Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (29 page)

The food arrives just as he’s about to close the book that makes him out to be the jackassed-fool of all time.

“Mr. Elliot was very wise-very wise, don’t you think?” The waiter bobs his head in the direction of the open book.

Hoop can only give him a blank look and pretend interest in the skewered chicken, the flat blistered bread, and whatever’s in the other dish.

“The massive balloons to forbid flying paparazzi and the motor coaches to forbid wedding guest traffic jam,” the waiter says without seeming snooty or know-it-all and asks in the same tone of voice if another ale is desired.

Hoop walks back to the guest house as stirred up as he’s ever been. He’s still not convinced he wasn’t played for a fool when he handed over the wicked amount of money for pictures that proved almost nothing. He’s not quite ready to believe the waiter’s comments have any worth. And afterburn from the queer food he ate is getting in the way of resolving what’s true and what’s not. For a while he simply plods on, placing one foot in front of the other without thought. At the door to the guest house, he observes that although he may have been given a key by the Brown Indian waiter, he’s on his own when it comes to finding the lock it fits.

Upstairs, he empties the rucksack on the bed without looking at the contents. He doesn’t need to gaze on the lawyerwoman’s girlhood diary to feel its strength and the spur it gives to his purpose. He doesn’t need to count what’s left of the cash supply; he can tell by heft there’s more than enough to see him through—even if he does make wrongheaded purchases now and then.

Most of all, he doesn’t need to make a review of the
Authentic Photographic Record of the Elliot-Chandler Nuptials
. Not now. Not when he might be better off making comparisons and digging through them for meaning.

While a cow-worshipping Indian’s not much like a Chink, isn’t there a sameness to again taking a foreigner’s word for something? And shouldn’t something be made of his again being seen as other than a Red Indian? Until his American way of talking gave him away, didn’t those tandoori people think he was one of their own? When he harks back to having passed as a Mexican in the eyes of the California Mexicans, as a South American in Gibby Lester’s New York eyes, and a Cuban escapee in the eyes of the crazy old New Jersey woman, is it any wonder he’s starting to believe history’s repeating itself?

Content with that scant progress for now, Hoop stores everything away for the night and gets ready for bed. He doesn’t expect to sleep long or well, but he’s at least got something fresh to read if need be.

At what he estimates to be the darkest hour—the one right before dawn—Hoop comes wide awake with the obvious. So obvious it’s like having walked past a sporting goods store without recognizing the need for a bicycle and camping gear. He jumps out of bed in the pitch dark, as heartened as he’s been since he made it through all those airport barriers.

He switches on a light to see his way into the bathroom, makes quick work of the morning duties and skips shaving his head for the third day in a row. He’s dressed and ready to go while daylight’s still only a suspicion behind the shaded and curtained windows.

Although breakfast won’t be served for a good while, he grabs up the rucksack and heads downstairs. In the lounge, as they call the sitting room, he turns on a floor lamp and goes for the phone book he saw here on another occasion. He settles in a sagged easy chair to find out that the listings for churches in and around Middlestone, Kent, fill more than one page. There must be dozens. Even if he had pencil and paper, he wouldn’t be willing to copy them all down, so he does what Hoople Jakeway would do—checks that no one’s watching and tears the pages out of the directory.

Next, he looks up places that rent out buses for special affairs and finds what he’s looking for under “coaches for hire” with several outfits to choose from. After that, he tries for hot-air balloons and is again dumbfounded by the number of listings—not in the dozens, but a lot more than expected. He tears these pages out as well, and crams them with the others into the rucksack.

Primed and ready to ride, he’s still got twenty minutes till breakfast is served. He fills the wait by matching a sampling of church addresses to map quadrants in order to come up with a starting point. What a daunting task this will become if he has to do this with each and every church on the list before finding the right one. And finding the right one is no guarantee it’ll point him straight at the rock star’s great stately home.

By entertaining these dark thoughts, he tempts a failure of nerve and purpose that could ruin everything. For a calmative, he takes out the wedding album and drills his unblinking gaze on the picture of the ancient church till he can see it on the insides of his eyelids when he shuts them.

At seven in the morning, six minutes after official sunrise, too stirred up to eat the breakfast he waited for, Hoop pedals out of the guest house parking lot in the direction of the hospital visited on his first trip to Middlestone. Three of the churches checkmarked for eyeballing this morning are on this route and he must have seen all of them during the taxicab ride out from the town center that day. But they didn’t matter then and it doesn’t look like they’re going to matter now.

He slows to pass one that’s too big to fit the image, and a mile or so later, to eye another that’s too new. The third one he comes to isn’t right either, but the clusters of people going into it make him realize this is Sunday, that if he wears out on the task at hand he won’t have any options. At least not till tomorrow when the bus and balloon companies will be open for business.

By nine o’clock, he’s eliminated three more prospects and wouldn’t mind finding a place to get something to eat and drink. He should have provisioned himself before starting out, another realization that comes too late to do anything about, so he pedals on, now on the watch for an eatery as well as the next map coordinate.

Seventeen churches of varying sizes and ages are crossed off the list when noon arrives with still no sign of a place to eat. At the first opportunity, he veers from the mapped-out route and takes his chances on an unnamed road. He hasn’t gone far before he sees a weathered sign advising of a village up ahead. Another sign boasts that archeological sites can be found nearby. He’d rather see a sign for a Blimpie Sub Shop. He’d content himself with a tandoori if need be. He’s even ready to eat mushy peas if he has to. On the outskirts of the village, he’s relieved to spot a picture board in front of a public house with a straw roof. The picture is of a black swan, fittingly enough, and a sticker on the door says cyclists are welcome.

Inside, they serve him what they call a plowman’s lunch made up of a bread bun, cheese, pickle relish, and hardboiled egg, with an apple and grapes on the side. This sits exactly right. The Coca-Cola they provide isn’t cold and they don’t offer ice, but it nevertheless hits the spot. The barman’s talkative, asking what brings him to this part of Kent. Without saying why, Hoop answers truthfully that he’s interested in old churches. He could say he’s also interested in great stately homes and local celebrities, but that could make him memorable.

He drinks another Coke before he leaves and takes an extra for the road. He’s glad for the extra when the terrain takes on some roll; he’s glad for a bike with gears when the roll becomes actual hills. As the afternoon wears on, he gets back on course after a long roadside stop to again match up church addresses and map quadrants. Now he’s on the lookout for the village of Harking. According to the map, it’s bordered by a Woodland Trust Estate—as they call their forest preserves—so it shouldn’t be hard to find.

But he must have a ways to go yet because well-tended farms fill the view in every direction. Some are fruit farms with low-growing trees spaced out in even rows as far as the eye can see; others are planted with cereal grains and plots of root vegetables. He can only guess that the farms with vines trained to unheard of heights on frames taller than a man’s head are growing some foreign kind of pole beans. Maybe that’s what they store in the queer-shaped silos that interrupt the landscape in two’s and three’s.

When forestland finally comes in sight, he’s on close watch for a signpost reading “Wheelwright Road” that will tell him he’s going the right way and has only a few more miles to go before reaching the next church—St. Margaret’s, according to the crumpled sheet from the phone book. He passes two crossroads without signposts of any kind and covers a lot of ground without seeing anything but trees and long runs of stone fencing. By his own estimation, he’s gone either too far or missed an uncharted turn somewhere. The burial ground he comes to looks like as good a place as any to stop and get his bearings.

He crests the moderate rise that gives entrance to the cemetery and enters through a high arched gate. He walks the bike along the narrow graveled road, not because the grounds are all that hilly, but because he sees a couple of gravediggers across the way that might look on cycling among the dead as disrespectful. For the same reason, he resists sitting on any of the larger grave markers or the many that are toppled by age and instead pushes the bike over to the stone wall bordering the grounds. The wall is like all the others seen today—made of stones fitted together without mortar—but it’s sturdy enough to sit on once he’s stretched his legs and worked the worst cricks out of his back.

Deep into map reading when a shadow falls over him, he looks up to see the owner of the shadow is carrying a spade-ended shovel. For a split second Hoop flinches the way he did when the lawyerwoman swung at him with a garden tool.

“Ya one a them blokes ’at fancy grave rubbings?” the gravedigger says and sits down without being asked. “This is the new section yer in, the prized stones are down below, close by the church, they are,” he says, letting the shovel drop to one side.

“What church?” Hoop says while wondering if grave rubbings are anything like grave robbings.

“The one just there, over the hill, St Margaret’s. Innit the one yer lookin’ for?” The gravedigger stabs at Hoop’s open map with a blackened finger.

“Yeah. Right. St. Margaret’s. Over the hill.” Hoop wants to stand up or at least stretch to see if there really is a church hiding behind the next crest, but he already looks dumb enough.

The gravedigger fills and lights a tobacco pipe, then goes on talking like he’s being egged on. Bellyaches about working on a Sunday even though it’ll bring extra pay in his envelope; bellyaches even more about a broken backhoe; bellyaches most of all about the those wanting two graves dug on short notice for folks that’re long-dead.

That makes even less sense than grave rubbings. “Two graves?” Hoop says of this fresh confusion while trying to understand what’s meant by long-dead.

The gravedigger chimneys out a plume of smoke and says, “You’d think, wouldn’t ya, they coulda held off till the backhoe’s workin’ again. I ask ya now, what’s another day when it’s already took this long gettin’ the job done? But no, it is. Won’t hear of delay. Not after goin’ ta the trouble and cost a flyin’ a pair a stiffs over from America. And innit just like a high ’n’ mighty pop star, always wantin’ others ta kowtow.”

“
What
pop star?” Hoop says without knowing if pop star is the same as rock star or what kowtow means.

“Don’t know as I can say. Don’t pay mind to that kind ’less I have ta—such as now—but I may’ve heard my mate say it’s the same one ’at tied the knot here. A few weeks gone, that was, and wasn’t
that
ruckus hard ta ignore what with fancy motor coaches blockin’ the roads and them massive balloons clutterin’ the skies.”

“When
is
the burial?”

“I won’t be the one fillin’ in the grave holes so I can’t say the hour, but I do know it’s tomorrow. Monday. Why else would I be workin’ of a Sunday?”

Hoop makes a big show of folding the map and stowing it in the rucksack. This keeps the gravedigger from seeing that his hands are shaking. Pulling his cap lower over his eyes keeps the gravedigger from seeing the sweat that’s about to stream off his shorn head and drip from his eyeglasses.

The gravedigger advises him to get cracking if he’s going to complete his grave rubbings before the weather comes down. This draws attention to a darkening sky that might not have been noticed otherwise.

“Off you go, then.” The gravedigger slaps the rear fender of the bike as he would the flank of a horse and sends Hoop in the direction of the church, where the best gravestones can be found. Where paydirt can be found if luck has finally come home to roost.

On the narrow graveled road he hesitated to ride on before, he tops the hill and looks down on a church unmistakable as the one in the picture committed to memory. On level with the church, he reads a sign that didn’t appear in the picture. “St Margaret’s Church-in-the-Vale,” it says and gives the founding date as fourteenth century making it ancient in anyone’s book. On the other side of the paved road fronting the church he positions himself where the photographer stood to take a picture that seems bargain-priced now that everything checks out.

Before leaving the area, he memorizes the view the way he did the picture. On the long ride back to Middlestone and the guest house, his head is so full of possibilities he hardly minds the heavy rain.