Phantom of Riverside Park (8 page)

“What about you, thrashing around like a herd
of buffalo?”

The man they were following began to zigzag.
He was onto them, probably because of all the noise Fred was
making. Thomas knew he should have made him stay behind.

“Where’s he at?” Fred caught up to him,
red-faced.

“Over yonder. He’s tryin’ to lose us.”

“I’m too old for this.”

“Who asked you to come?”

“You’re not doing much better yourself, you
old buffalo.”

“Warthog.”

“Papa,” Nicky pulled at Thomas’ hand. “Mommy
said calling names is ugly.”

“Now see what you’ve done?”

“Me?” Fred Lollar puffed up like a frog.
“You’re the one started the argument.”

“Well, I don’t have time to finish it. I have
a job to do. Elizabeth’s countin’ on me.”

“Where’d the man go?” Fred said.

With a sinking feeling, Thomas realized he’d
lost him. And it was all Fred’s fault.

“How do I know? You were standin’ there
jabbering at me like a jaybird.”

“Me? You’re the one who took up the
fight.”

Nicky pulled on Thomas’s sleeve. “He went to
the toilet.”

“Do you want me to go smoke him out?” Fred
said.

“Nope. You might tip him off.”

Thomas glanced at the sun. Another hour and
Elizabeth would be at the park to fetch them. That gave them plenty
of time.

“We’ll just sit here and wait him out.”

o0o

David was not pleased by the news McKenzie
brought.

“You’re sure it was Thomas Jennings?”

“Positive.”

“I don’t have to ask how you lost them.”

The suit and tie were wadded in a bundle on
the floor. McKenzie was stretched out in an easy chair in shorts
and a tee shirt, dark hair rumpled, shoes kicked off, bare toes
wiggling.

David would never allow such informal
behavior from any of his other employees, but he would tolerate
almost anything from McKenzie for one reason, and one alone: his
sister would never betray him.

McKenzie giggled. “I imagine they’re still
out there waiting for a skinny man in a three-piece suit to come
out of the toilet.”

David went to the window and trained his
telescope toward the park. It didn’t take him long to find them,
two old men and a little boy, sitting dejectedly on a park bench
waiting for a man who would never appear.

“How long does it take for a whizz?” Thomas
said.

“I told you to let me go in and smoke him
out, but no, you’re so all-fired sure you know everything.”

“He must have skipped out, but how? There are
no windows in the toilet.”

“Maybe he’s Houdini.”

“That’s not funny. Elizabeth’s counting on me
to find him.”

That was all David needed to know. He shut
the blinds, then sat in the gloom.

“You won’t be going to the park for a while,”
he told his sister.

“I can use the friendly grandmother disguise,
or my favorite, the teenaged boy.”

Elizabeth Jennings was trying to find out his
identity. How many others had tried? And how long before one of
them succeeded? Maybe it was time to set up a foundation. He
probably should have done it long ago. He could still keep his
anonymity. What he would lose, though, would be the thin, frail
connection he had with the people below him in the park - his
lifeline.

“No,” he said. “Go back down to the farm,
McKenzie. I’ve kept you away from your animals too long.”

McKenzie’s animals were the sixteen cats and
ten dogs she claimed as her own as well as those who were her
patients. She was a vet, practicing on three thousand acres of
peaceful farmland in New Albany, Mississippi, a legacy to David and
McKenzie from their mother.

The farm was more than legacy, more than a
piece of land: it was a place of refuge, a place where peace could
seep into a man’s soul and make life more bearable.

Though their mother’s farm was now David’s
and McKenzie’s place of escape, it was the land of their father
that had nurtured their deep love of nature; it was in northeast
Tennessee where a body could look up from the steep sloping tobacco
fields into the face of a wild beauty that made the heart ache.

A pigtailed hellion running wild, McKenzie
used to bring home mangy stray dogs from Crackers Neck and Shouns,
and birds with broken wings from Iron Mountain, which rose up like
a benevolent giant behind their house, while David trailed along to
keep his sister from harm.

The year that changed their lives, she’d
brought home a hawk she’d found sitting as docile as a canary on an
outcropping of rocks high in Doe Mountain, which they could see
from their front porch. And though he looked like a perfectly
healthy bird, she swore he was dying of a broken heart. His mate
had been lying dead at the base of the rock.

Their father, Clint Lassiter, was not happy
that his willful daughter had brought home a hawk.

“It’s not natural for a hawk to be earth
bound. That bird’s an omen, Della Jean,” he’d said, and his wife,
still a maverick of Mississippi meadows and ancient shiny-leafed
magnolias, had teased him about his mountaineer superstitions.

The next day his tractor overturned and his
blood spilled over the rocky ridges he’d called home for
forty-seven years.

Della Jean oversaw the burning of her
husband’s bones then personally spread them over the land he loved
in spite of Baptist rumors that cremation was an invention of the
Methodists and she would go to hell a poppin’ for such
sacrilege.

Rumors had been swirling around Della Jean
ever since she came to visit a cousin during the height of the Bean
Festival and turned down an opportunity to be Mt. City’s Bean
Queen. Back then when Mt. City was still the bean capital of the U.
S. and women who could pick twenty bushels of bush beans in one day
thought there was nothing finer than wearing the bean crown, Della
Jean distinguished herself by refusing to even enter the
contest.

She’d always been stubborn as a mule, even at
seventeen, but that didn’t save Clint Lassiter. That’s the way the
locals put it about one of their favorite native sons: Della Jean
came to town and Clint was lost. He’d taken one look at her eating
beans and cornbread in Arney’s Grill and vowed he’d found the girl
he was going to marry.

He began his courtship on the spot, and two
days later when he proposed to her right on the street in front of
Muse’s Hardware, she said
yes.
Clint Lassiter took his
bride to Doe Valley where he commenced raising beans, tobacco, and
two children.

And though Della Jean had a life-long love
affair with the corner of northeast Mississippi where you could
walk right out the front door of her daddy’s feed and seed store
and be standing on the Tallahatchie River Bridge, she loved Clint
Lassiter more. They were never apart, working and laughing and
loving side by side until the day he died.

“Finally, she’ll go back home where she
belongs,” folks said about her then, not knowing how her attachment
to Clint extended beyond death and how she would stand on the spot
where his tractor had overturned every evening for the next nine
years and listen to his blood sing love songs to her from the
rocks, how she would stand there until the cancer made her so weak
all she could do was look out the window and say his name.

She told her children she wasn’t about to be
older than Clint when she finally rejoined him, and she’d died two
days short of her forty-seventh birthday. Nobody said anything
about the heathen aspects of cremation when her children spread
half her ashes over the high meadows where Clint still whispered in
the tall grasses and the Queen Anne’s Lace, and the other half over
the farm in New Albany she’d never ceased loving. They were too
stunned at their own grief. For over the years and unbeknownst to
them, the Mississippi girl they’d said would never fit in had
become one of them. The whole town turned out to bid farewell to
the woman who had driven through the town twenty years earlier
waving at everybody she saw in spite of the fact that not a single
soul waved back.

The day Della Jean died was the day the hawk
left.

The broad winged hawk McKenzie had found
grief-stricken on Doe Mountain had still been with them, the hawk
she’d loved back to life. Over the next nine years it followed her
like a surrogate father, flying in descending circles over her head
as she raced through Doe Valley on her bicycle or ran barefoot up
the steep slopes after the rhododendrons had faded and the sweet
summer grasses whiskered the face of the mountains.

McKenzie called him Solomon, because of his
wisdom she’d said, although she could never quite understand why he
refused all offers of freedom.

Her senior year in high school she’d talked
David into driving her to the lookout in Hawk Mountain,
Pennsylvania, where broad-winged hawks like Solomon could be seen
by the thousands in spectacular September migration.

“Fly away,” she’d said. “Find a nice lady
hawk to love.”

Solomon, aptly named, had answered her with
his thin un-hawk-like whistle and sat staunchly on her shoulder
where he would remain until Della Jean drew her last breath. Then
he rose up on his barred wings, circled the house once and soared
over the valley toward Doe Mountain, his mission at last
complete.

McKenzie never had another hawk, but she’d
learned her lesson from Solomon well. Now she was the one with a
mission.

The work she did for David was merely a
sideline, a labor of love she often told him, and he knew it was
true.

No one loved him as much as McKenzie. In
fact, no one loved him
except
McKenzie. He would never
have what his parents had. He would never know the joy of finding a
soul mate and loving her so much that the two of them could never
be parted, even in death.

And why should he? He was the one who had led
his men into that death trap in Iraq. Nine men went in and only one
came out. Macky Evans, about to become a father for the first time.
Dead. Jim Branch, living for the day he could return to Maine and
buy his own lobster boat. Dead. Charles Black who would never be a
farmer, Wayne Linden who would never be an avionics engineer, Clyde
Mason, John White... The list went on and on.

They’d all started out like David, full of
hope and dreams, and they’d all been blown to bits. All because of
David. The darkness of his tower room couldn’t begin to hide his
shame.

Deep down in her soul where the wild hawk
still soared McKenzie believed she could love him back to life.

He knew this ... and knew its
impossibility.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“Life.”

McKenzie had learned how to endure David’s
dark room and his darker moods. She’d learned the art of
tranquility. David envied her. He could remain silent for hours,
unmoving except for an occasional twitching muscle. But there was
nothing tranquil about his stillness, nothing peaceful. He was a
deep river, full of treacherous shoals and turbulent currents, dark
and murky and filled with memories that made him wake at night
drenched in sweat.

“Are we going to sit in the dark long?” she
asked.

“I am. You don’t have to stay.”

McKenzie didn’t answer right away. She’d
always been this way, even when she was a little kid, weighing her
words so long that sometimes the person she was talking to gave up
and went home before the conversation was finished.

David had learned to read her silences.

“No, I don’t plan to go down to the farm, and
I don’t want to go to your apartment to eat chicken soup,” he
said.

She didn’t deny that she’d made soup. Every
time she made the drive up to Memphis to do one of David’s errands,
she made a big pot of chicken soup. She subscribed wholeheartedly
to their mother’s wisdom. Della Jean had always said, “If you want
to nourish the soul, you must first nourish the body.”

“Food for the soul,” McKenzie said.

“I don’t have a soul.”

The fact that she didn’t light into him right
away didn’t fool David for a minute. She was saving her guns for a
bigger target.

“I’m getting too old for these errands,” she
said. “You’re going to have to find somebody else.”

“You’re in better shape than most thirty year
olds I know, and you’d scratch out the eyes of anybody who tried to
take your place.”

“The trouble with you, David, is that you
don’t know any thirty-year-olds.” His look warned her, but she
ignored him. “I wish you’d consider seeing Dr. Michaels again. Or
even consulting someone else. I really think plastic surgery would
help.”

“Help what? Make me look less like a monster
and more like a man wearing a Halloween mask?”

Ignoring that shot, she plowed right on.
“Have you thought what your life is going to be like twenty years
from now?”

“What about you, McKenzie? Why aren’t you out
with some charming young man instead of hanging around with an
older brother or talking to a dozen cats?”

“Show me a man who’s as smart and sweet and
loyal as a cat and I’ll show you a living, breathing miracle.
There’s no such animal, big brother. Present company excepted. And
of course, Paul.”

Paul Matthews, the husband she’d adored, dead
for five years now, cut down on their first anniversary by a
drunken driver who had swerved onto the sidewalk right in front of
their house. She’d been inside lighting candles on the table when
she heard the commotion. Racing outside she’d found her husband
fallen among a dozen bruised and scattered roses. He’d died in her
arms.

“Paul wouldn’t want you to be alone,
McKenzie.”

Gathering her belongings, McKenzie gave him a
look that conveyed in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t about to
enter into a discussion about why she had chosen to remain
alone.