Concert of Ghosts (7 page)

The girl paused and gazed at Tennant as if she felt a profound pity for him.

“Obe's photograph was like that. It was reprinted scores of times around the world. You'll see it in histories of the sixties. It was even turned into a poster, but by that time the mood was beginning to change and the whole Haight thing was going down the tubes. The poster had a short shelf life, Harry. But for a moment that photograph was famous. And you say you don't remember it?”

Famous. Tennant, who found this hard to accept, walked to the window and looked out into the rain. Where was this girl leading? Didn't she understand he had more pressing things in his life than what was obviously a case of drug-induced amnesia? No, that didn't quite cut it: He was evading his own failure of memory. He suddenly wanted to be graceful and weightless, to float like a hawk through the rain, free.

Don't flee from stuff, boyo. You cope by standing still
.

Boyo? Another upstart voice in his head, a bastard that didn't belong in his mental apparatus. How did you get like this? Did the drugs really fuck you so royally?

“It's a blank,” he said. “You've got to keep in mind the way things were back then. Too many acid trips. Sometimes you took trips so goddamn intense you never quite made it back from the stratosphere. You left parts of yourself in orbit. Some things have been deleted from my tapes, that's all. Black holes.” As some people are said to feel the presence of an amputated limb, so Tennant imagined just then that his dog was brushing against his leg. A strange illusion.

Alison Seagrove picked up the clipping and held it in the palm of her hand. “They must be enormous black holes if you can't remember anybody in this picture.”

“You weren't around in those days,” he said. “A lot of bad acid hit the streets toward the end. Organized crime moved into the Haight. Those gangsters didn't give a shit what kids swallowed. People freaked out. I was unlucky enough to be one of them. I live with that. Some people live with a disability. I think of it that way.”
If I think of it at all
.

“An incomplete life.”

“I never really considered it like that.”

“Exactly how
did
you consider it, Harry? Or did you just hibernate out here in the boondocks and grow your dope?”

Tennant ignored her question. He wasn't going to admit to the plodding, clockwork way he passed his time. Okay, so the failure of memory was disturbing, but he had an explanation for it, and if she didn't like it, that was her problem.

“I'm waiting for the rest of your story,” he said.

She sighed, irked by his evasive manner. “It's simple really. I started out doing one of those fluff pieces—‘Where Are They Now?' That kind of thing. It's filler, Harry. Faces from the past. How are they living these days. Blah blah blah. But when I started to dig, something happened. It began to get interesting.” She laid the cutting in front of him. “Two of the kids in the picture seem to have vanished. And the other two are dead.”

“Dead?” Tennant wondered why his heart was wired with dread. If he couldn't recollect his companions in the picture, why should he be troubled by the knowledge that a pair of them had died? “Which two?”

She pointed to the photograph. “The kid with the Mexican mustache, Carlos Carlos, was killed in a motorcycle accident. December 1968.”

Tennant looked at the boy's slightly wasted smile.
Carlos
. Did the name mean anything to him? It was hard to tell.

“Who else?” he asked. He couldn't swallow. The kitchen felt like a clammy box in which he was suspended. Alison Seagrove's index finger, in the manner of a pointer crossing a Ouija board, moved over the surface of the photograph for a second. “This one,” she said, and she touched the fat girl with the granny glasses and the fringed paisley shawl. “Kat. She jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, March 1969.”

Tennant felt a curious relief that Alison Seagrove hadn't singled out the long-haired girl in the middle of the shot, although he wasn't sure why. Dread, relief—he was being dragged through some odd mixture of emotions.

“You said the other two have vanished.”

“Gone. Disappeared.”

“This girl in the middle … you haven't found any trace of her at all? Absolutely nothing?”

Alison Seagrove sat down at the kitchen table. She picked up the newspaper, and something in the way she touched it suggested an obsession she was beginning to resent. She'd been living with the story behind those five faces for some time now, and her quest was frustrating. She looked at Tennant with regret, as if she understood that by coming here she was disturbing ghosts that were not her own, but his, only his.

“Absolutely nothing,” she said. “It's like Maggie Silver never existed.”

5

He couldn't comprehend the relief he felt when Alison had pointed to the plump girl and not to the one called Maggie Silver. It was as if some kind of thread attached him to a person he must have once known—but that knowledge was so incomplete as to be worthless. Yet there was no denying the emotion, which must have been lying in wait somewhere in his brain—that place of absences and silences.

“There's some easy explanation for people vanishing,” he said. He managed to sound eminently sensible. “They move and they don't always leave forwarding addresses. You're looking back a long way. The Haight was a transient society. Kids changed their names. They dropped acid and went off into psychedelic realms, and they came back with a new name, a whole new personality.”

Tennant wasn't exaggerating. After a couple of monumental acid trips, scenic routes through light shows and into the vortices of the cosmos, who would want to be called Clyde Bullington or George Kryzaminski or some such thing? People became Sunshine Halo and Plenty O'Trips, outlandish names that now seemed ludicrous. He had the mildewed scent in his nostrils of an extinct generation.

“I managed to find you at least,” Alison Seagrove said.

“Yeah, and I've been wondering how.”

“Through your father. Indirectly.”

Good old Rayland. He'd had no direct contact with his father for—how long? He couldn't be sure. Years.

“Indirectly?” he asked. “What does that mean?”

“I got to know a young lawyer in your father's firm,” Alison said. “I understood from him that you and your father have been estranged for a long time.”

Estranged. Tennant thought that a mild word. “We don't talk, if that's what you mean. We don't have contact. I don't want to see him. I don't even want to think about him.”

“Am I allowed to ask why?”

Tennant was agitated. He knew he didn't have to answer this young woman's questions: All he had to do was close the door on her, treat her as if she were no more than an unwelcome purveyor of encyclopedias or somebody conducting some useless statistical survey. But he wanted to talk, as if to set free something trapped too long inside him. He walked around the room, his hands plunged in his pockets. He rattled loose change as he moved, a sound reminiscent of a light chain that echoed with every step he took.

“What can I tell you? We had a big-time disagreement. Call it a philosophical difference, if you fancy euphemism. Rayland defended a guy I considered indefensible. Worse than indefensible. A fucking monster.”

“Did the monster have a name?”

A name, Tennant thought. He couldn't bring himself to utter it easily. Some sounds, innocuous in themselves, assumed pernicious meaning by connotation. He sat at the table. “Noel Harker. Colonel Noel Harker.”

“Ah yes. The butcher,” Alison Seagrove said.

“You got it. The butcher.” Tennant was silent a moment. He might have been listening to the house as though it were a temperamental clock he expected at any second to tick. “Any guy who gives the order to massacre innocent Vietnamese women and kids isn't somebody you'd want to sit down with at Sunday lunch, never mind defend in a court of law. Which is what Rayland did. And he did it goddamn well, if you can appreciate that kind of performance. Poor Colonel Harker. The heart bleeds. Rayland got him off on the grounds of diminished responsibility caused by ‘battle fatigue.' The jury had seen photographs of babies burning, for Christ's sake. They'd seen pictures of bayonetted women lying in ditches. And Harker walks out free.”

“That was—what?—1967,” Alison said. “You haven't spoken to Rayland since?”

“Sure. Once maybe. Twice. I don't know. His defense humiliated me. I told him he was fucked up. He argued that the system gives any man the right to the best defense available. Christ, we fought bitterly. For the first time in my life I was ashamed of my own father. What was more agonizing was the way he began to appear on TV shows whenever there was any discussion about American brutality in Vietnam—voilà, there was Rayland on the box, defending the actions of men in war. He'd become an expert in the art of justifying atrocities. Jesus, he was smooth. He was good at it. By the time he finished you wanted to shake his hand and thank him for pointing out that sometimes brutality was more than justified, and God bless it.”

Harry stood up, restless. Exhuming his relationship with Rayland was an exhausting business even now. It should have been a corpse, long interred, but it still came back to haunt him. “I didn't want to see him after all that. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him. He was a dead man where I was concerned. I went off to San Francisco. I threw myself into a life-style that was directly the opposite of Rayland's. And that infuriated the hell out of him, which in turn delighted me. Sometimes …” He paused by the window and the girl looked at him.

“Sometimes what?”

“The thing is, he was terrific when I was a kid. My mother died when I was about eight, and Rayland—the only word I can find to describe him back then is devoted. He spent all his spare time with me. We went places together. Ball games. Movies. It was like he didn't want me out of his sight. He was considerate. Generous. You couldn't have asked for a better father. He could have shipped me off to some expensive school, but he didn't. He kept me at home, he made himself constantly available, no matter what his schedule was like. That's the Rayland I like to remember. The other Rayland's a guy I don't begin to know.”

He stared out at the darkening woods. He had an image of his mother, the first in a long long time. Lily, who had died of kidney failure, had had an anarchist's attitude to the society in which her husband was obliged by business to move. Addicted to five o'clock martinis, she'd dissect Rayland's acquaintances, saying they were terrific arguments for the legalization of euthanasia.
Thieves and villains, I swear. Every man jack of them. You want to watch out for them, Harry. Power's all they think about
. Lily, with her wide lipsticked mouth and overrouged cheeks and fanciful hairstyles, an eccentric who made her foibles attractive.

Tennant looked at the young woman. “I'd say the final break with Rayland came about a year after the Harker trial. We met in San Francisco. I was stoned out of my gourd at the time, which didn't help the situation much. We were speaking like people from different planets. He mentioned he'd given up the day-to-day practice of law and turned his talents to something I found just as laudable as defending ghouls: high-powered lobbying on behalf of the goons who make arms. A whisper in the right congressional ear. A discreet cocktail with a senator in some quiet bar. You know how it works. Rayland's a persuasive man. And by the time he defended Harker, he'd made a bunch of new pals in the military, and no doubt they saw Rayland's potential. Want to bulldoze some useless new trillion-dollar high-speed tank through congressional appropriation committees? Rayland's your man. He's on intimate terms with all the best ears in town.” Tennant was quiet a moment. “We had a real bad scene in the bar of the Mark Hopkins. There he was in his dark three-piece while I had on this leather vest and faded jeans and my hair down to here—and I dumped a drink on him and tossed peanuts into his face and he slapped me. It might sound amusing now, but at the time it was god-awful. Rayland isn't big on unseemly behavior in public places.”

“He was the warmonger and you were the hippie pacifist?”

“The way I see it, dope beats the hell out of war any old day of the week,” Tennant said.

There was a silence. Tennant wondered if, having told the story of his relationship with Rayland, he'd actually unburdened himself of anything. Probably not, otherwise he wouldn't feel the way he did, weighed down, depressed.

“So you met a friendly lawyer in my father's firm and he was kind enough to provide you with my address?” he asked.

“It took some small persuasion and a great deal of patience on my part. But he told me eventually.” She smiled then, perhaps a little slyly, a gesture that caused Tennant to wonder about the nature of this intimacy. It must have been enough to turn the lawyer's head around, because Rayland's private files were sacrosanct, rumored to contain damning information about prominent men.

“Funny,” he said. “I had no idea Rayland knew where I was living. That was naive of me, I guess. He always did have a network of informants and private detectives. I can see how he'd get some satisfaction knowing my address. He has this dark side that enjoys information gathered in secrecy and stored in locked cabinets. It gives him a jab of power.”

Tennant, dismissing the memory of his father, discarding the sense of betrayal Rayland inspired in him, stretched a hand across the table and let it fall upon the newspaper clipping. In the dimming light he could no longer make out the details of the picture, and he felt indifferent to the faces now, as if the falling darkness had stripped the images of any ability to surprise him. Even so, there was a charge in the air, a sense of impending ambush, like a stillness trapped between canyon walls. He had the instinct that something else was about to happen.