by Norman Green
But even that was too good to last.
I sensed the man before I actually saw him; it was a kind of sourness in my stomach, similar to the aftereffects of something I shouldn’t have eaten. I’ve never been sure how that works, exactly. A survivor’s reflex, perhaps, the residue of a life spent in harm’s way, an awareness of sound pitched too low to register in the conscious mind but there regardless, and the reptile mind deep inside took note and reached for the alarm button.
I had learned to trust my intuitions.
The intruder struggled with his balance as he navigated the steep gray ledges back over my right shoulder. He made no effort to conceal his approach. He was an older guy, and heavy, dressed up in a suit and tie. Some guys wear a suit and tie everywhere because that’s who they are, they got nothing else going. This one had a familiar face: Anyone who ever channel-surfed in the middle of the night would probably recognize him. Or even better, early Sunday morning, sometimes you could catch the guy on several different cable channels at the same time. He had snow-white hair, it was cut a little long and he combed it back with a touch of pomade. His jowls made you think of your grandfather or maybe your favorite uncle, and his suit would not have looked out of place on Daniel Webster or Henry Clay, four buttons on the jacket, wide flowing tie so as not to look like Colonel Sanders. They always shot him from below so that, onscreen, he seemed like he was up a little higher than you, and he liked to hold his Bible open in his right hand, it was a big book with floppy covers so it could lie there like some silent movie goddess at the end of her death scene, a snake-bitten Cleopatra all tragic and limp while you looked up at him preaching sin and redemption, come back to Jesus, brothers and sisters, He has always loved you, come back to God, let us help you, the pitch buried so deep in his schtick you hardly ever felt the fingers reaching into your pocket, he was one of the best around. I had not seen him in person in fifteen years.
The day was not shaping up the way I’d pictured it.
The good Reverend McClendon, come all the way north to see me. He was one of several stepfathers who’d cycled through my life. He’d been the first, the one with the longest tenure, and I had no fond memories of him. He’d been too midwestern for my tastes, too self-righteous, judgmental, abusive, arrogant, violent on occasion, too confident in his own opinions. Told me more than once that I was Lucifer’s disciple, and would never amount to much.
Nice enough guy, apart from that.
I looked away, out over the endless ocean, trying to take it all in, to wrap it up somehow, stow it away in a back pocket so that when the day came that I needed it, I could take it out just to remind myself that moments like this were still possible.
I wondered, just for a second, how the son of a bitch found me.
A marauding bluefish chose that moment to hit my lure. I knew it was a blue because it telegraphed its fury right through the forty-odd yards of monofilament. A striper will just pull, not much more than a sullen weight on the end of your line; catching one is more or less like winching in an old boot, but some creatures are overendowed with fire and spirit and a blue is one of those, a blue will fight you right up to his last gasp. This one actually came up and tail-walked across the surface, it looked like it was about an eight-or ten-pounder but it fought like a pissed-off welterweight. It took another ten minutes before I finally landed it. I backed out of the waves, dragging it up the beach behind me. It was tired enough for me to get a foot on it. I took the hook out of its mouth with a pair of rusty needle-nose pliers. You have to watch the teeth, a blue can hit you like a meat cleaver, this one had chewed the braided steel leader all to hell. I got it loose, finally, took my foot off it, meaning to chuck it back into the ocean, but it must have felt the wave coming, a couple of spastic flips of its tail and it was back in the water and gone.
You wonder what you’ll do when it’s your turn, will you fight when the fisherman comes for you or will you close your eyes and wait for the knife.
“Was that your dinner,” the preacher said.
I wondered if I just rebaited the hook and waded back out there, would the guy get the hint? But my life is rarely that simple. “Reverend McClendon,” I said. “You got some fucking nerve.”
“Saul Fowler,” the reverend said. “Nice to see you, too. Last report, you was living the life in a penthouse in Zurich. I thought maybe you’d finally gotten your act together. How the hell do you go from a high-zoot burg like that, two girlfriends and a Porsche to a place like this?”
“You walk out the front door, turn left, and keep going.”
“You look like shit,” McClendon said. “Are you okay?”
“I was fine until you got here.”
“Beautiful place,” he said, staring out at the sunrise, undeterred. “Shelter Island. Bit of a misnomer, though, especially for a man like yourself.” His eyes flicked from the horizon back to me. “You weren’t all that hard to find. You’re living in a Winnebago? Does that thing even run?”
“What the fuck do you want from me?” I cleared my throat and spat into the ocean. “How may we here at Black Sheep Enterprises not be of assistance?”
“There’s a loaded question,” McClendon said, and the air went out of him. “For starters, I want to show you a picture of my daughter.”
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“I don’t,” he said, and for a second McClendon looked like just one more guy who’d gotten slapped around by time and consequence. “But I did.” He pulled a smart phone out of his coat pocket, fiddled with it for a moment and then handed it to me. She was part Asian, straight black hair, with McClendon’s bright blue eyes. “Very pretty,” I said.
“She was,” he said. “Emphasis on past tense.” His voice cracked, he seemed right on the edge of losing control. “Her name was Melanie Wing.”
“What happened to her?”
McClendon squared himself up. It may have been a cold way to look at it, but I knew McClendon well enough to wonder how much of what I was looking at was the reverend’s real reaction and how much was just for show. “Six months ago,” McClendon said, “the cops fished her out of the water just off Staten Island. New York City. Most of her, anyway. Someone riding the Staten Island Ferry spotted her body floating by; if they hadn’t she’d have been swept out to sea and we’d never have found out what happened to her. We’d have never known.” He took back his phone, banished his daughter’s image with a swipe of a finger. “The cops keep telling me it’s an open case. They’re working on it. But you and I both know that after all this time, house money says they ain’t catching the guy.” He stared out across the gray ocean and hitched his coat up around himself.
“Sorry to hear it,” I told him.
“It gets worse,” he said, not looking at me. “She might have been your half sister.”
“What? Are you kidding?”
“You knew your father left your mother just after she came up pregnant with you,” he said. “It was because he hadn’t touched her in over a year. You weren’t his. Your mother could be hard to live with, you know.”
“Yeah, no shit. Are you serious? It was you?”
“I’m not saying it was me, Saul.” He backed away from that in a hurry. “There was more than one candidate. I mean, your mother, she got around. I tried to make it work with her, but like I said, she could be difficult.”
I looked up at the sky. I didn’t know what the hell difference it made, really, whether the sperm donor had been McClendon or some other anonymous asshole. But God, if you’re up there, I have to say this: You’re just like Mike Tyson, or maybe Bill Clinton, because just when I’m starting to like you, you pull some new fucked-up shit out of your back pocket . . .
“Saul, can we go somewhere warm and talk about this? You got me freezing my nuts off out here.”
“What was her name again?”
He looked out over the water. “Melanie,” he said. “And her mother’s name is Annabel.”
Empty coffee shop, blue
-gray shingles, salt-rimed windows. Northern New England, deserted beach town, out of season. McClendon parked his Mercedes right in front of the place. I slid my battered Jeep just behind, shut it off, listened to it cough and sputter before it died. A cloud of faint gray smoke split apart and drifted away in the breeze.
Inside, a waitress brought coffee. She looked at the old man with a funny expression on her face, for a minute I thought she was gonna ask him if he didn’t used to be on Happy Days or something. McClendon laid a twenty on her and told her that he just wanted to have a private conversation with an old friend. “I don’t know why you’re coming to me with this,” I told him, after the kitchen door swung shut behind her. “I’m retired.”
“No you’re not,” the old man said. “You’re unemployed, and broke. There’s a difference.”
“How’d you find me? Who gave me up?”
“Don’t be a sap,” he said. “You can’t hide from the world, not these days. I got friends in high places. Low places, too, for that matter. Not that I blame you for trying to stay off the radar. I was told they liked you a lot for that robbery at the Musée d’Orsay a year or so back. Didn’t I teach you better than that? That painting you took was too high-profile. How’d you expect to make any money on that? Didn’t they recover it about a week later? There was no way to sell . . .”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Actually, the painting was just a smokescreen. The real target was the Maximillian codex, which they didn’t even realize was missing until two months later.
“I bet you don’t.”
There was no point in denying anything to a guy like McClendon, he was the kind of con artist that thought everyone else was just like him, only not as talented. And I had zero interest in what he thought of me. “Why are you bothering me with this? Why don’t you go hire someone who does this for a living? You could probably afford Louie Freeh, for crissake.”
“I did that already, and they come up empty. Not Louie Freeh, but someone just like him. Skinny, nasty, dried-out prick of an ex-cop. This ain’t a job for a guy like that, anyway. This is a job for a guy from your side of the street.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You. Listen, I know you got no reason to want to help me. I was too young when your mother and I were together, and I didn’t know anything about being a father. Or a stepfather. And everything my old man did to me, which I hated him for, I did to you. And everything that’s happened to you since . . .” He fluttered his hand in space, leaving his opinions of my history unspoken. “I’m not saying that it was all my fault, but I put your feet on the wrong road. I know that now. It’s one of the great regrets of my life.”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to say to that, other than, you know, go fuck yourself, but that was the reaction he expected, he probably already had a play called for that, so I kept my mouth shut.
McClendon sat there looking tired and defeated. He was at a disadvantage and he knew it, because I had known him when. With the man I remembered, you might think you were getting to the real guy but all you really ever uncovered was another layer in his performance. If there was anything real to the McClendon I knew, he kept it buried so deep that no one ever got to see it. I would never say that I didn’t learn anything from the guy, quite the contrary, but it wasn’t anything you were gonna learn from the Sutras or the Bible or any university that I knew of. I’d never known whether to resent McClendon for it or be grateful. I didn’t give him any indication I was buying his act. “This is quite a transformation,” I said. “How’d you pull it off?”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” he said. “You can decide, afterward, whether you want to believe it or not.”
“Go ahead.”
“About ten years ago,” he said, “I finally hit the big one. The one we all dream about. And it was a total accident. Me and this guy I worked with were up in Canada, buying leases.”
Alberta. It had been all over the news for the past couple years.
Oil. More than in Saudi Arabia. More than the whole Middle East, maybe.
“You’re feeling me,” he said. “You’re with me, I can tell. Tar sands, everybody knew the oil was there. And everybody knew that you couldn’t get to it. Couldn’t dig it out. The paper we were buying was worthless, that’s what we thought, hell, that’s what everybody thought. So we form a corporation, we buy every lease we can get. The scam was gonna be, ‘Hey, this will never be worth a cent, not in your lifetime, but fifty, a hundred years from now when the rest of the world’s oil is gone, they will figure out a way to get to the stuff. You buy in with us, you leave your shares to your kids in your will, someday they’ll all be filthy rich.’ Well, guess what? We were off by fifty years or so.”
“You didn’t even have to scam anyone.”
“Right place, right time. The price of crude blew through the roof, and overnight, Alberta, Canada, is the new gold rush. Now all of a sudden the tar sand business is profitable, after all. It was like having the biggest pile of money you ever dreamed about fall out of the sky and hit you in the head.”
“What did you do?”
“I didn’t know what to do. Being a thief was all I ever knew, Saul, you know that. It’s all I ever was. And all of a sudden, it’s over. It was like I disappeared, Saul, when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see nobody there looking back. I’d been chasing that score all of my life and now I didn’t know what to do with myself. The game is over. I’m finished.”
“Oh, wait, stop,” I told him. “Let me guess. You got your pockets full of reasonably honest money, wait, don’t tell me, you get on a plane to Vegas.”
“A bus,” McClendon said, wrinkling his face up in distaste. “I ain’t too much for flying anymore.”
“How long did it take you to lose it?”
“I didn’t lose it all,” he said, defensive. “I gave away a lot, too. I was very popular for a while.”
“Yeah? How long?”
He sighed. “Eighteen months, give or take.”
“You are unbelievable,” I told him.
“Look,” he said. “You got your problems, too. I know you keep falling into the same holes. Well, so do I. And to tell you the truth, I don’t see where my blind spots are all that different from yours.”
“Yeah? You have to be the only guy I ever met, give you a hundred grand today and you’re broke by the weekend, and you got nothing to show for it.” But I looked through the window at the reverend’s Mercedes, parked by the curb. “So what changed?”
“You’re gonna laugh at me,” the old man said.
“Hey.” McClendon had landed a punch there, he had me doubting my own skepticism. Was I really about to see a piece of the real McClendon, or was I just falling for the bastard’s newest scam? “Wait. We telling the truth here? Do you even know what the truth is?”
The preacher leaned his elbows on the table and focused those blue eyes in on me. “Saul, as God is my witness. I had fifty cents in my pocket, a five-thousand-dollar bar tab, and the Trop was throwing me out. I’m walking down this street and I hear this guy.” He closed his eyes and nodded, giving me permission to laugh at him. “Preaching.”
“He must have been some goddamn spellbinder.”
“Nah, he was awful. Still is, actually. Gets his hair cut like he’s still in the Marine Corps, got no fashion sense at all, and his voice goes all high and squeaky when he gets excited. The guy is hopeless. Reverend Stillman.”
“So? I don’t get it.”
He leaned back in his chair and looked around the coffee shop like he was expecting reinforcements to arrive; when they didn’t he looked back at me and shook his head. “He was real, Saul. He believed in what he was doing. He is real. It was no act.”
“Seriously, McClendon . . .”
“I know.” He nodded again. “I know. But I tell you what, Saul, when he told me that I was a child of God, and that my father loved me, I bought it.”
“ ‘Convince yourself t
hat it’s real, that’s what really sells them.’ ”
“I remember telling you that. If I could go back and do different, I would, Saul, but that ain’t the way it works. Anyway, I went to work for Stillman that afternoon. Swept the floors, wrote letters, kept his books. I’m still working for Stillman.”
“Guess it didn’t take him long to recognize your real talents.”
“I am what I am, Saul. I’ve quit apologizing for it.”
“And no more trips to Vegas.”
He shook his head. “Can’t afford Vegas no more.”
I thought I saw a crack in the story. “Get real,” I said. “You practically got your own cable network. You got to be making more now than you ever did.”
McClendon shook his head again. “I told you, Saul, I work for the man. Stillman set up a foundation, and I get seventy-five grand a year. And my own bus. Well, actually, the foundation leases the bus, I think, but you get the idea.”
“So what did you do? Go study old Billy Graham tapes?”
“You know what, I did look at some of those, sure, but Graham was a man of his times. Strictly fifties and sixties. Except for the hair, he had great hair. But if he was trying to break into the business now, he couldn’t get arrested. ‘Come down and kiss the altar’ is all fine and good, but it don’t work no more. These days you got to be more sophisticated than that.”
“Who, then? Joel Osteen?”