The Four Corners Of The Sky (8 page)

“Lately. He just asks me how you are, then he hangs up.” Sam took Jack’s letter from her niece, studied it. “But yesterday, out of the blue, he calls, says how he’s really sick, asks me if you still fly the
King of the Sky
. Then today this FedEx comes. He says he’s dying, but well, you know Jack.”

“Not very well.” Annie shrugged.

“All I can hope is,” sighed Sam, “he’s lying. He usually is. That’s all I can hope.”

“What’s the fraud they’re after him for?” asked Clark, returning downstairs in dry shorts and T-shirt.

“False pretenses,” said Annie. “Ha-ha.”

“And a Miami detective called you about it?”

She summarized her conversation with the pleasant-voiced Detective Hart about the gold relic, the Queen of the Sea.

Sam gave a sympathetic squeeze to her niece’s arm. “Cuba thinks Jack’s got something that’s real?”

“Stupid Cuba,” Clark muttered. “Sam, you ought to change out of those wet clothes.”

Sam hushed him. “Don’t be a doctor. The other thing is—this guy’s been calling all afternoon—”

“Sergeant Hart?” asked Annie.

“No. Rafael Rook. A weird-talking guy. He’s in Miami too. He says Jack’s really ‘going fast.’”

Annie raised her eyebrow in a way she’d copied from old Claudette Colbert movies. “Jack was always going fast. With Jack, it was always the back of that leather flight jacket you were looking at. Dumps me for nearly twenty years and now a FedEx message he’s dying, lend him my plane, and rush him his flight jacket to St. Louis? I don’t think so.”[__] She unbuttoned her shirt, fanning herself. “I’m going to go put on some shorts. First it’s pouring rain, now the air’s dead. I’ll hurry.”

“Everything will be okay,” said Clark, shaking his head, watching Annie race up the stairs two at a time. “No hurry.”

When Annie thought of her father, it was always scenes of perpetual motion and precipitate change. A measureless highway of mildewed motels.

It was not until she was flying jets for the Navy that memories of those road trips rushed out of the past at her as if they’d been waiting in the sky. The scenes were underscored with fragments of old songs.

“Meet Me in St. Lou-ee, Lou-ee,” he’d sung to her when they’d gone to that city once and had almost gotten killed in a motel there.

“Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby,” he’d sung in a white and gold hotel suite, marching in from the bathroom, carrying a cake with five sparkling candles, with a crowd of strangers in loud-colored clothes around her bed, laughing so loudly so close to her that she’d burst into tears.

“La Bamba” he’d sung in the shiny plastic booth of a Taco Bell while carefully cutting a burrito into small pieces. “This is all we’ve got for supper, Captain Kid, we’re busted. If money mattered, we’d need to ‘go back and get a shitload of dimes.’” She’d laughed with him at the reference to
Blazing Saddles
. That time they’d driven all night and then had slept in the red Mustang at a rest stop with the doors locked and with a can of Mace nearby. “Just spray it in their face,” he told her.

“Whose face?”

“Anybody that gets in this car.”

When she asked him why they were always speeding down the road, he made his arms into wings and glided around her in the parking lot. “Because we’re Peregrines! The peregrine falcon is the fastest bird in the world, Annie. It can do a 45-degree dive at 217 miles per hour! Imagine that. Lindbergh in the
Spirit of St. Louis
could only go 117 miles per hour. So that little Peregrine bird is going 100 miles per hour faster than
Lindbergh
!” Years later, to her amazement, she was to discover that this fact about the diving speed of a peregrine hawk was one of the few true things he’d told her.

When she’d asked her father to identify the shadowy men from whom they were running so fast, and who’d occasionally almost caught them, he’d exasperatingly offer her cartoon names, like “Snidely Whiplash” or “The Penguin” or “The Man from Yesterday” or “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”

Whenever she wanted to know who her mother was, he made up some romantic story: Her mother was a circus acrobat, her mother had the highest IQ ever recorded in her hometown, her mother was the heir in exile to the throne of some small country whose name he would change from one nonsense word to another.

Even as a child she’d noticed inconsistencies. He was a compulsive liar, in fact a professional one. The only constant in his remarks about her mother was the claim that this woman had always said how much she loved Annie and how wonderful she thought Annie was. But the truth was hard to avoid: It did not appear that her mother had wanted a daughter in her life, however wonderful she might have thought her. And when Annie asked why her mother had left them, the answer was always that she’d thought her child would be better off with her father. Even at five and six, Annie found this assumption, if true, culpably naïve on her mother’s part.

Whenever she asked Jack Peregrine about his own work (fathers on television had jobs), he told her that he “lived a Life of Art.” By five, she had decided that what he called “a Life of Art” was in fact a life of crime. With her small solemn face she had watched him with a skepticism that time only increased. He was always on the phone, sometimes in a language she didn’t understand—he said it was Shangri-lang—always meeting strangers in peculiar places, sending cryptic messages, getting envelopes in return. Packages got left on his car seat or atop a restaurant table or even inside a trashcan in a city park once. Envelopes often had cash in them.

Just before they’d driven suddenly to Emerald that last time together, she’d sneaked a look at an unstamped mailer that had been slipped under their motel room door; inside it she’d found an Irish passport with a picture of her father but with a different name. Folded in the passport was a street map of Havana, Cuba.

Aunt Sam and Uncle Clark didn’t contradict her when she’d told them her father was a criminal but Sam could or would give her no details other than that in the year of Annie’s birth a card had arrived from Jack, postmarked Key West, with the entirely surprising news that he was raising an infant daughter on his own and that the two were “doing fine.” A year after that, he’d shown up with this baby (Annie) and his single-engine airplane. The two of them, father and daughter, stayed at Pilgrim’s Rest slightly less than a month, during which time Annie learned to walk. He then took Annie away and left the
King of the Sky
behind.

Afterwards, Sam heard nothing for six years. Then out of the blue he called to ask if he could drop Annie off “temporarily.” Two days later, he arrived with the child asleep in his red Mustang convertible, stayed only long enough to beg Sam for help because he was “in big trouble.” He didn’t explain what kind of trouble, or where the girl’s mother was, or
who
her mother was, or how he could bear to leave his daughter behind on her seventh birthday, after he’d kept her with him for so many years on the road. He asked his sister to hide Annie if anyone came to the house in the following weeks asking for him, and to say that she hadn’t seen him in years. Then he kissed her good-bye and told her, “Annie’s a great kid. I’ll be back.”

But of course he wasn’t.

In Annie’s early years at Pilgrim’s Rest, she asked Sam to tell her stories about her father’s youth. Sam told her tales of his escapades back when their next-door neighbor George was his buddy and the two boys were always “in trouble.” Stories of how they sold off family heirlooms at a Raleigh flea market and used the money to take the bus to California (the Phoenix police returned them); how they spent months on end digging in the yard for buried rubies and emeralds that they never found. But Sam told only childhood stories. She said that by the time Jack reached his teens, she was in college with her own troubles and knew little of her brother’s adolescence, except that when George’s sister Ruthie ran off with an older married man it had broken Jack’s heart.

Mostly Sam defended him. She denied Clark’s claim that he had robbed his dead father on the day of the man’s funeral, leaving Sam behind to deal with their crazy mother. She assured Annie that he’d always had a good, loving heart.

Pressed to explain why, if Jack’s heart was so good, he had dropped his only child off like an unwanted pet at the pound, Sam would fall back on assurances that he had loved his daughter “more than he could say.”

“Obviously,” the girl agreed as soon as she’d mastered the ironical eyebrow she had learned from Claudette Colbert.

“Let it go,” advised Sam.

In large part Annie did. But one day, in her teens, out jogging alone, she was running slowly along the path that wound through the old cemetery of St. Mark’s Church, where all the Peregrines were buried, and she came across a story her father had never told her. Studying the family grave markings there, she noticed a little marker with small curved wings, sunk in grass and obscured beneath the big purple blossoms of a rhododendron. Crawling under that bush’s branches, she rubbed at the moss and lichen obscuring the name on the grave. When she finally was able to decipher the carved letters, the sight knocked the breath out of her and she slithered quickly backwards, as if she’d been bitten. The small stone said:

John Ingersoll Peregrine

1946–1948

Taken From Me

John Ingersoll Peregrine was her father’s name.

Out of breath after racing across town to her aunt’s store, she asked Sam to explain why her father had a grave that said he’d died. Sam, her brow furrowed, handed Annie a glass of water, her remedy for all ills, then explained that the name John Ingersoll Peregrine was the name of Sam and Jack’s older brother, whom they’d never met because he’d died at two years old, before they were born. She said that their mother Grandee had chosen to give the dead boy’s name, John Ingersoll Peregrine, to the baby Jack. It might seem odd but it must have been Sam’s mother’s way of coping with the loss of her first son. The child who’d died so young had been called “Johnny,” whereas Annie’s father had always been called “Jack.” Sam was sure that Jack, wherever he was, was alive and doing fine and that Annie shouldn’t worry about him.

Annie ran next door where Georgette’s mother told her that, yes, there had been a baby Peregrine but she hadn’t been able to find out much about it. She clamped her hands over her eyes, her ears, her mouth in a hyperbolic pantomime.

Annie returned to Sam with Kim Nickerson’s report. Why was the gravestone at St. Mark’s so hidden? Why had the town been reluctant to talk about John Ingersoll Peregrine?

Sam’s teeth bit her mouth, then she sighed, then she said that it wasn’t a happy subject. Johnny had died in an accident. Her mother had been pregnant with Sam at the time.

“What kind of accident?”

Sam rubbed her eyes. “In a pool we used to have.”

“A pool? Where?”

“Just in the yard. Where the herb garden is now.”

“The pool that’s gone?”

But at that moment a shopper interrupted them, bustling into Now Voyager hoping for a just-released movie; Annie learned no further details about her long dead toddler uncle Johnny. That evening her aunt had brushed the questions aside, claiming she was late to a hospital board meeting. A teenager with her own life, Annie wasn’t much intrigued by a long dead relative she’d never met. She let the subject drop. In fact, in general she lost interest in asking Sam about Kim’s Peregrine stories. It was best to keep on the move anyhow, stay out of reverse, stay out of the past. The past was a deep pool covered by grass, like the grave marker of John Ingersoll Peregrine.

T
he storm rumbled across the fields that rolled down from Pilgrim’s Rest. Clark pulled off his glasses to examine the tiny brown and red object that Annie had unhooked from her father’s letter. “It’s a dry fly. Royal Coachman.” He showed her the key. “And this looks like, I don’t know, maybe a powerboat key. Maybe Jack’s planning on a sort of reconciliation father-daughter fly-fishing trip before he passes away, if he’s passing away, which I’m having trouble believing. He’s only forty-eight.”

Annie studied the FedEx envelope. “Why would he be in Miami, in a place called Golden Days Center for Active Living?”

Sam rubbed her white hair. “I’m older than Jack, and I’m way too young for one of those places.”

“You play tennis,” Clark reminded her. “Jack played the horses.”

“You don’t die at forty-eight from playing the horses.” Tightening her brow, Sam felt the stationery’s logo. “Cheap. Golden Days. He told me he was calling from a hospital.”

Annie shrugged. “Why’s he saying, ‘Meet me in St. Louis,’ if he’s in Miami? If he’s dying, why’s he hopping around the country?”

Clark rubbed her back. “Travel was always Jack’s strong suit.”

Annie opened the porch door to look up at the greenish-black swirls of fast-moving clouds. “That’s one way to put it.”

What did she remember of that last trip her father and she had taken to St. Louis? She could recall only how long the bridge had looked, reaching over the Mississippi River, how high the Arch had curved above the city, how the arch was sometimes gold, sometimes silver in the sky.

She suddenly remembered the television screen in a motel room in St. Louis, on which Egyptian clouds were gusting around in
The Ten Commandments
as Moses parted the Red Sea. She’d been watching that movie. Her father had been trying, unsuccessfully, to reach somebody on the phone. She’d been hiding under his arm, upset with Moses for closing the Red Sea over the Pharaoh’s horses. Terrifyingly, there was a banging on their door, a raspy voice calling out, “Pizza.” Her father threw her into a closet so fast he hurt her arms. Peeking out, she saw a big man in a windbreaker kicking at the door, snapping the chain and falling into the room. The man shoved her father back into the desk chair, tipping it. “Nice to meet you, Jack.”

Her dad said, “You’ve got the wrong guy. Swear to God.”

The man showed him a black pistol under his belt. “Be nice. Your little girl, where is she?”

“Not here.”