The Last Family

32

Paul stepped from his rental car and scooped up the files he had brought along. Sherry had called and asked him to drop by because she had had some ideas she wanted to toss around with him. She said she didn’t want to stay at the office late because she had things to do at home. He knew she had been mirroring his long hours, so he had agreed, and here he was, standing before her door and tapping lightly. He checked over his mental list again as he waited; he had been on and off the phone with Thorne and Joe all day, as usual, and he had been assured that nothing was happening that warranted his attention. Rainey, he hoped, was interviewing the Buchanan child and getting some new information.

Paul could hear music inside. A ten-speed bike was chained to the railing with a lock he decided could be violated in seconds by any crack addict worth his stuff. He shuffled the files into his left hand and was pleased that the hand had developed so much strength over the past few days of vigorous tennis-ball squeezing. He could drum the fingers on a tabletop with relative ease and surprising dexterity.

Sherry opened the door and smiled out at him.

“Any trouble finding the place?” she said.

“No. I followed the opera music.”

“Come in. I’m cooking us a snack.”

Sherry lived in a cozy one-bedroom apartment near Vanderbilt University. In the space of thirty feet the living room became the dining room, which became the kitchen. From what Paul could see from the living room, the bedroom was large enough only for the double bed, covered by a thin Indian-print cotton throw, a dresser, a trunk painted sky-blue with white trim, and a bookshelf filled with books. The living room held two matching shelf units also loaded with books in all sizes and of all ages.

“We’re having lasagna. I hope you like Italian. I guess opera seems highbrow, but it helps me cook Italian to hear Italian.”

“I love Italian,” he said. “I’d have picked up a bottle of wine if I’d known we were eating.”

“You haven’t? Eaten, I mean?”

“No.”

“I’ve got the perfect bottle of red-Chianti with the little black rooster on the label. A friend who knows Italy says you should look for the rooster on a Chianti bottle because the rooster stands for the region where the best Chianti comes from.”

He was silent.

She turned and looked at him and cocked her head. “You brought the files?” She sounded-what? Indifferent?

“Yes.”

“Good, you look so much better outside the office.”

“I know what I look like, Sherry. So do you-remember?” He fumbled at his jacket pocket nervously. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Of course you know what you look like! Ashtray’s on the coffee table. Listen, Paul. Let’s get one thing out in the open. Your face is screwed up a bit.” She looked down and then back up at him. “Okay, it’s screwed up a lot. But there is a difference between being ugly and having a face that looks like…” She paused. “Let me put it this way. Everybody has a good side. But usually they have to tell you which one it is. You’ve just done away with the guesswork.”

“I was going to say a Picasso.”

She laughed. “Okay, I might have chosen a different artist. But, look, it’s none of my business. You’ve evidently had a rough time, and your face really doesn’t matter to me. I didn’t ask you here to analyze you, pity you, mother you, or kiss your ass to get a better job.”

“You said you had some thoughts?”

“Oh, that. It was a ruse.” She busied herself rinsing glasses that she had pulled from the cabinet.

“Why did you ask me here?”

“I asked you here…” She stopped making the salad and looked at him. “Usually people skirt around a bit before they get into the heavy shit. But since you want to know. I asked you here because I’m attracted to you, and I thought I could talk to you here.”

Paul grimaced. Why did she want to talk to him? What did she really want? Didn’t she know his status was temporary?

She laughed as though she had read the thoughts.

He nodded. “Could I have a glass of the rooster red you spoke of?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. She poured him a glass of wine and worked on the salad while he sipped.

“So what’s the game plan? What do we talk about? Montana game laws? That’s about all I know anymore.”

“Well, according to my overall plot I thought we’d eat and drink wine. Then we can talk and see if there is a mutual attraction…”

Paul felt weak in the knees. “There is. I mean, I feel an attraction to most beautiful women.”

“But you’ve been in a cave in Montana. I’ll bet you’d be attracted to a…” She smiled. “Never mind. In that case, saying it holds through the food and wine, then we can go into the next room and… you know.”

“I know?”

“Well, we can take our clothes off and… like in the romance books.”

“Just like that?”

“Normally I’d expect you to court me for the socially proper time. Flowers, candy, dinner out, and a few movies.”

“Normally?” His mind was screaming that something was wrong with all of this. He fought an urge to run for it, out to his car and back to the hotel. But she compelled him with her eyes… made him want to stay.

“Paul,” she said. “Relax. This operation may well end tomorrow or the next day, so I’m not sure we have the time or if I’m your type or any of that. I decided to reach out to you.”

“It’s been… I mean, I was expecting something altogether different.”

“You haven’t noticed me watching you? I thought you had. I’ve noticed you watching me.”

“People must watch you all the time. You’re a beautiful girl. This probably isn’t a good idea.”

“Normally I’m not this forward, and I’ve never jumped into bed with anyone on a first date, but I’m willing to make an exception because we’re adults, and I’ve glanced at the Kama Sutra, and where this goes is up to you. But rules, now. We don’t discuss the low points of your life, we don’t feel sorry for each other. If the food stinks, you can lie about that. I hope you like lasagna,” she said again as she picked up a pair of pot holders and reached into the oven for the dish. “If you want to leave after dinner, go. If you want to stay, stay. Okay?”

He managed a weak nod.

As she was passing him on the way to the table with the hot pan stuck between pot holders in her hands, she paused and kissed him on the lips, gently. She looked him in the eye and smiled, and he could see that she really didn’t care about his ruined appearance. It almost eased his nervousness, but he hadn’t been in a romantic setting with a woman he was attracted to in something like six years. And then it had been Laura. He had known her intimately, and he had had an unscarred face and the natural confidence of a bulldog. That moment seemed a million years in the past.

She lit candles and turned the electric lights off.

They bumped their knees together, under the table, through dinner. It started as accidental, but each time they brushed against each other, the contact lasted longer. Paul was a bit self-conscious; he’d forgotten what a first date felt like, and he felt himself getting aroused. He was flattered by her attention. He liked Sherry, but he was haunted by second thoughts. What could she be setting him up for?

“It can’t be sexual harassment if it’s my idea,” she said, seeming to read his mind. “Maybe you can sue me.”

“Your idea?”

“You’d better believe it,” she said.

Dinner ended, and Sherry replaced the classical CD they’d listened to during the meal with a Nat King Cole disk. Then she poured them glasses of wine, led him to the couch, and sat beside him with her legs tucked up, her knees against his thigh, her hand behind his shoulder.

“Get enough to eat?”

“Yeah, but with Italian you’re hungry again in a week.”

“Comfortable?” she asked, laughing at his joke.

“I’m getting there,” he replied. He reached up and put his hand under her chin and brought her in close for a long, deep kiss.

“Can we talk a little, I mean, before we retire to the other room? I know I’ve seen you every day for the last few days, but we never just talked before.”

“You hardly know me,” he said.

“Everyone hardly knows you. I mean, they know what they see… observe about you. Like people follow you without even realizing they’ve made a choice in the matter. It’s something about your eyes-I mean your eye”-she smiled-“it has real depth to it.”

“Like a dark pool in the moonlight,” he said.

“Stop crackin’ wise.” She touched his scar so gently, he hardly felt it at all. “Even this. No one notices for long. Not after they hear you talk. They assume you’ve been there and given your all. Battle worn.”

Paul sat up. “My all? I didn’t give anything, Sherry. I stumbled into a wasp’s nest and good people died. They died for sins they didn’t commit.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong.”

“See, Sherry, most leaders aren’t shit. Just because you call someone Chief doesn’t mean they are. Look at the pharaohs and the thousands of slaves they killed to build a tomb for their own remains. Little leaders, like me, are no different, really. People get promoted despite themselves. Look at T.C. Robertson, for Christ’s sake. I was just as bad. Names became small tags to move around a board. Someone’s getting too big for their own britches-move ’em to Alaska and let ’em wade through ship holds of tuna looking for a kilo of grass. Their families, too. Out of sight with the snap of a finger. Let’s not get into what sort of leader I was. I don’t want to remember those days.”

“From what I know of you, you were a good leader, Paul. Rainey said you were the best and the brightest.”

“ ‘Was’ is the key word.”

“Paul, none of that matters. I mean, people have died, but you had no way of knowing they would die. I don’t believe that it was your fault for one minute, and I don’t see how you can believe it either. You defeated Martin Fletcher fair and square, and he couldn’t see his own guilt because he’s narcissistic.”

“Martin doesn’t hate me because I defeated him. He hates me because he thinks that I violated the warrior’s code he imagines he lives by. That I cheated and I wasn’t man enough to come after him head on. That I was responsible for his collapse.”

“Cheated him?”

“He thinks I framed him.”

“Did you?”

“It would have been dishonest, against the code, and a coward’s way out. But-”

“But?” she asked.

“But maybe sometimes things have to be done around corners. I mean, we make choices that seem better than the other alternatives.” He looked at her to see if he was saying too much, or not enough. Why burden her with his personal cross? “Hindsight is twenty-twenty. But in his mind I’m a coward, and maybe he’s right. I shouldn’t have arrested him. I should have shot him between the eyes while he was sitting across a table from me. Eye to eye, man to man. That the man would have understood. But I just didn’t have what it took. That was the right thing to do. Then I would deserve…” He stopped and looked at her. There were tears in his eyes. “I would deserve…”

“Everything you’ve thrown away.”

Suddenly Paul began to tremble, and he looked distressed, as if he were going to vomit, but he just began to cry, silent tears streaming down his cheek. Sherry held him tightly while his arms hung limp, and he cried like a child. He cried for a long time as she held him.

When he stopped crying, she could feel the wall going back up.

“See what a leader I am? I’m sorry, I’d better go.” He shifted his weight away from her.

“Why?”

“This really isn’t a good idea… I mean the wine and everything. I guess I should apologize for…”

“I could quit the job. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Do I look like someone who can’t find a job without making the boss? Plus you’re temporary here.”

“You’re serious?” Paul stared at her, studying her, suddenly seeing her differently from the way he had before.

“Dead serious.”

“Boy, are you setting yourself up for a disappointment.” He managed a nervous smile.

Paul stood beside the bed while Sherry undressed him slowly in the darkness. He was almost embarrassed. She peeled off the shirt, the pants, and the rest, and as she did, she covered the skin she was exposing with kisses. She ran her tongue over the bullet scars as she found them, nipped at the skin with her teeth, gently. Paul shivered; his wounded leg shook involuntarily, and he felt as if he were going to fall down, but he remained standing until she led him into the sheets. Then, with her back to him, she lit a candle and removed her clothes and draped them over the dresser slowly as he watched from the bed. It was like some wonderful adolescent dream. She turned, and as she did, her softly contoured buttocks became a triangle of dark pubic hair, and her shoulders gave way to her perfect breasts with small, dark nipples. She knelt into him and pressed her body against his torso. He kissed her breasts and her neck and pulled her down. They embraced and rolled toward the center of the bed, and Paul trembled like an awkward schoolboy about to get his first taste of love.

Later they were lying beside each other-he smoking a cigarette, she tracing words he couldn’t decipher on his chest with her finger. For the first time in five years he felt safe, if only for that moment. In a small apartment in Nashville, far from the stone walls outside his cabin, which he had assumed could shelter him. Even though she had said it didn’t bother her, he put the cigarette out after a couple of drags.

“You have a beautiful body,” she said. “For an old man, I mean.”

“So how old are you?”

“Small talk?” she giggled. “You know how old I am. You pulled my file and read it. I saw it open on your desk.”

“Sorry. I was just trying to…”

“Make conversation?”

“Something like that.”

She snuggled against him and twirled his chest hair with her finger. “My turn to open up? Okay, fair’s fair. Let’s see what my file didn’t tell you. My father was a biology professor, and my mom was Amerasian and taught painting. Only child. Spoiled rotten. Good childhood. Believed in Santa Claus until I was in junior high. Boy, did I feel like an idiot. Betrayed by my own parents, by commercial interests, by the media. Now, tell me about your childhood.”

“Boring stuff.”

“After I finish, okay? Will you?”

Paul nodded.

“You’re the fourth man I’ve ever slept with. That’s due to a natural shyness, not lack of want. Bert, my high-school sweetheart and first husband, was the first.”

“You’ve been married.”

“Yes. It lasted through our freshman year, when he found his next true love. Then I had this year-long rebound with my western-civilization professor who looked like Mussolini. Then I had a long romance with an archaeologist in graduate school, and now there’s you.”

“It’s been a while for me, too.”

“I can imagine. Living on a mountain in Bear Butt, Wyoming.”

“Montana.”

“Same thing. What, they don’t have girls there?”

“My wife, Laura, was the last. Been about six years, I guess.”

The memory of the last time they had made love sank a shaft through his soul. It was something he had managed to repress. Was it sex? No, it had been something else. Anger, rage, and pain. God, had that been he? How could he have done that to Laura? He remembered her face, the tears, which had given way to a look of betrayal, hurt, and finally something close to blind hatred.

He felt as if he had been shot through, hollow, and there was a taste in his mouth that was coppery, acrid. He wanted to get up and run, but he was affixed to the spot. Later that same night there had been a terrible fight. He remembered how it had started… it was too painful… was that why he hadn’t remembered?

“You all right?” she asked, shattering the thought.

He smiled as best he could through the curtain of pain and confusion. What else had he repressed that was crucial? What else? Why did he think of Barnett and Hill so much? He had hardly known them. Had he? Suddenly there was a swarm of memories swirling so fast that he couldn’t see them clearly, but he had the sense that they were important.

“Hope this was worth breaking the fast for.”

Paul laughed nervously-distracted and filled with anxiety and… fear. “It was, Sherry. This was wonderful for me.”

“Your childhood. Remember?”

Not now! Jesus, not now. Something important is happening.

Sherry sat up and looked down at him, realizing something was wrong. “Are you all right? What the hell is going on? Did I say something?” There was pain in her voice. “Paul?”

“I’m fine.”

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Several. He took a deep breath and lit another cigarette; the fingers of his right hand trembled. “It’s okay, I thought I’d pulled a muscle for a second is all.” He imitated a laugh.

“My story. Let’s see. There was a father. He was a writer who published twenty paperback pulp westerns. He lived in Louis L’Amour’s shadow. We got by, but his career wasn’t much in the way of a living. My uncle Aaron sort of subsidized us with the store he owned-owns. I worked in his store from the time I was four or five.”

“Hard labor?”

“Aaron’s a great character. He makes everything an ordeal. Sees life as a very narrow path.”

“True grit?”

“The truest. He’s been more of a father than uncle. He was proud of my father-sold his books in the store. He saved a complete set for me, but I expect they’re dust by now.”

“Were you close to your father?”

“I guess. He died of lung cancer when I was a small boy. Then a few months later my mom died, too. I was at the store one day, and there was a freak accident with a horse that kicked her, knocked her out, and she froze to death right there by the barn. So I stayed on with Uncle Aaron. When I was sixteen, I moved into a cabin he’d built.”

“College?”

“College. This man with a lot of money and power had a cabin-hell, a log mansion he called a lodge-near our place. His boy fell into the water, and I was there and got him out, and so to show his gratitude, the boy’s father paid my college fees. I found out later that the National Human Resource Foundation, which awarded me a full scholarship, was his. So the McMillans rewarded me with a degree. Good swap for a few minutes in cold water.”

“Jack McMillan? The oil man?”

Paul nodded.

“Paul, he’s the richest man in America, isn’t he?”

“Well, I’d say he’s right up there with the top ten or so. I don’t think paying for my education was a drain.”

“Was he… I mean, did he pull strings for you, after?”

“My career?” He tried to keep the edge out of his voice.

“I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“I never traded on our relationship.” Until recently, anyway. “He’s repaid me a hundred times over for something I would have done for anyone. I asked him to let me follow my own path. I didn’t want to owe him my life.”

“Your history’s certainly a lot more impressive than mine. I met Captain Kangaroo once.”

“See, you’re one up on me.”

“I only have three people to compare you to, but you’re definitely in the top fiftieth percentile.” She lifted the covers and peeked in. “Well, you old cowpoke, ready for another swing around the dance floor?”

Paul had to fight hard to gain consciousness, and as he moved into a state of awareness, he realized that he’d been drugged. His perception was way off, and he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He could make out the shape of someone standing beside the bed. A dark hood shrouded the features.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Who do you think?” Martin said as he moved into Paul’s field of vision.

“Martin?”

“It’s one of my names. It was Martin Fletcher you condemned with false evidence.”

“No, I saved your life. The others wanted to-”

“You had Barnett, Hill, and Thorne Greer help you. You put the drugs and money in the wall behind the bookshelf while I was away. Like a thief in the night. And because I went to prison, the Company wanted me silenced. So my wife and son were murdered. I escaped alone, and I remained alone to be eaten by this cancer of pain.”

Paul felt Sherry beside him.

Martin stepped closer. “So it is true. You set it up.”

“No,” he lied.

“Ask them…” Martin stepped back to allow Paul to see that Barnett and Hill were across the room. They were standing at attention. “Tell my old adversary what you told me,” Martin commanded them.

“It’s true, sir,” they said. “You killed us.”

Martin stepped away from the bed and pulled his hood back. The face was familiar… it was the face of Paul’s father as he had looked in the hospital. The skin was withered parchment-yellow and had patches of mold on it. “It was dishonest. You have brought this on all of them. It’s on your head. You are hereby condemned. I have opened the gates of hell for you.”

Paul’s mind was on fire, and the pain was blinding, excruciating; he knew, even through the agony, that this would last for eternity.

Paul screamed himself awake. As he opened his eye, he realized that Sherry’s bed was on the top of a tower and she was gone. He sat up and looked down to discover that the structure, hardly larger than the bed itself, was a good eight or nine hundred feet in the air and was made from ancient bricks set in crumbling mortar. He looked down in horror and realized that the tower was breaking apart as it reacted to the breeze, swaying. Then he realized that there were other towers at different levels. The closest was lower by thirty feet or so. Laura and his children were standing on it, huddled together. They swayed close together and then away at intervals. He knew he could jump, but if he did, the towers might both collapse. He thought that they would collapse soon anyway. They moved like cobras being charmed, and bricks were falling from them as they moved. As his tower tilted crazily and snapped in the middle, he jumped. He caught the edge of his family’s tower and realized that they weren’t even on it, but on a third, farther away. The tower he had been on collapsed, and he watched the bricks scatter silently. They fell, and a dust cloud grew as the debris hit. He tried to pull himself up but the platform slipped and swayed. Laura swung her own tower toward him and grabbed his arm. Then she, Reb, and Erin pulled him up and onto the final platform. He hugged them, and the tower tilted crazily and collapsed. They fell screaming toward the ground. He tried to flare out and fly, but he was falling too fast. And he couldn’t reach out to them. Somewhere inside his thoughts he knew he was dreaming.

He jerked awake in Sherry’s bed, holding on to her tightly. “Laura! Laura… I’m sorry!” Then he realized that this wasn’t Laura but Sherry.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. No, I’m not all right. I’m dying.

“You were yelling ‘Laura.’ ”

“My wife. Ex-wife.”

“Should I be jealous?”

Paul got out of the bed slowly and pulled on his pants awkwardly.

“Leaving?” she asked. “Please don’t leave.”

He sat down on the bed and kissed her tenderly. “I’m just not accustomed to sharing a bed. Besides, I have to get some work done.”

“Are you sure? I was planning breakfast in bed,” she said as she looked at the clock. “I can fix it now. It’ll be light soon.”

“Can I have a rain check?” He pulled on his shirt.

“Sure. I reckon I could stomach at least one more night of pure excitement beyond a human’s pleasure measure.”