One night, a long time ago, Johnny was sitting alone in the living room of his house in St. Augustine, watching the lights from the cars passing on the street outside spray streaks of red and white across his ceiling. There was an envelope with twenty-five hundred dollars in it sitting on the coffee table and a bottle of whiskey balanced between his knees. The money was Franklin’s share of what his friend Flash had paid them to steal documents from an office in a high-rise, high-security building two days before, the last time he’d seen his brother. Franklin hadn’t even bothered to come claim it. Johnny bought the whiskey that same night thinking he and Franklin would drink it together to celebrate a job well done; instead he was drinking alone.
By the time he got through half the bottle he’d pretty much decided to drive out to Tallahassee, dig a little hole, and bury Franklin’s share somewhere near Flash’s house. It was a petty, small-minded thing to do, but he thought the gesture would make him feel better. He’d already put his shoes on and was looking for his car keys when he heard a knock on his door. Johnny set the bottle down and stuffed the money in his side table drawer; when he pulled the door open a tall, light-skinned man in a rumpled green suit was staring back at him with red rheumy eyes.
“Looking for Franklin. He around?” his future employer wheezed. A man around Franklin’s age with a wide, flat nose, chapped lips, and a long, narrow keloid scar running down his left cheek. All Johnny could think was that this was some sorry spillover from a party he hadn’t been invited to, a refugee come calling from wherever it was Franklin went when he disappeared, sometimes for weeks at a time.
“It’s four o’clock in the morning.”
“Is it?” The man sounded surprised. “Look, man. I wouldn’t be bothering you if it wasn’t important, and anyhow your light was on. Just tell him you got Melvin here. He’s gonna want to talk to me.”
Every time the man opened his mouth Johnny was assaulted by the heavy scent of Lysol and vomit, a feat of halitosis that, Johnny knew from experience, could be accomplished only by someone on an undignified bender of at least three days. Yet this, apparently, was the kind of person whose company and laughter his brother now preferred.
“Get the fuck off my porch.”
“Come on, man. Don’t be like that. I just need a minute.”
Johnny glanced down at the man’s foot wedged in his doorway. For a moment, he considered pulling back the door, slamming it on the man’s knee, and simply shoving him back out the other side. The only thing that kept him from doing it was a quick calculation of how much longer it would take the man to get off his property if he was compelled to crawl.
The man must have sensed this because the foot slid backward.
He smiled. “Hold up, now. Wait a minute. You’re Franklin’s brother, aren’t you? Shit, man. I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. But it is you, isn’t it? Johnny Ribkins.”
Johnny remembered the strange reverberations of his own name coming out of the man’s mouth as it suddenly occurred to him what he might have looked like to someone standing on the other side of that door. For the first time Johnny wondered if that sour breath he’d been smelling was, in fact, his own.
“I remember you. Had that group back in the day,” Melvin said. “Went around guarding those civil rights people and shit. Kicking ass, taking names, and fuck if you didn’t look good doing it too.”
Johnny squinted at the man’s scar.
“What was it you all called yourselves? The Justice Committee. Y’all were like my heroes coming up.”
Melvin’s gaze kept drifting past Johnny’s shoulder and into the living room. Eyes scanning the stacks of newspapers and pizza boxes piled on the floor, the overflowing ashtray on the arm of a threadbare sofa, the open bottle of whiskey on the coffee table next to a pair of dirty athletic socks.
He shook his head. “I always did wonder what happened to you.”
Briefly, it flashed through his mind that maybe Melvin was messing with him.
“Where’s your hat, Johnny? You still wear that hat?”
Either that or he was a fool.
“Man, get out of here,” Johnny said. “I don’t have time for this. And I certainly don’t need you to tell me who I am.”
“No, I guess you don’t,” Melvin said. “Forgive me, Johnny Ribkins. I didn’t mean to bother you. And I certainly didn’t mean any disrespect. If you could just tell Franklin I stopped by…” He licked his lips and stared at the bottle of whiskey on the table. “If you could just tell him I’ve got his money.”
That’s about all Melvin Marks was to Johnny that first night: A thirsty, desperate look wedged in his doorway. The mention of money and the associated relief that maybe Franklin was up to something so simple as another con. The numb sense of betrayal as Johnny imagined Franklin sitting drunk in some crowded bar, laughing as he told stories about Johnny’s past. The sudden need to track his brother down.
Johnny could have done a lot of things that night. What he did was pull back the door and ask Melvin if he wanted a drink.
—
“The sad thing is I thought I was just being smart,” he remembered Melvin telling him that night. The two of them wound up talking for a long time; Melvin told him he was a lawyer who’d worked for a large financial institution until recently, when he was caught embezzling funds. “Trying to get ahead. Just playing the game. You know, not a game, but the game.” He helped himself to the bottle on the table between them. “And it is a game, you know that, right? I mean, ‘embezzlement’ sounds pretty bad, when you put it like that. But you think I’m the worst? I was just trying to fit in. People I worked for, people I worked with…Everybody else was out there doing the exact same things. But that is the part I didn’t get: I’m expendable. The low man on the totem pole, a cog in the wheel. Nobody cares what happens to me, Johnny. And I’m starting to realize they never did.”
Johnny nodded. That much he hadn’t even questioned. It was the way of the world. There were always bigger crooks hiding in the shadows, the biggest ones you never saw at all. They kept to themselves and counted their money and somehow managed to keep most folks busy fighting it out among themselves, over crumbs. In the final days of the Committee it had been an obsession of his; now it was why he didn’t feel particularly guilty about his chosen line of work.
“Word came down about an impending investigation and my supervisor started getting very paranoid about communications. Told me what the story was they were giving to investigators and wanted me to make sure I had the documentation to back it up. I had to present him with signed copies of all financial transactions approved by my department. And of course, loyal employee that I am, I was thinking about protecting the firm. Thought we were a team so I did what he said. Realized too late that they weren’t actually trying to hide a paper trail so much as making sure it led back to me. And I helped them do it.” Melvin shook his head and swallowed his whiskey. “They fired me, but it’s not over yet. I figure I got a couple days left before those indictments come down. Then it’s all over.” He stared around the room with a look of panic in his eyes. “I’m going to jail, Johnny.”
The story was pitiful, but of course Johnny was less interested in where Melvin was going than in how it related to where his brother was now. At one point he asked Melvin straight out to tell him how they’d met.
“Just around…you know, a friend of a friend. I don’t really remember. I run into him a lot at this bar where I go after work and after a while we just started talking. Him and his girl. What’s her name? Skinny, bright red hair…”
“Meredith.” Johnny frowned. “It’s a wig.”
Melvin smiled. “Not friends? What?”
“It’s not my business who Franklin chooses to crawl into bed with. But he’s done better, that’s for sure.”
Those comments, so far as he recalled, had been his one lapse into anything approaching the personal. Mostly he just let the man talk.
“I told your brother what was happening to me and he just laughed. Said he wanted to help me, that he could take care of it. All I had to do was come up with the money to pay him. Said he could fix it all with nothing more than a lighter and a ballpoint pen.”
He looked at Johnny. “I’m not stupid, Johnny. Your brother…he’s crazy, yes?”
Johnny shrugged. Of course Franklin was. But that didn’t mean what he said wasn’t true.
“That’s what I figured,” Melvin said. “Drunk or crazy or both. But here’s the thing—I find myself in a situation where I don’t really have much left to lose. And he swore up and down he was telling the truth. Would fix it, for a certain fee.”
Melvin reached into his jacket pocket. He pulled out a folded manila envelope and set it down on the table between them.
“There’s a thousand dollars in there, Johnny. Charged it to the company account. Do you know that is the one instance of an out-and-out theft they’ll have on me? Because I was so careful. Might have slipped up with a couple of incriminating emails, a couple of memos…but nothing on the books. When, believe me, this is the least of my crimes. I’ve been a real shit, Johnny. Still am.”
“Let me see the money.”
Melvin slid the envelope across the table. Johnny pulled out a crumpled wad of bills held together with a rubber band. He picked it up and counted. He set it back down between them.
“I can help you.”
“How?”
Johnny finished the last of the bottle. He reached inside the envelope and picked up the lighter and lit his cigar. He took out the pen and drew the man a map.
That was the extent of their first encounter. Johnny felt sorry for him, took the money, gave Melvin his map, and that was it. Next time he came to see Johnny, Melvin had lost his license to practice law but he hadn’t gone to jail. Even now, as Johnny recalled the exchange, there was nothing about it that seemed particularly sinister. He couldn’t even say that Melvin lied to him because he’d come right out and told Johnny he was a liar and a thief. He just left some things out.
—
Now Melvin had an office on the seventh floor of a glass-walled high-rise. It wasn’t where Johnny asked to meet him. He called Melvin soon after he and Eloise got back to St. Augustine, told him he was ready to settle accounts, but would prefer if they could meet at his daddy’s shop. He was standing in front of it two hours later when Melvin pulled up in his car.
“Feel better?” Melvin smiled.
“What do you mean?”
“Out in public. With all these people around you, all these potential witnesses? You weren’t scared to come to my office, were you?”
“No.”
“That mean you got my money?”
“I do.”
Melvin nodded. “Good. Because you know, Johnny, I realize that the last time we saw each other I was upset. Harsh words were spoken, very harsh words. And ever since you left my office, ever since I found out that the first thing you thought to do after talking to me was pack up and leave town without telling me where you were going, I’ve been concerned that maybe, in the heat of anger, I had not expressed myself as well as I might have otherwise.”
“You were pretty clear.”
“I hope so. Because all that stuff I told you? About what I was going to do to you if you didn’t pay me back on time? I meant every fucking word. Gave you a week to get your affairs in order, which is more than you deserved. And if you hadn’t made your way back here in time, and if you didn’t have my money, I would have hunted you down like the lying, thieving dog you are. And do you know why?
“Because of the organization. I’m trying to run a business here, trying to accomplish something, and I can’t do that if the people who work for me think they can get away with acting out of turn. There has to be an order and that order has to be respected and that means this is not about you and me. It’s about the organization. And what is an organization, Johnny, if not a dynamic system? It is a mechanism, if you will. One that can function properly only so long as every component is doing what it is supposed to do. That is why every component, first and foremost, has got to know its place. It’s also why there is no such thing as an insignificant part, because every part is, in truth, something larger than itself. Understand?”
“I do.”
Melvin nodded. “Of course you do, Johnny. You’re smart. I always liked that about you. So let’s see if we can’t rectify this unfortunate situation, fix what’s broke without bloodshed. Let you get back to your life as a broke-down old man.”
Johnny nodded, reached into the pocket of his jacket, and pulled out an envelope.
“What’s this?”
“A threat.”
Melvin opened the envelope and frowned.
“Where did you get this?”
“Brother left it for me. Sitting in a box under the money I was going to use to pay you back. Those are some of the documents you were looking for the night we met, aren’t they? Why you asked for that first map. All this time I thought the reason you never went to jail was because you used my map to get them back, then I come to find out Franklin had them this whole time. What did you do with that map, anyhow?”
“I took all the ones I could find. Kept waiting for the other shoe to drop but it never did.”
“Well, now we know why. Because, I must say, it does seem pretty irrefutable.”
Melvin shut the envelope and tried to hand it back.
“Naw, you keep it.”
“I don’t want it. This old news, Johnny. Statute of limitations for most of that stuff run out a long time ago.”
“Most. Not all. But it’s not about you anyway, is it? It’s about the organization. Having all of this made public would be bad for business. Draw a lot of unwanted attention to your current business practices; might motivate someone to start looking for patterns of abuse. I don’t imagine I’d have too much trouble getting somebody to take an interest in all this ‘old news’ right now, what with the elections going on. Don’t know if you’ve heard but Dawson has been making quite a comeback. And of course a lot of that stuff implicates him as well. Be a kind of poetic justice in that, don’t you think? Let him be the collateral damage for a change.” He shook his head. “You should have told me you used to work for Dawson, Melvin.”
“You never asked,” Melvin said, looking through the file again.
“Well, I’m asking now.”
Melvin set down the file. He looked at Johnny and smiled. “First time I saw your brother he interrupted a strategy session. I don’t even know how he got in the building looking the way he did—but I had him escorted out. Then we started noticing some things were going missing from campaign offices. I didn’t know how he did it until I tracked down your friend and he explained about your brother’s talents. By then he was making all kinds of threatening and dangerous accusations, and—you know what? What the weird thing about that was? They were all true.
“You hear me, Johnny? Everything he said was the truth. I mean it was chilling, trying to figure out how someone like that, someone so clearly unhinged, could access so much information. Well, we just figured someone had put him up to it. And, of course, all roads led back to you.”
“I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
“I know. Figured that out the night we met. It wasn’t you at all. It was a crack addict and a prostitute, having the nerve to threaten a man like Dawson. I mean, it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. How do you even cope with something like that?”
“You offer them a bribe.”
“Yeah. That’s right. Dawson offered your brother a lot of money and he still wasn’t satisfied. I mean he took it. It was money, what do you think? Everybody takes it, that’s how it works. He just didn’t stop. I brought the money to him like Dawson asked and he told me to go back and tell Dawson it didn’t change anything, that he was still coming for him. ‘Go back and tell Dawson: you can’t steal what’s already stolen.’” Melvin frowned. “Like I had nothing to do with it, like it was just between the two of them. When it was my paycheck he was fucking up, my life.” He shook his head. “Your brother had me confused for a bagman, Johnny.”
“Probably what you looked like then,” Johnny said.
“Maybe. I told Dawson it wasn’t going to work. But he was panicking by then, see? Told me to give him some time to figure out how to deal with it and then he’d let me know what he wanted me to do. So I went home and waited for his call. But see, by noon the next day, your brother was gone. And after that, Dawson must have decided in the wisdom of desperation that he was going to have to settle for a scapegoat. Me.”
“Pitiful.”
“I know. I really don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t saved me. And you did save me, Johnny. I do realize that. Not from your brother. From him…Dawson.”
“Did you have something to do with what happened to my brother?”
“No, Johnny. I did not. But I’ll be honest with you because I’ve got no reason to lie. I thought about it. Probably would have. But those wheels just kept turning on their own. Your brother was running wild back then, you know that as well as I do. He left town, slipped out on me, and it took a quick minute to track him down. That’s the real reason I came to your house that night. But then I realized you didn’t know where he was either. I’d heard a lot of people talking about your maps, figured it was an opportunity to see how you worked. By the time I found out Franklin and Meredith had gone back to his hometown I’d already missed my chance. That’s why, when you took off like that, at first I just assumed you were trying to run out on me too. Reg and Clyde were the ones who explained you were actually trying to get my money.”
“I suppose I should thank them for that.”
“From what I hear you already did.”
Melvin closed the file. “You sure this is what you want to do, Johnny? Threaten me?”
“Test me and see,” Johnny said. He shook his head. “I still don’t understand why you never came out and told me this, Melvin. Why I had to figure all this out on my own.”
“Why?” Melvin reached down and straightened his tie. “Because your brother was wrong about me. I’m no one’s bagman, Johnny. I’m a businessman. And the fact is, you are a real moneymaker, Johnny Ribkins. Dawson was right about that much at least. If it weren’t for that one simple fact, I would have kicked your ass to the curb a long time ago.”
Johnny nodded. “It’s what I’m counting on.”
Melvin smiled. “So that’s it, huh? Blackmail? Why you wanted to meet in public? Just in case I decided to hurt you?”
“I thought you’d want to see it.”
“See what?”
“Where all your money went.” He nodded toward the shop. “Weren’t you even curious about what I did with it?”
He’d done a lot of renovations over the past few years. Converted the upstairs into an art gallery, a proper showcase for his daddy’s work. Then he’d purchased the lot on the corner and converted it into a community garden. When the laundromat across the street went bankrupt, he took some of Melvin’s money to buy that too. He had to tear the whole thing down and start rebuilding from scratch. It still wasn’t finished, but now he could point to a sign hanging over the door: FRANKLIN RIBKINS REHABILITATION CENTER.
“Don’t you recognize it? I thought you might.”
Melvin looked up and down the block.
Dawson’s campaign promises.
“You mean to tell me you did all this with $100,000?”
“Oh, I took more from you than that. Been taking a little bit here and there pretty much the whole time I’ve known you.”
He started to walk away and then stopped. “By the way, Melvin. What does your organization, your mechanism, do? What is it you are trying to accomplish? I mean, you got a lot of parts working for you now, like you said. Seems to me you could do a lot of things with those parts if you decided you wanted to, if you just stopped for a moment, used your imagination, reconfigured a couple of things. Like if you decided maybe it was time to change course. It’s never too late for that you know. To turn things around.”
He walked inside the shop.
“Everything all right?” Eloise said as he pushed through the door.
“Better than,” Johnny nodded. He took off his hat.
“I knew you could do it, Uncle Johnny.”
“You mean we, right? We could do it. Because I might not have without your help. Might have just given up.”
She was standing in the corner, looking at one of her grandfather’s paintings on the wall.
“Pretty.” Eloise nodded. “All these colors…”
Johnny squinted. All he saw was blue and brown.
“You can’t see them, can you?”
“No,” Johnny said. “Wish I could.”
“Well, don’t feel bad. Sometimes I can see time. That helps.”
“What does that mean? Like, tell the future?”
“No. But sometimes I can see how stuff gets put together. From beginning to end and all the points in between.”
“Is that right?” Johnny said. “You never mentioned that before.”
“You never asked,” Eloise said. She pointed at the picture.
“You see that little swirl of yellow? Whoever did this made that line first. Then they added the red and then mixed in the blue. It’s an awful lot of paint jumbled up together. But still…”
Johnny stared at the picture. He remembered sometimes watching his father paint when he was younger, being confused by the amount of time his father spent blending colors together, trying to get at some particular shade. Johnny knew it had something to do with how his father saw the world, something about the contrast created by all those vibrant flashes of color folding in on one another. But when it was finished all Johnny saw was a whole lot of effort submerged within two monochrome bands.
“I’m sorry you never met my daddy. He would have really liked you.” Johnny smiled. “Now that that’s all taken care of, we’re going to have a good time. I got a whole lot of things I want to show you while you’re here.”
Eloise frowned. “But it’s Saturday.”
“That’s all right.”
“No, I mean, Mama’s coming back tomorrow.”
“That quick?”
“The festival was only for a week. I thought you knew that.”
“Well, that don’t mean nothing. You don’t have to hurry back the minute she gets home. You’ll stay for another couple weeks, she won’t mind. Then I’ll drive you back.”
“I can’t though. I have to get ready for school.”
“School?”
“Summer’s almost over, Uncle Johnny. I have to get back home.” Eloise smiled. “Next time.”
“Next time?”
“Well, I’d like to come back and visit you. I mean, if that’s all right…”
“Of course it’s all right. I mean, yeah, I’d like you to come back…I’m still thinking about this time, though. You see?” He smiled. “Let’s talk about this later. We’ll go out, have some fun. See how you feel then.”
Johnny put his hat back on. They got back in the car and he gave her a quick tour of the city. They had lunch in a pizza parlor and then he took her to the pier downtown and bought her a snow cone. They walked through the aquarium and then they went to Adventure Landing and played a round of minigolf. He could tell how much fun she was having. Still, when he asked her about it again, she insisted she had to get home.
“If it’s school you’re worrying about—and that’s good by the way, school’s important, got to prioritize your education—the thing is, we got schools right here. I don’t see why you couldn’t just stay with me for a little while, go to school here. And—”
“I can’t do that, Uncle Johnny. Mama wouldn’t let me.”
“She might. We could ask. Because I’m talking about good schools, Eloise. Put an emphasis on math and science and the arts, the stuff you like to do.”
Eloise frowned. “I can’t, Uncle Johnny. Mama wouldn’t let me stay away from her that long. And even if she did, I can’t leave her alone like that. And Bobby too. I promised him I was coming back.”
“Yeah, but your talent…I got so much more to teach you.”
She looked up from the empty bowl in front of her and smiled. “Next time, Uncle Johnny. I’ll come back.”
Johnny nodded. Next time. She’d come visit again and he’d make sure he was ready for it, would plan it all out in advance.