Thalo Blue (46 page)

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His tone got easy then, loose, drawn, but his foot kept going down on the gas pedal. Not surprisingly, the engine of the BMW sedan never gurgled. It just ran smoothly, taking them past other cars. Not unlike Big Teddy had done that last night on Heritage Highway, Oliver started dodging around the other vehicles, back and forth between the lanes. He got closer to them, started cutting in real close and Zeb thought they were going to clip a bumper or tail-end. “Take this prick at my firm,” Oliver said, as a horn blared. “He’s got my balls in a vice because he thinks he owns the goddamn world. If I don’t play by his rules, he says, he’s going to eat me alive. Well, I says, I got to play by his rules then, don’t I?—” He looked at Zeb like an answer was expected. Zeb tried to say something, but he was hugging the passenger door now, and his hand was white on its handle. Before he could get anything out of his mouth Oliver kept talking, like he had simply forgotten that his question hadn’t sounded rhetorical.

“—Mentioned my dad. Even had the goddamned gall to bring up Big Teddy Redfield—

—Like he ever even
knew
the man—

—Like he has a right to say a word about him—

—Even if his rules aren’t right, I have to fall in line.
Fall in line
, he says. Yeah, that’s what he says, just like that...
fall
.
In
.
Line
. I fall in line or I go away.”

“He even told me, he says, ‘You do
that
, you
fall in line
, or your kid goes hungry without you.’”

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Zeb never really considered that the shadow strings were running to his father’s wrists and ankles from a dark shrouded place. Back then, and even long after, he didn’t ever look at things from his father’s perspective. It’s not that his father was the enemy and one tries not to look through the eyes of his enemy for fear that he will see that the enemy’s point of view is right. It was that he just didn’t want to. It was hard. And seeing his dad as a victim of the strings did no good at all.

Oliver had run a red light, causing the oncoming traffic to screech and zag, their brakes and horns accosting the night air. Zeb asked to be taken home and when Oliver pulled up into the driveway at the house, letting the car jerk to a stop, a shaking Zeb had hopped out, slammed the door and run to the house.

He brushed through the front door, kicking over his knapsack and Oliver caught up with him. He was yelling by the time he made it inside. “You’ll go to the therapist!

“You’ll go and you’ll tell them everything’s fine—”

“
I will, will I
?” Zeb turned around, in that pocket of voided space, that mouth of the west hallway where living room, foyer, and kitchen all intertwined.

“
I’m not going to argue with you
, Sebastion. You’ll go and see this—
this therapist
and you’ll straighten this out. The last thing I need right now are these
accusations
. Remember what I said. Presentation is everything.
Smooth sailing
is important. You’ll go.”

“Dad. I’m not going to see this therapist.” His voice was indignant, not the little-boy-whine of before. But his face was red. This was a first. The first real come-uppance, the first defiant act of refusal. Zeb’s shoulders shrank. And Oliver grabbed him by the scruff of his collar. In Zeb’s face was the smell of starch and sweat and alcohol. It was sweet and bitter, both mixed together.

“—You won’t argue with me on this.
Smooth sailing
. We don’t need anybody snooping in our
goddamn
business. We need to keep clean or else—” He cut himself short, then added, with a disdain that made the order come as a sharper cut, “Don’t you disrespect me any further.
Your mother wouldn’t have stood for disrespect on this
.” His voice was raised, not just edgy anymore, but on the verge of a topsy, loose-lunged scream. The control he had over his voice in the car had slipped out the ends of his fingers. Just like his control over the steering wheel had on their “ride,” it was now dissolving, like that fading early evening light had from the windows before the room had plunged into darkness.

“You’re going. And that’s final.”

“
No.
”

Softly, Zeb dared to say it and immediately wished he hadn’t. The stroke from his father’s open hand came next. And they were left staring at each other for a fraction of a second before Zeb ran off to his room, wailing in broken spirit and shock, holding a hand to his struck face, red from more than just embarrassment.

The first session with the referred therapist occurred a week and a day after that event. The startling outburst tainted Oliver’s relationship with his son more than any bottle ever could have. Oliver had wound up and made true the self-fulfilling prophecy of Zeb’s charcoal drawing. But just that once. And he was left feeling helpless and hopeless afterwards, like the departing light that evening had seeped out of him instead of the atmosphere. It felt like it was never coming back.

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It was then, and for a long time after, that Zeb started to catch scent of the shadowy strings running to all the feet of all the people in all the world. They were alive, those strings, but he would not grasp their entire complexity and omnipresence for a few years yet.

In a brusque set of sessions, the therapist had tried to delve into Zeb’s frustration. Zeb didn’t believe he actually had any, and his crafty character allowed him to easily navigate around her questions, despite his father instructing him to be polite and tell her everything she wanted to know. She, perhaps sensing inevitable failure with her patient, diverted to other topics. Specifically, she attempted to dissuade young Sebastion Redfield from moving towards a self-destructive behavior cycle. That’s actually what she called it: a
Self-Destructive Behavior Cycle
. She had used a lot of that kind of talk. Big phrases, multiple-word titles. Junk, Zeb decided.

She said things about how Zeb, a bright and understanding person with tremendous potential, needed to be his own master. To own his shadow. To break out of the shackles it was holding him with. She said that he needed to grow beyond the hurt caused by his mother’s absence and take charge of all that dark stuff that hurt and fear feeds off. That, for everyone, growth is the most important thing in life. Garbage, Zeb knew. For the most part.

Zeb had wanted to tell her the opposite was true. In life, he wrote in his Book of the Dead, growth is weakness. Growth is what happens when there is fat to be stored, when there is excess of the same. Change is what occurs to the strong. Change is when everything is used, and processed. The most valuable thing in life is constant change.

He didn’t say a word about that to the therapist though, only showed up dutifully for his sessions and let them expire. Everything seemed to go back to normal—at least for all outside eyes. Which, Zeb supposed, was the point anyway.

Originally, he expected the same kind of spouting from Malin as he had gotten from that therapist of before. Verbal diarrhea that meant nothing below the surface of its own fancy enunciation. But she had been nothing like that at all. She had been different. And now it made him feel like throwing those shadows aside was not only plausible but entirely achievable.

As he drove under the Thalo-Cerulean splendor, leaving his feelings of loss for mother and dad further and further behind him on the road, he saw more of his future. In the weeks and eventual months following Oliver’s last morning, he had fallen away to a place where only his mind kept him company. He became a victim of himself for a while. A victim of what he perceived to be true. No growth. No change. A man with no memory of the colors which had filled every day of his life for so long before.

Now, facing the interminable roadway ahead, he wondered if cutting away the shadow strings was the only way one ever really knew he was alive. Would that prove it? Or is it something one simply
knows
when he does it? Leaping off the periphery could perhaps be more valuable than standing at its boundary and looking safely over the edge. Carefully clinging to the security of the ground and studying the height and its glory is casual change, an Oliver approach if ever there was one. But the jump—that fall into nothingness, that decent into what, the unknown?—
that
is change. Change in lieu of growth. Yes! His mind latched upon the idea. It became a potential that throbbed for realization. And he now felt like he was going to find that realization, or die trying.

All other things, white coats and tunnels, mortgage payments and television sets, pop cans and snapping towels, were different—all of that just got in the way. They were the things before you jump. They were the strings themselves.

He had forgiven Oliver for the slap, and for other things. Had forgiven Sadie for going, Jackson for doing the same, and himself for dwelling on all of it while infomercials raged at him with phony assurances. He had even, in a split second, asked forgiveness from all of them. He had let go of John Merridew, let go of the firm, of Caeli and the artificial sense of purpose he had felt for who knew how long. He was floating free at this moment.

That therapist had been right about one thing. He needed to own his shadow. To break out of the trappings where everyone places so much beleaguered emphasis. Out of the conjured life designed by another. He had been striving for such a departure like this for an eternity but never knew how to make it real. On this day, though:
Snip, snip
. And here he was, driving towards a bright horizon of Thalo blue. His fade away divine made complete.

Zeb reveled; he was going to own it all.

He was done with all of it.

What he didn’t know is that it wasn’t done with him.

II. Banks and the Bells of Cathedrals

The bastard fell from the sky that Monday morning.

Standing at a floor-to-ceiling panel of tinted glass in his office—the top floor of those three his firm had procured, yet still a number of stories from the pinnacle height of the polished tower itself—John Merridew sipped strong black coffee from a shiny mug.

Surveying the sky that he stood nearly in line with, a sky that was punctuated by similarly hindering towers all around, he whirled about to face Riley Fischer, who had brushed past a startled secretary.

Following the crack of a bullet that went through him and the plate of window behind him, Johnny Merridew fell through a waterfall of shattered glass and descended into the sky, no longer its equal. Out, out and down, he disappeared amid a flapping storm of papers and photographs.

The photos, as was the gun, had been fetched from the wall-safe at Fischer Senior’s.
My pop’s got Merridew’s bell rung, hasn’t he?
Fish had said. As Merridew’s secretary and other employees rushed to the lips of the office to look on, Fish shot himself next, and fell after Johnny—all the way down to a squat, two story rooftop far below. Taken years earlier, the photographs that were sucked into the frigid air on the other side of the empty frame showed a young boy—whose St. Vincent’s plaid uniform tie was wrapped like a bandana round elder Merridew’s head. That boy had been Fish.

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Someone once said that it’s the still-living ghosts that haunt. That wasn’t true for Sebastion. For him, the dead ones still did the talking. Riley Fischer, who had an affinity for Jim Croce’s
Bad Bad Leroy Brown
, was gone, a victim of the sky, a victim of himself.
He
had been haunted by a ghost with a pulse.

On Monday morning, far away from the city’s fringe and speeding still further from it, Zeb had no idea. But what he was starting to understand was his father’s point of view. And the dangling cords that had ensnared his dad’s ankles and wrists for years.

Zeb knew that John Merridew, his father’s boss and a bastard of the Nth degree, had always been accused of improprieties. Pointing fingers hovered around him like flies buzzing about decaying garbage. But he shrugged them off, and charges never followed the complaints. If they did, Zeb thought on occasion, Merridew had been able to buy his way out of them. Like Fischer, he seemed able to buy his way out of nearly anything.

Had Oliver heard something, or greater yet,
found
something that would make the powers that be, the ones with the pointiest fingers of all, come around and knock on Merridew’s door a little harder? Maybe Oliver had access to that same stack of photos Riley had brought into the office a few years after all this had really begun. Did pop confront his boss? And did that confrontation spark something that would eventually get utterly out of control? Oliver had a conscience. Money was king to him, Zeb knew, but there was morality in him. There was work ethic,and from that grew the branches of what must have been his morality. Were the accusations of Merridew’s account skimming or about the little boys seen arriving at his downtown condominium actually provable back then? Oliver might have pointed his finger at John Merridew only to have the bastard point back.
I-I did it for y-you
, Oliver had said. And his son had scoffed at that.
For me? Yeah, right.
But now the phrase had some salt in it. The idea had some bite. With Sadie gone and Merridew threatening that Oliver would lose his job—or worse—the notion that he might keep quiet and pay up seemed more plausible. Not likely, but conceivable. Is that why Zeb’s charcoal drawing of his battered aunt raised so many flags for Oliver? If Oliver was taking advantage of girls like Daniela or even his own son, eyebrows would lift. And an absent mother spelled the worst. Where would Zeb go if his father was found guilty of such things? Foster care? Worse?

You fall in line, or your kid goes hungry.
The illusion-strings, which Zeb had first become witness to on that night he sped through the city in his father’s passenger seat had been completely genuine. As the old man ranted, his son saw the dark lines pulled taught, not just in his mind, but around the real flesh-and-blood man called Oliver Redfield.