by J. A. Kerley
“Do you remember where Jim was during those times?”
“I don’t remember with the grass fire. I was calling for him when the house burnt, scared by all the smoke. He showed up mumbling that he’d been playing by the creek, the other direction. Oh Lord, I just remembered something else. Something I forgot completely about …”
“What?”
“He smelled like smoke. I thought it was from the air, the smoke in the air. There was a lot of smoke from the house fire. But it smelled so thick on him.”
Two and three, Nautilus thought.
He thanked Marlene Cullers and left. Next, he had a phone call to make, area code 325, somewhere around Abilene, Texas. It could be a very interesting call and he pulled off by the Tombigbee River to let his eyes wander over water as he read his notes again. He slipped a photo from his pocket, the picture made from a courthouse microfiche of old copies of the local newspaper. He set the photo on his lap, took another look at the sweeping river, then dialed the number.
THIRTY-FIVE
“You were married to Jim Day, Miz Pelgin? I’ve got the right person, I hope?”
“I was. But it was just a few months. Under a year.”
“May I ask what cut the marriage short?”
“Where is he?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I cain’t tell you anything. I’m hanging up.”
Nautilus felt a flash of irritation, jumped from friendly voice to hard-ass cop. “I’ll be in Abilene by morning, Miz Pelgin. On your doorstep. You go to work, I’ll be there. You run off and come back, I’m there. The best thing you can do is talk to me.”
“H-He’ll never hear what I say?” she stammered. “J-James.”
Nautilus let warmth back into his voice. “Absolutely not, Miz Pelgin. There’s no reason for it. I just need some background on his character. How’d you guys meet?”
Come on, honey …Nautilus thought, holding his breath. One answer that I can turn into two and then …
A long pause of decision. Pelgin said, “W-We met at a bowling alley. I was havin’ trouble and he came over and showed me how to hold the ball and all that. He seemed super nice and I couldn’t believe when he asked me out. We went together for two months and got married.”
“You must have stolen his heart, Miz Pelgin.”
Nautilus looked at the photo in his lap. It was the couple’s wedding announcement photo archived in the weekly newspaper. Brenda Day, née Kugler, looked to be about two hundred pounds, her chin becoming her neck becoming her chest. Jim Day was beside her. He was good looking, boyish, like the actor Jon Voight at the same age. The new wife wore a billowing white dress, Day was in some kind of uniform. His eyes looked a thousand miles away.
“To tell the truth …I used to be kinda heavy and he was my first real boyfriend ever. I was seventeen, he was twenty-six, had a job as night security guard at the chicken-processing plant and talked about becoming a for-real cop. He seemed sweet and kinda lost and tongue-tied at times. He’d show off a lot, like how many push-ups he could do, how long he could hold his hand over a hot burner before yanking it back. He liked to tickle me until I had to push him off. We got married by a JP and on our honeymoon we, we –”
She stopped as if her voice had rammed a wall.
“Hello? Are you still there, Miz Pelgin?”
“I cain’t tell it.”
“Miss Pelgin, I’m part of a special unit that deals with highly disturbed individuals. I’ve heard everything. Please don’t think you’re embarrassing me.”
Nautilus had discovered people were more likely to speak if he took the weight of embarrassment instead of them.
“W-We stayed in a motel in Branson for our honeymoon. On our wedding night he brought in this …a package. When he opened it up it was some kind of …thing, I don’t know what you call it. It had straps. He wanted me to, to …”
“That’s OK, Miss Pelgin. I’m reading you.”
“He peed when he was trying to …do it. It was crazy.”
“Did he ever get physically abusive?”
“Only after we was married. He started yelling at me and jabbing me when I didn’t iron his shirts just so, fix his food this way or that. I told him he didn’t want a wife, he wanted a dog.”
“You asked for the divorce?”
“Two months and I was flat-out done with that shit. When I told him he went full loony. He said he’d hurt me so bad my mouth would scream a week after my body was dead.”
Nautilus let his eyes drift to a towboat pushing a line of barges up the Tombigbee, the engines a steady rumble through his open window. The length of time a towboat wake continued to roil amazed Nautilus. The boat might be around a bend, but the river still shivered from its passage.
Pelgin said, “I didn’t know what to do, I was so scared. I finally told my daddy. He come by one day and knocked on the door, said, ‘Jim, Jimbo …how’s about we go grab us a beer, son?’”
“Your father got along with Jim?”
“Jim always went all gooey around Daddy, like a little boy. He made sure we kept Daddy’s favorite beer in the refrigerator, his favorite snacks around. But when Jim opened the door, Daddy smashed his face with the butt of a shotgun and knocked him to the floor. Daddy pointed the gun at Jim’s head and said I was leaving and never coming back, and if Jim wanted to argue the point, that was the time to do it.”
“What’d Jim do?”
“He started singing like an Indian. Blood’s pouring from his mouth and he’s peed in his pants, but he’s laying on the floor going Hi-yi-yi-yah, hi-yi-yi-yah and pumping his arm like he’s chopping with a tomahawk. A month later I was living a thousand miles away and never saw him again.”
“Why are you still so frightened, Miss Pelgin?”
“He’s such a freak that time don’t mean nothing. One day he’ll see me in his head and remember some unfinished business. It’s been over twenty years and I still look around for him before I step outside. You think I’m wrong to think like that?”
“No, ma’am,” Harry Nautilus said. “I’m beginning to think that’s a wise decision.”
“Rio Grande?” I asked Harry to his face, a wonderful sight to behold at 10.43 in the evening.
“A John Wayne movie, bro. John Wayne was a –”
I leaned forward. “Jeez, Harry, I know who John Wayne was. A cowboy actor.”
“Sit back, Carson. It’s like you’re bumping off my head.”
“Oh, sorry.”
I sat back in my chair. Computer cameras were new to me. When I’d told Harry the hotel had a business center with computer kiosks, he’d asked if the machines had cameras, like his new model. The desk sent a guy to press a couple buttons while Harry did the same. Presto, face-to-face conversation. It felt damn good to see his big square mug and bulldozer-blade mustache, even if he was jumping like a movie with half the frames missing. Harry looked amusingly eerie with a sepia tint and softened edges.
He said, “Wayne was more than a cowboy actor, but he was in a lot of Westerns. An icon, but more to folks a bit older than me. I guess the most common description of Wayne was a ‘Man’s Man’. He played macho roles before the term macho was popular.”
“What’s the tie?”
“I stopped by a video store, found a John Wayne compilation and watched Rio Grande last night.” Harry held a DVD box to the camera, a guy in a ten-gallon hat on the cover, bandana around his neck, smoking gun in hand. “The content shook me, Carson. A hard-bitten cavalry commander of a fort in Indian territory gets a new young recruit who is the son he hasn’t seen in a dozen years.”
“Let me guess, Harry. Sonny boy has to prove himself to Daddy.”
Harry nodded. “Kind of the theme of Muhammad–Malvo, right? A subject very interesting to Doc Prowse.”
I stared at Harry in his home office, a poster for the Newport Jazz Festival on the wall in the background. He had taken my request for Jim Day’s telephone number and transformed it into a b
ox in which long-separate pieces of the deadly puzzle were falling together.
Harry waggled a notepad at the camera. “I made some notes last night. You’re leaning in again.”
“Sorry.”
“Day was a hideously abused child, probably rented out by his mother and grandmother, every day a fresh nightmare. Mama goes to prison when Day’s thirteen and he starts the foster-home shuffle. By age fifteen, he’s playing with fire and animal cruelty. Plus he’s still wetting the bed.”
“The big three,” I said. Pyromania, animal cruelty and chronic bedwetting were three markers psychologists looked for in diagnosing sociopaths and psychopaths. One was not unusual, two were cause for concern, all three were a shrieking alarm.
“At the same time,” Harry continued, “Day’s watching emotion-heavy movies with John Wayne-types taking weak boys under their wing and – through carefully crafted doses of sternness and respect – making the boys into men. It becomes Day’s pattern for maleness.”
“A cartoon version, without emotional complexity.”
Harry shot a jittery thumbs-up that filled my screen. “Day gets married but is incapable of relating to a woman in an intimate sense, like he has gender autism. Sex is a confusing and humiliating muddle and, in the end, Daddy rushes in and punishes him for being such a fuck-up.”
“He really did that Indian thing: woo-woo-woo?” I chopped my hand at the camera.
“Vanquishing Indians was a recurring theme in old Westerns. My take is that Day was signaling surrender. It would have been a pivotal moment in his psychic development. Know what I think Jimmy Day decided was the best thing to do?”
I thought for a few beats, adding it up.
“Become the daddy.”
“As an abused boy lacking any father figure, he knew exactly what such kids were seeking. Day was screwed up bad, but learning to hide it better. He trades in the security guard uniform – he wore it to his wedding, how’s that for sad? – for a cop uniform. He’s suddenly become an authority figure, a man.”
I felt the conclusion coming. It blew a cold wind across my spine.
Harry said, “Your father is killed. Day is consumed by the sense of revenge, of a transforming moment. A year passes and, unbeknownst to anyone, he figures the case out. And finds a troubled young man he can befriend, nurture, and guide.”
“Day became Muhammad to Jeremy’s Malvo,” I whispered.
Harry nodded sadly. “Exactly, Carson. Your brother is Jim Day’s son. Or was.”
The man opened the cabinet and set a bottle on the table. Once a day he had to see – needed to see – his special bottle and its contents. So beautiful, so powerful. They were like tattered red flags that signaled conquest. He shook the bottle and watched the flags swirl and dance in the formalin, the preservative. History was racing toward him. He was racing toward history. These were his battle pennants.
“Charge,” he whispered.
His work table was white. Everything in the echoing room was white. It had taken almost a year to apply seventeen coats of white sealer. The room had once been an office and women had worked here. Their smells had been trapped in the walls like stains. It took fourteen coats of paint to bury the smell of the women.
The other three coats were to make sure.
There was a tray on the table. It held a small bottle of model-maker’s enamel, a brush, and a red doll small enough to clutch in his fist. He picked up the doll and smiled at the cartoon face, the bright lips.
At the corner of his eye …Movement! His face snapped to a shiver on one of the quartet of television monitors mounted on the wall; every side of the building was covered. He reached to the control, zoomed in on the motion.
It was just a stray dog sniffing at the trash behind the building. He released his held breath and turned back to the task at hand. Only one more time to do this. History was almost here.
He picked up the small red doll, grinned, and began to paint.
THIRTY-SIX
My mind had reached its limit, and without sleep I’d be unable to function, so I fell away for several hours. It was lousy sleep, my dreams a moonscape populated with towering cowboys, broken Indians, dead women dragging themselves across the ground and leaving bloody trails from the ragged holes in their bellies. I could hear Alice’s voice, but when I turned my head, she was gone. Jeremy’s head popped from craters, laughing at me. When I’d run to his crater he’d pop from another one and I’d run in that direction.
From somewhere behind the sky, Vangie’s somber voice would say, “Sorry, Carson.”
I awakened for good at four and went to my butcher paper. I began a new section, the formerly perplexing stacks of words and questions making sense when I added the name Day. It was the bottom line to almost everything.
I was still puzzled by the message Jeremy had conveyed through the blind man, Parks. No matter how I tried to interpret it, the George Bernard Shaw quote seemed no more than a cutesy reflection on the country as an asylum. It seemed frivolous for Jeremy, who never did anything without a subtext.
I studied my ramble of words, irritated. I leaned close to see other words scribbled in that particular storyline. Parks, referring to my brother, had said, “He called you something nice, said you was ‘ever the hero on water or land.’ Seems a nice thing to say, right?”
I stepped back and frowned. Ever the hero? Hadn’t Jeremy used the same phrase during his bedside visit?
Five minutes later I sat in the business center of the hotel, banging a computer keyboard, entering phrases into a search engine. Ever, hero, water, land. The engine returned tens of thousands of hits. I studied page after page, looking for anything to spark inspiration.
Thirty-seven screens in and about to bag the exercise, I noticed the name Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass had been one of my brother’s favorite works, a gift from his junior-year teacher at high school. Jeremy had loved Whitman, another searching spirit.
I added “Whitman” to my list of search terms and again scanned the results. On the second page of hits was a listing highlighting the terms “heroes of water and land”. I followed the link to a poem, Song For All Seas, All Ships, twenty lines in length.
Several phrases stood out as if written in neon:
To-day a rude brief recitative
Of ships sailing the Seas, each with its special flag or ship-signal …
Ever the heroes on water or on land, by ones or twos appearing,
…reserve especially for yourself …one flag above all the rest …
Flaunt out, visible as ever, the various ship-signals! …
Flags. Signals. Heroes by ones or twos.
“You bastard,” I whispered. “You tricky bastard.”
I knew what Jeremy had given me: the key for making contact. But I had to figure it out on my own, another of his damned games.
As children, my brother and I built forts in the woods behind our house, haphazard derelicts constructed from junkyard leavings. We often imagined them as ships and ourselves as heroic sailors, signaling between our forts with flags of torn sheets my mother had discarded, yelling “ahoy!” and “avast!” and whatever else heroic sailors yelled while coursing the Spanish Main.
I hung a sheet in my window, thinking I’d wait hours, maybe days. I waited for twelve minutes. The phone rang.
“Took you long enough,” Jeremy said. “Had a lobotomy recently?”
“You’re hiding across the damned street?”
“Guess again, matey.”
I went to the window and looked down into the crowd. Catty-corner was a pair of purse and luggage vendors, ink-black Somalians who hawked their wares in a succulent, musical language. They arrived at dawn and stayed past dark.
“One of the purse guys is doing recon on my window.”
“I pay M’tiwmbe two hundred a week to check every now and then.”
“How’s Folger? Is she –”
“She’s breathing and eating and, if I interpreted the sound correctly, s
he’s urinating as well. All that commotion just to take a piss. It sounded like someone aiming a hose at a wall.”
“How soon can we meet? We’ve got to meet. No tricks.”
“About time you did something worthwhile. I’ll send a cab. The driver has some odd notions. Play along with them.”
I stood on the corner and watched as a yellow cab roared to the curb, the driver grinning and waving furiously.
“Get in. GET IN! We are going to be important major stars together.”
The driver’s eyes blazed in two directions with cockeyed bliss. His hair looked like a field of elephant grass plowed by tornadoes. He wore a silver lamé tux jacket over a black tee emblazoned with a Warhol Marilyn. He seemed to have consumed several hundred cups of coffee.
“Stars?” I said.
“I AM GOING TO BUILD A HOUSE IN MALIBU!”
After a disorienting two blocks I discerned that a powerful and elusive Hollywood casting director had convinced my loosely wrapped driver that he was bound for stardom as long as he stayed in the director’s good graces. It appeared the director had cast me in the same movie.
I figured I knew who the director was.
When I exited at an address in Murray Hill, my driver wiggled his thumb and pinky at his mouth, screamed, “CALL WHEN YOU GET SETTLED,” and vanished like he had a date at the edge of a galaxy far, far away.
I found myself on a sedate street of brownstones. I stepped to the door of a slender building of gray sandstone and rang the bell. Jeremy opened the door wearing a red jacket and blousy blue shirt. He was thick in the middle – a pillow or something. His hair was a layer of blond snips, his eyes brown with false contacts. He’d done something to emphasize the creases in his face. He had spent time at a tanning salon, or perhaps it was a chemical concoction.
“You look ridiculous,” I said.
“I feel safe. Guess which is most important?”
