The Bones of Old Carlisle (5 page)

And yet, he’d joined two lives together, to the delight of dozens
more of their friends and family. And he’d brought another happiness
to himself, he said, chiding himself for once again not noticing until
after the affair was over that he’d enjoyed presiding at the wedding.
He found the girl who made the collage and handed it back, and
encouraged her to have it framed, because to say anything else about
it would have been in bad form.
Stevie tried to give him a $100 bill, and Arrowroot refused. “You
use that to do something special for yourselves,” he said, and he
slipped away, back to the Promenade to figure out what to do next.
And that’s when he found her. More or less.

Hercules Journeyman was elected Heligaux’s first black mayor in
1985, serving competently for two terms before retiring to putter in
his vegetable garden and manage his vast, extended and not entirely
perfect family.

In his 80’s now, he’d been bedridden for several years. He’d lost
a foot to diabetes, had problems with his heart and his lungs.
So Hercules was one of the last people Arrowroot expected to see
on the Promenade. But there he was, sitting in a wheelchair, painting.
And on the canvas before him, Journeyman had scratched out, with a
trembling hand, the rough contours of a bride, in a white sheath
dress, the great green peaks of Steeple Mountain behind her.
“Well, Hurk, looks like this day’s brought out everyone,”
Arrowroot said, sidling up to Journeyman to get a better look at his
creation. The wedding girl seemed to be an afterthought, painted
abruptly in front of the mountain, its green foliage here and there
still poking through her dress. Her skin was light brown, hair black.
Her face was still blank and her hands were just two shaky brown
smears.
Journeyman continued to squint at the canvas, as if he’d just
noticed the bride there himself.
Finally, he looked up at Arrowroot, squinted some more and, after
a few rasping breaths, recognized him. “You take,” he began, his voice
a gravelly mess. “You take. You take. You take too much credit for
things.”
“I do, you know,” Arrowroot admitted. “It’s one of my worst
habits.”
“Karmak. Kar, Kar, Karmak. That was my doing. That was all my
doing.”
“You know about that?” Arrowroot inquired. “We upgraded it all in
February. You like your new water bill?”
“I know all about it,” Journeyman spat, and he moved his hand
toward Arrowroot as if he were trying to swat him away. “I read it all
in, in, in the paper. I read about it. You up there, you never said a
word about the people, the people. About the people who did the first.
Karmak. The early work.”
“Oh, I did, Herkie. You know I did. You, Bertie, Mr. Olson, you
were all in my statement. They just didn’t take that part down. You
know how the
Herald
is. They never tell the whole story.”
Journeyman looked down at his palette, dabbing at the white with
a shaky brush and mumbling something to himself.
“That’s a beautiful painting,” Arrowroot observed.
“Doctor. Doctor. Doctor told me,” Journeyman began. “He told
Francine. I might last to summer. Been laid up. They took my foot.
They took my foot.” Journeyman grunted and raised his right leg to
show that there was nothing past the cuff of his gray denim pants. “So
I said, ‘I’m not gone. I’m not gone yet.’ This isn’t a painting. It’s
a vision. There’s so much beauty. I can see it. I can see it. I’m not
gone.”
“Truer words, Herk. Truer words.”
Journeyman leaned forward, studying his work.
“So tell me, Hercules,” Arrowroot began.
“What?”
“So who’s that a picture of? Who’s the bride you’re painting?”
“She’s just someone. Stood where you’re standing, just stood,”
Journeyman said, then he paused and drew a breath. “She asked me. She
asked me. Who ate your foot?” Journeyman hunched over and started to
shake. Arrowroot put his hand on the old man’s shoulder before he
realized Journeyman was just laughing.
“Well, what’d you say back?”
“I told her Mul, Muller, Molron. I told her the damn doctor ate
my foot.”
Journeyman laughed again, and the wind gusted and blew the canvas
off the easel. Arrowroot grabbed it, but too late. An impression of
the light brown oval where the wedding girl’s face belonged had been
planted on Journeyman’s dark forehead
“So where is she now?” Arrowroot asked, returning the painting to
its easel.
“Probably the inn,” said Journeyman, gesturing toward the Eden
Hotel. “That’s where I told her to go.”
“Why?”
“Why?” Journeyman echoed, making a few jagged corrective strokes
to the dress.
“Yes, Herk,” Arrowroot repeated, “why’d you tell her to go to the
hotel?”
“I told her to paint,” Journeyman said. “She said she wanted my
happ, my happ, my happiness. So I said ‘go on and go paint, see if
that does you.’ But she had no brushes, nor paints and such, like a
nature person. So I said go on to the hotel, Miss, you’re blocking my
light.’”
Journeyman looked up. “You’re blocking it too.”
“Like a nature person?”
“What?”
“Herk, you said she was like a nature person, like a girl of the
earth?”
“No,” Journeyman said. “Oh no. You go on to the inn, maybe she’ll
be there.”
“Then I’ll be on my way,” Arrowroot said. “Thank you, you’ve been
most helpful.”
Journeyman pointed a brush at Arrowroot, his wavering hand
tracing small circles in the late afternoon air. “You tell her to come
back and claim her picture. When I’m done.”
“I’ll tell her that.”
By any objective measure, today’s painting by Hercules Journeyman
was dreadful, Arrowroot knew. No matter how well the ex-mayor rendered
her face, it would be a face in the midst of disaster, a Mona Lisa
cast into a green blob of mountain, hovering over a set of white
geometric shapes vaguely comparable to a wedding gown. Or a lampshade.
And yet, as a statement of one human being’s insistence on
happiness against the overwhelming odds of diabetes and old age and a
gusting April wind, it was a masterpiece in the museum of everyone’s
blind, desperate pursuit of a little more joy.
Arrowroot, thinking that a meeting might finally be at hand,
consulted his phone. She’d texted again:

So you accept everything I said?
Do you?
Specifically: Do you accept that you ruined everything?
Just tell me that. Just admit that
Hello?

Arrowroot took a deep breath. The Promenade was emptying, the sun
just touching the top of Steeple Mountain, and the first gust of cold
evening air washed over his lanky frame. Winter would be back in less
than an hour. He tapped out:

There would be another reckoning. He was ready to confess. But
not now.
The Eden Hotel loomed before Arrowroot, 100 yards away and almost
blindingly bright in the slanted sun. He detoured briefly to the
railing beside the Mittelkopp, leaning over and watching the water
roil beneath him. Then he looked back, at where he had come from.
Journeyman was still there, alone, dabbing away under the vanishing
light. Surely a family member would turn up soon to take him back
home. He couldn’t roll himself and carry his canvas and palette and
brushes and tubes alone.
Oblivious to such concerns, Journeyman kept painting, making
careful marks toward the top of the canvas, where he’d put the wedding
girl’s face. Should I go back and take a look? he asked himself.
Journeyman’s depiction would be at best a random approximation of a
human face, of course, but what if she had giant eyebrows, or a
prominent nose? Those details might make it into Journeyman’s
portrait, and they could be important.
Arrowroot was about to return to the old man’s impromptu studio
when family showed up, a couple in their 30’s, and their child,
probably the ex-mayor’s great granddaughter. Journeyman handed over
his supplies abruptly, clearly frustrated that the day had ended, and
the woman took them gently while the man picked up the canvas and
easel, and then they moved like glaciers as Journeyman slowly
propelled himself away from the river. He refused to be pushed, so the
child, a 10-year-old girl with nothing else to do, danced just ahead
of him, her hips swiveling in a way that was neither ladylike nor
particularly respectful. Journeyman, his voice weak and his hands busy
with the wheels of his conveyance, could only bark and shake his head
disapprovingly, which just made the girl dance more buoyantly.
“You’re a lucky man, Hercules Journeyman,” Arrowroot said under
his breath. “Enjoy it to the last, you fool.”
The approaching night and the cold were driving everyone off the
Promenade now, the shop keepers and restauranteurs pulling in their
displays, cranking down their umbrellas.
Arrowroot, blaming the cooling, dry air for the tears in his
eyes, turned and set a brisk pace for the Eden Hotel.
As the sun progressed at this time of day, the line between light
and dark on the hotel’s brick exterior rose so fast you could almost
watch it happen. Six stories tall, with 20 rooms on every floor, it
was Heligaux’s biggest and grandest hotel. New inns and motels on the
interstate had taken business away in recent years, however, and
sometimes in winter it would go days at a time with no guests. The
Eden Hotel had seen better days, but it was still a place of
happiness, and that’s why Journeyman told her to head over. So, had
she? And if she had, where would she go within it? The lobby, the bar,
the restaurant? Or would she invite herself into someone’s room? The
possibilities were endless, for chaos, even death. As he neared it,
Arrowroot studied the building, wondering if bullets or bodies or both
were about to start flying.
A flash of white caught his eye, from the hotel’s second-story
veranda: A dark-skinned girl, leaning over the railing, watching the
rush of the Mittelkopp. In a wedding gown, alone.
This must be her. This must be Tamani. But his concern for her
informational value evaporated as he mourned for her. No girl should
be alone on her wedding day, but this was all she’d known since
morning, apparently. Now with day giving way to night, she was still
by herself, no groom, no bridesmaids, no minister, not Prophet Banjo.
Not even a stranger or two, as the veranda stayed empty this time of
year.
Then two more figures appeared behind her. Arrowroot knew one of
them well. Things had just taken a very troubling turn.

It wasn’t until he ran for Junior Class President that Karl
Arrowroot met his first monster. Quiet and studious, he’d avoided
notice, just another Traxie kid who still believed school could get
him to High Heligaux.

He knew he could beat Ernest Washburn, who was ambitious and
well-connected but a poor public speaker. Arrowroot already had the
Traxie vote, and he was determined to win the vote of anyone who cared
about the quality of his campaign speech. He’d been practicing it for
weeks, quietly before his bathroom mirror, more loudly in an abandoned
factory backlot.

He signed his name early on a Tuesday morning in April, right
under Washburn’s, and in fact the first person who acknowledged his
candidacy was Washburn himself, who shook his hand and wished him
luck. But Washburn’s peers were scandalized, and a set of instructions
were quickly passed through a convoluted adolescent social hierarchy
involving Washburn’s girlfriend, her brother, several more girlfriends
and a football player, at the culmination of which a 16-year-old Karl
Arrowroot found himself face to face with the rank darkness of the
human personality.

“Get on back to Traxie, Arrowfag,” ordered Lief Pullmon, his face
inches away from Arrowroot’s. “Lot a trash in Traxie. Maybe someone’ll
elect you to clean that up.”

Arrowroot knew something like this was bound to happen, but he
didn’t expect it to be so organized or happen on the same day he’d
nominated himself. They’d caught him in front of the old Green Grocer,
long abandoned and now just another eyesore along a street full of
them two blocks from his home. There were a dozen kids there, all
gathered to witness something as awful as what he’d hoped to see at
the state fair the time that Ferris wheel broke. He wasn’t going to
die today, he knew, but he stood to lose something almost as precious
as his life, and they wanted to watch it happen.

Arrowroot stood back, put out his hand and smiled. “Lief, good to
see you today. Traxie’s not all that bad now, is it?”
Pullmon took Arrowrot’s hand and smiled. “You gonna cross your
name out tomorrow, right?”
“Well,” Arrowroot replied, “if I did that, I couldn’t get
elected.”
The other youth watching the confrontation burst out laughing.
Pullmon slapped Arrowroot across the jaw.
“Wrong answer, Arrowshit,” Pullmon said. “Go in tomorrow and tell
them you meant to put your name on the other list. You know, the list
of people who want gay sex.”
“Well,” Arrowroot protested, “I can’t do that, Lief. I’m not
gay.”
Arrowroot was ready for the slap this time, and it didn’t hurt
much. If that’s the worst Pullmon was going to do, he was ready to
stand here all day listening and getting slapped. Pullmon was actually
pretty funny, he admitted to himself.
“Wait, wait, not gay sex,” Pullmon said, and he turned to make
sure the others heard him clearly. “Hooker sex. You know, whore sex.
Like your momma –“
And that was that. Arrowroot was aiming for Pullmon’s jaw but
struck his nose, breaking it with a dull crack. Pullmon went down to
his knees, covering his face, as if he were praying, or asking
Arrowroot for absolution. Then he held his hands out to look at them.
They were covered in blood, and he started screaming, two octaves
higher than his insult voice. Arrowroot didn’t know if the screams
were a product of pain, fear of blood, or humiliation, but he hated
what he’d done, hated truth, hated everything. He’d only wanted to
silence Pullmon, not break something.
“I’m sorry, Lief,” Arrowroot said with complete sincerity. “But
you can’t say things like that about people’s mommas. You know?”
Arrowroot hadn’t set down his books during the confrontation, and
he turned with three of them stuffed under his arm and walked home.
Pullmon’s screams had turned to human words, a rhythmic “fuck, fuck,
fuck,” and while Arrowroot heard the other kids muttering to each
other, he guessed correctly that this was finished. No one was going
to follow him home or bother him again.
In his mind, he’d left Traxie years ago. The fact he slept there
every night was immaterial, and he’d just made that clear to everyone
else. You can say all kinds of things about Traxie people’s mommas, of
course, but not Karl Arrowroot’s momma, not about that.
Arrowroot won the election, made some new friends, took a vital
step toward becoming his adult self, and earned an anecdote he would
cite whenever his campaign hit a rough patch. “This ain’t nothing,”
he’d say. “I had to break a boy’s nose to win my first race.”
But for days after the fight, his tormented brain crystallized
what had happened down to this simple statement: “Everyone knows my
mother’s a prostitute.”
So when Arrowroot looked up, toward the veranda of the Eden Hotel
that late April afternoon, and saw the girl in the wedding dress
standing next to the closest thing Heligaux had to a madam, his
response was complex, visceral, and not entirely captured by the words
he muttered under his breath: “Well, goddam. Well, shit, goddam.”
He stood back and watched the world’s oldest business transaction
unfold 15 feet above his head. Delilah Homans, who had been arrested
under that name and several others over the years, seemed to be
introducing the girl in the wedding dress to her next client, a man
Arrowroot didn’t recognize.
“This is Mista Franklin,” Homans said in a heavy Bronx accent.
“You gonna take good care of him, ain’t you?”
“Yes?” the girl replied, and it sounded more like a question than
an answer. She was barely 20, Arrowroot noted, well-muscled, darkskinned and, overall, a picture of health and strength. No wonder
Journeyman had been smitten. How could she possibly have ended up
here?
“Good goil, good goil,” Homans murmured, smoothing a flowery moomoo over her expansive body. She was in her 50s, hair dyed bright red
and her face painted to within an inch of circus. “Frankie, whaddya
think? I got the best, don’t I?”
Mister Franklin grunted noncommittally, moving unsteadily toward
the girl, his arms out at waist level. She stood passively as he
embraced her, but when he kissed her she leaned back, smiling
quizzically.
“Mista Franklin don’t like hard to get, honey,” Homans
instructed. “Just go along wid’ it.”
The man Homans was calling Mista Franklin, with thinning red
hair, dressed in the sort of burgundy coat and pants only the
unlearned mistake for a business suit, leaned in for another kiss,
simultaneously sliding his hand down the front of her dress to her
groin.
“No,” the girl said, grabbing his arms. It wasn’t a scream, nor a
protest, simply a statement. “No.”
Franklin relaxed, she let him go and he backed away with his
hands up, a sort of grimacing half-smile on his face. Was he happy or
sad? Arrowroot wondered. Probably both, like most people most of the
time, he thought.
The girl smiled back in a confused away, which Mr. Franklin’s
drunken brain interpreted as an invitation, apparently. He advanced
again, one hand behind the girl’s neck, the other back to her groin.
“Okay, you love boids, get a room,” Homans said with a
grotesquely feigned laugh, trying desperately to make the sad scene
before her into something more.
Having had enough of this, the wedding girl grabbed Mr.
Franklin’s upper arms and lifted him up a foot, his feet dangling, and
shook him like a rag doll.
“You need to go away,” she said, and in one fluid motion swung
him up and over the railing, suspending him high above the Mittelkopp.
“Does water kill you?”
“What the hell?” Mr. Franklin demanded slurrily. “You fucking
hairy bitch.”
“Hold on, hea’!” Homans protested. “Oh my gawd, put him down!”
Mr. Franklin’s form became a burgundy blur until it hit the
water, at which point it became a man again, badly-dressed and
partially submerged.
Homans, whose discretion and unflappability were assets in her
chosen profession, watched in what appeared to be stunned disbelief as
Mr. Franklin’s head surfaced, he looked around and started swimming to
the pier.
“You’re a fuckin’ freak!” she shouted at the girl. “Mistah
Franklin, you okay? That wasn’t supposed to happen! Oh my gawd, she’s
a fuckin’ freak! Mistah Franklin, swim to the pee-yah. That’s right,
find the ladda, they-ya.”
With Mr. Franklin nearing the pier, Homans turned her attention
to the wedding girl. “My gawd, you coulda killed him!” she said.
“What’s the matta’ with you? Hea’s everyone’s tryin’ to help ya and
you go and do that! No wondah ya betrothal found anothah matta to
occupy his toym with.”
The girl just looked at her, without speaking.
Homans lowered her voice, muttering a few things Arrowroot
couldn’t hear, then raised it again. “You see, I know you don’t have
any papahs, and you’re from Mexico, so let’s see what the police have
to say.”
“Yes,” the girl replied.
Homans stomped off, a door slammed and the wedding girl turned to
watch her would-be client drag himself up a rusty ladder to the pier.
Arrowroot shivered in sympathy for the man, but the girl betrayed no
concern for him, nor any reaction to the mountain air, growing colder
by the minute.
Once Mr. Franklin was back on dry land, the girl looked down,
noticing Arrowroot for the first time. Their eyes locked and he smiled
while she remained expressionless.
“Good evening, Miss,” Arrowroot yelled up, removing his helmet.
“I would like to speak to you. Can you stay there for a moment?”
She kept staring in an answerless way, telling him with her
apathy he needed to hurry upstairs before she wandered off again. Or
got arrested. Or killed someone.
At the main entrance to the Eden Hotel, Delilah Homans was
barreling out just as Arrowroot was entering.
“Hello, there, Miss Homans,” he said. “Where you off to?”
“To the police to report a voy-lent alien,” she announced, all
her discretion gone.
“Oh, you mean that girl in the wedding dress?”
“Exack-ly!” she shouted.
“The girl that tossed Mr. Franklin into the river?”
“Exack-ly! Oh my gawd!”
“So there you were,” Arrowroot continued, “trying to help Mr.
Franklin rape that girl, and she wouldn’t cooperate at all, would
she?”
“Exack—“ Homans replied, finally catching on. “That wasn’t rape,
Mistah Mayah.”
“Nope, it wasn’t, fortunately,” Arrowroot answered. “It was
attempted rape, and that’s how I’ll describe it when I’m asked to
testify.”
Homans’ eyes narrowed to slits just big enough to stare daggers.
“It was a date, which based on her words to me she was eaga’ to pahticipate in. I’m just a matchmaka’, as you most surely should know.”
“I know what you are,” Arrowroot said, “and I know that girl
barely knows anything about what’s going on around her. Now we’ll want
to get Mr. Franklin’s full name so he can testify too. Well, here he
is now. Hello, Sir.”
Mr. Franklin had approached them at nearly a trot but now he
stopped, seemingly confused about what to do next, dripping copiously
before the grand entrance to the Eden Hotel.
The human body and mind, when they are subjected to a shock such
as immersion into very cold water, quickly undertake a variety of
survival measures perfected over millions of years of mammalian
evolution. Most of the reactions are invisible, but three were
obvious: Mr. Franklin’s face had turned beet red, he was shaking like
a seizure patient, and he was very, very angry.
“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded in a quavering voice, and he
puffed his chest out at Arrowroot and balled his hands into fists.
A drunken man who’s been subjected to physical discomfort, denied
sex and humiliated by a woman makes a particularly dangerous mix,
Arrowroot reminded himself.
“I’m Karl Arrowroot,” he said, smiling. “I understand you’re a
Mr. Franklin?”
The other man said nothing, his eyes shifting suspiciously
between Arrowroot and Homans.
“I’m also the mayor of this town, Sir,” Arrowroot continued.
“Welcome to Heligaux, we’re glad to have you. Now, by the power vested
in me, I declare that Ms. Homans needs to refund whatever you paid her
for the services of the girl that tossed you in the drink.”
“Hea’s your deposit back,” Homans said without a moment’s
hesitation, pulling a wad of cash from a vent at the side of her gown.
“But really, Karl, I don’t know what you’re on about, considering what
your mothah used to do.”
“Second, here’s how this is gonna go,” Arrowroot said, smiling,
and he took off his glasses and peered carefully in turn into each
pair of eyes. “You’re going to forget that you ever spoke to that
girl, or attacked her, or got her help with taking that swim in the
river. Okay? And I’m going to forget that you tried to rape her, and
that you –“ he turned toward Homans “and that you did your best to
serve as an accessory to rape. You got all that?”
He was greeted with silence and angry stares, but he knew they
understood. “Now, if being charged with rape doesn’t scare you, that
girl should,” he said, and he turned to Mr. Franklin. “She shook you
like a dog shakes an old sock,” he said. “You’re damned lucky she
didn’t do worse than give you a bath.”
Arrowroot turned and strode into the hotel, his hand shaking
against the door as he pushed it open.