place, Blythe Spirit.”
“Beg pardon?”
Under the sound of the jet engine, Fletch had to strain to hear Crystal.
“Blythe Spirit was a terrible place, Fletch.” Crystal’s voice was low. “I’m glad you got me out of there. All their expensive, expert help had succeeded only in making me hopeless. I’m glad you nailed those bastards.”
“Is Mister Mortimer pleased?” Fletch asked. “I mean, with the new mirrors?”
“He’ll never tell you. No, in fact he’s been expostulating all morning. First, at the boys’ training schedule being interrupted. The next explosion from his mouth was, ‘Why doesn’t that Fletcher mind his own damned business?’ Then, when he watched Ricky seeing himself for the first time in the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall perfect mirrors, he fumed. ‘Now that damned boy won’t want to fight anybody but himself, ever! For a boy fightin’ himself in a mirror I couldn’t sell a ticket to a nun,’ was what he said. I noticed he didn’t send the mirrors back, though.”
“I can always tell when he’s pleased.”
“Ricky is why I’m calling.”
“Ricky? The younger boy? Why would you be calling me about him?”
“I’ve discovered him.”
“Was he under a rock?”
“You know
“No, ‘Leaves of grass, grains of sand/ Seasoned, soldier, hardened man/ Is what I’m told I am …’?”
“Guess I missed that one.”
“I found it in an anthology here. I just read it to him. To Ricky. Because they couldn’t work out in the gym this morning, with your workmen here. Listen to this. I’m putting him on.”
“Crystal—” At that moment, Fletch did not expect to be listening to a sixteen-year-old boxer in Montana recite poetry to him by long-distance telephone.
Then Fletch heard Ricky speaking. To him. To his core.
“‘Leaves of grass, grains of sand//Seasoned soldier, hardened man / Is what I’m told I am.’”
Through Fletch’s little telephone came Ricky’s magnificently timbred, modulated voice enhanced by his distinct diction, thrilling cadence: “‘Drinking mud, eating grass: / Think of me as Saddam’s ass. // We’re of different centuries / You and I. / I’m taught to think of lips for lips, / Eye for eye, / While you, my conqueror, are trained / To think of blips; / Coordinate hand, eye and brain …’”
Fletch stuck his index finger in his opposite ear and hunched over a little to hear better.
The voice was compelling. “‘Moslem, Christian and Jew / You do not know me as a man, / A true believer in Saddam, / See my bravery, see me bleed. / Even my final, dying scream: / Silent on your computer screen …’” In the voice of this sixteen-year-old boxer in Montana was a touch of the best, some of the surety, authority, timbre, rhythmic sense of Olivier, Burton …
To himself, Fletch mouthed: “Wow!”
Hunched over, finger in his ear, listening to Ricky over a cheap telephone speaking more than a thousand miles away, Fletch felt something electrical go up his spine and burst in the back of his head between his ears.
“‘The bazaar battled the arcade, / And, naturally, the arcade won. / You’ve had the benefits of our oil, / While my mother and I have had none. // The problem is, and think of this, / It is your every wish / To drag me into a new time, / The century of bliss. / While the world economy thins / Resources shall be averaged. / It matters not who wins. // Seasoned soldier, hardened man / Is what I’m told I am. / You, the pinball wizard mind, / The tommy deaf, dumb, and blind.’”
There was a pause. Then the boy’s voice, not speaking into the telephone, asked, “All right, Mrs. Faoni?”
Crystal took the phone. “Fletch? Did you hear?”
“Yes.”
“Are you hearing what I’m hearing?”
“That’s some fine instrument that boy has.”
“Fletch, Ricky isn’t a boxer. He’s an actor.”
“Oh, Crystal! Mister Mortimer will kill you for sure.” Looking up at the house, Fletch wasn’t sure what he was seeing.
“I read this poem to Ricky once, just once, this morning, and after a moment he began reciting it back to me, the whole thing, sounding as you just heard. Consider not only his sound. He’d memorized the whole thing only hearing it once! He still hasn’t read it! Isn’t he marvelous?”
“Outstanding.”
Someone was tying a sheet, a white bedsheet, to a railing of one of the upper balconies.
He could not see who that someone was.
Sheets. Something about sheets.
Bedsheets wouldn’t be aired from a balcony of the main house.
There was a laundry yard somewhere for that.
“Crystal, you can’t take one of Mister Mortimer’s two remaining boxers.”
“Such talent can’t be ignored. This boy should have his head beat in? No way! I won’t have it. I think it’s a very good thing you brought me here, Fletch. Who’d think of discovering a talented actor in boxing gloves and britches in Where-the-hell-am-I, Wyoming?”
“Why does that surprise you?” For a moment, nothing was happening on the balcony. The rest of the sheet did not appear. “What are you going to do about it, anyway, Crystal? I mean, do about him?”
“Work with him a little myself. I don’t know much, but I know more about this than Mister Mortimer does. I’ll read to him, make him read the texts, ask him what things mean, how he interprets them. I’ll get some tapes, play them for him. This boy has never seen or heard anything other than Terminator movies. I’ll get in touch with some people I know in regional theater—”
A black bulk appeared laid out along the top of the balcony railing. The bulk was as long as a person.
The black bulk rolled, was rolled off the railing.
As it fell, as the sheet unfurled, the body’s arms extended above its head.
The lower end of the sheet was knotted around the neck of the bulk, of the body, of the person.
Fletch yelled: “Crystal! I’m seeing someone being hung!”
“What?”
Hanging from the balcony railing by a bedsheet tied around her neck, the body was swinging. The legs and arms struggled, but not much.
The black hat fell off the head and floated to the ground.
No head appeared over the railing.
“Mrs. Radliegh!” Fletch yelled into the phone. “Amalie! She’s being hung! Good bye!”
Fletch was already running toward the house. As he ran, he folded his phone and tried without success to jam it into his pocket.
He jumped up steps and across a terrace into an enormous sunroom.
“I’ve been stabbed!”
Wearing only the bottom of a bikini, Alixis stood with Amy in the sunroom.
Alixis kept whirring around in a small circle, first this way, then that, whimpering, like a puppy chasing its tail. As she twisted, first she would reach her back with the fingers of one hand, then the other.
Each time she took her hand from her back she stared incredulously at the blood on her fingers.
There was blood on the floor where she was rotating on bare feet.
Amy was pacing around her sister, trying to examine her back. “Stay still! You haven’t been stabbed! You’ve been cut by a barbecue fork!”
There were two wobbling parallel lines across Alixis’ back dripping blood.
“Who did this to you?”
Amy said to Fletch, “I was asleep by the pool. Someone whacked me on the head—”
Fletch was dashing through the room. “Someone’s hanging from a balcony.”
“What?” Amy started to follow Fletch.
Alixis shrieked after them: “I’m bleeding!”
“Oh, shut up!” Amy yelled. “It’s time somebody barbecued you, you fuckin’ worthless piece of meat!”
