The iris algorithm, p.11
The IRIS Algorithm, page 11
CHAPTER 26
I was surprised and oddly relieved when we got back to the car and Jason had not flown the coop. A part of me wanted to be alone with Logan without my CEO-appointed, ventriloquist dummy with pretty eyebrows. I marched this road many times growing up and knew it was only 137 paces to the house. I did not try to remember distances; they somehow stuck in my brain.
My father was bound to have a few, halfway operational vehicles at the house. I wanted Jason to make a run for it, but there he stood, keys in hand, and that counted for something. A twinge of guilt about three seconds long made me sorry I wanted him to be gone.
Logan’s expression made it clear he did not agree with my sentiment.
“It’s about time,” Jason flashed a faker-than-usual toothy smile. “I was about to come looking for you.” He jumped behind the wheel. “Let’s get out of here.”
I got in the backseat, not in deference to the men folk who need to drive or ride shotgun, but because the backseat got there just a little later than the front. I wanted to delay my arrival as long as possible.
To my surprise, and Jason’s, Logan got in the back seat behind Jason. Judging from Jason’s expression, he thought Logan would garrote him before we went any further. That seemed statistically improbable to me, but not entirely impossible.
Jason laughed nervously. “What? Now I’m the chauffeur?”
“Just shut up and drive,” Logan snarled.
With all the requisite niceties concluded, we made our way cautiously down the dusty road in silence. The sound of the tires crunching and chewing the patchy gravel, the sullen hush of occupants no longer on speaking terms, the dread of another night creeping up on the House of Dancing, was all painfully familiar. There was no place like home.
A quick left around the line of azalea bushes, twelve feet tall and twenty feet across, and we were there. A shaggy carpet of Bahia grass rolled away from the house, punctuated by a scattering of unkempt fruit trees planted in some pattern that defied logic.
Little more than a rectangular box with a front door stuck in the middle, the three bedroom, tan brick house was the cousin of every other three-bedroom ranch in the Southeast. You had your choice of red brick or tan brick. In our case, there had been enough tan brick left from the Walton Correctional Institute’s expansion project to cover three sides of the house. The chipped and slightly darker tan bricks on the back of the house were acquired from a man in Piney Grove who, for unexplained reasons, had a substantial supply of slightly used construction material behind his barn.
The house was never large, but it, like everything else in DeFuniak Springs, had shrunk to a fraction of its original size. To the left of the house, the barn I once saw as two football fields away had moved to about fifty yards from the house. The rusting, tin barn, though larger than the house, had withered under the Florida sun to a diminutive shadow of its former grandness. The gray, scaly pecan tree, once so grand, now too frail to hold a tire swing, had retracted into the ground like a frightened sea anemone. I ruminated about Einstein’s theory of relativity—time dilation, length contraction, relativity of simultaneity—and searched for an explanation for all the shrinkage. The piles of junked equipment had not moved in the twenty years since I left, and there were new piles, all works in progress Dad used to say.
In case we were being observed, I stepped out of the car without hesitation, doing my best to look casual and in control. My heart beat strangely, and I wondered if a person could give herself CPR. I preferred to be self-sufficient.
The front driver’s window slid down with efficiency. Safe with his seat belt fastened, Jason stretched his thin neck out the window. “Maybe we should wait here, so you can have some time alone with your parents.”
“Parent,” I replied without looking back. “It is just my Dad. My mother died the first year I left for college.” I left for everybody’s sake. I did not come back, for the funeral. Mother was the last thin thread holding me to this place, holding me to anything that approximated normal. When she died, what was pawned off on me as a childhood was officially a closed chapter.
God takes whatever you love too much.
I still thought about my dad every day, wondered if he still hated me. He was not a bad man, just had a lot of bad luck. The worst was me. I looked at Logan and Jason sitting uncomfortably in the car.
“Come meet Lester Dancing. You will like him.”
As I strode to the front door, I heard the resounding thunk of car doors closing behind me. Too soon, we were on the tiny concrete pad that looked like a front porch from the road. Something was wrong.
The front door stood ajar two inches. I started to knock but pulled up short. Wary, I summoned my determination and slowly pushed the door open. I eased into the home of my youth. Logan and Jason crowded into the small foyer behind me. In the living room to the left, a wooden chair was knocked over. I could see through to the small kitchen and dining area, the old oak, Amish Shaker table with the leaf out and four chairs. The back door stood wide open.
“Lester?”
Logan grabbed my arm and pulled me behind him. I should have known he was armed. I recognized the gun, a Glock G26 sub-compact, 9mm. I have one just like it. His eyes, dark and menacing, fixed on something in the kitchen. Something wet and red pooled on the floor.
Logan motioned for us to be still, to stay put, to stay quiet. It was very practical advice designed to increase our probability for survival when the bullets started flying. Crouching, thereby reducing target surface area, I calculated would further improve our odds. Jason, on the other hand, was about to bolt. I pulled him to a crouching position by the crotch of his pants. I had not intended to get a handful of anything but 100 percent Italian wool crepe. That was why boxer shorts are hazardous to men’s health. Jason immediately assumed crouching position.
Safety first.
Logan moved forward with the stealth and expertise of a man who had done this too many times. God gave everyone different gifts for different reasons. The timing was odd, but my heart suddenly broke for Logan. For us. It broke for my dear eccentric father, whom I never hated. Who once loved me. Years of hiding behind the numbers suddenly did not compute.
The house was small. It did not take long for Logan to return to the foyer where Jason and I imitated ceramic garden toads. “It’s clear,” he said. “Looks like somebody left in a hurry.”
“Or was taken in a hurry,” I said.
Logan’s eyes continued to scan the surroundings, taking inventory, muscles taut. “The red liquid on the floor in the kitchen isn’t blood. Something from the refrigerator. Pickled beets, I think.”
“The people who took Samuel must have found out about my Dad. They must have him too.”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” Logan surveyed the disheveled surroundings, the open back door. “I don’t see signs of a struggle. Just signs of a mess. Except for the pickled beets, it looks pretty much like my apartment or any other place a guy lives without proper female supervision. Your Dad an exception?”
I thought about it for a few seconds. “Not really.” The man-mess gene was prominent in my father. “But he definitely does not leave doors open. Ever.”
“I think we should leave,” Jason said. Isn’t this like breaking and entering, trespassing, and illegally waving a gun around in somebody’s house?”
Jason did not realize how stupid he sounded.
Logan tucked the Glock in the small of his back. “We’ll check the barn. Any other buildings on the premises?”
“A tool shed and a small pump house near the barn,” I said. “The bunker.”
“The bunker?” Exasperation swarmed Jason’s face like a plague of locusts. “I can’t believe we didn’t think to check the bunker first.”
I never attempted to explain the peculiarities of Lester Dancing to anyone. It was something one had to experience to believe. “Survivalist school when I was fifteen. That was actually one of my Dad’s more practical ideas. The school never made money, but we all learned a lot of useful things.”
“I don’t believe this,” Jason said.
“I doubt he’s in the bunker,” I said, running through the alternatives and probabilities in my head.
“Why not?” Logan asked. I tried not to look annoyed by the interruption. “Just curious,” he mumbled.
“Because the bunker is meticulously sealed. It is actually very organized.” I looked at the mess in the house. “If you go in, you have a pretty lengthy procedure for proper egress and re-sealing of the bunker. Anyway, he would not have left the house open.”
“We should leave,” Jason said.
“You said that already.”
“Let’s get going.” Logan moved toward the back door. “If he’s here, we’ll find him.”
“I really feel like we should leave,” Jason said.
Logan’s stance told me he was ready to snap Jason like a twig, which he could do with one hand. The smell of pickled beet juice wandering from the kitchen was starting to wear thin on my olfactory nerves. Jason was wearing on all the others.
“Wait.” I looked across the grassy field from the back door. The v-topped, Bahia seed heads waved lazily in the golden light of the setting sun, the warm glow came to rest on all things of God and man, giving even the ugly things a time to be beautiful. A lanky figure emerged from the dark swampy woods, which were a fair way from the little, tan House of Dancing. His faded jeans tucked into battered army boots, a well-worn, olive drab, ranger vest with no shirt underneath, Lester Dancing marched to the beat of his own drummer. Singing at the top of his lungs, my father carried a large burlap sack full of something bulky but not too heavy that bounced over his shoulder.
“That would be my father.”
I smiled a real smile. In the propitious glow of the setting sun, even ugly memories subsided. Then and now. What was and what could be.
CHAPTER 27
Jason’s pounding head kept time with the ragged beat of his heart. This affair had become a surrealistic, psychotic nightmare. If he could wake up, he’d welcome his previous miseries. A lanky man with a salt and pepper crew cut marched ever closer to the house. He looked like a used pipe cleaner: wiry, smudged, and slightly bent. He was belting out some ditty about taking a job and shoving it, singing loud and not particularly melodic. Jason adjusted his cuffs, one half inch of tailored long sleeve showing.
“We could still leave. No one would ever know we were here.”
Simone ignored him. She took a couple of steps out the back door and stood with her hands on her hips. The used pipe cleaner didn’t scare her one bit. Jason couldn’t see her face, but he knew she was smiling. What a bitch. There was nothing to smile about.
“You don’t look too good, Glunt.” Jason flinched. Logan had silently eased beside him. “This not Gucci enough for you?” Logan’s noxious smirk burned the side of his face. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except finding a way to unwind this deal without involving more people, more witnesses.
“Why couldn’t he just stay in the bunker?”
When the man saw Simone, he stopped. Was this her father? How did something like that produce a Simone? Thankfully, the grizzly man quit singing. He adjusted the sack over his shoulder and walked toward the house in earnest. Jason reached into his pocket. He still had the car keys. No. He needed to stay cool and take care of this. This whole thing was just a deal. Nothing more. He was a deal maker. A rainmaker. Hell yeah. He could do this.
The rough old guy stopped a few feet short of the group, un-shouldered a brown, burlap sack, putting it to the ground with some care. An anthropologist regarding a new tribe from deep within the rainforest, he surveyed the three curiously: respectfully cautious and mildly skeptical. His face wasn’t cruel, but it was hard. Cheekbones pushed high against curious blue eyes. Deep lines creased his animated face, which seemed to react and move to every inner thought. Several days of graying stubble stood guard on the narrow face, surrounded the wide straight mouth, and accented his tanned, leathery skin. Here was a man who had never sat behind a desk his entire life and never would.
The man rubbed his chin with a calloused hand. “Well, now. I reckon this is what happens when a man fails to secure his outer doors.” The deep baritone voice, so rich and thick, seemed odd coming from the scraggy, lean husk. The face and the eyes revealed no anger only amusement. “That must be the first time in my grown life I done left the house wide open and look what happened.” The face smiled, but the eyes looked hard and knowing at Logan. He ignored Jason.
Simone’s face was unreadable. Lester Dancing released his gaze on Logan, and after a long slow blink, met Simone’s eyes in the failing light of summer. A peculiar silence rose like an ocean swell, high in the moment, long in the making. It made Jason hate the memory of his own father even more. He was sorry when the moment ended.
“Lester, we saw the beets on the floor. I was… concerned.” Simone measured each word carefully, the precision in her articulation in marked contrast to Lester’s heavy drawl. “You never liked pickled beets. It was… alarming.”
Volumes passed between Simone and her father. Invisible rivers flowed in white frothy torrents from their eyes. The air between them was charged with a potent energy that raised the hairs on Jason’s arms and made his spine tingle.
“I still don’t like’em,” Lester finally broke the energy field. “Sissy Brewster and them other church ladies bring me stuff, like I’m some kind of charity case. Hmmpf. When everything finally does break bad, I’ll be the only one around here who knows how to survive and has the necessary means to do it. I reckon I’ll be taking them food then.”
Simone nodded, “I am glad you are okay.” She took inventory of her father as though something was missing. She nodded toward the bag. “Should I ask?”
Lester’s sparkling blue eyes danced and an eager smile erupted across his entire face. “Well, yes ma’am, you most definitely want to know what’s in this here croaker sack. It might as well be gold.” Lester cackled and moved toward the door. “Let’s get inside before them man-eating skeeters get riled up. I got some the size of chicken hawks out here. Last night I swatted one with a rolled up Popular Mechanics, and I’ll be doggone if he didn’t take it away from me and beat me across the head with it. If I’m lying, I’m dying.”
Hell, yes! Get us inside. Jason moved to the door. We don’t want to be eaten by the wild skeeters prowling around—whatever they are. If I’m lying I’m dying. He practiced the idiotic phrase in his head, accent, and all. If I’m lying, we’re all dying. And, I’m so lying.
Once inside, an awkward silence ensured as Lester waited for introductions. Simone sensed there was a problem, but took a moment to comprehend that her father expected an explanation of the two strange men in his house.
“Oh, yes, of course.” Simone gestured toward Jason like a game show host. “This is Jason Glunt, a coworker.” Silence. “Right, and this is Logan Ranes.” Simone pointed. “Logan is, well, you see, Logan is actually my husband. Was, that is. Well, is still, technically. You know, I really forgot how warm it is down here. Do you have any iced tea?”
The overturned furniture and spilled beets were explained. Lester had gone into the mushroom business. Mushrooms preferred to be harvested daily at a very particular time; otherwise, they became unhappy. Unhappy mushrooms tasted bitter and had a 23 percent shorter shelf life than happy ones. Lester had determined the particular best time to harvest based on some form of science, intuition, and sooth saying Jason had a hard time following. Today Lester lost track of time. Realizing it was almost past time for the daily harvest, he ran off and left the door unlocked.
“I can’t be sending unhappy fungi across the fruited plain. Know what I mean?” Lester began taking mushroom filled, rectangular, cardboard boxes, about half the size of a shoebox, out of the brown sack and putting them into a large commercial refrigerator situated in a spare room while he talked. He precariously balanced several boxes as he loaded the refrigerator.
Forty three minutes later, according to his ever reliable, fine Swiss timepiece, they had been entertained, fed, and pumped full of sweet iced tea. Lester provided an abbreviated and notably well informed description of Agroforestry and his latest venture—farming exotic mushrooms in the dark swampy forest behind his house. He was growing Shiitake, maitake, oyster, and pompom that went for twelve dollars a pound to top restaurants and organic food outlets across the country. He rolled out a large drawing from an easel pad onto the kitchen table. The wrinkled sheet was covered with a multitude of drawings, sketches, calculations, and homegrown theories that would have made Leonardo da Vinci proud.
Lester leaned back in the wooden chair. “I got a thousand logs, bored and spored, over half producing.” His face contorted in exaggerated folds, nodding once in self-congratulation. “Let me tell you just what. Drilling all them holes in a thousand logs, and packing them with spores, and sealing them with hot wax. Lawdy, Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, that was a job,” Lester slapped his knobby knee at the memory of some good old hard work. Work that he assured them would make him a millionaire for sure this time.
“You wouldn’t happen to have an Internet connection by any chance,” Logan said.
“Sure do. Got me a high speed, satellite connection and a wireless network that reaches all the way to the barn. I done got all computerfied around here. Most of my fungi business is done over the Internet.”
Jason removed his suit jacket and carefully hung it on the back of the chair. A bunker. A fungi farm. Wild skeeters. He didn’t dare ask what else. At least, Logan had found a way of communicating. No cell phone coverage was a bummer. High speed Internet via satellite and this dump covered by a wireless network. Between his laptop and his Wi-Fi enabled smartphone, he could get the deal done even here among the fungi or was it funguses?
Simone’s father was definitely not what he had pictured. Stealing a glance at her, Jason considered that the nut didn’t fall too far from the tree. Logan was a bigger problem. The way he positioned himself off to one side, just out of clear sight, a sort of weight in one’s peripheral vision, was irritating. When he and Simone took a seat, politely offered by Lester, Logan lurked behind them, always repositioning, quiet and fluid. Irritating. He winced instinctively when Logan suddenly spoke.
I was surprised and oddly relieved when we got back to the car and Jason had not flown the coop. A part of me wanted to be alone with Logan without my CEO-appointed, ventriloquist dummy with pretty eyebrows. I marched this road many times growing up and knew it was only 137 paces to the house. I did not try to remember distances; they somehow stuck in my brain.
My father was bound to have a few, halfway operational vehicles at the house. I wanted Jason to make a run for it, but there he stood, keys in hand, and that counted for something. A twinge of guilt about three seconds long made me sorry I wanted him to be gone.
Logan’s expression made it clear he did not agree with my sentiment.
“It’s about time,” Jason flashed a faker-than-usual toothy smile. “I was about to come looking for you.” He jumped behind the wheel. “Let’s get out of here.”
I got in the backseat, not in deference to the men folk who need to drive or ride shotgun, but because the backseat got there just a little later than the front. I wanted to delay my arrival as long as possible.
To my surprise, and Jason’s, Logan got in the back seat behind Jason. Judging from Jason’s expression, he thought Logan would garrote him before we went any further. That seemed statistically improbable to me, but not entirely impossible.
Jason laughed nervously. “What? Now I’m the chauffeur?”
“Just shut up and drive,” Logan snarled.
With all the requisite niceties concluded, we made our way cautiously down the dusty road in silence. The sound of the tires crunching and chewing the patchy gravel, the sullen hush of occupants no longer on speaking terms, the dread of another night creeping up on the House of Dancing, was all painfully familiar. There was no place like home.
A quick left around the line of azalea bushes, twelve feet tall and twenty feet across, and we were there. A shaggy carpet of Bahia grass rolled away from the house, punctuated by a scattering of unkempt fruit trees planted in some pattern that defied logic.
Little more than a rectangular box with a front door stuck in the middle, the three bedroom, tan brick house was the cousin of every other three-bedroom ranch in the Southeast. You had your choice of red brick or tan brick. In our case, there had been enough tan brick left from the Walton Correctional Institute’s expansion project to cover three sides of the house. The chipped and slightly darker tan bricks on the back of the house were acquired from a man in Piney Grove who, for unexplained reasons, had a substantial supply of slightly used construction material behind his barn.
The house was never large, but it, like everything else in DeFuniak Springs, had shrunk to a fraction of its original size. To the left of the house, the barn I once saw as two football fields away had moved to about fifty yards from the house. The rusting, tin barn, though larger than the house, had withered under the Florida sun to a diminutive shadow of its former grandness. The gray, scaly pecan tree, once so grand, now too frail to hold a tire swing, had retracted into the ground like a frightened sea anemone. I ruminated about Einstein’s theory of relativity—time dilation, length contraction, relativity of simultaneity—and searched for an explanation for all the shrinkage. The piles of junked equipment had not moved in the twenty years since I left, and there were new piles, all works in progress Dad used to say.
In case we were being observed, I stepped out of the car without hesitation, doing my best to look casual and in control. My heart beat strangely, and I wondered if a person could give herself CPR. I preferred to be self-sufficient.
The front driver’s window slid down with efficiency. Safe with his seat belt fastened, Jason stretched his thin neck out the window. “Maybe we should wait here, so you can have some time alone with your parents.”
“Parent,” I replied without looking back. “It is just my Dad. My mother died the first year I left for college.” I left for everybody’s sake. I did not come back, for the funeral. Mother was the last thin thread holding me to this place, holding me to anything that approximated normal. When she died, what was pawned off on me as a childhood was officially a closed chapter.
God takes whatever you love too much.
I still thought about my dad every day, wondered if he still hated me. He was not a bad man, just had a lot of bad luck. The worst was me. I looked at Logan and Jason sitting uncomfortably in the car.
“Come meet Lester Dancing. You will like him.”
As I strode to the front door, I heard the resounding thunk of car doors closing behind me. Too soon, we were on the tiny concrete pad that looked like a front porch from the road. Something was wrong.
The front door stood ajar two inches. I started to knock but pulled up short. Wary, I summoned my determination and slowly pushed the door open. I eased into the home of my youth. Logan and Jason crowded into the small foyer behind me. In the living room to the left, a wooden chair was knocked over. I could see through to the small kitchen and dining area, the old oak, Amish Shaker table with the leaf out and four chairs. The back door stood wide open.
“Lester?”
Logan grabbed my arm and pulled me behind him. I should have known he was armed. I recognized the gun, a Glock G26 sub-compact, 9mm. I have one just like it. His eyes, dark and menacing, fixed on something in the kitchen. Something wet and red pooled on the floor.
Logan motioned for us to be still, to stay put, to stay quiet. It was very practical advice designed to increase our probability for survival when the bullets started flying. Crouching, thereby reducing target surface area, I calculated would further improve our odds. Jason, on the other hand, was about to bolt. I pulled him to a crouching position by the crotch of his pants. I had not intended to get a handful of anything but 100 percent Italian wool crepe. That was why boxer shorts are hazardous to men’s health. Jason immediately assumed crouching position.
Safety first.
Logan moved forward with the stealth and expertise of a man who had done this too many times. God gave everyone different gifts for different reasons. The timing was odd, but my heart suddenly broke for Logan. For us. It broke for my dear eccentric father, whom I never hated. Who once loved me. Years of hiding behind the numbers suddenly did not compute.
The house was small. It did not take long for Logan to return to the foyer where Jason and I imitated ceramic garden toads. “It’s clear,” he said. “Looks like somebody left in a hurry.”
“Or was taken in a hurry,” I said.
Logan’s eyes continued to scan the surroundings, taking inventory, muscles taut. “The red liquid on the floor in the kitchen isn’t blood. Something from the refrigerator. Pickled beets, I think.”
“The people who took Samuel must have found out about my Dad. They must have him too.”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” Logan surveyed the disheveled surroundings, the open back door. “I don’t see signs of a struggle. Just signs of a mess. Except for the pickled beets, it looks pretty much like my apartment or any other place a guy lives without proper female supervision. Your Dad an exception?”
I thought about it for a few seconds. “Not really.” The man-mess gene was prominent in my father. “But he definitely does not leave doors open. Ever.”
“I think we should leave,” Jason said. Isn’t this like breaking and entering, trespassing, and illegally waving a gun around in somebody’s house?”
Jason did not realize how stupid he sounded.
Logan tucked the Glock in the small of his back. “We’ll check the barn. Any other buildings on the premises?”
“A tool shed and a small pump house near the barn,” I said. “The bunker.”
“The bunker?” Exasperation swarmed Jason’s face like a plague of locusts. “I can’t believe we didn’t think to check the bunker first.”
I never attempted to explain the peculiarities of Lester Dancing to anyone. It was something one had to experience to believe. “Survivalist school when I was fifteen. That was actually one of my Dad’s more practical ideas. The school never made money, but we all learned a lot of useful things.”
“I don’t believe this,” Jason said.
“I doubt he’s in the bunker,” I said, running through the alternatives and probabilities in my head.
“Why not?” Logan asked. I tried not to look annoyed by the interruption. “Just curious,” he mumbled.
“Because the bunker is meticulously sealed. It is actually very organized.” I looked at the mess in the house. “If you go in, you have a pretty lengthy procedure for proper egress and re-sealing of the bunker. Anyway, he would not have left the house open.”
“We should leave,” Jason said.
“You said that already.”
“Let’s get going.” Logan moved toward the back door. “If he’s here, we’ll find him.”
“I really feel like we should leave,” Jason said.
Logan’s stance told me he was ready to snap Jason like a twig, which he could do with one hand. The smell of pickled beet juice wandering from the kitchen was starting to wear thin on my olfactory nerves. Jason was wearing on all the others.
“Wait.” I looked across the grassy field from the back door. The v-topped, Bahia seed heads waved lazily in the golden light of the setting sun, the warm glow came to rest on all things of God and man, giving even the ugly things a time to be beautiful. A lanky figure emerged from the dark swampy woods, which were a fair way from the little, tan House of Dancing. His faded jeans tucked into battered army boots, a well-worn, olive drab, ranger vest with no shirt underneath, Lester Dancing marched to the beat of his own drummer. Singing at the top of his lungs, my father carried a large burlap sack full of something bulky but not too heavy that bounced over his shoulder.
“That would be my father.”
I smiled a real smile. In the propitious glow of the setting sun, even ugly memories subsided. Then and now. What was and what could be.
CHAPTER 27
Jason’s pounding head kept time with the ragged beat of his heart. This affair had become a surrealistic, psychotic nightmare. If he could wake up, he’d welcome his previous miseries. A lanky man with a salt and pepper crew cut marched ever closer to the house. He looked like a used pipe cleaner: wiry, smudged, and slightly bent. He was belting out some ditty about taking a job and shoving it, singing loud and not particularly melodic. Jason adjusted his cuffs, one half inch of tailored long sleeve showing.
“We could still leave. No one would ever know we were here.”
Simone ignored him. She took a couple of steps out the back door and stood with her hands on her hips. The used pipe cleaner didn’t scare her one bit. Jason couldn’t see her face, but he knew she was smiling. What a bitch. There was nothing to smile about.
“You don’t look too good, Glunt.” Jason flinched. Logan had silently eased beside him. “This not Gucci enough for you?” Logan’s noxious smirk burned the side of his face. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except finding a way to unwind this deal without involving more people, more witnesses.
“Why couldn’t he just stay in the bunker?”
When the man saw Simone, he stopped. Was this her father? How did something like that produce a Simone? Thankfully, the grizzly man quit singing. He adjusted the sack over his shoulder and walked toward the house in earnest. Jason reached into his pocket. He still had the car keys. No. He needed to stay cool and take care of this. This whole thing was just a deal. Nothing more. He was a deal maker. A rainmaker. Hell yeah. He could do this.
The rough old guy stopped a few feet short of the group, un-shouldered a brown, burlap sack, putting it to the ground with some care. An anthropologist regarding a new tribe from deep within the rainforest, he surveyed the three curiously: respectfully cautious and mildly skeptical. His face wasn’t cruel, but it was hard. Cheekbones pushed high against curious blue eyes. Deep lines creased his animated face, which seemed to react and move to every inner thought. Several days of graying stubble stood guard on the narrow face, surrounded the wide straight mouth, and accented his tanned, leathery skin. Here was a man who had never sat behind a desk his entire life and never would.
The man rubbed his chin with a calloused hand. “Well, now. I reckon this is what happens when a man fails to secure his outer doors.” The deep baritone voice, so rich and thick, seemed odd coming from the scraggy, lean husk. The face and the eyes revealed no anger only amusement. “That must be the first time in my grown life I done left the house wide open and look what happened.” The face smiled, but the eyes looked hard and knowing at Logan. He ignored Jason.
Simone’s face was unreadable. Lester Dancing released his gaze on Logan, and after a long slow blink, met Simone’s eyes in the failing light of summer. A peculiar silence rose like an ocean swell, high in the moment, long in the making. It made Jason hate the memory of his own father even more. He was sorry when the moment ended.
“Lester, we saw the beets on the floor. I was… concerned.” Simone measured each word carefully, the precision in her articulation in marked contrast to Lester’s heavy drawl. “You never liked pickled beets. It was… alarming.”
Volumes passed between Simone and her father. Invisible rivers flowed in white frothy torrents from their eyes. The air between them was charged with a potent energy that raised the hairs on Jason’s arms and made his spine tingle.
“I still don’t like’em,” Lester finally broke the energy field. “Sissy Brewster and them other church ladies bring me stuff, like I’m some kind of charity case. Hmmpf. When everything finally does break bad, I’ll be the only one around here who knows how to survive and has the necessary means to do it. I reckon I’ll be taking them food then.”
Simone nodded, “I am glad you are okay.” She took inventory of her father as though something was missing. She nodded toward the bag. “Should I ask?”
Lester’s sparkling blue eyes danced and an eager smile erupted across his entire face. “Well, yes ma’am, you most definitely want to know what’s in this here croaker sack. It might as well be gold.” Lester cackled and moved toward the door. “Let’s get inside before them man-eating skeeters get riled up. I got some the size of chicken hawks out here. Last night I swatted one with a rolled up Popular Mechanics, and I’ll be doggone if he didn’t take it away from me and beat me across the head with it. If I’m lying, I’m dying.”
Hell, yes! Get us inside. Jason moved to the door. We don’t want to be eaten by the wild skeeters prowling around—whatever they are. If I’m lying I’m dying. He practiced the idiotic phrase in his head, accent, and all. If I’m lying, we’re all dying. And, I’m so lying.
Once inside, an awkward silence ensured as Lester waited for introductions. Simone sensed there was a problem, but took a moment to comprehend that her father expected an explanation of the two strange men in his house.
“Oh, yes, of course.” Simone gestured toward Jason like a game show host. “This is Jason Glunt, a coworker.” Silence. “Right, and this is Logan Ranes.” Simone pointed. “Logan is, well, you see, Logan is actually my husband. Was, that is. Well, is still, technically. You know, I really forgot how warm it is down here. Do you have any iced tea?”
The overturned furniture and spilled beets were explained. Lester had gone into the mushroom business. Mushrooms preferred to be harvested daily at a very particular time; otherwise, they became unhappy. Unhappy mushrooms tasted bitter and had a 23 percent shorter shelf life than happy ones. Lester had determined the particular best time to harvest based on some form of science, intuition, and sooth saying Jason had a hard time following. Today Lester lost track of time. Realizing it was almost past time for the daily harvest, he ran off and left the door unlocked.
“I can’t be sending unhappy fungi across the fruited plain. Know what I mean?” Lester began taking mushroom filled, rectangular, cardboard boxes, about half the size of a shoebox, out of the brown sack and putting them into a large commercial refrigerator situated in a spare room while he talked. He precariously balanced several boxes as he loaded the refrigerator.
Forty three minutes later, according to his ever reliable, fine Swiss timepiece, they had been entertained, fed, and pumped full of sweet iced tea. Lester provided an abbreviated and notably well informed description of Agroforestry and his latest venture—farming exotic mushrooms in the dark swampy forest behind his house. He was growing Shiitake, maitake, oyster, and pompom that went for twelve dollars a pound to top restaurants and organic food outlets across the country. He rolled out a large drawing from an easel pad onto the kitchen table. The wrinkled sheet was covered with a multitude of drawings, sketches, calculations, and homegrown theories that would have made Leonardo da Vinci proud.
Lester leaned back in the wooden chair. “I got a thousand logs, bored and spored, over half producing.” His face contorted in exaggerated folds, nodding once in self-congratulation. “Let me tell you just what. Drilling all them holes in a thousand logs, and packing them with spores, and sealing them with hot wax. Lawdy, Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, that was a job,” Lester slapped his knobby knee at the memory of some good old hard work. Work that he assured them would make him a millionaire for sure this time.
“You wouldn’t happen to have an Internet connection by any chance,” Logan said.
“Sure do. Got me a high speed, satellite connection and a wireless network that reaches all the way to the barn. I done got all computerfied around here. Most of my fungi business is done over the Internet.”
Jason removed his suit jacket and carefully hung it on the back of the chair. A bunker. A fungi farm. Wild skeeters. He didn’t dare ask what else. At least, Logan had found a way of communicating. No cell phone coverage was a bummer. High speed Internet via satellite and this dump covered by a wireless network. Between his laptop and his Wi-Fi enabled smartphone, he could get the deal done even here among the fungi or was it funguses?
Simone’s father was definitely not what he had pictured. Stealing a glance at her, Jason considered that the nut didn’t fall too far from the tree. Logan was a bigger problem. The way he positioned himself off to one side, just out of clear sight, a sort of weight in one’s peripheral vision, was irritating. When he and Simone took a seat, politely offered by Lester, Logan lurked behind them, always repositioning, quiet and fluid. Irritating. He winced instinctively when Logan suddenly spoke.
