Blood-Stained Kings

by Tim Willocks

  He had needed to see them again, to feel them near.

  He had summoned them to this meeting place.

  The grain of wood.

  The cleavature of stone.

  The heart of the atom.

  Buried secrets, only revealed to the eye of man by violent forces randomly applied.

  If there was indeed a purpose to his summons—for he himself knew it not—then only by such application would it be revealed.

  And when the revelation came, if come it would, it would take its place with all the others—grain of wood, cleavature of stone, heart of atom—and disappear from sight: trampled granules of sand washed by the vast ocean of all that was unintelligible.

  In the end, he thought, nothing that was true had ever made sense.

  Clarence Jefferson smiled across the musty parlor and said:

  “You’ve lost weight, Grimes, I’m concerned.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  CLARENCE SEYMOUR JEFFERSON, seated like an ailing suzerain upon a blighted throne, did not look well; but he was most irrefutably alive.

  Grimes stood on the threshold of the parlor and reassured himself that if he uttered the appropriate order then Gul would tear Jefferson apart, without a qualm and probably with some enjoyment. Gul stalked slowly across the moth-eaten carpet, his hips hunched low, ready to spring in an instant at the deformed figure hulking in the winged chintz armchair. The dog’s primeval basso made the mote-filled air tremble.

  “Gul,” said Grimes. “Stay cool.”

  Gul stopped. His eyes did not waver from Jefferson, who sat for all the world like a pagan idol cast in bronze and did not blink. Gul settled his muscled haunches on the carpet, still poised and ready to go, and waited.

  “Good man,” said Grimes. He looked at Jefferson. “This is Gul.”

  Jefferson glanced at the great black dog and nodded.

  “I know Gulbudeen,” he said.

  Somehow Grimes was not surprised.

  “You know ‘em all, don’t you, Clarence?”

  Jefferson shook his huge head. “Nobody knows them all,” he replied. “Sit down, why don’t you? You’re among friends after all.”

  Jefferson lifted his right arm and pointed at a second chair. The arm ended at the wrist in a thick black stump of what looked like a hard matte-black resin. Grimes glanced from the stump, whose origin he knew well, to Jefferson’s eyes. Jefferson knew too; he smiled. Grimes looked away and walked over to the second chair and sat down. The butt of the Colt revolver in his belt jammed into his kidney and he shifted on his seat.

  “You can put the gun on your lap, Grimes,” said Jefferson. “I won’t be offended.”

  Grimes pulled the Colt out, stuck it in the front of his belt and considered his situation. The first sight of Jefferson had made him feel sick. Initially it was with shock and an amorphous residue of the fear Jefferson had inspired on their previous encounter: when they had pushed each other, blow for blow, to the outer limits of existence and when Grimes had survived even if he had not won. This residue Grimes wiped aside. He would not be drawn into another game, not ofthat kind. He would not fear him; he would not hate him. Whether knowingly or not, Jefferson had taught him the folly of hatred, in the tunnel of pain they had crawled together; but now was not the time to dwell on that darkness. He would not be sucked into the past. All around Grimes there tossed a sea of rampant emotion: Jefferson’s torment, George’s lust for glory, the rage of Filmore Faroe. He could not afford that luxury. He had to mount the power of his will and his reason against the tides of feeling shifting within himself; otherwise he was lost.

  With his mind at least temporarily under control Grimes found his nausea sustained by a different source: the peculiar odor that pervaded the room. He was familiar with the smell for once known it was never forgotten. It was the smell of field hospitals in the killing fields and of limbs awaiting amputation. It always provoked in him a strange blend of disgust and pity, for it was the smell of bacteria toiling ceaselessly, and innocendy, at their life’s work of consuming human tissue. Pseudo-monas. Gangrene. Grimes swallowed the nausea and oriented himself.

  This side of the farmhouse faced north. The light from the casement windows was soft and pale. In the apple trees outside the window nameless birds flung profligate harmonies to the breeze, indifferent to they who listened inside. Grimes thought: bacteria, birds, dogs, men. He wondered if they all of them existed within themselves, as he did. He couldn’t see how they could not. And, if so, he wondered by what leaps infinitely large, and infinitesimally small, and by what alchemy and over what eons the toiling microbes had transformed their inner existence, whatever form it took, into birdsong and the stoutness of Gul’s heart and the fevered brightness of Jefferson’s eyes. And then he wondered what random and ephemeral forces had brought them all here together, on this late and fading afternoon in this dusty parlor, perfumed with gangrene, in the Ohoopee River bottomlands.

  Grimes recognized in the drift of his thoughts the hypnotic influence of Clarence Jefferson. The Captain sat there watching Grimes wonder as if ensconced among barren crags, waiting in abject serenity for a long predestined outcome. Against the back of his chair was propped a long wooden crutch. On the floor beside him, where he could reach it with his left hand, was an automatic shotgun with a sawed-down barrel.

  The fatman was no longer fat. If Grimes had shed pounds, Jefferson had shed all but the thread of life. His body was shriveled in the baggy wrapping of his skin. If Grimes had not known so well the gargantuan origin of the strength—the psychopathic strength—from which Jefferson’s spending of himself had begun, he would not have believed it possible that a pulse might still beat in this frame. But beat it did: in the bowed and sensuous mouth, in the shining eyes, in the insolent blunt-ness of the resinous stump. Six-feet-six and as wide as God, his blond skull a marble boulder gracefully hacked, Clarence Jefferson still defied his Maker even as he stank. His face, its classical lines clearer now that he was wasted, glistened with a thin, unhealthy sweat. His left leg was propped on a worn red leather footstool, whose stuffing bulged from a gash in the side. The leg of his tan cotton slacks had been slit as far as the knee to accommodate the grossly edematous limb. The naked foot was also swollen. Over the lateral aspect of both leg and foot the skin was grotesquely deformed by the unmistakable scar tissue of a full-thickness burn. Under one edge of the scar, on the warped fullness of the calf, was a livid purple-black disc, moist at the center and angry red at the edges. Ecthyma ßcmgrenosum. The lesion was in shadow and Grimes couldn’t see it properly, but he knew that it was from there that the sweet smell emanated.

  The last time Grimes had seen him, Jefferson had been flat on his back and surrounded by flames with almost a foot of steel in his belly.

  Grimes said, “How did you survive?”

  Jefferson said, “It was something I decided to do.”

  “You were well fucked and far from home.”

  “The fire, Grimes. You remember. The fire brought me around, the fire took out the wall. All I had to do was pull out the blade and crawl.”

  Grimes glanced at the swollen, gangrenous leg.

  He said, “You’re dying now, you know.”

  “Maybe,” said Jefferson.

  “May I take a look?” asked Grimes.

  Jefferson hesitated, then smiled a smile that chilled Grimes’s blood.

  “Why, I’m touched, Grimes. By all means.”

  Grimes stood up and walked over. As he got closer he saw that in the moist center of the black discoid lesion there was a pale and tiny movement. He squatted at a safe distance from Jefferson’s good hand. The forearm seemed the only part of Jefferson that had not withered: it was still the diameter of Grimes’s thigh and as dense as ironwood. Grimes knew Gul would take the Captain out before he reached the shotgun, but if that meaty hand—its veins and tendons buried muscle-deep—closed around Grimes’s throat, then it would be adios muchacho for him, Gul or not. Grimes looked more carefully at the
ulcerating wound. As experienced as he was, he swallowed.

  The pale and tiny movement at its center was a live maggot.

  Grimes said, “That’s a little old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

  Jefferson laughed. “You know, Grimes? You don’t disappoint me.”

  “You put it in there yourself.”

  “Don’t knock it. That little feller’s keeping me alive.”

  “Maybe for a while,” said Grimes, “but he won’t help the infection in your blood. You need a couple of heavy-duty antibiotics.”

  The names Tobramycin and Ciprofloxacin flashed through his mind. It didn’t seem worth mentioning them.

  “You didn’t come all this way to write me a prescription,” said Jefferson.

  Grimes squinted and inwardly sighed at himself. This man, this Captain of Vice, was the origin of all his woes; and yet Grimes was bizarrely glad to see him. He was glad Jefferson was not dead. He almost said so but didn’t. Grimes admired guts more than just about anything else. Clarence Jefferson might have been a cocksucker but guts he had in plenty.

  Grimes said, “Then why did I come?”

  “Because I asked you to. I knew you wouldn’t refuse an old friend.”

  “So why me?”

  Jefferson gazed at the ceiling for a moment, then looked down at him.

  “Because you deserved another chance,” he said.

  “Thank you,” said Grimes.

  Jefferson raised his eyebrows. “Will you deny that you needed me, rotting in your hole as Daggett found you? As I knew he would find you?”

  Grimes didn’t feel like answering.

  Jefferson said, “I’ve brought pain into your life, Grimes. Past and present.”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  Clarence Jefferson smiled. “Your stoicism is already beyond question.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “But as our mutual friend Seneca said, while God is beyond suffering, the true Stoic is above it.”

  “One day,” said Grimes, “I’m going to work out why it is that so many people want to tell me how I should live my goddamn life.”

  “You’re a much-loved man, Grimes. That’s why you’re here.”

  “I just want to keep my father out of trouble.”

  Jefferson said, “You delude yourself. You are here, as are we all, to sup on anguish. If it is so, as our Seneca implies, that suffering contradicts the very nature of God, then by the same token it defines ours. That is why, in the end, we so resolutely desire the anguish which imperils our life. Or rather, not anguish alone but anguish transcended. The man who thereby conquers the scalding anguish of desire, hatred and fear ‘surpasses God himself.’ Is that not our project?”

  “It isn’t mine,” said Grimes. “I just want to go back to my hole.”

  “Come now, Grimes, cynicism is a boy’s game. We are men, are we not? You must acknowledge that an extremity of anguish is the precious possession of an infinitely small elite.”

  “That’s the primest bullshit I’ve ever heard.” Grimes felt himself heating up. This was stupid. He stood up from his squat. “I won’t argue with you.”

  Jefferson looked up at him. “As you will, but at least hear me out. Surely you wouldn’t cheat Fate of the immense labor she has invested in bringing us together again?”

  Grimes walked over to the window and looked out on the first glimmerings of dusk. He ought to leave, yet couldn’t. He listened without turning.

  “You know you don’t have to be here any more than I do, Grimes. Don’t tell me you ‘had to come,’ that your conscience forced you. The Stoic does not spend his energies on the despair of guilt any more than on the frivolity of joy. You chose to make this journey, as did I, and for one reason only: because we both know in our hearts that it is only by dancing, cheek to cheek, with ruination and death that we can overcome them and take our rightful place among the stars.”

  “And Lenna Parillaud and my father,” said Grimes, still facing the window pane. “Are they dancing too?”

  “The invitation to the dance excludes no one.”

  “So this elite of yours isn’t so small after all.”

  There was a pause.

  “I retract that indulgence,” said Jefferson. “It was vain. And yet I meant it. For if our overcoming is to be more than abject submission to the random hostility of the cosmos, one condition—and one only—must be met in full. And it is this: that our anguish be a fit measure of the spirit of the man—or the woman—who desires it.”

  Grimes turned to look at him. There was an eagerness, an invitation, in Jefferson’s eyes that he had seen before, and had refused.

  “So you’ve got what you wanted,” said Grimes. “Sitting on the throne of God and measuring our fitness for eternity while the rest of us run around like assholes.”

  “No right man wants to be a god. A king, perhaps, but not a god.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be a king, either,” said Grimes.

  “Not even of yourself?” asked Jefferson.

  Grimes heard the slap of a gauntlet hitting the floor. He said nothing.

  Jefferson nodded.

  “That kingdom is the hardest conquest of all,” said Jefferson. “To keep it is harder still. Both endeavors insist upon the spilling of blood: whether blood of vein or blood of soul; your own and that of others, too.”

  So there was the nub of all that the Captain had summoned him to hear.

  Grimes didn’t want to see things the way Jefferson did; the burden was too grave. Yet he had accepted this summons; he was here. Maybe the Captain was right, then; but Grimes suspected that Jefferson was driven by the same mysterious undercurrents as he was, and as were they all, and that Jefferson’s speculations were no more than a thin garment hastily thrown over his fear of the inner unknown. As Grimes held his gaze, the feverish tinge to Jefferson’s eyes grew more intense. Grimes would deal with his own unknown in his own way. He decided it was time to go.

  “Okay,” said Grimes. “I’ve heard you out. You wrote me about two suitcases. Where are they?”

  “You mean the anvil of justice,” said Jefferson.

  “If you insist,” said Grimes. “Do they exist? Or was that just a part of the great game?”

  “Look behind me,” said Jefferson.

  Grimes stepped away from the window and looked behind Jefferson’s armchair. In the shadows between the chair and the wall stood two large suitcases in brown leather, bound by straps. Grimes bent down and picked one up. He almost dislocated a disc.

  “It feels like it’s full of gold bars,” said Grimes.

  “More than gold, Grimes, much more.”

  Grimes said, “Well, this is what I came for.”

  Grimes picked up both cases. He reckoned he could just about make it to Daggett’s car. He carried the cases into the center of the room and set them down. Gul looked up at him and showed him his tongue. Gul, at least, knew the score. Grimes cast a glance around the decaying room. The Old Place. It felt like a tomb.

  As if reading his thoughts, Jefferson said, “I was born in this house.”

  The words, though flatly stated, reached Grimes’s ears with the desperation of a plea. He turned back to the gangrenous carcass sweating away the last of his strength in the winged chair, and with those words and in that moment the legend of Clarence Jefferson died in front of him. Grimes saw only a man, putrefying in his own skin, a man who had sat here for a thousand crawling hours with nothing to keep him company but the memory of the lives he’d blighted, his attempt to squeeze some bitter drops of meaning from what he had done, and the maggot in his leg. That Jefferson had held on to the thread of sanity at all was a measure of his demonic will. Grimes hesitated to credit him with a great mind. Could greatness devote itself to evil and remain great? There were those who spoke readily enough of the glory of transgression; Jefferson had lived it. Had he, then, known glory? His body was being slowly and hideously poisoned, as he had poisoned the lives of Lenna, and of Faroe, of t
hose whose own crimes were crammed into the cases on the floor and of many more now dead and gone. And yet it seemed to Grimes that there was no justice in Jefferson’s slow putrefaction, but only more suffering.

  Jefferson sat staring at him in silence, as if waiting for the shroud of isolation to fall once more around his shoulders, and Grimes felt an intense pity for him. He would have preferred something else, triumph maybe, or gladness or relief. But pity was all he could come up with. There was nothing left to say.

  “Goodbye, Clarence,” said Grimes.

  Without waiting for an answer Grimes bent and picked up the suitcases.

  “Gul,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  As Gul rose majestically to his feet Jefferson swung his leg from the footstool. Gul displayed some teeth and growled.

  “Easy,” said Grimes.

  Grimes had some small inkling of the extraordinary pain Jefferson had to be in, yet the Captain hoisted himself to his feet without flinching. He grabbed his crutch.

  “I’ll see you to the door.”

  “Thanks.”

  Grimes headed down the corridor toward the backdoor. At his heel Gul kept an eye on the towering figure stumping along behind them. They passed through the gloomy kitchen and went out onto the porch and Grimes set the cases down. Across the cobblestoned yard Daggett was sitting in his Lincoln. Beyond the car was spread the splendor of the valley and the river’s winding gold.

  Behind him Jefferson said, “You ought to stick around awhile. At sundown, if you’re lucky, the bottomlands can seem like they’re bathed in blood.”

  Grimes turned and looked up into the fatman’s face, no longer fat.

  Jefferson said, “I reckon it’s as good a place to die as any other.”

  Grimes said, “When I see your head on a pole, I’ll believe it.”

  “Before you go, I have something I wanted to give to Ella.”

  Jefferson shifted his weight from the crutch and leaned his right shoulder against the timber supporting the porch roof. He put his left hand into his pocket.