The Long Count (25 page)

Squatting on a rock among the cottonwood trees Quarrie wiped sweat where it gathered on his brow. Mid-afternoon and the sun was a molten ball. A week had passed since his son’s school project had been completed and James was still basking in the fact that his teacher had been so pleased with what he had done she had exhibited the whole thing.

Quarrie watched James where he swam between the wrecked railroad cars. Pious was down there with him, and the way the boy’s straw-colored head seemed to bob against the surface of the water reminded Quarrie of days gone by with his wife. A moment of reverie, it was broken by the sound of approaching vehicles and he got to his feet, wearing a pair of sand-colored pants and a short-sleeved shirt. He wore his pale gray hat.

Climbing to the top of the bank he spotted an Oklahoma state police car driving the dirt road, followed by a panel van with three people up front and one man in the back. The van was tailed by a second cruiser, from Louisiana.

Quarrie waited for the cortege to arrive with his arms across his chest, watching dust shimmer as the vehicles came to a halt. Sitting in the passenger seat of the first car Clara Symonds smiled a little nervously at him through the windshield. They had spoken on the phone a couple of times since the night in Miss Annie’s old room, and when Quarrie told her what he’d discovered and what he was proposing because of it, Clara jumped at the chance.

All the vehicles had stopped now and Quarrie noticed that the driver of the Louisiana cruiser was the same trooper from that day by the railroad tracks. Climbing from the car he nodded Quarrie’s
way then fixed the strap at the back of his hat. A Colt holstered at his side, he carried a pump-action Winchester shotgun, as did the driver of the Oklahoma car. When all three troopers were ready the driver of the van got out. He was dressed in the black uniform worn by the guards at Bellevue Hospital and he was accompanied by an orderly and a nurse. Nancy McClain, she glanced at Quarrie briefly before her attention returned to the van.

The guard looking on and the state troopers with shotguns across their chests, the orderly opened the back door. One man shackled to his seat, his hair slicked back, he wore a pair of cotton trousers and a white shirt. He climbed down awkwardly, his manacled hands fixed by a chain to the irons that hobbled his legs, and the orderly supporting his arm. Taking a moment to consider his surroundings, his gaze settled where Quarrie stood.

‘John Q,’ he said. ‘They never said I was coming to meet you. Been some kind of crazy mix-up, maybe you can help straighten it out. Fact is they got me locked up at Bellevue right now for some reason I can’t understand – and me wounded and everything.’ He indicated his torso. ‘You remember Bellevue, the hospital where we visited that time?’

‘Sure,’ Quarrie replied.

‘I’ll get the situation squared away eventually, though it’s taking longer than I thought. I imagine they think I’m suffering from shell shock or something, post-traumatic stress or whatever it is they want to call it. Only to be expected I reckon, after three full tours.’

With a glance at the state troopers he shuffled towards Quarrie, picking his way through the scrub and saltgrass with one eye peeled for snakes.

‘This your idea to have them bring me out here? Sure is good to have a little fresh air. They let me out in the grounds every once in a while, but you know how that is with all those basket cases sitting out.’ Looking over his shoulder he arched a brow. ‘I can’t seem to get it across to them that it’s not me with the
problems, but they’ve clean forgotten about Ish.’

Taking him by the arm Quarrie led him across the lip of the bank into the stand of cottonwoods where there was a little shade. Behind them Nancy followed along with Clara and the troopers carrying their guns.

Quarrie helped him down so he could sit on the rock where he himself had been squatting a few minutes before. It took some doing because of the manacles and chains that rattled like he was Marley’s ghost. It was cooler there though, and between the pale trunks they could see the waters of the river and the hunks of rusting metal where the railroad cars had wrecked.

‘Did they tell you I caught up with Ishmael?’ Quarrie took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his shirt. ‘Found out what was wrong with him finally. You know those problems you told me about?’

One eyebrow hooked, Isaac squinted at him now.

‘Something Dr Beale was working on. It was why he wanted Ish brought down there to Trinity when he did.’ Shaking a smoke from the pack Quarrie tamped it against the base of his thumb. ‘You remember how we couldn’t figure that out, the two of us, what it was he had going on?’

Isaac did not answer. His gaze was not on Quarrie but the clay-colored water below.

‘Fact is Dr Beale was ahead of his time,’ Quarrie told him. ‘He was on to something Nurse McClain says most shrinks don’t believe exists.’ He glanced to the edge of the little glade where Clara and Nancy were listening intently. Isaac was staring at the river still, concentrating not on Pious so much as James.

‘Did you hear me?’ Quarrie said. ‘What he was working on – something he called
Dissociative Identity Disorder
. It’s a condition most psychiatrists figure is just a bunch of symptoms that some folk like to create on account of the attention it brings.’

‘What kind of symptoms?’ Isaac was still watching James.

‘Miss Annie’s kind: I guess you heard how she used to be Peggy-Anne Bowen when she was married to Ike.’

‘Ishmael’s mother, I know.’

‘How do you know?’ Quarrie said.

As if it was hard to drag his attention away from the two figures in the river, Isaac looked back to where Clara was watching with her features stiff. ‘You OK there, Mom?’ he said.

She gave a half-smile. She did not reply.

‘How did you know?’ Quarrie asked him again.

Isaac was still looking at Clara. ‘I found his birth certificate in a banker’s box. The key was in the first aid kit in the storm shelter, and that’s just the kind of weird place the old man would’ve hidden it, I guess. I knew it had to fit something important but I couldn’t figure out what it was. We had to go to Shreveport, remember, so I left the key on the shelf.’ He looked back at Quarrie then. ‘When I got home it wasn’t where I put it, so I looked everywhere and eventually found it back where it’d been before. Ish must’ve done that because I found the banker’s box in Dad’s closet under a sweater and it wasn’t there when I looked before.’

Pumping air from his cheeks he shook his head. ‘I had no idea. As far as me and Ish were concerned there was fifteen minutes between us, and there I am reading his birth certificate where his mom isn’t my mom and he was born three months before.’

‘And that was the first time you knew about it,’ Quarrie asked. ‘You had no notion up until then?’

Again Isaac shook his head. ‘So anyway,’ he said. ‘This condition – what is it? Dad never said anything to me.’

Silent for a moment, Quarrie looked squarely at him. ‘It’s complicated. I guess if you want to whittle it down it means that for fifteen years now Ishmael’s had Isaac living in his head.’

Lifting a manacled hand, Isaac tried to shade his eyes from the sun.

‘Kind of weird to think about,’ Quarrie went on. ‘All these years
walking around with a whole other personality inside your head. That’s what it is though, this disorder Dr Beale was trying to prove exists: at least two personalities at the same time and neither one knowing the other is there. They have different ways of talking, they dress in different clothes, and neither knows about the other at all. I guess Beale saw that kind of thing in Miss Annie when he took over at Trinity, and then he heard about you.’

‘I don’t get it,’ Isaac said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about. How can Ish have me inside his head? I’m right here. So we’re not twins anymore like I thought, but that doesn’t change who I am.’

‘Sure it does,’ Quarrie said. ‘You’re not Isaac. You’re Ishmael. Isaac is dead.’

Mouth open Isaac stared. ‘Dead?’ he said. ‘What d’you mean? I’m Isaac. I’m not dead. How can I be dead?’

Quarrie held his gaze. ‘You might think you’re Isaac. You might think it’s Isaac I’m talking to right now, but you’re Ishmael, you just got Isaac doing the talking instead. It’s why his mother left out when she did. It’s what drove her away, her missing son right there before her, manifested in her stepson’s head.’

Isaac was staring still. ‘I don’t understand. I don’t get you. What’re you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about Clara being your stepmother, not your mother. I’m talking about how she wasn’t able to cope with the fact that her son went missing fifteen years ago and you started to act like him.’

Isaac looked from him to Clara and back.

‘Miss Annie’s your mother, remember? When they introduced you to her that night at Trinity they were hoping it would spark you into remembering what happened to your brother, but all it did was push you over the edge.’

‘Miss Annie?’ Isaac knit his brows. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Sure you do – the woman who used to be Peggy-Anne Bowen.
She was married to your dad before he divorced her and married Clara instead. Your mother, Ish: Peggy-Anne. She was much sicker than anybody knew. She had a whole other personality called Miss Annie inside her head and she used to show up from time to time until one day she never left.’

‘On account of her kid,’ Isaac was nodding now. ‘On account of how they took him away from her the day he was born.’

Quarrie looked closely at him again. ‘Yes, that’s right. But how did you know about that?’

Isaac shrugged. ‘Ishmael told me, I guess.’

‘When did he tell you?’

With another shrug he shook his head.

‘It was Miss Annie that stabbed your dad,’ Quarrie went on. ‘That wasn’t some German soldier, it was Ike’s first wife, only not Peggy, but the other personality she had living in her head. After that Peggy came back for a while, but then they took her baby away and that’s when Peggy disappeared altogether and nobody has seen her since.’

‘And Ishmael? What happened to him?’

Quarrie lifted his palms. ‘You tell me, bud. We don’t know what happened, but the way we figure it something went down back when you were a kid. Something with Isaac because the two of you went out one day but only you came back. Dr Beale believed that’s when this all started. Your brother’s disappearance – you knew more about it than you were telling anyone, and that set you off on this path you been walking ever since. The whole point of that meeting with Miss Annie was to shock you, Ishmael; show you the truth of who you are and hope it would bring you back to reality so you could face up to whatever it was you did.’

Isaac looked quizzical again. ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. You just said the path I’ve been walking. You mean the path Ishmael was walking, right?’

‘There is only Ishmael: that’s the point.’ Quarrie indicated the
river. ‘Isaac went missing fifteen years ago, and there was no trace of him till my buddy down there found a skull under those railroad cars that belonged to a ten-year-old kid.’

‘No, that’s wrong. That’s all wrong.’ Isaac was gesturing under the weight of the chains. ‘I’m Isaac, not Ishmael. These irons, the damn hospital – that’s all because of Vietnam.’

Quarrie shook his head. ‘I listened to Dr Beale’s tapes and he was convinced that the only way you could come to terms with this was if you were shocked into remembering what it was you did.’

Isaac opened his mouth to speak again but Quarrie gripped him by the arm. ‘What was that, Ish? Was it Miss Annie? Did you know about her somehow, all those years ago?’

Isaac did not answer. His gaze was slack. He was no longer looking at Quarrie. He was concentrating on the river instead.

‘This is bullshit,’ he said. ‘I thought we were buddies, but Jesus – you’re as bad as them. I was a soldier. I lost friends, John Q. I was fighting in Vietnam.’

‘No, you weren’t,’ Quarrie said. ‘You never went to Vietnam. You never even joined the service. You weren’t in any last firefight and none of your buddies are dead.’

‘Thirty-one,’ Isaac murmured. ‘Thirty-one dead and one hundred and twenty-three wounded …’

‘You weren’t there,’ Quarrie said. ‘You heard that report on the radio same as me. That’s why your father never wrote. The letters you sent weren’t about real missions and they weren’t from Vietnam. I found one in its envelope in that banker’s box you talked about and the postmark was Houston, not Saigon. You didn’t join the army like your dad. That uniform you insisted on wearing – you bought that from the Army/Navy store in Marshall, Texas, when you left the salesman’s car. From there you hitched a ride to Trinity, a vet just home from the war. Then you took a train to Shreveport, Louisiana, and spoke to Dr Beale. His mistake was not keeping you there like he should. But he didn’t know you’d
started the fire. He didn’t know you’d killed Mary-Beth and he didn’t know about your dad. According to a tape he made over in Fannin County, he felt he had to take the opportunity of observing his subject under conditions he didn’t control.

‘Ishmael to Isaac, Isaac to Ishmael; both of you at Trinity and both at your father’s house. You passed each other at the grocery store. You told me how you thought you’d seen Ish at the H-E-B, remember? Well, I spoke to a mechanic who said how he’d given you a ride out to an Oldsmobile that had run out of gas. That car was the one you stole from the newspaper seller in Shreveport, remember? The guy you clubbed over the head.’

Isaac turned to look at him briefly before his gaze shifted back to the river. ‘What’re those guys doing?’

‘Pious, you mean, and that ten-year-old kid?’

Isaac looked sharply at him then.

‘That’s my son, Ishmael. He’s ten years old, which is exactly how old your brother was the day he went missing, right? Fifteen years ago in Lawton, Oklahoma. Remember? That’s barely forty miles north.’

‘Yeah, but what’re they doing?’

‘They’re noodling, hand-fishing; they’re grabbling for catfish and I think you know how that is. The day Isaac was lost you told everyone the two of you only went as far as a cornfield a few hundred yards from the house. You told them you were playing hide-and-seek and you were the one doing the counting. You told them Isaac went off and you went to look for him but you couldn’t find him no matter where you looked. Nobody could find him. The search was concentrated on that area but nothing was ever found. In the end the only conclusion anybody could come to was that Isaac had been abducted and he was never seen again.