Odyssey (25 page)

In the private wing of the small public airport, Eddie and Sovereign were led to a largish hangar where a midsize private jet was housed. The pilot wore reflective sunglasses and had a walnut mustache that was shot through with gray.

“Mr. Jinx,” the pilot said.

“You ready, Fydor?”

“Yes, sir. We’ve got clearance. You and your guest can board anytime.”

The pilot climbed in and Drum-Eddie put a foot on the first step. His brother held back.

“I told you that I’m not going to Brazil, Eddie.”

“I hope you don’t think this little plane can go that far,” the bank robber said. “We just takin’ a day trip, JJ. You will be back in time for your next court date.”

The copilot was a broad-faced, middle-aged white woman who was already seated in the cockpit.

The body of the jet had twelve seats, six on each side. The first two rows faced each other. Eddie sat with his back to the cockpit and Sovereign opposite him.

“Is this your plane, Drum?”

“No. A guy named Ryan Herkle owns it.”

“And how did you get him to let you use it?”

“Ryan has a son named Lloyd. Lloyd killed a guy in a fight on a yacht off of the Florida Keys. When the boy was out on a million dollars’ bail I was engaged to smuggle him down to a little Chilean village. Ryan gives the town one hundred thousand dollars a year and they look after the kid. Because I’m the go-between he does me favors when he can. I make sure never to lean on him too hard.”

“Where we going?”

“An airstrip outside of Riletteville.”

“South Carolina?”

“Mama wants to see you, JJ. If I can’t save you at least I can give her something.”

The flight was smooth and exceptionally silent. Sovereign decided that the inside of the plane must have had extra soundproofing so that the usual roar of flight was reduced to a mild hum.

Eddie spent his time reading documents on an electronic tablet, while Sovereign found a book in the netting behind one of the chairs—a very old paperback entitled
Hothouse
by Brian Aldiss.

It was a slender text about a far-flung future where mammals, reptiles, insects, and fish had been mostly supplanted by aggressive, all-encompassing plant life. One of the few nonplant forms of life that had survived were minuscule green humans who had barely held on in the billion years of plant evolution. These beings were tiny and primitive, matriarchal in their social structure, and existential inasmuch as their lives were immediate and their sense of a future nonexistent.

“Good book?” Eddie asked as the plane began its descent.

“Yeah. Yeah. It makes you think that maybe life has a sense to it even if you
can’t see it when you’re living it.”

“Philosophy?”

“Science fiction.”

“Pretty much the same thing, wouldn’t you say?”

“Have you gone to college, Eddie?”

“I once helped a guy move a nuclear bomb out of the Balkans and return it to some dudes in uniform in Moscow,” he said. “Yeah, man. I been to school.”

Not long after Eddie made that admission, the wheels touched down and they disembarked from the plane.

“We got a call while in flight, Mr. Jinx,” Fydor the pilot said to Sovereign’s brother. “We can’t wait for you. But Mr. Herkle has made reservations for you on the flight back to New York day after tomorrow. You have to pay for them but your seats will be held.”

A driver picked the brothers up at the dark airstrip and drove them, in a teal Cadillac, to a motel on a highway that had no other buildings in sight.

In the parking lot the driver, an elderly black man named Theodore, gave them keys with little yellow tags that identified their room numbers.

“You can get us tomorrow morning at seven, Theodore,” Eddie said.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Drum.”

The rooms to the single-story motel, the El Dorado, all faced the asphalt lot. Eddie went to his door at the far corner, while Sovereign was assigned to a center room.

Sovereign’s room was a simple boxlike space with pitted green linoleum floors and small frames containing photographs of paintings of flowers hanging on the faded salmon-colored walls. The digital alarm clock was chained to the night table, and there sat an automatic coffeemaker on a ledge opposite the queen-size bed.

Sovereign took out his cell phone and saw that he’d received a series of calls from Toni. He pressed a button, wondering at his ability to see her
call
.

“Where are you?” were her first words.

“Down South.”

“Are you running?”

“No. I’m down here visiting my mother. She’s been worried about the trial and wants to see me.”

For a long moment there was silence.

“Are you leaving me, Sovereign?”

“Never. I’m down here for one day. I’ll probably have dinner with her tomorrow night and fly back in the morning.”

“We have a meeting with the judge on Monday morning.”

“I’ll be back way before then.”

“Okay.”

“You sound mad, Miss Loam.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were goin’?”

“It came up all of a sudden. You know I really should do this. I haven’t even called my mother for over twenty years.”

“Why not?”

“If I knew the answer to that, baby, I’d be living in my own skin, laughing at people who thought they knew me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I love you, Toni Loam.”

“I got to go, Sovereign. I’ll come by your place day after tomorrow.”

In the morning Theodore took Eddie and Sovereign twenty-seven miles to a small hamlet nestled in a pine-and-dogwood forest in the middle of a sweltering plain of swamps and tobacco farms.

On the solitary main street there were quite a few two-story buildings, the bottoms of which were stores and businesses, with the upper floors either for storage or apartments. Up a rickety set of unpainted wood stairs, over a store called Capman’s Dry Goods, was a large apartment.

When Eddie threw the door open he yelled, “Mama!”

They were standing in a nondescript room that might have been called an entrance hall but it seemed unfinished. There was a sod-encrusted shovel leaning in a far corner and a red rocking chair by a door in the wall opposite the entrance.

An old woman came through this door. She was very thin and wore a loose dress that was once bright blue but now well on its way to turning gray. The hem went almost all the way down to her bony ankles, and her bristly hair was white.

“Mama?” Sovereign said.

It wasn’t until she smiled that he actually recognized her.

“Baby.” Her steps were slow and considered, but it was clear that she didn’t want help.

Zenith appeared at the door behind her in a pink dress suit, the cost of which would have probably paid his mother’s rent for a year.

Winifred James approached her middle child and put her arms around his neck as Toni often did. She rested her forehead against his jaw and he embraced her, ever so gently.

The hug was so tender as to feel insubstantial. Sovereign had the impression that he had gathered in his arms a parcel of smoke that had once been his mother: a fleeting moment before an expected ending.

“I missed you, baby,” she whispered. “I missed you.”

“Mama,” he said, unable to put together any other thought or concept.

“Come on, Mama,” Zenith said after a couple of minutes of this sober, sorrowful embrace. “Let’s bring Sovereign in and let him sit down.”

“Oh, yes,” Winifred James said. But she didn’t let go. “Yes, we should give him some a’ that hard lemonade you made.”

Sovereign stood there with his frail mother in his arms. It was an odd feeling, a solitary incident that was out of the range of any experience he had known.

“Mama,” Eddie said, and she raised her head from Sovy’s jaw. “Mama, come on in the dining room and we’ll all sit down and talk.”

While saying these words Drum-Eddie took his mother by the hand, disentangled her from Sovereign, and led her from the unfinished room into the interior of the apartment.

“Sit down and talk,” she said, repeating the words gratefully.

The dining room was a shock.

It was a comparable size to the dining room they had in the cylindrical San Diego home. It was laid out with the same furniture, and even the carpet looked similar to the one Sovereign and Drum rolled on as children.