by Adam Connell
“Burglary, robbery, I don’t know what’s the proper term. A painting by the front door. That’s what they wanted, could’ve grabbed it on the way in. But criminals are stupid.”
Faraday kept himself from grinning. It wasn’t unusual for Lundin to steal useless, random items during jobs. Faraday thought it was an amusing habit, actually. He didn’t know that Briggs was sometimes the same way, but never on contracts, and usually with Hoone.
“I’d like to thank you, coming up so fast, with so much going on,” Faraday said.
“Someone intimates they’re gonna make a donation for my constituents of that size,” Adelard said, “it’s only right I come here in person. Although these places aren’t my usual habitat.”
“You’d be surprised who we get,” Faraday said. He stretched his legs, crossed them at the ankle. “I run a, this is as wholesome as they go. Considering.”
“And profitable,” Adelard said.
“We do all right,” Faraday said.
“You have me wondering — ”
“Why you’re here,” Faraday said.
“I hope this has nothing to do with Int 3001.”
“What’s a Int?” Faraday said.
“That’s good.”
Faraday told lies about a new bar, Queens, worries over zoning restrictions. The new location, it was on the border of a school, how close could he get away with, the site was right on the line. While he talked, while Adelard listened, Faraday plumbed him for hollows or studs, seeking the background for structure. When he found evidence of absolutely no mental foundations, he did what Noaks had taught him, what every adept tried only last and in desperation — the straightforwards attack.
He’d met Noaks while backpacking north and south, down and up the East Coast in his late teens. Came to the Atlantic City boardwalk in summer. Noaks ran a booth telling fortunes, giving horoscopes, reading tarots, guessing weights. Warm-weather chicanery. Only it wasn’t chicanery, and they recognized this in each other, Faraday and Noaks. The authenticity. Noaks expanded his show to include Faraday. And because Faraday was handsome and Noaks an ugly forty, the money quadrupled.
Together they worked the fairgrounds, pavilions, and beach promenades, traveling by van, fleecing vacationers during the day and Noaks holding class with Faraday at night. Noaks remembered all the lessons from his dead tutor, broke them against Faraday one by one, like wood, to teach him how to tame his abilities. Faraday was willing but dense, yet when he felt he knew enough he ditched Noaks while the man lay asleep in the van.
The most valuable and difficult and protracted lesson was the straightforwards attack. To which Adelard was immune. Faraday blinked a few times, stared at a pen cap on the floor. Adelard was talking in response to Faraday’s inventions: about departments, divisions, research. Communities in need of businesses. Businesses in need of workers. The creation of jobs.
Faraday nodded at Dowd. Ten seconds later the Nicotine Queen came onstage. She wasn’t wearing her typical bikini. She wasn’t wearing a thing, and there was no music; Faraday wanted her to get Adelard’s attention immediately.
“The streets — In my district the streets you might be — Be interested in knowing about — ”
“I apologize,” Faraday said.
“No need to.”
“They come out periodically to practice,” Faraday said.
As the Nicotine Queen danced, Faraday tried again. Again with Noaks’ straightforwards attack that wasn’t repelled so much as negated.
He tried smaller attacks, clusters, and attempted to distract Adelard further. “Aren’t there rules against a contribution of this size?” Faraday said.
“There are ways around it,” Adelard said, “legal and ethical.” Becoming immune to Tamm as well. “We’d be doing nothing wrong, absolutely no rules in violation of. You’re a businessman with legitimate interests. I have an interest in my constituents. I’m not gonna use the money for a new car.”
“Or floodlights for the house,” Faraday said. Hoping to burst the man open with new fears from last night.
The Nicotine Queen segued from her standard introduction to her most lecherous twirling contortions.
“How do I know someone else won’t come along,” Faraday said, “change your mind against me?”
“You called my office to express your intentions,” Adelard said, his eyes on the Nicotine Queen but his thoughts in their atomic bunker. “And you called me, I like to assume, because of my reputation, which is stellar. I’m not here to be bought.”
“Of course.”
“I’m very busy as Council Speaker. There are a thousand issues pulling me a thousand directions. Your money will earn my attention, no more. If your needs go beyond that, I would suggest you find someone cheaper and more inclined.”
“Not necessary,” Faraday said with a false smile. “Rather, I found this talk encouraging. I know how to spell your name, you should be waiting on a check.” And he was going to send one. That’s how bad he wanted to know.
“It’s possible we can benefit one another,” Adelard said. “It was a pleasure meeting you. If we do it again, I’d prefer somewhere with real tables, no ashtrays, a maitre d’.”
When Adelard left, Kinkaid entered from the kitchen’s swing doors.
“Tell Tamm to stop dancing,” Faraday said.
He was astonished. Lundin was right. Faraday tried thinking of ways he could use this knowledge, of Adelard’s being an actual Stone. Only after the contract was done, of course — Faraday was ruthlessly couth when it came to his contracts.
But Iommi was also a Stone, and on Faraday’s payroll, and he barely used Iommi except as a bouncer. He dismissed the knowledge as useless, hardly worth the check he felt obliged to write.
What Faraday learned from the encounter was that whoever had the other side of this contract, presumably Sotto, was going to have a very hard time of it.
FIFTEEN
Friday, None
Calder took the subway. Of course I lost him going in but there weren’t many places he could’ve been headed and I caught him coming out. He bluffed his way back into the clinic where Sotto had captured him. Used his tonsorial satchel. Some suggestion on his part also helped.
He took the stairs to the fourth floor. There was a nursing station, no nurses. Just a very dark hallway, blue like a desert’s twilight. Calder chose a pretty young girl because her mind, like her body, was at rest. She had a symbiotic commitment to three skinny machines whose large heads were judgmental in their color. The room’s automatic light came on, but he turned it off. He took the lone seat.
Her name used to be Ardsley. Lately she felt that she had no name, that she didn’t exist, that nothing existed. Calder gleaned that much and left her alone.
He didn’t feel like conversation. He’d come to think, and got his best thinking done among the living dead. I’ve always called them Van Winkles, though sometimes they never do wake up.
After he’d been forced from home, well before Manhattan, Calder traveled through small towns, working graveyards, morgues, funeral homes.
At one bus stop in Iowa — traveling nowhere specific, between employment — Calder saw a flyer advertising an opening at a funeral home in the next town. Calder ripped the flyer off the billboard, got back on the bus.
John R. McDonald’s Funeral Parlor. In times of drunken giddiness — which were too often — John Jr., who’d inherited the establishment from his parents, he thought it would be funny, hang a shingle below their sign saying More Than Ten Thousand Served.
When he wasn’t drunk, John Jr. was a very serious man. During the interview Calder impressed him with his work experience. Handed him a handwritten sheet with references, phone numbers.
To pass the interview, Calder was taken downstairs to the embalming/prep room. Given a pair of scissors and a photo of the current client in her prime. Calder copied the picture, and was hired.
His job would be to do hair, and assist John Jr. with all the rest.
It was a very small town, just outside of Burlington. Small enough that Calder was able to keep their roving thoughts from his mind. Main Street only two blocks long. A grocery store, hardware store, jeweler, tailor, beauty salon, stationery store, clothing store, liquor, pharmacist, electronic store for TVs and vacuums and appliances, two restaurants, a bar, and a boardinghouse.
The funeral home, a car mechanic, and a Bank Iowa satellite were on side streets.
The kind of place if a Walmart sprouted from the ground, it would’ve put everyone but John Jr. out of business.
Post office open till noon, till two on Saturdays. A small, neat library open till noon, closed weekends.
No dentist, no car dealership, no pet store.
The kind of place Calder had felt comfortable the last few years.
Half the town worked at the dairy farm/bottling plant whose thirty cows supplied the neighboring counties.
It was the farmer’s elderly wife who Calder had used to pass the interview.
At the wake, the farmer was overwhelmed. He hugged Calder. “She looks twenny years younger.”
“She was a beautiful woman,” Calder said.
“Anything, anything you need, you come see me. I’ve got horses, too. You ride?”
“I learned at camp one summer,” Calder said.
“They’re smarter than bicycles but you’ll remember how. Come on out to visit whenever mood strikes.”
Calder lived in the third parlor downstairs, near the prep area. As this parlor had been dormant for decades, it had been converted into a spacious apartment.
The previous tenant had quit months ago. Some of his things were still there: a dented globe, CDs, things like that. Calder threw them all out. Curiously, there was a large bookcase with morbid tomes. A history of gravediggers and early doctors, a true-crime book on the murderers Burke and Hare, a five-piece collection on mortuary science, an oversized pictorial book of famous headstones and mausoleums, a chapbook on Halicarnassus. The only item Calder hadn’t seen during his travels was a thin treatise on Yorick.
Two days after his arrival, Calder saw John Jr. standing outside the apartment, waiting to be asked in.
Calder waved him in. He’d been lying on his bed, looking up at the popcorn ceiling, fantasizing about other occupations, different jobs unrelated to the dead. Realizing every few seconds that there wasn’t much else he could do to earn money, he couldn’t stand the company of people.
“I have to inquire,” John Jr. said. “Your references checked.” He gave Calder the handwritten sheet, folded in half. “Would’ve hired you anyway. I have to — Why so much death?”
“I’m no good at small talk is why.”
Lie.
“People, they make me uncomfortable.”
Truth.
“So it’s not a fetish, nothing like that,” John Jr. said.
“Nothing near it, no.”
“Good. You wanted for anything anywhere? That why you’re running?”
“Nope.”
“Parents?” John Jr. said.
“Passed away a long time ago.”
Lie.
“See you tomorrow. Or tonight. You never know.”
Calder also drove the hearse.
After a few months, Calder visited the farmer, borrowed a mare and took her at a canter towards Burlington, population 25,464. There were too many voices, fragments, thoughts in turmoil, too much yelling in his head and he had to turn back.
It was around this time that Calder had his visitor. He’d been eating alone at The Hearty Gullet when she sat down across from him. She was wearing boy’s shorts, a T-shirt tied up at the navel, toting a Hello Kitty knapsack.
“Hope I scared you,” she said, grinning at him with her meth mouth: shrunken gums, black, broken teeth. Some with visible holes the result of cottonmouth treated with too much soda. Some teeth just weren’t there.
“Followed you from the undertaker’s.”
“I wish you hadn’t.”
“Tailed or scared you?”
“Either, both,” Calder said. He wasn’t sure he was prepared to be someone’s company, or have company imposed upon him. The rest of the town knew by this point to leave him be.
He finished his burger. She didn’t order. She was thin and it was hard to guess her age, but the size of her breasts, their buoyancy, the purple heels under her eyes, that put her in her early twenties. About Calder’s age.
When the bill came she took a wallet from the Hello Kitty backpack, a wallet thick with money.
“No, really,” Calder said, leaning to the side to get at his own wallet.
“No, seriously,” she said, putting some money on the table. “I ran away from home and I took a lot of their cash with me.”
Calder shrugged.
She extended her arm across the table, so straight the elbow crooked backwards. “Why don’t you call me Arwen.”
“That your name?”
“I want you to call me Arwen. It’s my new name.”
“Calder,” he said, and they shook. Her hands were freezing.
“I’m staying at the boardinghouse. No one else here seems to be our age. You could sleep over.”
Calder, no virgin, declined.
“Why do you live here, so many older folks?”
“Work,” he said. “And I came to get away.”
“From?”
“People,” Calder said.
“You picked the right town. Fucking ghost town,” she said. “I’m not people. You’re no talker. I’ll do all the talking if you want but you don’t want that. Where you going tonight? There’s no movie thee-a-ter.”
“Home,” Calder said. “I gotta get some sleep.”
“See you tomorrow.”
And she did. Found him at the library, a Friday, ten-thirty.
He’d been flipping through some magazines. Arwen sat at the table with him, kicked off her flip-flops, put her feet up. Her toenails were ragged, her soles bumpy with corns.
“Well good morning,” she said.
Calder nodded.
“I hate walking. But don’t ever go by bus, I don’t mind telling you that. Walking, you gotta go potty side of the road. You ever wiped with leaves? I was in Paris once, parents took me. They had a by-day, like you couldn’t use it by-night.”
She had a laugh made you wish you were deaf. Some of the library’s customers began to leave early.
“My father, but you don’t wanna hear about him. Do you wanna hear about him? A pervert.”
Calder closed the magazine he was reading, made a pile of the rest.
“My feet don’t smell, do they? I showered today.”
“No, they’re fine. I got something to do,” he said, standing.
“It gross?” she said. “With the bodies?”
“Yeah, very gross.”
“Can I come?”
“Mr. McDonald doesn’t allow it.”
“Where will I find you later?”
“At the restaurant,” he said, left, went to the funeral home, out the back, jogged over to the farm. He made it closer to Burlington that day, on the horse, but only by a mile or so.
That night he ate dinner alone in his apartment.
The next night Arwen found him at the town’s other restaurant. Made no mention that he’d stood her up.
She talked. Her mannerisms were too jittery and Calder was scared at the way her words melted one into the next.
“My father,” she said, “part of why I ran away. Ever since I got these,” and she grabbed her breasts, startling Calder, grabbed them so suddenly and so hard they almost came loose from the knot on her shirt, the same shirt she’d been wearing since they’d met.
“My Mom doesn’t have any. Most men are decent, right? You’re decent, Calder. Sure you don’t wanna stay in my room? Bed’s real big, we could spend the night tossing and turning and never bump into each other, that big. If that’s how you want it.”
She yawned; she wasn’t tire
d, it just seemed to her like something to do.
“I had a couple dogs were smart,” she said. “I did well in school, when I liked the subject. I’ve got speed in my knapsack. Hello Kitty! In my room. I do it to take my mind off things, but that’s not smart. Speed doesn’t take your mind off anything.”
She yawned again, artificially.
“First time I did speed, that’s the night I laid Creery. I popped his cherry. Afterwards he cried like a girl. I never cry, and certainly not like a girl. When I cry — You don’t wanna be around for that, hear that.”
Calder didn’t want to hear any of this. His meal, Chicken Marsala, had been untouched since Arwen had sat down. He wanted to tell her to shut up, but it wasn’t just her voice. Her thoughts, unlike the others in this small town, were intruding on his own. Digging erratic trenches deep inside of him. He knew, given a few more days of this, of her, she’d inadvertently take up a manic residence inside his mind.
He asked John Jr. for some vacation, put what he needed into his backpack, went to stay with the farmer.
He took his favorite horse out every day, each day getting closer to Burlington, fighting the voices, finding he could fight.
The voices, the thoughts, were pervasive. He immersed himself, let them subjugate his identity until his mind became akin to a crowded room. Within a few hours he was able to identify some of the people singly. He pushed at them singly. He asserted himself, dampening them one by one until they became faint.
Rode home to the farm. Went back out the next day. The day after that.
On the fifth or sixth day Calder found he was able to repel the cumulative inner ramblings coming from the city’s edge. This city, Burlington, had a Walmart, a Target, a Home Depot.
He was happy that Arwen’s forwards mental instability had forced him away.
He’d finally, out of necessity, taught himself the trick to turning the ramblings aside — an entire portion of the city aside.
He allowed himself a few sublime minutes, vibrating under the weight of his discovery, the kind of moment you feel immortal. If only briefly. That you’ve uncovered something unique, something maybe no one else ever knew existed but you.