Freebird

by John Raymond

  He knew Anne would not approve of his war on evil. She would most certainly have some simple, obvious arguments against such a mission. But he didn’t want her voice tonight. In his mind’s eye, he watched himself slowly rising from the waters, face painted, hunting knife clenched in his fist, and mauled her intruding doubts into unbeing, after which he dragged the rent pieces back down into the bracken and continued his wait.

  The whisper of the tires came to his ears, and a moment later the car’s lights appeared, carving their white trench in the darkness. Ben’s senses were so highly elevated, he could feel the vibration of the car’s movement in the air molecules. There had been other cars before this one, but he knew this was the car he’d been waiting for: Holmes’s limo, cruising down the private lane, slowing at the iron gate, waiting as the gate retracted on its wheels with a distant clank and hum, and floating inside the property line, darkness pouring back into the ditch of light.

  At the first sensation of the car, all thinking stopped. The change had come over his system, and there was only his breath now, in and out. Ben lifted his gun in preparation, should his shot come. He nestled the stock into the padding of his shoulder and placed his cheek to the stock. He let his finger rest on the trigger guard, his other hand on the forestock. He looked through the scope to test the flattened optical frame. He watched the limo going through the same motions as the other night, drawing to a stop at the path leading to the front steps. The moon burned a hole in the sky, white hot among cold stars.

  The limo’s door opened, and Holmes emerged. Ben tracked his skull in the scope, a big, ripe cantaloupe hovering in space. A moon filled with brains. Ben breathed slowly, evenly, letting the stock fuse with his shoulder. The barrel was an extension of his arm and hand. The scope was a lens of his eye. Holmes walked down the path, carrying a paper bag filled with small boxes or something, something not very heavy, not that it mattered what. This was the moment. Holmes was there. Ben knew this man’s midwestern voice, his mild halitosis smell. He had shared injera, mujadara, and fried chicken with him. But he also knew Holmes had been granted too much power in the world, too much influence on the course of planetary life, and that was a crime. Ben’s finger tightened on the trigger, and with a light gasp the bullet was released. He barely noticed the recoil.

  A hundred and fifty yards away, blood sprayed onto geraniums, followed by a cloddish tumble of weight. Ben didn’t pause to confirm the kill. He knew the shot had been straight and true. He’d felt the taut line from his muzzle to Holmes’s brain. He’d felt the perfection.

  Down on the ground, time continued to rush onward, pouring over the scene of death, leaving no riffle, no wake. The world had turned slow and ultra-detailed, rich in information about rasping leaves, dispersing gunshot residue, idling engine sounds, satellite flight patterns, but Ben knew there wasn’t a moment to spare. Nimbly, he sprinted over the leafy ground, aiming himself toward Holmes’s estate. He took the street in two quick bounds and angled for the far corner of the wall, a murky area obscured by hanging fig branches, and using the fig tree as a ladder he scaled the wall, dropping deftly to the soft dirt on the other side. From there, he clung to the shadows of Holmes’s property line, spilling himself in quick, decisive bursts toward the water.

  He ran lightly, his rifle strapped to his back, emitting almost no sound. The cat’s cradle of his heart stretched and shrank inside his chest. Already, there was commotion near the door, but the Holmes estate remained sunk in darkness. He crossed the chemically fortified lawn en route to the lapping water and without a pause plunged himself into the sound. He was in his element again. The water is your mother and solace, as the SEALs always said. He’d learned in BUD/S training that, whenever in doubt, go to the water; the water will save you. He pounded his arms until he’d made it fifty meters out to sea, at which point he jettisoned the rifle, turned north, and swam another three hundred meters. He was slogging away in his heavy clothes, arms and legs burning, when the Holmes estate ignited behind him, every window shining, every corner exposed. But the light didn’t reach him in the black water.

  The white birch he’d selected as a landmark appeared, and he headed back to land, emerging onto the pebbled shore of Holmes’s neighbor’s estate. Soaking and winded, he sprinted another fifteen meters to the hole he’d dug over the course of two midnight visits a week before. The dirt, he’d dumped into the ocean; his tools, he’d discarded in a garbage can behind a Chevys restaurant. There was no remaining evidence of his digging work, and there were no witnesses, not that digging a hole was a crime.

  The hole was hidden under a plywood board obscured by earth and leaves and twigs and one large, shaggy pine branch. Gently, he pulled the board aside to reveal the hole’s black mouth, three feet deep, six feet long, and containing a single plastic garbage bag. He stripped his clothes and changed into the dry clothes he’d stored and put his wet clothes in the bag. The sound was dappled with moonlight, covering any trace of his passage. He climbed into the hole and slid the board—the wig, as he called it to himself—back into place, wedging the edge into the lip of dirt to make a clean seal.

  The hole was dark and comfortable. He could hear his ragged breath in his throat, and he could feel the damp earth against his spine. He lay there, momentarily safe. His scent had been expunged from the scene, and the canoe he’d stashed a mile in the other direction would lead his pursuers on a false path. The likelihood that anyone would find him quickly was extremely small. Most likely they’d scour the area and then widen the search, presuming he was fleeing to the interstate highway system. They probably wouldn’t even find his Vibe, parked five miles away in the bus parking lot, but if they did, the car, wiped clean, wouldn’t give them anything.

  He could hear sirens muffled by the fat of the earth, and in the darkness, waiting, listening, senses on high, he farted grandly. The fart was a celebration of the Mission’s success, and the smell was sulfurous and terrible, a joy. He squeezed out another two, adding to the noxious fumes, and relished the bouquet of coffee, rotten fruit, and mud. The smell was all his, but, he had to admit, the sound was much like his dad’s. The same washboard buzz, the same juicy finish. How many mornings of his childhood had included that noise? His father, bumbling through the kitchen, fixing a brown-bag lunch, farting without shame. It occurred to him, as it had before, that his asshole was probably shaped exactly like his dad’s asshole. It only figured. He had his dad’s ears and hands. Of course he’d have his dad’s sphincter, too.

  In the darkness, smelling his own gas, he pondered his dad’s body, the body he now owned. Lying there, invisible to himself, he could feel his father’s dimensions. His own ribs, his fingers, his pelvis, all were copies of his dad’s. He could almost feel the cells of his father replicating throughout his body, filling him in, shaping him. Someday his dad was going to climb out of his chest fully reborn. It was so strange, he thought. His dad, a man so unknowable, unreachable, and unreadable in life, was also so close at hand, nesting inside his very skin. Maybe Ben’s soul itself was a hand-me-down.

  Thinking about his father led Ben to think about his father’s father, and he tried to feel that man’s presence in him as well. If his father’s body harbored his own father’s body, and so on, back into the depths of time, Ben’s forefathers must still be lurking in him, too. How far back did it go? He could almost feel the original spark deep in the recesses of the past. He wondered who’d captured the first spark and what ancient knowledge the spark held. Who was the first man? Was it a Jew? In the darkness, his eyelids teeming with strange colors and amoebic shapes, Ben could feel his father and his father’s father behind him, running all the way back to the stars.

  Hours passed, and Ben dozed, thinking about his father’s blood, and his mother’s, too. His mother’s blood was the good blood, he thought. She’d died when he was only seven, and his memories of her had become talismanic and unreal, but he felt her nevertheless. Her blood was not like his father’s sluggish blood. It was s
mart and full of steel. If only he could bend his blood to her blood, he would, for, as much as he loved his dad, he hated to live inside those same limitations, to be plagued by the same weakness and shame. To be dumb like his dad, oblivious and narrow like his dad. To see his own family murdered and fail to save them. To be ruled by that law. Lying in silence, he could feel the two bloods streaming in his veins, at endless war.

  Out in the world, distant movements were becoming audible again. Through the earth he heard footsteps and voices. In the air he heard propellers. His senses groped to comprehend the significance, but he could only guess. He had no smell, no sight, to guide his thoughts. Only his ears, and they were tricky. He heard dogs barking. He heard rumbling sounds. Distant, irregular vibrations. He’d already decided that if the police found him, he wouldn’t fight. He wouldn’t kill anyone just for doing the job of law enforcement. So he lay there in his hole, resigned to whatever fate God doled out. He lay there, giving up over and over again, until a kind of peace came over him. If they found him, so be it. He would give himself to God’s will. Have mercy, he prayed. But do what you will. I submit.

  The peace lasted only briefly, and his ears kept straining to understand the movements of the outside world. He’d hoped he would find peace on this side of the law, but he could see now that wasn’t the case. This side of man’s law was much like the side he’d been on before, dark and inscrutable. Peace wasn’t here. He’d been hoping the Mission would part the curtain and send fresh light streaming into his mind, but the curtain was too thick.

  The sounds of the outside receded again, and he heard his own breathing. He smelled the moist, clean earth, infused with the brackish water scent of the sound even this far from shore. He heard the minuscule scratching of bugs or worms. How long had he been underground? Already time’s movement was becoming turgid and unclear. He farted again, and the hole filled with his luscious smell.

  His senses slipped away one by one. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t hear, he couldn’t feel. Without ears, without eyes, he drifted in black space for what might have been hours or, possibly, days. In stops and starts, he screened a mental movie of every memory of his dad he could summon. His favorite: his father, hale and happy, building a rock wall in the garden, healthy legs powdered in dust, powerful hands fitting sun-warmed stones face to face. He saw Anne in his blackness, laughing under an oak tree, and Aaron, wandering a path through a meadow, and for an instant he glimpsed a fountain of light that seemed to flow out of the wellspring of eternity itself.

  He rose two days later into a crepuscular world. The forest was murky with evening shadow. He moved the board back onto the hole, breathing fresh air. Someday someone would lift the wig and find the hole, he thought, but by then it wouldn’t matter. This earth was already forgetting him.

  15

  Thus far, Aaron had found only one album on which he and his grandpa could agree, and that was Steppenwolf’s Greatest Hits. Why this was the album that passed his grandfather’s muster, he had no idea. Maybe he’d heard it a long time ago in some bar or warehouse where he’d worked. Maybe someone at his gym or his coffee shop had once told him it was all right. It didn’t matter. The point was, they’d now listened to it four times in a row while sitting in the parking lot in front of the Bagel Café, and that organ sound was becoming like a serrated knife peeling back Aaron’s skin.

  They’d been there for almost four hours now, sinking into the life of the strip mall, becoming one with the poky circulations of the cars, the broken clatter of the grocery carts, the babble of cell phone conversations cut off by the slamming of doors. The day’s only action had come when a refrigerated food truck had pulled up and unloaded dozens of boxes of hamburger patties, and the jiggling glare on the glass had threatened to shatter on one deliveryman’s trip inside. In all that time, Grandpa Sam had never once elaborated on his theory as to Kari’s guilt, though his conviction remained strong. He knew she did it, to the degree that he barely seemed to be hearing the music at all.

  “How do you know she did it, anyway?” Aaron asked. “I don’t doubt you. I just want to know.”

  Predictably, his grandpa shrugged. He just knew. There was no way to explain.

  So they waited, listening to “Magic Carpet Ride” for a fifth time, that awful drone rising to that cloying, invincible chord progression. By whatever powers of concentration, by whatever flailing sense of intuition, Grandpa Sam didn’t seem to mind. He was too deep inside his truth, and he would not leave this post until justice was served.

  Maybe he did know something, Aaron thought. It was hard to say. It was not inconceivable that his grandpa’s life had granted him some kind of special radar for the doings of evil. Maybe his horrific youth had imbued him with an extrasensory moral compass. Or maybe it was exactly this extrasensory compass that had allowed him to survive in the first place.

  It was three minutes after seven when Kari finally departed the Bagel Café, dragging her long shadow along the blighted sidewalk and through the glinting chrome and glass of the parking lot. She crossed the empty spaces and climbed into an old Accord, where she sat for fifteen minutes, talking on her phone. She was still talking when she turned the key and backed out of her space, creeping her way through the aisles to the main strip.

  Aaron and his grandfather followed a few car lengths behind, sticking to the protocols of the TV detective. They didn’t talk during the pursuit but remained stone-faced, like good partners. When the light changed, she turned right, and they turned right, keeping her always in view.

  They weren’t hiding from her, exactly. If she’d spotted them, they wouldn’t have denied anything. But if possible, they were hoping to observe her without her knowledge, at least for a little while. They had no official authority in this pursuit. The police had told them none too ambiguously that the best thing they could do was head home and get some rest. But the cops hadn’t explicitly told them they were not allowed to follow her, either. Not that his grandpa cared what the police said, anyway.

  In the best-case scenario, Aaron guessed, the bag would fall out of her pocket while she was pumping gas or something. She would spot them in her rearview mirror and pull over and tearfully repent. They simply didn’t have enough information to go on. All he knew about Kari was that she paid her bills by carrying plates of food to geriatric customers at the Bagel Café. If he knew what music she listened to, maybe he could make some predictions. Insane Clown Posse? That was one thing. Rascal Flatts? That was another.

  One thing he found out about Kari very quickly: she was a fucking terrible driver. Two car lengths back, watching her drifting randomly between the stripes, stopping joltingly within inches of the brake lights ahead, failing repeatedly to signal her turns, he was appalled by her lack of skills. She was astonished by every obstacle, unprepared for every intersection. Texting while driving should be a capital offense, he thought, at least for her.

  He was glad when she turned onto the freeway, heading east, but then she peeled off almost immediately at the town of Livermore, a collection of unremarkable streets that he wouldn’t have noticed at all if he were just speeding by. The town was actually larger than he would have thought, built into a depression of land falling away from the highway, obscured by scrubby trees and low brush. He followed her across some train tracks, past some large water tanks, and around a quarry of yellow rock. She turned into a residential area, and he kept with her, going deeper into the dowdy blocks of Livermore, far from groovy Oakland, far even from nouveau riche Dublin.

  These were poor homes, identifiably so, ironically, because they were encumbered with such obscene amounts of stuff. Children’s play cars, trampolines, three-wheelers, motorboats, ATVs, Jet Skis. Every house was like a magnet of plastic. Poverty wasn’t what it used to be, Aaron thought. The shtetl wasn’t goats and water buckets anymore.

  Kari came to stop at a house much like all the other houses, a shoe box obscured by an unpruned magnolia tree. There was a broken car in the driveway,
and the small pad of yard was covered with leaves. A leopard-face blanket covered one window, and a distant, single-prop airplane droned in the airspace beyond the roofline. Aaron pulled over at the curb a few houses down.

  “So . . . ,” Aaron said, gauging his grandpa’s desire to continue the investigation.

  “So we wait,” Grandpa Sam said with calm authority. One could almost imagine he had some kind of plan, and again Aaron wondered if maybe he knew something after all. Maybe his grandpa had organized secret uprisings in the Kraków ghetto or trafficked in secret communiqués with Polish peasants outside the barbed wire of Birkenau. Maybe he was tapping into some old, spooky skill set he’d honed in the fires of World War II. Doubtful.

  Kari was on the phone again, and it took another five minutes before she dragged herself out of the car. She leaned back inside to grab her purse and rose again, glancing around. Her gaze traveled over the street, noting the mattress in the neighbor’s yard, the passing shirtless biker with the cigarette, and landed almost immediately on Aaron, at whom she stared directly for the majority of her phone call. She locked her car doors with a chirp, never taking the phone from her ear, and strode inside the house.

  Aaron and Grandpa Sam sat there, already caught. The sun was going down, and the street was fading from view. Some birds pecked at a disintegrating paper cup in the gutter near an abandoned fax machine. A school building chopped off a segment of purple sky. The quiet led only to more quiet. Grandpa Sam stared dully at the house. Aaron turned off the car.

  In Kari’s house, shadows passed by the yellowish curtains. From his oblique angle, Aaron watched the dark blotches shifting on the dingy fabric like brown ghosts. The shadows edged back and forth, folded, shrank, converged.

  An outdoor light came on and the front door opened and a young man emerged. He was hard to see through the overgrown branches, but he looked a little older than Aaron, though not that much older. He was very skinny, and his posture was elaborately hunched, almost gnarled, a combination of affected gangster slouch and inborn low self-esteem. He wore a plaid hoodie with Gothic lettering on the chest, and loose denim shorts that made his wiry legs look extra pallid and unhealthy. On his head was a crisp Giants lid. He was blond, blade-faced.