Bag of Bones (69 page)

I carry a comb in my back pocket. I took it out and combed her hair back from her forehead and her temples. She was starting to look put together again, but there was still something missing. Something that was connected in my mind with Royce Merrill. That was crazy, though . . . wasn't it?

“Mike? What cane? What cane are you thinking about it?”

Then it came to me. “A candy cane,” I said. “The kind with stripes.” From my pocket I took the two white ribbons. Their red edges looked almost raw in the uncertain light. “Like these.” I tied her hair back
in two little ponytails. Now she had her ribbons; she had her black dog; the sunflowers had relocated a few feet north, but they were there. Everything was more or less the way it was supposed to be.

Thunder blasted, somewhere close a tree fell, and the lights went out. After five seconds of dark-gray shadows, they came on again. I carried Ki back to the kitchen, and when we passed the cellar door, something laughed behind it. I heard it; Ki did, too. I could see it in her eyes.

“Take care of me,” she said. “Take care of me cause I'm just a little guy. You promised.”

“I will.”

“I love you, Mike.”

“I love you, too, Ki.”

The kettle was huffing. I filled the cup to the halfway mark with hot water, then topped it up with milk, cooling it off and making it richer. I took Kyra over to the couch. As we passed the dining-room table I glanced at the IBM typewriter and at the manuscript with the crossword-puzzle book lying on top of it. Those things looked vaguely foolish and somehow sad, like gadgets that never worked very well and now do not work at all.

Lightning lit up the entire sky, scouring the room with purple light. In that glare the laboring trees looked like screaming fingers, and as the light raced across the sliding glass door to the deck I saw a woman standing behind us, by the woodstove. She was indeed wearing a straw hat, with a brim the size of a cartwheel.

“What do you mean, the river is almost in the sea?” Ki asked.

I sat down and handed her the cup. “Drink that up.”

“Why did the men hurt my mommy? Didn't they want her to have a good time?”

“I guess not,” I said. I began to cry. I held her on my lap, wiping away the tears with the backs of my hands.

“You should have taken some sad-pills, too,” Ki said. She held out her cocoa. Her hair ribbons, which I had tied in big sloppy bows, bobbed. “Here. Drink some.”

I drank some. From the north end of the house came another grinding, crackling crash. The low rumble of the generator stuttered and the house went gray again. Shadows raced across Ki's small face.

“Hold on,” I told her. “Try not to be scared. Maybe the lights will come back.” A moment later they did, although now I could hear a hoarse, uneven note in the gennie's roar and the flicker of the lights was much more noticeable.

“Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me about Cinder-bell.”

“Cinderella.”

“Yeah, her.”

“All right, but storyguys get paid.” I pursed my lips and made sipping sounds.

She held the cup out. The cocoa was sweet and good. The sensation of being watched was heavy and not sweet at all, but let them watch. Let them watch while they could.

“There was this pretty girl named Cinderella—”

“Once upon a time! That's how it starts! That's how they all start!”

“That's right, I forgot. Once upon a time there was this pretty girl named Cinderella, who had two mean stepsisters. Their names were . . . do you remember?”

“Tammy Faye and Vanna.”

“Yeah, the Queens of Hairspray. And they made Cinderella do all the really unpleasant chores, like sweeping out the fireplace and cleaning up the dog-poop in the back yard. Now it just so happened that the noted rock band Oasis was going to play a gig at the palace, and although all the girls had been invited . . .”

I got as far as the part about the fairy godmother catching the mice and turning them into a Mercedes limousine before the Benadryl took effect. It really was a medicine for sadness; when I looked down, Ki was fast asleep in the crook of my arm with her cocoa cup listing radically to port. I plucked it from her fingers and put it on the coffee-table, then brushed her drying hair off her forehead.

“Ki?”

Nothing. She'd gone to the land of Noddy-Blinky. It probably helped that her afternoon nap had ended almost before it got started.

I picked her up and carried her down to the north bedroom, her feet bouncing limply in the air and the hem of the Harley shirt flipping around her knees. I put her on the bed and pulled the duvet up to her chin. Thunder boomed like artillery fire, but she didn't even stir. Exhaustion, grief, Benadryl . . . they had taken her deep, taken her beyond ghosts and sorrow, and that was good.

I bent over and kissed her cheek, which had finally begun to cool. “I'll take care of you,” I said. “I promised, and I will.”

As if hearing me, Ki turned on her side, put the hand holding Strickland under her jaw, and made a soft sighing sound. Her lashes were dark soot against her cheeks, in startling contrast to her light hair. Looking at her I felt myself swept by love, shaken by it the way one is shaken by a sickness.

Take care of me, I'm just a little guy.

“I will, Ki-bird,” I said.

I went into the bathroom and began filling the tub, as I had once filled it in my sleep. She would sleep through it all if I could get enough warm water before the generator quit entirely. I wished I had a bath-toy to give her in case she did wake up, something like Wilhelm the Spouting Whale, but she'd have her dog, and she probably wouldn't wake up, anyway. No freezing baptism under a handpump for Kyra. I was not cruel, and I was not crazy.

I had only disposable razors in the medicine cabinet, no good for the other job ahead of me. Not efficient enough. But one of the kitchen steak knives would do. If I filled the washbasin with water that was really hot, I wouldn't even feel it. A letter
T
on each arm, the top bar drawn across the wrists—

For a moment I came out of the zone. A voice—my own speaking as some combination of Jo and Mattie—screamed:
What are you thinking about? Oh Mike, what in God's name are you thinking about?

Then the thunder boomed, the lights flickered, and the rain began to pour down again, driven by the wind. I went back into that place where everything was clear, my course indisputable. Let it all end—the sorrow, the hurt, the fear. I didn't want to think anymore about how Mattie had danced with
her toes on the Frisbee as if it were a spotlight. I didn't want to be there when Kyra woke up, didn't want to see the misery fill her eyes. I didn't want to get through the night ahead, the day that was coming beyond it, or the day that was coming after that. They were all cars on the same old mystery train. Life was a sickness. I was going to give her a nice warm bath and cure her of it. I raised my arms. In the medicine cabinet mirror a murky figure—a Shape—raised its own in a kind of jocular greeting. It was me. It had been me all along, and that was all right. That was just fine.

*   *   *

I dropped to one knee and checked the water. It was coming in nice and warm. Good. Even if the generator quit now, it would be fine. The tub was an old one, a deep one. As I walked down to the kitchen to get the knife, I thought about climbing in with her after I had finished cutting my wrists in the hotter water of the basin. No, I decided. It might be misinterpreted by the people who would come here later on, people with nasty minds and nastier assumptions. The ones who'd come when the storm was over and the trees across the road cleared away. No, after her bath I would dry her and put her back in bed with Strickland in her hand. I'd sit across the room from her, in the rocking chair by the bedroom windows. I would spread some towels in my lap to keep as much of the blood off my pants as I could, and eventually I would go to sleep, too.

Bunter's bell was still ringing. Much louder now. It was getting on my nerves, and if it kept on that way it might even wake the baby. I decided to pull it
down and silence it for good. I crossed the room, and as I did a strong gust of air blew past me. It wasn't a draft from the broken kitchen window; this was that warm subway-air again. It blew the
Tough Stuff
crossword book onto the floor, but the paperweight on the manuscript kept the loose pages from following. As I looked in that direction, Bunter's bell fell silent.

A voice sighed across the dim room. Words I couldn't make out. And what did they matter? What did one more manifestation—one more blast of hot air from the Great Beyond—matter?

Thunder rolled and the sigh came again. This time, as the generator died and the lights went out, plunging the room into gray shadow, I got one word in the clear:

Nineteen.

*   *   *

I turned on my heels, making a nearly complete circle. I finished up looking across the shadowy room at the manuscript of
My Childhood Friend.
Suddenly the light broke. Understanding arrived.

Not the crossword book. Not the phone book, either.

My
book. My manuscript.

I crossed to it, vaguely aware that the water had stopped running into the tub in the north-wing bathroom. When the generator died, the pump had quit. That was all right, it would be plenty deep enough already. And warm. I would give Kyra her bath, but first there was something I had to do. I had to go down nineteen, and after that I just might have to go down ninety-two. And I could. I had completed just over a hundred and twenty pages of manuscript, so I
could. I grabbed the battery-powered lantern from the top of the cabinet where I still kept several hundred actual vinyl records, clicked it on, and set it on the table. It cast a white circle of radiance on the manuscript—in the gloom of that afternoon it was as bright as a spotlight.

On page nineteen of
My Childhood Friend,
Tiffi Taylor—the call-girl who had re-invented herself as Regina Whiting—was sitting in her studio with Andy Drake, reliving the day that John Sanborn (the alias under which John Shackleford had been getting by) saved her three-year-old daughter, Karen. This is the passage I read as the thunder boomed and the rain slashed against the sliding door giving on the deck:

FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 19

over that way, I was sure of it,” she said, “but when I couldn't see her anywhere, I went to look in the hot tub.” She lit a cigarette. “What I saw made me feel like screaming, Andy—Karen was underwater. All that was out was her hand . . . the nails were turning purple. After that . . . I guess I dived in, but I don't remember; I was zoned out. Everything from then on is like a dream where stuff runs together in your mind. The yard-guy—Sanborn—shoved me aside and dived. His foot hit me in the throat and I couldn't swallow for a week. He yanked up on Karen's arm. I thought he'd pull it off her damn shoulder, but he got her. He got her.”

In the gloom, Drake saw she was weeping. “God. Oh God, I thought she was dead. I was sure she was.”

I knew at once, but laid my steno pad along the left margin of the manuscript so I could see it better. Reading down, as you'd read a vertical crossword-puzzle answer, the first letter of each line spelled the message which had been there almost since I began the book:

owls undEr stud O

Then, allowing for the indent next-to-last line from the bottom:

owls undEr studIO

Bill Dean, my caretaker, is sitting behind the wheel of his truck. He has accomplished his two purposes in coming here—welcoming me back to the TR and warning me off Mattie Devore. Now he's ready to go. He smiles at me, displaying those big false teeth, those Roebuckers. “If you get a chance, you ought to look for the owls,” he tells me. I ask him what Jo would have wanted with a couple of plastic owls and he replies that they keep the crows from shitting up the woodwork. I accept that, I have other things to think about, but still . . . “It was like she'd come down to do that errand special,” he says. It never crosses my mind—not then, at least—that in Indian folklore, owls have another purpose: they are said to keep evil spirits away. If Jo knew that plastic owls would scare the crows off, she would have known that. It was just the sort of information she picked up and tucked away. My inquisitive wife. My brilliant scatterbrain.

Thunder rolled. Lightning ate at the clouds like spills of bright acid. I stood by the dining-room table with the manuscript in my unsteady hands.

“Christ, Jo,” I whispered. “What did you find out?”

And why didn't you tell me?

But I thought I knew the answer to that. She hadn't told me because I was somehow like Max Devore; his great-grandfather and my own had shit in the same pit. It didn't make any sense, but there it was. And she hadn't told her own brother, either. I took a weird kind of comfort from that.

I began to leaf through the manuscript, my skin crawling.

Andy Drake rarely frowned in Michael Noonan's
My Childhood Friend.
He scowled instead, because there's an owl in every scowl. Before coming to Florida, John Shackleford had been living in Studio City, California. Drake's first meeting with Regina Whiting occurred in her studio. Ray Garraty's last-known address was the Studio Apartments in Key Largo. Regina Whiting's best friend was Steffie Underwood. Steffi's husband was Towle Underwood—there was a good one, two for the price of one.

Owls under studio.

It was everywhere, on every page, just like the
K-
names in the telephone book. A kind of monument, this one built—I was sure of it—not by Sara Tidwell but by Johanna Arlen Noonan. My wife passing messages behind the guard's back, praying with all her considerable heart that I would see and understand.

On page ninety-two Shackleford was talking to Drake in the prison visitors' room—sitting with his wrists between his knees, looking down at the chain
running between his ankles, refusing to make eye-contact with Drake.