Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  “This way?” Mack asked, swinging with his shoulders, not just his arms.

  “That’s good,” Franklin encouraged him. “Mr. Spyros said we have to give those long roots more room.”

  “Hey,” I said, so they’d know I was coming. I’d had to learn to do that—I’d once made Dolly nearly jump out of her jeans years ago. “You never made a sound,” she’d said, hands on hips like I’d done something wrong.

  There wasn’t any point explaining that moving through brush like cigarette smoke through a mesh screen was ingrained in me. Too many years of training, too many years prowling hostile jungle—if they knew I was coming, they’d be waiting. Those times when fear was my most cherished friend. Now I always warn people I’m coming.

  If I want them to know, I mean.

  Franklin and Mack turned in my direction. Minnie was already looking, not making a sound herself, the tensed muscles twitching all along her hindquarters.

  “Franklin’s going to come over and show me and Bridgette how we can make a better yard.”

  “Franklin knows his stuff,” I said to Mack.

  “You know who’s coming for a visit, Mr. Dell?” the big man burst out, unable to contain himself any longer.

  “MaryLou?” I said. A safe guess—there wasn’t another person on this earth who could get Franklin so excited at the prospect of a visit.

  “Yes! She’s got four weeks off. And now that I’ve got my own place, she wouldn’t have to—”

  “Why don’t you bring her over for dinner?” Mack asked him.

  “You and…you and your wife?”

  “Sure.”

  “I bet she’d love that,” the giant said. What he didn’t say was that MaryLou would love the idea of Franklin’s having a friend like Mack. The only other friend of his she knew about was me, and I wasn’t her favorite person. MaryLou knew what I could do, and she didn’t want Franklin learning any of it. Unlike most, she knew Franklin could learn all kinds of things.

  “Then it’s done,” Mack said.

  The giant bent down and patted Minnie’s shovel-shaped head. “MaryLou is going to love you, too,” he promised the pit.

  —

  “Just make sure she understands this isn’t some kind of…social-worker thing, okay?” I told Mack.

  “MaryLou’s not that suspicious, Dell,” Dolly said.

  “Not of you, honey.”

  “You’re the one that’s suspicious of everyone,” my wife said. And I had no comeback—it was the truth.

  “MaryLou knows I keep my promises” was the best I could do.

  “Well, there you go. Isn’t that enough?”

  “You’re probably right,” I lied. “Still, I’d really appreciate it if you’d just…”

  “All right,” my woman said, as if giving in to a stubborn child. The truth is, she’s the stubborn one in our family. Once Dolly plants her feet, a steamroller would bounce off her. She didn’t know exactly why MaryLou was so confident that I’d keep my word, and it wasn’t something she needed to know.

  —

  I’d kept my promise to MaryLou when I tracked that pile of toxic waste to his new home in Denver.

  He wasn’t calling himself Ryan Teller then. I don’t know what they put on his tombstone—or even if he got one.

  So MaryLou believed that, when I said I’d do something, I would.

  If she had so much as suggested that the boy she’d killed was “bothering” her, Franklin would have pulled his head off his body. But MaryLou was nothing like her foul little sister—she wouldn’t use people, especially a man she knew truly loved her. And she knew I was a different species—I wouldn’t care what I had to use to get something done.

  MaryLou had come so close to throwing her life away on a psychopathic prodigy. Maybe that’s why she was so fiercely protective of the only person in her world that she knew would never betray her.

  —

  “When’re we gonna see some damn action?”

  I didn’t know why that fool who spoke only the few words of French that La Légion required us to learn worked so hard at letting the rest of us know how eager he was to see combat. But even though I was still a very young man, I’d already learned enough to know he wasn’t broadcasting to any of us—he was convincing himself. Trying to, anyway.

  “That’s not ours to decide,” Patrice told him, moving his head in the direction of the officers. His voice was low, but it carried.

  Carried a message. More than one.

  Idrissa shifted his body. Only a few inches, but it was a clear signal to those of us who knew him—not as a person, as a warrior.

  The man so eager to see action wasn’t going to return from any mission we were sent on. Not because he would act foolishly in combat, endangering the rest of us. He’d never see combat—he wasn’t going to survive the journey to reach the Blood Zone. How we explained his loss, that would be for later. But we could all see he was radioactive, glowing in the dark. Better if he was under the ground than walking it beside us.

  In our work, there were no guarantees, only empty promises. We knew the truth—we wouldn’t last any longer than the weakest of us did. We all knew that the best we could hope for was to increase our chances of survival. La Légion had its inflexible rules. We could all recite them by rote, but not a one of us would hold them higher than our own, single rule: do anything that might tip the odds in our favor.

  So we always paid strict attention to scouting reports, but not necessarily so we could follow them. That would depend on what was known about the scout.

  Some snakes are harmless, some are venomous. What we called a “carpet viper” is the same dirty-brown color as the trails we walked, and less than two feet long. But if one bites you, death is certain—its venom causes internal hemorrhaging. All the medics could do was to inject painkillers. A silenced bullet was kinder, and it preserved the meager supply of painkillers for the rest of us.

  A python could be ten times the viper’s size, but not really dangerous—it wouldn’t attack anything the size of a man, and it couldn’t kill with a bite, anyway. So the rule was: any small snake, you kill it.

  But it would be Idrissa’s blade doing that work, not my pistol. No silencer was ever as noiseless.

  Too much patience can keep you silent forever.

  I had to wait for the scouting reports to come back. But, in this zone, I trusted the scouts.

  So it wasn’t impatience that made me put together the machine. But it was my training that made me disassemble it when I saw no message from the ghost.

  —

  I was trained to move from one world to another, and return as if I had never left. But when I wanted to stay in that new world, I’d had to learn new rules.

  When you cross such a barrier, you must become what is expected each time—reentry is the most difficult phase. Sometimes, the barrier is so wide that you might have weeks, even months, to study, listen, learn…and blend. But when two worlds run parallel through your life, there’s no time at all—you are always a resident of both.

  In one world, people will speak glowingly of a man who never breaks his word. A man with such a reputation can be trusted, whether to repair your car or to tell you what medications will prolong your life. You can even look up a reputation on the Internet. That such reputations can be purchased never occurs to the trusting.

  “Trust” is situational. A reputation for always keeping your word is your only protection—it fills what otherwise might be taken as hollow threats with actual menace, and menace changes behavior. Whether that filling comes from honor, ego, or treachery doesn’t matter. Nor whether the threat is screamed, whispered, or unspoken.

  Dead is dead. No difference whether the body rests in a mausoleum or is never found.

  No difference to the dead man, sure. Not necessarily so to his killer. A “No Trespassing” sign could be a hollow threat. But a village surrounded by heads impaled on stakes sends the clearest of messages: only the skulls would eventua
lly become hollow—never the threat.

  —

  I’ve known a lot of men whose students called them “sensei” or “sifu.” I’ve seen knife fighters up close, and snipers at a distance.

  Combat covers all that, and more. But it always narrows down to this: pattern recognition and balance disruption.

  In the field, you are both aggressor and defender—a balancing act with only a hand-held pole to keep you centered. When that same pole must be used to strike or to repel, its next move must counteract precisely or your median is lost. And you fall.

  The mother bird who fakes an injured wing to draw predators away from her nestlings is acting on instinct. The soldier who deliberately changes the pattern the enemy expects—visual or audio—has been trained to draw predators closer.

  You might lure an enemy squad into an ambush, but you wouldn’t call in an air strike on your own position.

  Without information, patience is useless. You could be waiting for the enemy to walk across your trip wires, but if you don’t know what’s coming, you might be patiently waiting for your own death.

  I’d never use my Dolly as bait. But if I asked her to call off whatever she was up to this time, I’d have to explain why…and I couldn’t.

  I could ask her to just trust me, and I knew she would. But the next time? And the time after that?

  I could spend the rest of my life behind layer after layer of protection, but Dolly couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. With her, those were the same thing. The life she’d dreamed of in this little village on the coast was a life of peace, not confinement.

  Telling her to “be careful” would be like telling a screaming maniac to “calm down.”

  I couldn’t pretend I was interested in attending those endless meetings she was always going to. And I couldn’t hang around the kitchen when her crew was working—that would spook them bad enough to leave, and then I’d be alone with Dolly. Alone with Dolly and her questions that I couldn’t answer.

  So I got Mack to invite us over.

  —

  “Mr. Dell!” Franklin blurted out his surprise.

  “He didn’t come alone,” Bridgette said, flashing her bright, confident smile.

  “Dolly!”

  “MaryLou,” Dolly said, ignoring Franklin as she pulled MaryLou’s head down to kiss her once on each cheek. She’d taught all her girls that French nonsense, but at least it wasn’t some phony air kiss—MaryLou wasn’t a girl you had to be delicate with.

  My wife introduced the two other women to each other, leaving me and Mack and Franklin to do whatever we were supposed to do. I guessed that would be to sit down, so I did.

  Bridgette didn’t make any big deal out of the cold cuts and greens she pulled out of the fridge. Dolly had brought along a big tote overflowing with fresh baguettes. MaryLou pulled one apart, scooped out the inside, slathered on something that looked like mustard, and stuffed it full before she handed it to Franklin. The giant blushed. Nobody noticed.

  Bridgette and Dolly did pretty much the same…only they were already into their third bite before it dawned on me and Mack that we were on our own.

  There was a pitcher on the table that looked like one of those cans you carry to the gas station, except it was glass. Franklin picked it up by the handle and filled everyone’s glass—MaryLou’s first, then all the way around until he got to himself. MaryLou gave him a wink…the only thing that made that weight tremble his wrist even slightly.

  “Do you know a French toast, Dolly?” Franklin asked. But instead of answering the way she did her girls when one of them had asked the same question years ago—“Yeah. Maple syrup”—she said, “Sure I do: Mon ami”—she tipped her glass slightly toward each of us in turn—“ami des nôtres.”

  No translation required.

  —

  “You know what you’ll be doing after graduation?” Dolly asked MaryLou.

  The tall, rawboned young woman shook her head. “I don’t know. I mean, I could try out for the Olympics—they’re supposed to be reinstating softball—but it might be a long time to wait. Maybe go after a master’s, then find someplace to coach.”

  “You’d be great at it,” Dolly assured her. “When we used to watch games together on TV, everyone got an education just listening to you.”

  “Probably have to take a course at finishing school first.” MaryLou smiled. “I don’t have the right style to handle pampered little princesses who worry more about their makeup than their stride.”

  “If they didn’t listen to you, they’d be just…stupid,” Franklin said, stumbling a bit over the word that had been his unspoken middle name most of his life. Not always unspoken inside that house he was raised in. The only reason his drunken excuse for a father stopped beating on Franklin was that he didn’t need tea leaves to read his future if he didn’t.

  MaryLou was supposed to be gay. I say “supposed to be” because that’s what she played herself as. All through school, the same way. Maybe it was a “You don’t like it, just make your move” thing, maybe it was just her way of keeping distance. But Franklin had saved a damn fortune to take her to the senior prom. And Dolly told me MaryLou never had a girlfriend.

  Mack doesn’t give away much, but Bridgette was like a tough charm-school graduate who could send off messages with the smallest gesture. And all hers read the same: “Gay, straight, whatever, why would I give a damn?”

  Even Minnie and Rascal seemed to get along. They weren’t pals—not yet, anyway—but as much as they loved to snatch chunks of roast beef out of the air, they didn’t fight over them.

  “I know you don’t have smoking in your house,” I said, standing up and pulling a pack of cigarettes from my jacket. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  Mack knew I didn’t smoke, but he’d seen me smoke when I needed to be someone else. And when MaryLou got up to follow me outside, Franklin’s face told me he wasn’t surprised. So, either he was a lot smarter than anyone thought, or MaryLou had gotten the message to him.

  Maybe even both.

  I walked a short ways off, far enough so that our voices wouldn’t carry. Then I fired up a smoke without offering one to MaryLou—she’d been an athlete since she was a child, and I wasn’t going to insult her intelligence.

  “Franklin’s not going to get hurt,” I told her.

  Her harsh face told me that I’d guessed right. And every word she spoke next underlined that. “Because you’re going to protect him?”

  “I’m not going to use him,” I said, echoing what I knew was always in MaryLou’s mind when it came to the man who loved her.

  “You could pass any lie-detector test, couldn’t you?” she said. It wasn’t a question—she was making sure I understood she wouldn’t believe anything I’d say.

  “I’m not taking one. I haven’t lied to you, have I? About anything?”

  “No, I’m not saying you have. But something’s…off about you. I don’t know what it is, but I know nothing’s going to get between you and what you want to do.”

  “Need to do,” I said, underlining the difference.

  “Yeah, I get that. But Franklin would do anything you asked him to do, ‘Mr. Dell,’ ” she half sneered. She wasn’t disrespecting Franklin’s trust, just warning me off.

  “There’s no part for him.”

  “Then what were you talking to Spyros about?”

  “Nothing that you have to worry about.”

  The tall girl with the pale-blue eyes turned to face me. I matched her stare, minus the warning.

  “Tell me something,” she said, very softly. “If you thought Dolly was in danger, and you could protect her by killing Franklin, you’d just do that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Him, you, anyone else.”

  “Easy as that for you, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if you were planning to do that, you’d lie to my face, right?”

  “Yes.”

  By then, I’d lit another cigarette. Just in case.
<
br />   “You know I’m gay, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “No?! You think, just because Franklin—”

  “No, I think you played it like that because it was the only way you could be yourself in that school. You didn’t need a girlfriend, but you needed a way to make boys keep their distance. And a way to tell everyone to go fuck themselves if they didn’t like it.”

  “I…I’m not sure what I was. Am, I mean. It’s not like boys would be beating down the walls to get at me, anyway.”

  “Franklin would be a lot harder than any wall. And Franklin, he sees you beautiful.”

  “ ‘Sees me beautiful’—what is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that’s the way his eyes work: they connect to his heart. He loves you.”

  “And I love him. But…”

  “I’m not going to get him involved in any—”

  “You want to know the truth?” she said, clasping her hands behind her, as if she was afraid she might do something stupid with them. “I’m a…I’m a virgin. I never much liked boys. Or girls, either.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wished she was having this conversation with someone else.

  “Franklin wants to marry me,” MaryLou said.

  “He’s wanted to do that for a long time. But he wasn’t ready. In his mind, I mean. He’s only got his father for a model when it comes to being a husband. And he’d rather die than have you live like that piece of garbage made his wife live. But now he’s found something he’s good at. Real good at. He makes a nice living, too. And he’s got his own—”

  “Damn!”

  “What?”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Not what you think. I can’t come back here. Not after what…”

  Her voice trailed away.

  “It’s not the same place, MaryLou. There’s no trace of any of them left. Your so-called father moved out probably ten minutes after she took off. He can pick up his Disability check anywhere.”

  I didn’t have to spell out “she” for her—MaryLou was never going to hear her baby sister’s name out of my mouth.

  “It’s a paradise, now, this place?” she said, not sparing the sarcasm.