The Danger of Being Me (3 page)

"Oh, Jesus," Phil had said.  I had laughed at that.  Ben had shot me a hard glance.  I had coughed to cover up my laughter, and that had made Phil laugh.

Erin Chandler worked behind the desk.  She'd been a senior during our freshmen year.  Ben and Phil knew her because she'd been one of the two editors of the
Creek Reader
when they joined the paper as ninth-graders.

Instead of just asking her out, Ben concocted a story requiring the use of a microfilm reader.  He just needed someone to show him how the machine worked, he told her.  He requested the
Bulletin
film reels from June through September of 1910, and he listened attentively as Erin explained how to operate the reader. Twenty minutes later, he traded the Summer of 1910 for the Summer of 1911, and twenty minutes after that, he swapped the Summer of 1911 for the Summer of 1912.

Now I watched him unload the latest reel and return it to its cardboard box.  He picked up the last carton on the table, loaded the reel, and bent toward the screen.

"Yeah," I said to Phil without looking.  "I know."

Phil watched me for another few seconds.  I turned back up to him.  I waited for him to say something else, and when he didn't, I just shrugged.  He flashed a quick grin then, and laughed, shaking his head as well.

Phil indulged this little tangent of Ben's mostly because the air-conditioning in his rickety Chrysler Newport quit back June.  I passed the time reading the daily newspapers carried by the Library, and Phil occupied himself by once more pulling the black binder out of his bag.

He inherited his interest in John Doe 83 from his father.  Lysander Michener worked for the Prophecy Creek Police Department, and his first case as a detective had been the body of a man found slumped in a cracked plastic chair on the balcony of Room 16 of the Gateway Motel on April 3rd of 1983.  He never identified the man, but the autopsy showed no evidence of foul play.  The case ended there.

Just another Prophecy Creek oddity.

But Detective Michener's obsession did not end there.  He continued his attempt to identify the dead man on the balcony, building a formidable file of peculiar data that wound around itself and doubled back to nowhere.  When asked by his son one night in April of 1996 what the black binder contained, Lysander told Phil the strange story.

Phil convinced his father to make him a copy of the file for himself.  Now he pulled that binder out again, and I glanced to the Seiko Chronograph on my right wrist.  Noon approached.  Across the table, Phil sucked in a hard breath.  I looked up from a piece by David McCleary on a proposed human-relations ordinance.  Phil grinned.

He jabbed at a page in his book.  "I knew it."

I watched for a moment.  "Knew what?"

He laughed, then spun the book in my direction and pushed it across the table.  I snapped up the newspaper and folded it to the side as Phil slapped at a page in the volume.  "I knew I read that line somewhere before."

I looked down at a page in the fourth volume of Sebastian Hunter's rambling
Stanzas
collection.  Seven cinquains took up page 181.  I scanned them, looked up at Phil again, shook my head.  "What am I looking at?"

"Last stanza," he said.  "Bottom of the page."

At the foot of page 181, I found a poem, labeled with only the number 9,247 in parentheses, reading:

Upon that timeless island's bloody sand

Where April skies, by raging light, are split

Those sentries to the south, four brothers stand

bound by a truth unknown and infinite:

The only truth that matters.

The last line rang in my head for a long moment, like the pure tone of a tuning fork. 
The only truth that matters
.  It felt like a phrase worth remembering.  I laughed.

"This is what you've been looking for all this time?"

Phil's grin widened into an expression of victory.  He opened the binder and flipped through the pages until he came to the one he wanted.  Then he spun the binder in my direction and pushed it toward me as well.  He nodded down at the page, still flashing that triumphant grin.

I looked down to see two pages of photocopies.  The page on the right showed three 1953 two-dollar bills with sequential serial numbers.  The page on the left showed the front and back of a business card that Detective Michener pulled out of John Doe 83's pocket fifteen years ago.

The front of the card showed an old logo of the Wenro County Credit Union, and the name "Faith O'Ryan."  In one corner, I spotted what looked like an
[I]
pushed over on its side, sketched hastily by hand.  The Greek letter Xi.  The back looked blank, except for a single sentence hand-written in what looked like pencil.  Nine words scribbled in a nearly-illegible scrawl that read only: "Upon that timeless island's bloody sand, four brothers stand."

My mind snagged.  My eyes flicked back to Stanza No. 9,247.  The wording matched.  I looked back to Phil, and I could see in his face that he knew that I saw it.

"Huh," I said, sliding the binder back across the table.

Phil spun it back to himself.  "Yeah," he said, reaching for the book.  I let him take it.  "How about that?"

"So the dead man was carrying around a line of obscure 18th Century poetry?" I asked, more to myself.  "Why?"

Phil shrugged.  "Might as well ask why there's so much more matter than antimatter in the observable universe."

I blinked twice, and watched Phil flip the pages in the binder again.  "But it might explain why his boots were full of sand when they pulled them off at the autopsy."  He stopped at a densely typed page.  "You get three guesses as to what color it was, and the first two don't count."

I thought a moment, then said, "'bloody sand'."

Phil nodded.  "'Subject's right boot'," he read from the page, "'found to contain 5.1 grams of coarse sand, red in color.  Left boot found to contain 4.7 grams of same'."

I leaned back in my seat.  "How about that."

Phil flipped the binder closed and pulled Volume Four of the
Stanzas
back in front of himself.  He scanned page 181 again, silently rereading No. 9,247 once more, laughing as he stood.  He crossed the main room to the bank of copy machines against the far wall, and I followed as he asked me, "You ever been out to Prophet's Point?"

I shook my head, and asked, "Have you?"

"Not since the bridge collapsed."  Phil opened the lid of a copier and laid Volume Four down on the glass.

Now I grinned.  "That was during the quake in `51."

"It was," Phil said, feeding a dime into the machine and pressing the COPY button.  "Wasn't it?"

"That bridge was almost three hundred years old when it fell," I told him.  "The Wenrohronon Indians built it."

Phil picked his copy out of the tray.  "You know what color the sand is along the waterline out there?"

"Do I get three guesses?" I asked.

Phil laughed.  "But the first two don't count."

We crossed back to the desk.  Phil tucked his copy into the front pocket of the binder, returning the binder to his bookbag.  Then he unzipped a side pocket and pulled out a plastic sandwich bag, stuffed it into his jeans pocket.  "Prophet's Point was where Hunter's four sons made their stand against May's Raiders in December of 1761."

I nodded.  I remembered Mr. Kershaw's lecture on the Battle of the Four Brothers, all those months ago.  My mind snagged again.  "'Four brothers' stand'."

Phil zipped his bag closed, slung it over his shoulders.  "Except that it wasn't called Prophet's Point back then.  It had a Wenro name."  He laid Volume Four on top of the three volumes on the desk and picked up the pile.  "The most common translation is the Everlasting Land, but it's also been referred to as the Timeless Island."

I shook my head.  We crossed to the circulation desk.  "This is why no one lets you play Trivial Pursuit."

Phil set the first four volumes of the
Stanzas
down on the counter and turned to me.  "I'll bet you every penny in my trust fund that John went out to Prophet's Point."

I watched him.  A moment later, Ben stepped up to the counter and dropped his stack of cardboard boxes next to the books.  He grinned at Phil.  "You have a trust fund?"

Phil shot Ben a sidelong glance, cocked an eyebrow at him, and said, "No."  I laughed at that, and Ben opened his mouth to say something just as Erin Chandler stepped up to the other side of the circulation desk.  She tucked a swatch of dark hair behind her ear and looked at Ben with shockingly green eyes.  "Have any luck?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, shooting her a quick grin.  "Um, no."  He slid the pile of boxes across the counter to her.  "Can I get the
Bulletin
for June through September of 1913?"

"Sure," she told him.  She really did have an adorable smile, especially when she flashed her dimples.  I could understand Ben's fascination.  "Hang on."

"You know what?  Don't worry about it," Phil told her before she stepped away.  "That's okay."

"Are you sure?"  She glanced uncertainly from Phil to Ben and back.  "It's no problem.  I'm here all day."

"Yeah," Ben said to Phil.  "It's not a problem."

"She's here all day," I offered, grinning.  Ben nodded.

Phil ignored us.  "We have to go," he told her with a cordial smile.  "But thank you for all of your help."

She flashed those dimples again.  "Anytime."  Before Ben could answer, Phil bustled him toward the doors, and we stepped back out into the sweltering July heat.

5.

Even with the windows down, I sweated through my shirt by the time Phil pulled his rickety Chrysler Newport onto the soft shoulder of Galloway Road.

I climbed out of the passenger's side and stepped out into the middle of the gravel road.  I peeled my Flogging Molly t-shirt away from my chest, flapped it to get some air circulating.  The sky hung low overhead, the color of brushed chrome, like a massive expanse of dented sheet metal.  The temperature broke 100 degrees again.

Half-a-mile further up the Road, the terrain buckled and rose up into Galloway Hill.  A quarter-mile up, a heavy chain hung across the gravel path.  But even from here, I saw the decrepit building of the Irresistible Grace Calvinist Church perched on top of the Hill.

I felt no breeze out here in the stifling afternoon, and heard almost no sound.  I breathed slowly, acquainting my lungs with the air's humid texture. A far-flung grumble of thunder rolled in from the west like the midday sky trying to clear its throat.  We really needed the rain.

Ben threw the car's back door closed with the sound of a shotgun blast.  "Fuck this," he said, drawing out the pair of syllables as if the stagnant heat made even the simple task of speaking unbearable.  He spit onto the gravel.

"Couple of minutes, and we'll get out of here," Phil said.  "I just want to check something out."

Ben waved an arm as if it didn't really make that much of a difference.  It was about as close as he would get to admitting that he made us waste our morning at the Library.  If Phil meant to see this idiotic adventure through, Ben wouldn't to try to talk him out of it.

Phil just nodded.  I trudged back to the car, and the three of us hiked across a forty-foot stretch of shaggy scrub grass before reaching the treeline.  Ben led the way as we ducked between a pair of gnarled willow trees.

No trails cut through this swatch of overgrown foliage.  The tangled canopy turned the still air between the trees into a grey twilight.  A city ordinance protected this undeveloped southern sprawl of Prophecy Creek.

The three of us picked our way across uneven terrain.  Phil passed Ben and me to take the lead, navigating with the compass in his wristwatch.  Because even at just three square miles, we could easily get lost in these woods.

I followed in Ben's wake by a few paces.  He hauled himself up over the hulking trunk of a downed Scots Pine, and said, "You get that email from Ethan last night?"

"The one he sent two days ago?" Phil called back.

"Maybe," Ben said.  "I've been busy."

"You've been busy," I repeated.  "Yeah."

"Hey," Ben said over his shoulder, laughing, "I got a whole life you guys know nothing about."  He ducked under the low branches of a spruce.  "I do shit."

"Don't tell your Outer Banks story again," I said.

"Not that it isn't utterly fascinating," Phil added with surprisingly little sarcasm, "because I assure you that it is.  But I can only hear about Naomi so many times before I feel an intense urge to smack you upside the head."

"Seriously, man," I said, shaking my head.  I hiked around a tangle of bramble bushes, jogging to catch up to Ben.  "How could you not have closed that deal?"

"It was a delicate situation!" Ben insisted.

"That should be the title of your autobiography," Phil told him, checking his orientation on his wristwatch.

He angled to the left.  The three of us trudged up an incline as the trees thinned out.  Another hundred yards further along the woods ended altogether and the ground fell away into a rocky ten-foot drop.

The first steps of a stone bridge perched at the edge of the bluff, jutting out over the gap before dropping off into the air as well.  We stood at the precipice, looking out over the southwestern branch of Prophet's Creek.  On the far side of the gulley lay the quarter-acre chunk of land that some called the Everlasting Land, and some called the Timeless Island, and others called Prophet's Point.

Thunder muttered again.  Closer.  Like a warning.

"Here be dragons, baby," Phil said, grinning.

Ben glanced at him, then looked to the sheet-metal sky.  "Ethan said it's been raining in Edinburgh for six days," he said.  He coughed out a dry laugh, and waved a hand.  "I'd take that over this ungodly shit any day of the week."

I looked down the abrupt drop-off into the channel.  The heat of the last week-and-a-half dried out the Creek, leaving little more than a shallow stream.  The remnants of the Wenro bridge stood out of the water like broken teeth, creating a jagged path across the riverbed.