Once were giants: the wagtail woman and the blue-tongued lizard man, wayward travelers transformed into stone pillars, smoke that became lichen, lichen that was turned into fire, a world that was constantly forming and re-forming.
The sides of Rebecca’s tent were now moving in and out, inhaling and exhaling as she sat hunched over the small ad hoc desk, a crate turned on end with a folding chair pulled up. She had dry-broomed the tent clear of sand, had laid out the latest objects and photographs to be cataloged and considered, had her notebook opened to an empty page. Inhaling and exhaling.
Hidden narratives were entwined in the artifacts: a shale pendant on a rope made of braided hair; a necklace of animal teeth, wallaby mainly; quartz knives sand-polished to a fine and lethal sheen. Disparate, yet clearly connected. How to fit these together? The pieces didn’t interlock, but overlapped.
She was struggling with this when the flap of her tent was thrown open and the winds of the Outback blew in a Liru of another kind.
Rebecca, instantly indignant. “What is this! You’re letting in sand.”
The small man pulled up one of the other canvas chairs, placed what looked like the shell of a Bic pen on the desk in front of her as though it were some sort of peace offering. But no, not a peace offering. A promise. “Who,” he said. “The word you’re looking for is ‘who,’ not ‘what.’ ‘Who is this?’ ” He folded his handkerchief, once, twice, dabbed his forehead four times, put his handkerchief away. Smiled.
She knew that smile. It was a conjuror’s smile. A faint twitch of the lips, the county fair carney who knows he has already won, who knows that the switch has already been made before you even started, and all that remains is to go through the motions, to let it play out. As she stared into his eyes, Rebecca saw a familiar darkness as well. The demons of the Nirai Kanai in southern Japan, legends of the Wendigo, the cast-out angels of the Old Testament, the Devil Dingo Dog of the Anangu.
“Who are you?”
“A friend of a friend, shall we say?” He looked at the pewter heart that was even now hanging around her neck, her open collar, and she knew, with a sinking certainty in her stomach, it was Tom. Somehow, he was behind this. How she knew wasn’t clear, but she knew.
Rebecca of Des Moines, defiant. “I don’t have it.”
“I think you do.” He considered the plastic tube of the pen in front of him. “Sometimes the simplest solutions are best.” He looked up, locked his eyes onto hers. “The letter.”
“It’s mine.”
“Let him read it. Just once.”
“No.”
“Let me read it.”
“No.”
“Does it even exist?”
“No.”
“Are you telling the truth?”
A pause. “No.”
Love always ends, not in tragedy, but in farce. What a paltry tale. The small man said, “I can see from here that your hair doesn’t smell of sliced apples.”
She stared back at him. Glacial contempt. “You can see smells, can you?”
He nodded. “I can taste colors, too. I can hear numbers. And I can see certain scents. Here’s something: Did you know that there is another version of you, out there, turning circles in the mind of a burnt-out, second-rate travel writer? A more interesting version of you, I must say. But isn’t that always the case?”
“You need to leave.” These were the same words Lyle had used. You need to leave.
“Not without the letter.” The anger behind these words was distant, but clear. The silent howl of an ice storm outside an airplane window.
“I don’t have it,” she said, but her eyes betrayed her, a flick to the stack of cardboard boxes in the corner of the tent.
With that, his anger relaxed. “I’ll take that pendant, as well. It’s pewter. No inherent value, only sentimental. But, of course, the sentimental is always worth more than the inherent.”
“I carry my nitroglycerin in it.”
He stopped. “Do you?”
“A faulty heart.”
Was she lying? Probably just a story. But he was immune to such stories. “You’ll have to find someplace else for them.”
And that is where it should have ended, with Rebecca pulling out the folder, handing the thick envelope over, slipping off the pewter heart, but Lyle had roused himself in the interim, had alerted another member of the team about their visitation from the desert, and now a burly boy had burst in, all biceps and brow, young and bold and brimming with bravado, not yet aware of his own tenuous mortality. A fatefully perilous age, that. When one’s cockiness has not yet been reeled in. Such men die with a disconcerting regularity.
“What’s this then?”
A sigh. The small man, weary. “This doesn’t concern you. Go.”
“If it involves Becks, it sure as heck involves me.” Heck, not hell. The young man threw a yearning look in Rebecca’s direction, and the penny dropped as pennies do. With a rattle and a clink. Her lover. Or, more accurately, a would-be lover. The worst kind. So much to prove.
“How old are you, son?”
“Old enough.”
A child. And the Aussie accent made him only seem younger still. “I have what I came for,” said the small man. “I will be leaving now. I would recommend that you do the same.” The locket was wrapped in his fist like a rosary, the letter was stuffed into his jacket. He smiled, a smile that was wan and dying like a flickering VACANCY on a highway at night, the kind that repels more than it entices. “Step aside. Please. That would be best for everyone.”
Somewhere in the young man’s inner cerebellum, deep in its reptilian core, he could sense danger—camouflaged, perhaps, but danger still.
He stepped aside.
Rebecca, churning with anger, thinking the tide had turned (it hadn’t), shouting, “Don’t let him go!”
The burly boy hesitated.
Rebecca, a grating voice, demanding the boy do something, and the boy in love and not knowing what this entailed.
“He’s a thief,” she yelled. “Stop him!”
And with that the boy was lost. He had no choice, you see. He had no choice; love demanded it. He couldn’t step aside, had to insert himself back into the scene.
He died in front of her, silently, with only a youthful gurgle and a look of confusion. His features were soft and unformed—life hadn’t drawn its decisive lines on his face yet—and to have died like that, not fully shaped, seemed to the finder a worse tragedy than the death itself. I never even learned his name.
The tent was quiet, the canvas sides were breathing in and breathing out. There was always a strange vacuum, the finder noted, whenever someone died, as though their soul had been sucked out of the room. He turned his gaze to Rebecca. Wiped the blood from his hands with a handkerchief.
Rebecca’s throat was raw, constricted. “And now?” she asked.
“Now? Now something bad happens.”
* * *
WHEN HE WAS CLEAR OF the university camp, he pulled over onto the side of the highway, slowing to a stop beside a thicket of thornbushes.
Termite mounds and a lizard disappearing into the dirt. Grassy swales in the deep red earth. The wind was picking up, and in the distance a dark line was forming along the horizon; a storm was taking shape, was moving in from the southwest. The sands were beginning to stir.
He opened the creased envelope, thick with pages, folded tightly, and he thought, as he often did in such moments, Someone died for this. A violin. A set of dog tags taken from an Okinawan tomb. A one-cent magenta stamp. Someone died for this. He had stood over her in the heat, had hissed, “You did this. You killed him. And what will you tell them when they ask?”
She’d repeated what he told her, voice wavering, about how the boy had begun to choke, how she had tried to save him, had failed, and so distraught was she that no one questioned her story—except for Lyle, who had confronted the figure when it first coalesced, had let it pass, mutely pointing out which tent was Rebecca’s. Bu
t Lyle would say nothing. He would keep the glass stopper firmly in place, and, years later, when he began to unravel, he would recognize that this was the moment when it all started.
In the desert, parked beside some thornbushes, the small man unfolded the pages in the epistle of Thomas Rafferty. “To Becks” was scrawled across the top in drunken letters. The writing was cramped and undisciplined, scratched madly onto the paper as though with a quill that was running out of ink rather than with a ballpoint pen.
I lie awake & wonder if you are lying awake in pain or feeling alone, going through the years in my mind, the gallery in Sydney, should’ve known, shit, and maybe its true, with everything that’s happened, its still the most beautiful marvel—music that LACKS ONLY YOU—like some sort of sword in my flesh because in all this jabber and babble are so many in my confusion once you finish the work WE will be together once and forever because you influence me and you are the number one reason.
The small man shuffled through the pages, amazed. Read on.
my heart is full of you yet when I seek to say to you something words fail me even in bed especially and my thoughts go out to you today and yesterday, tearful LONGINGS—my farewell tour, in bed with bad ideas and I can only wander about for SO LONG, at home, but can that even exist under our circumstances? to be calm but still angry and
Whatever he might have been expecting, he hadn’t been expecting this: disjointed, full of arbitrarily capitalized words and forcefully underlined terms.
but never—NEVER—doubt the faithfullest heart that has made me selfish because I cannot and I am forgetful of every thing, I would be martyr’d for you in the face of mid-night that time I walked on those telephone wires to LOOK DOWN and see you coming, every haze & mist, I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think, and maybe our lives are going to let us have another other night that’s like BEGGING for mercy for fuck sake, this is what you are, and what fuckin words can I write anyway when I don’t know how to tell you how, such agitation, a life for the outline and the tint
Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
is why I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you, and I don’t really resent it, but I am REDUCED to a thing and I wanted to compose a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night but it’s all gone, fuck it, the un-dumb letters, and I would never write so elementary a phrase as that; with me it is quite stark
He flipped through to the last page, the writing becoming more frantic as it reached the irrational climax.
fuckin LOVED the dynamo of it with your chameleon’s soul, no matter WHAT storm! or home wherever we are in the morning, TOGETHER and the stresses of so many terrible years, we were always cheerful and jokers together but really it was like I had to beg to know EXPRESSLY your intention, I suppose most of us are, but cure is the discovery of our need—now that I know just as unendurable, so NEVER never imagine there is to it, as I did, like a prayer I can’t keep, so fuck it anyway! whatever you can dole out—I wish I could write about it but I can’t EVEN IF and I need you to understand when I
And there it ended, in midsentence. Not even a full stop at the end. Starting and ending on “I.”
The small man sat back. Considered who was waiting for him at Devil’s Spite Creek, a man who had valued his own life so cheaply, but yearned so strongly for this, was willing to risk dying for this. Fretful and stir-crazy, no doubt, waiting in a dismal room for this, desperate to discover who he really was—and maybe this was his true self, Thomas Rafferty at the core: absurd, drunken, disjointed, a figure more to pity than to ridicule. It’s the only honest thing I’ve ever written.
Some things are better left unfound.
Letter in hand, the small man walked out into the desert, found a hollow in the sand, lit the pages on fire, cradling the flames with his palms, watched them burn, curling inward like a wasp’s nest, flakes floating free, butterflying away. He then opened the pewter pendant, gathered some of the ashes, and walked back to his car. He had promised he would return the letter to the travel writer, and the small man always kept his promises. But he hadn’t said in what form he would return the letter. It was the kindest thing he had ever done.
CENTER MASS
“ALICE, IS IT?”
She still wasn’t used to how they referred to the town by its first name, as though it were a person rather than an outpost in the desert.
“Yes,” she sighed. “Alice Springs. The airport.”
Gaddy Rhodes had a flight to catch, but the wind was picking up, distressing the streets of Devil’s Spite Creek, raising spirals in the dust, swinging the signs on rusted hinge.
The taxi driver had come around to open the door for her, an incongruous act of chivalry, like a pickpocket tipping his hat to a passing lady.
“Won’t be any flights out today, I’m afraid,” he said, climbing in up front. He angled the mirror. “You with the uni?”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “If not the airport, my hotel then.” She gave him the name of the Travelers Inn in Alice. “On Khalick Street.” She would have to book another night, leave when the flights resumed. She’d have to get rid of the gun as well, maybe bury it in the sand. Gaddy felt hollow and alone, her defeat complete and unabashed, was only going through the motions now in a simulacrum of care.
The wind was beginning to shriek, driving a suffocation of dust before it, the way an army might, and the taxi crawled through it, headlights on and wipers flailing. They reached the highway and picked up speed as the world outside slowly disintegrated.
They passed the airport on their way into Alice Springs and in a gust between clouds of dust, she saw it: an aircraft tied down on the runway. A Learjet, streamlined and clean, its rear stabilizer curving up like a scorpion’s tail, ready to strike, tethered against the onslaught.
“You said there were no flights,” Gaddy yelled from the rear.
“Nothing came in. Nothing went out. Not t’die anyway. Thet’ll be a private plane. Grounded, too, from the looks of it.”
“But it’s on the runway.”
“Waitin’ on someone, I reckon.” He chuckled. “But TLT won’t be flyin’ today, can tell you that much.”
A jolt—and she was awake. “What did you say? Just now. What did you say?”
“I said, they won’t be—”
“The company. The name.”
“Thet? Oh, right. Should’a said ‘Aerojet.’ Changed their name a few years back. But I’m old enough t’remember. They were Tri-Lake Transport, before they became Aerojet. Operated out of Asia, I think. Maybe Indonesia? Who knows, not like I’m taking a private jet anytime soon, right?”
He looked in the mirror but she didn’t smile back. She was thinking of three-legged toads and all the various TLTs that had been scrubbed clean. But not forgotten.
He’s here. “Turn the car around.”
“Whet?”
“You heard me.”
They were going back to Devil’s Spite Creek. She would find Tom Rafferty, would shove the barrel of her Beretta down that fucker’s throat if she had to, pull the trigger if she must. She would make him talk. He’s here. I know it.
* * *
THE FAIRVIEW HOTEL WAS UNDER siege from every side. The windows were rattling in their panes, amid wails and whispers, creaks and moans and arthritic pops.
The dust storm that had pulled a curtain over the town had reduced the daylight to dusk, and they sat, as they had before, facing each other as another day slowly died.
Rafferty turned the locket over in his hand. A pewter heart, filled with ash.
The small man said, “She wore it close to her heart. The letter was burnt. Those are the ashes.” Not a word of a lie in any of those statements, and Rafferty never thought to ask when the letter was burned, or by whom.
“And Rebecca?” he asked. “How is she? Is she… Is she doing okay?”
“She was fine when I left her.”
“Did she understand why I was doing this?”
/> “Eventually.”
And now? Rafferty supposed he should have been devastated, or at least disappointed, at never getting the words he’d written returned to him, but he wasn’t. Not exactly. He felt empty, but free. Free of that letter, free from the smell of sliced apples, free of it all—and yet. In a strange way, he already missed it, the hold she’d had on him. It was like watching a balloon slip free. Tamsin. He needed Tamsin. Tamsin and her annoying laugh and loud gestures, her crude love. Probably in Syria, by now. Or Libya. Or Purgatory itself.
“There is still the matter of the medallion. I have kept my promise, Mr. Rafferty.”
“Right. The Saint Christopher’s medal—”
“Saint Anthony.”
“Right. The Patron Saint of Lost Things. It’s in the desk drawer, over there.” Wrapped in a cloth like a holy relic.
And so it was, they kept their bargain, each of them: an exchange of jewelry, as it were, neither of the pieces worth very much—the items or the men. A lost medallion for a heart-shaped locket filled with ash, and it struck Rafferty how damaged and incomplete the two of them were, clinging to objects of little value and lesser use.
The small man stood, straightened his jacket, which needed no straightening, tipped his head in farewell.
“Where will you go now?” Rafferty asked. Don’t leave. Stay. “I have some brandy if you’d like.”
Please stay. I’m lost and lonely and I don’t know where to go.
“Where? Back to the world, I suppose.” The small man looked at the darkness and dust flying by outside, the empty streets below. “I’ll wait this out, leave in the morning. I don’t imagine you will ever see me again.” Although a man like Rafferty might come in handy sometime. Rafferty didn’t realize it, but a pact had been made.
In the street below: a solitary lamp, swept with wind. A single figure, standing beneath it. Oddly familiar, but then—silhouettes always were. With that, the small man walked out into the storm, down the stairs and along the hallway, through the lobby and into a white noise of wind.
The Finder Page 31
