A Lite Too Bright

by Samuel Miller

  My dad laughed and I almost smiled. “Well, try.”

  I swallowed. “So there was a young man in the village, the son of the chief, and they had kind of decided he was the only one strong enough to make the journey. But because he was so vital, they weren’t sure if they wanted to send him out to die, because if he died, then the village was done for, for sure.

  “So I guess they decided to wait for a sign from God—or the divine, or whatever they called it—to let them know whether or not they should send him into the woods, because that’s the kind of people they were. And they waited and waited, and nothing happened. And the young man started to get sick, because he didn’t have enough water, but they didn’t want to send him, because they trusted the divine to tell them when.

  “Then one day, the boy’s father, the chief, came running into the village, shouting about how he’d just seen a cardinal, which, according to their superstitions, was a sign of good fortune. So they prayed, or whatever it is you do, and they sent the boy into the woods to get water.

  “But after the boy left, the chief confessed—it wasn’t a cardinal. It was a tanager. Which isn’t lucky at all; evidently it was common in that area. And the father knew that, and still he lied, to his own son, just for the sake of trying to save his village.”

  My dad took it in silently, waiting for me to continue.

  “So, yeah. That’s the story. I don’t know if the kid survived or not, but I don’t think that’s the point.”

  He didn’t move. “What is the point, then?”

  “The point is, I was wrong the whole time. I thought . . . I thought because he told me that story, he was giving me a sign, but in the story, the sign is fake.” I got louder as I spoke. “The point is, sometimes when you think you’re getting a sign, and you’re actually getting lied to. It wasn’t a cardinal. It was never a cardinal,” I said. “It was just a fucking tanager.”

  I couldn’t believe how strong and fast the words came out of my mouth. They hung in the air, thick and heavy like a quilt around us. My dad must have been shaken as well, because he didn’t respond. Watching him, I wished I’d never left home. I wished I’d never found the clues, or followed them like I had. I wished I’d never heard the story from my grandpa, or told it again now.

  “I didn’t know if I was being brave or being stupid.” His voice cut through the quiet. “But to tell you the truth, the more I’ve lived, the less I’ve understood the difference.”

  I blinked up to him.

  “Arthur Louis Pullman. A World Away, 1975. It’s not a Native American tale, Arthur; a hooker tells that story to the main character outside of a gas station.” He smirked. “I really would’ve thought you’d read the book by now.”

  I sat back in my chair and breathed.

  My dad continued. “You’re not that different from your grandpa. Did you know that?”

  Hearing him use the word Grandpa turned my insides over.

  “He used to take us to church, and I didn’t really get it, so one day, I asked him why everyone would believe in God, if nobody ever saw him. And he said, ‘If they saw him, that would ruin it. It’s the faith in the mystery—that’s the part that matters.’” He paused. “Now, granted, he was a devout Christian, and you’re a bloodsucking atheist—”

  I accidentally smiled.

  “—but you got his . . . his ability to . . .” He stopped himself and leaned toward me. “He didn’t mean that sometimes you’re lucky and sometimes you’re not. He meant that it doesn’t matter. He meant that a tanager is an invitation to be extraordinary if you just decide that it’s time for you to be extraordinary.” He swallowed. “And what you’re doing, Arthur . . . signs, or cardinals, or answers, or not. You’re chasing something you can’t see, and . . . and that’s more than most people ever do.”

  Outside, the moon was rising, and its light was spilling into the room. I hadn’t realized it for the hours I’d been there, but the Chicago Police Department building was next to the lake, with no skyscrapers to obscure the view. The moon must have been incredibly bright over our heads, because while I couldn’t see it, it was starting to paint the horizon line a soft orange.

  “Anyway, I don’t know if they told you, but someone bailed you out. I tried, but resisting arrest is expensive, and I couldn’t quite . . . Either way, someone stepped in.”

  I sat up abruptly.

  “Sounds like one of your friends from this week,” my dad said, looking toward the door.

  I’d been in the station so long I’d forgotten the world around me and moved on from the idea that there might be more to the trip. There was still Ohio, but who would know that? Mara?

  My father stood and knocked on the door. A moment later, Dr. Patterson answered. “How’re we feeling?” she asked.

  “Better, I think,” my dad said. I shrugged.

  “You’re going to be charged with misdemeanor assault,” Dr. Patterson said flatly. “That’s going to come with a fine and some community service time, but I’ve spoken with your father, and Dr. Sandoval, and we agreed. You’re an adult, and . . .”

  She let my father continue. “And we think you should finish going wherever it is that you’re going.”

  My head restarted and groaned back to life, engines beginning to fire as if the gears were shifting too rapidly upward, grinding against each other to force the machine forward. I didn’t know what I wanted: to go home and be done, or to go on and be frustrated again.

  “You’re very lucky, Arthur.” Dr. Patterson still spoke as a matter of fact. “You may not be paying much attention to it now, but . . . a lot of young men don’t get this many second chances.”

  I flashed to an image of Jack on the train, how close he had been to being apprehended for nothing.

  “So,” my dad said, standing to lead us out the door. “The guy’s here already—”

  “The guy?”

  “I don’t remember their names,” he said. Names. Multiple. “But it sounds like he was a part of some organization your grandfather was in.”

  The room turned to ice. I felt cold water up the back of my spine, chilling realization shooting its way to my brain.

  “Something plain, real normal name. Like—”

  “Jack?” I said, trying to stop, but the officers kept us moving toward the door. “Was it Jack?”

  “I don’t know. He’s waiting for you outside, I figure we’ll—”

  “No, Dad, I can’t—” I stopped myself. If Jack was here to bail me out, I was either going to be punished or, even worse, forced to work for them, but if I told him that I didn’t want to go, told him that this was an enemy, that I had enemies, then I’d have to go home. Or, without being bailed out, I’d have to stay in jail. And whatever was in Ohio would belong to Jack, and only Jack.

  “—does that sound alright, Arthur?”

  I didn’t respond. The final door was in front of us, the continental divide between bad and worse. I didn’t know which side was which. I held my breath as we plunged through it.

  But Jack wasn’t waiting for me in the lobby.

  It was another man. Short, old, wearing a necktie and a bowler hat, a briefcase to his right, and a British girl to his left.

  9.

  MY FATHER, MARA, and Sal Hamilton watched in silence as I filled out the required bail forms before leaving the station.

  Did I acknowledge that I knew or had a relationship with the person who had posted bail for me? No, not really.

  Did I swear that I wasn’t going to leave the state? No, couldn’t really do that.

  Did I know where I was going once I left? Nope, not a clue.

  I signed all of them anyway.

  As soon as we were out of the station, Mara tackled me to the pavement with a running, jumping hug.

  “You—fucking—idiot!” she shouted into my shoulder.

  Resting her feet back on the ground and pulling away from the hug, her left hand still squeezing my arm, she cocked her hand back and slapped me acro
ss the face.

  “What the fuck was that?” she said, now completely serious. “For a solid minute there, I was actually terrified. I didn’t know who that guy was. And he scared the shit out of me.”

  “I, uh—” I remembered every word of this conversation with Kaitlin, the one we had after I punched the wall. The conversation where she broke up with me. “I’m sorry, I, I don’t know what happened, I just, I got—”

  Mara didn’t wait for me to finish my sentence before hugging me again.

  “Everyone I know is fucked up, okay?” she whispered into my ear. “Just tell me things.” She pulled back again and I noticed small tears in the corners of her eyes. “Also, thank God you’re white.” She wiped her eyes. “Otherwise you’d be in there for months.”

  I nodded to my father and Sal Hamilton waiting in silence behind us.

  “Right,” she said, straightening. “This is Sal Hamilton.”

  He stepped closer, light from the streetlamp washing over him, and for the first time, I noticed his face. It was badly bruised, a near-purple spot under his right eye that hadn’t been there the day before. There were several cuts on his chin and neck and what looked like dry, caked blood on his lower lip.

  “What happened to your face?”

  My father leaned in to listen, and Sal looked to Mara. “Jack . . . happened,” she said, clearing her throat.

  “What did they do?”

  “Look, I owe you an apology,” Sal fumbled. “It was a big misunderstanding. There’s a lotta complexity surrounding your grandpa, and I—uh—I guess I clammed up a bit.” The words got caught in his throat, and when they finally came, they were soft. “You just look so goddamn much like him. Thought you mighta been a ghost or something.” He spoke harshly, with traces of an Italian accent. “And this group of kids—this Jack—they’ve been hassling me for a couple years now, and when you came ’round—I guess I thought you mighta been a part of that.”

  “How did you know we weren’t?”

  He pointed to Mara. “She’s pretty convincing, ’specially after they . . .” He ran his hand along the wounds on his face. “And it helped that she had that poem.”

  “Poem?” I’d forgotten my father was there.

  “Yeah, he . . . well.” I nodded to Mara and she pulled the journal from her pocket and handed it over. My father pulled it open and began to read. Back and forth across the page, only his eyes moved, and he concentrated intensely. I could only imagine what was happening behind his eyes, the world as he knew it expanding and contracting and changing in a way that he hated. When he finished, he started again, back up to the top of the page, finally turning to me.

  “This, uh—” He coughed. “This is real?” I nodded, and without warning, he hugged me. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay,” and I knew that was all he wanted to say.

  “Why would they come, come and find you?” I asked Sal quietly as my father stepped back, folding the journal into his pocket.

  “Well, they musta saw you come by early in the day, assumed I knew something.”

  Remorse came surging back and I almost doubled over, it hit me so fast. I’d put him in danger. I was responsible for his wounds.

  “Well?” We all turned, surprised to hear my father speaking. “Do you know something?”

  Sal sighed, the exhale pushing his head back, then forward, in a nod. “I think . . . I was the last person to see him alive.”

  I swallowed hard. “Do you know where he went next? Or how he got to Ohio?”

  Sal nodded again. “I drove him.”

  I stared at Sal in petrified silence.

  “The thing is,” Mara interrupted, nodding to Sal’s face. “Now they know where as well, and it’s likely that they’re on their way. Sal has no idea why your grandfather needed to go Ohio, he just knows where he dropped him off. So . . . it might be nothing.” She turned to me, lowering her voice. “Look, Arthur. We have no reason to believe there’s anything there, other than Jack, and a bunch of people who want to hurt you.” My dad’s eyes tripled in size. “So it’s possible that going now would be running fast into a dangerous situation with little hope of finding anything. You’ve done more than anyone could ever have imagined. You’ve got something he wrote for you; no one can take that away.”

  They all looked to me for an answer. I looked back, jumping from Mara’s stare to my father’s caution to Sal’s bruises.

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, not good enough,” I said, and I meant it. “There’s gotta be something more than that.”

  The edges of Mara’s mouth flickered upward. My father took a deep breath, then nodded. “Tanager,” he mouthed.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because if you said stop, we could turn around right now and go back on with our lives. No danger, no disappointment, no—”

  “Mara,” I interrupted, her face a foot from mine. “We’re wasting time.”

  She smiled.

  “It’s almost eight,” my dad said, pacing. “Does it have to be tonight?”

  “Yes,” the three of us said in unison.

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because.” Mara spoke first. “It mattered to him. He had to be in Ohio right away. So do we.”

  I turned to my dad. “You’re coming?”

  “I mean, if you, if you don’t mind—I, I don’t fly back until—”

  “No, that’s great,” I said. “You might notice something.” I turned to Sal. “And you?”

  “No chance I’m missing this,” he said. “You forget, I’m the world’s leading expert on Arthur Louis Pullman.” He noticed my father and me staring at him. “Maybe the third leading expert. Besides, you’ll need to borrow my car.”

  He motioned to the back of the parking lot, where only one car sat perfectly illuminated under the streetlight.

  I felt a surge through my fingers, adrenaline flaring through every vein. He was pointing to a black, 2012, 323-horsepower Chevy Camaro.

  I could feel them all looking at me, but I was alone with the car. It was an exact replica of my own; I saw it on the lot the day that I bought it; I saw it in Portola Valley, diving and gripping the road; I saw it in my dream, crashing and burning down the hill; I saw it in my garage, filling with exhaust.

  And now it was in front of me.

  “I’ll drive,” I volunteered without thinking.

  “No offense,” Sal started, “but that’s an expensive—”

  “Trust me,” I said. “I have to.”

  Sal studied me for a moment, then pulled the keys from his pocket and handed them to me.

  “You sure you’re up for it?” Mara asked, letting Sal and my dad crawl into the back seat.

  I didn’t say anything, just smiled back as I strapped myself into the cockpit and flipped on the engine.

  Part Nine.

  Kent.

  1.

  AS SOON AS we exited the Chicago area and reached an open passage of Interstate 80, I slammed the accelerator of Sal Hamilton’s Camaro to the floor. Mara laughed as her body was thrown against the passenger seat, inertia pushing her backward, momentum pulling her forward at sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five miles per hour. Passing streetlights threw waves of light over me, half smiling and comfortably at home behind the wheel as I shifted into fifth gear, sixth gear, whipping around a bend in the road at eighty, eighty-five, ninety miles per hour, sliding in and out around slower-moving cars like flags in a slalom ski race.

  Twice, my father mentioned the speed, and twice, I winked in the rearview.

  “Alright,” I said. “We need to hear what happened. The whole story. Start forty years ago.”

  Sal leaned forward from the tiny back seat of the Camaro. “I don’t know what you know,” he said, wedging his torso between the two front seats. “So I’m gonna assume you know nothing.”

  I nodded.

  “Just to give you some history of the relationship, I know your grandpops because back in the sixties, he used
to be a part of this organization—sort of secret anarchy movement—called Great Purpose. You familiar?”

  Mara and I nodded.

  “What? Secret anarch—”

  “Dad,” I said, finding him in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry, but there’s a lot we didn’t know. I’ll fill you in, but we’ve kinda gotta move forward right now.”

  He looked like he might throw up.

  “I mean, it wasn’t anything too serious, not at first anyway. Just a bunch of kids, right around your age. This was Vietnam time, so everybody and their mother was scared shitless they were gonna get drafted, and they were starting to think maybe the government wasn’t so smart sending our boys over there, but they didn’t know what to do about it.

  “So Arty n’ them, what they’d do is, they’d find a city, go meet the people, give ’em some literature, get ’em all pissed off and excited, and they’d teach ’em how to protest. ’N’ ’cause it was happening in San Francisco, everyone in Washington’d just say, ‘Ah, that’s just San Francisco, bunch a fuckin’ hippies.’ But then, bam. Riot in Denver. Kids on the march in Omaha. Now people are paying attention; phony newspaper guys like me are startin’ to give a shit, seems like a revolution is afoot in America. That’s what your grandpa did. He started the revolution.

  “And these new kids, this Jack—” He pointed to his face. “I don’t know what kinda God complex they’ve got, or what kinda powerful shit they’re smoking, callin’ themselves Great Purpose and thinkin’ they’ve got something to do with that, but it’s bogus. I don’t even know how they know about all this.”

  “The leader, Jack,” Mara said. I smiled at how disgusted Mara sounded saying his name. “Is Hunter S. Thompson’s son.”

  “Well . . . that makes sense, seeing as his pops was also a royal asshole. Apples and trees. So how I come into the story, how I know your grandpa, is that Arty, being smart, realized these protests were only gonna get as big as the newspapers would say they were. So he decides he needs a newspaperman, somebody with a national circulation, who’ll run what he tells him to run. We get introduced at a Rolling Stone function, we get blackout drunk, he tells me ’bout what they’re doing, and I see this could be mutually beneficial. I tell him I’ll print what he wants, but only so long as he promises it’s all coming to me first. So I did, and it was the best thing I ever did, too. I ended up gettin’ friendly with all the guys—Arty, Johnny, Jeff and Orlo, Duke, when he wasn’t off playing God—the whole gang.”