by Andrew Post
Brody stared at one of the decommissioned Darters. The gentle angular shape of it, the cluster in its abdomen where supplies were housed, the thorax where the passengers sat—where the two of them had sat, strapped in, on several occasions in a different Darter.
“I’ll get rid of all this stuff someday. When I’m ready. I’m going to bury all the guns in the field or melt them down and make horseshoes out of them. Maybe I’ll donate these rust buckets to a museum. I don’t know. Check it out,” Thorp said, holding up the mended pants and giving the sutures in the material a tug to test its integrity. “Good as new.”
Brody dropped his feet off the railing. “If picking up the gun and going through this shit will disturb the peace you’ve carved out for yourself, I can go it alone. I just want a gun to use as a threat, anyway. I don’t even want it loaded.”
Thorp skirted the question. “Do you really think that if we get this Seb guy to come and get his car that he’ll be able to lead us to Titian Shandorf?”
“If not directly to him, to someone who knows him.”
“And you’re sure of that?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Do you think Titian was involved with Nectar disappearing?”
“I can’t be certain until we get closer and ask some questions. But there might be a connection with the similarities in records that Abigail Schwartz and your sister had, plus they were in the same activist group. Nectar has an outstanding tab to Titian’s nightclub—she’s been in his orbit at one point or another.”
Thorp looked at the Darter, the snow-capped Fairlane, the barn, then finally Brody. “In your honest opinion, do you think Nectar’s alive?” He raised a finger. “Wait. Don’t answer right away. Don’t give me the half-cocked positivity that you do. Give me your honest-to-God gut feeling on this. Give it a second, think it over, and then tell me what you really think.”
Brody considered The Mothers, Abigail’s headless body, Nectar’s debt to The Glower, every other piece of information, foggy trace, and weak clue he had collected over the last set of days. He closed his eyes, letting the answer come to him and roll over his tongue. “Yes.”
“I told you to tell me honestly.”
“I have no reason to believe she’s dead.”
“Then where is she?” Thorp snapped. “Where the fuck is she?”
“She might be hiding out, waiting for it to cool down. You don’t know.”
“No, you don’t know. I’ve taken a life; you haven’t. That kid is gone, and I robbed him of possibly getting straightened out, living a normal life free of the terrorist cell crap and—”
“What does that have to do with finding Nectar?”
“I’ve killed. I know how easy it is. And if I can say it’s easy, someone like me who never had any interest in killing nobody, someone like this Titian motherfucker, who probably looks forward to the next neck he can get his hands round—I can’t imagine what kind of state Nectar is in, wherever she is.”
Even in the failing light and Brody’s vision at the very beginning of dissolve, he could see a thick tear rolling down over the cusp of Thorp’s cheekbone, hang for a second, then drip onto the mended fabric where it soaked in and vanished.
Brody took a deep breath and placed a hand on Thorp’s shoulder. “We’ll find her.”
19
Once the sky was dark and Brody’s lenses had charged, he put the case in his pocket and tracked his way through the accumulated six inches of snow to the house. Thorp had set off for the basement armory under the declaration “to find something appropriate for the situation at hand.” Brody pictured stepping into the armory to find him in full flak gear, grenades and automatic rifles hanging from every available inch on his body, crowned with a bandanna haloing his thinning hair, which Brody imagined cut into an attempt at a mohawk.
Instead, he found Thorp atop a stool at the workbench, tinkering with a disassembled pistol. Thorp glanced over his shoulder and waved Brody over.
Brody looked over the individual components of the pistol, the springs and the tiny intricate folds of metal and firing mechanism, the hammer and pin. He assembled the gun in his mind and saw it whole: the same make and model as the one they’d been issued in combat training. Brody remembered it being clunky and of cheap manufacture, loud, but incredibly precise. It had been the Army’s favored sidearm for a dozen years ever since the gun’s inception.
“The Franklin-Johann,” Brody said.
He could hear his drill instructor shouting the name of the gun to the platoon after they had fallen in as well as the informational spiel that followed as a way to hammer home the Franklin-Johann’s role. “This is your sidearm. This is for when Old Bessie, your assault rifle, is not appropriate to the situation at hand. The Franklin-Johann semiautomatic pistol will lovingly provide you with ten rounds of stopping power at medium to close range. It is the fallback weapon, your second lover that you keep in your back pocket for lonely nights when the situation at home has gone sour. Love her, respect her, and she will always be there to help you through any shit storm.”
“I got one for you, too. I’m just cleaning them. I haven’t pulled them out in a while. The last thing we need is to fire one of these things and it doesn’t work.” Thorp probed a brush through the inside workings of the pistol. When he was satisfied the gun was clean, he reassembled it with a blur of motion. He slapped in the magazine and chambered a round. He clicked on the safety and flipped the gun around. Holding the muzzle, Thorp pushed the grip toward Brody.
Brody’s hand remained at his side. He blinked at it, hesitating.
“It’s not going to bite,” Thorp said. “The safety’s on.”
Brody wrapped his hand around the rubber grip. Thorp released his grasp, and the familiar weight of the gun pulled Brody’s hand toward the floor. He had forgotten how much weight the Franklin-Johann had. He let it hang there in his hand for a moment. All the training and the countless hours on the range firing at hay bales with painted-on targets cascaded over him—the ear protection, the shooting glasses that tinted the world gold, the muffled sound of everyone in line firing in turn, and that faraway pop the shots made.
He had lived a full decade blessedly free of guns, only to be holding one again. He felt permeated by the nauseating authority and tingly danger that holding a weapon of such unmasked lethality carried with it.
“Are you okay? Because if you don’t want the Franklin—”
“It’s fine. It’ll do.” He slid the gun into the back of his pants where it would be concealed beneath his peacoat. Even back there, the trigger guard looped over the top of his belt—the gun causing the buckle to dig in against his abdomen. The gravitas, even without the weapon being in hand, was sharply ubiquitous.
Thorp thumbed rounds into a spare magazine, one at a time. At this sight of quiet and practiced preparation, Brody felt his stomach give a slight heave. His throat had run dry long before he’d come down into the basement. A nagging hollowness of terror and doubt had wormed its way into his chest. Watching Thorp load the clip with one brass-jacketed bullet after another, that click-click it made with each new addition being filed in, Brody had to think of Nectar to chase off the slow trepidation that was climbing atop him. He thought about her as the kid she was when he met her all those years ago. And in her first jigsaw photo, smiling, and then when she was a teenager and very much not smiling. It was worth it. He buttoned his coat and repeated the notion again in his mind. It’s worth it. Wrestling with that bullshit, carrying a gun again—it was all for Nectar.
“I’m going to start the car, let it warm up.” Brody didn’t wait for Thorp to respond. He passed through the basement, cleared the stairs, and hadn’t even fully closed the back door before he had the pistol removed and the magazine ejected. He yanked the slide back to kick out the chambered bullet.
He put the gun in one pocket and the magazine in another as if afraid the thing would reload itself on the drive if neglectfully stowed in the same pocket with its
ten little friends. He sunk down behind the wheel of the Fairlane, started the engine, and upon feeling the hot air from the vents, sighed. He had another one of Seb’s cigarettes and attempted some closed-eyed breathing exercises between drags. It helped.
A few moments later, Brody heard the jingle of keys and looked through the empty windshield frame to see Thorp locking the farmhouse. There was no bandanna tied around his head, no ballistics gear, but the simple sight of Thorp’s rucksack—which looked full—set Brody’s teeth on edge.
Thorp got into the car and shoved the bag into the backseat, where it landed with a profound metallic clatter.
Brody put the car in reverse without asking about its contents. He didn’t want to know.
For the entire ride, Thorp kept his hand up to block the roaring gale pounding directly into the car. He’d peek out at Chicago looming ahead, all its lights and traffic making the backs of his eyes ache. It reminded him that it had been a long time since he actually left the house. He had spent too much time there alone with his thoughts and theories and an overactive imagination that sometimes found in its stagnancy a way to twist back around on its owner. In its bite, he felt as if he were the sole perpetrator in his own misery. That he was the solitary mason setting up the bricks around him, the digger of his own moat that encircled his life.
Beyond the rumble of the Fairlane’s engine, he could hear the imagined thrum of the Darter as they were being taken to a new location with a new slew of problems. He remembered guys in their unit kissing rosaries, hands clamped together in prayer, others sitting quiet and stoic, thinking of home. Some took to bad habits like rituals, doing a complicated hand jive before taking a pinch of chewing tobacco, or rubbing their disposable lighters like a lucky charm or rabbit’s foot before lighting up. Some deliberately put the peril that waited for them out of their minds and sat by the open ramp door, the city of blond stone passing beneath them, looking as indifferent and bored as a man biding time at a bus stop. Thorp tried to be like them, to give an air of being effortlessly and blandly composed, even though beneath the surface he was anything but.
To calm himself, he removed his Gizumoshingu from his rucksack and felt with his fingertips in the darkness for where the car’s audio input was hiding. A moment later, Thorp treated Brody to the Ramones’ “Commando” at top volume. He sought approval in Brody’s face and was treated to a small smile developing beneath his squinted, orange eyes.
“Remember this?” Thorp cackled, trying his best to shoo out his worries.
“How could I forget?” Brody said, his face washed white in the monitor’s radiance. “What else you got on there?”
“All the good stuff. I got ‘Flight of the Valkyries,’ Zevon, Intrepid Hound Dog, JSBX. You remember how we used to listen to this stuff heading in?”
“Yeah, I’m surprised they never heard us coming, all of us singing together like that.”
For the song’s minute and fifty-one second duration, they were quiet.
When it abruptly ended, Brody leaned over the middle seat and shouted, “That was great, but do you know where this Mother Nature’s Womb place is?”
The slight bend in the road caused them to turn so that they were driving directly into the wind. The frozen current rhythmically pulsed through the car so aggressively it made their eardrums feel boxed. Neither man said anything while Brody negotiated the bend, ice on the road catching the car’s headlights with flares of dull white.
When they began going along the straightaway once more, Thorp lowered the volume on the music. “I thought we were going to nab this Seb guy.”
“We are, but there might be something at this gardening supply place where Nectar met up with those other protestors. Worth checking out, anyway.”
“But I thought it was closed,” Thorp shouted over the wind.
“It is but there might still be something there.”
“What about Seb?”
“We’ll do that afterwards. I know going past the gardening place is kind of a reach, but I want to eliminate all loose ends. Can you look up the address for me?” Brody gestured at the monitor set into the dashboard.
Thorp leaned forward and poked at the touch pad, entering Mother Nature’s Womb in the search query just as “Worrier King” began.
Located on a barren street on the north side of Chicago, Mother Nature’s Womb was still standing—in some definition of the word. Even from halfway up the block where they parked, the earthy tang of potting soil could be easily identified. It was a narrow two-story brick building that visibly leaned, with a closed pharmacy to one side and a burned-out storefront on the other. The windows of the gardening supply shop were taped over with old newspapers on the inside. The sign had been pulled down, leaving chains hanging above the front door.
Some hallmarks of The Mothers remained: a faded painted marijuana leaf on the mailbox. A smiling, round face set into the brick that watched over the sidewalk and resembled what a female counterpart to Buddha might look like. Mother Nature corporeal, Brody surmised.
05:59:59.
That would be sufficient, he hoped. A quick look around, moving onto baiting Seb once they found nothing, just as Brody suspected. But it felt good to be here, to be thorough and kick over every rock, even the ones that didn’t seem worth the time or the gas.
They went to the front of Mother Nature’s Womb and peeked in through the spaces between the newsprint pages quilted across the glass. Nothing could be seen inside, only the reflection of their own peering faces. Brody wasn’t surprised to find the door locked. He gestured to Thorp, a whirling display of dactylology for “go around back,” utilizing the hand signals they had learned at Fort Reagan.
They crunched through the tall weeds that ran alongside the building and got to the rear. Dozens of plants spilled out of their pottery prisons and grew unbothered in wild tangles. A greenhouse with every panel of its glass shattered. Beyond was the back door of the shop. Seeing how large and sturdy it was, Brody immediately thought of The Glower’s refashioned meat locker door. He threw an arm in front of Thorp before he stepped up to the door. Brody pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at the ground at the back door. Congealed mud resultant from melted snow. Tramped through the puddle were recent footprints.
Thorp pulled the pistol from the back of his pants and clicked the safety catch off.
Brody studied the prints. They were from large feet, probably around the same as Brody’s own. Shoes, with a decorative tread that was molded to look like a woman cradling a child, both of them adorned in flowing dreadlocks.
“Looks like it’s just one person,” Thorp whispered.
“Either way, keep ‘em peeled,” Brody said.
Brody tugged on the door handle. The door made a metallic snap and opened with a tortured groan of rusted metal. Thorp clicked on a flashlight and entered. Brody came in behind him and shut the door. Again, just like the door at the nightclub, there was no way to lock it from the inside. He noticed an aluminum tray that was used to line the bottom of a rectangular pot and jammed it up inside the door. From the way the tray was bent, that was apparently how the door was normally secured.
Inside the back room of Mother Nature’s Womb were more planters on several shelves reaching to the ceiling. Every plant was dead, brittle as ancient bone. In the corner, a desk with reams of paper upon it, a clear plastic tarp thrown over. On the wall, held in place with thumbtacks, a burlap banner matching the one in Nectar’s own in-home greenhouse.
Using the flashlight mounted to his phone, Brody glanced down to see if the muddy footprints went anywhere, but the entire shop’s floor was covered in a soft carpeting of spilled potting soil. The moment the prints crossed the threshold of the back door, they were lost.
Before going through the papers on the desk under the tarp, they moved into the main room and looked around. This was where the shop did transactions. There was a display of different gardening tools and bags of potting soil that had deteriorated and spilled the
ir contents onto the floor. The tang of potting soil, with its heady mix of environmentally conscious chemicals and minerals, was intoxicating. It conquered everything else. There could easily be a dead body in here somewhere, and they wouldn’t even smell it.
Remaining quiet, they walked carefully and deliberately. Thorp kept ahead of Brody, aiming his light over anything of interest, his gun at the ready in his other hand.
Brody spotted a partly ajar door behind a beaded curtain. He made a soft click with his mouth, like signaling a horse, to get Thorp’s attention. He pointed.
They approached the door, crossed the earthen floor as silently as they could. Brody eased the door open, and Thorp went first, bobbing his head around the corner for a quick peek, then stood at the bottom of the stairs, moving the flashlight up the risers to the landing above.
A frantic scrambling moved from one side of the upper floor to the other when they had climbed halfway up the stairs. Both Brody and Thorp instinctively ducked and pointed their guns to the top of the stairwell. They waited for the noise of clumsy fumbling to stop, then continued up the remainder of the narrow stairwell.
Thorp turned off his flashlight and tucked it away since there was a suitable amount of light pouring in from the street. He held his pistol out with both hands and scanned the various open doorways.
Brody crept into the first room, saw that it was just an empty space, with peeling paint on the walls, the floor sinking in the middle of the room, further evidence of the shop’s dilapidation. He glanced up at a hole in the ceiling that went out directly to the sky.
