After hanging up, he decided to get some coffee before hitting the highway, but as he stepped around the corner from the pay phone into the dining area of the roadside McDonald’s, through the window he saw a green Buick pull up behind the Caddy, blocking it in. Two men climbed out of the Buick. Beefy, florid men, one—the taller—balding, with a fringe of dark hair curling low on his neck, and the other with straight red hair falling over his collar. Irish-looking men. Cops, was Penner’s first thought, they must have traced the call. But then he realized that their hair was too long, their suits too expensive. They peered in the windows of the Caddy, at the hood, exchanged a few words, then the red-haired man slid back into the Buick and drove it into a parking space. The other made for the front door.
A weight shifted loosely in Penner’s bowels, Christ, he should have figured! McDonough could not allow a loose cannon like Carnes to jeopardize his position. Carnes had likely been instructed to drive somewhere after the job, to follow some specific course; these men had been set to meet him, and—no doubt—to dispatch him and reclaim the money. The advance payment made perfect sense now.
Wrong again, Carnes.
We’re talking a tripleheader here.
Beautiful, thought Penner. This was McDonough functioning at the peak of his political acumen. Minimal involvement of his people. Minimal risk to himself. A neat system of checks and balances. Snick, snick, snick. Three problems solved, all’s right with the world, and the great man could look forward to a lubricious future with the former Mrs Penner. After an appropriate period of mourning, of course. What a player he was! What a master of the fucking game!
Penner retreated around the corner. The primary colours of the walls were making his skin hot, and the merry babble of the diners generated a fuming commotion inside his head. Hostages, he thought. Grab somebody off line, drag them into the parking lot. The idea had an outlaw charm that appealed to the absurdist witness who seemed to be sharing the experience with him. Mad Dog Penner. But instead, he ducked into the bathroom. The windows were high and narrow. A skinny dwarf might have managed an escape. He flattened against the wall behind the door, holding Carnes’ gun muzzle-up beside his cheek. The white tiles were vibrating. The stainless-steel fixtures glowed like treasure. Every living gleam was a splinter in his eye. His thoughts were singing. Oh, Jesus Jesus Jesus please! What if some cute little tyke comes in to take his first solo piss, and you splatter the wee fuck’s brains all over the hand drier? Cod, let me live, I’ll say a billion Hail Marys, I swear it, right here in this holy nowhere of a bathroom I’m opening myself up to You, this is one of Your chosen speaking, an Irishman, a former acolyte, as sorry a lamb as ever strayed, and I’m begging, no, I’m fucking demanding a religious experience!
The big, balding man pushed into the bathroom, his entrance accompanied by a venting of happy chatter from the restaurant, and said, ‘Shit’ under his breath. He bent with hands on knees to peak beneath the doors of the stalls, exposing the back of his head. Joy surged in Penner’s heart on seeing that tonsured bull’s-eye, and as the man straightened, he stepped forward and smashed the gun butt against his scalp. The blow made a plush, heavy sound that alarmed him. But he struck again as the man toppled, rills of blood webbing the patch of mottled skin, and then dropped to his knees beside the man and struck a third time. He remained kneeling there with gun held high, like a child who has hit a spider with a shoe and is watching to see if its legs wiggle. More blood was pooling inside the man’s ear. Penner’s mind went skittering, unable to seize upon a thought. The white tiles seemed to be exuding a thick silence.
The red-haired man, he said to himself at last; he would exercise extreme caution when his friend failed to reappear. Nothing to be gained by waiting for him. He, Penner, would have to balls it out. Take a stroll off into Ronald McDonaldland and see what we can see. Tra la. He laughed, and the hollowness of the sound sobered him a touch, heightened his alertness. He caught the handle of a stall door and pulled himself up.
‘Stay right there,’ he told the balding man, and gave him a wink. ‘One false move, and I’ll hafta plug ya.’
He squared his shoulders, took a deep breath. Maybe they were still looking for Carnes, maybe the red-haired man wouldn’t recognize him. Who could say on a day like today? He stuffed the gun into the pocket of his windbreaker. He felt giddy, but the giddiness acted as a restorative, a nervy drug that encouraged him.
‘Yoicks,’ he said. ‘Tally ho!’
It was a fabulous day in Ronald McDonaldland. The sun had come out, the restaurant was thronged with golden light and pleasant smells, young secretaries and construction workers were stuffing Egg McMuffins into their mouths, and the red-haired man was just turning from the line of waiting customers when Penner stepped up and let him feel the gun in his side.
‘Why don’t we take a walk outside?’ Penner said. ‘I mean that’s what I’d like to do. But I don’t really care what happens, so you choose, okay?’
The man scarcely hesitated before obeying. The act of a professional, thought Penner, submitting by course to the rule of might. Beautiful.
They pushed through the glass doors out into the sun. The freshness and brightness of the air infected Penner, making him incredibly light and easy on his feet. Life was everywhere in him, plumping out all his hollows. The poor dead, he said to himself, not to have this, not to know. He felt like weeping, like singing.
‘What’s the story here?’ he asked, screwing the muzzle of Carnes’ gun deeper into the man’s side. ‘How’d you find me?’
‘You kiddin’?’ said the man. ‘You drivin’ a Cadillac with vanity plates and a pair of red socks painted on the hood, you think you’re hard to find?’
His disdainful attitude unnerved Penner.
‘Where’s Carnes?’ the man asked.
‘Ah, well, now,’ Penner said blithely. ‘That’s one for the philosophers, that is.’
He forced the man to deposit his gun in the dumpster at the side of the building. The man’s doughy face registered an almost comical degree of worry, and Penner considered telling him everything was going to work out, but realized that the man would not believe him. Instead, he asked for the keys to the Buick.
‘Beautiful,’ he said, accepting the keys, and pushed the man forward, moving through the asphalt dimension of the parking lot, the humming of traffic, like the dark general noise of life itself.
He had the man sit on the floor of the front seat with his back to the engine, his head wedged under the dash, legs stuck between the seat and the side panel. A tight fit, but the man managed it. It pleased Penner to have devised this clever prison.
‘Comfy?’ he asked.
The man gave no reply.
Driving also pleased Penner. In the golden light the cars shone with the lustre of gemstones under water, and he cut in and out of traffic with the flash of a Petty, a Yarborough. Lapping the field in the Penner 500.
What to do, what to do, he thought.
South on I-93 to New York, Washington, Miami and points beyond?
Brazil?
Just the place, so they said, for a man with a gun on the run.
He let the rhyme sing inside his head for a minute or so, liking the erratic spin it lent to all his thoughts. He switched on the radio. He heard the amplified crack of a bat and brash music. Then a man’s voice blatted from the speaker, saying that his guest was Mike Greenwell of the Boston Red Sox. Penner had to laugh.
‘What the fuck’s goin’ on?’ asked the red-haired man; he crooked his head to the side so he could get a look at Penner.
‘You gotta name?’ Penner asked.
‘Yeah…Tom,’ said the man with bad grace.
‘You a Sox fan, Tom?’
The man said, ‘What?’
‘I said you a Sox fan? It’s not a trick question.’
Silence.
‘Know what I think about the Sox, Tom? They’re God’s baseball joke. A metaphor for man’s futility. The Sisyphus of the American
League East.’
The man’s face showed no sign of comprehension. His eyes were flat and regarding. A serpent, Penner thought. There is a serpent in my garden.
‘Where’s McDonough?’ Penner asked him.
More silence.
‘Now you don’t have to answer.’ Penner jabbed the muzzle of the gun into the man’s belly. ‘But I just bet he’s waiting for a call from you.’
‘Home,’ said the man. ‘He’s at home.’
‘Anyone with him? A woman, maybe?’
‘How the fuck should I know?’
‘Right,’ said Penner, pulling back the gun. ‘How, indeed?’
But Penner knew his Barbara. She would be with McDonough. She was part of this. And she would be able to live with it, to make that kind of moral trade-off. He experienced a hiccup of emotion and pictured pale limbs asprawl, a gory tunnel burrowed into a shock of white hair. Could he really waste them? he wondered. How would it feel? Amazingly enough, it had felt pretty damn good so far. Since blood from the ears was not considered a healthy sign, he figured his score for the day was two. Four would not be a problem.
But, after all, it would be nice to survive this. As Barbara herself was wont to say, the best revenge was living well.
He had not, he realized, been considering the prospect of survival until this moment. Not really. Not with the calculation you needed to weigh the possibilities, nor with the calmness necessary to believe in them.
On the radio Mike Greenwell was saying there was no reason to panic, they just had to take ’em one at a time.
Sound philosophy, Mike. Words to live by.
A pick-up truck roared past, somebody screamed a curse at Penner. He noticed that he had let the speed of the car drop to thirty.
Brazil.
Take the money and run. What could be the problem with that?
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Ol’ Tom shifting about ever so slightly, preparing to try and kick the gun. Penner couldn’t much blame him for trying—unless he were a cockeyed optimist, he could not like his chances very much. He had proved a surly bastard, had Tom, and Penner elected not to extend him a warning.
The problem, he decided, making an effort to concentrate, the problem was in himself. In the Penner he always ended up being, no matter how promising the circumstance. Sad, sorrowful Penner. Christ the Penner inevitably borne toward some unimportant Passion.
But that, he thought, was the old Penner, the bumbling, good-hearted villain, the con man with a conscience.
Who was he now? he wondered. Was this Penner any better off?
Hot, he thought. Excessive heating of the face and palms seemed the primary characteristic of this particular Penner. A few aches and pains, a desire for an end to all this. Otherwise, very little to report. Pared down to almost nothing.
‘You can’t do better than your best,’ Mike Greenwell was saying. ‘You give a hundred and fifty per cent, you got no reason to hang your head.’
Amen to that, Mike.
The red-haired man had worked a leg up onto the seat, and Penner thought a confrontation might be just the way to decide such a momentous issue as one’s future or the lack thereof. Let him make his play. If Penner won, he would do…something. He’d figure out exactly what later.
Despite the indecisiveness of this resolution, Penner felt there was a fine weight to it, an Irish logic that defied interpretation. To make things interesting, he boosted their speed to 50. Then to 60. He kept pressing his foot harder on the gas, watching the needle climb, feeling that the speed was the result of him being pulled toward something. There was a curve coming up about a mile ahead, and he wondered how it would be just to keep going straight when he reached it. To go arcing up into stormlight over the water, into the golden glare and big-muscled clouds. And then down.
Do I hear any objections? he asked himself.
Fucking A, I object, he answered. Fuck all that remorseful Catholic bullshit! This is your goddamn life, Penner. This is the Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Challenge! Are you man enough to accept it?
‘You play a hunnerd and sixty-two games,’ Mike Greenwell said, ‘you gotta expect a few bad days. But we’ll be there in the end.’
Dead on, Mike me boyo!
Penner could tell that the red-haired man was waiting for him to look away, to do something that would give him an advantage; but that was no longer a problem. The game was in hand, and all the signs were auspicious. Light was flowing around the car, fountaining up behind in an incandescent wake, and the green world was blurring with their momentum, and the corners of Penner’s mind were sharp and bright as never before. Life hot as a magnesium flare, as Brazil, as freedom and the future, all the love in him sizzling high. He boosted their speed to 65 as they approached the curve, enjoying the feeling of being on the edge.
‘Hey!’ said the red-haired man; he had curled his fingers about the door handle, his eyes were round with fright. ‘Hey, you’re going too fast!’
The old Penner might have lied, made a gentle promise, offered hope or perhaps spoken persuasively of the afterlife. But this was not the old Penner.
Far from it.
‘Not me,’ said the Wild Blue-Eyed Penner, lifting his gun. As the Caddy swung into the sweet gravity of the curve, he trained the gun at his enemy’s heart, seeing only an interruption of the light, a dark keyhole set in a golden door. The thunderous report and the kick made it seem that the man’s life had travelled up his arm, charging him with a fierce new spirit. He took in the sight without flinching. Blood as red as paper roses. The body with its slack, twisted limbs looked larger than before, more solid, as if death were in essence a kind of important stillness. He stared at it until he was completely at ease. A smile sliced his face, the sort of intent expression that comes from peering into strong sunlight or hard weather. He thought about the disposal problem, a passport, opportunities for tropical investment. He spun the tuning dial, found an easy listening station. Paul Simon was going to Graceland, and he was going with him.
‘Not me,’ said Penner the Implacable, the Conscienceless, the Almost Nothing Man. ‘I’m just hitting my stride.’
THE SUN SPIDER
…In Africa’s Namib Desert, one of the most hostile environments on the face of the earth, lives a creature known as the sun spider. Its body is furred pale gold, the exact colour of the sand beneath which it burrows in search of its prey, disturbing scarcely a grain in its passage. It emerges from hiding only to snatch its prey, and were you to look directly at it from an inch away, you might never notice its presence. Nature is an efficient process, tending to repeat elegant solutions to the problem of survival in such terrible places. Thus, if—as I posit—particulate life exists upon the Sun, I would not be startled to learn it has adopted a similar form.
Reynolds Dulambre, Alchemical Diaries
1
Carolyn
My husband Reynolds and I arrived on Helios Station following four years in the Namib, where he had delivered himself of the Diaries, including the controversial Solar Equations, and where I had become adept in the uses of boredom. We were met at the docking arm by the administrator of the Physics Section, Dr Davis Brent, who escorted us to a reception given in Reynolds’ honour, held in one of the pleasure domes that blistered the skin of the station. Even had I been unaware that Brent was one of Reynolds’ chief detractors, I would have known the two of them for adversaries: in manner and physicality, they were total opposites, like cobra and mongoose. Brent was pudgy, of medium stature, with a receding hairline, and dressed in a drab standard-issue jumpsuit. Reynolds—at thirty-seven, only two years younger—might have been ten years his junior. He was tall and lean, with chestnut hair that fell to the shoulders of his cape, and possessed of that craggy nobility of feature one associates with a Shakespearian lead. Both were on their best behaviour, but they could barely manage civility, and so it was quite a relief when we reached the dome and were swept away into a crowd of admiring techs and scientists.
/>
Helios Station orbited the south pole of the Sun, and through the ports I had a view of a docking arm to which several of the boxy ships that journeyed into the coronosphere were moored. Leaving Reynolds to be lionized, I lounged beside one of the ports and gazed toward Earth, pretending I was celebrating Nation Day in Abidjan rather than enduring this gathering of particle-pushers and inductive reasoners, most of whom were gawking at Reynolds, perhaps hoping he would live up to his reputation and perform a drugged collapse or start a fight. I watched him and Brent talking. Brent’s body language was toadying, subservient, like that of a dog trying to curry favour; he would clasp his hands and tip his head to the side when making some point, as if begging his master not to strike him. Reynolds stood motionless, arms folded across his chest.
At one point Brent said, ‘I can’t see what purpose you hope to achieve in beaming protons into coronal holes,’ and Reynolds, in his most supercilious tone, responded by saying that he was merely poking about in the weeds with a long stick.
I was unable to hear the next exchange, but then I did hear Brent say, ‘That may be, but I don’t think you understand the openness of our community. The barriers you’ve erected around your research go against the spirit, the…’
‘All my goddamned life,’ Reynolds cut in, broadcasting in a stagey baritone, ‘I’ve been harassed by little men. Men who’ve carved out some cosy academic niche by footnoting my work and then decrying it. Mousy little bastards like you. And that’s why I maintain my privacy…to keep the mice from nesting in my papers.’
He strode off toward the refreshment table, leaving Brent smiling at everyone, trying to show that he had not been affected by the insult. A slim brunette attached herself to Reynolds, engaging him in conversation. He illustrated his points with florid gestures, leaning over her, looking as if he were about to enfold her in his cape, and not long afterward they made a discreet exit.
Compared to Reynolds’ usual public behaviour, this was a fairly restrained display, but sufficient to make the gathering forget my presence. I sipped a drink, listening to the chatter, feeling no sense of betrayal. I was used to Reynolds’ infidelities, and, indeed, I had come to thrive on them. I was grateful he had found his brunette. Though our marriage was not devoid of the sensual, most of our encounters were ritual in nature, and after four years of isolation in the desert, I needed the emotional sustenance of a lover. Helios would, I believed, provide an ample supply.
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 24
