by John Enright
The initial leg of the trip south, past New York City, was all on interstates and dreadful, but once out of New Jersey he cut off onto state roads and could relax. Dominick had decided to mail their letter from Valley Forge, which was about as far as he wanted to go his first day on the road. That seemed appropriate somehow, he was not sure how. From Pennsylvania he meandered south through western Maryland into Virginia, giving Washington and his mother’s house in Alexandria a wide pass. Snow piles shrank and then vanished from the side of the road. He stopped just south of Shenandoah, at an inn he remembered, and stayed there for three days before continuing on the five hundred miles to Charleston.
In Charleston he discovered that the old friend he was about to surprise with a visit was in the hospital and, from the sound of the report he received, was not expected to come out alive. Stroke. The past few years that sort of thing was happening with increasing frequency among his list of hosts. He called ahead to Tallahassee to his next planned visitation and was told that a recent fall and broken hip had made that stay impossible as well. Another call to Boca Raton raised just an answering machine.
Charleston was nice enough, and the temperature was almost springlike; but now he knew no one there. Dominick’s taste in hotels and restaurant meals was expensive, and he disliked feeling like just another spendthrift tourist. But his options were dwindling. Was his tenure of permanent guesthood coming to an end? He could always head back to his mother’s and regroup there. She might not even be there this time of year. She hated the cold. For all he knew she, too, had broken a hip or had a stroke. It had been a year since their last contact.
Dominick called John Starks first. He still had Starks’s apology note with his phone numbers. He wondered whether their Lord Witherspoon letter had appeared in the New Jerusalem News. Dominick called him at his work number, and Starks couldn’t talk. Dominick could tell someone was there with him, probably what was her name the new assistant, Constance. Starks took down Dominick’s hotel phone number and said he would get back to him after he saw whether the museum had any information about that.
When Dominick got back from dinner the red message light on his room phone was blinking. Starks had called back; call him at home.
“We may have kicked a bit of a hornets’ nest,” Starks said. The New Jerusalem News had published their Lord Witherspoon letter, which had then been picked up as a news story by the Boston Globe and then by the New York Times, which led to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. A new terrorist outfit was good for newspaper sales. Before all that broke, Starks and Emma had already moved on to phase two of their campaign, which Dominick had assumed was just a joke when they wrote it down. They had mailed out envelopes containing harmless white powder—Sweet’N Low—to the Hercules Corp headquarters in Houston and Dubai with courtesy notes—a sufficiently vague Bible quote, “He shall suck the poison of asps; the viper’s tongue shall slay him”—signed IGB.
“I had a meeting in Boston,” Starks said, “so I mailed them from there, from Concord, actually. Somehow that seemed appropriate.”
“Yes, I can understand that part,” Dominick said, “but not the rest.”
“Well, Emma is fond of her Gaia Brigade. She wanted to give it a little muscle.”
“What did you mean about the hornets’ nest?”
“You haven’t been watching the news?”
“No.”
“The FBI put their Lord Witherspoon aka Jake Forrest on their most-wanted list, splashed his picture all over the networks—new photo, same guy. Then they had squads of feds and local cops with cable news crews embedded conducting raids all over eastern Pennsylvania and around Boston. I can’t believe you have missed all this. Where were you? On another planet?”
“That would be nice.”
“They picked up a bunch of illegals and some other people whom they had to release after questioning. Big show of force.”
“That stuff isn’t good for you, is it?”
“What stuff?”
“That sweetener you mentioned that people put in their coffee.”
“Listen, Dominick, this is serious. They picked up Emma. Some old warrant, but they made a big deal of it.”
“Emma?”
“They need suspects that badly, I guess.”
“Any details?” Dominick asked. There was a balcony to Dominick’s Charleston hotel room out some French doors, with white wire chairs and a table. The phone on the desk had a long cord that stretched out there. He opened the doors and went out and lit a cigar, cradling the phone against his shoulder. “Have you talked with her?”
“No, no I haven’t. They picked her up at The Harp. I got the story from people there. They must have had the place staked out, looking for her, because as soon as she got there two agents came and took her.”
“FBI?”
“No, ICE guys, I was told, wearing their black-and-white uniform jackets, which people there thought strange. I mean, you can’t get more Native American than Emma.”
“A tall guy and a short guy?”
“Yeah. How did you know? Liam, the bartender, called them Mutt and Jeff. Where are you now? I didn’t recognize the area code.”
“South Carolina.”
“How’s the weather?”
“No snow on the ground, but it’s not spring yet. The feds haven’t gotten back to you?”
“No. Why would they? I’m not part of Bay Savers, and the only information I ever gave them was wrong. Where to next? Farther south, I’d guess, in pursuit of spring?”
“Probably. Sure. Do you know if Emma has a lawyer yet?”
“Don’t know. Probably not. He would have to be court-appointed. Bay Savers wants nothing to do with her, I gather. They denied she was any longer part of the group. I’d bet your Mr. Neisner is claiming she was part of his fictitious sleeper cell. Her warrant, I gather, had nothing to do with any of this.”
“How did The Harp feel about having its queen abducted?”
“Oh, this was her absolute coronation. She’s queen for life now. A raid by federal agents? They’ll probably name a drink after her.”
After he rang off from Starks, Dominick stayed out on the balcony to finish his cigar. The view was of the backs and roofs of houses in an old neighborhood. There were five church steeples in his panorama. The few taller new buildings of Charleston were all behind him. The future was all behind him. In front of him were buildings that predated the Civil War. Down there somewhere was the Old Slave Mart, where slaves had been auctioned off. Around him were strangers. The only downside to solitude was this occasional feeling of pointlessness. But then maybe everyone felt that, not just aspiring anchorites. Without others is there any meaning, any need for it? Alone, don’t we all find someone to talk to inside our head? Doesn’t everyone sometimes crave the solace of feeling watched over, observed? Or was that all just another layer, the undergarments as it were, of hubris and learned vanity that had to be finally shed in order to learn the naked truth? Which was, yes, pointlessness. Only the observed exist; unobserved you vanish.
Check out was at twelve. Dominick loaded his car and left. He had nowhere to go. He headed back north, but on a different and much more desultory route along the coast, avoiding the interstate, through Myrtle Beach and other coastal towns. It was if he was looking for something, but he didn’t know what. As dusk descended he crossed a bridge into a town called Washington, North Carolina. That sounded right, so he stopped at a roadside motel and checked in. The bed had known many tortures. From Washington it was only a half day’s drive to Yorktown, Virginia, on back roads through peaceful farm country and along the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp. Driving was a form of meditation.
Dominick had never been to Yorktown before, and really there was nothing there, which somehow seemed appropriate. Like every other battlefield he had ever visited it was empty and mute and forlorn, its moment of significance passed. He knew by now that he was headed back to his mother’s house in Alexandria, only a few
hours’ drive farther north. To compensate for his poor sleep the night before, he checked into the best hotel he could find. He called his mother’s house, hoping she would not be home. He still had a key, if she hadn’t changed the locks. But she was there, alive and complaining. Someone had died. Or was it her dog? She didn’t forget to remind him how his conception had ruined her live. He didn’t tell her where he was. She didn’t ask.
The next day Dominick drove past his mother’s house. It was raining. He didn’t stop but he slowed down. Nothing had changed. That piece of the past was frozen. As he left her gated community a local cop tailed him then pulled him over. The tag on his Virginia plate had expired. Dominick apologized, said he had been out of state on a business trip and had just returned and would renew his registration. He got a ticket anyway. Home is where when you return you get a ticket for having been away. He thanked the cop for reminding him. Beyond Bethesda he headed west, back toward Shenandoah and the inn where he had started this loop through the Confederacy. His route took him past the battlegrounds of Manassas and Bull Run, where he stopped, and through the tiny Blue Ridge Mountains hamlet of Washington, Virginia. So many Washingtons. Did he deserve so many? Was there a little town named Venus anywhere?
Chapter 22
The sound came from a neighboring room at the inn where the TV set was never turned off. After the first night Dominick asked for a different room, but there were none available. The place was full. There was some sort of Civil War reenactment or reunion or something going on up the valley at the Cedar Creek Battlefield. The inn was awash with men dressed as Confederate officers. The clanking of swords in scabbards was a curious sound Dominick had never heard before. The men’s Southern accents seemed exaggerated, but he noticed the license plates on the SUVs in the parking lot were primarily from the deeper Southern states. He wondered if the officers had any troops, and if so, where were they staying? Not in this expensive inn. In campgrounds somewhere else in the valley? And if it was a battle reenactment, where were the Union officers? And if he could not get another room, could the manager at least request a curfew for the TV set?
This was the problem with staying in public accommodations—there were always other guests. Back in his room, he could still hear the TV, so he decided to address the problem directly and knocked on the door of the offending room. No answer. He knocked again, harder. No answer. He tried the door. It was locked. There would seem to be no one home, just the TV set on. Back in his room he tried to read. He had picked up a brochure at the desk about the Battle of Cedar Creek, about which he knew nothing. It was General Philip Sheridan’s ultimate victory in driving the Confederate Army out of the valley. The Confederate general was Jubal Early. Dominick loved that name. So joyous a name for a general, though in this case the opposite of jubilant. Now all he could hear from the other room was a laugh track. He went for a drive. This whole valley had been a battlefield once. He wondered how many men had died in pain here. At Cedar Creek alone there had been more than 8,500 casualties. He had brought his camera but found nothing to photograph.
That evening after supper Dominick called Starks again to see if there was any new word about Emma. Surely some sort of bail had been set. Had she triumphantly returned to The Harp? Starks had heard nothing new from or about Emma, but he did have other news.
“That man you and she mentioned, Atticus, Atticus Jameson? I don’t know how close you were to him, but he’s dead. It was on the news. He’d been taken in again for questioning, and he died while in custody. A heart attack, they said. They said the grand jury was about to indict him, but they didn’t say for what.”
“John, is that offer of a place to stay for a few days still open?”
“Yes, of course, you’re always welcome.”
“I may take you up on it. I’ll let you know.”
Starks never asked where he was calling from, and Dominick didn’t mention it. He went down to the pub attached to the inn, which was by now full of liquored-up rebels, many still in their gray uniforms. He found a stool at the end of the bar and ordered a Guinness and a Jameson’s. He wondered how many Atticuses were now left in the world. For the original Atticus that wasn’t even his real name, just a pen name meaning he was from Attica. Dominick couldn’t recall his actual name, just a friend of Cicero’s.
The trip back north took four days as Dominick studiously ignored the interstate and cities. Again he was trying to avoid the present and people. Back roads that were headed in his general direction were fine. Driving was still meditation, but being out on the road had become contrary. Other drivers irritated him, so he sought out roads where there were none. He stayed at 1950s-style cabin motels where cars came and went all night long as locals checked in and out by the hour. One night near Wilkes-Barre there were gunshots off in the woods but no sirens. At some point in western Connecticut it started to snow again. He ignored it and it went away.
Dominick reached Starks’s house late in the afternoon while Starks was still at work, and he drove past the carriage house up to the big empty house at the top of the drive. Broadmoor, Starks had called it, another of those century-old monuments to show-off elegance. Each mansion—called cottages in typical Yankee false humility—was designed as if in a contest of wasted space and money. They reminded Dominick of the distinctive pampered breeds in a Westminster Dog Show, each hoping to win best of show. Broadmoor’s distinction was its femininity, its long vertical lines, tall narrow windows, two asymmetrically placed turrets—a wistfulness and delicacy that the macho Gilded Age profiteers who commissioned most of these places did not go in for. A woman’s touch on the architect’s drafting table, the set for some Victorian romance. It stood on a lonely windswept moor, not a bush or a tree within hundreds of yards of it. Why was the past always so cold, Dominick wondered? He sat there in his car and smoked a cigar and watched a non-sunset until at dusk he saw the headlights of Starks’s Jag pull in through the gates and disappear behind the carriage house.
Dominick still didn’t move. He didn’t know why he had returned. He had no reason, no story to tell Starks. He was just back. What did they call it in physics? Brownian motion? The random directionlessness of a wandering iota. Did direction need to have a meaning?
He parked beside Starks’s Jag and went up the stairs. There was music playing, something classical with lots of violins. It was loud. He knocked to no answer, then opened the door and stepped in. “John?”
Starks answered from somewhere, “Dominick, come on in. I’m fixing martinis for us.”
Dominick walked into the main room, taking off his coat. Starks appeared in the doorway to the kitchen with a remote control in his hand, which he pointed into the room and clicked a few times to turn down the music. “Why? you ask, as well you may. Because I was expecting you—I saw your car up at the big house—and I haven’t had an excuse to make martinis in a while, and it’s been one of those days.” Starks went back into the kitchen, then came out with a tray bearing a large silver shaker and two tall martini glasses. “Lots of olives, of course. How was your trip?” It was a strange feeling, almost like coming home.
“John, how is it you have no mate? You would make some guy a wonderful catch.”
“Please, Dominick. The same person day after day? The routines you have to put up with? It’s like having a pet, and then they get sick and die. No fun. But again you have answered my question with one of your own. Last you told me you were in South Carolina.”
“You know, Americans are basically very friendly people. They love to talk, about themselves.”
“Take any photographs?”
“Tried once or twice. Too many people. I visited battlefields.”
“Dreadful places.”
“Aren’t they, though?”
“My condolences for the loss of your acquaintance, Mr. Jameson.”
“Funny, the last thing Atticus told me was that he was in good health and not about to die.”
“One shouldn’t make assumptions li
ke that, at least not out loud.”
“Nothing suspicious about his death?”
“Seemingly no, just an old man collapsing. They tried to revive him. He died in hospital. That piece of news sort of got buried under the rest.”
“I suppose I must hear it,” Dominick said, holding his martini glass out for a refill.
“More olives?”
“Please.”
Starks came back from the kitchen with four olives skewered on a fresh swizzle stick. “Well, there was our Sweet’N Low campaign.”
“How did that go?”
“Oh, swimmingly. They discovered almost immediately what it was, of course, but not before the Houston police had emptied the entire Hercules Corp headquarters building and shut down the downtown Post Office. And then there were the dragnet raids in Concord and Pennsylvania. Is that where you mailed your letter from?”
“Yes, Valley Forge.”
“You masochist, you. But the bigger news, strangely enough, was our envelope to Dubai, which was just an afterthought on Emma’s part when she learned online that Hercules Corp’s real daddy was some Arab outfit there. That girl is a natural troublemaker.”
“Anything new from her?”
“Nope.
“Well, the Globe picked up the Dubai story and made the connection and followed it up, and bingo, big news—coordinated attacks in Texas and Dubai by the Gaia Brigade. The story was now several news cycles thick, so all the talking heads got onto it. I can’t believe you missed all this. Did you go someplace where there’s no TV?”
“That’s right, just old sitcoms and laugh tracks.”
Starks shook the last liquid out of the shaker into his glass. Dominick had eaten only two of his olives. Starks reached over and took the remaining two. “But there’s not much of a story there because it’s just Sweet’N Low and no one dies, so they end up talking instead about the Arab connection, about how natural gas was supposed to be the patriotic solution to depending on foreign cartels and all, and about how no one knew Hercules was just a front for some Arabs. I guess they wanted that kept a secret, and nobody had paid it much attention before.”
