Mortimer’s eyes were blazing. “I’ll be damned!” He flung the empty shotgun onto the ground. “I’ll show these boys how I can take you apart with my fists!”
Fletch backed up. “Never mind. I suspect they know you can.”
Mortimer’s fists were raised. Wiry, at seventy four, he was ready to rain every combination of punches all over Fletch.
“Relax,” Fletch said. “I made you a hero.”
“A hero!” Mortimer exploded. “To who?”
“To the world!”
“The only people I cared about in the world I put in prison, thanks to you!”
“They were bad guys, and you know it.”
“They were my friends!”
Fletch turned his back on Mortimer’s fighting stance. Through his nose he inhaled deeply. “Fresh air. Don’t you just love it?”
“Fresh air!” Mortimer yelled. “What’s it good for? It smells like nothing! You know how long it’s been since I’ve smelled a bakery?”
Turning full circle, Fletch noticed Ricky had disappeared.
Haja still stood curious under the tree.
“I’ll send you a loaf of Brooklyn pumpernickel,” Fletch said. “You can stick it up your nose.”
Lithe as a panther, Mortimer came swinging at Fletch. “I’ll rip your nose off you!”
Not raising his hands, Fletch ducked and backed up. “Cut that out!”
Pursuing him with perfect footwork, Mortimer said, “I’ll cut your fuckin’ heart out! Your eyes—”
Backing up, Fletch’s heel tripped on Mortimer’s shotgun.
Fletch fell to the ground.
Resting on his elbows, Fletch said, “You can’t hit me down here.”
“Mister Mortimer?” Ricky’s low voice demanded immediate attention.
He was standing in front of the van.
“Mister Mortimer,” Ricky said. “Come here, please.” His voice was as pervasive as mist. “There is something you must see.”
Fists still at the ready, Mortimer studied the boy. “Can’t you see I’m busy? I’m going to make chopped liver out of this …”
“Wuss,” Haja said.
Mortimer looked down at Fletch on the ground. “He’s a ‘was’ all right. He’s a never was! Get up, you bug, you bugger, you journalist!”
“If I do, you’ll hit me,” Fletch said. “So what’s the point? I’ll only find myself down here again.”
Ricky: “Please, Mister Mortimer.”
“All right.” Mortimer aimed a not very serious kick at Fletch’s boot. “What is it?”
He spat on the ground and stamped around the front of the van.
Fletch quickly got up and followed them.
Ricky had opened the sliding door on the other side of the van.
“What is it?” Mortimer asked impatiently.
Using his well-sculpted head as would a stag, his eyes as would a man who had looked from the top of mountains, Ricky indicated Mortimer ought look inside the van.
Mortimer looked. Then peered. Then squinted. “What is it?”
Crystal let out a little sob.
Mortimer stepped up into the van.
He looked a moment at Crystal on the bed.
He gasped.
“Oh, my dear lady!” He picked up her hand. “What has happened to you?”
“Oh, Mister Mortimer!” Crystal wept. “I don’t know!”
•
“I’m glad you brought her here,” Mortimer said. “Now get out.”
He had come from behind Fletch, through the broken spring door of the old farmhouse.
Fletch, feeling shunted aside by all the activity, had been standing on the porch looking out over the plain. A Mrs. Robbins he had found in the kitchen had provided him with a cup of coffee.
He had driven through some gorgeous parts of Wyoming to get here, but these acres were desolate. It looked to him as if the grass grew here as thin hay. A cow by herself would need acres to graze. Here even a cow would be lonely.
Immediately upon discovering Crystal in the back of the handicap van Mortimer had begun organizing.
While Crystal waited in the van, Haja and Ricky had dismantled Mortimer’s own king-sized bed and lifted its frame, box-spring and mattress to the barn and rebuilt it in a corner of the gymnasium just outside the swing door to the locker room. Mortimer made the bed himself.
The gym was not that large, but it was well built: hardwood floor, a boxing ring in the center, the latest in exercise machines along the far wall, as well as head and body punching bags.
The only thing odd about the gym was that the mirrors on the walls were old-fashioned: they were not perfect mirrors.
There was a sauna and whirlpool in the locker room, as well as open showers, basins and toilets.
Having some experience at it, Fletch tried to help bring Crystal into her new bed. Silently, firmly, Mortimer, Haja, Ricky elbowed him aside. They let Fletch run the van’s hydraulic lift to lower them all to the ground.
On the porch, Fletch said to Mortimer, “You don’t really hate me, do you?”
Mortimer spat over the porch rail. “Sure. You did the right thing, Fletch, as far as I was concerned. So did I. I’d seen what was wrong with the boxing game all my life, never took part in the filth but I went along with it. Impaling my young contender on that iron fence in Gramercy Park …”
“His name was Shane—?”
“Goldblum. Shane Goldblum…. Well, it made everything inside me, how can I say it, hunker down, atomize, and then …”
“I came along and gave you a way of blowing up.”
“You see, with my friends in prison, well, when we write back and forth to each other, I blame you for everything. Everything I did to them.”
“They deserved it. They’re bad guys.”
“Yeah, but they’re my bad guys. We grew up together, worked together. Who else, what else do I know? Loyalty may be a virtue, but it’s also a convenience. So, yeah, I hate you. You made the best of me, so I hate you. What else do you expect? My best boxers came to hate me. I made the best of them, they’d find themselves unique, alone, isolated, just like I am, so they’d blame me, hate me. Most people, I figure, never do anything unusual, they just go along with whatever it is, mediocrity, corruption, because they can’t stand the idea of being unique, alone, isolated.” Mortimer’s blue eyes scanned the field Fletch had just been watching. “I’ve been thinking of importing some pigeons. How do you think they’d do here?”
“Not well. Not enough used lunch bags.”
“Yeah. Well, the place needs used lunch bags, too.”
“Haja and Ricky seem like nice kids. Hopefully contenders.”
“Sure.”
“That Ricky has some presence.”
“Presence?”
“You haven’t noticed?”
“What’s presence already?”
“I don’t know. Dignity? His own sense of time, space, sight, sound? Self-awareness?”
“He’s just in love with himself. Somehow he makes you pay attention to him, watch him, when he’s not doing anything! A boxer? I don’t know.”
“So you think you’ll be able to help Crystal?”
“You said she’s a heavyweight.”
“Yes, I did.”
“A heavyweight challenge all right.”
Fletch said, “I’ll go say good bye.”
•
“You’re leaving?” Crystal asked. “You’re leaving me here?”
“Mister Mortimer is putting me off the place,” Fletch said.
“Don’t hesitate,” Mortimer said.
“Where’re you going?”
“Somewhere the landscape has more than one line to it.”
“Get out of here,” Mortimer said. “Ricky, see this bum off the place.”
“I’ll call,” Fletch said to Crystal.
“Tell Jack where I am.”
As Fletch was escorted by Ricky out of the gym, Mortimer was saying, “Now, listen, dear l
ady. You’re not going to lose weight right away. First we’re going to build you some muscle. You’ll be losing fat, but you’ll weigh the same, because muscle weighs more than fat, you see? So you’re not to get discouraged.”
Crystal murmured, “All I want is to take in the food I need for what I’m doing.”
“That’s very good,” Mortimer said. “Where did you learn that?”
By the angle of his head, the way he used his arms and his legs, turned his body into a K closing the side door of the van, somehow Ricky made Fletch watch him do it.
Mortimer may have developed the kid’s body but the kid’s presence was as natural to him as the color of his hair.
Fletch said, “I notice you don’t use contractions.”
Ricky said, “I do not?”
He opened the van’s door for Fletch.
“Bye,” Fletch said.
“Good bye.”
15
“You there!”
Walking his bike on a gravel path skirting the side of Vindemia’s main house, Jack looked up. An older woman was calling to him from a balcony. Wisps of her graying hair and her light bathrobe were being blown by the wind.
“Come here!” She pointed to an open, arched doorway beneath her balcony. “Go in there. Come up the steps.”
Overhead the ten huge flags on the roof were snapping imperiously in the wind.
He leaned his bike against a wall, went through the arch and up the stone stairs in the wall of the house.
She was the woman he had seen possibly weeping in the back of the chauffeur-driven stretch Infiniti the day he arrived.
“Do I know you?” she asked him. “I mean, have we done this together before?”
“What?” Jack asked.
“I need someone to take out my rubbish,” she said.
“Oh.”
“People keep forgetting,” she said. “To take out my rubbish.”
“I see.”
“I need this help.”
“Okay.”
“You look like the last boy who used to help me.”
“We’re infinitely replaceable,” Jack said. “I’m glad you realize that. He was my friend.” She stuck a bill into the pocket of his shorts. “Will you be my friend?”
“Sure.”
“It’s just this bag over here.” On the floor of the balcony near the French doors was a green garbage bag. “People keep forgetting it, you see.”
“I see.”
“If you’d just dispose of it for me.”
“Sure.” When he picked the bag up its contents clanked.
“That will be all.” Looking straight ahead, she went through the French doors into the house.
Jack found the latticed yard behind the kitchen of the house where the many covered rubbish barrels were placed in wooden, hatched bins. The area was as scrubbed as a surgery.
Jack lifted the garbage bag into a barrel.
Then he opened the garbage bag.
Within were many vodka bottles, a few sherry bottles, port bottles, brandy bottles, all empty.
There were also many differently shaped pill vials, all empty. The names of the prescription drugs on the typed labels meant little or nothing to Jack. Instructions limited the number of each pill taken daily and usually recommended taking upon rising or at bedtime. They were prescribed by various doctors, MacMasters, Donovan, Harrison and Chiles.
All the prescriptions were for Amalie Radliegh.
Jack would have thought the woman had just cleaned out her medicine chest of years’ accumulations, but all the dates on the prescription labels were within the last three weeks.
He retied the top of the garbage bag and closed the hatch.
Walking back to his bike, he took out the bill Mrs. Radliegh had stuffed into his pocket and looked at it.
It sure was an easy way to make $50.
16
“Are you marrying Chet?” Jack asked.
“Yes,” Shana answered.
“Why?”
Jack had walked his bike down to the swimming pool and left it leaning against a wall.
Shana Staufel was swimming her laps.
Otherwise the pool area was empty.
Jack waited for her to finish. He sat in a chair in the shade of the wall nearest the house. He could not be seen there from any of the windows, balconies of the house which overlooked the pool generally. He had learned that trick from Nancy Dunbar regarding the office windows next to the Japanese garden.
A small jet airplane circled over Vindemia to land at the estate’s airfield.
Shana had not seen Jack when she first came out of the water.
“Hey,” he had said in a low voice.
Drying her head with a towel, she had walked over to him. Today she was wearing a yellow bikini which brought wonderful light to her skin.
Now sitting on a cushioned chair near Jack she said, “So you know about Chet.”
“What do I know about Chet?”
She said, “He likes boys.”
“Does he like girls, too?”
She shrugged. “No way, Jose.”
“Then why are you marrying him?”
“It’s an arrangement.”
“‘An arrangement.’”
“Yes. Have you never heard of an arranged marriage?”
“A marriage of convenience?”
She nodded. “Very convenient.”
“What’s convenient about it?”
“There are certain ambitions,” Shana said, slowly, carefully, “which easily can be realized. For Chet to pass the Bar Exam, practice law locally, briefly, run for United States Congress, first, then, you know …”
“Buy the hearts and minds of the American people.”
“He’s very bright. He’ll be brilliantly staffed and advised. Already a book has been written for him contrasting the First and Fourteenth Amendments—”
“Written for him?”
“It will be published under his name. The ghostwriters have been well paid for both their work and their silence.”
“That’s nice.”
“The District’s present Congressman is expected to retire after this term.”
“How old is he?”
“Late forties.”
“Why is he retiring?”
“He’ll have enough funds to do whatever he wants.”
“Thanks to Chester Radliegh, Senior.”
“Yes.”
“He’s being paid to retire. Bribed.”
“Some people take their financial security very seriously. His congressional seat happens to be his major asset.”
“Which he can sell.”
“Yes.”
“To Radliegh and son.”
“Yes.”
“Sure. The Congressman shouldn’t sit on his asset. Whose ambition is this? Radliegh’s, or son’s?”
Shana sighed. “Chester believes strongly that what good can be done ought be done. With his father behind him, Chet can accomplish far more for this district, for the nation, maybe the world, than can the present incumbent.”
“I daresay. So it is believed that for his political career Chet needs a savvy, presentable wife.”
“You’re lookin’ at her.”
“There are gay members of Congress now.”
“Not from Georgia. Not at this time, there aren’t,” Shana said. “Sodomy laws have been removed from the books so recently here you can still see the dust from the eraser.”
“If this is Doctor Radliegh’s ambition, why is Chet going along with it?”
“Why not?”
“It means living a lie.”
“It would be fun. Chet’s very popular. All-American quarterback. Handsome. Bright. He’s got to do something with his life. Can’t live here playing Ping-Pong with his little sister all his life.”
“He doesn’t have to go into politics.”
“It’s what his father has always wanted. Chester is trying to shape Duncan up as the titular head, figur
ehead, whatever you want to call it, of the Radliegh business interests.”
“Good luck to him.”
“Yeah,” Shana said. “Good luck.”
“So Chet agrees to this marriage.”
“Agrees? Yeah. He agrees. We like each other well enough. Why not? He’s a bright, charming guy. As long as everything is understood. He gets to do what he wants, discreetly. This way Chet gets a degree of freedom, gets off Vindemia—”
“He’ll never be his own man in Washington.”
“Who ever is?”
“The Constitution expects a member of Congress to have a constituency of more than one.”
“One genius like Chester is probably worth more than the intellectual abilities of a sizable population.”
“So Doctor Radliegh knows his son is gay.”
“Yes. This is the arrangement he has made for his son.”
“It’s more than an arrangement. It’s a deal.”
“It’s a deal.”
“What happens to Chet if he doesn’t accept this deal?” Shana tried to make herself more comfortable in her chair. “Not stated.”
“What’s inferred?”
“Chet worries he’ll be cut off. Find himself on some South Pacific island selling pocket mirrors.”
“Nonsense. He must have his own abilities.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s all or nothing. If Chet wants the benefits of being Chester Radliegh’s son, which benefits are considerable, he has to conform to a pattern of behavior, at least image, which permits him to accomplish all that Chester Radliegh’s son can. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?”
“Do you have any idea how Chet himself feels about this?”
Beautiful in her yellow bikini in her cushioned white rattan chair, Shana looked uncomfortable. “Rage.” She cleared her throat.
“What?”
“Rage. He’s enraged. He’s got his nose right up against a brick wall. His father pushed him into sports, football in particular. Chet found himself building this hunk body. Became All-American. His father pushed him academically. Chet became Phi Beta Kappa. History. His father pushed him through Law School. You see, Chester had this plan for him all along. Chet always knew he was gay. He was straight with his father about it. When Chet discovered his father had had this book written for him, he was furious. Hurt. When he discovered his father had established what you might call a retirement plan for the local incumbent congressman, he was even more furious. He flunked the Bar Exam. I believe he flunked it on purpose. Chet had never failed at anything in his life. He knows for a certainty that whatever he does he cannot satisfy his father. Being gay doesn’t worry Chet at all. It’s that he can’t satisfy his father no matter what he does. He can’t get away from his father’s ‘arrangements’ unless he gets entirely away, gives up everything. Do you see?”
Fletch Reflected Page 11
