Tom swallowed. He didn’t dare speak, not now.
“She told me you chased her in the woods and you made her feel dirty. ‘Oh, Tommy-Tommy, I ran away after he made me feel dirty. He take pitchers of my private parts. He do it for his smart people school. Make me feel like a lady in a magazine. Tommy-Tommy, he snap-snap me and he not spose to.’”
Tom made to speak and with her fingers crossed on that cigarette of hers, Karen made a shushing motion. “Oh, Doc?” she called suddenly loud in the space. “Doc? Can you come in here?”
“Here’s what we have, Tom,” she said. “We have me. We have Mary. We have the town Doctor. Well, he was the doctor. He’s retired now. But he’s an old friend of Chris’s—”
The door slid open with a squeak and a big round man, maybe late sixties, maybe into his seventies, walked in and joined Karen at the end of the room. She stayed sitting. He stood.
“Ms. Banatyne here,” the big man said, “she’s told me a few things, young man, about how you’ve gotten awfully... familiar... with the guests?”
Again, Tom made to speak, but nothing came out of an open, gaping mouth. Sweat sprang out and refreshed the spine of his shirt with cool wetness.
“She called me over to see what I could do about this outbreak of poisoning. Lemme tell ya, boy, I didn’t have enough Kaopectate in town to batten down the hatches. It’s been an ugly scene. But the real problem came when I examined our dear Mary—”
The doc cut himself off and looked out the dining room window. Tom followed his gaze. Smitty was out there playing horseshoes in the back lawn with Ingy. They were blurry figures behind the curtains.
“I put my hands on her stomach,” Doc said. “She didn’t have food poisoning. Or, if she did, it was a minor case—”
“Mary doesn’t like fish,” Karen interjected.
“That’s right. She didn’t eat the housekeeper’s dinner. But what she did have was similar symptoms to everyone else.”
He let out a breath and took another to replace it.
“So I took blood and urine.”
Tom’s scalp itched and the frames of his vision clouded with deep red. He knew where this was going.
“Son,” the doc said. “Mary’s pregnant.”
19
Zeke walked out of the thick wood surrounding the hot spring in wet clothes. His ears rang and his head felt heavy, but clear thought had returned. He was sure he’d only been under the hot, churning water for less than an hour this time. He could tell by the sun in the sky.
He’d brought Mary back once—so twice in total, but to no avail. He wished so desperately he could share this with her. If they could both have their smarts back they could be together. Thinking of her and how she could never be like him, his chest sagged with a heavy desperation, as if someone had taken his child.
This was his sixth treatment. And he had solved pieces of it, how it worked, that sort of thing. He didn’t know the names of anything, nor exactly how a thinker worked inside a skull, but he did surmise that it might not be working for Mary because she was born with a faulty thinker. His thinker had been scrambled by an accident. The glass had been shattered and only repaired to a small degree when he was a boy. It was possible, Zeke thought, that the krill-critters glowing blue and mixing up the water could only piece back together broken thinkers, not one that had been pulled out of their mommies’ tummies this way. Mary and the others might never have a shot at polished glass thinkers, like his.
He wondered if there would come a time when he didn’t need his treatments anymore—if his thinker would be repaired and no regression to the broken thinker would ever come again. As he squished in his wet boots, the idea made him excited and nervous.
For now, he would go back to Mary. He would see if she was feeling better from her messy few days of dizzy head and broken tummy. He’d sit with her, play with her. With the others, like Nurse Karen, he’d keep pretending he was regular, dumb ol’ town retard, Zeke.
He’d see if Tom was awake yet and they’d talk about what to do with the knowledge of Chris-topher Banatyne.
20
“You can go, Doc. I can take it from here.” Karen finished her cigarette. She stubbed it out in the full ashtray on the big dining room table. She reached out and took Doc’s hand. “How’s Agnes these days? Any news?”
Doc, he was a big man and his breathing was heavy and thick. He squeezed Karen’s hand and looked down at her. “Things’re looking up, I’d say. We might have turned a corner.”
“That’s so good to hear,” Karen said, a faint, tough-luck smile contorting her bright red lips. “Give her my love.”
“I will,” he said. And with that, the big round Doc swept past Tom and out into the wide hallway. Outside, someone squealed with delight. Tom heard hand-clapping and singing. If Fidela was fired, who was watching Ingy, Smitty, Dar and Mary? And where was Zeke?
Still dumbfounded, Tom looked down at the last envelope. He had lain it on the table in front of him, a quasi-mirror of Karen’s stack at her end.
“Where’s Zeke?” he said.
Karen leaned forward and lit another cigarette. “Zeke?” she spat. “Who the hell cares about Zeke? What are you worried about him for?” The polite tone she’d used with her ‘family friend’ the Doc vanished. Now she used the voice she employed for all her hired help. She leaned back. “Well?” she said, waiting for his answer.
“You know what kind of crush he has on Mary,” Tom said, his voice fluttery and threatening to crackle out to nothingness.
Karen let out a laugh. It was a triumphant Ha!, as if to say, That all you got, kid?
“You think you’re gonna pin this on the town retard?”
Tom’s tone grew deep. He put his head down as if he was a bull ready to charge. Tom was getting angry. His voice did not waver now. “I’m not trying to pin anything. Now, listen. The day I took those pictures—” He threw a finger-point in the direction of the photos. “—the ‘town retard’ was in the hot pool out in the middle of nowhere with Mary Smithson for at least four hours.”
Karen rolled her tongue in her upper lip over her top row of artificially-whitened teeth. She leaned through her cloud of smoke. “Nice story. But I have pictures. I have Mary’s word. I have the Doc’s. I’ll probably even have Zeke’s.”
Tom’s seldom-heard angry voice: “Where’s Zeke?”
“Dunno,” Karen said returning to her what-me-worry voice. “Maybe at work. I could care less. But we have his blood. We have Mary’s. When the baby comes, we’ll get blood from it. And—” She eyed Tom and he realized she was looking at his arm. “—we have yours,” she finished, self-satisfaction dripping from her words.
Tom looked down at his arm, he unfolded it. At the crook inside his white elbow, a soft, flesh-coloured bandage held a wad of cotton batten. He picked at the edge of the bandage and pulled it up a mite. Under, the tell-tale dot and minor bruise of a needle.
While he’d slept, the Doc, or even ‘Nurse’ Karen had drawn a sample.
“Doc’s got all the vials already en route to the lab on the mainland. Something he called an HLA test. It’s good enough for an eighty-nine percent probability on paternity. And a hundred percent exclusion on who isn’t. Smart college boy like you should know what a paternity test is. Should know what probability means too. That’s good enough for the courtroom. Abso-tively.”
Colour flushed away from Tom’s face.
A moment passed. He stared down at his arm.
A thought occurred to Tom. He refolded his arms in front of him. Without thinking too hard on it, he did his own take on a menacing forward-lean, but to Karen, she sloughed it off as comical. She even gave a hand wave and glanced through the sheer drape at the movement of her houseguests out in the yard.
He said, “You do know that I keep my negatives separate from my prints, right?” He didn’t. In fact, he had no idea where the negatives were—not for the shots of Mary looking comely in her birthday suit and not for his shots taken
in the poorly lit back room of a house north of the creek with Zeke in tow. For all he knew, this last set was still in the school dark room and finding themselves swept into a trash bin by the custodian who didn’t like Mikey Dean and, therefore, didn’t like anything associated with him.
“So,” Karen said. “Big whoop. I have these.” She smacked her cigarette-wielding hand down on the stack and ash flew.
“But you don’t have the negatives.”
“Aren’t you listening, you little piss ant? I don’t need em.”
“But you would probably like to have them for these...”
He shoved the envelope down the table like it was a puck in an expertly played round of shuffle-board. This move did not look comical. It looked precise and planned. It looked like a scene in a movie with Paul Newman in some dank back room.
The envelope met the stack in front of Karen.
Again, rolling that thick pink tongue around on her teeth and in her cheek, a gross display of female cockiness, she reached casually for it.
“What have we here,” she said idly. She undid the red string binding it shut and then shook out the stack of pictures.
In a heartbeat, she dropped her cigarette.
In two, she began to protest—but in a stutter, like so many of her cherished houseguests.
21
The creak of the old door. This was the back door, not the front. Even after all these years, Zeke knew the sound of the back door from the front. And he was going into his daddy’s old house on the last remaining acre of his land by the back door.
Same for the snap of the floor boards under his feet. He knew how they sounded under bare foot and under shoed foot. He wore his shoes. He tracked mud in, but he didn’t care.
In his hands, the rusted axe from the chopping block, the one by the lean-to where the wood was kept. He had gotten it at some point, but the walk from there to here was blurry. He thought the treatments at the hot pool made things clearer. But this, no, this was not clear.
And yet, he knew why he was here. And that part was clear. He was here to find the old man. To find him and ask him why he did it.
Zeke padded his way through the kitchen on the old hardwood, letting it tick out that familiar song to him, a song he knew since he was a child. The back door creaked in the breeze. The floor tick-ticked. And Zeke, with his daddy’s old rusted axe, went through the swinging door to his daddy’s living room.
22
Tom Mason was no gambler. He’d never laid money on a table in any dorm room at school. He’d never told the other boys he had an uncle who skipped out on the Vietnam draft, high-tailed it to Canada and lived alone in a shack by a babbling brook while he babbled gently himself.
But what he did do, was gamble that the onset of food poisoning made him feel out of sorts the night he found Chris Banatyne in the back bedroom of that house up over the bridge. It was the food poisoning, he reasoned, and not his imagination. He did not dream up that sallow man with the giant blobs of discoloured skin sucking his face and his belly.
And he gambled that the photos of that man, like those he’d snap-snapped of Mary Smithson, were pretty darn good. The latter showed the woman in all her nude splendour. The former, well, they likely showed concise shots of a man in the throes of a slow, rotting death.
And Karen not only knew about it, she was covering it up. Or she had even caused it. Inadvertently or not, she was keeping it quiet. And a woman like Karen would understand in an instant the kind of power in Tom possessing such knowledge.
“Negatives are in the ether,” he said, trying to sound literate and ominous, maybe like Robert Vaughn in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., one that he loved as a kid. “You’ll never find them.”
Karen’s mouth fell open. She reached for the cigarette she’d dropped on the beautiful wood table. It broke into pieces of ash and the remaining portion of the filter rolled onto one of her file folders.
“And I can print more,” Tom said, trying to pour salt in a wound he didn’t quite see forming yet. “Lots more.”
Karen didn’t scream or shout. She didn’t fall over. She just looked through the stack, eyes in disbelief. And, after coming to terms with what the photos showed her, she leaned back, clutched her fist to her mouth and grabbed her first knuckle with her teeth. Then she started bawling.
She couldn’t stop. Her crying rolled into giant, exaggerated sobs. Water streamed her face. Eyeliner collected in the bags under her eyes and then brought sickly grey streaks to her cheeks. She reached down and fetched her purse at her feet to pull out a wad of Kleenex.
Tom sat mute and still. He was a statue with no thoughts in his head—just this vision of his boss at the end of her rope.
“My dear, dear, dear Christopher,” she wailed. “Oh my goodness, what’s happened to you?”
This went on and on. The daytime soapie awards had nothing on Nurse Karen. Her performance would have landed her on As The Word Turns if there had been a camera pointed at her.
Finally, Tom gave his own hand-wave. “I’m leaving,” he said and he got up.
“Wait,” she said, her big pink eyes like baubles suddenly staring up at him. She reduced herself to sniffles and wiped her nose and mouth with the wad of Kleenex. She blew her nose and dropped the gooey pile on her paperwork. “Just wait,” she said, getting up. “Wait, Goddammit! Who did this to him?”
Tom lolled his head back on his neck. His eyes rolled in a matching gesture of sarcasm and he slumped his shoulders as if to say, Are you kidding me, lady?
“Come on. I know you know,” he said. “Don’t shit me, Karen. Zeke helped you bring him to the house. He remembers it all. He told me everything. You can’t keep them clouded on those benzies all the time you know.”
A look of understanding flashed in Karen’s reddened eyes. She got up and reached for the mound of soiled Kleenex. Again, she wiped at her nose. She walked down the length of the dining table like a timid bird.
“I-I have no idea what y-you’re talking about,” she said in a stammer.
“Bullshit,” he said. He turned to walk out.
Her powerful hand landed on his shoulder, clutched him and swung him around to meet her again with force. Karen was shorter than Tom, but only by a few inches. Her modest stature was deceiving and made this show of physical power a surprise. “Listen here you little shit,” she spat into his face. “You’re gonna sit down here and you’re gonna tell me what the hell you were doing with Zeke at my husband’s bedside.” She shoved him down into the chair and it lit his previous “Mikey bruises” up anew. The bruises must go right down to the bone because, though the pain was less than before, they still rang out. He had, after all, been sleeping for hours—possibly a day and a half or more.
He cringed at the pain and at her reaction.
She went to the sliding door, gaped in both directions into the hall and slid it shut again.
She came and sat at the corner chair next to Tom. She leaned in on him and brought out her pointing finger. She levelled it at his nose, and held it there, unflinching in front of her own face. Her coffee and cigarette breath seeping into the atmosphere at Tom’s nose and mouth. Her lips wrinkled in a pout of anger.
“You piece of no-good shit-for-brains college bastard,” she said. “You’re not good enough to lick the sand from my feet after a day at the beach, you got that? I’m gonna tell you two things and you’re gonna listen or so help me—”
Surprising both of them, Tom grabbed her finger. He squeezed it and bent it. Then he swallowed up her hand with his and crunched it, like Jaws devouring the back end of Quint’s boat. Karen’s whole arm went with his gesture, her body contorting as he leaned strength and force into her hand. “Or so help you, what—?” he said back at her in a bark.
She pulled away. He let her go and she backed up some.
Her tone went contrite. She shrank back into the chair. She smoothed the breast of her white uniform. “Okay, okay,” she said, halfway back to her saleswoman voice. “Yo
u have something here that would hurt me. Big time, mister. But know this. I have something that will WRECK YOUR LIFE.” She said this last part as if it was a headline in a newspaper.
“We’re going to broker a...business deal. M’kay?” she said, filled with floral smarm. “You’re smart. You got into college. You know how to make a deal, right? One side gets what he wants. The other side gets what she wants. Everyone wins. M’kay? You understand that, right?”
“I understand,” Tom said. Unsteady, his heart flitting like a wagging tale, he reiterated. “I understand just fine.”
And, so, just like that, there in the dark-wood dining room of Ocean View Manor, Karen Banatyne began her pitch, her plea and her proposition, all rolled into one.
23
It was in the spring. We’d already lost so much, y’see. We used to own this island, practically, I mean. That was the joke. I knew people said it. People I went to school with, grew up with. They all envied me and Christopher. They said things like, “Y’know, the Banatynes, they could buy up this whole island if they wanted to. Could surely do it, and it’d be a better run place, it would. They’d make sure we never wanted for anything. Those Banatynes, they’re good people. The best sort of people.”
But we made some bad deals. Bad, bad deals. Christopher, really. He’d been born into money. Me, I’d never had any growing up. But he squandered things before he met me. He didn’t have as much sense, not for business, not in the beginning. Not when I showed him how. And when I say ‘didn’t’ I mean, ‘doesn’t’. He doesn’t have sense. He’s still with us, praise the Lord. I go to him every morning, noon and night. I check up on him, I feed him. I do everything he needs me to do... to keep him... comfortable.
So’s we—Christopher this is—bought a bunch of the farmlands up north. They’d been looked after by the same families for years and years, going back at least to the sixteen hundreds. But so many of them were getting sick. The cancer, you know. It claims so many. And they just didn’t have the heart to farm it any more, or keep it stocked with cattle and horses and all the other animals. The farmhands, well, most of them are immigrants from Mexico and the Philippines. Those dirty immigrants, they don’t have the good sense to run a business, not by a long shot.
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