Mr. X (12 page)

“Probably not,” I said. “I left when I was a kid.”

“His name is Stewart Hatch. Tons of money. His family sort of runs Edgerton, from what I hear.”

“We didn’t move in those circles.”

“You should be grateful, but I’ll never understand why a guy with so much going for him would decide to turn into a crook.” She efficiently buttoned herself out of her pin-striped suit.

About a quarter to six in the morning, I jumped out of bed before I was fully awake. Nettie’s sixth sense was operating at full strength. The only thought in my head was that whatever was going to happen to my mother was rushing toward her, it was
already on the way
, and I had to get to Edgerton in a hurry. Still foggy, I fumbled around for my clothes and saw a naked woman on the disarranged sheets. One of her legs was drawn up, as if in midstride. Her name came back to me, and I put a hand on her shoulder. “Ashleigh, wake up, it’s time to go.”

She opened an eye. “Huh?”

“It’s almost six. Something’s happening, and I have to get to Edgerton, fast.”

“Oh, yeah. Edgerton.” She opened the other eye. “Goo’ morning.”

“I’m going to take the world’s fastest shower, change clothes, and check out. Should I come back here to get you?”

“Get me?” She smiled.

“You’re still willing to give me a ride?”

She rolled onto her back and stretched her arms. “Meet me outside. I’m sorry you had bad news.”

A speedy shower and shave; a scramble into clean khakis, a blue button-down shirt, a lightweight blue blazer, loafers. I was going to see all my relatives, and for Star’s sake as well as my own, I wanted to look respectable.

Hoping she would not make me wait more than twenty minutes, I carried my duffel and knapsack through the revolving door into the cool morning light and heard a female voice call my name. Across the parking lot, Ashleigh stood beside the open trunk of a blaze-red little car. She was wearing a trim navy blue
suit that showed off her legs, and she looked as if she’d had maybe twice the time most people need to look the way she did.

“Slowpoke,” she said.

She sailed down the nearly empty highway at a comfortable sixty-five, fiddling with the radio and letting the occasional trucker blast on by. Neither one of us knew quite what to say to each other. She found a university FM station playing a mixture of hard bop and Chicago blues and let the digital counter stay where it was. “Did you call the hospital before you woke me up?”

I said that I had not.

“But you told me something happened to your mother. You didn’t get a call in my room, did you? I mean, I don’t really care, but …”

But if you didn’t tell them you were in my room, how did they find you?

“I guess I had a premonition.” She shot me a sidelong look. “Maybe it was just anxiety. I don’t know. I wish I could explain it better.”

She glanced at me again. “I hope she’ll be all right.”

“I’m just glad you were there.”

“Well, I am, too,” she said. “I think you should probably go around the country giving hope to depressed women. And you were so tactful, you never made anything seem prearranged.”

“Prearranged?”

“Maybe not prearranged, but you know, from Chicago, with my law school friend, Mandy.”

A sign announcing the approach of a highway restaurant and gas station floated toward us. I said, “Why don’t we pull in there and get something to eat?”

The story emerged over breakfast. In the bar of a Chicago hotel, Mandy, the law school friend, had sent me a drink. When I left my chair to thank them, Mandy invited me to sit down. The conversation led to our various reasons for being in that hotel lobby on that particular evening, and I had mentioned that I was going to the southern part of the state late the next day and would probably spend the following night in another hotel. To Mandy’s chagrin, I had seemed more interested in Ashleigh Ashton than herself. Mandy knew that after working into the evening of the following day, Ashleigh would be driving south. She whisked her off to the bathroom and imparted worldly advice. Not long
after, Ashleigh had inserted the Motel Comfort into our conversation, and I had expressed the hope of returning the favor and buying her a drink in whatever passed for a bar in the place if I wound up there, too.

“I told Mandy you’d never show up, but she said, Go to the bar an hour or two after you check in, and he’ll find you. I wasn’t even sure it was you! In Chicago, you were wearing a suit, and here you had on jeans, but the more I looked at you, it
was
you. And you were so tactful, it was like you would have come anyhow, not just to meet me.”

“I didn’t think you needed any more pressure,” I said.

Apparently someone who looked a lot like me, a former Tulane teaching assistant named George Peters or the man for whom the woman in the old Denver airport had mistaken me, had been cruising the lobby of a Chicago hotel. No other rational explanation seemed possible. At the same time, the sheer unlikeliness of the coincidence prickled the hairs at the nape of my neck. If George Peters, or whatever his name was, had succeeded in setting up an assignation with Ashleigh, what had kept him from it?

For the rest of the drive, a caffeine-enhanced Ashleigh maintained a steady sixty-five miles per hour while describing the misdeeds of her scoundrel millionaire. I made accommodating noises and pretended to listen.

The sign at the first of the Edgerton exits read
EDGERTON ELLENDALE.
“Is this it?” she asked.

“The next one,” I said.

At the next sign,
EDGERTON CENTER,
she spun the little car off the highway. For a time we drove past hilly fields on a divided four-lane road and then, without transition, found ourselves in the wasteland of fast-food outlets, gas stations, motels, and strip malls at the fringes of most American cities. At the moment we passed a billboard welcoming us to
EDGERTON, THE CITY WITH A HEART OF GOLD,
the mild, sunlit air shimmered into a wavering veil like a heat mirage, then cleared again.

“I have time to take you to the hospital, if that’s where you want to go,” she said.

A stoplight turned red at an intersection bordered by two three-story red brick office buildings, a vacant lot, and a bar called The Nowhere Lounge. Below the street sign, a rectangular
green placard pointed the way to St. Ann’s Community Hospital. “I think that’s the place,” I said.

Four blocks later, she pulled up before the hospital entrance. I said, “Ashleigh …”

“Don’t. You won’t have time to see me. I hope your mother gets better. If you were going to ask where I’m staying, it’s Merchants Hotel, wherever that is.”

She stayed in the car while I took my bags from the trunk. I came up to kiss her goodbye.

At the information desk, a woman told me that there was no patient named Star Dunstan, but that Valerie Dunstan was in intensive care. She gave me a green plastic visitor’s card and told me to make a right past the coffee shop, take the elevator to the third floor, and follow the signs.

Numb with dread, I wandered through dingy hospital corridors until a nurse led me to a set of swinging doors and a plaque reading
INTENSIVE CARE UNIT.
I obeyed a sign hung over a basin and washed my hands, then pushed open another swinging door and carried my bags into a long, dimly lighted chamber lined with curtained-off cubicles around a brighter central station. From the counter in front of me, a nurse gave me the once-over a store detective aims at a potential shoplifter. Far down the length of the room Aunt Nettie and Aunt May were standing in front of one of the cubicles. They were heavier than I remembered them, and their hair had turned a pure, ethereal white.

The nurse rolled her chair a half inch nearer the counter and asked, “May I help you?” An instantaneous, nonverbal exchange made it clear that I was not going to take another step until her authority had been acknowledged. The name tag pinned to her loose green staff shirt read
L. ZWICK, R.N
.

“Dunstan,” I said. “Star Dunstan. Sorry, Valerie.”

The nurse bent her head to examine a clipboard. “Fifteen.”

Nettie was already surging toward me.

13
Mr.X

O Great Beings and Inhuman Ancestors!

Only days before the prison walls of the academy’s eighth grade were to close around me, I came to a break in the woods and an overgrown field extending toward a road I did not know. On both sides of the field, the woods swept toward the road. Between the top of the field and the curve of the woods was a three-fourths-crumbled building of brick and stone. In a rubble of stone blocks at its center, the monolith of a fireplace reared into the air. At its far end, another chimney and a fire-blackened wall supported the remnants of a shingled roof extending over the remaining portion of the house. Beyond, bare joists dangled above empty space. The instant I beheld these remains, the hook in my entrails nearly yanked me off my feet, and a voice from within or without boomed,
Come at last!
Something like that. It might’ve been,
You are here!
Anyhow, the mighty voice informed me that we were getting down to brass tacks.

I knew it was my duty to take a survey of my property, so to speak, before rushing in to stake claim, and I processed around the perimeter of the ruin, observing how weeds had thrust themselves up between the stones, how the fire had charred the scattered bricks to the shade of overdone toast, how swales in the earth marked the former cellars. I saw destruction continuing in the pull of gravity on rotting beams and the erosion of roof tiles. At the front of the building, roof-high courses of joined stone extended some twenty feet from the fireplace wall. Rectangular casings with deep sills marked the third- and second-story windows. Beneath them, at roughly the level of my chin, smooth, arched casements speckled with bird dung gazed out from what had been the parlor. I placed my trembling hands on a gritty sill and looked within.

Light streamed into a two-sided enclosure three stories high. Dusty particles filtered down to a cement floor littered with plaster, broken pipes, and charred timbers. Here and there, grass
struggled up through cracks in the cement. Paw prints dotted the thick, feather-strewn dust. On the other side stood the forest. I jumped, grabbed the far side of the sill with both hands, and squirmed forward until I could get my legs onto the flat stone. Then I lowered myself to the floor and entered my inheritance for the first time.

Or: my inheritance entered me.

You who read the words I here inscribe upon the pages of a Boorum & Pease record book or journal with the same dependable Mont Blanc fountain pen used in former days to draft my instructional missives to the world already know the significance of the ruined house to Your Great Race. It was within its sacred enclosure that the Great Old Ones imbued my early torments and humiliations with the salvific Splendor of Preparation. An Elder God spoke, and I learned All. His Voice was low, husky, confiding, weary with age-old authority, yet powerful, commanding. I heard some pleasure in there, too, for my Unearthly Father, whose True Identity I still knew not, was giving me the lowdown on the Mighty Task for which I had been placed upon this Earth. My Role came clear, my Nature given Explanation. Half-human, half-God, I was the Opener of the Way, and my Task was Annihilation. After me, the Apocalypse, the entry through a riven sky of my leathery, winged, beclawed, ravenous Ancestors the Elder Gods, the Destruction of mankind, Your long-awaited repossession of the earthly realm. I advanced through the rubble, added my rump’s outline to the footprints of passing animals and was
spoken to
. By reason of my own frailty I should be cursed in time with a traitorous shadow
it was my responsibility to eliminate
. (In the surprisingly congenial surroundings of the Fortress Military Academy, Owlsburg, PA, I was to hear more of this.) You Great Ones, my Fathers,
depended upon my efforts
. The mighty Voice said,
We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth
. I loved that phrase, it spoke to me of that inexorable devastation Given as my Sacred Task. I repeat it to myself, talismanically:
We are the smoke from the cannon’s mouth
. These words sustain me. I was told that my only significant pleasures should be found
in the accomplishment of my Task
. On the other hand, insignificant pleasures, precisely those of a sort most
appealing to a lad like myself, would not be denied. In the midst of the
endless sorrow
, a great deal of fun was in the offing.