We arrived in Austin and drove immediately to the funeral home. It was located along in the suburbs off of a road called Capital of Texas Highway. I knew that we had arrived in the state where nothing is said in a small way. The funeral home was set back from the road and was nearly eclipsed by the sign for a gentleman’s club called The Landing Strip. We pulled into the funeral home and got out of the car. The building was aging stucco and the entrance smelled a little bit like flowers. It was also still very hot.
“Can I help you?” a young woman asked from behind a counter.
The placard in front of her suggested her name was Lesley. She had short blonde-brown hair, wore glasses and had a bit of a crooked smile. She was probably in her mid-twenties.
“Hello Lesley,” I said in a hushed voice. “My name is Theo and this is Polly. I have a question about a body that was sent here three years ago.”
“Not another one of you,” Lesley responded in nearly a shout.
“This happens a lot?”
“No, I was kidding.”
“Oh.”
“Your request is just so far from the realm of what I can possible fulfill and in so many ways, that I thought that I’d make a joke.”
“It was good. But seriously this is important to me.”
Then suddenly Polly was talking. “The man was a dear friend of ours. His name was Morton Petes. It’s a sad story of the way that he died, really. He was campaigning for the big progressive human rights political candidate in Boston, when he slipped and fell into a gas tank.”
“What?” I don’t remember if it was Lesley or me that asked it.
“Yeah. The tank was manufactured by one of the greedy big-money meat-eating oil companies from Houston.”
“Oh, I hate those Houston oil companies,” Lesley said wide-eyed.
“Huh, I didn’t realize that Austin folks had any bias against the rest of the state.” But, of course, surprisingly and wonderfully she was lying.
“I have to take a smoke break. You two want to come?”
We followed Lesley outside and she slapped a new pack of cigarettes against her palm several times. Then she opened the cellophane and pulled three cigarettes out of the pack and placed them back in the box backward.
“It’s for luck,” she said looking up at us. “Look. I know that your story is bullshit, but I am about ready to quit this job, I’m a writer and all I do is fill my notebooks with beautiful fiction as I sit behind that counter, no one respects me or the poor people that come in here, I hate it, so at this point it’s quit or go back to Alabama. Tell me the truth and I’ll see what I can do.”
We looked at the girl with open mouths and then we told her the truth. An hour later she met us at the side door of the building with a folder.
“He was cremated. There was a special request on the folder that said that only the family member could open the casket.”
“How does the cremation work?”
“The family member goes into the room and then the casket goes into the flame chamber. It’s a whole lot better than getting pumped full of chemicals and preserved like some sort of ego-starved Lenin corpse.”
“So, technically, the box didn’t have to contain a body?”
“Technically, with these special instruction, it could have contained eggplants.”
“And what was the name of the family member?”
“Hold on, let me get my stuff.”
Lesley disappeared back into the building. Then she reappeared at the front door with her purse, a box and an extended middle finger toward the building.
“P. Jacobs. Kensington St. That’s all it said. Could y’all give me a ride in to town?”
We dropped off Lesley at her apartment and then looked for a hotel. I don’t even want to talk about the bed situation. I have somehow become a prude. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Or maybe I do, but I am ignoring it for now.
The next day we checked local records at the library and courthouse, but couldn’t find a P. Jacobs. I took some aspirin for the ringing in my ears. Barring any other leads, we headed to Kensington St. and looked for a friendly face to ask some odd questions. As I got out of the car, I nearly fell down. My head was spinning in the red glow of my pattern sense. I shook off the feeling and got out of the car. We looked around the neighborhood of smallish one family homes for some time before we saw a man working on his van.
“Hello, sir, we are looking for our friend. It’s been a long time, and the only thing that we know is that he lived on this street.” I was a bit nervous with my newly acquired ease with lying and the lameness of my claim.
“Howdy, my name’s Bruce,” the man extended his hand and delivered a firm handshake.
“Hi, I’m Theo and this is Polly.”
“Nice to meet y’all. Now what was your friend’s name?”
“Well, it’s funny, but we always called him ‘P’, didn’t we Polly?”
“I used to call him ‘honey’ or sometimes ‘sweet-daddy,’ but yes, I also called him ‘P’. P. Jacobs.”
The girl took unpredictability to new levels and I, despite my hatred for human repetition, was surprised to find myself nervous, rather than thrilled by it lately.
“Thanks Polly,”
“There was a Jacobs fellow that lived near the end of the street. Down in 1217. The thing about Jacobs, before he committed suicide, that is, was that he rarely cut his grass. Our neighborhood association had a bit of an issue with that.”
The ringing in my ears moved to a higher pitch.
“Did you say he committed suicide?” Polly asked.
“Yeah. I’m sorry, I know that he was your friend. It must be coming as a shock to you that he shot himself. He was a quiet fellow.”
My sound in my head grew to drown out everything sound, and then, I passed out.
I awoke in our hotel room and Polly was looking at me with serious eyes.
“Are you OK, Theo?”
“My head is killing me, but yeah.”
“You fainted. That Bruce fellow helped get you in the car and then I drove back here. I’m amazed that I got you into the room by myself.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve had these headaches since we got to Texas and I’ve had this ringing in my ears.”
“Did this start after your nightmare in Tucson?”
“I didn’t think that you knew about that.”
“You talk in your sleepy, buddy-boy.”
I slid my legs over the side of the bed and sat on the edge of it. My sense of pattern started to engage. My vision became colored in red. I knew that I was close to a pattern and solution, but what it was, I couldn’t say. I knew that I needed to go back to Kensington St. to learn more. Polly reluctantly agreed.
“I’m caught up in this too, you know. Let’s see where it leads.”
It was dark when Polly pulled the Mustang up to the house that Bruce had indicated. It was weird to be a passenger in my car, and she drove as randomly as I would have guessed. The ringing in my ears had not lessened despite the half bottle of aspirin that I’d consumed, but I got out of the car and looked at the abandoned house. I grabbed a flashlight from the trunk of the car. The old house was dark but bathed in a red glow as my senses tried desperately to solve what seemed to be a looming pattern.
The home had green and red trim and was painted a white that had grayed and peeled over years of neglect and could no longer we described as white. Assuming that the front door was locked, we went to the side door and discovered that it gave with a few shoves. I looked at Polly who was also bathed in the red light of my perception. She nodded and I pushed the door and entered.
The apartment smelled of cat urine and mildew and the linoleum of the floor seemed to shift beneath my feet. The place had only four rooms. We walked through the kitchen. A brown fluid lay in a half-moon arc in the bottom of the bowls in the neglected sink.
“The bedroom,” I said.
In the bedroom, the mattress had been pushed against a wall. The middle of the room lay empty of furniture and the gray wood slats of the floor creaked beneath our feet. My head continued to ring, but my pattern sense felt as if it were finally approaching clarity.
“This is where he did it.”
“Killed himself?”
I nodded.
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
There were no signs of blood on the walls, but a painting hung behind where the bed had probably sat. It was covered with dust and I ignored the print that was on it, I would know what it showed soon enough.
I made my way to the front room of the apartment. The sense of pattern completion was nearly overwhelming. The room glowed in bright red. I looked out the front door windows. This was what P. Jacobs saw as he looked out into the world. This was the view of another suicidal man. Why did he do it? What made him want to join the other on the list that we were accumulating?
Then my foot turned on something beneath it. A piece of paper was on the floor near the mail slot. It was old mail. It had probably arrived after his death with the endless insistence of the postal service. I reached down and picked up a post card that read “Texas Roller Girls” on it. I spun the card in my hand like a sign spinner. Then I stopped and looked down at it. I saw the name that it was addressed to and then the pattern was complete. P. Jacobs was Peter Jacobs.
Morton Petes - Peter Jacobs - Jacob Phillips
Morton
Petes - Peter
Jacobs - Jacob
Phillips
The pattern. A cat called linc. The names were links in a chain.
I gasped. I finally knew something that had been true all along. Still, though, I lacked a sense of why the pattern was there. The red glow faded, as my senses were finished, but the ringing in my ears went on. I stumbled back to the kitchen and rummaged through the drawers, pulling them from their slots and throwing their contents to the floor. Silverware scattered across the dark floor in a rain of noise. Polly shouted.
“What is it Theo? What is it?” I didn’t answer. I wouldn’t speak to her again until later that evening.
Finally, above the sink, I found a copy of the Austin Yellow Pages and I flipped through it until I found the address that I needed. I tore the page from the book and bolted through the door and back into the night. I ran to the car and Polly chased behind me. If she hadn’t arrived in time, I’m not sure that I would have waited for her. I punched the car into gear and raced down the street, banking turns hard as Polly shouted.
“Where are we going, Theo? What did you find?”
I just drove. After a few minutes of this, Polly eventually stopped asking. I pulled out my cell phone and placed a call to a person that I hadn’t ever really expect to call. It was to Boise Idaho, and a man named Shawn. He was the ballistics expert whom I’d talked to over a month ago.
“Shawn, my name is Theo. We met in a diner in Boise a few months ago. We talked about guns and ballistics. Tell me, Shawn, what would the blood splatter from a suicide caused by a self-inflicted gun shot look like?”
I listened as he explained.
I drove across Austin, making sharp turns and at one point throwing a hubcap into a nearby river bed. Finally I reached my destination, the Austin County Medical Examiner’s office. I grabbed a spare t-shirt and the tire iron from the trunk of the car and marched to the side of the office building. It was bathed in phosphorescent gold light and I saw my own reflection in the mirror, my eyes shone with newly possessed madness. My ears still rang, but he red glow around me was gone. The pattern was solved, I just needed to know what it meant. I watched my own reflection wrap the t-shirt around the tire iron and then watched it smash the glass of the door until it broke. Then I was in the building and Polly was following behind me.
I found the office of the medical examiner and switched on his computer. I quickly discover the database of the deceased for the county and the associated photographic files. These files included the crime scene photos of any death if it had been an unnatural one. In short, murders, accidents and suicides. I typed the name “Peter Jacobs” into the search program and then pressed ENTER. His records came up on the screen. I found the photos showing the room I just left across town. Sprawled across the bed was a dead man with a splatter of blood coming from his head and with a gun in his hand. I flipped to the next picture which was a close-up of the head, and there with a look of anguish on his face, was Morton Petes. I flipped back to the previous photo. The splatter of blood arced across the bed. It arced in a way that didn’t match what Shawn had told me. It wasn’t right. He’d made a mistake. I turned to Polly and finally spoke in a voice more angry than I knew I could sound.
“Peter Jacobs never died. Neither did Jacob Phillips. They are the same person. They are all Morton Petes and they are all still alive. In fact, now he’s calling himself Phillip.”
To make things simpler, Phil (now Morton) had made a list. The process was complex and each step was important, so a list was a good idea. He had completed all of the items up to number four.
1) Practice answering to new name. ----- done
2) Death record @ morgue. ----- done
3) Get photos ready. ----- done
Number four required access to the police records, that could take some time, but he was in no hurry. He could skip to number six and begin packing, and so he had. Now all of his possessions were in three boxes in the corner of the room. He looked at the list and realized that he had not filled in one entry: Next of kin. He spun his pencil around his finger, again and again it spun as he considered. Then, he looked up at the painting on his wall and took the blue pen from his desk and wrote the name Morton Petes.
"Hello Morton," he said to the mirror.
"Oh, hello there Phillip, funny, I'd heard you'd died."
0 comments:
Post a Comment