The Skill of Our Hands--A Novel Page 26

  —O

  * * *

  “Chuck spoke to me of his life in Pittsburgh, of the feel of the handlebars on his BMW, of the ballgames he went to with his Uncle Andy. I know that whenever he tasted plum pudding he thought of his mother and his sister, and he’d smile.”

  There were tears, now, but it didn’t feel like meddlework. It felt like that January day in Berlin, full of life and hope and the power of a moment when he felt like he was riding the cyclone, he no longer mattered as a person; only the task mattered.

  “And I know the estrangement began with the fire, that it transformed him somehow, that, to you who raised and loved him, he was never the same person afterward. But this is the time to tell you that he never stopped loving you, and if the damage from that fire took something valuable from him, it also gave him things.

  “He proved himself a hero that day, and, for the rest of his life, he proved himself a good and loyal friend, with a quick laugh, a calmness that—” Oskar caught himself; he’d almost said, “as Chuck.” “A calmness that he hadn’t had before.

  “And he never stopped being part of his family. Today, Mrs. Purcell, Cindy, and those I haven’t yet met, please welcome him back into your family, and your hearts. There is nothing else he would have wanted.

  “I will now ask for a moment of silence, as we all consider what he meant to us.”

  When the moment was over, Oskar walked off the stage without ceremony, knelt in front of the two women, squeezed their hands and kissed their cheeks.

  The two Purcell women hugged Oskar, thanked him, then went over to Ren as everyone stood. An erect gray-haired man introduced himself as Andrew, and folded Oskar into a hug. The man next to him startled Oskar with how much he looked like Phil—same tall, thin body, even the same twisted eyebrow. Andrew introduced him as his son, Rick.

  Oskar shook hands with them both, glancing at where Ren was talking with Chuck’s remaining family. He remembered her body, naked in his arms just hours ago, and the moment of being simply fully present to one another that they had shared, and he was proud to know she was one of them.

  There was still so much to do. They needed a new Second for Phil as quickly as they could safely recruit one. And somewhere in the city—maybe still passed out at the Hyatt, maybe back on the job—Frio, the man who had shot Phil, was still alive and still a cop, thinking his badge made him immune to consequences. They would see.

  * * *

  Jimmy’s rental was already in the drive behind Oskar’s and Matsu’s, when they pulled up in front of the house. Jane parked on the street and put a hand on Ren’s knee. “It was a lovely service, Ren. You did a great job.”

  “I didn’t do much. It was Oskar.”

  “Well,” Jane said, “I’ll be back here tomorrow morning at nine thirty to take you to yoga unless you call and give me a very good reason why I shouldn’t.”

  “I can drive myself, you know.”

  Jane gave an apologetic shrug. “I’ve been needing an exercise buddy.”

  “You have not.” Ren shot Jane a mock glare, which she returned with steady friendship. “Thank you,” Ren said. “Yoga tomorrow would be great.”

  She got out of Jane’s car and walked through the suburban Sunday suppertimes to her own front door. Susi greeted her, tail wagging, then went bounding off, probably on the assumption that Phil must now be around, somewhere. Ren found Oskar sitting in Phil’s chair, and tapped his shoulder as she walked by. “Hey Oskar, you’re going to love this,” she told him.

  “Good.” Only his potion-blue eyes moved, tracking Ren across the room.

  “Oh god, were you grazing? I’m sorry.” Ren put her bag down. The house was quiet despite the three cars in the drive, and at least as many men somewhere inside it.

  “What am I going to love?”

  “I think you were right about Jane,” Ren said. “We could maybe recruit her as Phil’s Second.”

  “Ren!” Jimmy came in from the kitchen. He put a glass of wine in Ren’s hand, held her by the shoulders, and looked hard into her eyes. “Good,” he said and kissed her warmly on the mouth. “Did you get enough to eat at the memorial?”

  “Yeah,” Ren said, tasting the wine. “Does Matsu still have Phil’s stub?”

  “Yes. He’s a shaman,” Jimmy reassured her. “Oskar, wine?” Jimmy looked around Ren to the immobile Teuton on the sofa. “Mon Dieu, what a face!”

  “Ren thinks perhaps we might recruit Jane for Phil’s stub,” Oskar said.

  “But you … But she…” Jimmy turned from Oskar’s face to Ren. “I’ll get the bottle.”

  Oskar stood up and twisted his back, stretching. “If Sam is right about her, the work Jane is already doing may be too important for us to take her away from it. Nothing mitigates the most pernicious long-term effects of poverty as dramatically as even a single responsive, attentive adult in a child’s life. If Jane is able to make her students feel loved the way Sam reports, then she’s doing something Phil can’t.” Oskar bent over and pressed his palms to the floor. “Do you know who Irina’s date was at the memorial?”

  Ren laughed. “He wasn’t her date. That was Menzie, the guy who called Phil’s cell last night for help. She went by the courthouse and paid his bail.”

  Oskar reseated himself, taking Phil’s chair, waving Ren to the sofa opposite. “Did you like how he looked?”

  “Oh.” Ren sat. “You mean would I like him as Phil?”

  “Who now?” Jimmy was back with wine.

  “Menzie,” Ren said a little hollowly.

  “You had more chemistry with Frio.” Jimmy went back to the kitchen.

  “Right, and look how that worked out.” Ren’s fingertips went cold on her glass.

  “But you like Jane?” Jimmy came in with a tray of cheeses and crackers salvaged from the memorial.

  “Yeah,” Ren said, remembering the dark eyes in the idling car, their steadiness and care.

  “Could you love her?” Jimmy asked.

  Ren nodded.

  “Could you make love with her?” Oskar asked.

  Ren looked at him. “Yeah,” she said again. “If she were Phil.”

  Oskar grunted, the tenderness or fragility gone from his voice. “I’m going back to the Garden.”

  “What? No!” Ren said. “I need you here.”

  Oskar closed his eyes.

  “Oskar, we need to get Phil spiked into a new Second tonight,” Ren insisted. “His stub is way too unstable and we can’t ask Matsu or anyone else to stay in the Garden holding on to it.”

  “So recruit someone,” Oskar said evenly.

  “We need to decide who.”

  “So decide.”

  “That’s what I’m doing!”

  “No.” Oskar opened his eyes. “What you are doing is arguing with me about whether or not I should go back to the Garden and graze. I’m going. You figure this out. Or you and Jimmy or whoever else you want to consult, but I am going back to the Garden to find out whether or not, while we were burying Chuck and consoling his family and attending the reception, the police managed to collect Frio, or whether the housekeeping staff at the Airport Hyatt got a nasty surprise. I’m going to find out what Irina should have seeded days ago about who that fucker really is, and to whom he’s actually reporting. He’s a hell of a liar. He looked at you and said, ‘yes ma’am.’ He lies as well as we do. He shot Phil, Ren. He’s the guy. That’s what Phil meant when he said ‘I shot me.’”

  “Oh,” Ren said. “You’re right. Okay.”

  “Oskar.” Jimmy put his wineglass down.

  “What?”

  The front door clicked, Oskar sprang, and Irina blew in with her arms full of flowers. Susi trotted in, looked at Irina, then at the door.

  Oskar bellowed a wordless roar, threw himself back into Phil’s chair, and closed his eyes.

  * * *

  “No, thank you, Oskar,” Irina snapped. “I don’t need any help with these.”

  Jimmy stood, but Irina toed the fr
ont door closed and marched across the living room to deposit the flowers on Ren’s mantel. “From the memorial,” she announced, looking pointedly at Ren.

  Jimmy handed Irina the wineglass he’d filled for Oskar. “Ren is considering Jane for Phil’s Second,” Jimmy told Irina, settling himself on the sofa next to Ren. “Oskar is grazing for news on your friend Frio.”

  “Aren’t you all industrious?” Irina threw her shoulder bag onto the kitchen counter, and collapsed next to Jimmy on the sofa. “I thought you’d still be somber and quiet after the memorial, but spit-spot back to work is it?”

  Jimmy kissed her on the top of her head. “Fuck off, Irina.”

  She sagged against his shoulder. She’s been just as busy. Busier. But she couldn’t share her stories. She couldn’t even seed them. Assistant Police Chief Jack Harris hadn’t, in fact, known Frio shot Phil. Irina was glad to hear it, but not that Jack now suspected his man had “gone native.” Frio, it seemed, had taken personal time last night and disabled his car’s GPS tracking. He hadn’t reported in since.

  Irina had wangled a solemn oath from her Old Silver to call off the raid on the Hourlies by playing the spooky primitive. It was all very well for educated white ladies like Jane to dabble in superstition and talk about magic, but when a brown woman did it, it was scary. Jack had promised to keep all the SWAT forces in tonight lest Irina’s dreams of the wealthy’s food poisoned by the poor who cook it prove prophetic. She had tasted his mouth for toxins and told him a memory, true in its details, if neither time nor place, of a one-armed dark-skinned houngan, and how it felt to burn to death.

  She shuddered against Jimmy’s silken shoulder. “Where’s Matsu?” she asked.

  “Phil’s stub is unstable enough that we’re keeping someone in the Garden all the time just to hold on to it,” Jimmy explained.

  Irina nodded. “Where are Sam and Jane?”

  “Jane drove me home,” Ren said. “She was at the memorial.”

  “Yes. Without Sam.”

  “Yes. Irina. Look, we have to settle on a new Second for Phil, and I feel—”

  “Ren, Sam has been running an underground resistance group that’s been fucking with everything the immigration and border control cops do, particularly in Maricopa County. They call themselves the Hourlies, and target the private militia most, the wingnuts and the racists, but he’s managed to put a crimp in the pleats of the local police too.”

  “I know, Irina, but right now—”

  “But right now, the police think he’s dead.”

  “Sam?”

  “The police had noticed Phil. They were watching him. Probably electronically. Possibly here.” She jabbed her finger at the sofa to indicate Ren’s home. Ren shivered. “The Tucson police,” Irina enunciated carefully, “thought Phil was the ringleader of the Hourlies.”

  “I know.” Ren swallowed hard. “They had their undercover man shoot him.”

  “No,” Irina said. “That’s just it. They have no idea who shot Phil.”

  “Frio did,” Jimmy said. “Phil said so.”

  “Right,” Irina agreed. “But he didn’t do it on orders from the Tucson PD.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ren said.

  “Have a drink, Ren, you sound like shit.”

  “Iri,” Jimmy chided.

  Ren waved his objections aside and took a good gulp. “Go on,” she told Irina.

  “The police think Phil was the mastermind behind all the sabotage and confusion that Sam’s been causing,” Irina explained. “They think this because Frio, in his role as undercover agent, had been sending them surveillance pictures of Phil. Even though Frio knew Phil had nothing to do with the Hourlies. He duped the cops who, for the moment anyway, still believe the ringleader of their most closely guarded secret and humiliating defeats was shot by people inside a rival organization, probably the Minutemen. Possibly the skinheads. They, of course, don’t so much care who killed Phil. They care”—Irina raised her glass to Ren, toasting— “that the Hourlies have been completely dormant since his death.” She downed her wine with a flourish.

  “Frio was an undercover Tucson cop,” Ren said, putting the pieces together. “And he shot Phil, but didn’t tell anyone at Tucson PD?”

  “Exactly.”

  “He shot Phil either acting on his own, or for some other agency?”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Irina,” Jimmy asked quietly, refilling her glass. “How do you know all this?”

  “Menzie, whom I hope everyone got a chance to meet today,” Irina said, acknowledging Jimmy’s re-pour with an imperious nod, “is an investigative reporter. He, it turns out, has been working on a story about the increased militarization of Arizona police departments. Very interesting, no? And then, just last night, he was arrested for driving while brown. As a result, he’s highly motivated just now to break a really big story about our local PD.” Irina beamed and took a sip. “This really is a lovely wine. Your choice, Jimmy?”

  “But of course,” he said with an outrageous French wink.

  “So—” Irina pulled her pumps off and pushed them under the coffee table. “Now we spike Phil into Sam, and let him keep running the Hourlies, but maybe a little more quietly, and we take everything Phil knows about Frio, having shared his head for a while, and we give it to Menzie for a complete exposé.”

  “Spike Phil into Sam?” Ren repeated.

  “We don’t know how much visibility Phil will have had into Frio’s memories,” Jimmy said.

  Irina stood up and put her hands on her hips. “Well?”

  “What?” Ren said.

  “Fine, I’ll get it.” Irina rolled her eyes dramatically and walked behind Ren’s chair to the front door.

  Only then did Ren realize someone had been knocking. Susi was up, looking hopeful, but he never barked at the door.

  Irina yanked the door open and shifted her weight into her hip. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” said a young man’s voice. “I’m Daniel Whitman.”

  Jimmy got to his feet slowly. “Kate’s recruit? From Pennsylvania?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When did—”

  “I just got off the plane.”

  “Well,” Irina said. “You’d better come in.”

  * * *

  If you grip a thing too tightly, Takamatsu knew, it will slip away from you and may be gone forever. Sometimes that was a vague koan-like notion to inspire thought; sometimes it was merely practical instruction. Sometimes it fell in between.

  Phil’s stub remained before Takamatsu’s eyes in the form Ren had discovered it in his Garden, the same one she had created in the mud of her Garden to hasten his return—a spiral that was not a form or a direction, but movement: a verb, not a noun. Takamatsu could hold it, this not-thing, as long as he neither looked away, nor right at it. It was a balancing act, but he had good balance. He had good balance because he was aware of his body, of his center of gravity, of which muscles he kept tense, and which relaxed. These were things that did not exactly translate in the Garden, but neither were they entirely unrelated to what the imagination did in the dense nothingness, in the emptiness that was full.

  Phil’s stub was the taste of saffron, half a clamshell, the howl of the wind down the passes of Yonaha-dake, the touch of silk on Takamatsu’s forehead. All of those, and more, changing from one to the other, independent, yet connected.

  He could not find the pattern, because there was none. There could be no pattern, because Phil’s stub was both in the Garden and in Frio, and even in Jimmy, maybe in others as well; there and not there; bouncing randomly among the dream-lives of 203 very individual individuals.

  Takamatsu could hold it, he could keep it from being lost, he could follow it—for a while. How long a while?

  Not as long as he needed to, he knew that much at least.

  Ramon once told a joke about a mathematician catching a lion by building a cage with himself inside and the lion outside and then performing an inversion
. No one but Ramon knew enough mathematics to think it funny, but yet, on some level, all the Incrementalists understood. None of them, however, had ever considered it practical advice.

  But in the Garden, the imaginary is real, the mundane is numinous, and the spiritual is prosaic.

  In a fight, you know that the time to act has come when you discover you have acted. Takamatsu Toshitsugu discovered he had acted.

  * * *

  I should have been with him. He shouldn’t have faced this alone, but I was focused on Frio and action and answers.

  —O

  * * *

  * * *

  Jimmy glanced up as Irina stepped back to let Daniel Whitman into Phil’s house, and, looking at him, Jimmy suddenly remembered Phil in 1994. He’d looked a lot like Daniel Whitman: tall, wide across the shoulders, narrow at the hips.

  Ramon walked in from the hall, headed briskly to answer the door, and Ren glanced from Daniel to him a little wildly. “Oh hello, Ramon. I didn’t know you were here,” she said.

  “I brought him back with me.” Jimmy heaved himself to standing.

  “I was napping,” Ramon explained to Ren. “Hello,” he said to Daniel.

  “You were napping?” said Irina, an hysterical edge to her voice, and Jimmy considered how exhausted she must be. But when she spoke again, it was in her honey-silk voice. “Ramon, meet Daniel Whitman. Daniel,” she added, “shut the door.” Then she sat down, and Jimmy saw that she’d just realized she wasn’t going to convince Ren to pick Sam. Not over Kate’s young Daniel Whitman anyway.

  “Ramon?” Daniel repeated, but he had enough poise to shake the delicate, red-tipped hand extended to him.

  “You can call me Sarah, if you’re more comfortable with that,” Ramon offered.

  “It’s good to meet you, Ramon.” Daniel closed the door and his eyes shifted from Ramon to Irina to Ren. “You’re Ren.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “This is Jimmy and that’s Oskar.”