Bloodstained Kings

  Gul got there ahead of him and sat on his haunches to guard and wait. At three paces Grimes saw his father’s shoulders slowly rise and fall. He was tangled with the soldier. Grimes knelt down beside them. The soldier’s neck had been snapped like a gamebird’s by the encircling chain. Grimes unlooped George’s arms and pulled the two men apart.

  For the first time in his life Grimes’s clinical instincts deserted him. His father was unconscious, his body was broken, but Grimes had no thought for how he might put it back together. The tools were there in his mind: he could have examined the positions of the fractured bones and the angle of the bullet wound in the chest; he could have made a judgment as to where his father was bleeding from, and how fast, and how it might be staunched; he could have fallen upon him and tried to keep him alive; but Grimes did none of these things. Instead he loosened the red Slim Jim tie around his father’s neck and straightened his twisted limbs.

  Then he pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood from his father’s face. In places the blood was fresh, in others tenaciously caked, and Grimes had to dampen the handkerchief with spit, the way George had sometimes done when Grimes was a boy. George’s face looked like it was chopped from Indiana limestone, yet to the touch the skin felt fragile, and Grimes was afraid that if he rubbed too hard he would tear it; but he didn’t, and eventually the face was clean and gaunt and handsome again. George’s breathing had slowed now and between each brief rise and fall of his chest there was a long pause in which he did not move at all. The pauses got progressively longer. George didn’t open his eyes and Grimes didn’t try to rouse him. In the midst of this pain-strewn field George had found himself some peace, and Grimes sat within it and took it into himself. He watched the pale face, the papery eyelids, the stern lips and brisded iron jaw. At first he struggled for thoughts, words, but they weren’t there; neither were the guilt and shame. So Grimes did without words and let the moment be what it was, and himself and the twilit valley with it: a quiet valediction to a man and his last passage.

  George’s chest had not moved now for a long time and his lips were dark blue; but Grimes knew he hadn’t yet gone. He waited. Abrupdy, George inhaled—a deep breath, deeper than any that had gone before—then let it go in a great sigh. With the sigh his spirit left him and Grimes felt it passing by. And, as he had known in his inmost heart, the music ofthat dying breath was sweet, and worth the listening.

  Grimes stood up. For a moment he closed his eyes. He looked down.

  In death, George Grimes looked like a bloodstained king.

  There was a sound nearby and Grimes turned. Gul was already alert but had stayed by Grimes and had made no sound. Standing a few yards away was a young woman, black and striking in looks, with tears on her face. Ella MacDaniels, the child conceived in abandon and born into darkness and pain. Grimes looked into her eyes: they were bottomless with grief. In them he could see Lenna Parillaud. He turned back to his father. He knelt down again and slipped one hand under George’s shoulders and another under his knees and scooped him up and folded him into his arms. He stood up and walked toward Ella.

  “Ella?” said Grimes.

  Ella pulled her eyes away from George and nodded. She seemed unable to speak.

  “George asked me to tell you he was proud to ride with you.”

  Ella started crying again.

  Grimes had to put his mind to things practical. He looked up at the road. The Lincoln was finished. The Harley looked okay. He’d have to return it so that the kid wouldn’t call the cops. Then they had to get to the airfield and Titus Oates. He turned back to Ella.

  “Ella? Do we have a car we can use?”

  Ella wiped her face and nodded again.

  “I’m going after Lenna. I want you to stay with a friend, Titus Oates. He’ll take you somewhere safe.”

  Ella stared at him with an anger that took him aback.

  “George and me were partners, all the way down the line,” she said. “He let me make my own choices. That was George’s way.”

  Grimes realized this was an argument he wasn’t likely to win. It didn’t seem worth insulting her intelligence by pointing out the dangers. He nodded.

  “Yes, that was his way,” he said.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  And then Grimes realized that even though she didn’t know that it existed—still less what it meant—Ella would have to go back to the site of her own darkest moment.

  “There’s a place,” said Grimes, “called the Stone House. That’s where we’re going.”

  A question passed across her face, but she saved it. Ella turned and started back across the field toward the farm. After a few yards she started to run.

  Grimes walked back to the road with his father still in his arms. His muscles ached with the weight but he wouldn’t put him down. The ache felt proper. The blacktop ran due west, and here it was almost dark, but above the far horizon the indigo clouds were gashed by the scarlet pandemonium of the dying light.

  And Grimes remembered the way Jefferson had put it.

  The Ohoopee River bottomlands were as good a place to die as any other. And at sundown, if you were lucky, they seemed like they were bathed in blood.

  The fatman thirsts.

  His tongue is parched, his throat is dry.

  Yet his thirst is not for water alone; nor even for blood. The fatman thirsts for life; just a few drops more, a mouthful; that is all. And here he detects a paradox, an inconsistency that troubles him. All around he senses the tremble and the beat of well-forged steel: the toiling blades of the hovering machine. The fatman lies upon its floor and he has been beaten too: by the boots he glimpses through swollen eyes, by rifle butts and fists; by the outrage of defeat. For hours they have hammered on his carcass and their blows have brought him close to death—he feels it—and thence to the paradox. For the fatman admits no contenders in the arena of intellectual virility and he has long known—and long argued—that death is but life’s most luxurious indulgence. Why, then, should he crave one last gulp of gruel when the banquet itself awaits him?

  The hovering machine descends and settles and he is chained, left hand to right ankle, and dragged, and heaped before a gray house of stone.

  The fatman lies there, broken and weak; the man of strength, his strength now gone. Only his thirst remains strong, yet still it confounds him. Death is the youth of the world; this he knows well. It is a truth so fundamental as to defy the blindest ignorance: the simplest law of nature. Life is the unrestrained utterance that consumes itself, a perpetual tumult whose freedom is contracted upon one condition alone: that the spent and ruined organism make way, in its time, for the new—for new organisms, new effusions of uncontrollable turbulence, who will enter the dance with new steps and new partners, and with new forces, as yet unimagined.

  The fatman was born to such a dance. To a life of luxurious expenditure—of excess in all things, and of anguish most of all; and here, at the last pinnacle of reckless extravagance, he knew that death—his own death—was the ultimate, ruinous refinement of all that he had worked. It was ungracious to refuse it. The thought offended him. And yet he craved just one more swallow. He demanded, in defiance of his honor, one more card of fate, dextrously dealt from the bottom of the deck.

  And then he understood why.

  For while the fatman was willing to spend the last of himself, he was not alone. Another demanded its own share of luxurious consumption: and the fatman could not deny the justice ofthat claim. There were yet others, it was true: Ella and Lenna; and the good doctor Grimes; but they were not present in his flesh to press their suit. The other was. It had kept him alive; and it would hold the fatman to the bargain he had struck.

  He opened his eyes and saw the booted foot that would usher him—for a while—into oblivion. And as the boot descended he promised his companion that their thirst would be slaked and their card would be dealt. For the fatman could not break his word.

  T
o the maggot, living in his leg.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE DE HAVILLAND BEAVER named The Last of the Independents flew south-southwest in a cloudless sky across a land enshrouded by night. Grimes sat with Gul in the cargo hold as before and kept vigil over the body of George Grimes, which lay wrapped in a tarp on the floor. In the rear of the hold were crates of moonshine, heavily roped down. The crates ratded constantly, as did the plane itself, and the noise of both vibrations counterpointed the muted drone of the big propeller at the nose. Ella sat up in the cockpit with Titus Oates, and Grimes was glad: he didn’t feel like making the effort conversation would require.

  Against a generalized ache that mapped out the whole of Grimes’s body, the pains from his left knee, left ribs and lower back stood out with particular prominence. If he could have afforded the luxury, he would have been depressed; instead he settled for exhaustion. For a while he closed his eyes and tried to rest but fell into that nether state of consciousness where he didn’t know whether he slept or not. After a while he opened his eyes and rubbed his face and considered what exactly he should do next.

  On basic principles Grimes believed civilization to be a good thing. It pleased him that, within certain wide boundaries, no one had the right to walk up to him and shoot his balls off, and that if such an unfortunate event were to take place there would be some possibility of redress under the law. But in the final analysis law was merely the threat or actuality of being at the mercy of a violent power greater than oneself—men with guns. If there was a power greater than the law—more men with more guns—then the law was of scant comfort or utility. By the same token law demanded that the crime in question be brought to its attention, otherwise the crime effectively didn’t exist. Filmore Faroe was not, ultimately, more powerful than the law; but he certainly had the resources to keep a great deal from falling under its gaze. In Faroe’s shoes Grimes would have wanted Ella, Lenna, Jefferson and Grimes himself to be dead: maybe not immediately but certainly before any of them could open their mouths.

  Grimes made himself consider going to the police to report the events of the last twenty-four hours. Even if the cops believed him and went to investigate, they would be so retarded by legal red tape that Faroe would have plenty of time to tidy up before they found anything. It took six months to indict someone for pissing on the sidewalk and Faroe would have a dozen lawyers plugged into his millions in ten minutes. Meanwhile his mercenaries, unhampered by the Bill of Rights, would be dropping Lenna’s body parts into the Gulf of Mexico in weighted sacks. Grimes concluded that Filmore Faroe had to be killed and that it was basically up to him to do it.

  Rufus Atwater would have to go down too.

  All he had to do now was figure out how to do it.

  Ella climbed back into the hold from the cockpit. Gul awoke and stood up and shook himself down. Ella sat beside Grimes and looked at the holes in his suit.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “As right as rain.”

  Gul shouldered his way between Grimes’s legs and he stroked him.

  “I’m sorry about George,” said Ella.

  “Yeah,” said Grimes.

  “I didn’t know him long.” She hesitated. “It was long enough to know him.”

  “Thanks for that,” said Grimes.

  Ella didn’t speak for a while.

  “I know this is a hard time for you, but if you can stand it there’s some things I need to ask,” said Ella.

  Grimes had been expecting this, though he hadn’t been looking forward to it.

  “Go ahead,” he said.

  “Is Charlie—I mean, is Clarence Jefferson my father?”

  “No,” said Grimes.

  He wasn’t sure whether what he saw in her face was disappointment or relief. Perhaps it was a mixture of both. He wondered how much she knew about the Captain’s life. Probably very little. It was clear that she had a lot of affection for him. Grimes didn’t see any sense in taking that away from her. He wasn’t entirely immune himself.

  “Jefferson took care of you as best he could, but he isn’t your father.”

  “Is he a bad man or a good man?” asked Ella.

  For a moment Grimes was stumped by her bluntness.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “Jefferson has an unorthodox take on those concepts.”

  “Are you his friend?”

  “Let’s say we’re close.”

  Grimes felt in his pockets and found a crumpled pack of Pall Malls. He extracted one that had survived and lit it. Ella was thoughtful. He could see her trying to deal with a sadness she didn’t understand.

  “If Clarence isn’t my father …” Ella hesitated. She looked at Grimes full-on. “Then Lenna must be my mother.”

  “Yes,” said Grimes. “She is.”

  Ella looked away and the sadness grew deeper. A tiny rim of liquid gathered and glistened around her eyelids.

  “How did you figure it out?” he asked.

  Ella swallowed, pulled in a deep breath. “Before we split up, she told me she loved me.”

  Ella covered her emotion by reaching into her bag. She searched around, came up empty.

  “Can I take one of your cigarettes?”

  “Sure.”

  Ella lit up. She stared at the steel plating of the floor between her feet.

  “I know this sounds kind of a weak thing to say, but,” she paused, struggled, “but why didn’t Lenna want me? I mean, you know, I can make a guess, but it’s, I mean …”

  “Lenna did want you,” said Grimes. “Nobody ever wanted anyone more.”

  “Is it silly to want to know where I came from?”

  “No,” said Grimes. “It’s your birthright.”

  He took a drag on his cigarette and tried to figure out how to tell it. Ella seemed like the kind who’d want to hear it straight up, but even so. The whole truth had been tough even for him to listen to. He blew out the smoke.

  “When Lenna was about your age she married a man called Filmore Faroe, a rich man, and she went to live at his plantation. It’s called Arcadia.”

  “Did she love him?” interrupted Ella.

  “That’s not for me to say,” said Grimes. “Anyhow, Lenna didn’t have much of an existence at Arcadia. Faroe didn’t abuse her, the way she tells it, but he wouldn’t let her live her own life. After a couple of years Lenna’s life was running through her fingers and she was cracking up. She’d spent too much time trying to please other people. So she went into town. It was there she fell in love without question.”

  Ella looked up from the floor into Grimes’s eyes. He wanted to look away but didn’t. He saw how much she needed this, and more than that, she needed that he tell it one way rather than another. He went on.

  “It was a great passion and a true one, a whirlwind, a fateful spell. The passion of her life. Her lover’s name was Wes Clay.”

  Ella blinked. The cigarette between her fingers trembled. She dropped it to the floor and crushed it under her boot.

  Grimes said, “Wes was a musician, a trumpet player …”

  At this, tears started to roll down Ella’s cheeks. Grimes blinked himself. He was afraid his words would dry up on him and he didn’t want to let her down. He remembered Ella’s face on the poster of the club and realized what the details of Wes being a musician might mean to her. He pushed on.

  “It was a summer’s night, and it was his music that called out to her and pulled her in, off the street and into a small basement juke joint. Lenna had never been to such a place before. Wes Clay played like a man among men, which I figure is what he must have been. The moment they set eyes on each other, man, that was all she wrote. Lenna abandoned everything that she had in order to be what she was. And for three days they laughed and made love and shared their dreams. It was during those days that they conceived you.”

  Ella’s breath shuddered in her throat. She closed her eyes and drops squeezed out and clung to her lashes. Grimes waited. He wanted her to hold on to what
ever she was seeing in her mind for as long as she wanted to.

  Ella said, “In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire.”

  Grimes’s own heart ached as he recognized the voice of his father.

  “Yes,” said Grimes. “Their hearts were touched with fire.”

  Ella took the time she needed, controlled her breathing, opened her eyes again. She nodded for him to go on.

  “By that time Lenna had been reported missing, presumed kidnapped. The police found her in the nightclub and took her home.”

  Grimes saw Ella flinch with disappointment. He could see her asking herself why Lenna hadn’t stayed.

  “Lenna had to go. She didn’t have a choice. For herself she would have risked anything, but she couldn’t risk Wes Clay. She knew that if she stayed with him it would cost him his life. An old-style grandee like Faroe would never tolerate the humiliation of his wife leaving him for a black man.”

  “But she kept …” Ella hesitated. “But Lenna kept the child.”

  “Lenna told me that for all the grief it brought her, she never regretted loving Wes Clay. Ever. And she never regretted giving birth to you.”

  Ella said. “The grief?”

  Grimes swallowed.

  “When it became clear that Lenna was pregnant, she let Faroe believe that he was the father. That was possible, but Faroe knew more than she realized. He must have found out about Clay. When Lenna went into labor, Faroe had her secluded in a secret place.” Grimes paused. “When you were born, and you weren’t Faroe’s child, you were taken away from her. Lenna wasn’t given any choice.”

  “You mean they just took me away from her, I mean, physically?”

  “Yes.”

  Ella looked away. Grimes could see her imagining what it had been like for Lenna. He saw a question cross her face and saw her decide not to ask it. Grimes took a guess at what the question might have been.