Mr. X (4 page)

I could see an American flag on a mountainous promontory far above silvery water and endless waves, marking the grave of that without which I would forever be incomplete.

“I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but now you’re old enough to keep it to yourself. Nobody else knows what I just told you, except his superior officers.”

We washed and dried the remaining dishes in a charged but companionable silence. I knew that she was in a rush to change clothes and drive to her modeling job, but she stopped and turned around on her way to the kitchen door. “I want you to know something else, too, Neddie. Your father isn’t the only thing you have to be proud of. Our family used to be important people here in Edgerton. They took most of it away, but folks here remember, and that’s why we’re different from everyone else. You come from a special family.”

I sat on the living room rug and tried to see what was special in my aunts and uncles. The detectives had solved the weekly murder, and the aunts had come inside to sit on the green davenport and enjoy their favorite program. From my low, sidelong perspective, Nettie and May resembled monuments of Egyptian statuary. Their massive bodies in shapeless print dresses reared
up side by side above four hugely stationary legs. In a sleeveless mesh T-shirt, his suspenders clipped to the waistband of tan gabardine trousers, Uncle Clark was canted back in his easy chair, his wide mouth twisted into a sneer. Eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, Uncle James filled the high-backed rocker. A man with wavy blond hair and an aristocratic profile was sawing away at a violin.

“Mr. Florian Zabach has a gift which comes straight from God,” said Aunt Nettie. “I never heard prettier sounds in all my life.”

“Remember the time we went up to Chicago and saw Eddie South?” said Uncle Clark.

“Eddie South brought a beautiful tone out of his fiddle,” said Aunt May. “I have wondered if he might have been one of our category. A number of musicians are, I believe.”

“Little pitchers,” Nettie said. “Mind what you say.”

Uncle James snorted and stirred, and the other three looked at him until his chin dropped as far as his redwood neck would permit.

“That tone was why they called Eddie South ‘The Dark Angel of the Violin,’ ” Uncle Clark said. “But if Stuff Smith got up there, he’d gobble your Florsheim Swayback down in one bite.”

“Nettie,” said Aunt May, “I believe Mr. Welk is putting on some weight.”

My eyelids sagged, and I pushed myself upright before I fell asleep in the living room, like Uncle James.

My mother woke me up when she let herself into our room. I waited while she took off her clothes, put on her nightshirt, and found her way to bed. I heard her yank up the sheet and wrestle her pillow into shape. She had carried into the room an odor of smoke and beer mingled with fresh air and summer rainfall, and I tried to sort out these traces of her evening’s history as she relaxed into sleep. Her breathing stretched out and slowed down. When I heard it catch in her throat and release itself in what was almost a snore, I crept across and crawled in beside her. Star seemed enormous, a huge female animal still wrapped in the atmosphere of the adventures through which she had passed on her way home. I nestled my back against hers. My body instantly doubled in weight and began to slip toward the center of the earth, where my hero father lay buried. Star shuddered and spoke a
single word I trapped in my hands as I plummeted out of consciousness.
Rinehart
.

4

At the whispery pop of a seam I looked over my shoulder, saw a shadow fleeing down sunny Cherry Street, and fell bang on my bottom in surprise. At least once a week during my childhood and adolescence, this happened the moment my head hit the pillow. My shadow elongated over the white sidewalk and bent sideways to slip around the corner. The terror of an irredeemable loss immobilized me on the warm pavement. I got up, ran to the corner, and saw my shadow floating like a solid substance above the sidewalk ahead. When I pounded forward, the sidewalk tilted like a slide, and the familiar houses and dark porches softened in the heat.

Edgerton was gone.

I ran down a beaten track leading to a narrow river and an arched wooden bridge. The upright shadow scampered on. On the far side of the bridge, a line of stunted trees marked the beginning of a forest. I glimpsed the peaked roof and broken upper windows of an abandoned house above the treetops. My shadow moved up the arch of the bridge, leaned on the curved iron railing, and crossed one foot over the other. It faced me without having turned around.

Like an optical illusion, the mocking shadow receded with every stride I took. When finally I stood on the bridge, the shadow regarded me from fifty feet away and a point well above my head.

“You seem to be trying to catch me,” my shadow said.

“I need you,” I said.

“Then you’d better come along.” The shadow did its trick of switching front and back and moved on.

By the time I reached the top of the arch, the shadow was far down the descending slope. The iron handrails had become slim and delicate, and the planks bent beneath my weight.

The shadow patted the railing. “The longer it gets, the thinner it becomes. Like toffee. In the end, it disappears.”

“Can I get to the other end?”

“Maybe, if you get into some fancy sliding, use your momentum.”

“We need each other,” I said. “We’re the same thing.”

“You are me, and I am you, yes,” said the shadow. “But only in the sense that we each have qualities the other lacks. Unfortunately, your qualities are boring.”

“Boring?”

“Dear me, am I doing the right thing? What do other people think of me? Why don’t they like me?” The shadow flicked its hands in the air, as if to scatter a cloud of gnats. “I don’t give a damn what people think of me.”

“You’re a shadow,” I said. “People don’t think about you at all.”

“Then why care about getting me back?”

I had no answer for that.

“You won’t even be able to go out by yourself at night for another six or seven years. When do we have our first cigarette? Our first drink? When do we get to have actual sex?” He shook his head in disgust. “I want
darkness
, I want
night
. I want to see a big steak in front of me and a glass of whiskey beside the plate. I want cards in my hand and a cigar in my mouth and a little grown-up fun, and, kid, with you, it’s going to be too much work to get them.”

“Without me, you can’t get them at all,” I said.

“On the contrary. Without you, I can do whatever I like. If you catch me, I have to come back, but I won’t be easy to catch, and you’ll be in considerable danger during the pursuit.”

“What kind of danger?” I asked.

“That kind, for one.” He swept his arm toward the forest. Imaginary blue fire flickered from branch to branch. My heart went cold and my mind became a stone.

5

Four years before the dream I just described started wrecking my sleep two or three nights every month, my aunts and uncles had seen conclusive proof of their doubts that Star could produce an undamaged child. I hope they were gratified. I was not. I had been looking forward to my third birthday.

I can remember the balloons bobbing on the clotheslines and the big ladder between the house and the picnic table, and I know what I was wearing. Among the few of my mother’s possessions I retain is a photograph of me in the striped T-shirt and new dungarees given me by Queenie. I have to tell the truth: I was an angelic child. If I saw a kid like that, I’d tuck a dollar into his hand for sheer good luck. Mine, I mean, not his. But when I look at his cherub face I have to wonder what this little smiling boy is concealing.

That is:

I wonder if he has begun to feel a mild, increasing tingle like an electric current pass up his arms and into his chest. I wonder if his mouth feels dry, if the colors striped across his shirt and the vibrant reds and yellows of the balloons have begun to glow. That angelic boy in his birthday-boy clothes may have felt the tightening of the screws at the heart of the world, but he has no idea of the misery speeding toward him. He has not yet seen the first sly tongues of the blue fire.

The aunts and uncles, my grandmother, and my mother must have spent much of the morning preparing the scene. Someone had blown up the balloons and used the ladder to fasten them to the clotheslines. A paper tablecloth printed with birthday cakes and candles had been stretched out across the picnic table and arrayed with paper plates, plastic cups, and cutlery. (Now that I know how they managed to get all this stuff, I pity the owner of the local five-and-dime.) Jugs of fresh lemonade and cherry Kool-Aid and the containers of food held down the tablecloth.
Aunt Nettie had made a tuna casserole, Aunt May brought over a tray of fried chicken, and Queenie had baked her legendary sweet-potato pie. Reclusive Uncle Clarence and Aunt Joy had consented to emerge from their house across the street, a building so forbidding and funny smelling I dreaded entering it. Clarence brought along his banjo. Joy contributed a loaf of her blackolive bread. Star made lime Jell-O and the birthday cake, angel food with chocolate frosting. I can remember Toby Kraft, his face so white he reminded me of Casper the Friendly Ghost, strutting around the table and patting people on the back.

They must have gossiped, they must have told stories and teased one another as they dug into the fried chicken. I can’t remember that any more than I can remember the actual disaster itself. What I can remember—the most commanding mental photograph I retain from my third birthday—is an image so dissonant that it sank indelibly into me.

It begins with a sudden awareness of the warmth and color of the light, as if I had never before really noticed how this rich, vibrant substance streamed from above to coat the world like a liquid. I saw the brightness gather in a shining skin on the backs of my mother’s hands. Then the earth opened beneath me, and I plummeted downward and away from the picnic table, too startled to be frightened. I came to rest and found myself in a large, untidy room. Books covered a table and stood in piles on the floor. In the distance, an embittered voice ranted about smoke and gold. My eyes fastened on the mantel, where a fern drooped beside a fox stepping delicately toward the edge of a glass dome. The weights of a brass clock swung this way–that way on the other side of the fox’s confinement. I had been
pushed back
: I was in the museum of the past.