The Killer Is Dying (6 page)
HIS FEET WERE ON FIRE.
He had no idea where he was. He could see the sun low through the trees. The last thing he remembered was the sound of heavy artillery, the
thwack
of chopper blades. Now it was quiet. Scattered bird calls high in the trees. Rumblings far off that could as easily be firepower or a storm building. In his sleep, if it was sleep, or maybe before, he’d pissed himself. He pushed up on hands and knees, and insects went rattling away from him through the ruff of dry leaves.
Letting himself fall back over, he rolled and slowly pushed with his hands into sitting position. The dizziness passed, but he still was not seeing clearly; everything upon which he focused, trees, the burned-out stump beside him, his boots, had two or three borders. It took a while to get the laces undone, the phrase
Died with his boots on
running stupidly in his head the whole time.
At first he’d thought it was leached color from the olive canvas boots. Too green, though—and growing. Alive. He remembered a photograph that an uncle had showed him of his house in New Orleans, sidewalk, wood, even cement blocks covered with a patina of green. The growth on his feet went from green to black. No idea what part was fungus or mold, what part rotting skin. He didn’t want to think about that. But his feet itched like mad and burned like fire.
His socks were soaking. He swung them in circles, pushing out as much wet as he could, wiped between his toes with a handful of leaves, put socks and boots back on, and, hand against the burned-out trunk, experimentally stood.
—And woke,
What the hell?
, instinctively swinging out of bed to put his burning feet on the floor, toes curling around the carpet’s nap.
The clock blinked at 2:35. Jimmie walked to the window and looked out. No lights anywhere. The storm, he supposed. But he had slept through it. His heart still hammered. Strange how quiet it was, sounds so familiar as ordinarily to go unremarked now conspicuous in their absence: box fan wobbling and gently bucking near the door, that faint buzz of wires in the walls, hum of the refrigerator two rooms away.
He hadn’t returned the pan to Mrs. Flores yet. Why he thought of that now, he didn’t know. Why he hadn’t done it, he didn’t know. He’d scrubbed the pan, dried it; it had been sitting on the counter since.
Something else he was supposed to do as well …
The storm had long passed. He watched a police helicopter circle in the sky over toward Black Canyon Freeway, its spotlight lashing in crisscross patterns. Power came on—he heard the click of relays in the cooling system, felt a brief whoosh of breath from the fan—then again shut down. He’d fallen asleep without shutting off lights, and they had come back on just long enough that his eyes had to readjust to the darkness. As they did so, and as stars came back into the sky above, he remembered.
The telescope.
It was supposed to have gone out days ago. He’ d bought it from a woman in Texas whose grandfather had recently died. Produced by a company that, originally a processor of 3-D films, had surfaced briefly in the fifties to send into the marketplace a stream of high-quality, low-cost optical products—microscopes, binoculars, reading glasses, prisms—the telescope shared its birth year, 1957, with Sputnik. And the Seattle-based collector of all things Sputnikian would be wondering where his expensive telescope was.
Very unlike him to forget things like this, not to follow through. Maybe those dreams were having a greater effect than he realized. Taking their toll. He’d have to send an e-mail to the buyer right away.
Automatically, he went to the computer and hit the switch. Nothing. Of course. No power. And standing there, for a moment he felt something he couldn’t at first identify, then knew to be panic—occasioned, he initially thought, by his lapse. But the veil fell away, and he came to understand that the feeling was something more elemental: panic at being out of touch, at having his connection to the world torn away.
The moment, the feeling, quickly passed, but a shadowy residue, like an afterimage, remained.
When the lights flared back to life, he stood there blinking.
FOUR YEARS AGO he’d hit a pothole.
Man’s name was Les Baylor, and he worked midnight shift at a hospice, there for most of his adult life, twenty-some years. His routines had been simple to track because they were just that, routine, hard and fast. Lived in an unadorned, unkempt, underpopulated apartment complex eight blocks from the hospice. Stopped off at the Recovery Room for a beer on his way home when working since the Recovery Room opened at six A.M., walked up that way most late afternoons for an hour or so. Two, three beers was his limit. Breakfast he took at the hospice cafeteria. Every other evening he visited Blackhawk Diner for the special of the day; the rest, he dined at home on sandwiches and the occasional order-in pizza.
After it was done, Christian stood in the apartment looking around. Such a bare existence had gone on here. No television, maybe a dozen library books long overdue. Three radios, one for each room including the bathroom. Jeans, shirts, and scrubs folded and kept in layers on steel shelves in the single closet, socks and underwear left jumbled in a laundry basket beneath. No medications in the bathroom, only toiletries, comb and brush, safety razor caked with mineral deposits. In the kitchen, bags of health-food cereal, a keglike container of orange juice, cheese and cold cuts, mustard, milk, dark bread.
Simplify, simplify.
He shouldn’t care, of course, or stay around to ask questions. It was done. And strangely enough it wasn’t the why of it that rattled about his head, but the who of it. The man lying on his bed as if asleep had taken up little enough space in this world. He worked, he ate, he slept. Listened to the radio, one would have to suppose. Had no family and no apparent friends aside from a couple of fellow workers who occasionally joined him at the Recovery Room after shift.
The reason, the why, belonged to the person or persons who arranged this gig. But what of the man himself, Les Baylor? Had he left so much as a shadow in crossing this world? And what could the shape of that shadow have been, for someone to want him dead?
Christian poked at the clothes, picked up shoes to look at their laces and soles, shuffled through bills and recent mailings on the desk, which was particleboard, crumbling back to sawdust at the nearest edge. He turned each radio on. Two set to classical music, the other to easy listening.
He found the 8x12 brown envelope marked
Accounts Due
sitting on edge behind the library books. One leg of the metal clasp was gone. He thumbed it open, looked briefly, and took the envelope with him.
Back at Hacienda Motel he opened it again, slid the contents onto a table not unlike the one in Baylor’s apartment. Atop sat a composition book, the kind with marbleized covers, containing names and short biographies, close to a hundred of them, he figured, one per page, the thing so dense with entries that it was twice its original thickness.
Dav Goodman, born 1919, gunner in WW II. Worked as a salesman, cattle food initially, then hardware and, finally, furniture. Retired when Parkinson’s hit. One daughter, lives up in Iowa somewhere, not in good health herself. Son died “a few years back.”
That went on for some time before ending “Died April 9, 1998,” a formula that continued throughout.
Shelba Adari, born 1988. A runner on SMU’s team until the day she fell on the track while training and they discovered that her tibia had broken. Cancer, which was soon everywhere. Patrick, the law student she’d been engaged to, came to see her every Friday.
“Died Friday, December 21, 2005,” that one ended. The dates of death were written in a different ink from the other entries, an unusual green color, almost emerald.
Also in the envelope, behind the composition book and clipped together with a well-sprung paper clip, were a sheaf of letters written on a variety of paper. None had address, date, or salutation, though some bore a single letter upper left.
K,
There is so much pain in the world. I don’t know how we stand it. We reach out for the bag of food pushed through the take-out window and somewhere an entire town is being destroyed, bombs are being driven into shopping malls in old Toyotas, children are dying of hunger.
Outside his motel room window, across the street, stood a strip mall.
That
could be bombed out, he thought, from the way it looks. Of six storefronts, only the end one, a convenience store, remained in business, the rest caving in upon themselves, windows cataracted with dirt, bird droppings, and spray-paint tags. A young woman sat on what remained of the sidewalk outside the convenience store, back against the wall, talking on the pay phone.
D,
When I was eight or nine, on a road trip to visit my grandmother in Pine Grove, we came across an accident that had just happened. An old truck with no fenders had gone off the road and turned over. The driver, who looked ancient to me, like the gimpy old bearded man in cowboy movies, was trapped under the doorframe and when he finally pulled himself loose, about the time we got there, most of his leg stayed behind. While my father was busy improvising the tourniquet that saved his life, I sat by the little girl with my hand on her forehead. She was a year or two younger than me, couldn’t possibly be his daughter, I thought, old as he was. She died, with my hand on her head, just as my father finished his work and looked up.
We do what we can to ease another’s pain, thinking it will ease our own. But it doesn’t. Somehow, instead, it adds to our pain. We don’t erase theirs, we take it to ourselves. Is it possible that, far beyond our understanding, balances are at work? That suffering is like matter in the universe, there is only so much of it, forever the same amount, and all we can do is rearrange it, pick it up here, put it down there?
K,
Everything comes at a cost, even the good we do. Dav, Mr. Dahlhart, Belinda Chorley, Jerry (“Not the President”) Ford, Joe Satcher, they’re all at rest now, where pain, hunger, fury, even their own infirmities, cannot reach them. Angels didn’t lay them away like in the old song, not the angel of death or any other angel, because there are no angels. It’s all on us.
We have to be our own angels.
A man named Mr. Sheldon was the first. His heart, long overburdened by emphysema, was at last giving out, his skin by then mostly blue and parchment-like and looking like a drying mud flat, all cracks and fissures and discoloration. He had been a heavy equipment operator and “built half this state’s good roads.” He had one daughter, severely retarded. (“You think it was my drinking done that? I was a heavysome drinker those days.”) She visited once a month, first Friday, with her son, who seemed to be her caretaker. At the end, when I was there by him and Mr. Sheldon understood what was happening, he told me to call him Billy.
Even the hero, even the superhuman, exercises power at a cost. Terrible weakness, all but unbearable pain, inordinate aging. Exile. Madness. The gift he is given, and what he gives in return, sets him forever apart.
Cost.
And eventually the bill comes due.
There were, all told, sixteen letters (if indeed that’s what they were), some written straight out, others with deletions, changes, inserts scribbled between lines or sideways in the margin. Christian started at the beginning and read them all again, wondering who they might have been intended for, sensing a pattern, or hoping for one: some coherence, a line.
Not a time he’d easily forget. That month, following hard on weeks of increasing pain, blood in the stool and frequent vomiting, sitting in a brightly lit room that looked to be little used, surrounded by blond furniture, he’d learned the name of what was slowly taking him over and down.
Four years. He had beat the odds.
Beating the odds was it—all we could ever hope for.
That time, to his message
Your doll has been sent
he received no acknowledgment or reply.
And that night, the city around him was beginning to burn—a fire that had started in the industrial area just south of the city’s center, in a meatpacking plant, and quickly spread—though he wouldn’t know it till days later, far away in another town and another motel room, from TV news. He had been watching a show about vultures.
They’re not birds of prey, a zoologist said, but birds that clean up the messes around us. They can ride air currents for hours without once flapping wings, detect a dead animal by scent from two hundred feet in the air. Their intestines digest and destroy agents of such diseases as cholera and anthrax in the carcasses they devour. No chase or frenzied kill here. The vulture keeps watch, waits patiently for a day or two until gases start to leak from the decomposing corpse. One type, the bearded vulture, even specializes in bones.
The zoologist had mutton chops so bushy and thick as to draw one’s attention again and again from his eyes and face. Christian remembered how those eyes glistened as the man explained that, to make their meals more interesting to the birds, zoo attendants wrap freshly thawed rat carcasses in paper tightly tied with twine.
