Vanishing Act (16 page)

Jane walked across her back yard and into his and sat down on the grass beside his lawn chair. After a minute he said, "Am I imagining it or are people getting dumber?"

"I don’t know."

"Hardly a day goes by when I don’t read about somebody doing himself some real harm when if he’d just called up and asked me, I could have told him what to do."

"Who is it this time?"

"Take your pick. Today it’s Washington, but there’s never a shortage of the mentally needy. I ought to hang out a shingle."

"You’ve done everything else."

"What?"

"You’ve painted that wall on my side maybe three times."

"It’s the weather side. Takes special care."

"Jake, I’ve decided we’d better talk some more before you fall off a ladder peering in my window and hurt yourself."

"Very thoughtful," he said.

She chose her words carefully. "Those four men weren’t looking for me. They were looking for a friend of mine. He was the guy you saw knocking on my door. I helped him to go away."

"I’m not supposed to ask questions, I take it?"

"I’m telling you the things you have a right to know," she said. "He’s safe because they can’t find him. We’re safe because they’ll know he’s not coming back here." She stood up and smiled. ’’The end."

He nodded, his lips pursed in thought. "Why did you change your mind about telling me?"

"A lot of reasons. One is that I don’t want you to decide one day to have a talk with your friend Chief Dormont; you can’t be expected to keep a secret unless you know it’s a secret. Another is that if he or someone like him comes to my door some night, I don’t want you to think I’m in danger and haul out the old twelve-gauge and blow his head off."

"You’ve done this before, haven’t you?"

She didn’t answer.

"You said ’someone like him.’ That’s it, isn’t it?" he said. "The secret isn’t him, it’s you."

"Telling would hurt me," she agreed. "It would hurt me a lot." She stared into his eyes for a moment, until she had seen whatever she was looking for, and then she released him. "I’ve got some shopping to do. You need anything?"

"No," he said. "No thanks." He watched her go. The long brown legs and the strong, erect back made her seem taller than she was, but not tall enough for this.

Jake set the newspaper on his lap and stared off at the big trees along Franklin Street. The little girl next door hadn’t grown up to do something as normal as having a little outlaw sex. She was—well, hell—she was Jigonsasee. How could she think he wouldn’t know? Did she expect him to live for sixty years in a town called Deganawida and never bother to find out why they had chosen a name nobody could even spell? They used to teach it to kids in the grammar schools, although God knew what the hell they were teaching them now.

Maybe she was crazy. White people went crazy and thought they were Jesus Christ or Napoleon, but those two would strike an Indian woman as having no more to do with her than a couple of Australian marsupials. Besides, whatever sex was really about, one of the things it did was determine the way people thought about themselves. He had never heard of an adult woman who identified with a man.

Jigonsasee would make sense to her, he thought. Sometime in the distant past, a woman lives in a bark lodge all by herself on the trail that runs east and west below Lake Ontario a few miles from here. She feeds the warriors who pass by on their way to murder each other. One day, off the lake comes a canoe with a lone Huron in it who has paddled all the way across from the Canadian side. He’s a fugitive, a man in exile from his tribe up there. He’s been skirting the land, looking for the smoke of somebody’s fire so he can bring them his message. The message doesn’t seem like much, since all it really amounts to is that peace is better than war. His name is Deganawida.

The first fire he sees belongs to the woman. She takes in the wandering stranger and feeds him, and she is the one to whom he tells his message. And he calls her Jigonsasee, which means "New Face." So the solitary woman and the tribeless man meet up with a warrior driven crazy by the murders of his two daughters. His name is Hiawatha, and he has become a wanderer too and a cannibal, and together they convince all five tribes to stop slaughtering each other. The crazy cannibal combs the snakes out of the hair of the worst of the warlords. The visionary outcast foreigner tells the tribes in detail how to bind themselves together into one alliance and how to run it. And the Iroquois confederacy never changes at all after that. What Deganawida said to do is followed precisely by each generation.

Maybe three or four hundred years pass, and the two smartest men of another generation, another race— Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson—get stuck with the assignment of putting together a structure for a new society. Only all they have in the world to imitate is a lot of theoretical treatises written by dead Frenchmen and one working model of a confederacy of states called the Iroquois. By then the solitary woman and the visionary exile and the cannibal madman who invented the league are so long gone that nobody even knows the century when they did it. But the Iroquois, who are very much alive, have passed down exactly what these three said and what they did.

The one who would matter to Jane was Jigonsasee, a woman part Betsy Ross and part Joan of Arc, but mostly Mary Magdalene, still called the Mother of Nations and the Great Peace Woman, because she was the one who decided it was better to save two fugitives than to keep endlessly feeding the warriors who came along the trail on the way to butcher people just like themselves.

Jake sat in the lawn chair with the sunset bathing his face and warming his joints and the distant, tall trees waving slowly in the May breeze, all bright green with their new leaves. Jane’s secret was not the saddest thing he had ever heard. He was an old man now, and he had been to war and watched the wife he had loved and prized close her eyes and die. But it was sad enough. He admired heroes as much as anybody did, but he had no desire to see anybody he cared about taking risks just to be more like some dead person.

A girl like Jane, who was as quick and full of life as the squirrels in those trees, with so much promise—it seemed like such a waste. Saying it that way made him admit that what could promise be except an expectation that she was made to do something special, even risky? If you wasted something that was good enough, it wasn’t called waste, it was sacrifice.

And Jane Whitefield didn’t seem crazy, not even a little bit. Probably, she didn’t even know that she was trying to live the life of a thousand-year-old Indian woman, any more than his own daughter thought that when she was teaching high school she was Socrates. It was just that when she wanted to do a good job, this was the first way that occurred to her, an impulse she thought was instinctive because it had been emulated over so many generations that it didn’t even take conscious thought.

It was dark when Jane left her groceries on the back seat of her car and walked out of the parking lot and across the street to the newsstand. It was a little open shanty made of boards with peeling white paint and a green metal awning that Raymond Illia covered up each night at sundown. Raymond was busy rearranging the bricks he put on top of the stacks of newspapers to keep the wind from blowing them away. He glanced up and grinned. "Hey, Jane. Want to play cowboys and Indians?"

"No, Raymond," she said. "The Indian always has to talk funny."

"You can tie me up."

"You’ve been reading your own magazines again, haven’t you? The ones you keep face-down."

"Caught me!" he said, way too loud. Raymond was Jane’s age, but for some reason his mind had stopped growing at about the time they were in eighth grade. Everybody knew it, and now it was long past the time when people had mentioned it in whispers and clicked their tongues, which was what they did when there was a tragedy. Deganawida was too small to ignore people. Instead, some subtle shift had occurred to accommodate Raymond, and life had gone on. Raymond got some sort of disability payment from the state, but he could read and make change, and it seemed to suit him to stand around outdoors, greet people and chatter and be important.

Jane stepped to the stacks of newspapers and picked up The Buffalo News, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times. She gave Raymond the coins, and he happily slipped them into the coin changer that hung from his belt. "Take care, Raymond," she said.

She walked back into the supermarket parking lot, got into her car, and tossed the papers on the seat beside her. As she started the engine, she glanced around to see if the aisle was clear, and her eye passed across the top newspaper on the pile, the Los Angeles Times: MYSTERY MAN SLAIN IN SANTA BARBARA. She picked up the newspaper.

SANTA BARBARA—A man found murdered in his apartment on a quiet street in this quiet seaside community has been identified as Harry Kemple ...

Jane closed her eyes and sat clenching the wheel with one hand and holding the newspaper in the other. She opened her eyes after a few seconds and forced herself to find the name again.

... Harry Kemple, a gambler who was wanted by the Chicago police for questioning in the death of a Mafia chieftain in a card game five years ago. Police sources say Kemple had been living under the assumed name Harry Shaw, but when police took the deceased’s fingerprints, a routine procedure in cases of violent death, they were surprised to discover his true identity. A spokesman for the Justice Department denied that Kemple had been in any witness relocation program ...

Heat seemed to travel in a wave up Jane’s spine to her neck and temples. Her breaths sounded strange to her, coming in little gasps, and then she realized she was crying. Harry was dead. Somebody had made a mistake. Harry had stayed under for too long to get caught any other way.

Jane tried to collect her thoughts. She had to call Lew Feng. She turned the engine off and realized her hands were shaking. She took the keys and hurried to the line of pay telephones on the wall of the supermarket.

She put a quarter into the slot and dialed the number of Westminster Stationers in Vancouver. The operator said, "Please deposit two dollars and fifty cents." Jane fished quarters out of her purse and pushed them into the slot. Finally, there was a ring. There were two clicks, and then the machine. "Due to the recent death of the proprietor, Westminster Stationers will be closed until further notice." It was the voice of Charlie Feng, Lew’s son. The machine disconnected, and Jane began to feel dizzy. They had killed Lew Feng.

She looked into her purse. There wasn’t enough change left. She couldn’t charge this to her home number. She half walked and half ran to Raymond’s stand. "Raymond," she said. "Can you give me change for a ten?"

"Sure," he answered, and started to count out bills.

"No," Jane said. "Real change. Quarters."

He started pumping quarters out of the coin changer and whispering to himself, but he only got as far as five dollars before the coins stopped coming. "I guess I don’t have it," he said. "Maybe the supermarket—"

"Give me what you have," she interrupted, handed him the ten-dollar bill, and then ran back to the telephone.

This time she dialed the other number. It was the one in Feng’s back room, the one he gave clients in the name trade. This one rang four times before the machine kicked in. This was Charlie Feng’s voice too. "Due to a recent death in the family, we will be closing our mail-order business. Please do not send us your change-of-address forms because we are discontinuing our mailing list." It was a warning. Somebody had the list of new names. Charlie’s voice changed pitch and said something long in Chinese and then the recording ended.

Jane had not memorized the telephone number in Medford, Oregon, because having it in her mind would be an irritant, a constant, inescapable reminder that all she had to do was pick up a telephone. She looked in front of the phone book for the area code, then dialed information.

"What city, please?" said a young man’s voice.

"Medford."

"Go ahead."

"Do you have a listing for John D. Young? It’s a new number."

She heard keys clicking. "I’m sorry. We don’t have a John D. Young."

Jane closed her eyes and tried to keep calm. "I know the phone was ordered, and there was a number. He just got there a couple of days ago. Four at the outside."

"I’m sorry," he said. "Maybe he hasn’t activated his account yet."

"Is there a way to find out?"

"Not really. The business office puts the information in after the phone is in service."

"Look," she said. "This is really important. He lives at 4350 Islington, Apartment B. Can you ring Apartment A or Apartment C and let me talk to them? They can find out what’s wrong."

"I’m sorry. I can’t do that."

"I know you have these things on your computer. Can’t you just call up an address?"

"I’m not allowed to do that unless the police or fire department asks me to. Is there any other number, I can get for you?"

Jane thought for a second. "Yes. Western Union."

The operator went away, and the universal recording of a woman’s voice said, "The ... number ... is 555-6297. Once again ... 555-6297."

Jane dialed and a man answered, "Western Union."

Jane said, "Never mind." She controlled her frustration. "Thanks anyway." She hung up. Telegrams always had the name and address of the sender printed across the top automatically. If it didn’t get handed right to him, it would tell somebody the only place he had left to run to.

She leaned on the wall and thought. It had to be something that was open nights. She dialed the information number again. This time it was a woman’s voice. "What city, please?"

"Medford."

"Go ahead."

"I need the number of a message service. One that delivers messages in person."

"Any particular one?"

"No. If you know Medford, please pick one that’s close to Islington Street."

The operator went off, and the female computer came on and gave Jane another number. She dialed.

A woman answered. "Valentine Party Girls."