Jonah Man (24 page)

He grasps for the revolver in his pocket, but the truck is well out of range.

There’s a moment before he understands that the vertical slants of light mark gaps between the shed’s laths, before his palm on the dirt means he is entombed on a mountainside.

Hives burn his scalp. He tells himself it is OK. All symptoms will fade with the poison in his system. There are factors working to his advantage. His tolerance, for one. The only course of action is to wait. Were he to break free now, he would lose his way, fall prey to wolves, twist an ankle, end up writhing in a gulley, delirious. He will not oblige them. He will not panic.

A sustained period of calm in which he feels his body weightless, his mind clear. Looking back, he is able to see large swaths of his life set within a single frame. Early days walking a guy-wire in the alley behind his aunt’s building. A summer on the boardwalk. A succession of circuits taking him from one coast to the other. Wherever his mind lands, he discovers a hope and contentment he did not experience at the time. He sees his life not as he always thought of it—as progression and regression, movement toward and away from a target—but as modulating textures composed of noise, scenery, weather.

The question, he reasons, is not if he can forgive himself for killing Jonson, but if he can forgive himself for not killing
Connor. Not the recent Connor, but the younger, more capable Connor. The quality that had kept him from killing Connor was the very quality Connor had used against him. But Swain had been young, a child. He cannot blame himself for failing to kill Connor unless he is also willing to blame the boy for failing to kill Jonson. If he were unwilling to forgive the boy, then he would not have killed the boy’s father. By extension, he must absolve himself.

But he is not the boy. Anything he had managed to do, he had managed to do despite something fundamental in himself, something he couldn’t name but had spent his life disguising. A compulsion to be great. A conviction that he wasn’t up to the task.

He feels his head nod forward, jerks it prone.

Now is not the time, he tells himself.

He wakes to find his pants soiled, the roof of his mouth cracked. He cannot tell whether the landscape has gone silent or his hearing has failed, whether the light has faded or he is nearly blind. For a moment he is back in the tailor’s room, lying on the tailor’s cot. There is a woman with him, wringing out warm towels above a vaporous basin, layering them across his forehead, his chest. He pushes her away.

The Inspector fetched a tire iron from the trunk, beat on the lock’s shackle until the hasp tore from its hinges. Jerking the door open, he spun his head at the stench.

Swain sat with his torso hanging limp between his knees, his face in the dirt. Insects scrabbled up the back of his neck. The Inspector slapped them away with a handkerchief, raised Swain by the shoulders and set him against the wall. No breath, no pulse. Crouching, he gripped Swain’s ankles, dragged him into the light from the Packard’s beams.

The face was rimed with blood, but the Inspector could find no wound. He spit into his handkerchief, scrubbed until the source of the bleeding became clear: Swain had hemorrhaged from his eyes, nose, ears, mouth.

Why like this
? the Inspector thought.
Nobody would have questioned gunfire here
.

He wiped sweat from his brow with the heel of his palm, stood with his arms akimbo, waiting for his breath to slow. The Packard’s lights revealed a clutter of human and animal prints, his own among them. He scanned the visible ground, discovered no vials, no syringe.

He worked the corpse back into the shed, secured the door with a small boulder. At day break he would return with the undertaker.

He stopped at the turnoff to the cabin, exited the car, examined a flurry of tire tracks, the most recent curving toward town. Swain’s murder had served a second purpose: it kept the Inspector occupied while they crated their belongings and left.

Wrong again
, he thought.

Armed with the vials, he ought to have arrested Swain at once. As a result of his effort to learn more, the murderer had himself been murdered; Jonson’s patrons had fled.

He sat against the hood of his car, staring out at the desert, squinting dim patches of creosote brush into focus, trying to think of any course he might follow. There was the real estate company Mavis and the manager had spoken of. There was Jonson’s missive to the browser. The first was no doubt a front; the second provided the likely destination of his most valuable witness. As Swain had observed, the son might know what his father knew. And then there was the arson, a sentence with which to bargain.

He paced alongside the car, an idea forming and reforming in his mind until it seemed more like a physical sensation than a thought: he could not pursue the boy. Why? Because Swain had confessed to the boy’s crime? Because he’d sacrificed himself for a vision of the boy’s future? What future could there be for a motherless child who’d discovered his father lying murdered beneath a prostitute?

But none of that matters
, the Inspector told himself, maneuvering back behind the wheel.
My job is to track what has been set in motion
.

He pulled onto the road, drove as fast as the dark would allow. The hollow energy that had sustained him throughout the day was beginning to fade.

But I do more than track
, he thought. He’d left Jonson
alone with a vial, stripped Swain of his supply. Now his job called for him to arrest the boy, lock him in a windowless room, perform an autopsy on his life thus far. The boy would stare blankly, as he had that night in the dressing room—a skill he’d practiced daily in his life with his father. The Inspector would push harder, challenging the boy’s notion that he had been powerless, arguing that he was at least complicit in his father’s decline. Some part of you, he’d say, wished your father dead. You’d given up on him. Did it ever occur to you that you might have helped him?

And then, a chance for redemption: You can help others like him. Other boys like yourself. The Inspector could do this, had made himself do worse, not for the greater good, but because it was his job.

The town’s scattered lights came into view. The Inspector steered back onto the shoulder, cut the engine, remained seated behind the wheel. He shut his eyes, saw Swain’s corpse. He shut them tighter, saw Jonson’s corpse.

He stepped from the car, waited for shapes to solidify in the dark, then made his way to the double-strand wire fence that separated highway from ranch. Leaning his forearms on a post, he searched out the few constellations he could identify. An animal the size of a small dog jolted through his peripheral vision. He pivoted, found the brush still. Without realizing it, he began to whistle—stray, anxious notes. He made himself stop. Standing still, the air seemed abruptly colder. He stuck his hands in his pockets, felt the handkerchief filled with Swain’s vials. He removed a single vial, raised it above his head, watched the silver-blue liquid incandesce in the faint light.

Seen from a distance, he thought, someone might mistake it for an animal’s eye.

He prized the stopper free, drained the contents into the scrub, reached back into his pocket. He came to the last vial, held it balanced on his palm.

He tried again to think of anything he might salvage.

He’d been with the family for half a year before they played Chicago. A taxi took them from the station to the hotel, the father and his youngest son sitting up front with the driver—the boy, mother, and older son in back. They passed through streets the boy thought he recognized, crooked blocks lined with stone row houses, stickball games breaking up to let the cab pass. But then the driver veered into a part of the city he’d never seen, a neighborhood marked by skyscrapers and elaborate vitrines, the sidewalks clogged with people.

Their hotel sat across the street from a long and narrow park with a skating rink that served as an outdoor marketplace in the off-season. From the window of the room he shared with his stage brothers he watched a man on a bicycle weave in and out amongst the shoppers. Somewhere behind him, the mother was helping the youngest unpack. The older son crossed the room, tapped him on the shoulder.

My father wants to see you, he said.

Now?

When do you think?

Julius, the mother said, mind your tone.

In the adjoining room, the father sat folding his show handkerchiefs
into pocket-sized squares.

Hello, son, he said, pushing a stack aside. How are you feeling ? Not tired out from the trip?

No sir.

Tell me, are you hungry?

I suppose.

How do you feel about pork chops?

The boy scuffed at the floor with his heels, shrugged.

Splendid, the father said.

It was early for dinner, late for lunch. Apart from the staff, the restaurant was quiet. They sat across from one another in a booth by the window. The waitress brought them a basket of bread and a saucer of olive oil. The father ordered a gimlet.