Gibbon's Decline and Fall

by Sheri S. Tepper

  One such place was the home of Jacob Jagger, district attorney and, like so many others in Santa Fe, not a native. Now almost fifty, he had been in New Mexico for a dozen years, scarcely time enough to rub off big-city attitudes, even had he wanted them mellowed and buffed, which he did not. Tonight he stood at the sliding glass panel of his living room, staring southward, though careless of the view, waiting impassively but impatiently, as he had waited for a number of years.

  He heard a sound, the tiniest rustle, and turned to see his wife, Helen, standing in the doorway across the room from him, a pallid shadow in the dusk.

  “What?” he said in a dead, toneless voice that had no hint of either pleasure or impatience.

  “I wanted to be sure you have everything you want,” she murmured.

  “If I don’t, I’ll ask for it.”

  “I thought … maybe I’d just go on to bed.”

  “I think not. I might need something.” He stepped into the room and stared toward her. She was only a dim column in the doorway, a pallid, unlit candle. “What are you wearing, Helen?”

  “I’m presentable,” she said with a hint of rebellion.

  His voice hardened. “I didn’t ask whether you’re presentable, I asked what you’re wearing.”

  She touched the light switch beside her. In the sudden glow she materialized, neatly dressed in southwestern skirt, silk blouse, fancy vest. She was, had been, a pretty woman. She also was, had been, of an independent nature. Even now she was wearing boots, which he disliked. Boots were masculine. Boots were impudent. He preferred that women look like what they were.

  “Change the boots,” he said. “Put on heels. Don’t undress.”

  He did not watch to see if she obeyed. She had no real alternative. Putting her out of mind, he turned back to the porch and leaned outward, peering down at Hyde Park Road, which hugged the foot of the hill as it curved away to the west. An occasional car slipped along like a bead on a thread, only headlights betraying its presence. Nearer the town, Gonzales Road crossed Hyde Park, north and south. The car he was waiting for might come from that direction or from any direction, even from the north, down from the ski area. Though Jagger believed he had a close and secret relationship with Mr. Webster, his expected visitor, he had no idea where Mr. Webster lived or stayed or came from, any more than he was sure that his visitor would be Mr. Webster himself rather than some minion bearing Mr. Webster’s instructions. A voice on the phone had said simply, “Mr. Webster would like you to be available tonight at eight, at your home.” To which there was only one acceptable answer. No matter what plans he might have had, Jagger would have canceled them without a murmur. Anything for Mr. Webster’s convenience.

  Tonight it was evidently convenient for Mr. Webster to be late.

  Jake was more than willing to wait. Late or not, this meeting might prove the culmination of the dream Jake had held since he’d been a child huddled in his tiny cold closet of a room, the door locked from the outside, shut away from the music and laughter out there, shut away from more mysterious sounds as well. Ma was different when she got with one of her friends. She changed. When she was alone with Jake, she didn’t talk at all, but when she got with one of her friends, she never shut up. Jake often pressed his ear to the door, to hear what she was saying, but he could extract no sense from what she said, not from her words or the words of whatever man was with her.

  At night he was locked in, because Ma’s friends didn’t want to be bothered with little Jake—Jake the mistake, Jakey the Rat.

  Sometimes in the mornings one of Ma’s friends would be sitting at the kitchen table eating eggs and bacon and sometimes pancakes. The friend got orange juice or melon or bananas. Jake got cold cereal. Once he had thought he could get away with a banana.

  “Watch it, kid,” said the friend. “You’re messin’ up my paper.”

  “Yeah, Jake, watch it,” Ma laughed. “You be careful, now, Ratty.”

  He’d thought Jake the Rat was his name until he started to school and Ma told him his name would be Jake Jagger.

  “Was that my dad’s name?” he had asked her. “Jagger?”

  Her lips twisted. The smoke from her cigarette made a curtain before her narrowed eyes. “What makes you think you had a dad, Ratty? You had a hit-an’-run, a pay and poke it, that’s what you had.” She laughed her bubble laugh, as if she were all full of something sticky, with slow bubbles rising up. Jake saw a TV show about Yellowstone once, and the mud pools reminded him of Ma’s laughing: round, sticky bubbles slowly swelling and popping, each one a ha, a ha. “You better be careful, you better watch it.”

  Late at night, from behind his locked door, hearing the rhythmic rattle of her bedsprings, he would remind himself to watch it, to be careful to stay away from her friends, careful to stay away from her as much as he could. When he came home from being out on the street, when he opened the door just a crack, he could tell whether she was there or not by the smell. She had a wet, sticky smell that was more ominous than the musty, smoky funk of rooms she had merely occupied. It was a swampy smell. The bathroom smelled like her. The wastepaper basket in the bathroom sometimes smelled intimately of her, mysterious and hateful.

  Jake had made himself a window in his tiny closet, using an old beer opener to scrape the mortar from between the bricks, removing the bricks, two layers of them, to create an irregular notched opening looking out on the alley. Once he had his window, he cut a piece of cardboard to seal it up and hid it behind a poster he cleverly mounted with tape. After that it was easier to be locked in. Even when he was only seven or eight, he kept the tiny space spotless and smelling only of Lysol and lemon oil that he swiped from the building janitor. His sheets, which he took down to the laundry room every Saturday morning, reeked of bleach. He stole the money for the laundry machines. At night, shutting out the sounds from his mother’s room, he would lie on his back, his hands at his sides, the sheets drawn into a precise line beneath his chin, the air from outdoors sweeping over him and comforting him with its chill. The smell from outside was of exhaust fumes and hamburgers and garbage cans, but to Jake it was an otherness smell, a clean smell.

  He could not always avoid her. When she was drunk, she became sly, hiding behind doors to catch him, grab him, set him on her lap. Then, the cigarette hanging from the corner of her lips, the smoke around her head like a cloud, she would ask him questions about his life, how was he doing at school, what did he think of her new friend. He learned to answer these questions as briefly as possible, to avoid the wrath that would inevitably come later if she went on drinking. She always started joking and ended up in a fury, and he learned to be far away when she reached the last stages.

  Another window to the outside opened on the first day of school, when an eager young teacher told the class they could find out anything in the world if they paid attention and learned to read. To Jake it came as a revelation, the missing piece of the puzzle of his life! Here was the secret of existence he had known must be somewhere! All the mysteries of his existence would come clear, all the things he wondered about, if he would only learn to read. He did learn, quickly, passionately, with the ardor many boys reserve for sports. He read the backs of cereal boxes and the small print on packages. He read abandoned newspapers at the bus stop. And then, in a book checked out from the school library, he read the story of Johnny Appleseed. When he came to the last word, he turned back the pages and read it again. Casting aside as irrelevant all that stuff about apples, Jake knew immediately what the story meant. It was not actually about apples or trees at all, but about him. This man, this father man, went through the world dropping his seed wherever he went, making babies, raising a crop of sons. Like Jake. Or maybe including Jake.

  When the teacher had a moment, Jake went to her desk, politely begging her attention.

  “Yes, Jake?” She smiled encouragingly. Jake was a good student, an almost perfect student, but he treated her as though she were some kind of machine. Though he was never rude
, he was never in the least friendly.

  “In the Johnny Appleseed story. Did he … I mean, he could have put the seeds just anywhere, couldn’t he?” Jake asked. “It didn’t matter where he planted them. Just wherever he was, right?”

  “That’s right, Jake. He planted them as he was traveling, wherever he was, and the strongest trees lived, of course, to produce fruit that produced other trees. We call that natural selection.” The teacher was young and eager.

  Jake nodded, one short, definite nod, and returned to his seat. The story explained everything. His mother was just there at the time, convenient. She wasn’t important. The father man, the mysterious wanderer, the stranger in disguise, had simply used her as a kind of flowerpot. The father man was the important one. Women, a lot of women, most women, maybe all women, were just conveniences.

  He went on applying his reading skill to the daily paper, and to the newsmagazines he stole on Saturdays from the corner newsstand, and the books he continued to check out from the school library, returning them scrupulously on time so he could check out others. He read about cowboys and Indians and great hunters and adventurers, all men, and when he came across a female character, his eyes skimmed across that section, denying to his mind that any such person could exist in any context save that of convenience. He also read compulsively the stories of the rich, the famous, the powerful. He made a list of their names, a double column in a blank-paged little book that he swiped from a gift shop and carried with him always, and he read the list aloud to himself sometimes, like a litany or invocation. When someone on the list died or lost favor or proved capable of notorious error, he did not merely cross out the name but copied the shortened list anew on the following page. This list contained the names of Jake’s candidates for his father.

  Slowly over the years, as careless men died and foolish men fell from grace, the list grew shorter until, at last, only one name was left. This name appeared now and again in the Wall Street Journal, in the Washington Post, in the London Times, always in connection with powerful international interests. In a profile short on facts and long on aerial photographs of the enormous estates this man was said to own in half the countries of the world, People magazine called him the world’s most powerful recluse. He was said to have a fleet of yachts and private planes and even his own railway car. He owned urban real estate all over the world, including a high-rise office building in Chicago, where Jake was. This man was said to keep an eye on his vast empire by wandering through it anonymously, which item of information fit Jake’s suppositions exactly.

  His name was L. S. Webster.

  The more Jake read, the more convinced he became that Webster was his father. Birds of a feather, he told himself. Powerful men recognized one another, and sooner or later Webster would recognize Jagger if Jagger simply put himself in Webster’s way. Since Webster’s name was most frequently mentioned in association with the American Alliance, Jake grew up dedicating his time and money to the Alliance, helping it preserve the American Way of Life against attacks by inferior peoples, feminists, liberals, perverts, welfare cheats, lesbians, humanists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and anyone else who had no respect for Tradition.

  Gradually, as Jake advanced from passing out pamphlets at rallies and soliciting money at airports to tasks of greater responsibility, as he went from small jobs accomplished in the public view to larger projects hidden from any view at all, he learned that the membership of the Alliance was wider and more inclusive than the world at large suspected. In addition to many rich and powerful men, certain governmental agencies were well represented among its members: the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon. Jake met men from all these agencies; Jake recorded names; Jake was given a number of helpful hints and boosts along the way. He was supplied with money. He was given the names and numbers of contract men and mercenaries who could help his career by doing odd jobs from time to time.

  Throughout all those decades of dedication, Jake saw Webster personally only once. It happened on October 31, 1985, when Jake was thirty-five years old. On that day he was accepted as a formal member of the Alliance. After weeks of feverish anticipation, during which he rehearsed over and over the casual remark he would make about his possible relationship to the great man, he had been ushered into a large office, high up in one of the most luxurious buildings in Chicago. Suffocating falls of ashen draperies covered the windows and muffled any outside noise. Bluish lamplight pooled on an ebon carpet thick as swamp ooze. From behind a desk carved like a catafalque, Webster rose, to beckon Jake forward with a single curve of a pale, expressive hand. Jagger, who had been cautioned to keep his mouth shut, had been amazed at his difficulty in moving at all, in simply keeping his balance.

  What Webster said was: “Mr. Jagger, I am happy to welcome you to membership in the Alliance.”

  Thirteen words. Though it was far from the acknowledgment Jake had hoped for, Jake did not utter a word about fathers and sons—not then, not subsequently. Over the next few days Jake managed to convince himself that such a query would have been inappropriate, ignoring the fact that in that room, in Webster’s presence, any query would have been impossible. There was something quite awful in Webster’s manner, an aspect that stifled small talk. In that high, smothered room Jagger had not only seen but felt him, like a hot wave that started just behind his eyes and flooded throughout his mind, examining every thought and approving them all. Every insight: approved. Every ambition: approved. Every aspect of himself was accepted, as he was, as he intended to be.

  A more fanciful man than Jagger might have made a story out of this, but despite all his reading, Jake had no imagination. He did not wonder about Webster’s psyche or substance. He simply told himself that a man with Webster’s wealth and power would be different from other men, and Jake revised his own expectations to accord with that difference. His rapid advancement in the organization and his acceptance by Webster himself was proof that a relationship between him and Webster existed. If Webster didn’t want to talk about it or want others to know about it, fine. Jake could imagine some good reasons for keeping the matter private. He could wait.

  Two years later he knew his patience had paid off when, as a doggedly faithful, unquestioning member of the Alliance, he was sent to Santa Fe with the suggestion that he marry well, beget children, and become well-known. With the help of people Jake had come to know well and pay well, he had done so, picking a wife on the basis of her fortune, wooing her relentlessly, charmingly, as he had learned to do with possible candidates for membership. He had wordlessly and methodically raped her on their wedding night and thereafter as needed until two pregnancies—the first had resulted in a girl—had been achieved. As soon as the children were old enough, he had packed them off to the Alliance headquarters, where children of members were educated. He was not fond of them. They were only pieces in the game, the boy an elusive stranger and the girl a receptacle for which some use might eventually be found. Just as his wife, Helen, was a piece in the game for which some other use might be found.

  Below Jagger’s aerie a car nosed its way onto Hyde Park from one of the tangle of little streets below Gonzales. It turned upward, the headlights painting twin cones of yellow across the juniper- and chamiza-flecked hill. Without meaning to, without knowing he was, Jagger held his breath. The car slowed as it neared the entry to the hilltop complex, slowed even more, hesitated, then turned in to begin the steeper climb toward the house.

  Well. He lifted his chin, settling his collar, then smoothed his hair with both hands. It was good hair, graying but full, well cut, the forehead line echoing the line of his eyebrows, also gray and full. His face was heavy, but the heaviness was in the bone, in the prowlike thrust of the jaw, the impressive mass of the temples. Some might have judged the eyes too small for this face, too deeply set and veiled. No one would deny their concentrated alertness.

  He watched a moment longer, making sure the car was coming to this house, then strode to the door and waited
just inside. To open it in advance would seem too eager. To be slow answering it would be impolite. He let the steps approach, the doorbell ring, then counted one, two, three, four, five before thumbing the latch.

  “Mr. Jagger,” said an unfamiliar voice, coming from an unfamiliar person—a slight rumple-suited form wearing a creased, anonymous face behind thick-lensed glasses.

  Ah, but Webster was there also, almost invisible in the dusk, looming over the shoulder of the little man.

  “Mr. Keepe is one of our people,” Webster said in his sonorous, hypnotic voice.

  “Raymond Keepe.” The smaller man nodded, bobbed, cocked his head, birdlike.

  Jagger stood aside, half bowing them in. Keepe divested himself of a wrinkled topcoat. Webster wore none. Jagger hung up the coat and led the way down the hall into the spacious room beyond, where lamplight pooled on saltillo tile and leather chairs, on Navajo weavings and parchment-shaded lamps made from prize-winning Santa Clara pots.

  “Very ethnic,” Keepe said, smiling.

  “It goes over well with the neighbors,” said Jagger uncertainly.

  “One must keep up with the neighbors,” Webster murmured with slight amusement, as though responding to a witticism. He strode to the window and looked out over a hundred miles of desert and mountain, one hand briefly extended, as though to touch the fabric of the world. “You’ve done well, Jagger.”

  “I’ve followed orders, sir.”

  “Oh, we know.” Webster turned, selected a chair, sat down comfortably, and gave Jake an approving look. “We’ve come to reward you for that.”

  Jagger flushed, paled, felt himself swaying, held his breath, and chose to say nothing.

  Webster smiled.

  “Mr. Webster is enjoying the fruits of success,” said Keepe in an alert and cheerful voice. “Which he hopes to share with you. The Alliance has recently accepted several new applicants for membership.”