Michael stood there. He hesitated. Perhaps for the first time, he really hesitated.
Jimmy’s expression changed, as if the shadow of a cloud had passed over a field and left part of that shadow behind.
The immediate sense was one of disbelief that the kid would have the nerve to disobey him. Then there was something else, as if Jimmy Franklin suddenly became aware of the fact that Michael now stood level with him, that he wasn’t looking down at a little boy any more, but a young man.
“Why you—” he started, and then, as if realizing that words were all so much wasted air, he grabbed a knife from beside the sink and brandished it.
“Git!” he snarled. “Git, boy! Now!”
Jimmy lunged once, and though he missed Michael with the blade of that knife, the intent was all too clear.
Janette screamed. “No, Jimmy! Leave him alone! Don’t hurt the boy!”
She grabbed Jimmy’s arm, but Jimmy pushed her aside.
He advanced on Michael, one step, another, and Michael held his ground.
“You dare to challenge me?” Jimmy seethed.
“No, Jimmy, no!” Janette screamed again, and this time she forced herself between her husband and her son, pushing Jimmy back toward the sink.
“Go, Michael!” she said, her voice an entreaty, a plea. “Please, Michael. Please go… now!”
And it was not the knife in his father’s hand that made Michael back up and turn away; it was the look in his mother’s eyes.
Michael left the kitchen. He crouched in the shadows at the top of the stairs, and he listened as Jimmy Travis seethed venom and hatred through gritted teeth. He felt as if he had betrayed his mother, and yet he felt that he could not have done otherwise.
It was not long before he heard the rending of fabric, and he knew without a shadow of a doubt what his father was doing to his mother.
She would not cry out; she would not scream. She would close her eyes and clench her fists. That was what he did. That was what he always did.
And when Jimmy was done, he went back to the table, drank another glass of whiskey, lifted his fork, and continued eating.
But that evening it went a little differently.
Once Jimmy had seated himself at the table, Janette composed herself for a few minutes. She breathed deeply, thought of her past, her present, her future, considered what might ultimately happen to Michael far more than what would become of herself, and then she walked calmly through the front room, stood just a foot or so from her husband, and—much to his disbelief and wonder—delivered the following speech:
“I hate you with a passion so fierce I cannot even describe it, James Franklin Travis. You are an ugly man, not only physically, but right through to the very core of your being. You are a shameful blight on the face of the earth, and you are breathing air that does not deserve to be poisoned by your presence—”
To which Jimmy Travis said, “You stupid freakin’ bitch. You dumbass, motherfucking stupid freakin’ bitch. How dare you talk to—”
Janette smiled then, and there was something so strange about that smile that Jimmy just stopped talking.
That’s when Janette picked up the knife from the table, held it firmly in her fist, and—with every ounce of strength she could muster—drove it into his left eye.
Jimmy Travis sat there for a while, his right eye staring at her, that sense of disbelief still present in his expression—doubled now, for there was disbelief that she had talked back to him and a second helping when he realized she’d stabbed him through the eye. But maybe his nervous system had already started to shut down. Maybe the simple fact of finding three inches of cutlery through his frontal lobe was enough to warrant such an expression. He continued to sit there for a good ten seconds more, and then the body surrendered. Whatever electrical impulse might have still churned through his mortal frame gave up the ghost, and Jimmy Travis just sort of rolled forward, his head meeting the table, that knife burying itself a further three inches into his head. If he hadn’t been completely dead before, he was then.
For a single second it seemed as though Jimmy Travis had finally come to rest, but—as if in slow motion—his head turned and almost rocked back and forth. It stopped moving, the side of his face on the plate from which he’d been eating only moments before, his left eye nothing more than a raw socket from which protruded an inch of the knife handle, his right eye wide with disbelief and shock, whatever final vestiges of awareness might still exist trying to come to terms with the fact that this was it. He was done for. His life, as he had known it, was a wrap.
Janette Travis then sat down beside her husband and breathed deeply. For an hour, maybe two, she would be a free woman, and she was going to savor it as best she could.
After a couple of minutes, she called Michael down.
“Michael,” she said. “Your father is dead. I done killed him with a knife. You have to take your bicycle and go on over to Sheriff Baxter’s office now, and you have to tell them to send the coroner’s wagon for your father and a police car for me. They gonna hang me for this, I’m pretty sure, but I want you to know that I done it for both of us. I may spend the rest of my life in a jail cell, or they may just wanna save some money and have me done for as soon as possible, but there’s every likelihood that this here is gonna be the last time we see each other, certainly as mother and son. So don’t fret, don’t cry, and don’t even think that this was because of you. It was for you, sure, but it was for me as well, so don’t go beating yourself to death with any kind of guilt thing, you hear me?”
Michael just stood there in shocked silence.
“Michael, you answer your mother when she asks you a question. I don’t want you carrying on with any kind of guilt for this, okay?”
Michael nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I am counting on you to be the best you can be wherever you wind up,” Janette went on, “and never forget that I did this out of love for you and for no other reason. I could have borne this alone, son, but I knew that one day he was gonna kill you, and that I could never have suffered.”
She paused then, reached out and stroked her dead husband’s Dixie-Peach-Pomade-slicked hair, and added, “Anyways, whatever else happens, this is done now, and it can’t be undone.”
She turned and smiled at Michael. “Now come here and hug me good, and then off with you, boy. You go get Sheriff Baxter and tell him I done killed your daddy with a table knife. If John Baxter ain’t there, then you get Harold Fenton, okay?”
And Michael stepped forward, and he hugged his mother, and he closed his eyes and seemed to draw every inch of warmth and comfort he could from her, for he knew that this was perhaps the last time he would ever be able to do so. And then he fetched his bicycle and rode the mile and a half to the sheriff’s office to deliver the message.
The sheriff came out personal, brought Deputy Harold Fenton with him, put Michael’s bike in the trunk of his squad car and drove him back.
When they arrived, they found Janette Travis standing on the porch waiting for them. She had changed her torn dress for her Sunday best, and she had her coat all buttoned up.
“He’s in there, John,” she told the sheriff. “Deader ’an roadkill. I done killed him for his cheating, his lying, his infidelity, and his cruelty. No excuses, no sympathy needed. I just done what I figured was best for the boy long-term, and that’s all I have to say about it.”
“Appreciate you didn’t try to run, Janette,” Sheriff John Baxter said. “Only have had to come after you, and that’d have done nothin’ but make it worse for all concerned.”
“Nowhere to run to, John,” she replied. “Everythin’ I ever wanted was here, ’cept I didn’t find it. Wasn’t for lack of lookin’ though.”
“You understand this ain’t gonna go easy on you, Janette.”
“I know, John. I considered all o’ that
’fore I done it.”
“Shouldn’t be sayin’ these things to me, Janette. That smacks of premeditation, takes it out of the realm of self-defense. Have to let you know I’m obliged to write up anything you tell me, so’s best if you keep your lips tight for now.”
“Was premeditated, John. No use hidin’ from the truth. Been thinkin’ about killin’ him for just the longest time.”
“What do you want here, Janette? You wanna fry for this?”
She turned then, tearless, almost expressionless, and she smiled like Mona Lisa.
“I was dead three weeks after I married the son of a bitch, John, just no one had the decency to bury me. Left me to rot away here all these years. Now I’m gonna get buried, and maybe I’ll get some rest. I can lie to you now when I knows the truth, but whatever punishment I get here on earth will just mean an eternity in hell. Better just face it as it is, take the punishment due, and maybe I got a chance of forgiveness in the afterlife.”
Sheriff John Baxter didn’t know what to say in response, so he said nothing. He read Janette Travis her rights, he told she was under arrest for the first-degree murder of Jimmy Travis, and then he put her in the back of the squad and locked the door.
Michael had watched the entire exchange unfold in disbelief and silence.
“Maybe better if you just wait here for the county coroner,” Baxter said. “He’ll be along before you know it. But stay outside the house. Don’t go on in there. If you wanna take a ride back to the morgue with your daddy and the coroner, that’d be fine. Maybe you can have a few moments with him when you get there, say your goodbyes an’ all.”
And with that, Sheriff John Baxter left Deputy Fenton behind to keep an eye on the boy and the body and drove Janette Travis away.
Michael stood for a few minutes, and then—in defiance of the sheriff—he walked on into the house and stood in the hall. Deputy Fenton, a pasty-faced little man with a wife as wide as a water tower, seemed entirely unsure of the protocol in such a situation, and so he simply walked on in after Michael to make sure he didn’t touch nothing.
Michael looked through the doorway, could clearly see his father there, his head on the dinner plate, a mess of cold mashed potato and blood squeezed up around his cheek. A wide pool of blood had spread and was now dripping over the edge onto the wooden floor. Drip-drip-drip, like a metronome. It precisely matched the beat of his own heart. He wondered if fathers and sons always had the same heartbeat. He wondered if the baton had been passed.
Jimmy Travis’s right eye was open and staring. It was a bold blue, bolder and bluer than Michael ever remembered it. The expression—strangely—was one of reconciliation, resignation perhaps, a wordless acceptance of his own fate. And yet there was something else, almost a challenge, a prompt for Michael to say something, to give him one final word of backtalk just to see where it darned well got him.
It was a long time before Michael heard the sound of a car, and when he turned and walked back to the veranda, when he saw the coroner’s wagon winding a dusty path down toward the house, he knew that this day had been a special day, an important day, perhaps the most significant day of his life.
He did not know it yet, but this would also be the day when the dreams and the headaches began—dreams he did not understand and headaches that came and went so fast that they might almost have never happened. Ghosts of pain. That’s what they were like. Ghosts that haunted his sleeping thoughts, much the same as he himself had haunted the thoughts of his father.
Michael Travis went back inside. He stood once more in silence, listening to his own breathing, feeling the beat of his own heart, watching the ever-widening trail of blood as it drip-drip-dripped onto the floor beneath his feet.
3
“Agent Travis?”
Travis looked up.
“You all right, sir?” Rourke asked.
“Yes, of course.”
“Got the body here,” Rourke said. “Ready for your examination.”
“Absolutely,” Travis replied, taking the gloves that Farley offered him.
Travis removed his jacket, pulled on the gloves, and stood aside as Farley opened the drawer.
It took the three of them to lift the dead man onto a trolley, and then Farley wheeled him to the mortician’s slab. Again, it took three of them to transfer him from the trolley.
“Two hundred and forty-five pounds,” Farley said. “Give or take. He’s six foot one inches in height, he takes a size twelve shoe, and from the look of him, he’s either a gangster or a soldier.”
Farley stripped back the sheet, and the dead man was revealed in all his damaged splendor. The right side of his body—mainly focused on his shoulder, his hip, and his upper thigh—were badly discolored.
“Laking here,” Travis said.
“Precisely, and a considerable amount of it. As far as I can gather, the weapon of choice entered at the base of the skull.” Farley lifted the dead man’s head and turned it toward Travis. The hair was cut short in back, and the entry wound—now black and rigid—was little more than an inch wide.
“Whatever kind of blade was used, it went right up through the cerebellum into the temporal lobe. Two or three more inches and the tip of the blade would have touched the internal roof of the skull. It wouldn’t have taken a great deal of force. Could have been done by anyone with a modicum of strength.”
“And the lapse of time between death and discovery?”
“I’d say twelve to twenty-four hours. I’d like to be more specific, but that’s tough. As I said, there is a considerable amount of laking, so he was dead and laid on his back for a good number of hours before he was moved.”
“And the scars and the bullet holes are the reason for your assumption that he was a gangster or a soldier?” Travis asked.
“From what I can see, he has been through the mill, physically speaking. He appears to have been shot three times, once in the right shoulder, once in the right thigh, another time a through-and-through on the left side of his stomach. The oldest is the right thigh; the newest is the shoulder. Those wounds go back ten, maybe fifteen years. There are indications of defensive knife wounds to the hands, a stab wound in the lower back that narrowly missed his spine, a scar on the upper-right side of his head above the ear that would correspond to a blunt trauma injury, perhaps a tire level, a hammer even, and a host of other minor injury indications that really put him in a class of his own.”
Travis seemed to disconnect then, seemed to enter a world of his own. Farley and Rourke just stepped back and watched him as he pored over the body, literally inch by inch. He lifted the dead man’s right hand and turned it over. He inspected the wrist, the forearms, the shoulders, beneath the arms, the back of the neck. He felt along the hairline, behind the ears, along the collarbone, and across the chest. Then he inspected the lower half of the man’s body, getting Farley to help him turn the body over, looking every place possible for anything that would assist in identifying the man. He inspected every scar, every mark, every blemish.
“This means something,” Travis finally said, indicating the back of the man’s right knee.
Both Farley and Rourke came forward, and there they saw what Travis was speaking of.
It was a tattoo, no doubt about, but so small, so insignificant, that it could have been very easily overlooked. The simple fact that the tattoo was nothing but a series of small dots also meant that it could have been taken as a scattering of minor skin blemishes, perhaps lentigines or freckles.
“What the hell is that?” Rourke asked.
“Uncertain,” Travis said, “but it looks like a reversed question mark.”
Travis took his notebook from his pocket and carefully drew a precisely scaled diagram of the mark.
Travis set the diagram aside and continued to inspect the body. It was between the toes that he found further tattooed dots—sev
en in all, one dot at a time, three on one foot, four on the other.
He made a note of this in his book and then asked Farley to assist him in turning the body faceup again.
“So this bruising,” Travis said. “This appears more post- than premortem…”
“Hard to tell, yes,” Farley said, “but I’d go with post as well. If it is post, then at this stage we can assume that he was killed by the insertion of the blade into the brain, and then he was put under the carousel. The fact that he was under the carousel platform and on his left side indicates that the bruising on the right side came from being hit by the platform as he lay there. Truth is, we don’t know. All I can say is that from the extent of the laking, he was dead for a good while before he was found.”
Travis turned to Rourke. “The Brady woman reported seeing him beneath the carousel and got them to stop it, right?”
“Exactly,” Rourke said.
“And a couple of people from the carnival dragged him out.”
“Just like I said.”
“Okay,” Travis replied, closing his notebook. “That confirms that he could not have been on the carousel before he died, as was reported by some. That’s all for the body right now, Mr. Farley. Let’s get him back in the drawer.”
Once the body was returned, Travis asked for the man’s clothes and personal possessions. Again, with the same fastidiousness with which he had inspected the body, he pored over every inch of the man’s effects. He asked Farley for several sheets of paper and drew exact outlines of both the left and right shoes.
“You have fingerprinting ink and a roller?” he asked Farley.
“I do, yes,” Farley said, and handed them over.
Using the roller, Travis applied a thin layer of ink to the sole of each shoe and made an impression of them on two more sheets of paper. He then cleaned off the soles and returned the shoes to the bag from which they’d come.
Travis washed his hands thoroughly, smelled them, and washed them again without soap. Once satisfied that his hands carried no discernible odor, he went back to the dead man’s clothes, holding them merely an inch from his face, his eyes closed, attempting to determine anything telling. He inhaled, but as he exhaled, he turned his face away so as not to taint any existing aroma with that of his own breath.