By the time July’s heat had fallen on the house, Sebastion, spurred by Cordova’s suggestion and his own sight of sweat standing out on his dad’s neck and forehead—and the stink of him—had moved the adjustable bed and all the equipment downstairs. Oliver, he knew, liked it down there better anyway. Before all of this, during his rare free moments, dad would either be out in the driveway trying to finish that noisy motorcycle of his or he would be down there where the turntable was. The stairs leading down below the ground seemed like a division-line. Upstairs was work and responsibility, beneath was the opposite. A place for living. Sebastion remembered his father spending his time down there on the few evenings or Sunday mornings when he wasn’t in the den, bent over reports and account balances or with his eyes glazed in front of the computer monitor.
One stagnant night that month, Sebastion sat much like his father used to: in the round halo of a lamp, obsessing over a pile of papers in front of him. The breeze blowing across his face from an open window in the kitchen-dining split was almost as hot as the air inside and provided him no relief from the closeness. Cordova had gone home at her customary time, and Oliver, peaceable at an almost unheard of stretch, had asked his son to put on one of his old records, A Trick of the Tail, by Genesis.
Reverberating echoes of Dance on a Volcano and then Entangled wafted up the stairs like oil clinging to the surface of water, jostled and sloshing in the tug of a mad moon. And Sebastion—sitting at the dusty oak table which still looked golden-red and majestic—pored over the stacks of twenty year-old receipts in bewilderment. The bottom lines didn’t add up. It made sense, though, how all these years the coffers had been nearly dry. The mortgage was excessive—even for their modest bungalow. But the neighborhoods of Vaughan were pricy. Their home, the long flat rancher, was one of the smallest, oldest and least luxurious but it sat on a healthy-sized lot in a prime locale. It had cost a pretty penny. And sure, dad had spent money on new cars, had bought the house up near Edan on the lakefront, and had paid for private school and a full four years’ tuition at prestigious York University. But Sebastion always knew there had to be something else. Something chewing up his father’s cash. You don’t eventually make full partner at a financial firm the size, though small, of Whitman and Merridew without earning something.
He returned to the den and found another shoebox of receipts and envelopes. But they offered no clues. Then, finally, he remembered the safe hiding at the back of the closet. He opened it with the combination that Oliver had given him months before. If I go crazy and can’t remember things, he had said, you might need this. It’s your mother’s birthday. Don’t suppose you remember it, do you?
In the safe, among papers and receipts and a couple of what looked like bearer bonds, there was a small white envelope containing a stack of checks—there must have been almost a hundred, some of them already yellowing. All were made out to Jonathan Merridew—
A mingled and throaty holler came, atop the drowning, disparaging notes of Ripples. And Sebastion nearly fell through the doorway of the den. His heart thudded and a rush of blood came to his face. He ran out into the hall and towards the stairs with the stack of checks in his fist. The triumphant part of the song came next—a part he felt he knew by heart—but he tore down the stairwell and turned the turntable’s volume down as he passed.
He approached the bed. Under a patchy, stitch-lined scalp of pink and tan, Oliver’s eyes were closed but he was sitting up facing the doorway. His fingers were twisted tangles, outstretched, as though gripped with pain. His incoherent howl had turned to spit-throwing wails. “You ruined my table! Sebastion, you FUCKING brat! You wrecked it with your FUCKING crayons—wrecked it all, goddamn you! That was mom’s. And You made a goddamn mess of it!”
There was a colorless bile spitting out from his mouth in flecks. It bled from his lips, down his chin and onto his shirt. Like it had been for months, it was an off-white, nearly tan shade. Something despicable and putrid to look at. Sebastion grabbed the rag—one which he had gotten for Oliver when the bile had started coming quite often, one that he had to change more and more often in the last week—and began wiping at the mess while Oliver continued to yell and rant. His eyes were still closed and when the realization came to him that the music was gone he seemed to nearly snap out of it. His eyes came open and they focused on his son. The tears that had already begun on his red face now gushed and the volume of the words fell to nearly nothing. Sebastion sat down on the edge of the mattress. It shifted. And he put his arm around his dad, shushing him, easing his bother, wiping the puke from his shirt and his face. He was still talking; the words were blended with bile and spittle and his face was a tight grimace of hurt. “—you wrecked it, Seb. You wrecked it all—fucked it all up...”
When the sobs had eased, finally less jerky, Sebastion remembered the stack of checks now partially crumpled under him. After setting down the bile-rag he pulled them out and held them to his fathers eyes. “What’re these dad?” He shook the little bunch of papers in front of his father’s eyes, getting nearly angry. “Do you see these? What are they?”
Oliver tried to focus. His hand came up and rested against his son’s, trying to steady the shaking fan of bent, yellow papers and he really did look at them. He saw his own signature in the corner, then narrowed his eyes up at Merridew’s name, also in his own handwriting. He recognized the disheveled and fading slips. Each one of them.
He squinted and looked around. His eyes found Sebastion’s face and he said, quietly, without emotion, “Extortion, m’boy.”
“Extortion? Extortion for what?”
“Where’s the music? Somebody got rid of the music.” He was strained, panicky, looking blankly in the direction of the turntable spinning silently, but almost as though he couldn’t really see it there. He seemed ready to cry again. “Where’s the music? Somebody got rid of the music...”
“’S all right, dad. I’ll put the record back on.”
Sebastion got up from the bed, taking the stack of checks with him, and moved across the room to the turntable. His hand rested on the volume knob. “Goodnight, dad. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
There was no reply.
Oliver only lay back in his bed, his patchy head of hair and scars coming down gently on the pillows. The volume came back up and a crooked smile arrived on his lips. Above it, in his eyes, was a bare look, attentive to nothing.
Sebastion went to the stairs, snapped the switch and looked back again. A scrap of light from upstairs, behind him, fell downstairs, across his father’s face.
Los Endos, the final song on the album, grew to fill the space.
<> <> <>
Sebastion got little sleep.
His brain and his vision felt like he had downed too much caffeine and though exhausted, could not relax his panting lungs and thumping heart. He lay there in his little room, the multicolored walls he had painted twelve or thirteen years before only visible in tones of gray, hidden by the haze of darkness. He stared at the window, he stared at a tree branch. Maybe his eyes wouldn’t close because of all the nights his father had woken him up with screams and sobs—he could never get back to sleep after that. Or perhaps, they stayed open because of those other nights, the horrifically long ones when no sounds came from downstairs, no matter how much he willed his father to make some noise. In those long stretches of time and darkness he worried that the light of morning finally would come, and that he would find Oliver there, silent.
The combo-punch of both scenarios made his days and nights mixed up. He fell into uncomfortable catnaps at his desk, saw no clients, and felt the obscuring fog of his life a little like one might remember a night of binge drinking which occurred several years before.
Out of that nonsensical month or so, he concocted what he thought was an ingenious plan.
<> <> <>
Walter Whitman, the originator of Oliver’s firm, had been a partner in name only for the last six years or so. He was eight years older tha
n Sebastion’s dad. And he hadn’t been seen by any underlings and not by the other partners—since a month after he arbitrarily made Oliver Redfield the full-fledged third in the triumvirate. That decision besmirched the mood of Merridew, possibly because it allowed Oliver more than simple shareholder dividends—and possibly because of larger, unspoken faultlines. At that point Oliver finally had a real stake in things. At that point he started working even harder, staying even later.
After years of lower positions, watching others succeed where he only seemed to fail, he was finding the respect and cash he felt he was due.
Walter, they say, as rumor mills in any-sized company will churn out, was suffering from Alzheimer’s. His mind, according to the mill, was now a blank canvas, stretched and filled with paint. But it possessed no harmony, it was muddled, and there were no pictures visible in the color.
But he lived on, and he still collected his dues.
In the meantime, John Merridew took over main operational duties of the firm. Not, according to Fish, that there really were any. A company like ours, he once said, pretty much runs itself. The top dogs are out playing golf and sipping Black Velvets at the girlie clubs. They are redundant and they know it. But they wouldn’t phase themselves out, would they?
In addition to a still-visible inequality, there was also a large tension between Oliver Redfield and John Merridew. If either entered a room and the other was present, a palpable distaste would rise in the air. Sebastion always wondered if he was the only one who saw and now he knew it was actually real, not just perceived, though his finger still couldn’t rest on the exact source or nature of it.
Naw, I’ve seen it for a while, Fish said after Sebastion had brought it up. But then, I’ve been studying Merridew since I arrived in this stink-hole. I wanted to see if he would squirm a little when I walked about with my nose in the air. After all my pop’s got his bell rung, doesn’t he?... But, no, never. Merridew is always the coolest of cukes.
So, Sebastion said then, trying to be cool about it all himself, What does your dad have on him?
Fish cleared his throat. Damned if I know. Never told me. The two used to go to whore parties together. Maybe that’s it. But everybody does that...
I could find out—if it’s really burning your balls. The old man’s got a wall-safe in his house. But he’s mostly out on the boat these days. Says he’s retired.
Sebastion considered for a moment, then said, Fish, if you bring proof of whatever your dad knows that would have Merridew squirming in his executive-class leather chair, I’d pay you.
Jeez, Red. You don’t have to pay me. I’d bring it for free.
<> <> <>
And Fish delivered! From his father’s safe—his father, a man who had made his money on interesting real estate deals beginning more than thirty years before—he brought to Sebastion color photos of Johnny Merridew in some far from innocuous poses. Along with the aging patriarch’s white and pink flesh were the visible skin-tones and body parts of several unknown and clearly too-young-to-consent boys. One photo even showed Merridew wearing a St. Vincent’s School for Boys tartan-patterned tie wrapped like a bandana around his forehead. With one arm in the air, he straddled the closed-eyed boy from behind and Sebastion could almost hear Johnny’s Home-on-the-range Ride’em Cowboy bark. In all the pictures, the expressions on Merridew’s face—not looking too many years younger than he was now—were always contortions of pain and pleasure. Sebastion wondered how much of his dad’s money had paid for these trysts.
By day John Merridew was a thriving partner in a financial firm, fielding and quashing only whispered accusations of skimming. But by night, he was degrading the masses, one young soul before the next, one set of shadow strings at a time. Oh yes, big business and all manner of world politics were the same: a set of dazzling fabrications. The bigger fish were at the top of the food chain and size was decided, in that faux mirrored world, like all things—as though the contenders each took their turn dancing with a beautiful woman. Those that danced the best, threw the biggest prizes, and held the tightest strings, were those given the highest cards. And with those cards, they held the lives of countless others—suspended, teetering.
Sebastion’s judgment was heated, jumbled and thick. He was tired and strung out on shades of gray. He eyed the pictures Fischer had brought and in an instant, his thinking turned evil. His face became a haunted mirror of John Merridew’s contorted photo expressions and in his glimmering eyes there was an eerie reflection that looked like delirious delight.
Let the dance begin.
IV. Sums and Differences; Melody and Hush
There’s room for error. There’s always room for error.
The Thief knew countless ways to pull his victims from their lives without binding them up in the costly litigation of death. He had been doing this for a long time and knew that there were a multitude of successful means: traumas, blunt objects, and that ever useful standby—water.
But a different contrivance, used long ago for the first time, became both the marker at the end of the old ways and a starting line drawn on the cusp of a new era. It was the first of its kind in the Thief’s repertoire and, for many reasons, still stood as a perfect model of what could be done with the appropriate weapon. It began unlike most, certainly unlike the loud and proposterious events of the last while. Back then, there were no mistakes, no desperate yanks. In the early days, there was no such thing as Wrong Place, Wrong Time. Back then, it had all been deliberate.
Back then it had all been part of the hunt.
Thief met a sturdy young guitar player near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. That boy was not more than nineteen at the time—and, yes, boy was just the exact proper term, wasn’t it? He had a gift, this kid, and would have been idolized one day if only he could find the right management and a band with egos small enough to endure the shroud of his own. Then on top of marketing and touring, he needed to kick the nasty heroin habit. Thief had since come to learn that life on the road was no kind of living; it was the hardest, especially with the monkey on your back.
The boy and the Theif—though Thief was calling himself something different back then—met on the street, nothing more than two Frisco vagrants with a cigarette and a story to share. They had a communal high as early morning waves hit Hyde Street Pier’s barnacle-sluiced posts in the distance. Fish Alley was empty of tourists that early and the Thief fought the urge to take him immediately. It would have been pointless. He didn’t need him. And the anger in the Thief, that which he had dealt with for a long time by then, was not enough to overpower his sense of reason. He liked the boy. And, in fact, he was intrigued with him, was curious about what he could do with the six strings of an electric guitar. He followed him and his girl to gigs in Oakland and Salem, then up to Tacoma, where his own demons found him again.
He was called Clutch, that boy. Sometime after their last meeting the Thief looked deep into him and saw his nick name being christened by that girlfriend of his, as she rode with him on the back of his motorcycle. She had been a shapely thing, doting and easily jealous, with strawberry blonde locks glowing and flowing. She had sat with her hands held around the chest of his buckled leather bomber and her chin on his right shoulder. She watched his hand move when he changed gears and liked the noise it made, the slender rev of power between her legs. When they slowed enough for him to hear her voice over the engine she asked him what the sound was at those moments.
It’s the gears changing, he said.
What makes it do that? she asked him.
The clutch.
He took the name and it became a part of him. Just as the drugs had. The boy that everyone began calling Clutch had track marks up and down both arms. He was strung out most nights that he could score some product, but he could still play like a son of a bitch. He was in deep though, and nearly all of his money went into the habit. He just couldn’t kick it. And the worst part is that he didn’t want to.
The girl, Straw
berry, died in a motel room on the highway near Tacoma where she and the Thief waited for Clutch to return after a show. And though her death would have eventually come by way of that rubber surgical tube tied at her elbow, it came instead at the hands of men.
A chunk of black tar had been cooking on a scrap of tin can over a candle’s flame. She had been sitting at the table babysitting it, waiting for it to liquefy. Scatty and enchanted that it was finally ready, she was just tightening the death-band around her arm when a pair of headlights flared in the motel room window. The men from whom she and Clutch had stolen their latest hit had come up from Salem looking for them. She was dead soon after they arrived. And so was the Thief. But he could still hear the buzzing in his head so he knew there was some time. The buzzing had been bad that night, had made him think this might even be the last. At that point he needed Clutch. And, Thief thought, talent be damned. He was goint to take what he needed. He was nearly weeping at the dizzy view of the Thunderbird by the time he made it to the club. He found Clutch just coming off stage to applause, still loud and percussive.
Clutch staggered down the back steps of the venue tasting the metal of a pick between his lips, smiling a little. Just as he had gotten to his bike, unlocked a stowbox and reached for his fix, he looked up to see the Thief, staggering, and bloodied from a gaping wound in his head.
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