Ricochet Joe

13 THE PUPPET

Joe ran for his life, ran to preserve the meaning that had so recently been given to his life. The overcast brightened as chain lightning traveled pathways of oblique angles through convolutions of thunderheads. The flesh of the storm was rent, and rain roared down upon him in torrents.

Five blocks to the Montclair house seemed like five light-years and five millennia. As he bounded up the porch steps, he could have sworn they telescoped ahead of him, adding risers and treads to the climb.

If he had heard the shot, he had thought it was one with the peals of thunder. When he rushed through the front door and into the living room, Joe believed that, no matter what might be about to happen, he had arrived to thwart it. The sight of Portia dead on the floor brought him to a halt and wrenched from him a wretched sob of grief and self-disgust.

Evidently, the chief was not at home. Her uncle Patsy O’Day had come calling with a Colt revolver. Whatever had happened under the pool hall, after Joe and Portia had left, even if Hocker and Jagget had been shot to death, Patsy had been poisoned.

The puppet master was dead. It didn’t live in Patsy or anyone else. But its poison still circulated through this man’s veins.

Our illusion is that we travel through life on a calculated and straight trajectory, from the past through present into future, on a journey to understanding, truth, reward. But by Brownian movement we progress, sent angling off this way and that by the impact of everyone we meet and every event that we cannot foresee.

Joe didn’t hesitate to shoot Patsy dead, for otherwise Patsy would have shot him.

He could not bear the sight of Portia in death. Yet he was about to kneel and take her in his arms when the dog came through the archway from the hall. It regarded Joe with an intensity that conveyed to him that psychic tracking and the skill of an experienced gunman were not the only gifts he had been given in his role as a paladin.

He left her poor broken body on the floor and retreated through the living-room arch. When he crossed the threshold, the hallway was not as it had been. In its place lay a white corridor of luminous walls, with every so often the ghostly suggestion of a door. He did not seem to walk, but glide. When he passed through the door to which he felt drawn, he found himself in Chief Montclair’s home office, alone.

Night pressed at the windows. But no rain streamed down the glass. The digital clock on the desk read SATURDAY. The time was ten minutes before he had arrived in this place after shooting Dulcie.

The gun safe remained unlocked, and he selected a .45 pistol.

He opened a box of ammunition and loaded the magazine.

Portia sat at the table in the kitchen, in a state of distress, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate in front of her, a snifter of brandy beside it.

Perhaps her father had ventured out in search of Joe, concerned about how long he had been gone.

She looked up when Joe entered the room, and relief wiped the worry from her face.

Because he didn’t know what word or action might bend the past the wrong way and make an even greater nightmare of the future, he meant to say and do only what seemed essential.

As she started to get up from her chair, he raised one hand.

“No. I haven’t returned yet. I’m still at my grandmother’s house.”

She regarded him solemnly, and he believed she understood.

He put the pistol on the table.

“When the doorbell rings, let him in and shoot him in the foyer. He isn’t who he appears to be. And if you let him, he’ll kill you in the living room.”

Although he longed to touch her, he walked away, directly to the back door. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. No porch lay where a porch should have been, no yard, not even the dark of night. Ahead was only a whiteness more terrible than might have been the dead and starless blackness beyond the universe.

When he walked into the blinding brightness of the sea of time, he might have thought that he was drowned by it, dissolved to atoms and his atoms scattered into eternity—except one thing remained to assure him that he lived: the mental image of Portia, vivid and vibrant and beautiful.

In the whiteness, a door. Beyond the door, his grandmother’s kitchen, where she still lay dead.

Agnes had gone.

Joe hurried to the hallway and saw himself running toward the front door. He waited a moment before following.

Lightning revealed the Wagnerian heavens in dark tumult, the perfect stage sky for a performance of Götterdämmerung, here at the end of all things. Sabers of lightning eviscerated the thunderheads, and rain chased down the night in torrents.

Joe pursued himself at a distance, for he knew that the first Joe, the self ahead of him, would not look—had not looked—back.

The five blocks to the Montclair house seemed to pass beneath his feet in seconds, though he knew the journey was one of minutes. Just short of his destination, he left the sidewalk, crossed the street, and stood in the darkness under a tree.

Over there at the house, where a bright future might yet await Joe Mandel, that ordinary young man raced up the steps just as the front door of the Montclair house opened. She appeared, the pistol in one hand. He halted, almost recoiled, surprised by her weapon. But Portia came into his arms, and he embraced her. They held each other in silence for a moment, and then their excited voices carried into the stormy night…

… carried across the rain-swept street to the Joe who stood in the darkness under the tree. He waited until they went inside and closed the door, the terror of the night and all the killing behind them, a cover story in need of invention, a discussion between the chief and Agnes Jordan certainly necessary. But now, the future had angled sharply away from despair to hope. Evil, which endured all of time, was for this precious moment held at bay.

Joe set out into the rain, heading downtown toward the quaint shops and the sparkling cafés, and then past them to a semiquaint district where the bus station stood. A counter clerk sold him a ticket to a town five hundred miles away.

He didn’t have much money, only what was in his wallet. He did not know what he would do, where he would go after this night. But he knew it would be somewhere special, for every place on the earth was special in its way. And he knew that whatever life he led would not be ordinary.

His beloved grandmother, whom he would never see again in this life, said that you knew you were getting a little wisdom when you were able to see that even loss could be beautiful if it made you love more the things that hadn’t been lost. Portia had been lost to him, but not to death, and the lesser loss was one that he could survive.

Perhaps she would marry that other Joe, the version of himself that never knew his girl had been shot dead and resurrected. Maybe they would have children, a long and happy life.

He found some welcome solace in knowing that the other Joe would have her to hold and cherish. In this world of suffering, there was no perfect consolation, and this one was especially melancholy. In this momentous night, however, he knew far more sadness than grief, and while deep sadness bruises the heart, it doesn’t leave the enduring scars of profound grief.

In the long bus ride away from Little City, he stared out the window at the rainy dark. Sometimes the lights of habitation were many, sometimes they were few and far between in the distance, but he cherished all of them and wondered what lives they illuminated.