Shift: A Novel

San Francisco, CA

November 7, 1963

New Orleans. A hot spring day in 1942.

The Evangelical Lutheran Bethlehem Orphanage.

A twelve-year-old boy, skinny as a fence post save for the mop of dark curls framing his round, dusky face, is shooting marbles with a group of other boys ranging in age from six to sixteen. He wins only one out of three tosses, but Chandler knows he’s faking it. Roping the crowd in, working them up, making them think they have a chance. Deception came early to … to Melchior. So that really was his name.

Suddenly the boy looks up from his game. On his bed in the future, Chandler thinks Melchior is somehow looking at him. But no. He’s watching a pair of men walk up the long narrow sidewalk that leads to the side yard of the orphanage. One is tall, with a soft-cheeked face that belies his fit frame: he isn’t fat yet, but will be one day. The other is shorter, darker, walks with a slight limp. His beard is as sharp as Mephistopheles’. Melchior is sure the man knows this and courts the comparison. He looks like the devil. The devil in a light cashmere jacket and polished wingtips that seem as sharp as his beard.

But Melchior isn’t as interested in the men as he is in their target: a child playing by himself in the grassless dust off to the side of the yard. A small-mouthed boy of three or four, his russet hair flecked with gold from long hours in the sun. He squats in his short pants as though he’s shitting his drawers, but Melchior knows he is in fact drawing in the dirt. The same face over and over again: his father, who died before he was born. In the hierarchy of lost parents at an orphanage, this is a category unto itself, and even though the boy isn’t really an orphan—his mother leaves him here Monday through Friday while she works, picks him up on the weekends she’s not looking for a new husband—the boy still has a kind of totemic status. Like Jesus, he was born without a father.

The name comes to Chandler before he even realizes he is curious. Caspar.

Melchior has adopted Caspar in the way bullies sometimes adopt the helpless: this one and this one only will I protect. A large part of Melchior protects Caspar just for the many chances it gives him to fight—the child is so moony that older boys cannot resist picking on him—but there is some part of him that genuinely loves his charge. Loves him like a farmer loves his only hog, right up until the time he slices its throat.

The two men have reached Caspar. Melchior can tell from the way they approach him that they picked him out ahead of time. The bearded one takes notes in a spiral-bound notebook even as the tall man squats down in a kind of giant-sized replica of Caspar. He points at the picture in the dust. Melchior sees his mouth move, imagines his insipid question. Whatcha drawing there, young feller? He is pleased to see that Caspar’s mouth doesn’t move.

“Say, are you playing or what?”

One of the boys is impatient. One of the older, bigger boys. None of the smaller ones would dare question him in this way. Melchior turns, glances at the iridescent orbs scattered in front of the brick wall. Nine of them—his is the tenth and final shot. The farthest is a little more than an inch from the wall. He needs to shoot inside it to win.

He turns back to Caspar. The bearded man is talking to him now. Caspar has fallen back on his ass, looks up at the man as if transfixed. The man’s beard cuts the air like a fang.

“I said, are you gonna—”

Melchior shoots without looking. The chorus of groans tells him he has won even before he turns to collect his money and marbles, then starts across the playground.

“I thought I told you not to talk to strangers.”

Caspar looks up, scared at first, then brightening at the sight of Melchior. He points at his drawings.

“They was asking me about my daddy.”

“You don’t have no daddy. Now, run along.”

Caspar stares confusedly between Melchior and the men. It is clear he wants to do what Melchior says, but the men are grown-ups. They trump him. He takes a half step backward, a half step forward.

“My daddy’s in heaven.”

The tall man stands, gives Melchior an amused, annoyed look. He seems to think the mere fact of his gaze will banish Melchior, and when the boy stands his ground, he says, “This here’s none of your business, boy. Whyn’t you run along?”

His accent is deep but not local. Southern but not city. Gentry, like the people whose house his aunt cleaned, before he got to be too much for her and she sent him here.

The bearded man looks not at him but at Caspar.

“Look at his face, Frank. See how torn he is—he doesn’t know whether to obey his friend or us. He’s trying to think of a way he can win both our approval.”

“What are you guys, a couple-a perverts? Can’t you screw each other instead-a little boys?”

The man called Frank whistles. He is entertained, but it is a nasty kind of pleasure—the kind the Romans took in watching Christians being mauled by lions and barbarians. Melchior knows immediately that not only will this man hit a kid, he’ll enjoy it.

“You sure got a pair, don’t you, boy? Got a mouth, too, and I don’t like that. Now, hightail your ass outta here, or I’m-a stick my foot so far up it you’re gonna taste shoe leather.”

Melchior holds his ground. Gives the man a look that tells him if he hits him he’d better knock him out, because he will fight back.

“You been drinking,” he says, “cheap shit, too,” and turns on his heel. He walks not toward the orphanage but toward the withered live oak in the northern corner of the playground. His pace is steady, neither too fast nor too slow. The last thing he hears is Frank saying,

“The first thing we gonna teach you, son, is not to hang around with niggers.”

Only when he reaches the live oak does he turn around. The bearded man has taken Caspar’s hand and is leading him toward the gate. Caspar walks slowly, looking around in every direction. Frank has an impatient look on his face, like he just wants to kite the kid under his arm and get going. He, too, is looking around.

By now Melchior has retrieved his slingshot, and he pulls one of the marbles he has just won from his pocket.

“Timor mortis exultat me.”

The words come to his lips unbidden, and he pauses with the marble in the pocket of his weapon. After his mother disappeared, the nuns had taught him to say the Office of the Dead as though she’d died rather than run off. The only phrase he remembered was timor mortis conturbat me, “the fear of death disturbs me,” and that only because he’d come across a variation of it a few years earlier when he read The Once and Future King: timor mortis exultat me—“the fear of death excites me”—which warriors said before going into battle. He doesn’t know why the phrase comes to his lips now, but even as he releases the first shot, he knows that it will stay with him for the rest of his life.

The marble catches the bearded man in the temple. He screams and falls to the ground. Timor mortis exultat me: it’s not the warrior’s fear of death that excites him, but his enemy’s, and as Melchior watches the bearded man crawl like a scared dog behind a withered primrose, he thinks, Oh yes, he’ll remember this sensation forever.

The man called Frank is reaching for the inside pocket of his coat like a heavy in a gangster movie, but before he can pull his hand out, Melchior’s second shot catches him in the cheek. He staggers backward but doesn’t fall or cry out. But he doesn’t take his hand out of his jacket either.

“The next one takes out an eye,” Melchior calls quickly, calmly. “Now, let go of him and get the hell outta here.”

The bearded man is cowering behind the bush, but Frank is looking at the blood on his fingers with wide-eyed wonderment. A huge smile splits his face.

“You see that, Joe? He made that shot at twenty-five yards.”

A prick in his arm; sludge filling his veins, his brain. A terrific weight that seemed to press down on him from inside and out at the same time. The room returned, fuzzy edged, its colors paled to duns and grays. Keller was pulling a syringe from his arm.

“Enough for today,” he said.

As an irresistible fatigue sapped the energy from his limbs, Chandler’s head lolled to the side. There he was: Melchior. His eyes were closed and his clothes disheveled and drenched with sweat, but a strange smile was plastered on his face.

Chandler’s own eyes were drooping as Melchior’s opened. He looked over at Chandler, his expression exhausted but satisfied, like a man who’s just been serviced by his favorite whore.

“We gotta do that again,” he said. “Soon.”