The First Horseman

by John Case

  ‘So what did they say?’ Annie asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Customs.’

  ‘About what?’

  She punched his arm lightly. ‘The bodies!’

  ‘Oh yeah. They said I should call the port authorities.’

  ‘Which port authorities?’

  ‘All of ’em,’ he replied.

  ‘“All of them”?’

  ‘Yeah. Until I find the bodies.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘They faxed me a list.’

  ‘And you’re just going to call them? Every one of them?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll ask them if any bodies came through in the fall.’

  ‘God! I couldn’t do that. I hate calling people I don’t know.’

  Frank shrugged. ‘It’s what reporters do.’

  ‘I know, but . . . talk about tenacious!’

  He laughed. ‘Oh yeah, I’m a regular bulldog.’

  There were two messages on his voice mail, and they came from opposite ends of the too-real world.

  The first voice was Fletcher Harrison Coe’s. In his Long Island lock-jaw, he managed to turn Frank’s name into a mutisyllabic term of quiet approbation: ‘Fraa-ann-nnk. Fletcher Coe here. Reason I called: we’re still looking for that Sin Nombre piece you promised. Promised for this round, or . . . so I thought. ’Course, understand you’re busy, but I’m a little concerned about this rather startling run of expenses and . . . well, without some evidence of product, it puts everyone in a bit of an awkward position. A where’s-the-beef sort of thing. Give us a jingle, won’t you?’

  Christ, now he was going to have to bang out the New Mexico piece. He couldn’t call Jennifer or Coe with a lot of excuses; he just had to do it. And he would. If he worked the rest of the night and got an early start tomorrow, maybe he could get it done by tomorrow afternoon.

  He deleted the message and played the next one.

  Uncle Sid lived on a different planet from Fletcher Harrison Coe, and followed different conversational rules. For one thing, he didn’t identify himself. Nor did he have to. There was something about talking to an answering machine that made Sid want to deliver the message in a single breathless shout: ‘Frankie? Is that you? Where are you? Now, listen! I know all about this shit with your father you got a legitimate beef I understand that but I thought you oughta know – he’s a tough old cob, but this is his second coronary fachrissake and it don’t look good Frankie it’s the heart muscle you got major damage I don’t know if he’s gonna make it. He finds out I called ya he’ll knock the hell outta me but I thought you’d want to be there for him, y’know? It’s been ten years fachrissake! You gonna carry a grudge into the next century? Anyway, they got him in intensive care, over to St. Mary’s.’ There was a pause, papers rustling, a fist banged on a hard surface. ‘Hell, I can’t find the damn thing, Infermation’ll give ya the number. St. Mary’s!’ And then the phone beeped and he was gone.

  Just what I need. Talk about timing . . . A wave of annoyance washed over him, and for a moment he indulged it. Then he felt ashamed. Talk about self-involved. I’m as bad as the Old Man himself

  Getting a beer from the kitchen, he returned to the living room and sat down at his computer. Switching it on, he sipped his beer and waited for Windows to go through its routine.

  He didn’t think about his family much. In fact, he didn’t think about them at all. They were a part of his childhood, and his childhood had been over for a long time.

  A lone piano note, followed by a harp’s flourish, told him that the computer was ready to work. Switching into his word processor, he called up his notes on the Sin Nombre bug.

  What was it Sid had said? I thought you’d want to be there for him! Right, Frank thought. Like he was there for us.

  Us being him and his mother, the former Sigrid Leverkuhn, one-time prom queen and high school sweetheart of the hardest-hitting linebacker Kerwick High had ever known. (Ta-daaa!)

  Frank peered at his notes, looking for a quote from one of the Indians he’d met at the Taos pueblo.

  What a mistake that marriage had been. Forged in a kiln of adolescent glamour, the marriage had faded with the Old Man’s glory years. After two ‘seasons’ at Penn State, and twice as many knee operations, Big Frank returned to Kerwick, looking and feeling like ‘the man who lost the war.’

  His bride came with him,

  And then Frankie was born, and that was that. The future was past – or seemed to be – and all the Old Man’s dreams were like so many vanities. He quit, Frank thought. He just got scared, and quit. Christ, he was only twenty.

  And he was almost never around. When he wasn’t at work at the generating plant, where he had a job as a steamfitter, he was drinking with the boys at Ryan’s Bar & Grill – or chasing waitresses, one town over.

  Which meant, among other things, that Frank was raised by his mother. They lived in a run-down, clapboard house in a working-class neighborhood. Each of the houses on the block was fronted by a room-sized patch of lawn (or, more often, a square of hardpan) – except the Dalys’, and one or two others, which had gardens. This, in fact, was Sigrid’s pride and joy, and as a boy, Frankie liked to help her with it.

  Not that there was much time. Even when he was a little kid, Frank worked – shoveling snow, mowing lawns, running errands. And then, when he was old enough, he began working weekends at the Safeway, bagging groceries and stocking shelves from nine to nine. In the summers he worked a forty-hour week at the generating plant, feeding the boiler. Every Friday he brought his check home to his mother, and even the Old Man had to admit, Frankie pretty much pays his own way.

  And so he did, though it must be said that he had a pretty good inheritance. From his mother, he’d acquired a love of reading and a near-photographic memory that, taken together, made him an outstanding student. His aunts liked to brag that he was Sigrid’s ‘mirror image,’ but that was wishful thinking. She’d given him her sea-green eyes and high, raked cheekbones, but it was his smile that reminded people of her. This bashful lifting of the cheeks had a mischievous quality that sparkled in his eyes, drawing those who saw it into a conspiracy of mutual affection.

  The rest of him was his father – all gristle and bone, with a shock of dark brown hair lying across his forehead. He was six-one and 160 pounds – a string bean with a right arm that the local papers compared to a shotgun.

  The only freshman to make the Kerwick High School football team, he was the starting quarterback by the middle of his sophomore year. His stats were impressive, and they got better, game after game. Before long, the Old Man and his pals were showing up at home and away games, passing flasks back and forth, bellowing the school song. His father’s pride was palpable – and never more so than when the kid threw a ‘Hail Mary’ that traveled sixty-five yards in the air, setting a Pennsylvania high school record even as it won the homecoming game. Everyone knew Frank was destined for a big-time college program – when, suddenly, he stopped playing.

  Now, Frank leaned back in his chair and stared at the monitor. It was night, and he hadn’t written a word. Car lights slid up the wall, fanned out across the ceiling, then raced down the opposite wall, disappearing into the carpet.

  Quitting football, he thought, was really fucked up.

  Not that he regretted it. After all, it broke the Old Man’s heart – and that was the whole idea.

  It happened at the end of his sophomore year, when his mother contracted a respiratory infection that turned into pneumonia. Returning home from school, Frank found her on the kitchen floor, where she’d collapsed. Only fifteen, he carried her out to the car, then searched for the keys and, finding them, raced through traffic to the emergency room – where the nurse sent him home to get the insurance information they needed.

  And so it went. After returning to the hospital with the insurance numbers, he was sent back home yet again, this time to fetch his mother’s toothbrush, nightgown, and robe. Returning with these, he telephoned
Ryan’s to see if his father was there, telling them that it was a life-or-death emergency – lest the bartender lie, as he often did.

  I’m sorry, Frankie, I haven’t seen him for days. But I’ll put the word out. Tell your mother to hang in there.

  He spent the night in an uncomfortable chair in the brightly lit lobby outside the emergency room. Overhead, a poorly tuned television crackled with bad jokes and frantic music. His mother was in intensive care, and the doctors looked worried. She’s a very sick woman, son. Is there any way we can reach your father?

  All the time, Frank was thinking she’d get better because nobody died of pneumonia anymore. Or did they? No. Of course not. Except for the ones who did.

  He stayed with his mother for three days, holding her hand, waiting for his aunts to come. And when they arrived, it was almost worse. All they did was fume over his father’s absence and scheme about what they’d do when Sigrid got better. Only . . . she didn’t.

  The Old Man wandered in during the middle of the wake. I was on business, he mumbled, stinking of breath mints. Frank lunged at him, but Uncle Sid got in the way. Don’t ever raise your hand against your father, he said.

  That fall, Frank didn’t go out for the team. He didn’t make a big deal about it: he just didn’t show up for practice. At the time, the local paper was hyping the football team as Kerwick’s ‘best ever,’ and college coaches were calling twice a week. Frank told them, politely, that he wasn’t playing football.

  What’s the matter, son? Are you hurt?

  No. I’m fine.

  Then . . . I don’t get it.

  I’m just not playing. I’m sort of . . . doing other things.

  What ‘other things’?

  Reading. Working at the Safeway.

  This is a joke, right?

  No.

  Then you’re going to need counseling – the sooner the better. Get some help.

  His high school coach came by – again and again – but eventually even he gave up. He had a team to put on the field, and by then Kerwick was 3–0. Somewhere along the line, it dawned on everyone that Kerwick High School didn’t really need Frank. They had a terrific team even without him.

  But that wasn’t the point. The point, of course, was to break his father’s heart, to punish him for quitting on his own life so many years before, and for abandoning his wife to the waiting room of their marriage.

  Playing football had been the best part of the Old Man’s life, the source of every hope and expectation. Watching his son play had been a reawakening. Watching him walk away was a reinterment.

  They never really talked about it, though Frank could see that his father was desperate to do so. The truth was, after his mother’s death, they never really spoke at all – except to say, You seen the snow shovel? You want the car? I’ll be gone a couple of days.

  By his senior year he’d resolved to get out of Kerwick. Ironically, he was able to do this by winning a competitive scholarship open to children whose parents were members of the steamfitters Union.

  The University of California at Berkeley was as far away as he could get without setting sail. He spent a halcyon four years there, pursuing a liberal arts degree that included lots of creative writing classes. It was there, too, that he fell in love with biology and considered, for a while, going to med school. But growing up the way he did, so close to the poverty line, he recoiled at the enormous debts that med school would have necessitated. Graduating in ’89, he returned East to look for work.

  And he found it in New York City, as the English copy editor on the Alliance, a Russian-English newspaper in Brighton Beach. Soon, he was publishing stories about ‘Little Odessa’ in the Village Voice and Boston Globe Magazine. By 1992 he’d won statewide journalism awards for feature writing and investigative reporting. The latter was a series about gasoline-bootlegging operations masterminded by émigré Russian hoodlums. And that was when he applied, successfully, for a job on the Washington Post. His work on the Metro desk, covering the police and the courts, earned him a promotion to the more exotic National Security beat. He’d done well there, too, and was beginning to develop a good network of sources when he was transferred to the National desk to cover the presidential election. This, too, was a promotion, but not a happy one. He didn’t like political reporting. It was all about positioning and spin, gossip and leaks.

  What drove him to the Johnson Foundation was the prospect of yet another promotion, this one to the White House, where his job would be to cover the First Family ‘from a feature perspective.’ Aghast at the idea, he applied for one of the Johnson grants, proposing to explore ‘the brave new world’ of emerging viruses.

  It was an acceptable way to take a year off from the Post without ‘losing ground.’ Meanwhile, it would give him time to think about who he was and what he wanted to do – while writing about a subject that genuinely interested him.

  In fact, as Frank watched the car lights slide across the ceiling, he was thinking about who he was right now. Was he the kind of guy who would, as his uncle Sid put it, ‘carry a grudge into the next century’? Maybe. Probably. It sure looked like it.

  But then, he figured, what the hell, maybe it’s time. Lifting the telephone from its receiver, he dialed the information number in Kerwick and waited.

  There was a tone, and then a woman’s voice. ‘The area code you have dialed has been changed. The new number . . .’

  Christ, he thought, it had been a long time. They’d changed the area code on his childhood.

  17

  THE NEXT MORNING, he made coffee and read the Post at the kitchen table, feeling groggy.

  He’d stayed up until three, working on the Sin Nombre piece, and it still wasn’t done. Which was a problem. Today was the second Friday of the month, and that was deadline for the foundation’s newsletter. So, too, if he didn’t canvass the port authorities today, he’d have to wait until Monday.

  For an instant it occurred to him that he might be able to buy a postponement by calling the foundation to say the piece would be late; his father was in the intensive care unit at St. Mary’s and . . .

  No. He wouldn’t use his father’s illness as an excuse to get around a deadline. He wasn’t completely corrupt. Instead, he’d work on the Sin Nombre story until noon – make that, until he finished it – and then begin to call the ports. As for his father . . . he’d call later.

  By two o’clock the story was on its way to Jennifer Hartwig, stuffed into the backpack of a spandex-clad bicycle courier who looked and acted like an outtake from Road Warrior. Accompanying the story was an abject plea for reimbursement of his expenses.

  I never thought my fairy godmother would be a five-foot-ten-inch California girl, Frank thought.

  Taste of Thai delivered an order of pad thai, which he ate straight from the carton while working his way through the list of port authorities.

  It was tedious work, and probably a waste of time, But it was also the only lead he had. So he dove into it, and after half a dozen calls, he had his rap down pat.

  How quickly he got an answer depended on the intelligence and cooperation of the person at the other end. Sometimes, he got an answer in a minute or two. Sometimes, it took him ten minutes just to get past the automated switchboards, drumming his fingers on the desk as he listened to their moronic catalog of unwanted alternatives.

  Then, too, an amazing number of people were ‘away from desks,’ ‘on another line,’ ‘at lunch,’ or ‘out’. Still, he’d reached nineteen ports by four P.M., and eleven of them could be ruled out. Either they hadn’t received repatriated remains in the past year or they’d done so prior to September of ’97. That left dozens of ports still to go.

  He stood up and stretched. This could definitely suck up some serious time.

  And then he got lucky.

  The phone rang, and it was a woman named Phyllis or ‘just-Phyllis-if-you-don’t-mind,’ who worked out of the Port of Boston. In a clipped New England accent she reported tha
t the port had processed eight sets of remains in the past year – five of which had come all at the same time.

  Frank sat in his chair, rattling his coffee cup. ‘You’re sure?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, de-ah! I’m not likely to make a mistake about that. It was so unusual.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, the number of people – that was one thing. And they came in by ship. Usually, they’re brought home by air – but this was an accident at sea.’

  ‘Do you have the name of the ship?’

  ‘The Crystal Dragon. I thought at the time, what a pretty name!’

  Frank started to thank her, but she cut him off.

  ‘Just doing my job, deah. It’s all public record. Now if you’ll give me your fax number, I’ll send you the particulars.

  Five minutes later eight pages of documents rolled out of the machine. These gave the names of the dead, and included death certificates signed by the ship’s doctor, one Peter Guidry, M.D. The cause of death in each case was drowning.

  A signed and impressively stamped letter from a foreign service officer at the American embassy in Reykjavik, Iceland, made reference to an ‘accident at sea,’ and authorized the remains to clear Customs ‘absent the usual consular mortuary certificate.’ This same document indicated that on arrival in Boston, the remains should be consigned to a certified mortician in the employ of the J.S. Bell’s Funeral Home in Saugus, Massachusetts.

  Since the deaths had occurred at sea, it was the mortician’s responsibility to inspect and certify the ‘containment of remains’ – after which they would be released into his care.

  There was a document to the effect that this had occurred, signed by a mortician whose name Frank could not read, and checked off by a Customs official, who supplied only his initials. Frank knew from talking to the guy at the State Department that this was more or less the normal procedure. Maybe, he thought, J.S. Bell’s had some kind of steady arrangement with the Port of Boston to receive repatriated bodies.