5

Have you ever wanted to die and couldn’t, and not dying was infinitely worse?

Welcome to my world. Between the ringing in my ears, the mother of all blinding headaches, and the road rash on my back and buttocks from sliding across five acres of asphalt before colliding cranium first into the steel grate of a storm drain, I was not feeling especially talkative.

The FBI agents were unsympathetic. How did you know there was a bomb in the backpack?

The feds must have threatened every hospital worker at Harborview Trauma Center with an extended stay in a Siberian gulag. On TV, a nurse always warns the law that there will be dire consequences if they take more than five minutes to question the eyewitness suffering a head injury. In real life, the nurses disappeared faster than really good banana bread and left your bandaged brains at the mercy of doctors Jekyll and Hyde and FBI agents Yip and Yap.

“The girl acted odd.” I delivered the words between a rasp and a whisper.

“Odd?” said the tall agent with the lazy eye. Special Agent Barnes, I think. Rumpled suit. Thinning hair. Six months and six paychecks from retirement.

Why was every FBI worker “special”?

I swallowed and winced, throat desert dry. “Instinct, I guess. Her eyes. Flooded with a mix of fear and dread…and, I don’t know, like she knew she was about to detonate.”

Shorter, gaunt, younger Special Agent Wu or Phu, I forget, studied me with distaste. “About to detonate? How would you know that? Do you have experience with explosives?” Trained in Advanced Skepticism, he looked this close to slapping me in cuffs and hauling my skinned backside to the aforementioned gulag.

“Can’t explain it.” I felt wearier than I’d ever felt. How could I tell this man about the voice that told me to grab that girl and take her backpack? Or the other voices and messages delivered by the Number 17 bus? He may suspect my slipping mental state, but did Agent Whatever want to hear about my life and how it had suddenly veered toward the irrational? So I kept it simple. “Better to err on the safe side,” I rasped.

It sounded lame, even to my addled senses.

Behind Wu’s thatch of coal-black hair, the yakking television, which no one had bothered to shut off, showed continuous “breaking news” of the anarchists and the attempted bus bombing in Seattle’s downtown core. A shot of me being placed on a gurney was quickly replaced with what had to be a vintage high-school-yearbook photo. Buck teeth. Zitty chin. Awkward, ill-fitting suit. Where in the universe had they dug that up?

Over the chaos, a female reporter stared down the camera, the bomb-blasted Number 17 with its broken windows in the background, and shouted into a microphone, “He is James Riley Carter of the Belltown Neighborhood, a widower and retired dockworker who is today being hailed as a hero for his quick action in saving the lives of the fourteen other people on this Metro bus, and countless other innocent pedestrians on the street. Just moments ago, the mayor told KOMO 4 reporter, Jeff Hodges, that the irony should be lost on no one that the lives saved include those of the anarchists who have vowed to bring the city to its knees for hosting the World Bank Summit.”

“Is that what you are, Mr. Carter, a hero?” Agent Barnes barked the last word, much as if he’d sworn.

I didn’t have the strength to shake my head. “I was a lucky schlub. Don’t know what else to tell you. You might want to let them know, in the interest of accuracy, that I was a warehouseman for a marine-supplies company, not a dockworker.”

Both agents looked in need of antacids.

“One more thing, Mr. Carter. The girl. Her name’s Patty Newfeldt. Works at the Westlake Food Court. Mom’s an administrator with the county. Dad’s an accountant in the Columbia Tower. Only political aspirations among the Newfeldts were when Patty ran for junior-class president and lost. She was pulled into an alley at gunpoint on her way to work today. The guy was wearing a balaclava—he looked similar to the anarchist crazies on TV, only eyes and the bridge of his nose showing—and told her to wear that backpack onto a city bus or her parents would be shot and their bodies dumped in Elliott Bay. Nice, huh? He knew the exact addresses where Mom and Dad worked, his people were already in place, and he said he might even take out a few Newfeldt coworkers if he felt like it. He had some kind of walkie-talkie and periodically checked in with what sounded like the marchers—lots of hate-filled chanting and the like. He showed her the bomb, the digital timing device, the whole yellow-wire/red-wire scenario, then cinched her into that backpack and stood at the bottom of the steps, gun concealed inside a sleeve, until she stepped up and disappeared inside the bus you were on.”

Barnes at last picked up the remote and silenced the television.

The medication was wearing off. The throb in my brain intensified. The rumpled agent thought a moment, then drilled into my head with accusing eyes. “Then she said something really strange, Mr. Carter. She said that in her panic and terror, she prayed like a madwoman for deliverance. A rescuer. A miracle. Were you that miracle, Mr. Carter?”

With a deep sigh, I closed my eyelids against the light, the pain, the nightmare. Five beats of the wall-mounted clock passed before I opened them again and gave the FBI man a lopsided frown. I carefully cleared my throat. “Do I look like a miracle to you?”

~*~

They told me that someone matching Greta’s description came by to visit Tuesday evening.

I was napping in my hospital bed and she left a bouquet of white and yellow daisies. The card read: “My boyfriend says it would be an honor and a privilege to marry me once the truck is paid off. Thanks and don’t croak.—G.”

For the rest of the week, I hid out at The Antique Trunk, about a block from the apartment. The Trunk was a musty, dusty catchall located in the basement of the old Elks Lodge. Upstairs, everything being gentrified into condo living; downstairs, glorified junk in every dusty corner and hung from every overhead beam. There were no fancy antiques, although once in a great while something of modest value showed up. Ruthie found a pair of Victorian earrings worth a couple hundred and I snared Barry Manilow’s first record album, a self-titled vinyl that contained our favorite love song, “Could It Be Magic,” which I modified to have Ruthie’s name instead of the girl’s actual name in the song.

Oh, how I wish you were with me now, Ruthie. You’d have the answers where I am incapable of finding any.

In her absence, I do not pray for answers from another source. I do not enjoy the thought that God needs to get my attention by leaving notes on a bus or nearly killing me with a bomb. And a couple dozen other people in the bargain.

Or that He tore my Ruthie from my arms when He did. We had a lot of good years ahead of us and we were good together. Blazing good. We were Santa and Mrs. Claus the Christmas before she died. We gave out the presents to the homeless kids in the morning and rocked and held a mess of them in the afternoon. Ruthie was Mom to all the little ones, and God said I could have her only this long and no longer. “Don’t ask Me why. I’m sovereign. Stop asking. Stop.”

And forgive the redundancy, but how did I know the source of my quandary was divine? Hadn’t evil recently visited Third and University? Randomly selected innocent people for elimination? Struck without a whiff of care for lives, loves, plans, hopes, the present, or the future?

Maybe evil delivered messages by bus.

I moved among the narrow pathways that passed for aisles at The Antique Trunk. What were all the screws and bolts and nuts doing here? Did this three-quarter-inch woodscrew once belong to Louis XIV? How about that hand-painted broom and dustpan? Was there still a trace of castle dust from Marie Antoinette’s private chambers caught in the cleaning set’s joints and bristles?

Chase Lafferty was in charge of this little shop of questions. He waved from behind a glass counter filled with wooden toys and sock puppets.

I slowly doffed an imaginary cap. It still hurt to make sudden moves. “Any marionettes come in, shop-keep?”

Chase took a swipe at the glass top with a polishing rag. “Nawh, but Old Lady Estelle’s estate is sending a roomful of old toys next week. I hear tell there’s a rocking horse that’s more’n a century old.”

“Call me first? I’d like a look before it gets picked over.” Kids Safari could use all the toys it could get.

“Sure thing.” Chase looked around conspiratorially, as if he had a shopful of prying ears. “But I thought you were a mite busy with media interviews and such. Folks want to know about their caped crusader.”

“Let ’em wonder.” I fingered the contents of a bucket of foreign coins. “Get any gold doubloons lately?”

Chase buffed his watch with the rag. “Heh, that’ll be the day, Mr. Change the Subject. Seriously, Jim, you’ve got to satisfy people’s curiosity.”

I took a Moroccan dirham and a Norwegian krone over to the counter. Some kid with a coin collection would be mesmerized by them. I liked to spin a good tale of intrigue and fable to go with the small gift of a coin or two. “Just because you run a curio shop, my friend, does not mean I have to dance for the six o’clock news. I didn’t ask for the spotlight. Ignore it and it dies down. Feed it and it poops on your lawn.”

Chase raised one bushy white eyebrow at the non sequitur. “But you told me about it.”

“Only because you already know me, and I swore you to secrecy. Keep your nose clean and I might publish my memoirs.”

“When?”

“To be released the day they shovel me into the ground.”

“That’s what I figured. Jim?”

“Yes?”

“How did you know about the bomb in the backpack?”

Since the attempted bombing, that was the thousandth time I’d been asked that question, and for seven hundred and fifty of them, I’d done the asking. “I don’t know, Chase. How does a cat that’s lost two hundred miles from home find its way back? How do twins read each other’s minds? How does a magician make a woman disappear on stage and reappear a moment later in the top balcony?”

Chase’s grizzled face said it all. He knew I was deflecting his question, stalling for time. Hoping he would forget the whole thing. And he knew that I knew that he knew I was running from an answer I did not want to hear.

“I’m sorry, Chase, but you’ll get a lot further asking that question of someone wiser than I. God took my answers when He took my Ruthie. Perhaps one day the curtain will be pulled back and we will know even as we are known. I’m just not sure I want to be there for the big reveal.”

The old man looked as forlorn as I’d ever seen him. I took out my checkbook. He waved it away. “The coins are on the house, Jim, and so is this piece of advice. The answers to my question and yours will only be found on your knees. Instead of running from them, why don’t you try running to them?”

Before I started getting messages from Chase, I took my coins and left. A cracked skull or no cracked skull, it was amazing how fast a person could move when he wanted to.