Cast Of Shadows

– 15 -

Mississippi was just about his least favorite place in the world, yet it was also the place he felt the safest. That was just another one of those contradictions that Mickey felt proved the existence of God. The natural order was continua and spectra, with extremes at either pole and graduation in between. Everything changed by degrees and everything in the universe could be said to be mostly one thing or the other – hot or cold, black or white, right or wrong. Only omnipotent God had the power to make it both things at once: hot and cold, black and white, right and wrong. Killing people was always wrong, but couldn’t God, on occasion, make it right as well? The same way he made Mickey both miserable and content here in Mississippi? At least it was springtime and not so hot. It was wet, though. Before this afternoon Mickey doubted that three hours had passed since he’d arrived without a heavy shower replenishing the mud and mosquitoes.

The farm was large and neglected, 150 acres of knobby land and rocks and rotting barns and stables. It had been a cotton plantation years ago and that made Mickey a little uncomfortable – he admired African-Americans who had persevered through slavery and prejudice and who, having been rejected by the mainstream culture, had developed a culture of their own, a culture that espoused solidly conservative social values. Didn’t polls show that blacks were against cloning for any purpose, even research, by a margin of more than two to one? Harold’s family hadn’t owned this land during the days of slavery, at least, but Harold was undeniably a bigot, if an old-fashioned one, occasionally letting slip an almost quaint Southern slur like “nay-gra.” Mickey scribbled a mental note to have a talk with Harold one of these evenings, sipping lemonade on the big porch, about ways to bring more African-Americans to the cause. That would really freak out the West Coast liberals, wouldn’t it?

Three years ago, Mickey wouldn’t have risked coming here. Harold was too well known, and the feds were always watching his property, raiding it twice a year with warrants drawn on suspicion of harassment, or solicitation to commit murder, or violation of the RICO statutes. They never got a conviction, however. Harold had an ACLU lawyer who counterattacked with the First Amendment, once even taking his case to the United States Supreme Court, which found seven-to-two in Harold’s favor, igniting the editorial pages in New York and San Francisco with white-hot outrage. In the last twelve months, Harold said, the feds had grown bored with him, or frustrated that they couldn’t make anything stick, and so they mostly left him alone. “You can stay here as long as you like,” Harold told Mickey. “But I wouldn’t use the phone.”

Harold Devereaux wasn’t even an official member of the Hands of God, although HoG probably wouldn’t have survived the last few years without him. Harold called himself an “independent contractor serving one client only: the Lord God Almighty.” He was a prolific writer and anti-cloning pundit, but most famously (and this was what had brought him before the Supreme Court) he was the proprietor of a Web site identifying clinics, doctors, and researchers who advocated or practiced the cloning of human beings. Occasionally, when one of these individuals would die or retire, Harold would put a red line through his or her name. Sometimes the doctor would only be wounded, and Harold would change the color of his name from black to gray. Many people, specifically the individuals named on the site, didn’t like this. They called it a hit list. Harold’s ACLU lawyer disagreed, and seven justices happened to agree with Harold’s lawyer.

Out of 357 names, there were twenty-four red cross-outs on Harold’s site. Mickey was responsible for nine of them. Six had died of natural causes, six more had retired or quit out of fear for their lives or the lives of their families, and three had been shot in the head by an unknown person or persons. The police suspected the same killer might have perpetrated all twelve, Mickey’s nine plus the other three. They even had a name for him: Byron Blakey Bonavita. Two years ago Byron disappeared into the Kentucky woods with the FBI on his trail, and since then, every time Mickey offed a doctor, some witness claimed they’d seen Byron Bonavita in the area. He was like Elvis. Mickey didn’t know if Byron had committed the other three killings or not, but he was glad to have the FBI looking for someone else’s face every time he finished a job. That was probably why he was still in business.

There weren’t many targets in the small towns surrounding Harold’s ranch. Mickey was here on a social visit. Through his Web site, Byron collected donations for anti-clone “lobbying,” and he quietly dispersed much of it to several individuals and churches that spread the word about the evils of modern science. The Hands of God was one of them. This had brought the Hands of God to the attention of the FBI, which had already seen the group’s name on several threats to fertility clinics around the country. Phil and the others denied they had ever threatened anyone, and none of the threats bore an Ohio postmark. The feds didn’t know about Mickey the Gerund and the long box in the back of his Cutlass Supreme.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you here for a few days, Mickey,” Harold said. “You are a true instrument of the Lord.”

“Thank you, Harold,” Mickey said. “It’s nice to have a place to lie low and to get some genuine rest. When I went to bed last night I was sure I could have slept long into this evening.”

Harold was an odd-shaped man, with narrow shoulders and legs as yellow and brittle-looking as dried straw. In between, he had a large round belly that looked like an errant pregnancy or a gym ball. In the yard, Harold’s children played on an expensive mahogany swing set. Mickey had been here three days and wasn’t even sure how many kids the man had. At least four. Harold’s third wife was in the kitchen someplace. She was young and pretty because Harold was wealthy and famous, having once been on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Mickey didn’t like to imagine them having sex, but he couldn’t help himself – another of God’s contradictions, and a cruel one. Through the window blinds looking into Harold’s office from the porch, Mickey could see a counter that kept track of the visitors to Harold’s Web site. The number was in the millions (Mickey didn’t know when Harold had started counting) and it clicked off another every few seconds. People were buying Harold’s message at the same rate they were buying hamburgers, Mickey thought.

“What’s the latest in Washington?” Mickey asked Harold, who kept pace with such things.

“Nothing,” Harold said. When he lifted his glass to his lips, a ring of condensation remained on his T-shirt at the summit of his belly. “Cloning’s not even on Congress’s agenda this session. They don’t want to touch it. The less they have to acknowledge the issue, the better, as far as they’re concerned.”

“Same old same old, huh?” Mickey said.

Harold’s blue-gray beard pinched the area around his lips as he puckered them. “Don’t get me wrong. I love this country and I believe in democracy. But there are some issues, hard issues, that elected representatives are ill-equipped to deal with. They are controversy-averse, and our enemies use that to their advantage. There’s an old axiom in the Capitol: That which is legal tends to stay legal; that which is outlawed tends to stay outlawed. Once something like cloning is legal, the government is likely to keep it that way just so they don’t have to talk about it ahead of the election. Whatever they say is going to piss off half the people.”

“More than half the people agree with us, Harold,” Mickey said. “I saw a poll the other day-”

“I don’t need to see the polls,” Harold said. “I just talk to my friends and neighbors. There’s nobody divided on the issue around here. If our sonofabitch congressman had to vote on the cloning amendment, and he voted against it, we’d kick his ass out and he knows it. But the other side votes with dollars, and all they need to do is keep the amendment off the schedule. Cloning interests are happy, congressmen are happy, and now it’s two against one, with the American people getting the shaft.”

“It’s a shame all right.”

“You know I have a standing offer to debate any senator or representative on the other side, and do you know how many have taken me up on it? Zero. Sure, I go on the talk shows every now and again, but they put me up against people who don’t matter: college professors and feminists. What does being a feminist have to do with making clones? Can you tell me that?”

Mickey sucked some tart residue from an oblong ice cube in his glass. “Reproductive freedom. They say cloning is a necessary part of a woman’s right to choose. It frees them from the shackles of their uteri, blah, blah, blah.”

“That proves my point!” Harold was excited now. “Cloning was discovered and perfected by man just a few years ago. How can it be necessary? These liberals have been ridiculing the Bible for years, but then science figures out how to make a human being from a man’s rib – literally! – and they claim it as a momentous and necessary advance in the evolution of species. Ridiculous. It’s dangerous, is what it is. It’s not even man playing God – it’s man taunting God. But God has the last word because man might be able to make man in man’s image, but only God can make man in God’s image. Only God can forge a soul.”

“Amen,” Mickey said, clutching a few mixed nuts from a bowl between them.

Harold breathed loudly through his mask of hair. “So where are you headed next?”

The children shouted something and whinnied and chased each other around the back of the house. “I don’t think you want to know the answer to that.”

Harold laughed. “You’re right, I don’t. Just do me a favor and keep your business out of this county. There aren’t many legitimate targets here anyway, except for the university, I guess, but if some shit goes down in my backyard the feds will be up my ass again in a heartbeat.”

Mickey nodded. “Harold, you got a three-hundred-mile halo around you as far as I’m concerned. Don’t you worry about it.”

“A three-hundred-mile halo.” Harold tried to picture such a thing. “Who was that preacher out West that tried to build the nine-hundred-foot Jesus?”

“Oral Roberts.”

“Yeah, Roberts. A nine-hundred-foot Jesus and a three-hundred-mile halo.” He laughed.

That was the last they said for a long while, until Harold’s wife called them for supper. Four days later, outside a private research facility in Arkansas, Mickey shot a laboratory technician in the back of the head as he went to lunch. The technician died on the scene.

The Little Rock police passed around a sketch of Byron Bonavita.

Justin at Three