Theater Macabre (18 page)

“But why would he take such a risk?”

“To protect me.”

“From what?”

“I don’t know. An imagined threat, I suppose. But he was always that way, ever since we were kids. He looked out for me, even when I was old enough not to need it anymore.”

“Any idea why?”

“Because our parents were Outsiders too, long before that became the name for it. I was the only normal one in the family, but of course, nobody but Wesley knew it. As you all know, when you’re young, it doesn’t show. Not in any obvious way, at least. So I was able to hide it for a long, long time. And it killed me to do it, but as most of you are well aware, when deceit becomes the stock in trade, you can become the ultimate liar, especially if it means the difference between life and death.”

Rickman nodded. “And Wesley never tried to turn you in?”

“He loved me. It didn’t matter to him what I was.”

“And yet it mattered to you what
he
was.”

“Yes.”

“Which is why you’re turning him in now.”

“No. I mean, not only because of what he is…”

“I don’t understand,” Rickman said.

“It’s an act of mercy,” I told him. “No matter what kind of aberration he is, he was always my guardian. And I owe him for that. Now the strain of trying to keep up the charade of him being one of us is tearing him apart. He’s not able for it. Eventually he’ll crack, and then I don’t know what he’ll do. I love my brother, despite everything, and I want him at peace.”

Abigail Wray, she of the conspicuously absent jewelry, was the first to step forward. In the crowd, I saw a mixture of sympathy, and distrust, and confusion. In Abigail’s deep blue eyes, I saw only compassion as she embraced me and stroked my hair. “You’re a good man,” she said. Then she kissed my cheek and stepped back to be assimilated by the gathering.

“It’s a noble thing you’re doing,” Rickman said, nodding his agreement. “Perhaps more than his kind deserves.” He sighed and nodded pointedly at the letter. “What can you tell me about this?”

“It’s from his lover.”

“There you go,” Tom Garland said triumphantly. “We didn’t come at this half-cocked. We
knew
.”

“Then you’re aware of the androgynous nature of the name ‘Phoenix’ yes?” Rickman asked.

Tom frowned. “What?”

“Its signed ‘From Phoenix’, which might mean a man or a woman, or a location. There’s no postmark, so it’s hard to say.” He turned to me. “Has he said anything to you about this?”

“Not specifically,” I replied. “But I know who Phoenix is.”

“So it’s a who?” Rickman asked.

“Yes.”

The babble of the crowd died. The air grew taut with anticipation. Right at that moment I had complete control of the room, but then, it had been that way from the beginning, whether they realized it or not. And yet all I could think of was yesterday, and how the town at looked in the morning, the lawns glistening with dew, the sun a burning eye in the sky, everything in its rightful place as the world woke up to clean air and cleaner living. And how what I said next was going to ensure that my brother never woke up to that again.

“Phoenix is his wife,” I told them.

*

Edwin Crook was furious. “How long have you been aware of this?” he asked me. “You said you were the only normal one in your family, so why are we only hearing about this now?”

I tilted my head slightly as I regarded his small stocky form. “For the same reason Mayor Rickman didn’t immediately send us all to my brother’s door with pitchforks and a noose. I
suspected
. I was never sure. He hasn’t acted on his impulses. Yet. Never gave any indication that he embraced any particular lifestyle, so there was always the possibility that I was wrong. And he did stay behind after the Handover, which confused me. When he showed up here I convinced myself that he was one of us, maybe because I wanted him to be.”

Rickman frowned. “But you knew he had a wife?”

“No. Not until Corman and Appleton showed me the letter. Until then, the few references my brother made to Phoenix were just that, references to a place, not a person. ‘I miss Phoenix,’ he’d say, or ‘Sometimes I dream of Phoenix’. I just assumed he’d been there and had some anchoring memory that kept pulling his mind back there. He never told me where he went in those months after the Handover.”

“Still,” Edwin grumbled. “You should have said something.”

“Would
you
have?” I asked him, then looked at Rickman. “What would you have done?”

He exhaled heavily. “It’s hard to say. A lot of us lost family and friends in the Handover, but that was a choice
they
made, not us. I don’t have any siblings left. If I had a brother I loved dearly….” He shook his head. “I just don’t know.”

“You did the right thing,” said Abigail Wray, with a small sad smile. “The only thing. And all that matters now is that we know.”

Rickman nodded. “How would you like us to handle this, John?”

“I’d like to talk to him,” I replied. “Just for a little while, before you take him away. He’s still my brother.”

The mayor rose from his desk, folded the letter almost reverently, and slipped it into the inside pocket of his sport coat. “Then that’s what we’ll do.” He put his hands on his hips and looked over the faces of the gathering. “Out of respect for John, and for all the fine things Wesley has done for us over the years, no matter what he is, we’re going to handle this delicately. No screaming mob or public stoning, you hear me?”

The crowd seemed disappointed.

“I mean it,” Rickman told them. “Now go home, all of you, or if you’re unwilling to do that, then go somewhere else. I do not want to see you at Wesley’s house today, or you’ll have your own answering to do. Appleton, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like you to stay behind. Jim Laramie, you too.”

“Mayor, I have a right to—” Edwin Crook started to say.

“Get going, Edwin,” Rickman told him. “Please.”

It took some time, but all except the few Rickman had named filed their way out of his office. Without the bodies, the office reverted to its usual imposing size, though the smell of sweat and the unmistakable tang of promised violence hung in the air.

“Close the door,” the mayor said, when the last of the crowd had exited the outer office. As Jim Laramie obeyed the command, I saw the secretary, still seated at her desk, scowling as she rolled a pencil across a landscape of papers. Then the door was shut.

“John,” Rickman said. “You know this isn’t going to be easy.”

“I know.”

“Are you ready for it?”

“I think so.”

“Because you realize that no matter what I tell them, some of those people out there are going to take it into their heads that the justice we dispense will not be enough to counter the betrayal your brother being here represents.”

“I do, and I can’t say I blame them.”

He nodded slowly. “No. Nor can I. The Handover left an imprint in our minds we’ll never forget, but we try. It’s days like today that remind us how foolish that is. Some things never go away. Your brother is the first of them we’ve found here, in this town, but not the first in the country. There are more of them out there, left behind by accident or, like Wesley, by choice. And there are others who try to change, and believe they can, if it means a place in which they can feel at home, feel wanted. But you’re born one way or another, and all the wishing in the world can’t change that. Which is a pity, I suppose, because right now I wish more than anything that Wesley was one of us.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Isn’t there…?” Jim Laramie started to say, then shook off the thought and crossed his arms. “Sorry.”

I knew what he had been about to say.
Isn’t there anything we can do to change him?
And it was a preposterous notion I was relieved he had caught. The world is the way it is. People are the way they are. Like Rickman had said, no amount of wishful thinking was going to force that reality to change. All we could do in the meantime was the same thing we’d always done—survive as best we could.

“We’d better get moving then,” Rickman said. “Jim, I want you on crowd control. Anyone tries to ingratiate themselves into our little party, deal with them as you see fit, are we clear?”

Jim nodded curtly. “Yes, Mayor.”

“Good. Once we get there I want you to wait outside. Doubtless there will be protestors and loons trying to rip Wesley out of that house by his tail feathers. Deal with them. Buy John some time to say goodbye.”

“Got it.”

Appleton, still looking uncomfortable, raised a thick-fingered hand. “Mayor?”

“We’re going to need you to round up Corman on the way. Both of you will be required to give evidentiary statements later.”

The postmaster looked confused. “Then why am I going to Noon’s house?”

Rickman looked evenly at him. “To apologize for going through his fucking mail.”

*

Wesley’s house was three blocks from City Hall. We were there in minutes.

Despite the unspoken promises of the volatile crowd, none of them followed, though eventually someone would suggest disobeying Rickman’s order, and then they would come.

The three of us stood in a ragged semicircle on the pavement outside my brother’s house, under the shade of a gnarled old oak tree that looked as if it might see another winter, but no more. Before us, behind a tacky white picket fence, sat a modest Cape Cod with dormer windows, white siding and dark blue shutters. It was well maintained, which was no surprise. Wesley always believed that if you wanted respect, you had to look like you respected yourself. But as was the case with most of the houses in Harperville, it was hard to look at it without trying to imagine who had lived there in the years before the Handover. Wesley had not built this house, nor planted the azaleas and lilies and irises that lined the walk. He had not installed the small kidney-shaped pond or rock garden at the far end of the property. He had acquired all these things when the people who’d lived here had left it behind for the promise of a better life. They had inherited the town, not as a gift, which is what the departing government tried to make everyone believe, but as a scrap thrown to lesser beings.
Here, we’ve fucked the planet up. It’s yours now; we found a better one.

As a result, everything was tainted, marred by invisible fingerprints.

“You think he knows we’re coming?” Jim Laramie said, looking nervous. It was an odd thing to see on a man who looked like he could bench press a horse. His sloped, heavy brow came down over his small gray eyes like a shutter. “I mean…should we expect trouble?”

“No,” I told him. “He has no reason to expect company. Even if he did, he wouldn’t get violent.”

“Would he run?”

“No.”

Rickman checked his watch. “All right, we’re on borrowed time here gentlemen, so let’s get this show on the road.” To me, he said, “Sorry. I don’t mean to be insensitive, but if we want this done right…”

“I know.” I put a hand on his shoulder and felt bone, as if he’d forgotten to take the hanger out of his jacket before putting it on. “I won’t be long.”

They watched me, wordlessly, their presence at my back like a held breath as I made my way up the path to my brother’s house.

*

He didn’t answer when I knocked, and I hoped Jim Laramie hadn’t been right about my brother trying to flee. That would only make it worse for him. But then I tried the knob and found the door was unlocked. I held it, ajar, and glanced over my shoulder at the men standing at the gate, watching. The sun dappled them with pools of golden light. I smiled reassuringly, and went inside.

The interior of the house was gloomy, and smelled of stale beer, cigarettes and sweat. I knew Wesley had been coming apart at the seams, knew, in fact, a lot more about his condition than I had shared with Rickman or the townsfolk, but it hadn’t been necessary to give them everything. Soon, they would see for themselves.

He was sitting in an armchair, facing the fireplace, though no fire was lit. I could only see his arm, and the cigarette smoldering between his fingers. The light blue sleeve told me he was dressed in his uniform.

“Hey,” he said hoarsely.

“Hey.” I sat down on an ottoman. “You all right?”

He breathed a short laugh. “Dandy.”

I looked from his arm to the scattering of old beer cans and bottles on the stained carpet around his chair. “Been hitting it kind of hard, I see.”

“It helps.”

“I’m sure.”

A prolonged silence stretched between us. Then he said: “What’re you doing here, John?”

“Mayor Rickman sent me.”

“Why? Am I late for work?” He chuckled. He hadn’t been to work in almost a week. The calls and visits from Rickman’s gophers had gone ignored in that time, so he probably did believe that was why I had come.

“Yeah,” I said. “You are, but that’s not why I’m here.”

With great effort, he forced himself to sit up, then tossed the cigarette into the fireplace before turning to look at me.

I hardly recognized him.

A few days worth of beard darkened the lower half of his face. His handsome face was now skeletal, the skin waxy and pale. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and all light from them had fled. There was a long dark stain down the front of his uniform shirt, the golden badge like a gelid lump in the poor light. His hair stuck up from his skull in tufts.

“So what do you want?” he asked, and I saw by the lazy movement of his bloodshot eyes that he was drunk.

He was almost a stranger to me. But that only made it easier.

“Mayor Rickman is outside.”

Wesley frowned. “Outside here?”

“Yes.”

“Shit. What for?”

“It’s over, Wes.”

A trace of sobriety washed over him. He reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and produced a pack of cigarettes, lit one. “What’s over? You told them?”

“Not exactly.”

He stared. “Then what are you talking about?”

“They’re here to arrest you on suspicion of heterosexuality.”