cheap effect in a bad movie as he sprayed, ‘You want to know what she whispers? She whispers your name.’
Whose name, Kalen? Mine? Yours?
So Walker had to jump out of the car and beat the crap out of the baboon before the thing escalated, pushing him into a dangerous place. The valet parker and the maitre d’ guy in the uniform vaporized. Which of us are they afraid to touch? Kalen? Me? He doesn’t know. In a way, Walker was glad nobody saw. He needed to re-organize his face before he delivered his package which, for reasons, he had to do.
Grimly, he dragged Kalen upstairs to the grand ballroom, astonished by how leaden he was. Pleased, really, that nothing worse had happened. No. Surprised and relieved. But that was last night.
Snapping awake at first light, he sits up and – God! Daylight crashes into his head, streaming into him through the crack.
Locking his arms around his knees, Walker shudders, rocked by loss.
23
Dan
This isn’t where Dan expects to be, but in a strange way, he’s finding it extremely pleasant.
Where he should be down at the Star digging up clips on the incinerations, he is in the McCalls’ sunny Florida room with Mrs McCall, who for the fifth time has instructed him to call her Nenna. They’re side by side on her flowered sofa, bent over Chaplin’s old yearbook. Mildew has turned the faux leather to silver. Flattened insects breathed their last between these pages years ago, and a smell he doesn’t recognize rises from the gutter between the glossy pages. Mrs McCall is pointing out pictures in The FJHS Swordfish, although for reasons that are opaque to Dan, she hasn’t forgiven him for carbon-dating her.
He didn’t know what he wanted when he broke in to Chaplin’s house. God knows what made all that noise; he had to leave! With his search cut short, he grabbed The Swordfish and bolted. He got stupendously lost, escaping on back roads where everything looked like everything else. By the time he found his hotel he was too wired to sleep, but too wiped to do anything but crash. Maybe he slept, but if dreams are bookmarks, there’s nothing left to prove he did. Mostly he remembers thrashing.
His eyes popped open long before it got light. Four. Colon. Oh. Oh., the digital clock reported aggressively, taunting him. Four. Colon. Oh. Eight. Nyah, nyah. At Five. Oh. Oh. he declared the sun over the yardarm and opened the book. Sitting cross-legged in his briefs like a kid with a fresh porn mag, he scoured the pages, in hopes. Of what?
The answer fell into his hands like a gift. His mother’s photo led the senior class portraits: pretty Lucy Carteret, silenced for once, composed for her photograph. Smiling as ordered, but with that defiant glint. Looking into her face captured more than thirty years ago, he understood that Lucy had always been the same person. At eighteen, she faced the camera with her chin lifted in the proud, I-can-do-this way that Dan knows; seconds before the end she lifted her head and faced the future with that exact, intelligent glare.
The biography was like Lucy, short on detail. She’d listed only the necessary: May Court, 1, 2, 3, 4, May Queen, 4; The Liveoak, 1, 2, 3, editor, 4; president, National Honor Society, 3, 4. There was no nickname specified, even though high school kids without them usually improvised. There were no favorite sayings or flip mottoes to bring real Lucy to this page, no boyfriends named that he could interrogate and no girly lists of favorite flowers or songs to remember her by. The only thing personal about the entry was her smile. It hit him in the chest. These people, like their photos, began fading the moment the camera’s iris flexed and snapped shut, fixing them in time.
Maybe cows are right, he thought. The photographer who captures your image really has stolen your soul.
He wouldn’t have known the others. Chaplin’s text ran for several lines, beginning with Nickname: ‘Bobby.’ The list of achievements covered every sport, plus: FJHS Swordfish, 1, 2, 3, editor 4. Senior musical, 1, 2, 3, 4. Fort Jude Chamber of Commerce Sun King, 4. Science Club, 1, 2, president, 3, 4. The things they did, Dan thought, wondering if these itemized exploits carried the same freight as objects in that Vietnam vet’s story, ‘The Things They Carried.’
It was hard to reconcile this jaunty, bulletproof boy and the guy with the crumbling house in