Half World: A Novel (23 page)

Authors: Scott O'Connor

She worked around the photo of her father for the better part of a week, keeping it in the center of the table while she made prints of her runaway images. She would forget about the photo for a while and then feel the anachronistic shock of seeing Henry in 1950s San Francisco, his suit and hat, the clothing and bearing of the ghostly figures crossing behind and in front. His look versus the kids in the modern photos on the table around him. Not that different, maybe. People on the street, unable to find a way home.

She watched coverage of the chess match every night it was on. There was a delay when Fischer demanded that the proceedings be moved out of the main hall and into a closet-size room in the back of the facility usually reserved for table tennis. There was another delay when the Russians had Spassky’s chair dismantled, his clothes swept, his morning orange juice tested, sure that his suddenly somnolent play was the work of CIA poisoning.

Fischer had now banned all filming, so the news reports relied on still photos, drawings from artists in attendance, renderings that looked like a cross between political cartoons and courtroom sketches. There were detailed animations illustrating each move, along with expert commentary from former grand masters. Hannah tended to watch without sound. She was interested only in the real-life images, the few still
photographs that had been smuggled out, shots of Fischer and Spassky hunched over their table. The rest was irrelevant to her. She had never played a game of chess in her life and didn’t believe she probably ever would. The establishing shots of the Icelandic landscape at the beginning of the broadcasts were beautiful but beside the point. They could be playing anywhere, as long as it was remote, inaccessible. She cared only for the interior of that room, the men it contained.

Images of Spassky now showed him sweating like a man who had indeed been poisoned. The match had been moved back to the main hall, but Spassky hadn’t played well since the game in the back room. He had been outmaneuvered and he looked like he knew it. He realized the mistake he had made. He could see the catastrophe at the end of the chain.

She built a frame at her worktable, cut a mat, and brought the photo of her father out to the gallery. For the past month she’d been displaying the work of another photographer, images of drag performers at underground cabarets throughout the city. She hammered a nail into an empty wall and hung the picture of Henry. She stood back, surprised at how odd she felt, shaky and short of breath, as if she’d just told a long-held secret.

The next day, with the front doors open again, she came out of her studio whenever she heard a visitor. She stood just outside the doors, one canvas sneaker on the sidewalk, smoking, watching out of the corner of her eye as whoever had come in looked at the cabaret photos, working their way across the exhibit, finally coming to the lone island of her father almost twenty years ago, the black frame against the rest of the empty white wall. She watched for a reaction, not sure what she was expecting, what she was hoping to see. Some recognition of the enormity of the image, the freighted history it carried. She watched her visitors press their faces closer to the shot, and then, invariably, moving away, back to the other photos, or out the door entirely, nodding quickly in her direction before stepping back out onto the sidewalk and away down the street.

Dickie sat in the Cutlass watching Buñuel and reading
Johnny Tremain.
This had been the routine for the last few days, since his visit to Zelinsky. He still owed Father Bill a phone call, but didn’t quite feel like admitting he might have hit a dead end so early in the operation. Instead, he read the newspapers for anything new about the Orange County heists, tried to think up a story for if Zelinsky actually came for him, though it was hard to imagine the man even leaving his house. The story would need to be in line with Zelinsky’s books, but with a new wrinkle or two, enough to pique the man’s interest, draw him in a little further until Dickie could suss out what, if any, connection there was between the writer and the preacher and some dudes knocking over banks in high-end beach communities.

Dickie decided that he’d be one of the kids in the mental hospitals so prevalent in the books. Committed, maybe, by his hard-ass military father for recreational drug use that the old man saw as nothing less than a major mental defect. Seemed reasonable that could have happened at some point. And then young Dickie was shuttled from the hospital proper to a shadow wing, where he was drugged, tortured, mind-wiped. Sent down, maybe, to Vietnam, where he could be their eyes and ears, could rat out other kids who’d been snatched and sent southeast by other, less covert but equally nefarious government agencies.

Another day done. No sign of Zelinsky. No sign either from Buñuel that Zelinsky had clued him in to Dickie’s presence. Maybe it was time to go with Plan B, whatever that was. When Buñuel had packed up and headed out on the eastbound bus, Dickie decided to get some exercise, some not-so-fresh air to help him think. He left the Cutlass and started the walk back to the hotel.

It was dark by the time he approached the electronics store on the corner, just the light from the TVs in the window brightening the sidewalk in front of the glass. More war footage, he assumed, helicopters banking low over rice paddies and villages, tracers streaking through the air.

Closer to the TVs, he could see that it wasn’t the war. They were showing a vehicular accident, a rusted four-door beater and a police car on what looked like a fairly desolate stretch of road. Great Plains–ish. Wheat fields filling the screen. The beater nose down in a ditch, the police car right-angled across the road, its front end crumpled. Glass everywhere. The asphalt slick with gasoline.

Another shot of the beater. The front and back windshields shattered. Bullet holes in the doors. Cops walking the scene, talking among themselves. Someone taking pictures. A few fire trucks sitting, lights turning idly. A team of paramedics down in the ditch, pulling bodies from the car.

Photographs on-screen then, and Dickie stopped, staring at the familiar shots from the “Wanted” posters they’d been so proud of, the kid on the left’s name escaping Dickie at the moment, vanished from his memory banks because the photo on the right was a face he knew by heart.

Mary Margaret. The photo on the right was Mary Margaret. And then her name was up on the screen, along with a question mark under the photo of the nameless kid on the left. A headline under their faces,
END TO FUGITIVES’ RUN.

Dickie had to make an effort to close his mouth, not say her name out loud because there were other people around him now, watching the broadcast, what he thought might be a gathering crowd, but he turned and it was only one figure; no, two; and then someone coming
up behind him as well, Dickie unable to see faces in the dark, in the TV screen backlighting. He could only see that there were no faces, that the figures had something stretched over their heads, distorting their eyes and mouths, and one was raising something in its hand, a baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger,
he could make out the familiar branded seal on the barrel just before it cocked back, eye level, just before the figure jabbed the barrel forward and Dickie felt a sunburst of pain between his eyes, his sight flickering to nothing but the TV screen, the afterimage on the backs of his eyelids, Mary Margaret’s face in the glow.

She had dreams of Saturday mornings, that first spring in Oakland, crossing the Bay Bridge with her father in their station wagon. In her dreams she could hear the records she left playing in her workshop when she finally lay down to sleep, a vinyl stack three-quarters of an inch high, as much as the changer could hold. Skip James, Leadbelly, Blind Willie Johnson. Hymns of longing and regret.

Driving on the lower deck, the new morning sun appearing behind the wide steel supports. Her father telling her something while he watched the road, the car’s mirrors, always cautious, his voice buried just beneath the lyrics of the blues records that crossed into this abeyant space. Her father stopping the car at Yerba Buena Island, turning around on the gravel access road, sitting and watching the bridge. Hannah unwilling to go any farther, an irrational childhood fear, refusing to enter the city on the other side of the water.

On the ride back in the dreams, she is always alone in the passenger seat. There is no one driving; the steering wheel turns on its own. The music has ended by this time, the stack of records exhausted. Just the rhythmic whirl of the turntable spinning, filtering into her dream. Hannah heading home, watching out the windows to catch sight of the dead-man holes pocking the walls on the other side of the tracks. The dream fading, coming apart like a cloud. Hannah straining to keep it for
a moment longer, looking for movement, a man’s shape ducking into one of the holes where he will be safe. Trying to hold on long enough for a glimpse of a familiar figure, here and then gone.

* * *

She stepped outside the rink for a late-morning smoke break, wandered down the block, the summer smog hanging in the dry heat, the sky beach-colored, as if the air was full of sand.

There were two young men in the gallery when she returned. Mexican, one tall, one short. They stood a few paces apart, looking at the cabaret images, whispering to each other in English and Spanish, their fingers reaching out occasionally, touching, hooking, then releasing when one or the other moved a little farther down the wall. The taller man looked not unlike one of the subjects in the photographs, a drag queen in a platinum wig and sequined gown, a cigarette burning in one hand, standing majestically, fearlessly, poised and glamorous in a way that seemed to elude most actual Hollywood starlets.

Hannah was about to introduce herself, ask the taller man if he was indeed the subject of the photo, when he stopped in front of the picture of Henry, alone on its wall. His hands lowered slowly to his sides. He stared at the photo. His friend came up beside him and whispered something. The taller man turned to Hannah.

“Where did you get this?”

Something in the man’s tone was so loaded that Hannah stopped herself from the immediate, obvious answer. She didn’t want to expose any more than she already had by placing the photo out in the gallery.

“I’ve had it for years,” she said. “In my collection.”

The taller man turned back to the photo, spoke to his friend. “I know this man. This man worked for my father.”

“When?” Hannah asked. She tried not to sound too eager, wasn’t sure if she succeeded.

“I was a teenager,” he said.

The taller man looked to be in his early twenties, Hannah guessed, so not that long ago.

“Are you sure?”

The taller man nodded at the picture. “I wouldn’t forget him.”

“What work did he do?” the friend asked.

“Things my father was not willing to do.”

“Where?” Hannah’s voice was shaking. She could hear the vibrato, tried to steady it.

“Down the coast. Not far from San Vicente.” The taller man looked at Hannah again. “You don’t remember where you got the photograph?”

She shook her head.

The taller man spoke to his friend.
“Este es el hombre que me pagó para largarme.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—” Hannah took a step toward the men, realized her arms were crossed protectively over her chest. She forced them into the pockets of her jeans. “My Spanish isn’t that good.”

The taller man looked at her, irritated. She was intruding on a personal conversation.

“Do you remember his name?” Hannah asked.

“He didn’t have a name,” the taller man said. “We called him
La Escoba
, because he cleaned up my father’s messes. Sometimes we called him
El Fantasma Güero
.”

Hannah shook her head. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Ghost,” the shorter man said, turning back to the photo. “The white ghost.”

Nothing. Black only. Then tiny explosions, little white flowers of light in the dark. Pain approaches from some far place, filling his head, his lower back, his knees, growing quickly. He has been given painkillers and they are wearing off. He knows the feeling well. He cannot move his hands or feet. When he breathes his breath comes back to him hot and rank, the expelled air returning from somewhere close. He remembers Zelinsky’s books and Buñuel’s tracts and knows that he is in a closed container, he is in a coffin. He has been buried alive.

No, he is sitting. He can feel the bend in his hips, his knees. His feet are bare and cold and they are not touching anything, there is no floor, but he is sitting. He is not in a coffin. He has to try not to panic. There is nothing to focus on but the rapidly growing pain, so he focuses on that, the white flowers bursting. There is pain and that is his, that is something he knows, something that belongs to him, the feel of his body. He has to focus on that.

There is movement in the air. He can feel it on his feet, his wrists. His wrists are behind him, bound around something. The back of a chair. He has to try not to panic. He is in a chair, his feet tied and twisted so that they do not touch the floor, giving him the sense of floating, of falling.

His eyes are open but he sees nothing. His breath comes back to him and he makes a sound, a low, quiet
uhhhhh,
just to hear his own voice. His
voice goes nowhere. The sound stays close. There is something over his head, covering his face. He sucks air in sharply through his mouth and tastes rough fabric. He holds the fabric in his teeth.

He has been hooded like a bird.

This is what they did to him in the hospital. He remembers the hood and the chair.

No, wait, that is something he made up. That was a story he created, a story to tell.

My name is Dick Hinkle. Richard Hinkle. No, wait, that was a story they created, something they made up. His name is Ashby. Richard John Ashby. His father’s name is Jack.

Was Jack. His father’s name was Jack.

He is in withdrawal. He knows this feeling. He needs something for the panic and something for the pain. Something to help him hold on to this little kernel of clear thinking. If he could stop shaking and stop hurting then the kernel would expand and he would know what to do, he could work through the options.

He remembers the hood, the chair. This is what they did to him in the hospital.

* * *

Mary Margaret crosses a beam of warm orange sunlight, schools of dust motes swimming, following her movement. The hair on her arms shines as she passes through the beam, the holes in her old undershirt flashing, circles of freckled pink skin beneath, on her shoulder, her lower back. The first light coming to her apartment slowly, at oblique angles, entering to the side of a wooden shutter bent open like an elbow.

Her apartment. His apartment. Dickie had lived there for three months by that morning, a strange and unexpected domesticity, his toothbrush standing crossed with hers in a cup at the edge of the bathroom sink, his mother’s record among the Hendrix and Joplin in the wooden citrus crate in the living room.

Dust in the air. An apartment of books, records, open windows. Motes changing direction as she moves in the kitchen, the light bending
around her body, wrapping her in a quick embrace and then releasing her, snapping back to its original stalwart beam. The dust regathers, settling, drifting in the light, charged slightly, atoms waiting for her to cross again.

He comes sleepily to the edge of the kitchen, stopping at the border between wood and tile floor, his toes pressing the seam. He watches Mary Margaret crossing back and forth, making coffee, unaware of his presence. Dickie imagining, for just a moment, an alternate universe, a different life. Staying quiet so as not to disturb her, wanting to remain unnoticed, to hold this other place as long as possible. Breathing slowly, his toes pressing into the rough gap in the floor between rooms.

* * *

It is hard to tell when he is sleeping and when he is awake and when he has simply passed out. It is all dark. He must be awake because he can feel the pain in his head and the ache in his wrists and ankles. He can suck in air and taste the fabric between his teeth. He must be awake because he remembers the dream, Mary Margaret moving in the kitchen. He must be awake because he remembers the news report, the car crash, the bullet holes in the door, the covered bodies on the ground. Mary Margaret and Dale. The boy’s name was Dale. How could he have forgotten. Dale with his lockpicks, his snake rakes.

He needs to stay in this space, out of the dreams. He needs to stay in the dark, fight the pain and nausea, the shaking withdrawal, the fear. Fight the memories that are not his, that are things he created. Taste the fabric between his teeth. Feel his own hot breath on his face. Think of Mary Margaret. Feel her skin against his. Hear her voice in his ear.

Your name is Ashby, Richard John Ashby. Your mother’s name was Audrey. Your father’s name was Jack.

* * *

The first voice he hears outside of his head is a woman’s, but it does not belong to Mary Margaret. It is lower in pitch, flatter in tone. It comes from behind him, a few feet away from where his hands are bound.

“What do you need?”

The junkie’s greeting. How many times has he heard this. He can feel his own sweat now, he is aware of it for the first time, cold and slick on his forearms, soaking his shirt. Withdrawal sweat. He is shaking so much that his chair is creaking, another noise he is suddenly aware of.

“What do you need?” the woman asks again, and Dickie licks his lips and clears his throat and tells her, his voice hoarse and close in the hood. And then he is alone in the room and then she is back, or someone else is there, and his right arm is loosened, hanging useless and numb from restraint, then straightened and tied off and then the needle prick in the vein and then the blessed wash, the cleansing warmth, sweeping him away.

* * *

When he had finally learned to ride the bike, when he had stopped toppling off while Jack watched, smoking, from the garage, nobody could get him off it. He rode the streets of the air base, past the pavement and through the scrub brush and dirt to the high chain-link fence, watching fighter planes refueling, taking off, and landing in the distance on the other side.

He was riding home one afternoon when he saw a man leaving their house, another of the tousled collectors who came attempting to lure his mother back out into the world. The man stood in the driveway, holding his clutch of 78s between his knees while he lit a cigarette. Dickie stopped his bike. His father would be home soon. If Jack saw this guy he would beat the shit out of him on the front lawn. It had happened before. The MPs would come and pull Jack off and haul the beatnik down the street and out through the gates and come back and stand with Jack on the lawn and chuckle while Jack cracked a beer, fumed. Dickie sat on his bike at the end of the driveway and thought about telling this guy to hurry up with his cigarette and hightail it off the base. Instead he sat and watched, and when the man finally started moving again, Dickie said, “Why do you care?”

The man stopped, the cigarette burning between his lips. He loos
ened the leather strap from around the 78s, paged through them carefully, reading the labels as each sleeve passed through his fingers. He stopped on one, lifted it from the small stack, held it out. Dickie took the record, read the label, a song of his mother’s he’d heard a thousand times, a song his father put on the record player when he’d had too much to drink, when he was feeling maudlin or romantic. Dickie looked back up but the man was already walking down the street toward the front gate, unhurried, trailing smoke over his shoulder.

It would be years before Dickie understood. Playing the record, alone in Mary Margaret’s apartment, hearing his mother’s voice without her in the room. Just the hope and sadness, the fragile beauty of the sound.

* * *

Another voice in the dark. A man’s this time, small and pinched, slightly nasal.

“Do you know who we are?”

“Yes,” Dickie says. His throat is sore. His voice sounds weak within the hood.

“We know who you are,” the voice says. “You’re a ghost. Richard Hinkle.”

“That’s not my name.”

“Your license says Richard Hinkle.”

“My name is Ashby. Richard Ashby.”

“Who sent you?”

“You know who sent me.”

“Specifically.”

“I can’t give you a name. A real name.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know any real names.”

“You have two names and they have none.” The sound of chair legs scraping on the floor, the man’s weight shifting. “What were you trying to do?” the man says. “Following Buñuel, going to Zelinsky.”

“I was trying to find you.”

“Find us.”

“Talk to you.”

“Talk to us about what?”

It is hard to breathe within the hood. Dickie feels as if he can’t get enough air, that he is breathing fabric. The drugs are wearing off again. The hood is close, tight.

“Can you take the hood off?”

“No.”

“Take it off. Please.” There is no more oxygen in the hood. He’s just breathing his own bad air. “Can you take it off?”

No answer.

“Please.”

No answer.

“Please.” Dickie’s throat raw, his voice loud and painful in the hood, a frightening sound, sending his panic higher.

“Why?” the voice asks.

“Because it reminds me of the hospital.”

“The hospital.”

“Please.” Dickie’s face is wet. He wants to scream but he is afraid of what the sound of a scream in the hood will do to him.

“Which hospital?” the voice asks.

“I can’t.”

“You can’t what?”

“I can’t talk.”

“You’re talking.”

“I can’t breathe, please.”

“You’re breathing.”

“Not with the fucking hood. Take off the fucking hood.”

“What do you need?”

“Please.”

The sound of another chair scraping. Someone else in the room. The girl?

“The same?” the voice asks. “The same as what you got before?”

“The hood, please.”

“What do you need?”

“The hood.”

Both chairs scraping and movement in the room and for a second Dickie thinks they are going to take off the hood, but then there is the sound of a door opening, hinges groaning, and then the door closes and he is alone. There are no other sounds except his panicked breathing, then his chair legs banging on the floor as he rocks back and forth, trying to tip himself, trying to smash the chair. Then nothing, no noise except the sound of his screams in the dark.

* * *

Early in MAELSTROM, he had called Father Bill from a pay phone outside of Ann Arbor, freaked over a protest at the university that had ended in a shouting match with a group of Young Republicans, spilling over into confrontations in various parking lots, skirmishes in back alleys. It was nothing Dickie hadn’t been involved in before, except this time when he was trying to break things up, pull his guys away, there was this YR with thick black glasses screaming at Dickie about the beauty of killing commie gooks. Dickie tried to ignore him, shot him a few warning looks, like
back off, no, really,
but the kid kept screaming,
commie gooks commie gooks,
his spit spraying Dickie in the face, and then suddenly Dickie was on him, he had this kid on the ground and was hammering his glasses into his face, the frames cracking and the lenses breaking, Dickie pounding away until he was pulled off by the guys he was pulling away just a second ago, the rest of the fight having ceased in the face of the ferocity of this assault, Dickie dragged out of the parking lot and this YR kid lying on the pavement crying and holding his hands over his eyes.

Later, in the phone booth, Dickie on the line with Father Bill, confessing, expecting Bill to respond with weary disappointment, to pull Dickie out, abort mission, and Dickie deserving this, he knew, for believing his own bullshit, for buying into his own cover to the point where there was now a kid with God-knew-what kind of damage to his eyes, and Father Bill taking a silent moment, processing, Dickie hearing only his own scared breathing in the phone’s receiver, and then Father Bill telling him that there was nothing better for establishing bona fides than
forgetting your own cover to the point where you can’t be questioned, to where your motives are unassailable.

That’s good work, Dickie, Father Bill had said. They can’t touch you now.

* * *

“You’re calmer.” The man’s voice in the room.

“What did you give me?”

“I’ll bet you can make an educated guess. You seem well versed.”

Maybe he had slept. Maybe he is sleeping now. It’s hard to tell. The panic has subsided, though. He is warm, he is calm.

The voice says, “Can we talk now?”

Dickie nods.

“What did they send you to do?”

“Find you,” Dickie says. “Infiltrate.”

“Infiltrate.”

“That’s the term.”

“So far, so good.” The voice laughs. It’s an ugly sound, dented, a little cruel.

Dickie can smell the cigarettes as soon as they’re removed from the pack. The sulfur whiff as the match is struck, the tobacco burning. The voice sucks in, exhales. Smoke clings to the cloth of the hood.

“But you changed course,” the voice says.

“Yes.”

“Did you change course?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I read his books.”

“Zelinsky’s books.”

“I read the preacher’s tracts and those led me to the books.”

“Your masters didn’t give you the books?”

“No.”

“Interesting.” The voice sucks, blows smoke. “You read the books and what?”

“I’d always thought it was a dream. Or a fantasy. Something not real.”