Stone Junction (7 page)

‘Smiling Jack is a field assistant for Volta, one of the Star members, so I think that’s a safe assumption. But they dislike the phrase
working
for
. They prefer thinking of it as a natural alignment of mutual interests, and therefore an extension of the alliance.’

‘Well shit,’ Annalee said, ‘why not tell us? Or ask us to join?’

Shamus raised his hands in mock defense. ‘Don’t ask me why they do what they do. The only policy I know about recruitment is that you’re not supposed to approach people till they’re ready, and then to tell them the truth. I would suspect in your case that there’s some legal concern about Daniel, since you might be nailed for conspiracy if membership could be proven, and that’s a harder fall. Also, members are supposed to donate five percent of their net income to the cause, so maybe they didn’t want to lean on a single woman’s purse. Besides, you spent enough time on the street to understand the wisdom of knowing no more than you need to.’

Before Annalee could reply, Daniel leaned forward intently and said, ‘You keep saying
they
. Aren’t you a member?’

‘I was,’ Shamus said. ‘I quit.’

‘But they’re still helping you.’

Shamus sighed. ‘It’s complicated. I started out as a smuggler. Cigarettes and watches at first, then drugs, then gold. Gold was the first thing I’d ever moved that moved
me
. The first bar I ever saw, it was like the sun rose in my blood. I was working out of Florida at the time, very young, ambitious, imaginative, with a talent for safely transporting contraband from point A to point B. I was reliable, I was discreet, and I was making lots of money. And unlike most smugglers, I didn’t fling it away on drugs, racing boats, and high-flying women. I had fun, but at a level less extravagant than my income, because no matter how good you are, you can get unlucky.

‘I’d got to the point where I had plenty of money and lots of doubt that my luck could hold, so I was thinking about getting out of the business when Red Lubbuck paid me a visit. Red was the main mover on the Gulf side, so naturally I assumed he wanted to talk business; I was surprised when he told me about AMO instead. It was, like Red himself, very straightforward: I could enjoy the benefits of alliance in return for the annual dues, five percent of my net, paid on my honor – no collectors, no audits, no questions asked. The benefits of alliance, according to Red – he went into detail, but I’ll just mention them – were technical and legal assistance; a network of skilled and reliable people; the use of various facilities, from safe houses to machine shops; access to intelligence services, which Red claimed, correctly, were exceptional; and the possibility of using communal knowledge and educational opportunities to expand one’s own talents.

‘Red was persuasive without applying pressure, but I’d always worked independently and was thinking about retiring anyway, so there was no sense in joining an organization of strangers on vague promises of unusual opportunities and collective strength. I told Red I was flattered, but my answer was a friendly no thanks.

‘My Boston Irish can’t accommodate Red’s Cracker twang, but I can quote his reply from memory: ‘Hell son, we ain’t interested in your smuggling. That’s just an occupation, prone to go belly-up any time. What we’d like you to do is go study precious metals with Jacob Hind, who you probably never heard of, being young and unawares, but we think he’s one helluva teacher, a flat-out
master
– forgotten more shit about precious metals than you’ll ever learn. But Jacob Hind is pushing ninety. You’d be his last student.’

‘That snared me. As mentioned, I was becoming increasingly taken with precious metals and nervous about smuggling. Smuggling, after all, is a job, and no matter the danger or reward, a job gets boring. So I joined AMO, and three months later I was on an island in Puget Sound, the lone and bewildered pupil of Jacob Hind.’

‘Was this like regular school?’ Daniel wanted to know.

‘Not like today’s, no. If anything, it was plain old-fashioned master-apprentice.’

Daniel poked Annalee’s shoulder. ‘We just were reading about that a month ago, huh Mom?’

‘We sure were,’ Annalee said. ‘But let Shamus finish his story.’

‘Was Jacob Hind a good teacher?’ Daniel said to Shamus. Annalee wasn’t sure if the question was meant to defy her or encourage Shamus to continue.

‘A
good
teacher?’ Shamus repeated thoughtfully. ‘It’s a
good
question, even if I can’t answer it. At first I thought he was completely loony, this daft old Dutch-English fool who lost control of his bladder when he was excited, which was often. Half the time he babbled in Latin and when he did speak English it was almost entirely in metaphor. ‘The most precious stone is the river in flames.’ ‘One who has a man’s wings and a woman’s also is the womb of matter.’ The Latin may have been all metaphor, too. Anyway, I had difficulty grasping his lessons.

‘However, he had a great metallurgical laboratory and a better library – even though, again, half of it was in Latin or Greek. I was just beginning to understand his methods, and with them a sense of his substance, when he died suddenly of a heart attack.’

Shamus paused, taking a deep breath. ‘That’s how I burned my hand. When Jacob’s heart gave out, he staggered against the lab table. We were in the middle of an exercise involving the transformation of silver, and when he flailed his hand out to catch himself he hit the crucible of molten silver, spilling it on my hand. In that instant of shock before the pain consumed me, Jacob grabbed me by the shoulders and, with such power it seemed effortless, pulled me to him in a fierce embrace, shuddering as he gathered breath to whisper in my ear: “Make them return to ninety-two.”’

Annalee said, ‘What did he mean, “return to ninety-two”?’ Daniel was glad she asked.

‘I’m not sure what he meant,’ Shamus said. ‘In the Periodic Chart of Elements, ninety-two is uranium, a precious metal, the last natural element – last by being the heaviest in terms of atomic weight – before the fifteen created by man. If I’d understood him correctly in our brief time together, he despised man-made elements because they were dangerous, corrupting, confusing, and unnecessary.’

‘But how could you make them return to ninety-two?’ Annalee said.

‘I wish I knew. I wonder about it every day.’

Daniel said, ‘Now I understand.’

‘What?’

‘Why you quit, and why they keep helping you: They owe it to you for hurting your hand.’

‘But I
didn’t
quit then. In fact, when I recovered I took over Jacob’s lab and continued my studies. AMO not only approved, they provided me with a Latin teacher. In six months of demon study I could read most of the old texts. Out of the emerging connections, I became fascinated by the radioactive elements, and, not surprisingly, uranium in particular. Old ninety-two itself, Jacob’s point of return, the end of the natural line before the man-made mutants of linear accelerators and nuclear reactors. I had uranium samples, of course, but it was uranium-235, the fissionable isotope, that interested me. But since 235 is used in nuclear bombs, the government has it all. And if nothing else in my studies was clear, it was overwhelmingly obvious that we cannot comprehend elemental powers and processes without direct communion.

‘At any rate, I decided to steal some U-235, and I asked AMO for help. They sent a member of the Star to see me, a man named Volta, and he not only turned down my request, he tried to persuade me not to attempt it on my own. He said he sympathized, but – I’m quoting – “Personal fascinations aren’t sufficient reason to commit AMO to a course of action where success would be more dangerous than failure.” Which was Volta’s elegant way of saying that the theft of nuclear material would bring down the heat so hard and hot that other projects and many people would be jeopardized.

‘I was pissed, so I said something like “Since I
am
going to steal the uranium for my own selfish reasons, the only honorable thing I can do is quit AMO.” And Volta said, “As you choose. Not that it’ll make much difference – the scrutiny will still be severe and disruptive. And not that your honorable gesture is pointless; honor never is. By all means, do as you will.”

‘And I did,’ Shamus smiled ruefully. ‘And it fucked up. And the heat came down. And here we are.’ The smile had disappeared.

Annalee reached over with her right hand and squeezed his thigh. ‘I can think of worse places to be.’

‘Now what will happen?’ Daniel said. Annalee could have strangled him. The future would come fast enough.

‘Who knows?’ Shamus answered Daniel. ‘They’ll probably split us up in Dubuque and get me out of the country.’

‘Suppose we don’t want to split up?’ Annalee said.

Shamus turned to her and said softly, ‘But we do. So far I’ve got you burned to the ground, uprooted, and on the run. I’d love to stick with you, but that’d be an indulgence I don’t deserve and a risk I won’t take right now.’

Annalee started to say something, then changed her mind. She reached over and snapped on the radio, looking for some rock ’n’ roll she could crank up loud. Her brain told her splitting up was the most sensible move, but her heart reminded her she didn’t have to like it.

Transcription:

Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio

Oooooowwweeee!
You got me when you weren’t looking, the ol’ DJ hisself, the Duke of Juice, coming at you live as I can handle on KOOOOL mow-beel radio, where you find it is where you get it, but don’t look on the dial, baby,’ cause we’re not there. We’re OTD, OD, and O Sweet Leaping Jesus could this possibly be real! It is – heh-heh – it is indeed: The Blue Man in the Silver Van come to seed your dreams and feed your lonely little monkey.

What we’re talking here is HIGH Kulture. Towering! The Immensely Outasight! Magnificent Spirit-Shots into the Void! Direct Brain-Bang Transmission Leaps! Solid-State Astral Sex-Launch! That’s right, you got it! Welcome to the Cloud-Walker Kulture Klub.

Now just between you, me, and the cave walls, kids, tonight we’ve got a bodacious show. If it don’t get you off, you must be chained down.

Think I jive? Well, brothers and sisters, check it out. We’re gonna hear Karl Marxxx doing his Number One single, ‘Undistributed Surplus Income and What It Means for Working Stiffs Like You and Me,’ featuring Peter Kropotkin on dobro and Leon Trotsky on violin. We got Jean-Paul Sartre from that new Essays-on-Tape series, in this case his neglected disquisition on postindustrial anxiety called ‘Incipient Arousal and Feelings of Doom.’ You digging it so far? Want more? Well, write this one down: out-takes from a rare Walt Disney interview where he holds forth at length between pipes of opium on Electromythology and the Tinkerbell Fetish (and hey you guys, ’fess up – don’t you remember wishing little ol’ Tinkerbell was about five feet taller?).

And why stop there? Hell, why stop at all? We’re also gonna have
live
, in the here and right now, the
entire
Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing the dirty version of ‘Staggerlee.’ Fuck me if we ain’t! Plus –
mercy
, mama! – the recently discovered Bach violin partitas as performed by the Tap City Strutters, Demerol Jones conducting. And if that don’t leave you squealing, heap on our regular features – like Carl Jung on astrology, Consumer Hot-Line with Attila the Hun, Corliss Lime’s ultrabitchy book reviews, and me, the Duke of Juice, on drums.

So hang in there and I’ll hang it in your ear.

When they reached Dubuque later that day they stopped at a Conoco station. Shamus called a number from the pay phone. It was a short conversation, and he came back to the car looking thoughtful.

Annalee studied his face. ‘So, where to?’

‘The
City of Baton Rouge.
’

‘Louisiana?’ Daniel said from the backseat. ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

Shamus smiled. ‘The
City of Baton Rouge
is a boat, an honest-to-god old Mississippi stern-wheeler docked just out of town.’

‘Of course,’ Annalee nodded absently, ‘the Mississippi River. And down the mighty Mississippi to the Gulf at New Orleans. From there, I suppose, to Cuba by submarine.’

Shamus tousled her hair. ‘That’s the spirit. From Cuba to Brazil by glider. At night. No moon.’

‘Just starlight on the water and the rush of wings.’

‘You got it,’ Shamus said.

Annalee started the car. ‘First let’s find this riverboat.’

‘They’d never find us in the jungle,’ Daniel said with excited conviction.

Annalee said to Shamus, ‘Truth time – do you know where we’re going or are you just jacking us up?’

‘Take the last exit before the bridge, then north along the river. Elmo Cutter, one of Volta’s field men, is going to meet us there. Beyond our immediate destination of the
City of Baton Rouge
, I have no idea where we’re going. But I’m sure Elmo will have some suggestions.’

Elmo Cutter was short, swarthy, and squat. A thick, black cigar – which he never lit – wagged under the grimy bill of a Chicago Cubs cap. He greeted them on the dock with an assortment of gruff monosyllables, then led them aboard.

The
City of Baton Rouge
was the last of its class, a steam-driven stern-wheeler riverboat of sleek and majestic line. Before the turn of the century it had carried an elegant trade of businessmen, gamblers, and high-stepping women; and even now, though stripped and abandoned in 1950, it still had an aura of green felt, soft conversation, a waltz drifting from the ballroom. You could smell the fragrant mix of sourmash whiskey, country ham, and fresh magnolias in the serving girls’ hair; almost hear the soft clicking of chips as a pot was raked in the gaming room. But not even a fulgent imagination could blur its present state of weathered, empty decay.

Elmo led them to the dining room. Once two hundred had sat down at long tables sagging with fried chicken, ham, mashed potatoes, slaw, hot biscuits, butter-slathered corn, baked quail, greens, gravy, and thick slices of pumpkin pie. Now there was only a beat-up card table and four folding chairs.

Elmo went straight to the point: ‘You split up here.’