World Gone By: A Novel (14 page)

NO SLEEP THAT NIGHT.

Every time he closed his eyes he saw the
Androphagi
walking toward him with curved blades in their hands. Or he saw the point of a bullet streaking through the dark toward the center of his forehead. He opened his eyes, heard the house creak, the walls groan, the squeak of what could be footsteps on the stairs.

Outside, the trees rustled.

The clock in the dining room struck two. Joe opened his eyes—he hadn’t realized they’d been closed—and the blond boy stood in his doorway with a finger to his lips. He pointed. First Joe thought he was pointing at him, but he realized, no, he was pointing at something behind him. Joe turned in the bed and looked over his right shoulder at the fireplace.

The boy stood there now, with his blank face and sightless eyes.
He wore a white nightshirt and his bare feet were bruised purple and yellow. He pointed again and Joe looked back toward the doorway.

It was empty.

He turned back toward the fireplace.

No one there.

“FOLLOW MY FINGER.”

Dr. Ned Lenox held his index finger in front of Joe’s face and moved it right to left, then left to right.

Ned Lenox had been the Bartolo Family doctor since the days when Joe had run things. There were dozens of rumors about what had chased him out of a promising medical career in St. Louis—performing surgery while intoxicated, negligence that led to the death of a prominent Missourian’s son, affair with a woman, affair with a man, affair with a child, theft and illegal resale of pharmaceuticals—but the rumors, varied as they were in the Tampa underworld, were all wrong.

“Good, good. Let me see that arm.”

Joe held out his left arm and the frail, gentle doctor took it between pincer fingers just above the elbow and turned the inside of the arm up. He tapped a reflex hammer into the tendon where Joe’s forearm met his elbow, then did the same on the other arm and each knee.

NED LENOX HADN’T BEEN CHASED OUT of St. Louis; he’d left of his own accord and with a reputation in such good standing that even now the older doctors at St. Luke’s sometimes wondered aloud why he’d left in the autumn of ’19 and what had become of him. There was some
business, yes, about a young wife who’d died in childbirth, but the case had been reviewed by no less an authority than the State Board of Medicine, and Dr. Lenox, a tireless hero during that period of the Great Influenza, had been declared utterly blameless in the circumstances that led to the death of both his wife and child. The preeclampsia had set in with many of the same symptoms as the flu. By the time the poor man realized what ill truly beset his young bride and the child in her womb, it was far too late. People were dying at a rate of fifteen a day in those weeks, and 30 percent of the city was afflicted. Even a doctor couldn’t get a hospital to answer its phone or a fellow physician to make a house call. And so Ned Lenox was home alone with his beloved wife when she was taken from him. It was assumed that he could never live with the cruel irony that he, a doctor held in the highest esteem, couldn’t have saved her. In all likelihood, a team of natal specialists would have failed.

“HOW MANY HEADACHES have you had in the last week?” Ned asked Joe.

“One.”

“Bad?”

“Nah.”

“Any cause to which you could attribute it?”

“Chain-smoking.”

“Newfangled cure for that.”

“Yeah?”

“Stop chain-smoking.”

“Clearly,” Joe said, “you attended a top-notch medical school.”

NED HAD TOLD JOE another version of his story back in ’33, after a very long night patching up soldiers following one of the nastier skirmishes
in the Rum War. Joe had lent a hand in an empty hotel ballroom they’d converted into a makeshift operating theater. After, in the morning, sitting on a pier watching the fishing boats and the rum boats head out into the bay, Ned told Joe his wife had been a poor woman when he met her, a woman far below his standing.

Her name was Greta Farland and she’d lived along Gravois Creek in a tenant farmer’s shack with her rock-faced mother and hatchet-faced father and four mostly hatchet-faced brothers. All of them, with the exception of Greta, had shoulders that curled in like a crab’s and pointy chins, foreheads as high and stark as the walls of a storm ditch, and grim, thirsty eyes. But Greta was full in the hips and the breasts and the lips. Her milk-white skin glowed under streetlamps, and her smile, rare as it was, was the smile of a young girl who’d just developed a woman’s appetites.

“HOP OFF THE TABLE, YOUNG MAN.”

Joe did.

“Walk.”

“What?”

“Walk. Heel to toe. From this wall to that one.”

Joe did so.

“And now back to me.”

Joe crossed the room again.

GRETA HADN’T LOVED NED BACK, though he hoped that would change once she saw how much he could better her life. Their courtship was brief; her father knew a man like Ned only came around once, if that, for white-trash girls who grew up in The Basin. Greta married Ned and soon grew comfortable enough in her surroundings to learn the
difference between a dinner fork and a salad fork and occasionally beat the maid. Sometimes she could be pleasant to Ned for three or four whole days before the squalls of her dark disposition returned. It was those good days that kept Ned believing she would soon wake up and realize that what she mistrusted as a dream was real—she would never want for food or shelter or the love of a decent and prominent man, and her black moods would evaporate. Her pitiless view of humanity would be replaced with empathy.

NED ADJUSTED HIS GLASSES and made a note on the form attached to his clipboard. “Relax.”

Joe said, “Can I roll down my sleeves?”

“Be my guest.” Another scratch of the pen. “And no earaches, no shortness of breath, no excessive nosebleeds?”

“No, no, and no.”

Dr. Lenox glanced at him for a moment. “You’ve lost some weight.”

“Is that bad?”

He shook his head. “You could have stood to lose a few pounds.”

Joe grunted and lit a cigarette. He offered Dr. Lenox the pack. The doctor shook his head but produced a pack of his own and lit one.

WHEN GRETA BECAME PREGNANT, Ned felt sure a positive metamorphosis was imminent. Instead the pregnancy made her even less agreeable. The only time she was happy—and it was a hopeless, bitter happiness—was when she was with her family, because the Farland family, as a whole, was happiest when they were hopeless and bitter as well. When they came to visit, heirlooms and flatware disappeared and Ned
could tell they hated him for having everything they coveted but had gone so long without they now wouldn’t know what to do with it if they got it.

NED EXHALED A STREAM OF SMOKE and returned the pack to his shirt pocket. “So tell me again.”

“Don’t make me repeat it.”

“You’ve been having visions.”

Joe felt himself redden. He scowled. “Are they a brain tumor or not?”

“You do not show any evidence of a brain tumor.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t have one.”

“No, but it means the likelihood is awfully minute.”

“How minute?”

“About the same as being struck by lightning on a rubber plantation under a cloudless sky.”

NED WASN’T SURPRISED—shocked maybe, but not surprised—the day he came home unexpectedly and found Greta in their bed, four months’ pregnant, with her father grinding his dick into her from behind, the two of them rutting like hogs on a bed that had been in the Lenox family for three generations. They didn’t even have the decency to stop when they saw his forlorn reflection in the dressing mirror he’d bought for her as an engagement gift.

“SO LET’S TALK ABOUT SLEEP. You getting any?”

“Not much.”

He scribbled on the form again. “As the bags under your eyes would attest.”

“Thanks. My hairline receding too?”

Lenox looked over his glasses at him. “Yes, but that doesn’t have anything to do with our topic today.”

“Which is?”

“When’s the last time you saw this, uh, vision?”

“Couple days ago.”

“Where?”

“My house.”

“What was going on in your life at the time?”

“Nothing. Well . . .”

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“You’re in my office for a reason. Tell me.”

“There’s a rumor that an associate of mine may be angry with me.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

“And is this associate someone you can reason with?”

“Don’t know that, either. Don’t know who he is.”

“And in your business,” Dr. Lenox said with a careful tone, “angry associates don’t always deal with conflict in a . . .” He searched for the words.

“Genteel manner,” Joe said.

Lenox nodded. “Exactly.”

WHEN GRETA’S FATHER, Ezekiel “Easy” Farland, found Ned in the drawing room a few minutes later, he pulled a chair across from his son-in-law and chomped on a peach he’d grabbed off the dining room table.

“I know you got lots of things you think you want to say,” he told Ned, “but they don’t mean anything to me or mine. We got our ways. And I expect you’ll learn to abide them.”

“I won’t abide anything of the sort.” Ned’s voice shook and strained like a woman’s. “I won’t. I will cast your daughter out of this—”

Easy put the tip of a knife to Ned’s scrotum and put his other hand around his throat. “You do anything but go along, I will fuck your ass until you taste me in your mouth. Call my boys in and have them do the same, one after another. You understand? You in my family now. You part of us. That’s the contract you made.”

And to make his point, he made a clean slice in Ned’s groin just above his testicles and to the right of his penis.

“You a doctor.” He wiped the blade on Ned’s shirt. “Fix yourself.”

JOE THREADED A LINK through the holes in his right cuff. “So you think the vision could be connected to what?”

“Stress.”

“Fuck,” Joe said as his cuff link fell to the floor. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He bent to pick it up. “Really?”

“Really do I think you’re under stress? Or really do I think stress is causing you to see things? Can I speak frankly?”

Joe went back to fiddling with the cuff link. “Sure.”

“Some unknown person or persons may wish you bodily harm, you’re raising a son by yourself after your wife died a violent death, you travel too much, smoke too much, I presume drink too much, and don’t sleep enough. I’m surprised you’re not seeing an army of ghosts.”

FOR THE NEXT MONTH, Ned walked, ate, went to work but did it all without conscious thought. For thirty days, to the best of his recollection, his limbs acted from memory, not because he told them to. His food—wet ash on his tongue—reached his mouth not by act but by rote.
He made house calls and kept hospital hours in a city struck asunder by the flu pandemic. Every family of respectable size had at least one member infected with it, and 50 percent of them died. And Ned tended to the sickest of them, saw some to full recovery and pronounced others officially dead. And remembered none of it. Each night, he returned home. Each morning he left it.

During the checkup he gave his wife every morning, he noted that her blood pressure had skyrocketed. He decided to think no more on it for the rest of the day and went off to work. When he returned, Greta’s condition had worsened. He tested her urine and found clear evidence of kidney malfunction. He assured her she was fine. He listened to her heart and found it racing, listened to her lungs and heard the fluid sloshing within them. He held her hand and assured her that what she was feeling were the normal symptoms of a woman in the second trimester.

“SO THIS IS STRESS?” Joe said.

“This is stress.”

“I don’t feel stressed.”

The doctor let loose a long sigh through his nostrils.

“Well,” Joe explained, “I mean, not much more so than usual. Definitely not compared to, I dunno, ten years ago.”

“When you were a bootlegger during the Rum War.”

“Alleged,” Joe repeated.

“You didn’t have a child who depended on you then. Plus, you were ten years younger.”

“Younger men don’t fear death?”

“Some do, but most don’t really believe it’ll happen to them.” He stubbed out his cigarette. “What can you tell me about this boy you’re conjuring up?”

Joe hesitated, looking for even the slightest hint of amusement
on Lenox’s face. But all he saw was avid curiosity. He would have been embarrassed to admit how good the prospect of talking about the boy suddenly felt. He finished his second cuff link and took a seat across from Lenox.

“Most times,” he began, “his face looks like a used eraser, you know? He’s got a nose, a mouth, eyes, but I can’t really see them and I can’t tell you why I can’t. I just can’t. But once, I saw him in profile and he looked like family.”

“Like family?” Lenox lit another cigarette. “Like your son?”

Joe shook his head. “No, like my father or some cousins I met once. Like a picture I saw of my brother when he was little.”

“Is that brother alive?”

“Yeah. He’s in Hollywood, writes for the pictures.”

“Could it be your father?”

“I thought of that,” Joe said, “but it doesn’t feel right. My father was one of those guys came out the womb a full-grown man. Know the type?”

Lenox said, “But that’s not what your mind is telling you.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Well, I didn’t.”

Lenox waved his cigarette at that. “You didn’t visit a psychic or some fortune-teller with your concerns. You came to me, a medical practitioner. You were worried about a tumor, but I’m telling you it’s stress. Whatever you’re conjuring up, it means something to you. Whether your father thought of himself as a boy or not,
you
may have seen fit to imagine a boyish version of him. Or maybe something happened with one of these cousins you mentioned, something in the long ago you can’t reconcile with.”

“Or maybe,” Joe said, “it’s a real fucking ghost.”