The Bureau, page 22
Kurt gave a grudging nod and managed a thank you when the waitress filled their white ceramic cups from a glass coffeepot. “We’ve got some good specials this morning,” she said. “Ya’ll want to hear them?”
Des quickly said yes before Kurt could send her away. The specials did sound delicious: pumpkin pancakes, sweet potato pie, and persimmon muffins, among others. “Almost everything with a P.” He grinned at her, ignoring Kurt’s scowl.
“We should have made persimmon pastries then. Where’re ya’ll from, honey? That’s no Mississippi accent.” She patted his shoulder in a friendly way.
A Nevada prison likely wasn’t the right answer, even if it involved another P word. “Northern Ireland, ma’am.”
She put a hand to her chest. “Northern Ireland! Oh my, that’s a long way to come for our famous breakfasts. We’re so delighted to have you.”
“I bet it’ll be worth the journey.”
“And how about you, darling?” she asked, turning to Kurt. “Irish too?”
Kurt had been squinting at two people who’d just entered the restaurant, a white couple in their twenties. He turned his attention to the waitress with visible effort. “No ma’am. I’m from California. I’m showing my friend around the country.”
Des was impressed by the fabrication, especially if Kurt had just now thought of it. The waitress seemed captivated, and spent several minutes ignoring the impatient newcomers and dictating a list of everything they should be sure to visit in Mississippi. Des thought the couple near the door might give up and walk away, but they didn’t, and finally the waitress left Kurt and Des’s table and took the couple to seats on the other side of the room.
“I can’t decide between the specials,” Des said, eyeing the menu. “Or maybe I want biscuits and gravy instead. Or country ham and grits. If there’s a country ham, does that mean there’s city ham too?”
Kurt rolled his eyes. “It refers to a method of preparation, not where the pig is from.”
“That’s disappointing. What’s red-eye gravy?”
“It’s made from ham drippings and coffee. You’ve been in the South before. Didn’t you eat anything while you were here?”
“Mostly hamburgers and sandwiches. Larry didn’t fancy what he called regional cuisine.” Larry had always said those words disdainfully, as if food from anywhere but Oregon might poison him.
“And since he didn’t want to eat Southern food, you didn’t get to either?”
Des hoped the hurt didn’t show on his face. “He was the one paying.”
The waitress returned soon afterward, and Des ordered the ham and a persimmon muffin and a slice of sweet potato pie. Kurt shot him a look, obviously aware of Des’s attempt to prove his independence, and then asked for a crabmeat omelet and fruit. The waitress seemed happier with Des’s choices.
Kurt shared the newspaper with Des, who skimmed the articles with mild interest. Whatever was going on in the world didn’t much matter to a man who’d soon be back in a cell. He read the entertainment section, however, wishing he had the chance to see a film one more time. It didn’t seem worth asking Kurt, especially since Roebuck Springs had no cinema.
Their food arrived quickly. Des dug into his—the items were delicious—but Kurt ate with less enthusiasm, sometimes sneaking nervous looks at the newcomers across the room. Des didn’t understand why. The couple looked entirely ordinary, the woman in a gray skirt and purple sweater and the man wearing khakis and a button-up shirt.
“Did those people say or do something?” Des said quietly.
“No.”
Maybe they’d made hostile faces at Kurt the same way the motel clerk had. If so, Des had missed it, but he’d mostly been paying attention to the waitress. “I don’t think everyone here is a racist bastard. The waitress didn’t act like it.”
“And maybe she’s not. Thirty years ago, I could’ve been sent to jail for eating with white folks. I could’ve been beaten or murdered if the locals thought I was too uppity. And when those things happened to black folks around here, maybe that waitress stepped up and tried to stop it. Or maybe she turned away.” Kurt didn’t seem bitter so much as sad and weary.
You’re not the only one who has carried burdens, Desmond Hughes.
After breakfast, Kurt and Des stopped at the grocers and bought enough food to last a couple of days. Kurt said he was tired of eating out and could throw together something edible in the kitchenette. The drizzle had ebbed to a fine mist that sank into the skin of Des’s face and bare arms, reminding him a little of Belfast. Each of them carrying a bag, Kurt and Des returned to the cottages.
After they put the food away, Des expected Kurt to begin searching for the box. Instead he sat on the edge of the bed, picked up the phone, and dialed. Des sat at the table and pretended to read a book, but Kurt likely wasn’t fooled.
“It’s Powell. I need to speak to the chief, please.” Kurt’s sour expression suggested he wasn’t thrilled with the response he got, but he remained on the line, idly trying to untangle a twist in the cord. After a few minutes, he sat up straighter. “Roebuck Springs, sir. . . . No, we just got in last night. I’ll begin after we hang up. This one’s going to take some time—there are a lot of abandoned buildings. . . . He’s fine, sir. No problems.”
Des let out a breath. He hadn’t recognized his worry that Kurt might tell his boss about the previous night, but it must have been at the back of his mind. The fact that Kurt didn’t seem inclined to mention it was interesting. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and he could have ratted Des out without facing any punishment himself.
But Kurt wasn’t finished with the conversation. “Chief, did you send other agents here too? . . . I saw these two people this morning. I don’t recognize them, but— . . . Would East Coast HQ do that without informing you? . . . All right. . . . Yes, sir. Good-bye.”
He hung up and remained on the bed, looking introspective and somewhat troubled.
Des abandoned his attempt to appear uninterested. “Were those people in the diner Bureau agents?”
“Don’t know. Townsend says he doesn’t know of anyone else here, but I guess a different regional chief could have sent them. Or Townsend could be lying.”
“You don’t trust your boss?”
“He’s… I don’t even know the right word. Inscrutable, maybe.”
It was alarming that Kurt, enigmatic himself, couldn’t suss out the fellow. Even more troubling, could Des believe that the Bureau would keep its end of the bargain and allow him more privileges when he returned to prison? Well, it didn’t matter much right now. Either way, Des was enjoying his holiday.
Kurt carefully searched the cottage and the vacant one next door—he was handy at picking locks, apparently—but found nothing. They had sandwiches for lunch, and then Kurt went to the nearest outbuilding: a large house that might once have been the residence of the spa’s owner. The paint had peeled away, the porch sagged, and most of the windows were broken. Des hadn’t accompanied Larry into any of the outbuildings and didn’t even know if Larry had entered them, so he wasn’t going to be any help to Kurt. But tagging along was more entertaining than staying cooped up inside the cottage.
Careful of rotting floorboards and rickety stairs, Kurt used his magic device to search the entire structure, and Des followed with interest. Nothing much remained in the old house other than broken furniture, peeling wallpaper, mouse droppings, and a lot of spiderwebs and dead flies. No wizards’ boxes. Both men were grimy when they emerged to greet the dusk.
“I wouldn’t want to be in there at night,” Des said as they trudged back to the cottage.
“I have flashlights.”
“Not because of the dark. Ghosts. I’m positive that house is haunted.”
Kurt’s laughter was amused but not mean. “Ghosts don’t scare me.”
“You’ve seen them?”
“Of course. Bureau agent, remember? And believe me—people are a lot more dangerous when they’re alive than after they’ve died.”
Des considered that as they took turns washing up and then while Kurt made them salads and pasta for dinner. He prepared the sauce from scratch, and it was very good; apparently Kurt had a flair for cooking. Another unexpected layer to the man.
“I’m having another bath,” Des announced after washing the dishes. He was taking his luxuries while he could.
Kurt didn’t look up from his notebook. “This time put clothes on before you come out.”
“Afraid you won’t be able to resist me?”
That got no response.
The bath was just as lovely the second time around. More so, in fact, because when they’d been at the store, Kurt bought a big cake of soap that was loads nicer than the tiny paper-wrapped one the management had provided. The thick suds filled the room with the scent of orange and cinnamon. “You’ve become a fucking pomander, Desmond.” His voice was too loud in the small room, so he pressed his lips together.
They settled into bed more easily that night, but Des knew from Kurt’s breathing that he remained awake. “Was it the drinking that brought your divorce?” Des asked after a time.
“No. Mostly not, anyway. Maryann might’ve eventually convinced me to get treatment. She was working on it.”
“Then was it a man?”
“I never cheated on her,” Kurt snapped. Then his tone softened. “But eventually I had to be honest with her—and with myself.”
“Why? What made you decide?”
Kurt paused before answering. “AIDS. People were just beginning to talk about it, and I knew a couple of guys who died from it. It… didn’t seem right to lie about who I was when my brothers were dying, I guess.”
“AIDS? What’s that?”
There was a sharp intake of breath. “Jesus. You don’t know, do you?” And Kurt told him about a disease that was spread through sex and shared needles, that had killed actors and artists and athletes and tens of thousands of others. There was no cure for it. The treatments were uncertain. Young, healthy people wasted away, sometimes within months, sometimes abandoned by their families due to the stigma of being gay. It was like a horror story told around a campfire, only it was all true. And even in the darkness, Des could tell how badly it strained Kurt to talk about it.
“It would have killed me,” Des said after Kurt was silent. “If I hadn’t met Larry and then gone to prison, I would have caught this disease. I might already be dead.”
“You don’t know that.”
Oh, but Des did, with absolute certainty. He felt as if his own ghost was haunting him. “I fucked around a lot before Larry. I enjoyed it. Sometimes I did it for money, if I was. I didn’t really care who I did it with, or how. Is there something wrong with that?”
“I don’t think so, no. But… now it can be dangerous. Nobody knew about HIV until it was too late for so many.”
Des wanted to comfort him, but any attempts to console him in bed might be misinterpreted, so he continued to lay on his back, perfectly still. “You don’t have AIDS, do you?”
“You can’t catch it from sharing a bed,” Kurt growled. “Or making out.”
“That’s not what I meant. Are you… healthy?”
Kurt blew out a puff of air. “I don’t have HIV. I fooled around some in Nam, but back then the only risks were good old syphilis and the clap, and there’s drugs for that. Then I married Maryann, and like I said, I didn’t cheat on her. By the time I was ready to get into bed with men again, I knew about safe sex.”
“Do you have a lot of lovers?” Jealousy was beyond stupid under the circumstances, so Des tried to ignore the feeling.
“No. It’s hard to meet anyone if you don’t go to bars and don’t know a lot of other gay guys. The job sort of gets in the way too. I have a friend who comes over sometimes, but he’s not really….” His voiced trailed away and then he snorted. “Are we done dissecting my personal life now?”
Des would have liked to ask a lot more questions, but Kurt’s patience was obviously at its limit. “Larry’s boxes…. If he’d been able to give them to the angels, I wonder if they might have given him a way to cure AIDS.”
Kurt sat up abruptly, which pulled the bedding off of Des. “That’s bullshit.”
“But—”
“The only angel I’ve ever seen is an ex-Bureau agent, and he’s only half. Evidently some angel knocked up his mother and then disappeared, never to be seen again. No other angels have ever lifted a wing to help out with anything, not one fucking time. And I’ve never seen any of them near demons either. I don’t know what angels do with their time, but helping humans or playing war games with demons isn’t it. They wouldn’t have wanted your goddamn boxes, and they certainly wouldn’t have handed over the key to eternal health.”
Stunned, Des didn’t move or speak. That couldn’t be true. The angels and the gifts they could bestow were the whole point, the ends that justified the means. Larry was a doctor, for Christ’s sake! He’d seen people sick and dying, and while he hadn’t chosen the wisest or safest method to advance medicine, he’d wanted to save lives. He said so. A bit of suffering now but far, far less later. Why else would he have created the boxes?
Except… Larry wasn’t always completely honest, was he? Des had heard him twist the truth many times when speaking with others. Larry would say anything that would help him accomplish his goals. He’d lied to Des sometimes too, denying it later or claiming they were only small falsehoods that didn’t matter.
But no. Larry wouldn’t lie about something so fundamental and enormous. Wouldn’t have let the deception stretch for four fucking years.
Wouldn’t have led Des to murder innocent people over it.
“No,” Des whispered. Because if Larry had never intended to give the boxes to the angels, then he would have had some other use for them. He was nothing if not rational; he never did anything without reason. But there wasn’t really anything else he could do with the boxes. He could give them to demons, but he wouldn’t gain anything from that. Or….
Or he could have always intended to keep them for himself.
“He was going to use them to gain power.” Des said it so quietly that even he could barely hear it.
Kurt’s response was not much louder. “Yes.”
Chapter Fourteen
Des was unusually quiet all day and seemingly lost in his thoughts. He followed Kurt around like a puppy, watching as he got filthy searching the old stables, a couple of small storage buildings, and a bathhouse with a caved-in roof.
Although Kurt didn’t say so, he missed Des’s chatter. Kurt had been working mostly alone for years, so he should have been used to silence. He thought he preferred it. But apparently the past days had changed something in him, and now—especially while tediously waving around a bit of plastic in decaying buildings—he wished for conversation. Especially if that conversation came with a bit of an Irish lilt.
By midafternoon Kurt was discouraged and cranky. He should have continued to the next building but couldn’t force himself to keep working. Des at his heels, he returned to the cottage, where both of them washed up. They’d need to do laundry again soon.
Kurt’s mood didn’t improve when they went to the office to pay for another night and discovered the racist clerk slouched behind the desk. Although Kurt had managed to avoid him since the night before, he now stomped over and loomed, Des lurking even larger behind him. “We’ll be staying tonight too. And we need fresh towels.” Daily maid service was apparently not a perk at the Roebuck Springs Motor Lodge, which would have been fine, but Des bathed a lot.
Not so long ago—and even after the law prohibited discrimination—the clerk would have refused Kurt service, knowing that the local police would back him up. A black person who complained was likely to find himself thrown into jail on manufactured charges. But times had changed, and this guy had reason to suspect that he might not get away with being a bigot. He might feel nostalgic for the days when white skin automatically trumped brown, but all Kurt got from him today was some Confederate flag-waving and a sullen face. He felt satisfied knowing that the clerk was too big an idiot to notice that Kurt had been poking around where he wasn’t supposed to be.
Back outside, Kurt glanced up at the sky. It was solid gray, but rain didn’t seem imminent. “I’m going for a walk,” he announced.
“Can I go too?”
“Suit yourself.”
Kurt would have preferred a run but didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Anyway, he found this place oddly enervating. Weren’t spas supposed to be restorative? Maybe they just made people want to sleep.
A few houses stood between the motor lodge and downtown, along with empty lots that suggested Roebuck Springs had once been a more populous settlement. The weather was nicer than during yesterday’s walk to Sisters’ Diner. But even so, the downtown was sleepy, with a flag hanging listlessly in a little park and only a few pedestrians strolling down the sidewalk. Beyond the small business district were more houses, some well cared for and some long abandoned. Kurt found them interesting, very different from the stucco ranch houses of his LA neighborhood, but Des kept his eyes downcast as if watching every step.
A mile or so outside town, a gap in a brick wall led to a cemetery. Curious, Kurt wandered in.
It wasn’t in good shape. Gravestones listed drunkenly where the ground had shifted. Some had fallen down—or had been pushed over—and lay in cracked pieces amid brown leaves turning to dust. Even on the intact stones, the inscriptions were often illegible, the carvings eroded or clogged with lichens. Weeds choked the pathways. Overhead the crooked limbs of enormous oaks stretched outward, Spanish moss hanging from them like jewelry.
One large monument with a bronze plaque turned out to be not a headstone but rather a memorial to the local soldiers who’d died in service to the Confederate Army. Kurt ran a gentle fingertip down the list of names. He wondered if they’d been conscripted or had joined freely, and whether any of them really understood what they were fighting for. Did they sacrifice themselves so that some people, probably richer people, could hold others enslaved? Or did they march forward with dreams of glory and honor? Either way, they must have grown footsore and tired along the journey—sick of terrible food and dirty uniforms and sleeping on the lumpy ground. They missed their homes and families. And when they were dying from bullets or bayonets or dysentery, they were terrified and confused, yearning for the future they’d never see.
