Memorize ajar remainI’ll wait out in the car, I say, and hurry out of this stupid restroom, cursing Gerti, Hei?ur, and Edda in my mind. I treat everyone equally, you can grant me that. As I walk past Gerti, hanging bowlegged from the counter with a can of Coke and a Camel cigarette, I resort to the excellent idea ofsticking out my poetic tongue at him. The hand holding the Coke can freezes halfway to his mouth, but his expression doesn’t change, not one bit. Hickey nodded.‘Busy man.’ I’m outside, I texted.Please meet me at your front door. A few minutes later he heard Winifred open her door softly, presumably to see if anyone was in the sitting room. Then she closed it. Montemayor immediately opened his, darted into the sitting room and listened at Winifred’s door. Perry Mendelson was staring at me now that my nakedness was mostly covered. He was feeling something— what, I couldn’t tell. Many paths are mysterious, but none like the paths of the Eastfjords fog, which passes by and doesn’t pass by. The fog is a king’s daughter under a spell, they say. I’m a little assistant nurse under a spell. I might be released from it tonight. “You mean the committees,” Duncan put in. “The runners bear messages from one colony to the next. Running south from Johnson Hall.” Woolford stepped into the light.“Stand down, sergeant,” he replied in his best tone of command. “I am here to speak with the officer in charge.” The door opened for the hundredth time. I checked my watch for the hundredth time. It was twenty to two. Hickey put down his pint and sat up. A tall sullen man had entered the pub, dressed in a belted beige trench coat despite the heat. He had hands like shovels and cr?pe-soled shoes on great big splayed-out feet. He spotted Hickey, assessed me with dead eyes, and then clocked the Jiffy pack. Aw Jesus, I remember thinking as he plodded doggedly towards us. This is our man? I threw a glance at Hickey: can’t you do better? “If they had made an extra copy they would not have beaten me so. No one else must have such a key.” Duncan was alone as he reached the downstairs hallway, and paused again at the extraordinary painting of the document he had noticed before venturing into the largest chamber at the front of the house. Flanking an ornate marble fireplace were shelves of books. Over the fireplace was a large portrait of King George. Over a vase of lilac blossoms on a side table was a painting of a bare-breasted Indian woman on her knees, extending a handful of tobacco to a richly dressed European. Two more paintings adorned an adjoining wall, one of a native in a pose of earnest Christian prayer, the second of a fierce warrior with two eagle feathers extending from the back of his head, one upright and the other jutting at an angle. The warrior was accurately adorned with tattoos and quillwork, dressed in loincloth and leggings. Behind him was a murky forest where the dim shapes of a wolf and a bear could be seen. Mrs Reid wasn’t willing to drag that whole ugly business up again, so she ushered me in to the warmth of her kitchen and set about producing dishes of food, trying as she had always tried to fill some hole she perceived in me, but I wasn’t hungry. The red door loured beside us, connecting her quarters to the castle proper. She glanced at it from time to time, wary of rousing the big bad ogre who lived on the other side. Surely the old bastard was deaf by now? What was he, after all — ninety? What followed in the next few days was quite inevitable. Mortimer had never shown any particular interest in Winifred. However, when he saw that she was Montemayor’s wife, he immediately became excited. I moved next to Newland and he gave me a one-armed hug. ‘He’s repossessing it,’ Hickey realised, and took off clambering over the debris to jump out the broken window. I listened as he started up another machine and went booting after the repossessed one, and you’ll have read in the papers how that particular confrontation panned out. He was a brave man, Hickey, I’ll give him that. A braver man than me, which is not to say much for him. I could be dead, I realised with a flutter of vertigo when they were both gone and silence had returned to the empty site. I clutched my aching ribs and rocked. Dead, I could be dead. I could be just as dead as the other Tristram St Lawrence. The lucky one. He’d look forward to every late spring when the green grass bore its blue flowers. It was impossible, too, to talk to“M?sieur” Sert about his painting. These gigantic constructions, the hard work of his assistants (for he insisted, in person, on being faithful to his maquettes), the excessive use of silver and gold that failed to conceal a basic deficiency, those streams of redcurrant jam, those swollen muscles, those demented contortions of figures, those riotous shapes, left me feeling confused, and praise stuck in my throat. Phil found the first bus abandoned in the desert, out on the northeast edge of the Antelope Valley. From time to time, Jim took him out there, far enough from law enforcement to shoot the rifles and pistols he collected. Jim Durant, a hardworking but carefree man double the twenty-one-year-old’s size, was someone Phil felt lucky to have on his side. It was Jim who’d let Phil tag along on jobs, and it was Jim, too, who had talked the trailer park manager — Uncle Gaspar — into letting Phil shack up there when he needed the help. Jim might have been “only” a decade older than Phil, but these acts of kindness and the faint, final wisps of hair that clung to the top of the big man’s scalp seemed to give him a type of paternal authority Phil hadn’t sensed from anyone. Sometimes Phil saw him like an old Southern politician, wagging a finger at bureaucracy, making sure of certain things, like, no one takes care of your business but you. Like, being given a hand up from a friend is different than getting a handout from a program.. |