Half World: A Novel (34 page)

It took Kimble three nights to tell his story. Both men in their beds, Kimble smoking, the glowing red tip of his cigarette the only light in the room, pulsing like a radio tower. Kimble spoke slowly, deliberately. Where were we? he said at the beginning of each night, right after lights-out, lying flat on his back in the dark, the tiny red glow floating a few inches above his voice. His story a polished, oft-told thing. Kimble out beyond the limits, his old life, then Kimble on the train, approached by a Rider, then Kimble calling the number, coming to the barracks. Lighting a new cigarette from the dying end of the old. Telling his story until the first blush of sun out the window and then the alarm ringing, alarms ringing in rooms all down the hall, and Kimble saying, To be continued, rolling himself upright, placing his bare feet on the floor, toes, balls, heels, showing Thomas how to find his footing for another day.

More passengers on the train now, the end of the workday. Thomas walks, watches the faces and the prayer in his head. It is in the last car that Thomas sees him. A black man, middle-aged, sitting with his knees up, elbows on his knees, his hands open, head resting in his long fingers. The car crowded, but the seat beside this man empty.

The man’s clothes are grease-stained and worn. A workman’s jumpsuit. His eyes are closed. He is taking slow, shaky breaths, trying to get through some ferocious moment. Thomas checks his Bible, his watch. Begins to move through the car.

The apprenticeship with Kimble lasted a month. Thomas riding with him, plain-clothed, sitting inconspicuous, watching the man work. Having lunch together on a bench on the new Jefferson Park platform, then back on the train, Thomas watching, gradually realizing that he was hoping Kimble wouldn’t make any contact, hoping that no one would take Kimble’s cards, no one would stand with Kimble when he stood, for that would mean Thomas had been replaced. Kimble bringing this up one day while they ate lunch on the Jeff Park bench. Kimble already knowing this was something in Thomas’s head. Telling Thomas that this was
normal, this was what they all felt at first. That it was something to be embraced. You want to be replaced, Kimble had said. Being replaced is a joyous thing. It means someone else has heard. It means another man who realizes he is not alone.

There was no ceremony in the receiving of the jacket. Thomas didn’t know what he had expected, some kind of formal presentation, but one morning it was simply hanging on the doorknob when he left their room. No one said anything. No one acknowledged anything. He dressed and ate breakfast and put on his jacket and sat with the other men in the Fellowship Hall and listened to Reverend Lee and then boarded the bus. When they reached Clark and Lake, Kimble nodded to Thomas and Thomas exited the bus alone. It wasn’t until he’d got enough courage and looked the first man in the eye that it all made sense. It wasn’t until that man had looked up at Thomas, until Thomas had sat. In that moment he realized the ceremony. The jacket was just a jacket.

Getting dark now. Thomas works his way to the back of the car, the black man sitting alone. The man’s eyes closed, his mouth open, limbs pulled in like a mantis. Thomas squeezes past the man’s upraised knees, sits in the empty seat. Other passengers looking and then looking away. You do not need to open your eyes, Thomas says. You do not need to uncover your face. Thomas’s head down, his voice low through the noise of the train. The train’s brakes screeching then silent then screeching. Let me pray with you. The other man’s mouth closing, his jaw clenching. Let me be with you through this. Thomas speaking the words he had woken with, the prayer he’d found in his head that morning. The other man’s knees lowering, his leg touching Thomas’s in one place, in two.

The holy moment.

2

Raw light at dawn, white and blue, a clean chill in the air. Hannah stood at the pasture gate, her hands on the rough wood, fingertips finding the cracks and splits. She wore an old sweatshirt, the hood back so she could feel the air on her neck, her ears.

The motel had once been a ranch of some kind. It still had some of the wide tractor trails, the sheds and animal pens. There had been horses out there once, maybe, in the pasture, gray figures stepping through the early light. But it was a windswept, lifeless place now. The scrub brush and tumbleweed had reclaimed the land beyond the half-rotted fence. The ranch overcome when the desert returned.

There were birds on the fence posts farther down the line, crows smoothing their wings, beaks darting, feathers rippling from the contact. This felt like a far country. It hadn’t felt that way the night before, the day’s drive still in her mind, the manageable space between two points. But this morning, in this light, she felt that she’d woken in a very distant place.

They had taken buses west from her studio, changing lines every mile or so, Dickie insisting that they keep to the most populous areas of the city, streets with crowds, buses with standing room only. Safety in numbers, Hannah supposed, though she didn’t feel safe. It was evening by the time they reached Bert’s house. Dickie waited outside while she spoke to
Bert, telling him about her impromptu trip, assuring him that everything was fine. Bert offered her some cash which she immediately refused and then thought better of, accepting the small, thick roll along with the car keys. There was someone else in the house, she knew. She could hear music from upstairs, the bedrooms. Bert asked again if she needed help, but she’d already backed out the front door, started down the long driveway to where Dickie stood waiting.

She’d called the photographer who’d taken the cabaret pictures. He’d given her the address of a small bar in the shadow of the Silver Lake Reservoir where the cabaret appeared one night a week. Dickie stayed outside, keeping watch, while she went in. The room was still the daytime bar, with a handful of locals half haunched on stools, but it was beginning to transform. A few young men carried garment racks filled with gowns, others hauled lights and sound equipment through the front doorway. There was no door in the doorway, just a black curtain the men had to brush aside with no small degree of annoyance as they carried speakers inside, a mixing board, a cardboard box filled with colored gels for the lights.

The young Mexican was in the bar, directing traffic. The other men called him Gael. He recognized Hannah when she walked through the curtain. He stiffened a bit, watching her while he gave instructions to a man carrying a bag of multicolored boas.

It is the ghost catcher, he said. He nodded to the bar and when she declined he motioned to the bartender, who made him a drink, something dark with ice.

She told him she wanted to find the man from the photograph he’d seen in her gallery. She’d always been fascinated by the picture, couldn’t get the thought out of her head that he might really exist. She was hoping to make her own photograph of him, all these years later.

Gael laughed. I don’t think anyone makes pictures of the white ghost, he said. But he took a drink and gave her the information she asked for, the location of his father’s ranch, what little else he knew about
El Fantasma Güero.
He believed the man lived in one of the surrounding southern coastal towns, though he had no idea which one. The ghost always
just appeared when Gael’s father needed him, standing at the gate to the ranch with his suitcase and tripod. Gael believed that he rode the bus up to the ranch. There was only one bus, which stopped a couple of miles south of his family’s home, and this was probably where the ghost disembarked, walking the rest of the way along the side of the dirt road.

“They met in my father’s office in the main house,” Gael said. “Wednesdays, always the middle of the week, in the afternoon. That was the routine. My father is a man of routines. I suppose the ghost received instructions then, if there was something that needed handling. If not, I don’t know what they talked about. Maybe they just had a drink. My father’s confidant, possibly. His confessor.”

Another young man stopped and asked a question and Gael pointed toward the back of the bar.

Gael looked at the camera hanging from Hannah’s shoulder, and Hannah asked if she could take his picture. He threw up his hands theatrically, said that he wasn’t dressed. Then his smile faded and he nodded, his hands returning to his drink. He looked away, out into the changing bar, a practiced pose of chilled indifference. Hannah waited, watching his profile in the frame, his jawline and dark eyes, the neon beer signs in the background, red and yellow and green. She waited until he turned back, confused, impatient, looking at her, into the lens, and then she pressed her finger, releasing the shutter.

Before they had left her studio, Dickie had told her to throw away the rest of the pills. She’d flushed them, a bottle at a time, tablets plopping into the toilet water. He’d told her that it might be rough for a while, but she just had to make sure he didn’t find anything else to take.

On their way out of the city, he had stopped under a freeway overpass in Hollywood, knelt in the dirt there and dug something free, a brown paper bag, folded tight. She had been relieved when he’d opened the bag and she saw that it contained a gun, not pills, though she knew this meant that she was very far down the rabbit hole indeed.

She’d watched him as he drove Bert’s car. He had changed since that final night at her studio, as if telling his story had resurrected some long-dead side of him. He spoke and acted with a quiet determination now,
a clear focus. His body had changed. He moved simply, purposefully. It was not any kind of drug or fluke or instinct. This was training, this was experience.

They’d pulled over a few times so he could throw up by the side of the road, or just retch and heave, groan and spit. Each time he climbed back into the car, pale, shaky, and each time he shook his head when she started to speak. He stopped one other time, at a small pharmacy in Tijuana, and she was about to argue when he gave her a list of a few things they’d need, nonpharmaceutical.

The motel was the last stop before the coastal towns Gael had spoken of. It had come out of nowhere the night before, appearing in the headlights as they made their way in the dark. Nothing else around for miles. There was one other car in the dirt lot, a pickup with blue-and-white Jaliscan plates, but the windows of the motel rooms were dark. A husband and wife ran the motel. The wife checked them in, wrote down the name Dickie gave and took the money and handed him a key. Her husband puttered in the room behind the counter. They seemed like farmers to Hannah, as if maybe they had owned this land in its previous life and had simply adapted to the new terrain.

They had shared the single motel room bed, sleeping stiffly. Hannah had woken to a rooster crowing somewhere in the distance. She’d risen and sat on a wooden bench that hung from chains fixed to a corner wall. She had found a book in Bert’s car, a paperback western with a painted cover of a cowboy on horseback, a town’s main street behind him, the hotel and general store, a group of worried-looking men outside the saloon doors, all pointing at something approaching from off the cover. Hannah couldn’t tell if the rider was readying himself to defend the town or if he’d just robbed it blind and was on his way out. The sky above was a mad swirl of fire, orange and yellow and white.

She didn’t know if this was something Bert was considering turning into a movie or if he was reading it for pleasure or if it belonged to someone else, left behind beneath the passenger seat. She’d sat on the bench in the motel room and tried to read but the light was bad, so she’d set the book down and put on her shoes and a sweatshirt and left the room,
walking out to the fence, the last barrier against what was out in the desert, what the desert contained.

She watched the sky color slowly and imagined it red and orange and white, swirling with fire, the sky from the Wild West cover. She imagined the thing in the desert rushing out through the fence and through her and the buildings behind, sweeping the land clean, leaving nothing but dirt, dust, ash.

She’d wanted to take Dickie’s picture while he slept. A violent act, the first that had come to mind. After she’d woken, she’d stood over him, her toes on the cold tile, pointing the camera. She’d wanted to take something from him for what he had done, for bringing her to this place. But she’d known this was not quite right. She’d lowered the camera, walked to the bench, picked up the book. She wasn’t really sure who was to blame.

The rooster crowed again, finally on time. She watched the last bird leave its fence post, lifting into the air, and then she turned back to the motel, the truck in the lot, Bert’s car parked at the other end. Dickie was there, had been there for she didn’t know how long. He was sitting on a stool outside their door, watching her, smoking, the cowboy paperback open on his knee.

3

A night of blowing paper dust out his nose, plaster dust, soot. Coughing up something that looked like schoolroom paste. His clothes smelled like kerosene, so he threw them into the Dumpster behind the motel. He still had his gun, all his limbs and digits. He’d turned his ankle when he’d fallen on the road but other than that he couldn’t say he was anything less than damned lucky. He used every tissue and towel and roll of toilet paper in the motel room, blowing his nose, coughing it out. Finally had to pull the sheets off the second bed, use those.

Denver Dan the Telephone Man. Jesus Christ.

Jimmy stood in a phone booth down the street from the motel and dialed, ready to tell Squires that their first lead had almost gotten him killed. He thought better of it, though, and hung up the phone before the second ring. This wasn’t really any of Squires’s business. It wasn’t any of their business. Squires, Paul Marist, whoever else might be sitting in an office somewhere back east. It never had been. Jimmy realized this now. He rolled up the paper with Squires’s number and shoved it into the phone’s coin slot, watched it disappear.

He tracked down the address for Henry March’s daughter, a corner building in a Mexican neighborhood at the northern edge of the city. Jimmy sat in the Lincoln and watched the place for the better part of an afternoon. He was just about to throw in the towel when she appeared,
with none other than the bum from Squires’s photos, driving a more-than-gently-used Mercedes, baby blue.

She was about the same age as Jimmy’s son, looked nervous in a way that didn’t quite fit her, as if the worry was something new that she was still grappling with. Jimmy followed them to a bar a few neighborhoods south. The March girl went inside and the bum sat around the corner in the Mercedes keeping watch. The explosion at the beach house had been in the news and Jimmy didn’t know if this meant anything to the bum, if Denver Dan meant anything, if that was the reason for the jitters and the lookout act. The bar had a curtain in lieu of a door and when someone came in or out, Jimmy could see the girl inside, talking to a tall Mexican. A while later Jimmy followed her and the bum back to her place, sat down the street for a while, but there was no further movement and he was exhausted, his ass and ankle aching, his ears still ringing, so he went back to the motel, hoping somebody had changed the towels and sheets.

He lost two more days to the sickness. Two days, three days, shivering on the bathroom floor. This time he began to hallucinate, shapes and figures forming in the dark. Women in the room with him when he reached up and turned on the light. The two whores from the apartment on Telegraph Hill all those years before. The skinny white girl standing in the shower and the junkie Negro sitting on the john, both staring, watching him shake on the tile.

He turned and saw Henry March standing in the corner, wearing his headphones, holding his camera and ledger. March’s face impossible to read, the fluorescent light filling the lenses of his glasses, obscuring his eyes, whatever expression might be back there.

Where’s your book, Hank? Jimmy whispering in the bathroom. Where’s your book?

Jimmy thought of Jayne. Stories in the newspapers, on TV. A dark moment returned, exposed by Henry March. What was written in his ledger. Jimmy thought of Elaine, the memory of Elaine, hearing those things, seeing those things. Those rooms on Telegraph Hill. He thought of Steven, his grandchildren. This is how he would be remembered, what his name would come to mean.

One fist, then the other. He pushed his knuckles into the tile until his head and chest lifted from the floor. His body like lead. He grabbed the toilet rim and pulled. Grabbed the edge of the sink. Watch this, girls. Watch this, Hank. Hearing a noise in the room and not knowing where it was coming from and then realizing it was coming from him. A prehistoric growl. The pain just fucking unreal. Pulling himself to his knees, his feet. His face in the mirror, the reflection of the bathroom, his private audience, watching. Blood on his knuckles, blood in his eye. Eyes in the mirror, teeth in the mirror. Watch this, Hank.

The roar rising, filling the room.

*   *   *

When he came back to the bright autumn world the March girl and the bum were gone. The Mercedes was nowhere to be seen. There was no movement at her place. Jimmy let himself in. A photographer’s studio and gallery. A small living space. Boxes and binders of pictures and negatives, more than he had time to go through. A wall of postcards that had been sent by her retarded brother.

It took him too long to get the name of the Mexican that March’s daughter had been talking to at the bar. He had to squeeze the bartender a bit. Took him too long to find the Mexican’s apartment. He spent too much time inside the apartment, waiting for the guy to come home and then dealing with him when he did, but this he couldn’t help. He was amazed by how much strength he still had when he got going, how much his body remembered. He fed off the fear in the room, wanted to sink his teeth into it. The room white and hot, Jimmy pushing hard, the Mexican pleading. He was taking too long but it felt good to feel strong again. Jimmy pushing hard until the Mexican told him what he wanted to know. Not enough, though, not enough.

Jimmy pushing hard.