The Prince Of Deadly Weapons Page 14

  Cool reflection would have told him this was useless, foolish, dangerous, destructive. But some more deeply collective need was at work and made him disregard those simple decrees.

  There is an old adage— you run the con long enough, you run the risk of it running you. Dane wondered, questioned, had he bought into the pitch of a second chance? And not some gamer's description of a second chance.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  DANE HAD ASKED for her trust, and as dangerous as what he had suggested plausibly was, she had said yes.

  She stood just inside her open balcony door looking upon the night. Dane would be at the yacht club dinner very soon. Things would change very, very soon. Just above the roof tops the trees sounded like touched strings and all her pretense at calmness had little effect. A drink was mandatory.

  She sipped and stared and thought about what he had said back there on River Road. She stared and smoked and then in the window she stood beside the desk light reflected like some soft mirage. In the glassy shadows Taylor's picture caught her eye.

  Again the trees sounded like touched strings as she sat at the desk. She put her drink down, her cigarette down. She turned off the light and reached for his picture.

  In that darkness she felt a powerful transition going on inside her. We bear our pains like children and it is only by giving birth to them that we free them. And in doing so give voice to the needs of going on.

  She told him silently, almost mournfully, she was going on. Essie knew you cannot disregard the future and expect not to be disregarded yourself. She knew you cannot be married to shadows unless you care to exist with fictions signed in blood that do nothing for the living, give nothing to living.

  Essie would not allow this to happen to herself. She felt too much honest hunger to let it happen. She took Taylor's picture and kissed it and she cried thinking about all those deeply wished pleasures and deeply felt promises that once had been so alive.

  * * *

  PEOPLE WISH they could recall the past, recast it as the present, and relive it for all futures to see and praise…"

  With lights dimmed the investors around the dinner table watched the video of Nathan's tribute speech to his dead son that night on the deck of the Little California.

  "And in a way," Nathan went on, "a handful of God has touched us with that possibility. Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to meet someone who is a living symbol of what the center wants to achieve."

  From where he sat at the head of the table Nathan studied the body language of his dinner guests as the lens held on the face of a boy who would have been blind but for the chance of a dream offered through his dead son.

  The shadowy discourse of that quiet boy standing reverentially off to one side of the stage said as much as any words. Nathan saw one older couple at the table touch hands. He saw a coarse gray face across from them soften, and the edges of distance on another grapple with something heartfelt. Nathan knew, he had them.

  A second chance at immortality is about the finest angle on a sales pitch there is for raising spirits as well as raising money. The tragedy of someone's suffering being of benefit to someone else is one of the most time-honored selling tools in the world. It is almost a religion unto itself.

  But something untoward had come over Nathan that caused him to be unable to watch the monitor as he spoke of his son's charity and selflessness, his sense of love and common decency. Each phrase he had worked on to make just right in those days of pain were now again like honest nails driven into the complete sense of denial he had been living with.

  These feelings were either fueled or aggravated by the fact that he was succeeding now just as he had in the past, by failing as a human being. By lying. By scamming. By cunning.

  Why had he not given himself over completely to finding out who had killed his son? Was the memorial just a desperate alternative to his personal failures as father, as man? A testament to his own guilt rather than his son's dream? Or was he more concerned with just the plain simple trappings of going on?

  He tried to look within himself for that which was unconscionable and selfish for an answer, for that which was beyond love and common decency, when a light from the door opening behind him fell across the table.

  A shadow filled that pale rectangle and as he looked up a pair of hands came to rest affectionately on his shoulders and Dane, smiling, said, "I had car trouble, otherwise I'd have been here sooner."

  * * *

  DANE JOINED them at the table. He sat beside Ivy and answered the potential investors' questions like a gentleman. He absorbed their stares and their small talk and their smiles. Nathan saw it was the same each time. The boy was like a cup into which fragments of an investor's countless dreams could be poured. He was the poster child they could use to toast their good deeds.

  Nathan drank and watched and listened and as he did an intolerable clarity began to overcome him. There was little to no difference between himself and his dinner guests.

  He tried to remain natural and interested in what was going on around him, to return Ivy's silent looks of affection and pride, but at the same time he went through an irrevocable process of trying to qualify and quantify his compromises of character.

  He told himself he could have done all this straight. Just him and the boy. No Charles. No General. No numbered-trust-account favors. No laundered money. He could have changed his life and humped out the miles like a soldier.

  "What's it like," a woman sitting across from Dane asked, "to get a second chance at seeing? Is the world different? Do you feel different?"

  Nathan's stare rose from the rim of his goblet as Dane went around that amphitheater of faces to hold on the woman across from him who looked to have navigated years and sorrow.

  "I never took anything too seriously," said Dane. "I was your standard issue twenty-year-old. High on do me, give me, take me. You might say I could only read the writing on the wall after I blindly crashed into it."

  Dane's eyes closed a moment, then opened. He played with his napkin a bit, then fidgeted with a knife beside his plate while he took time to think.

  "Ma'am, things look different because I feel different." His raspy voice crackled a bit. "I can take a picture of Nathan's son and I can look into the eyes I'm seeing with. That shows you how heartbreakingly beautiful the world is. And maybe that's the point of what a new set of eyes is worth. You get to see, really see, what is not only heartbreaking but what is beautiful— because you are a part of both."

  He turned to Ivy. "Isn't that right?"

  Her muted attractive face tucked in a bit and quietly agreed. Then Dane folded his hands and addressed the table with a boyish sincerity. "That's what your investment is. A statement that because you see differently you feel differently and so will act differently. That you see things which are heartbreaking and you want to help make from that something beautiful."

  Dane now turned his attention to Nathan. "Take Nathan… it was Taylor's heartbreaking loss and inspiring sentiments that became the ground breaking idea behind the center. Nathan chose to find beauty at the heart of sorrow. And we can all share in that."

  Nathan put the goblet down as the circle of faces at the table closed in on him.

  "I want to tell you something else about Nathan," said Dane, "that will give you an insight into the goodwill of his character. It is also a way of making a little confession."

  And just like that, with their interest piqued, Dane began telling everyone about the box of plasma delivered earlier that day to Nathan's office. With humble charm he detailed how this charitable undertaking begun by Taylor was now being carried on by the father. You could have filled a book of virtues with the stares and slight nods and smiles of the dinner guests that someone would so go out of their way for such helpless creatures.

  Ivy and Nathan, enervated by how close this conversation came to the dark traces of their crime, tried to find solace in each other's stare.

  "They'd both been working so hard
," said Dane. "I decided to do them a favor and deliver the box." He rested his hand on Ivy's forearm. "And this is where my confession starts… I was walking across the parking lot and reaching for my keys when I dropped the box."

  Before reactions could settle in, before Nathan could disarm this conversation by saying it was all right Dane just went on. "So, when I got to my truck I opened the box."

  Dane could feel Ivy's arm stiffen. "I'm so embarrassed." He let the words hang as he repeated, "I opened the box, Nathan. I looked inside. I felt you needed to know. I looked inside to make sure I hadn't destroyed anything."

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  DANE SAW THE struggle on Nathan's face. A momentary failure of self-mastery had exposed him. It was an emotional flaw whose geometry Dane knew all too well. That empty form known as permanence had been ruptured. They could well now be dealing in hazards and extinction. Dane felt his heart flex and fill quickly, then more quickly, more urgently, as he said, "Nothing damaged, nothing lost. Your package got delivered, Nathan, just as you planned it."

  * * *

  WHILE THEY had brandy on the patio that overlooked the yacht club bay Nathan took a moment to pull Ivy aside. He felt her arm, it was clammy and cold. She was, he saw, on the verge of a horrible anxiety attack.

  Neither said a word, neither dared until Ivy realized, "He's leaving."

  * * *

  DANE WAS just about down the patio steps when Nathan leaned over the wall and called to him. Dane stopped. With hands in pockets and jacket collar now turned up he came about. His body arced back to look at Nathan. This was all done with a cool essential calm kind of turn.

  There were so many dinner guests nearby all Nathan could say was, "I'm going to call you later, all right?"

  There was an aqueous light that reflected up from the bay and along the white stairwell walls where Dane looked at Nathan and said, "If you think you need to."

  * * *

  DANE SAT in Essie's darkened living room and placed the cordless phone back down in its cradle. He smoked and leaned forward in the chair. He rested his forearms on his knees and closed his eyes.

  Everything that would ever happen in the world was happening here, happening now. Everything that would ever happen to him would happen here, would now happen.

  There is no journey too small that would not prove it true. One man who had not gone more than a hundred miles in his own life had shown that.

  Every wicked arrangement, every violation would come to pass. Every ploy or plot. From the foolish to the sublime. From the pathetic to the exquisite. Noble, ignoble. Each part of that one paradox— was all this a necessity?

  Essie came back into the room and Dane's eyes opened. He looked up and she offered him a drink he did not want, did not take. He pointed to the phone. "Nathan left three messages in the last hour for me to call him tonight."

  "Are you going to?"

  "Tonight… no."

  "What will happen now?"

  His head moved from side to side as he mused over the possibilities.

  "Do you think he will try and hurt you? Do you think he will try something violent?"

  Dane stared at his hands. At the smoke that rose from his cigarette. A phantom gesture not unlike today with the steam rising from the roof tops of Locke. And when he spoke it was as if the words were deeply felt and long remembered. "You lay out a premise, you set the tone, then you cap it with a temptation. There's only one thing left after that… the close."

  "Who taught you that?"

  Dane sadly looked up at Essie. "That… was my father."

  Dane then just sat there. He felt as if he had inherited something horrible. He could only describe it as a dire need to hold together the extremes of excess and deficiency. This feeling seemed to him beyond the appeal of rational law and he knew that it could, could tear him apart.

  "Is it all right," he said, "if I tell you there is hardly anything I haven't done wrong at least once. And maybe, I'm no better than any of them, only more so."

  She set the drink she had been holding down. She took his cigarette and laid it on the ashtray lip. She put both of his hands in hers and pulled him up.

  He watched the shaded outline of her hands as they rose to touch his face. They sloughed their way up the skin line feeling out the bones and flesh until his stare was poised between her palms.

  "I made a confession tonight," she whispered.

  He could smell the body soap and perfume she wore so beautifully and inexactly real.

  "And I made a promise."

  Her eyes locked him in. There was such future there.

  "I told the past—"

  She leaned up and kissed his neck.

  "— I'm going on."

  Her mouth slid along his cheek like wet air.

  "I'm going on."

  She found his mouth and her kiss felt as if he might have only dreamed it.

  "We're going on."

  It was a weightless moment.

  "Do you hear, we're going on."

  They could have been any boy or any girl, in any town at any—

  A door buzzer cut the moment. A tinny bleating and their embraced form marked on the window came apart.

  * * *

  WHEN ESSIE opened the door Roy was leaning against the alcove wall. "Sometimes," he said, "I think you moved to the second floor just to make it difficult for me to see you."

  She crossed her arms. "That's your vanity talking, Roy."

  He nodded. "Probably."

  She got her back against the opposite alcove wall. "Why are you here, Roy?"

  He braced up on his crutches. "Do you think we could go out for a drink?"

  "I won't take any part in hurting Francie."

  "I just…" He listed anxiously as he reached for her but Essie pulled away just enough to make it impossible. "I only wanted to talk."

  "I can't."

  He glanced through the partly open door and up that shadowed stairwell to her apartment. Mr. Well Spoken was probably hiding in the dark and getting a fuckin' earful of his little beg session. "Company?"

  "Yes."

  Roy's upper teeth bit at the edges of his beard along the lower lip. "Why did you stop going out with me?"

  "Because I realized you weren't, and could not be, kind."

  "I just needed time."

  "It wasn't time you needed."

  "Let's go have a drink and I'll replead my case."

  "I could try and be funny and say 'I'm outside your jurisdiction' but the truth, Roy, kindness is showing compassion, at least sometimes, for someone else's well-being when it comes into conflict with your own. You were terrible at the one and too greedy for the other."

  Roy's eyes darted toward the stairwell. "How 'bout Mr. Well Spoken. I bet he comes out of the shower just dripping compassion."

  That was the old Roy. The verbal shark attack hiding as a smile. "Good night, Roy. Say hi to Francie for me."

  She started back in. Roy bit down hard on his bad feelings. "You know, Essie. You're the kind of person I'd like to be, but can't. And you know why?" She stopped and looked back at him. "Because I hate myself too much. Because I'm bitter too much."

  When he stood a long time Roy's breathing got thick, almost muddy. His shoulders sagged so his back pressed out awkwardly. If he had only put half the effort into discovering a sense of compassion as he had into carrying around that broken body.

  "Dear Roy, did you ever think that you might be exactly the same kind of person you are even if you'd never had polio?"

  * * *

  WHEN SHE returned Essie found Dane sitting in the far corner of the balcony, waiting.

  "Did you hear?"

  "I came out here not to."

  "It was Roy."

  Dane looked out into that alley of a street, with its mood piece of balconies and lights.

  "He hates you."

  "Hate has a way of getting around."

  "Dane, we're all entitled to our secrets."

  He glanc
ed at Essie. "I gotta go."

  "You don't have to be afraid."

  "Of what happens?"

  "Of me."

  * * *

  IN THE blue silence of evening Dane crossed Disappointment Slough alone. The ironies of how something is compared to how it's called took him along all kinds of moody and significant channel ways from Discovery Bay to the dock of Taylor's house on Disappointment Slough.

  In deep thought Dane realized he must now confront certain inevitabilities. No matter what he accomplished here, no matter how he resurrected his life, when he was done he would have to leave. That had been the one part of the bargain when he agreed to it which was the most attractive. A new name, an undisclosed location, and all ties to the past severed.

  He pulled up to the dock and tied off. He sat in the boat and looked up into the long channel way of Disappointment Slough, into all that solitude and peace.

  He could still feel Essie's face against the line of his throat. Her skin and hair were still in his senses. His mind started to conjure and he could not shut it down. He visualized this imaginary life there with her, and a steady dose of Paul and Sancho Maria and the bar at the airport and maybe, maybe he'd even coax Paul into teaching him how to fly and he could hear all the guttural jabbing he'd have to take during that little scenario. Then he stopped. He had so visualized the moments he actually felt as if they were happening.

  And in that quietly rocking boat Dane came to realize how much of his own life he had thrown away, and because of that, how much more he would probably have to lose if ever life meant to be again.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  WALKING UP THROUGH that grove of trees Dane saw something that caused him to stop. It hung starkly from the porch roof light and left him uneasy. He'd had or did have a visitor.

  * * *

  USING THE shadows as cover he approached the house. The wind ran coolly across his back. The porch was tangents of light amidst the branches until he was close enough to detail a perfectly executed rope noose which held a beer bottle by the neck.

  * * *

  HE KEPT to the dark side of the porch. He stayed attuned to any wisps of sound or movement. The wind continued to run coolly across his back, and as he approached the dangling beer bottle the boards beneath his feet creaked like the hull of some old, old ship breathing.