Black House

“Did you make a tape for me, Henry?” Jack asks. “I bet you did, but I hope you didn’t die telling me what I already know.”

The tape clicks to a stop. Jack pushes PLAY and holds his breath.

In all his bull-necked, red-faced glory, George Rathbun booms from the speakers. “Bottom of the ninth, and the home team is headed for the showers, pal. But the game ain’t OVER till the last BLIND man is DEAD!”

Jack sags against the wall.

Henry Shake enters the room and tells him to call Maxton’s. The Wisconsin Rat sticks his head in and screams about Black House. The Sheik the Shake the Shook and George Rathbun have a short debate, which the Shake wins. It is too much for Jack; he cannot stop his tears, and he does not bother to try. He lets them come. Henry’s last performance moves him enormously. It is so bountiful, so pure— so purely Henry. Henry Leyden kept himself alive by calling on his alternate selves, and they did the job. They were a faithful crew, George and the Shake and the Rat, and they went down with the ship, not that they had much choice. Henry Leyden reappears, and in a voice that grows fainter with each phrase, says that Jack can beat vain and stupid. Henry’s dying voice says he had a wonderful life. His voice drops to a whisper and utters three words filled to the brim with gratified surprise: Ah, Lark. Hello. Jack can hear the smile in those words.

Weeping, Jack staggers out of the studio. He wants to collapse into a chair and cry until he has no more tears, but he cannot fail either himself or Henry so greatly. He moves down the hallway, wipes his eyes, and waits for the stony sorrow to help him deal with his grief. It will help him deal with Black House, too. The sorrow is not to be deterred or deflected; it works like steel in his spine.

The ghost of Henry Shake whispers: Jack, this sorrow is never going to leave you. Are you down with that?

—Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Just as long as you know. Wherever you go, whatever you do. Through every door. With every woman. If you have children, with your children. You’ll hear it in all the music you listen to, you’ll see it in every book you read. It will be part of the food you eat. With you forever. In all the worlds. In Black House.

—I am it, and it is me.

George Rathbun’s whisper is twice as loud as the Sheik the Shake the Shook’s: Well, damnit, son, can I hear you say D’YAMBA?

—D’yamba.

I reckon now you know why the bees embraced you. Don’t you have a telephone call to make?

Yes, he does. But he cannot bear to be in this blood-soaked house any longer; he needs to be out in the warm summer night. Letting his feet land where they may, Jack walks across the ruined living room and passes through the doorway. His sorrow walks with him, for he is it and it is he. The enormous sky hangs far above him, pierced with stars. Out comes the trusty cell phone.

And who answers the telephone at the French Landing Police Station? Arnold “Flashlight” Hrabowski, of course, with a new nickname and just reinstated as a member of the force. Jack’s news puts Flashlight Hrabowski in a state of high agitation. What? Gosh! Oh, no. Oh, who woulda believed it? Gee. Yeah, yessir. I’ll take care of that right away, you bet.

So while the former Mad Hungarian tries to keep both his hands and voice from trembling as he dials the chief’s home number and passes on Jack’s two-sided message, Jack himself wanders away from the house, away from the drive and his pickup truck, away from anything that reminds him of human beings, and into a meadow filled with high, yellow-green grasses. His sorrow leads him, for his sorrow knows better than he what he needs.

Above all, he needs rest. Sleep, if sleep is possible. A soft spot on level ground far from the coming uproar of red lights and sirens and furious, hyperactive policemen. Far from all that desperation. A place where a man can lay his head and get a representative view of the local heavens. Half a mile down the fields, Jack comes to such a place between a cornfield and the rocky beginnings of the wooded hills. His sorrowing mind tells his sorrowing, exhausted body to lie down and make itself comfortable, and his body obeys. Overhead, the stars seem to vibrate and blur, though of course real stars in the familiar, real heavens do not act that way, so it must be an optical illusion. Jack’s body stretches out, and the pad of grass and topsoil beneath his body seems to adjust itself around him, although this, too, must be an illusion, for everyone knows that in real life, the actual ground tends to be obdurate, inflexible, and stony. Jack Sawyer’s sorrowing mind tells his sorrowing ache of a body to fall asleep, and impossible as it may seem, fall asleep it does.

Within minutes, Jack Sawyer’s sleeping body undergoes a subtle transformation. Its edges seem to soften, its colors—his wheaten hair, his light tan jacket, his soft brown shoes—grow paler. An odd translucency, a mistiness or cloudiness, enters the process. It is as if we can peer through the cloudy, indistinct mass of his slow-breathing body to see the soft, crushed blades of grass that form its mattress. The longer we peer, the more clearly we can take in the grass beneath him, for his body is getting vaguer and vaguer. At last it is only a shimmer over the grass, and by the time the Jack-shaped pad of green has again straightened itself, the body that shaped it is long gone.

25

OH, FORGET about that. We know where Jack Sawyer went when he disappeared from the edge of the cornfield, and we know who he is likely to meet when he gets there. Enough of that stuff. We want fun, we want excitement! Luckily for us, that charming old party Charles Burnside, who can always be depended upon to slip a whoopee cushion under the governor’s seat during a banquet, to pour a little hot sauce into the stew, to fart at the prayer meeting, is at this moment emerging from a toilet bowl and into a stall in the men’s room on Daisy wing. We note that Ol’ Burny, our Burn-Burn, hugs Henry Leyden’s hedge clippers to his sunken chest with both arms, actually cradling them, as if he were holding a baby. On his bony right arm, blood slides out of a nasty gash and rolls down toward his elbow. When he gets one foot, clad in another resident’s bee slipper, on the rim of the bowl, he pushes himself up and steps out, wobbling a bit. His mouth is twisted into a scowl, and his eyes look like bullet holes, but we do not suppose that he, too, carries a weight of heavy-duty sorrow. Blood soaks the bottoms of his trousers and the front of his shirt, which has darkened with the flow of blood from a knife wound to his abdomen.

Wincing, Burny opens the door of the stall and walks out into the empty men’s room. Fluorescent lights on the ceiling reflect from the long mirror above the row of sinks; thanks to Butch Yerxa, who is working a double shift because the regular night man called in drunk, the white tiles of the floor gleam. In all this sparkling whiteness, the blood on Charles Burnside’s clothes and body looks radiantly red. He peels off his shirt and tosses it into a sink