Two if by Sea

  One shoe off, Claudia came stumbling into the drive.

  “I couldn’t catch him,” she said. “I was standing on the running board, trying to see you, trying to get service on my phone to call 911, and he just slipped out.”

  “It’s okay,” Frank said. Frank jerked the big kid to his feet. “Do you have shit for brains? You pointed a gun at a little boy?”

  “It’s not loaded,” the kid said. “It’s just some gun a guy gave me in Milwaukee. I don’t even know what size bullets go in it.” He was a pale, soft-looking kid, his hair-sprouted belly lapping over a cinched belt and jeans. His faded blue tee shirt read I Live in My Own World. They Like Me Here. Frank picked up the gun. Not only was it not loaded, it didn’t have any kind of trigger.

  “So you have a death wish, too. You pointed a fucking broken gun with no bullets at a guy with a loaded shotgun and at a three-year-old kid.”

  “I was going to take her to the auction in Des Moines. The horse. I owe a guy money. I don’t have anything left to sell. I can’t rob my grandpa. He’s old . . .”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Frank. “How decent of you. What’s your name?”

  “Clay. Clay Bannock.”

  “Your dad is Cal Bannock.”

  “My grandfather.”

  To Claudia, then, Frank said, “Do you mind just helping me for a moment? Please help Ian put Glory Bee out in the pasture. Can you? I don’t think he can close the latch by himself. She’ll go with him, but I don’t know if she’ll go with you . . .”

  “She’ll go with me,” Claudia said, and reached for Glory Bee. Already overexcited, the horse began to strain backward, then went up. Claudia cried, “Ian, no!”

  The child simply moved back until Glory Bee came down, and then approached her, with a whisper and a touch. As if a sedative had poured through her, Glory Bee dropped her head for a mouthful of May sweet grass before obediently following Ian into the paddock.

  “I’m sorry?” Claudia, confused, said to Frank. “What . . . ?”

  “No, it’s nothing you did. She’s probably scared and she’s always way too high-strung.” Claudia followed Ian to the pasture, where the child unclipped the lead from her bridle and handed it to Claudia, who looped it around her elbow and hand. Frank depressed a button on his phone and said harshly to Patrick, “This is urgent. Get here fast.” He tied the big kid’s feet with the halter rope and his hands with some baling twine, then pushed him down so he was sitting on a square bale.

  While Claudia washed up in the first-floor bath, Frank found his painkillers, took two, and helped Ian change out of his tuxedo into jeans and a fresh shirt.

  “I don’t want to leave my horses,” Ian said. Frank was confused for a moment, and then watched as Ian carefully removed twenty sticky rubber racers from the pockets of the defunct formal wear. “He had a gun.”

  “He did.”

  “He didn’t want to shoot people.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Were you going to kill him?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Were you really going to kill him, Dad?”

  Frank’s arms prickled. He had not misheard Ian. Dad. He wanted to take off his own clothes and put on his oldest clean sweats and lie down in the dark.

  Dad.

  Instead he said, “If he tried to hurt you, yes, Ian.”

  Who was Ian’s real father, that he could call Frank Dad? On the first day he could talk?

  The aide taking care of Frank’s grandfather hadn’t noticed anything. Jack was already asleep, and she was hunched over a deep bowl of french fries, so engrossed in a consummately violent war film that she wouldn’t have noticed if a real war broke out in the kitchen. She waved to Frank and Ian.

  Then Patrick burst through the door, one of his small, potent fists clasped around the fat kid’s bicep. The kid’s feet were still hobbled and his face was smeared with snot and blood.

  “I swear on my mother, Frank,” Patrick said.

  “I know that. Did you tell him about Glory Bee?”

  “I told him about Glory Bee and that she was worth a lot. He hung about, Frank. We had a drink. But I swear to you . . .” The big kid’s nose was broken. Ian held up a dishtowel, which the Bannock kid, for some reason, took and pressed against his nose and jaw.

  “It’s just the same legally as if he tried to shoot my . . . son. He could be dead now, your friend. He could be dead, easy.” He turned to the kid. “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen,” said the kid. He looked older, stuffed and bloated with drinking.

  “He’s even an underage drunk, Patrick. Well played.”

  Patrick looked away. As the pain of his headache began to recede, Frank’s vision cleared, and he appreciated Patrick’s laconic manner. One more word, and he would forget whatever instinct was propelling him toward an impulse of charity.

  “Don’t blame Pat. He’s a nice guy,” the kid said. “I got to know Pat because of the pictures I was supposed to take.”

  Frank said, “Pictures?”

  “I met the girl on Twitter. His daughter? The guy from New York who’s buying the farm?”

  “No one’s buying this farm.”

  “Her father paid me to take pictures. Five hundred bucks. I just really thought I would come over when you guys weren’t here because I wouldn’t get in the way. I was just going to take the pictures because she said her father was trying to figure out if they were going to knock this house down or fix it up and try to sell it—”

  “What in the hell are you talking about? You don’t even have the right farm. This farm isn’t even for sale,” Frank said.

  “It is. They sent me a picture of the farm. ’Course I knew it. This guy is some big deal in real estate. He’s going to build a hundred houses here. But the girl. We got to talking . . .” Cal said, and blushed. “She liked me. I told her about my music. I play guitar. She sent me pictures . . . you know . . . of her. And they wired me the money. It was a lot of money.”

  “For these . . . pictures?” Claudia said. “That you didn’t even take yet? Didn’t you think that was strange?”

  “No . . . because the girl and I had a relationship. We’ve been talking a long time. Two weeks. Three weeks.” Snuffling, the Bannock kid went on, “Then I got here and I remembered the horse, and I just went back for our trailer. I’m really sorry, man.” Without prompting, he fished in the back pocket of his half-staff jeans and pulled out a disposable camera. He threw it to Frank. “You can have the pictures. That’s the only roll.”

  Simultaneous wires of information told Frank that the fat kid wasn’t lying, but that what he was saying was also not the truth. Clay Bannock didn’t know the truth.

  “What did she tell you about her father? The guy who’s supposedly buying my farm?”

  “The builder. He wanted to see where all the bedrooms and bathrooms were, and how the barns were set up—”

  “You went into our house?”

  The kid cringed. “I didn’t touch anything. I swear to God. Nobody locks their doors around here . . .”

  “Patrick, do you know anything about this?”

  Patrick murmured in the negative.

  If wishing could make it so, Frank would have stood alone in the graveled circle in front of the farmhouse, seining the summer light through the lens of memory. He would never have gone to Brisbane. He would never have met Natalie. He would never have put on his rescue coat and set in motion this tumbrel that never stopped, only changed course, and rolled forward.

  “Take your truck and get out of here,” Frank said. “I’ll speak to your grandfather tomorrow. If I don’t turn you in tomorrow and get you charged as an adult with felony assault and armed robbery, it will be because your grandfather knew my dad and he tells me you’re in an inpatient program for alcoholism, starting Monday. Otherwise, you’ll spend the next ten years with people who’ll see your ass as a pillow park. Do you understand me?” The kid nodded. “Put your grandfather’s number in my phone and la
bel it.” The kid did. “Go on. Now. Get off my farm.”

  When the room was quiet, Patrick said, “I’ll see to packing my things.”

  “That’s foolish, Patrick. It’s not anything you did. Just find Sally . . .”

  “She’s under the porch. I guess she was scared.”

  “Some watchdog. I have to get back to my sister’s wedding. This is over now. Let’s forget it.” Frank peered at the disappearing flash of the trailer rounding the bend on Sun Valley Road. “What do you think he meant?”

  “I think some guys think everything is for sale. I knew a guy who lived like that. His cars. His house. He would say, everything is for sale,” Patrick said. “I think maybe some fellow got the wrong impression.”

  “I think someone is after Ian.”

  “Too right, guv. I do as well,” Patrick said miserably. Claudia said nothing until she and Frank were back in the truck, Ian in his car seat. “And here I was worried that you’d fall asleep at the wheel. I had no idea it was going to be the gunfight at the O.K. Corral.”

  “I can’t believe this. It’s a nightmare I can’t wake up from.”

  “You handled it well.”

  “I don’t know that I did. It was a mess. And I know better. I was in law enforcement for twenty years,” Frank said. “It’s like I have combat fatigue. I can’t think straight.”

  “Marty said you’d been in an accident in the line of duty.”

  Frank shrugged. “Not hardly. I got hit by a car.”

  “You saved lives other times.”

  “I doubt that, unless it was sending some idiot to prison for ten years of his life so he would have to wait longer to breed little criminals. I do know I thought that this was Disney Farm, USA, though. It’s been a long time since I lived here. Patrick said we needed to get motion sensors. I was thinking, crazy. Now maybe we need razor wire.”

  He glanced over at Claudia and saw how fixedly she was looking at the little boy, and, with an electric surge along his forearms, he knew what she was thinking. After quieting a colossal plunging, high-kicking horse, a forty-pound child had quietly told an adrenaline-pumped adolescent with nothing to lose to “Be nice,” and put down his fake gun—a gun Ian didn’t know was fake. “So, you saw what Ian did. I think he just assumes most people want to do the right thing. And he’s, well, he’s good with animals.”

  Claudia said, “Is that what you really think?”

  Frank said, “Not really.” In a few sentences, against his better judgment and almost against his will, Frank told her about Ian’s effect on his mother, and the animals in the hold of the airplane, and about Cedric and Tura’s deaths—everything short of how Ian had come into his life.

  “Marty said he’s a relative of your late wife.”

  “Yes, indirectly . . .” They are both human, Frank said to himself.

  “What did other people in the family say?”

  “Nothing. Not to me,” Frank told her. “I would imagine it’s something no one talks about.”

  Claudia then sat quietly until Frank pulled the truck into the parking lot at Hilltop. Necklaces of paper lanterns swung like festive plums from poles and eaves at the opening to the converted barn that was now used as a banquet hall. She didn’t say a word for so long Frank thought she would simply get out of the truck, get into her own car, and drive away.

  When she did speak, it was to say, “I met someone who could do that once before.”

  “Was it part of some study?”

  “No. I was in college.”

  “Where?”

  “She lives in North Carolina, not far from where I grew up. We moved to the south when I was twelve. I was born not very far from here, north of Chicago. Then later, my father was a professor of anatomy at Duke. My sisters and I went there. This woman was probably in her thirties then. I thought of her as old. She’s probably fifty now.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “Well, she was the aunt of a professor of mine. This professor took an interest in me. I was going to medical school, and I was interested in neurology then, the physical part of the mind, and mostly in the vestiges of instinct in human beings. This professor, she took me up there, a few times. I don’t want you to get the impression that the woman was some kind of hillbilly mystic . . .”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “Her name was Julia. Julia Madrigal. Isn’t that lovely? Everyone knew Mrs. Madrigal. Sounds like ‘magical.’ She did a great deal of good. She taught school. There were kids whose parents abused them, and people who hit their wives. There were kids like that guy back at your farm.”

  Frank glanced at Ian, who had seen the lanterns, and, impeded by the pockets stuffed with rubber horses, was struggling to get out of his car seat. “Ian, here. You can go ahead and find Aunt Eden.”

  Gratefully, Ian said, “Okay.”

  They watched him, a small dark hullock moving against the mounds of faraway clouds and hills, disappearing with a bounce into the sweet orange glow of the barn’s open bay. They could hear the music, an old Eagles song.

  “So, she worked with the parents and those others,” Frank said.

  “She didn’t need to work with them. She was just with them. The way Ian was with that guy at the barn,” said Claudia.

  “Did you want to study her?”

  “Of course I did. My professor did, too. But she wouldn’t allow that. She told us that she had always been this way, and helped people do the things they should do and that they probably really wanted to do anyhow. She didn’t want anyone outside the county to know about it.”

  Frank admitted to himself then that this was why he had let the fat, drunken kid go home to his grandfather’s farm when he deserved to be in the back of a cruiser on the way to the Sauk County Jail. He admitted that he didn’t want to answer questions, to draw even more attention, and his aversion was a wall in front of his common sense. The ranks of those who knew about the Ian effect were swelling, and if people didn’t want Ian for their use, then certainly they would want him under their lens.

  “Do you want me to talk to Ian?” Claudia said. “At least, you want to know if this troubles him.”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said. “Do you think it troubles him?”

  “Maybe now that he is talking, he could talk about what it’s like. That makes people feel better, to talk about what things are like for them.”

  “I’ll help you and the horse,” Frank said.

  “You don’t have to. I wouldn’t tell anyone about Ian. I’m not like that. I’m offering to talk to him because he’s little and you can’t help but care about him.”

  Frank said, “I think you misunderstand. It’s not a quid pro quo. I assumed you wouldn’t tell anyone about Ian.” Frank got out and opened Claudia’s door. “I’ll try to help, although I’m not really at all like my dad.”

  “Don’t take me on if you really don’t want to.”

  He put out his arms and Claudia let herself be lifted down. Frank felt a stirring, like a memory, at the spring of the warm flesh under her light coat, and was surprised.

  “I do,” he said. “I can try. I’ve done this with horses way more than people. And not really at your level. My dad was the master. Better than my grandfather, who was a legend. In Australia, I was starting to get good at it, but I’m not at all an Olympic coach . . .”

  “You could be.”

  “No, I couldn’t be, because that would have had to have started a long time ago. You, you still have events to go through . . .”

  “Quite a few. I’ve taken a year off. A second year if I make the national team. I’ll be ready if I qualify for Sydney.”

  “Sydney? Seriously? They’re going to be there again?”

  “The summer games. Sydney. Australia.”

  No fucking way was he ever going to fucking Sydney. Even if her horse was Pegasus.

  “Well, you should find a real coach,” Frank said.

  “I have one. He comes up from Chicago. I knew about
you from Marty. Then I heard you were coming back, so I spoke to Marty.”

  “I can help,” Frank said. “Maybe. I’m reluctant. What I can do is give it a try. Once. If your real coach doesn’t mind.”

  “When I was twenty-two, I almost got there. But I didn’t. I got hurt. The orthopedists said I’d never ride again. So I went to medical school . . .”

  “What happened?”

  Claudia said, “I broke my neck.”

  “Oh. Are you sound now?”

  “Yes. I got better. Like how you got hurt, it wasn’t glamorous. It was a stupid error. I wouldn’t risk ending up paralyzed. This is my last chance.” She lifted her hair off the back of her neck. Frank saw that she was young, and only seemed rather than looked older. She said, “I’m curious. Would you have changed your mind if this hadn’t happened?”

  “I don’t know. I might have. But it goes without saying that I’m grateful. And of course, I’d like you to look at Ian, not formally, but . . .”

  “I get it,” said Claudia. “Well, it’s been quite a day. Are you going to tell your sister?”

  “Maybe someday.”

  “Ready for the dance?”

  “Sure.”

  “But what?”

  Frank told her, “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Anyone can dance,” Claudia said, a smile exploding with dimples and creases.

  “I can dance,” Frank said.

  “What, then?”

  “I meant, I don’t know what to do about Ian. Or what to make of my life.”

  Claudia said, “If today was a taste of it, I wouldn’t either.”

  TEN

  YOU’RE GOING TO have a hard time getting a clean run at that speed,” Frank called out. “I’d rather you ride a careful course and avoid taking a rail, Claudia.”

  She laughed. “I like to go fast, and so does Pro.”

  Frank sighed. It was an early summer afternoon, sulky with rain to come, his fifth session with Claudia. She was the most stylish rider he’d even seen, astride the prettiest and most ungainly horse. Prospero was a big, red, fancy ten-year-old Hanoverian stallion with a sweet streak. Standing still, he looked like the proverbial million bucks. In motion, none of his legs seemed connected to his body. He was like a horse marionette manipulated by a child. When he cantered, he was all tossing and extra motion, even with a tie-down in place, and he looked so slow that Frank could scarcely believe the times he recorded on his stopwatch. When Prospero approached in that jerky all-over-the-place way, Frank held his breath. Almost every time, he thought Prospero would refuse, and then, instead, he sailed over fairly high verticals with inches to spare, his leap anything but classic—a sort of goat jump with a crazy feint at the end, almost like an air kick. Sometimes, the air kick knocked a rail, but never, not once, dislodged one. Fortunately, the way horses looked when they jumped didn’t matter at all in show jumping classes of the kind Claudia would need on her march to the Olympics, an absurd, sweet dream at best. The fastest clear run won. Prospero could jump backward if he went smoothly over all the jumps in the right order. He could make all the noise he wanted, and bang the rails until they shuddered in their cups, so long as he didn’t knock them out. Still, watching Claudia’s patrician carriage on top of that lumbering creature drove Frank nuts.