The Caveman's Valentine (33 page)

“Didn’t I tell you about clues? Forget about ’em.”

“Right.”

“Another?”

“Oh all right,” said Romulus. “Thank you.”

Jack Cork poured them new drinks. Romulus suspected that the drinks were getting progressively stiffer, but he had no way of knowing—his tongue was numb.

Cork got comfortable again.

“So Leppenraub came up with the money, and gave it to Joey on a Saturday morning. That afternoon he held a party—and
you
showed up, Caveman. Rattled him pretty bad, what you said to him. He called Joey several times at his motel—begged him to do something about you. And Joey told him to send you home on the bus.

“Joey decided you’d taken your shit way too far, and he had to get rid of you.

“Though just in case you spotted him and got away, well, he fixed himself up in a way to completely discredit any story you might tell. He wrapped bandages around his head and made himself look like your worst paranoid nightmare. It was perfect. Who would listen to you after you went into your Stuyvesant routine?

“Then he drove into the village of Gideon Manor and waited for your bus. He saw you get on, he saw you get off. He tried to do you, but as it happened, you
did
get away.

“So he decided he was going to need a little help. He got hold of this guy Robert Jackson—a guy he knew as Shaker—somebody he’d met during his lowlife stint. He and Shaker went to the tent corner on C and Seventh and snatched Matthew. Shaker did all the talking, of course—Matthew would have recognized Joey’s voice in a heartbeat.

“Matthew led them to your cave, but you’d slipped him again. The one-eyed woman said you’d gone south for a vacation.

“So Joey just beat Matthew within an inch of his life. Chiselwork worthy of a da Vinci, you know? And then he called it a night.

“And it wasn’t till the next day it occurred to him—what if ‘going south for a vacation’ meant that somehow you’d tracked him down to North Carolina? Joey called his mother, and sure enough you
were
down there. So he drove like a bat out of hell, and got to his hometown just in time to catch you watching the videotape you’d dug up from his mother’s yard.

“Then he put on his performance for you. He was eloquent, he says. He thinks in a just world they’d give him the Academy Award or something. Don’t
look
at me like that, Caveman, those are
his
words. All right?

“Anyway, after he was done with you, he figured now he wouldn’t have to bother with killing you. You’d swallowed his story hook, line, and sinker, and he could rest easy.

“He could retire.

“Though as a curtain call, as a little stinger at the end, he made himself disappear—I mean his Joey Peasley self. He staged his own abduction in front of his mother’s eyes, with the help of his buddy Shaker. He completely destroyed her, and it was the happiest day of his life.

“Oh, he thought he was the fucking Cézanne of terror.

“And that’s when he made up his mind a hundred grand wasn’t even in the ballpark of what he could get out of Leppenraub.

“He called the guy and told him another donation was in order.

“Another . . . five million, say?

“And when Leppenraub got his breath back he said he’d have to think about it. Also he told Joey that the Caveman had sent him a message. The Caveman said he’d made a copy of the videotape.

“OK—that was it. Joey was just fed up with you. He called Shaker again and they found you in your cave where you were waiting for him.

“And once again Joey underestimated you. He made that colossal blunder—he let you call your daughter. And then when he looked down from that bridge and saw Shaker get shot, he had to finish him off, so the guy wouldn’t talk. If he could have killed
you
he would have, but he’d have hit your daughter, too, and he knew that once a cop gets killed . . .

“So he just went back to his hotel room and laid low for a while. Then he called Leppenraub one more time and said, ‘When are you going to pay me, fucker?’ And Leppenraub did just what you’d told him to, Caveman. He said he had the money, and talked Joey into meeting him at the subway platform.

“Where I got to play a sleeping drunk, which was a marvelous performance for which I’m due an Academy Award.

“And where we nailed him. Thanks to my friend the crackpot caveman. And that’s the whole story. Any questions?”

Romulus thought awhile, then shrugged. “No. I mean, I’m sure there are, but I’m too drunk to think of any. You got a bathroom?”

“Back there. All the way down, take a leff.”

Cork was pretty high himself.

R
omulus wove his way back to the bathroom. When he passed the glass door leading out to the rose garden he thought he saw Sheila sitting out there. He didn’t stop. He went into the bathroom and found the switch and the fluorescent light flapped on and nearly blinded him. He stood unsteadily before the toilet and then worried he might make a mess, so he sat to pee.

When he passed by the glass door again he saw Sheila was still out there. He slid open the door as quietly as he could and stepped out and whispered to her, “What are you doing here?”

Sheila said, “You always had a lot wrong with you, boy, but at least one thing, you weren’t a lush. Now look at you. You’re going to wind up a wino on the—”

“I hate wine.”

“You’re drunk as a skunk though.”

“I’m celebrating.”

“What you got to celebrate?”

“I accomplished something.”

“You sure did. You nearly got your daughter killed, and yourself in the bargain, and you rearranged the lives of a couple of white folks that you have no business with at all—”

“I put a nick in Stuyvesant’s armor.”

She silently clapped.

Said Romulus, “And I put a murderer behind bars.”

“Ha! I did about half your thinking for you.”

“But you’re in my head.”

“I don’t care where I am, I don’t want you taking all the credit. You’ll get on your high horse.”

“Sheila, why are you always trying to belittle me?”

“Lower your voice. Because you’re always doing
little
things. You’re not doing your music, and everything else is little.”

“I’m in no condition for—”

“Rom.”

“What?”

“I’m
sorry
if I seemed to belittle you. I didn’t mean to. It was . . .
something,
what you did.”

“Thank you.”

“But still, you’re getting too old for this life—that’s for sure. You’re going to get arthritis living in that cave.”

He said good night to her, went back in and slid the door shut.

Cork put him up in one of the kids’ rooms. His head was spinning, and it was hard to fall asleep. Then he did fall asleep, but some time in the night he woke up and he was deadly sick. He staggered into the bathroom and knelt before the bowl and puked. The water in the toilet started out a deep, dizzying blue, but he filled it with the corpses of dead Seraphs, and it turned a reddish brown. There were thousands of them, floating in their own faint blood, pouring out of him, all the casualties. He retched, and his fingers were cold as ice where they clutched the porcelain, and his groans echoed in the bowl. He retched until there was nothing more to retch, and then he dry-heaved. He gazed down into that sea of carnage. The bits of broken wings, the thousands of tiny blind eyes, the delicate bodies scorched by Y-rays, corroded by Z-rays. What this victory had cost. And then he lifted his head and leaned back, and Cork was holding him. Romulus put his head against the tile wall, turned his cheek to it. The cool tiles. Cork flushed the toilet, and the water swirled the Seraphs away.

I
n the morning Jack Cork’s wife woke Romulus and fixed him breakfast.

He took a shower, then he called Moira Leppenraub. Then he rode with Cork back into Manhattan. They were too hung over to talk. They said about six words to each other. Cork left him off at the edge of the park.

He climbed the slope. His head was still throbbing, but he was essentially healthy. He climbed nearly to the top and angled around, down and then up, approaching the cave warily.

Stopped when he saw the crowd.

Cyclops was standing before his cave, holding forth. There were four or five TV cameras trained on her, and reporters barking questions, and a simmering mass of spectators. There were twenty kids up in the beech tree. Romulus watched for a while, and then he heard a voice behind him.

“Daddy.”

She wore a shawl and dark glasses. She took off the glasses, and she looked tired. She said, “I’ve been waiting for you. I wanted to warn you.”

Romulus turned back to look at the crowd and he shook his head.

She said, “I guess you know there’s reporters up there who would give their right arms for an interview with you?”

“Yeah. How about you, Lulu—how are you taking all this?”

“Oh, the attention was fun. For about twenty minutes. It’s weird, how quickly it got old.”

“Lu, have you seen Matthew?”

“We’re putting him in the rehab clinic, just like you asked. And it’s Leppenraub’s treat. But I couldn’t find one with a swimming pool full of morphine.”

“Then he probably won’t stay.”

“Daddy, where are
you
going to go?”

“Haven’t figured that out yet. Might spend the summer in the country. I have an invitation from David Leppenraub. My former enemy. The world goes around.”

“I was thinking . . . you . . . Daddy, why don’t you come home for a while? I think Mama wouldn’t mind having you around. Just for a while, I mean—”

“Did she say that?”

“She didn’t
say
that but I know her, Daddy.”

He considered the offer.

He tried to speak but he couldn’t. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You know what, Lulu, I don’t think so.”

They looked at each other and he said, “Maybe some other time. Thank you just the same, though.”

A
night full of katydids, a hot night, damp stars, and on the TV, on C-SPAN, the Undersecretary of the Perfectly Real and Good was testifying:

“What has gone wrong? Nothing has gone wrong. What have we lost? We’ve gained. Really. We’ve gained cunning. Why do we seem to hesitate? We’re only resting. Come on, everyone deserves a rest. We haven’t stumbled, you only imagine we’ve stumbled. You always let your imagination run away with you. Really,
really,
we are on the verge of great exultation. So why don’t you join us? Why don’t you
cease
with all these defeatist questions? Why don’t you rein in your foolish imagination, and join us before it’s too late for you?”

Then the Undersecretary laughed a sad, bitter laugh and tucked his lower lip under his teeth thoughtfully.

Romulus threw a shoe at the screen, and it went dark. Elon threw another shoe. Romulus said, “What do you think of
that,
Elon?”

Elon didn’t answer. He seldom answered, but he liked to hang out here in Romulus’s cave, in the cave Moira and Vlad and David had made for him, in the pear orchard at the edge of the Leppenraub farm. Elon liked to watch the shows with Romulus. He brought the bags of Doritos and the jugs of cranberry juice. When he was tired he’d fall asleep on the mattress. And on a clear night like this one, Romulus would drag the mattress with Elon asleep on it out from under the eave of the cave and stretch out beside him. Lao-tse would come over and curl up by his head, and Romulus would reach back and scratch her where she liked to be scratched. He’d gaze through the pear boughs at the stars and say to himself the names of his wife and daughter, and of his older brothers, and the names of his mother and father and of his uncles and aunts and all the cousins he could remember, and of his great-uncles and great-aunts, and so on, the circle growing wider and wider until he came to the circle of the stars themselves. Then he would carefully arrange the names into the form of a temple around the nest of the Seraphs, so that the newborns might sleep peacefully, guarded by the music of all these names, undisturbed by any alien ray or poisonous influence.

It was a lot of work but clearly necessary.

Some work you could squirm out of, but it was a lost cause to try to shirk this. You either got that name-music under way or the newborns would keep you awake all night. You wanted sleep? You gathered the names. You got the temple set up for the night, the lamps glowing, everything secure, everyone snoozing, even the katydids, even the owl—and then in that rhythm of absolute stillness and patience you could permit yourself to roll over onto your side and grab some shut-eye yourself. You did your work, and when it was done and not a moment before, you could let yourself tumble away.

G
EORGE
D
AWES
G
REEN
owned a clothing company, until one night a crowd gathered around the Guatemalan mountain workshop where fabric for the company was woven on footlooms. The crowd was looking for a dog that had attacked a child in the village. But the dog belonged to the head weaver, and the head weaver loved this dog. He locked the doors to the workshop and sat inside with the dog, a shotgun and a supply of rum, and wouldn’t let anyone in for a week—by which time the fabric shortage had caused such headaches for Mr. Green that he resolved to sell his company as soon as he could and try another career. He thereupon took up the writing of novels. His first book,
The Caveman’s Valentine,
won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1995 and was selected as a
New York Times
Notable Book.
The Juror
is his second novel.