The Four Corners Of The Sky (14 page)

But whoever this stranger was, he wasn’t her father. Even after all these years apart, Annie was sure she would recognize her father’s bright metallic voice. Rook’s timbre rustled like leaves blown across a yard. “You’re sure you’re a close friend?”

He puffed dismay. “Close? What could be closer than lying side by side in a prison cell in son-of-a-bitch Cuba?”

His response wasn’t the one she’d expected. “Cuba? My dad was in prison in Cuba? When?”

Rook said, “To me it feels like yesterday. One year, twelve long months, in that cell. Jack gave me the will to survive. Otherwise? I would have slit my throat on a rusty can lid, if I’d had a can, which I didn’t. I would have woven a noose of my own rotted trouser legs. They took away even time. No watches. But the worst was a bastard threw my guitar to the floor and just slowly stepped on it for the cruel pleasure.”

She asked if he were a musician.

“Ah…Here’s a question: Is what we are, what we might have been? Or is what we are, what with such sorrow, we have become?” He paused as if expecting her to offer an answer. When she didn’t, he added, “‘I have a reasonable good ear in music.’ To my mother’s grief I chased rumba down many excessively scummy streets. I could tell you—”

“Don’t. Mr. Rook! Mr. Rook—”

“In Miami my cousin found me a job with a dance band. Sad to say, many years later I returned to Havana, with your papa, and that’s when the bastards got us.” Over Annie’s attempts to interrupt, Rafael described how, for twelve months in a small slimy lightless cell, her father had recited Shakespeare from memory every night until dawn. “Oh, the poems and songs. He could just pull out a little verse every night from his head and it would be enough to keep me from misery. Compared to him, that Spider Woman Kiss, that was just silly movies. But this was Shakespeare. Thing of beauty, your papa. I can never repay him…What a heartbreak. And yet death comes to us all if we’re mortal, which they say historically we are—”

Annie took advantage of the young man’s necessary intake of breath. “Just stop there, okay! If my dad’s dying, why did he leave Miami and rush off to St. Louis?”

That sudden decision, Rook confessed, remained a mystery. In fact, Jack had left Golden Days entirely against Rook’s advice.

“What about his doctors? Isn’t Golden Days a hospital?” Annie paced, yanking the phone cord free of the leaping Malpy.

“Golden Days? It’s a petty creep down a dusty hall. I had a connection there and we slipped him in but I would not recommend it. Now he very much needs you to meet him in St. Louis with the
King of the Sky
. There are people who…do not wish him well.”

Annie didn’t doubt it. “What does Dad want, the big emerald?”

“Big emerald?” The Cuban sounded greedy. “You found a big emerald?”

“Or the password in his jacket? Do you know what this password’s to?”

A little too eagerly, he asked her to tell him what the password was.

She declined to do so. “Rook, what the hell are you and my father up to? Why does he need a plane? Can he even fly a plane? Frankly, I never thought he could.”

Rook claimed that Jack could do anything. Conversely, Jack and he were up to nothing. “I would basically like to offer him a helping hand at this juncture, because of my great debt to him; that’s the simple truth, Annie, no insinuation that truth is simple.”

Annie sat down in the chair that Clark carried over to her. “‘Juncture,’ meaning he’s definitely dying?”

“What’s definite? But when a man’s about to slip off a mortal coil, Annie—I feel I can call you Annie, because he talks about you all the time—a man goes to the core. So, if you want my advice, if it’s a password of Jack’s, it will have something to do with you, he is so proud of your accomplishments—”

The remark took her aback. Never before had she considered that, despite their long separation, her father might talk about her, and apparently with pride. She was surprised that he would even know of any accomplishments of hers. Sam must have told him. “Have you heard of my aunt Sam?”

The man said yes, “absolutely, of course. His sister Sam sends him news about your goings on. Impressive, number one in your class. In the end, Annie, you cannot take it or leave it with
familia
. This is what—you agree?—gives us our humanity.”

Although reluctantly moved to hear that her father had boasted about her, and although already planning to fly to St. Louis, she took a caustic tone. Even if he were dying, she asked, why should she deliver a plane to St. Louis to a man who’d thrown her away when she was seven years old?

Rook coughed as he mumbled, pardon him, but if he had been blessed with Annie’s brains, and if
his
padre were dying—which he wasn’t alive
to
die, because he had already died, young and much too fast, of this bastard cancer. And
his father’s
father, Simon Rook, had died even younger, in fact a horrible death off the coast of Cuba, thanks to the lying
cabrones
in the
CIA
.

Annie jumped to her feet, pacing. Sam rescued the plate as she flung out her arm. “Twenty years ago my ‘padre’ unloaded me on his sister and waltzed off into the ozone! So you’ll excuse me if I don’t get worked up over Jack Peregrine’s ‘dying’ wish. So fuck you!” Her outburst surprised her.

Rook’s rejoinder was also unexpected. He shouted loudly:
“Excuse me,
that is absolutely, definitely a lie! You have insulted me!”

But then she heard a pounding noise, grunts, and shrieks and realized he wasn’t talking to her anymore but to someone in his vicinity. Where had he said he was? South Beach? A store?

Finally he blurted out in a choked way that a vicious old lady was trying to wrestle out of his hand his mobile phone, claiming it was hers.

Annie heard more thumps and shouts. Then Rook was yelling, “I believe we still have a tiny ember in Florida of what once upon a time we called Liberty. Do not accuse me of committing a crime! Why would I steal your cheap cell phone? It’s pink!”

Annie could hear a woman’s voice shouting something about how this man had stolen her purse out of her shopping cart and that he was a foreigner who thought he could get away with robbing her because she was old, whereas people like him had no right even to be in Florida.

Rook shouted back, “Pardon me, my great-grandfather Isaiah Rook was a rabbi in Miami! My mother’s brother was up to his waist in the Everglades for Alpha 66 and my grandfather Simon Rook was personally recruited for a little something called Operation 40 by names you’d toss your cookies at if you heard them! That is what the fuck I’m doing in Florida!”

“What’s going on? What’s wrong with Jack?” whispered Sam, tugging at Annie’s sleeve.

Annie shouted into the phone. “Listen to me, Rook!”

The Cuban was panting. “Good-bye! The same to you!…Not you, Annie. That old lady, she’s gone,
gracias a Dios!
I apologize…Ah, let me take slow breaths. As the Great Buddha said, ‘
El camino no está en el cielo. El camino está en el corazón.’”

Annie ignored a sarcastic impulse to inquire into Buddha’s ability to speak Spanish and instead asked Rook to tell her exactly what was wrong with her father’s health.

Rook caught his breath loudly, like a balloon losing air, slowly calming himself. “He’s dying.”

“Dying from what?”

“Slings and arrows. Life. Pretty much.”

“Was it an accident?”

He coughed. “Accident? Annie, I’ll tell you my personal theory. When you’re born, in my opinion, they send you down here with everything worked out ahead of time, like, you know, a fixed race or a stacked deck of cards or a book they wrote the end of first. It could be your astronomical stars, your karma or, I don’t know, a lot of people are into this personal feng shui—From cancer, I’m sorry to tell you.”

Annie caught at the reality of the word. “Cancer? What kind?”

“Terminal.”

“Cancer?” cried Sam.

Clark whispered, “Get the name of Jack’s doctor. I could phone, see what’s going on.”

But the Cuban suddenly shouted again, “You called the cops on me, lady? You called the cops?[__] Annie, I gotta go!
”

“Call back,” she demanded. “I don’t know where in St. Louis he is!”

“Good bye!”

“Don’t hang up!”

There was a loud crackle in the phone.

Annie turned to her aunt. “Rook hung up.”

“Call him back.” Sam grabbed Annie’s arm.

Annie dialed the incoming number, but voice mail announced, “This is Evelyn Whitestone’s phone. Please leave me a message.” Then the line went dead.

S
am said, “I told you he was weird, that Rafael Rook.”

Picking up the sashimi, Annie absently ate it whole. “He said he was in prison with Dad in Cuba.”

“Your poor dad. He would have hated that.”

“Anybody would have hated it.” Annie turned to Clark. “So he says Dad’s dying of cancer.”

“What kind?”

“He didn’t say.” Annie sat down on the bottom stair. “I remember one time when Dad told some suckers he was dying of cancer because he wanted to sell them this fake land and I flipped out because I believed he was dying and he told me it wasn’t true, it was just a trick, he was fine.”

Clark rubbed her back. “I’m sure he
is
fine.” He noted that they should all remember how Jack had pulled the same “I’m dying, buy my house cheap” trick in Savannah and had been arrested for it. “Dying’s not in his personality.”

Abruptly all the lights went out and they heard the porch door tearing loose. In the dark Malpy raced around the room barking wildly, begging to be picked up.

“Clark, I hope you and the Weather Channel are happy at last!” shouted Sam, upset by more than the weather. “Now it
is
a damn tornado.”

The screen door shattered loudly as it blew off the porch.

Clark called out through the darkness. “Get the dogs. Go to the basement!”

Grabbing up Teddy and Malpy, they felt their way down the steep steps to the old Pilgrim’s Rest cellar, where Sam had collected all the broken objects, old toys, cracked leftovers of past generations that she couldn’t squeeze up into the attic. Here in the cool stone space, Peregrines had hidden for over a hundred years from bad weather and other calamities, like Yankee invaders and teenaged parties with amplified music.

Between the furnace and three of Annie’s bicycles, illuminated in the beam of Sam’s large flashlight, they stood together, listening to the cracks of snapping trees overhead. Sam used her light to see her cell phone to call Georgette, who told her, “Thanks. I’m in my basement, sitting on a moldy beanbag.”

“Call me back every ten minutes.”

Malpy whimpered but Teddy fell quickly to sleep.

After a while, Sam started her imitation of Katherine Hepburn. “‘Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.’”

Because niece and uncle had lived for years with a woman who owned a movie store and who responded to life crises almost exclusively by quoting classic films, the inimitable Hepburn voice, even badly mimicked, was somehow as soothing as a lullaby.

“
African Queen
,” Annie said.

Howling wind tore a whole tree loose with a terrible noise; it crashed near the house. “Oh God,” moaned Sam. “This is scary.”

Clark began: “‘Fasten your seat belts.’”

Annie finished. “‘It’s going to be a bumpy night.’”

“You two are making fun of me, aren’t you?” Sam shined the flashlight in their faces.

Annie and Clark told her yes, they were, and made her laugh. On they went, thinking of more quotes for Sam, soothing her with the murmur of memory; it was what they had done for decades, watching old movies on the couch together, eating with chopsticks from their Chinese takeout boxes.

Finally Sam told them to stop. “It’s like getting your hair brushed too long. First it’s a pleasure, then it gets on your nerves.”

Silence fell. After a long pause, Clark asked, “Know why the poor man became a baker?”

Annie answered, “Because he kneaded the dough.”

“Guess I already told you that one. How about the butcher that backed into his meat grinder and got a little behind in his work?”

Sam muttered, “Please. Top ten worst.” She phoned Georgette, whose line was busy or dead.

Gradually the noise of the storm subsided. Malpy stopped squeaking. Clark pushed open the cellar doors and they looked out. Rain was falling but the wind had eased. Pilgrim’s Rest had survived another storm.

Back in the front hall, Sam lit the half-dozen kerosene lanterns she kept for such an emergency, just as she kept extra water in jugs and extra gasoline in cans, extra salt for the driveway, first aid kits, antidotes. She telephoned Georgette next door again and reached her. “I told you to call me in ten minutes! Have you got candles?”

Georgette said she had found the five-dozen candles Sam had given her during last winter’s predicted power outage. “I was on the phone with my mother. I told her I was alone hiding in the basement in the middle of a twister and she said she’d gotten a birdie on the eighth hole.”

Sam sighed. “Tell me something you don’t know.”

“Okay. Annie’s not up in that plane. Is she?”

“Ask her.” Sam handed Annie the phone. Clark and she carried the lanterns around to check the house.

Annie told Georgette that she definitely planned on going to St. Louis. “The storm’s pretty much over.”

“It is? Look out the windows.”

“I have to find my dad.”

“Wouldn’t you have done it by now? I mean, almost twenty years? It’s a big house, but it’s not that big.”

“Don’t be funny. This so-called friend of his, Rafael Rook, called and says he’s got terminal cancer.”

“
But somehow you don’t believe it.” Georgette sighed. “Take it from me. They do die. George is in an urn next to his Rotary awards. On the other hand, Kim’s in a golfing retirement center shooting birdies. Count your blessings? Okay, I’m going to bed. I wanted to watch the History Channel. It was the excavation of Pompeii. I don’t know why a petrified dog should be so fascinating.”