“What d’you mean?”
“I helped cut the wire off him. It’s weird it wasn’t worse.”
“The bomb squad said that thing could’ve blown the place to kingdom come. You saying he faked it?”
“Don’t get mad at me.”
* * *
Why he did it, I can’t tell you. Had his reasons. I learned that in the war. What looks crazy, could be the logicalest thing a man can do. Might be loneliness drove him to it, his Romeo heart. It’ll cost the taxpayers a mint. That’s the wrong of it. The courts was always slow, and time this thing gets to trial, years’ll pass. Hung jury, and he’ll go free.
What punishment I’d give him that’d be fair? It’d have to hurt his pride. Not a whipping nor a fine. Put him out of town quiet-like, no send-off and no fuss.
Was it worth it? I’d like to know. He wrapped it careful around his face, like a mask, and hooked his mouth over it—lemme show you—so’s to claim he couldn’t yell. That barbwire a crown of thorns upon his head, and a bomb he made hisself, ticking down the seconds of his life. Did he feel excited, waiting for a savior to come along? That’s all of us, ain’t it, with knots we tied around our arms. Others have expired in this here park, same bench where that girl is laying. The baby’s dead, all right, passed among white hands, black and yellow hands, bound for a New Orleans hoodoo parlor where he’ll be dried and powdered. The great-great-great-granddaughter of a slave girl I sold, she’ll dole him out for love potions bit by bit, his magic strong enough to stop a paddlewheel.
Sheila, ain’t a thing you can do. Your clock’s been ticking since the day you were born. What you started here, you won’t see the end of—FBI men with light catching on their spectacles, another scandal, another long dry summer, while the city council connives to dig me up, and the Sons of Confederate Veterans gird theirselves in battle gear and wish they was born long ago. Each of us our own assailant, hankering for glory.
Sheila honey, goodbye. The men pushing that car will have to rest. They’ll stroll over, find you, and send for help. They’ll try to give the breath of life. A stranger’s breath it’ll be for you, one last kiss as you cross over.
A Shut-and-Open Case
by JOHN BENSKO
Midtown
As they broke through the plastered brick wall in the Midtown Memphis mansion they’d been hired to renovate, Jerry McTarne was swinging the sledgehammer when Hector Lopez shouted, “Para, para!” stop, stop, and Jerry glanced over to see Hector staring wide-eyed into the hole they’d opened. More than what Hector said, his expression of fear made Jerry stop with the hammer suspended and gaze through the dust. Beyond was a hidden room, just as the new owner had suspected. Luther Self, their boss, had assured the owner that the difference between the room’s inside and outside dimensions was merely an unusually large space left for the chimney. “You ain’t gonna find no treasure in there,” he drawled, with a toothpick hanging from the corner of his mouth. The owner, Antoine Fargé, who in spite of his name and vaguely foreign accent seemed to Jerry no more French than, well, Jerry himself, persisted.
“I must see into everything,” he said, waving a French-cuffed arm and flashing his diamond ring. “Every shadow of this house.” Only he didn’t say see and this, he said zee and deez.
Jerry peered through the cloud of dust and made out what he could only describe as implements. Implements, as if they were farm machinery left in a barn to rust and gather pigeon droppings.
“Dios mío,” said Hector, crossing himself three times, then kissing his fingers and crossing himself again. “Es la guarida del diablo.”
Jerry had to hand it to Hector. Describing what they saw as the den of the devil made about as much sense as anything. His next thought, one he regretted later, was: Delphi has to see this.
* * *
Tall, lanky, and redheaded, Jerry McTarne appeared out of place among the Mexicans he worked alongside, but he got on so well with them that he overcame his self-consciousness. Born in Mexico, he’d lived there until he was six, when his mother, Delphi, an Age of Aquarius hippie who went by the one name only, turned up a hand of tarot that caused her instantly to pack her hand-woven Peruvian wool backpack and leave ’Schroom, her boyfriend of seven years, whose fathership of Jerry she was vague about anyway. She hitchhiked with her son from Ajijic back to Memphis, the city of her forefathers, where the cards said her destiny would unfold.
At that age, Jerry spoke better Spanish than English. He remembered too vividly the series of creeps who picked them up once they crossed the border into Texas. This and other adventures, Delphi’s word, that she took him on made Jerry surprised he survived into adulthood. Yet he loved her. His attachment to her and her odd ways he couldn’t fathom, much less explain. Maybe there was comfort in despair.
Yes, Delphi would have to see this. Whatever this was, éste, in Mexico, that word used sometimes for things or people who were unfathomable yet close. And the word almost like es tú, it’s you. Éste, which he sometimes used silently toward his mother.
Working construction was not a profession Jerry would have chosen. Under Delphi’s influence, he smoked too much weed, dropped out of high school, and fell into it. As a teenager, he was thin and, with his red hair, a target of jokes at school. The jibes grew worse when Delphi came to the high school one time for Cultural Awareness Day. A flyer about it had accidently slipped out of his notebook on the dining room table where he did his homework, and she’d latched onto it. “They have to learn about Accidentalism,” she’d said with a gleam in her eye. It was the religion she’d founded. She had ten followers.
* * *
Faced with the devil’s den, Hector put down his sledgehammer, and without another word turned and left Jerry alone to ponder. Jerry shoved a few loose bricks aside and stepped into the long, narrow room. At one end was the chimney, a deep fireplace like an oven with a steel door opening at waist level, and a long bench covered with tin in front of that, as if someone could lay stuff there and feed it into the fire. To the side by the far wall was another long bench at waist height made of wood. It had metal clamps at both ends and could be separated in the middle with a screw device to spread the two ends apart. Dark stains covered the wood. From blood? There were other things, an old hook with a wooden handle like the kind used on bales of hay. A heavier hook, chain, and pulley dangling from a rafter, as if sides of beef were hung from it. Considering the oven, and Memphis, Jerry wondered if the room were some unusual place for cooking barbecue. He heard a gasp and turned toward the opening in the brick he’d stepped through. Hector and Feo and Chucho were huddled close, staring into the room. Feo and Chucho slowly backed away.
“No he visto nada,” Chucho said. I haven’t seen anything.
And Feo: “Yo tampoco.” Me neither.
Jerry spotted something on the floor, a matchbook. He picked it up and wiped the dust off. An advertisement read, The Delta Club, and under that, Where the River Sings. He’d heard his mother talk about it. His great-grandfather had worked there as a bouncer before he’d left his family and vanished without a word. Jerry put the matchbook in his pocket and stepped out of the hole in the wall.
“Qué vamos a hacer?” Hector asked. What are we going to do?
Jerry looked at his watch. It was five p.m. on a Friday. Luther had gone home already, leaving him the keys to lock up. Antoine Fargé was out of town and wouldn’t be back for several days.
“Nada,” Jerry said. But he already knew what he was going to do, and it wasn’t nothing.
* * *
Delphi’s irritation at having to stop while Jerry unlocked the door of the mansion verged on menacing. She tried to project an aura of being laid back, which fooled most people, but Jerry knew the real her. Inside she was seething. Always. His hand fumbled with the key, couldn’t get it into the keyhole, dropped it. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” he said. It was midnight Sunday. Delphi had insisted on the time.
“The cards say it’s the only time we�
��ll be protected.” She had a tight expression on her lips. This week she had hennaed her hair. Last week it was green. Accidentalism required such things of its priestess. It took Jerry a long time to learn the religion. Dyeing one’s hair, for instance, was no accident, and yet it was the type of thing essential to Accidentalism. Delphi explained that the whole philosophy of Accidentalism was that it, like everything else in the universe, was the opposite of what it was. Even though Jerry didn’t understand how, if something was the opposite of what it was, it ever could have been the thing it was to begin with, he could not argue with the fact that the religion, being inexplicable, suited his mother well.
When he’d told her about the room and showed her the matchbook, she’d snatched it from his hand.
“Where did you say this house was?” She put the matchbook up close to her face, as if not only to give it a close look but to smell it, even taste it. She often did that, to feel the spiritual presences. She rubbed it against her cheek with a slow, smooth gesture that seemed to Jerry almost sensual, as if she were trying to seduce it. When he told her the mansion was on Peabody Avenue, she said, “Yes.” Then, “Yes, yes, yes.”
“What’s yes?” Jerry had just opened a beer. With no idea what his mother’s response to the room and the matchbook would be, he knew only that it would be entertaining. She was like a sporting event between two closely ranked teams that hated each other.
“The rumors,” she said.
“What rumors?”
“About Boss Crump’s henchman.”
“What about him?” Jerry, like anyone who’d lived in Memphis, knew of the legendary political boss who controlled the city for nearly a half-century, but what he knew were shadows and myths.
“Never you mind. Just take me there. I’ll be able to feel it. If Pawpaw’s there, I’ll know.”
Jerry learned long ago not to press his mother too hard with questions. The answers only became more bizarre. Pawpaw, there?
Fumbling with the lock of the mansion’s front door under the patchoulied scent of his mother, Jerry wished he’d never taken her the matchbook or told her of the room. He was glad they were partly concealed by the neglected shrubbery that nearly hid the house from the street. Breaking into an empty house in the witching hour wasn’t his idea of a brilliant move.
“Wait,” his mother said. She pushed his hand away from the lock. “Give me the key.”
He handed it to her, and she drew out a velvet bag from a pocket in her dress. She waved it over the key. “Okay, now try it.”
The key went right in.
“The forces of evil were blocking us from the truth,” she said.
He wanted to tell her that the only forces in play were her making him nervous as hell, but he knew that arguing with her was fighting the wind. As if to make the point, when the door opened, a warm breeze wafted from within. It smelled of food, a faint smoky aroma sweet yet vinegary. His heart froze. Had the Frenchman returned early from his trip? Was he up cooking at this hour?
But Delphi was barging past him, pointing the beam of the large flashlight she’d brought around the room. It was a house from the 1910s with the heavy cornices varnished dark and a curving staircase going from the entry hall to the second floor. “Where is it?” she said. Then, “No, don’t tell me. I want Pawpaw’s spirit to lead me.” She handed him the flashlight and lifted her palms to the air.
“What’s Pawpaw got to do with this?”
“Neveryoumind,” she said, quickly and in a hush as if not to interrupt whatever was speaking to her.
Then, as if one of her spirits had brought it, a long-ago drunken night in a bar named the Lamplighter came back to Jerry. It was a place where old-timers hung out, and one regular, who was blind and always sat at the far end of the bar, was telling Jerry a wild story about Boss Crump. How men who worked for him made people disappear. “It’s rumored,” he had said, and the old lush paused to loom close to Jerry’s head, fumble against the side of it with his palm, and cup his hand around Jerry’s ear to whisper, “they burned the bodies in a special-built fireplace in one of ’em’s house.” With the word house, a mist of warm spittle met Jerry’s ear. Even as drunk as he was, Jerry remembered. And the old guy pulling back and staring at him with his cataract-clouded eyes, as if he could see right through Jerry.
* * *
Jerry and Delphi walked in darkness through the house to the room. Jerry did not look back at his mother, but a few times he heard her whispering. He knew she was not speaking to him. When they reached the room, which was windowless, he closed the door behind them and turned on the flashlight. “There’s what you wanted to see,” he said, swinging the beam to the opened hole in the plastered brick wall.
“I know,” she said. “I felt him drawing me here.”
“Him?”
“Pawpaw.”
“Oh, right. You want to tell me about that now?”
“We have to go in. Show me.”
He helped her through the hole in the wall with a sense that perhaps he would never come out the same. That he and his mother stepping into that room would be stepping into other selves. As for his mother, maybe it would be an improvement. But for himself? He didn’t want to be another Jerry. Or did he?
He was pondering the question when she said, “It’s just like in my dream. Give me that.” She snatched the flashlight from his hand and swung it toward the tin-covered table in front of the chimney. Then she climbed on the table, lay on her back, and folded her arms across her chest. “Slide me in,” she said in an urgent voice.
“Come on now. You can’t be serious.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he knew how ridiculous they were in relation to his mother. Everything she did was absurd. Yet she was serious about every last velvet-bagged crystal of it.
Her head was pointed toward the opening, and he didn’t quite know how to manage it, but he decided to grab her by the ankles and push. She stiffened, and he shoved her in. With the tin surface on the table it was surprisingly easy.
When she was in there, her hand stretched out with the flashlight. “Here,” she said, “I want it to be dark so I can imagine the flames.”
He was about to ask her how the dark could help her to imagine flames when he heard a creak that chilled his heart. It seemed to come from the whole house, as if it had found its voice after long years of disuse. In his mind, the sound reverberated into the high squeal of an animal stabbed in the throat. Cold air rushed past his mother from the chimney and into the room. His hand went limp, and he dropped the flashlight. For a moment they were in utter darkness.
The light in the main room came on, and a voice said, “Who eez that in there?”
“Oh shit,” Jerry said under his breath. Before he could answer, Antoine Fargé was climbing through the hole.
“Ju,” he said. “Vat are ju doing here? And who is theez?” Fargé pointed to the moccasined feet protruding from the oven.
“That’s my mother,” Jerry said.
“Ju are working at meednight and jur mothair eez helping?”
“She wanted to see what we’d found.”
“Jes,” he said. He looked around as if he’d only then noticed the hidden room they were in. “It eez just as I thought.” He walked over to the chain hanging from the ceiling and slapped it so it clanged against the pulley. “A raigulair chaimbair of horrors.”
Jerry, who wasn’t aware that there was any regularity to chambers of horrors, suddenly felt even more skeptical. The combination of his mother and some fake Frenchman was too much, as if the dam holding back long years of absurdity had burst.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Who air any of us?” Fargé replied. He pointed again to the feet protruding from the chimney. “Ju said she vas jur mothair, but who eez that? And who air you?”
“He’s in here!” Jerry’s mother exclaimed, as if she hadn’t heard anything of Fargé’s arrival.
“What eez she talking about?”
“Pawpaw,” J
erry answered.
“Ze tree?”
“I wish.”
“You can pull me out now!” his mother shouted. Jerry grabbed her ankles and pulled her from the oven onto the tin-covered table. She sat up and involved herself in dusting herself off. Antoine Fargé watched as if witnessing a ghost.
When she looked up and saw him, she didn’t seem surprised at all. “Ah, you,” she said. “I was expecting you.”
“What?” Jerry said. “You know him?”
“Not yet,” she said. “He was foretold. In the matchbook you gave me.”
Fargé, even in the dim light, turned pale enough to add light to the room. Jerry wondered if he needed help to sit down somewhere.
“My mother reads the future,” Jerry said. Then, as if to explain, “It’s a hobby.”
“It’s a gift,” his mother said brusquely.
“I must have ju,” Fargé said.
“What?” Jerry said. The Frenchman was staring at Delphi with a wild expression on his face.
“Right here, right now. In deez place.” He fell toward her and clutched her around the waist. It was as if he were trying to keep himself from falling, but with a mad, romantic insistence that required he save himself from plunging to the floor by groping Delphi.
Jerry pulled the Frenchman loose from his mother and punched him in the face.
“Jerry!” she screamed. “Don’t. He’s our only hope.”
Jerry shoved Fargé away from his mother, and the Frenchman’s back hit the wall where some old electric lines ran down to an antique breaker switch. When Fargé hit it, the breaker closed, causing his body to jerk with electricity and fall to the floor. Immediately, a hissing came from the fireplace. A loud whoosh, and flames shot from the oven. Perhaps from old grease on the bricks, the whole structure bristled into flames that reached the ceiling and turned the room searing hot. Fargé was on the floor, passed out or dead, Jerry didn’t know. Delphi was screaming. Jerry yelled at her to get out of the room, and he rushed to Fargé to see if he could rouse him or somehow pull him across the floor. The wood in the far wall was smoking. Any second, it too would burst into flames.
Memphis Noir Page 18
