Mr. X

‘The charming process of getting divorced from my husband, I suppose. I found out he was screwing half his female clients.’ An ironic light shone in her eye. ‘Guess what kind of practice he had.’

‘Divorce law.’

She pressed her palm to her forehead. ‘Ashleigh, you’re a cliché! Anyhow, I asked you those questions because I’m thinking about going back to my maiden name. Turner. Ashleigh Turner.’

‘Good idea,’ I said. Her divorce was probably no more than a week old. ‘The bad boys won’t smirk at you. But if you weren’t looking to get picked up, why did you go to the bar?’

‘I thought I was waiting for you.’ She glanced away, and the corner of her mouth curled up. ‘Sal and Jimmy asked me on a tour of their favorite Sinatra bars. The kid in the beer shirt, Ray, invited me into his room to do coke. He has a lot of coke with him, and he’s on his way to Florida. Isn’t that the wrong way around? Don’t people go to Florida to get the stuff and bring it back here? Those bikers, Ernie and Choke, wanted … Forget what they wanted, but it sure would have been adventurous.’

‘If Ray wants to make it to Florida, he better not hustle Ernie and Choke,’ I said.

She snickered, then looked chagrined. ‘I’m in this stupid mood.’

‘Did your divorce just come through?’

This time, she pressed both hands over her eyes. ‘Okay, you’re perceptive.’ She lowered her arms and turned in a complete circle. ‘I knew that, I really did.’

She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her nice lady-lawyer shoes. ‘The other reason I’m in a funny mood is that I can see my case going down the drain. Now that I’m being indiscreet, you’ve probably heard of the guy we’re after. He’s one of Edgerton’s leading citizens.’

‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘I left when I was a kid.’

‘His name is Stewart Hatch. Tons of money. His family sort of runs Edgerton, from what I hear.’

‘We didn’t move in those circles.’

‘You should be grateful, but I’ll never understand why a guy with so much going for him would decide to turn into a crook.’ She efficiently buttoned herself out of her pin-striped suit.

About a quarter to six in the morning, I jumped out of bed before I was fully awake. Nettie’s sixth sense was operating at full strength. The only thought in my head was that whatever was going to happen to my mother was rushing toward her, it was already on the way, and I had to get to Edgerton in a hurry. Still foggy, I fumbled around for my clothes and saw a naked woman on the disarranged sheets. One of her legs was drawn up, as if in midstride. Her name came back to me, and I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Ashleigh, wake up, it’s time to go.’

She opened an eye. ‘Huh?’

‘It’s almost six. Something’s happening, and I have to get to Edgerton, fast.’

‘Oh, yeah. Edgerton.’ She opened the other eye. ‘Goo’ morning.’

‘I’m going to take the world’s fastest shower, change clothes, and check out. Should I come back here to get you?’

‘Get me?’ She smiled.

‘You’re still willing to give me a ride?’

She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms. ‘Meet me outside. I’m sorry you had bad news.’

A speedy shower and shave; a scramble into clean khakis, a blue button-down shirt, a lightweight blue blazer, loafers. I was going to see all my relatives, and for Star’s sake as well as my own, I wanted to look respectable.

Hoping she would not make me wait more than twenty minutes, I carried my duffel and knapsack through the revolving door into the cool morning light and heard a female voice call my name. Across the parking lot, Ashleigh stood beside the open trunk of a blaze-red little car. She was wearing a trim navy blue suit that showed off her legs, and she looked as if she’d had maybe twice the time most people need to look the way she did.

‘Slowpoke,’ she said.

She sailed down the nearly empty highway at a comfortable sixty-five, fiddling with the radio and letting the occasional trucker blast on by. Neither one of us knew quite what to say to each other. She found a university FM station playing a mixture of hard bop and Chicago blues and let the digital counter stay where it was. ‘Did you call the hospital before you woke me up?’

I said that I had not.

‘But you told me something happened to your mother. You didn’t get a call in my room, did you? I mean, I don’t really care, but …’

But if you didn’t tell them you were in my room, how did they find you?

‘I guess I had a premonition.’ She shot me a sidelong look. ‘Maybe it was just anxiety. I don’t know. I wish I could explain it better.’

She glanced at me again. ‘I hope she’ll be all right.’

‘I’m just glad you were there.’

‘Well, I am, too,’ she said. ‘I think you should probably go around the country giving hope to depressed women. And you were so tactful, you never made anything seem prearranged.’

‘Prearranged?’

‘Maybe not prearranged, but you know, from Chicago, with my law school friend, Mandy.’

A sign announcing the approach of a highway restaurant and gas station floated toward us. I said, ‘Why don’t we pull in there and get something to eat?’

The story emerged over breakfast. In the bar of a Chicago hotel, Mandy, the law school friend, had sent me a drink. When I left my chair to thank them, Mandy invited me to sit down. The conversation led to our various reasons for being in that hotel lobby on that particular evening, and I had mentioned that I was going to the southern part of the state late the next day and would probably spend the following night in another hotel. To Mandy’s chagrin, I had seemed more interested in Ashleigh Ashton than herself. Mandy knew that after working into the evening of the following day, Ashleigh would be driving south. She whisked her off to the bathroom and imparted worldly advice. Not long after, Ashleigh had inserted the Motel Comfort into our conversation, and I had expressed the hope of returning the favor and buying her a drink in whatever passed for a bar in the place if I wound up there, too.

‘I told Mandy you’d never show up, but she said, Go to the bar an hour or two after you check in, and he’ll find you. I wasn’t even sure it was you! In Chicago, you were wearing a suit, and here you had on jeans, but the more I looked at you, it was you. And you were so tactful, it was like you would have come anyhow, not just to meet me.’

‘I didn’t think you needed any more pressure,’ I said.

Apparently someone who looked a lot like me, a former Tulane teaching assistant named George Peters or the man for whom the woman in the old Denver airport had mistaken me, had been cruising the lobby of a Chicago hotel. No other rational explanation seemed possible. At the same time, the sheer unlikeliness of the coincidence prickled the hairs at the nape of my neck. If George Peters, or whatever his name was, had succeeded in setting up an assignation with Ashleigh, what had kept him from it?

For the rest of the drive, a caffeine-enhanced Ashleigh maintained a steady sixty-five miles per hour while describing the misdeeds of her scoundrel millionaire. I made accommodating noises and pretended to listen.

The sign at the first of the Edgerton exits read EDGERTON ELLENDALE. ‘Is this it?’ she asked.

‘The next one,’ I said.

At the next sign, EDGERTON CENTER, she spun the little car off the highway. For a time we drove past hilly fields on a divided four-lane road and then, without transition, found ourselves in the wasteland of fast-food outlets, gas stations, motels, and strip malls at the fringes of most American cities. At the moment we passed a billboard welcoming us to EDGERTON, THE CITY WITH A HEART OF GOLD, the mild, sunlit air shimmered into a wavering veil like a heat mirage, then cleared again.

‘I have time to take you to the hospital, if that’s where you want to go,’ she said.

A stoplight turned red at an intersection bordered by two three-story red brick office buildings, a vacant lot, and a bar called The Nowhere Lounge. Below the street sign, a rectangular green placard pointed the way to St Ann’s Community Hospital. ‘I think that’s the place,’ I said.

Four blocks later, she pulled up before the hospital entrance. I said, ‘Ashleigh …’

‘Don’t. You won’t have time to see me. I hope your mother gets better. If you were going to ask where I’m staying, it’s Merchants Hotel, wherever that is.’

She stayed in the car while I took my bags from the trunk. I came up to kiss her goodbye.

At the information desk, a woman told me that there was no patient named Star Dunstan, but that Valerie Dunstan was in intensive care. She gave me a green plastic visitor’s card and told me to make a right past the coffee shop, take the elevator to the third floor, and follow the signs.

Numb with dread, I wandered through dingy hospital corridors until a nurse led me to a set of swinging doors and a plaque reading INTENSIVE CARE UNIT. I obeyed a sign hung over a basin and washed my hands, then pushed open another swinging door and carried my bags into a long, dimly lighted chamber lined with curtained-off cubicles around a brighter central station. From the counter in front of me, a nurse gave me the once-over a store detective aims at a potential shoplifter. Far down the length of the room Aunt Nettie and Aunt May were standing in front of one of the cubicles. They were heavier than I remembered them, and their hair had turned a pure, ethereal white.

The nurse rolled her chair a half inch nearer the counter and asked, ‘May I help you?’ An instantaneous, nonverbal exchange made it clear that I was not going to take another step until her authority had been acknowledged. The name tag pinned to her loose green staff shirt read L. ZWICK, R.N.

‘Dunstan,’ I said. ‘Star Dunstan. Sorry, Valerie.’

The nurse bent her head to examine a clipboard. ‘Fifteen.’

Nettie was already surging toward me.

13 Mr X

O Great Beings & Inhuman Ancestors!

Only days before the prison walls of the academy’s eighth grade were to close around me, I came to a break in the woods and an overgrown field extending toward a road I did not know. On both sides of the field, the woods swept toward the road. Between the top of the field and the curve of the woods was a three-fourths-crumbled building of brick and stone. In a rubble of stone blocks at its center, the monolith of a fireplace reared into the air. At its far end, another chimney and a fire-blackened wall supported the remnants of a shingled roof extending over the remaining portion of the house. Beyond, bare joists dangled above empty space. The instant I beheld these remains, the hook in my entrails nearly yanked me off my feet, and a voice from within or without boomed, Come at last! Something like that. It might have been, You are here! Anyhow, the mighty voice informed me that we were getting down to brass tacks.

I knew it was my duty to take a survey of my property, so to speak, before rushing in to stake claim, and I processed around the perimeter of the ruin, observing how weeds had thrust themselves up between the stones, how the fire had charred the scattered bricks to the shade of overdone toast, how swales in the earth marked the former cellars. I saw destruction continuing in the pull of gravity on rotting beams and the erosion of roof tiles. At the front of the building, roof-high courses of joined stone extended some twenty feet from the fireplace wall. Rectangular casings with deep sills marked the third-and second-story windows. Beneath them, at roughly the level of my chin, smooth, arched casements speckled with bird dung gazed out from what had been the parlor. I placed my trembling hands on a gritty sill and looked within.

Light streamed into a two-sided enclosure three stories high. Dusty particles filtered down to a cement floor littered with plaster, broken pipes, and charred timbers. Here and there, grass struggled up through cracks in the cement. Paw prints dotted the thick, feather-strewn dust. On the other side stood the forest. I jumped, grabbed the far side of the sill with both hands, and squirmed forward until I could get my legs onto the flat stone. Then I lowered myself to the floor and entered my inheritance for the first time.

Or: my inheritance entered me.

You who read the words I here inscribe upon the pages of a Boorum & Pease record book or journal with the same dependable Mont Blanc fountain pen used in former days to draft my instructional missives to the world already know the significance of the ruined house to Your Great Race. It was within its sacred enclosure that the Great Old Ones imbued my early torments and humiliations with the salvific Splendor of Preparation. An Elder God spoke, and I learned All. His Voice was low, husky, confiding, weary with age-old authority, yet powerful, commanding. I heard some pleasure in there, too, for my Unearthly Father, whose True Identity I still knew not, was giving me the lowdown on the Mighty Task for which I had been placed upon this Earth. My Role came clear, my Nature given Explanation. Half-human, half-God, I was the Opener of the Way, and my Task was Annihilation. After me, the Apocalypse, the entry through a riven sky of my leathery, winged, beclawed, ravenous Ancestors the Elder Gods, the Destruction of mankind, Your long-awaited repossession of the earthly realm. I advanced through the rubble, added my rump’s outline to the footprints of passing animals and was spoken to. By reason of my own frailty I should be cursed in time with a traitorous shadow it was my responsibility to eliminate. (In the surprisingly congenial surroundings of the Fortress Military Academy, Owlsburg, PA, I was to hear more of this.) You Great Ones, my Fathers, depended upon my efforts. The mighty Voice said, We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth. I loved that phrase, it spoke to me of that inexorable devastation Given as my Sacred Task. I repeat it to myself, talismanically: We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth. These words sustain me. I was told that my only significant pleasures should be found in the accomplishment of my Task. On the other hand, insignificant pleasures, precisely those of a sort most appealing to a lad like myself, would not be denied. In the midst of the endless sorrow, a great deal of fun was in the offing.

I could certainly have gotten away scot-free if I had killed Maureen Orth, which was what I had in mind for her once I got the sex part out of the way. The only reason I ran into trouble was that she got home. Her sense of humor went south about a minute after I tied her up. I wasn’t going to kill her in the woods, I was going to kill her in the ruins.

I wanted to see Maureen’s close-set eyes fly open when I looked at some visiting pigeon, stopped its heart, and tumbled it stone-cold dead from its perch. I wished to add to the effect by announcing my intention of floating eight inches off the ground and lingering there for a count of, say, ten, even though the effort would have brought sweat cascading from every pore of my body. I depended on the lassie to declare, That’s a fib, nobody can do that. Then I wanted to see the expression on her homely mug when I proved her wrong. I looked forward to dazzling my pathetic sweetie with a few other tricks, too, before I killed her.

In the meantime, I couldn’t help myself, I was impulsive, I know, a number of insecure maidens had accompanied me into the woods to end their pointless lives on the floor of my classroom. I did go to the trouble of interring most of the bodies, but I might as well have let them rot. The search parties never came near the ruins. In any case, I had outgrown this sort of exhibitionism by the time I was thrown out of the academy.

14 Mr X

In essence, boarding schools are all the same, especially to those who are as smoke from the cannon’s mouth and wind up getting expelled from one tweedy snakepit after another. Actual military school, in my case good old Fortress, of Owlsburg, Pennsylvania, to which my father sent me in a last convulsion of disgust, suited me far better than its civilian imitations. My father had informed me that failure at this last resort would derail the gravy train – no more monthly deposits into my account, no inheritance, no trust fund, finis – thereby compelling me to work at least hard enough to pass the courses. I rather liked my uniform’s chill, fascist pomp. Because I entered in the senior, or Cavalry, year, one of my duties was to bully the students beneath me, those in Artillery, Quartermaster, and especially Infantry, which was packed like sardines with doe-eyed fourteen-year-olds in a desperate sweat to please their overlords. We were supposed to reduce these children to whimpering blobs of panic, and they had to take it without protest or complaint.

I spent one of the happiest years of my young life in that place. As soon as I understood the deal, I drove out my roommate, a prep-school expellee like myself named Squiers whose babble had exhausted my patience before the end of our first day together. Thereafter, in my palatial single I was free to do as I wished. I did not at all mind the necessity, due to my parents’ refusal to have me come home, of spending the Thanksgiving vacation and Christmas break at school.

The only sign of impending difficulty occurred early in March, when my calculus instructor and unit commander, Captain Todd Squadron, drew me aside to announce that he would be visiting my quarters at 2100 hours that evening. I found this news alarming. Captain Squadron, a by-the-book regular army type whom I had bluffed into admiration from the day of my arrival, lately had grown cooler, almost dismissive. I feared that he had seen through my performance. I hoped that he had not discussed my ‘case’ with an all-seeing dreadnought named Major Audrey Arndt, whom I had taken considerable pains to avoid. One other possibility was an even greater worry. After his arrival in my room, I discovered that both of these matters, the not so serious and the positively grave, were on his mind.

I saluted and stood at attention. Captain Squadron growled, ‘At ease,’ and gestured me to my cot. His oddly wary, knowing attitude was laced with the dismissiveness I had lately sensed in him. When I had perched on the cot, Squadron leaned against my dresser and gazed down at me for a long moment transparently intended to unnerve.

‘What is it with you, anyhow, Pledge?’

I asked what he meant.

‘You’re different, aren’t you?’

‘I hope I might take that as a compliment, sir.’

‘There’s an example of what I mean, right there. After the Infantry intake, most transfers are foul balls.’ He pulled at his uniform jacket, automatically aligning it with his trousers. ‘They got bounced out of so many schools their parents just want to keep them in line. Even though most of them aren’t too swift, they all think they’re smarter than we are. Every last one has a big, big problem with authority.’

‘Not me, sir,’ I said. ‘I respect authority.’

He gave me a sullen glare. ‘I cordially suggest that you stop jukin’ with me, Pledge.’

We were all pledges, no matter what class we were in. I considered saying ‘Sir, the pledge is not familiar with the term “jukin’ with,” sir,’ but kept my mouth shut.

‘It falls to us to straighten up these sorry-ass rebels as best we can. As a general rule, we have about a sixty-forty chance if we get them in their second year. If they come into Artillery, it’s less than fifty-fifty we can pound some sense into their heads. By Cavalry, it’s a lost cause. All we do is, we concentrate on teaching them to stand up straight and how to tell their right foot from the left one so they can manage the drills, and we push them through the course work until they graduate and get the hell out.’ He folded at the waist like a puppet, tightened his shoelaces, and snapped upright again. ‘If it was up to me, we’d refuse to transfer students into Cavalry. Eighteen is too old to adapt to our way of life.’

He turned to face the mirror over my dresser and gave the jacket another series of precise tugs. He lifted his chin and examined the effect. ‘The little clowns come in laughing, and I have to waste a hellacious amount of time convincing them with all the means at my disposal, which are many, that we are not to be sneered at.’ He caught my eyes in the mirror. ‘I believe I can claim a one hundred percent success rate at carrying out that particular mission. Maybe those feebs were a long way from being soldiers when they walked through the gate for the last time, but I guarantee you this much, they were believers.’ He was still holding my eyes.

‘I became a believer as soon as I got here,’ I said. ‘Sir.’

Squadron turned around and leaned against the dresser without bending. His wide, blunt face was distorted by a broken nose that would have made him look like a fighter had it not been the size of the nose on a shrunken head. ‘I’ll give you this much, you had me fooled.’

‘Sir?’

‘You had me thinking, this pledge is going to change your mind about admissions policy, Captain. In a couple of days, he snaps off a salute could shatter a brick. Trims his uniform like a West Point grad. In a week, memorized the Reg Book and Lore and Traditions. Respectful and well prepared in class. Okay, he had a little problem with his roommate, but these things happen. Fact is, Pledge Squiers is an unrelenting motormouth who should have been paired with a deaf-mute. This new pledge fit in from the moment his shoe leather hit Pershing Quad and is a fine asset to his class. Look at the way he braces those squirts in Infantry! He’s a goddamned natural! You know what that young man is?’ He pushed himself off the dresser, raised his arms at his sides and gazed upward. ‘That young man is officer material!’

‘I do my best,’ I said.

Captain Squadron canted backward against the dresser and pushed his hands into his pockets. In the mirror, the clean line of a fresh haircut curved above the starched collar of his tan shirt. The dark stubble on his head and his tiny, dented nose made him look like a gas station attendant. ‘You’re a real piece of work, aren’t you?’ He smiled exactly as if he had just decided to punch someone in the face.

‘I don’t follow you, sir,’ I said.

‘How many friends have you made here? Who are your pals, your asshole buddies?’

I named three or four dullards in my class.

‘When was the last time you and one or more of your buddies took the bus into town, caught a movie, had a few burgers, that kind of thing?’

The question meant that he already knew the answer. When we left the grounds we had to sign out in groups. I had taken the bus into Owlsburg once, looked around at the dreary streets, and returned immediately. ‘I tend to devote my weekends to study.’

He rocked back and smiled again. ‘I’m inclined to think that you have no friends and zero interest in making any. Didn’t go home for Thanksgiving, did we? Or over Christmas break.’

‘You know I didn’t, sir,’ I said, beginning to get irritated with the captain’s theatrics.

‘Christmas is a major, major holiday. It’s a rare pledge who doesn’t get home for Christmas.’

‘I explained that,’ I said. ‘My folks invited me to go to Barbados with them, but I wanted to spend the vacation studying for the finals.’

He grinned like a wolf. ‘Should we go down the hall and call your parents, ask them a few questions?’

Again, he already knew the truth. Squadron had checked on my story. ‘Okay,’ I said, cursing myself for having succumbed to the temptation of a colorful lie. ‘If I got along with my family, would I be here in the first place? It isn’t easy to say that your parents hate you so much they won’t even let you come for Christmas!’

‘Why would they hate their own kid like that?’

‘We had misunderstandings,’ I said.

He looked up at the ceiling. ‘I was so impressed by your conduct that I started to wonder why a young man like yourself had been asked to leave all those boarding schools. Five of them, to be exact. Didn’t mesh with what I was seeing. So I looked into your files.’ He smiled at me with his smug challenge. ‘Damned if I could find anything there but smoke.’