The Storm Giants

by Pearce Hansen

  The BMWs skidded in on either side as Everett reached arms’ length with her, the car’s hoods a few yards away to his right and left.

  The woman seemed unsurprised at his abrupt approach. She had to be in her mid 50s by now, with a barely restrained sexual intensity. Every movement was a seduction. Tall and blonde, very Nordic and proper, with a striking face like a cameo carved out of ice. The smell of Chanel No. 5 wafted from her, bringing all the old associations crashing.

  She had the kind of slender athletic build only to be obtained through years of psychotically dedicated gym work. She was well dressed and elegant, but her dark sun glasses suggested the weakness in her game: she didn’t trust her own eyes not to betray her.

  Everett still didn’t acknowledge the flanking cars. This blonde had his full attention even though he didn’t aim any direct looks at her. Seeing her, being near her, wasn’t a good thing – back history belonged behind you, not in your face.

  “Car doors had best not open,” Everett said. His ready hands dangled relaxed at his sides.

  “It has been a long time, Everett,” the blonde said, a trace of Germanic accent to her voice. “You prefer to be called that, and not your given Christian name?”

  “Doesn’t matter. What you want?”

  “Think, Everett,” she said. “Search your memories.”

  She relished her little game. Everett was reminded of a cat playing with a half disemboweled mouse, and considered giving her a mocking squeak.

  She asked, “Surely you remember your childhood dentist? Doctor Dauffenbach – and us? You cannot be so rude as to forget your visits to the office. And you know I am a widow now.”

  “That was then, this is now,” Everett said. “You’re not here for nostalgia.”

  “I am not,” the Widow said. “Though I apologize for neglecting you so long. If the Juden had not persecuted him unto death, Doctor Dauffenbach had planned on bringing you into the fold. You belonged with us – but the mud people would not permit it to be. I have followed your career, even if from a distance. In the interests of repairing our relationship, you have an opportunity to perform for me again. A task, an errand. A Labor if you will, like Hercules.”

  “Not interested,” Everett said. “You’re in the way.”

  She smiled with a simper and scuffed the edge of a shoe against the asphalt. “So how is your lady, Kerri? And the little one, what is his name? Raymond?”

  Everett found himself stepping closer, his hands aching to grab her. His eyes panned from right to left, scoping the twin Beamers. They both had tinted glass, so neither driver could be seen clearly. They were just blobby silhouettes behind their steering wheels, both of them watching without urgency.

  They thought they were safe in their cars; they thought they had him. Their eyes would widen in shock when he demonstrated their error. They’d die whatever they filled their hands with.

  But then what? He’d still be in the dark. His family would still be at the mercy of this wicked woman’s good intentions.

  Everett relaxed his hands though they screamed silent protest as if the appendages were thwarted of a vital purpose. He looked right at her instead of how he usually looked at people: just past them or beside them; at the ground by their feet or over their head.

  “Good,” the Widow said, with the almost imperceptible nod she’d have favored a pet with had it learned a new but unsurprising trick. “You are perhaps still as intelligent as I remember. You can not think I would harm your family. I could never pose a threat to them. There is a bond between us after all.”

  She scuffed her shoe on the ground again, an unconvincingly girlish gesture. “We are still friends and you can trust me, Everett. But it occurs to me that the very capabilities I see in you might be a temptation to foolishness.

  “Your mother told me many things about you before she declined. She was quite cooperative.” The Widow shook her head in simulated commiseration. “I would hate the samples I obtained of your mother’s DNA to fall into the wrong hands. It’s only circumstantial evidence, but the familial genetic similarity might inspire the authorities to treat you as a ‘person of interest’ and turn their millstone attentions your way. But it will not come to that. We are good friends.

  “What do you want?” Everett asked.

  “I have suffered a loss and you will make it good, as I know you would wish to,” the Widow said. “A thief stole from me and I need you to recover my goods.”

  Everett gestured at the bracketing cars. “You got a crew.”

  “He knows me and my people. He has certain defenses in place that are too inconvenient for me to deal with. In addition, there are other factors, none of which are your concern. I have to send a stranger for any chance at recovery. Someone like him and his people. And here you are again, convenient to my needs.”

  Everett let himself be diverted into examining the tactical situation she confronted him with. A relaxing distraction though he wasn’t about to let her see how pleasant it was for him. “What did he boost off you?”

  “Gold. Bullion to be exact. My late husband managed to salvage a large cache when the Reich fell, and this has supported me and my endeavors for many years. But it was stolen from me by this thief, this charlatan.” She looked a little angry; a furrow tried to mar her unlined Botox brow.

  “How’d he manage to beat you for it?”

  The Widow exuded ill concealed chagrin. “He pretended to be something that he wasn’t. He charmed me.”

  Everett decided he knew just what kind of charm she was talking about, figured it the most expensive fuck since the Taj Mahal. He tried not to envision her naked and demanding, satisfying someone else. “Where did Dr. D get this gold from?”

  “That too is none of your concern,” she said. “You must learn your place. I wish you the best in all things, young man. But you must remember what a thin line it is between a healthy family, and a fate even your best intentions could not prevent. You will not fail me.”

  Everett studied her cold beauty. He’d know her face and body in Hell a million years from now. “So you want this bullion, in exchange for leaving my family alone and giving up the DNA samples?”

  “You do understand,” she said. “I will be in touch.”

  Chapter 5 : A Passing and a Bolt for Home

  That night in a Fremont motel room, Everett’s eyes opened and he was awake. Something had just happened, though he couldn’t tell what it was. A relief, a calmness.

  He called the hospital. They said his mother had just passed. Would he care to make funeral arrangements? Everett hung up and was on the road within five minutes.

  As he drove the speed limit up Highway 101 toward Mendocino and home, Bambi’s face loomed to fill the night sky in front of the Escort, her expression enigmatic.

  What was she trying to convey? Everett couldn’t tell with the storm giants laughing behind her, even if they couldn’t get past her, couldn’t get all the way at him while she was there. It was startling though. He hadn’t seen them outside of dreamland since he’d moved to Mendo.

  Everett was alone so it was safe to say “The fuck away,” as he raised one hand from the steering wheel and clawed the images to the side. They disappeared, leaving nothing ahead of the thrumming little Escort but the two lane blacktop illuminated by its headlights.

  Part Two :

  Chapter 6 : So as not to Intrude

  Everett took the access road off 101 and descended the switchbacks zigzagging down the steep embankment toward the river. On the short straight-aways between the hairier turns, he could see his and Kerri’s snug little house and its outbuildings.

  A murder of crows croaked welcome from a tree as the Escort passed. Everett answered back, imitating them with exactitude. The crows cocked their heads and aimed bright eyes at him.

  A family quintet of Red Tailed Hawks circled above, buoyed on the wind as they patrolled for prey or carrion. The surrounding pines bulked on the bowl of highlands, enclosing their home.
/>
  Despite the breeze whispering through the trees, heat waves shimmered off the flood plain borders of the Eel River, which chuckled and chattered idiotically over its stony bed in the middle distance. The river was semi-full with icy runoff from the latest rain storms in the Mendocino Range. Its clattering roar grew louder as Everett exited the last switchback and parked on the wide concrete slab he’d laid just before he’d left. The cement was curing well, and didn’t look at all look bad considering Everett was no contractor.

  Kerri came to the doorway and they took note of each other. She wore the stained and spattered smock she always had on when painting. Her eyes blinked behind her coke bottle glasses as she pushed away an unruly lock of long red hair.

  She gave Everett a single preoccupied nod as he exited the Escort. He followed her as far as the porch when it became plain it was her easel she was drawn to.

  Sun beamed through the skylight Everett installed, illuminating her latest canvas. Everett studied Kerri’s painting from the porch without entering. The forms and shapes and colors interplayed on the canvas, adding up to something greater than the sum of their parts – mysteries would be revealed if you looked at the painting long enough.

  “It’s beautiful,” Everett said.

  “You don’t think it’s too dark?” Kerri asked. “These days, my pieces . . .”

  She noticed he still stood out on the porch, engrossed and staring at her canvas as if trapped by it. She smiled.

  Raymond’s smaller easel stood next to his mother’s. He usually painted or drew right along with her, but today he was messing with one of his terrariums at the low working table Everett built.

  The glass tank was occupied by a gigantic banana slug; the psychedelic yellow mollusk dangled off the baby fern placed in there to make it feel at home. Raymond scattered pieces of lettuce in the terrarium.

  Everett came to watch over his shoulder, trying not to intrude on his son’s mental space either if he could help it. Everett simultaneously enjoyed – and was troubled by – the fact Raymond was comfortable with his back to the door. There were no scars on Raymond, and none of his bones had been broken yet.

  “Hello, daddy,” the four year old said, smiling down at his pet mollusk. The slug’s Disney cartoon face seemed also to express pleasure as it chowed down on Raymond’s offering. “Look. He never stops eating.”

  “Never?” Everett asked. “He’ll stop eating some day, son. Everything will pass in the end.”

  Raymond shook his head vehemently in the negative, hard enough his helmet of red cowlicks jiggled around a bit before returning to stillness.

  Raymond looked at his captive slug with his mother’s eyes, inhaling the world like Kerri did. But sometimes a look of cold appraisal crept into Raymond’s eyes, the same look Everett saw on those rare occasions he stood in front of the mirror.

  Chapt er 7: Constructive Purposes

  Everett pushed a wheelbarrow of concrete laying tools along a newly poured concrete walkway to the water pump. He picked up one of the bags of cement stacked there. Everett emptied the bag of cement into the wheelbarrow and started pumping at the water spigot’s handle. Water gushed out in hoarse spurts as he worked.

  Everett mixed up the concrete with the piece of two by four. He rolled the barrow up the series of cement walkways to a fire pit, mid way up the embankment toward the highway.

  Next to the fire pit was a squared off form built out of two-by-four lengths. Everett dumped the cement into it, raked at the slurry and then got down on his hands and knees with the framing level, Everett referred often to the level during the final scrape and smoothing.

  During the last sweep of the board he noticed there was a contentment here that he’d been feeling the entire period this project took – several days of dawn-to-dusk labor. It was strenuous, distracting.

  Everett had capable hands, steady and precise. When he was four, the boy he’d been was able to cut the skin off a sunny side up egg without puncturing the yolk. He’d had Raymond try the same stunt once, and he managed it just as well. Raymond’s hands would grow soon enough into the ready tools Everett’s were – Raymond could be a surgeon someday if he wanted to.

  Everett looked down at this latest victory, feeling the peaceful satisfaction of acting out a constructive purpose.

  Chapt er 8: The Mortal Risk of Display

  Kerri approached as Everett finished the work; she was carrying her watercolor kit as she’d been catching the light down by the river. He laid down his tools and stood to greet her. He rinsed both hands under the spigot before reaching to drag her close and take a sniff at her red hair, inhaling her scent.

  Kerri burrowed her head against his broad hard muscled chest. She smelled burnt hair and noticed a scorched patch on the back of his head. He’d managed to burn himself while he was down in the Bay Area.

  She gave an inward sigh. That was just like Everett – not taking care of himself at all if she wasn’t around. She wondered just what he’d done involving fire.

  “Got a letter from the Montessori School up in Arcata,” Kerri said. “Raymond starts next month, they want us to drop by with him soon. We can tour the classrooms, meet his teachers.”

  She sensed his unease. “What, Everett? You thought we could hide forever? We’ve got to move on some time.”

  It was kind of her to say ‘we,’ but that wasn’t the pronoun she should be using. The prospect of seeing the teachers was what unnerved him. At the meet-and-greet they might look at Everett and see the wrongness.

  But they’d extend that fear to Raymond, and judge the son by the father. Everett was approaching the end of his usefulness if he couldn’t figure out the line for this. Everett stroked Kerri’s shoulder and looked past her at the house and beyond that at the river.

  Raymond was down there, squatting on his hams at the water’s edge and pointing a stick at a dead salmon bobbing in the shallows. He jumped erect to twirl in place, swiping his stick at invisible enemies.

  The technique was childish, but Everett tried not to critique it even to himself. Raymond was strong and body smart like his daddy. Everett could show him a beginning level athletic trick once and Raymond would be able to reproduce it after a couple tries as if he’d practiced it his whole short life.

  It was time to start teaching Raymond the stick work: how to hold the rattan, how to swing it, and where the best body targets were. No kill moves though. Raymond wouldn’t need any of those skills to survive through adulthood.

  Kerri watched the way Everett looked at their son down by the river. She said, “I can always tell when you feel safe. That’s the only time you look at him like you care. Is it that scary to let the world know what he means to you?”

  Ch apter 9: A Night at the Sprints

  The evening Everett first found out about Raymond’s existence did not begin auspiciously. He and Kerri were living in Castro Valley at the time. One night Rolly called the house just as they were on their way out to the Outlaw Sprints, down at Baylands Racetrack in Fremont.

  Kerri enjoyed Everett’s relative animation at the races. Everett always seemed exhilarated by the power of those 700hp winged pocket hot rods. He listened to the thunder of those engines like they sent a personal message.

  Kerri hadn’t much liked Rolly’s phone call interruption, as it broke the rhythm she was trying to establish for the evening. But Everett told her they had to stop by Rolly’s, so of course there’d been nothing to do but make the detour and pick up Everett’s oh so charming partner first.

  Everett asked her to drive, but rather than go direct to Baylands he had her head over to the Flats near the Coliseum, a bad neighborhood deep in the Killing Fields of East Oakland.

  As directed, she parked in front of a house off 66th. Everett and Rolly got out, walked up on the porch and were allowed through the front door.

  Kerri looked around the neighborhood in growing wariness. Tight faced blacks on the corner looked right back at her. Expensive cars crowded the curb at t
he liquor store up the street, all kinds of wide open drug dealing and flesh peddling brawling around her on 66th.

  If Everett hadn’t seen fit to bring her, a white bread girl like herself wouldn’t have anything to do with this hood. What the hell was he thinking, leaving her alone in the car out here?

  But this was the environment he lived and worked in, Kerri thought in epiphany, having started to figure out what Everett was all about even by then. This was where he made his money, and how he paid their bills.

  She wasn’t a hypocrite; she spent the fat wads of cash he brought home all right. But this was an intolerable situation, even if it didn’t bother Everett any.

  A smacking sound came from inside the house, a sharp crack loud as a pistol shot – hella loud for her to be able to hear outside in the car. The front door flew open and a huge young black man bulled out, clad only in a pair of white boxers.

  The big black rocketed so hard out the house that he sailed past the top step and into space, his legs still wind-milling a Fred Flintstone aerial sprint as he arced through the air off the porch. He had both hands clasped to his lower face. He flew and landed full length on the walkway, hitting with a horrible thud that made Kerri think he wouldn’t get up again.

  But adrenaline can perform miracles and his legs pistoned him erect. He sprinted down the street crying, hands still clutching his mouth. Blood cascaded down across his pot belly and fragments of teeth scattered from his broken jaw as he ran. Even as Kerri watched, his shattered face commenced swelling up like a smashed pumpkin.

  He sobbed at the top of his lungs as he ran past a crowd of hangers on at the corner, who watched with wise cracking interest. She could still hear him howling after he disappeared down 66th.

  Everett and Rolly strolled out of the house. Everett’s eyes glowed bright electric blue. His face was almost unrecognizable under the porch light. As if her Everett wasn’t there anymore, and had been replaced by someone she had no interest in knowing.