The Sleepless (5 page)

‘Take me,’ he said, in a thick, slurred voice. 

‘What?’ asked the man. The sirens were very close now, and the wind was getting up. 

‘Take
me
,’
he repeated. 

‘Your choice, Your Honour,’ the man replied. 

He came around to the side of John’s seat, placed his right hand between John’s shoulder blades, and pushed John forward, so that his face was pressed between his knees. Then he positioned the parrot-beak cutting-blades on either side of John’s neck. 

John tried to think of nothing at all. He couldn’t think of a prayer. He saw in nitpicking detail the helicopter’s grey-flecked carpet, with a shiny black blob of chewing gum on it, and the dark rococo patterns of Dean’s arterial blood. He felt the metallic teeth of the cutting-blades pinching his skin, but they were more of an irritation than anything else. He saw the shadow of a cloud crossing the carpet, or perhaps it was smoke. 

Then he heard a hydraulic hiss; and his whole being detonated into blinding white pain white white white – and he heard, he actually
heard
his own head tumbling on to the floor. 

But he didn’t hear the parrot-beak snapping its way through the aluminum supports of Sissy’s seat. Neither did he hear the man clambering out of the helicopter; and the whooping sirens and shouts that quickly followed. 

Nor did he hear the softly-rumbling
whoomph
of kerosene catching fire, as the helicopter exploded in a huge balloon of flame. 

Two 

There was a cautious knock at the den door and Michael instantly flung away his copy of
Mushing
magazine and vaulted off the leather couch. By the time Jason opened the door and came inside, he was sitting at his desk in front of the window, his head resting on his hand, scribbling on a legal-size pad as if he had been scribbling for hours. 

He kept on while Jason approached his desk. Jason trod softly because he knew Dad was busy and didn’t like to have his train of thought interrupted. Jason was thirteen, skinny and gentle and tall for his age. His blond hair was cropped like a scrubbing brush. He wore black-framed Clark Kent spectacles which made his ears stick out, but he had the most arresting blue eyes, clear as two lakes, and a lovely dry sense of humour. He wore a T-shirt with the red-lettered slogan Dyslexia Lures OK. 

Michael swung around in his battered green leather captain’s chair and said, with exaggerated patience, ‘Yes, Jason, what’s the problem?’ 

‘There’s a guy outside wants to see you,’ said Jason. 

‘A guy, hunh?’ Michael inquired. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’ 

Jason shrugged. ‘He just said, “Is Mr Rearden home?” ‘ 

Michael leaned back in his chair and tapped his front teeth with his Pilot pen. ‘He didn’t mention Games Company?’ 

‘Unh-hunh.’ 

‘I’m expecting somebody from Games Company. You see all this stuff on this desk? All these hundreds of little pieces of paper? This is it, this is my latest money-spinner. Project X.’ 

Jason glanced out of the corner of his eye at the heaps and heaps of notelets and Post-its and newspaper cuttings and legal sheets and torn-out magazine articles, all of them softly ruffling in the breeze that poured softly through the half-open window. 

‘You’re going to start recycling paper?’ he suggested. 

Michael swung out his arm and gave him a feinted cuff around the ear. ‘Recycling paper! Smartass!’ 

He swung around again, and picked up his pad. ‘This, my friend, is the first major new question-and-answer game since Trivial Pursuit. This is going to make millions. No, I tell a lie, billions. In years to come, they’re going to talk about this game in the same breath as Monopoly and Scrabble. That’s when you and I are living in luxury in Palm Beach, with power-boats and Lamborghinis and all the babes we can handle. Well, all the babes
you
can handle. I’m quite happy with your mom.’ 

Jason gravely regarded the mess and said, ‘It looks kind of complicated.’ 

Michael pulled a face. ‘Oh, for sure.
Now
it
looks complicated. But think about it. Before they put a clock together, it looks kind of complicated, doesn’t it? All those little cogs and stuff. But by the time I’ve finished – ‘ he shuffled some more papers into order ‘ – well, it’ll be less complicated.’ 

‘The guy said he really had to see you.’ 

‘Oh, the guy. Did he tell you what his name was?’ 

‘Rocky Woods, I think.’ 

Michael looked up at him with a grave face. ‘Rocky Woods? Is that what he said?’ 

‘His exact words were, “I have to see your father. Ask him if he remembers Rocky Woods.” ‘ 

Michael covered his mouth with his hand for a moment, and said nothing. Only his eyes betrayed what he was thinking. They were darting quickly from side to side as if he were reading from an autocue, or vividly remembering something that had upset him, in more detail than most people care to. 

‘Dad?’ asked Jason. ‘Did I do right? Do you want me to tell him to go away?’ 

But Michael reached out and took hold of Jason’s wrist, and squeezed it, and tried to smile, and said, ‘You did fine. How about asking him in?’ 

‘Okay, if you say so.’ 

When Jason had gone running off, leaving the door ajar, Michael stood up and walked around his desk to the window. His den was not much more than a run-down conservatory on stilts, overlooking the grassy dunes of New Seabury beach, and the permanently blue waters of Nantucket Sound. The rest of the house was just as spartan – a three-bedroomed summer cottage that he had bought from a friend at Plymouth Insurance. It was all bare scrubbed boards and Quaker furniture and Indian-style rugs. When he had brought his family down from Boston to see how Michael was getting along, his friend had joked that it was like spending the weekend with the Pilgrim Fathers – ‘all succotash and pumpkin pie and how are we going to survive the winter?’ 

Michael was a lean, hawkish-nosed man of thirty-four, with mousy, short-cropped hair and eyes that were blue and opaque, where his son’s were blue and clear. He was handsome in the way that Jimmy Dean had been handsome; or the young Clint Eastwood; a little too drawn-looking and slightly deranged and hurt in the way he looked at people. In his blue check short-sleeved shirt, his wrists looked knobbly and treble-jointed, and his khaki hiking shorts didn’t too much for his gangly legs. His movements were hesitant and shy, and occasionally almost effeminate. But there was no doubting his masculinity. Apart from the fact that he had courted and married the cutest girl at Plymouth Insurance, his interests in life were classically male: fishing, baseball, drinking beer and tinkering with things. 

His greatest passion was what he called ‘downwind thinking’ – which meant solving problems by approaching them from downwind and jumping on them when they least suspected it. Since they had moved to New Seabury over a year and a half ago, he had invented a self-releasing weight for casting fishing lines to record distances, and converted Patsy’s electro-exercising machine into a device for removing barnacles and limpets and other shellfish from the bottom of yachts. In the same way that the exercising machine caused human muscles to contract, the ‘Limpet-Zapper’ put the bivalves’ whole bodies into spasm, so that they literally jumped off the hull. 

But two moderately successful inventions hadn’t generated anything like enough income to keep Patsy in pantyhose or Jason in Adidas, and they were still living like the Pilgrim Fathers, except it was meat loaf instead of succotash and Jell-O instead of pumpkin pie and how are we going to survive until the end of the month, don’t even think about the winter. 

He watched the cloud shadows sailing across the sands. They reminded him of giant stingrays, gliding swiftly and silently across the floor of the ocean. He saw three children flying a red box kite, and a woman in a pink swimsuit and a huge pink hat, walking a brown-and-white spaniel. If only you could capture this scene, exactly as it was, and hang it on your wall, complete with wind and movement and sound, and the net curtains stirring at the window. He smiled to himself and realized that he had just invented television. 

There was no knock at the door; but he heard it swing open a little more. He turned around and there was Joe Garboden, same as ever, in a mauve-and-green-and-cerise-and-yellow-striped blazer that looked as if it had been rejected by the Mambo Kings for being too showy. Joe was large-headed, with thick black greasy hair, and cheeks with the texture of cauliflower. His eyes were deep set and glittery, but kindly, and he smiled a whole lot – more than the average, anyway – which was what made him one of most acceptable bearers of bad news that Michael had ever known. 

‘Hallo, Joe,’ he said, keeping his hands buried in the pockets of his hiking shorts. 

Joe came and stood next to him, one hand extended. He waited; and waited; and in the end he said, ‘What’s the matter, Michael, playing with your dinkle more important than greeting an old colleague?’ 

Michael reluctantly took out his hand and shook it. Joe smiled, and then stared at the palm of his hand and said, ‘I hope you
weren’t
playing with your dinkle.’ 

‘I’m not going blind, am I?’ Michael retorted. 

‘That’s only because you’re not doing it right.’ 

Joe dropped his greasy Panama hat on to the desk, right on top of Michael’s legal pad, and then he stepped right up to the window and admired the view. ‘Beautiful day, isn’t it? This house is heaven in summer. What’s it like in midwinter? Hell, I’ll bet. How do you heat it?’ 

‘Blankets.’ 

‘Blankets?’ 

‘That’s right. From Thanksgiving evening to Memorial Day morning we stay in bed.’ 

‘Hey, good deal. Especially with Patsy, if you don’t mind my saying so. She still looks like everything a man ever dreamed about.’ 

‘Oh ... you saw her?’ 

‘Sure, we talked. She’s out in the yard, washing the car. Or ... what shall I say? ... washing the bits that hold the rust together.’ 

‘What brings you all the way down here?’ Michael asked him. ‘You didn’t come to show me that coat, I hope.’ 

Joe said, ‘Mind if I park my ass?’ and eased himself down on the leather couch. He picked up Michael’s magazine and frowned at the cover. ‘
Mushing
?’
he asked, in disbelief. 

Michael said, ‘Mushing ... you know, training huskies to pull sledges, skijoring, that kind of thing. Mush! Mush!’ 

‘People do a lot of that around here?’ asked Joe, straightfaced. 

‘Forget it, Joe – it’s just an idea I’ve been working on.’ 

‘All right,’ said Joe. He took out a crumpled handkerchief and wiped his forehead. ‘I guess I’d better tell you why I’ve come.’ 

‘You mentioned Rocky Woods. My kid thought that was your name.’ 

‘I’m sorry. That’s not a name to make jokes about it, is it?’ 

Michael didn’t answer, but turned away, and watched the box kite ducking and weaving over the shoreline. He could guess, approximately, what Joe was going to ask him, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to look at his face when he did. 

Joe said, ‘You heard about John O’Brien, of course. The Supreme Court justice-to-be.’ 

‘Of course. Who didn’t? Pretty average luck, hunh? The Lord didn’t mind giving it to him, but the Lord sure made sure he took it all back, in spades.’ 

‘That helicopter was insured by us at Plymouth, and underwritten by Tyrell & Croteau. It was actually owned and run by Revere Aeronautic Services, but that day it was out on charter to the Justice Department.’ 

‘I heard on TV that it was engine failure.’ 

‘That’s what you heard on TV.’ 

‘You mean it wasn’t engine failure?’ 

‘I mean that’s what you heard on TV. Engine failure was part of the story, for sure. Engine failure was probably the principal cause of the chopper coming down – although we still don’t know
why
the engines failed, or even how, or whether it could have been sabotage. But it’s what happened after it came down that’s really making our heads hurt.’ 

‘It burned, didn’t it? Helicopters loaded with two hundred gallons of aviation-grade kerosene do have a tendency to burn.’ 

‘This one didn’t ignite until nine and a half minutes after impact.’ 

‘Nobody got to the wreck for nine and a half minutes?’ 

‘That’s the mystery. The
rescue services
didn’t get out to the wreck for nine and a half minutes. It was way out on the end of Sagamore Head, out on the sand – and, more than that, somebody had abandoned a beaten-up Winnebago on the track from Nantasket Beach, and it took the fire department more than five minutes just to clear
that
away.’ 

He folded up his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead again. ‘However ...
somebody
got out to the wreck before it exploded. Several yachts persons reported seeing a black Chevy Blazer or similar-type vehicle parked alongside the wreckage, maybe two or three minutes after impact. One guy had actually anchored his yacht about two hundred feet off the head and was paddling ashore in his dinghy to see if he could help. He says he clearly saw a black four-wheel-drive vehicle and also a person dressed in a black coat emerging from the wreck, carrying something that could have been a bag or a sack. About twenty seconds later, the helicopter exploded and there was so much smoke and flame that he couldn’t see anything more. By the time he reached the shore the vehicle had gone and the helicopter was almost totally burned out.’