"Not in here!" the guard announced sternly. "Outside."
Mr. Perfect rose and stepped out of the limestone box. He walked past the guard and retraced his route down halls, until at last he saw waning daylight coming from a doorway. He proceeded down the hall toward it and out into the sandy evening. It was quiet.
He fumbled for his cigarettes and realized he was still wearing the dingy grey robe. He raised its hood against the stinging sand then he turned toward the outer stone walls and cupped his hands to light a cigarette.
After he exhaled he listened to faint rising and falling murmur of the meeting still going on within. It confirmed that he was missing nothing, and so he took out of a batch of telegrams he'd been handed upon their boats' arrival and began to peruse them.
One caught his eye: "Urgent notice to Mr. Ernest White. Have tried to relay this message to you several times but have been unsuccessful. Your mother has died."
He felt the wind pin his head against the stone behind it.
"Please acknowledge receipt of this message at once."
He closed his eyes then opened them again. He felt his heart turn then sink, like all the world was a hole. He sank down against the wall.
One minute later he heard sharp staccato bursts coming from inside, then screams, then a violent scuffling.
He dropped his cigarette to the sand. Soon people began running out, their faces blanched, their clothes blood spattered. They did not stop to look at him, so White grabbed the shoulder of next fellow who raced by and the man fell down in the sand.
"What's going on in there?"
"One of the cattle went nuts! Said the cult killed his daughter. He shot the leader, and the other leader, and a lot of others besides. But an old English guy stopped him." The man pushed himself up off the ground and was about to run but Mr. White grabbed hold of him again.
"But the man who stopped him – is he okay?"
"Hell no, he's dead!" the man said, and tore himself loose from Mr. White's grip and ran away.
Mr. Perfect paused. Others went running past him. He folded his telegrams and placed them neatly in his pocket. He looked down and saw a small pistol lying on the ground where the man had fallen. He picked it up and put it to his head, pulled the trigger, but the gun did not fire, so he tossed it aside and started walking across the sand. The wind stirred up a vortex to hide him, and his unconscious steps led him back toward the home of his childhood.
Chapter 15
From Ernest White's Journal:
Once when I was a child I had stood all morning throwing stones into the pond. I was fascinated by the way they rippled the surface for a second, then just sank, no trace of them. I was fascinated by the motion then the swallowing and dying. That night Asher showed me the shapes up in the stars. I hadn't wanted to stop crying but I did. I was not sure I wanted to trust the big man, but he showed me the shapes that appeared night after night, up in the darkness, never swallowed.
Even now my energy is fading. Even now my outrage and my anger are almost gone. Even now my memory is afire only in the way cold jewels have a fire, though the pressure and the heat that formed them are gone.
My God they expect a war and then a new prosperity. They're whitewashing old buildings even now. Whitewash over the dry rot so they can sell it. Even if I led a pretend life it was less pretend than theirs, and I was seeing from a distance with a jewel of memory held to my eye. Come inside the white suit and see, I used to say. Only then can you see clearly.
On my last great expedition before I returned home, when everyone on the party betrayed me and I went on at last on my own, I was shocked not to find that the tomb was empty, but that I did not care. Its limestone blocks gaped with purple and dust and nothing, and I matched its emptiness with my own. Someone had collected the dropped jewels, the unwanted dead, and I found I could let go of whatever had been in my hands.
Yesterday I told the old bear of a priest my sins. Through the screen he smelled of an aftershave that hasn’t been on the shelves in ages.
This morning the dawn presented a purple and gold sky in horizontal layers like the accretion of a pearl piling down toward the plains. The accretion of missteps and wrong decisions can't keep the gold from coming through, even at a late date, if you have eyes to see it.
*
"I am presenting you this check on the behalf... No, I mean, On behalf of Ernest White, I am presenting this check on...for..."
"With flourish! With flourish!"
"I'm trying, Mr. White," Otto said.
His employer’s eyes relaxed. "Forget it, you'll do okay in the moment. Hell, they'll probably not hear a word you say anyway once their eyes settle on the money. At least bow when you hold it out, though."
"Okay. Why the heck are you doing this anyway?"
"To keep my peace – to keep my fragile brain from shattering completely. Is that good enough reason? Well, it's all I can tell you. In any case, you'd better get going. I'd like them all to be distributed by this evening."
So Otto drove around the community and sometimes beyond, delivering checks in large sums to people Mr. White had designated. Soon word got around and people came to expect the Cadillac's low rumble, and came to despise when it stopped in front of their neighbor's house and not their own. But the recipients were ecstatic. For most it meant a new life. For some it meant a new house, a restored "manse", a trip to a qualified hospital, a child sent to college, a new car or needed tractor, an ailing relative tended to, a haunting debt paid off.
Only Birchola refused her check. "I doan want none of that mad man's tainted money," she said, even though her normally guarded eyes craned wide open at the sum. The manager of the drugstore threw a wet dish towel at the back of her head and cussed her the second Otto had departed from the store.
When Otto got home at the end of the day he was worn out. He came in the door drooping.
"Tell me about it," Mr. White said. "And don't mince details."
So Otto told each story as best as he could remember, and Mr. White enjoyed each one.
"And now here's your check," White said at last. He handed Otto a large envelope.
Otto, who had been drooping in his chair, sat up in surprise. He opened the envelope and he was staggered. It was more than ten times the sum of the largest check he'd given out today. He looked over and Mr. White was smiling.
"Tomorrow's my fair," Mr. White said. You can leave for good when I check out in the morning. The house will fall under into the hands of a caretaker old lady – a friend of my late mother's. I won't be coming back to it. But first I want to show you something."
He led Otto back outside and they both climbed into the car. White started it up and steered them over the red dirt road, out of town, the opposite direction from town, until abrupt hills like small wild ponies began to rise beneath them. Finally they crested one, pulled off the road, and came to a stop. White shut the headlights and Otto looked out to see tiny dots of light all across the countryside. His eyes adjusted to the dark and he saw that the dots were campfires that swam up hills and down valleys, dipped into gullies and climbed up river banks. And around each fire were faces old and young, painted and composed, exotic and ordinary, inviting and aloof, but all smiling. And beyond the fires were an armada of colorful wagons, and the horses unhitched from them and grazing and stomping and neighing one to another across the distances in the fields. And out in the clearings of the countryside men and women practiced their acts – throwing knives, blowing fire, juggling pins, swallowing swords. Distant but surrounding laughter rose and fell like a tide. Singing in many languages came from here and there across hollows toward each other like competing clusters of birds.
Otto was slack-jawed. He turned it to his master.
"I called in some favors," White said.
"You called in a lot of favors," Otto replied.
Mr. White corrected him. "I called in all my favors."
After appraising the scene they drove back to the g
ray mansion, with even Otto's mind filling with anticipation and, to his surprise, a bright shuddered revelation of his own insignificance.
Mr. White hummed part of a tune he'd heard sung being sung by some of the distant performers across the hills that evening, and he read a few more pages from his father’s letters.
I had met the Green Girl once, before I saved her child. We called her the Green Girl not only because that was her surname, but because she was more wild and full of life than anyone we knew. I was an awkward loner farmer, more at home hunting in the woods than facing people in town. I was returning from night fishing and I saw her sitting by the side of the road in a shimmering green dress that alternately sparkled and glowed in the moonlight. Her golden brown hair fell in beautiful, expensive ringlets. Her dress was torn at one shoulder and I could tell she had been crying, and I suspected that one of the town’s big men had hurt her.
If she had been hurt by one of them, she did not tell me. She saw me walk up and looked for a minute like she might run off, but after looking at me some more she sat back down. I took off my hat and walked up the clay road till I stood beside her. She looked beautiful and sad. She laughed, and she cried as she laughed. Her tears were little jewels and I wanted to collect each one and save them until she was happy again and give them back to her as diamonds.
But she laughed like she knew she was broken. "Would you mind walking me into town?" she said. "I’ve twisted my ankle."
There in the moonlight I helped her up and felt her sudden warmth against me – a sudden perception that rose as a marvel as we took steps and I felt her weight and her warmth with one arm draped across my shoulder. She did not talk about where she had been coming from or going to, all dressed up but out in the middle of nowhere. She only commented on how she felt safer and how beautiful the stars looked among the shadow-hidden trees. She asked did I ever wonder how God came to make nature so beautiful then put creatures like us in it, and I didn’t know how to answer something like that, and my dumbfounded silence made her laugh.
Town was not that far and in a few moments we had emerged at the back of the hotel, away from the view of the road. After a precise knock the back door inched open one light-flooding crack, and a girlfriend of hers dressed for bed looked at her then threw a scowl at me, but the woman I was helping laughed and said that I was nothing to worry about, that I had helped her.
The woman took her from me and walked her through the doorway, and then the Green Girl looked one last time at me and I saw something fragile and beautiful in her, balanced on the moment I had helped her, and she looked silvery like moonlight on a moving pond, shaken to bright ripples that hinted now of promise, of alternately breaking and pulling back together.
"Thankyou," she said. "Goodnight." And the door closed behind the two of them and they were gone.
I walked through the full dark night along a narrow clay path back to my home. But she was in my mind - I saw her in every glint of light.
And Asher used to work for her family. Asher knew her though that proximity, and I knew her through him. Asher thought I was crazy prying him for details about her, but what little he knew he’d tell me with a laugh. Asher was a man like me who was had washed up in this town as on an island, armed only with a memory of what he’d lost and a sense of what slim holdings this town offered as their replacement. When they killed Asher they killed the bridge to my ideas of what could have been, if the world were saner or life were not so unfair; they ripped out my eyes.
White put down the note and tensed his hand to crumple it, but he did not. Instead he slid it carefully back in the drawer. He stared into the purple exhaustion of the evening and met it with an evacuating sigh, a desire to let go in order to atone, to commemorate in fixed measure because otherwise it would kill him.
*
September 1939
The day of the fair dawned like a soap bubble. It caught light in concave rainbow panels of possibility. It floated with nothing so far to burst it.
In the pink and blue light of morning the town square revealed itself to be the site of awakening activity. A whistling man was weaving red, white, and blue bunting through the hand rails up the courthouse steps. Two others were hoisting a banner across the front of the building, above a wooden podium flanked by chairs. The banner read, "Welcome, Congressman Larr!" and beneath this was the subtitle, "Dam Commencement Ceremony."
In the town square, workers in the dewy grass were setting up chairs several rows deep facing the courthouse steps. Smells of grease and baking dough were wafting from booths that lined the square. Over a dirt and gravel lane, in an empty lot beyond the depot, workmen were busy setting up rides and booths for the carnival Mr. White was sponsoring. They were bolting together the metal arms, pulling taut the ropes of flamboyant tents, forking hay to familiar and exotic animals. Braying blended with cursing and a soft undercurrent of clipped, efficient instruction.
Off to one side in the shade of trees near the courthouse, three thin, middle-aged men with identical crewcuts squatted and uncrated several wooden boxes. The sides of the boxes read "From the World of Tomorrow." The men wore serious looks on their faces. At the persistent inquisition of a farmer they explained that they were assembling a prop robot they trundled across the country wherever federal dollars were subsidizing a community improvement effort. When assembled he would stand eight feet tall, confront visitors with optimistic aphorisms resonating from the hollow of his metal chest, remind people of the generosity of FDR, and display the word "HOPE" in light pushed by bulbs through a panel of red cellophane in his chest.
*
"He gave away his money?"
"He gave away all his money!"
The town was abuzz over the previous day's disbursement of checks and now the carnival.
"Where is he?"
"He's gone. His house is completely empty. Drove past there this morning."
"Hell, it aint empty."
"Looked empty to me."
"I'll grant you that – the placed looked empty."
"I imagine he followed some siren off into the woods to who-knows-what fate. He always was an easy mark."
"You and your sirens."
"Weren't you just cussing him the day before?"
"Yeah, but that was back before he gave all his money away. He's easier to pity now."
"Who's to say he gave away all of it?"
"Lord, can't you let a body tell a story?"
*
It was morning and Mr. White stood in front of his dresser mirror, sliding a lilac tie under his collar. Out of the corner of his eye he suddenly noticed that Otto was standing in his doorway.
"Today's the day?" Otto asked.
"I think so," White said. "I don't feel a need to stay in this house any more. Not sure where I'll stay tonight, but it won't be here."
"I see you boxed some things up."
Mr. White turned and looked at his valet. "And what are you dressed up for?"
Otto looked especially tall and well-dressed this morning. The valet's coarse brown hair had been recently trimmed, and now it neatly framed his tall, thoughtful forehead. He wore a brown tie and neat white shirt. His hair and even his eyebrows glistened with something slick and scented.
"Constance is introducing me to some of the officials running the dam project today," he said. "She has it on good authority that they might have an opening for one more planner. They were very impressed with my engineering education."
"Well they should be. So why are you nervous?"
He fiddled with the end of his tie. "It's funny," he said. "I've been working for you for so long, it almost scares me to go back out on my own and see what working in the world is like again."
Mr. White paused. "Well, you have to get back into it some time, and now's as good as any. I suppose you're going to find it more challenging, less forgiving, but much less bizarre than your past few years. Or maybe more bizarre, but in a different way."<
br />
"Do I look all right for an interview? I mean, Constance has given me her recommendation to them, but these are folks who like to size up a man before they commit to anything."
Mr. White stood back and looked at him. Otto looked at once strong and jittery, competent and nervous.
"Just calm down and be yourself. You've met royalty before so you can certainly handle these clods. Now what is it about this meeting that's getting you so worked up?"
Otto looked down. "Well, as you may have guessed, I like Constance, and I feel like all this is also tied up with her. I think she has expectations if I get this job. It's like I'm interviewing for what's going to happen for the rest of my life."
"Good God, are you sure you don't want a drink?"
Otto looked at him to see if he was joking and could not tell. Nonetheless he felt his insides unknot slightly.
"You'll do fine," White told him. "Just be sure to give a firm handshake, look these men in the eye, laugh at their jokes but no too much, eat heartily at lunch, and sound intelligent but not too smart. Look, Constance's family is well-connected, and the people you're meeting will want to make her happy, so I think you'll be okay."
"Good. And can I take your car?"
"Sure. And let me know if you’d like one of my others in storage and I'll have it shipped here as yours from now on. What do you fancy? The Peugeot? The Edelhaus? The Bram Healy Straight Six?"
"Thanks but no thanks. I'll be making it on my own, hopefully, from here on out."
"A fine sentiment, but one I'll ignore. I'll just pick one out myself then."
Otto smile and smoothed his hair back with one hand. "Well, I have to be going. I'm having breakfast with Constance in town."
Mr. White understood. They shook hands firmly, and then Otto turned to depart. White walked Otto to the door, and Otto gave himself one more check in the entryway mirror then walked out. White heard the car purr to life then crunch across their gravel drive. Soon its noise had faded from the air.
Mr. White walked back into the empty house. He had indeed already begun boxing things up, and already the tall rooms felt empty and quiet.
He walked into the kitchen, cleaned the few dishes left from his breakfast, rinsed them, then set them in the rack beside the sink. Sunlight pushed between the thin curtains of the window above the faucet. He noticed the small potted plant that rested on the sill. Both he and Otto must have thought the other was looking after it, because it now looked pretty scrawny. White decided to give it a better home. He picked it up, walked through the front door, and set it beside the stoop. Then he threw his arms out wide and felt the freshness of the early hours of the day.