Brambleman (5 page)

Charlie sat up and rubbed his face with both
hands. “I passed out.”

“That’s all right. I hope it’s not boring. I
see you read to page one hundred and one.” She emphasized those
last few words, making it sound like the most fascinating number in
the universe.

“Oh, no. It’s … interesting. I just … just …
had a rough day.”

“I understand. I’ll make you breakfast and we
can talk about how we’re going to proceed.”

He thought he should proceed out the door. On
the other hand: food. “OK.”

Kathleen left to putter in the kitchen.
Charlie looked at the clock and groaned. It was 4:05. He’d slept
less than an hour and had a miserable, hungover feeling without
having experienced the joy of drunkenness—a vice he’d sworn off the
day Beck was born. (The morning after, actually.)

The dream had seemed so real; the events were
etched in his mind. Maybe editing the book was possible, after all.
Charlie returned to the manuscript, but he was tired and the words
made no sense. They were just scratches on paper. He put his head
on the desk.

“Breakfast is ready!” Kathleen called out.
Charlie glanced at Momo’s picture on the wall, muttered an
expletive, and padded into the kitchen in muskrat-scented crew
socks.

“What’s wrong?” Kathleen set a plate of
scrambled eggs and toast on the table. “You look like you’ve seen a
ghost.”

“No, no.” Charlie shook his head. “Ghost
isn’t quite the word.”

He couldn’t get Momo off his mind. He kept
seeing his gargantuan cousin-in-law bending over, picking up a
Hardee’s cup while serving his community-service sentence. In 1987,
Momo had pleaded no contest to charges of battery and making
terroristic threats after he punched out and threatened to kill a
white civil rights marcher during the second Forsyth County
protest. And now Charlie was burdened with the suspicion that the
racist thug had killed a man in the first march and gotten off
scot-free.
Make it go away
!

While thoughts of Momo tended to diminish
Charlie’s appetite, the smell of fresh coffee revived it. As he
ate, he looked at the old lady in a threadbare burgundy robe across
from him at the rickety table; she’d pulled her hair up in a bun,
so she now looked semi-presentable, which was more than he could
say for himself. He studied her kitchen. The finish on the old
white curved-top Kelvinator refrigerator had worn to black around
the handle. She must have lived here forever, poor woman. He
guessed that all she had besides this fixer-upper house was her
demented dream to publish her late husband’s work. He hoped she
wasn’t thinking that the book would make her rich, because it
wouldn’t. He wasn’t even sure it
was
a book. After reading a
hundred pages, all he could say was that it appeared to be well on
its way to becoming a gigantic mess.

“So you’ll do it?” she asked.

“I’m sorry. What?” He stopped mid-chew and
looked down at his hand, which was resting on a check made out to
him—for twenty-five hundred dollars. “What’s this?”

“A retainer. Or is it called an advance?”

“For what?”

“Editing Thurwood’s book. I’ll pay you twenty
dollars an hour and we split the royalties fifty-fifty. That’s what
he said to offer you.” She patted her hair. “Don’t worry. I’m not
in it for the money. We just need to get this done.”

He sat there, mouth unhinged, looking like he
was about to swallow a rabbit whole. Finally, he managed to say,
“You should use this money to fix up the house.”

“Oh heavens, I have plenty of money.”
Kathleen got up and went into her bedroom. After fumbling and
clunking around, she padded back into the kitchen holding an armful
of papers. She produced statements from brokerage houses, mutual
funds, and banks for his inspection.

“You shouldn’t be showing me these things,”
Charlie said. However, he
was
curious, and after a polite
pause, started looking through the papers.

Hmm
. This certainly changed
things.

“And two certificates of deposit in a safety
deposit box for fifty thousand each. I was hoping I’d be a
millionaire.”

“Don’t forget to count your house,” Charlie
said.

She leaned forward like a willing con victim.
“I own it, free and clear. How much is it worth?”

“In Virginia Highlands?” He chuckled. “You’re
a millionaire, easy.”

Her face filled with joy. “You’re good luck
already! You made me rich, just like that!” She snapped her
fingers. “As for the house, Angela—that’s my daughter, she hates
me, you should know—she gets it when I die.” Kathleen went on,
adopting a grumbling tone. “If I fix it up, she’ll have me
committed. She already keeps me prisoner here. Made me turn in my
driver’s license. She claims I’ll lose my car, but I think she
wants it for herself.”

Charlie shook his head and smiled. “Come on.
She doesn’t hate you.”

“You don’t know her. She only comes to see me
once a week. She’s got a girlfriend, a cute young thing. And I do
mean
girl
.” Kathleen frowned and shook her heard. “She
shouldn’t date her students. Thurwood wouldn’t have put up with
that. Don’t tell her I told you about the money. Anyway,” she said,
brightening, “I need a business write-off. A writer, anyway.” She
laughed, amused by her turn of phrase. “There is one other thing.
You have to sign a contract. He’s bringing it by—”

“Who is?”

“
Him
. The man you came here with.”

“Trouble?”

She gave him an incredulous look. “Is that
his name?”

“It’s as close as I could get. And it suits
him.”

“Well, he’s bringing it by later today.” She
looked out into the darkness. “It is today, isn’t it?”

“Uh, yeah. I suppose it is, at that.”

“Do you have a place to stay? He said you
needed one.”

“When?”

“Now, I guess.”

“No, I mean
when
did he talk to you
about all this? He didn’t stay five minutes last night, just long
enough to introduce us.”

“He called me,” Kathleen said. “Must have
woken me up.”

This baffled Charlie, since he hadn’t heard
the phone ring.

“He said, ‘There will be miracles, but you
won’t like most of them.’ Oh, and he said, ‘No cops.’ I wonder why
he said that.”

Charlie shrugged. “That’s how he rolls.”

She wore a puzzled expression. “He rolls?
What does that mean?”

“Just an expression. I guess he doesn’t like
cops.”

“Anyway … you can stay in the basement
rent-free while you work on the book. You
are
going to edit
it, aren’t you?”

Charlie sipped coffee and pondered his
situation. He’d been struggling recently to write fiction for an
hour at a stretch. Now this opportunity popped up. Funny-strange
how a job had come looking for him, brokered by the weirdest dude
he’d ever met. And it involved Forsyth County, of all places, land
of his accursed in-laws, and Momo, the unnamed assailant. There
were also nuts and bolts to consider. A lot of detail work, but the
breadcrumbs were there. So what if the book sucked? Many did. Just
add it to the pile. And there was that check—with the promise of
more to come. The woman had plenty of money, so it wasn’t like he’d
be bleeding her dry even if he logged some serious time on the
project. If he could whip Thurwood’s doorstop of a manuscript into
shape and get it published, it would look good on his résumé.
Royalties would be icing on the cake.

“I can stay rent-free?”

Kathleen nodded and pointed at the door
leading to the cellar. “Take a look.”

He opened the door and flipped on a light at
the top of the stairs. He stumbled down creaking wooden steps into
a cold, dark, mildewy little world. He saw a bare bulb dangling
from a joist and pulled its chain, illuminating the water heater
and furnace. He listened to the whoosh of gas and suspected he’d
need a carbon monoxide detector. Old paneling bowed out from cinder
block walls. As for furniture, there was a metal-frame foldout cot
with an old mattress that appeared to have been home to some hungry
rats, a desk, a card table, and two metal chairs. The green shag
carpet had to go, but it looked like it would put up a fight.

There was a separate patio entrance; the
door’s panes, like the overhead windows that ringed the basement,
were caked with decades’ worth of greasy dust and grime. The
basement opened onto a small back yard surrounded by a
weather-beaten, gap-toothed wooden fence. The small detached garage
behind the house looked like it could topple over or come crashing
down at any moment.

He climbed the stairs to the kitchen. At the
top, he turned for one last look.
What a dump
. Only a truly
desperate man would accept such abysmal quarters. “Can I move in
today?”

“Certainly. I don’t see why not.” She handed
him a set of keys along with the check.

“I need to get some things from my
house.”

“Didn’t you walk here?” she asked.

He groaned. “Yeah, I did. I’m kind of
stuck.”

“Here, take my car.” She grabbed a key from a
nail on the kitchen wall and handed it to him. “It’s old, but it
doesn’t have many miles on it because I don’t drive. It’s in the
garage out back.”

She was handing him so many things: money,
house keys, car keys, hopes and dreams. He should give her
something, too. A promise, then. “I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t. God sent you here. If you
cheat me, you’ll answer to Him. Or Her.” She looked at the wall,
then turned back to Charlie. “This is all new to me. Before
tonight, I didn’t believe. Now I know. It really is amazing.”

“Yeah. That’s one word for it. I’ll be back
in a while.”

Charlie stepped outside into the cold night
and walked along the driveway—two concrete strips separated by
patchy grass—to the weathered white garage, which was now
illuminated by a spotlight shining from a corner eave of the house.
After he struggled with it for a minute, the flip-out door rose
with an ominous groan to reveal a silver 1986 Volvo sedan. Charlie
squeezed into the narrow space between automobile and wall and
fumbled in the dark to unlock the car door. The wind picked up and
the garage moaned. He crammed himself into the car, plopping onto
the cold black seat.

At first, it wouldn’t start, the engine
having fallen out of the habit of running. After a couple of tries,
the battery started to fade. On the fourth try, the engine went
rur … rur
… and started, sputtering badly. He idled the car
for a minute, watching the exhaust in the mirror forming a
malevolent cloud behind him. A creaking rafter persuaded him to get
moving before the garage collapsed on him like an evil tool shed in
a Stephen King novel. He inched out and backed down to the street.
The car’s timing was off. While he waited and hoped for the engine
to hit its stride, he picked up a scrap of paper from the seat and
turned on the dome light to examine it: a Kroger receipt, two years
old.

After a minute, the ancient Volvo’s engine
fell into a steady rhythm. Charlie drove off, marveling at how the
night had turned out. This was madness, of course, but he wouldn’t
let that stop him. As his beloved Dr. Hunter S. Thompson once
famously said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

It was time for Charlie Sherman to leave the
ranks of the amateurs.

* * *

Charlie couldn’t guess what would happen when
he returned to Thornbriar, but he knew things couldn’t continue the
way they’d been going. After all, his marriage had been
deteriorating for several years. Susan had grown testy after Beck
was born and more so when Ben arrived. The main problem was
Charlie’s decision—his wife no longer considered it a mutual
agreement—to stay home and take care of the kids while he wrote
books. This made sense at the time, since she was making more at
the bank than he was at the public relations firm. Plus, he hated
flacking, whereas she liked money. Years later, his failure to get
published made his career path seem like a horribly stupid
mistake.

Charlie loved his children, which was more
than he could say about his wife these days. Of course, she had
plenty to say about him, too. He wouldn’t be surprised if, when he
returned to the house, the cops were still there, taking notes
while she continued her head-shaking, fist-waving rant.

Why had a border-state Yankee (the most
ornery kind) from Missouri married this Southern girl from the
whitest county in Georgia? Well, first of all, they met in Macon,
and the only thing to do there was boink each other. There
certainly had been an attraction. She was barely out of high school
when they met, not even twenty years old, and he’d impressed her
with his intellect and his position as a newspaper editor. He’d
fallen for her because she was a saucy blonde and kind of hot.
Actually, pretty hot. “Brassy and sassy,” she liked to say. That
demeanor was a facade to hide her innocence, and as it turned out,
she had a hill-country
You Break It, You Buy It
policy.
They’d married within a year (most of her relatives were surprised
to find out they didn’t have to).

Gradually, disappointment had worn off her
playful edge, and now she acted like a troll half the time. Charlie
thought she was still attractive, though in recent months he’d
looked at her more with resentment than desire. Even with all their
problems, life together had been bearable until the previous Fourth
of July, when their marriage imploded, with the help of two of her
most intolerable and intolerant family members—one of whom had
apparently killed a college professor for sport.

Charlie rounded the sweeping curve of his
block in the old Volvo and saw the porch light burning at 2567
Thornbriar Circle, a ranch much like the other houses on his
relatively quiet suburban street. The windows were dark. The cops
were gone. As he exited the car, an early morning train rumbled in
the distance, sounding its horn at a crossing. He crunched the
Volvo’s door shut and squished across the driveway on prune-like
toes in tattered shoes. He unlocked the front door and stepped into
the foyer. Sirius was there to greet him, planting a cold nose on
his master’s hand.