Synopsis
Book by Straley John
Extrait
Priscilla had the dental probe pointing directly at my eye. Toddy took one step forward from the corner. He was wringing the long tail of his shirt in both hands. Todd is my roommate and he's about my age in years. There is some debate as to what his mental age is. He put his hand on Priscilla's elbow and whispered to her, "I'll make us something that is exceptionally good. Would you like a cup of hot chocolate with some marshmallows? I could get that for you quickly. Then perhaps we could have some venison soup. Would you like venison soup?"
Priscilla relaxed slightly. Her features softened and the atmosphere seemed to brighten somewhat like the moon coming from behind a cloud on a stormy autumn night. She dropped the probe back on the table. I had tried to pick my own lock with it several weeks back and it had broken off in the key set so now our door stays unlocked all the time. That was fine because the key was lost anyway.
She said, "You don't know what it's like, Cecil. You just don't know what it's like."
That was true. I stood next to Priscilla and gave her a one-armed hug that touched her back and waist lightly. She didn't appear to have anything else tucked in her belt.
"Tell me what it's like," I said.
"It's all his fault. Him and his family. They never wanted me. They never wanted me in that crowd. They think because they've got so many connections they can do anything they want. They're gangsters. I hear now they want to make a deal. That means I'm beating them. I don't care what anyone else says. I'm not dealing with gangsters."
Here the shadow was starting to darken. I released Priscilla and walked closer to Todd out in the kitchen. He was pouring milk into a saucepan.
"Cilia, let's have some cocoa," I said. "We can't think of everything on an empty stomach."
She walked toward me and then right past. She stood in the window that overlooks the channel. My house is built out on pilings and the tide was high so you could hear the water lapping on the boat ramp underneath. She stood by the window and I saw her image reflected on the scene of the harbor: gulls swirling around the fish plant's outfall pipe, a seine skiff with a woman standing in its bow ready to jump to the dock of the marine supply store, the water rippling across the entire pane, highlighting the dark shadows that hung from Priscilla's eyes.
"What kind of deal do they want to make?" I asked her.
"Oh, I don't care. I'm not even going to find out about it. I'm not making any deal." Her fists were clenched. She spoke to the window. "It's just not right. It's just not right that he should have him and not me. My sister says I should compromise. She says I should be reasonable. Reasonable. They can be reasonable."
Priscilla never talked about love. She never used Young Bob's name, in front of me anyway. Priscilla always talked about justice. She was certain of the truth. She wanted rectitude and balance, but I never quite understood why. Or whether, if she got everything she wanted, she would have to invent a whole new personality just to keep her hatred moving.
Todd handed her a cup of chocolate that had marshmallows floating on top. Priscilla was offended by Toddy. Toddy didn't seem to fight against any label. Social workers had given up on the categories. He wasn't retarded, he wasn't classically autistic, and although he had an active and stilted vocabulary, he didn't really fit as an idiot savant. His file had his name on it. He was his own category. I think this is the real reason that Priscilla was uncomfortable with Toddy. He didn't fit into her multilayered conspiracy theories.
She also didn't like Toddy because he was on a vigilant search for the nature of Heaven. This seemed to Priscilla to be not only a waste of time but an irritating and threatening distraction. Todd's mother had died of hypothermia when Todd was a little boy but this didn't keep her from visiting him. She would appear in her old clothes if Todd hung them in a particular way above her shoes. On these visits his mother would tell Todd all about Heaven. Eventually she told him she was worried that he was becoming too concerned with Heaven and that she wanted him to live his life in order. On her last visit, Todd's mother told him always to tell the truth and not to worry. Then she was gone. Her clothes were empty for good, and Todd had no memory of any of the details of Heaven.
Todd took his dead mother's advice about telling the truth very seriously, but he had a struggle because nearly everyone he told his story to didn't believe him. They tried to talk him out of his beliefs. Sometimes he became agitated, but never violent. Todd had been in state custody for several months when I finally managed to become his guardian. Now his two passions were dogs and trying to read every volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He felt certain these were the keys to his remembering Heaven.
But any talk of death seemed to anger Priscilla. She grabbed the hot chocolate and put her back to Todd, speaking to me rapidly.
"Cecil, I want you to bug Judge Gaffney's telephone.
"I'm not going to do that."
"Do you work for me or not?"
"I'm not going to bug the judge's telephone, Priscilla."
"The evidence is there, Cecil. Someone got to the judge. I know it was the Senator. I know it was. All we need is proof."
The shape of Priscilla's conspiracy theory was elegantly abstract. Almost like the recent theories of cosmology. The universe was bowl-shaped and the black holes were not eternal but emitted energy. For Priscilla, the courts, the Legislature, and the Department of Social Services were like black holes. She could never get information out of them and anything that went in funneled down to a secret that was abstract and infinitely dense.
State Senator Wilfred Taylor was such a black hole for her. Priscilla had peppered his office with Freedom of Information Act requests for his journals and his personal phone records. The fact that the records never were produced was proof positive to her they were critically important. I had spoken to Senator Taylor several times. He had been patient at first but later flatly refused to accommodate any request from Priscilla or me. Old Bob Sullivan, Priscilla's former father-in-law, was a friend of Senator Taylor's. Priscilla was convinced that the Senator had used his influence to corrupt Judge Gaffney, who had ruled in Young Bob's custody case. Wilfred Taylor was a state senator from Anchorage, a charming man who was routinely reelected largely on his strengths with big oil and the interior Native corporations. He was also a politically active Christian, who knew that free enterprise was the first of the "family values." I had stood in the hall of the state capitol and shaken his hand. He'd said, smiling, "There is nothing here. Tell Mrs. Sullivan or Miss DeAngelo, if that's who she is, that if this keeps up she will be making more trouble than any of this is worth." He shook my hand with a firm but fleshy grip. Then the elevator bell rang and the Senator moved into the crowd of suits reaching for his elbow.
Priscilla leaned against the top edge of my woodstove. She sipped her hot chocolate and looked thoughtfully down into its sweet steam. Her face changed once again from pleading to stony resolve. She set the cup down on the stove.
"Then I'll take care of this myself."
"Priscilla, you can't bug someone's office. If you end up in jail do you think you'll ever get Young Bob back?"
"Thank you for your concern, Cecil. But you and I are no longer associated in this matter." She was about four and a half feet tall but now she pulled herself up to every inch of it. "I will take care of this situation without your help, Cecil. I'll tell them what they can do with their deal. There's a plane to Juneau tonight. I will be on it."
She turned and walked down the stairs to the street-level boot room. Todd was standing with a cup of soup that he had held out in her wake.
The shadows lengthened on the bookshelves. It would be dark by five o'clock. But the sky was clear, so as the darkness came on the air above the channel seemed suffused with burgundy for a moment. It may have been officially spring, but I was still snoozing through winter. Todd put the pot of soup back on the stove and I lay on the couch. A Charlie Parker tape was playing and I had a book of poetry by Pattiann Rogers. I read a poem, then looked up to the shadows shifting down the walls, listening to the saxophone and the water on the rocks under my house. Toddy was using an awl and some dental floss to stitch reflective tape on a leather collar for his new puppy. The dog had simply appeared under our house one night. He had chewed up my plastic gas tank for the skiff and was retching some foul yellow substance onto the deck when Toddy found him. He appeared to be a very young Staffordshire terrier, maybe boxer mix. Todd had retrieved him and brought him into the house. They both looked at me with the same expression and all of my resolve to live without canine company drifted away. Todd named him Wendell. As I drifted off to sleep on the couch the puppy knocked my bowl of soup over and started wildly licking the floor. I heard him start to chew on the spoon and I began to dream of flying across the Pacific in a hot-air balloon with Myrna Loy as she had looked in the Thin Man movies.
My lawyer showed up unannounced, just as I was swaying gently over a tropical waterfall with one hand on the wicker balloon basket and the other around a silver cocktail shaker. Dickie Stein stood over my couch and woke me up to my chilled living room where the fire had burned down.
Dickie Stein was a vision in his own right. His hair never lay flat and he always seemed to have his eyebrows arched in some comical expression. I know for a fact he didn't use drugs but he appeared always to be stoned. He was wearing a maroon Harvard sweatshirt, baggy shorts, and rubber boots that were rolled down midcalf. He had a sheaf of papers in his hand.
"How ya feeling, chief?" Dickie stared at me as if from a great distance. As the dream rose out of my mind he came more closely into focus. He had set a pan on the stove and Toddy was poking its contents with a wooden spoon. Then Toddy bent down and put some more wood in the firebox.
"I brought you some teriyaki moose. A client from Yakutat paid me off with what was in his freezer. It may have been a little old but I soaked it in sauce long enough that even an old boot would taste good."
"Thanks, counselor. Take a seat and we'll put on some rice."
"Yeah, well, that sounds pretty good but really I'm on the clock. I was looking for Priscilla."
"Gone. Maybe hours ago. I don't know. Catch her at the airport tonight. She's headed to Juneau to confront the Great Satan."
There was the low rumble of a jet aircraft rising above the water and the blues riffs. Dickie looked at his diving watch.
"Hell, man, you need a clock around here. It's late. That's the evening flight now. Why don't you have a clock in here anyway?"
"I'll put the rice on and we'll eat it when it's done. Don't need a clock." I reached for the mason jar full of rice above the cook stove. Toddy ran some water into a saucepan. Dickie flopped into a chair and thumped his boots up on the table.
"Christ, I wish I had got ahold of her. I just got this stuff and I think it will make her happy. Maybe it will even get her off my back for a little while."
I started the fire under the front burner. "That would make all of us happy. Whatta you got, her copy of the Zapruder film?"
"Wrong conspiracy, Younger. It's better...at least I think. Her ex, you know him, I believe--Robert Sullivan." Dickie looked up at me with a puzzled and condescending smile as if I were a sick bird in his hands. I rubbed my head where Mr. Sullivan had rattled my neurological cage with his wine bottle several months earlier.
Dickie picked his teeth with the corner of one of the legal papers "Well, I've heard from his people finally. Maybe your encounter will do some good. His lawyers down in Seattle said that Sullivan is interested in talking about extended visitation with the kid, with the possibility of unspecified relaxed custody arrangements in the future. They will meet with Priscilla soon, if she will just calm down and try to be reasonable."
"Yeah, that could happen."
"Come on, help me with this. This is way more than she could ever hope for. We might be able to arrange supervised visitation at first, then get her into something more acceptable."
"Like her husband's head on a stick. I think that is her compromise position."
Dickie picked up the papers again and absentmindedly flipped through them. "The family suggested I contact her sister. Jane Marie. You used to know her, didn't you? She's some kind of scientist or something?"
"The last I heard she was a biologist. She has an old seine boat and does marine biology. She runs her own little mail-order business to fund her research," I told him, and flopped back on the couch.
"Christ," Dickie muttered, scratching his greasy hair with the end of a ballpoint pen. "Another eccentric. What is this, are there more eccentrics these days or just fewer normal people?"
"There never have been normal people. It's a myth," I said as I reached under the sofa cushions looking for an antidepressant I might have dropped while I was opening the bottle. "Listen, Dickie, there are just crazy people and statisticians. Of course, there is some overlap." I pulled up a greasy, lint-covered quarter. "But I haven't seen Jane Marie for years. I don't know where she fits in." I put the quarter in my pocket.
Of course I wasn't trying to ignore Jane Marie DeAngelo. Whenever her name came up I made a point of listening carefully. Jane Marie was working on humpback whales. She was documenting their feeding behavior and keeping track of their population numbers in the waters of southeastern Alaska. She wasn't working for any agency or university so she was funding her own work by writing a newsletter and selling games by mail. Recently she had been in the news. She wanted to establish a field camp at an old mining site and there had been some public controversy about her cleaning up the mining materials. Two weeks ago I had seen her picture in the paper. I had touched the photograph with my index finger, letting it rest there for a moment. She was still very beautiful, particularly for a crazy statistician.
Dickie had stopped flipping through the papers and was reading one. "This is weird. What do ya think? Robert Sullivan says we should deal with Harrison Teller as local counsel."
"Teller? He's out of Fairbanks." I poured the rice into a pan and Toddy moved to the refrigerator to root around for some vegetables. Wendell began chewing on the toe of Dickie's boot. Dickie grinned down at him, gently nudged him away once and then gave him my book of poetry to chew. I walked across and took it out of his jaws immediately. Wendell looked up at me with the cocked head and vacant eyes of a true poetry lover I wiped the slobber off the cover and put the book back on the shelf.
"Christ, Dickie. Those nitwits in Seattle cou
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