Lester sat down at a table full of vinyl records and posters of freak-shows.
“Did you know who he was, when you applied?” he said.
“There was no name.”
“And when you got there?”
“I guessed.”
“And people ignored you because you worked there?” he said.
“Yes, they did.”
“Because you were helping a Cassidy?”
“Yes.”
To Sophie the questions were like rainfall after a drought, the inflections nudging her skin, the word “you” more than once.
“I needed the money, Mr Hoops. They want to shut me out, they shut me out. What can I do?”
She lit a cigarette. Lester glanced over towards the drapes, then back.
“What about Jack?”
“I felt sorry for him. What else was there to feel? He was a dying man.”
“You didn’t know his story?”
“I needed the money. What concern did I have for the history?”
There was a murmur from behind the drapes, the hum of a song.
“He was divorced, I think. He had books. He was a salesman once upon a time. The land was family land. He never said too much.”
Lester laid his paws down flat on the table. “And what about John?”
Sophie paused. She squashed the butt in the ashtray, and whispered, “He put his step-father in hospital. Poisoned him until he snapped. His mother’s a drunk. He stole money from her. And Jack wouldn’t see him at first. He didn’t believe him. Hadn’t seen him for twenty years, didn’t recognise him. Plus, there were others. Another son, nephews, nieces, all came to the house, all claiming to be connected to Jack.”
He digested, licked his lips with his crusty tongue.
“So, twenty years,” he said, “then he turns up. There’s a man about to die, a sick man, a man with money and land and no-one to leave them to, and this long-lost drifter he doesn’t even believe to begin with comes along?”
“That’s about right.”
The humming stopped. Lester noticed, Sophie didn’t. She tied her hair up, shifted the vinyl sleeves like giant playing cards.
“And then he took him away,” she said, and leant back in the wooden chair. “He got him up one morning and then they were gone. No word, no nothing.”
“You didn’t know where?”
“He never said a thing.”
“And Jack never came back?”
“No, sir, he didn’t. I never saw him again.”
“And the burial?”
“No. Don’t even know where it took place.”
“Can I ask you something?” Lester said, clenching one of his paws, “Did he leave you anything?”
She shook her head.
“Nothing? No keepsakes, no mementos?”
“Not that I know of.”
“So, you look after the old man. You clean him up. You wash his clothes. You cook for him. You are, until this stray dog comes along and takes him away, his only carer. And there’s nothing?”
She shook her head again. He moved his paw closer to her tiny pink pads, looked at the bare skin at the back of her neck.
“Did he owe you anything?”
“Lee sorted it. He went to the house.”
“And?”
“John paid him what was owed. He gives some to me and keeps the rest. Then his car goes off the road.”
The eyebrows arch. “Continue, please.”
“He loses control, in broad daylight, on an open road. Ends up in a ditch. He’s a car mechanic, Mr Hoops. The steering was never faulty. Then there’s the fire.”
“He remembers nothing of?”
“Not a thing. Look at him.”
Lester turned, saw the body-shape against the drapes hung from a homemade rail. The hum started up again, got louder, hit a chorus. He saw her flinch when it stopped.
He stood, felt the tack of his soles on the floor. He got to the door, looked over at the grease of the cycle chains, at the boxes piled high. He walked out and got level with the angled nose and the boxgarden, the sound of Sophie’s dainty boots behind him. “We never leave,” she said, “Between us we’re here twenty-four-seven. We do alternative shifts. Meat factory and here. We don’t have health care, or insurance. We can’t take him anywhere, or do anything with him. We’re stuck, Mr Hoops.”
Lester saw her look down.
“We could help you out,” he said and took a good handful of notes from his billfold and held them in his hairy paw. He reached out, took her pink pad in his, opened out the fingers, put the money in, and closed them again.
“Here, take it. You’ve helped us.”
Sophie looked up at the frisky clouds, then over towards the flatlands. She made a single glance towards him, and took it, with a nod.
“Anything you can think of,” he said, “anything we can use. People’d speak to you again, if they knew. They’d help you, fix the roof, do something with the car. Anything that gets the stray dog off the land. Anything that puts a nail in his coffin. That’s what we’re looking at.”
The sound of a medium-sized dinner plate hitting a kitchen floor from approximately two and a half feet. Then another, and another, and a fourth. And, at the very point of each smash, the squeals of little-boy laughter, doubled. Doug was on the phone to John.
“Vincent wants me to play golf with him again. There’s a proposition,” he said, and walked the length of the hallway to see hands skittering over the marbleised kitchen surface like crabs, feeling for anything else that might break extravagantly. He saw them by-pass boxes and cartons, crawl quickly by anything wood or plastic and close in, even at that young age, unable to make a mark for their name or dress themselves, on the sugar bowl and cookie jar and the ceramic coffee pot laden with dregs.
“Something to do with new land. Viola! Help me out, here.”
He watched her appear in the doorway, looking, even though dusk had gathered, as if she had only just got out of bed, untouched by the healing powers of daylight. Her hair needed a wash. A horse blanket was draped around her shoulders. She had so little left, so little gas in the tank.
The carnage paused. Doug gestured towards the telephone in his hand as she shuffled into the room.
“He mentioned your name. He said he’d like me on board.
Something about the pins.”
He saw the two boys watching her, dawdling by the bowl, tapping fingers like cartoon cats. The bowl started to move, as if nudged by a colony of ants, towards the edge. Viola dropped like a sack to her haunches.
“I’m not a deserter, John.”
“Doug, listen.”
“I’m not a mercenary. I need you to know this.”
“Do you need the money?”
“We’re way into the savings.”
“And Viola? And the boys?”
“They start kindergarten in three months.”
“Then go and play the golf. Talk to him at least. See what he wants.”
Doug pointed with a wince towards the bowl. Too late. As if in slow-motion, granules jumping ship on the way down, and a mouse-like squeak into the folds of her skirt from Viola. Doug put the phone down on a brutalised kitchen table, picked up the two boys in both arms, their legs kicking against him, and set them down outside without saying a word. He walked to a cupboard, scored by crayons, took out a brush and pan, and handed them to Viola.
“Honey, let’s go,” he said, “one thing at a time. The door’s locked.”
Viola looked up at him and across at the shards and splinters, at the scattered sugar over the floor. He smiled as best he could, picked up the phone again.
“Are you selling the land? Is that what it is?”
“Who knows? Now, go and do yourself a favour. You need the money. And let me know, I’ll be in touch.”
John put the phone down. Outside across the Cassidy land, across the rough terrain and beyond to Rupture Hill and its lattice of crags, a sky of chain-mail grey and lob
ster shell, of streaked vermilion and bruise-blue. He walked over to the table, to the peach segments and spoon, to the rope and tape and thinner cord.
He could feel them getting closer, moving in towards him with every day that passed. He could sense them making those preparations. Vincent, practising his moves for the second meeting in the roadside bar, Lester, his sparring partner. Ted Mallender in his office. The town’s recruits and volunteers, on whom he could sniff out the righteousness a mile away.
He jockeyed the bowl of water down the cellar steps, lay it down on the floor and peeled away the old tape and bandages from Jake’s listless body. The eyes that looked back at him were fearful no more. The appearance of the shotgun never flinched him, nor the scissors and rope. There was no longer the anticipation of pain from the cuts and bruises being dealt with, with his body being shifted and untwisted. There was no fear of the dark, of wounds not healing, of gangrene, of rats and rat poison, of malnourishment or dehydration, of not enough protein, too much sickly brine, toothache, retinal damage, paralysis. No, for Jake, what was worse than any of those was the relentless biding of time. He was not cut out for incarceration, or confinement of any kind. He was not a survivor. He was not a man of mental or physical resources. If he had little to no concentration before John Cassidy picked him up and carried him back from the riverbank, then he had none after. Whenever John came in to pull back the tape from his mouth he had less and less to say. There was no pleading, no presentation of his case. There was no will to understand anymore. He was a shell, a casing only of bones slow to heal, of pastel bruising and scores that left pale, fossil-like marks. He stared out at some mid-distant point on the far wall, above the tins of food and paint, above the opened tin of rat poison. He gulped at the water John gave him, swilled it around the tenderness of his mouth and spat it down, some on the floor, some into the bowl, and some over John who took the tape from his hands, picked up the dampened cloth and mopped at the cheeks and brow, who wiped at the nape of the neck and round under the jawbone and throat. Sometimes he pulled out the sweatshirt and squeezed the cloth so that the water ran down over his chest and belly, so that whatever bruising was soothed and whatever openings rinsed. The body stayed slack and disinterested, the sinews and muscles unmoved.
“I don’t know what choice you think I have, Jake. You forget how easy you come into my house,” he said, untying the ligatures around his feet, “you forget how quick you were to rip open the chair my father sat in, to get your hands over things not yours to touch. You forget you stole from me. You forget you had no thought or respect for who I was because you don’t know or care who I am. I mean nothing to you. I am nothing to you,” he said, snipping the cord, fraying the thicker pieces with a knife. “To you I am only a name and a history. To you I am only cruel. I am reacting badly.”
He sponged the still-swollen feet, ran water over and in between the toes, the crusted soles and heels, the indigo slopes. He took a dry towel and ran it over grooved ankles and shins and calves weakened from lack of walking.
“But you forget, just like the others forget. You forget this simple thing; that if you don’t fuck up in the first place, if you don’t presume you can do things to people and not get something back in return, then we’re not where we are and I have no need to keep you here. It’s not difficult,” he said, wrapping clean tape back around his ankles and wrists and mouth, “it’s cause and effect. Oldest equation in the book.”
Vincent was the first to arrive. He sat in a window seat and waited in his pale-grey suit for John to step through the ropes. It was a temperate day, the dome of Blessings Point clear to the north and, as he waited, with a wheat beer in front of him, he began to align his body and the features of his face, to hide the disdain, the dislike, the dismissal he felt. He’d played people so many times in so many ways over the years. He’d told them what they wanted to hear, showed them what they wanted to see, but this time it was different, and when John walked in forty-five minutes late, in T-shirt, ripped jeans and sneakers, with no word of apology or explanation, sat down, picked out a point on the far side of the road close to the ditch’s edge and fixed it, he had to clench his jaw and look down at his beer before he smiled and spoke.
“If this is about family, I understand,” he said. “If it’s about you father, your flesh and blood, the attachment to, history of, I get it, you have my empathy. But listen,” he said, sat back, sipped at the beer, “these are different times, John. You would not be letting down the family name, you would be selling a piece of land. That’s it. Your father’s not here anymore. It’s about you. These are your choices. Do you know what carpe diem means?”
John nodded, once, still looking out.
“My father seized the day. In fact, he seized the day every day. And for that this company owes him a debt, for that he is still its beating heart. He is my attachment, my bloodline. My work is his work,” he said, looking towards the half-profile, the marine-cut temple, the bent snout, “but if he was here now, he’d tell me one thing. He’d say, ‘Vincent, it’s your life, do what’s best for you. The past is the past. It’s done with.’ And, if it’s about the money, I understand that, too, believe me. But if you want a good price, I’ll give you a good price. If you want a deal you can walk away from and not feel you should’ve got more, come to me. You need any contacts out east, let me know. You need a connection somewhere, tell me, I know people, I have favours to call in. Somewhere to stay, somewhere to work, tell them I sent you. You need to look after yourself, John. Make whatever peace you need to make and move on, make a fresh start. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Think of it as an opportunity.”
There was a moment’s pause while a Cadillac passed, sending up whorls of dust and dirt. A moment to look up and see the young man not even looking, not listening. A moment to feel the acid rise up in his throat.
“I don’t know what more to say to you. I have nothing else,” he said. “But I wonder why you care so little for what people think of you. Where you find the insouciance, the presumption, the arrogance. I wonder why people think of you as having no light.”
John looked at him for the first time. Not for long, and not studied, but enough to catch the shift. He watched the hay-stalks scoot across the road, the sidling by of a flatbed truck half-full of sliding boxes. His breathing was good, the forearms strong.
“Why you are no more than a gypster to people, why you are only speculation and rumour. You know it beats me why you stay,” he said. “You live out there in your grief-shack on the land your family stole, with your tinned food and your father’s beers, unspoken to, resented, despised. You don’t understand the force of your presence, Mr Cassidy. These are not rational people. They’re twistable, open to manipulation. Wind them up and point them in the right direction, boy, they’ll go. And I wonder why you would set fire to Lee Shaw’s house,” he said, leaning forward, a relish to his tone, “why you might poison your step-father, why your mother is no more than a drunk who never wanted you in the first place and from whom you stole money. And why your father wouldn’t let you in, didn’t recognise you, didn’t believe you were who you said you were. He thought you were an imposter, didn’t he, a charlatan after his land and his money, a trickster, a mountebank, an ass in a lion’s skin? Why did you take him away, John? Where did he die? Where did you bury him?”
John closed his eyes a few moments, took the combinations, felt a shudder in his facial bones. Vincent was a reach away then, an arm’s length only from the throat he could sense the gristle of, from the empty glass he could pick up and push into his face, feeling it break so that he could grind and twist the edges hard and deep into his skin and bone. And the more he’d try to wrestle himself loose, the more he would get torn at, ripped open and pulled until he was nothing but cut fruit, all sap and flesh and pulp.
He stood, an old jalopy about to pass, and looked at him. And then he leant in, hands arched on the table, his head moving to within inches of Vincent’s pinned face.
“Do you want the land or not?”
Vincent nodded.
“Say it.”
“I want the land.”
“Louder.”
“I want the land.”
“Say I am the fucker that wants the land.”
Vincent swallowed. John moved a notch closer. “Say it.”
“I am the fucker that wants the land.”
“I am the bastard that wants the land.”
“I am the bastard that wants the land.”
“Say I am the cunt that wants the land.”
The crooked snout pushed into Vincent’s cheek.
“Say it.”
“I am the cunt that wants the land.”
John pulled away. From the other side of the room the jukebox kicked in. The jalopy passed, sending straw out across the land.
It was only natural in a place like Mission, with its demeanour of moral rectitude, as Abe Masterson called it, that the news on the unpardonable word would spread faster than a bush-fire in a heatwave. The context was meaningless. The use of the word enough to make people feel violated. The womenfolk, especially, even those who knew what their husbands had done to Jake Massey, felt defiled, and Sylvie Buckle’s, in the days after its utterance, was not a place to casually blow-dry around the latest gossip but instead was one of whispers and asides. No-one could mention the word. No single, coned woman, pretending to leaf through a magazine for fashion tips or otherwise, could possibly repeat what the diabolic Cassidy beast had said to poor Vincent.
It was similar in Ike’s, but less whispered. Amongst the younger men who went in there once a month there were equal measures of disgust, disbelief and a seething desire to get out there and do something. The older ones remembered. They went back, shackled themselves like captives to the decency of the place, to its history, to its land and to the wistful contents of Abe Masterson volumes. They went back to its upright nature, to those values and ways that existed before a stranger could walk into town and use such a word.
Mission Page 19
