Men from Boys

by John Harvey

  Though the car’s motor has stalled, the tape plays on as the flutist begins to sing wordlessly behind the breath of his instrument, providing his own ghostly accompaniment. A lizard scampers across the windshield. Music, sky and lizard alike go with him over the edge and down – down for a long time.

  His name, the name of the person to whom this happens, is Parker.

  Without thought, he left her there.

  Acting purely on instinct, he was halfway across the roof before anything like actual thought or volition came, before the webwork of choices began forming in his mind. Never let the opponent choose the ground. Withdraw, lure the opponent on to your own, or at least on to neutral ground. By then years of training and action had broken over him like a flood. Four days later, on a Monday, Quentin stood looking down at two bodies. These were the men he’d seen fleeing the apartment below Sandy Buford’s. For a moment it was Ellie’s body he saw there on the floor of that faceless motel room. He knew from newspaper accounts that the two of them had spent some time at the house once he’d fled. He tried not to think how long, tried not to imagine what had happened there.

  Surprisingly, as in the old days, he bore them no direct ill will. They were working men like himself, long riders, dogs let loose on the grounds.

  Himself who, hearing the window crash downstairs, rolled from bed on to his feet and was edging out on to the roof even as footsteps sounded on the stairs. Then was up and over.

  With small enough satisfaction he took their car, a midrange Buick. A simple thing to pull wires out from beneath the dash, cross them. Somewhere in it he would find the map he needed, something about the car would guide him. He had that faith. Everyone left footprints.

  Never blame the cannon. Find the hands that set elevation, loaded and primed it, lit the fuse. Find the mouth that gave the order.

  They’d have to die, of course, those two. But that was only the beginning.

  The world comes back by degrees. There are shapes, patterns of dark and light, motion that corresponds in some vague way to sounds arriving from out there. They knock at your door with luggage in hand, these sounds. While in here you have a great deal of time to think, to sink back into image and sensation in which language has no place. Again and again you see a sky strewn with stars, a lizard’s form huge among them, a woman’s pale body.

  Constantly, it seems, you are aware of your breathing as an envelope that surrounds you, contains you.

  For some reason flute music, itself a kind of breath, remains, tendrils of memory drifting through random moments of consciousness. Memory and present time have fused. Each moment’s from a book. You page backward, forward, back again. All of it has the same import, same imprimatur.

  Faces bend close above you. When you see them, they all look the same. You’re fed bitter pastes of vegetables and meat. Someone pulls at your leg, rotates the ankle, pushes up on the ball of your foot to flex it. Two women talk overhead, about home and boyfriends and errant children, as they roll you side to side, wiping away excrement, changing sheets. One day you realise that you can feel the scratchiness, the warmth, of their washclothes.

  The TV is left on all the time. At night (you know it’s night because no one disturbs you then) the rise and fall of this voice proves strangely comforting. Worst is mid-morning when everything goes shrill: voices of announcers and game show hosts, the edgy canned laughter of sitcoms, commercials kicked into overdrive.

  There are, too, endless interrogations. At first, even when you can’t, even when it’s all you can do to keep from drowning in the flood of words and you’re wholly unable to respond, you try to answer. Further along, having answered much the same queries for daily generations of social workers, medical students and interns, you refuse to participate, silent now for quite a different reason.

  The world comes back by degrees, and slowly, by degrees, you understand that it’s not the world you left. Surreptitious engineers have sneaked in and built a new world while you slept. In this world you’re but a tourist, a visitor, an impostor. They’ll find you out, some small mistake you’ll make.

  Mr Parker, do you know where you are?

  Can you tell me what happened?

  Can you move your hand, feet, eyes?

  Do you know who’s President?

  Is there anything you need?

  ‘No.’

  Here is what my visitor tells me.

  We met, Julie and this Parker, just out of school, both still dragging along cumbersome ideals that all but dwarfed us. Once, she said, I told her how as a kid I’d find insects in drawers and cabinets lugging immense, stagecoach-like egg cases behind. That’s what it was like.

  We had our own concept of manifest destiny, Julie said. No doubt about it, it was up to us to change the world. We’d have long conversations over pizza at the Raven, beer at the Rathskeller, burgers at Maple Street Café. What could we do? Push a few books back into place and the world’s shelves would be in order again? We fancied ourselves chiropractors of chaos and corruption: one small adjustment here, a realignment there, all would come straight.

  Colonialism. Chile and the CIA. South Africa, Vietnam, our own inner cities, Appalachia. We imagined we were unearthing all manner of rare truth, whereas in truth, as immensely privileged middle-class whites, we were simply learning what most of the world had known for ever.

  When I found out you were here, I had to come, she says. How long has it been? Twenty years?

  She works as a volunteer at the hospital. Saw my name on the admissions list and thought: Could it possibly be?

  Other things you begin to remember:

  The smell of grapefruit from the backyard of the house across the alley from your apartment.

  The rustle of pigeons high overhead in the topknots of palm trees.

  Geckos living in a crack in the wall outside your window. By daylight larger lizards come out on to the ledge and rest there. Lizard aerobics: they push their bodies up on to extended legs. Lizard hydraulics: they ease back down.

  Dry river beds.

  Empty swimming pools painted sky-blue.

  Mountains.

  Even in the center of the city, you’re always within sight of mountains. Mornings, they’re shrouded in smog, distant, surreal and somehow prehistoric, as though just now, as slowly the earth warms, taking form. Late-afternoon sunlight breaks through clouds in fanlike shafts, washes the mountains in brilliance, some of them appearing black as though burned, others in close relief. Spectacular sunsets break over them at night – and plunge into them.

  Sometimes you’d drive into the desert with burritos or a bottle of wine to witness those sunsets. Other times you’d go out there to watch storms gather. Doors fell open above you: great tidal waves of wind and lightning, the whole sky alive with fire.

  This is when you were alive.

  ‘You’re going to be okay, Mr Parker.’

  Her name, I remember, though I check myself with a glance at her nametag, is Marcia. On the margins of the nametag, which is the size of a playing card, she has pasted tiny pictures of rabbits and angels.

  ‘The doctors will be in to speak with you shortly.’

  I wonder just how they’ll speak with me shortly. Use abbreviations, clipped phrases or accents, some special form of semaphore taught them in medical school? One rarely understands what they say in all earnest.

  Marcia is twenty-eight. Her husband left her six months ago, she now lives in a garage apartment with an ex-biker truck driver named Jesse. To this arrangement Jesse has brought a baggage of tattoos (including two blue jailhouse tears at the edge of one eye) and his impression of life as a scrolling roadway, six hundred miles to cover before his day and daily case of beer are done. To this arrangement she’s brought a four-year-old daughter, regular paychecks and notions of enduring love. Hers is the heavier burden.

  I’ve paid attention, watched closely, hoping to learn to pass here in this new world. I know the lives of these others just as, slowly, I am retrieving
my own.

  Of course it’s my own.

  Marcia leans over me, wraps the bladder of the blood-pressure monitor about my arm, inflates it. ‘It’s coming back to you, isn’t it?’

  Some of it.

  ‘No family that you know of?’

  None.

  ‘I’m sorry. Families are a good thing at times like this.’

  She tucks the blood-pressure cuff behind its wall gauge and plucks the digital thermometer from beneath my tongue, ejecting its sheath into the trash can.

  ‘Things are going to be tough for a while. Hate to think about your having to go it alone,’ she says, turning back at the door. ‘Need anything else right now?’

  No.

  I turn my head to the window. Hazy white sky out there, bright. Always bright in Phoenix, Valley of the Sun. Maybe when I get out I’ll move to Tucson, always have liked Tucson. Its uncluttered streets and mountains and open sky, the way the city invites the desert in to live.

  With a perfunctory knock at the door, Marcia re-enters. ‘Almost forgot.’ A Post-It Note. ‘Call when you can, she says.’

  Julie.

  Back when we first met we’d walk, late afternoons, along Turtle Creek, downtown Dallas out of sight to one side, Highland Park to the other, as Mercedes, Beamers and the bruised, battered, piled-high trucks of Hispanic gardeners made their ways home on the street. Just up the rise, to either side of Cedar Springs, bookstores, guitar shops and tiny ethnic restaurants straggled. Within the year, glassy brickfront office buildings took up residence and began staring them down. Within the year, all were gone.

  She tells me this when she comes to visit.

  Twenty years.

  She never had children. Her husband died eight years ago. She has a cat. I’ve thought of you often, Julie says.

  Tucked into a compartment in the driver’s door Quentin found a rental agreement. When you need a car, rentals are always a good bet. You can identify them from the license plates mostly, and no one gets in a hurry over stolen rentals. The contract was with Dr Samuel Taylor, home address Iowa City, local address c/o William Taylor at an ASU dorm. Mr Taylor had paid by Visa. Good chance he was visiting a son, then, and that the car had been boosted somewhere in Tempe. Quentin called the rental agency, saying he’d seen some Hispanic teenagers who looked like they didn’t belong in this car, noticed the plate, and was checking to see if it might have been reported stolen. But he couldn’t get any information from the woman who answered the phone, and hung up when she started demanding his name and location.

  A dead end.

  He left his motel room (first floor rear, alley behind, paid for with cash) and went back to the Buick. He wasn’t driving it, but he’d left it out of sight where he could get to it.

  Neither of them had smoked. Radio buttons were set at three oldie stations, one country, one easy listening. The coat folded on the back seat he assumed to be Dr Taylor’s; few enforcers (if that’s what the two were) wore camel hair. Likewise the leather attaché case tucked beneath the driver’s seat, which, at any rate, held nothing of interest. The paperback under the passenger’s seat was a different matter. Lesbian Wife, half the pages so poorly impressed as to be all but unreadable. Tucked in between page 34 and 35 was a cash ticket from Good Night Motel.

  Good Night Motel proved a miracle of cheap construction and tacky cover-up the builder no doubt charged off as architectural highlights. The clerk inside was of similar strain, much preoccupied with images on a six-inch TV screen alongside an old-style brass cash register. However he tried to direct them away, his eyes kept falling back to it.

  ‘Look, I’m just here days,’ he said, scant moments after Quentin tired of equivocations and had braced to drag him bodily across the desk’s chipped formica. ‘Never saw them. Might check at the bar.’ And heaved a sigh as a particularly gripping episode of Gilligan’s Island was left unspoiled?

  In contrast to the inertial desk clerk, the barkeep was a wiry little guy who couldn’t be still. He twitched, twisted, moved salt shakers, coasters and ashtrays around as though playing himself in a board game, drummed fingers on the bar top. He had a thin mustache and sharp features. Something of the rat about him.

  Quentin asked for brandy, got a blank stare and changed his request to a draft with whiskey back. He put a fifty on the bar.

  ‘I don’t have change.’

  ‘You won’t need it.’

  Quentin described the two men. The barkeep nudged a bin of lime wedges square into its cradle.

  ‘Sure, they been in. Three, four nights this week. Not last night, though. One does shots, Jack Daniels. Other’s a beer man. Friends of yours?’

  ‘Purely professional. Guys have money coming, from an inheritance. Lawyers hired me to find them.’

  ‘Sure they did.’

  Quentin pushed the fifty closer. ‘That covers the drinks. People I work for –’

  ‘Lawyers, you mean.’

  ‘Right. The lawyers. Been known to be big tippers.’

  Another fifty went on the counter, closer to Quentin than to the bartender.

  ‘Four blocks down, south corner, Paradise Motor Hotel. Saw them turn in there on my way home one night. Bottom-line kind of place, the Paradise. No bar, no place to eat. Gotta hoof it to Denny’s a dozen blocks uptown. Or come here.’

  Quentin pushed the second fifty on to the first.

  ‘Freshen that up for you?’ the barkeep asked.

  ‘Why not?’

  He waved away Quentin’s offer of payment. ‘This one’s on me.’

  Afterwards – it all happened quickly and more or less silently, no reason to think he’d be interrupted – Quentin searched that faceless motel room. Nothing. Sport coats and shirts hanging in the closet, usual toiletries by the bathroom sink, a towel showing signs of dark hair dye. Couple issues of Big Butt magazine.

  Quentin went downstairs and across rippled asphalt to the office, set into a bottleneck of an entryway that let whoever manned the desk watch all comings and goings. Today a woman in her mid-twenties manned it. She looked the way librarians do in movies from the Fifties. This kind of place, a phone deposit was required if you planned to use it, and even local calls had to go through the desk. They got charged to the room. The records, of course, are private. Of course they are, he responded – and should be. Twenty dollars further on, they became less private. Another dour Lincoln and Quentin was looking at them. He wondered what she might do with the money. Nice new lanyard for her glasses, special food for the cat?

  There’d been one call to 528-1000 (Pizza Palace), two to 528-1888 (Ming’s Chinese) and three to 528-1433. That last was a lawyer’s office in a strip mall clinging like a barnacle to city’s edge, flanked by a cut-rate shoe store and family clothing outlet. Like many of his guild, David Cohen proved reluctant to answer questions in a direct, forthright manner. Quentin soon convinced him.

  Bradley C. Smith was quite a different animal, his lair no motel room or strip-mall office but a house in the city’s most exclusive neighborhood, built (as though to make the expense of it all still more evident) into a hillside. Location was everything. That’s what real-estate agent Bradley C. Smith told his clients. But real estate was only one of Bradley C. Smith’s vocations. His influence went far and wide; he was a man with real power.

  But that power for many years now had insulated Bradley C. Smith from confrontation. That power depended on money, middle men, lawyers, enforcers, collectors, accountants. None of which were present when Quentin stepped into the powerful man’s bathroom just as Bradley C. Smith emerged naked, flesh pale as a mushroom, from the shower.

  There at the end, Bradley C. Smith tried to tell him more. Seemed desperate to tell him, in fact. That was what, at the end, Bradley C. Smith seized upon, holding up a trembling hand again and again, imploring with eyes behind which light was steadily fading.

  Thing was, Quentin didn’t care. Now he knew why the two killers had been dispatched to that apartment on Sycamore, now he had the
other name he needed. Ultimately, those two had little to do with him, with his life, with the door he was pushing closed now. Soon they’d have nothing at all to do with it, neither those two, nor Bradley C. Smith, nor the other. Quentin walked slowly down the stairs, climbed into his stolen Volvo. Soon enough it would be over, all of it.

  I fail to recognise myself in mirrors, or in Julie’s memories, or in many of my own.

  I remember riding in a car with a young man dressed strangely, in a plaid shirt that hung on him like a serape, black bell bottoms, an African skullcap. Remember finding a wallet bound with rubber bands once he’d gone.

  I remember lying prone in a church steeple watching families come and go.

  I remember a man drifting away from me in a culvert, blue dye coloring the water beneath him. Bodies below me on a motel room floor. Other bodies, many of them, half a world away.

  As memory returns, it does so complexly – stereophonically. There is what I am told of Parker, a set of recollections and memories that seem to belong to him, and, alongside those, these other memories of bodies and cars, green jungles, deserts, a kind of double vision in which everything remains forever just out of focus, blurred.

  I wonder if this might not be how the mind functions in madness: facts sewn loosely together, so that contrasting, contradictory realities are held in suspension, simultaneously, in the mind, scaffolds clinging to the faceless, sketchy edifice of actuality.

  ‘I brought you some coffee. Real coffee. Figured you could use it. I’ve had my share of what hospitals call coffee.’

  He set the cup, from Starbucks, on the bedside table.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. City paid. You need help with that top?’

  Parker swung his legs over the bed’s edge and sat, pried off the cover. The detective remained standing, despite the chair close by.