The Garden of Dead Dreams (24 page)

“Fine,” Carl whispered.

Etta snapped her gaze to him.

“I’ll take you to talk to Galen, but only because he’s a hell of a lot closer than you think. Robert North convinced me to give him a ride to a cheap motel on the other side of town two nights ago. I don’t see as how talking to someone as twisted as Galen is going to do you any good, but I’ll take you. On one condition.”

Etta wiped at her tears, anticipation and panic jumping to the back of her throat.

“Don’t even think about leaving my sight when we’re with that crazy asshole.”

* * *

“Word of advice?” Carl pulled to a stop in the parking lot for the Jackson Motor Motel, a two-story L-shaped building. A few dim bulbs lit up some doors on the second floor, and a vacancy light glowed red above the washed out wooden sign. His face was submerged in shadows, but Etta could just make out his motions. He took off his cowboy hat, set it on the seat between them, and ran his hand through his hair. “Don’t mention his father.” Carl opened his door, the sound of the rain thundering inside. The dome light illuminated his tall frame as he slid off the seat.

Carl’s door slammed shut and darkness washed over the truck again. Carl was the last one who’d seen Olivia, Etta realized. Olivia had sat exactly where Etta was on the last night anyone had seen her. A shiver swept up Etta’s spine.

Her door creaked opened. The sound of the rain and Carl’s face next to hers filled her senses. He reached for her arm. She let him take it, her feet finding the ground. The rain was icy on her face. They climbed a rickety iron staircase. Carl stopped in front of room two-o-eight, one of the doors lit by a bare light bulb. The flickering blue light of a television eased from the sliver between the drawn curtains.

Etta winced as her knuckles struck the cold metal door.

She knocked again, harder.

The door flew open, and Etta reeled backward. She recognized him. She’d been peering at his face for months. It hung in every corridor of the lodge, in the library, in Hardin’s office. “You look just like him,” Etta whispered, even though he looked less like his father every second, because the images were still, and Galen’s face never stopped moving. His lips moved even when he wasn’t speaking—pursing, smacking together. His pale face was grooved with creases, his black hair streaked with white.

“What are you selling? Girl Scout cookies, sex? I got no use for either one.” Etta’s gaze went to the hole where Galen’s two bottom teeth should be.

Galen’s gaze shot to Carl, and recognition washed over his face. When he looked at Etta again, the intensity of his gaze made her hands shake. “Bobby told me I had about as much chance of seeing you as a man has of dying of a shark bite in Kansas. Fancy metaphors for such a waste of a man. Doesn’t give a damn if a friend gets murdered, but cries like a little girl if one of his piece-of-shit poems gets a bad review. What layer of hell do you suppose the devil reserves for fucks like him?”

“Mind watching your tongue?” Carl’s voice was low.

“It’s okay,” Etta said. Was Galen talking about Robert North?

Carl stepped closer to Galen and glared at him

“How do you know who I am?” Etta asked.

“If you don’t mind, I was locked inside a building for three decades. I can’t stand being outside anymore.” Galen jerked away from the door and shuffled into the room.

Etta took a step forward to follow him, but Carl grabbed her arm. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” he growled.

Etta gave him her most pleading look, and he dropped his hand. The smell of the cigarette smoke hit her first then the heat. Sweat beaded on her forehead. There were piles of paper stacked everywhere—on the floor and table, the TV, which was on, but without sound. Its flickering light was the only light in the room, except for one of the bedside lamps, which illuminated the floral-print wallpaper and the stacks of paper splayed across the bed. “I thought you lived in the forest.”

Galen set his black eyes on her for a moment then laughed—a hacking raspy sound. “Do you think I’m Rumpelstiltskin?”

“No. I . . . How do you know who I am?”

Galen paced. He was thin and wiry, and his body seemed to jump when he moved. “Bobby told me some girl was asking questions. Figured it was the same girl Matt’s girl talked about. I looked for you.” Galen stopped pacing, his skin shining blue in the TV light. His face became still for a single second then his lips started to move again. “I was afraid you’d end up where she is. Where I was.” He brought his hand up and ran his finger along a scar from his chin halfway up the side of his cheek. “They diagnose you, so no one ever listens to you again. Who’s going to believe someone in an asylum? It’s as good as killing you. Better. Nobody’s gonna turn up a body.”

He moved to the bed, leaned over, and sorted through a stack of papers, his hands jerking. A soft grunting seemed to come from somewhere deep in his throat. Then he stepped toward Etta.

Carl stepped in front of her. “Don’t lay a hand on her.”

Galen extended a crumpled piece of paper toward Etta. She reached past Carl’s outstretched arm to take it.

A nine line stanza and a six line stanza. A sonnet. Etta’s gaze dropped to the bottom of the page where the initials M.L. were neatly scrawled. She jerked her head up to meet Galen’s blinking gaze. “Was going to leave it with that.” She followed his gaze to her thumb, to Olivia’s tourmaline ring. She’d slipped it on after she’d found it on her porch and had all but forgotten it. “Thought about trying to roll it up and stick it in there, hoping you’d find it, but the rain never stops pissing down around here, does it? Don’t know what the Jap-lover thought was so holy about that place. Being out there was worse than being strapped down with white coats cramming pills down my throat. Course the Jap-lover had his whore geishas to entertain him.”

Etta looked from the poem to Galen. “Is the Jap-lover your father? Vincent Buchanan?”

Immediately, she regretted the question.

When Galen got angry, he moved more than usual, not just the twitching and blinking and shaking, but jerking and pacing, his hands flailing out to his sides. His speech dissolved into mumbling. One of his eyes watered, a steady trickle down his cheek that glimmered when he turned toward the TV. And for several minutes “white coats” and “Jap-lover” were the only words Etta could decipher.

Carl stood with his arms crossed over his chest glaring at Galen. Occasionally he shot Etta a look, which she supposed was meant to convey a message—either
I told you not to bring up his father
or
Let’s get the hell out of here
. It didn’t matter. Etta wasn’t planning on taking either suggestion.

As Galen’s nonsensical mumbling gave way to teeth gnashing, Etta stepped toward the brass lamp on the wall next to the bed. She squinted at the paper, blinking to make out the typewritten words in the sporadic television flickers and read aloud:

Winter comes to the garden of dead dreams

Rain puddles on yesterday’s lives decayed

Wilts azaleas once lovingly displayed

Turns decay to life with relentless streams

Washes away September’s pale sunbeams

Winter clouds above and memories fade

Moss coats barren bark in the season’s shade

Here, truth is more enshrouded than it seems.

I have searched the deserted forest floor

Have hunted secrets sleeping with the souls

Have sought out stories about peace and war

and pondered the men who once dug these holes

The garden of his summer you must score

The truth is there behind her marking stone

M.L. November 2, 1985

The room was silent except for a low wheezing whir that seemed to come from somewhere deep in Galen’s throat, like he was struggling to push air in and out of his lungs.

“Matthew Lowther was a poet?” Etta said the words aloud mostly to distract herself from the sound of Galen’s breath.

“He was a genius. Renaissance man. Martyr.” Galen rubbed at his face, his pale fingers trembling so badly that Etta looked away. “The Jap-lover . . .” he mumbled.

“You sick pervert,” Carl cut him off. Etta spun around.

Carl had moved from her side to a particle-board writing desk, which looked as though it was about to collapse under the piles of paper stacked atop it, some of them bundled in rubber bands, their yellowed pages curling up. Etta moved toward him. He held a faded photograph. Even in the shadows, Etta knew the face instantly: the dark eyes and olive skin, the flushed cheeks. The little girl staring back at her was perhaps three or four, but Olivia’s features had hardly changed at all. “Was this his?” Etta spun around. “Was it Matthew Lowther’s?”

Galen paced. “I found Matt’s little girl. He talked about her all the time. They thought I was doped up and semi-consciousness in their asylum, but I found her, all grown up. Got her into their snooty little academy. Found Bobby too. The only thing that kept me going all those years was dreaming of the frigid geisha’s face when Bobby swaggered through those doors.

“I should’ve known Bobby wouldn’t do Matt justice. All that hair dye seeping into his brain.” Galen laughed. He stopped pacing next to the bed, his face lit in the lamp light. “Tell me, your dad ever cheat on your mother?” His face was still for a minute then one eye pinched shut as though a gnat had flown into it, and his lips started to move again.

Wallace Fox left the house at seven thirty each morning after a bowl of rolled oats with a teaspoon of brown sugar and eight ounces of orange juice. At noon he ate a turkey sandwich with a slice of tomato and one sprig of iceberg lettuce, and then prayed for the remainder of his lunch hour. His leisure reading material consisted of exactly one book:
The New Order Translation of the New Testament
, which he read every evening between nine thirty and ten, at which point he turned off his light and inserted his ear plugs. Etta couldn’t imagine Wallace Fox breaking from his routine to have sex with anyone, even her mother. But her mind went to Lewellyn, the organ player at church, who always waddled to her father’s side after service. And the students who waited in the straight-backed chairs in his secretary’s office, waiting to consult with her father about biblical passages or position papers or vexing moral quandaries. Nausea churned through Etta’s stomach at the thought of her father sleeping with any of them, which, she realized, had been exactly Galen’s intention.

She dropped her gaze to the piece of paper, and read the poem again, trying to make sense of it. The garden of his summer. Truth. Truth? The play. Hans staggering through the forest. “Something’s buried in the cemetery?”

Galen’s hands trembled and his pace quickened as he walked toward the TV and back again. “Matt wasn’t a poet. Only reason he’d write a sonnet was for Bobby. The prima donna was obsessed with them. Thought he was going to be the next Petrarch. Matt left it in Bobby’s desk. Probably hoped if something happened to him, the worthless sack of bones would read it and go find the manuscript he’d been working on. Too bad Bobby doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself. Didn’t even show anyone the poem till I tracked him down last summer.”

Etta gasped. “Maybe I have it.” She lunged to her bag and tugged on the straps. “His manuscript. Maybe he didn’t bury it in the cemetery.” She thrust the dissertation toward Galen. “It’s about your father.”

Galen seized the book and heaved it into the wall. It plunked to the shag carpet.

“Don’t call that useless Jap-lover my father. He kept his Jap geisha and her half-wit son down the road dressed in silk and pearls. My mother died of desolation, of abandonment, and he sent me to rot in a head case house while his geisha’s little boy ran that store.”

Galen stepped in front of Etta, his eyes flashing blue in the television’s reflection. She inhaled the scent of him—acrid, stale, and sour—but forced herself not to break his gaze.

Galen jerked his chin toward the dissertation. “You think a man gets killed because of a pedantic piece of academic shit like that? So what. The famous writer had a Jap geisha whore on the side. He took up with a frigid poet half his age. He had affairs with a half-dozen other slut Lolitas. One of them thought people gave a shit and did a series of interviews with the New Yorker just before the Jap-lover died, tried to expose America’s beloved patriot as a letch. Guess what? People worshiped him more. He liked his liquor in large quantities and snorted lines of blow so he could stay awake through the night pounding away at his Remington, storming at anyone who knocked on his door—even his six-year-old son. No one gives a shit. Americans want their luminaries blemished and raw, deranged and narcotized. Makes ‘em more intriguing.”

Galen stepped closer to Etta. His breath grazed her hair. “Whatever’s buried in that cemetery will bring down the Jap-lover and his precious academy, and the henchmen and frigid geisha bitch who hijacked his royalties by convincing him to send me to putrefy in an asylum. It’s not some soap opera sob-story about a half-orphaned kid making friends with a Jap girl who ruined my mother’s life. It’s something they’re dead serious about keeping in the ground.”

* * *

Carl lunged between Etta and Galen, his dark gaze lancing Etta’s. All of the hairs on Etta’s body stood up at once. Panic surged through her. Carl had worked for Hardin for years. He’d always been willing to fill in as needed, to do whatever Hardin asked. He’s the one who walked the grounds searching for Galen. He’s the one who got rid of Olivia. What had made Etta think she could trust him? She took a step backward. Her calves struck the edge of the mattress.

Then the world went black, and she was on the ground, her elbow grinding into the carpet, Carl’s weight crushed against her. Then he edged off her, and she felt a cold dampness swirling with the heat and heard the sound of rain roaring into the room. Had the door blown open?

A voice sliced through Etta’s ears like a knife blade. It was unmistakable.

The major.

Uriah Winston Mills’ thin, wiry shadow darted in front of the TV. Then the world went black again. Etta forced her eyes open and saw a flash of metal. Major Mills’ outstretched arm moved in a slow arc from side to side in front of the TV, the outline of the handgun juxtaposed against the talk show. Behind it a smiling host leaned forward in her chair gesturing at her panel of guests. Tonight’s topic was uplifting if their smiles were any indication. The camera panned the audience—a hundred smiling faces.