Mortal Memory

by Thomas H. Cook

  True to her method, she then ticked these emblems off.

  Crude and childish, they would normally have seemed no more than the physical representations of men who had become locked in boyish fantasies. But under Rebecca’s transforming eye, they took on an occult and totemic symbolism: Fuller’s baseball bat, Parks’s simple curl, Townsend’s foreign stamps, Stringer’s safari hat, and last, as Rebecca described them, “the sleek racing bikes of William Patrick Farris.”

  “By clinging to these symbols,” Rebecca wrote, “these men made one last effort to control a level of violent romantic despair which women almost never reach.”

  With the exception of my father, each of them had even gone so far as to take these totemic objects with them in their efforts to escape. Fuller had thrown the bloody bat into the back seat of his car; Stringer had worn his safari hat onto the plane he’d hoped to take to Africa; Townsend had stuffed his briefcase full of foreign stamps beneath the seat he’d purchased on an eastbound train; and Herbert Parks, though trying to disguise himself in other ways, had stubbornly maintained his enigmatic curl.

  The tenacious hold of these symbols upon the imaginations of the men she’d studied led Rebecca unerringly to the final conclusion of her book:

  In the minds of these men, the most immediate need became the elimination of whatever it was that blocked their way to a mythically romantic life. That is to say, their families. Essentially, they could not bear the normal limits of a life lived communally, domestically, and grounded in the sanctity of enduring human relations. Instead, they yearned for a life based, as it were, on male orgasmic principles, one which rose toward thrilling, yet infinitely renewable, heights of romantic trial and achievement. In time, they came to hold any other form of life in what can only be described as a murderous contempt.

  But even as I read this final passage, I wondered if it could actually be applied to my father. For where, in all the descriptions of vast romantic torment which dotted Rebecca’s book, was the man who’d puttered with a bicycle in the basement and played Chinese checkers with a little girl, and who’d said of these simple, normal, intensely humble things, “This is all I want.”

  Once more, I read the section of Rebecca’s book which dealt with my father. She’d written elegantly and well of my family’s life, and even given my father an exalted place among her other subjects by suggesting that his particular totem, the Rodger and Windsor bikes, provided the most fitting symbol for the destructive male romanticism she had studied and at last condemned, “a thing of high mobility and speed, self-propelled and guided, capable of supporting only one lone rider at a time.”

  Only one?

  Then to whom had he passed the shotgun that rainy afternoon?

  Once more I imagined the “someone else” with whom he might have joined in such murderous conspiracy, but even here, I found that there was still something missing, something that didn’t fit.

  And so, at last, I returned to the small stack of crime-scene photographs Rebecca had sent to me. Slowly, one by one, as the early morning light built outside my hotel window, I peered at each picture, my mother’s body behind the floral curtains, her blood-encrusted house shoes on the floor beside her bed; Jamie, faceless, beneath the wide window, his biology book opened to the picture of a gutted frog; Laura, her body wrapped in a white terry-cloth robe, her bare feet stretched toward the camera as if trying to block its view.

  By the time I’d returned the last of the pictures to the envelope that had contained them, I still was no closer to knowing if Rebecca had been right about my father. At least for me, she had not yet solved the mystery of his murderousness, but she had doubtless offered the only clue as to where and how it might be solved.

  FIFTEEN

  RODGER AND WINDSOR.

  Rebecca had made an immensely persuasive case that the men she’d studied had been unable to live without their private romantic totems. In my desperate need to find him, it struck me at last that my father might have been no less obsessed than the rest of them, that the sleek red racing bikes he’d imported from England had perhaps made the same romantic claim upon his mind as foreign stamps and safari hats had made upon the other men in Rebecca’s book.

  It was a wet, fall day when I reached Rodger and Windsor’s offices in New York City. The cold drizzle I’d walked through had given me an even more desolate appearance than usual, and because of that, the neat young man who came out to the front desk to greet me seemed hesitant to come too close.

  “May I help you?” he said.

  “I’m looking for my father,” I told him.

  “Your father?” he asked me, puzzled. “Does he work here?”

  “No,” I answered.

  Then, in all its appalling detail, I told him the story of my father’s crime. One by one I showed him the crime-scene photographs of my mother, Laura, and Jamie. At each picture, he flinched a little.

  “Your father did all that?” he asked finally.

  I nodded, then took out Rebecca’s book and read him the relevant passage. He listened with a rapt intensity.

  “My father was obsessed with these bikes,” I told him, “he wouldn’t be able to live without getting one.” I waited, then added, “And I’m sure it would be red.”

  From the look on his face, I could tell that the young man in the starched white shirt and plain gray tie had decided to do everything he could to help me. Something exciting had unexpectedly come into his life, and as I looked at the eagerness I could see building in his eyes, I wondered if I had been like him on that day Rebecca had first arrived at the offices of Simpson and Lowe. Had I been nothing more than a clerk with a clerk’s long day looming before him? Was that the secret of my fall? Was it no more than the flight from boredom that had killed my wife and son?

  I thought of my father, too, the way he’d trudged up the narrow aisles of his hardware store day after day. I saw the listlessness in his eyes, the weary rhythm of his gait, and it struck me more powerfully than ever before just how dangerous a man may become when he suddenly feels no compelling reason any longer to live as he has always lived.

  The clerk nodded. “And you want me to help you find him?”

  “Yes,” I said, then added, “I have reason to believe that my father crossed the border into Mexico.”

  The clerk smiled. “Then let’s start in Mexico,” he said.

  And so we began there, going back through the stacks of sales invoices that stretched toward the present from the distant year of 1959. With a continually deepening level of engagement, we stalked the passing years. It was the clerk who found the first hint of my father’s new abode. He pulled a single sheet of paper from the file. “Could it be this?” he asked.

  I took the paper and looked at it. The order was dated March 17, 1962, and it was for a single red Rodger and Windsor bike. It had been received from a bicycle shop located in a small town on the western coast of Mexico. The man who’d signed the order had used the name Antonio Dias. There had been other orders from other places, of course, but this was the only bicycle shop that had ordered only one Rodger and Windsor, and that had specifically stipulated that its color must be red.

  During the next twenty years, as the clerk discovered, this same Antonio Dias had ordered thirty-two red Rodger and Windsor bikes. The shipping invoices showed that during that same time he’d moved to nine different towns, each time farther south until he’d finally reached the border of Honduras.

  In 1982, the orders had abruptly stopped. For the next three years there were no orders from Antonio Dias. Then, in November of 1985, one appeared again. This time, however, it had not come from Mexico, but from far more distant Spain, from a town about the size of Somerset, but located on the Mediterranean, and which bore the exotic and romantic name of Alicante. At the rate of nearly two a year, the orders had continued to arrive over the next seven years. The last one had been received only two months before.

  The clerk looked at me significantly. “If this A
ntonio Dias is your father,” he said, “then my guess is, he’s still in Alicante.”

  And so I made my plans to go. I renewed my passport, then waited in my hotel room for it to arrive. During that time I watched no television nor read a book. I wrote no letters nor read any that I received. I didn’t want to be distracted. As the days passed, I sank deeper into my own closed world. I no longer nodded to people on the street. I didn’t answer when they spoke to me. The days passed, and my world grew smaller. At last, I shrank into a small, dark seed.

  The passport arrived, and I bought a ticket to Madrid. From there, I took a bus to Alicante.

  It was nearly midnight when I arrived. A foreigner, with no knowledge of the language, I took the first hotel room I could find and stretched out on the small, narrow bed to await the morning. Through the night, I thought of my father, of how near I sensed he was. I tried to imagine his face webbed in dark wrinkles, the sound of his voice as it spoke in a foreign language. But he remained as elusive as always, still as remote and towering as he had been the day he’d stood on the veranda and silenced all of us with nothing more commanding than his gaze.

  I awoke very early, just after first light. Across from my bed, I could see a small sink, a wrinkled towel that hung limply from its bare metal rack, and a battered armoire. They didn’t look the same as in my escapist dream, however. Nothing was the same. Outside my window, where light blue, rather than white, curtains lifted languidly in the warm morning breeze, there were no tiled roofs or dark spires. There was only a sprawling modern town gathered around a much older one.

  It was still early when I left the hotel. Across the street was a large market, decked with bright-colored vegetables and row upon row of sleek, silvery fish. Pointing first to one thing, then another, I bought a piece of bread and a cup of coffee, eating as I continued on my way.

  I’d written the address to which the last Rodger and Windsor had been sent on a piece of paper, and for nearly an hour after leaving the market, I moved from person to person, showing each the address, then following an array of hand signals, since I could not understand what was said to me. Block by block, turn by turn, I closed in on my father, moving deeper and deeper into the old Moorish quarter of the city. Perched on a high hill, a huge fortress loomed above me, its massive yellow walls glowing in the sun.

  At last I found the street I’d been looking for. Madre de Dios it was called, Mother of God. It curled near the center of a warren of other narrow, nearly identical streets, and at its far end, half hidden in the shadows, I saw a sign. It was carelessly painted, and hung at an angle, the way I knew he would have painted and hung it. It read BICICLETAS.

  I approached the store slowly, with a sensation of shrinking, of returning to the size of a little boy. I felt as I had felt that night I’d gone down the basement stairs, hesitant, unsure, eerily afraid of the man who stood behind the large black wheel.

  And so, once I reached the shop, I found that I couldn’t go in. Through a single, dusty window, I could see a figure moving in its dim interior, moving as he had moved, haphazardly from place to place, but I could not approach it. Each time my hand moved toward the door, it was seized by a terrible trembling, as if I expected the shotgun still to be cradled in his arms.

  After a moment, I turned abruptly and walked across the street, standing rigidly, unable to move, while a stream of men and women, some with children at their sides, casually went in and out, ringing the little bell he’d hung above the door.

  There was a small, dusty plaza just up from the store, a place of scrubby trees and cement benches. I went there and continued to watch the entrance of the shop. As the hours passed, I remained in place, my back pressed up against the spindly gray trunk of an olive tree. To the right, a gathering of women, their faces hung in black scarves, talked idly while young children scrambled playfully at their feet. At the far end of the square, old men in black berets tossed wooden balls across a dusty court, their faces shaded beneath a canopy of palms.

  Time crawled by, minute by minute. The sun rose, then began to lower.

  While I waited, I imagined it again.

  I imagined following him as he made his way out of the little bicycle shop. Using the landscape that now surrounded me, I saw him trudge along the deserted street, winding uphill toward the ancient fortress, its gigantic walls glowing yellow above him, striking and unreal. I imagined stalking him steadily as he crossed the little plaza, his feet shuffling cautiously over the rubble of its broken walkway. I saw myself close in upon him as he turned into a narrow, nearly unlighted alleyway, passed under a low, crumbling balcony, and disappeared behind its veil of hanging flowers. It was there I saw myself sweep in behind him, rushing beneath the balcony, the two of us suddenly gathered together behind the dense curtain. I heard myself say, “Father,” then watch as he turned toward me. I knew that I would give him time to turn, time for him to see me, time for his body to stiffen as the word continued to echo in his mind, as he wondered hopelessly, and with a wrenching sense of terror, if it could be true.

  Then and only then, I would strike, raising the blade above his trembling, horror-stricken face. This is for Laura,” I would tell him as I delivered the first blow. “And this is for Peter and Marie.”

  For the next hour or so, I continued to luxuriate in my father’s murder, reliving it again and again, rejoicing in his agony, while the sun sank farther toward the sea, and still, he did not come out. By then the other shops had closed, their owners marching off to the nearest tavern to while away the remainder of the afternoon, while my father remained inside his shop. I’d seen the door of my father’s shop close, as well, then a hand draw down a curtain, but nothing more. At first, I imagined him still inside, perhaps piddling with his latest Rodger and Windsor. But as the hours passed, a graver thought occurred to me. Perhaps he had escaped again. In my mind, I saw him crawling out a dusty window, then trotting down a narrow alley to where a small boat waited for him, bobbing lightly in a peaceful sea.

  For a moment, I felt a great terror sweep over me, the fear not only that he’d escaped again, but that he’d escaped from me, as if, from the beginning, from that first flight into the rain, that had been his one true aim.

  I stood up and peered out toward the shop, my eyes squinting against the still-bright sun, and almost at that instant the hand appeared again, and the curtain rose.

  With the afternoon siesta over, customers began to come and go again. There were not many of them, as I noticed, but then my father had never been one to attract a steady clientele.

  The light began to change with the final waning of the afternoon, darkening steadily until the first blue haze of evening descended upon the street. At last, the first lights began to shine from the shop windows that lined the narrow, winding route of Madre de Dios.

  It was already full night when those lights began to blink off again. The one that shined beneath the tilted sign for BICICLETAS finally blinked off, too.

  Seconds later, I saw him back out of the shop, pulling the door closed behind him, then turn slowly to face the plaza. A streetlight cast a silver veil over him, and in its light I could see that he was dressed like the other old men of the region, in a dark suit, with a faded white shirt that looked slightly frayed at the collar, and no tie.

  He turned up the street, and then I saw his yellow cane as it hung limply from his hand. He placed it firmly on the ground and began to walk slowly up the hill, the cane tapping lightly in the nearly deserted street.

  As he moved toward me, I could see that he was still tall, though bent now, his shoulders slightly rounded. His hair was white, and his face was brown and leathery, drier than I remembered it, parched by his long years in the sun. The only thing that remained the same was his piercingly blue eyes.

  They didn’t glance in my direction as he headed across the street, then into the little plaza, finally going by me at a distance of no more than ten or fifteen feet. A woman nodded toward him as she passed and an old man wa
ved from the other end of the square, but my father didn’t stop to talk to either of them.

  He continued on, his feet plowing unsteadily across the dusty plaza. When he was near the middle of it, I stood up and watched him closely, as if expecting him to vanish magically into the air. In the distance, I could see him moving past the old men tossing balls in the courtyard, the women with their children, his feet raising a little cloud of dust behind him.

  He was almost at the end of the plaza before I fell in behind him, trailing him at a distance, the eyes of the people in the square following me almost as intently as I followed my father.

  Slowly, with an old man’s gait, he made his way up a narrow street, then, to my surprise, turned abruptly to the right and entered a small tavern.

  He’d already taken a seat behind a round, wooden table when I entered the same tavern seconds later. There were other men around him, men at other tables, old men who looked as weathered as he, their eyes deep-set and encircled by spidery webs of dark lines, their skin deeply furrowed. But they were shorter and rounder than my father, who still retained something of the tall, lean figure I remembered from my youth. It was clear that they knew him, perhaps even associated him with the American cowboys they’d seen in movies and on television, the silent, solitary, lethal men whose brave adventures made their dull, familial lives seem small and cowardly and of little worth.

  I took a seat across the room and watched as my father ordered his first drink. When it came, I saw that it was sherry, a drink that struck me as quite bland for a man who on a rainy November day had, with the help of “someone else,” taken a shotgun to his family.

  Sherry, I thought, my father drinks sherry, and suddenly I saw him as a man of tastes and appetites, an old man who walked slowly through the dusty streets, his shadow moving jaggedly along the flat stone walls. The specter of my youth, the gray figure in the basement, the slaughterer of my family, there he was before me, drinking sherry and wiping his wet lips with a soiled handkerchief.