Half World: A Novel

by O'Connor, Scott

  Before they had left her studio, Dickie had told her to throw away the rest of the pills. She’d flushed them, a bottle at a time, tablets plopping into the toilet water. He’d told her that it might be rough for a while, but she just had to make sure he didn’t find anything else to take.

  On their way out of the city, he had stopped under a freeway overpass in Hollywood, knelt in the dirt there and dug something free, a brown paper bag, folded tight. She had been relieved when he’d opened the bag and she saw that it contained a gun, not pills, though she knew this meant that she was very far down the rabbit hole indeed.

  She’d watched him as he drove Bert’s car. He had changed since that final night at her studio, as if telling his story had resurrected some long-dead side of him. He spoke and acted with a quiet determination now, a clear focus. His body had changed. He moved simply, purposefully. It was not any kind of drug or fluke or instinct. This was training, this was experience.

  They’d pulled over a few times so he could throw up by the side of the road, or just retch and heave, groan and spit. Each time he climbed back into the car, pale, shaky, and each time he shook his head when she started to speak. He stopped one other time, at a small pharmacy in Tijuana, and she was about to argue when he gave her a list of a few things they’d need, nonpharmaceutical.

  The motel was the last stop before the coastal towns Gael had spoken of. It had come out of nowhere the night before, appearing in the headlights as they made their way in the dark. Nothing else around for miles. There was one other car in the dirt lot, a pickup with blue-and-white Jaliscan plates, but the windows of the motel rooms were dark. A husband and wife ran the motel. The wife checked them in, wrote down the name Dickie gave and took the money and handed him a key. Her husband puttered in the room behind the counter. They seemed like farmers to Hannah, as if maybe they had owned this land in its previous life and had simply adapted to the new terrain.

  They had shared the single motel room bed, sleeping stiffly. Hannah had woken to a rooster crowing somewhere in the distance. She’d risen and sat on a wooden bench that hung from chains fixed to a corner wall. She had found a book in Bert’s car, a paperback western with a painted cover of a cowboy on horseback, a town’s main street behind him, the hotel and general store, a group of worried-looking men outside the saloon doors, all pointing at something approaching from off the cover. Hannah couldn’t tell if the rider was readying himself to defend the town or if he’d just robbed it blind and was on his way out. The sky above was a mad swirl of fire, orange and yellow and white.

  She didn’t know if this was something Bert was considering turning into a movie or if he was reading it for pleasure or if it belonged to someone else, left behind beneath the passenger seat. She’d sat on the bench in the motel room and tried to read but the light was bad, so she’d set the book down and put on her shoes and a sweatshirt and left the room, walking out to the fence, the last barrier against what was out in the desert, what the desert contained.

  She watched the sky color slowly and imagined it red and orange and white, swirling with fire, the sky from the Wild West cover. She imagined the thing in the desert rushing out through the fence and through her and the buildings behind, sweeping the land clean, leaving nothing but dirt, dust, ash.

  She’d wanted to take Dickie’s picture while he slept. A violent act, the first that had come to mind. After she’d woken, she’d stood over him, her toes on the cold tile, pointing the camera. She’d wanted to take something from him for what he had done, for bringing her to this place. But she’d known this was not quite right. She’d lowered the camera, walked to the bench, picked up the book. She wasn’t really sure who was to blame.

  The rooster crowed again, finally on time. She watched the last bird leave its fence post, lifting into the air, and then she turned back to the motel, the truck in the lot, Bert’s car parked at the other end. Dickie was there, had been there for she didn’t know how long. He was sitting on a stool outside their door, watching her, smoking, the cowboy paperback open on his knee.

  3

  A night of blowing paper dust out his nose, plaster dust, soot. Coughing up something that looked like schoolroom paste. His clothes smelled like kerosene, so he threw them into the Dumpster behind the motel. He still had his gun, all his limbs and digits. He’d turned his ankle when he’d fallen on the road but other than that he couldn’t say he was anything less than damned lucky. He used every tissue and towel and roll of toilet paper in the motel room, blowing his nose, coughing it out. Finally had to pull the sheets off the second bed, use those.

  Denver Dan the Telephone Man. Jesus Christ.

  Jimmy stood in a phone booth down the street from the motel and dialed, ready to tell Squires that their first lead had almost gotten him killed. He thought better of it, though, and hung up the phone before the second ring. This wasn’t really any of Squires’s business. It wasn’t any of their business. Squires, Paul Marist, whoever else might be sitting in an office somewhere back east. It never had been. Jimmy realized this now. He rolled up the paper with Squires’s number and shoved it into the phone’s coin slot, watched it disappear.

  He tracked down the address for Henry March’s daughter, a corner building in a Mexican neighborhood at the northern edge of the city. Jimmy sat in the Lincoln and watched the place for the better part of an afternoon. He was just about to throw in the towel when she appeared, with none other than the bum from Squires’s photos, driving a more-than-gently-used Mercedes, baby blue.

  She was about the same age as Jimmy’s son, looked nervous in a way that didn’t quite fit her, as if the worry was something new that she was still grappling with. Jimmy followed them to a bar a few neighborhoods south. The March girl went inside and the bum sat around the corner in the Mercedes keeping watch. The explosion at the beach house had been in the news and Jimmy didn’t know if this meant anything to the bum, if Denver Dan meant anything, if that was the reason for the jitters and the lookout act. The bar had a curtain in lieu of a door and when someone came in or out, Jimmy could see the girl inside, talking to a tall Mexican. A while later Jimmy followed her and the bum back to her place, sat down the street for a while, but there was no further movement and he was exhausted, his ass and ankle aching, his ears still ringing, so he went back to the motel, hoping somebody had changed the towels and sheets.

  He lost two more days to the sickness. Two days, three days, shivering on the bathroom floor. This time he began to hallucinate, shapes and figures forming in the dark. Women in the room with him when he reached up and turned on the light. The two whores from the apartment on Telegraph Hill all those years before. The skinny white girl standing in the shower and the junkie Negro sitting on the john, both staring, watching him shake on the tile.

  He turned and saw Henry March standing in the corner, wearing his headphones, holding his camera and ledger. March’s face impossible to read, the fluorescent light filling the lenses of his glasses, obscuring his eyes, whatever expression might be back there.

  Where’s your book, Hank? Jimmy whispering in the bathroom. Where’s your book?

  Jimmy thought of Jayne. Stories in the newspapers, on TV. A dark moment returned, exposed by Henry March. What was written in his ledger. Jimmy thought of Elaine, the memory of Elaine, hearing those things, seeing those things. Those rooms on Telegraph Hill. He thought of Steven, his grandchildren. This is how he would be remembered, what his name would come to mean.

  One fist, then the other. He pushed his knuckles into the tile until his head and chest lifted from the floor. His body like lead. He grabbed the toilet rim and pulled. Grabbed the edge of the sink. Watch this, girls. Watch this, Hank. Hearing a noise in the room and not knowing where it was coming from and then realizing it was coming from him. A prehistoric growl. The pain just fucking unreal. Pulling himself to his knees, his feet. His face in the mirror, the reflection of the bathroom, his private audience, wat
ching. Blood on his knuckles, blood in his eye. Eyes in the mirror, teeth in the mirror. Watch this, Hank.

  The roar rising, filling the room.

  * * *

  When he came back to the bright autumn world the March girl and the bum were gone. The Mercedes was nowhere to be seen. There was no movement at her place. Jimmy let himself in. A photographer’s studio and gallery. A small living space. Boxes and binders of pictures and negatives, more than he had time to go through. A wall of postcards that had been sent by her retarded brother.

  It took him too long to get the name of the Mexican that March’s daughter had been talking to at the bar. He had to squeeze the bartender a bit. Took him too long to find the Mexican’s apartment. He spent too much time inside the apartment, waiting for the guy to come home and then dealing with him when he did, but this he couldn’t help. He was amazed by how much strength he still had when he got going, how much his body remembered. He fed off the fear in the room, wanted to sink his teeth into it. The room white and hot, Jimmy pushing hard, the Mexican pleading. He was taking too long but it felt good to feel strong again. Jimmy pushing hard until the Mexican told him what he wanted to know. Not enough, though, not enough.

  Jimmy pushing hard.

  4

  They drove to the last town before the coast. Dickie had traded Bert’s Mercedes for the motel owners’ pickup while the couple was out working in the chicken yard. Two criminal acts, suddenly, that Hannah had been a party to. He had pulled her down into this so quickly. She could see how it happened now. One move, another, and then there was no way of going back.

  Dickie steered the truck along the town’s crowded streets. There were people everywhere, drinking, singing, pushing into bars. Mexicans and tourists, some Americans. Strings of colored lights hanging low across the alleyways. The traffic moved slowly, cars and buses and flatbed trucks, horns honking when the revelers passed.

  They found a hostel in the center of town. Four floors, with more partiers sitting in the long rows of open windows, drinking, laughing, shouting down to those on the street below. They paid for a room on the top floor. Many of the doors in the hallways were open, young men and women passing through with drinks in their hands. Dickie kept Hannah moving, into their room at the end of the hall.

  A single mattress on the floor, a water basin and a pitcher on a table, an open window with a sheet hanging for a curtain. Dickie stood in the window for a few moments; too long, Hannah thought, before he finally pulled the sheet closed. One light, a single bare-bulbed lamp on an empty fruit crate by the mattress. Dickie emptied the bag from the Tijuana pharmacy. Scissors and hair dye, an electric razor. She sat on the crate and Dickie cut her hair, his hands moving at the nape of her neck, brushing the tops of her ears. She bent over the basin and he worked the dye through. They sat smoking, waiting for the color to set, and then she leaned over the basin again and he stood behind her, poured cool water from the pitcher, rinsing the dye clear, squeezing it loose with his hands. A brunette now, in the mirror, with what looked like a guerrilla cut, the kind of uneven chop she saw in news photographs of overseas extremists, women who left bombs in cafés and busy marketplaces.

  Dickie took off his shirt and sat on the crate and she cut his hair, wrestling with the thick tangles, pushing his head one way and then another in an attempt to keep things symmetrical. She finally dropped the scissors and took after him with the electric razor. How many years is this? she said, and he made a sour face. The beard was next, one hand on his chest to steady herself, moving the buzzing machine up his cheeks in long, slow strokes.

  When she was finished he stood in front of her in the mirror and they looked at the strange reflections. Lean distillations, reductions of their former selves. Her hands hung at her sides, still tingling from the work and the razor.

  Hannah saw a last lock of hair on the crest of his clavicle, the bare skin there. He said something that she didn’t quite hear. Her hands hot and buzzing. She leaned forward into his shoulder and blew.

  * * *

  Once it was dark and they’d changed clothes, he sent her down the back staircase, told her to exit through the alley behind the hostel. Get onto the main street and stay in the crowds. Don’t look back. There was a parking lot they’d passed on the edge of town and she was to go there and wait. If he didn’t arrive within an hour he told her to come back to the town center, find an American, ask to be taken to the police. Tell them everything.

  He followed Hannah to the back door, watched while she made her way to the end of the alley, toward the crowd on the street beyond. He looked back over his shoulder one last time, then started after her.

  The street was full and loud, cheers and songs and firecracker explosions like gunfire. Gunfire, possibly. He struggled to keep Hannah in view, her new profile, while watching other faces in the crowd. Looking for Walter or Julian or Sarah. He knew that they must be there, somewhere, that they must have followed this far. This was the only chance of losing them, even temporarily, before they reached the coastal towns. A new haircut, a shave, a separation.

  Men held drinks out to him, women grabbed at his arms. He pushed through, watching Hannah, looking for Walter, looking for the man he’d seen back in Los Angeles, the old bald man watching them at the cabaret bar and then back at Hannah’s studio. Someone from Zelinsky or Father Bill, he didn’t know which. He wasn’t sure that it mattered anymore.

  A rousing cheer from the crowd and then the sounds of brass and guitar, a man’s high voice, a mariachi band moving through. The crowd parted to make way, cutting Dickie off from his view of Hannah, seeing and then losing her again. Dickie trying to stay calm, moving forward, restraining himself from the impulse to pull or shove, careful not to draw attention. The band appeared, crossed directly in front of Dickie, the trumpet blasts filling his chest, Dickie losing Hannah and then seeing her again for a moment before she was swallowed by the crowd.

  * * *

  She walked with her hands deep in her sweatshirt pockets, her head down, moving through the crush of bodies, bumping shoulders, hips. She tried to think of herself as someone else, with a new face, a new name. Imagining that if she believed it then it would be true, and they would look right through her, she could pass free to the other side.

  Horn honks. The sound of a band somewhere behind her. Hannah bumping elbows, chests. At every touch feeling sure that there would be a shout, a hand on her shoulder, at her throat, pulling her away into the dark.

  * * *

  He walked twice around the perimeter of the parking lot. There was a single light high on a wooden pole in the center but the edges of the lot were dark. Full of cars, many with U.S. plates. He didn’t see her and didn’t see her and then something hit his arm, a small stone. He turned and another hit him in the chest and there she was, a few rows away, crouching between cars, watching him, shaking, rocks in her hand.

  PART FIVE

  * * *

  Half-World

  1

  The bum and the March girl had given themselves pretty good witness-protection jobs. Jimmy had almost lost them. The bum looked like a new man, younger, harder, more defined without all that hair. Not unlike the dodgers and deserters already in the coastal towns, kids with military-issue cuts, eyes dark from lack of sleep, too many drugs, fear.

  The bum had traded the Mercedes for a pickup, so Jimmy traded the Lincoln, did it the old way, getting out at a stop sign and walking to the green Ford in front of him, sticking his gun in the window. Vámanos.

  There was a string of towns along the water, with no significant differences between them that Jimmy could see. Noisy, loose, dusty. Bars, tchotchke shops, maybe a movie theater. Churches, more bars. The main streets empty during the day but nearly solid with bodies at night. It seemed a transient place, without memory or history, wiped clean by the ocean wind every morning.

  He could be here. Here or somewhere close. This wa
s a place Henry March could live unnoticed.

  Jimmy had first seen the station wagon when he crossed the border. Two men and a girl inside, following the bum’s Mercedes and then the pickup. They’d gotten turned around in the first town, when the bum and the March girl changed appearance, and so now they were following Jimmy instead.

  Jimmy trailed the pickup, careful to keep enough distance so that the station wagon would stay lost. In the third town he placed the bum and the March girl and when night fell he headed back to the outskirts, parked the Ford, waited.

  He’d bought a bottle of something to help dull the pain. The liquid was thin and clear but foul-smelling. The man at the liquor store spoke a little English, said that the expat kids drank it to get rid of hangovers and VD. Jimmy pulled the bottle from the glove box, covered his nose with his wrist, drank. It tasted like it smelled. He put his gun on the seat, lay back, waited.

  There was a streetlight about a hundred feet from the car, bright, throwing shadows across the road, into the vacant lot on the other side. He closed his eyes and when he opened them sometime later there were two figures standing beside the car, guns pointed in at him through the open window. Young men, one black and tall, the other white and short and balding, with a mustache that hung down over his mouth.

  Jimmy stayed prone on the seat, one hand open in surrender, the other still folded under the back of his head, his fingers now tingling and swollen with sleep.