Revolution Number 9 (21 page)

“Become him.”

“The papers and stuff? Years ago.”

“When Rebecca was still here?”

“After.”

“So she was still Rebecca when she left?”

“As far as I know,” said Malik. He gazed at Charlie, somewhat myopically. He was still holding his glasses. “Why is it important?”

Charlie returned the gaze until Malik broke it. Then he walked away. He didn’t like being close to Malik, and he had to think. He tried to think while eyeing the dishes in the sink, the half-full takeout bag from Yong Lok Gardens on the counter, the calendar with a picture of the CN Tower, still turned to the month before. He flicked through the pages, looking for memos. All the days were blank.

“One little stick of dynamite,” he said. It was the only thought in his head.

“What?”

“Did all that.”

“You’re talking about the … explosion?”

“What else?” Charlie said. “Where did you get it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The dynamite,” Charlie said.

“For the bomb you built?”

“What other bomb is there?”

Malik, fat, myopic, sweating slightly, laughed. That same old laugh, much closer to barking, but he was too short of breath now to sustain it for long. “
Touché
,” he said.

“Is there something funny about it?”

“It depends on your point of view. Like me being in real estate, from yours. What do you do for a living?”

“Trap lobsters.”

Malik smiled. “See?” He opened the fridge, drank more milk, removed a takeout carton. “You like
nhem shross
?”

“Never had it.”

“Cambodian.”

“Solidarity forever.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. You haven’t answered the question.”

“What question?”

There was only one question, wasn’t there? Where is Rebecca? Charlie knew that Malik didn’t know the answer. But other questions kept forming in his mind. “Where did the stick of dynamite come from?”

For a moment Charlie thought Malik was about to smile again, possibly even laugh that barking laugh. Instead, he replied: “A construction site, I think. Somewhere on the pike. Rebecca stole it, if I recall.”

“Was there anything special about it?”

“Special?”

“To cause an explosion of that size.”

Once more Malik’s lips seemed to hover on the edge of a smile. Malik licked them and said, “Not that I know of. You’re the one who built it, for Christ’s sake.”

Some expression on Charlie’s face made Malik shrink against the wall. But Charlie didn’t come crunching toward him across the floor. It was revulsion, not rage, he was feeling. He didn’t want to spend another second in this kitchen, in this house, and he had nothing more to say. He went to the door, opened it, stepped out on the porch, breathed a big lungful of city air.

“What are you doing?” called Malik.

Charlie turned in the doorway.
“Ciao,”
he said.

“You’re leaving? Just like that?” Malik stood there with shoulders shrugged and puzzled face. “I don’t understand what you want.”

At the bottom of the steps, Charlie turned. “You’ve really got baseball tickets?”

“The Blue Jays are going all the way this year.”

“You’re a fan now?”

“Live and learn,” Malik said, putting on the smoke-gray glasses. Charlie walked away.

· · ·

Malik closed the door, hurried out of the kitchen. He went quickly through rooms that had they been furnished might have been the dining room and living room, but were bare: what was the point of furniture? He’d be selling the place in a month or two when the market started up, and moving into
another one he had a few blocks away. Malik looked out a window facing the street. He saw Charlie get into a car and drive away. Malik had time to memorize the plate number and notice the sticker on the bumper: “Maple Leaf Car Rentals.”

He phoned Maple Leaf. “Hi,” he said. “I’m calling from Mulligan and Urquhart. We just had a customer of yours—”

“All our operators are busy at this time.”

He waited. Through the window he saw another car pull out of the parking space and drive off, with a young blond man at the wheel.

“Can I help you?”

“Mulligan and Urquhart,” he began again; telling long, complex lies was tiring, but he was used to it: it was the
sine qua non
of his business. “We just had a customer of yours in here. It looks like he forgot his coat. My secretary ran after him but he drove off. Have you got an address where we can mail it? She wrote down the plate number.”

Thirty seconds later, Malik had Charlie’s name and address. “Ochs?” he said. “As in Phil?”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing.”

Thirty seconds after that he had Charlie’s telephone number. He dialed the number, just for the hell of it.

A woman answered. “Hello?” she said. She had a nice voice—warm, educated, poised. “Hello?… Hello?… Hello?” She was losing a little of that poise by the last hello. Malik hung up.

He made three more calls. The first was to a law office in Berkeley, California. A mistake perhaps? How much protection would come from that quarter? The truth was he wouldn’t feel safe as long as Wrightman/Ochs was around. Doing something about that without involving himself was the problem. He considered it for a while and placed a call that made him feel a little funny: to the ROTC office at Morgan College. That got him the number for the third call, to some backwater in Georgia.

Malik felt safer after that, safe and hungry. Food had become his only pleasure. How about it? Was he in the mood for lobster?

N
inety degrees. Ninety percent humidity. Ol’ J.P.—he thought of himself as Ol’ J.P., especially those nights, afternoons, and occasional mornings when he was half-cut, and he was half-cut now—sat outside on a frayed canvas chair, wearing only his briefs. His body was clammy, his mind, like a perfect miniature of the external world, a haze. Ol’ J.P. sat there on the edge of the swamp, just breathing.

The phone in his trailer began to ring. He let it; the only calls he got were from people or machines trying to sell him things he didn’t need and often hadn’t heard of. He raised the bottle in his hand, a bottle of something cheap, and took a small sip. Very small. Birdlike. Abstemious. Was that the word? Was it a word of any kind? He studied the label. “Genuine Tennessee Whiskey,” it read. There was a sketch of a man in a coonskin cap. The tune from “Davy Crockett” began running in J.P.’s mind, faded out in the haze. He stared at the label for a while. The phone stopped ringing.

J.P. heard something rustle down by the water. He had excellent hearing. He saw a fern twitch. He had excellent vision. So excellent that there, at the base of the fern, hidden in all that greenery, he could distinguish the outlines of a bullfrog. A big fat son of a bitch. Camouflaged in nature’s grand plan—but not from him.

J.P. set his whiskey bottle down in the grass without making a sound. He had a box of nails under the chair, old rusty ones he’d bent into V shapes. He fished through them, slow and silent, until he found one that felt good on the pads of his fingers. He had a slingshot down there too, made from a coat
hanger and a wide rubber band. A crude weapon—a kid’s toy, if you wanted the truth.

With the toy in his left hand, J.P. fitted the nail into place at the center of the rubber band and drew back. He didn’t sight, didn’t take aim, simply drew back and released, letting his hands do all the work. He heard a whizzing sound, very faint: that was the nail, spinning through the air. Then came another sound, a little less faint:
plop
. That was the nail making contact with the big green head. Down by the water the frog performed a funny kind of leap, with only one leg extending, and flopped sideways onto the grass.

A toy weapon, good for killing toy creatures.

J.P. got up and walked to the water. They called it a lake, but it was so full of plant life it was almost as green as the land and not much wetter. J.P. examined the frog. The point of the nail had stuck into its head, about a sixteenth of an inch above the left eye. And it was the right leg that had extended. That was interesting. Left brain, right brain—wasn’t that the theory? The fact that the nail had hit point-first was dumb luck of course. The frequency of point-first hits was about one in ten. It made no difference. Head shots killed every time, no matter what part of the nail did the job. J.P. squatted down and plucked out the nail. Then he picked up the frog by the extended leg and tossed it underhanded into the water. It described an arc, as they used to say in gunnery school, and fell with a quiet splash.

A mosquito bit the back of J.P.’s neck. He slapped it, gazed at its squashed form lying in a red smear on his palm, wiped it off on the side of his briefs. Then he walked back to the chair, dropped the nail back in the box, and went inside the trailer, pulling the screen door shut behind him.

J.P. was hungry, but it was too hot to eat. The icebox was by the door. He took out a beer. Whiskey was drink, beer was food. Across from the icebox, on the other side of the trailer, about three feet away, was a Formica-topped table with a phone on it. The phone started ringing again. J.P. ignored it, walked toward the back of the trailer. There were no partitions; he could see his domain entire: sink, toilet, stall shower, double bed, bureau.
Nothing on the walls, nothing on the linoleum floor. He sat on the bed and took a sparrowlike sip of beer. It took away his hunger, nourished him, although it didn’t clear the haze. The phone stopped ringing.

Framed photographs on the bureau. Family pictures, of that three-member family, now down to one. These he found himself staring at from time to time; times like this.

Picture one: Mina at the beach, late fifties. Bikini, flat stomach, round thighs, big smile. He remembered that beach. A nice beach in a nice little town on the south Jersey shore. They had stayed in a motel—the Wee Willie Winkie. He remembered that too. They’d made love for the first time in the Wee Willie Winkie and been married a few months later, after she got pregnant.

Picture two: Mina and the boy, midsixties. Boy on swing, laughing, head thrown back, Mina pushing, mouth laughing but eyes worried he might fall off.

Picture three: Himself, Mina, boy, 1970. Studio portrait. Mina smiling into the lens with enthusiasm because the whole thing was her idea, boy smiling because he’d been told to, himself posed behind them like the great protector.

Family pix. He made himself look away, drained the beer and tossed the bottle into the trash can by the icebox. Didn’t sight, didn’t aim, just let his hands do it. His hands were good at stuff like that.

The phone began to ring again. “Jesus Christ,” he said, or maybe only thought it. All they wanted to do was sell him, sell him, sell him. A goddamn fever of selling. He didn’t need anything and even if he did there was no money to buy. He had his pension and that was it. Didn’t their computers know that by now? So what the fuck?

Ring ring
.

J.P. got off the bed, went to the Formica table, picked up the phone.

“What is it?” he started to say, but the words clumped together; he hadn’t spoken in some time. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What is it?”

“Hello,” said a voice on the other end, a man, not a machine. “Captain Pleasance, please.”

That threw him, but he recovered after only a second or two, ten at the most. “This is him. Except I’m retired.” Been retired for fifteen years, for Christ’s sake.

“Captain Jack Pleasance?”

“That’s what I told you. You better not be selling something.”

The man on the other end of the line laughed, at least that’s what J.P. supposed it was—it sounded more like a dog barking. “I’m giving, not selling,” he said.

J.P. didn’t get it, so he kept his mouth shut.

The caller spoke again: “Does the name Blake Wrightman mean anything to you?”

J.P. had trouble breathing for a moment. He leaned against his pasteboard trailer wall for support. “What if it does?” he said. “Who is this?” It occurred to him that he’d got the questions in the wrong order.

It didn’t matter: the caller ignored the second one. “If it does mean anything to you, I could supply his present name and address, especially if you’re a self-reliant sort of person.”

J.P.’s heartbeat quickened then, quickened a lot, pumping strength into his body, driving away the oppression of the heat and damp, driving the haze from his mind. “Self-reliant?”

“Someone who doesn’t get bogged down in official channels. A take-charge guy.”

J.P. cleared his throat again. “That name means something to me.”

“Got a pencil?”

“Hold on.”

J.P. put down the phone, searched for something to write with. On the icebox, on the bureau, in a drawer, under the bed: getting frantic, breathing in quick little breaths. A fucking pencil—come on, come on. He found a leaky ballpoint in the pocket of a shirt that had been lying on the floor for a few days, or maybe weeks. He grabbed the phone.

“You still there?”

“What’s going on?” asked the caller, affability gone, suspicious.

“Nothing,” said J.P. “I’m ready.”

The caller dictated the name and address. J.P. wrote it down
on the Formica tabletop and repeated it to the caller, spelling out the name.

“You got it.”

“How do you know—” J.P. began.

The caller interrupted. “Good luck.”
Click
.

“Good luck”? Meaning what?
J.P. stood in his clammy briefs by the table, the phone still in his hand. It began blaring the off-the-hook signal. He hung up, stared at the name and address on the Formica for a minute or two. Then he picked up the phone again and called information. He soon had the phone number that went with them. He wrote it on the table.

Three bits of information. He gazed at them for a long time, long enough for them to become part of his memory. J.P. looked up. He needed a drink bad. The Tennessee whiskey was—where? He looked around, finding it in the grass by the box of bent bullfrog nails. He picked it up and drank what was left. The haze returned, but light, like the mist off the swamp in the evening. He was sweating now, dripping with it like a prizefighter in the twelfth round. From down by the water came a wet sucking sound, followed by a splash.