Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  “Sorry,” I said. “Your turn. Go ahead and ask.”

  “The Rough,” she said. “What’s it like for you?”

  Not Mad Max, I told her. All those stories were overblown. The Rough was poor, that was basically it. The Rough was low on water, but lower on money.

  She said: “And the leg?”

  So I gave her the golf-cart-en-route-to-the-morgue version. How I’d been in a car accident once, back in college, passenger side in a vehicle driven by my best buddy. How I nearly died, went near the light. Only there was no light. Or not a light that could be understood as a light.

  “A presence?” SaBe asked.

  I shook my head. There were no words for this one. It remained with me more as a shrouded formula, an algorithm nestled at the heart of universal affairs. I thought perhaps, at some moment of great epiphany, I might suddenly discover a way of expressing this in numbers.

  SaBe was looking at me again. The head tilt. The angling of the eyebrows. She said: “So then what?”

  Then, I told her, after a period of time had passed that I would only later appreciate to have been three weeks, I returned to the land of the living by my own crazy choice.

  “Crazy why, you think?” SaBe asked me.

  “Crazy because I could have stayed,” I told her.

  We were parked in front of the security centre. SaBe didn’t say anything, just sat facing forwards, fingers gripping and re-gripping the wheel.

  Griegson’s skin was mahogany brown even in death. Good-looking man, dumb-luck sucker that he was. Well-known reader for a financial news cable channel. He had some fame in the western longitudes. I understood that Sunshine City was in the grip of a polite and clubby kind of mourning. Griegson’s photo was already being framed the size of a Prince of Baghdad for hanging in the clubhouse. People liked the man. But the fact that this micro-seizure of random violence had chosen him, well . . . that vaulted Griegson upwards. A known face, but one that now could not be recalled without some other augmented feeling. Something along the lines of awe, even love.

  I smoked before looking, extracting a joint from a Ziploc and lighting up. I finished it while looking over the morgue sheet hanging in an envelope from the drawer handle. Age, sex, general health. I skimmed. Cause of death: gunshot wound, massive hemorrhage, etc. And when the joint was finished and I was released to a merciful distance from my own senses, I unzipped the body bag the rest of the way down to Griegson’s shoes and looked at what there was to see. He lay in pewter morgue light, in the humming chill. I stared as if trying to bring his face into focus. As if that effort were failing.

  SaBe waited outside. I went through Griegson’s clothes: open-necked polo with a Maybach logo, chinos, argyle socks, white golf shoes with a kiltie tassel. In his hip pocket was a billfold, twenty-four dollars, some plastic, a Sunshine City ID card. In his left front, some change, a key to his cabana. In his right front a score card (1 under at 14) and a business card. Pale blue, thick card stock. An outfit called Destinex. A phone number and a lat/long address in the Rough.

  I dialled the number and let it ring fifteen times, hung up. I looked the body over a final time. Felt down the pant legs. Behind the ears. I was just about to slide the drawer home, leave him be. Then I noticed the golf glove. I peeled it off his left hand and found another phone number scribbled in ballpoint pen on his palm. So he was a palm writer. Very particular type those. Last-minute scramblers. Equivocal. Harried.

  I dialled that number too. I heard the line open as someone picked up, familiar bird song, the lightest suggestion of breath. Then the person hung up.

  I phoned the number again, immediately. No answer of course.

  I went outside and found SaBe sitting in the cart, staring off into the hills east of Sunshine City. I had a sense what she was thinking about. The husband gone. The weight of what came afterwards. But I didn’t say anything about it, just told her to run me on down to Griegson’s cabana. Then on the way down I asked her about Destinex.

  She shook her head. “Name of a company?”

  “Looks like,” I said, nodding. “Probably nothing.”

  The wind gusted up just then, blew her hair forwards and over her face. She pulled it back with one hand, still steering the cart. Green eyes locked on the path ahead. I checked out the sky: high and blue. An infinity sky. It arched overhead and contained us as we wound our way up between the cedar-sided buildings and the cacti, the lotus blossoms, the miniature palms, the woodchip flower beds, cameras pivoting from the fence posts, winking and blinking in the hard light. In Sunshine City there was an ambient soundtrack. I hadn’t noticed that earlier. But in the quiet of the row of cabanas, I heard it piped in from hidden speakers in the greenery. Celtic strings, faint as the ocean.

  Griegson lived in cabana 1211, two shingled buildings around a deck that looked down into a narrow ravine. Very private. Two cabanas actually, the living room and bar area, then the bedroom and massive bathroom. They faced each other around a deck with a hot tub and big chairs made out of bent willow branches with plush leather cushions. All of this facing down into the cool of a ravine that sloped through trees and long grass to the 8th fairway of the second course, right at the black-and-white 150-yard marker.

  I went inside to shade-cool rooms, wood-slat blinds drawn. The cleaning staff used a particular kind of soap at Sunshine City and I could smell that here. The air alive with lavender and rosemary. I cracked the blinds and judged the room to have been cleaned up. Signs everywhere: bed perfectly made. Persian runners squared up in the corridor. Items on the desktop perfectly aligned. One wall was covered in bookshelves. Novels, biographies, economics textbooks. Spines dusted and in perfect alignment. In the closet there was a rank of ironed pastel polo shirts on one side, and a rustling hedge of silk Brooks Brothers women’s blouses on the other. All this order from a man who scribbled phone numbers on his hand.

  I picked up Griegson’s phone and listened for the click, then the tone. I visualized the disk starting to spin somewhere, a track laid down with a date code and Griegson’s name affixed. I wondered why Frick bothered, what arcane insurance clause made recording every call necessary. I imagined the bored staff who handled the data, storing it for a year or two before purging.

  I dialled Frick.

  He said: “Already? You’re as good as they say.”

  “Why’d they clean the room?” I asked him.

  “Griegson was . . .” Frick started.

  “Normally a mess?” I said.

  Sure, Frick agreed. A mess.

  “When did the wife die?”

  Frick was nodding into the phone. I could tell this because his chin was rasping the mouthpiece as he did so. A distant feline purr. Large breed. He told me Griegson’s wife had passed two years prior. Her name was Savionna. From somewhere in Alabama apparently. “But you know how it is,” Frick sighed into the phone. “The old guys tend to go after they lose their girls.”

  “Generally not by gunshot wound on the 14th green.”

  “Point taken,” Frick said. “You been up the hill yet?”

  “Up what hill?”

  “Hill 231, where SaBe saw the muzzle flash. She can take you up in one of the security quads. Although it would be a bit of a hike on the peg. Nice peg, by the way. Is that new?”

  It was pretty nice. My long-ago insurance provided for a replacement every five years, and this latest one was the stuff, tapering away at the bottom like an antelope. With two I might have looked like a satyr. But there was less than no point in talking to Frick about my prosthetic, just as there was less than no point talking to him about Hill 231. Like someone pops off a shot from the ridgeline and leaves his phone number scratched onto a rock. A heart, some initials. I came all the way to the Sunshine City and all I got was a lousy washed-up sexagenarian newsreader.

  “Send security up,” I told him.

  I stood in the cool of Griegson’s bedroom. Massive king-size bed with golden bolster, 900-thread-count sheets or whatever it
was by now. Maybe this was the exact cabana Frick was planning to give to me if I accepted his offer of membership. I could hear water running in pipes somewhere. Geysers of filtered, lead-free water. Lakes of it stored safely in reservoirs, heaving desalinated seas. What would I be here? Would I work in the office? Do accounting for Frick? Would I make book or settle member disputes, rolling my reality bones in a makeshift hearing room set up off the member’s hall, Griegson’s face looming large over a glass case where somebody had laid out his clubs?

  I logged into Griegson’s computer using the password taped to the bottom of the keyboard. Emails from here and there. Nothing much. Browser cache empty. There was a spreadsheet file saved to the desktop under the name “Tally of Scores.” I double-clicked the file and popped up a password box. I tried “Savionna.” I tried “Sunshine City.” I tried “1211.” After three tries the box closed down and refused further attempts. I could power off the unit and try again, but I knew it wasn’t worth the bother. So he was a score tracker. So he kept a running average. So he had trend software running off tables and graphs. I could always look around for a password-cracker program later, if I really got curious about how Griegson’s game had evolved over the years. In the meantime, it felt like a red herring to me.

  I pushed back from the desk and spun around in his office chair, spinning, spinning. About the third spin, I saw SaBe in the mirror over the headboard, which offered a bounce-back glimpse of the deck outside. She was sitting in one of those faux-cottage chairs, hands on the bent wood, nestled into the leather. She was watching me. I stopped spinning.

  She got up and came to the doorway. “IAF tradecraft. The chair spin.”

  I said to her: “I was hoping you’d come in.”

  “Why hope. You can ask. You have me under secondment. You can order me around.”

  “You like being ordered around?”

  “Just because it’s my job doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  “Let me ask you.”

  She waited.

  “You live here. You’ve got some kind of money. Why play Gal Friday to Frick?”

  She sighed and shook her head. I really just didn’t get something, apparently.

  “Well explain it to me,” I said.

  “Well for starters,” SaBe said, staring at me hard. “I hate golf.”

  I looked up at her and held the stare. Then I nodded. Fine. So she was bored out of her tree. Trapped and yet too fond of the pampered life to dare think about a shot at freedom. Out there. “Frick and Griegson,” I said, moving on. “Were they close?”

  “Not particularly.”

  I turned back to his computer and pulled up the search interface, punched in Destinex but the name apparently wasn’t in any document on Griegson’s system. I punched in the lat/long address. Got a cluster of nothing.

  I rifled the drawers. Staplers, pens. Cigar cutter. A copy of Don DeLillo’s Underworld. I picked that up and shook the book with the pages open. Nothing. I ran my fingers along the spine and found the shipping tag from a big mail-order book place out East.

  “Griegson was a reader?”

  SaBe looked over at the bookshelves. “Seems so.”

  “How about you? Don DeLillo. Have you read him?”

  “Never got through that one, honestly. I preferred White Noise.”

  She was looking around the room and I took that chance to steal a long glance at her standing in the slats of light that were coming in through the wooden blinds. Hard ribs of white and black that emphasized the shape, the contour, the flow of fabric on her arms and legs. Her parents had been members, so many years before. So she was born a Sunshine City member. The first I’d ever met other than Frick. A legacy. Born in captivity.

  My hunch had been right. Griegson’s cabana was to be my own while I stayed. If I stayed. When Frick phoned me to tell me, I said: “Like you don’t think the cops will find it odd I’m sleeping in your crime scene.”

  Frick was in the lounge sipping a gin and tonic. I could hear the music. Hear the clinking of ice cubes. He said: “We did due diligence. Scanned the place, took photos. Plus Griegson didn’t die there. So, relax.”

  I didn’t relax. My mood darkened. The next morning I woke under the massive gelatinous weight of the dope I’d smoked to help me sleep. A security guard banging on the door. Against his better judgment, the man agreed to escort SaBe and me the sixteen miles northeast to Destinex as I had requested, through roads parched white, beaten by the heat, the sun. Here’s me with a bad morning-after: I keep turning my head to catch things and seeing the inside of my skull before it snaps on around and gets centred up. I was behind myself, somehow. Security dude with shoulder badges from Bartinson Private Solutions has picked all this up of course. He has files open on his desktop back in the guard compound. All my marvellous history. He’s gotten to wondering. And the odious whiff of skank isn’t helping his mood. Neither is my telling him to put away the shotgun, which he might otherwise have kept in his lap the whole way out. When I turned to say it, I saw myself reflected in his mirrored sunglasses, SaBe off to the side, warping into view on the convexity of that judgmental surface.

  There was nothing out there. Nada and then more nada. Destinex was a warehouse among warehouses in a place that used to be busy. Auto parts, machine shop, tattoo parlour, diner. All defunct. There was a man living in the carcass of an old car wash, tented in among the crust-dry brushes next to a chipped mural of a naked Latina lying on the hood of a yellow Koenig-segg. Destinex was what? He shook his head. He said: a prank? Then laughed. He wore a cap with an embroidered phrase on the front: Don’t That Blow?

  I gave him a joint for his trouble and peg-legged back out into the sunshine through those long, hanging clear plastic slats that still covered the entry to the wash. Bartinson Private Solutions was waiting in the jeep with SaBe, glowering. He felt his advice being ignored. Not to drive into the warehouse complex. Not to get out of the vehicle. Definitely not to enter the car wash. It put him in a certain mood.

  “You guys ever shoot back?” I asked him, climbing in. “Someone starts pinging away up there. Don’t you ever just want to haul out the old 306 and knock him down? You’d have self-defence on solid odds.”

  He quoted some Sunshine City ordinance at me, looking towards the sea. He seemed sad, all of a sudden. A real bone-weariness coming now through the mirrors.

  “What about Hill 231?” I asked him. “Been up?”

  Yes, they’d been up. And they had a casing for me too. 7.62mm.

  I raised my eyebrows, impressed. Sixty acres of hillside and they found it. Right up there next to the ridgeline where the barbed wire was strung and the motion detectors stood on towers. Whoever Harry Zitman had been, at the airforce base named after him they weren’t into visitors. Danger, danger. Do not pass. We were driving now. Quite fast. SaBe had gotten a whiff of something in our conversation and found a suitable response in speed.

  And she wasn’t alone. There was an animal out in these parts of the half-green Rough, a starved jackrabbit burnt down so skinny that it looked like a praying mantis slightly bulked out with patchy fur. But it held its speed. I saw one bust out of the weeds and make the road, then the field beyond. A streak. A blur. A ragged, spit-flecked bolt of madness. Rodent, insect, bird. Pygmy. Hard to tell.

  We made Sunshine City in silence through the beaten, angry sunlight. SaBe dropped the guard at one of the huts. He went in and came back with a clear plastic envelope containing the casing. 7.62, sure enough. Nice touch.

  SaBe said thanks and tipped him a fair-sized clip of cash. Driving away I must have made a face, that minor squint, the lip shift to acknowledge new information. She made a sharp hand motion in return. Yes, we tip. And if you plan to stick around, you’d better learn to do it too.

  We went together down to Griegson’s cabana, a few doors over from the pool complex. There was a sign on the gate with information about Griegson’s funeral. Printed up on heavy cardstock, colourful borders and ringed with flo
wers. The caddy was waiting for me on the porch. We went out back and sat next to the silent hot tub. His name was Wes. A baton of a man, a pole with hands. He apparently shot three over and hit the ball a ton. He’d done six years for stealing money from the Episcopalian Fund for Autism Research. He didn’t look at SaBe as she passed him. His eyes, strangely, went right through the willowy length of her. I took a moment to consider what eyes, exposed only to Sunshine City’s brutal pleasantry, would not alight on SaBe in the moments when the opportunity arose.

  But then, Wes was tight generally. Terse. Angry. Distracted. Or actively thinking about something else. I imagined him polishing club heads in his mind as we spoke. Seeing the 4th green from 150 yards out, bad lie. Calculating the players’ odds and his avenues to improving the 18th green tip. Take the three, sir. Punch it out to the top of the rise. You have a nice soft wedge going into an easy pin.

  Information beaten out of Wes in monosyllables over half an hour of questioning: 1) nobody golfed without a caddy; 2) yes, a party of four would therefore have involved eight people on or near the green at the time the shot was fired; 3) no, foursomes weren’t necessary; 4) Griegson was not in a foursome.

  I was drooping from the heat. SaBe came out of the cabana living room with a glass of lemonade for me.

  “Wes is for what?” I asked him.

  “Westlake.”

  “Is that your given or conviction name?”

  Wes still nodding. Lips quivering tight.

  SaBe said it quietly from behind me. “Staff use conviction names here, Hoss. Mr. Frick’s policy.”

  I said to Wes. “And you were arrested up north . . .”

  “Near Westlake,” he spit at me. “You’ve cracked it, genius.”

  I sat back and nodded to SaBe. She brought him a glass of water, which Wes didn’t touch. I waited for my next idea.

  “All right,” I said, finally. “Griegson’s party, this past Thursday morning.”