Sandman

by Sean Costello

  It made one final bid, banking away from the boat, churning the water to a boil. Then Richard had it in the net.

  “Look at this puppy,” he said. “Pickerel. Gotta run five, maybe six pounds.” He lay the net in the bottom of the boat, pressed his boot over the fish’s gills and reached for the hook in its throat.

  “Here,” Kim said. “Let me.”

  Richard shifted and Kim pressed her own foot over the fish, pinning it to the ribbed aluminum floor. Leaning closer, she studied its glassy eye and, feeling nothing, wondered if something was missing from her. She stroked the creature’s flaring gills, the raised spikes of its dorsal fin, new sensations of slime, wildness and detachment. Then she went after the hook. It was in deep, and after a minute of tugging Richard handed her a pair of needle-nose pliers. With the coolness of a surgeon Kim grasped the hook and twisted it free. Something from deep in the fish’s guts came out on the barb and Kim regarded it with mild curiosity. Then she picked up her catch, most of the fight played out of it now, and dropped it into the wicker creel. She smiled at Richard as she rebaited her hook.

  “Beat that,” she said, casting her line again. “Maybe we should work out some kind of deal. You know, like, whoever catches the least fish gets to clean them all?”

  “Not worried,” Richard said. “Oh—I’ve got a whopper.”

  He made a big show of battling what turned out to be a six inch sunfish that bit him as he took it off the hook then managed to wriggle over the side to freedom.

  Laughing, Kim turned her face into the sun. She felt...alive. It was a rich, guiltless feeling, one she could hardly believe herself capable of. There was a lightness in her now, a buoyancy she couldn’t attribute solely to her loss of weight. It reminded her of a cartoon she’d seen someplace, a pack mule standing next to a horse at a hitching rail. The horse wore only a saddle and stood comfortably erect, while the mule stood swaybacked beneath a load of prospecting equipment, its belly almost dragging in the dirt. The animals faced each other, the mule’s expression puzzled, and the caption read: “What load?”

  That was how she felt, as if some enfeebling load had been magically removed, a load she’d become aware of only in its absence. The bulk of it came off when she found out about her father. It hurt at first, hurt terribly, the unexpected enormity of it; but strangely, once the initial shock had passed, it simply stopped mattering. Letting him go had been not only easy, but the most liberating experience of her young life. Through all of these lonely, guilt-fraught years, she had not been the bad one. He had.

  She snuck a peek at Richard, still griping about the killer sunfish, and smiled a secret smile. He wasn’t her father—she would probably never know who her real father was, nor did she especially care to—but he was her friend. She sensed this as clearly as she sensed her mother’s love. He liked her very much and was coming to love her, to picture her always in his life. It was in his voice when he spoke her name, in his eyes when he smiled at her. It was in the way he instructed her in the use of oils, so patient, ignoring the outbursts over which she had no control. He understood her frustrations, having seen some of the drawings she’d done...before, and labored with her daily to repair the connections between hand and eye. One morning she’d become so enraged trying to get her fingers to obey, she’d demolished both canvas and easel in a single violent swipe, then rampaged through the studio. And Richard had caught her and held her in a way no adult male had ever held her, with compassion, acceptance and love. And the rage had fallen away. “You’re an artist, Kim, a wonderful, gifted artist. What you do is uniquely your own. Don’t worry, you’ll get it back, I know you will.”

  She looked at him fondly, tugging at his line. She just wished he’d get a move on with her mother. She started to tell him as much when something hit her line again, harder than last time.

  “I hope you brought your rubber apron,” she said. “’Cause I just got another one.”

  * * *

  An hour following Jack’s escape, Graeme Crowley boarded Delta flight 109 bound for Honolulu, with a connecting flight to Suva, Fiji. Once aboard he set about the welcome task of getting loaded, facilitating the process with sporadic runs to the shitter for hits from his coke flask. By the time they crossed into American airspace, Graeme was well on his way.

  But the tension lingered, the shock, leaving him jittery and vaguely ill. During the afternoon’s proceedings Jack had given him a discreet nod, a prearranged signal to indicate that today was the day. And that cocky grin. “When the time comes,” Jack had told him the evening before, “I’ll wait until we’re back in the outer hall, just before they shackle me. That way no one has to get hurt.” But the son of a bitch made his move right there in the courtroom, dropping that scrawny kid, snapping his neck like a twig—just to clarify his intent—then shooting those guards, both of them dead, the gunshots ear-splitting in the crowded courtroom.

  For an instant after the guards were shot Graeme’s forehead had come into Jack’s line of fire and Graeme had been certain the jig was up. He’d thrown himself to the floor and slammed his eyes shut...but when he opened them seconds later, Jack was gone and people were stampeding everywhere. Graeme’s instincts for self-preservation had gotten him moving then and he snapped his briefcase shut, slipped out a side exit and hailed a passing cab, leaving his car in the swarming lot. He’d gone straight to the airport and bought a ticket for the first intercontinental flight he could find.

  Now here he was, soaring peacefully above it all. He closed his eyes and thought of Fiji. Sandy beaches, lean brown ladies in bikini thongs, tasty colored drinks with paper parasols.

  “Jack, you fucker,” he said, the buzz finally starting to uncoil his nerves. “I hope they shoot you down like a dog.”

  25

  GRAEME HAD DONE HIS JOB well, everything arranged exactly as Jack had specified. The car, a junker Ford that started on the first try, and the other items—a fat clip of cash, a silenced 9mm Glock with two boxes of hollow points, a fresh change of clothes and, most importantly, the list of addresses—tucked under the floorboards of the boathouse at the Fallons’ cottage. The last item was in the beer fridge, still frozen solid.

  Good boy, Graeme. Good boy.

  After ditching the burgundy service van, Jack loaded the stuff into the trunk of the Ford and drove back to the city, the September sun baking his face through the open side window. He passed a couple of roadblocks along the way, but the assholes were only checking vehicles leaving the city.

  “Oh, Paul,” Jack said, smiling as he reviewed Graeme’s list. “Won’t your momma be surprised to see me again.”

  * * *

  Jenny lay in that pleasant, semi-trance state that sometimes comes before emergence from a deep sleep, images that were half dream and half memory unfolding vividly in her mind. She was with Richard, naked beneath him, and they were teenagers, groping their way through their first attempt at love-making. On the couch in her parents’ basement, her parents asleep upstairs. “I love you, Jen,” Richard was saying, “I love you so much...”

  Something wet touched her cheek. It twitched. Jenny opened her eyes on a gaping fish mouth. Squealing, she rolled away.

  Richard’s shadow fell across her. “Kiss me again, sweet thang.”

  Jenny scrubbed her cheek and scowled. Kim stood nearby, giggling into her hand. Richard spread his feet and lifted a chain hung with a half-dozen fish, including the pike that had just tried to French her. Jenny squinted up at him.

  “What time is it?”

  “Two-thirty, sleepy head. Good thing you put sun block on.”

  Jenny hadn’t, and she could feel the skin on the backs of her legs tightening already.

  “How many of those did you catch?” she said as she got to her feet.

  Richard grinned sheepishly.

  “Try none,” Kim said. She turned to Richard. “Remember our deal...catch ’em or clean ’em?”

  “No, that wasn’t it,” Richard said. “We said your mom’d
filet them, right? Gut and scale them first, of course.” He held the dripping mass out to Jenny, some dead, some still gasping for oxygen.

  Jenny raised her eyebrows. “Sure, I’ll clean them. Kim? Hand me the Bobbitt knife, would you, dear?”

  Richard said, “All right, I’ll do it. But you guys start the fire.”

  “I’ll find some wood,” Kim said. “C’mon, Mom, you can help.”

  Jenny followed stiffly, blinking against the sunlight. Clouds were stacking up in the east now, forming a billowing anvil, and when she saw it—massive, shock-white against the faded sky—Jenny experienced an instant of childlike wonder. It seemed a monument to this perfect day.

  She shifted her gaze to Kim, already hefting an armload of firewood, and understood that she was part of a miracle. Her daughter was alive and happy, really happy for the first time in her life, and Jenny felt a deep and sobering humility in the face of it.

  She looked again at that luminous anvil of cloud. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much.”

  Then she set about gathering firewood.

  * * *

  “Paul. He’s out.”

  Paul’s mother stumbled into his bedroom, her breath coming in thin gasps. Startled, Paul whipped off his headphones and jumped off the bed he’d slept in as a child. He’d been listening to the “Goldberg Variations”, trying to lose himself in the cool precision of the music.

  At seventy-two, Eleanor Daw was plagued by a failing heart, and when Paul saw her he thought she must be having another attack. He took her by the shoulders, feeling her trembling frailty against his palms.

  “My God, Mother, what is it? Is it your heart?”

  Her spidery fingers closed around his wrists with panicky strength. “It’s Jack,” she said. “It’s on the TV. He got away.”

  “Oh, no...”

  “You’ve got to hide.”

  “But I’m safe here, Mother. No one knows I’m here, not even the police—”

  There was a flat coughing sound and Paul’s mother went rigid in his arms, her watery eyes rolling back in their sockets, the tendons in her neck straining grotesquely. Then she was limp, Paul taking her weight, certain her heart had finally given up the ghost.

  He looked over her shoulder and saw Jack Fallon standing in the doorway, a silenced pistol in his hand. Jack glanced at the weapon, then looked at Paul.

  “God damn,” he said, entering the room. “I was sure that slug’d go right through the old gal and drop the two of you. Now what do I do with you?”

  Paul let his mother’s body slump to the floor. Tears sheened his eyes.

  Jack set the pistol on the bureau and raised a long, slender object Paul at first mistook for a cane. But it was a sword. Jack withdrew it from its ornately inlaid scabbard.

  “It’s called a Katana,” he said, admiring the blade. “This one’s centuries old. Traditionally, the sword is unsheathed only if blood is to be drawn. Doesn’t matter whose.”

  “Jack, I...”

  “I know,” Jack said, “I know.” He ran the ball of his thumb along the blade’s shimmering edge, raising a bead of blood. He studied it curiously, then licked it away. “Moral outrage, got the better of you. And I must say, I’m impressed. Seems I misjudged you.”

  Jack took a sliding step past Paul and seemed to blur. It was as if his abrupt, spinning burst of speed had reduced him to a smudge. Then he was facing Paul again, inspecting the blade. Behind him, in the bay window, the top half of a four foot Umbrella plant toppled to the floor. “But at what cost, your outrage?”

  Startled, Paul stumbled over his mother’s splayed legs and came to rest against the bureau, facing Jack. The gun was behind him now; he was practically sitting on it. He could feel the cold metal through his pants.

  “Nice recovery,” Jack said, glancing at the old woman’s corpse. “That could have been nasty.”

  Now he turned to the window and sighed, the sword at rest in front of him. Orange sunlight, the last of the day, seemed to light him up, and Paul thought of a picture of Jesus his mother had hung over the mantel on the occasion of his first communion; it hung there still. Paul had stared at it a thousand times growing up, filled with uneasy wonder at the power of such a man-God.

  And now, here He was, personified in Jack Fallon, come to strike him down for his sins of lust and betrayal.

  Paul reached behind him and gripped the butt of the pistol.

  Shaking his head slightly, Jack said, “You know what amazes me about people like you, Paul? Your stubborn desire to know why. Isn’t that what you’re wondering right now? Why does he kill? Why does he have no compassion? No remorse? Why me?” Jack raised the sword, touching its tip to the foot of the antique bed, tapping it lightly against the spooled wood. He pushed out his bottom lip in a mock pout. “Why doesn’t he love me back?

  “But don’t you see, Paul? Some things are unencumbered by reason. They simply are. Your own appetites are a clear example. You wonder where they come from, why you have to be different, but the answers never come. Because there are none. Knowing that, understanding it, is the key to freedom.

  “Paul, quit screwing around. If you want to pick up the gun, go ahead and pick it up.”

  Paul brought his hand back in front of him. It was empty.

  Then the point of Jack’s sword was against his Adam’s apple, the tip indenting the skin.

  “I said, pick it up.”

  Paul did as he was told, holding the weapon as he might a venomous snake. The sword was withdrawn.

  “Try not to shoot yourself in the foot.”

  “Why do you kill, Jack?”

  Jack shook his head, a seam of irritation in his brow. “I’m going to answer that with a question: Why don’t you kill me? You’ve got the gun. Why—?”

  Paul raised the gun and pulled the trigger. The weapon kicked and Paul had an instant of stupefied glee. He’d blown the fucker right through the window. The glass tinkled merrily from its frame...

  Then Jack rose from his crouch and Paul felt a sting in his neck. The room tilted and he realized he was falling, but with the illusory weightlessness of a man in a high-speed elevator, the floor rushing up at him, then the ceiling pulling away. His head struck the floor without pain, without sensation of any kind...then it rolled, and Paul’s last sight was that of his own headless body collapsing to the floor.

  “Jesus,” Jack said, glancing at the shattered window. “That’s the second time I underestimated you.”

  He picked up Paul’s head by its thinning hair, dropped it into a plastic bag and carried it out to the car. The next name on his list was Nina’s.

  Nina and the twins.

  * * *

  Rain clouds began to eat up the sky right after the fish fry, around six o’clock. The air grew cold and started to move, hissing through the cook-fire, raising whitecaps on the lake. Richard dragged the boat on shore and flipped it over, tucking the paddles underneath. When the first spats of rain came, everyone put on their jackets and got busy cleaning up.

  Reluctant to leave just yet, Kim suggested they sit in the shack and play a few games of Sorry. They could use the kerosene lamp if the light got too low.

  Jenny and Richard agreed, and soon they were caught up in the fun and frustration of the board game Kim had brought along in her backpack. The wind picked up to near gale force as they played their second game and the door slammed shut in the downpour, icy droplets strafing in off the lake. Richard lit the lamp and latched the door.

  Kim said, “Can we keep it open?”

  “Sure,” Richard said. He opened the door against the wind and stepped out into the squall, hunched against the force of it. He braced the door against the wall with a length of two-by-four then scrambled back inside.

  Kim stood by the open door now, gazing out, her face pale and without expression, her body so still she seemed cast in stone, and Jenny winced a little at the sight of her. These trances or spells or whatever they were never failed to unnerve her. T
hey reminded her too much of the ambulance ride to the hospital that night, the death mask that had replaced Kim’s usual warm, somehow expectant expression. She couldn’t help wondering where Kim went when they came. Somewhere deep inside? Or...out? Jenny had been warned to expect these fleeting stupors—what Dr. Sanders called a mild, non-convulsive form of epilepsy—and assured they’d diminish in frequency over time, which they had. But they frightened Jenny all the same. It was almost as if Kim had slipped back into a coma, and Jenny feared that one day she might just stay that way.

  Then Kim turned to face them, brown eyes shining. “I love you,” she said. “Both of you.” She looked back outside and said, “We can go home now.”

  The cloudburst had passed as quickly as it came.

  * * *

  Jack parked in front of Claudia Rider’s home in stormy twilight. Nina’s car was parked in the laneway behind her sister’s van. Jack tucked the silenced Glock into his belt and got out, hunched against the drizzle. The neighborhood was quiet, the weather keeping everyone indoors. Warm light filled Claudia’s windows, most of which were stained glass.

  When Jack reached the porch he took three running strides and went airborne, striking the door with a pile-driving sidekick that ripped it off its hinges. He landed in the foyer in a hail of splinters and shoved the remains of the door shut behind him.

  “Jerry?” he said. “Jeffrey? It’s your uncle Jack.”

  * * *

  It started to rain again as the trio tramped up the path to the manor, sheeting down abruptly and string straight. The gunmetal sky sagged miserably, seeming to brush the limp treetops, and a gusting wind snapped the leaves from their branches in tumbling droves. It was as if the summery magnificence of the day had been merely a dream.

  Tired from the long day of sun and fresh air, they shed their damp outerwear in the vestibule and went their separate ways, agreeing to meet later in the rec-room. Richard had a huge video library and had turned the girls on to the Pink Panther series. He did a respectable Inspector Clouseau, and had had Kim in stitches the previous night, parroting the Peter Sellers character through the entire film. “After we’ve watched these a dozen times each,” he told her, “we’ll get started on the Monty Python.”