The Great Forgetting (21 page)

“Guy was dangerous,” the Captain said shortly. “More than you know.”

“Yeah, I seen what he did to Jean. Glad to see her come through. Anyway, you didn't come here to chat. You best skedaddle. They got a cruiser parked in front of your house, right through them trees.” Nils tossed Jack the keys.

“How you getting home?” asked Jack.

“Suppose I could use some exercise,” said Nils. “I'll help you with the car, if you're ready.”

Jack grabbed Cole's backpack and the change from the cup holder. Nils helped get the Captain in the cab of the truck and then they returned to the Saturn. Cole took the passenger side, Nils the back bumper. Jack reached in, clicked it to neutral, and leaned against the doorframe. “On three,” he said.

A minute later the car slipped into the water and gently pitched over the edge of the drop-off. They watched the back wheels point toward the stars and bob there for a moment as bubbles simmered around its sides. Then the car sank beneath the dark surface of Claytor Lake, drifting to the bottom, where it joined the silent junkyard on the floor, home to crawfish and giant carp.

Jack shook Nils's hand. “Don't tell Sam about this,” he said.

“No.”

Cole took the bitch seat as Jack had one last look at his family's house through the trees. The light was on in the living room. Jean was probably sitting by the phone, waiting for him to call. He wanted to walk over there and say something to reassure her. But even if he could, even if there wasn't a cruiser and two patrolmen watching from the road, he wouldn't know what to say.

He adjusted the mirrors and turned the key. The truck's engine sounded like a sick bear. When they rolled back onto Porter, Jack hit the lights and made toward the interstate. They'd have to find a place to stay for the night. Might be best to hit an ATM, too, before they froze his accounts.

How far will we get?
he wondered. New York City seemed so far away. And Alaska? Traveling all the way to Alaska would be utterly insane. The longer they ran, the more people they'd have following them. In a day or two, the FBI, the marshals, the police, everyone would be hunting them. And if they arrested him before he could prove that something much more important was going on, they would lock him up and never let him out and then no one would know. Revealing the Great Forgetting, if it was true, that's all that mattered now. It was bigger than all their troubles. Wasn't it? The only thing Jack knew for sure was that he didn't want to lose his memories. And he didn't want to see his father regress into that drooling old man watching shadows in the hospice. No way. He'd gotten his father back and he wasn't going to give him up again.

New York was their best chance. A Collector could walk them through it. The stakes. Who was behind the new forgettings. Then, if he could get a reporter involved, a Mike Wallace or whoever could do that sort of thing, maybe that would be enough. Maybe they could help him find Tony. And then Tony could tell the police that he'd had nothing to do with Mark's murder. Maybe he could get the Captain someplace safe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

5
    “Where is he?” growled Marlon Hoover. The detective sat in a chair across from the woman with the cinnamon hair, in a ten-by-fifteen-foot concrete block of a room they used for interviews. When she didn't answer, he continued. “
Miz
Brooks, you have to see by now that Jack fooled you like he fooled everybody else.”

“He didn't kill my brother. Why would he kill my brother?”

“Maybe 'cause of what Mark done to you when you two were kids. I read your juvie file. They placed you with fosters when the school found out. Your husband was stealing money from the hospital. He knew we were coming for him. He needed to fake his own death, start over, so he goes to his old friend Jack. They need a body to put in that lake, to try to fool us, make us think it was Tony if we ever went looking. And Jack, he knows someone he'd like to kill, doesn't he? Yes. Yes he does. And here's the bonus: with Tony and Mark gone, he gets you all to himself.”

“That's ridiculous.”

“I knew Tony wasn't dead. Cowards like him ain't got the stones for suicide. He's been out there, living the good life. Probably shacked up with some girl who isn't half as damaged as his wife.”

“You come up with that yourself?”

“Mark was stabbed with a marine Ka-Bar, the same sort of knife we found at the Felter house. Jack killed him. And his old man helped before he went full retard.”

She looked to the corner of the room where someone had placed an ant trap; it looked like a discarded hockey puck, dead ants lying around it like specks of black paint.

“Why did Jack drive to Pymatuning last week?”

“I told you, you dumb motherfucker, I don't know.”

“Watch your language, missy!”

“I know my rights,” she said. “You can't keep me here. Not if I ask for a lawyer.”

“This ain't the city, Miz Brooks. This ain't no county seat, even. This is Franklin Mills. You're in here with me. No recordings. No one else in the room. If I say you didn't ask for a lawyer, you didn't ask for no goddamn lawyer.”

Sam stood and tried to leave, but the door was locked. It was a pointless attempt at escape, but her petulance infuriated Marlon. He came out of his chair like a lion uncaged and pulled her from the door. She reacted, shoving him back with all her strength. He backhanded her, hard. “Oh, you bitch!” he said between clenched teeth.

She stared at him, a hand on her cheek where it was red from his hand. There was something in this man's eyes she'd only ever seen in her father's, a barely managed fury like a face burned by acid, beneath a thin mask. This detective was another dangerous man.

“Get gone,
Miz
Brooks,” he said, unlocking the door with a key attached to his belt. “And think hard about whose side you want to be on. How will history judge you when all this is over?”

“I'll sue you,” she whispered as she walked by.

“Doubtful,” he said.

6
    They rested for the night in Bellefonte, a ways off I-80, north of State College, inside a centuries-old structure called the Bush House Hotel. Jack paid cash, avoiding eye contact with the Pakistani man behind the counter. Cole walked the Captain to their room. They were quickly becoming friends—the Captain had entertained Cole with some of his best war stories during their drive: the one about fishing with grenades in Laos; the one about the guy who'd slept in pajamas in the jungle trenches; the one about the forty-foot-long python that darted across the road in front of their convoy. The Captain had always been best with other people's kids.

“One bed, you cheap bastard?”

“Money's tight,” said Jack. “I don't know when we'll be able to get more.”

“Well, I ain't sleeping with you. You steal the goddamn covers. You always did that. Wrap yourself in a cocoon like nobody else needs them. And I can't sleep with the boy because he might be gay.”

“I'll sleep on the floor,” said Jack. “Just try and get some sleep. We leave early. I want to be in the city by noon.”

“This is the worst fucking road trip.”

They watched the news—Jack found a Steubenville station after some flipping. His flight from justice had not yet caught the interest of reporters outside Portage County.
Give it a few more hours
, he thought. He hoped for some national crisis, a presidential scandal, anything to distract the media until he figured out exactly what he was doing. Stuff like that happened every day. Why shouldn't it do some good for once?

As if reading his mind, the Captain stirred in the bed. “What's the next move, Johnny? Have you thought that far ahead?”

“After New York? I don't know,” he said.

“Start planning ahead. Don't wait to react or you'll end up playing defense. That's life. A game. Like chess.”

“I know.”

“No you don't.”

His mind was an overloaded circuit, threatening to short. Jack felt fatigue pulling at his mind, whispering to him, promising to wash away his anxiety. But he kept imagining the door crashing in and a SWAT team rushing at them, pulling his father off the bed. Or worse. What if the door crashed in and on the other side was a team of those wrinkly-faced men in Panama hats? The Hounds? He saw a shadow under the door, someone standing in front of their room. He braced himself. But the shadow moved on.

“You asleep?” the Captain asked.

“No.”

“What about the gay kid?”

Jack looked over at Cole, who was curled up in the wide chair. “I think he's out.”

“Good. You want to hear it?”

“What?”

“You know what.”

“Okay.”

The Captain cleared his throat. Talking still took some effort for him. Jack pictured his vocal cords as two frayed rubber bands stretched too far. He wished his father would just go to sleep. He didn't really need to hear this. It wouldn't change anything.

“I gave him a chance, Johnny,” he said. “We both did. Tony and me. That morning … Your sister was a mess. We got her into rehab at Haven, as you know, made sure Paige was safe with Anna, and then, after you came to the hospital, Tony and I went out to Mark's place to tell him to leave town. He was in his trailer, picking through the junk in the living room for a couple of two-liter soda bottles. He'd just got back from Walmart with supplies and was going to do some of those what do you call 'em … shake and bakes?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“He'd passed some point, you know? Some point that he could never have come back from, not even if he'd gone clean. There was this smell about him. Like rot. Body rot. Athlete's foot, kind of. Sort of. Except worse. You could smell it eating him. Controlling him like some worm, because that's what drugs are, I guess.

“‘Leave,' I told him. ‘Get out of Franklin Mills. Stay away from my daughter and stay away from Sam and don't you ever come back.' And he looks at me, you know, sizing me up like he's a lion and I'm a gazelle or whatever. He looks at Tony and you can see he's working it over in his mind and he's thinking he's got an old man and a skinny fancy boy and maybe he can take us. It was murder in his eyes. Seen it before. Know what that look is. I thought there was a chance he was right and that we were outmatched. Who knows what those drugs do to a man's strength, is what I was thinking.

“And then he goes, then he goes”—the Captain was laughing a little, the way a man will when he recalls something tragically funny, the way he got when talking about his buddy Halftrack, the guy who'd got drunk on rice wine one night in 'Nam and, searching for a bottle opener, dug into his jacket and pulled out a grenade pin—“he goes …
THPPPPPPPPPFT!
” The Captain put his hand to his mouth and blew a wet raspberry. “Mark farted. Ah, God, it was terrible. Like all he'd eaten in a month was Taco Bell and meth. And Jack, we couldn't help it. We couldn't. Tony turned to me and we started laughing. Laughing at him. Oh, he was pissed! But you could tell, too, that he was embarrassed, that there was this trace of a man somewhere in there who was embarrassed but not strong enough to control his body anymore. And I guess if I'm sorry, I'm sorry for that little spark of something still inside him. Anyway, he got mad and he got stupid. Instead of jumping across the coffee table at me, he jogged around it and that gave me enough time to pull the knife.

“I brought it thinking maybe I'd scare him. Never in a million years did I think I'd actually use it. But there it was. He came at me and I reacted. I reacted because I hadn't thought through the situation, I hadn't thought through the game. And the knife came out and thank God it did because he really could have killed us both if he'd gotten up to speed. Knife went in, high in the chest because he's a stocky motherfucker, and I knew I'd pierced his heart. I'd made a choice and couldn't back away from it now. So I made sure it was done. Stabbed him seven times, deep as I could. One of his lungs popped and hissed like a kid's balloon.

“Tony took me home after that. ‘I'll take care of it,' he said. He went back and torched the trailer. An hour later, I see Tony's car pull into that drive from Porter that goes out to Claytor Lake. I knew what he was doing, but I didn't understand why. Why dump Mark's body in the lake if he was going to burn the trailer down? Should have left the body to burn, too.”

“What you did was justified, Dad,” said Jack. “Self-defense.”

“Maybe. But we did it in his home. Without an invitation, if you know what I mean. But I realized something that day. I realized that Tony was a clever SOB. He has his own agenda. His own game to play. That's why he put the body in the lake. In case Sam needed a body to be convinced. Like maybe she'd send a diver down to verify his death, huh? Shithead never figured you'd find a way to bring it up. Tony was setting the pieces for his escape that day. Methodical. Can't trust a man like that, Jack. You remember that.”

“He's just searching for his own things.”

The room was quiet for a bit. Jack started to think the Captain had finally fallen asleep. But then he stirred again.

“We'll never be able to tell the world what's happening, you know that, don't you?”

“I don't know anything right now, Pop.”

“Everyone wants to forget. It's human nature. Never met a man who wouldn't want to forget the worst thing he'd ever done. How powerful is that urge, huh, if it's everybody in the world?”

Eventually sleep found him. It took its damn time, though.

7
    Haven. It sat against the sky in an arrogant fashion, denying through its unchanging façade that it was complicit in the theft of the men who loved her. She hated this place, its airy corridors, its sterile make-your-nose-itch smells, its simple
being
. Sam thought she might burn it down if it meant learning more about what happened to Tony and Jack.