D b, p.14
D. B., page 14
Two months after Baron's hasty departure, a woman named Jane turned up at the camp. Reba, perhaps sensing Cooper's growing restlessness, had put word out for Jane over the hippie grapevine, but as she introduced them Cooper saw that Reba was taking some pleasure from his disillusionment. The woman calling herself Jane was old, her hair a frosty tangle of gray, her face sagging here and there like a balloon left out in the cold. She wore too much topaz, her fingers and throat webbed with cheap Mexican silver jewelry that clacked and tinkled at her slightest move. She'd put on a few pounds in the hip department since the fetching sketch of her Cooper had stared at so many sleepless nights. She was also crazy or a little light in the head, a terrible combination of menopause, cheap acid, and a case of sunstroke she'd come down with while drifting on a pontoon boat in the Sea of Cortés with a Mexican industrialist who refused to let her off until she agreed to marry him—a long and confusing story that Cooper had a hard time following.
“To the hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Reba said, stepping between them, a little too pleased with herself.
Cooper ignored her as Jane asked him if he was a Fed hoping to arrest her for antigovernment activity, saying, “To tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, all that stuff was just a pose, a fashion statement. You see, I had my eye on this guy and he was, like, very committed to the cause and I was totally not committed, if you know what I mean. I mean, I liked his beard and the way he wore his sandals and so I started going to meetings and before I knew it I was involved with this AWAKE thingamajig and all these unshowered men with big plans for anarchy, protest marches, and LSD in the drinking water. Before I dropped out and tuned in I was just a housewife, ironing socks and packing lunches like the rest of the horde.”
“Perhaps Jane would like to see the book, Irv,” Reba said.
“What book?”
“Oh, it's nothing,” Cooper said.
“Nothing is never nothing,” Jane said. “I thought everybody knew that. Nothing is always something. Where have you been?”
“Never mind then,” Cooper said. “I think there's been a mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
Without thinking, Cooper said, “For starters, you're too old. The Jane I'm looking for is younger.”
“What do you mean too old? I've maintained myself. How old do you think I am?”
“I'm not going to answer that.”
“I think you should show her the book,” Reba said. “It might clear some stuff up for you.”
Jane poked him in the chest. “I have a right to see this book, don't you think? I mean, you asked and here I am, and now what? Don't think you can jerk me around, pull my daisies. I've been around the block and I'm telling you, I'm the one and only original Jane.”
Cooper started for the creek, telling them he was late for a nap, hoping to shake them. But they tailed him down to the water's edge, picking his liver out about the book, until he began to wonder if this Jane wasn't some waste case Reba had coaxed up to the camp to prove that his search for the mystery lady was little more than a pointless sexual snipe hunt.
When he saw that there would be no peace until he showed them the book, he led them back to his tent and flipped through the moist pages until he came to the sketch.
“This you?”
“Oh my,” she said, blushing and clutching her throat. “I thought this had been destroyed in the police raid.”
Reba chimed in, “Wonders never cease.”
Cooper gave her a buzz-off look and pulled Jane aside to quiz her at length. One thing the camp had taught him was that things were never what they seemed. And he was himself knee-deep in the deception. So he quizzed Jane about the dog and was surprised to find that she held her own, answering his questions correctly until she'd convinced him that most of the stuff written about her in the book was false.
“It was my old man's psychotherapy journal, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call him my young old man. I was twelve years and three months his senior,” she said. “His beard falls out and I get blamed. He went around telling people how I'd crawled inside his head to break his heart. We were the Frank and Ava of the underground movement, fighting and falling in love. I have mostly fond memories because I was in it for the sex, but it's clear he never got over me. I guess that's the risk you take with younger men.”
Cooper asked what happened.
“I got old,” she said. “Happens all the time. You men and your ability to spawn. I'd like to see you go through the change. Men are mostly weak.”
Cooper nodded—he'd heard enough. He took the book back from her and wrapped it in its canvas bag. Jane kept talking until Reba stepped in and asked if she'd like to eat.
“Depends.”
“Rice and steamed dandelion greens?”
Jane left, but not before extracting a promise from Cooper that he would destroy the book. Desperate to be rid of her, he agreed and spent several days doing his best to avoid her.
A week later he retrieved the fireproof boxes from their shallow grave, and the minute he shuffled a pack of the twenty-dollar bills he knew that it was time to go. Traipsing back through the dark jungle he saw the camp in all its shambling glory—the peeling khaki paint, the wet cut-off jeans and peasant blouses drying in the trees, and the piles of garbage they'd been too lazy to bury or haul down to the village dump, where it would all be recycled by Indian children and junk dealers.
He found Reba. She was alone, drunk and sitting in a partially collapsed lawn chair with a small lizard perched on her knee and a jug of wine within easy reach. “I noticed it's always the green that seem to go first,” she said, picking at the broken bands hanging off the lawn chair.
“Sun absorption. You don't get that with the white ones.”
She thought about it a moment and then said something to the lizard before taking a slug of wine. “Do you want some?”
He shook his head and started for his tent. He was afraid she'd ask about the burlap sacks containing the money. “I know you're leaving,” she called out. “I have a sense for these things. I hope it's not the crash of this Jane dream of yours. I only meant to help.”
“No,” he said. “It's time I hit the road.”
“Just as well,” she said. “I fear this place is doomed to suffer the same fate as Nashoba. Those Scots and slaves made it four years before their little communitarian experiment crumbled. I give it another year or two. I figure we'll either be discovered by tourists or else stagnation will set in. Splinter groups will form. But then again, Rome did not fall in a day.”
“I thought it was wine and sodomy.”
Reba sighed. “Well, a new order rises and the cycle repeats itself. You should have that printed on a card and hand it out to remind folks where they've been and where they're going.”
With that, Cooper wished her good night and left her to the wine and lizard. He did not look back.
AS HE DROVE home from the party, making the familiar rights and lefts and catching lights, it began to sink into Frank that the banal ritual he'd just escaped from marked the end of his career as a government man. He thought about the articles on retirement Clare had set aside for him, the ones intended to prepare him for the inevitable with their talk of money market funds, rising health care costs, second mortgages, the importance of diet and exercise, wills, and second careers. He had zero patience for the whole business of what was optimistically advertised as the Golden Years. The photos of grinning gray-haired men clutching scuba diving gear or the liver-spotted women wearing denim skirts with inappropriate slits, standing in front of the junk-filled antique shops they'd opened, made Frank dread old age. They were the same insufferable people who dragged golf bags around lush country clubs, grinning like fools, socializing at tented cocktail parties, gulping multivitamins, subscribers to Fortune and Smithsonian. They watched Matlock, wore copper arthritis bracelets, gave advice on where to get the best steak, pulled straight Republican at the polls, and let on after a few too many Gibsons or G&Ts that they still enjoyed sex. Frank wasn't about to sun and fun the rest of his life away on some treated wood deck, waiting for his hair to gray and go and his teeth to loosen as he gummed oat bran muffins and worried about his prostate. Sooner or later he'd have to figure something out before Clare started riding him and making little comments about how it was time to get on with the rest of his life.
Other guys he'd known from the Bureau had made tidy fortunes setting up private security businesses or playing the market. They traveled—cruises mostly, a little bone fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and Southeast Asian junkets that Frank believed to be shorthand for sex tours featuring slim-hipped thirteen-year-old girls or boys. He'd been too busy to plan, figuring that whatever was supposed to happen next would happen and he'd adjust and move on. Only now, as he pulled the car into the drive, he wasn't so sure.
He turned to Clare and told her that he felt tired.
“Retired?”
“That too,” he said, killing the engine and waiting for the feeling to pass. It did not. She leaned over and gave him a kiss—nothing behind it, just a dry pressing. “You did good,” she said. “I never know how to act at those things. Everybody lies and tells you to stay in touch when it's the last thing they want.”
“Well, it's done. Tomorrow I am a zero file.”
She turned to him, her hand already on the door latch, the other gathering her purse. “I'm cold. We can talk inside if you want.”
He told her to go on, knowing she was eager to check the messages on the machine, hoping some buyer had called with a last-minute counteroffer on one of her listings. It was more likely her mother with some exasperated complaint about her father.
She got out and headed for the door. He followed, tripping the security lights he'd installed behind the juniper bushes at her request after a house down the street had been broken into and ransacked by stoned teenagers. He still remembered the argument they'd had when he told her how the neighbors would complain and how in the end the lights wouldn't be much of a deterrent because, in his experience, if someone wanted to get into your home bad enough, they were going to get into your home, lights or no lights.
Frank froze, half embarrassed by the paranoid brightness of the lights as Clare keyed the door and continued inside without him. He heard her purse drop on the carved trestle table, followed by the clunk of her shoes against the oak floor.
When he turned to make sure he'd rolled up the car windows he saw something small scamper along the cinder block footing and disappear into a knot of shadows cast by the bushes. As he waited for whatever it was to come out and show itself, the security lights clicked off, stranding him in the dark. He listened to the thrum of crickets and peepers for a while until he heard a rustling sound and a rabbit emerged from under a juniper bush, quaking. If he moved, the rabbit would bolt into the neighbor's yard and probably set the dumb black lab to barking or else it would get hit by a car and he'd have to watch it rot for a week guiltily. So he stood there, not moving a muscle, until he heard a car approaching and he turned, instinctively following it up the street, trying to catch the plate numbers—H8 something—a maroon sedan with a bad exhaust pipe and dented front bumper. When he looked back under the juniper bush the rabbit had vanished. There was nothing else to do except go inside and have another drink, maybe sit in his chair and hope the heavy feeling he felt pressing down on his shoulders would lift and allow a few hours of sleep.
But the feeling was still with him when he startled awake several hours later. He sat up. The bedroom appeared dim and familiar, all the shadows in their right places and Clare's sleep warm body nearby. The air smelled correct, even his clothes sat folded neatly on the black Windsor chair they'd bought at an antique shop from a small, neatly dressed man who kept polishing his glasses when asked whether or not the chair was a reproduction.
The framed photos on the dresser glinted like dark mirrors, reflecting what little moonlight leaked through the clouds outside. His legs ached and twitched and he felt oddly lucid, as if he were meant to be up at this hour staring out the window, waiting for something important to happen.
He shuffled the blankets off and slid his feet to the floor, feeling better already and yet wincing at what he knew could all too easily become a habit. Perhaps it was already a habit, he didn't care as he made his way downstairs, expertly navigating the dark hall and landing until he was in the kitchen.
The bottles rattled as he opened the liquor cabinet and reached behind the frosted fifth of gin and the sticky pint of peppermint schnapps, feeling for the smooth neck of the Smirnoff.
Standing at the sink he gulped down a juice glass of vodka and listened to the purr of the refrigerator and the pop and grind of his shoulders as he poured another shot and tossed it back. Then he ate a few antacids, crunching them down, and swished his teeth clean with another half a jig before setting the glass in the sink. Only then did he walk his routine circuit, checking windows and doors, eyeing the front hall closet, where he briefly allowed himself to imagine a burglar or bad, knife-wielding man hiding in there, nestled between the rain slickers and mothballed coats. He chided his urge to open the louvered door and check for the phantom intruder and instead went into his office, where he lowered himself into the swivel desk chair, the liquor already warming his belly, melting away the nervous twitch in his thighs and the tightness in his throat. He sat there for a long time, staring at the phone and thinking of Anne Blackwood and the way she'd fixed him with her dead eyes all those years ago when Frank had come for her husband. It bothered him that he should so easily conjure her without knowing what he wanted or exactly what it was he intended to do about her. She wasn't even a victim in the worst sense of the word, just a woman tangled up with the wrong man and left to sort out the pieces.
With that he took the one file he'd lifted from the office before his retirement. It was the pond girl's, Jane Doe #5966–7, long since zeroed. The case had not even been the Bureau's until Frank had made it one by arguing to the SAC that she'd been the victim of a suspected serial killer operating along the Oregon border—his only proof being that she was young, female, possibly a hitchhiker, and dead. She, too, had gotten under his skin, but in a different way, teasing him with the utter absence of leads. Thirteen years later, the finger bone and thin file were the only evidence that she'd ever existed.
He opened the folder, its edges foxed and dimpled where paper clips had held notes, site photos, and shots of her skeleton resting on a black body bag, the eye sockets like empty egg cups. He leafed through the various medical reports and lists of scant leads he'd chased down into quiet dead ends over the years. The pages of missing-person reports filed during the time the girl had gone missing brought back the many awkward phone calls he'd made to the relatives of the missing, a pool of names, each of them anxiously waiting on any news—even bad—of their vanished. He recalled one woman whose daughter Maggie, a shy freshman at Reed, had disappeared from her dorm room. The woman told Frank about a disturbing phone call she'd received long after she'd given up hope of ever finding her daughter alive or even knowing what had become of her. Late one night a woman calling herself Margaret had called collect but had simply sobbed before suddenly hanging up. He'd heard dozens of stories just like it, stories of parents glimpsing their lost children in crowds or receiving mysterious postcards. But there had been no such breaks in the pond girl case or parents to step up and claim her. Only Frank and maybe a local or cop or two had shown interest in the case over the years, and now certainly there was nothing except these pages and her killer out there somewhere. He skipped past the forensic reconstruction photos and sketches as that nagging and all too familiar sense that he'd missed something or somehow failed the dead girl came back to him, as fresh and as haunting as the day he'd leaned out over that cold pond waiting for her bony hand to float into his. He quickly shut the file and stashed it back in the desk before heading up to bed, hoping the vodka would work its lethargic magic on his brain and let him sleep.
He woke the next morning and untangled himself from the sheet as weak bands of sunlight struggled through the blinds. The backs of his hands were puffy and he could feel the first cottony buzz of a booze headache descending on him. He rubbed his face, stood unsteadily, and remembered how in his younger days a night of drinking could be shrugged off with a glass of water and a greasy breakfast, followed by a two-mile run.
By the time he reached the bathroom sink he realized there was no reason to rush through his groom-and-go routine, no more sniffing his jacket collar before swinging it over his shoulders or checking his tie for grease stains as he gulped one last cup of coffee, said good-bye to Clare and loped out to the car, already blocking out his day—the endless follow-up calls, sit and grins with wary local cops, file work, briefings, and lost hours spent fucking around in front of the Selectric pecking out reports and expense sheets. This morning there was nothing except his swollen reflection staring back at him and all the time in the world to stumble downstairs and do whatever it was you did when there was no job to go to, no boss to please or clock to punch.
After pulling on a worn gray sweatshirt, he opened the closet and thumbed through his old waist sizes, searching for his work pants. For some reason he'd kept a couple pairs of the dark blue 32s from his first days in the Bureau, the 36s Sansabelts from back when he'd worked undercover, and a half-dozen 38s he could still squeeze into if he skipped a few meals, did his crunchers regularly, and got religious with the jogging. He'd held the line at 40 for the last six years, vowing to stop the expansion because he did not want to be one of those older men who took to wearing baggy clothes to hide their spreading asses and thickening middles. But today, for the first time in years, he stared at the pants strung up on their wire hangers and wondered why he hadn't just shoved them all into a garbage bag and hauled them down to Goodwill or dropped them at one of the nearby churches. What was the point in keeping them? They were depressing reminders that he was getting old and out of shape.
