Blood-Stained Kings

by Tim Willocks

  Faroe finally choked out some words. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to go away,” replied Ella.

  “Go?” said Faroe. His voice was hoarse. “Go where?”

  “Wherever you have to,” said Ella. “That’s your own choice.”

  Ella glanced at Lenna’s tear-stained face; then she looked back at Faroe.

  Ella said, “Once upon a time, you loved her too.”

  Faroe looked at her for a long time. What went through his mind in those moments, Grimes could not guess. The pain of betrayal, the torture of confinement, the slaughter that had ushered Ella into the world. Things terrible, things grievous, things sad: these things unknown and perhaps, even in him, a very small remnant of something else: something more eternal than the rest. Faroe took a sudden heave of breath.

  He said: “And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

  Grimes thought Faroe’s mind had finally snapped. Do it, he thought. Tell Gul to go and depend on Faroe’s basic reflexes to turn the gun away from Lenna.

  But suddenly Faroe dropped his arm. The gun fell away from Lenna’s throat. He let go of her and stepped back. His gun clattered to the ground. Filmore Faroe looked at Ella one last time, with an expression that Grimes would always remember but would never entirely comprehend; then he turned and fled, stumbling, into the blackness of the midnight field behind him.

  Lenna fell into Ella’s arms.

  Faroe was gone.

  Grimes walked over, with Gul, toward where Titus Oates was emerging from the tree line. An M16 rifle hung dejectedly from Oates’s hand. He jerked his thumb toward the undergrowth.

  “I guess this means I have to give Paco a break too,” said Oates.

  Grimes nodded. “Seems ungenerous not to.”

  Oates looked down at Gul. “And into the bargain I lose my fucking pooch too.” He glared at Grimes. “You were supposed to get yourself killed, man.”

  Grimes crouched down and put his fingers in the fur of Gul’s neck. He stared into the bottomless black eyes and Gul stared back.

  “Listen, pal,” said Grimes. “If you want to hang out with me, I’ll do my best for you, but I have to tell you that Titus here would make a better partner than I would. You understand?”

  Gul blinked once.

  “It’s up to you,” said Grimes.

  Gul looked up at Oates. Oates held out his right hand toward him.

  “Well?” he said. “What’s your problem, man?”

  Gul licked Oates’s hand. Oates smiled at Grimes.

  “Sorry, cousin.”

  “That’s the hand with blood on it,” said Grimes.

  “Hey, Mrs. Oates didn’t raise any of her babies to be assholes.”

  “Remember, Gul’s planning a trip to D.C. with those suitcases.”

  “Mmm,” grunted Titus Oates. “Well, if him and me are going to be partners, I guess it wouldn’t do to welsh on our first deal.”

  “Treat him right,” said Grimes.

  He walked away toward Lenna and Ella. Gul barked. Grimes turned. Gul looked at him but stayed by Oates’s side.

  “Be good,” said Grimes.

  Gul barked again and Grimes swallowed the things he felt and turned his back and walked on.

  When he reached the women, Ella said, “Tell her, Grimes. Tell her she’s got to come with us.”

  Lenna looked at him and Grimes knew from her eyes that whatever he might say, it wasn’t going to work.

  “I’m staying here,” said Lenna.

  Grimes waited.

  “All this is mine,” said Lenna. “All this and all that’s happened.”

  Grimes said, “That’s not so.”

  “Most of it is mine,” countered Lenna. “I never took care of things the way I should have. This time I will. No one need ever know you or Ella had anything to do with it.”

  “No one has to take a fall for me,” said Grimes.

  “It’s what I want,” said Lenna. “It’s what I ask of you.”

  She looked at Ella.

  “It’s what I ask of you both.”

  In Lenna’s expression, as she looked at her daughter, Grimes saw that this was her way of being what she’d always wanted most to be: Ella’s mother. Perhaps it was the only way she had.

  “Good luck, then,” said Grimes.

  Lenna smiled at him and the smile melted his heart.

  “Is that the best you can do?” she said.

  Grimes took her in his arms and kissed her. Her lips and skin and hair were soft, and lovely. The kiss tasted of all the things he knew of her, and of all the things he knew not, and wanted to, but never would. In a world of different possibilities, perhaps, but not this one. The limits of this one had been inscribed, and fixed, before they’d ever met.

  Not this world then, but some other.

  His imagination knew it well.

  Grimes pulled away and looked at Ella. She seemed unconvinced. Grimes held his arm out and she came and embraced him. He spoke quiedy in her ear.

  “George let you make your own choices. I reckon we owe Lenna the same.”

  Ella looked at him. She nodded. Grimes smiled.

  He said, “I’m proud to have rode with you, too.”

  Then a long and curdling scream arched above them through the night.

  It called out to Grimes; and it called him alone.

  The yearning that had haunted him and haunted him still.

  Grimes turns toward the midnight field and runs. He runs over grass and weeds and clods of clay He runs on and on, through a hazy dark. And splayed upon the fallow ground he finds a body: with spindled limbs and gaping neck.

  The body’s shaven head was gone.

  Grimes looks to north, and east, and west, and he cannot see him. He strains his eyes. He cannot see him. The sky is bigger than all his sight, and, too, the land; and in the black the land and sky seem one. Grimes cannot see him.

  Then a bolt of lightning cleaves the sky and floods the midnight field with incandescent witness: he is there.

  And he is running too.

  Bestumped and rotting and wasted: he runs. With a maggot in his leg.

  And the earth cannot stop him, nor her gods, nor the gone dead souls that grieve upon the wind. And in his arms he holds a ragged bundle, tight.

  And as the incandescence fades and a bolt of thunder rolls the darkness home, Grimes imagines that he sees the fatman smile.

  And Cicero Grimes smiles too. For in his heart he knows: the fatman loves them.

  He loves them dear.

  EPILOGUE

  TITUS OATES, and his partner, Gul, took the lawman’s corpus delicti, with which they had been entrusted, to D.C., and Titus divided the corpus into two portions. The one he delivered to The Washington Post as Cicero Grimes had suggested, and as Gul insisted that he do. But because Titus did not wholly trust the Post, tied as they were, at least as he saw it, to certain principles that conflicted with his notion of freedom, he delivered the other portion to Soldier of Fortune magazine. Neither organ let them down. The hurly-burly that the lawman had predicted ensued and the anvil of justice rang loud across the land. Oates became a feted and famous man, all the more so when he was tried on a multitude of indictments in the states of Louisiana and Georgia. Though Oates denied nothing—and in fact embellished his deeds in order to take into account those actually performed by Cicero Grimes—so heroic was his tale, and so forthright his defense of the justice of what he had done, that the citizens twelve and true chosen by each court acquitted Oates of all charges, on the grounds that he was constitutionally entitled to defend himself, and the lives of vulnerable others, to the best of his reasonable judgment. After the trial, Titus Oates changed his name to Hajj Dha Bah, which he understands to mean “the pilgrimage of ritual slaughter,” and disappeared with Gul into the remote wastes of Canada in order to wander the Northern Roads. To what exact purpose, and in search of what goal, no one knows.

  Lenna Parillaud also stood trial and was f
ound guilty of the charges that Filmore Faroe had planned to bring against her concerning his abduction and imprisonment and the defraudment of his wealth. She made no mention of the fact that Ella MacDaniels was still alive, or of Grimes, and they respected her wish that this be so. She is presently serving twenty-five years in the Louisiana State Correctional Facility for Women, and when Ella visits her, or she writes to Grimes, Lenna insists that she has no complaints. Her appeal, and the complexities of her estate, have yet to be resolved.

  Ella MacDaniels returned to the City and changed little of her outer life. She started writing songs, and continues to perform. She refuses to use the deposits Clarence Jefferson bequeathed her, because she figured that the cash was accumulated out of injustice, of which she wants no part. She too corresponds with Grimes and he has learned that she is presently negotiating a recording contract with an independent outfit based in the City, and that she’s taken herself a lover, who, she says, treats her well.

  Cicero Grimes went back to his hole and dwelt for a while upon the death of his father, George. When he finally decided that he was bound to the Orphic wheel along with the rest of them, and that in the end he had earned the right, in front of himself, to stand alongside his father’s bloodstained ghost, he settled his affairs, which were few, and left the City for good. He packed his Olds 88 with the things he needed, and a few of the things he wanted, and drove south, deep into Mexico, where the air was dry and the days were long and where he could speak Spanish and be thought of as strange because he was a gringo and not because strange was how he was.

  There, in the mountain town in which he has chosen to live, he has started to practice medicine again and his hands have come back to life. And maybe he makes a difference and maybe he does not, but he feels, and he hopes, that it is work of noble note and in it he believes he has rediscovered something of that which was most precious to him and which for a time he thought he had lost.

  And often in the heat of the night, and sometimes in the cool of the morning, Grimes dreams of Clarence Jefferson. And in those dreams the fatman too is stained with blood. And this is right and fitting. For though he is a demon he is also a king: of a realm whose mysteries are without resolve, a dominion whose wilderness is without end. And the fatman is running. He is running still. Through the eternal darkness of a midnight field. To a crossing of roads which he will not shun. To a congress—and a confrontation—with the shades of bloodstained kings.

  In honored remembrance

  of my grandfather

  FRANK COUSIL

  who sang to me,

  and showed me how wide is the world

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Green River Rising

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TIM WILLOCKS is a novelist, screenwriter, and doctor

  of medicine specializing in addiction.

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