Black House (47 page)

The weariness in Henry’s voice startles Jack, makes him uneasy. Henry doesn’t sound like himself or any of his radio personae; at this moment he just sounds old and tired, on the way to being used up.

“I am, too,” Jack agrees, trying not to let his concern show in his voice. Henry picks up on every vocal nuance. He’s eerie that way.

“What do you have in mind for the Thunder Five, may I ask?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” Jack says, and perhaps because he’s tired, he gets this untruth past Henry. He intends to start Beezer and his buddies looking for the place Potsie told him about, the place where shadows had a way of disappearing. At least way back in the seventies they did. He had also intended to ask Henry if he’s ever heard of a French Landing domicile called Black House. Not now, though. Not after hearing how beat Henry sounds. Tomorrow, maybe. Almost certainly, in fact, because Henry is too good a resource not to use. Best to let him recycle a little first, though.

“You have the tape, right?”

Henry pulls the cassette with the Fisherman’s 911 call on it partway out of his breast pocket, then puts it back. “Yes, Mother. But I don’t think I can listen to a killer of small children tonight, Jack. Not even if you come in and listen with me.”

“Tomorrow will be fine,” Jack says, hoping he isn’t condemning another of French Landing’s children to death by saying this.

“You’re not entirely sure of that.”

“No,” Jack agrees, “but you listening to that tape with dull ears could do more harm than good. I
am
sure of that.”

“First thing in the morning. I promise.”

Henry’s house is up ahead now. It looks lonely with only the one light on over the garage, but of course Henry doesn’t need lights inside to find his way.

“Henry, are you going to be all right?”

“Yes,” Henry says, but to Jack he doesn’t seem entirely sure.

“No Rat tonight,” Jack tells him firmly.

“No.”

“Ditto the Shake, the Shook, the Sheik.”

Henry’s lips lift in a small smile. “Not even a George Rathbun promo for French Landing Chevrolet, where price is king and you never pay a dime of interest for the first six months with approved credit. Straight to bed.”

“Me too,” Jack says.

But an hour after lying down and putting out the lamp on his bedside table, Jack is still unable to sleep. Faces and voices revolve in his mind like crazy clock hands. Or a carousel on a deserted midway.

Tansy Freneau:
Bring out the monster who killed my pretty baby.

Beezer St. Pierre:
We’ll have to see how it shakes out, won’t we?

George Potter:
That shit gets in and waits. My theory is that it
never
goes away, not really.

Speedy, a voice from the distant past on the sort of telephone that was science fiction when Jack first met him:
Hidey-ho, Travelin’ Jack
.
.
.
as one coppiceman to another, son, I think you ought to visit Chief Gilbertson’s private bathroom. Right now.

As one coppiceman to another, right.

And most of all, over and over again, Judy Marshall:
You don’t just say, I’m lost and I don’t know how to get back—you keep on going
.
.
.

Yes, but keep on going where?
Where?

At last he gets up and goes out onto the porch with his pillow under his arm. The night is warm; in Norway Valley, where the fog was thin to begin with, the last remnants have now disappeared, blown away by a soft east wind. Jack hesitates, then goes on down the steps, naked except for his underwear. The porch is no good to him, though. It’s where he found that hellish box with the sugar-packet stamps.

He walks past his truck, past the bird hotel, and into the north field. Above him are a billion stars. Crickets hum softly in the grass. His fleeing path through the hay and timothy has disappeared, or maybe now he’s entering the field in a different place.

A little way in, he lies down on his back, puts the pillow under his head, and looks up at the stars.
Just for a little while,
he thinks.
Just until all those ghost voices empty out of my head. Just for a little while.

Thinking this, he begins to drowse.

Thinking this, he goes over.

Above his head, the pattern of the stars changes. He
sees
the new constellations form. What is that one, where the Big Dipper was a moment before? Is it the Sacred Opopanax? Perhaps it is. He hears a low, plea-sant creaking sound and knows it’s the windmill he saw when he flipped just this morning, a thousand years ago. He doesn’t need to look at it to be sure, any more than he needs to look at where his house was and see that it has once more become a barn.

Creak
.
.
.
creak
.
.
.
creak:
vast wooden vanes turning in that same east wind. Only now the wind is infinitely sweeter, infinitely purer. Jack touches the waistband of his underpants and feels some rough weave. No Jockey shorts in this world. His pillow has changed, too. Foam has become goosedown, but it’s still comfortable. More comfortable than ever, in truth. Sweet under his head.

“I’ll catch him, Speedy,” Jack Sawyer whispers up at the new shapes in the new stars. “At least I’ll try.”

He sleeps.

When he awakens, it’s early morning. The breeze is gone. In the direction from which it came, there’s a bright orange line on the horizon—the sun is on its way. He’s stiff and his ass hurts and he’s damp with dew, but he’s rested. The steady, rhythmic creaking is gone, but that doesn’t surprise him. He knew from the moment he opened his eyes that he’s in Wisconsin again. And he knows something else: he can go back. Any time he wants. The real Coulee Country, the
deep
Coulee Country, is just a wish and a motion away. This fills him with joy and dread in equal parts.

Jack gets up and barefoots back to the house with his pillow under his arm. He guesses it’s about five in the morning. Another three hours’ sleep will make him ready for anything. On the porch steps, he touches the cotton of his Jockey shorts. Although his skin is damp, the shorts are almost dry. Of course they are. For most of the hours he spent sleeping rough (as he spent so many nights that autumn when he was twelve), they weren’t on him at all. They were somewhere else.

“In the Land of Opopanax,” Jack says, and goes inside. Three minutes later he’s asleep again, in his own bed. When he wakes at eight, with the sensible sun streaming in through his window, he could almost believe that his latest journey was a dream.

But in his heart, he knows better.

18

R
EMEMBER THOSE
news vans that drove into the parking lot behind the police station? And Wendell Green’s contribution to the excitement, before Officer Hrabowski’s giant flashlight knocked him into the Land of Nod? Once the crews inside the vans took in the seeming inevitability of a riot, we can be sure they rose to the occasion, for the next morning their footage of the wild night dominates television screens across the state. By nine o’clock, people in Racine and Milwaukee, people in Madison and Delafield, and people who live so far north in the state that they need satellite dishes to get any television at all are looking up from their pancakes, their bowls of Special K, their fried eggs, and their buttered English muffins to watch a small, nervous-looking policeman finishing off a large, florid reporter’s budding career as a demagogue by clocking him with a blunt instrument. And we may also be sure of one other matter: that nowhere is this footage watched as widely and compulsively as in French Landing and the neighboring communities of Centralia and Arden.

Thinking about several matters at once, Jack Sawyer watches it all on a little portable TV placed on his kitchen counter. He hopes that Dale Gilbertson will not revoke Arnold Hrabowski’s suspension, although he strongly suspects that the Mad Hungarian will soon be back in uniform. Dale only
thinks
he wants him off the force for good: he is too softhearted to listen to Arnie’s pleas—and after last night, even a blind man can see that Arnie is going to plead—without relenting. Jack also hopes that the awful Wendell Green will get fired or move away in disgrace. Reporters are not supposed to thrust themselves into their stories, and here is good old loudmouth Wendell, baying for blood like a werewolf. However, Jack has the depressing feeling that Wendell Green will talk his way out of his present difficulties (that is,
lie
his way out of them) and go on being a powerful nuisance. And Jack is pondering Andy Railsback’s description of the creepy old man trying the doorknobs on the third floor of the Nelson Hotel.

There he was,
the Fisherman,
given form at last. An old man in a blue robe and one slipper striped black and yellow, like a bumblebee. Andy Railsback had wondered if this unpleasant-looking old party had wandered away from the Maxton Elder Care Facility. That was an interesting notion, Jack thought. If “Chummy” Burnside is the man who planted the photographs in George Potter’s room, Maxton’s would be a perfect hidey-hole for him.

Wendell Green is watching the news on the Sony in his hotel room. He cannot take his eyes off the screen, although what he sees there afflicts him with a mixture of feelings—anger, shame, and humiliation—that makes his stomach boil. The knot on his head throbs, and every time he witnesses that poor excuse for a cop sneaking up behind him with his flashlight raised, he pushes his fingers into the thick, curly hair at the back of his head and gently palpates it. The damn thing feels about the size of a ripe tomato and just as ready to burst. He’s lucky not to have a concussion. That pipsqueak could have killed him!

Okay, maybe he went a little bit over the edge, maybe he took a tiny step across a professional boundary; he never claimed to be perfect. The local news guys, they piss him off, all that guff about Jack Sawyer. Who is the top guy covering the Fisherman story? Who has been all over it from day one, telling the citizens what they need to know? Who’s been putting himself on the line, day after crummy goddamn day? Who
gave the guy his name?
Not those blow-dried airheads Bucky and Stacey, those wanna-be news reporters and local anchors who smile into the camera to show off their capped teeth, that’s for sure. Wendell Green is a legend around here, a star, the closest thing to a giant of journalism ever to come out of western Wisconsin. Even over in Madison, the name Wendell Green stands for . . . well, unquestioned excellence. And if the name Wendell Green is like the gold standard now, just wait until he rides the Fisherman’s blood-spattered shoulders all the way to a Pulitzer Prize.

So Monday morning he has to go into the office and pacify his editor. Big deal. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. Good reporters make waves; nobody admits it, but that’s the deal, that’s the fine print nobody reads until it’s too late. When he walks into his editor’s office, he knows what he’s going to say:
Biggest story of the day, and did you see any other reporters there?
And when he has the editor eating out of his hand again, which will take about ten minutes flat, he intends to drop in on a Goltz’s salesman named Fred Marshall. One of Wendell’s most valuable sources has suggested that Mr. Marshall has some interesting information about his special, special baby, the Fisherman case.

Arnold Hrabowski, now a hero to his darling wife, Paula, is watching the news in a postcoital glow and thinking that she is right: he really should call Chief Gilbertson and ask to be taken off suspension.

Wondering with half his mind where he might look for George Potter’s old adversary, Dale Gilbertson watches Bucky and Stacey cut away yet again to the spectacle of the Mad Hungarian taking care of Wendell Green and thinks that he really should reinstate the little guy. Would you look at the beautiful swing Arnie took? Dale can’t help it—that swing really brightens up his day. It’s like watching Mark McGwire, like watching Tiger Woods.

Alone in her dark little house off the highway, Wanda Kinderling, to whom we have made passing mention from time to time, is listening to the radio. Why is she listening to the radio? Some months ago, she had to decide between paying her cable bill and buying another half gallon of Aristocrat vodka, and sorry, Bucky and Stacey, but Wanda followed her bliss, she went with her heart. Without cable service, her television set brings in little more than snow and a heavy dark line that scrolls up over her screen in an endless loop. Wanda always hated Bucky and Stacey anyhow, along with almost everyone else on television, especially if they looked content and well groomed. (She has a special loathing for the hosts of morning news programs and network anchors.) Wanda has not been content or well groomed since her husband, Thorny, was accused of terrible crimes he could never ever have committed by that high and mighty show-off Jack Sawyer. Jack Sawyer ruined her life, and Wanda is not about to forgive or forget.

That man trapped her husband. He
set
him
up.
He smeared Thorny’s innocent name and packed him off to jail just to make himself look good. Wanda hopes they never catch the Fisherman, because the Fisherman is exactly what they deserve, those dirty bastards.
Play
dirty, you
are
dirty, and people like that can go straight to the deepest bowels of hell—that’s what Wanda Kinderling thinks. The Fisherman is
retribution—
that’s what Wanda thinks. Let him kill a hundred brats, let him kill a thousand, and after that he can start in on their parents. Thorny could not have killed those sluts down there in Los Angeles. Those were sex murders, and Thorny had no interest in sex, thank the Lord. The rest of him grew up, but his man-part never did; his thingie was about the size of his little finger. It was impossible for him to care about nasty women and sex things. But Jack Sawyer lived in Los Angeles, didn’t he? So why couldn’t
he
have killed those sluts, those whores, and blamed it all on Thorny?

The newscaster describes former Lieutenant Sawyer’s actions of the previous night, and Wanda Kinderling spits up bile, grabs the glass from her bedside table, and douses the fire in her guts with three inches of vodka.

Gorg, who would seem a natural visitor to the likes of Wanda, pays no attention to the news, for he is far away in Faraway.

In his bed at Maxton’s, Charles Burnside is enjoying dreams not precisely his, for they emanate from another being, from elsewhere, and depict a world he has never seen on his own. Ragged, enslaved children plod on their bleeding foodzies past leaping flames, turning giant wheels that turn yet larger wheels oho aha that power the beyoodiful engynes of destruction mounting mounting to the black-and-red sky. The Big Combination! An acrid stink of molten metal and something truly vile, something like dragon urine, perfumes the air, as does the leaden stench of despair. Lizard demons with thick, flickering tails whip the children along. A din of clattering and banging, of crashing and enormous thuds punishes the ears. These are the dreams of Burny’s dearest friend and loving master, Mr. Munshun, a being of endless and perverse delight.

Down past the end of Daisy wing, across the handsome lobby, and through Rebecca Vilas’s little cubicle, Chipper Maxton is concerned with matters considerably more mundane. The little TV on a shelf over the safe broadcasts the wondrous image of Mad Hungarian Hrabowski clobbering Wendell Green with a nice, clean sweep of his heavy-duty flashlight, but Chipper barely notices the splendid moment. He has to come up with the thirteen thousand dollars he owes his bookie, and he has only about half of that sum. Yesterday, lovely Rebecca drove to Miller to withdraw most of what he had stashed there, and he can use about two thousand dollars from his own account, as long as he replaces it before the end of the month. That leaves about six grand, an amount that will call for some seriously creative bookkeeping. Fortunately, creative bookkeeping is a speciality of Chipper’s, and when he begins to think of his options, he sees his current difficulty as an opportunity.

After all, he went into business in the first place to steal as much money as possible, didn’t he? Apart from being serviced by Ms. Vilas, stealing is about the only activity that makes him truly happy. The amount is almost irrelevant: as we have seen, Chipper derives as much pleasure from conning chump change out of the visiting relatives after the Strawberry Fest as from screwing the government out of ten or fifteen thousand dollars. The thrill lies in
getting away with it.
So he needs six thousand; why not take ten thousand? That way, he can leave his own account untouched and still have an extra two grand to play with. He has two sets of books on his computer, and he can easily draw the money from the company’s bank account without setting off bells during his next state audit, which is coming up in about a month. Unless the auditors demand the bank records, and even then there are a couple of tricks he can use. It’s too bad about the audit, though—Chipper would like to have a little more time to paper over the cracks. Losing the thirteen thousand wasn’t the problem, he thinks. The problem was that he lost it at
the wrong time.

In order to keep everything clear in his head, Chipper pulls his keyboard toward him and tells the computer to print out complete statements of both sets of books for the past month. By the time the auditors show up, baby, those pages will have been fed into the shredder and come out as macaroni.

Let us move from one form of insanity to another. After the owner of the Holiday Trailer Park has extended a trembling index finger to point out the Freneau residence, Jack drives toward it on the dusty path with gathering doubts. Tansy’s Airstream is the last and least maintained of a row of four. Two of the others have flowers in a bright border around them, and the third has been dressed up with striped green awnings that make it look more like a house. The fourth trailer displays no signs of decoration or improvement. Dying flowers and skimpy weeds straggle in the beaten earth surrounding it. The shades are pulled down. An air of misery and waste hangs about it, along with a quality Jack might define, if he stopped to consider it, as
slippage.
In no obvious way, the trailer looks wrong. Unhappiness has distorted it, as it can distort a person, and when Jack gets out of his truck and walks toward the cinder blocks placed before the entrance, his doubts increase. He can no longer be sure why he has come to this place. It occurs to Jack that he can give Tansy Freneau nothing but his pity, and this thought makes him uneasy.

Then it occurs to him that these doubts mask his real feelings, which have to do with the discomfort the trailer arouses in him. He does not want to enter that thing. Everything else is a rationalization; he has no choice but to keep moving forward. His eyes find the welcome mat, a reassuring touch of the ordinary world he can feel already disappearing around him, and he steps up onto the topmost board and knocks on the door. Nothing happens. Maybe she really is still asleep and would prefer to stay that way. If he were Tansy, he would stay in bed as long as possible. If he were Tansy, he’d stay in bed for
weeks.
Once more pushing away his reluctance, Jack raps on the door again and says, “Tansy? Are you up?”

A little voice from within says, “Up where?”

Uh-oh,
Jack thinks, and says, “Out of bed. I’m Jack Sawyer, Tansy. We met last night. I’m helping the police, and I told you I’d come over today.”

He hears footsteps moving toward the door. “Are you the man who gave me the flowers? He was a nice man.”

“That was me.”

A lock clicks, and the knob revolves. The door cracks open. A sliver of a faintly olive-skinned face and a single eye shine out of the inner darkness. “It is you. Come in, fast.
Fast.
” She steps back, opening the door just wide enough for him to pass through. As soon as he is inside, she slams it shut and locks it again.

The molten light burning at the edges of the curtains and the window shades deepens the darkness of the long trailer’s interior. One soft lamp burns above the sink, and another, just as low, illuminates a little table otherwise occupied by a bottle of coffee brandy, a smeary glass decorated with a picture of a cartoon character, and a scrapbook. The circle of light cast by the lamp extends to take in half of a low, fabric-covered chair next to the table. Tansy Freneau pushes herself off the door and takes two light, delicate steps toward him. She tilts her head and folds her hands together beneath her chin. The eager, slightly glazed expression in her eyes dismays Jack. By even the widest, most comprehensive definition of sanity, this woman is not sane. He has no idea what to say to her.