In the small stand of trees by the stream, she found three clumps of moist, honey-colored chanterelles. They’d go great tonight with the remainder of the beef burgundy. As she picked, she listened in her head to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Dylan singing, “Something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?”
It was when Mr. Johnson was president, she remembered, and the students were burning their draft cards, that all the parties stopped.
AFTER LUNCH they were up in the Jeffersonian study. Lucy surreptitiously scanned the shelves for novels and war memoirs, but didn’t see a single one. Augie had been talking about his first days in America, first in New York, and then in Schenectady, where he’d “bached with” a Latvian-American widow.
“And the photo of you on the dust jacket — the one taken by Sergeant Cahan — you carried that with you wherever you went?”
“I didn’t have too many papers — you can imagine. The Latvian aid people in New York got together what they could, including that picture. I still have the old brown envelope. There isn’t much in it.”
“I’d love to see it.”
“Sure. I’ll dig it out for you. Remind me.”
“I don’t suppose the name Thetford means anything to you, does it?”
“Thetford…Only Thetford I know is a town in England. I think it’s in the Midlands — no, East Anglia. Minna and I, we vacationed over there once — I had to do some research, not on sand dollars, at the British Museum Library and the Bodleian in Oxford. We drove around the country as much as we could, and spent one night in Norwich.” He said Norwitch. “They’ve got a castle there, and a cathedral that Cromwell knocked around a bit. Thetford’s near Norwich, I believe. Seems like we drove through it but didn’t stop. Why do you ask?”
“Because an odd woman from Thetford sent me this.” She got the photograph from her bag. “She thinks it could be you.”
“Yeah, looks like me. Though it’s difficult to make out the face.” He took it over to the window, tilting it to catch the diffuse sunlight. “Why’d she send it to you?”
“Oh, you know. I’ve been trying to do some not-on-sand-dollars research.”
“Hey, what’s that? And there’s another, I think.” He pulled open the drawer of his desk and found a magnifying glass. “Look,” he said, pointing at the dirt in the background, holding the glass over it. “Doesn’t that look to you like a chicken?”
Preoccupied with the boy and the barbed wire, she hadn’t properly attended to the dirt. There was a distinct but out-of-focus chicken shape there, the same nearly black color as the earth.
“And there’s the other one.”
“You’re absolutely right.”
Augie laughed. “Couldn’t be me. If I’d been that close to chickens in those days, I wouldn’t have been lallygagging by that fence. I’d be wringing those critters’ necks.”
His tone was light, open, guileless. Lucy, certain now that she was looking at a picture of Juris Abeltins, no relation to August Vanags, felt giddy with relief. She said, “But isn’t it a weird coincidence — that boy, the wire, and all?”
“He looks like he’s living in the land of plenty. So why’s he all skin and bone?”
“He had a disease called coeliac. His name was Juris Abeltins.”
He corrected her pronunciation and said, “Latvian, like me.” He checked his watch. “Gotta go — date out on the water at four o’clock sharp.”
Looking out the window, she saw the sea was back. On the sand berm at the end of the lawn, Alida, in T-shirt and jeans, was buckling herself into a life vest. “Have a great paddle, or whatever one says.”
She preceded him down the stairs. At the bottom, he said, “Juris Abeltins! Well, whaddaya know!”
He moved to join Alida on the berm, while Lucy went in search of Minna.
FOR AS LONG NOW as it seemed he could remember, he’d spent nearly all his time brooding in his office suite. It was torture to him to drag himself on his rounds through the city on necessary business; he got through it as fast as he could, then drove back to Occidental Avenue to tend his wounds. He wasn’t awake and he wasn’t asleep — at once fully conscious and in the grip of a terrible dream. No distraction worked. When he tried to read, the words were foreign symbols on the page. The cartoons he watched were meaningless colored drawings on a screen. He noticed neither darkness nor light outside. He ate, pissed, and shat — the only punctuations of his unending, unendurable days. Nothing could divert him from the memory of the scene in #701, at which his whole being went rigid with fury and shame.
One thing he knew: he was through with people business. Parking lots were clean, uncomplicated by comparison, generating a revenue stream as pure and untainted as a river gushing from a mountain crag, while the people business was as contaminated as a pipe of swirling sewage, drenching him in filth from head to foot.
Strange to think that only days before he’d looked on the Acropolis with love and pride. Now he wanted it gone — obliterated, wiped off the face of the city. His sole slow-dawning satisfaction lay in the thought of a giant wrecking ball smashing into the building, Pow! and Pow! again, reducing it to a heap of splinters and brick dust.
He’d show those fuckers — all of them, and especially the bitch in #701. They could live in the street along with the rest of the scumbags, making fires in buckets, digging in Dumpsters, begging for quarters, crying, fighting, sucking on their stupid bottles. The street was where garbage in human form belonged. They could scavenge in the alley beside the smoking red-dirt mountain that would be all that was left of the Acropolis.
Where the building had stood, he’d gouge a massive underground garage, multistory, deep as he could go, then lease the space above to some big commercial interest — supermarket, maybe, or bank. Let them build. He wanted only to destroy, right down to the infected foundations of the apartment block.
Pow! He saw the wrecking ball arc slowly through the air, the collapsing walls, the explosion into dust. For the first time since his excruciating humiliation, Charles O caught a distant glimmer of what it might be like to be himself again.
LUCY HAD GROWN to anticipate with pleasure Minna’s regular graces before meals. The meals deserved them, and in her mouth the words “for health and food, for love and friends” sounded just right.
As soon as they sat down, Alida began asking Augie about his book. She was already ninety pages into it, and before dinner had told Lucy that it was “Good—really good.”
“And you were really there? Everything really happened to you?”
“Oh, yes, but of course it was all a long, long time ago.”
“If even some of that stuff happened to me, I would’ve turned out totally freaked and weird.”
“You don’t think I’m weird? I sure am — at least, if you ask some people. Your mother, for instance. She thinks I’m a fabulist and an exaggerator, that I make it up as I go along.”
Aghast, reddening, Lucy said, “Augie! That’s not true!”
He ignored her. Chuckling to Alida, he said, “You only have to see her face when I’m talking about the Islamist threat. She thinks I’m some nutty right-wing hyena. Oh, yes you do! Don’t deny it! Alida, can you pass your mom the wine? She spends far too much of her time reading The New York Times—either that, or I really am the madman she believes me to be.” To Lucy he said, “Don’t think I haven’t considered the possibility that my views may have been warped by my crazy childhood — yeah, it’s possible, but of course I hold them to be entirely rational.”