Jacko

by Keneally, Thomas

  I remember tacking on sundry pleases and sorries and I can’t help myselfs.

  Jacko had the grace to keep quiet while I compelled Lucy with my prophetic voice. Naturally I was ashamed, but not as much as I was afraid. The heat in my face was not from blushes. It was the purest fear. The McNeill-Lehrer News Hour wasn’t even on, and I had had the dream so often already, and the limitless night remained.

  —I’m not saying Jacko’s not a prick, I told her in his presence, and then wept over that.

  Jacko looked so sage and sad as I said it. There was no anger there, and I thought that, though he acted the fool, this proved he wasn’t one really. Lucy began to look wan, just because of the pressure I was putting on her. Though the truth was the pressure was already there, and I confirmed it in my mad high pitch.

  At last Jacko attempted to mention normal things. He asked me was my wife coming to the hospital. I began to weep again, because even that cherished face couldn’t save me from the dark book.

  —Jesus, mate, he told me, putting a hand on one of my knees, we’ve got to get you some sedation stuff. You’ve had a bloody great whacking shock eh!

  I saw him go out of the ward. Old men with oxygen hoses up their nose called after him in voices aspirated with emphysema:

  —Hey, Jacko, catch your show. When ya coming to my place?

  From my bed I could see the hallway, where Jacko talked to a young Indian doctor. He confided in the man, touching the white-coated shoulder, cajoling, frowning. He came lolloping back, and I felt a childlike gratitude, an ineradicable devotion. Such enormous, paternal shoes, I noticed, on the hospital floor. He had to get them made up out of haunches of leather by a bespoke bootmaker in Queens.

  —He’ll have you fixed, mate.

  Lucy took hold of my undamaged hand.

  —Stay a while, I pleaded.

  The hand healed faster than the appalled soul. It took only a day or two of medication – and my wife, who knew from her earlier career in nursing how to talk to doctors, firmly kept on reinforcing Jacko’s demand for sedatives – before the dream became less specific as to landscape, grew to be as confused as dreams should be and carried only an average freight of night fear.

  When poor Lucy got a call from the woman, she dutifully passed it on to my wife so that I in turn could be reassured. The woman wanted to know if Lucy ever came to San Bernardino. She let Lucy know that, because of recent storms, Ess had at least been taken out of the lined and furnished pit in which she had been living – the first pit, that is. Not the new one he was digging. Her husband had tried everything with that first pit, said the woman, talking, according to Lucy, like a typical handyman’s wife. He had put in an electric pump. He had laid a new drain. The second pit he was digging for his future infidelities had also flooded, even worse. Expansion plans were, for the time being, cancelled.

  There was a Ramada Inn in San Bernadino where she would willingly meet Lucy. She had been thinking of all this for a long time, she said. A woman in her position needed a confidante, but having another woman on the premises, sometimes hidden, sometimes frankly acknowledged as the family babysitter, made things very difficult. When Ess was allowed to be visible, people wanted to know why she had come back. The effort of explaining that detracted from the friendship the wife sometimes felt for Ess. For while she was locked in the box for all that time, the woman and her husband had been able to put around the easier story that Ess had gone home to her family.

  All this, recounted by Lucy, cheered Jacko. The subtlety and growing length of the woman’s story, and her tone, full of the right sort of madness, the tone of one utterly unmotivated by some conscious dream of publicity, was convincing. For, she told Lucy, she did not want to be interviewed by Jacko, no, never …

  One afternoon at the hospital Jacko said to me, Tell you what. We’re going to get just one of the poor bitches back from darkness eh.

  I felt my brain clench.

  —Darkness?

  He said, for he was ignorant of my dream, We’re going to bring her up from the pit that bugger dug for her.

  —And I suppose then you’ll interview her, I said harshly, though he was used to that. He tolerated my recent greater acerbity, writing it off to the burn.

  —No, no, mate, he told me, shaking his head. We’re going to win one back in this sod-awful, hypocritical vacuum.

  —So, I said, you’ll take both of them with you, eh? Lucy and Dannie on the Metro Grand flight to LA. Hi-bloody-ho!

  —It won’t be easy, he told me. So best not to make a joke out of it eh.

  Able to wear a white linen glove, I came home from hospital the Friday they left in the belly of the Metro Grand jet. The tenderness I felt in the palm of my hand seemed to me an image of the stricture Jacko had made for himself, as with Dannie to one side and Lucy to the other, he was borne high above an America made of human energy and God’s hand. So pristine a country: the huge blank blue of the Great Lakes, and Minnesota’s snowed-upon pastures; cornfields and feed lots along the North Platte; the profound red of the Colorado’s august pit, primped up with snow, its old geology delineated in ochre and white. To the right, the tangle of canyons where Mormon polygamists once hid; to the left, the Painted Desert muted under cloud. How could such villainy as the book of darkness be contained in that landscape? How could time be wasted on malice and slavery when there were so many glorious National Parks?

  I waited in New York, sure that Lucy would tell my wife the whole of it, and the residue I would have from Jacko.

  It would not be welcome news to me to discover everything they could do now. Now they could film and hear conversations from four hundred yards away. Video snipers.

  They wired Lucy and put her in the bar early, and then they filmed from the street every woman who arrived on her own and parked her car in the hotel’s lot. They had Lucy seated in a window seat. The lighting was good, though sadly at seven o’clock, the appointed hour for the rendezvous, the bar pianist turned up and the lights were dimmed. A table candle cast some light on Lucy’s lower jaw and long lips, and you could tell it was her on the film.

  The woman who ultimately approached Lucy turned out to be a small red-haired woman with thin shoulders and full hips. She had left an old yellow Dodge station wagon outside. She carried her handbag retentively under one armpit and her mouth looked embittered and narrow. She wore torn pants and an orange blouse in a brave but fated attempt to dress up to the standards of the Ramada Inn cocktail lounge.

  I heard and saw it all on the tape. They said hello to each other and sat down and ordered drinks

  —I hope you don’t mind me calling you. I mean, you must have had your suspicions.

  —That’s right, murmured Lucy. But don’t worry about me. I have my plans. Your situation, it seems so serious.

  —It’s been serious a long time, said the redhead. And in more than one way.

  —This woman, Ess. She’s been there …?

  —Years. It’s hard to excuse …

  —No, breathed Lucy.

  —It was all so normal for so long. He’d take her out to suspend her. But nothing sexual. That was our arrangement. He honoured it for a damn long time. Until they fell in love.

  —She fell in love with him? asked Lucy.

  —It’s a long story, the woman told her, again like any normally wronged woman. I see now that he used both of us. Ess and I got pretty close. Sometimes we were like sisters, and then sometimes we were like rivals. He jerked us around. Not deliberately maybe. But he decided which we’d be.

  Lucy surmised aloud that this means the girl wasn’t always in the box or in the pit.

  The redhead said, No.

  Though for one period Ess had been in a box, this was after they changed houses, for two years, and she and her husband told their neighbours Ess had gone back to her family. The husband would take Ess out only at night, to give her a meal, and suspend her and so on. Sometimes he’d give her a bath.

  —Baths are a mixed bles
sing in our house, said the woman in a normal tone.

  Of course Lucy asks why.

  —Well, he holds your head under. He can’t help himself. It’s an experiment with him. He sees how far he can go. That’s why I let him have Ess in the first place. I was sick of the baths.

  They had both moved on to a second glass of wine by now. Some men came over and asked them if they wanted a drink, and the red-haired woman and Lucy both said with a touching flatness, Thank you. Maybe later. Thank you.

  The woman said, You see, I’d be held under so long I’d pass out.

  As I watched the tape, I felt the flat, banal terror of this news. I wanted to succour this plain woman, take her out through the minefield to a sort of refugee camp of the kind which I know doesn’t exist in a flawed world. A refugee camp which is a refuge.

  Her testimony was made more affecting for the matter of fact manner of utterance! Even with the bad lighting you could see Lucy shake her head, and then shake it again. She could not address herself for the moment to asking more questions.

  The woman said, I’ve been guilty of a big lie. You see, I know a man can turn a person right around by keeping them in the dark for years. By keeping a padded box on their head. And he told her that all of this was sanctioned, and that he had paid for it: he had a licence to keep her. He said there was a Corporation, and he produced a contract, a very fancy legal document. He did it on the joinery works typewriter when he was working back. He put all sorts of embellishments on it and it looked highly legal and official. And he got her to sign it which she did without argument, because she knew he could use a whip or electricity on her. Or else she signed it because she’d just lost hope of a different kind of life. And at one time he took her to a building in Riverside which he said was the Corporation’s building, and told her the Corporation was everywhere: half the cops, his own father, neighbours of ours, all the judges in the United States. He showed her stills from movies where painful things are done to people – stills of folk who’d died in torment – and he told her that this was the work of the Corporation. That what she was seeing were runaways who’d paid the final penalty. It was all a long damn rigmarole! No man loves rigmarole more than him.

  Lucy says, You don’t sound as if you hate her at all. You don’t sound very jealous.

  —I try to be a good woman. It’s not her fault.

  —So you want to give her her freedom?

  —I keep meaning to tell her there’s no Corporation. Yet I keep putting it off too. I mean, he spent two weeks wages taking her to New York, just to see her father. So I thought, Damn her! I felt like that for a while. It was a lot of groceries he spent.

  Lucy asked how the woman’s husband had known old Bob was in the hospital. He hadn’t, she said. He got the idea that that would be the big test, to be able to take her home to see her people. He didn’t even know her mother had died. He found out when he called the father’s place. A talkative neighbour was minding things for the father.

  And did the husband tell Ess her mother had died?

  —Oh yes. She took it pretty well. And then they went to see her father. I mean …

  The wife clearly thought this journey could be read as rank marital disloyalty, even though she herself might be a tolerant woman.

  Lucy said, You know full well you’ll have to tell her eh.

  —Yes, said the redhead. But everything will come unglued, and I kind of fear that. I’ve got children …

  Lucy said; I know how you feel. But do you expect me to keep totally silent about all this? You’re not swearing me to secrecy are you? I mean, it strikes me you’re telling me this because I don’t have to keep secrets even if you do.

  —Oh God, said the pit-digger’s wife, beginning again to weep, I don’t know what I want to do. Things can’t go on though …

  —You’re right about that, said Lucy.

  By candlelight Lucy’s tears showed up as a gloss on her face.

  —You ought to realise that everything you tell me is horrifying to me. It’s been your normal life all right! But to me it’s utterly bloody shocking. I can’t keep it a secret.

  The woman began thrashing her head about.

  —But don’t tell him we met like this.

  —Who? My husband?

  —No. My husband.

  Watching the tape, you see Lucy reach her hand out.

  —He might find out not from me but from what others say to him.

  Watching the film, I thought this was desperate bush casuistry of a high order, saving her own soul from the taint of outright deceit, but preserving Live Wire’s filming rights. And maintaining the fiction too that they were sisters in grief, if it was a fiction.

  —You’ve told the police you’re meeting me, said the woman, standing up and staring around her.

  Finally she hung her head from her shoulders in a frightful way. It was the posture of bellowing and awful to see.

  —We are being filmed, Lucy can be heard to say on the tape. You had to expect that.

  And she held and soothed the demented red-haired young woman. Lucy looked out of the window for the answer, but knew it was only the clowns of Live Wire out there.

  Dannie asked Jacko, Why did she say that? She didn’t have to say that.

  The woman tore herself away from Lucy and ran out of the bar. The camera crew filmed her getting into her old yellow station wagon.

  After the unconsoled woman ran away, Jacko left Lucy in the Ramada Inn to wait long hours until he had finished his purposes. Jacko had broadly interpreted Lucy’s earlier stated condition that he contact the police at once. Dannie and Clayton and Durkin would all have considered it simple-minded of him to meet that condition straight away in any case.

  Abandoning Lucy therefore to wait for them in that awful hotel, where a room had been booked for her, they followed the redhead for fifteen miles into the hills, into an area of scrubby five-acre lots at the top of the cactus belt, before the conifers set in. Clayton drove: he was trained for that sort of pursuit.

  They watched her get out of the car and stand for a while, composing herself. Jacko and Dannie debated whether she would tell her husband. If so, the husband would run around destroying evidence.

  Without any urgency, she walked up to a mobile home set up on cinder bricks and entered it. The camera crew could see in the moonlight, on the far side of the mobile home, a water pump, half-covered with plastic, lying on the ground. The device with which the industrious husband had attempted to empty Sunny’s pit of its flood water. There was a garden shed, too, screened by a few scrawny eucalypts.

  Jacko described later how strange all that seemed to him: Could such Satanic ambitions of enslavement, ambitions of the order which the woman had described to Lucy, be accommodated in the modest dimensions of this little trailer home?

  Clayton held the mobile telephone. If they saw lights go on, the pit-digger emerge to look around or fill in his dungeon, the police would need to be called. But they saw the redhead pensively drinking water in the kitchen, and then there was darkness.

  Outside, Dannie appealed to Jacko. Why couldn’t they, the Live Wire team, break in anyhow, crack the case, expose the pits this man had been digging for women? What was his name? Jacko crept out of the car and inspected the letter box. Kremmerling.

  —So are we going in or not? asked Dannie.

  Jacko might have been enthusiastic to do it too, if this Jacko were the same Jacko who had taken a jackhammer to the Wall.

  —We’ll go back to town and see the police, he said. They have to be involved now.

  —What’s this lack of daring? Dannie asked, laughing acidly in the night air.

  So Dannie called Durkin on the cellular telephone, getting him just as he arrived at the Morning Manhattan studios, at an hour New York was not yet awake.

  —No, he said, don’t do that. Don’t barge in. That’s too much anarchy, and it could be dangerous.

  —Come on, urged Dannie, nothing’s too dangerous. We’re he
re and no one else is.

  —What will you do? Arrest him? At best, he’ll run around wrecking evidence. At worst he’ll fire buckshot at you.

  —Jesus, said Dannie. They’re limp-dick reasons. Just to be there when the cops break in? It isn’t enough! Not for this case.

  Jacko had begun to get anxious about Lucy. It was nearly midnight now. Was she still waiting in the Ramada Inn bar, expecting someone to come in and tell her sanity was restored to the earth and that she could go to bed?

  And he was in trouble with Dannie. Later she would say to Jacko that if he’d supported her then, instead of being distracted, they could have overridden Durkin, and Durkin would have been grateful to be overridden. Except that Jacko hadn’t supported her.

  So after half an hour they drove back into San Bernardino, to the City of San Bernardino Police, a fortress in the midst of shuttered liquor stores and service stations with barred and enmeshed cashier booths. The sergeant on night duty called his superiors at home and punched the station wagon’s numbers into a computer, etc., etc., just as in cop shows, and the banal answer came back fitting the address and the name: Kremmerling, Charles. No fly-by-night, he had lived there four years. His wife: Kremmerling, Joyce. Two children: a boy and a girl. Just as Joyce, the red-haired woman, had told Lucy.

  —Not what you’d call an offender’s profile, said the sergeant.

  —And, Jacko explained to me later, Dannie’s saying everything with an edge, as if I’d let her down. So that at one stage by the coffee machine at the cop shop, I pulled her by the elbow and I said, Listen, he’s kept a woman locked up in a head box. Just think of that! And she said, Yes, oh yes. Don’t you think I’m thinking of that? It’s the Olympics of evil, and we’re the only ones here. And we’re farting around.

  He recounted how, throughout that long night, he got more and more depressed, and more and more value went out of finding the poor lank-haired child. The question was: what had she been rescued for?

  A number of senior officers had now come from their beds and needed to see Clayton’s footage. They were startled by its authority, its circumstantial feel. Next they needed a warrant, and that took an hour or so. Time went very fast in that near-desert city. The policemen complained how cold it was outside, five degrees in the inland night, and Clayton claimed they didn’t know what cold was until they’d lived in New York.