Chapter 38 #3
Under less fraught circumstances, it would have been amusing to watch Captain pout.
Wisps of fine yellow hair, age lines having been smoothed away by a new layer of fat, legs seeming too short by comparison with the bulk of his torso—–he reminded me of an enormous baby even before he sealed the image with a thick-lipped pout.
He flexed his hands as though searching for an object to throw in a tantrum.
“I won’t tell you names, places, not anything you can take to the police to use against me or to have the boy taken away from me before I’m done with him.
Bare bones. That’s what you’ll get—the bare bones of his story.
If then you still don’t believe he’s real, God help you and this girl.
” As a priest takes courage from his faith, Captain found new strength of purpose in anger, which geysered in his heart and mind, bringing pastel color to his face.
That pity-me pout flattened into a score line almost as thin as a scalpel cut.
Although his cheeks were pink, his compressed lips were bloodless.
When he was able to control his rage enough to continue speaking, his voice had become half sneer and half snarl.
“I need that money. If I can’t have it, then you can’t have her.
My boy will take her. And maybe not just her. ”
I knew too well the version of the world in which Captain lived.
His dark universe had “neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” There was for him no right or wrong, only desire and what he deemed necessary to fulfill his desires.
Our only hope depended on learning more specifics of the threat Captain lodged, an unintentional revelation he might make.
“Convince me the boy is real,” Franklin said, though by now he believed.
“You’ve said so little about him. If you’d been pitching me a movie with such a character, I would have had no interest in the project.
The loss of a hundred thousand won’t materially affect our lives, but my sadder experiences in the movie business have made me sensitive to con jobs. ”
And so Captain told us what he was willing to reveal about the dangerous creature in his control.
He called the boy Jack, though that was not his name.
Jack was the first—and only—child of a farmer and his wife in a remote corner of a state in the Middle West. Jack was born at home with a midwife assisting.
The parents and midwife alike were shocked by the appearance of the infant, but they weren’t horrified.
In addition to being poor and hardworking, they were Christians.
They believed things happened for a reason, that every child, regardless of appearance or disabilities, deserved to be loved and nurtured.
Because such a special child added to the mother’s duties, her sister and sister’s husband—call them Sam and Sarah—came to live there and help work the farm.
Jack’s father and Sam, with the assistance of members of their church, built a small house for the newcomers.
Eight months later, Sarah gave birth to a son; call him Bobby.
The boys were homeschooled, grew up together, and were best friends.
To the family, as strange looking as Jack might have been, he was nonetheless just Jack, never to be feared, a smart kid with a sense of humor for which he sometimes had to apologize when one of his pranks went too far.
However, because others recoiled from him with visceral disgust, the boy was never taken into town; his world was the farm and the woods beyond.
The family were fundamentalists. They raised young Jack and Bobby with strict discipline and fear of God.
On rare occasions when Jack misbehaved, when his sense of humor revealed a dark side, when he was caught in a lie, he was remorseful and tearful.
He didn’t have to be told to ask God to forgive him; he retreated to his room, left the door open, and spent an hour or two on his knees, praying aloud.
One Saturday, the four adults drove into town to shop and have a café lunch.
Bobby usually went with them. This time he preferred to stay home with his best buddy.
When the adults returned in the late afternoon, Jack was distraught, shaking.
Bobby had saddled Buttercup, one of the family’s two horses, and had taken her for a ride.
When he came back home, as he was approaching the stable, a rattlesnake startled the horse and Bobby, too.
Buttercup reared and panicked and threw her rider.
The horse was grazing calmly now. The snake was gone.
And Bobby was dead. He’d been thrown onto the cast-iron hand pump that stood on a concrete pad to provide water for the stable.
He crushed his skull against the three-inch-diameter pump spout and died almost instantly.
In this rural territory, the county sheriff ran a small shop with fewer deputies than needed.
The coroner made a living primarily as the proprietor of a funeral home; he had never received training in forensic medicine.
No one had time or resources to investigate deaths that appeared to all intents and purposes accidental.
A month after Bobby’s funeral, as Jack’s mother was turning out the pockets of his jeans before washing them, she found a penny that had been placed on railroad tracks and flattened to twice its normal size under the wheels of a locomotive.
Bobby’s uncle had given it to him, and the boy had carried it—his “lucky penny”—at all times.
No one had thought to retrieve it before the body was transported to the funeral home.
At first, Jack said Bobby had given it to him, but then claimed he had taken it off the corpse as a remembrance of his friend.
Over the next few days, his parents were dismayed that he more often than before broke the family rules.
When he took the Lord’s name in vain repeatedly at a Sunday dinner and showed no remorse, it seemed that something had happened to instill in the boy a defiant attitude and a shameful pride.
His parents suspected what that “something” had been, but they didn’t want to believe it.
The county where they lived provided no mental health service, but after making inquiries, the parents were put in touch with a government psychologist in the state capital.
We’ll call him Dr. Mephisto. He did contract work for the Department of Health and the attorney general’s office.
He arranged for Jack’s parents to bring their son to the Mephisto Clinic and leave him for a three-day evaluation.
Dr. Mephisto was a graduate of a renowned medical school, but his success as a scam artist was a result of natural talent.
He would bill both the health department and the attorney general’s office for his treatment of Jack, who was then just thirteen, and he would report twice the number of hours of counseling that he actually provided the boy.
On the telephone, the parents described their son as having grievous physical deformities that medicine could not fix, that would be lifted from him only by divine grace.
This led the good doctor to hope the boy might provide him with a third source of income.
Fifteen years earlier, he had discovered the world of carnival freak shows.
With considerable dedication, he had made contact with the operators of several ten-in-ones and as well with thirty psychologists and psychiatrists all over the country who had established clinics roughly analogous to his.
Among the patients those specialists treated were occasional individuals with disabling deformities who were depressed or acting out their anger in perilous ways.
They were usually wards of the state or clients of faith-based welfare agencies, in either case poorly served.
Most proved not to be misbegotten enough to thrill the marks on a midway, neither monstrous nor amusingly malformed.
Seven or eight times each year, however, one or another of Dr. Mephisto’s associates sent to him, by express courier, photos of a candidate who was a sure thing.
If the miscreation resisted the prosperous future that was offered, there were drugs and certain threats that resulted in a concession.
To the ten-in-one operators, the doctor provided photos and a bio of the performer, along with a required finder’s fee determined by the degree of freakishness of the person being offered.
The money was substantial. In extraordinary cases, bidding ensued.
Mephisto split each finder’s fee with the associate who introduced him to the human oddity.
Cash. Beyond the observational capacity of tax authorities.
Jack’s parents brought him to the clinic, ostensibly for a week of psychoanalysis and counseling, and Mephisto saw his patient for the first time.
The good doctor’s heart soared with delight.