Brambleman (26 page)

After paying for priority delivery, he
emerged triumphantly from the post office and stared into the
bright sunshine like a man exiting a cave. Yes, it was over.
Finally
. Night had been conquered; the long storm was over.
Perhaps now the contract would stop oozing blood. Or did the
manuscript have to make it to New York? Be published? Arrive in
stores? Win the Pulitzer? When exactly is a writer finished? He’d
never come close enough to know.

And what next? Work as a handyman, to take
his mind off his mind? Maybe he’d get a regular job and look for a
loft. With Susan’s help securing a loan—was it too much to ask?—and
the second $10,000 check, he might be able to buy a fixer-upper.
Would Susan resent his attempt to solidify their separation? She’d
been acting like a woman scorned since that day at White Water.
Well, she hadn’t asked him back, and he had to go somewhere,
because his days in the dungeon had come to an end now that his
mission was accomplished.

In any case, he should celebrate. A sudden
chill wind whipped through his shirt as he crossed the alley to the
coffeehouse. Jean, alone in the shop, looked up from the magazine
she was reading when he walked in. Pat Metheny was playing jazz
guitar over the sound system. The triumphant coauthor gave her a
weary smile. She glanced outside. “Getting cloudy. Sometimes I
think you bring the rain.”

He looked over his shoulder. Where had
those
clouds come from? “I finished.”

“You what?”

“The book. I just mailed the manuscript to my
publisher. It’s done!”

“Yay!” She ran around from behind the counter
and hugged him. Her scent was surprisingly feminine. She pushed him
back and smirked at him, arching her eyebrow, the one adorned with
a tiny gold ring. “Whatever will you do now? Besides fix up
people’s houses and take care of kids and write another book, that
is. This calls for a cup on the house.”

A lightning bolt flashed close by, followed
by a loud crack of thunder. “That was random,” she said.

“Not exactly,” Charlie said. “Gotta go.”

He left the coffeehouse at a dead run. It was
dark as twilight when he bounded up onto Kathleen’s porch. He burst
into the living room, fearing something terrible had happened. The
old woman stood befuddled, pinching her black cardigan tight around
her bosom. “Freaky weather,” she said.

He leaned over and put his hands on his
knees, panting to catch his breath. “You all right?”

“Kinda cold,” she said, sounding nervous.
“Cold and creepy. I don’t know why.”

Charlie brushed past her and went into the
study. A chill wind blew in through the window. He slammed it shut,
sensing that something was coming. Trouble, perhaps? Maybe the old
guy wasn’t so dead after all and was coming to say “Job well done”
or “Congratulations, earthling, you’re free to go.”

Charlie tiptoed down to the basement, trying
to sneak up on the dreadful, loathsome contract vat that he’d
tucked away in the dungeon’s darkest corner. The vat was dark to
the top. Charlie lifted the lid and saw roiling blood. He staggered
back in horror. This was damnation, not celebration!

Outside, lightning flashed, followed quickly
by a clap of thunder that shook the house and rattled its windows.
Then came several strikes in quick succession.

Kathleen shrieked. Charlie heard a heavy
thump on the porch, then another. There came an ominously soft
knock. Telling himself he had no reason to be afraid, Charlie
clomped up the stairs, pulling himself along the rail.

“Don’t answer it,” Kathleen whimpered.

“Not an option,” Charlie said. He felt an
electric shock as he grabbed the doorknob. He twisted it and gave
it a jerk, swinging it open, kicking it sideways to finish its
motion.

Lo and behold, there stood Trouble, fully
charged, the lines in his face deep and sharp. His eyes were dark
and haunted. Something was terribly wrong. “Dude,” he said.
“Where’s my book?”

“I finished it,” Charlie said. “Mailed it.
Fire in the hole.” He punctuated the statement with a jaunty
gesture, swinging his fist playfully.

“Did you?” Trouble was covered with a patina
of filth. Charlie fell back as the weird one entered the living
room, filling it with his choking aura of physical decay, body and
engine oils, sweat-matted grime, farts, and ozone. Trouble stank
fiercely, as Ben would say, with all his might.

“Yeah. Just got back from the post office,”
Charlie wheezed, trying not to inhale.

Kathleen continued to whimper. She’d covered
her eyes like a child trying to hide. Trouble breathed heavily,
rumbling like a bison with a chest cold. “Show it to me.”

“Gladly,” Charlie said with the confidence of
Mark Twain’s Christian with four aces. Trouble followed him into
the study, where Charlie pointed to the spare copy of
Flight
from Forsyth
.

Trouble picked up the manuscript and held it
under the overhead light. He seemed to stare into it, then set it
down, leaving grimy thumb prints on the title page. He inhaled and
roared at the top of his lungs, “THAT’S NOT THE WORK YOU AGREED TO
FINISH, YOU STUPID ASSHOLE!”

Charlie flinched from the hurricane of bad
breath. “What do you mean? A deal’s a deal.”

“And this ain’t the deal.”

Charlie laughed uncertainly. “You’re joking.
Look, I did my job. Anyway, why did I have all those dreams?”

“Dreams? I don’t do dreams. I do small animal
impressions. And by the way, thanks so much for trapping me.
Twice
. Nearly broke my neck and shoulder.” Only then did
Charlie notice that Trouble’s head tilted to the right.

“That’s what you get for stalking. But the
dreams—I saw everything, clear and whole.”

Trouble snorted in disgust. “This book was
already finished. It was your ego that told you there was something
left to do on it. That and sloth. The deal is to complete Talton’s
unfinished
work.”

Charlie couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Sloth?”

“Laziness. Look it up.”

“But he hasn’t been lazy,” Kathleen said,
appearing behind them, holding her nose.

Trouble ignored her. “You still have to
fulfill the contract. And you haven’t even started.”

He stomped away, brushing past Kathleen, who
looked like she was going to throw up.

“What are you talking about?” Charlie said.
“I don’t have any idea—”

“You have everything you need,” Trouble
declared over his shoulder.

Charlie rushed to the window and opened it
for some fresh air. He turned and saw that Kathleen was starting to
keel over, so he parked her on the study’s sofa and rushed after
Trouble, who was at the front door. “Wait, wait,” Charlie pleaded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you mean Talton had
something else, they stole everything in a break-in right after I
started.”

Trouble didn’t stop. He walked out the front
door and didn’t bother closing it. Charlie grabbed the knob but
left it open, since the house needed airing out. He watched Trouble
stomping away with incredibly high steps, as if he was a life-size
marionette.

Charlie turned around and saw Kathleen
standing in the dining room. “He stinks so bad,” she said, then
lurched to the bathroom and started vomiting.

Charlie returned to the office and looked
around the room where he’d spent countless hours. This was supposed
to be a moment of triumph. Instead, he’d been told he’d performed a
fool’s errand. Nothing made sense. “Damn it!” he yelled. He grabbed
the manuscript and threw it at the wall, sending pages flying all
over the room.

That was a start. He grabbed a file cabinet
drawer and yanked it out. He threw it at the sofa, spilling out the
fake documents he’d drawn up to replace the stolen ones. The second
drawer did not come out so easily. This irritated Charlie even
more, and he tugged harder. The cabinet toppled and crashed to the
floor. A corner clipped his knee, cutting through his jeans and
slicing open his skin. Charlie cursed and kicked wildly at it. His
hiking boot dented the metal side.

He bent down, put his hands on his knees, and
grimaced, looking around for something to destroy. A dusty manila
envelope that had been wedged between the file cabinet and the wall
stood edgewise on the floor. He picked it up, intending to rip it
apart, but there was something small and hard inside that piqued
his interest. He flipped the envelope over and read aloud, “John
Riggins, Forsyth County 1930s.” There was also a 1987 date in magic
marker, a burlesque of Talton’s elegant scrawl—perhaps this was the
last thing the good professor ever wrote. Charlie recalled putting
this atop the file cabinet months ago. The thieves must have
knocked it behind the cabinet during the burglary.

What the hell was he supposed to do, now that
he was a few thousand hours off course? He calmed down, took a seat
in the chair, and fanned himself with the envelope. “Fuck me,” he
said.

Kathleen appeared in the doorway. “What’s
that?” she asked.

“Something about a man named Riggins,”
Charlie said. “You ever heard of him?”

She shook her head as he emptied the envelope
on the desk. There was a cassette tape and some typewritten notes.
The back of a photo was dated Oct. 12, 1937 and the name John
Riggins was scrawled on it. He flipped it over. “Oh my God,” he
said. It was a picture of a human body charred beyond recognition,
hanging from the limb of a dead tree. Wisps of smoke were visible,
giving the eerie impression that the soul was departing the
tortured body.

Outside, a crow cawed loudly. Charlie looked
up and saw the bird flying toward the window, only to veer off at
the last instant. He heard a bus rumble in the distance. Kathleen
stood transfixed, paler than he had ever seen her before. Charlie
held the cassette in his hand and glanced at the old
black-and-white photo. There were several men in the background.
Beside the still-smoldering corpse, pointing up at it like it was a
prize marlin, knelt a bantamweight man with a straw hat pushed back
on his forehead. Charlie couldn’t bear to look at the picture and
averted his gaze as he gingerly slid the photograph back into its
envelope. “That’s horrible,” he said.

He needed a break, but Trouble’s visit had
convinced him there was no such thing—not for him. How could
finishing
Flight from Forsyth
have been such a mistake? How
could the death of one man outweigh the horrors that occurred in
Forsyth County in 1912, with more than a thousand victims? He shook
his head; it made no sense. But maybe this was what Trouble had
been talking about. Charlie looked around. He couldn’t think of
anything else.

Since there was nothing else left of the
professor’s papers and documents, the only thing he could do was to
find out more about this last iota of Talton’s work. He went to the
dungeon to retrieve his boombox so he could play the tape. He snuck
a glance at the vat. The blood was receding. The weight was still
on his shoulders, though, pushing him down—and forcing him to
stumble forward.

Charlie took the boombox out to the front
porch and plopped down, stretching out his legs and resting his
feet on the second step. His knee had stopped bleeding. Overhead,
the clouds were breaking up. He slipped the cassette into the
player and turned it on. He leaned into the gentle breeze that
stirred the bushes around him and listened to the otherworldly hiss
of the tape. After a few seconds, Talton’s high, clear voice piped
up. “Interview with Jasper Riggins, January 23, 1987, at 237 Agate
Drive, Atlanta, Georgia.” A pause, then: “Please tell me about your
cousin’s death, Mr. Riggins.”

Charlie knew that a black man named John
Riggins died at the hands of persons unknown on October 12, 1937 in
Forsyth County, and that the man’s widow, Lettie, drowned in the
Chattahoochee River less than a year later in an apparent suicide,
leaving her infant daughter Minnie an orphan. Riggins had been an
only child; his wife had two sisters, one of whom had raised the
girl. Both of Minerva’s aunts died in the 1970s. As for the
gruesome photograph, Talton had written a note saying that it
arrived in the mail at his house on January 20, 1987 with no return
address and a Cumming, Georgia, postmark.

Charlie listened to Talton’s tape again the
next morning, struggling to understand Jasper Riggins’s Deep South
black dialect, mixed in with the interplanetary hiss that Charlie
suspected contained the real message he was supposed to hear.

The old man’s sad, defeated mumble still
echoed in his ears as Charlie drove to Summerhill, a poor
neighborhood south of downtown Atlanta, virtually sitting in the
shadow of the gold-domed Capitol. The address he sought was within
walking distance of Turner Field, home of the Atlanta Braves. He
turned onto Agate Drive and looked for 237, but the old houses on
that side of the street had been razed and replaced with townhomes.
Charlie parked the van in front of 240, a dilapidated wood frame
house turned gray. He glanced around for signs of urban danger, saw
none, and exited the van. He strode up the cracked sidewalk,
stepped past a rotten railing onto the porch, and banged on the
torn screen door.

There was shuffling inside. A moment later,
an elderly, overweight black woman with a kind face and bulging
eyes opened the door. She wore a blue house dress and slippers.
“May I help you?”

“Yes ma’am. I was trying to find out about
someone who used to live on this street.” He pointed over his
shoulder to the townhomes. “Before those were built, most
likely.”

“You a bill collector?”

“No ma’am. I’m a writer.” The woman bent
toward him and leaned on the doorframe. He said, “I’m looking for a
man named Jasper Riggins.”

“He dead.”

“I’m sorry. When did he die?”