Black House (38 page)

Jack laughs, touched by this unexpected insight. “I didn’t know it showed.”

“You know one way it shows? In the way you treat other people. I’m pretty sure you come from a background people around here only know from the movies, but it hasn’t gone to your head. You see us as people, not hicks, and that’s why I know I can trust you. It’s obvious that your mother did a great job. I was a good mother, too, or at least I tried to be, and I know what I’m talking about. I can
see.
”

“You say you
were
a good mother? Why use—”

“The past tense? Because I was talking about before.”

Fred’s smile fades into an expression of ill-concealed concern. “What do you mean, ‘before’?”

“Mr. Sawyer might know,” she says, giving Jack what he thinks is a look of encouragement.

“Sorry, I don’t think I do,” he says.

“I mean, before I wound up here and finally started to think a little bit. Before the things that were happening to me stopped scaring me out of my mind—before I realized I could look inside myself and examine these feelings I’ve had over and over all my life. Before I had time to travel. I think I’m still a good mother, but I’m not exactly the
same
mother.”

“Honey, please,” says Fred. “You are the same, you just had a kind of breakdown. We ought to talk about Tyler.”

“We are talking about Tyler. Mr. Sawyer, do you know that lookout point on Highway 93, right where it reaches the top of the big hill about a mile south of Arden?”

“I saw it today,” Jack says. “Fred showed it to me.”

“You saw all those farms that keep going and going? And the hills off in the distance?”

“Yes. Fred told me you loved the view from up there.”

“I always want to stop and get out of the car. I love everything about that view. You can see for miles and miles, and then—whoops!—it stops, and you can’t see any farther. But the sky keeps going, doesn’t it? The sky proves that there’s a world on the other side of those hills. If you travel, you can get there.”

“Yes, you can.” Suddenly, there are goose bumps on Jack’s forearms, and the back of his neck is tingling.

“Me? I can only travel in my mind, Mr. Sawyer, and I only remembered how to do that because I landed in the loony bin. But it came to me that
you
can get there—to the other side of the hills.”

His mouth is dry. He registers Fred Marshall’s growing distress without being able to reduce it. Wanting to ask her a thousand questions, he begins with the simplest one:

“How did it come to you? What do you mean by that?”

Judy Marshall takes her hand from her husband and holds it out to Jack, and he holds it in both of his. If she ever looked like an ordinary woman, now is not the time. She is blazing away like a lighthouse, like a bonfire on a distant cliff.

“Let’s say . . . late at night, or if I was alone for a long time, someone used to whisper to me. It wasn’t that concrete, but let’s say it was as if a person were whispering on the other side of a thick wall. A girl like me, a girl my age. And if I fell asleep then, I would almost always dream about the place where that girl lived. I called it Faraway, and it was like this world, the Coulee Country, only brighter and cleaner and more magical. In Faraway, people rode in carriages and lived in great white tents. In Faraway, there were men who could fly.”

“You’re right,” he says. Fred looks from his wife to Jack in painful uncertainty, and Jack says, “It sounds crazy, but she’s right.”

“By the time these bad things started to happen in French Landing, I had pretty much forgotten about Faraway. I hadn’t thought about it since I was about twelve or thirteen. But the closer the bad things came, to Fred and Ty and me, I mean, the worse my dreams got, and the less and less real my life seemed to be. I wrote words without knowing I was doing it, I said crazy things, I was falling apart. I didn’t understand that Faraway was trying to tell me something. The girl was whispering to me from the other side of the wall again, only now she was grown up and scared half to death.”

“What made you think I could help?”

“It was just a feeling I had, back when you arrested that Kinderling man and your picture was in the paper. The first thing I thought when I looked at your picture was,
He knows about Faraway.
I didn’t wonder how, or how I could tell from looking at a picture; I simply understood that you knew. And then, when Ty disappeared and I lost my mind and woke up in this place, I thought if you could see into some of these people’s heads, Ward D wouldn’t be all that different from Faraway, and I remembered seeing your picture. And that’s when I started to understand about traveling. All this morning, I have been walking through Faraway in my head. Seeing it, touching it. Smelling that unbelievable air. Did you know, Mr. Sawyer, that over there they have jackrabbits the size of kangaroos? It makes you laugh just to look at them.”

Jack breaks into a wide grin, and he bends to kiss her hand, in a gesture much like her husband’s.

Gently, she takes her hand from his grasp. “When Fred told me he had met you, and that you were helping the police, I knew that you were here for a reason.”

What this woman has done astonishes Jack. At the worst moment of her life, with her son lost and her sanity crumbling, she used a monumental feat of memory to summon all of her strength and, in effect, accomplish a miracle. She found within herself the capacity to
travel.
From a locked ward, she moved halfway out of this world and into another known only from childhood dreams. Nothing but the immense courage her husband had described could have enabled her to have taken this mysterious step.

“You
did
something once, didn’t you?” Judy asks him. “You were there, in Faraway, and you
did
something—something tremendous. You don’t have to say yes, because I can see it in you; it’s as plain as day. But you have to say yes, so I can hear it, so say it, say yes.”

“Yes.”

“Did what?” Fred asks. “In this dream country? How can you say yes?”

“Wait,” Jack tells him, “I have something to show you later,” and returns to the extraordinary woman seated before him. Judy Marshall is aflame with insight, courage, and faith and, although she is forbidden to him, now seems to be the only woman in this world or any other whom he could love for the rest of his life.

“You were like me,” she says. “You forgot all about that world. And you went out and became a policeman, a detective. In fact, you became one of the best detectives that ever lived. Do you know why you did that?”

“I guess the work appealed to me.”

“What about it appealed to you in particular?”

“Helping the community. Protecting innocent people. Putting away the bad guys. It was interesting work.”

“And you thought it would never stop being interesting. Because there would always be a new problem to solve, a new question in need of an answer.”

She has struck a bull’s-eye that, until this moment, he did not know existed. “That’s right.”

“You were a great detective because, even though you didn’t know it, there was something—something vital—you needed to detect.”

I am a coppiceman,
Jack remembers. His own little voice in the night, speaking to him from the other side of a thick, thick wall.

“Something you had to find, for the sake of your own soul.”

“Yes,” Jack says. Her words have penetrated straight into the center of his being, and tears spring to his eyes. “I always wanted to find what was missing. My whole life was about the search for a secret explanation.”

In memory as vivid as a strip of film, he sees a great tented pavilion, a white room where a beautiful and wasted queen lay dying, and a little girl two or three years younger than his twelve-year-old self amid her attendants.

“Did you call it Faraway?” Judy asks.

“I called it the Territories.” Speaking the words aloud feels like the opening of a chest filled with a treasure he can share at last.

“That’s a good name. Fred won’t understand this, but when I was on my long walk this morning, I felt that my son was somewhere in Faraway—in your Territories. Somewhere out of sight, and hidden away. In grave danger, but still alive and unharmed. In a cell. Sleeping on the floor. But alive. Unharmed. Do you think that could be true, Mr. Sawyer?”

“Wait a second,” Fred says. “I know you feel that way, and I want to believe it, too, but this is the real world we’re talking about here.”

“I think there are lots of real worlds,” Jack says. “And yes, I believe Tyler is somewhere in Faraway.”

“Can you rescue him, Mr. Sawyer? Can you bring him back?”

“It’s like you said before, Mrs. Marshall,” Jack says. “I must be here for a reason.”

“Sawyer, I hope whatever you’re going to show me makes more sense than the two of you do,” says Fred. “We’re through for now, anyhow. Here comes the warden.”

Driving out of the hospital parking lot, Fred Marshall glances at the briefcase lying flat on Jack’s lap but says nothing. He holds his silence until he turns back onto 93, when he says, “I’m glad you came with me.”

“Thank you,” Jack says. “I am, too.”

“I feel sort of out of my depth here, you know, but I’d like to get your impressions of what went on in there. Do you think it went pretty well?”

“I think it went better than that. Your wife is . . . I hardly know how to describe her. I don’t have the vocabulary to tell you how great I think she is.”

Fred nods and sneaks a glance at Jack. “So you don’t think she’s out of her head, I guess.”

“If that’s crazy, I’d like to be crazy right along with her.”

The two-lane blacktop highway that stretches before them lifts up along the steep angle of the hillside and, at its top, seems to extend into the dimensionless blue of the enormous sky.

Another wary glance from Fred. “And you say you’ve seen this, this
place
she calls Faraway.”

“I have, yes. As hard as that is to believe.”

“No crap. No b.s. On your mother’s grave.”

“On my mother’s grave.”

“You’ve been there. And not just in a dream, really
been
there.”

“The summer I was twelve.”

“Could I go there, too?”

“Probably not,” Jack says. This is not the truth, since Fred could go to the Territories if Jack took him there, but Jack wants to shut this door as firmly as possible. He can imagine bringing Judy Marshall into that other world; Fred is another matter. Judy has more than earned a journey into the Territories, while Fred is still incapable of believing in its existence. Judy would feel at home over there, but her husband would be like an anchor Jack had to drag along with him, like Richard Sloat.

“I didn’t think so,” says Fred. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to pull over again when we get to the top.”

“I’d like that,” Jack says.

Fred drives to the crest of the hill and crosses the narrow highway to park in the gravel turnout. Instead of getting out of the car, he points at the briefcase lying flat on Jack’s knees. “Is what you’re going to show me in there?”

“Yes,” Jack says. “I was going to show it to you earlier, but after we stopped here the first time, I wanted to wait until I heard what Judy had to say. And I’m glad I did. It might make more sense to you, now that you’ve heard at least part of the explanation of how I found it.”

Jack snaps open the briefcase, raises the top, and from its pale, leather-lined interior removes the Brewers cap he had found that morning. “Take a look,” he says, and hands over the cap.

“Ohmygod,” Fred Marshall says in a startled rush of words. “Is this . . . is it . . . ?” He looks inside the cap and exhales hugely at the sight of his son’s name. His eyes leap to Jack’s. “It’s Tyler’s. Good Lord, it’s Tyler’s. Oh, Lordy.” He crushes the cap to his chest and takes two deep breaths, still holding Jack’s gaze. “Where did you find this? How long ago was it?”

“I found it on the road this morning,” Jack says. “In the place your wife calls Faraway.”

With a long moan, Fred Marshall opens his door and jumps out of the car. By the time Jack catches up with him, he is at the far edge of the lookout, holding the cap to his chest and staring at the blue-green hills beyond the long quilt of farmland. He whirls to stare at Jack. “Do you think he’s still alive?”

“I think he’s alive,” Jack says.

“In that world.” Fred points to the hills. Tears leap from his eyes, and his mouth softens. “The world that’s over there somewhere, Judy says.”

“In that world.”

“Then you go there and find him!” Fred shouts. His face shining with tears, he gestures wildly toward the horizon with the baseball cap. “Go there and bring him back, damn you!
I
can’t do it, so
you
have to.” He steps forward as if to throw a punch, then wraps his arms around Jack Sawyer and sobs.

When Fred’s shoulders stop trembling and his breath comes in gasps, Jack says, “I’ll do everything I can.”

“I know you will.” He steps away and wipes his face. “I’m sorry I yelled at you like that. I know you’re going to help us.”

The two men turn around to walk back to the car. Far off to the west, a loose, woolly smudge of pale gray blankets the land beside the river.

“What’s that?” Jack asks. “Rain?”

“No, fog,” Fred says. “Coming in off the Mississippi.”

PART THREE

Night’s
Plutonian Shore

15

B
Y EVENING,
the temperature has dropped fifteen degrees as a minor cold front pushes through our little patch of the Coulee Country. There are no thunderstorms, but as the sky tinges toward violet, the fog arrives. It’s born out of the river and rises up the inclined ramp of Chase Street, first obscuring the gutters, then the sidewalks, then blurring the buildings themselves. It cannot completely hide them, as the fogs of spring and winter sometimes do, but the blurring is somehow worse: it steals colors and softens shapes. The fog makes the ordinary look alien. And there’s the smell, the ancient, seagully odor that works deep into your nose and awakens the back part of your brain, the part that is perfectly capable of believing in monsters when the sight lines shorten and the heart is uneasy.

On Sumner Street, Debbi Anderson is still working dispatch. Arnold “the Mad Hungarian” Hrabowski has been sent home without his badge—in fact, suspended—and feels he must ask his wife a few pointed questions (his belief that he already knows the answers makes him even more heartsick). Debbi is now standing at the window, a cup of coffee in her hand and a puckery little frown on her face.

“Don’t like this,” she says to Bobby Dulac, who is glumly and silently writing reports. “It reminds me of the Hammer pictures I used to watch on TV back when I was in junior high.”

“Hammer pictures?” Bobby asks, looking up.

“Horror pictures,” she says, looking out into the deepening fog. “A lot of them were about Dracula. Also Jack the Ripper.”

“I don’t want to hear nothing about Jack the Ripper,” Bobby says. “You mind me, Debster.” And resumes writing.

In the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, Mr. Rajan Patel stands beside his telephone (still crisscrossed by yellow police tape, and when it will be all right again for using, this Mr. Patel could not be telling us). He looks toward downtown, which now seems to rise from a vast bowl of cream. The buildings on Chase Street descend into this bowl. Those at Chase’s lowest point are visible only from the second story up.

“If he is down there,” Mr. Patel says softly, and to no one but himself, “tonight he will be doing whatever he wants.”

He crosses his arms over his chest and shivers.

Dale Gilbertson is at home, for a wonder. He plans to have a sit-down dinner with his wife and child even if the world ends because of it. He comes out of his den (where he has spent twenty minutes talking with WSP officer Jeff Black, a conversation in which he has had to exercise all his discipline to keep from shouting), and sees his wife standing at the window and looking out. Her posture is almost exactly the same as Debbi Anderson’s, only she’s got a glass of wine in her hand instead of a cup of coffee. The puckery little frown is identical.

“River fog,” Sarah says dismally. “Isn’t that ducky. If he’s out there—”

Dale points at her. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.”

But he knows that neither of them can help thinking about it. The streets of French Landing—the
foggy
streets of French Landing—will be deserted right now: no one shopping in the stores, no one idling along the sidewalks, no one in the parks. Especially no children. The parents will be keeping them in. Even on Nailhouse Row, where good parenting is the exception rather than the rule, the parents will be keeping their kids inside.

“I won’t say it,” she allows. “That much I can do.”

“What’s for dinner?”

“How does chicken pot pie sound?”

Ordinarily such a hot dish on a July evening would strike him as an awful choice, but tonight, with the fog coming in, it sounds like just the thing. He steps up behind her, gives her a brief squeeze, and says, “Great. And earlier would be better.”

She turns, disappointed. “Going back in?”

“I shouldn’t have to, not with Brown and Black rolling the ball—”

“Those pricks,” she says. “I
never
liked them.”

Dale smiles. He knows that the former Sarah Asbury has never cared much for the way he earns his living, and this makes her furious loyalty all the more touching. And tonight it feels vital, as well. It’s been the most painful day of his career in law enforcement, ending with the suspension of Arnold Hrabowski. Arnie, Dale knows, believes he will be back on duty before long. And the shitty truth is that Arnie may be right. Based on the way things are going, Dale may need even such an exquisite example of ineptitude as the Mad Hungarian.

“Anyway, I shouldn’t
have
to go back in, but . . .”

“You have a feeling.”

“I do.”

“Good or bad?” She has come to respect her husband’s intuitions, not in the least because of Dale’s intense desire to see Jack Sawyer settled close enough to reach with seven keystrokes instead of eleven. Tonight that looks to her like—pardon the pun—a pretty good call.

“Both,” Dale says, and then, without explaining or giving Sarah a chance to question further: “Where’s Dave?”

“At the kitchen table with his crayons.”

At six, young David Gilbertson is enjoying a violent love affair with Crayolas, has gone through two boxes since school let out. Dale and Sarah’s strong hope, expressed even to each other only at night, lying side by side before sleep, is that they may be raising a real artist. The next Norman Rockwell, Sarah said once. Dale—who helped Jack Sawyer hang his strange and wonderful pictures—has higher hopes for the boy. Too high to express, really, even in the marriage bed after the lights are out.

With his own glass of wine in hand, Dale ambles out to the kitchen. “What you drawing, Dave? What—”

He stops. The crayons have been abandoned. The picture—a half-finished drawing of what might be either a flying saucer or perhaps just a round coffee table—has also been abandoned.

The back door is open.

Looking out at the whiteness that hides David’s swing and jungle gym, Dale feels a terrible fear leap up his throat, choking him. All at once he can smell Irma Freneau again, that terrible smell of raw spoiled meat. Any sense that his family lives in a protected, magic circle
—it may happen to others, but it can never, never happen to us—
is gone now. What has replaced it is stark certainty: David is gone. The Fisherman has enticed him out of the house and spirited him away into the fog. Dale can see the grin on the Fisherman’s face. He can see the gloved hand—it’s yellow—covering his son’s mouth but not the bulging, terrified child’s eyes.

Into the fog and out of the known world.

David.

He moves forward across the kitchen on legs that feel boneless as well as nerveless. He puts his wineglass down on the table, the stem landing a-tilt on a crayon, not noticing when it spills and covers David’s half-finished drawing with something that looks horribly like venous blood. He’s out the door, and although he means to yell, his voice comes out in a weak and almost strengthless sigh: “David? . . . Dave?”

For a moment that seems to last a thousand years, there is nothing. Then he hears the soft thud of running feet on damp grass. Blue jeans and a red-striped rugby shirt materialize out of the thickening soup. A moment later he sees his son’s dear, grinning face and mop of yellow hair.

“Dad! Daddy! I was swinging in the fog! It was like being in a cloud!”

Dale snatches him up. There is a bad, blinding impulse to slap the kid across the face, to hurt him for scaring his father so. It passes as quickly as it came. He kisses David instead.

“I know,” he says. “That must have been fun, but it’s time to come in now.”

“Why, Daddy?”

“Because sometimes little boys get lost in the fog,” he says, looking out into the white yard. He can see the patio table, but it is only a ghost; he wouldn’t know what he was looking at if he hadn’t seen it a thousand times. He kisses his son again. “Sometimes little boys get lost,” he repeats.

Oh, we could check in with any number of friends, both old and new. Jack and Fred Marshall have returned from Arden (neither suggested stopping at Gertie’s Kitchen in Centralia when they passed it), and both are now in their otherwise deserted houses. For the balance of the ride back to French Landing, Fred never once let go of his son’s baseball cap, and he has a hand on it even now, as he eats a microwaved TV dinner in his too empty living room and watches Action News Five.

Tonight’s news is mostly about Irma Freneau, of course. Fred picks up the remote when they switch from shaky-cam footage of Ed’s Eats to a taped report from the Holiday Trailer Park. The cameraman has focused on one shabby trailer in particular. A few flowers, brave but doomed, straggle in the dust by the stoop, which consists of three boards laid across two cement blocks. “Here, on the outskirts of French Landing, Irma Freneau’s grieving mother is in seclusion,” says the on-scene correspondent. “One can only imagine this single mother’s feelings tonight.” The reporter is prettier than Wendell Green but exudes much the same aura of glittering, unhealthy excitement.

Fred hits the
OFF
button on the remote and growls, “Why can’t you leave the poor woman alone?” He looks down at his chipped beef on toast, but he has lost his appetite.

Slowly, he raises Tyler’s hat and puts it on his own head. It doesn’t fit, and Fred for a moment thinks of letting out the plastic band at the back. The idea shocks him. Suppose that was all it took to kill his son? That one simple, deadly modification? The idea strikes him as both ridiculous and utterly inarguable. He supposes that if this keeps up, he’ll soon be as mad as his wife . . . or Sawyer. Trusting Sawyer is as crazy as thinking he might kill his son by changing the size of the boy’s hat . . . and yet he believes in both things. He picks up his fork and begins to eat again, Ty’s Brewers cap sitting on his head like Spanky’s beanie in an old
Our Gang
one-reeler.

Beezer St. Pierre is sitting on his sofa in his underwear, a book open on his lap (it is, in fact, a book of William Blake’s poems) but unread. Bear Girl’s asleep in the other room, and he’s fighting the urge to bop on down to the Sand Bar and score some crank, his old vice, untouched for going on five years now. Since Amy died, he fights this urge every single day, and lately he wins only by reminding himself that he won’t be able to find the Fisherman—and punish him as he deserves to be punished—if he’s fucked up on devil dust.

Henry Leyden is in his studio with a huge pair of Akai headphones on his head, listening to Warren Vaché, John Bunch, and Phil Flanigan dreamboat their way through “I Remember April.” He can smell the fog even through the walls, and to him it smells like the air at Ed’s Eats. Like bad death, in other words. He’s wondering how Jack made out in good old Ward D at French County Lutheran. And he’s thinking about his wife, who lately (especially since the record hop at Maxton’s, although he doesn’t consciously realize this) seems closer than ever. And unquiet.

Yes indeed, all sorts of friends are available for our inspection, but at least one seems to have dropped out of sight. Charles Burnside isn’t in the common room at Maxton’s (where an old episode of
Family Ties
is currently running on the ancient color TV bolted to the wall), nor in the dining hall, where snacks are available in the early evening, nor in his own room, where the sheets are currently clean (but where the air still smells vaguely of old shit). What about the bathroom? Nope. Thorvald Thorvaldson has stopped in to have a pee and a handwash, but otherwise the place is empty. One oddity: there’s a fuzzy slipper lying on its side in one of the stalls. With its bright black and yellow stripes, it looks like the corpse of a huge dead bumblebee. And yes, it’s the stall second from the left. Burny’s favorite.

Should we look for him? Maybe we should. Maybe not knowing exactly where that rascal is makes us uneasy. Let us slip through the fog, then, silent as a dream, down to lower Chase Street. Here is the Nelson Hotel, its ground floor now submerged in river fog, the ocher stripe marking high water of that ancient flood no more than a whisper of color in the fading light. On one side of it is Wisconsin Shoe, now closed for the day. On the other is Lucky’s Tavern, where an old woman with bowlegs (her name is Bertha Van Dusen, if you care) is currently bent over with her hands planted on her large knees, yarking a bellyful of Kingsland Old-Time Lager into the gutter. She makes sounds like a bad driver grinding a manual transmission. In the doorway of the Nelson Hotel itself sits a patient old mongrel, who will wait until Bertha has gone back into the tavern, then slink over to eat the half-digested cocktail franks floating in the beer. From Lucky’s comes the tired, twanging voice of the late Dick Curless, Ole Country One-Eye, singing about those Hainesville Woods, where there’s a tombstone every mile.

The dog gives a single disinterested growl as we pass him and slip into the Nelson’s lobby, where moth-eaten heads—a wolf, a bear, an elk, and an ancient half-bald bison with a single glass eye—look at empty sofas, empty chairs, the elevator that hasn’t worked since 1994 or so, and the empty registration desk. (Morty Fine, the clerk, is in the office with his feet propped up on an empty file-cabinet drawer, reading
People
and picking his nose.) The lobby of the Nelson Hotel always smells of the river—it’s in the pores of the place—but this evening the smell is heavier than usual. It’s a smell that makes us think of bad ideas, blown investments, forged checks, deteriorating health, stolen office supplies, unpaid alimony, empty promises, skin tumors, lost ambition, abandoned sample cases filled with cheap novelties, dead hope, dead skin, and fallen arches. This is the kind of place you don’t come to unless you’ve been here before and all your other options are pretty much foreclosed. It’s a place where men who left their families two decades before now lie on narrow beds with pee-stained mattresses, coughing and smoking cigarettes. The scuzzy old lounge (where scuzzy old Hoover Dalrymple once held court and knocked heads most every Friday and Saturday night) has been closed by unanimous vote of the town council since early June, when Dale Gilbertson scandalized the local political elite by showing them a video of three traveling strippers who billed themselves as the Anal University Trio, performing a synchronized cucumber routine on the tiny stage (FLPD cameraman: Officer Tom Lund, let’s give him a hand), but the Nelson’s residents still have only to go next door to get a beer; it’s convenient. You pay by the week at the Nelson. You can keep a hot plate in your room, but only by permission and after the cord has been inspected. You can die on a fixed income at the Nelson, and the last sound you hear could well be the creaking of bedsprings over your head as some other helpless old loser jacks off.