Son of Fletch

6

Aha! Now I see!” Shiny clean, even unto his eyeglasses, his soft body encased in a guest bathrobe, Kriegel exclaimed when Fletch entered the study. The man had a saddle-shaped birthmark on the bridge of his nose. “Come here!” he said to Fletch grandly.

Fletch stayed where he was.

Behind Kriegel, Jack was standing stiffly.

Kriegel came to Fletch. With both hands, he fingered Fletch’s head. He stood on tiptoes to do so. He walked around Fletch, looking him up and down. “You are Jack’s father!”

“You’re a phrenologist?” Fletch asked. He frowned at Jack.

“You have the same bones! The same blood!”

“You’re a nut?” Fletch asked.

Turning, Kriegel went to Jack and clasped him by the shoulders. “This man is your father! Why didn’t you tell me? He is one of us! We are saved!”

“Praise the Lord,” Fletch said.

“Introduce me,” Kriegel ordered Jack.

“Father,” Jack said, standing at attention. “This is The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel!” For an instant, Jack put his hand to his mouth. “Doctor Kriegel, this is my father, Irwin Maurice Fletcher!”

Kriegel said, “I’m so pleased.”

Fletch said, “Charmed, I’m sure.”

Fletch saw that Kriegel, for all his role-playing as an emperor, or whatever, was fighting hard to stay awake. He was intoxicated with exhaustion. His arms and legs moved as if they were in water. Blinking, his eyelids spent longer closed than open. When not speaking, he breathed through his nose more in the rhythm of sleep than wakefulness.

Like a drunk pretending to be sober, Kriegel was only pretending to be awake, alert.

At the moment, he was no threat to anyone.

“Ah …” Kriegel was looking toward a curtain of one of the French doors. He staggered to it. “Poor butterfly!”

Fletch said, “That’s a moth.”

Gently, Kriegel cupped both hands over the moth on the curtain, capturing it. He brought it to the open French window.

With a grand gesture, he released the moth into the morning sky. “You’re free! Fly away home, little butterfly.”

“I suspect its ‘home’ is in my wardrobe,” Fletch said.

“There is someone else in this house,” Jack said sternly to Fletch. “I heard the bed jumping.” He pointed to the ceiling. “You were right over this room.”

“We heard you, too,” Fletch said. “You play the guitar well. I recognized it as a Segovia arrangement of something, but I don’t remember of what.”

“Who is upstairs?” Jack asked.

“Nashville?” Fletch asked. “You were headed for Nashville in a pink Cadillac?”

Near the windows, Kriegel swayed, eyes closed.

“Your playing could charm a collicky baby covered with poison ivy,” Fletch said.

Kriegel’s eyes popped open when Carrie entered the study. He gasped. He raised his arms at his side. “Brunnehilde!”

“Broom Hilda?” In her tanned, freckled face, Carrie’s wide-set blue eyes were flashing. Having ruled six large brothers, hefty farm workers, an ex-husband, sons, various obstreperous small children, and large animals, Carrie was the most dangerous person in that house, on the farm at that moment, Fletch reflected. Everyone might as well know it.

Having glanced contemptuously and dismissively at The Reverend Doctor Kris Kriegel, who looked like a dust ball in the gray robe, fuzzy gray hair sticking out over his ears, backlit against the French doors, she stared at Jack.

Jack returned the stare.

“Jack!” Kriegel said. “Is this your mother?”

Jack swallowed hard. “Of course not.”

Carrie was considerably younger than Fletch, and looked even younger than she was.

Kriegel took a few steps toward Carrie and Fletch. It seemed his intent to take them by the hands.

Fletch stuck his hands in the pockets of his shorts.

Carrie turned her body square to him. Clearly, she was prepared to break his nose if he touched her.

“Brunnehilde and Siegfried!” Kriegel said. “How wonderful!”

“What’s his engine revvin’ for?” Carrie asked.

Fletch said, “I think we’ve caught a racist.”

“E=MC²!” She pointed her index finger at Kriegel. “You!” She pointed at the divan. “Go over there and lie down. You’re half stupid tired. Your other half is probably just plain stupid.” Shoulders drooping, Kriegel crossed the room to the divan. “And we don’t want to hear no more of your stupid shit about Broom Hilda and what’s-his-face. You hear?” Kriegel sat on the divan. He folded his hands in his lap. Smiling, he closed his eyes. She asked Fletch, “Who’s what’s-his-face?”

“Siegfried?”

“I never heard of nonesuch.”

“Ask Wagner.”

“Who’s Wagner?”

“Wrote music.”

“Got kinfolk around here?”

“Possibly.”

Again, she was staring at Jack as she would a horse before saddling him. “Shit,” she said. “He’s your son, all right. Clear as a church bell on a crisp night. He’s got your body.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” Fletch said. “Last time someone said that about me and someone else, one of us got shot through a window.”

“It wasn’t you?” she asked.

“It wasn’t me.”

“I,” Jack said. “It wasn’t I, great writer.”

Carrie pointed her finger in Jack’s face. “And that’s exactly enough sass out of you, you unbroke pony. You do any buckin’ around here, and I’ll personally whip your ass all the way back to that stable you come from in Kentucky. And you’d better believe it.”

Jack’s face couldn’t be more startled if she had punched him hard.

He put his shoulders back. “Yes, ma’am.”

Eyes closed on the couch, Kriegel chuckled. “Wonderful! I’ve found them!”

Quietly, smiling to himself, Fletch said, “You all better believe it.”

“Ruinin’ your life the way you done. Takin’ a potshot at a woman just doin’ her work. Handsome boy like you? The way you play that guitar? What’s the matter with you anyway, boy?”

“Ah …” Clearly Jack had never been laced out by a Southern woman before.

Carrie continued, “What you doin’ here anyway? Never got in touch with your father all the years of your growin’ up, the minute you get in big trouble, runnin’ from the law, you show up here in the middle of the night, draggin’ these ugly messes behind you? What you want, boy?”

Jack glanced at Fletch. “Ah …”

She waved her hand at him. “I’ve heard and seen enough of you already. You guys go get some eggs.” She looked at the obedient Kriegel asleep on the divan. “If that bag of manure moves one flap, I’ll blast his parts all over the cornfield.”

Fletch said to Jack: “She will. You’d better believe it.”

OUTSIDE, JACK ASKED, “Eggs? How far is the store?”

Fletch ambled toward the barns.

Although the sun was just above the horizon, it already made steam rise from the puddles.

As he crossed the road, Fletch heard Emory’s truck coming down the hill. That truck hadn’t had a complete muffler in recent memory and could be heard well before being seen.

Jack walked beside Fletch.

“Who’s she?” Jack asked.

“Carrie.”

“You two married?”

“No.”

“You going to get married?”

“These days you marry a woman and two lawyers. Beds just aren’t that big.”

Jack said, “She doesn’t hesitate to rush in where fools would fear to tread, does she?”

Fletch said, “When Carrie twangs, you’d better listen.”

Jack pointed across the home pasture at the cottage. “No one lives there. I checked last night.”

“I can’t figure out how you found this place so exactly yesterday,” Fletch said. “Runnin’ from the law. Through a storm. You’ve cruised this place before, haven’t you? Scoped me out.”

“Yes.”

“As the man answered, when a friend told him he has passed his house the day before: Thanks.” Most of the cattle on the hills were visible cropping the fields. Later, once the sun was higher in the sky, they would disappear in the deep shade of the trees. “What crime put your Kris Kriegel in jail?”

“When he first came from South Africa,” Jack said, “in a hotel in Washington, the chambermaid, bringing in a mint for his pillow, or something, opened the door of his room just as he finished strangling a girl from some escort service. He was caught red-handed. Bare-assed and red-handed. Red-assed.”

“How long has he been in prison?”

“Five, six years.”

Fletch led Jack into the dark cool of the barn. “What’s this ‘The Reverend Doctor’ stuff?”

“I believe he has a Ph.D. from someplace. A real one.”

“Subject?”

“History, probably. Sociology? I don’t know.”

“And ‘The Reverend’ part?”

“I think he gave himself that while in prison. Sent five dollars for a certificate to someone advertising in the back of a magazine, or something.”

At one of the barn’s stalls, Fletch slipped the bit in Heath-cliffe’s mouth, the bridle and reins over his head. He fastened the buckle. “And what’s your relationship to him?”

Jack said, “I’m his lieutenant.”

“I see.” Fletch led Heathcliffe out of the stall.

“Where are you going?” Jack asked. “How far is this store? Do you think you’re getting away?”

“I’m going up the hill to get your two other traveling companions. Want to come? There’s another horse there.”

Jack was trying to stay close to Fletch but away from Heathcliffe. “They’re too big.”

“Not so big.” Fletch climbed onto the horse. “Or you could jog along beside me.”

“Don’t you need a saddle?”

Fletch was riding through the back doorway of the barn into the corral. “Open that gate for me, will you?”

“Hey.” Jack trotted behind the horse. “You’re riding a horse barebacked in shorts.”

“Yeah,” Fletch said. “Just like a Native American.”

FLETCH SAT ON the horse at the lower end of the gully. Water still rushed down it noisily.

Sprawled in the gully, head down and forced into a loose bail of rusted barbed wire, left leg arced over an old washtub, was one of the escapees, the smaller, slimmer one, Moreno. His blank eyes stared at the cloudless sky of the new day. His throat was badly swollen.

Fletch guessed he had been bitten by either a rattlesnake or a copperhead, and then drowned.

Fletch said to himself, And then there were three.

FROM UPHILL CAME a loud, deep guttural noise. To Fletch it sounded like “Ou-row-ouu!”

He looked up to his right.

Charging down the edge of the gully toward him came Leary, all one-sixth of a ton of him. Soaking wet, muddy, he ran head down making this noise.

Fletch twitched Heathcliffe’s rein, circled him around to the left.

As Leary pounded toward Fletch, Fletch rode the horse into him.

Leary fell back into the gully.

Fletch backed the horse off.

“Ow-row-ouu!” came from the gully.

Leary climbed out of the gully.

Again, bellowing, he charged Fletch.

Again Fletch rode the horse into him and sent Leary falling back into the gully.

The third time Leary climbed out of the gully, he stood on its edge a moment.

Fletch sat three meters away, watching him. He wondered if Leary might be thinking of a better way to solve his problems.

No. He was just catching his breath for a new charge.

“Ow-row-ouu!”

The fourth time Heathcliffe pushed Leary back into the gully, there was a god-awful holler.

“ARRRRRRRRR!”

After backing off, Fletch’s feet flicked Heathcliffe forward to the edge.

In the gully, Leary had landed on Moreno’s corpse. Arms and legs flailing, trying to get off the already bloating corpse, splashing in the rushing water, fighting off barbed wire, rotten fence posts, the holey wash tub, Leary thrashed and bellowed until he was standing. Without hesitation he leapt at the side of the gully, flung himself against it. Kicking his legs, pulling with his arms, he scrambled up the gully’s muddy side.

Standing again at the edge of the gully, Leary breathed hard. He looked down at the corpse now undulating deeper in the rushing water.

Fletch said, “‘Mornin’.”

Leary’s close-set eyes near the top of his egg-shaped head looked up at Fletch.

Fletch asked, “Are you hungry?”

Dry-heaving, clutching his stomach, Leary stumbled down the hills a meter in front of Fletch astride Heathcliffe.

FULL LIT BY THE LOW morning sunlight, Jack sat on the corral’s fence watching them come over and down the last hill. As they approached, he asked, “Where’s Moreno?” Herding Leary into the corral, Fletch answered, “Dead.” As Fletch rode Heathcliffe through the corral gate, Jack quoted, “‘…just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide…’”