16
“Are you all right, Fletch?”
With the ringing in his ears, his still-blurred vision, Fletch had not heard or seen Carrie approach.
“Like a coconut,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I got hit on the head.”
“By what?”
“A bowling ball.”
“You’re not making much sense,” Carrie said. “Your eyes are glassy.”
“I came across Joe Rogers in the woods,” Fletch said. “I thought I needed to confirm what Jack said about him. Joe was a friend.”
“Looks like you confirmed the worst.”
“I did.”
“Poor Francie. I expect she has no idea of this at all, at all.” Carrie’s eyes scanned the dark woods. “Where’s Joe now?”
“Taking a nap.” Fletch jerked his thumb toward a place in the woods not far behind them. “I knocked him out.”
“You knocked the sheriff unconscious?” Carrie’s giggle sounded a little nervous.
“He’ll be snoozin’ a little while.” Fletch fingered the lumps on his head. “How we protect ourselves from the law once we leave here I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Can we leave now?”
“No.” Fletch rubbed what parts of his head did not hurt too much, to encourage the blood to course. “I can’t drive. I can’t see very well. I can’t even walk yet. Sit down. Give me a few minutes. Then we’ll go.”
“Poor Fletch.” Still glancing nervously into the woods, Carrie sat on the ground beside him. She took his hand. “Anything I can do for you?”
“Yeah,” Fletch said. “Don’t sing ‘Rocky Top’ just now.”
She said, “Not to that stupid music.”
Fletch tried to focus, concentrate on what was happening in the middle of the campground.
The men generally were moving in circles around the bonfire, some clockwise, some counterclockwise. They reminded Fletch of young people in Spain, boys and girls, walking around a town plaza, a paseo, scrutinizing each other without looking directly at each other, while hoping themselves to be admired.
Those who had been marching in place began to move forward around the bonfire. Some marched quickly, pretending they had marshal’s batons, others shouldered rifles. As they did so, their arms flashed out at each other. In what could have been seen as friendly gestures, they slapped the backs of the heads, the shoulders of those they passed. But they were hard slaps.
Fletch winced at every slap to the head he saw.
The “dancing” was turning violent.
The men seemed to be enjoying themselves, their violence.
Most had taken off their shirts. Their sweating chests, backs gleamed in the moonlight, firelight.
At first, circling the bonfire slowly, they cuffed each other’s heads, shoulders with the palms of their hands. Then, bare-chested, they began to bump into each other full-bodied, laugh, go on to bump into someone else even harder. A few got knocked down. It seemed a playful, primitive, silly game. They butted heads. A few faces became bloody. They ran up behind each other and kicked each other, hard. One older man, personally affronted, broke his bottle over a boy’s head, sending him sideways onto the ground. Some paired off and began wrestling on the ground, freestyle, not according to any rules, just clutching each other, bringing each other down, rolling together over the vomit.
All this to blaring march music.
Also watching the “dancing,” Carrie said, “What fun. Does this come under the heading ‘Boys Will Be Boys?”
Fletch said, “Just Saturday night at the ol’ campground.”
Leary was in his element. Laughing insanely, he ran around, bumped people, butted people, punched them directly in their faces.
Fletch said, “I don’t know how that guy is still standing up.”
Just then someone ran up behind Leary and whacked him over the back of the head with a board.
With both hands, Fletch grabbed his own head.
Leary was totally unconscious when he fell.
“He isn’t,” Carrie said.
Some of the younger ones were trying to do something probably they had seen in movies, which did not work for them, not karate, not kick-boxing, just some ignorant, ungainly high kick aimed at each other’s throats, heads usually, which sent themselves into a facedown flop on the ground.
Watching them, focusing badly, still feeling nauseous, full consciousness coming and going, in his memory, Fletch heard Toninho say,
“Orlando … Give Fletch a demonstration of capoeira, of kick-dancing. You and Tito. Make it good. Kill each other.”
This memory came from long ago and far away.
In that memory, Fletch and Toninho were sitting by an uncleaned swimming pool outside a house of ill repute in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“Wake up,” Orlando said.
In a short moment, Tito and Orlando had the rhythm of it, had each other’s rhythm. Gracefully, viciously, rhythmically, as if to the beating of drums, with fantastic speed they were aiming kicks at each other’s heads, shoulders, stomachs, crotches, knees, each kick coming within a hair’s breadth of connecting, narrowly ducking, side-stepping each other, turning and swirling, their legs straight and their legs bent, their muscles tight and their muscles loose, their fronts and their backs flashing in the sunlight, the hair on their heads seeming to have to hurry to keep up with this frantic movement. With this fast, graceful dance, they could have killed each other easily.
Eva had come onto the porch to watch. Her eyes flashed. A few faces of other women appeared in the upper windows of the plantation house. Everyone loves the Tap Dancers…. They’re sleek.
“Remember…” Toninho was saying. “A skill developed by the young male slaves, in defense against their masters. They would practice at night, to drums, so if their masters came down from the big house, to look for a woman, they could pretend to be dancing. Thanks to—what is the word in English?—miscegenation, such skills ultimately were not needed….”
There was a loud Thwack! and Tito began to fall sideways. He had taken a hard blow to the head from the instep of Orlando’s foot. The blow could have been much, much harder. Tito did not fall completely.
“I told you to wake up,” Orlando said regretfully.
Recovering, Tito charged Orlando like a bull, right into his midriff. Orlando fell backward, Tito on top of him. Laughing, sweating, panting, they wrestled on the grass. At one point their bodies, their arms and legs, were in such a tight ball perhaps even they could not tell whose was whose.
Eva, moving like Time, went down to them.
Finally, Orlando was sitting on Tito and giving him pink belly, pounding Tito’s belly hard repeatedly with his fists. Tito was laughing so hard his stomach muscles were fully flexed and no harm was being done.
Standing over them, behind Orlando, Eva laced her fingers across Orlando’s forehead and pulled him backward, and down.
Kneeling over Tito as he was, sitting on him, bent backward now so that his own back was on the ground, or on Tito’s legs, Orlando looked up Eva’s thighs. His eyes rolled.
He jumped up and grabbed Eva’s hand.
Together Orlando and Eva ran down the grassy slope from the swimming pool and disappeared….
“Ugly, isn’t it?” a soft voice beside, above Fletch said.
Kriegel stood in the moon shadow of the trailer.
Both Carrie and Fletch looked up at him.
Even at that distance, the light flickering from the bonfire made the blue, saddle-shaped birthmark over Kriegel’s nose seem to come and go, appear, disappear.
Fletch said, “It’s not capoeira.”
Kriegel took a step to stand beside Fletch. “What’s that?”
“Kick-boxing,” Fletch said. “A skill, an art, a method of fighting developed by Brazilian slaves to defend themselves against their masters.”
“Black slaves?”
“Yes. Black slaves. It is very beautiful. It is very deadly.”
“Beautiful …?” Kriegel watched the men staggering around the lowering bonfire aiming blows at each other with their fists, with their feet.
By now several were unconscious on the ground. Most of those still standing were bleeding from their foreheads, noses, ears, mouths.
Fletch said, “I think your education regarding this hemisphere suffers, Doctor.”
Ignoring him, Kriegel said, “They are so stupid. They are all so stupid. I hope you know I realize how stupid these animals are, Mister Fletcher.”
“Animals? These aren’t the chosen people?”
“No. You are the chosen people, Mister Fletcher. All this I do for you.”
“Don’t bother.”
“Never judge a leader by his followers.”
“Do not judge me by these stupid, stupid people.”
“Why not?”
“We are just using these fools, these psychotics, toward an end.”
“‘Using’ them,” Fletch repeated.
“Of course. Using them. I wish I didn’t have to. There are many reasons you should be grateful, supportive toward my efforts.”
“Sorry, I never carry my checkbook.”
“Where would these psychotic fools be tonight, what would they be doing if they were not here bashing each other’s brains out?”
“Home baking cookies?”
“They have to belong to something, something bigger than they are, something secret, of which they can be secretly proud. By their natures, these fools are gang members. They are incapable, you see, of standing on their own, as individuals. We’re just taking advantage of their natures. We direct their energies. We organize them. They need the discipline we give them.”
Fletch almost choked. “Discipline!” He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. Not once had Kriegel looked directly down at Fletch, perceived Fletch’s condition. “You guys have a strange idea of discipline.”
“Yes,” Kriegel said. “Discipline. The discipline is in the secret. As long as they belong to us, they will restrain themselves in the world, keep the secret of their group power to themselves, only do in the world what we order, only commit the mayhem we demand. The discipline is in the belief we give them of our ultimate mission. They must save themselves for that, you see.”
Fletch stared through the firelight at the soft lines of Kriegel’s chest, narrow shoulders, chins.
Kriegel said, “I have nothing but contempt for these fools.”
He slouched away into the dark.
After Kriegel left, Carrie said, “I’m proud of you.”
“Why?”
“You didn’t let the ol’ fool know you’re incapacitated.”
“Right,” Fletch said. “Siegfried.”
JACK CAME AROUND the corner of the building. “I was looking for you both. What are you doing here?”
“Recovering,” Fletch answered.
Carrie said, “He ran into your Enforcer in the woods.”
“Your Chief of Internal Affairs,” Fletch said. “For some reason, he doesn’t believe I’m one of you. I forgot to pull the ‘Siegfried’ line on him.”
“I guess they fought,” Carrie said. “Fletch won.”
“He doesn’t look it,” Jack commented. “Where’s What’s-his-name now?”
“I hope he’s still suffering nightmares,” Fletch said. “Probably of black people taking over the world and making him pick cotton while singing in Hebrew.”
Carrie said to Jack, “Fletch is barely conscious himself.”
“I can tell.”
“I’ll be all right,” Fletch said. “We’ll go soon.”
Jack sat cross-legged on the grass with them. He did not lean his back against the cement blocks. He could see Fletch and Carrie and also the bonfire.
The outline of the hills around the encampment was clear in the moonlight.
Conversationally, Fletch said to Jack, “You know, this encampment is as indefensible as Sarajevo.”
Jack’s eyes scanned the hills. “I know. Pitiful. Almost none of these guys has any military training whatsoever.”
Fletch said, “That’s obvious.”
“About eighty-five percent of them have spent time in institutions, but they’ve been either prisons or mental institutions.”
“That scares me, sure enough,” Carrie said. “All these ignorant messes runnin’ around with machine guns and pistols, knives, steel-toed boots, chains and whips.”
“Like me,” Jack said. “Do I scare you?”
“Sure enough,” Carrie said softly.
Jack said, “That’s the point. You see?”
Fletch said, “Maybe I’m beginning to. Then again, I’m half-unconscious.
In a most conversational tone, Jack said to Fletch, “You mustn’t worry, you know. My mother is very indebted to you.”
“For what?” Fletch asked.
“Me.” Jack’s smiling face in the flickering firelight was a warm delight for Fletch to see. “I’m the light of her life.”
“Sure,” Carrie said. “I bet you are. You and her septic tank.”
Jack laughed. “I am.”
Fletch said, “Maybe.”
Jack said to him, “She thinks you hung the stars in the sky.”
“Why?”
“You made her life. Her career.”
“Hardly,” Fletch said.
“That story you gave her. The biggest scoop of her life. It established her.”
“I never gave your mother a story.”
“The story about the murder of the big newspaper publisher, Walter March, during that journalism convention at Hendricks’ Plantation. Because she had the story, she got the job at The Boston Star. That story won journalism prizes for her.”
“Your mother was more than capable of getting her own story, anytime, anywhere, about anything. And of winning her own prizes.”
“She said you gave the story to her. The whole thing. She scooped the world with it. She said she never could figure out how you put together that story, every detail, so well and so fast. Especially seeing it seemed to her you spent almost all your time at the resort in your hotel room.”
Fletch recalled the suitcase full of electronic listening devices he kept under his bed at Hendricks’ Plantation.
Jack chuckled. “Mother says you not only gave her a child, me, you arranged it for her so that she could afford to have the child, me. Support me well, educate me.”
“Your mother always loved to tell stories about me,” Fletch said. “Just because she tells a tale doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Jack Saunders says so, too: you got her that job at The Boston Star. From there her career soared.”
“You know Jack Saunders?”
Jack was a newspaper editor Fletch worked with for years.
“Sure.”
“How?”
“Mother and he still keep in touch. I told you: I spent some time in school in Boston. It’s only natural I should know him.”
Fletch had in mind several simple questions to ask. He asked none of them.
Instead, he said, “Jack’s retired now.”
“Yes. ‘Reluctantly retired and delightfully discontent,’ as he describes himself. He insists the fourth estate has slipped badly since it’s had to do without him.”
“He’s right. You ever hear him speak of his wife?”
“Oh, yes. I believe Mister Saunders has spent his best energies thinking up terrible, rude, hilarious things to say about her.”
“He has.”
“I know her, too,” Jack said. “They had me to dinner several times. She loves him truly, deeply, wonderfully.”
“Of course. And he loves her totally.”
“He says you were pretty good at your job, too.”
“He does?”
“Yeah.”
“He never told me that.”
“Sure,” Jack said. “He’s told me stories about you.”
“Everybody tells stories about me,” Fletch said.
“And none of them is true?”
“None of them,” Fletch answered. “Not one.”
They were silent a moment.
His head clearing, Fletch said: “I do believe this young man is trying to tell us something, Carrie.”
“Feeling better?” she asked.
“Yeah.” Slowly, Fletch stood up.
He stood still a moment, while dizziness cleared his head.
When his vision cleared, he saw that Jack and Carrie were both standing as well.
“Well,” Jack said, “I guess I’ll leave you here.”
“Come with us?” Fletch asked.
“No.” The answer was immediate and crisp.
Jack turned on his heel. Hands in the back pockets of his shorts, he walked away from them, back toward cabin headquarters.
Fletch and Carrie watched him go.
Carrie asked Fletch: “What do you know now you didn’t know before?”
Fletch said: “I know we’ve got to get the hell out of here. Right now.”