Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  I thought I’d be awake awhile, anyway. Lots to think about. Always is when I have to do something I’m not good at.

  But my night-luminous wristwatch said it was almost six in the morning when the weight of Dolly on top of me woke me up.

  After that, I didn’t have much to do but hold on. I remembered my hands on Dolly’s bottom, I remembered…

  “Lazy bastard,” from Dolly, just as I drifted off to the cushion of her whispered chuckling.

  —

  When I came around, it was a couple of minutes past seven.

  I found Dolly in the kitchen, but she wasn’t working on her project. She was working on breakfast.

  “Perfect,” I said, after a bite of the omelet she’d slipped onto my stoneware plate right from the pan.

  “Best you ever had, huh?” she said, winking to make sure I knew she wasn’t talking about food.

  “Best anyone ever could have.”

  That got me a kiss…and a little basket of croissants.

  I sipped my white-grape juice as my wife bustled around doing whatever she does when she cooks. It was a moment of such sweetness that a familiar blanket dropped over my thoughts. If this Benton is a threat to my Dolly, he’s a threat to…everything. But until I know who the players are, I can’t cut into the game.

  —

  “Where’re we going?”

  “Franklin’s house.”

  “At this hour? He’ll be at work.”

  “He’s not the one I need to speak to.”

  “Got it.”

  A few minutes later, Mack said, “I don’t know her. But I’ve met her. Maybe I could help…”

  “Not with this,” I told him. “You’re going to drop me off a couple of blocks from where they’re staying. I don’t think it will take long, but you don’t want to wait around.”

  “Why not? Where Franklin lives, that’s one spot where nobody would even look twice at my car—once they’re sure it’s a white man behind the wheel, that is.”

  “You’re not wrong. But it’d be better if you drifted off. I’ll call you when I’m leaving, and you can pick me up two blocks north of here,” I said, pointing to make sure he knew the direction I meant.

  —

  MaryLou must have been watching for me—the door to the house popped open a crack as I was coming up the packed-dirt path.

  I stepped inside, closed the door behind me. I’d been in Franklin’s place before, but it looked different, somehow.

  “Find a seat,” MaryLou said.

  I took a corner of the couch. She folded her long body into a lounge chair, but didn’t recline it.

  “I need to borrow Franklin’s truck tonight.”

  “Why didn’t you ask him?”

  “I would. And he’d say ‘Sure.’ But he’d say something to you about it, and I wanted to get any worries out of your mind.”

  “Meaning, you’re not going to be doing anything where Franklin’s plate number could cause trouble for him down the line?”

  “Nothing,” I assured her. “But I don’t want Dolly to know where I’m going, so I can’t use our car.”

  “I’m supposed to help you do something that—”

  “—will protect Dolly,” I finished whatever she was going to say. “But I don’t know if the people I need to speak to will help me do that. And I wouldn’t want Dolly to—”

  “—worry about it? The same way you wouldn’t want me to worry about what you might be up to in Franklin’s truck, right?”

  I gently placed my right fist into my left palm and bowed slightly.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” the suddenly falcon-faced young woman said.

  —

  Franklin’s pickup was a work vehicle.

  No back seat, so MaryLou was kind of squeezed between us. But it never occurred to me to ask her if she wanted the window seat. I’d already given her the directions, right down to what the odometer should clock, so I closed my eyes and leaned my head back.

  I could hear them talking, but I tuned out everything except the sound of it. When I felt the truck come to a gentle stop, I opened my eyes. We were at the beginning of what I knew was about a quarter-mile of driveway.

  “I’ll call as soon as I’m done,” I said. To the both of them, I guess.

  It was only a couple of minutes before I saw the lights in the house I was approaching.

  —

  Johnny opened the door.

  “Where’s your car?” he asked, telling me they’d picked up on my approach way before I’d tapped the telegraph key mounted on a block of dark wood they’d put together to make a doorbell.

  “I got a ride,” I told him. “When I’m leaving, I’ll call to be picked up. No reason to bring strangers any closer to your home.”

  “Why not give us a call first?” That was Martin, Johnny’s partner.

  “Because you’d ask me why I wanted to talk to you, and I didn’t want to explain that over the phone.”

  Johnny stepped to the side, ushering me in.

  “You want something? Coffee? Tea? Cognac?”

  “No, thanks. I just want to sit down with the two of you and ask a couple of questions.”

  “No harm in asking,” Martin said, just in case I was thick enough to miss that they weren’t necessarily going to answer.

  Their living room was probably bigger than our whole house. It didn’t matter what I thought of it—what I knew was that it was all put together the way they wanted.

  I had only one card worth playing, and I wouldn’t get a second chance once I put it on the table, faceup. Before I could get fully centered, Johnny jumped the gun. “Dolly’s not with you? Is there anything…?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “For now, anyway.”

  “What does that mean?” Martin asked, his tone somewhere between frightened and dangerous.

  “It means that someone said something to her. Friendly-like, but—”

  “But what?” Johnny cut me off.

  “What he said was something like ‘I hope you’re not going to go running around half cocked.’ ”

  “Dolly will do that,” Johnny said, smiling.

  “Sure,” I said, holding his eyes. “But you know me. I’m not like Dolly, am I?”

  “No, you’re not,” Johnny said, dropping the smile. He didn’t know me, not really. I’d been at their nursery quite a number of times, to pick up flowers for Dolly. Even a couple of trees, and other gardening stuff.

  I knew I had better standing with Martin ever since I recognized the battered hulk in his garage as a Facel Vega. I think he was used to his partner’s making fun of his “project,” and there wasn’t a trace of meanness in the way Johnny said anything to him.

  Besides, they both adored Dolly. Always greeted her with a kiss on each cheek. That might have looked affected to some people, but they wouldn’t be people that mattered.

  And it didn’t matter to them what I was, or whatever I might have done. They knew she was safer with me in her life. How they knew that, I don’t know. I don’t even know how they decided I wasn’t interested in how they lived, but they acted just as sure of that, too.

  I think I probably was prejudiced against homosexuals when I was younger. The only ones I ever ran across when I was a street kid in Paris were always asking the same question. Different words, but the same question: What would I do for a hot meal? Or a bottle of wine? Maybe a nice, warm place to live? Or they skipped right to money.

  They scared me.

  After Luc took me out of the gutter, I guess I never thought about men like that again. Not until I was a légionnaire. There was this big guy. Rhodesian. Called himself Hondo. Patrice had warned me about what this guy was. What he’d done to a couple of the weakest ones. If you were…raped—what else could it be called?—you couldn’t go to the officers. That could result in a number of outcomes, none of them good for you.

  We set him up. It was easy. Patrice explained it to me. “Those kind, they’re all alike. And tha
t makes them think the whole world is the same.”

  “Homo guys, they think everyone’s a…?”

  “No, lad. Men like him, what they think is, everyone lives under the same tent. If you’re strong enough, you can take what you want. If you’re not, people will take from you. There’s no middle; you’re one or the other. No,” he added, before I could even get the question out, “different people want different things. Sex, money, land—it doesn’t matter. You’ve seen that plenty of times yourself.

  “Hell, you’re part of it. We all are, here. They pay us money for what? To take things they want. If they want land, we take that land for them. That means killing. Not a one of them would care if any of us wanted to rape a woman—even a little girl—those who’re left over after their men are either gone or dead.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “Ah, no man would do such things. But there’s plenty with the same equipment as us,” Patrice said, cupping his crotch to make sure I didn’t miss his point, “and they’d do…well, they’d do anything they thought they could get away with. And call themselves ‘men’ for doing it.

  “And it’s not only us, I don’t want you to be thinking that. The savages, they do that all the time. It’s part of the way they fight their wars between themselves. A woman from one tribe, she gets pregnant by rape from a soldier of a different tribe, she’s got the enemy’s seed in her.

  “We took a village once. When we went through it, we found a dead woman. Not dead from our bullets. She had a sharp stick…stuck inside her. You could see she was pregnant, from her belly, but she was all bloody down…down there. Probably tried to stab that baby inside her, so she’d never have to look at her own poison-blood child.”

  “Mon dieu!”

  “There’s no God in here, son. Or, if there is, he’s one blood-thirsty bastard. But who am I to talk? More than one priest held our weapons for us. When we came calling, they knew what we’d be out there doing. I never understood it, not really, not the way it’s told. Catholics being driven out by Ulstermen. Maybe so, but not for any…religious reason. We want the bloody Brits out; the Orangemen, they know what their fate would be without the Queen’s soldiers. Remember what I told you? About the curse of the Irish?”

  “It’s not drink; it’s revenge.”

  “Aye, that it is. A blood feud. Blood that will never stop flowing. You know why I joined this pack of misfits. Mickey was my mate, all the way back to when we were little ones. When they killed him, I had no path but to take vengeance. I won’t be able to go home for a good while.”

  Hondo came up on us one night. Patrice told the big man he was finished. With me. For the time. He walked off. Hondo turned to watch him go, and I had my dagger deep into his right kidney before he realized I’d been holding it all along. Patrice had showed me how to darken the dagger. It was second nature to him—anything that might catch a glint of light had to be darkened. That’s why he’d told me to never wipe blood off the blade—dried, it was almost black.

  The big man was already dying when Patrice ran over and hastened him along.

  —

  Any feelings I’d ever had about homosexuals being degenerates, or bent on rape, or cowards, they wouldn’t have survived my first work as a hired gun.

  When I left the Legion after the five years you had to serve, I’d learned a lot about people, but I had only one skill. A cluster of skills, really. But only one market for them.

  I signed on with a unit that was working jungle. The pay was much better, and the bosses didn’t think we were scum. Or, if they did, they kept it to themselves. We all need sleep just as much as we need food. We can only go so long without either. Bosses, that’s what we called them. We didn’t wear uniforms, and we didn’t salute. But we were all a vicious lot, and a boss who closed his eyes at night wanted to be able to open them the next day.

  One of the men in my squad told us his name was Pinky. He went into great detail about how a certain place in his body had turned pink from being used so much. You could tell immediately that he hadn’t been used at all—anything anyone ever did to Pinky was by invitation.

  He was a hefty man, but he moved like a poisonous snake. Smooth and silent. Pinky thought rifles were for cowards. He carried three pistols, one on each hip, the third in a shoulder holster. Another strap held the tube silencers. All of his pistols were the same. H&K, chambered for NATO rounds.

  Pinky would get close. He’d drop two or three of the enemy before they realized they were under attack.

  And I’d seen him standing, his back against a tree, dispensing death from each hand. No silencers then. Not much use in a firefight. The man was either fearless or seeking death—the way he fought, it was impossible to tell.

  In the jungle, there’s a deep, powerful belief in magic. I don’t know what went through the mind of a hired rifleman at the sight of native boys wearing pink chiffon scarves, reeking of perfume, charging headlong into bullets. Despite dropping one of them after another, they would keep coming, as if the rifleman were playing some lunatic’s video game.

  Their belief in magic would hit the rifleman as surely as his bullets hit those crazy boys.

  When we all went our own ways after that job was done, Pinky was still alive. But not before he shot a guy named Abel. The man he shot had called him some kind of name. I didn’t hear anything but the cough of the shot. One shot.

  Nobody did anything. Nobody said anything. This wasn’t La Légion. We had none of their lies controlling us, no orders to never abandon our wounded or our dead.

  We just walked off, in different directions.

  —

  I learned a lot from Pinky.

  From watching him, I mean. How he handled whatever came his way. Maybe he’d once wanted to prove something to himself, but, whatever that test might have been, he knew he’d passed it.

  If Pinky asked you if you wanted to “put it where it’s nice and pink” and you shook your head, he would just shrug. And leave you alone. That was Pinky: he’d either leave you alone or leave you dead…and that was your choice.

  Maybe what I had learned branded me in some invisible way. All I know is that Johnny and Martin accepted that I had no feelings about what they did, how they lived, or even how they came to be that way.

  That last part was something I figured out for myself. It wasn’t a choice; it was in you or it wasn’t. Like being born with blond hair. You could dye your hair, but you’d still be blond underneath the covering.

  I never had their feelings, but I realized that didn’t make me anything special. I loved Dolly, and it seemed I’d never had a choice about that, either.

  —

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink?” Johnny asked. “I’m going to brew some tea for Martin and me anyway….”

  “No, thank you.”

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s just get to it, whatever it is.”

  “Do you know anything about a man named Benton? That’s George B-as-in-Byron Benton. Hedge-fund guy. He started something called PNW Upstream in Portland. Mid-forties, looks a little younger, maybe. Moved to the village we—me and Dolly—the one we live in, about a dozen years ago.”

  “Why do you ask?” Johnny said. Like he was just curious, not probing.

  “He’s a danger to Dolly.”

  “And you…?”

  “Shut up, Johnny.” Martin sliced into whatever his partner was going to say. “You’re sure?” he asked me.

  “Yes.”

  “Whatever you want, just say it.”

  “I just did.”

  “That’s all you want? Whatever we know about…him?”

  “Yes.”

  Johnny walked over and sat down next to Martin and put his hand on his partner’s arm, telling me he stood with Martin. All the way.

  —

  “We don’t know him,” Johnny said. “But we know him.”

  “I’m sorry….”

  “He’s a fraud,” Martin said, no
emotion in his voice.

  “He doesn’t really manage a hedge—?”

  “He’s not gay,” Johnny said, making it clear he was telling me a fact, not expressing an opinion.

  “Then why would…?”

  “He’s an infiltrator,” Martin answered me, trying to speak a language he thought I’d understand. “Where you live—actually, all along the coast—it’s political suicide to be ‘homophobic.’ Or even not a liberal. You have to support the ‘arts,’ ” he went on, hitting that last word with a light acid bath. “You have to be eco-conscious; you have to recycle, you have to be a ‘Dem.’ You have to write letters to the editor, even if nobody reads that rag. And it goes without saying that you have to support ‘gay marriage.’ ” He didn’t spare the vitriol on that last phrase.

  “Aren’t there plenty of…I don’t know, people who call everything they want ‘small government’? Like lowering property taxes, or being against abortion, or…?”

  “Yes,” Johnny said. “No shortage. But Martin said ‘political.’ Which means you can leave out all the trailer trash—not my term—because, whether you’re white or Mexican, if you don’t have money, you don’t vote. Nobody runs for office as a Republican or Democrat at the local level—everybody’s ‘nonpartisan.’ Makes it a lot easier to control all the decision making. How many local Republicans do you think you’d find in Chicago?”

  “Okay, but why the masquerade, then?”

  “That’s a good question. But I can tell you this for sure: Martin and I had dinner with George and Roger—that’s the man he lives with—a couple of years ago, and they are not a couple. They may be partners, but not romantically. I don’t mean they gave it away by not camping it up—that’s not a test, that’s a personality.

  “But when you’ve lived your whole life as we”—he pushed his shoulder against Martin’s—“have, you just can…feel some things. Especially between another couple. I’m not talking about some ‘gaydar’ nonsense. That’s a signal you deliberately send out, and theirs was the opposite: a cover-up. But I can tell you this. I can tell you this, for sure: those two are the first closeted fag-bashers I’ve ever met.”

  “They hate…you? I mean, not you personally, but—”