Cast Of Shadows Read online

  He reached over to touch her left knee, but the seat belt and windshield glare had positioned her body so that he couldn’t reach it with his hand, and so he rubbed his knuckles against the blue cotton covering her hip and with his thumb made cuneiform shapes on the top of her thigh that he hoped would translate as affection.

  Martha smiled and closed her eyes, leaning back against the headrest. She set the brochure on her lap and with her own thumb tickled her flat belly and imagined herself as host to a new life for a man now dead. She knew it wasn’t like that exactly, but she believed in people, loved all people, loved even their mistakes, and believed that every person, even saintly ones, wanted and deserved a second chance.

  – 2 -

  From the passenger seat of his twenty-year-old Cutlass Supreme, Mickey Fanning watched the door of the New Tech Fertility Clinic for most of three days. Each morning he arrived at 7 a.m. and claimed the best of spot of all, on the opposite side of the street and just south. This morning he shifted into park, freed himself from the fraying shoulder harness, and scooted across the bench seat. It had occurred to him the night before that he would be less conspicuous if he weren’t behind the wheel.

  At eleven, exactly eleven according to his old watch, which he checked and adjusted whenever time and traffic were given on talk radio, he slid back to the driver’s side and pulled out, circling the block until he could find a less good but still adequate surveillance position. At 3 p.m. he did it again, settling even farther down the street. He left for his motel only after the last doctor locked up, noting the exact times of the physicians’ arrivals and departures in a perfect-bound pocket notebook, the cover of which he had decorated with blue ballpoint crosses and the letters JESUS across the top and JUSTICE down the left margin, with each word sharing the adorned initial j.

  His cleverest friends called him Mickey the Gerund back in the days when he had clever friends. Since he was nineteen or so, Mickey had been suspicious of clever people. Clever people were very nearly intellectuals, and intellectuals were the reason – one reason, anyway – that the world was going to hell soon, starting with the Arab nations, followed shortly thereafter by atheist China, pagan India, and then, probably, the United States, from the coasts inland (although the heartland was rotten with sin, too, a fact to which he was about to testify). Intellectuals, in his experience, didn’t believe in right and wrong. Mickey the Gerund believed in nothing but. Not just the practical right and wrong of deeds as revealed to the apostles by the example of Jesus Christ (although that, too), but right and wrong as it has existed from the beginning (and ever shall be, world without end. Amen). God did not arbitrarily decide what was right and what was wrong; God was right and wrong incarnate. What else did Jesus mean when he said, “No one is good but God alone”? The Lord did not invent righteousness, but instead was made up of it. If Mickey were ever called to account by the laws of man for what he had done and what he was about to do, he would calmly produce his four-hundred-page typed manifesto, in which he explained this and other truths. Few would understand it, but those few would have a chance, just a chance, of passing through the needle-eyed gates of His Kingdom.

  He watched a couple exit through the tinted doors. The man was older than the woman and they were holding hands. She was young and fit and wholesomely pretty. He watched her, was aroused by her. He prayed in a distracted whisper, but the words spilled out in an unexamined, rote chain. Mickey the Gerund did not believe that sex was evil in itself (and procreation was, of course, preferable to the reproductive perversions that took place in jars inside the clinic), but he was certain that his sudden covetous lust for this woman was proof she was trapped in the clutches of a demon. Would it not distort the bigger picture, disrupt the master plan, he could extract some measure of justice through her. He wasn’t going to fall for such wicked temptation, however. The devil would no doubt sacrifice a common siren to maintain control over the hell soldiers still inside the building. Mickey had sworn off many sins on the day he decided to give himself to Jesus, women being one of them, and women had been the hardest of all to give up. In many ways celibacy had been the most rewarding, however. He saw things clearly. So long as a man thinks he might again know woman, his mind will always be fogged with desire, and Mickey was reminded of this by every unclean thought and every painful erection.

  Mickey pointed his first and second fingers at the couple as they paused beside their parked Acura down the street, cocked his thumb hammer, and let it fire, first at her, and then at him.

  – 3 -

  “Here. I got you a present.”

  Anna Kat placed in front of Davis a thin, square package, about as long on a side as one of her slender fingers. Then she reached back and found a chair with her hand and pulled it forward so she could sit opposite him, across his desk.

  “What’s this for?” he asked, pleased. Anna Kat’s visits to his office were often inconvenient but they always cheered him. Surely it was not unusual for a man to be proud of his daughter, to feel bettered by her, but Davis dared to consider his relationship with Anna Kat especially close. In spite of his dedication to work, he had raised the kind of young woman a teenaged Davis Moore would have admired, would have befriended, would have pursued with all his energy and charm. More important, he had raised the kind of young woman who would have seen through teenaged Davis Moore’s unflappable, swaggering bullshit.

  “It was supposed to be for your birthday,” she said. “But then I figured you could use it before then, and anyways, once I get a gift for someone, I pretty much want to give it to them right that second, so I guess you could say this is really a thanks-for-the-impatience-I-inherited-from- you gift.”

  “From me?” Davis pretended to be offended as he lifted the tiny-bowed present and began picking at the wrapping. “Your mother’s the impatient one. Always was.”

  She laughed. It was so easy to make her laugh. When she was small he could get her started, and the giggling recharged her like an alternator, until minutes had gone by and she became incapacitated by a delirious aerobic seizure. That would get Davis started, too. Countless times, Jackie discovered them together in the family room, turned on their backs like turtles inverted on their shells, at the mercy of spasms of laughter.

  The tape unstuck and the paper unfolded to reveal a small, reflective disc in a black plastic case. “What’s this?”

  “Newly uncovered birth and death records: Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nevada. Eighteen hundred through 1833, although not all the states are complete.”

  Davis turned it over. It had no label, or even printing. “Where did you buy this, exactly?”

  “Buy?” AK fingered through a bowl of candy on his desk for something chocolate, no crunch. She pinched a tiny Hershey bar, unwrapped it in a manner that was unconsciously similar to the technique just used by her father to unwrap his gift (picking at the ends, first the left side and then the right). “No buy,” she said with candy in cheek. “Download. Copy. Burn.”

  Davis reproached her with a severe stare.

  “Yeah. So,” she said. “There was a certain amount of hacking involved.” A remorseless confession.

  Davis shook his head.

  “You can possess information, but no one can own information, Dad,” she said. “These are allegedly public records just sitting on a server in Dallas, and they weren’t going to release them for another two years. Even then they were going to charge an astronomical fee for the privilege. That’s fascism.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This isn’t just an early birthday gift, it’s an act of nonviolent protest.”

  “Well, thanks,” he said, and he meant it.

  “Speaking of violence” – in the bowl she found a peanut butter cup she had missed on her last pass – “heard anything from the religious wrong lately?”

  Davis shrugged. “Eh. Letters. Notes. Barely literate stuff. A lot of quoting and misquoting from the New Testament.”

  �
�Anything from the Hog?”

  From the credenza behind him Davis pulled an inch-thick stack of erratically lettered envelopes, bound by a rubber band. The letters inside were all signed “HoG,” and accompanying each signature was a crude drawing of a hand with the index finger extended upward. Davis had once joked to Gregor, one of his partners at the clinic, that the person who sent them must be a University of Arkansas Razorbacks football fan. Go, Hogs! Davis joked. We’re number one!

  “Threats?”

  “Sure. Or warnings, anyway.”

  “You’re so casual about it. I hate that.”

  “Do you want me to look more nervous?”

  “Yeah,” she said and then smiled. “I just think about it a lot. I don’t want anything to happen to my dad.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to me, AK.” He knew this had been on her mind lately. “That… the incident last month with the clinic in Memphis, that was a freak thing. And they caught the guy. Or he’s dead, anyway.”

  “He had an accomplice.”

  That was probably true. Police suspected the bombing had been instigated by the infamous Byron Bonavita, and they might have blown their best chance yet of capturing him. An investigation of the dead conspirator had been little help so far. “Maybe. Maybe not. I won’t lie. There are a lot of insane, angry people and it’s going to happen again sometime. Somewhere. But you want to worry, worry about me when I’m driving up the Tri-State Tollway. I’m much more likely to get myself killed in merging traffic than I am in some explosion here at the office.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. We already had that talk in driver’s ed. A state trooper came and he had gory slides of car wrecks and everything. It was gross.”

  “Besides, if you’re so certain something’s going to happen to the clinic, why are you here today?”

  “Money.” Anna Kat turned her head sideways and dropped her hand, palm-up, on the desk. She wiggled her fingers. “Besides, I’m too young and pretty to die. Stick with me at all times, Dad, and you’ll be perfectly safe.”

  God, Davis thought. How often since the day she was born had he silently expressed the same notion in reverse? If he could only be with her all the time, nothing could happen to her. To them. He pulled his wallet out of the desk and placed two twenty-dollar bills in her hand.

  “Speaking of young and pretty, I saw Dr. Burton in the hall,” she said.

  “Did you say hello?”

  “I did,” she said, then, “Mom hates her.”

  Davis froze his hand above the drawer as he was about to return the wallet there. “What are you talking about?”

  “She says she doesn’t like having someone that pretty around you all day. She says Dr. Burton’s just your type.” Her voice was singsongy in the last few syllables, in imitation of her mother.

  “She said that to you?”

  AK shook her head. “To Aunt Patty. She was kidding. I think. Sort of. Little bit.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “We don’t use that word, Dad. Remember?”

  Davis frowned. Yes, he knew better. Jackie’s family had a history of mental illness and a tradition of suicide going back four generations that they knew about. She could be eccentric at times (a trait that he had found alluring once), and Davis and AK monitored her odd behavior for signs of true irrationality. Occasionally, father or daughter would worry when they caught Jackie talking to herself, or when she began one of her obsessive weeks of top-to-bottom housecleaning, but the other would usually counsel patience. The advice always proved to be sound when Jackie returned to normal.

  And, AK might remind him, Davis had been through a stretch of odd behavior himself: an embarrassingly cliched midlife crisis in which he purchased an impractical performance car and even took seven weeks of skydiving lessons, although he quit before his first solo jump. Davis never cheated on Jackie, never even considered it, but over several late nights at the office he confided his concerns about Jackie’s health to Joan Burton, and that established an intimacy between them that his wife could no doubt sense. He wasn’t sleeping with Joan but they were keeping a different kind of secret.

  “It would help Mom if you were around the house more. Heck, maybe I’d like it, too.” She stretched across his desk and punched him collegially in the arm. “Especially the weekends. Of course, I’m going to be working Saturdays soon, but you could still hang with Mom. Work with her in the garden.”

  Davis’s hours at work had long been a point of contention with the Moore women. In one of her less subtle moments, Anna Kat had framed for him a New Yorker cartoon that labeled one of the caricatures a “Stay at Work Dad.”

  Typically, Davis didn’t commit. “You looking forward to your job?”

  “It’s just the Gap,” she said. “I spend half my time there, anyway. And now that Tina works there it’ll be like regular Saturdays, only with an employee discount.”

  Davis laughed.

  “Let’s do something,” Anna Kat proposed. “The three of us. This Saturday. Before I start. How about we go into the city? Eat at Berghoff’s. Maybe do the architecture tour.”

  He had appointments on Saturday. Three of them. In his periphery, he could see them on his computer screen, highlighted in blue. Many of his patients couldn’t take time off during the week to see him. He’d explained it to Anna Kat a hundred times.

  “All right,” he said. “That sounds like fun.”

  “I’ll make the reservations.” AK jumped to the flat treads of her tennis shoes and walked around his desk and drew his cheek next to hers. When she pulled away Davis could see red scratches on her cheek, already fading, transferred from his half-day stubble. He was lucky to have a teenaged daughter who wanted to spend any time with him at all. “I’m gonna hit the Beast for an hour before Old Orchard. Then I’ll be at Libby’s. Don’t wait up.”

  AK walked down the hall and Davis could hear her call good-bye to Ellen, the receptionist. He turned toward the window and a half minute later he saw her bike accelerate into frame as it turned from the sidewalk onto the street. Her hair had grown about six inches below her helmet and it flared above her shoulders as the air drafted past.

  “I love you,” he said quietly, which he often did in those days, just to hear the words said.

  – 4 -

  In the parking lot outside a football stadium some years ago, Mickey the Gerund saw a friend (this one a like-minded friend, a friend to the cause) pull down the backseat to give him access to a cooler of soda pop in the trunk. Mickey’s Cutlass didn’t have such a feature, but he immediately saw its usefulness, and constructed one of his own. With a hacksaw, he cut a piece from the middle of the backseat about the size of a box you’d buy boots in, and he cut a slightly smaller piece from the metal frame behind it. When reassembled, it looked like an armrest recessed into the back of the seat, although if somebody sat against it, the odd piece would probably come loose. Fortunately, no one ever sat back there anymore.

  His sons used to sit there in the days when he so arrogantly put himself and his family before God. We are all born sinners, he realized now. Specifically, we are born with the animal instincts to survive, to seek pleasure, and to reproduce. If you are a God-fearing, God-loving man, you are obligated to act on the last of these urges and to sublimate the first two. This is a paradox of sorts: God wants us to live and to procreate in order to spread His gospel on earth. But ultimately, life here in this bodily dimension means very little to the Lord or to His truest followers. Death here means nothing. What did John Lennon say about dying? “It’s like getting out of one car and into another.” Something like that. John Lennon was an agnostic or a Buddhist or a Hare Krishna or some crazy damn thing, but that part he got right. Too bad he didn’t know Jesus so he could find out just how right he was.

  Mickey’s guns had never bothered his wife, Bev. Her father had been a hunter and she grew up in a house full of rifles and bows. Oddly enough, she became alarmed only when Mickey wanted to learn how to use them right.
He joined a gun club and went there for target practice three days a week. When Jim, their oldest, turned ten, Mickey started to bring him along. Before he’d let Jim shoot, he taught the boy how to carry a gun and how to store it safely. How to check to see if it’s loaded, and how to clean it. He taught Jimmy respect for guns. Bev didn’t see it that way.

  “I don’t like having all these weapons around,” she said. “I don’t like you getting Jimmy all excited about them. He buys the magazines now. And the catalogs. I want him to have other interests. I want him to play sports and have hobbies he can share with his friends at school, not just his daddy.”

  “It’s just target practice,” Mickey told her. “It’s a sport he can enjoy all his life. Like golf.”

  At the recommendation of a friend at the beer distributor where he worked, Mickey started meeting Tuesday nights with a special group. He called it Bible study, and Bev assumed it was a male-bonding thing somehow related to Promise Keepers and didn’t ask too much about it. It didn’t have anything to do with Promise Keepers.

  They numbered thirteen and called themselves “The Hands of God.” They usually met in the kitchen of Phillip Hemley, who worked a white-collar job in Morgantown somewhere. Insurance. They talked about how modern-day religious institutions obscured the true word of God under a fog of politically correct bullshit. They talked about what God really said in the Bible, and what He preached in the non-canonical texts that the Catholics originally (and the Protestants since) have hidden from the flock. They talked about the words of God that the selfish and the weak didn’t want to hear.

  Until one day when Mickey the Gerund suggested they stop complaining and do something about it.

  A few weeks later, Mickey the Gerund came home to Bev and their sons and announced that he had quit his job. He sold their house, too (and put a down payment on a smaller place in another town), and had withdrawn about a third of their savings. I’ll be gone for a while, he told them. He’d return if he could, but then he’d be gone again soon after. Bev would have to support the boys on the few thousand he left them and on the money she made cutting hair.