Chimera, page 22
“I have that Tron shirt all ready for you. It’s clean right now but after a month of constant use? Whew,” Joshua said. I hadn’t heard him walking up from behind me but now heard a clanking noise coming from inside the cardboard box he was holding as he plopped it down on top of the table.
“Don’t get too cocky, I still think your clown hypothesis is wrong.”
Even while I said it I was beginning to think I was going to lose the bet. I was starting to suspect one of the dwarves was the killer. Specifically, the one Lulu was sleeping with. He was an unpleasant man, but for a reason. He’d been trained as a doctor, but because of people’s prejudices, thinking that just because he was small, he couldn’t possibly have a brilliant mind, he’d been forced to join the circus to make a living. Instead of treating patients, he was made to wear ridiculous colorful costumes, pointy shoes with bells on them, poofballs in place of buttons, a long thin rubber nose, instead of a lab coat. He was bitter, and rightfully so. He especially hated when kids would stand next to him and compare their heights. “Look ma, pa, I’m taller than this man.” They’d laugh at him, all those snotty kids, when he tried to climb a regular sized chair. They’d throw peanuts at him as if he were a trained monkey. They’d even pat him on his head, as if he were the child. It made sense that he would be the killer. Not the clowns. He was smart and cunning. The clowns were all a little slow. One of them, the speak no evil one, seemed particularly inept, and not up to the job of luring children into a tent. Most of the time he ended up without any paint around his mouth because he would absentmindedly lick his lips while daydreaming about beaches for some reason.
Joshua remained standing as he rooted around the box, pulling things out of it.
I’d never seen what he was placing on the table in person, but I knew what all of it was from watching TV. Hand grenades, claymore mines, brightly colored det cord, what looked like white bars of soap but I knew to be C4.
“Oh my god, what are you doing?” I said, as I jumped up and away from the table.
“No, don’t worry, they won’t go off. I wouldn’t do something that stupid Em.”
So he says. I kept my distance, looking at the objects as if they were a pile of slithering snakes, dangerous.
“What are you doing with that stuff? Are you crazy?”
Some of it, like the det cord and C4 were modern, but some of it, the claymore mines, the hand grenades, I knew were old, leftovers from WWII and Vietnam. Don’t those things become unstable after a while? And if one of them went off, the whole damned thing would go off, one after the other, a domino effect.
“Can you believe it? Some guy sold me the whole box for a hundred bucks.”
“I didn’t ask if you got a bargain, that stuff is really dangerous.”
“Eh, it’s only dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Samuel, Catherine, and Abby were now walking towards us, curious as to what had made me jump.
“Check it out guys, fireworks!” Joshua said, carelessly holding a mine in one hand, a grenade in the other.
Samuel scanned the tabletop, frowned, and put his arm in front of me, nudging me back even further away from the table.
Abby, who rarely missed a thing, noticed, and picked up one of the old olive-colored pinecone hand grenades, took a step towards us, and pulled the pin.
I instinctively took another step back as if that small amount of space would keep the grenade from ripping me to shreds.
“Abby, that isn’t funny.” Catherine, instead of stepping back, stepped toward Abby, staring at her.
“Oh lighten up. I didn’t let go of the lever,” Abby said, and raised the grenade to eye level. I could see that it didn’t have a safety clip. The only thing keeping if from going off was the pressure she still had on the lever.
“Put it back.”
Abby rolled her eyes, replaced the pin, and mumbled, “So fucking sensitive,” and tossed the grenade, carelessly, back into the box.
Catherine continued to glare at her, and Samuel finally lowered his arm, which he had kept in front of me. As if it could shield me from the blast.
“Hey, don’t worry Em, Abby is an expert in these things,” Joshua said, a little nervously.
An expert in explosives. Wonderful. It figures. The one person here who would love to see me blown to pieces was an expert in how to accomplish it.
“What do you think Abs? String four or five of these grenades together with det cord, wrap it all up in C-4 like a big ball of dough and KABOOM!” Joshua said, looking at the grenades.
“Hm. Might work. You have any detonators? Blasting caps?”
Joshua scrounged around in the box and I could hear the clunking of more grenades, more mines.
“Got em!”
“That’s not happening Joshua and you know it. Shooting off guns is one thing, an explosion that big? We’d have the NSA surrounding us in minutes.” Catherine, who’d finally taken her eyes off of Abby, started putting the objects back into the box.
That’s what she’s worried about? The NSA? Not that doing that would blow this entire junkyard to bits? That we’d all end up, if not dead, armless and legless?
“Not even one?” Joshua asked.
“Not even one.”
“I spent a hundred dollars!” Joshua said.
Abby, still intent on scaring the hell out of me, picked up a small brick of the C-4, looked my way, then slammed it down hard onto the tabletop. I winced even though I knew C-4 to be very stable. I knew it wouldn’t explode, but still, what the hell is wrong with her? It’s one thing to ignore me, to act as if I’m an unwelcomed nuisance. It’s another thing altogether to threaten to blow me up.
“Come on, Joshua, let’s crack open one of these grenades, maybe we can rig a smaller explosion, one that Catherine will approve of.” Catherine’s name she said sarcastically. As if it were she who was being the unreasonable, unstable one.
Joshua looked at me apologetically, but I didn’t blame him. He wasn’t the psychopath.
“Maybe we should just forget about it,” he said, as he walked away with the box, following behind Abby as they headed back to his trailer.
So much for neutrality.
“When does this all end?”
Catherine and I were once again sitting outside my RV. She on her cot, me on the steps. Everyone else had gone to bed. Samuel, I could see, was sitting atop the trailer, reading a book. One of the book lights Joshua had bought for me bobbing up and down as he turned pages.
“End?”
“The chase. Are these people, the people you told me about, are they any closer to accomplishing what they’re trying to accomplish? Or am I going to have to be on the run my whole life?”
“I wish I could tell you no. But the truth is I don’t know,” she said. “It may be impossible, this thing they’re trying to achieve, in which case, yes, you could be here for a long time.”
I picked up a pebble from the ground and threw it over toward the picnic table.
“Do you hate it that much? Being here?” she asked.
The truth was I didn’t hate it here. Despite my best efforts, I’d let myself get comfortable. And I had come to think of all of them as friends. Good friends. Except, of course, for Abby. If it wasn’t for her, I would be content staying here forever if that’s what it took. True, it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. RVs, no television, gas powered electricity, but I didn’t think it was a high price to pay for the companionship. I liked having someone to say good morning to. I liked not having to eat alone. Not going for long stretches of time without talking to someone my own age. I hadn’t realized it at the time, or maybe I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. Admit that I had been lonely. That although it was a nice, predictable, non-flesh-wound-from-a-gunshot life, it was also empty. I knew that if I could somehow go back, if everything were erased and life would carry on as if I’d driven down Stinson Road without a hitch, I would feel it. The quiet solitary dinners with only the television for company, the mornings, putting on my running shoes without laughter in the background, without the clanking of generators being fixed, without Kam’s stories, and even Samuel’s rhapsodizing about axles and drive shafts.
But with this new wrinkle, this Abby business, it turning into hostility, I probably had more to worry about inside these walls than out.
“No, I don’t hate being here,” I said, and smiled to let her know this place wasn’t the reason I was feeling a little depressed. “It’s just…Abby, that thing with the grenade. I know she doesn’t like me, but that was a little extreme don’t you think?”
“It was,” she admitted. “But she was only messing around. She wouldn’t actually have—“
“Messing around? People mess around with paper snakes in a can or a hand buzzer. Not explosives.”
“Hand buzzer? Really? They still make those things?”
She was joking. I shook my head, looked down at the ground. Maybe I wasn’t as scrutinizing as I should be. Maybe I’d let my guard down too much, too easily. That she could joke about high explosives was troubling.
“I didn’t…I’ll have a talk with her,” she said, seeing that I was agitated at her nonchalance.
“No don’t,” I said quickly. I didn’t want any more trouble. I didn’t want Abby to think I was pitting her friends against her on top of everything else. “I don’t want to cause any problems. But, well, maybe you can talk to Joshua? Make sure he gets rid of those things?”
“That’s probably a better idea,” she said.
I sat, after that, quietly, thinking, doodling in the dirt with a stick. I didn’t realize it, but I guess I looked unhappy, thinking about Abby.
“You do hate it here,” Catherine said.
“No, no, it’s just…I still don’t know anything. I’m still in the dark about so much and now this, this thing with Abby. It just makes me feel like I don’t have control of anything. I feel powerless.”
“Powerless?”
“Well yeah. I know nothing. I can do nothing.”
She was absentmindedly rubbing her knee. I knew, from a story she’d told me, that she had a scar on it though I hadn’t seen it. She’d fallen from a tree when she was a child, just like me, but had gashed it on a rock, not a nail. “I know what that feels like. Powerlessness.”
“You? Powerless? I can’t see that.”
“Well, it’s true,” she said. “Emile, this promise I made. It means a lot to me to keep it.”
“Yes, I know.”
“But I also think it’s not right. To keep it from you. Not now. Not anymore.”
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders by way of a reply. I didn’t know what it was she was trying to tell me.
“So…if it means that much to you, if it’ll make things a little easier…”
“You’re going to tell me what it is these people are searching for? Why I’m here?” I asked, sitting up.
“I will. If you want to know.”
I had stopped asking questions weeks ago. The longer I was here, the more I let it go. Nothing had happened, not a single person had come looking for me, not even the police. Here, behind these walls, in this little peaceful place away from everything and everybody, with not even a television to let me know the world was still out there, it was hard to keep up that level of concern, of alertness. By now it was more curiosity than anything. It’s not that I’m that much of a frivolous person. That flighty. I still thought of Mr. Anderson every single day. I still cried for him on some nights, especially when Abby kept her window open and the wind carried that scent of coconuts into my RV. I knew the price he had paid for the secret Catherine was about to tell me. Yet as I looked at her now, as she rubbed her knee, I didn’t want her to tell me. Like Mr. Anderson and Barbara’s ring, it was something she did, usually when she spoke about her mother. Probably remembering the care with which her mother had bandaged it, her knee, when she had gotten the gash. How she said her mother had hugged her, soothed her, sang to her to get her to stop crying. I don’t even think she’s aware that she does it but I’d seen her do it several times when we exchanged childhood stories, which, for the both of us, always included our moms. So either it had something to do with her mother, this secret, which didn’t seem likely, her mother had been dead now for years, or it was just something she did, rubbed her knee, when she spoke about something emotional.
“I don’t want to know. I mean, I do, of course I do, but I don’t want you to break your promise.” Her loyalty was one of the things I most admired about her. I didn’t want my curiosity, which was all it was by this point, to be the reason why she did something that went against her nature. I had no way of contributing much to her, to the others, for sheltering me, keeping me safe, but I could at least do that. Let her keep her word.
And, as it turned out, I wouldn’t have to wait long to find out who they really were anyway. Less than three days and I would have all my questions answered. All their secrets, all that they were hiding, would be revealed. Less than seventy-two hours and my life would never be the same again.
chapter twenty-one
jealousy
Three raccoons were dunking their eggrolls in the pie tin full of water, stretching their arms, keeping an eye on Mustard. They came around almost nightly now, enjoying the free food. I wonder what they did with all their free time, now that they didn’t have to scavenge. Joshua treated them like guests, even marking take-out containers with “Buster, Bonnie, Clyde” on them. That’s what he’d named them, though he admitted he didn’t know if they were male or female. Even Mustard now only half paid attention to them but they were still wary of him.
I finished my own eggroll and fried rice, took my empty container, along with Kam and Catherine’s and threw them in the trashcan. Abby, who was on the other side of the fire, watched me, but only for a second, then went back to fiddling with a case she’d brought with her from her RV. I don’t know if Catherine said anything to her about what had happened the previous day, but she was back to ignoring me. And after seeing that grenade in her hand, this act, this pretending I didn’t exist, suited me just fine.
“Do you know who Vasili Arkhipov was?” Kam was asking me.
I did know who he was but I said that I didn’t. Kam had been gone for four days, only returning late this afternoon, and I missed his stories. So I listened to him tell me how during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he, Vasili, had prevented an almost certain nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia. How he’d refused to launch a nuclear torpedo when American Navy destroyers surrounded the Soviet submarine he was second in command of. The destroyers dropped several practice depth charges into the water, only trying to get the submarine to surface for identification, a practice the Soviets weren’t familiar with. For all they knew, war had already broken out and they were under attack, surrounded, about to be blown to pieces. The two other officers authorized to launch were ready to fight back. Arkhipov, alone, refused.
“Wars and revolutions certainly do their part in changing the course of human history,” Kam said, “but sometimes, sometimes it only takes one person. Just one person to affect the lives of millions.”
Kam’s stories always came with a little something extra. A moral. A life lesson. A philosophical question. I was about to ask him if he’d ever considered becoming a teacher. I could easily imagine him inspiring bored thirteen-year-olds in boxy classrooms having to read outdated history books but Abby had just pulled something out of the case she had on her lap and it caught my attention.
It was a violin.
I had learned how to play the violin when I was ten years old but had never gotten very good at it. I used to look up different makes and models on the internet though, thinking that if I just had a better instrument, surely I could play better. Mine had been a scuffed up used one my mother had bought on an online auction for two hundred dollars. Not top of the line by any means. So I knew that the one Abby had in her hands was not cheap but I couldn’t see it well enough to know just how not cheap it was.
Kam noticed me admiring it and asked Abby if he could take a look at it. He brought it over, plucked the strings for show, and then handed it to me. Abby was busy rosining her bow so I took the violin, which was gorgeous, and immediately checked for the label. I think I actually made an “eek” sound and quickly handed it back to Kam, who once again plucked the strings, a little too roughly, and I winced. I knew it was worth more than everything in this entire junkyard put together, including Joshua’s car. If you were to sell everything here, RV’s, cars, antique advertising signs, generators, everything, plus tack on two or three family houses, you’d still have less than what that violin cost. It was a Stradivarius, easily worth over a million dollars. How in the hell did she get a hold of a freaking Stradivarius?
Abby had finished with her bow and Kam actually tossed (TOSSED!) the violin to her over the fire. It was like watching someone toss a baby from one high-rise building to another out of a thirty-four story window. My hands instinctively went to my mouth, steepled, as if I were praying. Praying the museum quality instrument wouldn’t fall into the fire and go up in flames. It didn’t. Abby caught it easily and didn’t seem at all concerned that the nearly 250 year old violin had come this close to becoming a pile of ash.
Joshua had once again brought out his beat-up old eighties era boom box, placed it on his lap, and started to search through stations. He landed on a blues song I wasn’t familiar with but liked. Abby only had to listen to a few bars before jumping right in and playing beautifully along with the horns, the piano, the guitar.
I sat back on the cab seat and listened as Abby played along to it, then, when it was over, Joshua flipped some more, and found two more songs. “Je M’amuse” by Caravan Palace and “Be Mine” by Alabama Shakes. Both beautiful songs, both completely different from one another, and Abby had no trouble switching from style to style. Listening to her play, I wished circumstances could be different and we could be friends. Someone who can play violin like that can’t be all that bad.
