Bloodstained Kings

  Grimes could have been mistaken but Daggett looked a shade paler than before.

  “This is the Old Place,” said Daggett. “I’ll wait here for you.”

  “Okay,” said Grimes.

  He opened the door. Gul lunged eagerly outward. Grimes grabbed his collar and held him back. A disturbing wariness clogged his throat. He glanced back over his shoulder at Daggett.

  “You’re not in any danger,” said Daggett.

  Grimes let Gul climb out and followed him. He closed the car door. Gul reconnoitered the yard, his long nose close to the ground, shoulders bunched low. Grimes stepped up onto the back porch. The boards creaked under his feet. Behind a screen the inner door stood open. Gul joined him, eyes sharp, ears moving in small twitches. Grimes pushed open the screen door and stepped inside.

  They were in a large kitchen with a flagstone floor. It was fitted out with what looked like quality 1950s appliances: stove, refrigerator, toaster, percolator, a table and six chairs. On the table was a mildewed checked tablecloth. There was a layer of dust over everything, fuzzy in the warm yellow light that filtered through the dirty windows. Two open doors led off the kitchen, one onto what looked like a laundry room, the other into a hallway. At the far end of the hall, angling back up toward the second floor, was the handrail of a banister. On first glance it all seemed frozen in time, as deserted as it was neglected; then Gul started his low growl, so low it was almost silent.

  Grimes crouched at his side and put a hand on his back. GuPs muscles were coiled. He didn’t look at Grimes. His black eyes, gleaming with the primitive violence Grimes had seen the night before, were fixed on the hallway.

  “Steady, pal,” said Grimes. “Stay cool.”

  Gul twitched his ear, then suddenly moved across the room with intense and soundless speed. On the threshold of the hallway he stopped and glanced back, waiting. Grimes followed. He thought about pulling out the revolver and decided against it. It seemed overdramatic and he wasn’t confident in its use. He entered the hallway corridor at Gul’s shoulder.

  Just beyond the kitchen door and to the left gaped a set of stairs, going down into the basement. The steps were dark. According to Jefferson’s letter the suitcases were down there. Grimes looked for a light switch. Just as he found it, Gul left him and stalked with silent purpose down the hall.

  “Gul,” said Grimes. For some reason his voice came out as a whisper.

  Gul stopped outside a closed door. He snuffled at the crack at the bottom, glanced at Grimes, then stood pointing his nose at whatever was in the room on the other side. After a moment he looked at Grimes again, but he didn’t move from his position. Reluctantly, Grimes followed him and stopped at the door. He could feel the dog almost quivering at his side. Grimes felt drenched with fear and, at the same time, ridiculous. Should he knock or just go in? How should he go in: fast, slow, on his knees? He wasn’t used to this stuff. Grimes wiped his brow and stood against the wall to one side of the door. If a bullet came through it would pass over Gul’s head. Grimes reached out and turned the door handle. Nothing happened. He pushed the door and let it swing open.

  Gul bared his teeth and made his sound. He looked ready to do his thunderbolt rush if he needed to, but he didn’t enter the room. Grimes stepped away from the wall and looked in on a cobwebbed parlor.

  For a moment Grimes lost all sensation below the neck.

  Sitting facing him, in a winged chintz armchair, among the shadows on the far side of the room, was a massive figure in a blue Hawauan shirt and a Panama hat. Beneath the brim of the hat, Grimes saw the warm smile and inscrutable eyes of his own most sweat-drenched dream.

  Grimes said, “You fat son of a bitch.”

  NINETEEN

  SOMEWHERE in Alabama—she didn’t know where—Ella MacDaniels and George Grimes awoke at dawn and let Mitch Kerrigan fuss over them while he prepared a large breakfast and tried to persuade them to take him with them on the road. Mitch didn’t know where they were going or why; George wouldn’t tell him any details; but Mitch wanted to come anyway and Ella found that it made her sad.

  Mitch was in his mid-fifties and wasn’t anybody’s idea of a loser. He ran an auto bodyshop with one of his sons; he had a wife, Alicia, whom he loved, and he had no diseases or debts. Yet the presence of George inflamed him. They talked about the battles they’d fought over thirty years before, and although Ella got lost among the quick-fire references to the AFL-CIO and the Meatcutters and the ACWU and Taft-Hartley and “that bastard Meany,” she felt awed by the depth of their passion and by the sense that during this strange and bygone age of which they spoke, their lives and actions had been inspired by ideals more grand and more urgent than any she had ever known. They missed it and they hungered for it and therein lay the sadness that she felt for them. And maybe she felt sad for herself, too, for not really knowing what it was that they missed. Ella knew that there was no shortage of suffering and strife in the world but she couldn’t get a handle on it. No one she knew could. It was hard to care that much, or rather there didn’t seem to be anywhere to put the caring and so it shrugged its shoulders and went on home. It was like a lyric without a tune to carry it. After breakfast Mitch took them out to the woods to shoot some guns.

  After much discussion about the relative merits of autopistols and wheelguns, at the end of which they left the choice to her, Ella swapped George’s Colt .45 for a Smith & Wesson Model 15 Combat Masterpiece loaded with Black Hills wadcutters. It was like listening to the guys in the band arguing about amplifiers and effects pedals. The trigger action of the wheelgun was heavier than the .45 but she preferred it to the snapping slide and flying brass of the auto. It had a two-inch barrel but since they insisted that she would not be using it at more than ten-foot range that didn’t matter. Mitch set up some targets—flattened cardboard boxes tacked to wooden stakes—and she used up thirty rounds at ten and six feet. Six feet—when she forced herself to imagine the cardboard as a man’s body—was frighteningly close. Again she felt the siren song of the weapon’s power and again she told herself not to trust it. Then Mitch gave them the use of his Jeep Cherokee and made one last pitch to be taken along. George turned him down.

  Just before they set off Mitch shook George’s hand and said: “In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.”

  Something in the way Mitch said it, and something in George’s face as he heard it, told Ella that the younger man had learned the words from the elder, a long time ago.

  They drove all day under cloudless skies, taking turns at the wheel every two or three hours. The interstate was dreary and ten miles out of Montgomery they took Highway 80, which was pretty all the way, and headed across the Alabama-Georgia line toward Macon.

  George talked a lot, as if it was something he didn’t get a chance to do very often, and Ella listened without getting bored. In a town called Geneva they bought sandwiches and fruit and milk at a store and stopped for lunch at some picnic tables overlooking the Flint River. There George told her about his sons, Luther and Gene, and about how proud he was of them. She could tell, though he didn’t say so and would probably have died before admitting it, that they had caused him great grief and that made her wonder about the worry she had caused her parents with her singing in dives and what they saw as wild ways. Reading between the lines, it seemed that George’s boys had gone a little further than that. The elder brother, Luther, who had been a soldier—in George’s words “a soldier’s soldier”—was dead; George avoided saying how or why. Gene, the younger, was a doctor and the original recipient of the letter from Charlie. Although George adored him, almost desperately, he was clearly bewildered by Gene and, for all his articulateness when talking politics and war, words seemed to fail him when it came to saying why.

  Ella wanted to meet Gene, badly. Gene had known Charlie. Not Charlie: Clarence Jefferson. It was just a name, she knew, yet when she thought “Clarence Jefferson” she couldn’t see a face or hear a voice; Charlie disappeared. Why hadn’t he
told her his real name? Maybe because he was a cop. A bad cop. Charlie had treated her well. He’d supported her, always, in her ambition to sing; he hadn’t told her she was a dreamer and a fool like some others had. In a way that had sometimes shamed her, she’d loved Charlie more than her mother and father.

  Ella had no brothers or sisters. Her parents, Sam and Tina Mac-Daniels, had been—and still were—the best anyone could wish for. She loved them but she’d never felt that she was like them. Then, most of her friends thought that about their folks. But with Charlie there’d been something else. It wasn’t a sexual thing. Charlie had never laid a finger on her or even looked like he wanted to. Her father, Sam, had passed Charlie off as an old friend, yet he’d always been nervous around him and they never seemed to spend any time together. With Charlie having been around for as long as she could remember Ella had never much dwelt on this before, but the letter he’d written to Grimes had turned all she thought she knew about him upside down. Two lines from the letter repeated themselves in her head: “Besides you she’s the only person in the world I give a shit for … she’s no part of this, except that she’s a part of me.”

  Ella looked at George across the picnic table and asked him the question that had come to her in her sleep.

  “George?” she said. “Do you think Clarence Jefferson is my father?”

  George squinted at her in the sun. She could tell that the thought had occurred to him as well.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it’s possible.”

  With the question out in the open it took on a greater force. She looked at her arms. Her skin was paler than either of her parents’. In itself that didn’t mean anything, or it never had until now. She tried to listen to her body: the truth of who she was was buried somewhere inside her. Half of her had come from her father: surely that half could make itself heard. She closed her eyes and felt the vibration of her energy. She thought of her parents and couldn’t hear them within her at all. This she suddenly knew with total conviction: she was not born of her parents. They resided in her heart but not in her fabric. To her surprise this new knowledge didn’t shock her as much as she would’ve expected; but then on some level it wasn’t new: she’d known it all her life. She concentrated again, intensely and long. She couldn’t feel Charlie inside her either. She wanted to. The thought of not knowing at all was terrifying, though she didn’t know why. She tried again; but she still couldn’t feel him. It was different with her parents. They definitely weren’t there. With Charlie there was doubt: she couldn’t hear him, but at the same time she couldn’t feel with the same certainty that he wasn’t there. It was possible. He might be. She wanted him to be.

  “Ella?” said George.

  Ella opened her eyes and blinked. There were tears clinging to her eyelashes she hadn’t been aware of. She felt foolish and brushed them away with the back of her hand.

  “Family’s always difficult business, one way or another,” said George. “I don’t know what else I can tell you. We don’t choose them, and they don’t choose us.” He smiled. “Not like you and me.”

  His words seemed to reach out to enfold her and Ella realized just how stranded she had felt.

  She said, “I would choose you anytime. Always. Always.”

  Then she looked up at his eyes—his old and gray and crazy eyes—and a massive sadness rolled up, sobbing, from her chest. She bent her face down, wishing he couldn’t see her, but she couldn’t stop the sadness and the sobs, which were for George and his oldness and the sons who had caused him grief, and for her parents who weren’t her parents but had been the best of all time, and for Mitch and his rekindled fire, and for all the world and all its souls, struggling and mystified and lost; and for Charlie, whoever and whatever he had been, and for herself, Ella MacDaniels, whoever and whatever she was.

  She felt George put his hand on the back of hers without speaking. The sadness waned. She collected herself. She was fine.

  “I don’t often cry,” she said. She looked at him.

  “I know,” said George. “Me neither.”

  “Will Gene know if Clarence Jefferson was my father?”

  “Maybe. He has a way of getting to the heart of things. We’ll ask him when we get back to the City.”

  Ella saw his features crease up with concern.

  She said, “Will he be in trouble?”

  George wiped his concern away.

  “No more than we are, if he is.” He smiled. “I raised him to take care of himself, least I hope so. He doesn’t always hold with my way of thinking, but I guess I wouldn’t have it any other way He’ll be sure enough mad at me for taking off with you after these suitcases of dynamite.”

  “Why?”

  “He reckons it’s not his business and it won’t change anything anyway.”

  “You think it will.”

  “I don’t expect it will make the lion lay down with the lamb but it’ll sure as hell make for some good TV. And maybe it’ll make people think twice about who they give their power to.”

  He nodded across the picnic area toward the Jeep.

  “You ready to go?”

  “All the way,” said Ella.

  Ella took the wheel and within ten miles George had fallen asleep. At Macon, Ella skirted the city and continued east on 1-16. By the time she turned off onto Route 1 heading south the sun was low in the sky behind them. George woke up from his doze and stretched himself back to life. He blinked through the window at the passing countryside.

  “We’re almost there,” said Ella.

  “We’ve done well,” said George.

  “The Old Place is out in the backwoods. This town coming up is Jordan’s Crossroads. It’s our last chance to score a coffee and some food, if you want to.”

  “Good idea,” said George.

  When they reached Main Street Ella pulled the Jeep into the parking lot behind the diner and George climbed out stiffly. They went inside and took a table by the window and both ordered steaks, rare, and fries. In her head, as she ate, Ella pictured the route they would take out of town. At the crossroads they’d head west for about fifteen miles. Then there was a turn they had to make, a cutoff to the left that she wasn’t sure of. She couldn’t remember any landmarks to guide her. She hoped the cutoff would come back to her when she saw it. She looked up from her steak.

  In the rear corner of the diner, sitting in a booth, was a woman with blond hair, dressed in a black suit. The woman was staring at her. As Ella caught her gaze the woman immediately looked away. Ella turned back to her meal. It occurred to her that out here an old white man and a young black woman made strange dining partners. Back in the City nothing surprised anybody anymore but this was deep in the boondocks, as George would say. Klan country. Aryan Nation and other creeps. The blonde didn’t have a country look to her, though. Ella threw another glance toward the booth.

  The woman was watching her again. Ella suddenly felt weak inside, a strange vibration she’d never felt before. She didn’t know what to do: the blond woman watching her had tears streaming down her face.

  TWENTY

  WHEN Lenna Parillaud woke up in Mrs. Stapleton’s guest room she experienced a moment of disorientation and fear. She’d been in the sort of leaden, ultradeep sleep that left the pillow damp with drool and her limbs barely responsive to her instructions to move. Between the top of her shoulders and the base of her skull her spine felt like a piece of rubber tubing. She struggled up to sit on the edge of the bed and used her hands to lift her head and massage some life back into her neck. Grimes and his dog were gone. There were just some bills left on his bed and a note on the table. The note said:

  Dear Lenna,

  I’ve gone to find Jefferson’s bullshit suitcases; it’ll take me a couple of hours. There’s a diner in town; if you’re not here when I get back I’ll look for you there. Don’t get too mad at me.

  Yours, Grimes

  Lenna did feel mad. Her brain cleared. Grimes was such an asshole t
hat he hadn’t said what time he’d written the note so she didn’t know what “a couple of hours” meant. She had the fleeting thought that he’d abandoned her altogether. She recalled his gaunt, wide-boned face and his steady pale blue eyes, and decided that she was being more paranoid than was necessary. She was hungry too. Lenna brushed her hands over her sleep-crumpled clothes, went downstairs and walked into town through hazy late-afternoon sunshine.

  She went to the diner as Grimes had suggested and found a booth at the rear. She ordered coffee and, with reluctance, a tuna salad. When the salad came it was too big and the dressing was sugary sweet and she pushed it aside after two mouthfuls. She looked at some of the families in the diner: eating, squabbling, laughing, correcting each other’s manners and talking about the weather, baseball, which new movies were at the multiplex; lavishing upon each other in a hundred hidden ways, some helpful and some not, their unquestioning affection and concern. Good people, in a good country, in which she herself felt like an alien. That was probably because they were basically happy. If she ever found happiness she wouldn’t know what to do with it.

  Lenna had never been inside a multiplex or sat in the bleachers. She’d never been in a diner like this before. When she didn’t eat alone she ate in the eerily overcontrolled environment of expensive restaurants, served by handsome waiters with fake smiles and in the company of business partners whose smiles were even more fake, the kind of places where it was compulsory to find at least one tiny fault with the food or the wine and send it back to the kitchen for rectification. It wasn’t that she exacriy liked this diner; she felt too out of place here; but it spoke of a mundane warmth and stability she’d never known and which she envied. Then she remembered that she had known this world: for three days and three nights, two decades and a thousand years ago, in the arms of Wes Clay.