you now that none of this could go. When it’s all said and done, I’m making you no promises, no guarantees. But I will tell you this.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I want the end of the book, I want you to release the whole thing so I can have people ‘officially’ read it and so I can move it around my office and through my contacts. I want you to sign this-customary procedure. Leaves you with the rights to all profit, the ability to decide your own contract with us or with anyone else. It just gives us the right to read it and says you’re aware we may have other properties with similar themes.”
Janson leaned forward and signed.
You idiot, Adam thought. I could be taking your house right now and you wouldn’t know the fucking difference.
In fact, Adam was moving through proper legal channels just as he’d claimed. He was too far along in his career to risk “borrowing” material, but the simple scrawl of Janson’s signature on the form infuriated him. The trust in simply giving up his name like that, in relinquishing it.
But he had him now, and had him just where he wanted him. He had the full story (and the only copy from the appearance of the first two-thirds of it), and all the time in the world to decide if he wanted to make it hot.
Adam took the form back across his huge desk. “Great,” he said, forcing a smile, though he didn’t feel much like smiling at all. “We’ll be in touch. I’ll have Scott pick up the end of your manuscript from your buddy at your… dinner place. Any questions?”
Janson studied a dirty fingernail. “Yeah.” His eyes were glazed, distant. He raised them. “Are we having lunch?”
“No. Sorry. I have a lunch meeting later. I’m afraid you’ll have to pick something up on your way back,” Adam said. He smiled handsomely and his eyes flashed to the door.
HIS FEET ACHED from walking by the time he got home, but he was good at ignoring pain, and he thudded heavily up the stairs to his tiny room. The meeting hadn’t gone too badly. He remembered the manic nausea that had washed over him when Adam introduced those numbers, that money, so casually. Twenty- five thousand dollars to a quarter of a million. Janson couldn’t think in numbers that big, couldn’t quite get a handle around them and put them somewhere that showed what they were. He didn’t even try.
The lowest number was more than his father had saved in his entire life, let alone earned in a single year. But a lifetime of blue bruises that turned a sickly black was enough to wash some of the green from the dollars floating through his head.
Just one thousand dollars, he thought. That’s not much, not much given the numbers these men talked. Could get me far and away from here and put me up for a few nights in a new town-a town, not a city-until I found work. Somewhere I could see the sky, not just a translucent gray fog, and trees glancing from pools of water standing as still as sleeping shadows. And cool nights with stars laid out like holes clear through to heaven.
He closed his eyes and thought for a minute, his mind catching the image of a wood fire burning in the country somewhere, of smoke moving through the night air along lines as soft as the curves of a woman.
There were things he could still do. Not many, not skills, but there were things, and a check with four digits on it could get him to a place where he could show just what those things were. Once he didn’t have to bend his back to keeping the door shut, he could bend it to other tasks. And leave the city with its one check a month, its stamps for meals, its pitiful offering of a lifeline which did not include a life.
He swung the door open to find the typewriter staring at him, a metal eye in the middle of the stark room. The odor of his sweat drifted to him as the draft sucked the stale air past him into the hallway. The typewriter watched him expectantly. Not yet, he told it with his eyes. Not yet. He fell on his mattress, exhausted, and watched the rotating fan overhead.
Janson couldn’t write for several days and nights, until he was convinced that it would never come, and that he had lost it all. He had lost the check with four figures on it, the town that was not a city, and worst of all, the demons would forever stay their perch inside him. He watched the fan spin for nights and nights and then, at last, it lulled him to the edge of a cliff where sleep was waiting.
He had no idea when he woke up, but he woke up typing, and there was night all in his room and in his head. He was drenched in sweat, and it took him great effort to pull his clinging undershirt off. His fingers were running, running away from something, and they hammered on the metal keys until they ached with a dull throbbing pain. The ragged skin on the side of one of his fingernails finally gave way. He winced as he typed on. Droplets of blood made their way down under the key and flew up with the key’s release, faintly spraying the sheet. The paper was almost out, and he prayed to a God he no longer believed in that it would hold just that much longer, just until it was out of him.
The wind picked up the rain on its bosom and bore it to my face. It was no longer liquid, but a thick, solid paste smearing my brow and eyes. I was all feet and knees high-pumping and knocking my gear, but I had Henry’s footsteps to pull me through the mud and the brush. The one face from before the war, the one laugh I knew from a time when all laughs weren’t merely crackings of the soul to push the fear out. Again I thought of his footsteps when he blocked for me against Allston and I was the county sweetheart. A two-hundred-eighteen- yard game, and all two hundred and eighteen had been my feet in his footsteps just as they were now, but that was back when boys would be boys and when we loved rather than feared the thickness of soil and turf. I watched his feet sink in the mud ahead of me and pressed my own into the messy mounds they left.
The copter was there just like they’d sent word on the radio, but then they sent all codes and numbers over the radio and all we usually got was fire and brimstone. They were behind us still as they always seemed to be and we could see the spinning blades lowering in the clearing ahead, and suddenly our whole lives narrowed to a single gem-like point. Three hundred yards from the jungle to the clearing. I could feel my soul moving to the clearing with the might of a boulder on a downhill roll. It pushed toward the opening with euphoric longing, with a desire to escape that was red tinged pink around the edges and lit like a forest fire underneath my moving body.
That was when the ground gave and I saw Henry’s knees where his feet had been and then his shoulders and he dangled above the tunnel, the roaring rain crashing on him even through the leaves. The whirring of the helicopter tormented our ears with the full glory of our world just in reach and leaving without us. The ground yawned around him and a furrow opened up and I saw his legs still moving like they were running. One of them appeared beneath him in the tunnel with his gun trained up on us. On his ridiculously kicking legs and my head framed in the light above the tunnel, and with our guns somewhere back in the blast behind us, dropped in tangles of brush and churning soil when we first heard the full promise of the metal bird which would carry us like babies to our rebirth. And it called to us still, deep-throated from the clearing ahead, the only sweet-voiced bird I heard in sixteen months spent in a bird’s habitat.
He stared at me from below, all cruelty in the smallness of his eyes, and jerked once with his gun to indicate my movement, that he wanted me to drop to them, to fall into the earth of my own volition after willing myself to life with a will like steel doubled over. And it called, hovering gently, that it was leaving without us and we had been so close, Henry Wilder and I, to going back shoulder to shoulder and starting to drink away the memories together but alone. We had been strides away that I counted in my mind as I gazed ahead and saw the line of the blades through the bend of the trees and the mist, and Henry was already lost, his legs within their reach and no hope of pulling up and out and free.
I flooded with instinct; it moved through my body like water washing across my grave, and I kicked him, just once, a shove of my boot on his shoulder and I was running before he fell. I didn’t see his face-no, I did not, or even the few hours of sleep that I now steal would be lost-just the surprised face of the underground rat below as Henry’s living body hurtled toward him blocking out the sun and his arms raised momentarily above his face as he stepped back in surprise to avoid the falling man and missing, sweetly missing, me as I fled on fairy’s wings to my bird.
I swear to God, though by then I was all but through to the clearing with footsteps between us that had never turned over faster, I swear to God that even above the angry wind and the cry of the copter I heard his body hit the ground. I heard it then, and I’ve heard it every night since. It comes to me, all echoes in hallways and rapping knuckles against wooden doors. The sound of Henry Wilder’s living body hitting beneath the earth in a jungle that carried the licks of Hell’s little flames on every leaf.
Janson was sobbing now, sobbing so thickly he barely noticed when the “d” went out. The underside of the key was soaked with blood from his split finger, and it stuck. He had to type a “c” next to an “l,” to make a “d.” He
