The New City

by Stephen Amidon

  Susan took a deep breath. She wanted more than anything to fight her mother on this. But it had already gone too far. One more word and she’d lose her temper. And if she did then Irma would see what she was planning. Just play along, she told herself. In a few days you’ll be back with him. And then you will surprise them all.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said with a shrug.

  It worked. That raised eyebrow on Irma’s forehead dropped.

  “Yes. I am.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, Susan taking solace by picturing the moment when she and Joel would be able to see each other again. Although she hadn’t been able to talk to him since Saturday, she was sure he knew exactly what they were going to do. They’d talked about it enough. They’d be at April’s a few hours after they saw each other. As soon as the bus got them there. Then they’d get money, maybe even some wheels. By the time Irma thought to send her father after her they’d be long gone. So far that not even he would be able to find them. They’d never have to see this stupid city again.

  She looked up to see her mother staring expectantly at her.

  “So you think Teddy’s cute, then?” Susan asked.

  “Of course he is. Okay, there might be things about him that are not quite so … splendid at first. But he is very interested in you, my dear. Do not lose sight of that.”

  Susan stood. She walked around the table and kissed her mother’s soft cheek.

  “No,” she said. “I won’t. I understand about the future, Mom. I really do.”

  “That’s my good girl.”

  Something sharp adhered to Susan’s bare foot as she started to go. She reached down to pluck it out. It was one of those little plastic soldiers from the game. Luckily, it hadn’t broken the flesh.

  Susan handed it to her mother.

  “Ah,” Irma said, examining the piece closely, as if it had some hidden quality she was only now recognizing. “There’s always one that is left behind.”

  21

  Truax saw the words when he went to retrieve the thermos. He’d inadvertently knocked it over while stretching, sending it bumping across the treehouse floor’s minor warps until it settled in a dark corner. That was where the writing was, scratched low on the plywood wall, behind a scrim of dead web. A damp stain had obliterated most of the sentence, leaving only its first and last words. Joels. dick. When Truax first saw them a pulse of fear ran through him. They knew he was out here. They’d come while he was away and done this to let him know. But he immediately realized that was absurd. This was written years ago. He was tempted to get his K-bar from the Cutlass’s trunk and scrape away the remaining two words. But he decided to leave them be. As a reminder. To keep him sharp.

  He checked his watch. After seven. It would be getting dark soon. The house remained quiet. It had been several hours since there had been any human movement behind its big windows. The only activity was the slow progress of shadows across the walls and the cat’s languid relocations. An untrained eye would have thought the place empty. But Truax knew that there was someone inside.

  It had been different that morning. He’d watched from his customary position behind the treehouse window, using his nocs to get a better view. The twins had come down first, clumsily assembling milk cartons and cereal boxes on the big kitchen table for breakfast. Though Ardelia usually accompanied them, today she was lagging behind. Which must mean she’d seen the letter as she came down the stairs. Just as Truax had planned. Sure enough, she walked stiffly into the kitchen a good two minutes after the girls, her eyes fixed on the single sheet of notepaper. She ignored the milk her daughters had already managed to spill, letting the thin white waterfall plummet freely to the tiled floor. After a few seconds she half collapsed against the counter, her eyes fixed on the page, as if trying to memorize its contents. The twins could tell something was wrong—they had grown perfectly still, staring at their mother. Finally, Ardelia remembered where she was. She folded the letter back in the envelope and placed it on top of a row of cookbooks. Her actions were brusque and short-tempered as she cleaned up after the girls. A few minutes later a yawning, shrugging Joel came down. Ardelia spoke to her son as he stood scratching in front of the fridge. Judging by his astonished reaction, her words must have been unusually sharp. He watched her closely as she bustled the twins toward the front door, collecting the letter as she left the room. She said a few last impatient words to her son and then she was gone, driving down Merlin’s Way with uncharacteristic speed. Joel remained behind, eating bowl after bowl of Kix before slouching back to his room. Truax felt the customary hate rise up in him as he watched the boy. It would be a long time before he got the image of that slick condom out of his mind. Those scratched words hovered at the edge of his field of vision. Joels. dick.

  It was almost two hours before Ardelia returned alone. The letter was still in her hand. Once again, she placed it on top of the cookbooks, as if that was where it was now meant to be. If anything, this usually imperturbable woman looked more upset than when she’d left. She slammed around the kitchen for a while, at one point freezing in front of the sink, head bowed, her left hand pushing the hair from her forehead. Because she was facing away from Truax it was impossible to tell if she was crying. Joel, dressed now, appeared in the doorway a few minutes later. He tried to speak to her. Ardelia shook her head a few times without meeting his eye, then stormed past him, remembering at the last moment to snatch Swope’s letter from on top of those books. Joel looked like he was considering going after her, though in the end he simply left the house. Some son, Truax thought. Ardelia soon appeared in the master bedroom’s window, pacing the room for a few minutes before falling onto an unseen bed.

  Since then, nothing. Ardelia rose once to go to the bathroom, but that was all. Joel stayed out. The twins were nowhere in sight. The afternoon passed. Heat gathered in the treehouse. Mosquitoes came but were repelled by the glistening layer of repellent Truax sprayed on his wrists and neck. He dreamed a few times, dissonant snatches of memory that came to nothing. Faint rumors of pain fluttered up from his infected hand, though he put this down to sleeplessness. He ate the lunch he’d packed, a Lebanon bologna sandwich and a couple of Ho Ho’s. Chewing without relish. By five o’clock the big thermos of Gatorade was just about gone.

  The letter had worked. Just like Swope said it would. Truax had planted it an hour before dawn. Swope explained that it was essential that it find its way into Ardelia’s hands as soon as possible. Since there was no mail slot in the front door, Truax had to think of some other method of delivery. He’d considered folding it into the copy of the Sun that would be lying near the porch, though he immediately abandoned this plan when he saw that two previous papers remained uncollected. Other ideas kicked through his head. Putting it beneath the Le Sabre’s wiper like a parking ticket. Getting some local kid to deliver it. In the end he decided there was no reason to be cute. He simply crept up to the front door and stuck it to one of its fan of windows. The envelope’s sharp edge nestled snugly into the crack between the wood and glass. He made sure that Ardelia’s boldly printed name faced inward. He worked without worry—there was no one around at 5 A.M.

  They had come up with the plan the night before, after Swope’s call woke Truax from the light sleep he’d fallen into after his airport mission. Swope had instructed him to stand down for a few hours, reasoning that Wooten wouldn’t be back until the following evening at the earliest. So Truax took a quick shower and then changed his dressing, noticing a slight reddening in the deepest precincts of his wound. He didn’t dwell on it. He had things to do. Downstairs, he found the house empty—Irma had left a note about going off for ice cream with Teddy and the girls.

  And then Swope called with news that it was time to escalate.

  He requested they meet at midnight in the empty parking lot of Newton High, explaining that two visits to Prospero’s Parade in one night would have been unsafe. Truax joined him in the front seat of the Town Car. They spen
t nearly ten minutes talking as an infinity of bugs swarmed around the lot’s sodium lights. Swope explained that he’d come to a decision. Wooten’s trip to Chicago not only confirmed his thievery—it also suggested he might be getting ready to flee after making one last big score. It was time to start turning up the pressure on him. Simple surveillance would no longer suffice. They needed to start twisting some screws. Make him sweat. Force him to get sloppy and commit mistakes. Swope explained that not everything they had to do would be strictly legal. There might be some acts involved that naive people would construe as vandalism or petty burglary. But given the fact that Wooten had the local cops in his pocket, these moves were necessary. Swope had paused after mentioning this part of the plan, saying that if Truax had a problem with any of this he should speak up right now.

  “No,” he answered immediately. “I don’t have any problems.”

  It was then that Swope gave him the letter, describing it as their opening salvo. Truax had always liked that word. Salvo. That, and enfilade. He used them whenever he could back when he was an instructor. Of course he didn’t ask what was inside the envelope and Swope didn’t explain. He told Truax to get it anonymously into Ardelia’s hands as soon as humanly possible and then provide him with a full account of the effect it had on the household. He was particularly interested in what happened after Wooten returned. Swope couldn’t be sure when that would be, though he guessed it might be as early as Friday night.

  “It doesn’t matter when it is,” Truax said. “I’ll be there.”

  Just before eight Joel returned, slouching up to his room. Truax was momentarily worried that the boy had somehow managed to see Susan, though he quickly dismissed the thought. Irma was watching over the girl. There was no way Joel could get by her. Besides, Susan had other interests now. For the fourth night in a row Teddy was visiting. At first Truax had been suspicious that his interest was some sort of plot the two friends had dreamed up to allow Joel to get around Truax’s ban. But Irma had then explained that Teddy and Joel had fallen out. In the three nights he’d sat watching the Wootens’ house he’d seen no sign of Teddy. Irma’s theory that he had only been hanging around Joel as a way of keeping close to Susan must have been right after all. Not that Truax was surprised. He may have been Susan’s father but he was also a man. He knew how attractive she was. A boy would have to be crazy not to jump at the chance to be with her. According to Irma, Teddy was being the perfect gentleman about it. Not pressing. Including Irma and Darryl in things. Going slow. Acting like a Swope. If things kept up like this Truax might even consider letting his daughter out of the house again.

  His thoughts were broken by the sight of the Ranchero racing into the circular drive. He glanced up at the master bedroom. The light remained off. Ardelia still hadn’t moved. This was good. Whatever had been in that letter must have been a real bombshell. Truax knew it had something to do with what he’d seen at that apartment. The way that skinny woman had looked at Wooten.

  Things were going to start changing now.

  Lights flared on downstairs as Wooten entered his house. Truax used his nocs to watch. Wooten moved along the hallway and then stood staring into the dark kitchen for a long moment. Finally, he reached out and hit the switch. Fluorescent light flickered over him. He looked beat, that suit bag draped over his shoulder like captured prey. He hefted it, then turned and headed upstairs. The master bedroom’s light came on five seconds later. Truax had to lean far to his left to see Wooten’s face. He was staring down at the bed. He began to say something but then stopped. The beginnings of fear entering his eyes.

  Now it starts, Truax thought.

  22

  The house was quiet. Which was strange—he’d expected to be greeted by the twins rushing him like blitzing linebackers, leaping up into his arms, writhing and giggling and craning their necks to see what he’d brought them. And Ardelia right behind them, wiping her hands on a dish towel, her head cocked, waiting to hear the news. There should have been tinny noise from the kitchen Zenith, the complicated smells of cooking. The upstairs thud of Joel’s music and then his son himself, materializing at the top of the steps, looking nonchalant even though he really wanted to be in on this.

  Instead, silence. And darkness as well. He hit some lights as he made his way down the long marble hall to the kitchen, his suit bag banging gently into the backs of his legs, hurrying him along. He didn’t want to call out—the twins might be in bed, banished after some summer mischief. Besides, whoever was home would have heard him enter. Nobody had ever accused Earl Wooten of sneaking up on people.

  The kitchen was empty. There were no signs of imminent dinner, no watery churn from the dishwasher. Dirty plates were stacked in the sink and there was a puddle of dried milk on the table. Wooten stood in confusion for a moment, trying to remember if he’d seen the Le Sabre in the garage as he parked his own car out front. Scenarios involving snapped bones and gashed flesh began to percolate through his mind. A mad dash to the hospital down in Cannon City. But then he remembered Ardelia mentioning she might take the kids to Western Sizzlin after picking them up from play school. That had to be it. He checked the refrigerator for a note. There was nothing. Not that that meant much. They’d been married long enough where notes weren’t always necessary.

  Wooten relaxed, the worry that had begun to accumulate in him draining like unblocked water. He decided to head upstairs and grab a shower before they got back. Unpack the gifts he’d barely had time to buy at O’Hare. The Ernie Banks shirt for Joel. The wind-up tin birds for the twins. Ardelia’s Pantou. Relax a bit before breaking out the best gift of all—the news of his job. Ardelia would say yes, there was no doubting that. First thing Monday, he’d call Savage. And then he could tell Austin. The time for secrets between them was almost over. Everything would finally be out in the open. Both men would have the best possible futures.

  He passed the gallery of photoportraits lining the front hall. His ancestors, staring out from the dozen daguerreotypes Ardelia had hunted down and restored for his fortieth birthday. Closest to the kitchen was the photo of his mother and father, Hattie and Cyrus Wooten, captured on their wedding day in 1928. Cyrus just returned from his hell-raising days up in Chicago, his mother no older than Joel. Gazing boldly into a future that wasn’t to be, denied them by something as improbable as a bolt of lightning. Next came the shredded picture of the Mound City house where Wooten was raised, its rickety beams and teetering chimney somehow surviving the storms that blew in off the plains. Wooten and his sisters, Jean and Dolly, were captured on the front porch, so blurred that they might have been anybody’s kids. Wooten held a toy rifle his mother had been given by some white woman whose own boy didn’t want it anymore. His sisters were dressed in the frilled frocks and bonnets that his mother always managed to keep clean. After that was the portrait of his father’s folks, Daniel and Jessie, also on their wedding day, looking eerily similar to their son and daughter-in-law. And then came a half dozen more photos with less immediate connection to Wooten—a great-aunt posing in some St. Louis studio, a parasol held jauntily above her head; a distant cousin in the stiff collar and leggings of the Expeditionary Force; a Mississippi work crew, most of them called Wooten, standing by some recently cut spillway. Finally, just before the first baluster, was the photo that had sent a chill down his spine when he first saw it. Nobody had known it existed until Ardelia hunted it down in some archive of the Pulaski County library. Wooten remembered the look they’d exchanged when he opened it, the pride and the shame. The knowledge. It was the very first Earl Wooten. Big House himself. His great-great-great-grandfather. Taken in 1873, according to the scripted legend at the bottom. Ten years after the man had walked up to Illinois from Kimberly, Alabama, where he’d spent the previous fifty-odd years as another man’s property.

  Wooten paused in front of the photo for a moment, looking into those tractless eyes. The gaunt, opaque flesh of his sallow cheeks, the cordlike veins bulging from his scrawny neck. Tho
se lips, cracked and dry. Hair as white as sugar. A hundred years. Four generations from this broken man to where Wooten now stood. He’d done it. Brought his bloodline from unspeakable indignity to the very brink of the inner circle. The place where there were no bossmen and no raging rivers to cross. Just a percentage that kept ticking, even if you paused to take yourself a breather. An image from Savage’s sketches flashed through his mind. That shadowy figure by the fake kudzu, hoe held high. Wooten realized that he’d been wrong to criticize. With him building it, AmericaWorks would be a tribute to men like that.

  He started the long climb up to his room, wishing Ardelia would hurry up and get back. There hadn’t been time to call before he left Chicago—he’d had to rush down from Seven Oaks to catch his plane. She’d be thrilled, not just for the money and respect, but also because they wouldn’t have to move. And the girls, able to tell their friends that their dad was building a place where every child would want to go. Even Joel would be proud. No, he wouldn’t show it. Especially not with the past week between them. But Wooten knew that his son would come to see his father’s triumph. See it and respect it.

  He reached the top of the steps, momentarily surprised to see a light on in Joel’s room. There was the faintest echo of music from behind the closed door. He must have decided to stay home. Too old and too cool to be seen with his mom and kid sisters at a restaurant. Wooten understood. He’d been there himself. He’d go see the boy after hanging up his things. Give him that Cubs shirt. Start to bury the hatchet.

  He reached into his bedroom and turned on the light. He almost fell over when he saw Ardelia. She was lying perfectly still on top of the covers of their king-sized bed, stretched out like a corpse. Fully dressed. She even wore her shoes. Her eyes were closed but Wooten could tell that she was wide awake. Something in the room’s atmosphere made him suspect she had been like this for a long, long time.