Wildcards - One Eyed Jacks Part 15

Then the well-dressed woman turned and looked at him with violet eyes and said, quietly, "Mark."

It felt as if one of the youthful football jocks who had been the curse of his adolescence had just chop-blocked his pelvis out from under his spine.

"Sunflower," he managed to say through a throat gone as pliable as an airshaft.

He heard the squeak-scruff of his daughter's sneakers on stained linoleum behind him. A moment of silence hung in the air, stretching gradually, agonizingly, like a taffy strand. Then Sprout boiled past and threw herself at the woman, hugging her with all the strength of her thin arms.

"Mommy."

The rat-faced man slid out of the booth and walked up to Mark. He had wet-looking black eyes and a mustache that looked as if it had been carelessly dabbed on in mascara. Mark blinked at him, very carefully, as if his eyes were fragile and might break.

The smaller man thrust a packet of papers into his hand. "See you in court, buppie," he said, and sidled out the door.

Mark stared down at the papers. Freewheeling, his mind registered official-looking seals and the phrase determine custody of their daughter, Sprout.

And the other customers came boiling up from their checkered cheesecloth tables as if tied to the same string, stuck big black cameras in Mark's face, and blasted him back into the door with their strobes.

His vision full of big swarming balloons of light, Mark staggered into the little bathroom and threw up in the toilet beneath the Jimi Hendrix poster.

Fortunately the poster was laminated.

Kimberly Anne slid into the limousine by feel, watching the Pumpkin's front door with bruised-looking eyes. Around the fringes of the plywood she could see the photographers' flashguns spluttering like an arc welder.

"Poor mark," she whispered. She turned with mascara beginning to melt down one cheek.

"Is it really necessary to put him through all this?" The backseat's other occupant regarded her with eyes as pale and dispa.s.sionate as a shark's. "It is,"

he said, "if you want your daughter back."

She stared at fingers knotted in her lap. "More than anything," she said, just audibly.

"Then you must be ready to pay the price, Mrs. Gooding."

"My advice to you, Or. Meadows," Dr. Pretorius said, leaning back and cracking the knuckles of his big, callused hands, "is to go underground."

Mark stared at the lawyer's hands. They didn't seem to fit with the rest of him, which was a pretty unorthodox picture to start with. You didn't expect hands like that on a lawyer, even a long-haired one, especially not resting above a gold watch-chain catenary on the vest of a thousanddollar charcoal-gray suit.

They jarred. Just like fording the cream wallpaper and walnut-wainscoted elegance of Pretorius's office in a second-floor walk-up in what the tabloids liked to call the festering depths of Jokertown. Or like the strange tang like pus-filled bandages that seemed to stick in the back of Mark's nose.

Mark couldn't evade the issue any longer. "I beg your pardon?" he said, blinking furiously. Behind his chair Sprout hummed to herself as she studied the array of insects mounted under gla.s.s on the walls.

"You heard me. If you want to hold on to your little girl, the best advice I can give you as a lawyer is to go underground."

"I don't understand."

""Oh, my G.o.d,"' Pretorius quoted, ""you're from the sixties.' Doesn't ring any bells? You didn't see that movie they made out of W E Kinsella's autobiography?

No, of course not; chewing up a blotter and sitting through a revival of 2001 three times is more your speed in movies."

He sighed. "Are you telling me you don't know what 'going underground' means?

You know-Huey Newton, Patty Hearst, all those fabulous names of yesteryear."

Mark glanced nervously back at his daughter, who had her nose pressed to the gla.s.s over some kind of bug that looked like a ten-inch twig. Mark had never realized before just how nervous insects made him.

"I know what it means, man. I just don't know-" He raised his own hands, which in the somewhat stark light began to look to him like specimens escaped from Pretorius's cases, to try to draw communication out of himself, out of the air, whatever. Outside of one area of life he had never been much good at getting ideas across.

Pretorius nodded briskly. "You don't know if I'm serious, right? I am. Dead serious."

He let his hand drop forward onto his desk, onto the copy of the Post Jube had given Mark. "Do you have any idea who you're dealing with here?"

A blunt finger was tapping Kimberly Anne's face where it peered over Sprout's shoulder. "That's my ex-old lady," Mark said. "She used to call herself Sunflower."

"She's calling herself Mrs. Gooding now. I gather she married the senior partner at her brokerage firm."

He stared almost accusingly at Mark. "And do you know whom she's retained? St.

John Latham."

He spoke the name like a curse. Sprout came up and insinuated her hand into her daddy's. He reached awkwardly across himself to put his free arm around her.

"What's so special about this Latham dude?"

"He's the best. And he's a total b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"That's, like, why I came to you. You're supposed to be pretty good yourself. If you'll help me, why should I think about running?"

Pretorius's mouth seemed to heat-shrink to his teeth. "Flattery is always appreciated, no matter how beside the point."

He leaned forward. "Understand, Doctor: these are the eighties. Don't you hate that phrase? I thought nothing was ever going to be as nauseous as the cant we had back in the days when Weathermen weren't fat boys who got miffed at Bryant Gumbel on the morning show. Oh, well, wrong again, Pretorius." He c.o.c.ked his head like a big bird. "Dr. Meadows, you claim to be an ace?"

Mark flushed. -"Well, I..."

"Does the name 'Captain Trips' suggest anything?"

"I-that is-yes." Mark looked at his hands. "It's supposed to be a secret."

"Cap'n Trips is a fixture in Jokertown and on the New York ace scene. And does he ever wear a mask?"

"Well ... no."

"Indeed. So we have a fairly visible but apparently minor ace, whose, ahem, 'secret ident.i.ty' is a man who follows a rather divergent life-style in a day when 'the nail that stands out must be hammered down' is the dominant social wisdom. St. John Latham is a man who will do anything to win. Anything. Do you see how you might be, how you say, vulnerable?"

Mark covered his face with his hands. "I just can't... I mean, Sunflower wouldn't do anything like that to me. We, we're like comrades. I knew her at Berkeley, man. The Kent State protests-you remember that?" His confusion came out in a gush of reproach, accusation almost. He expected Pretorius to bark at him. Instead the attorney nodded his splendid silver head. The perfection of his ponytail filled Mark with jealous awe.

"I remember. I still walk with a limp, thanks to a National Guardsman's bayonet in my hip-among other reasons."

Pretorius sat back and gazed at the ceiling. "A radical in '70. An executive in '89. If you knew how anything but uncommon that story is. At least she's not with the DEA."

"And while we're on that subject, I have formed the impression you don't say no to recreational chemistry"

"It doesn't hurt anybody, man."

"No. Ain't n.o.body's business but your own; couldn't agree more. Being a Jew in Nuremberg in the thirties didn't hurt anybody either."

He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. "Doctor, you are a big, soft, inflated Bozo the Clown doll in the climate of today, and Mr. St. John Motherf.u.c.king Latham is going to knock you all over the courtroom. So I say to you, Run, baby, run. Or be prepared for a sea change in your life."

Mark made a helpless gesture, started to stand. "One more thing," Pretorius said.

Mark stopped. Pretorius looked to Sprout. She was a shy child, except with those close to her, and the lawyer had an intimidating way-he intimidated her dad, anyway. But she faced Pretorius, solemn and unflinching.

"The question that needs to be asked is, what do you want, Sprout?" Pretorius said. "Do you want to live with your mommy, or stay with your father?"

"I-I'll abide by her wishes, man," Mark said. It was the hardest thing .he'd ever said.

She looked from Pretorius to Mark and back. "I miss my mommy," she said in that precise, childish voice. Mark felt his skeleton begin to collapse within him.

"But I want to stay with my daddy."

Pretorius nodded gravely. "Then we'll do what we can to see that you do. But what that will be"-he looked at Mark-"is up to your father."

Seven o'clock turned up on schedule. Susan-he was fairly sure it was Susan-marched to the front door to flip over the sign to SORRY--WE'RE CLOSED just as a woman materialized and pushed at the door from outside.

Susan resisted, glaring. Mark came around the counter wiping his hands on his ap.r.o.n and felt his stomach do a slow roll.

"It's okay," he managed to croak. "She can come in." Susan turned her glare on Mark. "I'm off now, buster." Mark shrugged helplessly. The woman stepped agilely inside. She was tall and striking in a black skirt suit with padded shoulders and a deep purple blouse. Her eyes had grown more violet over the years. The blouse turned them huge and glowing.

"This is personal, not business," she said to Susan. "We'll be fine."

"If you're sure you'll be okay alone with him," Susan sniffed. She launched a last glower at Mark and clumped out into the Village dusk.

She turned, Kimberly, and was in Mark's arms. He d.a.m.ned near collapsed. He stood there a moment with his arms sort of dangling stiffly past her like a mannequin's. Then he hugged her with adolescent fervor. Her body melted against his, fleetingly, and then she turned and was out of his arms like smoke.

"You seem to be doing well for yourself," she said, gesturing at the shop.

"Uh, yeah. Thanks." He pulled a chair back from a table. "Here, sit down."

She smiled and accepted. He went around behind the counter and busied himself.

She lit a cigarette and looked at him. He didn't point out the LUNGS IN UsE-No SMOKING, PLEASE sign on the wall behind her.

She wasn't as willowy as she had been back in the Bay days. Nor was she blowsy from booze and depression as she had been when their marriage hit the rocks and she self-destructed at the first custody hearing, back in '81. Full-figured was what he thought they, called it, glancing back as he waited for water to boil, though he had it in mind that had become a euphemism for "fat". She wasn't; voluptuous might have put it better. Whatever, she wore forty well.

... Not that it mattered, not really. He was still as desperately in love with her as he'd been the first time he saw her, thirty years and more ago, tricycling down their southern California tract-home block.

The lights were low, just a visual buzz of fluorescents above the deli counter.

Mark lit candles and a sandalwood stick. The Windham Hill mob was history. The tape machine played real music. Their music.

He brought an earthenware pot and two matching mugs on a tray. He almost tipped the a.s.sembly onto the floor, slopping fragrant herbal tea on the red-and-white checkered tablecloth as he transferred the pot to the table. Kimberly sat and watched him with a smile that held no mockery.

He spilled only a little of the pale amber liquid as he poured and handed her a mug. She sipped. Her face lit. "Celestial Seasonings and old Bonnie Raitt." She smiled. "How sweet of you to remember."

"How could I forget?" he mumbled into the steam rising from his mug.

A rustle of beaded curtain, and they looked up to see Sprout standing in the gloom at the back of the store. "Daddy, I'm hungry-" she began. Then she saw Kimberly and came flying forward again.

Kimberly cradled her, telling her, "Baby, baby, it's all right, Mommy's here."

Mark sat, absently stroking his daughter's long smooth hair, feeling excluded.

At last Sprout relinquished her hold on Sunflower's neck and slid down to sit cross-legged on the scuffed linoleum, pressed up against her mother's black-stockinged shins. Kimberly petted her.

"I don't want to take her away from you, Mark." Mark's vision swirled. His eyes stung. His tongue knotted. "Why-why are you doing this, then? You said I was doing well."

"That's different. That's money." She gestured around the shop. "Do you really think this is any way for a little girl to grow up? Surrounded by s.m.u.t and hash pipes?"

"She's all right," he said sullenly. "She's happy. Aren't you honey?"

Wide-eyed solemn, Sprout nodded. Kimberly shook her head.

"Mark, these are the eighties. You're a dropout, a druggie. How can you expect to raise a daughter, let alone one as ... special as our Sprout is?"

Mark froze with his hand reaching for the pocket of his faded denim jacket-the one that held his pouch and papers, not the one with the Grateful Dead patch. It came to him how great the gulf between them had become.

"The way I've been doing," he said. "One day at a time."

"Oh, Mark," she said, rising. "You sound like an AA meeting."

The tape had segued to Buffalo Springfield. Kimberly hugged Sprout, came around the table to him. "Families should be together," she said huskily in his ear.

"Oh, Mark, I wish-"

"What? What do you wish?"

But she was gone, leaving him and her last words hanging in a breath of Chanel No. 5.

The stuffed animals sat in a rapt semicircle on the bed and in shelf tiers along the walls. The light of one dim bulb glittered in attentive plastic eyes as the girl spoke.

Mark watched from the doorway. She had not pulled the madras-print cloth to, indicating she didn't want full privacy. She spoke in a low voice, leaning forward. He could never make out what she said at times like this; it seemed to him that the length of her sentences, the pitch of her voice even, were somehow more adult than anything she managed in the world outside her tiny converted-closet bedroom, in the presence of anyone but the Pobbles and Thumpers and teddy bears. But if he tried to intrude, to come close to catch the sense of what she was saying, she clammed up. It was one area of her life Sprout excluded him from, however desperately he wanted to share it.

He turned away, padded barefoot past the dark cubicle where he had his own mattress on the floor to the lab that took up most of the apartment above the Pumpkin.

Red-eye pilot lights threw little hard shards of illumination that ricocheted fitfully among surfaces of gla.s.s and mechanism. Mark felt his way to a pad in the corner beneath a periodic table and a poster for Destiny's gig at the Fillmore in 1970's long-lost spring and sat. The smell of cannabis smoke and the layers of paint it had sunk into enfolded him like arms. His cheeks had become wet without his being aware.

He pushed a cabinet on casters away from the wall, untoggled the fiberboard rear panel. The compartment hidden inside contained racks of vials of various colored powders: blue, orange, yellow, gray, black, and silver that swirled together without mixing. He stared at them, ran a finger along them like a stick along a picket fence.

A long time ago a skinny kid with a crew cut and highwater pants, who had just dropped LSD for the first time ever, had stumbled into an alleyway in horror, fleeing a People's Park confrontation between National Guardsmen and students in the dark angry days that followed Kent State. Moments later a glowing beautiful youth emerged: an ace for the Revolution. Together with Tom Douglas, the Lizard King and doomed lead singer for Destiny, he had stood off the Guard and the Establishment ace Hardhat, and saved the day. Then he partied the night away, with help from the kids, Tom Douglas, and a beautiful young activist called Sunflower. He called himself the Radical.