.”

  “That’s a virgin in a whorehouse argument,” Charlie said.

  “You, sir, are no virgin.”

  “Yeah, but I’m an ascetic.” Charlie gripped his phone tightly while he considered throwing it across the street, then relented. “Shit. All right.”

  “That’s my bestselling author! Talk to you later.”

  Greene hung up; the publicist stayed on. “You’ll fly to Chicago Sunday for a Monday taping. Steele’s people will call you with arrangements. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  “I want Oprah!” Charlie wailed. “She understands this Forsyth County shit!”

  After the phone call, Charlie snuck back to the loft and watched Matthew Steele’s tried-and-true formula of bright lights, dim crowd. Steele, a short man with wavy blonde hair, wore a sharply tailored black suit. On this show, a mother and daughter—both immense, with teased-out hair—were pregnant by the same man. It was the standard fare: bleeped expletives, hair pulling, and security guards dragging contestants back to their chairs, where they’d rest during the commercial breaks and come out swinging for the next round. At the end of the show, Steele turned to the audience and gave a what-can-I-do? shrug. “Well, I guess the lesson for today is, ‘Don’t foul your own n
est.’” Brightening, he said, “If you thought this was something, wait until you hear what we’ve got lined up for next week, when a controversial bestselling author takes on folks from Forsyth County, Georgia, lynching capital of America! Join us Tuesday for ‘Racist Murderers and the In-laws Who Rat Them Out!’”

  Charlie shook his head in disbelief. The show had been taped the day before, when Charlie had no intention of appearing on it. So how could Steele make such an assumption? What a presumptuous, arrogant, sleazy bastard! The fact that he was prescient made it even worse.

  Following the show, Charlie went downstairs to check his mail. He was standing in the vestibule reading a letter from Satalin politely reminding him to vacate the premises by the end of the month when someone grabbed him from behind. On the verge of delivering a sharp elbow, he realized his attacker smelled too good to be a varmint assassin. He turned to face Dana, her dark eyes merry with mischief. Despite his lingering hurt over her liaison with the photographer, he was happy to see her. Still, he had to say something. “You’ve been ignoring me.”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked down and pouted. “I’ve been busy. Don’t be mad at me. I vill make it up to you.”

  He regarded her suspiciously. “When?”

  She pursed her lips. “Soon. Vot’s that?” she asked, pointing at a lavender envelope.

  “Don’t know. Forwarded by Fortress’s publicity department. From Aimee Duprelier.”

  “The Aimee Duprelier?”

  He wrinkled his face. “How many could there be?” He opened it up. “I am invited to … a fundraiser for Redeemer Wilson.”

  “A party! Take me!” she cried out, bubbling like a schoolgirl.

  Charlie gave her a bemused laugh. “Do you know her?”

  “Who doesn’t? She’s very rich. This is a great opportunity … to get out and have some fun … vith you, you stick-in-the-mudge.”

  “Mud. Just when I’m going back into hiding,” he said, punching the elevator button.

  “Vot for, this time?”