A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,30

were too quick to stop but that was not his intent. Despite that knowledge, my elbows were instinctively coming up. He dropped his guard suddenly and I took the bait, delivering my own combination. This time he slapped away my left, slipped under my right and hooked two short punches, filled with the power of his hips and legs, into my midsection, just above my hip bones.

I lost my eyesight for a second and had a strange recollection of the first time I tried to stand on ice skates as a child and felt no friction under my feet.

When my vision returned and refocused, I was down on the canvas with my knees together and ankles splayed out, squatting. Mohammed was back in his corner, standing, taking instruction from his trainer. The room was still spinning when I turned to look out of the ring. My father was missing. And then I saw his back turned to me. The sight of his son being dropped to the floor by a black man, even in sport, was something he could not bear to witness. His shoulders filled the door to the street and he met the cold wind without dropping his chin.

13

The light woke me. A midday sun left bright and clean by a high pressure system that had swept the sky clear of cloud. I was not used to sleeping in daylight.

“The evils of city nightlife,” I said aloud, with no one to share the joke. I got up and set the coffeepot going and rummaged through the rough pantry shelves for canned fruit and a sealed loaf of bread. As I ate I could hear the hard “keowk” of a tri-colored heron outside, working the tide pools on the western bank of the river. I looked for a book in my sloppy stack on the top bunk and picked a collection of stories about the Dakotas by Jonathan Raban. I took it outside and sat on the top step, propping my back against the south wall. I was deep into the fourth story when the cell phone started chirping.

“Yeah, Billy?” I said instinctively into the handset.

“Ya’ll wait till I say hello an’ you wouldn’t make that mistake,” McCane said from the other side of the connection.

“McCane?” I said. “Who gave you this number?”

“Well, that’d be your pal Manchester. He doesn’t seem too eager to deal with me one-on-one, if you know what I mean.”

I could hear a tinkling of glassware and the strains of a Patsy Cline song in the background.

“What do you need?” I said.

“I need to get with you on this little purchase group I’ve been sniffin’ out, Freeman. Why don’t you come join me? We’ll sit down and have a drink and sift through it a bit.”

“Why don’t you sift through it over the phone? I’m afraid I can’t make it back in today,” I said. It was early afternoon and I could hear the softening of the hard vowels and drawn out s sounds in McCane’s speech, telltale patterns I’d heard too many times in my youth. He wouldn’t be sober by suppertime.

“Okay. Have it your way, bud,” he started. “We got a bit of a trail working here. But it’s not exactly clear where it’s leadin’. Through our company I pulled some private documentation and laid out the purchases on our insured. Then I got some friends with the other companies to do the same.”

He was clicking back into business mode and I had to admire the transition.

“Now, these investment boys pull these life policies in from a lot of places. The so-called gay community was a choice target when that AIDS thing was knockin’ ’em off a few years back. And there wasn’t too much illegal goin’ on, since these boys figured they had a death sentence anyway so let’s get the money and party. Hell, the investors bought ’em up for twenty cents on the dollar. The boys spent the money while they shriveled up, and when they died, the investors cashed out.”

Even with a few drinks in him, McCane still only bordered on displaying the homophobia in his voice. Nothing that an e-mail or printed deposition would ever show.

“But the money guys needed a go-between,” he continued. “They sure as hell weren’t gonna go hang out in the boy bars themselves recruitin’ business.”

“So you’re saying there’s a go-between here also?”

“There’s always a go-between Freeman. You know that. The money men, especially the white-collar money men, never get their hands dirty.”

McCane sounded