by Paul Hawkins
As the populace followed the circus, someone pointed out black smoke in the distance. A clown pointed a seltzer bottle at it and sent a spray at the distance plume.
"It’s the White place," someone said.
Afterwards Bill went back up to the hotel room to find part of the lion's confidence returned. The old man sat in a chair by the window in a rich robe, and there was some color in his face again.
Billy mopped his brow and threw himself into a chair. "That was something!" he said.
The old man stood at the window. He was watching the plume of smoke. Already it was diminishing and was grey and thin instead of black. "That old martyr – that was all he had?" the old man asked.
"Looks like it."
"The man is sick. That parade – that's his unconscious flowing out. Sign of poor mental hygiene, a literally dirty mind. A mind devoid of Christianity and common sense. A damp fizzle of a send-off. Piss poor, really."
"Well, it's all over now."
"Yes, the folks can concentrate on celebrating. They've got a lot to look forward to. And your speech helped emphasize that!" A gleam lit his eyes.
"I was just carrying water for you."
"No, you did good. Darned good for a first time. You know that, don't you?"
The son smiled. "Well, maybe I do."
"I was a fool, Bill - a fool! To let that eccentric get to me so."
"Well, Dad, that's his skill – he's a fakir. He's made a lifetime out of twisting people's hopes and fears against them."
"But I'm old, I should know better. What could he do to me that he hasn't already done? Why nothing, or else he'd have done it by now. I am getting old to let him play upon my frailties."
"I think I'd have done the same as you."
The old man's face warmed and he looked at his son. "It felt good, didn't it? The adulation of the crowd? The applause? The feeling of them looking up to you?"
Bill blushed. "Yes it did."
The old man rose. "Well, you stepped into the big boots. You, Bill, are a natural. When my term is up I will do everything in my power to see that you succeed me."
"Thank you, Dad."
The old man smiled and patted his shoulder.
"If you'll excuse me, Dad, I might go downstairs and meet a few men from the Corps of Engineers. It's a courtesy, but they want to show off some plans and things while they're in town."
"Now watch out Bill – you're not senator yet!" he said, but then he laughed. "Of course, of course, I understand. Please pass on the word that I feel much better but intend to rest the remainder of the day."
With that Bill departed and the old man returned to his window, sipped from a glass and looking down on the festivities below.
Otto bumped into Bill as he emerged from the foyer of the old hotel. Otto excused himself and proceeded out into the fresh air. Cigar smoke trailed after him in visible curlicues as he burst through the doors to the outside. His meeting had lasted hours longer than he'd imagined it could.
He had never been around men who liked to hear themselves talk so much. His interviewers had been three large, round men with ruddy faces and fat bodies buttoned into brown, too-tight suits. Otto needed to gasp for breath. It had been stifling inside, though the men seemed unaware of it. They just talked for hours upon hours on end, their round faces blotching from the exertions of laughter, each joking or cajoling or preening, eyeing the others suspiciously while laying flattery on thick, mostly addressing the others but occasionally addressing him.
"Gonna have a marina over there..."
"Great stride for hoo-manity..."
"They people don't need a Robin Hood when they got a true social democrat fightin' for them..."
"You're living in a grand time, Otto Reid. Young man like you gets to be a part of powerful things, a pilot fish on a tide of forces, a tugboat in the era of the sea change..."
"Yes sir."
Their faces mottled in their tight collars from the exertion of eating and talking, but they seemed never to tire. He felt the need to gasp for breath. Their faces all seemed inches from him, sometimes one or another and sometimes all at once, almost as if they wanted to eat him.
"We’ll be seeing you bright and early Monday morning!" they called as some imperceptible milestone of etiquette or digestion was finally reached and he found himself accepted and excused.
Otto stood outside, in the waning afternoon light. He leaned forward across the boardwalk railing. From the nearby shadows Constance came walking up.
"How did it go?"
"Fine, I guess."
She slipped a slim arm around his waist. "I know you did fine. Won't it be great?"
"Yes."
"I know they can be intimidating. They are big men, used to being in charge. But you'll fit in – they'll get to trusting you. We'll buy you some new clothes. Oh, and while you were in there, something happened. There was a small fire at the old White place."
"You mean Ernest’s house? Ernest White? Our Ernest White?"
"Yes," she said. "But I heard it was not a big fire..."
"I've got to go check on it," he said.
"I was hoping..."
"No no, I've got to check it out! You wait here!" He ran to the car and started its engine with a roar. He shifted roughly into gear and raised dust behind him. Constance walked to the middle of the street and watched the car disappear in the distance.
Otto drove out into the country and soon arrived at the smoldering ruin. It had not been a small fire at all. Everything was gone but a charred skeleton of the frame and amorphous black hillocks of debris inside. His stomach knotted and his chest felt tight. He got out, nudged a board that was sticking out of the mound of black ruin. The destruction was overwhelmingly violent.
The statue of the Polynesian deity stood alone and implacable in the midst of the debris. Its former blue and gold paint had been burned off and it now stood singed a uniform umber. It was implacable and inscrutable, with a look of empyreal anger on its face. Its hands pointed in the four directions of the world. The fire revealed an inscription that a previous owner must have filled in with putty and painted over. Square letters read: "Walk past me and be unmade; I make corpses out of princes and princes of the dead." The eyes were featureless concaves, open forever and unblinking.
Otto ran away up one side of a nearby ridge. He told himself he was looking for Ernest. He ran harder than he had to in order to work his lungs like a bellows, to take fresh air in and purge the soot.
At the bald top of the hill he looked down at the town and through eyes bleary from his exertion, and he had a vision: he saw the land scraped clean and smooth and the river redirected. He saw houses like the houses like the houses next to them, all looping on curved lanes to nowhere, doubled back upon themselves. They stretched as far as the eye could see, a monument of captured and dissipated energy, ambition and curiosity and impatience and impertinence tapped then discharged into a spit and trickle of indifference redirected toward a turquoise trough.
Then his eyes cleared and he was looking at the squalid town and then at the ruin of White’s house, and a tremor of violence shuddered through him, and he vomited like a sick nervous schoolboy.
He walked back down the hill. He got in the car, pulled the door behind him, started the engine, and steered back onto the road. He felt suddenly awakened to the fact that he had been living in a dream, or a trap, and he wanted to get out of it. He drove north, north til he left the county, north til he crossed the state line, north til the hills disappeared behind him and the night fell thick and hid everything. He drove north toward the country he knew and grew up in. If the world was going to be at war he wanted to be there with his family. He wanted to be with the known and the familiar. He wanted to be where he trusted the compass inside of him.
Mr. White would understand. His foot pressed the accelerator. If anyone would understand, White would understand.
On the radio he heard that Germany had invaded Poland.
&nb
sp; *
Mr. White had been in the back of a wagon all afternoon, lodged amongst watermelons while the wagon made its slow progress under thick trees. Now and then he stared at the backs of the old man and woman at the buckboard, and also at a young man who was leading a woman on horseback, she holding one child and pregnant with another. It was getting dark.
A trim spinster who had been continually and silently sitting at his side turned in and leaned to him. "Someone's following us," she said at last.
"What?"
"It's nothing. The old man at the reins just sometimes gets hunches when someone's following us."
"But when did he tell you? There's no one following us – is there?"
She kept looking straight ahead but spoke to him out of the side of her mouth. "I can tell by his glances, and by his silence. I trust the old man's instinct."
Mr. White scanned the woods, then looked back at the travelers ahead of him.
"He thinks Death's following us," the spinster said. "He's switched trails twice to try to throw him. It haint done no good."
Ernest peered at the deep shadows now settling between the close-hanging branches. "You do realize people were trying to kill me today? How much longer til we get to town?"
The whole party stopped. In the front of the group, the old man at the reins held up one hand for silence. White felt the nerves screwed up tight in the back of his neck and between his shoulder blades, then a sudden jab in his ribs made him jump at least a foot in the air and he screamed like a girl. The spinster laughed, then the old man laughed, then even the young man and woman laughed, though she at least had the decorum to look a little sheepish. Ernest felt his face flush red and his ears burn. "Good Lord!" he said. "I should have known I was being played!"
The old man was doubled in of laughter. "I’m sorry, son. You town folk are just so superstitious. I can’t help myself."
White stood and fumed. Finally he spoke up. "Can you just tell me how far we are from town?"
"Why son, we’re practically here. Just over that hill."
"Then I’ll proceed on foot from now on, thankyou," he said. He huffed and jumped down and smoothed his coat to reclaim his dignity.
"Aw look, climb back on. It’s just a little further. Where in town did you say you were headed?"
"Ernest White’s place."
"Son, I think you better take a look in that direction."
He looked at the man’s face and saw no laughter now. They had finally cleared the coverage of trees and he looked in the distance and saw the exhausted fire’s thin plume of smoke.
"My house!"
"But son," the old man said. "Let us take you there…"
But he did not hear him. Instead he ran. He angled off the road and dove through the open country in the direction of the plume. He ducked through copses of trees and bolted across slippery creek banks. He knew the way. After about a half hour he threw himself into one final thick belt of blackjack and sweetgum and pushed through them and ran up the hill on the other side and when he crested it he stood panting and picked out the spent plume of smoke in the sky and followed it down to his house in ruins. He stared down at the heap of black and char. He raced down toward it.
As he neared the blackened ruin he saw the outline of a woman standing in the shadows in front of it. It was Atalanta. He tried to run to the burned remains but her arms stopped him.
"Let it go."
He tried to force his way past her, but she pushed her hands firmly against his chest as he looked past her at the smoking wreckage.
"They burned my house!"
"You were leaving it anyway. Let it go. Don't get pulled into their web anymore."
He stared at all the ruin, at all he had collected, all he had ever done – all up in smoke, and he felt a coil of black anger tightening deep inside of him. If he could damn them all, he would. But Atalanta persisted.
"Let it go."
He felt her hands pressing into his chest. The warmth from the hands sank deep but it was not enough. Then for the first time he looked down into Atalanta's face. It was teared and streaked with soot. "I’m here for you if you want me, Ernest. I’ll always be here. That’s all we need now. Don’t let them poison you again."
"They tried to kill me," he cried to her. "They've always been trying to kill me!"
His broke down into tears. He tried to pull away but her but she would not let him. She wrestled with him as if for life itself. She held him and finally managed to capture and hold his eyes in her own, and he felt a sudden realization of the all suffering they had both been through.
"There’ll be no satisfaction in revenge. The best thing to do is live."
Off in the distance, a paltry firework from the planned show for the evening went off prematurely, and the yellow and green of its false daylight was cast against them, and in his mind Ernest saw all the buildings of the town in its alien light. He suddenly felt how long he had let himself live without hope.
He looked down into Atalanta's face and held it in both hands and felt a thing begin to uncoil inside his chest. He put his head on her shoulder and wept. She took his hand in hers, and they walked away from the wreckage, away from the town.
*
Some time late in the evening Ben Sweet entered the hotel. He looked up Larr's room and went up to it without the least bit of interference. He found the old man watching the festivities from a chair by the window.
"Here are the revised plans for the lake," Ben said, tossing a mailing tube into his lap. "Mr. White has added a public park and some other facilities. Most of it uses your current land. I'm sure you'll see fit to push the changes through. Oh yes, and you're not to run for public office again. Attached are some certificates of appreciation, courtesy the Sweets, the Whites and the Pinkertons. Well, good evening. Enjoy the fireworks."
After Ben left the old man unrolled the map, glanced at it, then cast it aside. Rolled up in the map was another document, a notarized transcript of the deathbed confession of the man he'd hired to abduct the girl and her baby all those years ago. Other documents fell out from behind this, page after page of dossiers transcribing the congressman's misdeeds over decades, back-stabbing deals with men who thought they could trust him even now. Mr. White had kept his investigators busy for years – busy and relentless and quiet. The Sweets had kept an accounting of their own as well, and pages upon pages of sworn affidavits announced themselves and damned him.
Noah Larr sank down in the chair and cried.
*
Years later Mr. White heard one more version of the story, and given the odd jumble of facts this is the one he finally chose to believe:
In the Fall of 1901 a horse-drawn cart came through town in the evening. It was colorfully decorated on its sides with exotic animals and stars, but there was a sad gray horse in front, head down and clopping slowly as twilight fell.
A rakish young man in a collapsed top hat held the reins. He looked up as he passed the train station. A bright new metal sign read "Welcome to Blaze." He had heard that the town drew its name from a blaze left along the trail by Ponce de Leon's men, as they marched in search of the fountain of youth. But not much of the wonder from those legends had rubbed off on the place, and the people gave him low, suspicious looks as he came through town.
He decided this was not the kind of place receptive to his kind of show, but he met a beautiful young girl at the roadside who was apparently the toast of three leading men in town. She laughed when she told him that none of them dared touch her, because each thought she was the other's girl. Her green eyes caught him and he laughed and led her up to see the odd wares and elixirs and promises he peddled. "Finally!" she said.
He moved on through town before sunrise the next day, past Main Street then past the few blocks of houses and back out the other side. Some miles down the road he looked back, but then he continued heading into the milky sunrise.
But in the end the story and all of its versions did not matter. Mr.
White lived and became poorer and stranger than he ever imagined. He and Atalanta raised three children in a town you'll never hear of, doing work that hardly suited him, going by a name that did not mean anything to anyone. Time wore softly on him like weathered denim, relaxing with age and conforming to the shapes of his bones. He relaxed against his own resisting and a wider world opened outside and inside of him than he'd ever foreseen, random and vibrant and alive like a child's spilled paints. In the evenings when the children were in bed and he and Atalanta were on the porch, he wore the kaleidoscope of the emotions rocketing through him like a Joseph's coat, in permanent surprise at the mystery of returned love and of new life fierce and unbeholden. In time he began to believe that everyone was made for something wonderful.
