Once more Malik’s lips seemed to hover on the edge of a smile. Malik licked them and said, “Not that I know of. You’re the one who built it, for Christ’s sake.”
Some expression on Charlie’s face made Malik shrink against the wall. But Charlie didn’t come crunching toward him across the floor. It was revulsion, not rage, he was feeling. He didn’t want to spend another second in this kitchen, in this house, and he had nothing more to say. He went to the door, opened it, stepped out on the porch, breathed a big lungful of city air.
“What are you doing?” called Malik.
Charlie turned in the doorway. “Ciao,” he said.
“You’re leaving? Just like that?” Malik stood there with shoulders shrugged and puzzled face. “I don’t understand what you want.”
At the bottom of the steps, Charlie turned. “You’ve really got baseball tickets?”
“The Blue Jays are going all the way this year.”
“You’re a fan now?”
“Live and learn,” Malik said, putting on the smoke-gray glasses. Charlie walked away.
· · ·
Malik closed the door, hurried out of the kitchen. He went quickly through rooms that had they been furnished might have been the dining room and living room, but were bare: what was the point of furniture? He’d be selling the place in a month or two when the market started up, and moving into another one he had a few blocks away. Malik looked out a window facing the street. He saw Charlie get into a car and drive away. Malik had time to memorize the plate number and notice the sticker on the bumper: “Maple Leaf Car Rentals.”
He phoned Maple Leaf. “Hi,” he said. “I’m calling from Mulligan and Urquhart. We just had a customer of yours—”
“All our operators are busy at this time.”
He waited. Through the window he saw another car pull out of the parking space and drive off, with a young blond man at the wheel.
“Can I help you?”
“Mulligan and Urquhart,” he began again; telling long, complex lies was tiring, but he was used to it: it was the sine qua non of his business. “We just had a customer of yours in here. It looks like he forgot his coat. My secretary ran after him but he drove off. Have you got an address where we can mail it? She wrote down the plate number.”
Thirty seconds later, Malik had Charlie’s name and address. “Ochs?” he said. “As in Phil?”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing.”
Thirty seconds after that he had Charlie’s telephone number. He dialed the number, just for the hell of it.
A woman answered. “Hello?” she said. She had a nice voice—warm, educated, poised. “Hello?… Hello?… Hello?” She was losing a little of that poise by the last hello. Malik hung up.
He made three more calls. The first was to a law office in Berkeley, California. A mistake perhaps? How much protection would come from that quarter? The truth was he wouldn’t feel safe as long as Wrightman/Ochs was around. Doing something about that without involving himself was the problem. He considered it for a while and placed a call that made him feel a little funny: to the ROTC office at Morgan College. That got him the number for the third call, to some backwater in Georgia.
Malik felt safer after that, safe and hungry. Food had become his only pleasure. How about it? Was he in the mood for lobster?
20
Ninety degrees. Ninety percent humidity. Ol’ J.P.—he thought of himself as Ol’ J.P., especially those nights, afternoons, and occasional mornings when he was half-cut, and he was half-cut now—sat outside on a frayed canvas chair, wearing only his briefs. His body was clammy, his mind, like a perfect miniature of the external world, a haze. Ol’ J.P. sat there on the edge of the swamp, just breathing.
The phone in his trailer began to ring. He let it; the only calls he got were from people or machines trying to sell him things he didn’t need and often hadn’t heard of. He raised the bottle in his hand, a bottle of something cheap, and took a small sip. Very small. Birdlike. Abstemious. Was that the word? Was it a word of any kind? He studied the label. “Genuine Tennessee Whiskey,” it read. There was a sketch of a man in a coonskin cap. The tune from “Davy Crockett” began running in J.P.’s mind, faded out in the haze. He stared at the label for a while. The phone stopped ringing.
J.P. heard something rustle down by the water. He had excellent hearing. He saw a fern twitch. He had excellent vision. So excellent that there, at the base of the fern, hidden in all that greenery, he could distinguish the outlines of a bullfrog. A big fat son of a bitch. Camouflaged in nature’s grand plan—but not from him.
J.P. set his whiskey bottle down in the grass without making a sound. He had a box of nails under the chair, old rusty ones he’d bent into V shapes. He fished through them, slow and silent, until he found one that felt good on the pads of his fingers. He had a slingshot down there too, made from a coat hanger and a wide rubber band. A crude weapon—a kid’s toy, if you wanted the truth.
With the toy in his left hand, J.P. fitted the nail into place at the center of the rubber band and drew back. He didn’t sight, didn’t take aim, simply drew back and released, letting his hands do all the work. He heard a whizzing sound, very faint: that was the nail, spinning through the air. Then came another sound, a little less faint: plop. That was the nail making contact with the big green head. Down by the water the frog performed a funny kind of leap, with only one leg extending, and flopped sideways onto the grass.
A toy weapon, good for killing toy creatures.
J.P. got up and walked to the water. They called it a lake, but it was so full of plant life it was almost as green as the land and not much wetter. J.P. examined the frog. The point of the nail had stuck into its head, about a sixteenth of an inch above the left eye. And it was the right leg that had extended. That was interesting. Left brain, right brain—wasn’t that the theory? The fact that the nail had hit point-first was dumb luck of course. The frequency of point-first hits was about one in ten. It made no difference. Head shots killed every time, no matter what part of the nail did the job. J.P. squatted down and plucked out the nail. Then he picked up the frog by the extended leg and tossed it underhanded into the water. It described an arc, as they used to say in gunnery school, and fell with a quiet splash.
A mosquito bit the back of J.P.’s neck. He slapped it, gazed at its squashed form lying in a red smear on his palm, wiped it off on the side of his briefs. Then he walked back to the chair, dropped the nail back in the box, and went inside the trailer, pulling the screen door shut behind him.
J.P. was hungry, but it was too hot to eat. The icebox was by the door. He took out a beer. Whiskey was drink, beer was food. Across from the icebox, on the other side of the trailer, about three feet away, was a Formica-topped table with a phone on it. The phone started ringing again. J.P. ignored it, walked toward the back of the trailer. There were no partitions; he could see his domain entire: sink, toilet, stall shower, double bed, bureau. Nothing on the walls, nothing on the linoleum floor. He sat on the bed and took a sparrowlike sip of beer. It took away his hunger, nourished him, although it didn’t clear the haze. The phone stopped ringing.
Framed photographs on the bureau. Family pictures, of that three-member family, now down to one. These he found himself staring at from time to time; times like this.
Picture one: Mina at the beach, late fifties. Bikini, flat stomach, round thighs, big smile. He remembered that beach. A nice beach in a nice little town on the south Jersey shore. They had stayed in a motel—the Wee Willie Winkie. He remembered that too. They’d made love for the first time in the Wee Willie Winkie and been married a few months later, after she got pregnant.
Picture two: Mina and the boy, midsixties. Boy on swing, laughing, head thrown back, Mina pushing, mouth laughing but eyes worried he might fall off.
Picture three: Himself, Mina, boy, 1970. Studio portrait. Mina smiling into the lens with enthusiasm because the whole thing was her idea, boy smiling because he’d been
told to, himself posed behind them like the great protector.
Family pix. He made himself look away, drained the beer and tossed the bottle into the trash can by the icebox. Didn’t sight, didn’t aim, just let his hands do it. His hands were good at stuff like that.
The phone began to ring again. “Jesus Christ,” he said, or maybe only thought it. All they wanted to do was sell him, sell him, sell him. A goddamn fever of selling. He didn’t need anything and even if he did there was no money to buy. He had his pension and that was it. Didn’t their computers know that by now? So what the fuck?
Ring ring.
J.P. got off the bed, went to the Formica table, picked up the phone.
“What is it?” he started to say, but the words clumped together; he hadn’t spoken in some time. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What is it?”
“Hello,” said a voice on the other end, a man, not a machine. “Captain Pleasance, please.”
That threw him, but he recovered after only a second or two, ten at the most. “This is him. Except I’m retired.” Been retired for fifteen years, for Christ’s sake.
“Captain Jack Pleasance?”
“That’s what I told you. You better not be selling something.”
The man on the other end of the line laughed, at least that’s what J.P. supposed it was—it sounded more like a dog barking. “I’m giving, not selling,” he said.
J.P. didn’t get it, so he kept his mouth shut.
The caller spoke again: “Does the name Blake Wrightman mean anything to you?”
J.P. had trouble breathing for a moment. He leaned against his pasteboard trailer wall for support. “What if it does?” he said. “Who is this?” It occurred to him that he’d got the questions in the wrong order.
It didn’t matter: the caller ignored the second one. “If it does mean anything to you, I could supply his present name and address, especially if you’re a self-reliant sort of person.”
J.P.’s heartbeat quickened then, quickened a lot, pumping strength into his body, driving away the oppression of the heat and damp, driving the haze from his mind. “Self-reliant?”
“Someone who doesn’t get bogged down in official channels. A take-charge guy.”
J.P. cleared his throat again. “That name means something to me.”
“Got a pencil?”
“Hold on.”
J.P. put down the phone, searched for something to write with. On the icebox, on the bureau, in a drawer, under the bed: getting frantic, breathing in quick little breaths. A fucking pencil—come on, come on. He found a leaky ballpoint in the pocket of a shirt that had been lying on the floor for a few days, or maybe weeks. He grabbed the phone.
“You still there?”
“What’s going on?” asked the caller, affability gone, suspicious.
“Nothing,” said J.P. “I’m ready.”
The caller dictated the name and address. J.P. wrote it down on the Formica tabletop and repeated it to the caller, spelling out the name.
“You got it.”
“How do you know—” J.P. began.
The caller interrupted. “Good luck.” Click.
“Good luck”? Meaning what? J.P. stood in his clammy briefs by the table, the phone still in his hand. It began blaring the off-the-hook signal. He hung up, stared at the name and address on the Formica for a minute or two. Then he picked up the phone again and called information. He soon had the phone number that went with them. He wrote it on the table.
Three bits of information. He gazed at them for a long time, long enough for them to become part of his memory. J.P. looked up. He needed a drink bad. The Tennessee whiskey was—where? He looked around, finding it in the grass by the box of bent bullfrog nails. He picked it up and drank what was left. The haze returned, but light, like the mist off the swamp in the evening. He was sweating now, dripping with it like a prizefighter in the twelfth round. From down by the water came a wet sucking sound, followed by a splash.
J.P. went back in the trailer, picked up the phone, dialed the number now firmly in his mind. The call was answered on the first ring.
“Hello?”
A woman. J.P. wasn’t prepared for that. He tried out various explanations while the woman said, “Hello?… Hello?”
She had a nice voice.
“Who is this?” she was saying. “Who is this?”
A nice voice, at least it sounded nice to him. Nice, and maybe a little scared, he thought, hanging up. Scared of what?
Ol’ J.P. went to the mirror, had a gander at himself. Time to get cleaned up.
21
“Hello?” Emily said one more time, but even as she did there was a click at the other end of the line. She put down the phone and got back to work.
Emily was sitting at her desk in the bedroom, overlooking Cosset Pond. On the computer screen columns of numbers attended her next move, like soldiers at inspection. She backed the hurricane ten degrees by typing “37H” on the keyboard and waited to see what it would do to her beach. The desktop computer waited too. The mainframe at MIT was doing all the work.
It wasn’t a quick job, not even for the Cray. If she was right, her beach would now not only be protected by the jetty she’d angled off the shore almost three miles away, but would also widen ten to twelve feet, padded with sand swept in from the offshore bar. The prospect excited her, not for practical or mercenary reasons, but because she liked solving puzzles, especially those of her own devising: the hurricane, the beach, the jetty, and the sandbar were all just numbers in one of her erosion models.
The phone rang again. Emily answered. “Hello?”
Silence.
“Hello?… Hello?”
Silence; perhaps the faint sound of breathing. That made her angry. “Who is this?” she said, her voice rising. “Who is this?”
Click.
Emily hung up. She turned back to the screen, annoyed, uneasy, distracted, found herself staring through the numbers into the blackness beyond. Get a grip, she told herself. It was nothing but a wrong number, two wrong numbers; probably the same careless caller. But misdialers usually hung up as soon as they realized their mistake, didn’t they? And this one hadn’t. This one had listened to her for a while; breathing. She didn’t like the breathing. It meant a crank. Or a sicko. Emily’s imagination ran with that thought, as she sat at her desk, waiting for MIT to do the numbers.
“Get a grip.” This time she said it aloud. She was just jumpy. It was all about Charlie of course, off somewhere with his uncle, dealing with a complicated and difficult family she had known nothing about. Charlie’s Uncle Sam had said it might be a few days. “A few” meant three, but that was a possibility Emily hadn’t really taken seriously. She’d expected Charlie back the next day; that was today, and there wasn’t much of it left. Outside the sun was low in the sky, reddening the surface of Cosset Pond. And if he wasn’t coming back today, wouldn’t he call to tell her? She would in his place. Then she tried to put herself in his place, and could not: there were too many sudden unknowns. Did they make Charlie a puzzle too? Emily shrank from that idea, but she was still thinking about those unknowns when all the numbers on her screen changed.
Emily looked at the new numbers. They would have been meaningless to all but a few dozen people in the world. Emily understood them right away. Her beach was gone.
22
Day three.
“It might take a few days, actually,” as Uncle Sam had said. Few was the way to say three without being tied down.
Day one: Bombo. Day two: Malik. A logical progression, even if it had led nowhere. There was nothing logical about day three, and Charlie couldn’t have explained what he was doing, not even to himself. It had nothing to do with finding Rebecca, nothing he could see. But late in the afternoon of day three he was back on campus, standing outside Cullen House. Going backward, Charlie old boy, going backward.
Day three had begun like days one and two, warm and sunny, but now top-heavy thunderclou
ds were swelling in the west. A tanned woman came out of Cullen House, saw him looking at the sky, and said, “It’ll hold off. Are you signed up for the mixed doubles?”
“No.”
“We need one more man for the four point fives. What’s your rating?”
“I don’t know.”
“My God, I thought we sorted that out at orientation.” She ducked back inside the building.
Charlie walked away before she could return with racquets and balls and evaluate his game. He followed the crushed-brick path, through the line of oaks, into the central quad, past the chapel. He stood in front of the Ecostudies Center, seeking the skeleton of the old structure. This was difficult; the building and his memory of it had both changed.
Charlie circled the building. At the back a gardener watered flower beds, a cigarette drooping from his lips. The gardener’s hose ran from a square hatch at the base of the wall. He squinted through cigarette smoke at Charlie. Charlie moved on, around to the front. The door of the Ecostudies Center opened and a woman, this one pale and nonsporty, emerged, eating trail mix from a paper bag. When had he last eaten? Charlie couldn’t remember.
He took the crushed-brick path to the edge of the campus, walked along College Street to the Catamount Bar and Grille. In 1970 it had been a dive with a cat’s-head sign and cheap greasy food. Everything had changed but the sign. Charlie took a seat under a small painting of an alienated nude, priced at $250, listened to the list of specials, ordered something with sun-dried tomatoes because he’d never had them, and chose a beer he’d never heard of. A book of Catamount Bar and Grille matches lay in the ashtray. Charlie put them in his pocket.
The beer came first. He tasted it. Not bad, but all at once he didn’t want beer, didn’t want food, either. He got up and walked to the phone by the men’s room. “A few days,” Uncle Sam had said. “A few” would mean three to Emily, a firm three. He picked up the phone and dialed his home number.
Revolution #9 Page 17
