Brambleman (21 page)

Charlie arrived at Gresham and coached
himself to remain calm. He apologized profusely to Beck’s and Ben’s
teachers and meekly accepted separate but equal scoldings. Bottom
line: The next time he was late, he would receive a warning letter,
and a copy would go “in the file.”

Charlie left school ranting about a
conspiracy against him, only realizing he’d gone over the top when
he saw his kids staring at him in alarm. “I’m writing a story about
monsters,” he explained. “Sometimes I practice it out loud.”

Monsters interested the kids, especially Ben.
On the way back to Thornbriar, Charlie told them the story of
Frankenstein
. It had been two days since he’d showered, and
midway through his tale, he scratched a sticky armpit.

“You stink worse than a monkey,” Beck
said.

“Don’t be rude,” Charlie said.

“Then don’t stink,” she suggested.

At Thornbriar, Charlie fixed peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches. He was pretty sure that the one he made for
himself was his first food of the day. On second thought, he had no
idea when he’d last eaten.

* * *

The next day, Charlie proudly arrived at
Gresham Elementary on time only to find Evangeline waiting in the
office. He did a double-take, nearly spraining his neck as karmic
tires squealed on psychic pavement. “What are you doing here?” he
asked, not bothering to be polite. The school secretary watched the
two antagonists impassively, as if she might one day be called on
to testify.

“I came to pick up the kids,” Evangeline
said. “Susan can’t trust you to do that anymore.”

He grimaced. “Not true. And here I am. You
wasted your time. Anyway, you’re not on the list.”

“Susan put me on it.”

“Did she,” he deadpanned, making sure it
didn’t sound like a question.

“She did,” Evangeline replied, making sure he
got an answer.

“I’m gonna get the kids.”

“I’ll be at the house, waiting for them,” she
declared.

Charlie escaped with Beck and Ben out a side
door. He took them to Dairy Queen, then the library. They were at
Duck Lake Park when his cellphone rang.

“Mom’s at the house. She says the kids are
missing. She wants to call 911.”

Charlie pushed Beck’s swing. “No, they’re
with me, Susan. Too bad she drove all the way to school for
nothing. Hey, wanna eat out tonight? My treat.”

“Yay!” Beck cheered, waving her arms and
almost toppling from her seat. “Pizza!”

“Pizza!” said Ben, twisting the chains as
Charlie gave him a push.

Susan continued: “The school counselor called
today and asked if anything was wrong with you. She said you showed
up at school yesterday mumbling to yourself.”

“Why would Ms. Morris claim that? I didn’t
even see her.”

“The teachers told her. They say you’ve been
disheveled and disoriented.”

Obviously, someone had gotten to them.
Satan
. And he had evidence! “I’m under a lot of pressure to
get the book finished. You have no idea.”

“Don’t be late again. I can’t be pulled away
from here. I’m up for a promotion. I need you to focus on the kids.
They need you to focus on them, too.”

“Fine,” he grumbled. She kept talking, but he
quit listening.

He dropped the kids by Thornbriar after Susan
got home. He didn’t bother to go inside, since Evangeline’s Crown
Victoria sat fat and stupid in the driveway like an ugly old
toad.

* * *

Increasingly,
Flight
was becoming
Charlie’s book. The dreams persisted, and like a side effect from
the drugs that were advertised on Kathleen’s nightly news programs,
they were excessively vivid. Charlie awoke each day at his weirding
time of 4:00 a.m. with images and scenes etched into his brain,
hearing echoes of rifle shots in the hollow, seeing the fear in a
sharecropper’s face illuminated by a nightrider’s torch, smelling
armpits and tobacco spit on the crowded courthouse steps. Charlie
had come to believe that
Flight from Forsyth
was a book of
lost souls, who now came unto him for deliverance from guilt,
shame, and/or injustice—although some of them just wanted to share
recipes.

The only way to rid himself of the pressure
on his brain was to download these graphic scenes. Charlie’s
compulsion to write was so strong it often overwhelmed his urge to
piss. He scribbled frantically on a legal pad while waiting for the
computer to boot, certain that his dreams were true. He was
extremely grateful to be gaining more in his sleep than he’d lost
in the burglary, though it didn’t seem worth it the morning he woke
with a severe headache after dreaming the county’s 1910 annual
budget meeting.

The next night, he found himself in a coffin
as clods of dirt thudded on its closed lid. Panic rose in his chest
and he clawed at the pine box. Splinters stabbed the quick beneath
his fingernails. He awoke clutching his chest. He couldn’t describe
the horror of being buried, nor could he see its place in
Flight
. He didn’t even know who he’d been. Then again, maybe
all dead people felt alike.

He went to the bathroom and returned to his
cot at 4:02 wishing he didn’t have to write this horror, but there
was no escaping death. He turned on his laptop and flexed his
fingers. Pain shot through them. He typed slowly, then sped up,
surprising himself by writing not a dirge, but a letter to a
sister-in-law in nearby Dahlonega:

October 16, 1912

Dear Addy,

The last of the coloreds left Oscarville
yesterday. Luther burned down their shacks this morning and plans
to plant cotton there next year. He says he got the best claim to
the land, but it doesn’t seem right, what folks been doing. Luther
says keep my mouth shut, but everbody knows what’s going on. No use
to talk about it. I fear there will be a price to pay. That’s what
the Bible says …

The letter went on to mention an obnoxious
mother-in-law and how many jars of applesauce had been canned for
the winter, along with the recipe. It would go well with the pork
chops from the pig Luther had bought from Lester McCready, the
colored man who moved away.

It made no sense, this mix of death and food,
but Charlie kept typing. He yelped in torment as he wrote about
sewing a new dress, describing its frilly lace in agonizing detail.
He wrung his hands to ease the pain. They felt like nails had been
hammered through them. Another knot appeared, this one on the palm
side of the base knuckle of his left middle finger.

The next night he channeled property records,
again waking with a terrible headache. Charlie spent six hours
inputting data before collapsing in a heap on his cot. When he was
done, he checked Talton’s text and realized he’d dreamed the
documents that had been stolen from the study. But now Charlie
could see black faces and cotton fields, not just names and
numbers.

* * *

Day and night bled together. Except for his
children, all was darkness, and the stress of dream and dungeon
took a toll. Charlie now talked to himself nonstop on his daily
shamble down to the coffeehouse. He had learned to mask the odd
behavior by pulling out his cellphone and holding it to his ear as
he walked, so he looked like a man on the go, not one going insane.
These trips, his only breaks from the grind, were also a luxury he
could ill afford, since he was nearly broke and hadn’t done any
handyman jobs in two weeks, having gotten no offers despite leaving
his business cards tacked on bulletin boards all over that part of
town. He regretted giving Susan his painting money to help pay the
mortgage. Meanwhile, Kathleen owed him for more than a hundred
hours of work on the manuscript, but she was so crotchety he
hesitated to ask for payment. To top off his humiliation, when he
ordered a double espresso, Jean told him, “You look like a
deliveryman who lost his truck.”

By this time, Charlie believed he was more
electrical conductor than writer—a wire with its insulation chewed
off, stretched to breaking between two unseen points (neither one
in the living world), and heated to the melting point. Charlie
Sherman was a candidate for spontaneous combustion, if ever there
was one.

* * *

He was an attorney in the old courthouse
looking through property records. A young secretary flirted with
him, showing him a picture she was drawing of the recently deceased
Martha Jean Rankin. When he went into a back room, she followed.
Hot damn! A few minutes later, he was running out of the
courthouse, tucking his white starched shirt into his trousers with
a deputy and another man on his heels.

Charlie woke up breathing heavily. No wet
dream, just running for his life. He cupped his hands over his
face. Now he knew that Randall Pryor, the original attorney for
accused murderer Bernie Dent, had been caught diddling a secretary
in the file room and had to be replaced by an inexperienced young
attorney named Jackson Ponder just days before the trial. He also
knew that Lillian Scott’s great-grandmother was a hussy. How could
Charlie put such scandalous details in the book? There had to be a
way—although he’d probably let Lillian Scott’s slutty ancestor have
a pass, since she was an artist.

By now the dreams were connected like pieces
in a puzzle. He knew that the deputy who chased Pryor out of town
had stood by when the mob descended on Ted Galent’s cell. The other
man who’d pursued the horny attorney was named Jim Biddle, a member
of Galent’s lynch mob. Biddle would later sit on Bernie Dent’s
jury, brag to his colleagues about the lynching, and fall asleep
when Jackson Ponder presented Dent’s case, which was not so much a
defense as a second-hand confession and plea for clemency. (Ponder
had believed Dent was a dead man the moment he’d been arrested, so
the outcome was inevitable.)

Charlie started writing, describing the
buildings Pryor had passed by on his sprint out of town. Details,
details.

* * *

He sat at a table underneath a tree. Everyone
in the county, white and black, formed a line that extended all the
way to the Chattahoochee River. Each person waited to shove a note
card containing personal statistics in his face. He stared at each
one for a moment to burn it into his memory, then nodded his head.
The person stepped away and was quickly replaced by another.

This census went on for several nights.
Orderly and alphabetical, like dead Talmadge voters in Telfair
County, circa 1946. Each morning, he typed the data in courier font
at speeds in excess of 100 words per minute. The miracle of
photocopying would blur and confuse the source, making it seem
authentic, he hoped. He now knew everyone in the county back then,
and better still, had backup for the stolen documents on
landownership.

The high-speed stenographic channeling
continued to take its toll. He had two more knots in the palms of
his hands:
Carpal Stigmata Syndrome
, he called it. He
developed a migraine during his census count. He feared he was
growing a brain tumor, and it was doing all the work. But he had to
admire such an industrious malignancy, since it certainly was
getting the job done.

The next night, he was in a mob chasing after
someone. Couldn’t see who.

The night after that, he was being chased by
a mob. He took down names, then got his ass kicked.

Then he was a she, complaining about having
to do her own wash after the maid left town.

He spent one night as a feisty cur sniffing
hitching posts. Someone who smelled like a Cutchins threw rocks at
him. He chased the boy and bit him on his barefoot heel. Barking
vociferously, he called the Cutchins a bitch. That was a good
dream.

In the next, he stood in the middle of a
stinking, late-summer crowd and felt dull-eyed primitive religion
pulsing through the people, sensed an insane hatred of blacks,
listened to the brainwashing by Randolph Carswell as the county’s
so-called Great Man told whites it was time for blacks to leave
Forsyth forever. Then he went out and repeated the lies, and by
constant repetition, helped to forge a new reality. Making lies the
truth—wasn’t that how people got things done in the world?

* * *

The file drawer was full again. Charlie had
played God’s own hack and gone far beyond replacing Talton’s
purloined documents. He’d lived the story and heard the frightened
whispers about a mischievous devil and an angry God.
Flight from
Forsyth
played in his head constantly, swirling around in
endless variations on the same theme.

However, even a feverishly
obsessive-compulsive fellow in his manic phase can stare at a
computer screen only so long. One Saturday night in early February,
he ran out of steam just past eight o’clock. The day was done,
shot. Kaput. He turned off his laptop and went to the living room,
where Kathleen sat on the couch watching
Casablanca
for the
third time that week. Her eyes glowed in rapt attention as Rick
told Ilsa what colors she and the Germans had worn in Paris.

Charlie sat down in the green chair, wishing
he had enough cash to go somewhere. Friday, he’d asked Kathleen for
$500—a fraction of what she now owed him for the hours he’d racked
up on the project. She responded by claiming she’d already paid
him. No point in asking again. Angela, plague-free and re-lawyered,
had come over that morning and seized Kathleen’s financial papers,
claiming her mother’s failure to take her medications was proof
that she couldn’t be trusted with her own affairs. Kathleen
explained that she’d gone off her meds to prevent Angela and the
pharmacist from controlling her brain. Before she left, Angela told
her mother to quit paying Charlie—which happened to be what
Kathleen wanted to hear, anyway. So now the Talton Gang was
plotting to starve him.
How had they learned his secret, that he
would gladly finish the book for free
?