Chapter 39 #5
Captain was pleased with himself—“very damn pleased”—and wanted to assure us that his new identity had been so well crafted that a thousand Pinkertons could never find him.
He was so euphoric and getting such pleasure from belittling us that, as he ranted on, he became more enfevered and less judicious about what he said.
I was pretty sure the “little freak who was not born but was puked up instead” must have been a reference to me, but that was not what got him in trouble.
He said Pinkerton and the FBI and “Jesus Christ Himself” could spend eternity searching for him in “every carnival there ever was or will be anywhere in the world” and would fail to find him.
This seemed to imply that he had no intention of using the money to create a new ten-in-one.
You might infer that he did not, after all, mean to return to the Bram to pick up Midwest Jack after carrying the loot half a mile and loading it in his getaway car.
That was certainly the inference Jack made.
Jack evidently believed that he no longer had any hope of being a freak-show star, would never be a partner in a lucrative enterprise, and would never have enough money to buy even an hour with one of the girls in those under-the-counter magazines.
We all know how sad and frustrated we become when someone we trusted, someone who made a solemn promise, proves to be a liar.
We can only imagine how much more intense are the emotions of a psychopathic, schizophrenic, cyclothymic, paranoid, lycanthropic, idiomorphic, devil-worshipping kleptomaniac who has been called ugly all his life and then realizes that he also has just been played for a fool.
In all the years I had known Captain, I had never heard him scream.
Yet I had no doubt that the screamer in the upstairs hall, on the far side of the bedroom door, was my old keeper from whom I’d been liberated eight years earlier.
I do not wish anyone a painful death or any kind of death at all, so I was badly shaken even though his scream did not last long.
Although the six of us bearing the surname Fairchild (which included Rafael) were no less the victims of Captain Forest Farnam than anyone else, Midwest Jack had arrived at the conviction that we and Captain were seven of a kind, all of us aligned against him.
Shrieking at us, his language even more disgusting than that of the man he had just murdered, he pounded the door with such force that it seemed he possessed Thor’s hammer and would split the wood.
His voice shrill with fierce glee, he promised to kill us all and swore he wouldn’t break his promise as our kind did.
With unrelenting maniacal ferocity, he tore at the doorknob until metal squealed and cracked.
Such strength! The knob on our side fell out of the door.
Key parts of the lock assembly rattled loosely against one another, and the latch bolt retreated from the striker plate in the jamb.
As Jack threw himself harder against the door, we heard the joints of the bracing chair begin to splinter.
Their pistols in a two-hand grip, Loretta and Franklin shouted at us to get behind them.
They needed the door to be thrown open, to see the target.
That was a reasonable response, although Harry had a better one: deal with the threat before it got into the room where, even wounded, it might kill one of us.
Our Harry, amateur historian and military buff, knew the accuracy of his weapon, knew how much punch the cartridges in the magazine would deliver, and was sure they would penetrate the door.
He squeezed off seven rounds in quick order, grouping them in the middle square of three recessed panels.
Every round passed through, but I cannot know how many still had lethal velocity on the far side.
Whatever the number, it seemed to be enough, for Captain’s proxy fell silent, his voice replaced by the fading roar of gunfire that echoed along the hallway and down the stairs into the ground-floor rooms. Harry didn’t assume he’d dealt a fatal blow to the boy who was no mere boy.
He judged that the situation didn’t merit hesitation.
He kicked aside the half-broken chair and pulled the door open and stepped onto the threshold and fired his last three rounds into a crumpled figure on the floor.
I will not sicken you with a description of the scene in that upstairs hallway.
There are only two things you need to know.
First, this family into which I had been welcomed was in many ways as warm and cuddly as the March family in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, but at the core of each of them, there was something harder than bone, stronger than muscle.
They knew loss and failure and hardship, but they did not know defeat.
They ventured into the carnage of the hallway, stepping with care so as not to soil their feet, quickly discussed what must be done: reactivate the telephone system, call the sheriff, recover the laundry bag containing the money, close the door to the hidden room if Captain had left it open, brew a large pot of coffee for the tedious hours ahead, lead curious Rafael away from the cadavers and keep him downstairs.
They hugged me, one by one, and said not a word because they knew how this episode must have affected me and understood that words were unequal to a loving embrace.
Confident that the thick walls of the house and the length of the gardens combined to ensure that neither Chef Lattuada nor Lynette Rollins, in their apartments, had heard the gunfire, the members of the family went their separate ways to attend to the tasks awaiting them.
No one needed a pill to settle the nerves.
The second thing you need to know is what Midwest Jack looked like.
Perhaps you do not want to know what it meant to me when I saw him dead on the hallway floor, but I intend to tell you anyway.
I’ll start with his appearance. He wore a black T-shirt and shorts.
He was tall and lean, with ropy muscles suggesting uncanny strength.
In some way I could not define, he seemed more animal than human; no one who encountered him in low light or a lonely place would think of him as a boy.
His long face was malformed in a way that explained the metaphor that my inadequately clairvoyant unconscious employed to warn me about him in dreams. Exceptionally wide brow.
Sharp face narrowing severely toward the chin.
His mouth, frozen in a death grin, revealed teeth like the beveled edges of chisels.
His somewhat protuberant eyes were set farther apart than they should have been, enhancing the vague but unmistakable impression of a mantis face.
I feared him when he was alive. In death, however, he became a subject of sympathetic pity, at least to me.
He might have been born with the capacity to love, as I had been.
There was no reason to suppose he had been born evil, though the possibility could not be ruled out.
Maybe he had come into this world with the ability to be formed by experience into what a child of God should be.
If so, he’d had the bad luck to be in the care of parents who might have wanted to love him in spite of his appearance but who lacked the compassion to take him into their hearts.
In their defense, life on an undercapitalized farm was without exception a hardscrabble existence of exhausting physical labor and endless worry about destitution.
A sweet-faced baby could bring with him hope for the future, thereby inspiring love.
An infant who looked like Jack required an effort to love and might seem to be an omen of the family’s imminent destruction.
Before I discovered my uncanny talents, my good luck had been a sweet face and a good mind.
My bad luck was everything else about my body.
My bad luck was to have been placed in the care of Captain; my good luck was that I made money for him, so he became a source of books for me.
This person, Midwest Jack, was a financial burden in a home where books were not valued.
My luck had been better than his. It was incumbent upon me to recognize that and be grateful.
“Rest in peace,” I said. I went downstairs to do my part, wondering about luck and divine grace and nature’s role in the way of all things.
The events of that day could have been a media sensation, with the sleazy tabloids and cheesy mainstream press competing viciously to sell the most extreme version of what had transpired.
Before it was all done, the public might have been led to believe that Jack was actually Franklin and Loretta’s freakish child whom they had chained in the attic all these years to prevent him from tarnishing their squeaky-clean reputation and glamorous image.
Once again, the good will with which they had treated others was repaid.