Chapter 38 #4
Perhaps Jack saw something in Dr. Mephisto to which he could relate, for he never became obstreperous or engaged in deceit, and he cooperated with the analysis.
As for the counseling, it amounted to little more than an explanation of the workings of a ten-in-one and an accounting of the average weekly gate that would be shared with the ten exhibits.
Jack was excited by the prospect of being freed from the boredom of the isolated farm and from poverty, by being a valued star rather than an embarrassment to his family.
He said, “No more Jesus this and Jesus that all day long.” His smile was so wide that it briefly alarmed Mephisto.
There was no question that young Jack was a psychopath, although not as extreme as his strange face suggested he might be.
He had a potential for violence. He admitted to killing Bobby, but not intentionally.
His cousin had been in a mood that day, taunting Jack relentlessly, finally picking a fight.
“I wish it hadn’t happened,” Jack told Mephisto, “because of all the trouble it’s caused me.
But I’m not sad. Bobby always got the best of everything.
He lorded over me.” To cover the facts of the killing, the boy had saddled Buttercup, turned her out in the yard, and invented the story about the rattlesnake.
Jack was self-aware enough to know that only he had the power to destroy the opportunity Mephisto laid before him, that his future depended on him controlling his dark side.
Nevertheless, the best ten-in-one operator for the boy was Captain, who possessed a knack for charming the most difficult oddities out of their bad behavior.
Mephisto sent him four photographs, a short bio, and a price.
The day he received the mail, Captain called the doctor to say he was coming by car and would be there in two or three days to “adopt” the boy.
Jack’s parents had not completed elementary school.
Mephisto overwhelmed the couple with a diagnosis that terrified them even though they didn’t understand it.
By phone, Mephisto assured them that Jack was “a psychopathic, schizophrenic, cyclothymic, paranoid, lycanthropic, idiomorphic, devil-worshipping kleptomaniac who will—not might but absolutely will—kill you in your sleep. His secret fantasy is to behead you and offer your heads to Satan on an altar. The attorney general’s committee on homicidal maniacs intends to sue you tomorrow for custody of the boy and place him in a high-security asylum where he will no longer be a danger to himself and others. ”
When Jack’s parents declared their loathing and distrust of pettifoggers and worried that legal fees would bankrupt them, Dr. Mephisto agreed all lawyers were shysters, but he explained their other option.
They could choose not to contest the decision by the committee on homicidal maniacs (which did not exist), sign a document transferring parental rights to the state, and be released from all criminal and financial responsibility they would otherwise face when their son inevitably raped and murdered young women.
The father wanted to know where to get those documents.
Mephisto said, “I’ll drive the hundred thirty miles to your place as soon as we hang up.
” The mother wanted to know what to tell people, how to explain that she and her husband had conceived a mad child.
“How about this,” Mephisto suggested. “You don’t tell them any such thing.
You print a note from him. He ran away, says he’s going to Canada where people like him are treated better. ”
Now, under the birdless sky, on the birdless lawn of Bramley Hall, Captain said, “The papers they signed were nonsense. Mephisto didn’t leave copies with them.
Back in his clinic, he burned all of them.
When I finally got there, the boy was ready to go.
I dropped more cash than I can afford, but the second I saw him in the flesh, I knew he was worth it.
He wore a hooded jacket when we stopped for gas and checked into motels.
The past three days, where I live, I’ve made sure he eats what he wants, better than he’s eaten before.
For the first time, he can listen to anything he wants on the radio.
I bought him some under-the-counter magazines with pretty girls, and he’s more grateful than you can imagine.
We talk about the new ten-in-one I’m going to open, what it’s like in the carnival, how much money he’s going to make.
Maybe he’ll hold himself together and be a star for me.
But like I said, I know that look he gives me, what it means.
In the end, it’s only blood the boy wants, and he can’t help himself.
Anyway, he and I worked out how to make sure you all suffer if you don’t come through with the hundred-grand stake I need.
You did it before. Why not again? So now you tell me how it is. ”
Franklin rose from his chair and surprised me just a little by saying, “I believe the boy is real and he’s what you say he is. It’s half past eleven Tuesday. I can have the money for you by the close of business Thursday. Just this once and never again.”
“What shit is this?” Captain demanded, thrusting to his feet so violently that he knocked his chair over. “You’ve got that much here and now in that home vault of yours, the same from which you got the forty thousand eight years ago and brought it to Blue Mood.”
“Be sensible, Farnam. These are far different times. Back then, thousands of banks were failing. We didn’t trust them.
That part of the crisis is past. We have our money in investments, certificates of deposit.
I need a little time to wind down some things in such a way that we don’t lose another hundred thousand in addition to the one I’m paying you. ”
“Like hell. There’s still a depression. Maybe worse than ever. You’ve got end-of-the-world money piled up here in Bramley Hall.”
“You’re right about things being bad, but stashing cash in the mattress is the way to make it worse.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Loretta said as she and I got to our feet. “The economy needs investors to take big risks and get the country’s engine started again. The government sure hasn’t been able to do it. We can get the money, Farnam, but it’ll take a few days.”
“I’m not begging for a loan, a bank check, and a payment book,” Captain said somewhat incoherently. “It’s got to be cold cash.”
“Which we can’t have until Thursday,” Franklin insisted. “Do you want to take a few valuable paintings for ransom, a silver tea service, maybe the living room furniture? Be reasonable, sir. You have spooked us into giving you what you want—as soon as we can.”
Captain’s face had paled once more during his long story of the origin of the psychotic boy.
Extreme frustration brought some color back to him.
However, the rosy blush was confined to his bulbous nose, which seemed to glow like a reminder light that the time for his midday nip of the bottle had arrived.
“Very well. But let me tell you something, Daddy Warbucks. Better not call any bastards with badges, better not think you can track me to where I live. I parked my car in town and walked two miles out here. I’ll walk back.
I’ve got a sharp eye for shadows. If I see one, the deal is off.
This girl you wanted so bad to rescue from me—you won’t have her anymore.
I don’t like surprises. If you’ve got one for me, just know I’ve got one for you already, a surprise just waiting to spring. ”
“Four o’clock Thursday,” Franklin said. “I’ll bring one hundred thousand wherever you want. Now I’ll see you to the front door.”
He led our visitor across the lawn and up the garden path toward the house, as nonchalant as if Captain wasn’t the kind of man who would stab him in the back.
When they’d gone far enough to reassure Rafael, the dog descended the pavilion steps and raced toward Loretta and me.
Suddenly crows strutted through the grass, pecking for lunch.
Birds began singing in the trees. I didn’t know for sure exactly what to make of all that—although I had an idea.
Loretta pulled me against her. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“Yes. Are you?”
“Better with him gone.”
“Captain doesn’t scare me. Not him. But . . .”
“What is it, Addie?”
“I saw that farmhouse in dreams.”
“Dreams plural?”
“Yes. In one of them, I saw the boy riding a terrified and screaming horse in the moonlight. I believe he bit it on the neck.”
“Bit the horse?”
“Yes. All this was at a distance. I can’t say what he looked like, except that he was strange.”
“Your dreams are not just dreams.”
“Some are more. I used to deny it.”
“Do you know where this farm was?”
“No. But in another dream, it was on the empty dance floor of the Palomar. And there were praying mantises.”
“Mantises?”
“As big as people. Everyone on the dining terrace was a mantis. And a mantis came out of the farmhouse there on the dance floor.”
“The boy?”
“I guess it represented him. He’s not a mantis, but the mind shapes dreams in metaphors.”
“The subconscious.”
“It’s a strange animal, the subcon. The mantis that came out of the house made its way to this cradle.”
“Cradle?”
“With a baby. A human baby. The mantis lifted it out of the cradle to eat it.”
“I don’t think I could handle your dreams.”
“They’re never boring. I woke up before it devoured the baby. I don’t think I could let my subcon show me something like that.”
With Rafael keeping us company, we walked toward the house, into which Franklin and Captain disappeared.
“So,” I said, “whatever the boy is, he’s real.
Subconscious foresight, intuition, clairvoyance—whatever you want to call it—I’ve learned to trust what it’s trying to tell me even though the messages need interpretation.
” We walked in silence for a moment. As we were passing the dolphin fountain, I said, “You’re going through all this because of me. ”
“Not you, sweetheart. Not you at all. Because of Farnam.”
“If not for me, Captain would never have been in your life.”
She halted on the terrace. “If not for you, Gertie would have died of septic shock.”
“We can’t know that for sure.”
“I know it.”
“What I mean is—there’s no such thing as inevitable fate.”
“On my darkest days I wonder about that,” she said.
“When one big thing changes in your life, everything after that changes, too. If you’d never met me, so many days after would have unfolded differently. Gertie might not have gotten a nosebleed, or if she got it, she might have come to you instead of packing it the way she did.”
“So you’re the cause of nosebleeds now?”
“You know what I mean.”
“If you’re the cause of nosebleeds, prove it. Give me one.”
“I’m not going to give you one.”
“I demand you give me a big, wet nosebleed right this minute.”
I shook my head. “You’re being silly.”
“I don’t think it’s silly to accuse you of false advertising. You claim to be able to provide a service, but when you’re asked to do so, you pretend to have made no such claim.”
“A nosebleed is a service?”
“No less than the service Danny Dutton provides when he comes each week to clean the swimming pool and add chemicals to the water. What would you think of him if he just went for a swim and left, no cleaning, no chemicals, a complete swimming-pool-service fraud?”
“You’re trying to make me laugh.”
“If that’s what I’m doing, it seems to be working. But what I’m really doing is trying to get the damn nosebleed you promised.”
“I might just give you one.”
“Ha! You talk big, but it’s all talk. Look at my schnozzle. Not one drop.”
“Your nose is perfect. No one would call it a schnozzle.”
“I’ll call my nose anything I want to call it—schnozzle, snoot, snout, beak, Fred.”
“You don’t call your nose Fred.”
“Yes I do. I have a masculine side, but it’s all in my nose.”
So we sort of collapsed together on a terrace bench and held each other until I stopped laughing.
Loretta said, “Never ever again say we’d have been better off without you or I’ll give you a nosebleed you’ll never forget. You’re a blessing, pure and simple. Captain Farnam is a mosquito. We’ll swat him away.”
“What about the boy?”
“Addie, Addie, Addie. Since when has a Fairchild ever been afraid of a psychopathic, paranoid, lycanthropic, devil-worshipping kleptomaniac?”
“Since never?”
“You said it. I’m pretty sure I know how Franklin intends to handle this—the same way that I want to handle it.
Honey, by four o’clock Thursday afternoon, Captain Farnam will be in jail, charged with extortion, and the boy will be in whatever institution can help him, if in fact he can be helped. Easy peasy.”
Loretta and Franklin had triumphed over so much misfortune, so many reversals, and were toughened by experience.
I thought maybe a scheme like Captain’s, for all its evil and potential to result in horrific violence, might nevertheless be countered and defused in ways that he lacked the sophistication to predict.
As it turned out, the surprise he promised to spring if Franklin crossed him was not an empty threat.
What seemed easy peasy would be anything but that. Such is the world.