Black House (71 page)

“Oh,” Burny says. “A problem.” He plucks his shirt away from his chest and trudges forward, leaving behind him progressively fainter footprints Maxton fails to see.

“Take a pew,” Chipper says, waving at the chair in front of his desk. “Pull up a bollard and rest your bones.” This expression comes from Franky Shellbarger, the First Farmer’s loan officer, who uses it all the time at the local Rotary meetings, and although Chipper Maxton has no idea what a bollard may be, he thinks it sounds cute as hell. “Old-timer, you and me have to have a heart-to-heart discussion.”

“Ah,” Burny says, and sits down, his back rigidly straight, due to the clippers.
“Hardz zu hardz.”

“Yeah, that’s the idea. Hey, is that shirt wet? It is! We can’t have that, old buddy—you might catch cold and die, and neither one of us would like that, would we? You need a dry shirt. Let me see what I can do for you.”

“Don’t bother, you fucking monkey.”

Chipper Maxton is already on his feet and straightening his shirt, and the old man’s words throw him momentarily off his stride. He recovers nicely, grins, and says, “Stay right there, Chicago.”

Although the mention of his native city sends a prickling sensation down his spine, Burnside gives nothing away as Maxton moves around the side of his desk and walks across his office. He watches the director leave the room.
Chicago.
Where Poochie Flagler and Sammy Hooten and Ferd Brogan and all the others had lived and died, God bless ’em. Stalks of grain, blades of grass, so foul so beautiful so enticing. With their smiles and their screams. Like all Caucasian slum children, pure pale ivory white under the crust of dirt, the fishy white of the city’s poor, the soon-to-be-lost. The slender bones of their shoulder blades, sticking out as if to break through the thin layer of flesh. Burny’s old organ stirs and stiffens as if
it
remembers the frolics of yesteryear.
Tyler Marshall,
he croons to himself,
pretty little Ty, we will have ourselves some fun before we turn you over to the boss, yes we will yes indeedy yes yes.

The door slams behind him, yanking him out of his erotic reverie. But his old mule, his old hoss, it stays awake and on its mettle, bold and brash as ever it was in the glory days.

“No one in the lobby,” Maxton complains. “That old bag, what’shername, Porter, Georgette Porter, down in the kitchen stuffing her face, I bet, and Butch Yerxa sound asleep in his chair. What am I supposed to do, ransack the
rooms
to find a dry shirt?”

He strides past Burnside, throws up his hands, and drops into his chair. It’s all an act, but Burny has seen much better than this. Chipper cannot intimidate Burny, not even if he knows a few things about
Chicago.

“I don’t need a new shirt,” he says. “Asswipe.”

Chipper leans back in his chair and clasps his hands behind his head. He grins—this patient amuses him, he’s a real card. “Now, now. There’s no need for name-calling here. You don’t fool me anymore, old man. I don’t buy your Alzheimer’s act. In fact, I don’t buy any of it.”

He is nice and relaxed and he oozes the confidence of a gambler holding four aces. Burny figures he is being set up for some kind of con job or blackmail, which makes the moment all the more delicious.

“I gotta hand it to you, though,” Chipper goes on. “You fooled everybody in sight, including me. It must take an
incredible
amount of discipline to fake late-stage Alzheimer’s. All that slumping in your chair, being fed baby food, crapping in your pants. Pretending you don’t understand what people are saying.”

“I wasn’t faking, you jackass.”

“So it’s no wonder you staged a comeback—when was that, about a year ago? I would have done the same. I mean, it’s one thing to go undercover, but it’s another to do it as a vegetable. So we have ourselves a little miracle, don’t we? Our Alzheimer’s gradually reverses itself, it comes and it goes, like the common cold. It’s a good deal all around. You get to walk around and make a nuisance of yourself, and there’s less work for the staff. You’re still one of my favorite patients, Charlie. Or should I call you Carl?”

“I don’t give a shit what you call me.”

“But Carl’s your real name, isn’t it?”

Burny does not even shrug. He hopes Chipper gets to the point before Butch Yerxa wakes up, notices the bloody prints, and discovers Georgette Porter’s body, because while he is interested in Maxton’s tale, he wants to get to Black House without
too
much interference. And Butch Yerxa would probably put up a decent fight.

Under the illusion that he is playing a cat-and-mouse game in which he is the cat, Chipper smiles at the old man in the wet pink shirt and rolls on. “A state detective called me today. Said I.D. on a local fingerprint had come back from the FBI. It belonged to a bad, bad man named Carl Bierstone who’s been wanted for almost forty years. In 1964 he was sentenced to death for killing a couple of kids he molested, only he escaped from the car taking him to prison—killed two guards with his bare hands. No sign of him since then. He’d be eighty-five by now, and the detective thought Bierstone just might be one of our residents. What do you have to say, Charles?”

Nothing, evidently.

“Charles Burnside is pretty close to Carl Bierstone, isn’t it? And we have no background information on you at all. That makes you a unique resident here. For everybody else, we damn near have a family tree, but you sort of come out of nowhere. The only information we have about you is your age. When you turned up at La Riviere General in 1996, you claimed to be seventy-eight. That would make you the same age as that fugitive.”

Burnside gives him a truly unsettling smile. “I guess I must be the Fisherman, too, then.”

“You’re eighty-five years old. I don’t think you’re capable of dragging a bunch of kids halfway across the county. But I do think you’re this Carl Bierstone, and the cops are still eager to get their hands on you. Which brings me to this letter that came a few days ago. I’ve been meaning to discuss it with you, but you know how busy things get around here.” He opens his desk drawer and pulls out a single sheet torn from a yellow notepad. It bears a brief, neatly typed message. “ ‘De Pere, Wisconsin,’ it says. No date. ‘To Whom It May Concern’ is how it starts. ‘I regret to inform you that I am no longer able to continue monthly payments on behalf of my nephew, Charles Burnside.’ That’s it. Instead of writing her signature, she typed her name. ‘Althea Burnside.’ ”

Chipper places the yellow notepaper before him and folds his hands together on top of it. “What’s the deal here, Charles? There’s no Althea Burnside living in De Pere, I know that much. And she can’t be your aunt. How old would she be? At least a hundred. More like a hundred and ten. I don’t believe it. But these checks have been coming in, regular as clockwork, since your first month here at Maxton’s. Some buddy, some old partner of yours, has been looking out for you, my friend. And we want him to continue what he’s been doing, don’t we?”

“All the same to me, asswipe.” This is not precisely truthful. All Burny knows of the monthly payments is that Mr. Munshun organized them long ago, and if these payments are to stop, well . . . what comes to an end with them? He and Mr. Munshun are in this together, aren’t they?

“Come on, kiddo,” Chipper says. “You can do better than that. I’m looking for a little cooperation here. I’m sure you don’t want to go through all the mess and trouble of being taken into custody, getting fingerprinted, plus whatever might happen after that. And me, speaking personally, I wouldn’t want to put you through all of that. Because the real rat here is your friend. It sure looks to me like this guy, whoever he is, is forgetting that you probably have something on him from the old days, right? And he’s thinking that he doesn’t have to make sure that you have all your little comforts anymore. Only that’s a mistake. I bet you could straighten the guy out, make him understand the situation.”

Burny’s mule, his old hoss, has softened up and dwindled like a punctured balloon, which increases his gloom. Since entering this oily crook’s office, he has lost something vital: a feeling of purpose, a sense of immunity, an edge. He wants to get back to Black House. Black House will restore him, for Black House is magic,
dark
magic. The bitterness of his soul went into its making; the darkness of his heart soaked through every beam and joist.

Mr. Munshun helped Burny see the possibilities of Black House, and he contributed many and many a touch of his own devise. There are regions of Black House Charles Burnside has never truly understood, and that frighten him, badly: an underground wing seems to contain his secret career in Chicago, and when he drew near that part of the house, he could hear the pleading whimpers and pungent screams of a hundred doomed boys as well as his own rasps of command, his grunts of ecstasy. For some reason, the proximity of his earlier triumphs made him feel small and hunted, an outcast instead of a lord. Mr. Munshun had helped him remember the scale of his achievement, but Mr. Munshun had been of no use with another region of Black House, a small one, at best a room, more accurately a vault, which houses the whole of his childhood, and which he has never, ever visited. The merest hint of that room causes Burny to feel like an infant left outside to freeze to death.

The news of the fictitious Althea Burnside’s defection has a lesser version of the same effect. This is intolerable, and he need not, in fact cannot, endure it.

“Yeah,” he says. “Let’s have some straightening out here. Let’s have some understanding.”

He rises from the chair, and a sound from what seems to be the center of French Landing speeds him along. It is the wail of police sirens, at least two, maybe three. Burny doesn’t know for sure, but he supposes that Jack Sawyer has discovered the body of his friend Henry, only Henry was less than perfectly dead and managed to say that he had recognized his killer’s voice. So Jack called the cop shop and here we are.

His next step brings him to the front of the desk. He glances at the papers on the desk and instantly grasps their meaning.

“Cooking the books, hey? You aren’t just an asswipe, you’re a sneaky little numbers juggler.”

In an amazingly small number of seconds, Chipper Maxton’s face registers a tremendous range of feeling states. Ire, surprise, confusion, wounded pride, anger, and disbelief chase across the landscape of his features as Burnside reaches back and produces the hedge clippers. In the office, they seem larger and more aggressive than they did in Henry Leyden’s living room.

To Chipper, the blades look as long as scythes. And when Chipper tears his eyes away from them and raises them to the old man standing before him, he sees a face more demonic than human. Burnside’s eyes gleam red, and his lips curl away from appalling, glistening teeth like shards of broken mirrors.

“Back off, buddy,” Chipper squeaks. “The police are practically in the lobby.”

“I ain’t deaf.” Burny rams one blade into Chipper’s mouth and closes the clippers on his sweaty cheek. Blood shoots across the desk, and Chipper’s eyes expand. Burny yanks on the clippers, and several teeth and a portion of Chipper’s tongue fly from the yawning wound. He pushes himself upright and leans forward to grab the blades. Burnside steps back and lops off half of Chipper’s right hand.

“
Damn,
that’s sharp,” he says.

Then Maxton comes reeling around the side of the desk, spraying blood in all directions and bellowing like a moose. Burny dodges away, dodges back, and punches the blades into the bulge of the blue button-down shirt over Chipper’s belly. When he tugs them out, Chipper sags, groans, drops to his knees. Blood pours out of him as if from an overturned jug. He falls forward on his elbows. There is no fun left in Chipper Maxton; he shakes his head and mutters something that is a plea to be left alone. A bloodshot, oxlike eye revolves toward Charles Burnside and silently expresses an oddly impersonal desire for mercy.

“Mother of Mercy,” Burny says, “is this the end of Rico?” What a laugh—he hasn’t thought of that movie in years. Chuckling at his own wit, he leans over, positions the blades on either side of Chipper’s neck, and nearly succeeds in cutting off his head.

The sirens turn blaring on to Queen Street. Soon policemen will be running up the walk; soon they will burst into the lobby. Burnside drops the clippers onto Chipper’s broad back and regrets that he does not have the time to piss on his body or take a dump on his head, but Mr. Munshun is grumbling about
dime, dime, dime.

“I ain’t stupid, you don’t have to tell me,” Burny says.

He pads out of the office and through Miss Vilas’s cubicle. When he moves out into the lobby, he can see the flashing light bars on the tops of two police cars rolling down the far side of the hedge. They come to a halt not far from where he first put his hand around Tyler Marshall’s slender boy-neck. Burny scoots along a little faster. When he reaches the beginning of the Daisy corridor, two baby-faced policemen burst through the opening in the hedge.

Down the hallway, Butch Yerxa is standing up and rubbing his face. He stares at Burnside and says, “What happened?”

“Get out there,” Burny says. “Take ’em to the office. Maxton’s hurt.”

“Hurt?” Incapable of movement, Butch is gaping at Burnside’s bloody clothes and dripping hands.

“Go!”

Butch stumbles forward, and the two young policemen charge in through the big glass door, from which Rebecca Vilas’s poster has been removed. “The office!” Butch yells, pointing to his right. “The boss is hurt!”

While Yerxa indicates the office door by jabbing his hand at the wall, Charles Burnside scuttles past him. A moment later, he has entered the Daisy wing men’s room and is hotfooting it toward one of the stalls.

And what of Jack Sawyer? We already know. That is, we know he fell asleep in a receptive place between the edge of a cornfield and a hill on the western side of Norway Valley. We know that his body grew lighter, less substantial, cloudy. That it grew vague and translucent. We can suppose that before his body attained transparency, Jack entered a certain nourishing dream. And in that dream, we may suppose, a sky of robin’s-egg blue suggests an infinity of space to the inhabitants of a handsome residential property on Roxbury Drive, Beverly Hills, wherein Jacky is six, six, six, or twelve, twelve, twelve, or both at the same time, and Daddy played cool changes on his horn, horn, horn. (“Darn That Dream,” Henry Shake could tell you, is the last song on
Daddy Plays the Horn,
by Dexter Gordon—a daddy-o if there ever was.) In that dream, everyone went on a journey and no one went anywhere else, and a traveling boy captured a most marvelous prize, and Lily Cavanaugh Sawyer captured a bumblebee in a glass. Smiling, she carried it to the swinging doors and launched it into the upper air. So the bumblebee traveled far and away to Faraway, and as it journeyed worlds upon worlds on their mysterious courses trembled and swayed, and Jack, too, journeyed on his own mysterious course into the infinite robin’s-egg blue and, in the bee’s accurate wake, returned to the Territories, where he lay sleeping in a silent field. So in that same darned dream, Jack Sawyer, a person younger than twelve and older than thirty, stunned by both grief and love, is visited in his sleep by a certain woman of tender regard. And she lies down beside him on his bed of sweet grass and takes him in her arms and his grateful body knows the bliss of her touch, her kiss, her deep blessing. What they do, alone in the faraway Territories, is none of our business, but we compound Sophie’s blessing with our own and leave them to what is after all, with the gentlest possible urgency,
their
business, which blesses this boy and this girl, this man and this woman, this dear couple, as nothing else can, certainly not us.