I slid the ring of keys into the dust deep between the feet of the Cheez-Its machine. They’d be retrievable if I needed them, but should I be caught, they’d hardly aid my case. Then I slumped inside the doorway, tucked my feet close, drew myself out of sight of the corridor from every angle I could calculate. Exhaustion was toxic, and my head began to nod. Not nodding in time—I wasn’t composing and committing to memory a lost masterpiece of a rap album, only nodding off. Anyone could sneak up on me who liked to. The black eye of the television glared down, but it wasn’t intelligible, wasn’t Vader or Big Brother. There was no authority here, malign or otherwise. The Pepsi machine glowed, but no one was home.
I woke, to bright sunlight and an aching urge to pee, to find the Plexiglas window across the corridor full not of sluggish morning visitors but an agitated glut of COs, Watertown city policemen, and a handful of other middle-aged white men in dark suits, a few of them jotting on stenographer’s pads. Then I was startled by someone nearer: a young CO in the vestibule with me, back turned as he fed dollars into the machine, one after another, and gathered an armload of Pepsi. The rolling clunk of a can into the machine’s gullet was what had jerked me awake. The CO hadn’t spotted me, but turned now, abruptly.
“I, uh, dropped some change,” I said, blinking awake, and pawing with my hands on the floor.
“How the hell’d you even get in here?”
“Through that door,” I bluffed. “It was open.”
“Holy Hell, if Talbot saw you!”
“It was Talbot who told me I could come in here,” I tried. “I think I’m a little confused. Where’s the bathroom, anyway?”
Now the CO squinted down at me, sensing something irregular. He had to straighten his shoulders, and reorganize the freight of soda cans in his crooked elbow. He was the youngest I’d seen, evidently a gofer, though his belt was laden with keys, plastic baton, and, I was pleased to see, ultraviolet scanner.
“You’re a newspaperman, right?” he asked.
“Surely you remember me, young man.” I stood, brushed myself off, and affected a transatlantic tone of befuddled impatience, casting myself as Cary Grant, him as Ralph Bellamy.
“What’s your name again, though?”
I searched and came out with: “Vance Christmas.” He was the only newspaperman I could think of in my condition, besides Jimmy Olsen. I supposed Christmas deserved any belated trouble Aeroman could bring him.
“Right, yeah, but from where?”
“Albany,” I said. “I’m with the, uh, Albany Herald-Ledger. You know, we’re doing a special feature on the state of the prisons.”
“But you came in with those other guys, right?” The fog of uncertainty between us was an irritation to this man, my diffident captor—he wanted me to supply a right answer as badly as I wanted to supply one, so he could resume his uncontroversial errand.
“Sure, Talbot invited me to tag along,” I said. I supposed those other guys were the ones just on the other side of the window. If I was made to join them perhaps I would be allowed to tag along and, eventually, shuffle out. “Because of the special feature thingee, the supplement.” This fiction was becoming distractingly real to me—I imagined a shattering exposé, Pulitzers for the underdog Herald-Ledger —so I neglected to wonder why reporters, real reporters, were here in the first place.
I’d made a mistake, though, in trying a second time to claim the unseen Talbot’s blessings. Gofer squinted harder, and arranged the cans of soda along the top of the machine to free his hands. He rubbed the crook of his arm to restore feeling to the chilled flesh, and cleared his throat, reassembling dignity and command.
“Can I see some I.D.?”
“Look, listen,” I said, lowering my voice. “I didn’t really come in with those other guys.”
“How’d you get here, then?”
“I spent the night. I came in as a visitor, yesterday—here, check my hand stamp, you’ll see.”
“Well, I don’t know about that . . .” He seemed about to panic and seek help. We were still unnoticed by the congregation in the search room. This was my margin, my breath, and it was rapidly vanishing.
“Listen, wait,” I said. “I really am a reporter for the Albany Tribune.” Had I bollixed my credential? No matter: “I persuaded a couple of guards to smuggle me in here—you know Stamos and Sweeney?”
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t want to get them in trouble, that’s why I was stalling. They let me stow away, for my investigation.”
“Stamos did that?”
“Yup.”
“Christ, they’re idiots!”
“I know, I know.”
“Talbot’s going to murder them.”
“Maybe not, if you can get me out of here. Just slip me back through to the lot. I’ll never involve any of your names, I promise you that.”
“Jeez Louise!”
“Check my hand.”
Shaking his head, Gofer unclipped his scanner and shone it on my knuckles. The purple emblem seemed to hover, a tiny hologram.
I tried to hustle him past deliberation, by acting as if he’d already agreed. “Let’s make a move now, they’re not looking.”
“Jeez—”
“Only I really need to stop in the bathroom, I was stuck there all night.”
“Oh, brother.”
When I emerged from the men’s toilet Gofer regarded me pityingly, my threat all dissipated now. “Guess it was unlucky for you this whole thing went down today,” he said.
“Crazy unlucky,” I agreed.
“Teach you to try that again.”
“Indeed. Never.”
“It’s not funny.”
“I’m not laughing.”
At the A/B doors I whispered, “Probably you should just say I left something in my car.” Gofer made a face, then leaned through a sliding window.
“This guy’s got to go back to the lot,” he said, his tone morose, like a bullied boy. “I’m taking him out.”
“Okay,” came the bleary reply. The cage’s bolts slammed open and shut, each in turn, and we moved through.
“Hey, so what exactly did go down in there?” I asked Gofer at the entrance to the lot. The dawn’s early light, still combing through the treeline, shocked my crummy orbs. I caught a whiff of myself, an ordinary all-night stink. Three disgruntled crows jogged across the gravel as we approached, then flapped aloft to barely clear the razor curls atop the Cyclone fence, and winged for the highway and the strip mall beyond it. The birds made shabby harbingers of my freedom: the prospect of my rental car’s AC, some McDonald’s coffee.
“Holy Moses,” said Gofer, incredulous I’d been so near yet missed the breaking story. “Nothing apart from a fellow up in the SHU fooled an officer into opening his door, made a run for it. I guess he had some stolen keys, so we’ve got a whole headache about it now. Talbot’s having a cow.”
“Guy escaped?” I was blessed, I understood now, in being one headache too many this morning. Hence my easy ticket out. No one, least of all Gofer, wished to see Talbot further inflamed. I couldn’t have scripted Robert Woolfolk’s role better if I’d tried.
“Killed himself.”
“What?” I blurted.
Gofer shut his eyes and stuck out his tongue.
“They killed him, you mean.”
“Nope.” He staged-whispered for effect. “Suicide. Got loose, then did away with himself, poor crazy son of a gun.”
“Why would he kill himself if he got free?”
Gofer shrugged. “This fellow leaped off a gun tower, highest point on the yard. Gunnery officer said he was hooting like an eagle. He hit a sloped concrete embankment, landed sideways, I guess. It was pretty sickening. They were taking pictures out there but nobody’s going to use them. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen—his arms got tangled under his body, so he sort of crumpled up and broke in half as he slid down that bank. Didn’t even look human by the time he came to a stop.”
chapter 16
I’d driven all day and far into Sunday night from the mall lot in Watertown, committing topological penance across western New York and into Pennsylvania, on a flat, three-lane interstate which judged or forgave nothing, only left me wholly to my own judgment. Now I understood: I’d wakened Aeroman to kill Robert Woolfolk. It was a collaboration that had taken Mingus and the ring and my half-conscious hatred years to devise, though the seed of inspiration had been unmistakable, in Aaron X. Doily’s plunge into the Pacific Street vest-pocket park, twenty-three years ago—what goes up comes down. Aeroman was nothing if not a black body on the ground. I hadn’t even played fair and told Robert of the ring’s switch to invisibility. I wondered if he’d discovered it. I wondered if the guards on the tower had only told themselves they’d seen the man who screamed like a raptor on his way down, if there’d been anything to see until he’d smashed to pieces on the embankment.
For so long I’d thought Abraham’s legacy was mine: to retreat upstairs, unable or unwilling to sing or fly, only to compile and collect, to sculpt statues of my lost friends, life’s real actors, in my Fortress of Solitude. To see the world in a liner note: I am the DJ, I am what I play. But here I’d catapulted across the country in an airplane seat, a deranged arrow-man of pure intention, to uncover Mingus and Robert at Watertown—they hadn’t asked me to come. Maybe I’d underrated the Rachel in me, the Running Crab ready to destroy and bolt, to overturn lives and go on the lam.
So now I had to move on the ground, touch the earth. I needed to follow her crab footprints exactly, make no mistake in whom I was tracking this time. I drove just over the limit, anonymous in the flow, but inside the space of the car I was a vigilante, a low rider. I drove without music, my CD wallet on the backseat, untouched—no soundtrack to prettify the ugly scene of me. I stopped only to stretch my legs, gas up, and piss, and to make a handful of calls, letting Abraham and Francesca know I wouldn’t be returning to Brooklyn, contacting the airline to cancel a ticket and the rental office to say I’d be returning the car to Berkeley in a few days, not La Guardia tomorrow. No one was pleased, but I didn’t give anyone a choice in the matter. I didn’t call Abby, because I didn’t have anything to tell her, not yet.
I lost my wits on the road at around three. The sporadic lights coming the other way seemed always about to veer into mine, despite the wide grassy divider between us. I found a Howard Johnson’s then, at the entrance to Ohio, and slept for a few queasy hours, showered, hit the road again. I made Indiana by midmorning—a left turn at Indianapolis, past Larry Bird’s auto dealership, south to Bloomington. Campus parking was a bitch, so I settled for a faculty spot. I’d killed a man last night—I could stand a campus parking ticket.
At a terminal in the library I made my discovery: my quarry not only still lived in Bloomington, he worked on campus. I wouldn’t even have to repark my car. The researcher at Zelmo Swift’s law firm had traced Running Crab’s last known address to Bloomington, 1975, before she’d dropped off the map after bail flight in Lexington, Kentucky. But Abraham had refused even to look inside Zelmo’s manila folder of “This Is Your Life!” data, and neither Zelmo Swift nor Francesca Cassini could have known, as I did, another name to use to pick up the Bloomington trail.
The Archives of Traditional Music and the Carmichael Collection shared Morrison Hall with a portion of IU’s English and psych departments, and with the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, which occupied two of the hall’s upper floors. It was at the Kinsey Institute that I’d located Croft Vendle. He worked in their Office of Public Affairs. I called him from a phone in the library, and he told me to come by.
When I arrived, the Kinsey secretary explained that Croft was on a call. So I sat in a waiting room and read brochures. From the evidence, the institute was still struggling to defend its first, half-refused gift of knowledge to the American mind, and teetering always on the brink of exile from the campus by Indiana’s priggish legislature. The walls around me held the single biggest repository of “erotic materials” in the world, Alfred Kinsey having forged deals with police departments all over the country to quietly cart away seized materials, sparing the expense of their storage or destruction. For all this, the offices were homey, walls lined with neat-framed fifties-vintage smut, black-and-white photos as sunny as Topps baseball-card photography. Beside the receptionist’s desk hung an honorific row of studio portraits of past directors, beginning with bow-tied Alfred himself, and continuing through a charming sequence, leading to the present day, of thoughtful eyeglass-frame-gnawing psychologists, gentle stewards of freaky reality.
Croft was a man I barely recognized, in a rust corduroy two-piece, maroon tie, and milk-chocolate Earth shoes. His ruddy features swarmed with wiry silver beard, all trimmed to an exact length, even where it sprouted from his ears. He resembled a diet or exercise guru, someone usually seen only in running shorts but temporarily got up in a suit for a book-plugging appearance on Today. It was a shock. In my mind’s eye only Abraham aged; Rachel and her lover were still verdant, in 1974 bodies forever.
“I’ve got this call on hold,” Croft said apologetically, gesturing back toward his office. His voice was helium-high, another thing I didn’t remember. He seemed to take my appearance more in stride, despite my hints of road-weary desperado: three-day beard and sunburned forearm, Vietnam-vet walleye. Perhaps he’d been expecting me for years. “It’s this wealthy gay collector in Los Angeles, he’s been dangling this donation for months, a stash of Japanese erotica, thousands of pieces. I’ve got him on the brink, but it’s taking some real hand-holding.”
“No problem,” I said. “I can wait.” I wondered if Erlan Hagopian’s Rachel-paintings would find their way here someday. Maybe they already had.
“I was thinking if you’re free you’d come out to the farm for dinner,” he said. “So we can talk.”
“Number 1, Rural Route 8?” I asked.
Croft’s eyes widened. “We call it Watermelon Sugar Farm, but yeah. Bring your car out front at five and I’ll lead you. Place can be difficult to find—kind of a backroads, no-map-to-the-territory deal.”
“Okay.”
“Cool,” he said. “I’d better get back to this call. If you’re just killing the afternoon I could get Susie, she’s our intern, to give you the full Kinsey tour.”
“That’s okay.”
I’d noted the Hoagy option on the way through Morrison’s lobby, and suspected that better fit my mood. So Croft went to his phone call, I to “March of the Hooligans.”
“Just one thing I want to show you,” said Croft. “Then we ought to go for a walk around the property, before the light’s gone. It’s a rare night.”
Croft, piloting a decrepit Peugot, had led me along a s
erpentine country road, through hamlets and farmland and well into the woods, before we’d turned onto a well-maintained dirt road with W. SUGAR marked on the mailbox. There we’d rumbled past a few rotting Volkswagen Beetle exoskeletons, field grass swum up through their engines, to stop in front of a hand-hewn cabin, with an ancient paint job mostly blistered off its plank exterior. I thought it leaned dangerously, but we headed for the half-open door. Beside it, an upright manual lawnmower was rusted to sculpture beside a primitive stone well, each having surrendered, like the Beetles, to the field grass.
“You live here?” I asked. I withheld the question that went with it: Was Croft the only one left on the property? The scene was Walden-pretty, but a little desolate, regarded on civilization’s terms.
“God, no, the homes are down the hill, in the woods. We’ve got a hundred and sixty acres. This place was the old communal cookhouse, back when we all ate together. Plus a winter sleeping bunk for the folks in tepees. This was some time ago, though. Nobody uses this for anything anymore, except the bees.”
I suppose there was never a reason for tearing down a cabin or scrapping a stopped automobile, if you had all those acres. Particularly if your models of exterior decoration were author photos of Richard Brautigan, at the door of a Kaczynksian Montana shack.
Inside was an abandoned kitchen: an old range, its enamel webbed like the glaze of a Renaissance painting, a long, stained butcher-block which could have been salvaged for installation in a loft in Emeryville or Gowanus, and a double-basined sink with an old plastic bucket below, in place of plumbing. What Croft had called a sleeping bunk sagged so low over the stove it threatened to kiss it. I picked out wood rot and insect eggs, a hollow-log scent. Croft clambered over some barrel staves and steel drums, into the corner beneath the loft, and from a shelf full of water-swollen hardcover books plucked up a mechanical something and curled it under his arm. When he crawled back through the wreckage, he presented it to me: a manual typewriter. The double ribbon, black-over-red, which had produced the reverb of crimson in Running Crab’s postcard font, was still strung between the spools, though the spools themselves were thick with corrosion, going nowhere in a hurry.
The Fortress of Solitude Page 55
