Pericles Tarr was not in debt to Mouse, not in the ordinary way. Raymond took on friends now and again, hung out with them, made clandestine plans with them. Mouse was a criminal, a master criminal. He was also an active member of an outcast community. Whatever it was that made Tarr disappear, it had something to do with Mouse’s business. Pericles might have been dead, but it wasn’t because Mouse had lent him money.
And where was Raymond? He wasn’t the type to kill a man and run. Mouse ran after things, not away from them.
The effort of thought was making me tired. I was falling asleep when I remembered the bill of sale that Tourmaline had stolen for me. Why had she done that? Was it because she was a poor college student who could use the money for books? But then she just handed it over, refusing the money.
As I got older, my profession began to take center stage in my life. I wanted to know why things happened, but not like when I was a young man. In my early life, I wanted money and women, success and respect, not for what I did but for who I was. Now I was interested in Tourmaline because I couldn’t quite understand her motivations; I didn’t know what she saw in me, and that was very unusual.
It was also beside the point.
Easter Dawn was sleeping in Feather’s room, dreaming about the man she called father. One day he would hand her a pistol and tell her that he’d murdered her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and all their friends — but until that day her love for him would be bigger than the sky.
These thoughts comforted me. In the morning I’d go looking for Christmas again. Maybe I could help him. Maybe he would help me find Ray.
Ray: the closest friend in my life before Bonnie came on the scene.
Thinking of Bonnie was the turn that guaranteed me another sleepless night. Once Bonnie entered my mind, there was no possibility for repose. She was the book I couldn’t put down, the life savings I had lost, the question I could not answer.
And it wasn’t only her. I had a blood daughter somewhere, lost to me, and parents who had died before I was eight.
I remembered a woman — Celestine. She was a distant cousin of my mother’s who took me in when I was orphaned. Her house was so clean that I was afraid to walk across the floor. Because no matter where I went, there was dust and lint, crusts and detritus of all kinds cascading off me. Celestine’s life was perfectly ordered and spotless. I didn’t belong in her world, though I longed for it.
At the age of nine I ran away after breaking a jar of strawberry jam that clotted her perfect kitchen floor. I didn’t know how to clean up the sticky red disaster and so I ran away and never returned.
I grew up and went to war. The red stains there were taken away by explosions, flies, and dogs getting a taste of their onetime masters. Cleaning up in Europe was killing. I could do that.
I kept a list in my head of every human being I had slaughtered. The roll was far too long. And even though I had never actually murdered anyone, there were many innocents who died by my hand: white men and blacks, young and old. I once shot a German sniper who turned out to be a nine-year-old boy chained to his post by a teenage superior.
THE LONG DARK MORNING passed like that, an interminable chain of associations among the things lost to me or the crimes I’d committed. Just before the sun began to rise, I came to understand that my mind was a deep chasm, a fault of culpability. Before I threw her out, Bonnie would call to me when I began that inevitable fall into myself.
I had other realizations, but they didn’t mean anything. I was like a pothead solving the problems of the world with a hash pipe and too much time on my hands.
After some time had passed, the sun came up and I climbed out of Jesus’s lumpy bed. I showered and shaved, put on the same charcoal suit I’d worn on my date.
I tried for a moment to think about what I’d feel like if I’d had sex with Tourmaline, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the notion.
I took out the folder Gara had given me from her research on the medals and started going through the names and their sketchy descriptions.
I rejected Xian Lo first off. The man I had met wasn’t Asian, and though it was possible for an Occidental to have an Asian name, the probability just wasn’t there. Morton, Heatherton, and Lamieux were all too short for my guy.
It also wasn’t Charles Maxwell Bob because he was a Negro. It said so at the bottom of his sheet: Rc. Neg. It was the only indication of race in any of the files. This didn’t surprise me; it wouldn’t have surprised two people out of two million in America at that time. I noted the bias, but that was just another case.
It was a good morning’s work. I’d cut down my suspects from eight to two.
Either Glen Thorn or Tomas Hight was my man. Tourmaline wouldn’t have liked the first one: not enough syllables for her.
I went through my Southern California phone books and found addresses for both men. Life wasn’t good, but at least it kept moving forward.
17
I was sitting at the kitchenette table a few minutes shy of 6:30 when the baby cried. I was considering which problem I should tackle first. I had Christmas’s most recent address from the bill of sale that Tourmaline had provided and two soldiers I could look up. I knew that Pericles Tarr had a girlfriend somewhere. Each of these potential paths had equal weight in my mind.
If I had had a clue about the whereabouts of Mouse, that’s the direction I would have taken.
I was missing Ray, not because he could help me through this violent period but for his sense of humor. He liked to laugh and tell a good story. Added to that, Mouse didn’t understand guilt or broken hearts — that was just the kind of ignorance I craved.
“Hi, Dad.”
Jesus was standing in the kitchen with Essie in his arms. I reached out for her without thinking about it. She cried and then cooed. After getting used to my smell, she practiced kicking and turning her head from side to side.
Jesus went about making coffee.
I had had almost fifteen years of that boy brewing me coffee and bringing me the gifts of life. He’d been brutally abused when he was little older than his daughter, but somehow that had not twisted him. I would have liked to say that it was my firm hand and loving home that saved the boy, but he was the one who saved me more often than not. It was Jesus that emptied all my liquor bottles when my first wife left. It was Jesus made me coffee and dinner more times than I could count.
And now he had brought me a granddaughter. Here we couldn’t have a gene in common going back more than twenty thousand years, but that boy was my blood.
He brought two mugs to the table and took Essie from me. The way he cradled that baby made me think of the few years he spent with my friend Primo before coming to me. Maybe the Mexican and his Panamanian wife, Flower, had saved Jesus’s soul.
“Feather said that you’re mad at her,” my son said.
“I’m not.”
“She said that she gave you a hard time about the wedding and that, and that you got mad.”
Essie grabbed his lip and pulled, just a little.
“You remember when you were a boy?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“You remember when you didn’t talk those first years, never spoke a word?”
Jesus looked at me, mute as he was back in those days.
“Why?” I asked. “Why didn’t you talk for all that time?”
“I did,” he said in a voice reminiscent of his first whispering years of conversation. “I did with my mind. I was thinking answers and I thought you could hear me. And you did, Dad. You knew everything I wanted to say.”