The Enigmatologist (26 page)

“You have my word.”

“The word of an Abernathy. Worthless. I have a better
idea. You keep your black holes locked away. In exchange, I keep your father.”

“My father?” John stepped back, almost stumbling over a
rock.

“We have him in a cryonic deep-freeze at our Los Alamos
facility.”

For most of his life, John had lived with the narrative
that his father ran out on them, leaving his mother at the foot of the
mountains to raise a son. It was a common story, a young father not ready for
responsibility. A son who grew up unable to cope with the conflicting emotions
that came from having someone who was supposed to love and protect him leave
without even hearing a sobbing five-year-
old’s
appeal. As much as he believed this version of the past, there was a place in
John that always knew his father didn’t abandon him. He’d buried it in his
dreams, those nocturnal moments when his father visited and endured the
coldness of a teenager who only knew how to deal with his frustrations by
turning inward, obsessing over puzzles. But his father didn’t just live in his
dreams. Apparently, he’d been in Los Alamos most of John’s life, frozen. John
peered into Colonel Hollister’s mind and knew he was telling the truth.

His father is in a tube, the ice-frosted glass, his blue
face preserved by the cryonic chemical bath and Sagittarian DNA. Machines are
monitoring the fluids and gases keeping him close to death. The facility’s
layout unfolds in reverse, the room, the hallway, elevator, stairs, lobby, the
security guard everyone calls ‘Bobby J’, the sign on the glass door reading
‘Wayland Accounting’, the nondescript Ford
Tauruses
in Parking Lot A of a corporate complex called ‘Aspen Meadows’. Colonel
Hollister is going through various levels of security, thumb print, retinal
scan, voice recognition,
Cape Canaveral
trivia, swiping scan cards,
entering key codes, and John was sure those security measures would change and
the passwords he’d just seen Colonel Hollister use were useless.

Snapshots of the search and capture of his father, the Air
Force giving up hunting body doubles and switching their focus to Archibald
Abernathy’s descendants. Colonel Hollister is in Philadelphia, watching some of
John’s distant cousins repair water heaters and steal tools from the homes they
are working in. He is in New Mexico, sitting in a Jeep, reading carbon copied
excerpts from Archibald’s journal. There is purple ink on his hand and he takes
out a handkerchief and wipes it, but the paper is smudged. He is in Colorado,
watching a film of John’s dad rushing from a burning building with an elderly
woman wrapped in a wool blanket. His arms and face are burned. The camera is
handheld and palsied and when it zooms in on John’s father’s arm to record it
quickly healing, the camera jerks and has to find him again, reframing him. His
dad looks around and runs off screen. His father is leaving work and Colonel
Hollister approaches him with three men. Threats are made and John’s father
agrees to go with them, offering himself in exchange for the lives of his wife.
And son.

It happened quickly, decades were viewed in the time it
took for a single electrical impulse to fire across the hemisphere of his
brain. And John was back in his own mind.

If Colonel Hollister noticed John watching a montage of
his memories, he didn’t show it. He stared at John with an arrogant grin, the
same grin he had when he approached John’s father and took away whatever
options he might have had at a future with his family, with his son. John
understood that his father had to leave, sacrifice himself for John and his
mother, creating the unintended consequence that, for the past eighteen years,
John had been angry at the wrong person.

“This is all your fault,” John said. “Everything we’ve
gone through, my mom and me, all because…
Goddamnit
!
This is all your fault!”

“So, is it a deal? You have your black holes and I have
your father.”

A few wild flowers grew among some rocks and shell
casings, their thin and stringy stalks, their small bulbs hiding vibrant
colors. They survived the boot and tire treads and arid climate and were
beginning to open. Flowers in half bloom, providing a glimpse of beauty amid
the desolation. They seemed out of place, but belonged there, having made an
evolutionary bargain necessary for survival.

“And we leave each other alone,” John said.

“We leave each other alone.”

John knew Colonel Hollister had spent his life hunting
extraterrestrials, and to have come this close, seeing them descend from the
sky in rickety and rusted RVs, the perfect disguise, he wouldn’t stop now. And
John’s father, all this time, locked away, frozen, visiting John in dreams,
only to receive cold anger. John couldn’t stop either.

They didn’t shake hands. They just stared at each other
for a minute, each man plotting, scheming, knowing the other was doing the same.

John ran to the Winnebago and jumped in. As they lifted
skyward, John stood in the open door, watching the world shrink. Colonel
Hollister stood in the middle of the vehicles, watching them rise. Off to the
side, unaffected by the flying Winnebago, a man smoked. The faint glow of
tobacco embers offered little light, but John saw the nose, mouth, chin of Rex
Grant. He took a few more drags, then threw the cigarette on the ground and
crushed it. He stepped deeper into the darkness between the vehicles. Disappeared.

They
had been telling stories about Elvis for an hour and now it was the driver
Ricky
Handjive’s
turn. He was a body double like
Leadbelly
, and told them a story about Elvis in Hawaii.
Elvis is drunk, naked, chasing a mongoose with a handgun while eating a turkey
leg, or maybe the mongoose is chasing Elvis.
Handjive
didn’t really remember.

“Can you believe that
sonuvabitch
?”
Sheriff Masters asked, laughing as
Handjive
acted out
the story’s climax, where a drunk, naked, gun-toting Elvis straddled a palm
tree.

John sat at the kitchen table, staring out the window. He
wasn’t interested in ancient stories of a drunken pop star. He was thinking
about something more recent.

“Did you know Hollister had my dad?” he asked
Leadbelly
, who was seated across from him.

“No way, man,”
Leadbelly
said.

“I thought you were all connected or something.”

“He
musta
closed himself off
from us before Hollister put him in the deep freeze.”

“You can do that?” John asked, surprised. He set
Archibald’s journal on the gold-flecked, white Formica table. It seemed
incomplete, like an introductory textbook.

“Man, you’re
gonna
learn there’s
a lot we can do.”

The kitchen table seat cushions’ coarse fibers, a plaid of
interwoven greens, browns, and oranges, scratched against John’s jeans as he
slid across it.

The blinds on the window were up. They passed over a
highway. The headlights of the few cars beneath them were the only lights, and
John barely saw the surface, the thin road, the near-dead earth. The Winnebago
veered away from the road and the world outside John’s window became obscured
by height and darkness.

“Where are we going,” he asked, hoping
Leadbelly
was fulfilling his promise and taking him to Rosa, but he was doubtful. “And I
don’t want any of your mysterious shit.”

“Mysterious shit?”
Leadbelly
smirked. He waved his arms at John like he was conjuring spirits. “John
Abernathy, you have been whisked away, man. Into the great beyond,” he said,
sounding like a spooky fortune teller delivering the tagline from
Elvis and
the Groovy Ghost
. John knocked
Leadbelly’s
hands
away.
Leadbelly
stuck them back up, waving in hokey
eeriness. “Co-starring Ann-Margret.”

“Ann-Margret?”
Handjive
spun.
“Man, I gave her a Tijuana Toilet Seat.”

The taillights of
Winnebagos
,
Coachmens
, and Holiday Ramblers glowed red in the black
sky. A Chevy with a Coleman Camper on their right. A green glow radiated from
underneath each vehicle.

“Whew,” the sheriff said from the passenger seat. “Would
you look at that?” He leaned over the dash, gawking at a vintage trailer above
them, the kind found on highways sixty years ago. A chrome bullet cutting
through the flesh of a country.

“I know what you mean, man,”
Handjive
said, patting the dash. “It’s a combination of a diesel engine and good-old Sagittarian
know-how.”

“Where are we going?” John asked again.

“Someplace where we can be safe, man,”
Leadbelly
said. “Just trust me.”

John lifted his knees up, wrapped his arms around them,
turned away from his sparkling relative, and tried to see past the reflection of
their ship’s interior in the window and into the void beyond, but all he saw
was the image of his own face, the lines creasing his forehead, the bags behind
his glasses, the fatigue of an epiphany, and he turned and stretched out across
the kitchen table’s bench seat, his back to the window and the Rockies,
indiscernible from this distance and altitude. Even if they were visible, he
couldn’t look at them. They reminded him of Denver, his life there, and about
how, even if he did return, he’d have to tell his mom about the journal, the
Sagittarians, his father. How was he going to tell her his dad was alive? and
frozen in a lab in New Mexico?

This isn’t easy for me, you know. John didn’t say this. He
thought it. It was not an internal thought, meant for introspection. He
directed it at
Leadbelly
.

I know, man,
Leadbelly
thought
back.

My life was supposed to be art and creation. Me and my
mom. Now I’m an alien fugitive, related to an Elvis impersonator.

Man, I told them I’d make a good role-model.
Leadbelly
smiled at this thought.

Where did you get those pictures of me? John slid the
stack of photos across the table. They were fanned out, each blade a shard of
the past twenty-three years.

I’ve been watching you.

What are we talking here, lurking in the bushes, or video
camera in the changing room?

Not like that, man. I was looking out for you.

And my dad, my grandpa? did you take those pictures, too?

Your grandpa, yeah, but not your dad. I was in Vegas when
he was born, man.

Why look out for us?

We’re family, man. We look out for each other. That’s what
we do.
Leadbelly
reached across the table and put his
hand on John’s forearm.

The only person you look out for is yourself. John
wrenched his arm away.

Leadebelly
brushed some dust onto the floor,
his pinkie ring scraping the table.

Someone told you to take those pictures. John tapped the
journal. Did Jonathon
Deerfoot
order Rosa to sleep
with me?

Jonathon
Deerfoot’s
dead.
Leadbelly’s
thoughts and emotions blended and John felt his
sorrow. Man, he died forty years ago. Someone else’s calling the shots now.

You’re just a giant piece of sequined ambiguity, aren’t
you?

What can you do, man?
Leadbelly
shrugged his shoulders.

I have a few ideas. John gripped the table with both
hands, stared intensely at
Leadbelly
.

He thrust his mind into
Leadbelly’s
,
searching for answers, but hit a wall and was jolted back into his body like
he’d been caught by the seatbelt and the driver suddenly slammed on the brakes.

Telepathy, man,
Leadbelly
thought, laughing inside John’s head. I knew what
you were going to try the minute you thought it. Gave me time to get my psychic
defenses up. Good for you for trying, man. Don’t worry. You’ll learn how to do
that stuff, too.

John rubbed his head with the
palms of both hands.

“Who’s worried?” he said.