Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3

RECONCILIATION

Ransom fells believed from a young age that he disliked his father, if not hated the man.

And was all the angrier when his dad up and died unexpectedly nearly a decade ago, before Ransom could find out for certain who the man really was and confront him. Maybe to sever ties forever, maybe to reconcile.

But, talk about second chances, at age thirty-nine Ransom Fells coincidentally found himself in circumstances that did indeed let him learn a bit more about the man.

And at the moment, he was now reflecting on these facts and thinking, too: Be careful what you wish for. Be real careful about that.

Under a gray sky, he was sitting alone in his rental Camry in a city park in Indiana. He peered absently through the windshield at a splashy army of September trees surrounding an impromptu softball field, laid out sloppily by some local teams. The lot and park were empty.

He considered again what he’d just learned about his father, things that he never could have imagined.

And he considered, too, the bigger question they raised: Could a death — violent death — ultimately (and ironically) lead to something positive, a reconciliation of sorts?

Ransom absently touched his chin and felt stubble, turned the rearview mirror his way and gazed back at his lean face, small buttons of gray eyes, hawkish nose, full head of businessman’s neatly trimmed black hair. Yes, he’d forgotten to shave. Unlike him. He flipped the mirror back, stretched and lifted his coffee cup to his lips, realized suddenly he’d ordered the cup four or five hours ago. Ice cold. Still he swallowed the sip and took another.

His father.

Impossible.

And yet…

Yesterday, for his job, Ransom Fells came to this area, northern Indiana, on the cusp of the country’s terminally ill Industrial Belt. Chesterton was about ten miles from where he’d grown up and twenty from Gary. This was an area of the United States to which Ransom had never traveled since he left home at age fourteen with his mother and younger brother to be near her relatives in Virginia, after his parents’ divorce.

He’d had a few chances to come here for business but declined. Another man at GKS Technology generally handled this part of the country.

And as for a pleasure trip to these parts? No way in hell. There were a few remaining family members nearby, but they were indistinct, distant planets in the solar system of relations.

But he wouldn’t have visited even if he’d known them better. No, the reason he was a stranger was Stanford Fells, his father.

Coming here would remind Ransom way too much of those gray Saturday afternoons in the fall, when many of his high school classmates would go to the local football games with their dads or — unimaginable to Ransom — to Soldier Field to see the Bears, on season tickets! Stan had taken him to one baseball game, the White Sox, and they’d left at the seventh inning stretch, because his father figured they’d seen enough. “Seven’s good as nine. You wait till the end, takes you forever to get out of the lot.”

Coming here would remind Ransom that Stan never bothered to tell his son anything about his job as a service tech for industrial power systems, which seemed really neat to the boy, who would’ve loved to see some of the factories Stan worked in. He never met any of his father’s work buddies, never went to barbecues with their families, like the other kids talked about.

Coming here would remind him of Stan silently enduring holiday dinners for forty minutes or so and leaving before dessert and going down to the Ironworks Tavern — yeah, even on Christmas. Preferring the Ironworks to playing with the new football his son had received as a present or helping put together the train set or playing the computer game, even though it came with two controllers.

Coming here would remind him of Ransom and his little brother — Mom dozing — glancing at the curtains of their bungalow when they heard the whooshing sound of a car approaching, lights glowing on the dingy cloth. Was it Stan? Usually not.

But then yesterday fate, God or what have you (Ransom believed in the last of that trinity only) intervened, in the incarnation of a call from his boss. “Joey’s sick, I mean fucking sick.”

“Sorry to hear that.” Ransom’s heart fell. He knew what was coming.

“Yeah. Can you take over for him?”

“Where, Chicago?”

“Indiana, north.”

Wouldn’t you know it, he thought angrily.

“You’re from there, right? You know it?”

He debated but in the end decided to stop being a wuss. It was hard to say no to his boss and even though GKS was weathering the bad economy you never knew what the future would hold. Besides, the money would be great and who couldn’t use a little extra green? So he’d said a reluctant okay, downloaded Joey’s file and read through it. He then picked up a rental car near his home in downtown Baltimore, threw the salesman’s sample cases into the trunk and hit the road, growing increasingly edgy as he miled his way west on I-70.

Near Gary he turned off the interstate and wound along state routes, until he came to an intersection he hadn’t seen for years, but remembered perfectly: Poindexter Road and Route 224. One sign pointed left toward Chesterton, six miles away, the other to his hometown of Marshall, four miles. He paused under a maple canopy of yellow and crimson, his head swiveling.

The pause, however, was only to let a Peterbilt stream past on the perpendicular. Once it was past, he turned decisively left and accelerated. There’d been no decision about which way to go.

Chesterton, Indiana, had a few upscale companies, like the one whose CEO he was set to see tomorrow, Hardwick Investments. He drove past it now, a two-story glass and metal structure in a groomed office park outside of town. But Hardwick was the exception. Soon he was into the real Chesterton, cruising by sagging and scabby one-level shipping companies and factories making products of mysterious purpose (“Compress-ease,” “Multi-span Tensioner Plus,” “Asphalux”). Plenty of abandoned ones, too. Forty, fifty years ago, when U.S. Steel and other heavy manufacturers were at capacity, there wasn’t an empty commercial facility for miles around or an unemployed worker who didn’t choose to be.

Hell of a lot different now, half ghost town.

Damn, I hate it here…

The Shady Grove Motel nestled in what was now better described as stump grove, thanks to Dutch elm, it looked like, but the place was otherwise pretty decent.

Ransom checked in and drove around back to his room, away from the busy road. He took a brief nap and then reviewed Joey’s file again. He carefully went through his salesman sample bags, organizing the trays containing tools for cleaning and repairing computers. Everybody tended to think of computers in terms of software, forgetting they were also physical boxes with moving parts. Desktops sucked in plenty of crap and laptops not only did the same but also got tossed around mercilessly. If not properly cleaned, a computer could conk out at any time.

Ironically, though, it was the computer world itself that was endangering GKS Tech. People were now ordering more and more of the products online.

Thank you very much, TigerDirect.

The days of the traveling salesman would be over soon.

But Ransom knew he’d find something else that would suit. He’d always landed on his feet. He’d learned that early. His father had dropped out of community college and didn’t value learning for anybody in the family. And so in reaction, Ransom decided that nothing was going to stop him when it came to education. Moderately smart, he’d muscled his way through high school by being extremely persistent. Faced with little money and less support after he graduated, the teenager did the army thing for two years, which let him slingshot his way into college, George Washington, in D.C., where he did very well. He foundered a bit after his discharge — Stan providing no guidance, of course — but Ransom heard back from one of his army buddies and the man hooked him up with some people in Baltimore. He took a temporary job that turned permanent. He’d never pictured himself in this line of work, but he turned out to be a natural.

Ransom Fell’s ex could be wacky, with her walls of self-help books looming like glaciers in the living room of their old Baltimore apartment, but she was pretty sharp, Ransom never hesitated to admit, even to her. Beth would look at his situation with his father and diagnose that Stan Fells had not engaged in any “life lessoning” with his son. Instead, Ransom had to rely on “self-foundation-building,” “me-ness,” and “inner-core structuring.” Despite the language, which could get even weirder, the ideas made sense. He would have phrased it more simply: Stan taught him shit and so he had to learn to fend for himself.

Which he did.

As for his mother, sure, she was there some of the time. Sure, she tried. But she largely checked out; who wouldn’t with a husband like Stan? Besides, given his upbringing, Ransom figured a boy needs a mother only until he stops sucking and gumming pureed food. When the kid’s able to walk, it’s time for the other half of the act to step up. Your turn, Dad. Freud was totally screwed up — you don’t want to kill your father; you want to go hunting with him, you want him to take you to a ball game. All. Nine. Fucking. Innings.

And with that thought he realized he was sitting forward in the cheap motel chair, hovering over his salesman’s cases, shoulder muscles solid as a tire.

Shouldn’t’ve come here.

The money’s good. Gotta keep the boss happy.

Doesn’t matter.

Shouldn’t’ve come.

A little after six he worked out in the motel health club. For forty minutes he slammed along the treadmill and hefted free weights—30-pound barbells — as he worked up a good sweat despite the chill autumn air that bled into the underpopulated exercise room. These facilities were always kept cool in the motels and hotels. He was convinced it was to save money in heating costs and to discourage people from using them because of liability. A broken neck, despite the waiver, could be very, very expensive, he figured.

Ransom took a fiercely hot shower and at 8 p.m. he dressed in tan slacks and a dark shirt, pulled on his navy blue sports jacket and headed out the door. At the front desk a fifty-something guy who looked like a lifetime front desk clerk directed him to the Flame and Fountain, a steakhouse. He was there in five minutes. He hardly needed the restaurant’s sign to find it. Out front an energetic, blue-lit water treatment surrounded an impressive plume of fire. Tacky, but the exhaust of grilled steaks was seductive.

He smiled at the hostess and passed her by. When traveling for work he never sat at tables, only the bar, which was what he did now.

Several stools away was a woman close to his age, late thirties. In front of her was a frothy drink in a martini glass with a stem the shape of a fat teardrop or skinny boob. It was that kind of bar.

Tacky…

Wearing a tan skirt and matching jacket, she was attractive, a little heavier than she probably would have liked but it was sensuous weight and definitely appealed to Ransom. Voluptuous. Her hair, probably bottle blond to combat premature white, not brunette, was matte textured and had been wrestled into a taut ponytail. When he’d sat down she didn’t look his way. But then she wasn’t looking at anything, except the New Yorker she gripped with fierce fingers, tipped in iron-clad red nails.

Ransom assessed: She’d broken up or divorced about five or six months ago and had finally decided the severing was for the best and was now determined to abandon the comfort of Häagen-Dazs or Doritos for the real world. And here she was, meeting that tough challenge head-on, no safety net, as a woman alone in a bar. You needed to be vigilant, confident and constantly measuring what came your way.

Ransom didn’t think he’d have the energy to handle it.

He ordered a chardonnay, which turned out to be buttery and rich. Opening USA Today, he asked the bartender a few business traveler’s questions about the area, more making conversation than satisfying curiosity. He noticed, through his periphery, that the woman glanced his way twice then returned to the magazine. The bartender moved on and this time when she looked toward him he noted — not directly but in the smoky mirror behind the bar — her eyes graze the ringless heart finger of his left hand.

Ransom gave it a few minutes longer then asked her politely if she’d eaten here and if so what was good.

Food is always a good intro (she’d had a decent chicken, she told him in a husky, humorous voice; but two steaks had walked by and they’d looked better). From that icebreaker there followed typical banter — careers first, of course, then glancing reference to exes and children (the former yes, the latter no, in both their cases), then sorties about TV shows and movies and media and very careful forays into politics and religion.

But still, an objective observer, fly on the wall, would note that they survived the ritual admirably, that the conversation flowed like silk and was buoyed with humor and that Ransom and Annie had more than a little in common. The New Yorker, NCIS, Dancing with the Stars and the guilty pleasure of Two and a Half Men, now that Sheen was gone. Cabs over pinots. They shopped at Whole Foods for special occasions, IGA or Safeway normally. They each had secret indulgences: unshelled pistachios in her case, Mounds bars in his, a line that Ransom managed to deliver without a spark of lascivious intonation.

He had dinner — yes, a steak, which lived up both to her assessment and to the aromatic promise wafting through the parking lot. When he was through he talked her into sharing dessert, over two glasses of sweet wine.

And then, pushing ten o’clock, the night concluded. As indisputable as a chime, they both knew it was time to go.

But, the question remained, go where?

That inquiry was answered as soon as they were swathed in their coats and outside in the nose-tingling chill of the evening, under a dome of staccato stars. She said in that low voice of hers, “Walk me home? Just two blocks?”

“You bet.”

And with that the night was settled. Love, or one of its many approximations, is always determined in subtle subtext.

They walked down a street canopied by rustling leaves, washed gray of autumn color because of the missing streetlights.

In the middle of a conversation about Miami, where Ransom had just been on business, she took his arm firmly. Her breast met his biceps with persistent pressure.

And sometimes, he reflected, the communications are less subtle than at others.

A moment later they heard a loud voice: “Hey, why’re you with that old, you know, guy? You want a real dick?” The words slipped and slid as if they had vertigo.

He was stepping forward from an alley. The kid was white, acne speckled and beefy. Eighteen or maybe younger. Annie tensed immediately and Ransom increased the pressure on her arm as he led her around the boy.

“I’m talking to…you.” His brows knitted belligerently but it was hard to bring off ominous since he couldn’t focus.

Ransom smelled beer mostly and guessed his already hearty belly would swell to double its already impressive size in five years.

“What’re we going to do?” she whispered.

“Just keep walking.”

“Fucking slut. You’re a fucking slut. You want a dick?”

“Go home,” Ransom said calmly. “Get some sleep.”

“I’ll fucking take you down. I will. I’ll fucking do it.”

Tighter on Annie’s arm, he moved to the left and then right, swerving slowly like a ship around an iceberg. The young man’s eyes were swimming as he tried to follow them. Ransom decided that in the next sixty seconds the boy would jettison most of the alcohol that wasn’t in his bloodstream and he wanted to make sure they weren’t nearby when that happened.

The kid made a fist and stepped forward.

Ransom stopped and held up a hand, palm first. “Think about it.”

“You asshole…”

“You hit me, it’ll ruin your life. You’ll be in jail for a year. You want to explain that to your parents? Your future employers?”

The hesitation was enough to let Ransom and Annie get a breaking-the-spell distance down the sidewalk.

“You’re both fucking sluts,” he shouted.

He didn’t follow.

A half block away Annie whispered, “Oh, that was terrible.” She was shaking. “I thought he was going to attack us.”

“He couldn’t do much damage in that condition.”

Ransom looked back. The young man staggered around the corner and the sounds of what he’d predicted a moment ago floated unpleasantly into the sharp air.

The grunt, the groan, the splash.

Thinking suddenly of his mother.

Then, naturally, of his father, whose ghost seemed to be inescapable on this trip. A loner in school, skinny, Ransom was picked on a lot. He asked his father to teach him how to fight but the man scoffed. “Fighting’s for fools. Don’t ever get into a fight. You fight, I’ll whip you.”

“Why not?” young Ransom had asked, a bit confused about the apparent contradiction — and at the man’s vehemence (he never spanked the boys).

But his father had offered a cool look that meant the conversation was over and made another phone call, lighting a cigarette. Ransom didn’t get it at the time but he later decided that the reason he couldn’t teach him self-defense was that he was all bluster. A coward.

And just like with schooling, Ransom made sure he didn’t follow his father’s path in this area either; his training in the army saw to that.

“You all right?” Annie asked.

“Fine.” She’d be thinking he was tense about the real-life confrontation with the punk, not the remembered one with Stan.

She laughed. “I thought you were going to deck him.” She squeezed his arm. “With those muscles you could have.”

“We’ll let somebody else teach him a lesson…Forgive me for not defending your honor.”

“He called you a slut, too,” Annie reminded.

Ransom frowned broadly. “Hey, that’s right. And you didn’t defend mine. I guess we’re even.”

Another husky laugh.

They arrived at her apartment.

She unlocked the front gate. He turned to her.

“So, is it good night?” Annie asked. Confident, prepared for rejection, prepared for the opposite.

Ransom read the signs. “No, it’s not good night,” he said firmly.

He had learned over the years — and not, of course, from his father — that indecision was usually a bad idea.

At 2 A.M., Ransom Fells lay in Annie’s bed, staring at the ceiling.

Then at her curled body, hair hovering stiffly around her angelic, pretty face, marred only by lipstick he himself had skewed. Her breathing was low and, even as she slept, seemed sultry.

For his part, though, Ransom was anything but peaceful. His jaw was tight. He was awash in that feeling yet again: the darkness, the bad, the guilt.

Not remorse for sleeping with her, of course. The evening had been completely mutual. He’d enjoyed her company and she his, he could tell, and the sex was pretty damn good, too. No, Ransom’s heart was foundering because he knew very well it was going to end, and he knew how, too: thanks to him. Just like with Karen six months ago and Julia a few months before that.

Ransom still carried the glum residue of how those times — and plenty of others — ended, just as he would carry around the burden of his anticipated behavior with Annie.

Why couldn’t he just feel good about meeting her?

He couldn’t quite say why exactly, but, given his frame of mind, given this perverse sentimental journey, Ransom chose to blame his father. The man’s distance, the failure to give his son guidance, to be a role model…that led to the conundrum: desperation to connect with these women, guilt when it was over.

Sometimes you just can’t win.

A reluctant smile crossed his face. You come back to a place where for the first fourteen years of your life all you were aware of was your father’s absence even though you were living in his house. Now, the man is dead and gone and yet he’s everywhere.

Troubled thoughts finally gave way to sleep, though naturally it came packed with an anthology of troubled dreams.

In the morning, Ransom came out of Annie’s bathroom, dressed, and he found her sitting up, smiling at him, the sheets ganging around her like an entourage.

Her look was pleasant and casual. And she asked, with no apparent agenda, if he wanted coffee and something to eat or had to be going. There was none of the edginess or downright bizarre behavior of some women at this stage of the liaison (like the one who had him listen to her entire playlist of Deer Tick, or the woman who got up at five to make him biscuits from scratch because he’d casually mentioned the night before at dinner that his grandmother made her own).

He told Annie he had a meeting but afterward he didn’t necessarily have to scoot out of town too fast. Why didn’t they talk later?

Her eyes narrowed.

Had he done something wrong?

She asked, “Did you actually say ‘scoot’?”

His brow furrowed, too. “Can that just be our secret?”

“Deal.”

She eased forward, wrapping the sheet around her, and kissed him. He gave her his phone number and then he was heading back to the Shady Grove.

As it turned out, though, his plans altered. He got a message that John Hardwick would not be back into town until late that afternoon.

Irritated at the delay, Ransom Fells considered these unexpected free hours. And suddenly he decided on bald impulse to do something inconceivable.

He’d go visit his childhood home.

Population 14,000.

The color of the timid sign welcoming drivers to Marshall was green, not white, which it had been when the Fells were living here but Ransom believed the number on it was the same. Could this be true, the town had not shrunk or grown in twenty years? Or had the city elders not bothered to transpose census data?

Marshall was a town that tended to ask, Why bother?

While Chesterton lived in the shadows of U.S. Steel, Marshall didn’t even have the shabby grandeur of industry as a jewel in the crown. No looming cooling towers, no massive concrete blockhouses of refineries or smelters or assembly plants, no sweeping rusty vistas of marshaling yards (the name came from a minor nineteenth-century explorer, not railroad tracks), no faded, graffiti’d signs from the past century proclaiming its position in the economic spine of the nation.

Chesterton Makes, the Country Takes.

Even though the paraphrased words were stolen from Trenton, New Jersey, at least Chesterton could make the claim in honesty.

Not so, Marshall. Here were trash yards, smoldering tire dumps, service stations unspruced by national franchises, shopping centers surrounded by crumbling asphalt parking lots, anchored by small grocery stores not Targets or Walmarts. Pawn shops aplenty. The downtown featured mom-and-pop storefronts veiled with sun-blocking sheets of orange vinyl, shading products like office supplies, tube TVs and girdles. The movie theater, in which Ransom had spent a lot of his youth, usually alone, was closed. What was left of the poster on the front was nearly impossible to make out, but Ransom believed it depicted a young Warren Beatty.

The land was largely flat, both in geometry and color, and the billboards and roadside signs were bleached and crackled like Chinese pottery. The only bright hues came from death — the exiting leaves of maple and oak trees.

Ransom’s palms actually began to sweat when he turned the Camry off Center Street and approached his old neighborhood. Heart stuttering faster. He thought of his days in Iraq. He thought about the rifles, pistols, explosives he was comfortable with. I’m a fucking veteran of combat, Ransom reflected angrily, and my hands are shaking like a kid’s.

Then he was unexpectedly passing the two-story, pale green colonial and had to brake fast. The trees — and there were a lot of them — had grown significantly in the twenty years since he’d been away (no Dutch elm here), so he hadn’t recognized the place. Though he supposed the truth was that he simply had chained out so many memories of his birthplace that he couldn’t really recall what it looked like.

He backed up, pulled to the curb and parked. The house was set back about thirty feet from the street across a leaf-strewn grass yard. The residences in this block dated to the 1930s and though the neighborhood would qualify as a subdivision or development, the structures were not made from cookie cutters. Each was significantly different. The Fells family home had a number of distinctive elements, including one that Ransom now recalled very well: a small round window, pied by perpendicular strips of wood — like a telescopic gun sight.

An unwanted memory from earlier returned: His father going hunting. Alone. Stan had told his son, “Pretty dangerous, guns. When you’re older.”

Even though Jimmy and Todd and even Ellen went hunting with their fathers all the time.

Oh, and, by the way, older never made it onto the schedule.

How dangerous would a hunting expedition have been anyway? Stan never came back with a deer or pheasant; he couldn’t have fired more than a dozen shots.

Ransom continued to examine the house, which was smaller than he remembered, though he knew that always happened when seeing something — or someone — from the past that you’ve been thinking about for some time.

He noted the sliver of kitchen window. He remembered Stan sitting at the uneven Formica table before he left for work, always wearing the same: boots, jeans and a blue denim shirt over his wife-beater T-shirt (description only; like the boys, their mother never received more than a gruff glance or sharp word from Stan). He would sip coffee and read, never making conversation. Occasionally stepping into the den and closing the door after him to make or take a call. Ransom and his brother left for school with Stan still sitting at the table over his book or magazine and coffee.

Ransom was startled by his buzzing phone. It was Annie. He let it go to voice mail then turned his attention back to the side yard where he and his brother played.

Back to the front porch, where his mother would sit outside with a glass of wine disguised as juice in a red plastic cup. A big cup.

Back to the lawn he would mow every Saturday for the allowance that he was never given but had to earn.

Waiting, waiting, waiting to feel something.

But no.

Numb.

Then a curtain moved, yellow and brown.

The time was 10 a.m., a little after, and the owner — wife, probably — or a cleaning lady might be wondering what a sedan was doing parked in front of the house, with the driver in sunglasses on an overcast day no less. Not smart. Ransom slipped the Toyota into gear and rolled up the street, turning at the corner. He stopped at an intersection and pulled out his cell phone, did some research, made a few calls. Five minutes later he continued on, toward downtown Marshall.

The Ironworks Tavern was still in existence, about a mile from the house. It was on the edge of downtown, beside a river the color of dried mustard, and near what had been an unenclosed train station, where commuters would board one of the infrequent trains to Gary or to change to a different line for Chicago.

Ransom’s father never took the train but he came to the Ironworks frequently, after he got home from work and wolfed down supper, often standing in the fluorescent-lit kitchen, and then changed into a clean shirt and headed to the Ironworks.

Ransom now parked on the diagonal in front of the tavern, twenty empty spaces surrounding an occupied three. Inside, the large room was similar to what he recalled from the one or two times he’d been here with his mother, looking for Stan when they “happened” to be shopping nearby (though there was an IGA that was closer to home). The place would have been painted, of course, and the sports posters were of mostly existing teams. Jägermeister was for sale, as was Red Bull, according to the promotional signage. And, heaven help us, Hefeweizen was on tap. Stan, a beer drinker exclusively, wouldn’t have approved.

Ransom was amused that breakfast was being served, which also would have been unheard of twenty or thirty years ago. Four saggy people at three tables forked eggs, sausage and bacon into their mouths. Cigarette packs bulged in several shirt pockets. Ransom bet that at least one or two were wondering what the consequences would be if they lit up after they finished.

Ransom picked a shaky stool at the bar and told the elderly man behind it he’d like a coffee. The stooped guy gave Ransom a careful scan. “Just regular,” Ransom told him, eyeing a steaming glass pot. Behind the bar was an espresso machine but it looked like it had never been used. He didn’t like fancy drinks anyway.

“Yessir.”

“You’re Bud Upshaw?” Ransom asked when the man brought a mug and two Mini-Moo’s creamers. An old-fashioned sugar shaker eased forward as cautiously as the man’s eyes. “Yessir,” he repeated. He was about seventy-five, with a face aggressively wrinkled. His complexion was an odd shade — not tan, not ethnic, but some curious tone of dark. Ransom thought of the unfortunate river out back. He was sinewy and where his hair had been now clustered a dozen age spots.

Ransom hadn’t wanted to waste the time of coming to this part of town if the Ironworks wasn’t here any longer or if there was no one on staff from twenty years ago. His call earlier had been to the Shady Grove, where the desk clerk told him that the Ironworks was still a “Marshall landmark” and Upshaw, the owner for three decades, was still “chief cook and bottle washer,” which happened to be one of Stan’s favorite expressions.

The man was definitely uncomfortable and at first Ransom thought it was because he was dressed in a business suit and tie and had a lawyer look about him. Reason enough to be cautious in Marshall, where credit problems carried off as much peace of mind as lung cancer did lives. But, no, it was Ransom’s face that drew most of Upshaw’s attention.

“You know me?”

Ransom might have seen a much younger version of the man but couldn’t recall. He said, “I don’t. My father might have. My family used to live here years ago. I’m in the area on business and thought I’d stop by.”

“Father…” Upshaw was whispering. And some troubled thought was clearly volleying around in his mind. Then: “When was it? That you lived here?”

“Oh, I left over twenty years ago. I was a kid.” Finally he couldn’t let it go any longer: “Something wrong?”

“Nosir. How’d you know my name? Just curious.”

“Fellow at the Shady Grove. Clerk.”

“Sure, sure, sure.” Though this didn’t make Upshaw feel any better. He scanned the breakfasters uneasily and scribbled out a check for one table, then scurried to deliver it.

Then, returning to his roost behind the bar, Upshaw froze. The old man whispered, “Stan Fells.”

“That’s right. I’m Ransom, his son.”

“Uh-huh. Sure. Uh-huh.” His eyes scanned the room and it seemed to Ransom that he was looking for help.

“There a problem?”

“I…No.”

Though there was. Clearly. And this intrigued Ransom a great deal.

Upshaw aggressively dunked a dishcloth and wrung it out several times. Dunked again. He continued, “So. Your dad in the area? You going to meet him here, by any chance?”

“My father? Oh, he died nine years ago.”

“He died, what happened?” the man asked. Not an unusual question, under the circumstances, but the speedy velocity of the words was curious.

“Car crash. Sorry to have to tell you.”

Only Upshaw himself didn’t seem troubled about the news. In fact, he looked positively relieved.

Upshaw nodded thoughtfully and ignored another man waving for a check. “So, dead. He was the last.”

“The last?”

“Of the Round Table.” He gestured to a dim corner, where a booth — which was square — now sat. “Stan, Murphy, Shep, Mr. Kale. The regulars.” He fell silent as the diner approached with some irritation. He now paid, leaving coins for a tip. Upshaw didn’t pay any attention.

“Car crash. Round here?”

Stan had skidded off the road into a river in Michigan, returning from a trip to Detroit. He told Upshaw this.

“Detroit,” the man whispered, as if this, too, was significant.

Intrigue hummed at a higher pitch in Ransom Fells’s heart.

The dishrag went for another swim and wringing and Upshaw mopped a part of the scabby bar that needed varnish, not soapy water. The man’s face revealed an odd milkshake of emotions: He was wary of Ransom, he was curious, he was relieved. It didn’t make any sense. And the mystery continued as Upshaw asked, “Your father ever mention me or the place?”

“What?” Ransom asked, amused. “He died nearly ten years ago.”

“Just wondering.”

“And I didn’t talk to him for a few years before that.”

“Oh. That must’ve been tough.”

Not really. Ransom was silent.

Upshaw looked up, caught the gray eyes and then down again at dishwater that was pretty much the same shade. “Means you didn’t much happen to cross paths with any of the other boys he worked with?”

This was laughable. “No, I didn’t know anybody at the company.”

“Company?”

“Bud, what’s this all about?”

“Oh, nothing, sir. Just curious. You were talking about old times and I was thinking the same. Walk down memory lane,” he said with a big phony smile on his face. “So.”

But Ransom wasn’t going to put up with any crap. He was enduring this hard pilgrimage to find out about his father, and this man obviously knew something. He fired a glance the man’s way and touched his arm, gentle but insistent. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Though Ransom believed he had a pretty good idea and it made perfect sense.

A woman.

Stan had been having an affair and Upshaw knew about it. Dad had probably brought the slut here dozens of times. Maybe the bar owner was worried about shattering Ransom’s memories of his dad. But to judge from the wariness in his face, he guessed that it was more likely his father had threatened him to shut up about it.

Ransom understood something else; he guessed his mother knew, too. There had to be some reason she graduated from beer to wine to vodka.

“Really, please, sir.” Voice quivering.

“You don’t tell me, I’ll just go through my father’s address book from back then and start calling people. They’ll give me some answers.” There was no address book — Ransom hadn’t inherited anything but a few thousand from an insurance policy — but for his job he’d learned to bluff. He was good at it. But he hadn’t meant his words as a threat, simply a prod to get the man to spill.

So he didn’t understand the alarmed reaction. “No, no, you don’t want to do that!” Now, Upshaw’s hybrid complexion paled. The resulting color was eerie. “Look, let’s forget it. Please.” He was begging. “You want some breakfast? It’ll be on the house, for old times’ sake.”

Ransom tightened the grip on Upshaw’s arm then flattened his hands on the bar, as if planting himself, never to leave until he had some answers.

Upshaw swallowed and went to get himself some coffee he didn’t seem to want. He returned and fiddled with the sugar shaker, poured in what seemed like a half cup. He didn’t stir it. “You’re not…you’re not law, are you?”

“Law?”

“Police, or whatever?”

Confused, Ransom muttered, “I’m a salesman, computer products.”

Now Upshaw’s own gaze grew tight, as if he were a truth detector.

Instinct told Ransom to relent. “Look, Bud, my dad was a mystery to me. This was his favorite hangout after he’d get home from his company. I thought you could tell me a little about who he was, what he talked about, what he did. That’s all.”

Now, lapsing back to his whisper, Upshaw looked around the tavern. “Okay, sir. Well, first of all, this wasn’t a place he’d stop in after work. This was his office. And as for who he was, please, I’m sorry. Your father was an enforcer.”

“A what?”

“He killed people for a living.”

Bud Upshaw was leaning back, now clutching the coffee as if he was going to fling it Ransom’s way and flee in the event of an attack.

But Ransom Fells simply laughed. “You’re crazy. You’re out of your fucking mind.” Maybe the old guy was senile.

“No, no. I wish I was. It’s true, sir.”

Not smiling any longer. “Bullshit.” Still, though, Ransom remembered the look of relief on Upshaw’s face when he learned that his father was dead. Maybe, for some reason, Upshaw had lived in fear of his father. And the old man now said with complete sincerity, “No, it’s not.”

“Tell me.”

“Mr. Kale I mentioned?”

At the ghost table.

“He was Stephan Kale.”

Ransom had no clue.

“Kale was a lieutenant for Doyle back in the seventies and eighties.”

“Wait. Bobby Doyle?”

“You heard of him?”

“Something on A&E or the Discovery Channel.” Head of a largely Irish gang on the South Side of Chicago and in Cicero. Here, too, northern Indiana. Doyle was dead or in prison but the outfit was still around, Ransom believed.

“Stephan Kale ran their Gary operation from here.” Upshaw waved his arms, indicating the Ironworks. “This was sort of their unofficial office. Your dad was one of the first ones Mr. Kale recruited. It was, I guess, forty years ago, maybe more. Mr. Kale had him kidnap Vince Giacomo’s wife, in River Forest.”

“The Mafia guy?”

“Yeah, who’d been moving into Chicago Heights, Doyle’s territory. Giacomo backed off — and paid a half million to get his wife returned. Was your dad’s first job and it went so smooth he was in like Flynn after that. He and the rest of the crew would come in during the day, hang out, get their assignments. Protection money here, bombing a competitor’s restaurant there, more kidnappings, drugs and money laundering. Sopranos stuff. They’d come back at night and hand off the money or report about what’d happened on the job.”

“That’s not killing people,” Ransom whispered firmly.

Even more quietly: “But he did that, too. I know it. Oh, hell, yeah, I know.”

“Impossible.”

The drippy rag was gone and Upshaw was sipping his coffee, hunched over and leaning close to Ransom. “Swear to God. Sure, they never talked about it out in the open. They weren’t stupid, none of the Round Table crew was. But one day, I found out. See, there was this pipe started leaking in the utility room. I went in to fix it and I was behind the water heater, working away. And your dad and Mr. Kale come in and they must’ve thought the room was empty because he says to your dad, ‘Good job with Krazinski. The DA suspects but my contact tells me they can’t make a case. The coroner’s gonna go with accidental. Doyle’s happy about that, real happy.’ And your father didn’t say anything. Course, he was always pretty quiet.”

So it wasn’t just me, Ransom reflected. Despite the horrific nature of the conversation, Ransom was oddly pleased.

Upshaw continued, glancing cautiously around. “Two days before, this star witness in a union embezzlement case, Leo Krazinski, died in a boating accident on Lake Michigan.”

“Jesus.”

“And then Mr. Kale goes, ‘There’s this numbers guy in Gary who’s been skimming. He told Ig to go fuck himself. He needs to be gone.’ And then they got all quiet and they must’ve heard me breathing, even though I was trying not to, ’cause next thing I know I look up and there they are staring down at me. I started to cry, I’ll admit it. I was blubbering like a kid. And your dad bends down and helps me up. And reaches into his pocket and takes out some Kleenex. And hands me one.”

“Yeah, he always carried that packet.” Ransom now realized they maybe weren’t to wipe his nose but were to take care of fingerprints.

“And he looks at Mr. Kale and he nods and I’m sure I’m dead. You know, this was it. Then Stan bends down and picks up the wrench I was using. And, what the fuck, he unscrews the L-joint I was working on. He looks at it and goes, “Your water’s too hard.” And he looks at me in this way, I can’t describe it, just looks and hands me back the pipe. That’s all he says. I got the message. Just that look, and I got the message.”

“And the numbers guy?”

“Ended up in a bad car crash two days later. Both him and his wife burned up.”

“His wife, too?” Ransom asked.

“Yeah, I guess because it looked more real, or something. So the cops wouldn’t think it was murder.”

Ransom Fells closed his eyes and exhaled long.

“That’s why I was so freaked out, sir, when I seen you. I didn’t know why at first, I just felt somebody stepped on my grave. ’Cause you look like him, you know.”

This had always irritated Ransom.

“And, hell, when you told me who you were, I thought maybe the law was after your dad, and you and him were going around taking out witnesses. Or he’d been caught and you were here to settle the score.”

Though his thoughts were reeling, Ransom actually smiled at this. He felt a curious need to reassure the poor old guy. “No, I just wanted to find out a little about him.”

“And, man, I sure told you more than you’d ever wanna know. I’m sorry.”

Ransom now wondered if the car crash in Pennsylvania had in fact been an accident. From the few times he’d driven with the man, Ransom knew his father was a good driver. Maybe back then, car crashes were a popular way for hit men to cover up their crimes.

Upshaw added, “Maybe he got out of the business, I don’t know. Probably did. He was a decent guy.”

“Decent?”

“Well, I mean, he never caused no trouble here. Tipped good. Never saw him drunk.” Upshaw shrugged. “Wish I could tell you more, sir.”

Ransom pushed off the stool and asked for a coffee to go. When the old man gave it to him and Ransom had doctored it with cream just right, he laid a couple of dollars on the bar but Upshaw handed him back the money. “Naw, don’t worry about it.”

As he walked to the door Ransom debated furiously. Yes, no?

Do it, don’t.

He turned. “Hey, Bud, did he ever mention me?”

Upshaw squinted, as if trying to wring out memories like water from the dishrag. “Family stuff, things about home, it wasn’t right to talk about them here. This was business. It was like it would disrespect the wives and kids to do that.”

“Sure.”

But when he got to the door, his hand on the knob, he heard the man call, “Hey, wait, sir. Wait. You know, one time, I remember, Stan did say something. Did you go to Thoreau High?”

“Yeah.” Ransom stared back at the man.

“Well, I heard him talking about this great play in the last few minutes of a Thoreau — Woodrow Wilson game, a sixty-yard touchdown. He was smiling. He said his kid did a great job. The best play he’d ever seen.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah.”

Ransom nodded and walked outside, dropping into the front seat of the car and firing it up.

Reflecting that what Stan actually would have said was, “the kid,” not “his kid.”

Ransom had never played football.

And now, four hours later, Ransom Fells was still sitting in the rental Toyota, on the meager hill that overlooked the lopsided softball field. He clutched his cool coffee and riffled through Upshaw’s stories again and again.

His father a killer…and possibly murdered himself.

Impossible.

And yet…

The old man’s account had seemed too specific to be made up and his troubled face had registered genuine fear that Ransom had come to kill him. Ransom lined Upshaw’s words up against the facts he remembered from his childhood:

How his father never talked about his job or introduced the family to fellow workers. How Ransom and his brother were never invited to his company. How Stan didn’t want Ransom to get into fights — which might draw the police. How he rarely took the family out in public — for fear of jeopardizing them? How he regularly went hunting solo but never came back with a trophy (and what game had he really been after?). How his quiet, retiring manner was similar to, say, a sniper in Iraq that Ransom knew, who’d never boast about his kills and who was a craftsman who treated taking lives as simply another job.

One big question remained, however: What was Ransom’s reaction to the news? He simply couldn’t tell. He was too confused.

It was then that he remembered Annie had called. He listened to her message, in which she’d suggested, no commitment, if he wanted to get together that night she’d enjoy it.

He now called her back.

“Hey,” she said, recognizing the number.

“Hey to you, too.”

“How’s your day been?”

If you only knew…

“Good. Productive.”

“I’m bored,” Annie said breathily.

“Well, have dinner with me. I’ll cure you.”

“I’m quite familiar with your course of treatment, Doctor. Can you fit me in at seven?”

She really had one of the sexiest voices he’d ever heard.

“The appointment’s been scheduled,” he said playfully.

He disconnected and, as he stared again at the field, an electric jolt coursed through him. Ransom Fells actually smiled.

Of all the weird ironies, learning the shocking truth about his father had suddenly put his own concerns in perspective. The edginess, the tension, the guilt he’d felt when connecting with someone like Annie vanished completely.

The sentimental journey, which he’d avoided for so many years, had paid off in a way he could never have expected.

More than he would ever have expected.

Ransom fired up the car and returned to Chesterton. He finished up his business with John Hardwick then hurried to Annie’s.

On the way he made up a phrase that was worthy of his ex.

Absentee reconciliation.

Ransom liked that. The phrase had two meanings when it came to his father: He’d reconciled with someone who was emotionally absent, even when they were living in the same house, and now who was absent physically.

An exhilarating sense of freedom coursed through him.

He parked and made his way to Annie’s front door, rang the bell and heard the thump thump thump of steps as she approached. He noticed that she didn’t play any games — like slowing down, or making him wait.

Then the door was opening and she pulled him inside fast, smiling and kissing him hard on the lips.

Ransom swung the door shut with his foot and held her tightly. He cradled her neck, stroking her hair teasingly.

She whispered, “Don’t you want to examine me before dinner, Doctor?”

Ransom smiled. Silently, he slipped the Smith & Wesson revolver from his pocket and touched her temple with the blunt muzzle. He slipped the index fingertip into his ear — the .38 special rounds were loud as hell.

“What’s—?” she asked.

He pulled the trigger.

Still, the gunshot was stunning and numbed his hearing. It pitched Annie’s head sideways so fast he wondered if the impact had also broken her neck.

She thudded to the floor like a sack of ice melt.

The house was at least fifty yards from the nearest neighbors but gunshots are quite distinctive and he knew he didn’t have much time. Pulling on latex gloves, he dropped to his knees and wiped her lips hard with a tissue to lift any DNA he might have left from the kiss. Then, with a new tissue, he wiped his own prints from the gun and nestled it in her still-quivering hand, which he then dusted with the gunshot residue from this particular lot of cartridges. He then planted around her house a half-dozen items he’d lifted from John Hardwick’s house, after he’d killed the man and his wife a half hour before: dirty socks and underwear, a toothbrush, condoms, a coffee mug. (On Hardwick’s corpse he’d also planted some hairs he’d lifted from Annie’s brush that morning in her bathroom and more condoms, the same brand.)

The prepaid anonymous cell phone, whose number he’d given Annie earlier, was now scrubbed of his own prints and marked with Hardwick’s; it rested in the dead man’s pocket. The police would find only one message, from Annie — the call he hadn’t picked up earlier. It was “John, hey, it’s me, Annie. If you want to get together tonight, I’d love to. Only if you’re up for it.”

Ransom had told her his first name was “John.”

He stood for a minute and surveyed the house, deciding it was a righteous set.

It was easy to kill someone, of course. What was difficult was setting up a credible scenario so that the police stopped looking for suspects. In the thirty-five killings Ransom was responsible for, he usually found a person to take the rap. The police, forever overworked, were generally happy to take the obvious explanation, even if there were a few holes as to the truth of the incident.

Murder/suicide was always good.

The police would conclude that John Hardwick had been having an affair with Annie Colbert and had told her it was over. She’d gone to his house tonight when he got home from work, shot him and his wife and then returned home, taking her own life with the same gun she’d used to kill the couple.

There were a few people who’d seen Annie and Ransom together. The drunk kid wouldn’t remember anything. The bartender might but the young man had been busy and Ransom had introduced himself as John to him as well.

Besides, Ransom Fells had a solid cover: a traveling salesman for GKS Tech, based in New Jersey. It was a front, of course, but a very elaborately documented one. And in any case Ransom would be out of this area in twenty minutes.

Then he was out the door and, sticking to bushes in the backyards of the properties here, he made toward the car, parked several blocks away.

Ransom’s boss would be pleased. The clients would, too — a money-laundering operation on the East Coast trying to expand into the Midwest and meeting resistance from John Hardwick, who had his own financial game set up here.

Ransom was pleased, too. And about more than the success of the job.

Learning what he had about his father had removed one of the biggest draws in his career, one he’d wrestled with ever since joining the operation: the troubled feelings about making a living at murder, so to speak, and the guilt at killing the innocent to enhance your goal.

Could a death — violent death — ultimately (and ironically) lead to something positive, a reconciliation of sorts?

Apparently the answer was yes. Not his father’s own death but the killing that was his father’s profession.

Knowing what he’d learned from the scrawny bar owner had worked a miracle. Now it was clear. He’d been born this way, his father’s son, and there was nothing he could do to change.

And then another thought struck him like the shockwave from an IED.

My name!

Stan’s first job had been the kidnapping of the Mafioso’s wife in the western suburbs of Chicago, at which he’d made his own career…and made Bobby Doyle $500,000—in ransom.

His father had named his firstborn son after his big break.

Ransom grinned like he hadn’t done for years.

He was halfway through Ohio when he received an encrypted email and pulled over; he didn’t want to read it while driving and risk a ticket. His other weapons were carefully hidden under the computer tools, but why tempt fate?

The message was from his boss at GKS Tech, thanking him for the Indiana job and asking if he was able to take on another assignment — back in his own territory of the New York area. A whistleblower was going to testify against a client — a government contractor, who’d been delivering shoddy military equipment and overcharging for it. The employee had not gone to the authorities yet but was going to do so on Monday. The client needed him dead right away.

Ransom answered that he’d handle the job.

A moment later he received another message. It said that Ransom ought to know that the target was presently at home with his wife and two teenage children and would be there all weekend until he left for the DA’s office. It was possible that the entire family would be present when he killed the man. There’d probably have to be collateral damage.

Ransom typed: That’s not a problem.

And cut and pasted the address of his victims into his GPS.