Captain smiled and nodded as if, being an experienced insurance salesman, he was accustomed to customer resistance. “I understand your petulance, and I’m confident that, as successful entrepreneurs, you’ll get past your displeasure and approach this in a businesslike manner. I must tell you, no matter what extraordinary steps you take to fortify your estate, it’s the nature of my boy, a function of his very freakishness, that he can’t be kept out. And as to your concern about future premiums, this is the one and only, even if I wished otherwise. The boy is the instrument that makes it possible for me to do what I’ve advised you I will do if not paid. For now, he sees me as his savior and is pleased to obey me. But in time, he will become less ... manageable. Even now, he frightens me, though I dare not let him know. Once he has paid his first visit to your lovely home and you realize that a hundred fifty thousand is a small price to pay to ensure he won’t return, once I have my money, I’ll kill him. Certain things he does ... how he looks at me ... I’d be crazy to think I can control him and use him long-term.”
If Franklin had been ready to hustle Captain off the estate, he was given reason to hesitate by the quiet note of dread in the man’s voice and a supporting anxiety in the set of his broad face. Loretta seemed likewise affected. Captain was a pitchman, wickedly effective at selling the exaggerated qualities of a thing with superlatives that he could make ring true. However, he was not competition for the great actors of American theater. I could see he wasn’t faking. He was profoundly afraid of this boy of his.
Loretta was aghast. “Kill him? After you use him, you kill him? You share your intention with us as if it will put us at ease—when what it does is make us morally complicit in murder.”
Captain waved his hands as if to brush away her concern. “It won’t be murder. Killing in self-defense isn’t murder. In addition to his physical abnormalities, the boy is a stone-cold psychopath. If we knew everything that he’s done, I’m sure we would all feel that execution would be warranted.”
“You’re sure, are you? You call him a boy. How old is he?”
Captain promoted himself out of an undignified slump into a better posture. The folding chair was a credit to its manufacturer; it neither bent nor creaked in protest. “Mrs. Fairchild, you’ve no need to know anything more. I’ve put the proposal before you, and you either value this girl’s life or you don’t.”
“Actually,” Franklin said, “it’s not that simple. The way you speak of this boy, I’m beginning to think he might exist and might be as dangerous as you claim. You’ve spooked me to consider your terms seriously, though a minute ago, I was prepared to dismiss you as a fraud. However, just being told this creature exists isn’t good enough. A hundred thousand dollars requires that I becertainhe’s out there somewhere. I need to be convinced. How old is he? Where does he come from? Why are you sure you can control him even now?”
Under less fraught circumstances, it would have been amusing to watch Captain pout. Wisps of fine yellow hair, age lines having been smoothed away by a new layer of fat, legs seeming too short by comparison with the bulk of his torso—–he reminded me of an enormous baby even before he sealed the image with a thick-lipped pout. He flexed his hands as though searching for an object to throw in a tantrum. “I won’t tell you names, places, not anything you can take to the police to use against me or to have the boy taken away from me before I’m done with him. Bare bones. That’s what you’ll get—the bare bones of his story. If then you still don’t believe he’s real, God help you and this girl.” As a priest takes courage from his faith, Captain found new strength of purpose in anger, which geysered in his heart and mind, bringing pastel color to his face. That pity-me pout flattened into a score line almost as thin as a scalpel cut. Although his cheeks were pink, his compressed lips were bloodless. When he was able to control his rage enough to continue speaking, his voice had become half sneer and half snarl. “I need that money. If I can’t have it, then you can’t have her. My boy will take her. And maybe not just her.”
I knew too well the version of the world in which Captain lived. His dark universe had “neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” There was for him no right or wrong, only desire and what he deemed necessary to fulfill his desires. Our only hope depended on learning more specifics of the threat Captain lodged, an unintentional revelation he might make.
“Convince me the boy is real,” Franklin said, though by now he believed. “You’ve said so little about him. If you’d been pitching me a movie with such a character, I would have had no interest in the project. The loss of a hundred thousand won’t materially affect our lives, but my sadder experiences in the movie business have made me sensitive to con jobs.”
And so Captain told us what he was willing to reveal about the dangerous creature in his control. He called the boy Jack, though that was not his name. Jack was the first—and only—child of a farmer and his wife in a remote corner of a state in the Middle West. Jack was born at home with a midwife assisting. The parents and midwife alike were shocked by the appearance of the infant, but they weren’t horrified. In addition to being poor and hardworking, they were Christians. They believed things happened for a reason, that every child, regardless of appearance or disabilities, deserved to be loved and nurtured. Because such a special child added to the mother’s duties, her sister and sister’s husband—call them Sam and Sarah—came to live there and help work the farm. Jack’s father and Sam, with the assistance of members of their church, built a small house for the newcomers.
Eight months later, Sarah gave birth to a son; call him Bobby. The boys were homeschooled, grew up together, and were best friends. To the family, as strange looking as Jack might have been, he was nonetheless just Jack, never to be feared, a smart kid with a sense of humor for which he sometimes had to apologize when one of his pranks went too far. However, because others recoiled from him with visceral disgust, the boy was never taken into town; his world was the farm and the woods beyond.
The family were fundamentalists. They raised young Jack and Bobby with strict discipline and fear of God. On rare occasions when Jack misbehaved, when his sense of humor revealed a dark side, when he was caught in a lie, he was remorseful and tearful. He didn’t have to be told to ask God to forgive him; he retreated to his room, left the door open, and spent an hour or two on his knees, praying aloud.
One Saturday, the four adults drove into town to shop and have a café lunch. Bobby usually went with them. This time he preferred to stay home with his best buddy. When the adults returned in the late afternoon, Jack was distraught, shaking. Bobby had saddled Buttercup,one of the family’s two horses, and had taken her for a ride. When he came back home, as he was approaching the stable, a rattlesnake startled the horse and Bobby, too. Buttercup reared and panicked and threw her rider. The horse was grazing calmly now. The snake was gone. And Bobby was dead. He’d been thrown onto the cast-iron hand pump that stood on a concrete pad to provide water for the stable. He crushed his skull against the three-inch-diameter pump spout and died almost instantly.
In this rural territory, the county sheriff ran a small shop with fewer deputies than needed. The coroner made a living primarily as the proprietor of a funeral home; he had never received training in forensic medicine. No one had time or resources to investigate deaths that appeared to all intents and purposes accidental. A month after Bobby’s funeral, as Jack’s mother was turning out the pockets of his jeans before washing them, she found a penny that had been placed on railroad tracks and flattened to twice its normal size under the wheels of a locomotive. Bobby’s uncle had given it to him, and the boy had carried it—his “lucky penny”—at all times. No one had thought to retrieve it before the body was transported to the funeral home. At first, Jack said Bobby had given it to him, but then claimed he had taken it off the corpse as a remembrance of his friend. Over the next few days, his parents were dismayed that he more often than before broke the family rules. When he took the Lord’s name in vain repeatedly at a Sunday dinner and showed no remorse, it seemed that something had happened to instill in the boy a defiant attitude and a shameful pride. His parents suspected what that “something” had been, but they didn’t want to believe it. The county where they lived provided no mental health service, but after making inquiries, the parents were put in touch with a government psychologist in the state capital. We’ll call him Dr. Mephisto. He did contract work for the Department of Health and theattorney general’s office. He arranged for Jack’s parents to bring their son to the Mephisto Clinic and leave him for a three-day evaluation.
Dr. Mephisto was a graduate of a renowned medical school, but his success as a scam artist was a result of natural talent. He would bill both the health department and the attorney general’s office for his treatment of Jack, who was then just thirteen, and he would report twice the number of hours of counseling that he actually provided the boy. On the telephone, the parents described their son as having grievous physical deformities that medicine could not fix, that would be lifted from him only by divine grace. This led the good doctor to hope the boy might provide him with a third source of income. Fifteen years earlier, he had discovered the world of carnival freak shows. With considerable dedication, he had made contact with the operators of several ten-in-ones and as well with thirty psychologists and psychiatrists all over the country who had established clinics roughly analogous to his. Among the patients those specialists treated were occasional individuals with disabling deformities who were depressed or acting out their anger in perilous ways. They were usually wards of the state or clients of faith-based welfare agencies, in either case poorly served. Most proved not to be misbegotten enough to thrill the marks on a midway, neither monstrous nor amusingly malformed. Seven or eight times each year, however, one or another of Dr. Mephisto’s associates sent to him, by express courier, photos of a candidate who was a sure thing. If the miscreation resisted the prosperous future that was offered, there were drugs and certain threats that resulted in a concession. To the ten-in-one operators, the doctor provided photos and a bio of the performer, along with a required finder’s fee determined by the degree of freakishness of the person being offered. The money was substantial. In extraordinary cases, bidding ensued. Mephisto split each finder’s fee with the associate who introduced him to the human oddity. Cash. Beyond the observational capacity of tax authorities. Jack’s parentsbrought him to the clinic, ostensibly for a week of psychoanalysis and counseling, and Mephisto saw his patient for the first time. The good doctor’s heart soared with delight.
Perhaps Jack saw something in Dr. Mephisto to which he could relate, for he never became obstreperous or engaged in deceit, and he cooperated with the analysis. As for the counseling, it amounted to little more than an explanation of the workings of a ten-in-one and an accounting of the average weekly gate that would be shared with the ten exhibits. Jack was excited by the prospect of being freed from the boredom of the isolated farm and from poverty, by being a valued star rather than an embarrassment to his family. He said, “No more Jesus this and Jesus that all day long.” His smile was so wide that it briefly alarmed Mephisto. There was no question that young Jack was a psychopath, although not as extreme as his strange face suggested he might be. He had a potential for violence. He admitted to killing Bobby, but not intentionally. His cousin had been in a mood that day, taunting Jack relentlessly, finally picking a fight. “I wish it hadn’t happened,” Jack told Mephisto, “because of all the trouble it’s caused me. But I’m not sad. Bobby always got the best of everything. He lorded over me.” To cover the facts of the killing, the boy had saddled Buttercup, turned her out in the yard, and invented the story about the rattlesnake.
Jack was self-aware enough to know that only he had the power to destroy the opportunity Mephisto laid before him, that his future depended on him controlling his dark side. Nevertheless, the best ten-in-one operator for the boy was Captain, who possessed a knack for charming the most difficult oddities out of their bad behavior. Mephisto sent him four photographs, a short bio, and a price. The day he received the mail, Captain called the doctor to say he was coming by car and would be there in two or three days to “adopt” the boy.
Jack’s parents had not completed elementary school. Mephisto overwhelmed the couple with a diagnosis that terrified them eventhough they didn’t understand it. By phone, Mephisto assured them that Jack was “a psychopathic, schizophrenic, cyclothymic, paranoid, lycanthropic, idiomorphic, devil-worshipping kleptomaniac who will—not might but absolutely will—kill you in your sleep. His secret fantasy is to behead you and offer your heads to Satan on an altar. The attorney general’s committee on homicidal maniacs intends to sue you tomorrow for custody of the boy and place him in a high-security asylum where he will no longer be a danger to himself and others.”
When Jack’s parents declared their loathing and distrust of pettifoggers and worried that legal fees would bankrupt them, Dr. Mephisto agreed all lawyers were shysters, but he explained their other option. They could choose not to contest the decision by the committee on homicidal maniacs (which did not exist), sign a document transferring parental rights to the state, and be released from all criminal and financial responsibility they would otherwise face when their son inevitably raped and murdered young women. The father wanted to know where to get those documents. Mephisto said, “I’ll drive the hundred thirty miles to your place as soon as we hang up.” The mother wanted to know what to tell people, how to explain that she and her husband had conceived a mad child. “How about this,” Mephisto suggested. “You don’t tell them any such thing. You print a note from him. He ran away, says he’s going to Canada where people like him are treated better.”
Now, under the birdless sky, on the birdless lawn of Bramley Hall, Captain said, “The papers they signed were nonsense. Mephisto didn’t leave copies with them. Back in his clinic, he burned all of them. When I finally got there, the boy was ready to go. I dropped more cash than I can afford, but the second I saw him in the flesh, I knew he was worth it. He wore a hooded jacket when we stopped for gas and checked into motels. The past three days, where I live, I’ve made surehe eats what he wants, better than he’s eaten before. For the first time, he can listen to anything he wants on the radio. I bought him some under-the-counter magazines with pretty girls, and he’s more grateful than you can imagine. We talk about the new ten-in-one I’m going to open, what it’s like in the carnival, how much money he’s going to make. Maybe he’ll hold himself together and be a star for me. But like I said, I know that look he gives me, what it means. In the end, it’s only blood the boy wants, and he can’t help himself. Anyway, he and I worked out how to make sure you all suffer if you don’t come through with the hundred-grand stake I need. You did it before. Why not again? So now you tell me how it is.”
Franklin rose from his chair and surprised me just a little by saying, “I believe the boy is real and he’s what you say he is. It’s half past eleven Tuesday. I can have the money for you by the close of business Thursday. Just this once and never again.”
“What shit is this?” Captain demanded, thrusting to his feet so violently that he knocked his chair over. “You’ve got that much here and now in that home vault of yours, the same from which you got the forty thousand eight years ago and brought it to Blue Mood.”
“Be sensible, Farnam. These are far different times. Back then, thousands of banks were failing. We didn’t trust them. That part of the crisis is past. We have our money in investments, certificates of deposit. I need a little time to wind down some things in such a way that we don’t lose another hundred thousand in addition to the one I’m paying you.”
“Like hell. There’s still a depression. Maybe worse than ever. You’ve got end-of-the-world money piled up here in Bramley Hall.”
“You’re right about things being bad, but stashing cash in the mattress is the way to make it worse.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Loretta said as she and I got to our feet. “The economy needs investors to take big risks and get the country’sengine started again. The government sure hasn’t been able to do it. We can get the money, Farnam, but it’ll take a few days.”
“I’m not begging for a loan, a bank check, and a payment book,” Captain said somewhat incoherently. “It’s got to be cold cash.”
“Which we can’t have until Thursday,” Franklin insisted. “Do you want to take a few valuable paintings for ransom, a silver tea service, maybe the living room furniture? Be reasonable, sir. You have spooked us into giving you what you want—as soon as we can.”
Captain’s face had paled once more during his long story of the origin of the psychotic boy. Extreme frustration brought some color back to him. However, the rosy blush was confined to his bulbous nose, which seemed to glow like a reminder light that the time for his midday nip of the bottle had arrived. “Very well. But let me tell you something, Daddy Warbucks. Better not call any bastards with badges, better not think you can track me to where I live. I parked my car in town and walked two miles out here. I’ll walk back. I’ve got a sharp eye for shadows. If I see one, the deal is off. This girl you wanted so bad to rescue from me—you won’t have her anymore. I don’t like surprises. If you’ve got one for me, just know I’ve got one for you already, a surprise just waiting to spring.”
