The Reign of the Kingfisher

by T. J. Martinson

  “I have to go to work. I’ll bring my laptop with me. I’ll be on the message boards.”

  “Whatever.” Parker flapped her hand in dismissal. “If you’re going to leave, just leave.”

  As Wren passed by Parker on her way to the bathroom, Parker reached out and grabbed her gently by the arm.

  “I’m sorry. I know this bothers you, all of this,” Parker said. “It bothers me, too. But this isn’t the right time to be acting on feelings. We need to be realistic and logical, and we need to cover our asses before we can even think about doing anything else.”

  Wren didn’t say anything. Parker squeezed her arm, lightly, tenderly.

  “We have to look after ourselves before we can help anyone else. That’s just the way the world works, Wren.”

  “Is it, though?”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Parker smiled. It was a smile that either welcomed a kiss or threatened a slap, so Wren chose to let it be. It was too early in the day to decrypt Parker’s intentions.

  3 JUDGE OF MAN

  EVERY MORNING LUCINDA TILLMAN RUNS. Sometimes with the wind, sometimes against it. She runs along Lake Michigan with the other runners who acclimate to the powdery grayscale of predawn with specially designed clothes meant to capture and reflect the stare of oncoming headlights. They run with their keys and wallets in their socks or fanny packs that bounce with each forward stride. They run as individuals without any sort of predictable formation and speak only in a vernacular of grunts and nods and half-waves, and at various paces they begin to spread out across the Western shore of the lake, squinting as the sun rises over their shoulders, breathing in through their noses and out through their mouths.

  Her running shoes are old and worn and they emit a soft sigh each time they hit the ground.

  The other runners along the lake shine iridescent in their neon windbreakers and chartreuse sneakers, buzzing points of electricity against stony, cloud-beaten Lake Michigan. But Tillman wears black sweats, black shoes. And she runs fast, faster than most, and sometimes she runs like this for thirty minutes, an hour, or several hours. A near-sprint. She runs until she feels like her lungs might collapse, her heart might give out, the world might dissolve and fall away. And then she stops, sits down cross-legged wherever she is, waits for her breath, and runs back even faster in the direction she came from.

  * * *

  Tillman stood at her apartment door fishing the apartment key from her ankle socks. Behind the door, she heard Al Green crooning on the record player and this meant her father was awake. Sure enough, she found him sitting like a museum statue in the recliner by the window. He was wearing the same pajamas she had bought him for Christmas four years ago even though she had bought him a new pair every year since. They were stacked in the closet like a drunken pyramid.

  The record player lazily spun at her father’s side. His eyes were closed and he opened only one of them when she walked in the door.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “I went for a run,” she answered, just as she did every morning.

  “Where?”

  “The lake.”

  “Why?”

  “Exercise.”

  “I know this,” he said. “I am not stupid.”

  “It’s going to be hot today. Hot and humid. I could feel it.”

  “Always hot. Because conditioner unit”—he pointed to the air conditioner in the window—“blows hotter air inside.”

  “No it doesn’t,” she said, unlacing her shoes. “It’s a new air conditioner, Dad.”

  “I know it when I feel it. I am not an idiot.”

  She left him sitting in his recliner, and as she passed him she thought he looked smaller today than he had yesterday. Yesterday she had thought this as well. This didn’t make her observation any less true, but it comforted her on some level to know that, at the very least, she was noticing his gradual dissolution. She wondered if someday in the as-of-yet distant future she might come home to find nothing more than the mere suggestion of her father, the man having fully collapsed into himself.

  He called after her in the kitchen. “What time you come home from work today?”

  She pretended not to hear him.

  In the kitchen, she made a protein shake. She added honey to the frothy mix and stirred. It tasted like sidewalk chalk and dirt and brown-mushy banana. And honey. What she couldn’t choke down in a single swig she brought with her into the living room. She sat on the couch next to her father and turned on the television for the morning news. The news anchor competed with Al Green in the small, dimly lit space.

  “Turn it off,” her father protested. “I have my music.”

  She turned up the volume on the remote.

  “—the gunman then proceeds to demand the release of the medical examiner’s report, which our producers were able to confirm has, in fact, never been released to the public. Until the ME report is released, the gunman says, he will kill again. This threat is all the more ominous considering that the gunman claims to have more hostages. We are still waiting on a statement from the police department, but for the time being, we are going to show a clip of the video right now for those of you who have not already seen it online. Even though we have edited the footage to remove most of the graphic imagery, we want to caution that particularly sensitive viewers, such as young children, may want to leave the room at this point.”

  “Dad,” Tillman said. “Are you seeing this?”

  One eye struggled open. Al Green hit a high note and simply hung there.

  “I do not see what’s happening,” he said, but watched anyway as the grainy video played. When it was over, the camera returned to the news anchor, clearly improvising as he went along, waiting for his producers to speak into his ear. Tillman turned down the volume until only a whisper escaped the speakers. In the near-silence, her fingers flexed into a fist.

  There is something unimaginably cruel and small, Tillman thought, about filming the murder of someone and then sharing it with the watching world. This is a specter haunting the twenty-first century, the unspoken hunger for these once-unspeakable things. She imagined her final moment on earth replayed a million times for everyone but herself.

  “That man said the Kingfisher is still alive?” her father asked with a temerity she wasn’t used to hearing from him.

  “That’s what you take away from that?” she asked sharply, and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Her father closed his eyes again, knitted his hands together, and rested them atop his stomach. He made a low sound in his throat, a grated rumble.

  “Dad?” she asked.

  He smiled, breathing loudly. “It would be nice,” he said finally, without opening his eyes.

  “What?”

  “It would be nice if the Kingfisher is alive today. But he is not. He is dead. You want to know how I know? I know because he would not leave us like he did if he was alive. That man on the television, he is crazy. He is a crazy person with stupid ideas.”

  “You missed the point,” Tillman said. “That man killed someone. He put the video on the internet. He has other hostages and he’s going to kill them. And then he’s going to show the whole world again.”

  Her father shrugged, a gesture that seemed to require great effort. “People die each day, Lucy. It’s very little new. So maybe we see it sometimes. Maybe we don’t. It does not mean anything if I see it on my television or I do not.”

  She shook her head, readying her possible rebuttals. But she reminded herself of the most useful advice her mother had ever gifted her: “Your father likes arguing more than anyone likes making a point.”

  Tillman collapsed on the couch next to her father’s chair. Her head felt heavy. She dug her palms into her eyes, trying to erase the face of the hostage the moment before the gun fired. He had stared at the camera. Into the camera. Into the millions of waiting eyes. His lips quivering, eyes wild. Like nothing you’ve ever seen unless, of course, you’ve seen it, in whic
h case you instantly recall every other time you’ve been so unfortunate as to witness that indelible moment of primal terror, a life on the brink of ending. That moment when a life is staring back at you, begging without words.

  She looked up. She was not back there. She was here.

  “I think,” her father said. He waved a finger, about to mark his point, eyes still closed. “I think that if you remembered the Kingfisher, you would also think it nice for the Kingfisher to be alive today. But you do not remember. You were very little. Maybe that is truth. If the Kingfisher could be alive, you would know. He would clean up the dirty streets. It would make your job much more easy. When do you work today?”

  “We’ve talked about this,” she said, just as she did every morning. “I’m not going into work today.”

  “But they need you today,” he said, his voice falling back into the fog of his crippling mind. With a shaking finger, he tapped his temple and let it rest there. “My smart daughter. My strong daughter. They need you.”

  “I’m not going into work today,” she said again, but this time louder. Not for her father to hear, but for herself to hear.

  * * *

  Lucinda Tillman was in middle school when the first Kingfisher story broke. She attended St. Mary’s Academy, a private school for girls nestled due south of Logan Square. The other girls she hung around were mostly other first-generation immigrants from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, which meant that Tillman, whose parents were Haitian, was free to observe but not much else. The other girls brought to school newspapers they purchased with money their parents gave them for lunch. They sat outside before the class bell rang, turning through the pages. Their interest in the Kingfisher, so far as Tillman could tell, derived not from the city’s collective fascination with this man, but from the romantic ideal of a true-to-life superhero who, so far as anyone knew, lacked the quintessential love interest. There was an opening and they were looking to fill it.

  “What do you think he looks like?” asked one of the girls.

  “Dark,” replied another. “And handsome.”

  “Very handsome.”

  “And tall.”

  “Very tall.”

  “And strong.”

  “Very strong.”

  The nuns at school discouraged the girls from reading about the Kingfisher. To them, the mythic Kingfisher existed on a diametrically opposed plane to the other names they prayed to. They confiscated the newspapers and tore them up in long, exaggerated motions, faces twisted into disgust. They burned them in trash cans with sulfur matches that stunk up the room. Sister Frances made each confiscation a sort of ritual, turning slowly from the orange flames in the trash can to deliver a spontaneous and improvised catechism.

  It is not man’s job to punish his fellow man. Leave this to the Creator Eternal. Only God, and God alone, can judge mankind.

  The day that the Kingfisher’s death was announced in the newspapers, Tillman was in the ninth grade. She heard the news from the girl who sold her individual cigarettes in the alleyway before school. Sister Frances gave the announcement over the PA system and amid the static and the steel-frequency, Tillman was surprised to hear the sadness that permeated Sister Frances’s uncharacteristically quiet voice as she reminded the students that only God, and God alone, could judge mankind. She said a prayer, lost in the static of the intercom.

  On her way home from school, Tillman bought one of the few remaining copies of the day’s Inquisitor from a street vendor. The front page was the article written by Marcus Waters. It was titled “The Kingfisher Dies.” When her parents arrived home from work, they listened solemnly as she translated the article into Creole. Although they both spoke proficient English, they preferred the familiarity of their first language. It was a small comfort, which might have been necessary now more than ever.

  A captain of a shipping barge passing through the Chicago River had spotted a body under a bridge and called it in. Cops pulled the body from the water. It had been burnt horribly. Shot and stabbed and carved. Mutilated. After what the article called “extensive testing,” police officials and the county coroner determined that it was indeed the enigmatic Kingfisher. No suspects, no further evidence, no justice. Just several hundred words brittle against paper.

  Her mother cried. Her father delivered some Creole variation of “no good goes unpunished.” But she herself watched the two of them, stone-faced and unimpressed, smelling vaguely of the menthol cigarette she had smoked on her way home.

  Her father turned on the television. Happy Days. They watched through the night. Tillman pretended to laugh when the audience laughed.

  The following morning, her father decided to send a letter to the journalist Marcus Waters. It was a sympathy letter of sorts. Though her father had never met Marcus Waters, he nonetheless felt close to him after reading every last word of the Kingfisher articles for nearly five years—or rather, having his daughter translate and read to him these articles. Perhaps it was appropriate then that he also had his daughter write the letter as he dictated it to her in his native tongue.

  And all these years later, though the rest of the four pages were completely lost to memory, she could still remember the closing line of the letter, and when she remembered it she remembered it in her father’s drag-and-glide voice: “I am sorry you lost your friend, because he was also my friend. He was all our friend and he did good things and I miss him, too.”

  4 PRO BONO

  AFTER LEAVING STETSON’S OFFICE, Marcus found Jeremiah waiting outside the door, staring down at his phone. He was watching the video, eyes inches away from the small screen on which Marcus saw the same sickening mask. Miniaturized, but no less imposing. When Jeremiah looked up, he stared straight through Marcus and into Stetson’s office, lips pressed together so tightly they disappeared.

  “Someone will meet you outside at the car, Mr. Waters,” Jeremiah said flatly and pushed past him to walk through Stetson’s open door. Before Jeremiah shut the door behind him, Marcus heard Stetson ask what the hell he was doing barging in like that.

  A telephone ringing, and then another, and then another. All of them in a floundering rhythm.

  Marcus shuffle-footed down the hall like a last-call drunk, feeling completely lost in almost every sense of the word. The floor seemed to shift with each uncertain step.

  Walter Williams. Walter Williams. No matter how much he tried to focus on the physical world in front of him, the name echoed in his head.

  A flurry of uniformed officers scurried around him in a half run toward the motor pool. He assumed they were going after the other people whose names Marcus had given Stetson just a few minutes before—the other two people who were with Walter the night the Kingfisher saved him. Or at least he hoped that’s what the police were doing. After Marcus gave the names, Stetson thanked him and said, “So you think this gunman is rounding up people that the Kingfisher saved?”

  “I don’t know. But I know that was Walter Williams.”

  “The Kingfisher saved a lot of people, Marcus. So why are you worried about these two guys?”

  “Because they were there with Walter that night.”

  Stetson nodded. “But you didn’t use their real names in your book, right? I’m just trying to understand how someone could have known about it.”

  “I don’t know.” Marcus shrugged. “There were other people there that night. I don’t know how many. The story may have gotten around. I don’t know.”

  Stetson thought about this for a moment and nodded. “I’ll see that someone does a welfare check on them.” Marcus thought he had heard a thin trace of skepticism in Stetson’s voice that seemed much less thin in hindsight.

  But to Marcus it was simply beyond the realm of coincidence that the hostage in the video happened to be Walter Williams and that there were exactly two other hostages shown in the video. And besides, Marcus wasn’t sure he believed in coincidences. There was something lurking in the word—a faith in neatness behind t
he chaos of life—that Marcus absolutely despised after sixty-eight years of living.

  * * *

  It was a few weeks after his wife’s death that Marcus decided to brush off the old files—kept in an aquamarine filing cabinet in his closet—and write the book he had always told himself he would one day write. He imagined it as the culmination of a career he had recently left behind. He got in touch with some old contacts, but he mostly planned on using the stories and interviews he had collected during his time reporting on the Kingfisher thirty years prior. Word must have spread, as it often does, and as he was finishing up his manuscript, he received an unexpected phone call from someone who began the conversation by saying that the Kingfisher had saved him and two others. Even over the phone, the man’s voice sounded desperate to convince Marcus that the story he had to tell was true, but Marcus remained dubious. And rightfully so. Those who claimed similar stories had contacted him back during the Kingfisher years. The Kingfisher had saved them, they said. He’d even met with several of them. They told stories of a man who, at the exact right moment, had descended from the heavens to shield them from a bullet, a man who emerged from the earth to whisk them away from an attacker. Whether or not their stories were fabricated or even just exaggerated, Marcus wasn’t one to say, but he couldn’t print these single-sourced stories and still call himself a journalist.

  And it was with this same trepidation that Marcus agreed to meet Walter for coffee. Walter had just gotten off from work. He was wearing hospital scrubs, said he was a nurse in the ICU at Mercy. He had a smile, unfaltering, that seemed carved into his face. But when Marcus asked him to tell his story about the Kingfisher, Walter’s smile vanished. “First things first, I don’t want you using my name or anything. I had to work like hell to get out of that past life and get to where I am today. Are we good on that?”