Phantom of Riverside Park (9 page)

“Change your mind about the soup. Say yes,
David.”

“I have work to do, McKenzie.”

She sighed then walked out the door. David
stared at the empty chair where his sister had sat.

Once when he’d vacationed in Maine, many
years ago, he’d watched a flock of Canadian geese wing their way
south for the winter, heading for warmer lakes and balmier weather.
Suddenly one of them, a straggler barely keeping up at the end of
the vee formation, had turned and headed in the opposite direction,
north where the lakes would soon freeze and snow would blot out
every speck of green on the horizon. He’d wondered what made such a
magnificent bird choose isolation and possible death.

Now he knows.

David won’t be eating chicken soup in
McKenzie’s sunny apartment overlooking the Mississippi River. He
won’t be seen at tailgate parties and county fairs making the
acquaintance of thirty-year-olds.

He’s made his choice.

o0o

McKenzie drove home crying. The thing that
broke her heart was that David had meant every word he’d said.

Her brother, the man who had been her hero
all her life, had shut himself off from life for so long that he
didn’t realize he still had a heart and a soul.

Sometimes when she thought about him late at
night with nobody to keep her company except her animals, she cried
so hard her eyes swelled up. When David was eighteen and a senior
at Johnson Country High School, he’d been voted Most Handsome,
which didn’t begin to describe his beauty. Before the accident his
features had been so perfect, so astonishing that people used to
stop dead still in the street to stare as he walked by.

McKenzie would have grown up with a complex
if she’d been the jealous type. As it turned out, she’d been happy
simply being in her brother’s shadow. She still was.

Only now the shadow he cast was dark. And all
because of the dreadful isolation he’d endured over the years.

The psychiatrist he’d seen during the long
days of recuperation after he’d returned from Iraq had told him it
was survivor’s guilt that held him back from finishing his
reconstructive plastic surgery, guilt that he’d come home when
thousands hadn’t. David embraced the theory, but McKenzie thought
it was only halfway right.

She believed the answer lay deep in David’s
subconscious mind where late at night hand grenades exploded and
guns barked. He used to shatter the night screaming, “I can’t save
them,” while she raced down the hall to shake him awake and end his
night terrors.

But waking never ended them: David carried
the scars deep inside where nobody could see. His face was his
scarlet letter, an outward symbol that matched his tortured
soul.

As she drove home for her own lonely dreams
of Paul and what might have been, she thought of her brother
sitting alone in the dark. She knew what he would be doing: staying
awake as long as possible trying to escape his dreams of the past.
But there was no escape for her brother because he still had his
memories.

After McKenzie left, David sought the blessed
oblivion of books. He enjoyed fiction and nonfiction, alike, but it
was poetry that spoke to his soul. Once he’d been a dreamer. Having
seen a wild hawk descend to the valley and eat from his sister’s
hand, he’d believed that all things are possible. He believed in
the greening of leaves and the inevitability of mountain flowers.
He believed in rocks where blood faded to rust still sang of love.
He believed in the legend of the dogwood and the heart-pull of
mountains that held the colors of a million sunrises.

Back then, he’d still believed in love.

He skipped over the love poems and selected a
slim volume by Melville. With the reading lamp providing the only
light in his office, he let the book open where it would.

“All wars are boyish, and are fought by
boys,” Melville had written in “March into Virginia.”

Suddenly David’s head was filled with
screams…

“Get it off! Get it off!”

There was the sound of rubber-soled shoes
sliding across tile, then a familiar voice. His night
nurse.

“Get what off, David?”

“The sand. I’m buried in sand.”

“Shh. There’s no sand, David.” Her hand
was cool on his brow. “You’re home now, baby. Just rest.”

Home. A room with drab green walls and a
row of beds filled with the wounded and the dying. Windows so high
you couldn’t see out.

Not that he wanted to see. He didn’t even
know why he wanted to live.

The last thing he remembered was the
explosion of the hand grenade, the sharp searing pain that
enveloped his left side, the blood that bloomed out of his head and
flowed red like the sea.

“God came down that day and Moses parted
the waters,” the preacher was shouting.

No, it wasn’t the preacher. It was Moose,
yelling at David to hold on. It wasn’t God who was coming, but the
medi-vac chopper.

Or maybe it was God, after all.

David passed a hand over his face, one side
perfect, the other a map ridged with scars and sunken with
potholes, courtesy of the early Iraqi war. He tried to pull himself
out of the past, but the floodgates were down and memories kept
coming.

The day they took the bandages off and David
first saw himself in the mirror, he vomited. That was not a man
looking back at him but a monster, a ghoulish apparition with one
eyebrow, half a nose, very little cheek on one side and a tattered
ear.

“Plastic surgery can do miracles,” the doctor
said.

David hadn’t believed in miracles then, and
he didn’t believe in them now. Not for himself.

He went straight to window, pushed back the
curtains and trained his telescope into the park, his lifeline.
Elizabeth Jennings had arrived. Smiling and fresh faced and so very
young.

David suddenly felt as old as Thomas Jennings
who was engaged with his grandson in a game of
I spy
.
Elizabeth squatted beside the boy to take his side.

“The bird, Nicky. Look, it’s a robin
redbreast.”

“I spy a robin bedrest,” the boy shouted, and
the old man laughed so hard tears rolled down his cheeks.

“You got me,” he said. “I don’t see him.”

“Did I win, Papa?”

“You won.”

“I won! I won!”

Nicky grabbed his mother’s hands, and the two
of them did a victory dance.

“Hey, you can’t cut a rusty without me.”

Thomas Jennings grabbed their hands and
pranced around with more energy than some men half his age.
Suddenly Nicky plopped on the grass.

“What’s the matter, darling?”

“I’m tired. Me and Papa runned all over the
park chasin’ Houdini.”

“Who’s Houdini? Papa?”

“That hoodlum who gave me the check.”

McKenzie would pop her buttons laughing.
David even found himself smiling.

“If you don’t have a funny bone to tickle,
you might as well be dead,” his mother had always said, and that’s
the only thing David had brought back intact from Iraq. That and
his brain. The package that held it together would send the likes
of Elizabeth Jennings screaming for the woods. Fortunately,
corporations didn’t care.

Years ago holed up in dark cubicles David had
applied his brain--his genius, some said--to the burgeoning
industry of computer technology. Good fortune landed him at Apple
in California where he rapidly advanced to become part of Steve
Job’s new management team that put Apple back on track. But the
pull of the land his parents had loved called him home, so David
returned to launch his own technology driven empire. And always,
the lights around him were kept low.

Beneath his window Elizabeth gathered Nicky’s
fire truck, the old man folded his tattered paper sack and the
little trio left the park. David imagined them walking home holding
hands, skipping when Nicky took a notion, occasionally slowing down
so Thomas could catch his breath. He pictured Elizabeth in her
run-down house telling the day’s events to her little family,
glamorizing the customers who came into the bakery. Sometimes she
did that in the park.

She’d made Mrs. Simpson Simmons, who always
wanted pink icing on her cupcakes, sound like a cross between
Mother Goose and Glenda the good fairy.

McKenzie’s version was quite different.
Dressed in her teenaged boy disguise, she’d spied on Elizabeth at
the bakery.

“That mean old witch, Mrs. Simpson Simmons,
walked out without paying for her cupcakes because the icing was
the wrong color of pink. Elizabeth had to take the money out of her
own purse. I’d have followed the old biddy and whopped her upside
the head with my umbrella, but Elizabeth just smiled and told her
to have a nice day.”

Then McKenzie had laughed. “After the old bag
left, Elizabeth did flip her the finger, though. I’ll bet she’d be
mortified if she knew I was looking.”

It was stories like that that sometimes made
David wonder if he’d chosen the right path. He could have followed
through with endless plastic surgeries. He could have looked decent
enough to be seen in daylight without causing old women to faint
and little children to run screaming for their mommas.

He could have married. Maybe. And had
children. Definitely.

That was the thing he missed most about his
life, the delightful upheaval of children, the little boy pranks a
son would pull and the charming manipulations of little girls.

He’d seen McKenzie at the age of two charm
their father into letting her wear yellow rubber boots to church on
a perfectly sunny day. Most mothers would have had a conniption fit
because the boots didn’t match the pink frilly dress she also wore,
but Della Jean Lassiter was a rare breed, a woman who cherished
independence and abhorred convention, even in her children.

The day she had died, she’d said to David,
“Don’t you ever let anybody clip your sister’s wings.”

He hadn’t, either. One of the few times since
Iraq that he’d gone out in broad daylight was to put the fear of
the devil into her fiancé pre-Paul Matthews.

McKenzie had come to David with her cheek
reddened and her right eye swollen.

“My fiancé slapped me, David. I was talking
to some old friends at a party and he accused me of flirting.”

She wasn’t crying when she told David the
story: she was mad.

“I threw his ring in the swimming pool, and
I’d have beat him up if I weren’t such a lady.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll do it for you.”

“I knew you would.”

David had kept his word.

The thing he remembered most about that day
was the boggle-eyed stares.

Now, David closed his mind to the past and
his blinds against the outside world. Ordinarily he would have
scanned the park eavesdropping on other people’s lives, looking for
another person in need of a million dollar check.

Today he called his bookkeeper on the
intercom.

“Has Elizabeth Jennings cashed her
check?”

“No, she hasn’t.”

George Clark didn’t have to consult any
records to find out. From the time David authorized the check,
George tracked its progress through the banking system with the
diligence of a blood hound.

Why were Elizabeth and Thomas Jennings
looking for the donor of the check, and why hadn’t she cashed
it?

David skimmed her file again, but apparently
large chunks of her past were missing. Not the facts but the
motives. Why she had left the Delta, why she hadn’t married Nicky’s
father, why she lived in poverty when the Belliveaus had more money
than God.

“Will you need me any more this evening,
David?”

“No. Go on home, George. Spend some time with
your wife for a change.”

David knew he had one only because McKenzie
had relayed the information to him. He preferred to watch marriage
from afar. In fact, he preferred to watch life from afar.

Except occasionally. Except on evenings like
this when he felt a restlessness that had no name.

He watched at his window until dark, then
took his private elevator down to the private parking garage. With
his hat brim pulled low and the collar of his trench coat pulled
high, never mind the heat, he climbed into an old Volvo that gave
him the anonymity he desired then drove out of the garage and into
the city.

As he passed the Peabody he remembered why he
so seldom went out into the city, even after dark when he was
relatively safe from the curiosity of strangers. He used to have
drinks there with his fiancée and listen to a great pianist, or a
very good combo playing the romantic old ballads.

That had been years ago, of course, back when
he’d thought life would go on forever as it was. Food made with
real cream and real butter and nobody tried to scare you about
cholesterol, neighbors speaking to neighbors, and parents sending
their children to school without worry over bullies and
maniacs.

Seeing the Peabody was a poignant reminder of
loss, not merely his personal loss but a collective loss. After
Viet Nam innocence had fled in shame. Iraq and Afghanistan only
added to the loss. Never again would there be a generation who
viewed the world as David once had.

He eased past the horse-drawn carriages
parked in front of the grand old hotel and tried not to think about
the couples climbing in under the guise of touring the historic
downtown district when all they really wanted was some heavy
petting under the blanket the driver would throw over their laps to
ward off the chill that rose up at night from the Mississippi
River.

Something inside his body jolted, reminding
him he was still a man, and he turned his head away. Across the
street was the alley where the Rendezvous cooked up the best
barbecued ribs this side of Heaven. David rolled his window down so
he could inhale the aroma.