Cold Fire

think-I'm-an-old-fool look, she took his bad hand and held it reassuringly.

After studying her a moment, he said, “You've seen something special Jim did, haven't you, something like magic?”

“Yes.”

“So you maybe know where this is going.”

“Maybe.”

The unseen birds began to screech again. The residents at the television set turned the sound off and looked around, trying to identify the source of the squealing.

Holly looked toward the courtyard window. No birds there. But she knew why their cries made the hair stand up on the back of her neck: they were somehow connected with Jim. She remembered the way he had looked up at them in the graveyard and how he had studied them in the sky during the drive to Solvang.

“Jamie, our son, was like his mother,” Henry said, as if he did not even hear the birds. “He just sometimes knew things. Fact is, he was a little more gifted than Lena. And after Jamie had been married to Cara for a while, when she got pregnant, Lena just one day up and said, 'The baby's going to be special, he's going to be a real mage.' ”

“Mage?”

“Country talk for someone with a power, with something special about him the way Lena had something special and Jamie, too. Only she meant real special. So Jim was born, and by the time he was four … well, he was doing things. Like once he touched my pocket comb, which I'd bought at the local barbershop here, and he started talking about things that were in the shop, though he'd never been in there in his life 'cause he lived with Jamie and Cara down in Los Angeles.”

He paused and took a few deep breaths. The slur in his voice had begun to thicken. His right eyelid drooped. Talking seemed to tire him as if it were a physical labor.

A male nurse with a flashlight was at the fireplace. He was squinting up into the flue, past the cracks around the damper, trying to see if any birds were trapped up in there.

The shrieking was now overlaid by the frenzied flapping of wings.

“Jimmy would touch an item and know where it'd been, bits and pieces about who owned it. Not everything about them, mind you. He just knew whatever he knew, that was it. Maybe he'd touch a personal item of yours and know the names of your parents, what you did for a living. Then he'd touch a personal item from someone else and only know where they'd gone to school, names of their children. Always different things, he couldn't control it. But he always came up with something when he tried.”

The nurse, trailed by three patients offering advice, had moved away from the fireplace and was frowning up at the air-conditioning vents. The quarrelsome sound of birds still echoed through the room.

“Let's go out to the courtyard,” Holly said, getting up.

“Wait,” Henry said with some distress, “let me finish this, let me tell you.”

Jim, for God's sake, Holly thought, hold on another minute, just another minute or two.

Reluctantly she sat down.

Henry said, “Jim's specialness was a family secret, like Lena's and Jamie's. We didn't want the world to know, come snooping around, call us freaks and God knows what. But Cara, she always wanted so bad to be in show business. Jamie worked down there at Warner Brothers, which was where'd he'd met her, and he wanted what Cara wanted. They decided they could form an act with Jimmy, call him the boy-wonder mentalist, but nobody would ever suspect he really had a power. They played it as a trick, lots of winking at the audience, daring them to figure out just how it was all done — when all the time it was real. They made a good living at it, too, and it was good for them as a family, kept them together every day. They'd been so close before the act, but they were closer than ever after they went on the road. No parents ever loved their child more than they loved Jim — or ever got more love given back to them. They were so close … it was impossible to think of them ever being apart.”

* * *

Blackbirds streaked across the bleak sky.

Sitting on the redwood bench, Jim stared up at them.

They almost vanished into the eastern clouds, then turned sharply and came back.

For a while they kited overhead.

Those dark, jagged forms against the sere sky composed an image that might have come from some poem by Edgar Allan Poe. As a kid he'd had a passion for Poe and had memorized all of the more macabre pieces of his poetry. Morbidity had its fascination.

* * *

The bird shrieks suddenly stopped. The resulting quiet was a blessing, but Holly was, oddly, more frightened by the cessation of the cries than she had been by the eerie sound of them.

“And the power grew,” Henry Ironheart said softly, thickly. He shifted in his wheelchair, and his right side resisted settling into a new position. For the first time he showed some frustration at the limitations of his stroke- altered body. “By the time Jim was six, you could put a penny on the table, and he could move it just by wanting it to move, slide it back and forth, make it stand on end. By the time he was eight, he could pitch it in the air, float it there. By the time he was ten, he could do the same with a quarter, a phonograph record, a cake tin. It was the most amazing thing you ever saw.”

You should see what he can do at thirty-five, Holly thought.

“They never used any of that in their act,” Henry said, “they just stuck to the mentalism, taking personal items from members of the audience, so Jim could tell them things about themselves that just, you know, astonished them. Jamie and Cara figured to include some of his levitations eventually, but they just hadn't figured out how to do it yet without giving the truth away. Then they went to the Dixie Duck down in Atlanta … and that was the end of everything.”

Not the end of everything. It was the end of one thing, the dark beginning of another.

She realized why the absence of the birds' screams was more disturbing than the sound itself. The cries had been like the hiss of a sparking fuse as it burned down toward an explosive charge. As long as she could hear the sound, the explosion was still preventable.

“And that's why I figure Jim thought he should've been able to save them,” Henry said. “Because he could do those little things with his mind, float and move things, he thought he should've been able maybe to jam the bullets in that crazy man's gun, freeze the trigger, lock the safety in place, something, something …”

“Could he have done that?”

“Yeah, maybe. But he was just a scared little boy. To do those things with pennies and records and cake tins, he had to concentrate. No time to concentrate when the bullets started flying that day.”

Holly remembered the murderous sound: chuda-chuda-chuda-chuda …

“So when we brought him back from Atlanta, he would hardly talk, just a word or two now and then. Wouldn't meet your eyes. Something died in him when Jamie and Cara died, and we could never bring it back again, no matter how much we loved him and how hard we tried. His power died, too. Or seemed to. He never did one of his tricks again, and after a lot of years it was sometimes hard to believe he'd ever done those strange things when he was little.”

In spite of his good spirits, Henry Ironheart had looked every one of his eighty years. Now he appeared to be far older, ancient.

He said, “Jimmy was so strange after Atlanta, so unreachable and full of rage … sometimes it was possible to love him and still be a little afraid of him. Later, God forgive me, I suspected him of…”

“I know,” Holly said.

His slack features tightened, and he looked sharply at her.

“Your wife,” she said. “Lena. The way she died.”

More thickly than usual, he said, “You know so much.”

“Too much,” she said. “Which is funny. Because all my life I've known too little.”

Henry looked down at his culpable hands again. “How could I believe that a boy of ten, even a disturbed boy, could've shoved her down the mill stairs when he loved her so much? Too many years later, I saw that I'd been