“Apologies for not welcoming you,” Farley said. “I’m Jack Farley, Greenwood County Coroner. Pleased to meet you, Mr.…?”
“Travis. Special Agent Travis.”
“So we got ourselves a federal drama, have we?”
“Perhaps,” Travis replied. “For the moment this is just a fact-finder.” He glanced at the cadaver upon which Farley had been working.
“That’s not your man,” Farley said, indicating the body. “That’s a-few-drinks-a-day-too-many Stanley Jarrett. Had it coming a long while, and I’m surprised he made it this far. Your man is out back on ice, but I can’t keep him for much longer as he’s gonna start reekin’ something terrible.”
Jack Farley put his right glove back on and indicated a door at the back of the room. “Let’s go to the icebox.”
It was as Michael Travis walked down the corridor to view the dead man that he remembered the death of his own father, the way he had looked as his body cooled and stiffened at the dinner table that evening so many years before.
And the memory came, a memory he had tried ever harder to bury, and yet he knew now, as he’d always known, that they were memories from which he could never be free.
The previous day had dredged these things to the surface, and there was nothing he could now do but face them.
2
Perhaps some people exist simply to remind the world that the devil is real.
This, simply stated, was the thought that gave Michael Travis some small degree of comfort.
Michael was merely fifteen years old when the Terrible Rage came to an end. It came to an end suddenly and unexpectedly and gave him barely sufficient time to catch his breath.
It was a warm August evening, some last vestige of high summer present in the atmosphere. The day had stretched lazily from dawn to dusk and filled each hour between with a sense of strange anticipation. Insects gave up their buzzing and bothering, finding respite from insect business in the deep-shadowed eaves of barns and haylofts. It seemed as if the world and all it offered had come to some unspoken and tacit consent that no manner of work would be undertaken on a day such as this. It was still too darned hot, there was too darned little air, and a cool breeze was something so indistinctly remembered that it might have been a figment of universal imagination. Such was this day: quiet, slow, airless, and as dry as bones.
And so the Terrible Rage came to its conclusion, yet had you asked Michael if such a thing was expected, he would have eyed you with an expression as revealing as a pail of milk. And had you told him that his mother would be the one to bring it to an end, he would have called you a barefaced liar.
So, telling it as it occurred, so very different from the embellished narratives that would late be spun by those who had no business spinning such things, this was how it happened:
Michael Travis was an only child, born on Tuesday, May 10, 1927, born of two people who should never have wed at all, but small-town Midwest farm life being what it was, there was a narrowness of view and an ever-present yearning to see the end of being alone in such a vast and wide-open flatness. There was the earth and the sky, merely two or three kinds of weather in between, and not a great deal else to discuss. People fell in together by default, by external determination, by the divisive collaboration of those possessed of vested interest and ulterior motive. This was Flatwater, Nebraska. It sat within a stone’s throw of the Howard County seat, St. Paul, and—as such—no different from a million other American towns where happiness found sparse and awkward welcome in the lives of its residents.
So Michael’s mother-to-be, Janette Alice Cook, her simple cotton housedress decorated with a handful of self-embroidered flowers, married James “Jimmy” Franklin Travis on Wednesday, December 15, 1926, in St. Paul. Though Janette did not yet show her pregnancy to any great extent, the mere fact that her first and only child was born but five months later explained the actual necessity to marry, for neither the Cooks nor the Travises, presently or historically, had ever owned anything worth a hill of beans. Jimmy Travis was predictably drunk for the occasion and proceeded to drink so much afterward that he could not perform his husbandly duties on the marriage night. Janette sat in the bathroom of their apartment and cried for a little while, and then she steeled herself, told herself that all would be well, that Jimmy would change, that fatherhood would do him good, and she prayed that she was right.
She was not.
Fatherhood did not suit Jimmy well, and whatever Janette might have believed her husband to be, he was far worse.
Jimmy Travis was a bullheaded, bigoted, misogynistic asshole of a man. His own father had described the teenage Travis as “a hundred pounds of raw hamburger with the charm and sense of a fence post.”
Soon after they were married, Travis angled and maneuvered his way into a foreman’s position in a migrant labor camp out near Flatwater. He got the job because he could drink and tell dirty stories. He got the job because he had no problem kicking coloreds and Poles and Germans and Czechs. It was a hard decade, no question, and the camps that sprang up across the Midwest were merely depositories for those who could still heft an ax or swing a hammer despite the lethargy occasioned by broken dreams. Homes were nothing but makeshift sheds built from tar paper and roofing tin; everywhere there was the smell of oil-soaked timber, cheap liquor, sweat, shit, and failure. Travis’s camp was an offshoot of the Great Migration, the Germans and the Czechs thus outnumbered by the coloreds, and yet they’d all come in the sure belief that life just got better the farther north you walked. They soon learned that life was no different in the north, that the liquor tasted the same but cost a nickel more a quart, that work was hard and getting harder, that happiness was as rare as hummingbirds and hailstorms, that they were destined to spend their lives building railroad lines between nowhere special and someplace less so.
Jimmy Travis didn’t care for much else but sufficient dollars to drink, a few hands of cards, and the feeling that here he was master of his own territory. He was sufficiently confident and expressive of his ill-founded opinions that those of less intelligence believed he knew best, but—in truth—he knew very little at all. Maybe Jimmy Travis was worth little more than his own weight in hamburger, and charmless to boot, but he had himself positioned as a boss, a leader of men, and he got them to work by threats and hollering and the promise of a good beating. When men are already broken, it doesn’t take a lot to subdue them completely. So Travis ran the camp, and the men laid the lines, and the Midwestern Standard Railroad Company paid Travis enough to get drunk and stay that way.
It has to be said that meeting Janette Cook was the both high point of Jimmy Travis’s life and the low of Janette’s. Neither deserved the other. Janette deserved someone decent and kind, whereas Travis deserved a bitter and twisted harridan intent on making his life a misery. But love being what it is—so often misguided, misunderstood, misconceived—those who have no business falling for each other yet fall like stones. Janette had married someone who perhaps represented security, a replacement father, a strict uncle who would keep her in check but yet allow her to blossom. She married an idea viewed through rose-tinted glasses and then discovered that fine ideas and reality were never one and the same thing. In truth, Jimmy Travis was not even a handsome man. His skin was dark and leathery from sun exposure, his hands calloused and rough, his wrecked teeth like a mouthful of broken crockery, and his eyes were just too damned close together to make anyone feel at ease in his company. Plumb the depths of his personality and you discovered almost no personality at all.
Janette, however, was a different arrangement altogether. She was a beautiful child grown into a beautiful woman, perhaps not sufficiently beautiful for every man who saw her to secretly wish his own wife were dead and deep-sixed, but she was something quite special nevertheless. Jimmy Travis didn’t see beauty the way others did; Jimmy Travis simply saw a cute brunette with a fine ass and a g
reat rack, adequate decoration for his arm when he walked down the street. It was not fair to say that Jimmy Travis did not love Janette Cook. It was fair to say that he neither understood love, nor knew how to express it. Where she was gentle, patient, and kind, he was domineering, opinionated, and aggressive. Where she was quiet, discreet, and compassionate, he was a bully, a loudmouth, an insensitive boor who believed that anything worth doing in life was best accomplished by force, by manipulation, by deception. Even before Michael was born, Jimmy was screwing around. He had always screwed around. He screwed around on every girl he’d ever known. He’d also beaten pretty much every girl he’d ever known, and though it was no saving grace, he did not start beating Janette until after Michael was born. Perhaps that was some small testament to a dim light of decency that still resided in the dark embers of his heart.
At first Jimmy beat Janette because the dinner was cold. Then he beat her when the baby cried too much. Sometimes he beat her simply because he was drunk and there was no one else to beat. Eventually he beat her because he enjoyed it. It made him feel like the big man, the boss at work and the boss at home, and Janette—petite, almost fragile—took it wordlessly, resiliently, endlessly.
To his credit, Jimmy Travis never actually beat his own son. He threatened to, but he never carried that threat into action. It seemed he had energy enough for the Germans, the Czechs, the coloreds, his wife, but by the time it came to his own son, he was plumb worn-out. For everyone else, Jimmy Travis had a hard word, a clenched fist, but for Michael, he kept his tongue in his mouth and his fists in his pockets. For that, and that alone, Janette had something for which to be grateful.
Had you asked Jimmy, had you really asked him, he would have admitted something strange.
“Kid worries me,” he would have said. “Kid don’t say a damned word, but sometimes when he looks at me, I feel like he sees right through me. There’s just somethin’ not right there, like I don’t feel nothin’ for him, like there ain’t connection at all.”
Jimmy never voiced this thought, nor did he even really think it, but he knew it. Somewhere beneath the paper-thin superficiality of his day-to-day thought processes, he believed there was something wrong with that kid. The kid spooked him, plain and simple.
Michael, however, just got on with the routine business of growing up, knowing nothing much of anything beyond the reality of the Travis household. He heard the raised voices, he saw the violence inflicted, and perhaps he believed that this was just the way things were. He was unaware of anything else, and thus any other way of life would be purely imagined.
Sometimes, Michael, all of six or seven years old, would sit with his mother as she nursed a cut lip, a bruised eye, a dislocated finger, and he would ask her why his father hurt her so bad. Was this normal? Were all husbands and fathers this way?
“It’s nothing but a Terrible Rage he feels, sweetheart,” she would say. “It’s not your fault, nor mine, and in a way it’s not even your father’s fault. Some people are just filled to bursting with this Terrible Rage. They feel that life has done them badly, that there are things that they’ve been denied, and they try to deal with it the best way they can.”
“But why does he blame you for them, Mom?”
“He doesn’t blame me, darling.”
“So if he doesn’t blame you, then why does he hurt you?”
She would hold Michael close then and say, “Because I’m here, baby, because I’m here. That’s why.”
Michael did not understand his father, and he suspected his mother did not understand the man either, but he never said as much.
There was one thought, however, that did trouble Michael, and it sat beneath his thoughts like a shadow that he did not dare to view. Sometimes he himself would perceive some sense of madness. Sometimes he would feel a bitterness and resentment building inside him, and then the slightest thing would cause him to snap. A sudden flash of anger, brilliant and searing hot, a firework in his mind, and he would want to break something, smash something, do something truly wicked. He did not. He contained and restrained and withheld himself, but the fear was there: that he carried something of his father in his blood and that he would inevitably grow to be the same.
And so, when the Terrible Rage came to an end—finally, indefatigably—it was as much a surprise to Michael as anyone else.
August of 1942, as US forces were preparing to raid the Japanese-held Gilbert Islands, as Winston Churchill concluded his meeting with Stalin at the Kremlin, Jimmy Travis had far more significant things on his mind, one of which was a twenty-two-year-old waitress called Mary Pulowski. Mary was a simple girl from a simple family. Her father, Josef, was on Travis’s railroad crew, and Mary came on up one time to bring her father some sandwiches. Travis was in his makeshift office, and Mary caught his eye as she crossed the site perimeter and started down toward the work zone.
Travis called her back, asked about her business, eyed her up and down like a hungry man stares down a T-bone, and with his sharp line in smart quips, his Dixie-Peach-Pomade-slicked coif and his mischievous grin, he got her to fall for him in ten minutes flat. Whatever he might have promised her would only ever be known by Jimmy Travis and Mary Pulowski, but it was enough to get her skirt up around her waist right there and then in the Midwestern Standard Railroad Company Team #31 foreman’s office, and Jimmy gave her everything he got. Half an hour later, Jimmy Travis himself delivered the sandwiches to Mary’s father, and as the old man thanked him, Jimmy took a moment to marvel at his own magnificence.
That was not the first time he and Mary Pulowski broke a sweat over bullshit promises of better lives and bigger futures, Jimmy having convinced the poor, gullible girl that it was merely a matter of right timing before he announced the details of his desertion to his wife. From that moment and for all the years Mary could envision, it would be the high road for them both. The future was as bright as the sun-blessed horizon in the east, and Jimmy Travis and Mary Pulowski would be making their way toward it, smiling high, wide, and handsome, their pockets full of cash, their hearts full of love, their spirits uplifted by the sheer joy and wonder of how good life had become. That was the story, the narrative spun, the tale told, and it was about as worthless and insincere as an eight-buck bill.
Jimmy Travis had no intention of leaving his wife. He just wanted to keep on fucking Mary Pulowski until he tired of her, and then he would find someone else. He even joked about her with his drinking buddies, referring to her as Merry Pull-Off-Ski, his Polish hand job. This was his way, and there was nothing wrong with it as far as he could tell.
That evening—the evening the Terrible Rage finally ended—Jimmy Travis came home from one such illicit rendezvous smelling of cheap liquor and cheaper perfume. The perfume he had bought himself and given to Mary as some sort of tangible token of the future he’d promised her. It was nothing more than rosewater, but he’d peeled off the label and told her it was Channel N°55 or somesuch, from Paris near France, you know? Mary believed him. She wanted to believe him. She’d been saving every hard-earned cent and dime for as long as she could recall, had all of fifty-three dollars and change stowed someplace safe, and she was waiting for the right moment to give it to Jimmy as a pledge for their tomorrows.
That evening she’d walked down to the site and hid out in Jimmy’s office until the crew had disbanded and headed home. She’d prepared her father’s evening meal, left him a note to say she was with friends, and once the coast was clear, she and Jimmy had driven out toward the railroad station. There was a field behind the station where they could park undisturbed, and here Jimmy had her do things for him that a good Polish Catholic girl should never have done for any man.
Once Jimmy’s carnal needs had been satisfied, he drove her back to the main road, no more than half a mile from her home, and sent her on her way. She had wanted to talk to him, to ask him again when he was going to leave his wife and run away with her,
but she had seen how much he’d drunk, and she didn’t dare make him mad. She knew he had a temper, a short fuse, and she knew better than to light it. She had convinced herself that once they were away from Flatwater, he would be different, that his temper was merely due to the frustration he felt about their not being together all the time. That’s what he’d told her, and she believed him. She needed to believe him, because if he was lying, then everything of which she’d convinced herself was worthless, and that would have been too much to bear.
So Jimmy let Mary out of the truck, and she started walking home. He drove back to his own house, and there he found Janette waiting for him, his dinner cold, her own temper frayed, and Michael—all of fifteen years old—wondering whether he would be witnessing yet another drama of violence and madness unfold before his eyes.
“Don’t even open your freakin’ mouth,” was Jimmy’s greeting as he entered the house. “Long day, dumbass workers, problems you could not even comprehend, and the last thing I need is to hear some bullshit whiny freakin’ bitch going on at me about how I’m late.”
And then he turned to Michael and added, “And I don’t need to see you sharing sideways fucking glances with her like you think you’re better than me. Don’t think I don’t know what you say about me, you pair together like snakes in a freakin’ basket. Get my dinner, get me a drink, and leave me the hell alone, all right?”
Michael fetched a bottle and a glass, Janette fetched a plate and some cutlery, and they set those things down before Jimmy and backed away to the kitchen.
“This is freakin’ shit!” was the first comment.
“This is some goddamned cold fuckin’ shit you’re giving me!” was the second.
The third was delivered in person as Jimmy came into the kitchen and roughly pushed his wife against the edge of the sink.
He turned to Michael. “Get the fuck upstairs, boy!” he hollered.