by David Martin
“Everyone came out a winner. The birth mothers were relieved of a responsibility they could ill afford and at the same time received cash payments they desperately needed. The adopting parents rejoiced because I was providing what nature had refused them. I made money, the lawyers made money. But the biggest winners of all were the babies. They had been born in jeopardy but I, Mr. Lyon, I delivered those babies from their fate and arranged for their arrival in the land of milk and honey. Just as West Virginia exports its other natural resources, coal and timber, I was exporting babies. And making everyone happy in the bargain. There was only one problem — can you guess what that was?”
“Not enough supply to meet the demand.”
“Precisely!” Quinndell exclaims, offering his small-toothed smile. “Twenty-five years ago, sixty-five percent of all babies born to single, white mothers were given up for adoption. Now it’s down to less than five percent. Prices for newborn white babies kept escalating but I couldn’t exploit the market because the supply had dried up. No babies! I found this maddening. Instead of everyone winning, everyone was losing — the birth mothers had another mouth to feed, the wealthy couples had to continue waiting for children to adopt, I was losing out on fees, but most important of all, the infants themselves were being sentenced to unfortunate lives, ill-fed, ill-clothed, poorly educated, when they could just as easily have been placed in homes where they would have wanted for nothing.”
“So you started playing God.”
“Yes!” Quinndell puts both hands on his desk, leaning eagerly in Lyon’s direction. “I say this with pride, Mr. Lyon. I began playing God — a benevolent God, however. A wise God. A God who removed babies from households where they would have suffered and delivered them to households where they could prosper.”
“I can guess then how you solved the supply problem.”
He smiles widely, showing more of his little yellow teeth. “Whenever I needed a baby to place with a wealthy couple, I would wait until some at-risk mother brought her infant to the hospital, some woman on welfare, abandoned by her husband, four or five other children at home, or perhaps some girl who had dropped out of high school to care for her baby, the father having already left the area, and I would inform this woman or this girl that, alas, her baby had died. The mother would be distraught, of course, but I told her it was God’s will. In fact, it was my will.”
Lyon has been watching Quinndell carefully as he speaks, realizing that not only is the doctor telling him the truth, but he believes in what he has done, is proud of it.
“Those twenty children whose coffins lie empty in the cemetery are currently living lives of great privilege — which they owe to me.”
“And you owe your wealth to them.”
“Of course! Capitalism is the religion of our time, Mr. Lyon, and I am one of its greatest apostles. People in India sell their kidneys for transplanting into rich Americans. Wealthy couples pay poor women to have their babies. Americans are roaming the globe snatching up available children, ten thousand a year for the last ten years — a hundred thousand foreign-born children adopted by American couples in the last decade, at a cost of twenty thousand dollars each in travel, legal fees, and other expenses. Two billion dollars in foreign adoptions alone. Good Lord, man, you don’t understand any of this, do you? There is a screaming desire out there for babies. Each year fifty thousand children who were born in this country are placed with adoptive parents. But guess how many couples are waiting in line for those children — a million. And if you’re one of the lucky couples to get a white newborn, you probably waited in line five years. My wealthy clients don’t wait in lines. Their money puts them at the head of the line, where I’m waiting to sell them a baby.”
“Except the mothers of those twenty babies weren’t selling anything. They thought their babies had died.”
“Yes, yes,” Quinndell says, annoyed. “But that’s only because they were too stupid to do what would have been best for them and their babies. I had to make the decision for them because they were thinking with their uteruses. It’s all hormones anyway, we have shots for that.”
“Jesus.”
Quinndell sits in the chair behind his desk, extending his arm so he can tap those long fingers on the desktop. “Have you ever heard of Georgia Tann?”
“No.”
“During the 1940s she became wealthy by arranging adoptions, selling babies. She paid the medical expenses for unwed women and then charged prosperous couples adoption fees. But Georgia ran into the same problem I did — supply and demand. So she arranged with a judge to have children taken by court order from poor families. She accumulated a fortune equivalent to five million dollars in today’s money. Would you care to guess how many children she placed?”
“No.”
“Five thousand children, Mr. Lyon. Why, I’m an amateur compared to Georgia Tann. Still, my philosophy is that if you work the upper end of the market —”
“Claire Cept said your blindness is evidence that God still answers prayers.”
Quinndell pauses a moment and then smiles. “There are some matters on which Claire and I find ourselves in complete agreement.”
“What was the point of calling her and claiming you had murdered and butchered those babies?”
“Why, to drive her mad of course. And it worked too, didn’t it? She was so crazy, no legitimate journalist would’ve listened to her. She was so crazy she killed herself.”
“If I arranged for a camera crew to come here, would you repeat everything you’ve just told me?”
Quinndell puts his head back, opens his mouth, and shakes his shoulders up and down — an eerily silent laughter that Lyon is watching carefully and with a growing sense of dread when the lights in the office are extinguished.
He quickly gets out of the overstuffed chair.
“It wasn’t until I heard that the granddaughter was in the area,” Quinndell says from the darkness, “that I even remembered having her in my examining room when she was a teenager. Oh, I’ve sampled these young girls before, but Claire had the strangest reaction. There I was having intercourse with her, hiding what I was doing behind the examining sheet, but of course she knew what I was doing and yet she remained so totally placid, grimacing occasionally because of the pain, but otherwise showing no emotion at all, not even fear.” He pauses a moment. “I was wondering, John, has she become more animated or does she still just lie there and —?”
“I’m going to enjoy doing this story on you, going to enjoy watching you squirm, Quinndell.”
“Doctor Quinndell.”
“Yeah, well I’m leaving now, Quinndell.”
“And there’s no way a blind man can possibly stop you, correct?”
Turning away from the monster, Lyon is just reaching for the double doors when they open, flooding the office with light from the hallway, Mary Aurora standing there with the saddest expression on her face. “I’m sorry,” she tells Lyon, embracing him.
He hears a sound behind him, turning to see in the shaft of light from the hallway that Quinndell is approaching from the depths of the office, gliding quickly toward Lyon and holding something in his hand. But it’s not a spoon this time.
Lyon tries to get out of Mary’s arms but she continues embracing him, the handcuffs making it difficult for him to escape.
She keeps telling him she’s sorry, Lyon just breaking her hold when his right buttock is jabbed hard with a needle, Lyon twisting around in pain, swinging with both handcuffed hands but missing Quinndell, who has eased now back into one of the office’s dark corners.
Lyon turns toward Mary, who has tears in her eyes. Before he can speak, his mind begins to float upward, Lyon suddenly overcome with a feeling of intoxication, trying to turn back around to say something to Quinndell but getting tangled up in his own feet.
“Don’t fight it, John,” comes the doctor’s kindly voice. “Just ease on down to the floor.”
“What’re you going to do to me?” h
e asks, surprised by how dreamy his voice sounds, how it floats the way his body is floating. In fact, Lyon isn’t even sure he said those words, he might only have been thinking them. “What was in that shot?”
Then he lurches out into the light of the hallway, Mary trying to catch him before he falls, no longer floating, he’s sinking now, gliding downward toward a dark and seamless depth, John Lyon going to black.
CHAPTER 35
Carl stops the patrol car at the bottom of the gentle slope leading up to Randolph Welby’s shack, which is dark. The deputy has a bad feeling about this. For five years, ever since Carl forced Randolph to find a cave Doc could use, Carl has had this premonition that the weird little hermit has been biding his time, waiting for revenge.
Carl was surprised that Doc renewed his offer tonight, that even though the nigger woman escaped in the cemetery, Doc said he would still pay Carl twenty-five thousand dollars to kill Welby. Carl keeps watching the dark shack, not sure if he wants Randolph to be home or not. There’s a lot of money at stake, but the question is, can Carl do it?
Ever since he was in junior high school, outweighing even the largest of his classmates by a good fifty pounds, Carl has been beating up on people, striking back at them for making fan of his size, striking out from the confusion caused by his low-wattage mental powers. To balance the scales he has bloodied noses, blackened eyes, broken arms; he’s even delivered people to Doc for killing and then cleaned up the messes Doc and Mr. Gigli made. But killing someone himself is a line across which Carl has never stepped. He thinks he can do it, however. For twenty-five thousand dollars and the continued blessing of his benefactor, Carl is pretty sure he can kill Randolph Welby.
He exits the patrol car, leaving the door open, and starts what for him is a laborious climb up that slope toward the dark shack. Carl has his pistol out, ready to shoot the first dog that shows itself, but he also has his mind on Mary, wondering if Doc was serious about making her go to bed with him.
He loses the start of a hard-on when he hears ferocious barking coming from behind the door to Randolph’s shack. Carl immediately turns to run, pumping his fat legs to get down off the slope, convinced now he’s going to need the shotgun.
Two dogs come off the porch just as the deputy is struggling to squeeze in the patrol car, Carl getting the door closed right before the dogs reach the other side of the car, their fury terrifying. Like they hate him. One of the dogs, in fact, has clamped his jaws on a tire, shaking his head and trying to rip the tread loose, the second dog with its front paws up on the passenger window, looking in on Carl, wanting to be in that car with him.
Carl is trembling so much he fumbles getting the shotgun out of its rack, not even checking to make sure the short-barreled, pump-action twelve-gauge is loaded, barely remembering to flip the safety off. The passenger window is rolled down a few inches and the dog there has turned its head sideways to push its jaws into that open space, growling and foaming and snapping.
Anticipating the sound that the shotgun is going to make in the enclosed car, Carl grimaces as he aims the muzzle at the window. But the explosion is even more severe than he expected, deafening Carl, blowing out the entire passenger-side window, those double-ought pellets blasting the hound with such force that it actually does a complete back flip in midair, dead before it hits the ground.
But Randolph bred his dogs for heart, the second one instantly up into that gaping window space, back feet scratching against the car door for traction, halfway into the front seat now with its eyes pinned on Carl’s face, the dog eager for that thick neck, Carl repeatedly squeezing the trigger to no effect. In the terror of the moment he has forgotten to pump the next shell into the chamber.
And now that dog is twisting and struggling to get the rest of the way in, still snapping and lunging at Carl, who has braced himself against the driver’s door, finally summoning the presence of mind to jack in a new shell, pulling the trigger immediately, the interior of the patrol car once again exploding with flash and sound.
The pellets tear open the dog’s chest with a tight pattern no larger than the palm of your hand, the dog screaming as it goes into a violent death spasm, dog’s blood all over the car’s interior, flung onto Carl’s shirt and face, the hound finally dying, lying limply in that window space, half in and half out of the car.
Up on the porch, meanwhile, hidden by the night, Randolph’s third dog, the big black, is whining to attack. In some dog way he realizes what has happened to his two companions, also understanding in some sense that the same fate awaits him, but still he is eager for the command, willing to follow his Alpha Master’s command into Hell itself.
From behind the front door, Randolph says it with great sadness: “Sic ’em.”
And the big black is gone, down the slope and past the dog on the ground, jumping up to the car, clawing over the dead companion who lies half in and half out of that window space, the big black in mortal pursuit now of the object of his fury.
Carl chambers another shell and blows the dog’s head off.
Up at his door, Randolph Welby weeps for such valor.
Carl keeps dropping the shells he’s trying to load into the shotgun, finally getting three new shells into the magazine and then bracing himself for more dogs. Ten minutes he waits before carefully, shakily getting out of the patrol car. A lamp has been lighted in Randolph’s shack.
Sweeping the shotgun from side to side and occasionally turning completely around, Carl once again climbs that slope.
No more dogs, but Randolph Welby is standing on the porch, half hidden in the shadows.
“How many dogs you got in there, asshole?”
Randolph doesn’t reply.
The deputy, meanwhile, is trying to make out the details of Randolph’s getup, some kind of stupid cowboy clothes. “Who you trying to be, Texas Pete?”
“Ta Wyoming Kid,” Randolph replies, pulling down on the big cowboy hat that is already sitting low on his head, resting on his protruding ears.
“Yeah, well, Kid, let’s go inside, I need to borrow one of your rifles.” Just like Doc said, shoot him with his own gun so it can be made to look like suicide.
Randolph steps to the edge of the porch and draws both pistols from the gunbelt around his tiny waist, leveling the muzzles at Carl’s unmissable girth.
“Those aren’t real,” the deputy insists.
But when Randolph cocks both hammers, Carl suddenly isn’t sure. The light from the shack is weak, and maybe those pistols are real.
“Dwop it!” Randolph shouts, flicking the barrels to indicate Carl’s shotgun.
With some effort, Carl bends over to put the shotgun on the ground — but while straightening up, he draws his own revolver.
Then the two of them wait there, ten feet apart in a Mexican standoff.
“Did you shoot Sheriff Stone?”
“I tink not.”
“Where is he?”
“All bwowed up. You dwop tat hogweg too, mistah, and get weady to meet you makah.”
Carl isn’t sure what to do. If the pistols the little man is holding are real, can Carl get a shot off before —
Randolph knows what’s going to happen when he pulls both triggers, the hammers clicking into place as Randolph shouts to supply his own sound effects. “Pow! Pow! Got you!”
Carl twitches when the hammers click and then twitches again with each word Randolph shouts. But after a moment’s silence, the deputy grins. “You stupid fuck,” he says, already forgetting Doc’s instructions about killing Randolph with one of his own guns, the deputy shooting Randolph right there on the porch.
Carl is standing over the little man, picking up one of the toy pistols and seeing that it has been loaded with wooden cartridges. “You stupid fuck,” he says again, a trace of regret in his voice, the deputy looking down at the ancient but childlike face, chinless and with a high forehead, a face of old leather, dramatically weathered, the skin around the old man’s eyes drooping with the weight
of years, that tiny mouth drawn into a small O.
“You dead,” Randolph whispers without opening his eyes.
Carl grabs one of the bandoliers and drags him inside the shack.
Half an hour later, Carl is sitting in the patrol car making a call on the cellular phone Quinndell gave him last year so they could communicate outside official channels.
Mary answers.
“I have to talk to Doc,” Carl demands.
She hesitates. “He’s busy right now.”
“You better git him ’cause I got trouble out here.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Just git Doc to the phone!”
“He doesn’t want to be disturbed. What’s wrong, you didn’t find Randolph?”
“I found him all right. But there’s something in his shack.”
“What?”
Carl doesn’t know if he should tell her or not.
“Carl?”
CHAPTER 36
“Come on, Mr. Lyon, wide awake now.”
He comes awake only reluctantly, however, and although he hears Quinndell’s voice, Lyon still can’t seem to make his eyes open.
“I’ve already given you an injection that should have you buzzing, but if you’re still groggy I’ll give you another.”
Lyon finds his voice. “No.”
“Excellent. Have you opened your eyes yet? The lights are on solely for your benefit, Mr. Lyon.”