“About his plans?”
“He said he didn’t exactly have any.”
“And the land?”
“The dry land?”
“No, his land.”
“He didn’t know, but he was thinking about an offer from the Land Management Agency. Yes, he was thinking of selling the land.”
“He said that?”
“He mentioned your name, said you’d given him a card,” Jake said and inhaled from a cigarette at the window. “And he wanted something else,” he said, “Something you could help him with.”
“What?”
“He didn’t say.”
Ted got the smell of cinder blocks and sawdust. He walked over towards the window, gave Jake another pack of cigarettes and patted him twice on the shoulder.
“You did a good job.”
“You want anything else, you just let me know.”
“I will,” he said, opening the apartment door, sniffing, heading for the stairway.
“Hey,” Jake shouted, “do you know Delilah Morris?”
Ted drove away from the apartment building smelling of nicotine. Over to the north the ridges and crests of Rupture Hill were caught in a glare-less sunlight. Children played in the neighbourhood streets. Cars got washed, polished and waxed. Middle-aged men in pastel shirts mowed short, square lawns and the scent of grass wafted up into the birdsong of blossomed trees. And, as he skirted the town, past the railway station and on towards the burial grounds, he figured this much; that maybe, after more than a century, after the laying down of the ragged thief’s threes and kings had bent every generation of Missionites out of shape, the issue of the Cassidy land may not be an issue for much longer.
Most mornings he had black coffee and peaches in syrup. Then he exercised, usually bare-backed so that with every sit-up both ‘Restless’ and ‘Fearless’ would ripple like indigo waves. He showered and, every third day, he shaved, using the same china-handled razor his father had. Sometimes he busied himself: He moved the single bed towards the window. He took down the netted drapes, felt them crackle in his hands. He opened all the windows to let out the fetid air, cleared all the seed packs from the veranda, and, with polish Sophie had left behind, he shined up the gargoyles.
Sometimes he did magic tricks. He wore the black suit and the white, cotton shirt, put on the gloves and, in front of the equally polished mirror of the wardrobe that remained, he remembered what Mario had done to disappear the buttons, coins and hatpins, to set free the watches and chains.
Most days, though, interrupted only by sustenance food and a bottle of his father’s beer, he read: Sometimes in the armchair, sometimes leaning against the back wall overlooking the land, but more often at the kitchen table he kept clean and dry so he could lay those books down and not have them smeared in brine or prune juice or sausage meat smoked in a cannery.
It was a self-styled education, a free-form curriculum. One day he might follow a pattern or a theme. The next he might take out the blindfold and randomly choose a volume, whether it was muscles, museums or mushrooms, parliaments, parrots or particles. Or, he might move from one thing to the next, weaving those zany diametrics with the barest of threads. And, there were those things he kept going back to, over and over again; the evolution of card games, the great, unsolved disappearances, gambling scams, legal studies and precedents, poisons, examples of epistolary, of boxing, of Zen archery, of trance, of the source of the leather shoe and the cotton shirt, the myriad examples of chess sets, of opening gambits and permutations and the multitudinous ways to skin a bob-cat.
When he was done with the encyclopaedias, he put them back into the room with the single bed and turned his attention to the local histories. This was generally chronological. There was no reason why John should rope-swing from one historical event to the next in a scattergun manner. History was cause and effect. In history, one thing led to another.
The material was manifold. Some could be found in the encyclopaedias. The geographic region, for one, the Gold Rush, for another. There was information under Lewis and Clark and the aluminium industry. There were footnotes in the Modoc wars, appendices in wheat, pioneers and Godliness. Some was in smaller volumes by local writers who might attempt the historic panoply of the place but who generally focussed on more specific events; the migration west, the ‘Christianising’ of the native tribes, the land purchases and, of course, the gold.
They might, as they inevitably had to, mention young Nathaniel Hansetter who, in the gloaming of the nineteenth century, while contemplating a proposal of marriage to his childhood sweetheart, Rosa Carter, discovered what he thought was a sure-fire sign of his direction-to-be, a ring, embedded in the ground near Coronation Point. Except, it wasn’t a ring, it was what the ring was made of. They might tell of how, instead of heading straight for Rosa’s house, knocking on her door and going down on bended knee, he got side-tracked. He had visions, golden visions of voluminous wealth that took him away from the town that very day, beyond the foothills and over the higher land to look for a buyer to make him rich. They might say that the fate of Mission was sealed then because, being a simple, dunderheaded soul who’d never left the town from the day he’d been born, he was never going to understand the guile and easy deceit that lay in spades beyond those hills. They might relate how, the day after he returned with his handful of potential ‘buyers’, as well as ‘surveyors’, ‘mining engineers’, weighers armed with scales and a whole posse of hardy, grim-faced prospectors disguised as trappers and traders, he was found dead in a ravine at the bottom of Rupture Hill, and the flood gates opened.
They came mainly from the south and the east. On horseback, in wagons, on foot. Some came by sea and then made that arduous journey inland, and after they’d travelled those weeks and miles, they wanted something substantial at the end of it. They were men of blunter demands who had less need for scriptural guidance and who shunned the parables and commandments for whorehouses, bars and places that sold equipment that could last the bad weather.
The look of the place changed. No longer prim and clean, it began to bear all the hallmarks of a large-sized shanty town; detritus and waste, worn thoroughfares, the sudden rise in transitory accommodation, the arrival of the railroad, the extension, much needed, of the jailhouse, the place humming to the scent of the mass unwashed. In the midst of so many changes a good proportion of the previous inhabitants left, taking their families with them across the prairie lands in wagons piled high. Some stayed. Some saw it as their duty to convert the panhandlers. And there were others who saw the whole thing not as an invasion or a collapse, but as an opportunity, to gain dividend and position. Hence, Archer’s chandlery, Parker’s general store, Smithson’s loan company, Jess’ board and lodgings.
So, they might lay the blame at the feet of young Nathaniel. They might suggest it was his stupidity that changed the town for good. They might imply that even though those treasure-hunters didn’t stay for very long or even find an abundance of treasure, their legacy, apart from a few stray bastards and a greater urban sprawl, was a culture where profiteering on any scale became second nature, and goodness and kindness and looking out for others got left behind.
Other reading material came in newspaper articles, letters, a few barely decipherable maps and a small collection of black-and-white and sepia photographs, all gathered together in various conditions from pristine to ragged in a box found in the dusty belly of the wardrobe, marked ‘Dinner shirts/White’.
There might be a discussion of the building of the timber mill, something about the migrant housing settlement, the refurbishment of the Station Hotel, the burial grounds. There might be a feature on the redistribution of land beyond the river, which happened to coincide with the creation and the establishment of the Land Management Agency through which every application needed to pass.
The Mallender family made several appearances, as early land-owners and mayoral candidates and in various photographs of the family estate. So, too, d
id Patrick Cassidy. Mentioned in volumes spanning the turn of the century and once in Eke Masterson’s The People of Mission, he also made a number of the photographs in Jack’s shirt box: With John’s grandfather, as a boy, on a Jeepster, the sun in his eyes. With him a few years later on the edge of a sports field and then in uniform, weeks before Utah beach.
He imagined it, the buildings and streets and landmarks of the town. He imagined its history and its geography, and he didn’t need to stand on any particular vantage point to see how important the land was. Nor did he need to spend any time in the clearing of Coronation Point to figure how much of a part the gold had played. He didn’t need to walk into every civic building in town to feel the hold that greed and manipulation had. No, most clear days, when he stood in that homestead doorway just as his father and his great-grandfather had before him and looked back towards the town, he could sense the righteousness skewed and bent out of shape and the godliness that was both scabbard and shield. And the gambits started to move, and make shapes.
Two weeks later Jake made his way across the Cassidy land again. He was there, on Ted’s request, to see if there were any developments, if that something else that John wanted was imminent. He brought foodstuffs this time, perishables, dairy and fruit that had sap. He sat in the old armchair, squinting, trying his damnedest to listen, to play it hush-hush, to figure whether he was being Jake or Ted’s boy out on his mission. He lit cigarettes, looked down at the shovels and saws, at the seeds in the grooves of the porch-way steps. It was difficult. It dazzled him as he sat there in the afternoon sunlight.
“I’d like you to meet Delilah,” he said. “I’d like to bring her here and see what you think. We could bring Chinese. I could ask Rita.”
“Maybe we could,” John said.
There was a pause. Jake swilled the dregs of the coffee. “So…” he said, “was there something else you wanted?”
“I need surveys and maps,” John said quickly, “All the land this side of Coronation Point, including the rough terrain, all the way over to Rupture Hill. Detailed. You think you could do that for me? You think you could get those? And then we’ll think about the Chinese.”
“I could try,” Jake said, and followed John back into the house. He was confused. Was he working for both sides now? Was he a double agent?
The Land Management Agency was situated on the third storey of a sandstone building just across from the Police department. Apart from the Italianate cornicing, the walnut angels on the staircase and the commissioned oil portrait of Edward Mallender, senior, astride a chestnut stallion, there was little fanciful about it.
A couple of middle-aged men in suits wrote in ledgers, and Doug Sketchings, father of two two-year-old insomniacs with short fuses, stared down at a chart like he was trying to hypnotise it.
Ted looked out of the window with his back to Jake.
“So, he wants surveys and maps, does he? Did he say what for?”
“Just he wanted them.”
“But not why?”
“No, sir.”
“He didn’t expand?”
“No.”
“Maybe he’s figuring how much land there is to sell. Maybe he’s working it all out.” He said and turned. “Why aren’t you at work?”
“I got suspended,” Jake said.
“What for?”
“Lateness.”
Ted popped an antacid into his mouth and piled another couple of assumptions about Jake Massey onto the spike.
“We need something,” he said. “I don’t care what it is. Something that lets us in, something that tells us what he’s up to. Does he have a weak spot?”
“Sir?”
“I want you to find me his weak spot. Sometimes it’s easy to see, sometimes it’s not. You see Doug over there? You know what Doug’s weak spot is?”
Jake shook his head.
“Look at the eyes. Most of the time they’re heavy, and when they’re not heavy they’re bloodshot. Look at the collar of his jacket. Look at his pants. Stand up, Doug, show the kid your pants.”
Doug did so, slowly.
“You see what his weak spot is now?”
Jake was drawn to the maps on the wall and the host of coloured pins.
“It’s his domestic situation. He’s got two kids that won’t sleep and a wife who zones out all day. He’s got food stains on the collar where he holds onto the kids and his pants look like they’ve been ironed by a retard. You want Doug to do something, you don’t ask him first thing because he’s exhausted and you don’t ask him last thing because he’s already dreading going back to his situation. So, you give him a coffee and you ask him around midday and then he might do a half-decent job. It’s called psychology, Jake.”
Doug sat down again. It was three-thirty in the afternoon. Ted sat at his desk upon which stood a framed photograph of him and Lily at a property convention in Oklahoma.
“He’s not here because he wants to be, is he? Neither he nor his sick father were here through choice. He wants the surveys and the maps for a reason. He’s making moves, and I want you to find out what they are, Jake. Can you do that?”
“I think so, sir.”
“We’re smoking him out. We’re getting closer.”
He dusted the photograph with the sleeve of his jacket and stood.
“You see, that land out there belongs to my family,” he said, “and I have a duty to get it back. I owe it to all those good people from whom it was stolen. We can do things with that land, Jake. It changes the town. It makes it a better place and what we don’t need are any more of those Cassidys to sit on it for another hundred years and rub our goddamned noses in it. You see what I’m saying? If he wants the surveys, we can give him the surveys. If he wants the maps, he can have them. But we need something back, Jake. What do you say?”
Jake turned to face him, to see the flushing of his cheeks and the eyes that pierced and then settled.
“What are the red pins for?” he said, pointing.
And, because the surveys arrived, rolled in cardboard tubes, marked The Property of Mission LMA and with Ted’s official seal of approval, the Chinese meal took place, in the Cassidy homestead, on 9th August, John’s twenty-fifth birthday.
To begin with, it was stilted, notwithstanding Jake’s fanfared entrance of waving the tubes above his head as if he’d stolen them from Fort Knox. Rita and Delilah had never met John before, even though, like everyone else in Mission, they knew the name and every connotation of depravity that came with it. What they also knew, because he’d told them so many times, was that Jake was knee-deep in a clandestine mission with more secrets than a CIA filing cabinet.
The meal itself passed off quietly. They sat at the table with the food in front of them. Delilah found a thick beeswax candle under the sink, placed it in the centre and lit it so that their faces took on fitful glows as they sat. John, for his part, was courteous. He’d sat down with Mario enough times to know how to mime the manners he needed and even though, with each course, his crooked nose burst into spasms of sniffing, it looked more like the actions of a trained chef than those of a small forest animal. He managed a couple of conversational fillers, like the abridged history of the bean sprout or why Occidentals are better at mathematics than westerners, but generally he left it to Jake and his Kung Fu films and Rita and her high-pitched enquiries as to the names of the dishes and how to pronounce them.
As the plates and containers were taken away and Jake opened up his beers and whisky, it was always likely the shackles would start to loosen. It got noisier, for one thing. Rita found some of Jack’s records and put them on so that the howls of the Coyotes started to quicken and the squawks of other creatures got louder across the land, so that more than once one of the Anderson lights went on and more than once the door would open and the crucifix would swing in the slice of light.
Rita got lascivious, as she always did. She wanted to see John’s books, his pictures and papers. She wanted to see the value of his
land in actual figures. She wanted to, and did, rifle through the shoe and shirt boxes in his room, most of which did not contain shoes or shirts. No matter, she shuffled through them anyway, her face veiled in cigarette smoke. And, when she was done, she threw them back.
Then, with insistent Jake right next to her, she wanted John to put on the black suit and the white shirt and the long ladies’ gloves and do some of his tricks. John had little choice. To Rita’s yelps and with hands as though in bird-flight, he made coins disappear and re-appear. He produced flowers, keys and lockets, tied hatpins in chains, all without moving a muscle on his face.
Then she wanted to, and did, put the suit on. She wanted the blindfold and the thin white gloves and to dance with John who stood white-shirted and barelegged as she moved towards him and who, with the slightest movement of the head only, refused. So, she danced with Jake instead, and when Jake let her go, she fell. She sent coins rolling from the jacket across the floor and as she slumped into the table, the candle rocked and the blindfold slipped. Within five minutes, she was asleep like a deadweight, her hand up around her face, the cherry-red nails so carefully stroked by Sylvie Buckle that very afternoon, chipped and cracked, and a snore like a flap of folded paper stuck in the spokes of a wheel.
Jake staggered out onto the veranda. He lit his cigarette and started to rant about the timber mill and how the company wanted it closed down, about Dan Cruck, the smug-fuck, and the unfairness, the harshness, the pettiness of being suspended like a school kid for lateness and for stinking of alcohol next to a whirring saw. He got raucous, and at the peak of one of his rants, he kicked out and into the gut of Jack’s armchair, puncturing it with his heel. The material ripped and flapped open. Bare springs popped and stuffing the colour of earwax oozed out. He said nothing, sat on the chair, dragged on his cigarette, and closed his eyes.
John watched him from the doorway. He felt the ululations of night wind on his face, looked down at Jake slumped into the give of where his father used to sit and look out over the land, across to Coronation Point and the town beyond the wooded rises where the people despised him, getting paler with each day that passed, more wasted and wizened, the sags of skin of his upper arms dangling around the joints, the drawn cheekbones, the sallowing skull, the near-liquid breath in the bones of his chest. He walked over towards him, took off his shoes and socks and removed the lit cigarette from between his fingers. He sniffed, the ears moving indiscernibly.
Mission Page 8
