Jack Guravitch searched for a bell but couldn’t find one. He knocked on the door and waited: there was no reply. He knocked again, louder this time, and tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open and walked into the house. Voices came from the direction of the living room and he moved towards them.
A man called Lou was telling a woman called Mary that he appreciated the efforts she’d made to find him a date for that evening’s awards dinner – he really did! But why, he asked, had she fixed him up with a woman who was eighty-three years old? Jack smiled when he realised the voices were coming from the television and that he was listening to a re-run of the Mary Tyler Moore Show. It was like meeting up with old friends again.
Doc was asleep in an armchair snoring gently, a small rivulet of drool trickling from the left corner of his mouth. Jack decided to let him sleep, catch up on some of the rest he’d missed out on over the years. He walked quietly to the kitchen and took a beer from the fridge and a packet of Doritos from one of the cupboards. He prised the cap off with his teeth and returned to the living room just in time for the start of another episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show: Ted was having an argument with Georgette, his long-time girlfriend. Jack sat down on the couch and rested his feet on the coffee table.
‘Tell me, Jack, do you know of anyone who makes more noise eating a tortilla chip than you do?’
Part of a Doritos went down Jack’s throat the wrong way and he started to cough violently. He reached for the beer and took a deep gulp. ‘Jesus, Doc!’ he spluttered, ‘You almost killed me.’
Doc smiled at his godson. ‘A few moments ago, I was riding a unicycle through the centre of Paris on pavements smooth as silk, and all of a sudden I hit gravel and start to fall. I wake up and see you sprawled on my couch crunching your way through a packet of Doritos. Do you suppose by any chance the two events are related?’
‘The amount of drool leaking from your mouth, old man, you might just as easily have woken up thinking your bike had gone into the Seine. Now stand up and let me hug you,’ Jack said. ‘And another thing: why don’t you have a bell on your door?’
Although Doc would have preferred to have simply shaken hands with Jack, he allowed himself to be hugged. It seemed to be the way of the world these days.
‘I don’t have a bell because bells remind me of churches, and churches remind me of death. I’m sure I’ve explained this to you before. Anyway, everyone’s got a pair of knuckles, and it’s not as if I’m deaf.’
‘Hell, Doc, you were fast asleep with the television on and your door unlocked. Anyone could have walked in and burglarised the place, strangled you to death if they’d wanted to. You’re lucky it was just me and all you’re missing is one beer and a packet of tortilla chips. And, by the way, if you had any dips in your fridge I wouldn’t have made so much noise eating them and you’d still be cycling through France.’
Doc went to the kitchen. ‘You eaten?’ he asked.
‘I stopped at a diner a couple of hours back, thanks. Sorry I didn’t get here sooner but there was a last-minute problem with the rental car – I’ll take another beer, though.’
Doc got a beer for Jack and poured himself a glass of red wine. He took a selection of cheeses from the fridge and placed them and an unopened box of crackers on a large plate. He brought them to the coffee table and sat back in his armchair. His expression turned serious. ‘So tell me, Jack: how are you doing? What’s your situation now?’
‘I’m a new man,’ Jack replied, and then after a pause, and with slightly less bravado, added: ‘Kind of.’
If Walter Guravitch hadn’t moved his family to Doc’s home town in 1948, then Doc would have never been Jack’s godfather. And if Walter had shown no interest in fog, it is doubtful that Jack would have become another city’s favourite weatherman.
If such a thing as a Guravitch family tree had existed, then Walter would have been listed as a first second-generation American. He was also the product of his grandparents’ fervent belief in the virtues of assimilation, and consequently had little knowledge of either his religion or culture. (On reaching the United States both grandparents had taken a vow never to speak of the past again, but to live only in the present. Roots, they often said, weren’t everything – unless, of course, they were vegetables.) Walter vaguely knew that Passover was celebrated in April and Yom Kippur in October, but would have struggled to explain the significance of either. He was similarly vague about the origins of his family. He thought, but wasn’t sure, that the family had originated in the Moldovan part of Russia and immigrated to the United States to escape either Czarist pogroms or a succession of failed harvests.
Walter’s father, now called George rather than Georg, had followed his own father into the family tailoring business on New York’s Lower East Side, and it was presumed that Walter would similarly follow suit. Walter’s interests, however, lay elsewhere. His real enthusiasm was art. In his spare time he would visit the city’s art museums and look through the windows of galleries he could never afford to enter. He bought books and schooled himself. In time he became proficient in oils and later photography. His favourite school of painting was Impressionism and his favourite Impressionist, Monet. In particular, Walter admired the artist’s depiction of fog. In his paintings of Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament, Monet had captured the changing nature of light like no other artist before him. After seeing these paintings, Walter became as captivated by fog as, in later years, Nancy Skidmore would be imprisoned by it.
On the death of his parents Walter went in search of fog. He sold the family business and moved with his wife to the Monongahela Valley, where the river fogs, in Walter’s mind, replicated the London of Monet’s paintings. He and Hannah settled in Donora, and Walter opened the town’s first photographic portrait studio. Unlike Hannah, he never noticed the brutality of their new surroundings. He had eyes and paintbrushes only for fog.
Walter painted canvas upon canvas of Donora and its locality. For some he would use only browns, greys and blacks to portray buildings and boats emerging from, or disappearing into, the unnatural cloud. Other times he would add bright splashes of colour to characterise the bizarre nature of fog when sun shone through its haze: mauves, oranges, yellows, pinks, blues and purples. These were Walter’s favourite paintings. Occasionally one would sell, but never to a Donoran. Donorans didn’t share his enthusiasm for fog. They lived with it because they had to. For them, fog had nuisance value but no artistic value. The last thing they wanted after a hard day’s work was to return home and find a painting of fog on the wall waiting to greet them.
Walter’s romance with fog, however, came to an abrupt end after the Death Fog struck Donora in the fall of 1948.
By nature fog is an innocent: romantic, mysterious, even beautiful, and no more sinister than a cloud. If, however, it mixes with the wrong crowd, tiny particles of soot or chemicals, for instance, then its character changes: Jekyll becomes Hyde and Dr Fog turns into the unpleasant Mr Smog. The arrival of heavy industry in the Monongahela River valley accordingly changed the complexion of fogs there.
By 1948, the economy of Donora was dominated by the American Steel & Wire Company and the Donora Zinc Works. Money pumped through the town’s veins and smoke and other fumes belched into its environs. Pollution became an accepted way of life for the town’s 13,500 inhabitants and, in their minds, a necessary trade-off. Consequently, when another fog enveloped the town on October 26, no one gave it a second thought, and the Halloween parade scheduled for that Friday evening went ahead as planned.
Overnight, however, the fog built, and when the high school football team took to the field the following afternoon, players lost sight of the ball and spectators lost sight of the players. That evening the town of Donora disappeared under a blanket of thick white odorous smoke. Donorans couldn’t see to drive, couldn’t even see the hands they placed in front of their faces. They found their way by touch, like blind people reading Braille maps.
Donora’s world had been turned upside down by an unusually long temperature inversion. A mantle of warm air had trapped the cold layer beneath it and effectively placed a lid over the town. Pollution from coke plants and blast furnaces could no longer escape into the atmosphere and the town was transformed into a chemist’s sweetshop, its shelves stacked with sulphur dioxides, carbon monoxides, fluorides and the heavy dusts from lead and cadmium. Air came to a standstill, and oxygen was sucked from the town.
The fog prowled the streets like a silent killer that night, creeping into houses through windows and under doors. House plants wilted and family pets died. The fog constricted the throats of the Donorans, tried to choke them and paralyse their respiratory systems; it gave them headaches that split their skulls in two, burned their eyes and made them vomit. During the four days it lingered, twenty people coughed and gasped their last, seven thousand were hospitalised and hundreds more left seriously damaged. It was only after rain started to fall on the fifth day that the fog eventually lifted.
That same day, the fog blinding Walter to its dangers also lifted, and for the first time he was able to link the early signs of his son’s asthma to the area’s pollution. Immediately, he left Donora and moved his family to a town far away, where the air was clear and the doctor was called Chaney. There, his eight-year-old son, Sydney, became the new best friend of a ten-year-old Doc.
Although his grandfather had never once tired of describing the beauty and dangers of fog to his grandson, in truth it was cloud in its pristine form that had drawn Jack to the subject of meteorology. He became transfixed by clouds, and by the time he entered high school was not only familiar with their ten basic genera, but also their species, varieties, accessory clouds and supplementary features.
He revealed to his friends the differences between layered stratus clouds, heaped cumulus clouds and curly-haired cirrus clouds, and warned them to expect rain whenever depressing nimbus clouds came into view. He pointed out jellyfish trails to them, twisted tousles, Father Christmas beards, comb-over hairstyle clouds, cloud fingers, dissipation trails, cigar-shaped fallstreak holes, horseshoe vortexes, sundogs and circumzenithal arcs.
It was no surprise, therefore, when Jack told his parents he intended to become a meteorologist. He took an undergraduate degree in geography and then embarked on a doctoral degree in meteorology. He acquired exemplary computational and mathematical skills and honed them to a fine point. That he was swayed from building forecasting models for a living was the consequence of the Donora Death Fog and an appearance on local television.
The city where Jack’s university was located had a low-level smog problem caused by car fumes rather than heavy industry. The year 1998, however, was the fiftieth anniversary of the Donora Death Fog, and although Donora was in a different state and completely unknown to the city’s population, the television station hoped to draw parallels with that disaster and, more importantly, fill five minutes of airtime. The researcher who contacted the university’s meteorological department was given Jack’s name as a person capable of talking about smog and its causes. When Jack let it be known that his grandfather had actually lived in Donora at the time of the Death Fog, he was immediately assigned to the project.
What impressed the television executives most when the segment aired wasn’t Jack’s knowledge of the subject under discussion, but his ease in front of the camera. They judged him a television natural, possessing all necessary attributes: he was handsome and photogenic, his teeth were white and strong, and he had a full head of hair. They offered him the position of weatherman on the evening news, and Jack accepted: the salary was more than generous, and the station’s medical and dental plans were similarly unsparing.
It was another two months, however, before Jack was able to start his career in television. He himself had to finish writing and defending his dissertation, while the television station needed time to terminate the contract of the channel’s existing weatherman, who had made the mistake of growing old and was now as bald as a turnip.
On his first day at the station, Jack was shown around by Ed Billings, the station’s manager. Billings was an overweight bear of a man, whose chest and back hair sprouted from the inside of his shirt collar. He had a brusque, no-nonsense manner, and moved Jack efficiently from one person to the next.
Jack received a warm welcome. He was greeted with wall-to-wall smiles, an array of firm handshakes and several friendly slaps on the back. People congratulated him on joining the most successful and forward-thinking local television station in America, and advised him that, if he played his cards right, he might well be approached by one of the nationals.
Eventually, Billings left Jack in the hands of Human Resources and told him to meet him in reception at noon, when he’d introduce him to the anchors of the evening news – Phil Wonnacott and Mary Margaret Jennings. Jack filled in forms, watched health and safety videos and drank coffee until it was time for him to meet back with Billings.
‘Phil, Mary Margaret, this is Jack. Go eat lunch and get acquainted,’ Billings said. He then about turned and went back to his office.
Phil Wonnacott and Mary Margaret Jennings were both in their thirties – Phil’s later than Mary Margaret’s. There was an ease about Phil not mirrored in the harder-edged Mary Margaret. Whereas Phil had achieved anchorman status, Mary Margaret was still only co-anchor, and while Phil was content to remain in local news as the big fish in a small pond, Mary Margaret longed for the national arena.
Phil was tanned with teeth the size of bleached tombstones. He had an athletic build and wore shorts and a polo shirt; all that was missing was a tennis racket. By contrast, Mary Margaret was as white as pure snow, as scared of the sun’s ageing properties as she was any meal over four hundred calories. Her dark mascara-ed eyes were hidden behind large sunglasses; her lipstick was bright red; and her chemical blonde hair was tied back with a gold scrunchie.
Phil Wonnacott had worked as a reporter for several small California newspapers before moving into television. His credentials were those of a journalist, and he would often change for the better any copy handed him by the station’s writers. His baritone voice brought gravitas to the more serious news stories of the day, and viewers felt safe in the knowledge that no harm would come to them while Phil Wonnacott was reading their news. Phil’s first wife might have told them a different story: one of infidelities, blackened eyes and bruised ribs. As she still lived in Sacramento, however, no one heard her voice – certainly not Phil’s second wife Bonnie, or their two daughters.
‘You’d think Billings would do something about that body hair of his,’ Mary Margaret said. ‘I swear to God, Jack, I once saw him take off his shirt at a company picnic and he looked like he was wearing a mohair sweater. I’m surprised his wife doesn’t say something to him.’
‘His wife just left him,’ Phil said.
‘I didn’t know that,’ Mary Margaret said. ‘Why didn’t I know that?’
Phil shrugged his shoulders. ‘Where do you want to eat, Jack? There’s a good steak house around the corner if that sounds okay.’
‘Fine with me,’ Jack said, who was used to eating only sandwiches at lunchtime.
The three of them arrived at the restaurant and ordered lunch. While they waited for the food to arrive, Phil and Jack drank beers and Mary Margaret a glass of spritzer. ‘So, what do you think of Billings?’ she asked Jack.
‘Businesslike,’ Jack replied.
‘He sure as hell doesn’t do warm and friendly,’ Phil smiled, ‘but he’s solid as a rock, Jack. If we ever have a problem, he’s the one we turn to. Right, Mary Margaret?’
Mary Margaret nodded in agreement. ‘He’s a big pussycat really; his bark’s a lot worse than his bite.’ Jack glanced at Phil to see if he too had noticed Mary Margaret’s mixed metaphor but, deciding that he hadn’t, wisely made up his mind not to raise the matter.
Food was served and Jack and Phil cut into their steaks. Mary Margaret played with the salad she’d ordered, but only occasionally placed any of it in her mouth.
‘So what experience of television do you have, Jack?’ she asked.
‘Just that segment I did for the station last year on photochemical smog,’ Jack replied.
‘Oh, I remember that,’ Mary Margaret said. ‘It was about that man called Donald, who got lost in the fog and died, wasn’t it?’
‘Not quite,’ Jack said. ‘It was about the town of Donora; but you’re right, people did die.’
Phil looked up from his plate. ‘Where is Donora?’ he asked Jack.
‘Pennsylvania. About twenty miles south of Pittsburgh.’
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Phil said. ‘For some reason, I’d got it into my head that it was in Sweden. I wonder why that is?’
‘It’s probably because it aired around the same time that Swedish guy tried out for weatherman,’ Mary Margaret said. ‘Do you remember him? Tall as a tree.’
‘Oh yeah, now I do. Why on earth would we want to hire a Swede?’
‘Why not a Swede?’ Mary Margaret asked him.
Phil put down his fork and gave the matter his full attention.
‘As you ask, I’ll tell you, Mary Margaret. We all know what Germany was doing during World War II, but what the hell was Sweden doing? Nothing, that’s what! Just sitting on its butt waiting for the war to blow over. To tell you God’s honest truth, I’d rather work with a German than a Swede any day of the week. You know where you are with Germans, and at least they’ve got backbones. Sometimes, I think the United States has more in common with Germany than with any other nation. And if you think about it, we’re the only country since Germany that’s ever had the balls to invade anyone… You any thoughts on the matter, Jack?’
Jack had: he thought Phil was completely gaga! Rather than say this, however, he picked up the conversation where Mary Margaret had left off. ‘What Mary Margaret said about the Swede being tall? Did you know that Norwegians and Dutch are taller still, probably the tallest people in the world, in fact?’
‘I have to confess I did not know that,’ Phil said somewhat sarcastically. ‘Any more nuggets you’d like to impart?’
‘The Finns have the highest mathematical level,’ Jack ventured.
‘I can believe what you said about the Dutch,’ Mary Margaret chipped in. ‘I travelled there once and they’re huge. At first, I thought it was an optical illusion, because we’d just come from Belgium and they’re all like midgets there. But it wasn’t. They’re seriously tall. And the language! Have you ever had a Dutch person talk to you? It’s awful, absolutely awful! The language sounds awful for a start but, worse still, when Dutch people talk, they spray your face with spit. I had to carry antiseptic wipes with me the whole time I was in the country. It was gross!’
‘And what do you suppose the Dutch were doing during World War II?’ Phil asked, determined to recapture the conversation.
‘They were occupied,’ Jack said.
‘There’s occupied and there’s occupied,’ Phil replied. ‘Our GIs were occupied, trying to fight their way across Europe and liberate people. I don’t call sitting around at home eating cheese and doing drugs being occupied. I despair, I really do. Sometimes I think we let the rest of the world ride roughshod over us. Someone at the station should be saying these things, but no one ever does. Too scared of their own shadows, if you ask me.’
It was difficult to tell if Phil and Mary Margaret were friends or merely colleagues. They chatted easily enough through lunch, but there seemed to be little warmth between them, certainly not the camaraderie they displayed on television the times Jack had watched them.
‘Watch out for Mary Margaret,’ Phil whispered to Jack as they left the restaurant. ‘Don’t let her sink those talons of hers into you.’
‘Watch out for Phil,’ Mary Margaret whispered to Jack as they reached the television station. ‘Don’t ever turn your back on him.’
Jack weighed these thoughts in his head until Billings collected him from reception.
‘Wonnacott talk politics to you?’ Billings asked.
‘Kind of,’ Jack said.
‘Jeez! That guy never misses a beat. Keeps asking me if he can have a two-minute editorial slot at the end of every show, like Eric Sevareid used to have at CBS. We’d be off the air in no time if that happened. I told him, if he wants a chance to air his views, he should get a job as one of those radio nuts.’
When Billings had stopped talking, Jack asked him where he’d find the computers for his weather forecasts. The station manager looked at him incredulously.
‘You don’t have to worry about that, kid. We get the forecasts from the National Weather Service and a local private one. It’s not as if there’s a whole lot of weather to predict around here, anyway. It’s either going to be hot or less hot; some days it’ll rain but most days it won’t. All you have to do is present the weather. Didn’t they tell you that?’
‘I honestly can’t remember, Ed. I suppose I must have just assumed I was going to be doing the actual forecasting as well as the presenting. Seems like only half a job.’
‘Yeah, but just think of how much money you’ll be getting paid for only half a job. There’ll be plenty of other things you’ll be able to fill your time with… By the way, did they tell you we’re calling you Jack Green?’
‘No!’ Jack said.
‘It’s a thing we do all the time. The important thing is to get you connected with the audience fast, and most of them around here will never be able to get their heads around the name Guravitch, let alone spell it. Jack Green’s easy for them to remember, and it’s a strong name, too. You won’t have to change your name in real life, and your cheques will still be made out to Jack Guravitch. That’s the main thing, eh, kid?’ he said, slapping the back pocket where he kept his wallet. ‘Now come on and let’s start getting you trained up as a weather presenter. Your first broadcast will be a week from today.’
Jack interacted well with his colleagues at the station, and quickly secured his place in the hearts of viewers. Billboards advertised the new evening news line-up, and the smiling faces of Phil, Mary Margaret and Jack beamed down on the city; three happy friends offering their friendship to all who cared to raise their eyes. In reality, the three anchors of the evening news were never more than colleagues. They rarely socialised, each preferring to go their own separate ways after broadcasts: Jack to his friends at the university, Mary Margaret to her cat or favoured beau of the moment, and Phil – or so Jack presumed – to his wife and daughters.
That Phil didn’t always return to his family after broadcasts became apparent after the news anchorman unexpectedly invited him out for a drink one evening. What Jack hadn’t realised until too late, was that the venue for this drink was a downtown singles’ bar. They bought drinks and sat down at a table. They talked about the broadcast they’d just finished, a bit of station gossip and then, during a lull in conversation, Phil leaned toward Jack conspiratorially.
‘Do you know what makes an attractive woman beautiful, Jack?’
There was only going to be one correct answer to this question, Jack realised, and that answer was already stored in Phil’s head. ‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘Low self-esteem,’ Phil leered, and then laughed. ‘It’s God’s gift to man. Now look at those two over there. They can’t take their eyes off us. I tell you, of all the fringe benefits TV celebrity status bestows upon a man, none comes sweeter than this. Let’s buy them a drink and play it by ear.’
Jack hated the idea. ‘You’re married Phil,’ he said. ‘What would your wife say if she knew what you were about to do?’
‘What’s marriage got to do with any of this? Sure, I’m married, and I love my wife. I’m not intending to marry either of those girls at the bar, and what my wife doesn’t know isn’t going to hurt her. This is normal man stuff, Jack, a bit of rest and recreation for the family breadwinner. Now are you coming over there with me or am I on my own?’
‘I’m afraid you’re on your own, Phil. I’ve just started seeing someone and I’m not about to screw it up.’
‘Suit yourself. One day, though, you’ll realise that life’s too short for your kind of morals – especially in television. See you tomorrow, chump.’
Phil left Jack at the table and strolled nonchalantly towards the bar and the two waiting girls. Jack quickly emptied his glass and left. He’d lied to Phil. He had no girlfriend, but he sure as hell didn’t want to find one in that desperate place.
The next day, Phil mentioned nothing of the evening to Jack, and neither did Jack ask him anything. It was as if the time they’d spent together had been airbrushed from both their lives. Fortunately, in case Phil ever did decide to ask him out for another drink, the weatherman met his imaginary girlfriend at a colloquium on two-winged flies.
The first day of the Diptera conference had been devoted to mosquitoes, the second day to sand and black flies, and the third day to midges. The conference organisers had invited Neil Murray, a leading authority on Scottish midges, to give the keynote speech on the final day. He’d been a controversial choice of speaker, but his standing in the fly community, and reputation as the wild man of Scottish entomology, ensured that the auditorium would be full to capacity when he strode on to the platform.
For the many delegates who had never seen Murray before, his actual physical appearance came as a huge disappointment. They had wrongly presumed that a Scottish wild man and authority on Scottish midges would at least have looked and sounded Scottish. Though none would have admitted it, they had fully expected to see no less a character than Rob Roy climb on to the stage that Friday afternoon, dressed in a kilt, wearing a sporran and with a set of bagpipes carelessly thrown over his shoulder. Murray sported none of this apparel – didn’t even throw his audience the sop of wearing a Harris Tweed jacket. Rather, he wore a quiet suit and, when he spoke, betrayed only the slightest hint of a Scottish accent. What he lacked in appearance, however, Murray more than made up for in presence: his enthusiasm for midges was unbridled, passionate, and covertly fortified with swigs from a flask containing fifteen-year-old single malt whiskey.
Once the Scottish entomologist had settled at the podium, his performance commenced. He started by pacing the platform slowly and deliberately, but then quickened his tempo and became animated. Without warning he leapt from the platform, raced up the aisle on the right side of the hall, exited through the rear doors, and then rushed back into the auditorium down the left-side aisle before climbing back on to the platform. He did this several times during the next hour-and-a-half, while simultaneously haranguing his audience on the subject of midges. Sometimes he would come to an abrupt halt in front of, or next to a delegate, and lecture him or her on a one-to-one basis for an entire minute; other times he would simply stand there in silence and salute them.
Murray waved his arms to portray the midge’s mandibles and maxillae piercing and then cutting deeper into the skin of its victim. He dramatically fell to the floor and lay on his back mimicking the same scissor-like cutting action with his legs, before suddenly rolling on to his side to avoid the imaginary blood spurting from a broken capillary vessel. To represent the midge’s food canal, he curled the day’s printed agenda sheet into a narrow tube, put it to his mouth and pretended to suck blood from a delegate’s arm or head. He then mimicked the midge preventing its newly-sourced blood from clotting, by spitting mouthfuls of saliva into the air. The audience was left mesmerised, off-balance and, some of them, wet.
Murray told his captives that of all the world’s midges, the fiercest lived in Scotland, and of the thirty-four varieties living there, the Highland Midge or Culicoides impunctatus was the most merciless. This midge, he told them, with something verging on pride, had probably caused more discomfort, misery and pain than any other midge in the history of mankind; in doing so it had also conserved the natural beauty of its habitat from the ravages of human activity. For this, he argued, the midge was owed a debt of gratitude, and he encouraged the delegates to rise from their seats and give the small fly three cheers. The delegates duly obliged.
Murray thanked his audience, told them he looked forward to meeting them individually at the reception that evening, and then sat down.
In attendance at the reception was a middle-ranking administrator from the Faculty of Sciences called Laura Yandell. She had no interest in flies. She was there as one of several women invited by the organisers to counter-balance the largely male complexion of the Diptera conference, and to bring a touch of glamour to the evening’s proceedings.
Laura Yandell had the reputation of being able to talk to anyone and feign interest in anything. She bridged social and educational divides effortlessly, and laughed easily – if sometimes a little too soon. For this reason, she’d been introduced to Neil Murray and asked to keep him sober until it was time for the delegates to take their seats for dinner.
‘I’m afraid I missed your address, Professor Murray, but I gather it was well received.’
‘Yes, it went well enough, thanks, but bearing in mind the previous speaker was a Nicaraguan blabbering on about sand flies in his second tongue, then you have to figure the odds were stacked in my favour.’
Laura laughed and accused him of being too modest. ‘Do you mind if I say something about the midge, Professor?’ The Professor indicated he didn’t. ‘It’s their biting that puts me off. Why do they have to bite people?’
Neil Murray’s eyes lit up when he mistook Laura’s inane and time-filling question as a sign of genuine interest.
‘It’s only the females that bite, Laura, and they don’t simply bite for the fun of it: they do it for the sake of their unborn children. If their eggs don’t get a blood-meal, their eggs die, and if that happened year after year, eventually so too would their species. It’s the only way they know how to survive. And it’s not as if they drain a person dry: the most they ever take is one ten-millionth of a litre of blood. I think we can spare them that, Laura, don’t you? What’s that small amount to a person with 5.6 litres sloshing around inside them? Drop in the ocean, my dear!’
‘Put that way… but why do their bites cause so much swelling and itching? Are they poisonous or something?’
‘No, they’re not poisonous!’ Murray laughed, ‘It’s just the… Damn! That drinks waiter has ignored me again! It’s as if he’s doing it on purpose. Did you see that? If you catch his eye before I do, give me the heads up, will you, or just grab him. I can only drink so much of this grape piss without getting heartburn.’
‘I will,’ Laura lied, ‘but you were just about to tell me something about how the midge isn’t poisonous.’
‘The midge isn’t poisonous, Laura. It’s the human body over-reacting to the bite that causes all the fuss. Imagine, if you will, what it would be like if the Department of Homeland Security upped the level of terrorist threat every time one of its cameras picked up a small boy dropping a piece of litter in the street? It’s the exact same thing. A bit of harmless midge saliva…’ At this point, Murray broke off his conversation and, with an indignant harrumph, went storming after the drinks waiter who had ignored him yet again.
Laura looked around the room. She knew it would only be a matter of time before someone else joined her, no doubt another man, but she didn’t wait for this to happen. She’d recognised Jack Green standing diagonally across the room from her, and decided to introduce herself.
‘Hi, I’m Laura Yandell,’ she said as she approached. ‘You may not remember me, but I knew you back in the days when you were Jack Guravitch.’
‘Sure I remember you,’ Jack smiled. Or at least, he remembered her hair.
If Jack’s first interest in life was meteorology, a close second was hair – and also the fear of losing it.
This interest was his alone. It had no family roots – and this was also the source of his fear. Until Jack came along, no male Guravitch had ever given two hoots about how their hair looked, or whether in fact they had any. They had more important things on their plates – like what to put on them, for one – than to give a damn about what they had, or had not, on their pates.
It was difficult to pinpoint the exact time hair became important to Jack. As a child it wasn’t, but some time during his teenage years it became critical. He grew unhappy with his father’s use of the family clippers and insisted on visiting one of the town’s barbers. As life progressed, Jack moved from barber to barber and from salon to salon, searching fruitlessly for the one person who could understand the idiosyncratic nature of his hair. He agonised over whether he should keep his hair parted on the left, move the parting to the middle or do away with a parting altogether. He worried whether to comb his hair backwards, forwards or allow it free rein. He wore it short and spiky for a time, medium length other times and sometimes long. Occasionally the style was dictated by the day, but mostly by his own whim.
On Saturdays he would visit drugstores and hairdressing salons in search of new shampoos, conditioners, gels, balms, mists and sprays that might have made it to market since his last visit. He read the list of ingredients printed on the sides of the plastic bottles with a magnifying glass but little understanding. He’d skim over the complicated names of the acids, chlorides, phosphates, proteins and sulphates, until he reached the more interesting names of the plants and flowers the manufacturer used; aloe, avocado, brazil nut, coconut, grapefruit, lavender, lemon, Californian meadowfoam, seeds of the African moringa tree, rosemary and wheat. Sometimes the manufacturer would identify the source of a particular ingredient, the Peruvian rainforest for instance, but most times didn’t. For birthdays and Christmas, Jack’s parents bought him hair care products he’d identified to them from such visits.
Jack looked upon hair as mankind’s last frontier, and hair salons as the New American West. He believed that people could express themselves better through the medium of hair than they could any other part of their anatomy: conformity, rebellion, allegiance, individuality – the whole caboodle. Hair allowed a person to stand out from the crowd or merge seamlessly into it; it also afforded a person the opportunity to change their life without joining a wagon train. Jack’s theory, however, only worked if a person had hair. For him, the loss of his hair would be tantamount to the loss of his very being, and a diagnosis of androgenic alopecia, the equivalent of a death sentence.
Consequently, Jack fretted about losing his hair, and from the age of eighteen checked regularly for signs of premature baldness. He would stand in front of a mirror and hold a second mirror to the back of his head, scrutinising the reflection for any change. Shortly before his twenty-first birthday, and after a particularly dissatisfying haircut, Jack found that however he brushed or combed his hair, the hair at the back of his head refused to lie down. Checking with the hand mirror, he was alarmed to see two small bald spots. The shock literally caused his legs to give way and he collapsed to the floor, cracking his forehead on the bathroom washbasin. He lay there for twenty minutes or so, simultaneously bleeding and collecting himself, and then walked unsteadily to Doc’s house.
Doc opened the door and saw before him an ashen-faced Jack with dried blood on his forehead, and rivulets of the same down the side of his right cheek.
‘What in God’s name happened to you, Jack?’ he asked.
‘Doc, this is urgent! I need your medical opinion on something.’
Doc examined the back of Jack’s head and then stepped to the front of the chair Jack was sitting on. ‘No baldness I can see,’ he said. ‘The problem, if it is a problem, is that you have two crowns at the back of your head instead of one. It’s not unusual, and certainly nothing to worry about.’
Jack was relieved and gave an audible sigh. He then took a photograph from his pocket and showed it to Doc.
‘Who’s this?’ Doc asked.
‘It’s my mother’s grandfather. I was wondering if it’s possible to X-ray it and see what his hair’s like underneath the hat.’
Doc laughed out loud. ‘Of course it’s not possible. It’s a photograph, you damn fool, not an actual head. Why are you even bothered what’s underneath it?’
‘Because if I know how his hair is, then I’ll pretty much know how mine will be when I get to his age. My mother can’t ever remember seeing him without a hat, so X-raying the photograph was my last hope. You know that baldness for a man is inherited from the maternal grandfather, don’t you?’
‘It can be,’ Doc replied. ‘But even if your great-grandfather was bald, there’s still only a fifty per cent chance of you inheriting the bald gene. Your parents are just as likely to influence any hair loss you might have – and they both have good heads of hair.’
Jack walked slowly back to his parents’ house reassured, at least for the moment, that he wasn’t going bald, but unable to rid himself of the nagging thought that one day he would go bald. It was a cross he bore alone; a monomania no one else appreciated. He was aware there were more pressing problems in the world – hunger, poverty, disease and war, to name but a few – but in his world none of them ever featured. He wondered if, in this respect, he was uniquely without social conscience or just like everyone else except for his honesty in admitting that he was self-centred. He did, however, take umbrage at his father’s assertion that he was vain, and his constant admonition that there was only the finest of lines dividing an Adonis from a donut!
If Jack was overwhelmingly attracted to women with thick and lustrous hair, which he undoubtedly was, then the women attracted to Jack were more likely to be on medication or in therapy. Laura Yandell was one such woman. After five years of therapy, she now stood on her own two feet and, apart from an open-ended prescription for small yellow pills, faced the world alone.
In truth, Laura suffered from life no more than any other woman of her generation, and despite protestations to the contrary was no more complicated or crazy. Put simply, Laura Yandell was just another of the nation’s spoilt children who looked upon therapy as a fashion accessory. Indeed, the only issue of any consequence that had arisen during the five years of therapy – and one that seemingly explained the estrangement from her parents – was that Laura was ashamed of her family’s wealth; its origins, rather than its amount. Laura told the therapist that she would have preferred her family’s fortunes to have come from the proceeds of slavery, rather than canned spaghetti.
It was the therapist who suggested Laura stop coming to see her. She led Laura to believe that her journey was complete and further therapy unnecessary. In truth, the therapist was sick to death of Laura’s moaning and analysis-to-death of things that had little or no bearing on anyone’s life, let alone her own. She had taken particular offence at Laura’s assertion that the therapist was raping her; this after Laura had discovered that the words therapist and the rapist corresponded exactly.
‘It must be more than a coincidence!’ Laura had said to the therapist.
‘It is,’ the therapist had replied. ‘It’s Greek!’
The therapist wished Laura well, wrote her a prescription for the occasional ‘difficult day’ that might lie ahead, and then moved to Sedona.
Jack had been invited to the reception for the same reason Laura had – to bring colour to an otherwise dull evening. An alumnus of the university and now a local celebrity, he was introduced to the delegates as the city’s favourite weatherman.
Jack took the hand that Laura proffered. He vaguely remembered her working as a secretary in the Geography Department after he’d moved to the Meteorology Department, but had never known her name. The memory of her long dark hair, however, with its thick and natural waves had stayed with him, and he was pleased when she introduced herself.
Jack and Laura chatted easily, and Laura laughed at the jokes Jack never told. He was aware, however, that the day wasn’t one of his best, and started to worry that his breath had become stale. He asked Laura if she had a spare stick of gum and she answered that she did. She was about to remove the gum from her bag when the conference organiser took her by the arm and asked if he might have a quick word. She moved a short distance away, but left her opened purse in Jack’s hands. ‘Help yourself,’ she told him.
Jack felt flattered to be allowed such an unsupervised search, something that only usually happened in a relationship. He found the gum and was about to take a piece, when he caught sight of a box of Tic Tacs and opted instead for the breath candy. He clicked the mechanism twice and out popped two small mints. Having noticed their unfamiliar colour, Jack was prepared for a different Tic Tac flavour but, even so, was still surprised by their slightly metallic taste. He thought no more about it, however, and washed the taste from his mouth with a good rinse of the white wine he was drinking.
By the time Laura re-joined Jack, the delegates were already seating themselves for dinner. Laura explained that she had to sit next to Neil Murray at the organiser’s table, but asked him if they could meet for dinner the following evening. Jack was more than okay with the idea.
By the end of the first course, Jack could barely keep his eyes open and, worse still, couldn’t stop yawning. The yawns were cavernous, noisy and impossible to hide, and left other guests at the table with the impression that Jack found both them and their conversations boring and, worse still, was completely unconcerned that they know it. Between yawns, Jack tried to apologise, but eventually thought it best to excuse himself from the table, find a bathroom and splash cold water on his face. He was at a loss as to why he felt so tired.
The water, however, failed to refresh him, and the temptation to take a nap in one of the stalls proved too strong to resist. He slid the catch on the door, hung his jacket on its hook and sat down on the toilet seat. Within seconds he was fast asleep.
Jack was woken at nine-thirty the next morning by a cleaning janitor knocking on the stall door and threatening to call the police. The city’s favourite weatherman had no idea where he was.
How the two of them laughed that evening!
Laura explained that the Tic Tac box contained prescription pills. Partly because of the container’s dispensing mechanism, but largely to disguise the medication from other people, she kept the pills in the mint box. The effect of these pills on anyone not used to taking them was soporific, and as the manufacturers also warned that alcohol should be avoided when taken, their effect on Jack had consequently been even more marked.
Laura found it easy telling Jack these things, and wrongly recognised in him a strength she herself didn’t possess. She told him her life story, the death of her parents in a car accident and her work in the Faculty of Sciences. Although she had a degree in business administration, she told Jack that her real passion was writing, and that one day she hoped to make a living from it. Already in love with her hair, Jack now fell in love with her voice and, more gradually, her entirety. He felt sorry for Laura, empathised with the cruel hand life had dealt her, and made it his business to throw a couple of aces her way. Jack Guravitch had been suckered.
Laura allowed Jack to read two of her short stories. The Trail of a Snail was about a private detective who liked plants, and The Man who Broke the Internet was about a man who played the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on his computer keyboard and accidentally broke the internet. Although Jack liked the titles, he had no idea what the stories were about, or if they were supposed to have meaning. He did, however, think that Laura’s style of writing was as good as anything that came out of the station’s newsroom, and when a vacancy arose there suggested she apply for the position. Laura got the job and Ed Billings took a shine to her. Six months later he appointed her roving reporter: her articulation and good looks, Billings told everyone, were wasted in the copy room; it was time for her to get in front of the camera.
Laura and Jack moved in together shortly after Laura joined the network, and almost immediately things started to go wrong. Like most couples, they’d fallen in love listening only to the best tracks on the other’s metaphorical life album; living together, however, they got to hear all the album tracks, and most of what they heard they didn’t like.
Laura was the first to question their compatibility. She started to analyse their relationship in depth, and involve Jack in long and wearying discussions: was it right for her; was it right for him; or right for either of them? She’d dismantle their relationship like a car mechanic stripping down an engine, and place bits of him and pieces of her on a sheet of newspaper on the kitchen table. Some pieces she’d clean and others she’d discard. Each time the engine was taken apart and pieced back together again, fragments of machinery invariably remained on the table and the motor never ran as smoothly. It was only a matter of time before the engine stopped running altogether.
Conversation between the two of them also changed in nature. Once carefree and spontaneous, it now turned into pre-programmed chunks of dialogue that could have been found on the shelves of any convenience store, and spoken by anyone to anyone. Jive talk had become Java talk.
Even though Jack and Laura lived in the same house, they started to speak to each other long distance, and over a crackling line. They missed the occasional word, sometimes a whole sentence and rarely understood the other’s meaning. ‘You are so…’ Jack had once started to say to Laura. He never got the chance to finish: Laura left the room under the impression that Jack had just called her an asshole.
‘You’re such a loser,’ Laura once shouted after him as he left their apartment.
‘Maybe I am,’ Jack replied, ‘but at least I’m at the top of my game!’
It was only after the door slammed shut behind him that the asinine nature of his reply struck home. Intending to puncture her soufflé, he’d unintentionally ended up icing her cake. That he was now thinking in mixed metaphors also caused him concern.
Laura started to spend time away from Jack. She insisted on going to an old school friend’s wedding by herself, and spent weekends away from him looking after friends with cancer, or talking other friends through difficult relationship problems. Curiously, Jack realised he didn’t care that Laura went away on her own, and was almost relieved to have these weekends to himself. It also registered that Laura’s hair wasn’t quite as thick as he’d once imagined it to be, but an illusion. Laura Yandell, he realised, had a big head.
It was while looking through a photograph album the two of them kept, that Jack made the decision to call a day on their relationship. All the photographs, he noticed, showed him and Laura smiling, pulling silly faces, holding hands or with their arms around each other. They showed happy times, but, Jack realised, selective happy times. For obvious reasons, there were no photographs showing the bits in-between – the unhappy moments and the times they’d been miserable together – and Jack knew there were many more of these than the former.
Jack heard the door open and braced himself for the conversation he knew they would have to have. He looked up as Laura walked into the room. She threw her purse on the couch and then unexpectedly flung her arms around him. ‘I’m pregnant, darling. You’re going to be a daddy!’
The wedding was a small and low-key affair, close family and friends only. An unexpected pleasure for Jack was meeting Laura’s dead parents for the first time. ‘We’re not taking her back,’ Laura’s mother whispered.
If news of Laura’s pregnancy had been a surprise to Laura, then it was certainly a shock to Jack, who in his junior year at college had contracted mumps. An unfortunate side effect of the virus had been to diminish the size of his testes, and although Jack had never been formally pronounced infertile, it was generally assumed that he’d be welcomed with open arms if he ever applied for membership of the sub-fertility club.
Even when Laura grew to the size of a house, the reality of becoming a parent never really hit home for Jack; fatherhood forever remained an abstract. He hoped that once the child was born, the mantle of paternity would slip naturally over his shoulders – but it never did. Laura gave birth to a healthy boy and Jack felt nothing. He held the child in his arms and still felt nothing.
As Conrad grew, Jack found himself actually starting to dislike the child. One evening when Laura was working late, Jack sat in the den watching over Conrad and Laura’s cat, Perseus. The room was silent. Conrad played with his toys on the floor and occasionally looked up at Jack and glared. Perseus, whom Jack believed to be responsible for most of the neighbourhood’s knife crime, stared at him from another corner of the room. He looked from Conrad to Perseus and back to Conrad, trying to figure out which was the creepier and more sinister of the two. How could a father feel this way?
In truth, Laura had never given Jack any encouragement to feel anything different. She monopolised the child. It was she who’d chosen the name Conrad, she who’d fed him and her who’d insisted on changing his diapers. She took him with her wherever she went, and discouraged contact between him and his father. They had secret conversations that ended abruptly whenever Jack walked into the room. On the day of his fifth birthday, Conrad had even approached Jack and told him he would never speak to him again – even if he lived to be the age of twelve! Laura simply laughed.
Jack felt hopelessly trapped, not just in his marriage but also in his job. Weather forecasting had proved to be the unfulfilment of his professional life. Not only had the television executives failed to inform him that he’d only be presenting the weather and that his name would be changed to Jack Green, they had also forgotten to mention that as weatherman, he would also be expected to be the punch line for all the dumb jokes that came out of Phil and Mary Margaret’s mouths. It was the same tired format employed by all local television stations in America – and probably around the world.
It was bad enough being the object of Phil and Mary Margaret’s prosaic wisecracks, but Jack took especial umbrage at having to be the butt of Troy Robicheaux’s ridicule. (Robicheaux was the station’s sportscaster, and regarded by Jack as the most stupid person he’d ever met.) Jack, however, played the game: he forced smiles that caused his jaws to ache, and acted like a good ole boy having the time of his life with his best buds.
Ed Billings had also encouraged Jack to be a panellist on game shows, and guest on daytime cooking and lifestyle programmes. He was invariably introduced to the studio audiences as the city’s favourite weatherman, which was code, Jack now knew, for the city’s favourite fool. As Jack’s popularity and bank balance grew, so too did his dignity fall into the toilet. By the time Laura announced she was pregnant, Jack had already reached breaking point and was on the verge of resigning. Laura’s news, however, changed this, and job satisfaction once more took a backseat to money. It seemed that Jack would be weather-forecasting now until the day Conrad graduated from college.
The day Jack discovered Conrad wasn’t his child, therefore, was one of the happiest days of his life.
The sequence of events that led to this realisation started with a daytime repeat of a popular medical drama, whose main character – unlike Doc – was a misanthrope. This television doctor derived satisfaction from curing patients of obscure ailments, but never any enjoyment. His only enjoyment was telling patients, or the families of patients, that they or the people they loved were about to die. He was an unhappy man who took heart from other people’s pain and sadness. Oddly, the viewing public loved him.
Jack was home that day, eating lunch and reading through bank statements. He was only half listening to the programme until something he heard caught his interest: the doctor started to discuss cleft chins. The boy with the mysterious ailment, the television doctor told his fawning colleagues, couldn’t possibly be the son of the man who claimed to be the child’s father, because the son had a cleft chin and the supposed father didn’t. ‘Goddamn!’ Jack exclaimed, ‘Conrad’s got a cleft chin!’
Conrad did indeed have a cleft chin, and a marked one at that. Jack had once joked to Laura that Conrad looked more like Kirk Douglas than he did either of them, and what had Laura said to him by way of reply? ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid, Jack!’ At the time, he thought her response uncalled for but, thinking about it now, maybe understood it better. Laura didn’t have a cleft chin and neither did he; Laura’s parents didn’t have cleft chins and neither did his. In fact the only person he knew with a cleft chin was… ‘Goddamn!’ Jack exclaimed for the second time: ‘Phil Wonnacott’s got a cleft chin!’
Jack put his unfinished sandwich to one side and went to get his laptop. He keyed in cleft chins and paternity and clicked the search button. Unsurprisingly, there was no shortage of information on the topic but, disappointingly for Jack, none of it as hard-and-fast as the declarations of the television doctor. A cleft chin, he read, was more likely to be inherited from a parent or grandparent than just happen – but it might also just happen. Jack decided, however, that probability was on the side of genetic determination – or certainly this is what he hoped – and started to look through the phone directory for the number of the private investigator Ed Billings had used at the time of his divorce. He spoke with a secretary and arranged to meet with the detective.
The detective’s name was Tommy Terpstra, and his office was three floors above a Laundromat in the city’s downtown district. Tommy was an ex-cop but looked more like an accountant. He had a slight build and a slight lisp, as if his tongue was too large for his mouth, and mannerisms that were overly exaggerated. He grasped Jack’s hand and shook it firmly, indicating with a flowing gesture of his left arm that Jack should take a seat. ‘How can I be of help, Jack?’ he asked.
Jack spelled out his reasons for doubting that Conrad was his son. He started with the mumps and ended with the cleft chin. He then mentioned Phil Wonnacott’s cleft chin and the weekends Laura had spent away from home in the months leading to her pregnancy. Terpstra listened intently and made notes with an old-fashioned lead pencil, heavily chewed at one end and now only half its original size. When Jack finished talking, Terpstra sat back in his chair and tapped the pencil against his cheek.
‘Weirdest thing about cleft chins, Jack, is they get such a positive press. Men pay plastic surgeons good money to have them implanted. They think it makes their features look more chiselled, stronger, while all the time a cleft chin is a failure of nature. Both sides of the lower jawbone are supposed to fuse together – right here,’ he said, tapping the pencil against the centre point of his chin, ‘and when they don’t, you get an indentation, a cleft. The only example I know of man glorifying a cock-up.
‘Anyway, there’s a sure way of finding out if you’re right about this, and it’s fast too. It’ll save me a lot of legwork and you a lot of money.’
‘DNA testing?’ Jack asked. Terpstra nodded.
‘What I need from you, Jack, are samples from you, Conrad and Wonnacott. You’re easy enough. I’ll take a swab from your cheek once you bring me samples from Conrad and Wonnacott. We’ll get them sent off to the lab at the same time and we should have the results in three days. My advice is to get Conrad’s toothbrush, but make sure you replace it with an identical one: no point in arousing any suspicions. Getting a sample from Wonnacott might be trickier, but I’m guessing you’ll have access to his dressing room at the station. Strands of hair or a used razor would do the trick, a toothbrush would be ideal. You think you can do that?’
Jack took the samples to Terpstra two days later. Terpstra then swabbed the inside of Jack’s cheek with a Q-Tip, and called a courier service to take the samples to the testing lab. Terpstra then took a bottle of bourbon and two glasses from a filing cabinet and poured two single measures. He handed one to Jack.
‘You look like you need this,’ he said. ‘What will you do if Wonnacott does turn out to be Conrad’s father?’
‘I’ll divorce Laura, for sure. Probably leave the station too. I’ll tell you something, Tommy. For the first time in years I feel hopeful, like I’m on the verge of getting my own life back. Can you understand that?’
Labor Day weekend came and went. Jack spent it with Laura and Conrad, aware that this would be their last holiday together. He’d known for a week that Phil Wonnacott was Conrad’s father, but had revealed nothing of this to Laura. He couldn’t explain why.
The news that Wednesday evening was unusual only in that it was slower than usual, and therefore demanded more off-the-cuff filler from the presenters. After a studio discussion on anorexic pets and an interview with an eighty-four-year-old weightlifter, Phil introduced the final story of the evening. It was a longer than usual piece recorded by Mary Margaret earlier in the week, and dealt with the station’s very lifeblood – grand tragedy on the local scale.
Jackie and Ferris Wheeler were the type of young couple that made people proud to be American. They lived in a gated community in a large six-bedroom house and had a five-year-old son called Skip. Ferris owned a small electronics company and Jackie stayed home looking after Skip and playing golf.
One Thursday afternoon, Jackie was standing on the teeing ground for the fourth hole waiting for her friend and golf partner, Kristy Birdsong, to complete her shot. Kristy sliced the ball and let out an expletive. Despite her headache, Jackie couldn’t help smiling at her partner’s reaction. She then carefully placed her own ball on the tee and looked to the distant green, where the flag flapped in the day’s gentle breeze. She positioned her feet carefully, adjusted her grip, and swung back the golf club. Jackie hit the ball full and square, and then dropped to the ground dead as a doorknob. Unaware that it would never be hit by the same person again, the golf ball continued along its target line and dropped neatly into the cup on the fourth green.
Initial coverage of Jackie Wheeler’s death focused on the bizarre nature of its circumstances and ran along the lines of: ‘Dead Woman Hits Hole in One’. Mary Margaret, however, saw an opportunity to tell another story: the story of a young widower coming to terms with grief and struggling to raise a child on his own. Shortly after the funeral – and for what passed as a sensitive period of time at a news station – Mary Margaret arranged to interview Ferris.
The footage of Mary Margaret’s film was accompanied by a suitably melancholic soundtrack designed to tug at the viewers’ heart strings; it was also intended to show her and the station in a caring light. After the report had finished, the studio camera honed in on Phil and Mary Margaret’s sad faces, magically capturing Mary Margaret dabbing a tear from her eye. There being a full three minutes of airtime left to fill, Mary Margaret and Phil embarked upon their inevitable chat about the story.
‘That sure was a sad story, Mary Margaret. I know my heart goes out to Ferris and Skip, and I’m sure the hearts of all our viewers do, too. I know a round of applause is never suitable at a time like this, but I wish there was some kind of equivalent.’
‘Right, Phil. I know exactly what you mean. The most poignant part of the story for me was listening to the way Ferris explained the situation to little Skip. While I was there, Skip asked his daddy where Mommy was, and Ferris had to explain to him again that Mommy was gone, that she was dead. And when Skip asked him to explain what ‘dead’ meant, Ferris put it in the sweetest of ways. He said: ‘It means we’ve got to start cooking for ourselves, son.’
‘Boy, that really says it all, Mary Margaret,’ Phil said. ‘We’ve got to start cooking for ourselves. Hmmm.’
Mary Margaret agreed. ‘And what’s so peculiar about Jackie’s death, Phil, is its symmetry. It starts with a stroke on the tee and ends with a hole in one on the green. It’s so ironic.’
‘I think you’ll find you mean iron,’ Phil corrected Mary Margaret, ‘Probably a 3 iron is my guess. That’s what my wife would have used for such a hole.’
When the glance Mary Margaret gave Phil looked as if it might kill him stone dead too, the producer of the show hastily told them to bring Jack into the conversation. Jack had been listening to their exchanges disbelievingly, and despite the seriousness of the piece couldn’t help smiling. When the camera turned to him, he looked, somewhat inappropriately, like the happiest man on the planet.
Jack had filled time successfully on many an evening. He’d talked about tsunamis, the El Niño effect, global warming, blizzards and the differences between tornados and cyclones. What Jack really liked to talk about, however, was fog and clouds. That he rarely got a chance to do so became a running joke at the station. He would be told through his earpiece that there was time for him to talk about fog for two minutes, and after maybe getting four words into the subject then told by Phil they were out of time. Mary Margaret would laugh, and Jack would have to stand there grinning, pretending to enjoy the joke: ‘You guys,’ he would say shaking his head. ‘Got me again!’
This time, however, there really was plenty of time left, and Mary Margaret fed him a great line. Could he explain to the viewers the difference between nimbostratus and cirrostratus cloud formations? Jack took the bait. He’d been speaking for barely twenty seconds before he started to hear titters of laughter from the studio floor. He looked at the monitor that showed the picture viewers at home would see on their TV screens, and there were Phil and Mary Margaret pretending to be fast asleep, bored out of their skulls by Jack’s enthusiastic explanation. Jack stopped mid-sentence.
A fine line divides a person losing their senses from one coming to them, and the exact location of that line is open to interpretation. What many later described as Jack having a mental breakdown, Tommy Terpstra rightly construed as Jack regaining his mind.
‘Fuck this!’ he said. ‘And fuck you, Phil! Thanks for fucking my fucking wife!’
He unclipped the microphone from his lapel and left the building, never to appear on television again.
If not a new man, by the time Jack arrived at Doc’s house there was no doubting that he was a changed man. His on-air resignation from both his job and family had been a cathartic and freeing experience, and emotions that had long been suppressed broke through to the surface and blessed him with an unprecedented clarity of vision. Although his initial words hadn’t accurately reflected the wholesome nature of his reformation, fuck this did give a strong indication of the depth of change that had taken place. The days of behaving like a man whose confidence allowed him only to write in pencil were now behind him. In future, he would speak his mind, confront issues head on and, if necessary, upset people and not care.
When Jack walked off the news set, he kept walking. He didn’t stop to gather any personal items from his office, but went straight to the elevator and punched the button for the lobby. He walked through the foyer, out of the building and kept walking. He had no intention of going home: he no longer had a home to go to. He tore off the station blazer he wore for broadcasts, shoved it into a garbage can and continued to walk. Ten blocks from the station he checked into a small but comfortable hotel and phoned Tommy Terpstra.
‘Tommy, I need a divorce lawyer – a good one. Do you have any suggestions?’
Tommy had: his daughter, Tina. ‘She’s kin, Jack; I’m not about to hide that fact from you, but she’s also damn good at what she does and her speciality’s family law. What’s more, she’s a woman, and women are always better in cases like this – you ask Billings, if the two of you are still talking.’
Jack agreed to Terpstra’s suggestion, and Terpstra arranged for Jack to meet his daughter the following day.
Tina Terpstra was a junior partner in a large legal firm located one block from the hotel where Jack was staying. Jack’s appointment was for eleven o’clock, but he’d misjudged the time it would take for him to walk there and arrived early. He was shown to a seat in the reception area and served coffee. He had a dull headache and wished he’d eaten breakfast. He took in the surrounding decor and noted it was expensive and tasteful. He wondered how much the visit would cost him. Shortly after eleven, one of the receptionists asked him to follow her. She led him to an office at the very end of a long corridor, knocked on the door and entered. ‘Jack Guravitch to see you, Tina,’ she said, and then left.
Tina stood up from behind a large mahogany desk and extended her hand to Jack. Jack took it, surprised by its firmness, and then sat in the chair indicated. Tina wore a dark pin-striped trouser suit and, although looking to be about the same age as Jack, already had flecks of grey in her short hair. She wore little, if any, make-up, and Jack imagined that from a distance Tina could easily be mistaken for a man. He also noticed that she wore no wedding ring. In his newly-acquired state of mind, Jack came straight to the point.
‘Are you gay?’ he asked Tina.
(Jack had emerged from his epiphany with something resembling a mild form of Tourette’s syndrome, and it took time for him to appreciate that freedom of speech wasn’t a licence for tactless or graceless behaviour: it had its responsibilities. He had to learn to harness and finesse this new freedom, and recognise that remaining true to oneself didn’t necessarily involve smashing another person over the head with a claw hammer. If he wanted to influence people with his words, which he now did, then people would have to feel comfortable around him; if they didn’t, this newly discovered freedom would gain him little.)
‘Yes. Is that a problem for you?’ Tina asked.
‘Not in the least, Tina. The thought just crossed my mind, so I thought I’d ask it.’
Tina looked at him, still dubious. ‘I might not date men, Jack, but neither do I hate them. If I agree to represent you, then I’ll be representing you and not your wife. I won’t be taking it easy on her just because she’s a woman, if that’s what worries you. Do you understand this?’
Jack apologised for any misunderstanding he might have caused. Secretly, however, he couldn’t help thinking that Tina was a tad sensitive for a dyke.
Tina questioned Jack carefully about the personal and financial aspects of the marriage: Laura, Conrad, and Phil Wonnacott; the house, savings accounts and pension arrangements. She ordered more coffee from reception and a snack for Jack, whose stomach was now rumbling uncontrollably. While Jack ate his cheese sandwich, Tina took two encyclopaedic-looking books from a shelf, studied them and made notes.
‘Okay, Jack, these are your options,’ she finally said. ‘You can proceed with the divorce presuming Conrad is your child…’
‘But he’s not,’ Jack interrupted.
‘Hear me out,’ Tina said. ‘I’m just giving you your options. You can proceed with the divorce presuming Conrad is your child. This would be your quickest way of getting a divorce, and it would also allow you custodial and visitation rights if you so desired them. However, the downside of this is that once you legally acknowledge paternity of Conrad, you can never challenge paternity at a later date – even if you prove not to be the father – and you’ll also have to pay child support.
‘If, on the other hand, you decide to challenge your paternity of Conrad, then now’s the time to do it. It’s clear from the tests you’ve already had done that you’re not Conrad’s father, so we can confidently expect that any further tests will have the same outcome. And, if you’re proved not to be the father, then you’ll have no child support to pay, but in all likelihood you’ll also lose all visitation rights vis a vis Conrad.
‘I think I can guess your answer, Jack, but I need to hear it from you. What are you thinking?’
‘Option two,’ Jack said immediately. ‘I’m not Conrad’s father and I want this known. My obligation ends now. I’m not spending another cent on that ungrateful kid. Wonnacott will have to put his hand in his pocket for a change – and he’s welcome to my visitation rights, too!
‘I do have one question though, Tina. I’ve been shelling out for Conrad ever since he was born. I was tricked into doing this, essentially defrauded by Laura. Can I get my money back?’
‘For the money you’ve spent on Conrad to date, you mean?’
‘Exactly!’
‘Hmmm. That’s a difficult one. I can understand your point of view, Jack, but there’s no legal precedent for this. From a lawyer’s point of view it would be fun to try, but it could take years and cost you a fortune, and there’s no guarantee we’d be successful.
‘My best advice to you is that we stay with option two. You’ll be free of paying any more money on Conrad’s behalf, and the marital property as it stands now – home equity, retirement, bank accounts and stocks – will be divided fifty-fifty between you and Laura once the settlement’s been finalised.’
Jack thought for a few moments. ‘Okay, let’s do it,’ he finally said. ‘I’m in town for the next week, but then I have to make a trip with my godfather and I don’t know how long I’ll be away.’ He tore a sheet from a notebook he carried with him and started to write. ‘This is my mobile number and this, my email address, Tina. You can reach me anytime on these.’
They shook hands – firmly.
Against all expectations, Laura agreed to the terms of the divorce as set out and presented to her attorney by Tina. She neither challenged the assertion that Jack wasn’t Conrad’s father nor quibbled over the suggested fifty-fifty division of assets. There was no apology.
Jack was untroubled by her silence: he was more than happy not to see her again; particularly happy never to see Conrad again.
Having made sure that neither Laura nor Conrad would be there, Jack visited the family house only once. He wasted little time, methodically moving from room to room and filling suitcases with clothes and items personal to himself: CDs, books, photographs, letters and documents. That night, he phoned Billings and asked if he could buy him a drink. Billings laughed.
They met the following evening in a bar close to Jack’s hotel. Billings was in a surprisingly jovial mood and gave Jack a friendly punch on the arm. ‘You made an old man happy, Green,’ he said.
Billings told Jack bluntly that his broadcasting career was pretty much dead in the water, but congratulated him on ending it in such great style. For him, the ex-weatherman’s outburst had been the unexpected apotheosis of what, until then, had been a dull and repetitive career in broadcasting. He recalled for Jack his silent joy at seeing the look of abject horror on Wonnacott’s face after Jack had accused him of sleeping with his wife, and burst out laughing at the still-warm memory.
‘Wonnacott’s a pompous ass, Jack, and everyone at the station knows it. He’s always had a predatory nature around women, and at ground level he’s not getting a whole lot of sympathy – that’s all going your way. At brass level, it’s different. The station’s got a family ethos, and as Wonnacott’s their most valuable asset, they’ll protect him by hanging you out to dry. There’s a statement being prepared apologising for your outburst and explaining it in terms of a mental breakdown. You might want to know that even as we speak, the station’s providing you with the best treatment available.’
‘You mean beer?’ Jack asked.
‘That’s about it,’ Billings smiled. ‘Publicly, they’ll be saying Wonnacott’s an innocent man who got caught in the crossfire. They’ll also be saying that even though he’s been wrongly maligned, Wonnacott forgives his old buddy the weatherman and wishes him a speedy recovery. What a guy, eh?
‘Raise your glass, Jack, and let’s make a toast: To you, Jack Green. May your pastures new be even greener!’
The two men clinked glasses. ‘What are you going to do, by the way?’ Billings asked.
‘I’m thinking of becoming a hairdresser,’ Jack replied.
‘So let me get this straight, Doc. We’re going to spring an old girlfriend of yours from a nursing home and then get the hell out of Dodge?’ Doc nodded. ‘And she’s half loco?’ Doc nodded again. ‘And I’m your wife.’ Again, Doc nodded. ‘Jeez!’ Jack said.
Doc, however, was pleased with his plan, the logistics of which had fallen into place after he’d made one further trip to Hershey. That visit, he hadn’t called on Nancy. He was aware of his promise that the next time they’d meet would be the time they’d leave together, and hadn’t wanted to run the risk of distressing her further. Instead, he limited himself to driving around Hershey and its environs until he was satisfied with the route they would take and the place where they would rendezvous with Bob.
The plan was this. Rather than fly to Harrisburg, Jack would drive them to Hershey in his rental car. The evening before the planned abduction, the two of them would check into a motel close to the town, and the following morning Jack would become Doc’s wife. Doc would take the wheel for the final leg of the journey – a short one, fortunately – and drive to the nursing home.
After parking the car, Doc would help Jack into a wheelchair and push him into the nursing home. He would sign them in as Doctor and Mrs Chaney and they would then go looking for Nancy; if she wasn’t already in her room, they would find her and take her there. Jack would then take off the women’s clothes he was wearing and Nancy would slip them on over hers. They’d wait in the room for a half hour or so and then leave. Nancy would climb into the wheelchair and Doc would wheel her to the car, stopping only to sign out at the reception desk. After a short interval of time, Jack would follow and drive them to a pre-arranged meeting place, where Bob – Doc’s friend – would be waiting for them. Doc and Nancy would transfer to Bob’s RV, and Jack would re-join them after dropping his rental car at Harrisburg airport. They would then leave Hershey, a town known for its chocolate, and drive to Coffeeville, a town not known for its coffee.
‘So, what’s wrong with her nose?’ Jack asked. While Doc had been explaining the details of the plan, Jack had been staring at the portrait of Nancy that hung on the wall.
‘Nothing,’ Doc said. ‘The artist got it wrong.’
‘How come he got the fruit right, then? The apples and pears look real enough to eat.’
‘I don’t know,’ Doc said exasperatedly. ‘You’ll see her soon enough.’
‘Are the two of you getting it on?’
Doc looked at him incredulously. ‘You’re asking me if we’re having sex?’
‘Yes,’ Jack said, not at all abashed by his question. ‘I haven’t upset you, have I?’
Unaware of the epiphany’s after-effects on Jack, Doc had trouble understanding why his godson had asked him such a personally intrusive question.
‘No, we’re not having sex! In our twenties we had sex, but not now. Unless you grow old with a person, the chances are you’re not likely to want to have sex with them after not seeing them for forty years. You know how your own body’s changed in that time – and that’s difficult enough to come to terms with – so why would you want to inflict it on someone else? And why would you want someone else to inflict their worn-out body on you?’
‘In short, Jack, the answer’s no. I’m glad Nancy’s my friend these days, and I’m also glad there was once a time when we did have sex.’
Another question came to Jack’s mind. ‘Should I try and get inside Nancy’s head before we go, Doc; choose clothes she’d wear?’
‘You’re not supposed to be Nancy, Jack: you’re supposed to be my wife. Believe me; you don’t want to get inside her head. There’s no fun to be found there. Choose someone else if you have to choose anybody.’
‘Okay, Mary Tyler Moore then. We’ll buy clothes Mary would have bought.’
‘Let’s play it by ear. I doubt we have her budget.’
The first thing they bought was a wheelchair. They tried out several models, Jack sitting and Doc pushing, before deciding on a rigid rather than a folding chair: it had fewer moving parts and the joints were permanently welded; it was lighter and required less energy to push and, just as importantly, could be dismantled quickly.
Next, they bought make-up and went shopping for a wig and suitable clothes. It took Jack no time to decide on a wig, but the clothes took longer as he put himself inside Mary’s head. They ended up buying a thick red polo-necked sweater; a pair of dark slacks – so Jack wouldn’t have to shave his legs; some ladies’ sneakers and white socks; and a large cashmere shawl. Doc was about to question the need for a shawl made out of cashmere when Jack raised his palm and gestured for him to stop: ‘Mary’s got class, Doc, and she’s a doctor’s wife now. This is the way it has to be. We’ve got to play it for real.’
The last stop was the bank. Jack remained in the car, while Doc went through the swing doors and emerged a good half hour later.
‘I didn’t see anyone coming out,’ Jack said. ‘How long was the line?’
‘There wasn’t a line,’ Doc replied. ‘I was the only customer.’
The next morning the two men prepared to leave for Hershey. They put the wheelchair and a suitcase filled with Nancy’s clothes into the trunk of the car, and their own bags on the back seat. Doc told Jack to start the car while he made one last check of the house and set the alarm.
Jack looked at his watch. How long did it take a man in his seventies to check a house? He pushed a CD into the player and, in the moment of silence when the radio quieted, heard a sharp crack. He looked up and saw Doc hurrying down the drive with a gun in his hand. ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ he exclaimed.
Doc climbed into the car reeking of cordite and slammed the door behind him. ‘Drive, Jack! Now!’
Jack put his foot down on the accelerator and the car sped away from the house. ‘What the fuck did you just do, Doc? You didn’t shoot Frisbee, did you?’
Doc turned to him and gave a wry smile. ‘Just his dog,’ he said, and then fell silent.
The journey to Hershey was long but uneventful. Jack drove while Doc snoozed, lured into a fitful sleep by the motion of the car and the warmth of its interior. Occasionally, Jack took his eyes from the road and glanced at his passenger. Although the two men had spoken frequently since Sydney’s death, this visit was the first time Jack had seen Doc since the funeral. The man sitting next to him was now looking old – older, in fact, than his actual years. Dark and permanent circles ringed the man’s eyes, lines that had once creased his face had deepened into cracks and previously full cheeks had hollowed conspicuously, as if scooped out with a spoon. The picture of age surprised him, but what disquieted him more was the haggardly look that framed this picture. Not only did Doc look drawn when his guard was down, he looked haunted.
Jack knew better than to mention this observation to his godfather: from experience, he realised that any such conversation would be pointless. As a boy in his late teens, he’d once asked Doc if he was happy. He still remembered the withering look his godfather had given him. The glance had been only fleeting, but the question had hung in the air and never been answered; Doc had simply changed the subject. Jack had mentioned this episode to his father.
‘I’m probably his closest friend, Jack, and even I wouldn’t have asked him that,’ Sydney had replied. ‘He doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. I don’t think he can afford to. The only thing you’ll ever find there are cufflinks and buttons. He’s pretty much been that way ever since he returned from Maryland. The man has feelings, but he internalises them and never shares them. It’s the way he is and so I respect that. But he doesn’t do himself any favours.’
‘Does he like me?’ Jack asked. ‘It’s hard to tell, sometimes.’
His father had laughed. ‘Sure he likes you, maybe even loves you, but never expect him to tell you this. Doc bonds with few people because most people he doesn’t like, but once he does become your friend he’s your friend for life and you’ll always be able to depend on him. Why else do you think I asked him to be your godfather?’
Jack had been pleased with his father’s reply. He liked Doc and, despite their age difference, had always looked upon him as a friend rather than an informal relation. As Jack matured, his friendship with Doc strengthened. When Jack was in town visiting his parents, the two of them would meet for meals, go for drinks, or simply hang out on Doc’s back terrace. Jack was comfortable sharing his own thoughts and feelings with Doc and would openly discuss any problems he might be having. Doc would listen intently while his godson spoke, counsel any advice he might see fit to give, and respect any confidences Jack preferred his parents and others not to know. Doc, however, never reciprocated and Jack learned not to pry into his older friend’s emotions. From what his father had said, it was clear that Doc wasn’t a man who bled in public. Looking at him now, however, asleep as he was in the passenger seat of a rental car, it was clear that his godfather had been bleeding internally for most of his life.
‘We almost there yet?’
Doc’s voice startled Jack. ‘I was beginning to think you’d died on me, old man,’ he replied. ‘We’re getting close, so you might want to start wiping that drool off your chin. It’s like you’ve got an artesian well pumping away inside your mouth.’
Doc pulled a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and rubbed his chin with it. ‘It’ll happen to you someday, kid. Age doesn’t play favourites and it doesn’t take prisoners, either: it inflicts its sorry ass on all of us. You won’t escape. By the time you’re sixty, your rhythmic walking pattern will have started to deteriorate, by the time you’re seventy you’ll have twenty per cent less bone, and by the time you’re seventy-five you’ll be shorter by two-and-a-half inches. Drooling’s the least of it.’
‘Well, aren’t you the barrel of laughs? I’ll tell you what, though…’
‘Hey, you’re passing it! This is the turn-off, Jack. Start signalling!’
Jack didn’t have time to signal. He braked hard, turned the wheel to the right, but even so still clipped the grass verge on the passenger’s side. Once the car had regained its equilibrium, Jack pointed out to Doc that this wasn’t the exit for Hershey.
‘I know it’s not,’ Doc replied. ‘We’re staying the night in Lebanon. We’ll drive to Hershey in the morning. It’ll only take thirty minutes.’
They found a small motel on the outskirts of the town close to US 422. Doc paid cash for two adjoining rooms accessible from the parking area and Jack drew the car up outside.
‘I wouldn’t have minded sharing, Doc. It would have saved you some money.’
‘Nothing personal, but I can’t sleep with someone else in the same room these days, let alone someone in the same bed. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t rightly know why. I’m guessing it’s because I’ve spent too much time on my own.’
They unloaded the car, took what luggage they needed to their rooms and walked to a nearby diner. It was late, approaching closing time, and there were few other customers in the restaurant. They sat down in a booth and looked through the menus brought to them by a woman about Doc’s age.
‘I love this kind of food,’ Doc said. ‘If it was up to me, I’d choose a diner over a fancy restaurant any day of the week. Look at this: T-Bone Steaks, Sirloins, Grilled Pork Chops, Fried Country Ham Steak, Baked Western Ham Steak, Golden Fried Shrimp, Broiled Trout and Pan Fried Chicken. And the most expensive thing is only $15!
‘You know the first thing I did when I retired from practice? I went to a burger bar and bought the biggest hamburger they had, and the biggest portion of French fries they served. The next day I went to a pizza restaurant, the day after that to a fried chicken restaurant, and so on. By the end of the week I was five pounds heavier.’
‘Why did you do that?’ Jack asked.
‘Because I was no longer a doctor. I didn’t have to lead by example anymore. All my professional life I’d been telling people to cut down on junk food, watch their cholesterol, eat more vegetables, eat more fruit, cut down on alcohol, do more exercise, and who’d have listened if the guy telling them that had been the size of a blimp? Retirement freed me, Jack. For the first time in years I felt like I could eat what I wanted and it was no one’s damned business but mine. I’m like everyone else now. Once more a man of the people!’
The waitress arrived and interrupted Doc’s flow. He ordered pork chops and mashed potatoes, while Jack chose the sirloin steak and French fries. They agreed to share a bowl of turnip greens as a gesture to healthy living, and cemented the gesture with two beers.
Jack finished his meal first and laid his knife and fork on the plate. He looked around the diner. They were the last of the customers and the waitress and cook were now sitting at the counter drinking coffee, no doubt waiting for them to leave.
‘It’s a good job only one of us here has blue eyes, Doc. The people of Lebanon get suspicious of men with blue eyes gathering together. In fact they hang them.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You’ve never heard of the Blue Eyed Six?’
‘No,’ Doc replied, ‘Only the Brown Eyed Girl – a song from the sixties,’ he added, when he saw Jack looking perplexed. ‘Who were they?’
‘Six men who took out an insurance policy on the life of a hobo. It was supposedly one of those win–win situations: they’d look after him while he was alive, feed and clothe him and the like, and then collect on the policy when he was dead. The only fly in the ointment was that within the year the guy was dead – supposedly fell off a plank and drowned in the creek. At first, his death was ruled an accident, but then the son-in-law of one of the six stepped forward and said that he’d seen the man being drowned. Even though only two of them were alleged to have carried out the killing, all six were charged with first degree murder. Reporters from all over the world came to cover the trial, and one of them noticed that all six defendants had piercing blue eyes – hence the Blue Eyed Six. Apparently, 1879 was a slow year for news.’
Ostensibly satisfied with his explanation, Jack ended the story there. Doc, however, was left hanging.
‘So what happened? Were they found guilty?’
‘Yes, and even though it came out in the trial that the son-in-law was a deserter from the army and had caught his wife having an affair with one of the accused, the jury still found them guilty. Five of them were hanged, and the sixth was given leave to appeal and then acquitted at his retrial on the very same evidence that had convicted his friends. Strange old world, eh?’
‘How do you know all this?’ Doc asked.
‘There was a guy at the TV station who was a big Arthur Conan Doyle fan. Occasionally, we’d eat lunch together, and it came up in conversation that the Sherlock Holmes short story called The Red-Headed League was inspired by a trial in America. When I asked him what trial that was, he told me this story about the Blue Eyed Six. Never thought I’d ever be staying the night in the actual town, though. Remind me to send him a postcard of Lebanon in the morning, will you? He’ll get a kick out of it.’
‘No postcards,’ Doc said. ‘It’s best no one knows you’re here.’ He then peeled off two twenty-dollar bills and put them on the table. ‘Time to go, Jack. We’ve got a big day ahead of us tomorrow.’
Doc woke with a start, gasping for breath and covered in perspiration. He lay there exhausted; his stomach churning, his heart pounding. He looked at the clock on the bedside table and groaned when he saw the digits 04:30 glowing red in the dark of the room. He resigned himself to the fact there would be no more sleep for him that night, turned on the television and tuned it to a news channel.
At 7:30 am, he climbed out of bed more exhausted than when he’d climbed into it. He went into the bathroom and ran the shower, stood under it for a good fifteen minutes while he collected his thoughts, and then shaved and dressed. He walked over to the diner, drank three cups of coffee and ordered two large coffees and some sausage and biscuits to go. Again, he paid in cash: no trails.
It was 8:30 am when Doc knocked on Jack’s door – three times, to be precise. Jack eventually opened the door looking dishevelled and still wearing the boxer shorts and T-shirt he’d slept in.
‘What time is it, Doc?’ he asked groggily.
‘After 8:30,’ Doc replied, looking at his watch. ‘There’s no rush but you need to start getting ready. Here’s your breakfast,’ he said, handing Jack the bag containing the coffee and biscuits. ‘We need to leave at 10:00. I’ll leave my door unlocked – knock on it when you’re ready.’ Jack nodded and Doc returned to his own room.
Doc was sitting on the can when Jack walked into the room. ‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he shouted through the bathroom door. Jack sat down on the bed and waited for Doc to admire his transformation. He heard the toilet flush and then the sound of a tap running. Shortly, Doc walked into the room drying his hands on a small towel. When he saw Jack, his jaw dropped.
‘Hell’s teeth, son!’ he exclaimed. ‘You look like some over the hill hooker!’
‘A hooker! How do you figure that? I think I look like one classy broad, even though I do say so myself.’
Doc said nothing, but spent the next ten minutes adjusting the amount of padding Jack had stuffed into his bra, toning down the eye shadow and lipstick, and adding more foundation to cover the shadow of his beard. He then stepped back and surveyed his handiwork.
‘That’s more like it,’ he said. ‘I can’t see you getting any dates, but if you keep your head down and wear these sunglasses you’ll serve the purpose. Now let’s go.’
Doc loaded their belongings into the car, and when the coast was clear called for Jack – passenger side, he reminded him. He then took control of the car and accelerated out of the motel’s grounds, narrowly missing two large ornamental pots. Jack looked across at him. ‘You sure you’re okay to drive?’
‘Sure,’ Doc answered. ‘One eye’s worse than the other, but I’ve still got some central vision left – for now, anyway. Fine details are a problem, but I can usually see cars in front of me – at least for the next thirty minutes, I can. Feel free to holler if it looks like I’m going to hit one.’
‘Okay, Doc, but maybe you should slow down a bit. You’re doing 70 mph. Did you know that?’
‘No. I can’t make out the dials. Dials come under the heading of fine details. Hope to God I can recognise Nancy when I see her.’
Despite Doc’s erratic use of the accelerator pedal and questionable lane discipline, they made it safely to the nursing home. Doc parked the car in a quiet area away from the main entrance, rubbed his eyes and smiled at Jack. ‘Okay, son, let’s do it!’
Jack waited in the car while Doc lifted the wheelchair from the trunk, assembled it and wheeled it to the passenger side door. He made pretence of helping Jack into the chair and then pushed it slowly to the main entrance. He was relieved to find that the receptionist on duty wasn’t the one who’d signed him in on his previous visit, and decided on the spot to use a pseudonym.
The receptionist was in conversation with an old man complaining about the fish tank in the foyer and seemed to welcome the interruption. Doc said his name was Homer Comer and that he and his wife Ruby were here to visit Nancy Skidmore in the secure unit. She smiled politely and asked him to sign the visitor’s book, noting the time of arrival in the column next to his name. She then wrote four numbers on a post-it note and handed the piece of paper to Doc.
‘This is the code you’ll need to open the door, Mr Comer.’
Doc thanked her. He then turned the wheelchair in the direction of the secure unit and casually pushed it down the corridor. He looked at the piece of paper in his hand. He muttered something under his breath that Jack couldn’t quite hear, and then punched the very same numbers into the keypad he’d punched on his previous visit: 1111. The door swung open.
In the beginning was the Word, and then the Word – all words – became meaningless.
The Nancy Skidmore who now resided in the secure unit of the Oaklands Retirement Centre was a person who had travelled a long way from her true self. Lichens and mosses clung to her mind as they would an ancient gravestone and the door to her memory, destined as it was to be locked and bolted from the other side, was fast closing shut.
If Nancy’s craziness had been a constant, a condition she was unaware of and accepted at face value, then life for her would have been easier, and certainly preferable to the life she now lived. There were times, however, when the fog enveloping her mind lifted and she found herself gazing into clear blue skies, conscious of what was happening to her and, more worryingly still, mindful of the inevitable fate awaiting her. It was then that she became anxious. Being crazy and knowing it, was the scariest hell of all.
Nancy spent her days in the unit standing at its entrance and peering through the glass door into a world that was now denied her. For hours at a time she remained there unmoving, endlessly punching numbers into a keypad that would release the door from its latch and allow her escape. If, in the event, the door was opened from the other side by either attending staff or visitors, she would slip through the gap like greased lightning, only to be turned back with a gentle but firm hand and, often as not, escorted to the lounge area.
There, Nancy would pace the room’s perimeter or sit restlessly in one of the high seat armchairs that lined its walls. She sat as far from other residents as possible and spoke to them no more than she had to. She never started conversations, seldom understood the meaning of things they said to her, and was unsettled by their mumblings and occasional screams. She didn’t understand why she’d been placed with people who were so obviously wrong in the head, and couldn’t for the life of her comprehend why she wasn’t allowed to return home. Time and again she’d plead with nursing staff to let her go back to her own house, but she may as well have been speaking to a brick wall: all they did was smile at her, ignore her questions and treat her like a six-year-old child.
Nancy tried to remember how she’d got there, but remembering anything now was getting harder by the day. She vaguely remembered walking on the side of a road and being given a ride by a kindly policeman, but after that – nothing. She had a hazy recollection that someone was supposed to come get her, but wasn’t sure who that someone was: was it her husband, her parents, Ruby, or that nice boy she used to date in college? She had no real idea, and no one ever came. She lost track of the days, was unsure if she’d been there one day or ten, and started to worry that she’d always be there. Consequently, the morning Doc walked into the lounge, a huge feeling of relief swept over her – even if he was pushing a wheelchair with what appeared to be the ugliest woman in the world sitting on its seat.
‘Gene! Gene! I’m over here,’ Nancy called. She raised herself from the chair she was sitting in and moved towards him as fast as her sixty-seven-year-old legs would allow. Doc put his arms around her and held her to him.
‘You have to call me Homer, Nancy,’ he whispered. ‘It’s important!’
‘Why? Your name isn’t…’
‘You just do, Nancy,’ he interrupted her. ‘Now, where’s your room?’
She took his hand and led him the short distance, glancing at the woman in the wheelchair. ‘I thought you said your wife was dead, Gene,’ she whispered. ‘Have you been lying to me?’
Once inside the room, Doc closed the door and wedged it shut with a chair. He allowed Nancy to hug him one more time and then gently pushed her away. ‘Do you remember me telling you that the next time you saw me we’d be leaving here together?’ Nancy nodded. ‘Well, today’s the day. This is my godson, Jack, by the way. He’s going to help us.’
Jack held out his gloved hand to Nancy. ‘I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs Skidmore, and if I might say so, you’re a lot better looking than your name might suggest – and certainly more attractive than the portrait Doc has of you.’
‘What’s he talking about, Gene?’
‘He’s just being friendly,’ Doc replied, casting a glance in Jack’s direction and silently imploring him not to complicate things. ‘Okay, Nancy, now listen to me carefully. This is what we’re going to do…’
While Doc talked, Jack took off the wig, sunglasses and clothes that masked his true identity and stood before Nancy as himself, wearing a pair of dark blue jeans and a crew-necked sweater.
‘Who’s this?’ Nancy asked.
‘I told you, Nancy, he’s my godson. He’s here to help us.’ He then helped Nancy put the clothes Jack had just taken off over her own, and handed her the wig.
‘I’m not wearing this!’ Nancy said. ‘That man’s been wearing it and he might have nits.’
‘Believe me, Nancy, the care Jack takes over his hair, he’d be the last person on earth to have head lice.’
‘Actually, I did have them once,’ Jack said. ‘I got them from Conrad.’
‘Who’s Conrad?’ Nancy demanded.
‘He’s my son; or rather the boy I thought was my son.’
‘What’s he talking about, Gene?’
Doc took Jack by the arm and led him towards the room’s small bathroom. ‘Excuse us a minute would you, Nancy?
‘What the hell are you doing, Jack?’ he said. ‘You’re confusing her; can’t you see that? Keep things simple and just agree with anything I say. Okay?’
‘Okay… Sorry, Doc. Sometimes things just come out.’
‘Yes, I’ve been noticing that.’ Doc replied. The two men re-entered the room.
‘I’ve checked his hair, Nancy, and it’s fine. No nits!’
Reluctantly, Nancy pulled the wig over her own hair and Doc handed her the sunglasses. He looked at his watch. Twenty minutes had passed since they’d signed in. ‘It’s too soon to leave yet. We’ll wait another ten minutes.’
‘Are we going now?’ Nancy asked.
‘Soon, Nancy. Soon.’
Doc spent the remaining time searching the room for anything Nancy might need for the journey, patiently responding to her as she asked the same question over and over again: ‘Are we going now, Gene? Are we going now, Gene? Are we going now, Gene?’
Doc looked at his watch again: thirty minutes had passed. He told Nancy to sit in the wheelchair and hooked the arms of the sunglasses over her ears. He then knelt down and placed his hands on either side of her face. ‘Until we get outside, Nancy, you don’t say a word – even if someone speaks to you. Do you understand?’ She nodded. He kissed her on the cheek and then pushed the wheelchair out of the room.
Jack remained. He was to follow ten minutes later and, if challenged by anyone at reception, sign his name in the book against another visitor’s name. He rinsed his face with cold water, dried with a hand towel he found hanging at the side of the basin and then checked himself in the mirror. What he saw alarmed him, for while the foundation and lipstick had washed off, the mascara had stubbornly remained and left him looking like a droog from A Clockwork Orange. He swore under his breath, and kicked himself for having mistakenly bought waterproof instead of non-waterproof mascara. The only course of action left was to walk with his head down and hope he didn’t collide with anyone. He left Nancy’s room and walked self-consciously to the door of the Secure Unit. No one stopped him, no one looked. He punched the code into the keypad and started down the long corridor to the foyer. ‘So far, so good,’ he thought.
It was then he heard the explosion of a gun being fired, followed quickly by the noise of glass breaking and voices screaming. ‘Jesus, Doc!’ he exclaimed, ‘What the hell have you done now, you crazy old fool?’ He ran the remaining distance with his head up.
William Hoopes was a retired policeman from Berks County, Pennsylvania, and a man used to getting his own way. As an officer of the law he’d been a stickler and never once cut slack for anyone, friend or foe. The law was the law and so too, to his way of thinking, were his prejudices. He’d been used to power his whole life and had enjoyed seeing the look of fear in people’s eyes when he’d exerted it. He’d had few friends but believed himself to be widely respected. It therefore came as a surprise to him when, at the first high school reunion he attended after retiring, the other attendees booed him. Retirement, it seemed, had de-authorized him: what he’d presumed to be respect had, in fact, been fear all along.
What really annoyed him, however, was the constant jibing about whether he was going to run for President again, maybe get a few more votes this time. Damn his namesake! He wasn’t even a relative of the Reading man they alluded to, and not even of his generation. And he certainly wasn’t a Socialist! In his book, Darlington Hoopes had been nothing more than a troublemaker, and if it had been left to him in 1956 he would have gladly strung the presidential candidate from a lamppost. Although he took solace in the fact that the old lawyer had polled only 2,192 votes – a mere 363 more than a New Jersey pig farmer standing as an independent candidate – it rankled that people connected him to such a loser.
William Hoopes tired of the ridicule and decided to leave Berks County for a town where no one knew him. He walked into the kitchen one morning and told his wife they were selling the house and moving to a retirement community in Hershey. For a while, he fitted in well at Oaklands. He made new friends and joined in many of the activities, but then the fish tank began to trouble him.
The aquarium was located in the foyer. It was large and filled with a variety of tropical marine fish. It was an eye catcher for anyone visiting the Oaklands Retirement Community and radiated an air of calm. As a result, the lobby had become a popular area for residents to sit and while away their time. During lulls in conversation, their eyes would turn to the multicoloured fish swimming in the tank and, often as not, they would fall asleep. All, that is, except William Hoopes, who had to constantly excuse himself and use the bathroom. The sound of running water, he found, was far from conducive to a man with an enlarged prostate.
Hoopes mentioned this to receptionists on the desk, brought it up at meetings, and wrote letters to the owners of the centre. He told them he was a reasonable man and willing to compromise: he was happy for the aquarium to stay where it was, but wanted the water pump turned off during daylight hours. When it was pointed out to him that the fish would die if such a course of action was taken and that the aquarium was there to stay, the authoritarian streak in Hoopes reared its ugly head and the man who claimed to be reasonable morphed into a fucking nightmare, as the administrators now described him. If he and his wife hadn’t occupied an expensive two-bedroom apartment in the complex, he would in all likelihood have been asked to leave.
It had been William Hoopes talking to the receptionist at the desk when Doc and Jack had arrived at Oaklands that morning. Unbeknownst to them, he’d been in the process of giving her an ultimatum: either she agreed to the removal of the aquarium from the foyer or he’d take matters into his own hands! The receptionist had made it clear – as she had done on many previous occasions – that the administration had no intention of removing the aquarium from the foyer and then, somewhat unprofessionally, had suggested that he tie a knot in his John Thomas. Hearing that, Hoopes had gone apoplectic and stormed out of the foyer.
Moments after Doc had wheeled Nancy out of Oaklands, Hoopes had charged back into the reception area brandishing a Colt Python revolver. ‘Why don’t you tie a knot in this,’ he shouted at the receptionist. He’d then aimed the gun at the aquarium and fired a .357 Magnum bullet into it. The aquarium had immediately shattered and the enclosed water cascaded on to the floor. Homeless fish, gasping for breath, flapped among broken pieces of glass, and the receptionist ducked behind the desk in fear for her life. Some of the residents sitting in the foyer screamed, two women fainted and an old man clutched his heart.
Hoopes remained standing there, the realisation of what he’d done slowly sinking in. He released his grip on the revolver and the gun dropped to the floor. Staff came running from all directions, and in the ensuing pandemonium not one of them noticed the man with unusually dark eyes side-stepping the debris and exiting through the doors to a waiting car.
Jack drove, while Doc sat in the backseat of the car holding Nancy’s hand. He looked at their reflections in the driver’s mirror and smiled: ‘Hey you two! No making out back there. I’ve just had the car valeted.’
‘Just drive, Jack!’ Doc snapped. ‘And make sure you don’t miss the turning.’
Jack pulled the car on to Governor Rd and headed west. He passed the Medical Centre and turned left on to Bullfrog Valley Rd, and then took another left on to Wood Rd. At the intersection of Wood and Middletown Rd, he turned into the parking lot of the Stoverdale United Methodist Church, empty apart from a forty-foot bus that filled it. ‘What the hell’s that thing doing there?’ Doc wondered out loud.
They’d arrived twenty minutes earlier than expected, and Doc worried that his well-laid plans were already starting to unravel. He’d chosen this particular location for its seclusion, to ensure that the rendezvous with Bob would go unnoticed; God only knew how many prying eyes were peering at them through the darkened windows of the bus.
He soon found out: four – two belonging to Bob, and two belonging to a small boy wearing a bicycle helmet. ‘I’ll be damned,’ Doc said when he saw the two of them climb out of the bus.
‘Remember him, Nancy?’ he said. ‘It’s Bob, Bob Crenshaw! We used to ride buses with him back in the day. Looks like we’ll be riding another one with him, now.’
‘I remember Bob,’ Nancy said, ‘but this man’s old. Bob wasn’t old.’
‘We’re all old now, Nancy. He’s grown ancient like the rest of us.’
‘Oh my,’ she said. ‘Oh, my goodness. I thought he was dead.’
The two old men embraced each other and then Bob embraced Nancy. ‘Hey, Nance. Beautiful as ever!’
‘Oh shush, Bob. You’re talking nonsense just like you always did.’
‘I ain’t talkin’ ’bout you Nance – I talkin’ ’bout me!’ He laughed loudly and Nancy laughed too – the first time in a long time.
Jack and the small boy stood to the side, watching. Jack went up to the boy and introduced himself. ‘Hi, I’m Jack. What’s your name?’
‘Eric, sir, Eric Gole.’ They shook hands.
‘You just stepped out of the shower?’ Jack asked him.
‘No, sir, my hands are always wet: they sweat a lot. What’s wrong with your eyes?’
‘It’s a long story, Eric, but when I buy some stuff to get the black off, I’ll take you with me and we can get something for your hands. I used to have the same problem when I was your age: I could have cultivated watercress on them!’
Jack was intrigued by the boy’s ingenuousness. It was like meeting a child who’d grown up on a Christmas tree farm. Why couldn’t Conrad have been like him? He shuddered at the thought of his erstwhile progeny.
‘Who’s the kid?’ Doc asked Bob. ‘And what’s he doing here?’
‘I’ll explain on the bus, Gene, but take my word on it, man, there a good reason fo’ him bein’ with us… Eric, c’mon over an’ meet Gene an’ Nancy.’
The luggage and wheelchair were transferred from the car to the larger vehicle, and then all but Jack climbed on to the bus. ‘We’ll follow you, Jack,’ Doc told him. ‘You’re clear about what you have to do?’ Jack nodded. ‘And wear sunglasses, for God’s sake: you look positively strange.’
They left Hershey behind, passed through Middletown – a municipality that had left its better days behind it – and headed towards the plumes of steam rising from the cooling towers of Three Mile Island. Bob pulled the bus into the car lot of a large pharmacy opposite Harrisburg International Airport, while Jack drove into the airport and dropped off the car at the rental agency. He then walked calmly through the short-term parking garage, crossed the airport road and climbed the railway embankment. Once certain no trains were approaching, he stepped over the tracks and carefully descended the other side of the embankment. He waited by the roadside until there was an opening in the traffic, and then crossed Highway 230 to the waiting bus.
‘Give me a minute will you, Doc? I need to go to the pharmacy for some things. Eric, you want to come with me?’
They returned after a few minutes with mascara remover for Jack, and a pair of red washing-up gloves for Eric. ‘Red was the only colour they had,’ Jack explained to the others.
Bob turned the engine and pulled the bus out of the car park. Their journey to Coffeeville had begun.
They drove through Harrisburg, passed over the Susquehanna River and headed south on I81. They drove through rural Pennsylvania and crossed the Mason–Dixon Line into Maryland. As they approached the Potomac River, Bob slowed the bus and gave the gun he’d retrieved from Doc to Jack. ‘Throw it, man. Far as you can.’
They entered the eastern panhandle of West Virginia and continued along the Shenandoah Valley into Virginia; the Blue Ridge Mountains visible to the east and the Appalachians to the west. Doc and Nancy sat together, and Eric sat with Jack. Bob hummed.
‘Is there a bee in here?’ Nancy asked.
‘No. Bob’s humming a tune to himself – what’s the song, Bob?
‘There ain’t no song.’
‘Well, what are you humming, then?’
‘I ain’t hummin’.’
‘And I’m not a doctor, either,’ Doc said.
‘No, you ain’t. You retired.’
Doc smiled at Nancy. ‘Hasn’t changed, has he?’
Nancy returned his smile. ‘No, he hasn’t,’ she laughed. ‘Who is he?’
‘It’s Bob, Nancy. You remember him? We were at Duke together.’
‘Oh, of course we were. Yes, I remember him now. He was that nigger friend of yours, wasn’t he? The one we thought was selling drugs? You’ll have to forgive me, Gene: I forget things all the time these days… Where are we going, by the way?’
‘We’re driving to Coffeeville, Nancy.’ He looked at her nervously, took her hand and squeezed it gently. The smile on Nancy’s face froze. She squeezed his hand back and turned to face him.
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Gene – thank you.’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘There’s no rush, though, is there? We can take our time?’
‘Sure we can, Nancy. We’ll make a holiday of it.’
Eric interrupted their conversation: ‘Have you seen my gloves, Mrs Skidmore?’
‘My, aren’t those nice?’ she said to him.
‘They’re a present from Jack. Shake my hand, Mrs Skidmore – go on, shake it.’ Nancy took hold of Eric’s hand and did as requested.
‘You shake my hand, too, Doctor Chaney.’ Doc did. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think Jack’s a man of boundless generosity, Eric, and I like your handshake, too: firm and dry.’ The beam on Eric’s face grew bigger, and he made a move to shake Bob’s hand.
‘Probably best not to bother Bob while he’s driving, Eric,’ Doc advised. ‘Besides, he’s humming some tune or other and I don’t want him to lose his place and have to start from the beginning again.’
‘I already told you, man – I ain’t hummin’. You prob’ly got tinnitus in yo’ ears or somethin’. Anyways, you shouldn’ go raggin’ on the driver. My concentration goes – y’all go!’
They pulled into the next rest area, where Doc decided it would be safer if Nancy remained on the bus and out of sight. He and Bob would stay, while Jack – now his eyes were back to normal – would go with Eric to the vending machines. ‘I’ll be right outside having a cigarette,’ he told Nancy.
Bob joined him. ‘Give me one o’ those, will you, Gene?’
‘I thought you didn’t smoke these days.’
‘I don’t as normal, ‘specially roun’ Marsha, but I have one ever’ now an’ then.’ He shook a cigarette from the opened pack and lit it from the flame of Doc’s lighter.
‘I think we need to pull off the interstate and find somewhere quiet to spend the night,’ Doc said. ‘They’ll have probably figured out that Nancy’s missing by now, and even though they won’t know how she got out or where she’s heading, we’ll still need to play it safe. You know this neck of the woods better than I do. Any ideas?’
Bob thought for a moment. ‘Three Top Mountain ain’t far from here. We could park up by the fire tower fo’ the night. No one’ll see us there.’
Doc liked the idea. He took one final draw on his cigarette and then ground it underfoot.
‘Who’s the kid, by the way? You said there was a good reason he was riding with us.’