Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Twenty-Two

Two days later, on Saturday morning, I see a boy in laced new work boots and starched and ironed navy blue strap overalls over a pressed denim shirt, with a fresh haircut, walk up my drive and mount the steps and knock on my door. He wears neither a hat nor a coat and seems so frail in stature that a hard wind could blow him down the road. He’s looking over his shoulder and does not see me when I approach the door. “What do you want, Jack?” I say through the glass.

“Need to talk,” he says, turning toward me with neither fear nor anger but a deadness in his eyes that doesn’t go with his years.

“I tried to stop you on the highway, but you climbed into the cab of a log truck. That was rude.”

“I had some people after me.”

I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. I unlock the door and step outside. His skin has a translucent bleached look, his tats and his veins like faded print on parchment. “Say it,” I tell him.

“You pissed at something?”

“Yeah, I gave you a break when you came to my house to either rob or kill me. Now your brother is dead, and the cops are probably looking for you. I don’t want you dragging your problems on my gallery.”

“On your what?”

“Get out of here,” I reply.

“You said I was stand-up and had moxie.”

“What about it?”

“Nobody else ever said that to me.”

“So?”

“I need a job. Anything. I want to start over.”

“What about the cops?”

“Unless you file charges, they don’t have anything on me. Plus I’m not a big ripple in anybody’s life.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Your brother was torn apart. I think the cops have a few questions for you.”

“My brother tried to slam a gram, then went crazy and climbed between two boxcars while they were moving.”

“I was told you set fire to your home when you were twelve.”

“I was cooking my father’s dinner while he was balling a woman he brought home from a truck stop. I burned his food, so he slapped me all over the kitchen and threw me out. He must have left the burner on. But I didn’t do it.”

I wonder how much of his story is a lie and how much is true, and more importantly, I wonder if he knows the difference.

When I don’t speak, he gazes down the slope, his expression whimsical, narcissistic, the kind of kid who feeds on thoughts about the importance of his own mortality. Then he looks at me again. His eyes are flat, impenetrable, like watermelon seeds. “You think I’m some kind of monster?”

“If you work for me, it’s hit-it-and-git-it all day long, and no profanity while you’re on the property.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I didn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because you shouldn’t have asked it.”

His face clouds as he looks at the river and the undulation of the waves in the mid-current and the tangle of cool green-yellow light sealed under it. His face is fine-boned, his skull probably as fragile as an eggshell. “I didn’t have much of an upbringing. But I learned early that manners and morality aren’t the same thing.”

“Where you staying?”

“At the Poverello,” he says.

“You need a few dollars until you can make a payday?”

“Yes, sir, I sure could.”

I hand him a twenty-dollar bill, but I don’t quite let go of it. “You wouldn’t jump me over the hurdles, would you, Jack?”

“I don’t know what that means, sir,” he replies.

“That means you wouldn’t play a trick on me, would you?”

“No, sir.”

I release the double sawbuck and shut the door and softly slip the bolt.

My charitable act, if that’s what it was, brings me no peace. I don’t know where Fannie Mae has gone, nor how to get her back. I drive to the cemetery and place flowers on her grave and speak to her through the ground. The wind is cold, the mountains blue in the distance, the birch tree above her grave denuded of its leaves, the white bark cracked with brown and black rings around the trunk and limbs. I squat down by the bronze plaque on the grave and run my fingers over the letters in her name.

“You’ve got to give me a sign, kid,” I say. “Your old man is about to lose it.”

A little boy is running through the cemetery, flying a kite with the American flag emblazoned on it. He almost runs me down. His father grabs him by the hand and apologizes.

“That’s all right,” I say, squinting up at him. “It’s a fine day for kites.”

They walk away together, the father resting his hand on the little boy’s shoulder. Then I go down on one knee and say a prayer, ignoring the moisture and rich black soil in the rolls of sod and grass that have not mended the work of the gravedigger’s steel bucket. I belong to a house church, but I don’t pray in public except when I come here; if I did not pray here, I might smash my fists against any surface I can find.

Two shadows, one long, one short, fall across the plaque.

“Sorry to bother you again,” the father of the kite flyer says. “Is that Tacoma yours?”

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“You left your engine running.”

I stand up and brush off my knee, then feel in my pocket. “Must be somebody else’s vehicle. I have my keys.”

He points at my truck. “That black pickup?” he says. “It’s running, whether it’s yours or not.”

“Thank you,” I say.

I wait until they’re gone, then walk to the truck. The tailpipe is vibrating, the engine idling. As soon as I unlock the door, the engine dies. There is no key in the ignition. I look back at the grave. A solitary robin is standing on the plaque. The robin looks at me, then lifts into the air, circles once over my pickup, and flies away.

That night, after I fall asleep on the couch with a quilt over my head, I hear a clanking sound in the fireplace. I pull the quilt off my head and sit up. Fannie Mae is sitting in a straight-back chair by the hearth, jabbing at a burnt log with a fire poker. Her skin is lit by a watery yellow nimbus shaped like a candle flame, except it gives no heat and is flickering like a lightbulb on the verge of shorting out. She gives up on the fire and drops the poker in the ash.

Sorry I couldn’t get back to you sooner, she says. I had some trouble with a couple of guys.

“Major Baker was one of them?”

Yep, and some who are a hundred times worse.

“Who are they?”

World-class assholes.

“Why are they allowed to bother you?”

They’re not. It’s me that’s going against the rules.

“Because you’re looking after me?”

Somebody has to. What were you doing with Short Stuff?

“Forget about me. Who were the people chasing you?”

They belong in hell. That’s not a figure of speech. That’s where they escaped from.

“Do you want me with you? I can do the footwork.”

Don’t you dare think like that. That’s what they want. They fear your goodness.

“I doubt that.”

She doesn’t answer.

“You sound tired.”

I am. It’s you who has the power. That’s what you don’t understand, Pops. It’s the living who have to keep these assholes locked up.

“You have to stay with me, Fannie Mae. That’s been my prayer since you died. That you’ll always be with me.”

I love you, Pops. You’re such a good dad. You don’t know how much I miss you. But at a certain time you have to say farewell.

“I will not do that. Never. Not in this world, not in the next. Where are you going?”

I get up from the couch and walk toward her. The nimbus is jittering, her dimensions shrinking, her face dissolving, her mouth moving without sound, perhaps in protest. Then she’s gone and the room spins so violently that I fall sideways and the floor comes up and hits me like a fist. I lie inches from the fireplace, the smell of ash and carbon in my nostrils, my right arm twitching, my mouth drooling on the hearth, my eyes sightless, as though they have been picked from the sockets.

It’s called hysterical blindness. I call it another night in Gethsemane, a garden you never want to visit.

The manager of the Poverello, our local homeless shelter, dropped off Jack Wetzel on Monday at eight a.m., and the two of us went to work cleaning the barn and then running a plumber’s snake through a stopped-up sewer line and then splitting firewood. I have no doubt he’s a good worker. It’s noon now, and so far Jack hasn’t taken a break except to use the bathroom. I go inside and look at a manuscript I can’t finish or even think about, drop it in a drawer, and watch Jack through the window. It’s obvious he takes pleasure in a skill he has just learned. My firewood is stacked in the open air against an outside wall of the barn under a roof supported by poles. Jack balances a segment of ponderosa on the block, tamps a wedge even with the grain, and raises the maul high above his head and splits the wood cleanly and to its base. I go back outside. “You’re getting to be a pro,” I say.

“Thank you,” he replies.

“You never split firewood before?”

“No, sir.” He pulls off the work gloves I lent him earlier and touches a blister on his palm.

“Maybe lay off the maul for a while,” I say.

“It don’t hurt.”

“Lay off it just the same. Want to go to lunch with me at Fiesta en Jalisco?”

“I brought a sack lunch from the Poverello.”

“Well, it looks like you do real fine work, Jack.”

“I appreciate you giving me a chance, Mr. Broussard. I know I say the wrong things to people sometimes,” he says. “I mean talking like a smart-ass.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be back later. Can you hold things down?”

“Yes, sir,” he replies. “Want me to clean that chicken house?”

“It could use it.”

I drive my Avalon to a Mexican restaurant on Brooks in Missoula and look in the rearview mirror as I turn into the parking lot. A red Ford F-150 is tight on my bumper, close enough that I dare not touch the brake. I go on through the lot and park in back. The driver of the Ford beats me to the entrance of the restaurant. “How’s it hanging, slick?” she says.

“How are you, Sister Ginny?” I reply.

She’s wearing camouflage pants and a nylon vest and her red cap, her gold-dyed hair stuffed inside it. “I’d like a little chat with you.”

“About what?”

“Business and money. I’ll buy you lunch.”

“That kind of conversation at the table goes against my raising, Miss Ginny.”

“Maybe at your house sometime?”

We’re blocking the entrance, the people behind us too polite to push us out of the way. “That would be fine, Sister.”

We go inside and she sits down across from me in a booth, making a big whooshing sound when her rump hits the vinyl. Her eyes go all over the young woman who waits on us. A man passes our table and tries to say hello to her. She mouths fuck off and gives him a glare even after he’s gone.

“Who was that?” I ask.

“Some shit-bird with a broom up his ass.”

“What did he do?”

“Said the warranty on my running boards wasn’t any good because I ran over a rock,” she replies. “You have anything to do with the music in your movies?”

“Writers have no influence in Hollywood.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Without a writer, you don’t have a script, right?”

“That’s right. That’s why we’re not liked.”

“I used to sing with a country band. I’ve written a couple of songs with John Culpepper. Maybe you can pass them on to somebody?”

“I’m not supposed to look at uncopyrighted material.”

Her eyes are the color you see inside an oyster shell. “You can get sued for plagiarism down the track?”

“It’s called proof of access,” I say.

She looks sideways out the window and bites a tortilla chip. “The Jews run Hollywood?”

“No.”

“That’s what I’ve always heard.”

I prepare for the dreary two-thousand-year-old lies that never seem to die. But I’m wrong.

“What kind of money does it take to make a movie?” she asks.

“It depends. The key is usually OPM.”

“What’s that?”

“Other people’s money.”

She crunches the tortilla chip between her molars. “I can put up seven figures. What if me and you got together?”

“Thanks for the offer, Miss Ginny. I write books and stay out of trouble.”

“It’s Sister Ginny. I don’t like that cutesy Gone with the Wind rhetoric. It’s like none of those people ever passed gas. I mean get a fucking life.” Both her hands rest like bear paws on the edge of the table. “So no-way-Ray on the movie, huh?”

“I thought we agreed not to talk business.”

She begins drumming her fingers, then accelerates the rhythm and increases the volume. I look around to see if anyone is watching. She picks up the menu and pretends to read it. “You eat here a lot?” she asks.

“Yeah, the owners are friends of mine.”

“It’s good?”

“Yeah, they’re from Guadalajara.”

Her eyes wander around the room. I’m convinced there is nothing behind them except moths flying inside an empty closet. Then she tears the menu neatly in half and rolls the halves into a cone and places the cone in her waterglass.

“What I’d like to do is produce your book about the Texas Ranger who gets captured by Pancho Villa. We could shoot it down in Monterrey. You got the action and I got the traction, Jackson. Think it over.”

On her way to the door, she juts out her elbow and knocks the man from the truck agency into the glass counter.