Black House

Bad news for Dale, he knows, and he regrets both his inability to join the investigation and to explain his refusal to his friend. Dale’s ass is on the line, no two ways about it. He is a good chief of police, more than good enough for French Landing, but he misjudged the politics and let the staties set him up. With every appearance of respect for local authority, state detectives Brown and Black had bowed low, stepped aside, and permitted Dale Gilbertson, who thought they were doing him a favor, to slip a noose around his neck. Too bad, but Dale has just figured out that he is standing on a trapdoor with a black bag over his face. If the Fisherman murders one more kid. . . . Well, Jack Sawyer sends his most profound regrets. He can’t perform a miracle right now, sorry. Jack has more pressing matters on his mind.

Red feathers, for example. Small ones. Little red feathers are much on Jack’s mind, and have been, despite his efforts to magic them away, since a month before the murders started. One morning as he emerged from his bedroom and began to go down to fix breakfast, a single red feather, a plume smaller than a baby’s finger, seemed to float out of the slanted ceiling at the top of the stairs. In its wake, two or three others came drifting toward him. An oval section of plaster two inches across seemed to blink and open like an eye, and the eye released a tight, fat column of feathers that zoomed out of the ceiling as if propelled through a straw. A feather explosion, a feather hurricane, battered his chest, his raised arms, his head.

But this . . .

This never happened.

Something else happened, and it took him a minute or two to figure it out. A wayward brain neuron misfired. A mental receptor lapped up the wrong chemical, or lapped up too much of the right chemical. The switches that nightly triggered the image conduits responded to a false signal and produced a waking dream. The waking dream resembled an hallucination, but hallucinations were experienced by wet- brain alcoholics, drug takers, and crazy people, specifically paranoid schizophrenics, with whom Jack had dealt on many an occasion during his life as a coppiceman. Jack fit into none of those categories, including the last. He knew he was not a paranoid schizophrenic or any other variety of madman. If you thought Jack Sawyer was crazy, you were. He has complete, at least 99 percent complete, faith in his sanity.

Since he is not delusional, the feathers must have flown toward him in a waking dream. The only other explanation involves reality, and the feathers had no connection to reality. What kind of world would this be, if such things could happen to us?

Abruptly George Rathbun bellows, “It pains me to say this, truly it does, for I love our dear old Brew Crew, you know I do, but there come times when love must grit its teeth and face a painful reality—for example, take the sorrowful state of our pitching staff. Bud Selig, oh BU-UD, this is Houston calling. Could you Please return to earth immediately? A blind man could throw more strikes than that aggregation of WIMPS, LOSERS, AND AIRHEADS!”

Good old Henry. Henry has George Rathbun down so perfectly you can see the sweat stains under his armpits. But the best of Henry’s inventions—in Jack’s opinion—has to be that embodiment of hipster cool, the laid-back, authoritative Henry Shake (“the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook of Araby”), who can, if in the mood, tell you the color of the socks worn by Lester Young on the day he recorded “Shoe Shine Boy” and “Lady Be Good” and describe the interiors of two dozen famous but mostly long-departed jazz clubs.

. . . and before we get into the very cool, very beautiful, very simpatico music whispered one Sunday at the Village Vanguard by the Bill Evans Trio, we might pay our respects to the third, inner eye. Let us honor the inner eye, the eye of imagination. It is late on a hot July afternoon in Greenwich Village, New York City. On sun-dazzled Seventh Avenue South, we stroll into the shade of the Vanguard’s marquee, open a white door, and proceed down a long, narrow flight of stairs to a roomy underground cave. The musicians climb onto the stand. Bill Evans slides onto the piano bench and nods at the audience. Scott LaFaro hugs his bass. Paul Motian picks up his brushes. Evans lowers his head way, way down and drops his hands on the keyboard. For those of us who are privileged to be there, nothing will ever be the same again.

“My Foolish Heart” by the Bill Evans Trio, live at the Village Vanguard, the twenty-fifth of June, 1961. I am your host, Henry Shake—the Sheik, the Shake, the Shook of Araby.

Smiling, Jack pours the beaten eggs into the frying pan, twice swirls them with a fork, and marginally reduces the gas flame. It occurs to him that he has neglected to make coffee. Nuts to coffee. Coffee is the last thing he needs; he can drink orange juice. A glance at the toaster suggests that he has also neglected to prepare the morning’s toast. Does he require toast, is toast essential? Consider the butter, consider slabs of cholesterol waiting to corrupt his arteries. The omelette is risky enough; in fact, he has the feeling he cracked way too many eggs. Now Jack cannot remember why he wanted to make an omelette in the first place. He rarely eats omelettes. In fact, he tends to buy eggs out of a sense of duty aroused by the two rows of egg-sized depressions near the top of his refrigerator door. If people were not supposed to buy eggs, why would refrigerators come with egg holders?

He nudges a spatula under the edges of the hardening but still runny eggs, tilts the pan to slide them around, scrapes in the mushrooms and scallions, and folds the result in half. All right. Okay. Looks good. A luxurious forty minutes of freedom stretches out before him. In spite of everything, he seems to be functioning pretty well. Control is not an issue here.

Unfolded on the kitchen table, the La Riviere Herald catches Jack’s eye. He has forgotten about the newspaper. The newspaper has not forgotten him, however, and demands its proper share of attention. FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN, and so on. ARCTIC CIRCLE would be nice, but no, he moves nearer to the table and sees that the Fisherman remains a stubbornly local problem. From beneath the headline, Wendell Green’s name leaps up and lodges in his eye like a pebble. Wendell Green is an all-around, comprehensive pest, an ongoing irritant. After reading the first two paragraphs of Green’s article, Jack groans and clamps a hand over his eyes.

I’m a blind man, make me an umpire!

Wendell Green has the confidence of a small-town athletic hero who never left home. Tall, expansive, with a crinkly mat of red-blond hair and a senatorial waistline, Green swaggers through the bars, the courthouses, the public arenas of La Riviere and its surrounding communities, distributing wised-up charm. Wendell Green is a reporter who knows how to act like one, an old-fashioned print journalist, the Herald’s great ornament.

At their first encounter, the great ornament struck Jack as a third-rate phony, and he has seen no reason to change his mind since then. He distrusts Wendell Green. In Jack’s opinion, the reporter’s gregarious facade conceals a limitless capacity for treachery. Green is a blowhard posturing in front of a mirror, but a canny blowhard, and such creatures will do anything to gain their own ends.