The Plant (13 page)

more than sidestep Carlos’s revenge, Mr. John Kenton. With my help you can
use him to achieve your dream. If you doubt me think of this: Kevin Anthony
7/7/67. I am sorry if this upsets you but there’s no time to spend convincing you
that I know what I know.

Sincerely yours,

Tina Barfield

From John Kenton’s diary

March 31, 1981

This has been a long day—a terrible day—a wonderful day—an I-don’t-know-what day. All I know for sure is that I’m shaken to my heels. To my very soul. You can blithely quote Hamlet—“more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”—and never think about what the words mean. And then maybe shit happens, like the kind of shit that happened to Roger and me today. And the floor you have so confidently spent your life walking on suddenly turns transparent and you realize there’s a horrible gulf below it. And the worst thing is the gulf isn’t empty. There are things in it. I don’t know what those things are, but I have an idea they’re hungry. I’d like to be out of this. And yet there is something to what Roger says. I feel some of the crazy excitement I saw in his eyes. I—

Oh man, this is no good. I’m all over the map. Time to take a deep breath, settle down, and start from the beginning. I’ll get this down even if it takes me all night. I have an idea that I wouldn’t be able to sleep much, anyway. And do you know what haunts me? What keeps going through my head like some kind of crazy mantra? The Dark Powers must give before they can take. The possibilities in such a simple statement! If such a simple statement could ever be true!

Okay. From the beginning.

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Usually it takes the alarm five minutes of uninterrupted braying to get me up, but this morning my eyes popped open all on their own at 6:58 AM, two minutes before I’d set it to go off. My head was clear, my stomach settled, not so much as a trace of a hangover, but when I got up I left my own dark silhouette behind me on the sheet; I must have sweat out a pint of mingled booze and salt water in the night. I had ugly, tangled dreams; in one of them I was chasing Ruth with some sort of poisonous plant, yelling after her that if she ate the leaves, she’d live forever.

“You know you want to, you bitch!” I was yelling at her. “Smell the leaves! Like cookies in your grandma’s kitchen! How can something that smells like that be bad for you?”

I grabbed a quick shower, a few mouthfuls of juice right from the carton, and then out the door I went. Roger always gets in early, but this morning I meant to beat him.

On the bus I read through the Barfield woman’s letter again. Last night, fuzzy with drink and about two thousand jokes concerning lesbians, black people, and deaf nuns, all I could see was my dead brother’s name. In the flat gray light of an overcast New York morning, sitting amidst the last wave of blue-collars and the first wave of white-and pink-collars—strangely serene in that uneasy mixture of Posts and Wall Street Journals—I read the letter again, this time better able to appreciate its multi-layered weirdness.

Yet it was my brother’s name my eyes kept returning to.

I stepped off the elevator and onto the fifth floor of 409 Park Avenue South at 7:50 AM, sure I must have beaten Roger by at least half an hour…but the lights in his office were already on, and I could hear his IBM

clacking away. He was transcribing jokes, it turned out. And although his eyes were a trifle bloodshot, he didn’t look any more hungover than I felt.

Looking at him sitting there, I felt a kind of dull hate for Harlow Enders and all the suits above him, guys who—I’d bet on it—have never read a single one of the books they publish. Their idea of a page-turner is a profit-heavy annual report.

“They don’t deserve you,” I said.

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He looked up, startled, then smiled. “You’re here early. But I’m glad.

I’ve got something to show you, John.”

“I’ve got something to show you, too.”

“All right.” He pushed back from the typewriter, then looked at it with distaste. “The book about General Hecksler is going to be unpleasant, but the joke-book…man, this stuff is ugly.” He looked at his current copy and read: “’How many starving Biafarans can you get in an elevator car?’”

“All of them,” I said. Now that we were out of the smoke and laughter and yelled drink orders and the blaring juke that combine to make Flaherty’s Flaherty’s, the joke really wasn’t funny at all. It was sad and ugly and dangerous. The fact that people would laugh at it was the worst thing about it.

“All of them,” he agreed softly. “Fucking all of them.”

“We don’t have to do the book,” I said. “There’s no paper on it yet except for a couple of memos, and those could disappear.”

“If we don’t do it, someone else will,” Roger said. “It’s an idea whose time has come. It is, in its own stinky way, brilliant. You know that?”

I nodded.

“You want to know something else? I think it is going to be a bestseller.

And I think the dozen or so sequels we’ll do are going to be bestsellers. I think that for the next two years, jokes about niggers, kikes, blindmen, and dying minorities are going to have a…a vogue.” His mouth gave a revolted downward twitch…and then he laughed. It was horrible, that laugh.

Outraged and yet greedy. Then I heard myself laughing, too, and that was even more horrible.

“What did you want to show me, John?”

“This.” I handed him the letter. His eyes went to the signature first, then widened. He looked up at me and I nodded. “Carlos’s boss in Central Falls. Maybe we’re not through with him after all.”

“How did she get your address?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you think she could have gotten it from Detweiller?”

“She says she hates him.”

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“Doesn’t mean she does. Who’s Kevin Anthony? Any idea?”

“Kevin Anthony was my brother. When he was ten, he started losing the sight in one eye. It was a tumor. They took the eye, but the cancer had already gotten into his brain. He was dead within six months. My mother and father never got over it.”

The color left Roger’s face. “God, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“No, you didn’t. No one in New York does, so far as I know. Let alone Central Falls. I hadn’t even gotten around to telling Ruth.”

“And the date? Was that—”

I nodded. “The day he died, right. Of course none of this is top secret.

The woman could have found out. Mediums wow their marks by knowing stuff they’re not supposed to know, and in the end it turns out to have been nothing but research and legwork. But—”

“You don’t believe it. I don’t, either.” Roger tapped the letter. “’Bring the WaterBoy if you want to.’”

“I wondered about that,” I said.

“When I was in high school, I went out for the football team. I was serious about it, fool that I was. I only weighed a hundred and thirty pounds, but I had visions of…I don’t know…being the Reading High School version of Knute Rockne, I suppose. I was serious, but no one else was. They just about killed themselves laughing. The team, the cheerleaders, the whole student body. Coach along with the rest of them. I ended up being the team waterboy. It became my nickname. It’s even in the yearbook. Roger Wade, Class of ’68, Drama Club, Glee Club, Newspaper. Ambition, to write the Great American Novel. Nickname, Waterboy.”

For a moment neither of us said nothing. Then he picked up the letter again. “She seems to imply that Iron-Guts Hecksler is still alive. Do you think that’s possible?”

“I don’t see how he could be.” But I did see, at least sort of. It had been a fire, after all. Nothing left but ashes and a few teeth. It could have been done. It suggested a degree of cunning I didn’t much like to think of, but yes—it could have been done.

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“She wants us in Central Falls,” Roger said, turning off his typewriter and standing up. “Let’s give her what she wants. Still plenty of time to shag ass over to Penn Station and catch The Pilgrim. We can be in Rhode Island by noon.”

“What about the joke book? What about The Devil’s General?”

“Let those three deadbeats do a little work for a change,” Roger said, cocking his thumb at the short corridor which opens on the editors’ cubicles.

“You’re serious?”

“As a heart attack.”

And he was. At 9:40 we were stepping onto Amtrak’s Pilgrim in the bowels of Penn Station, armed with magazines and bagels; at 12:15 we were stepping off in Central Falls; at one o’clock we were getting out of a taxi on Alden Street, in front of the Central Falls House of Flowers. The place is a rather shabby New England saltbox rising behind a dead lawn still dotted with clumps of melting snow. To the rear is an absolutely huge greenhouse which does indeed stretch all the way to the next street. Outside of the Botanical Gardens in D.C., it’s the biggest damned greenhouse I’ve ever seen. But unlike the Botanical in D.C., this one is filthy—the windows are grimy, some mended with tape. We could see little shimmers of heat rising off the top—the apex, if you’ll pardon the word. During the weird Mardi Gras of the original Detweiller craziness, someone referred to it as a jungle—I don’t remember who, probably one of the cops—and today Roger and I could see why. It wasn’t just the heat rising off the glass panels and into the gray March chill; mostly it was the dark bulk of the plants behind those panels. In the dull light they looked black rather than green.

“My uncle would go bonkers,” Roger said. “If he was still alive, that is.

Uncle Ray. When I was a kid, he’d always greet me with ‘Hey, I’m Uncle Ray from Green Bay.’ To which it was my job to reply, ‘Hey, Ray, what do you say?’ And he’d come back with ‘Can ya stay, or do ya have to leave today?’”

I suffered this rather bizarre reminiscence in silence. The fact was, I couldn’t take my eyes from the dark, crowding bulk of all those plants.

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“Anyway, he was an amateur horticulturist, and he had a greenhouse.

A little one. Nothing like this. Come on, John.”

I thought, being in a rhyming mood, he might add a verbal flip of the hip like Let’s get it on, but he just resumed walking up the path. The porch steps were stained with a winter’s worth of salt. Beyond them, in a window by the door, was an FTD placard, the one with winged Mercury on it, and a sign reading COME IN, WE’RE OPEN! The words were flanked with roses.

When we reached the steps I stopped for a second. “I just remembered—you said you had something to show me, too. Back at the office. But you never did.”

“Just as well. I believe it may be better shown when we get back.”

“Does it have anything to do with Riddley’s room?” I don’t know where that came from, exactly, but once it was out I knew I was right.

“Why, yes. It does.” He looked at me closely. Standing there at the foot of the steps with the collar of his overcoat turned up, framing his face, and a little color in his cheeks, it occurred to me that Roger Wade’s a pretty good-looking guy. Better-looking now, probably, than a lot of the fellows who made fun of him back in high school, calling him Waterboy and God knows what else. Roger might even know that, if he’s been back to any of his class reunions…but those voices from high school never quite leave our heads, do they? Maybe if you make enough money and bed enough women (I wouldn’t know about those things, being both poor and shy), but I doubt if they leave even then.

“John,” he said.

“What?”

“We’re delaying.”

And because I knew it was true—neither of us wanted to go into Carlos Detweiller’s erstwhile place of employment—I said, “Delay no more” and lead the way up the steps.

A little bell jingled over the door when we went in. The next thing to hit me was the smell of flowers…but not just flowers. The thought that 105

crossed my mind was Funeral parlor. Funeral parlor in the deep south, during a heat wave. And although I’ve never been in the deep south during a heat wave—have never been in the deep south at all—I knew that was about right. Because there was another smell under the heavy perfume of roses and orchids and carnations and God knows what else. It was meaty smell, bordering on rancid. Unpleasant. Roger’s mouth twitched downward at the corners. He smelled it, too.

Probably back in the forties and fifties, when the place had been a private home, the room we stepped into had been two rooms: the entry and the small front parlor. At some point a wall had been knocked down, making a large retail area with a counter running across it about three-quarters of the way in. There was a pass-through panel in the counter, now raised, and beyond it an open door leading into the greenhouse. It was from there that the worst of the smell was coming. The room was very hot. Behind the counter was a glassed-in coldbox (I don’t know if you call that kind of thing a refrigerator or not—I suppose you must). There were bouquets of cut flowers and floral arrangements in there, but the glass was so fogged up—from the temperature difference between the two environments, I suppose—that you could barely tell the lilies from the chrysanthemums. It was like looking through a heavy English mist (and no, I’ve never been there, either).

To the left behind the counter, sitting under a blackboard on which various prices had been marked, was a man with the Providence Journal held open in front of his face. We could just see a few wisps of white hair floating like milkweed over an otherwise bald skull. Of Ms. Tina Barfield there was no sign.

“Hello!” Roger said heartily.

No response from the man with the paper. He just sat there with the headline showing—REAGAN WILL PULL THROUGH, DOCTORS

VOW.

“Hello? Sir?”

No movement. A queer idea came to me then: that he wasn’t really a man but a mannequin posed with the newspaper upraised. To foil 106

shoplifters, perhaps. Not that shoplifters would frequent flower shops in any great numbers, I wouldn’t think.

“Pardon?” Roger said, speaking even louder. “We’re here to see Ms.

Barfield?”

No response. The paper didn’t so much as rattle.