The Last Family

37

Martin had always loved spying because it was the secret sharing of information-information he wasn’t supposed to have. And the more craftily it was taken, the less evidence there was of his having taken it. He found himself out in the open sunshine on St. Charles Avenue a mile from Laura’s house collecting information. If those DEA fools knew what he looked like, he’d be dead. Martin Fletcher shifted in the driver’s seat of his old Chevrolet so he could see down St. Charles Avenue and checked his watch. It was two P.M. Erin’s streetcar would be arriving to pick her up any minute. It had been a long time since he had watched her, but today was important. Thorne and the agents had moved across the street and into Laura’s house. There were agents on the perimeter, and police patrols had been tripled within ten blocks of the house. He had decided that he couldn’t afford to drive by the house anymore until it was time to move in for keeps. He had a plan in case they stayed ensconced inside.

He was hoping they would move the family before his mother took the agents off on the annual parade. He knew that if he was in Paul’s shoes that’s what he would do. They assumed they could follow her to him. But they couldn’t move the family too far, or to a place that was too well protected, because they wouldn’t risk putting them completely out of reach of an attempt. They also couldn’t risk losing a shot at him. No, that meant too much to all the people involved. Not even Paul could order them whisked out of sight completely. He knew what was in Paul’s mind: that if they missed him with his mother, they thought they could get him when he came for the family. They would assume they had two opportunities at him. But he knew something they didn’t know-that there was no way they could possibly succeed. He was on St. Charles Avenue to see how good the new stage of coverage was. So far it looked totally amateurish. Either they weren’t taking him seriously, or they were completely incompetent. It didn’t matter which.

Martin had not been at all upset that the agents had found his bug. He had anticipated it. He had figured correctly that they would then bug the house themselves, and when they had, it had just become a matter of frequency searching until he was able to apprehend the signals being sent to the DEA’s receiver. The laser device didn’t bother him; he’d figured that was the technology they’d use. He listened carefully to the morning’s broadcast, which he picked up from a remote receiver carefully hidden three blocks from Laura’s house in a boarded-up Sunoco station.

“She’s very talented,” Reid was saying. “They’ll bring ten times that someday.”

“A million dollars?”

“A million bucks, aw shucks.” Martin mimicked Thorne’s voice. “Ow fuck me runnin’.”

“It isn’t out of the question,” Reid’s voice answered.

“Once the bitch is dead,” Martin added, “sky’s the limit. Maybe three million.”

“Well, it’s out of my range,” Thorne said.

“So’s Lassie’s IQ.” Martin giggled.

“I keep thinking that we’ve met before,” Thorne said.

“You’ve met all of me,” Reid said.

“Not yet,” Martin said.

Martin snapped off the tape and removed the earphones. He was watching the streetcar stop. He knew Erin’s schedule as well as he knew Reb’s. One day a few weeks earlier he had taken a seat on the streetcar beside Erin. He had been disguised that day as an older man and had spoken to her, turning his most disarming personality into several blocks’ worth of small talk. He could have killed her but let the opportunity pass. The time just hadn’t been right.

He watched as a woman in her late thirties passed, pulling a six- or seven-year-old boy along toward the corner. It triggered a flow of memories, and he closed his eyes and rubbed the sockets gently. He had liked to watch his parents-to spy on their secret world, starting at age four or so. He had especially loved it when they were arguing, because when they argued, they made up with an emotionally charged fuck that made the springs echo through the house, and they snorted and yelled things that were funny.

Martin remembered everything. He had been small, seven or eight, and his ears half again as large as his head as he moved down the narrow hallway toward his parents’ bedroom that night. Martin had stood in the dark hall and peered into the well-lit room from the vertical opening between the jamb and the door’s edge. The door would not close all the way because it was warped, and if he stayed well back in the darkness, he could watch their secret lives.

That evening promised a good making-up session because his father had himself worked up into a rage and he was screaming at his mother, who was sitting on the bed looking into her lap, where she had locked her fingers around some knitting. “We can’t afford it!” he shouted, his face looking like a hot-water bottle filled with all but enough pressure to explode.

“He wanted it,” she replied. “And we can afford it,” she added calmly. “You’re his father, and all the other kids have bicycles and far, far more than he has.” She wagged the needle in his direction, and this further enraged him.

“He’s a fuckin’ pansy. He’ll get hurt on it, and doctors cost money. More’n we got, the way we’re goin’.”

“You’re a skinflint. Marty’s a good boy. And he’s your only son.”

“Son of mine? That punk’ll be trading blow jobs for baseball cards in a few years. And he’s no son of mine. You fooled me, you slutty bitch. His father was more’n likely some clap-drippin’, liver-lip, monkey-dicked nigger from-”

“Don’t you dare speak about him like that!”

“He’s a pencil-dicked fairy, and you’re a dried-up sack of corn husks. You haven’t felt a human emotion since the first time you felt hunger and wanted to suck your mother’s tit.”

“I’m warning you,” she said flatly. “I won’t let this pass if you say any more. That’s all, and you know I’m good as my word.” She might have been reading instructions off the back of a cake-mix box. “Don’t talk about my Martin.”

“Or you’ll what?” He raised his fist over her head. “You cock-suckin’-”

“I’ll kill you.”

He dropped his hands and bent down closer to her face. “He’s a little bed-wetting, turd-eating, cock-suckin’…”

From the hallway the motion Martin caught from his perspective was more like a sneeze than a thrust. Eve jerked her head down and then pushed up with both hands, and then she was standing with a knitting needle in her hand, the tip buried deep in his father’s eye socket. Milton Fletcher’s body lurched as if he had been electrocuted. He collapsed in a heap.

“Oh, dear, now look,” she said. She reached down and tugged at the needle. Then she put her foot on his forehead and pulled hard, and there was a noise like a cork popping and she had pulled the needle out. She wiped it carefully on his pant leg before she put it into the basket on the bed.

“I told you,” she announced. She pointed her finger at the body and wagged it up and down. “I warned you, mister. Don’t say I didn’t.”

Eve turned and saw her son standing in the shaft of light with his hands covering his mouth.

“Come right in here.” She pointed at her feet as if she was commanding a dog. He entered the room, his eyes wide in terror.

“Baby, it’s okay. Daddy had a seizure is all.”

The child looked down at the open eye, which had filled with blood.

“I saw…,” he said. “You stuck his eye with that. How’d you do it?”

“Were you spying on your mother?”

“No. I was just-”

“Spying. Well, when you spy, you never know what you’ll see.” She laughed and patted his head. “Did you hear me warn him?”

“Yes.”

“See, you have to listen to Mother. It isn’t who you know or what you know, baby. It’s what you know about who that matters.”

“Is he dead?” Martin had gone down on his knees like a prisoner awaiting interrogation and prodded his father’s cheek with his finger. It came away red, and he inspected it carefully before he wiped it on his pants.

“Deader’n Kelsey’s nuts,” Eve said. “Help me. Lift up his feet and I’ll pull ’em. Else he might snag something. Wait a minute, let me get a towel before he bleeds all over the floor. Nothin’ harder to clear up as that.”

Young Martin had followed his mother, who pulled his father through the house by his thick wrists. Martin had struggled to hold up the feet, using the cuffs of the pants as handles. He looked at the towel that she had wrapped around the head and noticed the spot growing as they went. They went through the kitchen and down the stairs and stopped in the yard, where she leaned him up against a tree.

“Are you cold, baby?” she asked.

The child shook his head. His feet were wet, and it was cool.

“Wait here,” she said, and ran back into the house.

Somewhere a dog barked a promise. Martin remembered that. Three times. Then tires had squealed out in front of the house as a drunk in a large loud car stopped, one car door opened and slammed, and a shrieking woman opened up. “Youthinkyou’resoooo-hot! You sack… of… shirt.”

The driver yelled something unintelligible that was muffled by the trees, and the tires squealed as the car turned the corner. Seconds later a house door slammed, rattling the glass.

His mother came out their back door and strode up holding a shotgun-naked except for her shower cap and reading glasses. She jerked the towel free from Milton’s head and pushed the gun barrel hard against the pierced eye, resting the butt on the ground between his splayed legs. His father’s hand made a fist in the grass beside his leg, and he made a noise that sounded like a fish being stepped on.

“He’s not dead,” Martin had offered. “Gonna stick him in the other eye?”

“Reflexes prob’ly. Go in the house so you won’t mess up your good pj’s. Now, if anybody ever asks, you were asleep and never heard a sound or nothin’. And Daddy had been drinking somethin’ awful for days and crying about how he never did amount to mithin’. Give Mama a kiss.”

Martin kissed the cheek she offered. “Didn’t ’mount ta nuthin’,” Martin practiced. “Drunk all the time lately. Cryin’. An’ didn’t you warn him afore you stuck his eye out? You bet you did.”

“No, Martin, Now, listen to Mama. You forget the warning and stickin’ the eye part, because it didn’t happen. You say that, you’ll get us both electrocuted or hanged and put in the cold ground where the worms will eat our faces off.”

“Turn us into old skeleton bones.”

“Exactly.”

Martin nodded to himself even as he had nodded to her that night. She had smiled at him, kissed his forehead, mussed his hair, and directed him by turning his shoulders facing toward the back door. “Go inside and say your prayers and get ready for bed. I’ll be in to tuck you in.” She pulled him to her and pressed his face against the furry place between her legs. He could recall the smell, a strangely comforting blend of musky perspiration and a hint of stale urine. Then she had pushed him off toward the house.

He had knelt on the braided rug, folded his hands, and begun his prayers as soon as he got inside. He always minded. He’d heard the blast, and it looked as though someone had fired a flashbulb outside. Before he was finished praying for all the things he had to keep up-now his father’s soul going to heaven had to be included-he heard his mother turn on the shower and pull the curtain. Then he finished with the Lord’s Prayer, climbed into bed, and listened to Eve singing her South Pacific song, which she usually did with the hi-fi on full blast.

“I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair… gonna wash that man right outta my hair… gonna wash that man straight on outta my hair… and send him on his wayyyyy!”

The next morning he had awakened and had gone out to see if he had imagined it all. There was what had once passed for his father, the first stiff he’d ever seen, with half of his head gone. The sight would always remind him of a ruined picture, with the pierced-eye side turned to one gaping hole-the skull all but empty. The remaining eye bulged out a full inch at the end of the optic nerve bundle. It fascinated Martin, and he had crouched for a better look while minding that he didn’t get any of the ick on him.

The shotgun had been placed so his father’s thumb was hooked inside the trigger guard. The bark on the tree behind him was deeply gouged and stained deep rusty brown. The drying brains were coated with crawling blowflies, and a trail of ants entered the pajama-pant leg and fanned out through the opened shirt collar across the face and inside.

“Life is competition,” his mother had told him, shocking him. “It’s eat or get et. And never let anyone do you bad less you pay ’em back fivefold.” He turned to find her standing on the steps with a cup of coffee in her hand and a cigarette pegged into the corner of her lips. She put a hand on his shoulder.

“Come, and I’ll fix you some eggs like you like ’em. Then I better call the cops and say I found him. Maybe I’ll say you found him and you can like stare at ’em with your mouth open and not answer their questions so you don’t let nothin’ slip out you shouldn’t. Seems like nobody reported the shot. The hell is wrong with people these days?”

The police hadn’t seemed all that interested, and the questions they asked had been met with Martin’s straight face.

“Boy might best see a psychiatrist,” one cop said. “This can turn a kid nuts. Turns grown men nuts.”

He remembered how he had slept with Eve in the years after that night. He wondered whether he had instigated the bedroom play or had merely understood her needs. He was twelve at the time, maybe thirteen when the sex started. He remembered that he had had pubic hair and his mother had taken that as a sign to start his education. The first step was to teach him how to touch her in that special way-how powerful it had made him feel to be able to create the orgasms in her-control her breathing with the pressure and motion in his fingers. He loved to watch her lose control and flail and make the noises she had made only for his father before. She had never discussed it, but she had shown him how wonderful an orgasm could feel. She had rubbed his erect penis with warm lotion until it had throbbed-hurt, but hurt in a divine way, and had taken it in her hand like a bar of soap and rubbed her hands together vigorously until the thing erupted, squirting from his navel to his lips. It made him feel good-no, beyond wonderful. Martin felt blessed to have had such an understanding, giving, and strong mother.

Her love was an all-powerful and totally giving thing. It was instruction. A lesson for a better life. “This is what girls all want,” she’d say as he started rubbing at her. “For a big man like you to get them to a special place. The place where the cat goes in his mind when he purrs.”

He called up the memory of a black girl his mother had brought him for his pleasure. He had loved her skin, the ebony breasts with the hard purple nipples, the soft hair in her armpits, the narrow waist, the hard rounded buttocks, the muscular legs, the dark slippery-wet vagina that reminded him of an orchid. The smell of her breath, of her sex, their sweat and his semen. Eve called her their maid, but her real job was to please Martin sexually. His mother must have paid her well, because she was with them three days a week for a year or so. She told Martin that she liked fucking a lot better than doing housework-in fact, she loved to fuck. Any way Martin wanted it. Any way at all, and she was eager to teach him new ways to please her. Martin spent most of their sessions experimenting, keeping copious notes, and when she was away, he would dream of what they would do next time and write it down in detail. She seemed to love it. Not that it mattered to him. She, the person inside that sleek, black, seallike skin, meant no more to him than a squirrel playing in the oak trees outside the window. She was hardly more in his mind than a sock to toss off into.

After that girl came around, Eve’s own lessons in physical love had ended. He missed them, but growth is change, and change is good. But the spiritual love, the undying gratitude he felt for her support and comfort, had endured. From his mother there were no secrets, only shades of the truth for her consumption. She loved Martin’s soul and he loved hers. They might be the only two people on earth with souls. He was truly content only when she held him against her and talked softly to him. No one could ever understand their love. No one.

Besides, he remembered her earliest admonition as she worked over his manhood with her oiled hands. “In nature a mother’s love is a pure thing-a real thing. After all, what’s a man but a tame animal? Animals in the wild do it with their mothers, so it’s natural as anything.”

A garbage truck blowing past interrupted his memories. He opened his eyes and glanced at his watch. He couldn’t get back into the moment for a while, but with concentration he was back there as though it had all happened a week earlier instead of over thirty years. The evening before, Martin had seen the Cadillac on the news as it had been pulled from the river like some great fish from the depths, the driver’s form a bloated shadow; his left arm caught in the rush of escaping water had waved like a flipper. PROMINENT LOCAL BUSINESSMAN SLAIN. Front-page banner. Even in a city as numbed to murder as New Orleans, it warranted celebrity handling. There were photos of Lallo Estevez with his young children, with the mayor, the present governor, who was the past governor as well. There was a shot of his chauffeur standing at attention while Lallo entered the limousine. The gangster with his extra smile who had been discovered by the towboat crew was buried in a lower column in section B. Martin had hoped that the car wouldn’t be discovered before he had finished in New Orleans. But it added an interesting addition to the mix, and he couldn’t have let that business lag or affect the mission he had devoted the last six years to. Add another variable into the complex equation. They would try to catch him with his mother in Florida-but had no idea of how slim the odds of their succeeding really were. He smiled at the thought of how he would make the DEA professionals look like what they were: dead clowns.

At two o’clock Erin walked through the school doors in the center of a wave of kids. She was barely able to contain her excitement. She exchanged looks with Eric Garcia and was sure she was blushing. They had spent ten minutes formulating a plan at recess. He had all afternoon to spend as he saw fit. She didn’t, but hadn’t told him that. She had told him that her father had bodyguards watching her-that he was a DEA agent and worried excessively. If Eric had been reluctant to date the daughter of a federal agent who put watchdogs on his daughter’s tail, he didn’t give any indication of it. In fact, the challenge of seeing her under such circumstances seemed to excite him.

Erin saw Sean standing beneath a tree in the schoolyard with his hands in the pockets of his seersucker suit coat. He was wearing dark glasses, but she knew his eyes were locked on her. He wouldn’t approach her but would walk behind her all the way home. They had wanted to drive her from door to door, but she had refused flatly. Her mother had reluctantly taken her side, saying that they could cover her without embarrassing her in front of her friends. As she passed Sean, he started walking. She looked over her shoulder and saw Eric slide into his mother’s gray Mercedes.

Erin walked the two blocks to the streetcar stop. She turned to find Sean standing three feet behind her, surveying the people nearby. He met her stare.

“Hi,” she said.

He nodded. “Where’s your Mace?” he said.

“Haven’t got a refill yet. So where’s my ten bucks, and I can go over to K and B for one?”

He reached into his pocket and started going through his wallet. He handed her a ten.

“Okay, we’re even.” She put it into the zippered compartment on her backpack. “It was your fault, you know.”

“If you say so.”

“Okay, so let’s let bygones be bygones,” she said. She handed him her book bag. “Least you can do is carry my books. They’re heavy.”

Erin looked out of the corner of her eye as the streetcar approached. There were maybe a dozen kids and a few adults waiting for the car. Sean took the bag with his left hand and placed the strap over his shoulder. The car pulled up, and the conductor opened the front and rear doors simultaneously. People started climbing in through the front while others exited through the rear doors. Sean and Erin were going to be last in.

“After you,” she said.

He smiled and started to climb in. Then he realized something was happening, and he turned to see her running for a nearby Mustang that had pulled up crowded with young girls. Before he could close the distance, Erin jumped over the door of the car, fell in among the other bodies, and the tires squealed as the vehicle pulled away from the curb, the laughter of girls filling the air. Sean cursed out loud as he ran after the car until it was obvious that he was never going to come within a hundred yards. He turned in time to see the streetcar pulling away, leaving him standing in the middle of St. Charles holding her book bag. He was filled with dread as he fished the cell phone from his breast pocket.

A battered Chevrolet Caprice honked at him, and he stepped to the curb, cursing and feeling very small. He heard the car’s driver laughing as it pulled by him, a loud barking that ricocheted around in the car’s interior. The big automobile roared off in the direction the Mustang had gone.

Seconds later the prowl car that had been providing additional cover wheeled up beside Sean, and he jumped into the backseat. They gave chase, but the next light changed before they got there, and a line of cars began moving across the intersection immediately. The policeman turned on his blue lights, and the cars moved grudgingly aside. Sean cursed out loud, but by the time the prowl car had cleared the intersection, the Mustang had several blocks on them.