The Garden of Blue Roses

by Michael Barsa

  Or if their core, their being, was equally as bleak?

  The following morning I thought about Henri's move to southern Vermont after the accident and the difficulty of finding any identifying information with his name. It was a puzzle that Sherlock Holmes would have spent many grueling hours pouring over, piecing it together with all the other clues, arranging them until they formed a coherent and satisfying tale. And what would such a tale be in Henri's case? Again I wondered if I'd been wrong to fear in him some profounder threat. Perhaps the truth was simple, even mundane. Perhaps he was just a confidence man—one who'd read about the accident and decided to take a chance, who'd discovered in Klara an easy and suddenly wealthy mark.

  I turned this possibility over in my mind as the sun brightened my bedroom window and the walls began to creak with the day's first warmth. In many ways it offered hope, a way to rid myself of deeper fears, yet it was precisely for this reason that I distrusted it—it was too convenient a solution, one that required me to be blind to what I knew. Yes, I knew something darker and more sinister was at work, knew it the way one knows lightening is about to strike or snow to fall—by the smell and feel of the air. I had only to close my eyes to sense that he was already at our house that morning and plying Klara with his lies, that these lies were taking hold of her like a coil of rapacious vines.

  The breakfast table was empty. This was the first thing I noticed when I descended—the sense of abandonment that had come over the dining room, its long thick table hosting only a single place setting: mine. I put a hand on my chair's high back, tempted to enact the normalcy I craved, knowing Marta was in the kitchen waiting until the chair scraped back before bringing out my eggs. That was her little trick. Only I wasn't hungry suddenly.

  They were sitting on the patio, Klara in a low-cut blouse that revealed the reptilian ridges of her spine, while Henri talked in rapid whispers, mouth stuffed with croissant. I opened the French doors. It was like stepping onto a stage without any lines, just the dim realization that something momentous was about to happen. Klara whirled around and said "Look, it's Milo," as if I were a dangerous zoo animal.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  "Having breakfast in the fresh air. Won't you join us?" Her voice was like a shiny new penny, and just as cheap. "Henri was saying he wanted to talk to you. About our plans, our vision for the garden. He was also hoping to clear up any misunderstandings. We're both sorry, Milo, that everything has been so hard for you."

  I moved forward. Klara was pointing at a chair. It had all the expectancy of an electric chair. I sat in it anyway.

  "Klara is right," Henri said in the miserable tone of a child forced to be polite. "I want to show you our plans." But his eyes weren't polite at all. He knew Klara was in his power. My heart beat faster. "I fear you have the wrong impression of what we are trying to do here," he went on.

  "I don't think so."

  "I understand why you love these woods." He leaned toward me. His lips were moist from the croissant's buttery sheen. "Such a sense of mystery. Of things hidden."

  He began to roll up his sleeves. I watched the muscles in his arms bulge like little animals trying to break free. "Then why not leave it the way it is," I said.

  "Ah," he replied. "That is the question. Why disturb things now?"

  I reached forward to the little table and poured myself some orange juice. Thankfully there was a third glass. Just in case? Or was this planned? "Exactly," I said after I'd gulped it down.

  "The answer will have to wait until we're finished," he said. "Then you can be the judge."

  He leaned back. That's when I noticed something on his arm. On the smooth veined inner skin just below the elbow. Even now I wonder how this story might have turned out if I'd never seen it—if I really had stayed in my room—whether it was possible to have avoided the terrible spell he was about to cast.

  "Henri was in the military once," Klara said. "He was a soldier, Milo."

  "Actually I spent most of my years as a military police officer. We investigated everything from murders to war crimes in the areas we controlled."

  "Did you hear that?" she smiled. "He was a soldier and a detective."

  This was her eager-to-please morning voice—a voice both naïve and false. It was like she wasn't the one talking, like another voice was coming through her, and she was just an empty shell, a ventriloquist's dummy.

  I turned to Henri. He was holding up his arms, hands locked behind his head and his mouth held in a sly grin as if to say: Can you doubt who I am now?

  "I think you'd find you have a lot in common, actually," Klara was saying.

  But her voice had become a distant memory, a scratchy gramophone recording of another, simpler era—one that didn't include atomic bombs or sarin gas or suicide vests, nor the dark blue tattoo on Henri's arm: a horseshoe with a flame-like fleur-de-lis in the center and the number 2 at bottom.

  "I was for two years in Chad," Henri said. "In ‘79 and ‘80. Brutal. We could hardly count the bodies. You cannot imagine how it was, trying to sort out the truth under such conditions. Afterwards I dedicated myself to creating life, not killing it. Loving, not hating."

  Klara raised her eyebrows at me. "Did you hear that?"

  I turned to her. Was it possible she hadn't seen it? Or recognized it? She, who read all of Father's books at least once a year?

  Keith did the Foreign Legion tat himself, by copying an art book.

  But what it meant? He didn't know; he liked the look

  And all the searing pain that came

  From holding that sharp needle under hot blue flame

  "We were based in Atti and in N'djamena, the former Fort Lamy area," Henri was saying.

  "You were a Legionnaire," I said.

  "I was young."

  "Is that how you got your tattoo?"

  His eyes widened. Ah, you recognize it. Yes, I recognized all the signs. There was no doubting anymore. This was preceisely what Keith would do before his killings: display the tattoo and invent stories about his past. Draw his victim close with a slow tease and then . . . Bam! True, Keith was pale and bald and dark-eyed, but this could be a minor obfuscation—a way to keep us off-guard while he worked his way into our lives. I thought of the names. They were so obvious now. Henri, Keith. Both were five letters. Both shared an H, E, and I. And what did those three letters spell? "He" and "I."

  "He could tell you lots of stories," Klara said to me. "But they're not always the sorts of adventures you read in your books. Isn't that right, Henri?"

  "War brings out the worst in people. And war in Africa? It makes savages of us all."

  "I'm so sorry," said Klara. She leaned over and touched the tattoo, rubbing a forefinger gently across it—a gesture that made me want to scream.

  "It was a long time ago," Henri told her. "Still you never forget these things. Gardening has been good therapy, as you say."

  "You see?" Klara said to me. Then she whispered, too loudly, into Henri's ear: "For me, too. It's been that for me, too."

  I felt I ought to say something, do something, but my old helplessness seized me suddenly. Even my raid upon the roses seemed like an impotent gesture now. "I always heard that the Foreign Legion's military police were notoriously corrupt," I managed.

  "We did the best we could under difficult circumstances."

  "Did you ever plant evidence? Arrest someone you knew was innocent? Or torture people into false confessions?"

  Klara gave me a sharp look. "Milo!"

  Henri put a hand on her arm. "It is a fair question."

  "It's insensitive," she insisted.

  "I cannot say I was perfect, but I always thought I was just," he said to me. "Perhaps we all have things to atone for, no?"

  I looked at Klara. I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs: Why can't you see it? Yes, it was brilliant, I had t
o admit it, because Keith had also once worked for the police—as a crime scene photographer. Not an investigator, true, but close enough. "He'd learned to see a body, bloody clothes, and limbs in binds / As elements of composition, the aesthetics of the crime." Still a part of me resisted. I hung on to reality as if for dear life. I told myself, more forcefully this time, that there must be another explanation—that fictional characters didn't step off the page, didn't come to life. Or did they?

  I shot to my feet.

  "Please sit down, Milo."

  "Excuse me."

  Back in my room, I pulled my secret diary out of the lock-box beneath my bed. Part of me didn't want to revisit these old scenes, but I had to be sure, because I no longer trusted fickle memory. I turned to a passage from shortly before Father's death: "He's been dressing like his characters. Today he's LumberJack, The Ripper." I remembered the red plaid shirt, the axe he carried around, his gruff manner of speaking without moving his newly bearded lips. At the time I thought he'd been gathering fictional material: "getting to know his characters." Then came Keith. I could see him even now: paint-spattered pants, shaved head, Bowie knife with its thick handle wrapped in electrical tape and the gleaming half-serrated blade. He'd been at the edge of the woods, on one of his midnight walks, when he'd pulled that blade out of a sheath strapped to his belt and marched toward a tree—a tree where, I suddenly noticed, lay a cage, and inside the cage something snorted and squirmed, an animal wracked with fear. I felt for this poor beast—I knew the feeling intimately myself, the small death that comes from helplessness, but I wasn't prepared for the larger death, for what Father had obviously planned. He lifted the top of the cage. Down plunged the blade. Suddenly the night, the woods, were filled with a horrible baby-like scream. I could hardly move as Father bent over and got to work, wiping his brow on his sleeve as he sawed off the poor thing's head. He raised it. I saw a band of white fur, glittering eyes. A raccoon. "Now he's talking to it," I'd written at the time, in my shaky hand, "just like Keith talks to the severed head of Beatrice."

  I closed the diary, tempted to believe this had been fantasy, because that's what I sometimes wrote in my secret diary: the world as it ought to be. But I'd never wish for what had happened that night, and I never embellished when it came to Father. I wrote only the facts about him—no matter how strange—to provide a record, to prove to myself and perhaps ultimately to others what kind of man he was.

  So what did it all mean?

  I crept onto Klara's balcony. They were directly below, Klara rubbing her forehead while Henri stroked her shoulder. With the rustling leaves and chirping birds I could barely make out their words, but on that day I wished I hadn't—wished for once I could be satisfied with ignorance.

  "You see how he reacted?" Henri was saying.

  "He's all I have."

  "My dear, what if that is his own doing?"

  She waved a hand uncertainly.

  "Listen to me, Klara. He followed us to the hospital and stole the evidence. Why else would he do that?"

  "For fun? Milo can be like that."

  "Don't you want to know the truth?"

  "The car is gone."

  "Are you sure? All the insurance companies in Vermont use the same scrap dealer outside of Brattleboro. One of my workers has told me of this." He took a deep breath. "I know it is none of my business. I only want you to be happy. Maybe a phone call to see if the car is still . . . ?"

  I couldn't deny it any longer. This was Keith exactly. He'd always taken a shrewd measure of his victims. It would be just like him to realize Klara's secret longing to be taken advantage of, to enslave her desires to those of a stronger man. Even a man bent on destroying us? Yes. It would make his victory that much sweeter, knowing that she knew what he was up to, but couldn't help herself. He could take everything—my freedom, her wealth, her self-respect—and still she'd beg for more.

  I staggered back through Klara's room, wondering whether Father himself was doing this somehow, grasping at us from beyond the grave. But why? Unfortunately the question answered itself: to punish us for daring to move past him, to remind us we could never forget.

  "I am always with you, Milo. Never forget that. I am part of you, and you are part of me."

  I drifted into the hallway, where his voice suddenly emanated from every stone, every shadowy corner: "'Close your eyes, Milo, and let it come to you.' 'I'm scared.' 'Move closer to me and you'll see everything.'" I found myself beneath the Bram Stoker portrait. Dracula had always been one of his favorites. Only I'd never realized its significance before: how it was full of unholy creatures, dead yet granted eternal life: "Lucy's eyes in form and colour; but Lucy's eyes unclean and full of hell-fire, instead of the pure, gentle orbs we knew." And what could be more dead—yet more eternally alive—than a fictional character?

  I managed to reach my bed. It was like a ship floating through space, a place of safety even though it never was—even though Father always sat on its edge and watched me fake sleep, his face looming close, his sulphurous breath washing over me. "'You know the secret to creating fear, my son?' 'Please, Father, no.' 'Planting belief.'"

  No. I buried my face in the pillow, resisting even now. If only I can break this spell. . . I reached into my night stand's drawer. My photo album. This is what I do when situations seem overwhelming—I turn to my baseball photos. Not reminders of a happier time but just the opposite: proof of my ability to endure when things seem most impossible. I studied the washed-out images of my childhood like a desperate archivist: the blur of a ball, my maroon uniform and cavernous helmet and high white socks. I remembered what a nightmare it had been—how I couldn't hit or catch, how even the coaches made snide remarks. At the time I saw no escape, because Mother believed that all American boys were required to play baseball, and nothing could dissuade her.

  "What if I were in a wheelchair or retarded?" I'd pleaded with her once. "Then I wouldn't have to play."

  "But you're not," she'd replied, folding the Little League's liability waiver into an envelope. "You're a healthy boy. Healthy boys play baseball."

  "Not every healthy boy. Not Eric Chin."

  "He's Chinese. That's different. He can't help being un-American. You, on the other hand, are an American boy."

  I tried explaining that baseball actually derived from the English game of rounders, so it wasn't really "American" at all. Or that I rarely played, relegated to the bench or far right field. But it didn't work. She mailed in the form. It was up to me to end this charade. How? It took patience, waiting for an opportunity, and ultimately an act of grit and bodily sacrifice—letting my worst fears materialize and pushing straight through them. A lesson that wasn't lost on me now.

  It happened when our team's catcher, Davey Moor, fell ill with chickenpox. His usual replacement was undergoing an orthodontic procedure, so the coach, some beer-swollen imbecile, pulled me aside and pointed to the pads and plastic guards behind the bench. I hesitated. I'd never played catcher before. I just stared at the equipment—remains of a vanquished knight—before realizing what I had to do. I picked them up. My teammates grumbled. "So much for our chance of making the playoffs," I heard.

  Just you wait, I wanted to say.

  I never made it through warm-ups. The first pitch hit me squarely in the shoulder. The second bashed my shin. The third crashed into my face guard and sent me reeling in a cloud of dust.

  "You OK?" the coach asked.

  "I've almost got the hang of it."

  By the end I could hardly walk. The coach had to peel the equipment off me. "Jesus Christ," he said when he looked at my swollen, useless arm. The other boys all turned away, but I just smiled as Klara picked me up and fussed over me the entire way home. "What did they do to you?" she asked. Even Mother noticed what awful shape I was in.

  "My God, did you ride your bicycle into a tree?"

  She was hurrying across
the living room with a painting of sunflowers under her arm and a gold speckled scarf around her head. She looked like a glittering pirate. She pushed her sunglasses to the tip of her nose. "Or were the boys at school—?"

  "Baseball," I said as I heaved myself onto the sofa.

  "But you can hardly walk, and why are you holding your arm so funny?"

  "I was trying out for catcher and kept getting hit by the ball."

  "Why do they allow you boys to do such things?" she said as she put the painting down and examined me more closely. "I'm going to call the school principal."

  "This is Little League. It has nothing to do with school."

  "All we have is our health. Without our health we have nothing. Always remember that, Milo."

  "Yes, Mother."

  "I don't want you playing this baseball anymore," she said, holding the painting against the dying light. "I'm sorry if you're disappointed."

  That night I doused my baseball uniform with nail polish remover and brought it to a ditch by the side of the house. A single match was enough. I wished Mother could see the flames, the smoke, the crackling of burning nylon. This was a much more American activity than baseball—as American as smoke-signals, really.

  It was early afternoon when Klara pounded on my door.

  The pounding—loud, insistent—shocked me out of my reveries, and another dark thought occurred to me: that Henri had already turned her into his accomplice, that she'd come with a poisoned needle or a fat little Derringer to murder me. Or that she'd called the scrap dealer. Perhaps she had news. Perhaps there'd been a development.

  I opened the door.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Come."

  She turned and descended the stairs, her footsteps echoing on the cold hard stone. She led me into the living room. The television was on, the screen a solid blue. She sat in one of the high-backed chairs and took up a pair of remote controls, arranged just so. I sat beside her. The screen popped to life. The picture was shaky at first, then colorful flowers came into view, set to warbled Vivaldi-like music.