Half World: A Novel (31 page)

Hannah said, “What the hell?”

The boy was still back at the corner. The light changed, but he didn’t cross, just stood where he was, watching them. Dickie yanked Hannah again, pulling her along, jogging now, their boots splashing in the quickly forming puddles.

Back inside the gallery, he checked one more time, the sidewalk, the cars parked at the curb, and then he locked the front doors. They were both wet. He stood with his back to her, water dripping from his beard, staring at the seam where the two doors met, his mind racing, she could tell, struggling with a choice, which way to go.

“What did you see?” she said.

He leaned forward, a hand on each door. He spoke, finally, and she didn’t know if he didn’t face her because he was afraid to face her or because he wanted to face the doors, if he was standing between her and something outside.

He said, “I have something to tell you and I need you to hear me out, no matter what.”

She didn’t want him to go any further. She thought that if she didn’t respond they could just stay like this, motionless in this space, perched but not yet falling.

He set his forehead against the doors, dripping rain, breathing hard.

She didn’t want to hear anything. She didn’t want to know.

She said, “Tell me.”

3

Into the blare and shine of the airport terminal. Moving sidewalks, careening baggage carts, directional signage a cryptographer couldn’t decipher. Jimmy squints at arrows, stops to swivel at intersections. At each stage of the trip he has been asked if he needs assistance, if he requires a wheelchair, help finding his seat, an elbow to hold on his way to the lavatory. If he would like an attendant to contact someone in his destination city so they can be waiting at the gate when he arrives.

He rents another car, drives past the airport sprawl, out through Santa Fe. Night in the desert. Into a little two-lane town, stopping at the first bar he sees.
Hutch’s Blue Room
. He orders a drink, another, standing instead of sitting, trying to get some circulation back into his legs after the flights, letting the pain fall, slowly, from his crotch to his feet.

He checks into a motel, cash, one night, using Squires’s name. The room is the room, stale carpeting and mesa-print wallpaper, a pair of double beds, cool to the touch. There are only a few hours until morning but he leaves the beds undisturbed, sits at the desk with the miniature bottles of whiskey he hoarded from the flight and the Gideon’s Bible he found in the bedside table.

Elaine became religious in her final months. It was something Jimmy couldn’t agree with, but he held his tongue. She was a smart woman, but desperate. She needed to believe this wasn’t all there was, that her life
wasn’t being cut short so much as she was moving on early. So Jimmy kept his mouth shut, sat silently in the hospital room while the priest placed the Eucharist on her dry tongue.

Jayne was born-again, had found Jesus ten years before she’d met Jimmy, in the exact moment between the swing and connection of her first husband’s fist with her left cheekbone. She saw everything in that moment, she said, her life before and her life to come, her mistakes and her possibilities, and by the time his fist shattered the bone she was already gone, at least in spirit, already packed and away, starting her new life. The first night they went to dinner she told Jimmy her whole story, and then she asked if he was ready to accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Jimmy looked across the table at this woman, twenty years his junior, one eye drooping slightly, but the clarity in her face when she asked the question, that quiet certainty, was something he thought he could find comfort in, so Jimmy said, Yeah, sure, why not, I’ve accepted everything else to this point.

On vacations Jayne brought books, handbags full of romance novels, but if there was a Bible in the hotel room she’d read it before bed. They’d drive out to the coast, little beach towns and tourist traps, wherever she wanted to go. Jimmy didn’t care, was happy to make the reservations and follow along. She was always moving, even in the house, room to room, cleaning, arranging, settling rarely, for meals, a phone call, but then back up and over to the laundry room, downstairs to change the bedding in the guest rooms even though they weren’t expecting guests. She made the trip down the mountain almost every day, weather permitting, shopping or lunch with friends or meeting with her Bible study group. It was easy for Jimmy to see that she was still trying to outdistance something, but at least now she was running from one safe point to another. At the end of the night, when she was finally motionless in bed, Jayne’s face would compose into that calm look of certainty, that belief in something greater, and if that was the last thing Jimmy saw before he closed his eyes then he didn’t have so much trouble getting to sleep.

He sat in the motel room, waiting out the night. The bottles and the
Bible. He didn’t believe what Jayne believed, but he hoped the arithmetic of the situation was enough, her faith canceling his doubt.

He had an envelope of cash he’d taken with him from the house. Jayne wouldn’t notice it was gone, not right away. He’d invested his pension well, was the recipient of off-hours phone tips, calls from men he’d worked with who still needed to go to an office every day and had moved to the private sector. Men still terrified of the man Jimmy hadn’t been in a decade. He took no pride in it. It was no way to make money, talking on the phone, writing checks, opening mail. Any idiot with a pulse and a few well-connected acquaintances could do it.

He opened another bottle. He thought of Henry March in a room like this, waiting. March in some in-between place. March the mystery, how a man could disappear so completely. Jimmy had come out of that room, past that monstrosity of a door, and March was nowhere to be found. His ledger nowhere to be found. Clarke in hysterics. They’d been livid back east, and terrified. They didn’t trust Jimmy with much after that. He still got calls, but it was mostly strong-arm stuff, intimidation work, nothing like the apartments on Telegraph Hill. Excommunicated. Henry March’s escape was seen as his fault. Many times he’d thought about going to the house in Oakland and beating something out of the wife, the retarded son. But March wouldn’t have told them anything. He would understand that knowing nothing would keep them safe.

There was a hound on the trail and Jimmy had been sent to hunt the hound but then who would be sent to hunt Jimmy? He was little more than another loose end, he knew this, despite all of Squires’s bullshit. There would be another engine in the system soon, waiting for Jimmy to do his job before taking Jimmy out. Or maybe they knew more than they let on, Squires and his superiors. Maybe they had talked to Jimmy’s doctors, seen his test results. Maybe they knew that Jimmy had brought his own hunter with him.

He greeted first light with a final drink, the Bible still closed on the desk. He made a couple of phone calls back east to some of those old acquaintances, looking for an address north of Santa Fe. He left the room as he’d found it. Stopped at a pawnshop on the way out of town for a
pistol, thirty bucks cash, a battered silver L that had been much used, easy in his hand, a thing with its own weight of memory, that carried its own dark history.

*   *   *

The house was in an unfinished subdivision below a smooth rise of bare hills. Only a few completed hacienda-style homes among the other unbroken lots. Cactus and manicured sand in the front yards, foreign cars in the driveways. Jimmy heard coughing from behind the house, let himself through a side gate onto a back patio dense with vegetation. A small fountain burbled somewhere unseen. Jimmy moved through the growth to the center of the patio, the man on his knees there, his hands deep in soil, repotting.

“Doctor,” Jimmy said. “You look well.”

Clarke stopped digging, stared at the plant in front of him. After a moment he stood and turned. He was still a handsome man, tanned and fit. His hair was white now. A clipped white mustache sat on his upper lip.

“Nice place,” Jimmy said. “Quiet. Are we alone?”

“My wife is away for the weekend.”

“First? Second?”

“I’ve been married a few times.”

“I’ll bet.”

Clarke’s hands hung at his sides, dirty to the knuckles. He reached for a towel on the edge of the fountain, wiped the earth from his fingers.

“You weren’t hard to find,” Jimmy said.

“I stopped hiding years ago. I realized it wouldn’t make any difference. Anyone can be found.”

“Not quite anyone.”

Clarke refolded the towel, lifted a cigarette pack from his shirt pocket.

“When was the last time you spoke to Henry March?” Jimmy said.

“I speak with him every day.” Clarke shook a cigarette from his pack. “Don’t you? I plead with him for a few more years of silence, to allow me to finish out my days undisturbed. You look sick, Jimmy.”

“Is that a professional diagnosis?”

“What do you have?”

Jimmy looked back over his shoulder, past the distant roofs of the rest of the subdivision, the purple hills beyond.

“Let’s go inside,” Clarke said. “Have a drink.”

“It’s early.”

“Since when?”

Jimmy turned back to him. “You keep a gun in the house, Chip?”

Clarke lit his cigarette, hands shaking.

“We’ll stay out here for now,” Jimmy said. “When was the last time you spoke to the flesh-and-blood Henry March?”

“You know when.”

“Nothing since?”

Clarke shook his head.

“Spoken to anyone else?”

“No.”

“A lot of years,” Jimmy said. “A long time to keep quiet.”

“I’ve never told anyone, Jimmy.”

“No?”

Clarke shook his head.

“One of those wives?”

“No.”

“Somebody else?” Jimmy said. “Middle of the night. Another secret.”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

Clarke pulled anxiously on his cigarette. Jimmy watched, wanting one for the first time in years. He hadn’t smoked since Elaine’s doctor had given them the test results, as if Jimmy quitting could somehow change her diagnosis. As if there was a balance to things, a zero-sum accounting.

“I expected this years ago,” Clarke said. “You coming, someone coming. I’ve watched it all on TV. The protests, the marches. My son went to New York for that concert in the field. Do you remember, one of the johns talked about rolling around in the mud? We gave him
STORMY
. The man sat naked on the bed, talked about it for hours. Then I turned on the television and saw a hundred thousand people rolling around in the mud. My son in there with them, somewhere.”

Jimmy looked back past the garden, the nearest house maybe a hundred yards away.

Clarke put the cigarette to his lips, took a shaky pull, lowered his hand again. “We let something loose into the world,” he said. “I expected you years ago.”

“You want to go inside now?”

Clarke looked at the surrounding plants, the pot he was working in when Jimmy arrived. “I’d rather stay out here. This is where I’m most at peace.”

Jimmy put his hands into the pockets of his coat. The rental-car keys there, his sunglasses, the cold metal L
.

“I’ve never said anything, Jimmy.” Clarke’s eyes were wet. “I’ve been quiet.”

“I believe you, Chip.”

“I’ve been quiet.”

Jimmy nodded. He watched Clarke’s hand tremble as he lifted his cigarette, Clarke’s lips reaching, desperate for it.

Jimmy’s hand tightened in the pocket of his coat. Everyone he saw, he was seeing for the last time.

4

Dickie had told her everything. She’d wanted to leave and he had told her that she couldn’t, that the Sons would find her, so she’d climbed up onto the roof to get away from him. He could hear her up there, pacing, the boards creaking in the high ceiling.

He took a couple of sedatives, drained a bottle of wine, knowing that it would be a long time before he swallowed another pill, another drink. He turned on all the lights in her work space, sat with her photos, her brother’s postcards, the picture of her father. A final impression of Henry March, Henry Gladwell, the man fading, the photo fading, black and white and gray.

At one point he thought he saw Mary Margaret sitting on the sofa at the other end of the work space. At one point he thought he saw the security guard from the bank. This could be the sedatives. This could be the alcohol. This could just be what he carried with him now, the company he would keep.

In a shoe box he found the pictures that Henry March had taken when Hannah was a girl. She’d told him about these, photos of San Francisco meant to alleviate her fear of nuclear war. Dickie could see the first stirrings of her work in them, shots of buildings standing solid against the sky, or fixed among the uncertainties of human motion, blurred pedestrians passing. She had her father’s eye, his interest in the periphery, the movement at the edges of a frame.

He had told Hannah everything except how he felt that he understood her father now, his ledger. What happened when you took an accounting of your sins, a book filled with the names of the dead and damaged. Dickie could have his own ledger. He could account for his own names. He could commit to paper what he had done. They weren’t so different, he and Henry March. He wondered what he would find in Mexico. What happened to men like them.

You could still run.

This was Father Bill’s voice, coming from the couch behind him. Dickie doesn’t turn, he just listens. This could be the sedatives. This could be a dream, though he doesn’t think it’s a dream. It could just be Bill because Bill is who he talks to, Bill’s voice is the voice he hears now when he’s alone in a room.

You know how to run, Bill says. You could get out of this. Cut your losses.

Dickie lights a cigarette. There’s not much left to cut.

You’d be surprised, Bill says. There’s always more. But you want to find this man.

Yes.

And if it’s him?

Then they can have him.

This group? These killers?

Yes.

You’ll trade him for her? She won’t go along with it.

Dickie places the photo of Henry March in the center of the table, surrounded by the photos March had taken, the city twenty years in the past. Making him solid again, a man in a time and place, surrounded, visible. Willing March’s image not to fade entirely, not just yet.

But then, Bill says, I suppose she doesn’t have to know.

*   *   *

Everyone had lied. Dickie, her father, Ginnie, who could not have shared a bed, shared a life with that man without knowing something.

That man. Hannah thought of Henry as someone else now, a stranger
moving through her memories. She stood on the roof of her studio, watching plane lights blink across the blue-black sky. Everyone had lied.

Your father shaves in the morning, leaning over the bathroom sink. The mirror fogging from the hot water pouring from the tap. His glasses sit on the edge of the basin, their lenses clouded with steam. His face appears in the mirror, pulling the razor down across his cheek, creating a pink trail in the cloud of white foam.

Your father dresses in his bedroom, shirt, slacks, socks, shoes. Looping his tie in the mirror. A man’s secret, the intricate sleight-of-hand that leads to a tight knot at the throat. Combing his still-wet hair. The chemical-sweet smell of aftershave and hair tonic. Humidity from the shower and sink, warm weight in the air.

Your father eats his breakfast at the dining room table. He takes a lunch your mother packed in a small brown paper bag. He kisses your mother, your brother. He kisses you, just above the left ear, his aftershave and cigarette smell strong for a close moment and then gone as he walks down the short hallway, out the front door.

How could she reconcile her memory of her father with this life she’d been told he’d led? These things he may have done, may have been a part of. This man in the morning; this man in the station wagon beside her, driving along the lower deck of the Bay Bridge. This man in the photo outside the Merchants Exchange, staring into the camera lens, saying good-bye.

She’d gone up on the roof because she needed to get away from Dickie, from what he’d told her. He wouldn’t let her walk back out onto the street, but she had to go somewhere, so she climbed and was relieved when he didn’t follow.

The things he said her father had done. The things he, Dickie, said that he’d done. A man dead in a bank in Irvine; a man dead in an office in Portland. A woman he’d been involved with, a girlfriend, dead in a car, shot by the police. He’d told her these things to establish his legitimacy, she guessed, so she would think of him as a reputable source.

She could climb onto the adjoining roof and make her way down to the fire escape at the far end. She could go to the police. She could run. She could call Bert. She thought about Dickie’s descriptions of the mem
bers of this group he’d been with and tried to remember having seen any of them on the street, around the gallery, in one of her countless photos of kids and buildings throughout the city.

Or maybe no one had lied. Maybe Dickie was crazy, maybe he had escaped from an institution somewhere, had just happened to wash up on the bus-stop bench. A drug addict, an alcoholic. She’d taken him in and confided things and he’d turned them back on her, warped and distorted. He was playing through some dark fantasy that now included her and her history, her secrets.

He’d described her father’s handwriting and that could be a coincidence, a lucky guess, but she remembered the ledger from their cross-country drive, the nights in the motel rooms and her father recording all sorts of minutiae about his camera and film and shutter speeds, apertures and light. It was the first time she’d ever seen those terms and she’d never forgotten how they looked on the page.

Dickie had listed the towns and cities they’d visited on their trip in exact order. Charleston, Lexington, Louisville. He knew the names of the roadside motels where they’d stayed, every one, and she knew them, too. He had an astonishing memory and she’d never forgotten.

He’d said the Apple Tree Lodge in Carmi, Illinois, six dollars, and when he spoke she saw her father writing the same words in his book in that motel room and she knew that her life was not what she’d thought it was.

*   *   *

She climbed back down the ladder as the sun rose. A few lights on in her studio, in the gallery. It was so quiet that at first she thought he was gone, but then she smelled coffee coming from the kitchen.

“I found half a can in the back of a cabinet,” he said. He held up the coffee container. He had to prove everything now. He was standing at the counter, wearing the same clothes as the night before, the burgundy cardigan. His hair had dried to a high frizz. The teakettle was on the hot plate, the heating coil turning pink, then red.

She took off her jacket and draped it over the stool by her worktable.

“I can’t go,” she said.

“You can’t stay.”

“What if Thomas comes?”

“You won’t be here. If you stay, they’ll take you.”

“This group.”

“Yes.”

“This is insane.”

“Yes.”

“This is how they teach you to talk?” she said. “Under questioning? Yes, yes, yes, yes.” She grabbed her cigarettes from the edge of the counter. She’d been dying for one all night but hadn’t been willing to come back down just for that.

“What if you’re lying to me now?” she said. “What if you take me right to them? Isn’t that possible?”

“It is.”

“How do I know you won’t do that?”

“You don’t.”

The teakettle began to whistle. Dickie turned off the hot plate, lifted the kettle, poured the steaming water into a mug on the counter.

“How long do we have?” she said. “Until they lose patience with you. Until they come.”

He lifted the mug, crossed to her. “I don’t know. Not long.”

After a moment she took the mug, held it with both hands, absorbing its warmth.

“What if it’s him, down there?” she said. “Then you give him to these people? Knowing what they want to do?”

He didn’t say anything. He was still standing a few feet in front of her, arms at his sides.

“And if it isn’t true,” she said, “then you finish your job and go on to the next one?”

He didn’t say anything.

“And what if there’s no answer?” she said. She wanted to throw her coffee at him. “What if there’s nothing there?”

He looked down at her hands, his.

“What if there isn’t,” he said. “Yes. I don’t know.”