“Say it again.”
“Yes, I did.”
“What did you do?”
“I fucked it up.”
Ted looked down at the floor, his rheumy eyes imagining Lily in the red organza dress, in Wyoming. The boy tilted the barrel of the gun upwards in his direction. And the men blinked out. They wanted, dimly, to call it a day. They wanted the save of the bell.
The town was quiet. The townsfolk, Vincent figured, had wrung out those last drops of woefulness and self-pity and hunkered down in their nests for the night. He left the rented car in a side-street by the neighbourhood blocks. Outside the hotel was too dangerous. He sat a few moments, took in the dumpsters, the trash and the few stray dogs, and then went, scuttling his way street to street, crab-like, until he got to the covered arcade across from the hotel. He waited, gathered himself. A car passed by, heading slowly down to the rail-tracks. Inside were four men.
When it was still again, he scurried over and stood in the doorway. He watched the night-clerk with the deadpan look, waited for him to get wrapped up in his puzzle again, and then crossed the pale-honey glow of the foyer to get to the stairs. He listened out, pausing at every turn, taking the corridors soft and shoeless. He stopped Outside the room, took the handle in the slithery grip of his palm and opened it in notches. There was a faint smell of soil and night air coming from somewhere. The drapes were open, the windows shut. He checked around him; surfaces, wardrobes, drawers, bathroom shelves and cabinets, the same in Lester’s room.
He moved quickly. He pulled to the drapes, picked up the empty valise and placed it open on the bed and with scant concern for the forethought that had run his life, he packed away his belongings and anything left behind in the adjoining room. He took what was left in the mini-bar, the toiletries, the photograph of Madeline, and within five minutes, he was ready. What he didn’t notice in his haste to get out was this; that the valise had been moved away from the wardrobe and closer to the bed and that the lining of his pale-grey suit had been slit like a scar the length of a mannequin’s hand.
He stood a moment in the middle of the room, his mouth dry, his feet still shoeless. And then he went, tip-toeing the corridors. If he heard anything, he darted back, held himself taut and still, his eyes invariably closed. Somehow, back and forth, he got to the last turn of the stair next to the foyer. He looked over towards the desk clerk, who glanced up and laid his puzzle to one side as the lights of the same passing car slowed up again and stopped by the doorway. Two of its doors opened, and then slammed shut.
He turned and ran back up the stairs, up and up, second, third and fourth storeys until he came to the fire-escape door. He pushed it open, looked down at the rusty zigzag of the metal. Below him were the line of dumpsters and the half-lit windows of the kitchens. He’d had little to eat or drink all day. He felt dizzied, like a spun top on its last reels. He could see over the prairies, over the felt of the charcoaled land where the rail-tracks bent east. He closed the door behind him, stood on the metal prow. A few sudden claps of wind rattled the frames and sent up the trash-scents from below; the thrown, spiky foods, the rancid dregs and spillages. He imagined he could hear the squeal of sizeable rats somewhere, the scratching and scraping of dogs. He went down slowly, the tan leather shoes in one hand, the valise aloft in the other.
When he got halfway, something moved in one of the dumpsters and, in spite of being a leanish man with a teenage past on the sports field, he started to lose his balance. The shoes went first, spinning out of his grip, over the rail and into the mulch of the neighbouring dumpster. The valise was not far behind and, by the time that something moved again, and louder, and quicker, he was bouncing like a pinball rail to rail until he landed at the foot of the steps, crawled between the dumpsters and scrunched to a near-ball, head down and every spike drawn in.
The valise, meantime, was upright. It had proved its considerable expense by being solid on landing. The downside, though, was that two four-legged animals, not quite close enough to dogs to be a hundred per cent sure, were sniffing at it like it was a carcass they could feed on. One of them pawed at it until it lolled onto its side, and the other, sensing it suddenly docile, started to bite into it, to tear at its hide so that its head raged from side to side until two things happened to make it stop: One, the fire-escape door opened and two men he recognised as diggers and yea-sayers, appeared in the dim, borrowed light, and two, the kitchen door boomed wide and a bucketful of slops was hurled in the direction of the dumpsters, some of which landed, but most of which showered over his foetal frame.
The kitchen door closed loudly. So too the fire-escape, the men gone. The two four-legged beasts left the mauled valise and ran. He waited a few minutes, and then stickily began to unfurl himself, this man of business, this man who, like his father before him, never spoke of failure. He went on hands and knees through the tack and slime, picked up his valise and, smelling of a goulash of wet vegetable skins, stood and walked away. From somewhere, out beyond the town, beyond the churn of the burial grounds, came the sound of a shotgun.
No-one asked her how she knew about Madeline. No-one asked her anything about how she’d watched her for weeks, or how she’d broken into her apartment one night and found enough to know that she was not who she or Vincent Clay said she was.
She folded up the mermaid dress and laid it flat on the belly of the case. She left some of her shoes, some of her objects and belongings. For Delilah Morris, there was no nostalgia, no ache of fondness for what she might be leaving behind. For Delilah, her memories were only ever those of an outsider, an orphan, a fish forever out of water. And, if that made her elusive and remote in others’ eyes, if it made her prissy and cold, then so be it.
It wasn’t to escape that she was going. It wasn’t to get out of the town that’d shunned her most of her life. And it wasn’t for love that she was taking the train out the next morning in her own winter coat and boots. It wasn’t to follow the illusion of a better life somewhere else, nor to relinquish who she was to become someone else. She expected no jangled bells wherever they might go, no glow of light nor better air to breathe. She was not Lily Mallender, nor Rita, nor any of those women in the town who asked so little of life that they were granted only its scraps. No, it was to be with John Cassidy, the scoundrel, the peasant, the thief, who spoke to her very little, who, even on his return to the town, told her next to nothing as to why he was there, who would never once come home with a spray of flowers, but who, whenever he was with her, understood her like nobody else ever had. And for Delilah Morris that was enough.
She watched him at the small kitchen table, the crooked nose, the hands that twisted hatpins. She watched him as she pressed the clothes down into the case, the closing of the eyes, the tapping of the frontal lobe. She liked to lay her hands on his scalp as he slept, to hold onto the shape of his skull so that she could sense the thrum of his thoughts, the routes that no-one else in the world knew of. She liked to groove her thumbs into his shoulders, to prop his rib cage from behind to stop him falling. She liked it when he washed her feet, when he moulded the cream into the scars on her back, when he snipped her nails with scissors.
When she was done and the case was clasped shut, when the midnight bells struck across the town, he stood up from the table and put on his peacoat that shook with watch-chains and pins.
“I have to go out,” he said. “I’ll be a couple of hours.” And with that he rested the tips of his fingers on her cheekbones, and she nodded.
“They’re calling me a liar, Lester. That fucking clotheshorse walks in and tells me that. That leech, that pampered sponge stands there and tells me that’s what those hicks are calling me. A liar, a cheat, and a trickster. Amongst others. Not a man of business anymore, not an investor, not the taker of risks or the man who gave them their hope in the first place. People have short memories, Lester. Yes, they do.”
Vincent pulled another chunk of peel off himself and cast it onto the floor with the others. He sat next to the
bed on a plastic sheet twice the size of the reclining chair it covered, and that squeaked out like a toy dog every time he moved.
“And show me anyone who hasn’t fabricated something,” he said. “Show me anyone who’s never stolen anything, or told a lie of any kind. Show me anyone who’s never cut a corner once in a while, who’s never cooked the books, who doesn’t always manage the figures, who’d rather give than take, who has a moral compass pointing north the whole time. Show me an accountant, a realtor, a finance man, show me any man of business anywhere who conducts his affairs one hundred per cent above board, for whom those things are not part of his modus fucking operandi, and I’ll show you a failure and a liar. Hillbillies and hicks. That’s what they are,” he said, “and I’m running from these people, Lester. I’m standing in the hotel room, which has been sneaked into by the way, and I’m checking every car that goes past. I’m going through the hotel in my socks. And the desk clerk, can you believe this, the one with the deadpan look who, for fourteen whole months has his slack head inside of his puzzle book, chooses right then to lay it to one side and do his fucking job. I’m climbing down a fire-escape. I’m hiding between dumpsters while animals are ravaging my valise, and I’m getting covered in shit.”
Lester twitched. He was part-upright, part-slumped, the drooped side of his face turned, the eye neither blinking nor closed. His forehead glistened with sweat, his hair was plastered down across his scalp in pale-gold strands and the cuticle neck of his pale-green gown had slipped down to his monitored sternum where a small, circular sticking-plaster rested like a third, erroneous nipple.
“I’m reduced to this, Lester. And there isn’t a single silver lining anywhere. Nothing. There’s no gold lying around. We are all but bust. The only money we can get to, and not yet, is the pittance from the ruined land. Ted won’t help us out. And I have no fucking shoes.”
Lester coughed. His lime-green heartbeat jumped a moment on the screen. His blood pressure rose in figures, and then fell again. One of the pillows behind him slipped so that his head dropped and leant out and a line of stringy saliva oozed from his slackened mouth. Vincent didn’t notice.
“And I am something I have never been before. I am a beaten man, a fooled man. I am that thing that my father could never say. I am Rocky Marciano until right now, undefeated, afraid of no-one. What did he say? There will always be fall-out. If there’s no fall-out you haven’t done it right. And there will always be casualties. The world is full of them. They’re everywhere, Lester. That’s what makes it work. That’s the whole reason why it works. Because the world is full of people dumb enough to fall for something. That’s it. The world is full of people you can sell anything to, people you can step over easily, who don’t string one thought to the next and don’t know what you’re doing to them even while you’re doing it. People are clay, Lester. People are dough. There’s no such thing as a fair fight. And then this,” he said, his hair streaked with brine and sap, like he’d washed it in the juice of apricots, “Who is this? Who is it that’s done this to me?” He paused. The sound of a buzzer somewhere. “You know, I asked myself the same thing over and over again. I tried to understand it. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see where the gain was. I couldn’t see what the point of the whole elaborate thing was if there was no gain anywhere. But now I know. The gain, Lester, is my failure, and my humiliation and pain. That’s it. The gain is Vincent Clay as a beaten man, creeping through the streets of the town, despised, thought of as a trickster. The gain is Vincent Clay all but bust, covered in shit on a plastic sheet. That’s what the gain is.”
Lester flickered, his good arm flexed, the fingers moving in baby-shakes.
“So, I ask myself, who would want to do this to me? All the planning. All the extent of everything: The letters, the maps, the reassurances, the guidelines. To take us to that town, at that time, to make us do all those things that we did, to buy up the land, to get rid of the mill. All the fucking hearts and minds, Lester, week after week, month after month. All the not saying boo to those fuckwits. Who would do such a thing?”
Vincent closed his eyes. He slumped back, his arms out wide over the chair. A slice of peel stuck to the back of his neck like a leech, and his feet dangled out beyond the edge of the chair, damp and ripe.
He fell asleep, greatly troubled, in the heat and the quiet of the hospital side-room with Lester right beside him, his reliable man, part of a network of wires and tubes, staining his pillow with drool.
Everything was clear. As clouds as puffed as gunsmoke rolled over the prairies from the flatlands further east and, as the sunlight fell upon the town of Serpentine and the hospital to its north, set in grounds of poplar and pine and with driveways split by buzz-cut lawns, as it strained at the sand-coloured blinds of those rooms that ran the length of its second-floor, Vincent was in the bathroom, trying his damnedest to give himself a clean-up. And, as he twisted to get the juice from his scalp and bent to wash away the tack of the peel and lose that godforsaken stench by lavishing himself in a host of powders and sprays, so John Cassidy sat at the kitchen table, lacing up his winter boots.
And just as he drank his black, sweetened coffee and ate his apricot crescents by hand from the tin, as Delilah walked the half-empty spaces of her apartment for the last time and, despite the spring sunlight, draped the winter coat around her shoulders, so Vincent kicked his stinking clothes into a pile on the floor, dressed in his pale-grey suit and his shirt the colour of spruce and stood barefoot in the room, swathed in his incongruous scents. He looked down at Lester, studied the modest palsy of his face, and followed the routes of the wires and tubes to measured bags and machines. And, as he did so, as he sifted again through his clothes, he realised, with a spasm of his own heart, that he had neither shoes nor money, that, at some point, his billfold must’ve jumped ship.
He glanced at Lester, and then at the bedside table. He saw the right eye still unclosed and the mouth a pale-plum sag, and he looked at his billfold and shoes. Lester had small feet. The shoes were a good size too tight but he had no choice other than to squeeze his feet inside. He took out the notes from the billfold and picked up his valise. He took a last look at Lester, walked out of the hospital, left the rented car on the parking lot and headed down the driveway towards Serpentine station.
And, as he did so, John and Delilah closed the door on the apartment and went out into the sunlight and a town broken up; not only by all those hopes ground down to nothing, not just the pillaged land, or the transcendent deceit, or the skewered guts of every one of its people, including Ted Mallender, who stared at the blasted portrait of his headless ancestor and the hole in the wall behind him, but by the return of the beetle runs and the juju chains hung in doorways, by the assortments of stones, and by every beast in every herd of every field being so transfixed they couldn’t move an inch.
As the two of them stood on the stone platform riddled with bugs and waited for the train to come up from the south, Vincent was twenty miles further on, in a waiting room the size of a prison cell, with Lester’s shoes resting by his already bloodied feet. He closed his eyes. He was hungry and tired. Lester’s money was enough to take him so far east and no further. He’d slept fitfully on the plastic sheet for no more than an hour and barely had any sense left in him. And what remained was shot through with one thing only: who the fuck would do such a thing?
The train was on time. Small crowds gathered in Mission, some to stand in loose, silent circles and look down at the stones and bugs, some to gaze at the static cattle, and some to go down to the woods by the rail-track and watch, slack and dumbstruck, as John Cassidy and Delilah Morris walked along the platform towards the very last carriage, and climbed in. None of them spoke. None of them could muster any words to explain how the young man with the crooked snout and the devil’s ear had come into their town and spent his months out on the Cassidy land, how he’d lived the way he lived. They couldn’t figure him. But then, none of them knew.
>
When it got to Serpentine, Vincent stood up. In spite of the businessman’s suit and the shirt of a middle-aged golfer, he looked bedraggled and out of whack. His hair was half-wet, half-dry, his eyes bloodshot, and every time he put one foot in front of the other he squealed out like a piglet. He headed for the emptiest carriage he could find, laid the valise up on the rack and, as the train pulled out, sat facing east, staring out at the stretches of prairie land like a man who was running on empty, whose swagger had gone, and whose congruence and ease had been shredded into irreparable bits.
He peeled off the shoes and looked down at the blistered toes that smarted every time he moved. He took off the jacket and folded it down on the seat beside him, brushing away the last few remnants of dog-spit and only then noticing the slit in the navy lining, how clean and straight it was and how inside of it was a piece of paper, once-folded. He took it out and opened it, placed it down flat on the table in front of him. It was a letter; single-sided, type-written, double-spaced in plain sans serif font, addressed to no-one person in particular.
It was a letter that, on that bright, spring morning with the sunlight and the gunsmoke clouds, with the prairies and the blaze of rapeseed and corn, was found by a number of people; Dr Abraham Stone, for one, who came across it in the desk drawer of his office where the cheques used to pile up, Lee Shaw, for another, who saw it stuck onto a white supremacist poster right above his head. It was found in Steve’s, pinned to one of the corner tables by a steak knife, on the counter in Harry’s, weighed down by an opened bottle of whisky and a drunk-from glass. It was in Ike’s and Sylvie’s and old Mr Parker’s, in the neighbourhood apartment of the gunshot man and his gunshot son, twisted like a corkscrew into the barrels of both. It was, somehow, found amongst the medications and creams of Ted Mallender’s bathroom cabinet, and, strangest of all, it was in the bedside drawer next to where Lester Hoops lay half-propped in pulses and flickers. Nobody knew how they’d got there. But no matter where they were, how they got there and who found them, they all said the same thing:
Mission Page 26
