by David Black
And the next and the next and the next …
—During 1977 another U.S. Navy-funded researcher reported that his experiments of exposing primates to radiofrequency radiation resulted in “gross morphological damage to the brains” of the test subjects … Soon thereafter, this researcher’s funding was canceled …
—Cluster of testicular cancer in police officers exposed to handheld radar.
—Children whose birth address was within 200 meters of an overhead power line had a 70% increased risk of leukemia.
—Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have identified a chemical reaction that may explain higher rates of illness observed among some people exposed to strong electromagnetic fields such as those produced by high-voltage power lines.
—A dose-responsive relationship between magnetic fields from power lines and asthma and combined chronic illness is identified in an August 2001 Australian study …
—There is solid evidence that secondhand smoke is less dangerous than magnetic fields.
—Area legislators are working together to safeguard neighborhoods that have been targeted for the expansion of a high-voltage electrical transmission line.
2
Caroline read the “The California EMF Program” report’s chapter headings: Leukemias, Adult Brain Cancer, Childhood Brain Cancer, Breast Cancer, Miscarriage, Alzheimer’s Disease, Heart Disease, Suicide …
“Did you see the report on electrical power lines and hallucinations?” Jack asked.
“Ghosts, fairies, UFOs,” Caroline glanced over the printout. “Remember, twenty years ago the big UFO flap in the Hudson Valley?”
“You must have been a baby,” Jack said.
“Every night I had a dilemma,” Caroline said. “Keep the window open so Peter Pan could come get me or keep it closed so the aliens couldn’t.”
“How long did it take you to grow out of that?” Jack asked.
“When I hit puberty,” Caroline said, “I traded aliens for vampires.”
“Sexier,” Jack said.
“I don’t know,” Caroline said. “All those alien anal probes…”
“See the report on how many people getting the electric chair see angels or devils before they fry?” Jack asked.
“Who says they’re hallucinations?” Caroline said.
She turned to another printout and read: “One of the issues confronting policymakers is the value of a human life. Does it make sense to spend $4 million to bury a line if the reduction in EMF will save [only] one life?”
“Money,” Jack said. “That’s what it’s all about.”
“Says here Slate estimated a human life is worth between four and eight million,” Caroline said.
“If someone grabs you,” Jack said, “I wouldn’t pay a penny over five mil.”
As Jack said it, he felt a constriction of his heart, a physical reaction to fear.
“What if—?” Jack started.
“No one’s going to bother me,” Caroline said.
“They went after me,” Jack said.
“I’m not backing off,” Caroline said. “Even if you do.”
3
They were driving past the Volunteer Fire Department sign, which this week said: Welcome home, PFC Dwayne Prettyman, Iraq—Two Tours.
At the junction of Route 66, Jack hung a sharp right and then turned left into the parking lot of the Jayhawkers Inn. Gravel crunched underneath the car tires.
Inside, the restaurant was dim, each table lit by a small lamp with a red shade. Three metal trays held corn relish, cottage cheese, and spiced crab apples. An ancient Wurlitzer finished playing a Peggy Lee song and started a Frankie Laine number, one after another, songs from the late Fifties, Snooky Lanson’s Your Hit Parade.
“So where are we?” Jack said. “Frank’s dead. Stickman’s dead. Both were connected to Jean—”
“Who’s also dead,” Caroline said. “And who was a junkie hooker.”
“And who was possibly suffering from electrical pollution,” Jack added.
“And related to Robert,” Caroline also added.
Jack smeared some corn relish on a water cracker, cracking it.
Jack was very aware of the flop of the new record on the Wurlitzer—Dinah Washington—the sound of some kind of food grinder in the kitchen, a murmur of voices from across the room—only one word, “bathtub,” stood out—and a faint ammonia smell.
The waitress delivered their meals: Jack’s jumbo burger special with extra crisp string fries, Caroline’s rack of lamb with garlic mashed potatoes and creamed broccoli.
“You’re not supposed to pick up your lamb chop unless it’s wearing those little paper panties,” Caroline said, “but I figure I’m wearing panties, so—”
Caroline picked up a chop with both hands and, pulling back her lips, baring her teeth, began ripping off the meat and gnawing on the bone. Jack could hear the bone cracking.
When she smiled at Jack, he saw a string of lamb caught between her top front teeth.
Jack tapped his own top teeth with a fingernail and handed Caroline a napkin, which she used to wipe her mouth.
“Frank had files and files on Robert’s family,” Caroline said. “Going back generations.”
Jack shrugged.
“Frank was their lawyer,” he said.
“The files he had seem like overkill,” Caroline said.
“Maybe they just thought family papers would be safer in his office than at home,” Jack said.
“Did you know Frank was so involved with the Flowers family?”
“There’s a lot I didn’t know about Frank,” Jack said.
“Then, there’s this,” Caroline said, putting the lamb bone onto her plate and taking some folded papers from her pocketbook.
Jack recognized the dark blue stripe across the tops of the pages.
“Frank’s phone bill?” he asked.
“Jean’s cell.” Caroline handed the bill across the table. “Frank was paying her bills. I’ve got more in the car. Take a look at the second page.”
Jack did. Caroline had left a lamb-grease fingerprint on the paper.
“A lot of calls to a 415 number,” Jack said. “Western Mass.”
“I checked,” Caroline said, picking up the lamb bone. “It’s in Great Barrington.”
“Robert’s number?” Jack asked. “Keating’s?”
Caroline nodded, looking up at Jack over the bone she gnawed, whites showing under her rolled-up eyeballs.
“Three the night Frank died,” Caroline said. “I figured she was calling for help.”
“Before she met with Frank?” Jack asked.
“Or to rub Robert’s or Keating’s nose in the fact she was meeting Frank?” Caroline said.
Jack gestured for the check.
“I’m still eating,” Caroline said. “And dessert comes with the meal.”
“You said the files are in the car?” Jack asked.
Caroline nodded.
“You drive,” Jack said, “while I go through them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1
The silhouette of Caroline’s head was outlined by oncoming headlights. Her frizzy hair looked electrified.
The intermittent rain spattered the windshield.
Jack sat in the back seat next to two brown-and-white cardboard bankers boxes. When Jack took off the top of the closest, flakes of brittle, browning paper puffed up, making him sneeze. The files seemed to be in chronological order. Jack slipped the front manila folder out, opened it, and in the car’s yellow ceiling light read,
“Legation of the United States
“Madrid, March 4, 1844
“My dear Commodore:
“Ill health, which has made me rather irregular in my correspondence, has prevented…”
Jack glanced down to the signature at the bottom of the paper—
“I am, my dear Commodore,
“Ever very truly yours,
“Washington Irving.�
��
—and the addressee below the signature:
“Commodore M. C. Perry
“Commanding African Squadron.”
Perry, yeah, Jack thought. Robert had mentioned he was an ancestor.
The following file had a letter written horizontally and then, when space ran out, sideways up the page, crossing the horizontal lines. Reading it was a trick, Jack thought, like the psychology experiment in which a picture, focused on one way, was a vase and, focused on another way, became two faces looking at each other. It was from Commodore Perry to what seemed to be his daughter, Bell, Robert’s Perry ancestor.
“Navy Yard, Vera Cruz
“November 2, 1847
“My dear child:
“I was very much gratified last evening by the receipt of your truly affectionate letter of the 3rd of last month and am very glad that your mother has entrusted your education to the charge of Madame Cheganay for whose attainments and ability, and estimated—”
Jack figured the word should have been esteemed.
“—qualities I have always entertained the highest respect.”
A different world, Jack thought, glancing at Caroline’s haloed silhouette in the front seat. A truck went by fast. The passing airstream slapped their car so hard it rocked.
Caroline turned on the radio, which was tuned to the local NPR station.
“Songs of the Auvergne” filled the car.
Jack would have looked for a rock station. Rhythm and blues. Or jazz.
Songs of the Auvergne …
Jack wasn’t a reverse snob. He’d learned to appreciate, even like, classical music, although his taste—Wagner, Richard Strauss, Bruckner, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Puccini’s Turandot—tended toward the lurid or sentimental. But, when tired or stressed, he gravitated to the music of his youth: the Dell Vikings, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, the Blues Project, Mingus.…
Songs of the Auvergne …
Jack smiled.
The music of Caroline’s youth?
As Jack worked his way through college and law school, struggling not to get good grades, which he found easy to do, but to civilize himself, he often regretted that he didn’t have Caroline’s kind of background, picking up art, classical music, great books from the very air she breathed at home. Junior year of college, when Jack knew enough to realize he was missing references others found obvious—Sinbad, “My Last Duchess,” Ratty and Mole, “The Pied Piper,” the Jabberwocky—he bought himself a used copy of Journeys Through Bookland and read it, volumes one through eight of the faded blue-covered books, from Mother Goose to Peter Stuyvesant. He’d smoke dope and spend hours gazing at the color-drenched illustrations of The Water-Babies and Robinson Crusoe. He bought a child’s version of the Greek and Roman myths. A book about the Norse myths and one about the legends of Charlemagne. He got to know all the common store of references that a cultured person in the first half of the twentieth century might know.
But he knew them.
That was the problem.
He hadn’t lived them.
He could never catch up—any more than Caroline could catch up with baseball statistics, games Jack had listened to in the dark in his bedroom, the radio dial glowing the color of the gold-brown old letter from Frank’s files in his hand.
See for yourself why over five million glasses of Ballantine beer are enjoyed every day.…
Jack could remember the ads, remember Mel Allen and Phil Rizzuto’s voices:
Our broadcast today will be joined by the Armed Forces Radio Service, short-waving this broadcast around the world to our troops.…
Jack was a Red Sox fan. South of Albany right over the Massachusetts border, there were pockets of Sox fans, although most of the kids in his neighborhood were Yankees fans. Every season, Jack got into half a dozen fistfights.
The final game of the season …
October 1, 1961.
JFK was in the White House, and the Sox were at Yankee Stadium.
No TV. Jack had to listen to the game on a New York AM station, which faded in and out. He was too far west to get a Boston station.
1961—the year that looked the same when turned upside down.
And there’s the pitch. It’s in there. Strike one.…
A couple of weeks earlier, Jack—who was a UFO buff as a kid—had followed the news about the first report of a Gray alien. Maybe one of the spacemen Caroline was afraid might sneak through her opened window …
And the pitch. Curve inside.…
Between the commentary, the fans in the bleachers made a background churr like the cicadas outside Jack’s window.
… swung on and fouled off. One and two.…
Roger Maris was one home run away from beating Babe Ruth’s record.
… strike three.…
Jack had a buried affection for Maris, because the other Yankees ostracized him; they didn’t consider him a real Yankee.
Here’s the pitch to Maris. Left field. Going back to Yastrzemski. And he manages a one-handed catch.…
Jack liked Yaz. Instantly liked him—even though this was his first season. Shit, he was born on Long Island, Southampton, wherever that was, and yet he was a Red Sox, playing left field just like Ted Williams.
When Maris got up at bat again, it was his last chance to break the Babe’s record.
Last time up, Roger hit deep to left field.…
The fans stood up to see if Maris could pull it off. Hit number sixty-one.
Way outside … Ball one.…
It was the middle of the afternoon. Jack lay on his back on the bed, staring at the brown water stains in the ceiling.
There’s the wind up …
… and it’s a hit to deep right.…
The crowd went wild, drowning out the sportscasters.
Who was the pitcher? Jack tried to remember.
Another standing ovation for Roger Maris.…
Stallard. Yeah, Jack thought, Stallard.
I’ve got a headache.…
Which one of the announcers said that? Rizzuto? Allen?
You still have it?
I still got it.…
An odd personal exchange, caught on radio, remembered vividly almost half a century later—remembered more vividly than Maris at bat, about to beat the Babe’s home-run record.
The sweet summer smell of grass had seeped in through Jack’s window, which he left open, not for Peter Pan like Caroline, but for a breath of air in his small, hot room in the old shack.
Songs of the Auvergne …
… qualities I have always entertained the highest respect …
How alien Caroline’s world seemed to Jack. Not like the aliens Caroline feared, but real, physical beings, people Jack saw on the streets in clean, pressed clothes that fit them. People driving in new cars. People at home reading in the glow of a lamp, seen from the sidewalk through their windows at night. People who didn’t have to worry about whether there would be food in the house on alternate Thursdays, the day before the pay envelope came home.
Because the ’61 season was eight games longer than seasons before, they tried to say Maris’s sixty-one home runs didn’t count.
They always try to screw the underdog, Jack thought.
Caroline swerved, swerved again, her fingers gripping the steering wheel.
“I can’t stop killing them,” she said. “They’re all over the road.”
2
In the headlights, Jack saw what Caroline was trying to avoid hitting: The road was swarming with tiny frogs, which the tires were squashing.
“I can’t help killing them,” Caroline said, “but I don’t have to kill us.”
Jack watched as Caroline grimly plowed through the plague of frogs.
“It’s a massacre,” Caroline said
Although Jack could see her eyes bright with tears in the light reflected back from the road, she started laughing, a low, almost animal bark. Not quite hysterical, but—Jack thought—close enough
to hysteria.
Jack wanted to touch her, to put a hand reassuringly on her knee, but knew the gesture would be misinterpreted.
After a while, where the road was drier, the frogs thinned and then disappeared.
“You okay?” Jack asked.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Caroline asked back.
Jack studied her.
She felt him studying her. Her right eye twitched.
3
Jack went back to examining the bankers boxes.
A faded diary of a cruise up the Nile, written by Robert’s great-great-great aunt, Edith, who apparently was sinking into depression.
A sheet of soft, thin paper—“a flimsy”—with a rusty pin in the upper left hand corner. Whatever had been attached was missing. The ink looked blurred, furred from where it had bled through onto the copy, the nineteenth century equivalent of carbon paper or a photocopy.
The next: “Great Barrington, Apr. 27/62
1862.
“My dear Barlow, The conduct of the Administration against McClellan is really disgraceful + wicked—it shows once more that instead of patriots and statesmen we have only partisans at the head of government.…”
Next: A paper book sewn together with brown thread: “Official Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, Held in 1864, At Chicago,” printed a third of the way down the fading cover.
Flipping through the documents, which, in the second bankers box, ended a month ago, Jack felt he was seeing a panorama of American history.
Jack felt that, unlike the Flowers and their relatives and friends, who had such an intimate connection with the historical events, he had no part of that history. He was excluded. Like a child in his bedroom, vaguely hearing the sounds of an adult party downstairs.
Maybe, when he was a kid, Jack should have closed his nighttime window against aliens after all.…
From the last folder, Jack took a slip of paper, the torn bottom of a yellow legal sheet, which had written on it in Frank’s hand, underlined and circled three times: 07-2376.
“A docket number,” Caroline said when she glanced at the paper Jack held out to her. “One of Jean’s cases?”
Jack shrugged as he studied the number.
“The 07 indicates the year,” Jack said.
