“He’s coming back, you know.”
Jermaine didn’t look at his mother. He was kneading dough, and with the amount of flour left in the house he wanted to make sure it had gone towards something worthwhile. Attention could not be spared.
“Just like I thought he would. I know how he thinks, you see. That’s why I was so important. Necessary. The only one that really could do that.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Jermaine risked. The old tile counter thumped under his fists, muffled by soft dough and his own fists.
His mother nodded vigorously, staring out over the long lake through the fog and drizzle and the horrible clouds of insects. The mosquitos stayed away from her, even out on a deck whose screen had been gone since before Jermaine’s own children had been born. Too tough, no juices left, who knew why.
“He’s coming back,” she said. “He can’t afford not to.”
“Yuh.”
“He IS, you know,” she said shortly, and stomped her foot. The deck made a soggy sound, like a starfish trampled underfoot, and Jermaine winced at it.
“Don’t DO that, mother. You know about the scorpions.”
“They wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Only because they can’t reach it. Don’t make such a ruckus out there.”
She harrumphed, but she didn’t stomp again.
***
The bread had been good, despite Jermaine’s best efforts. And that had been his day, such as it was. Mother was fed, he was fed, he’d done at least one thing he could pretend was worthwhile after waking up, and the roof hadn’t collapsed on him. Nothing left to do but see how many bug bites he could get in the course of one cigarette.
Now if only he could persuade his head to stay quiet. Because as he stood there, smouldering, he couldn’t stop thinking about the roof.
And the floors.
And the walls.
All lovely, lovely, lovely old wood that hadn’t seen a day of repair in twenty years. He was less scared of the scorpions underneath the porch than he was the things he couldn’t see in the walls. Black mould? Could be red and purple and green for all he knew.
But mostly he’d bet it was the soft colourless mush of a creature eating itself from the inside out. This place had been a lovely cottage, back then. Lovely enough to pretend it was a mansion, which it did very well.
“The president used to come here,” his mother told him. “Your father and I used to invite him.”
“Yeah,” he said to himself. Yeah, he knew.
***
Jermaine had sat on the back stoop as the troopers stormed in through the pantry door, boots kicking through fancy wood panelling like cheap paper. A stern look from the sergeant had frozen his behind to the stair, and now he was afraid that if he breathed someone would remember he was there and decide to shoot him.
Shouts from inside had become fewer. Whatever they were doing was finishing up.
That was when the big car opened up, and out came the president.
Jermaine had never seen the president before in person, but he’d seen coins and bills and a television and he knew the face when he saw it. All jaw and jowl.
“Hey,” said the president, and he was talking to him, Jermaine, of all people, at his house. Maybe this was the sort of thing you were supposed to be excited about. “Hey kid.”
Jermaine nodded, finding a compromise between obvious attentiveness and trying not to move. “Your mother home, kid?”
Jermaine nodded before he could think about his answer. The president laughed. “Yes. That’s good. Hey, you know what she’s been up to?”
Jermaine shook his head.
“Neither do I. But I think that’s going to change.”
He walked into the cottage, and he ruffled Jermaine’s hair as he walked by. Just a little harder than necessary, making his neck hurt.
***
The pantry door had been fixed. Come to think of it, that might have been the last part of the building to get replaced.
Jermaine finished his cigarette in perfect harmony with the sunset; two little embers going out at once as he idled on the porch, swatting the mosquitos reflexively. He sighed – a proper bellows of a thing, in and out and clear the lungs – and stepped back inside and almost walked into his father.
He was eating a crude sort of sandwich over the kitchen sink, but when he saw Jermaine his eyes bulged and his food vanished into him like a magician’s scarves in reverse.
“My boy,” he managed, and it wasn’t just the full mouth making him hoarse. There was something wrong with his throat, something raw. “My boy. How are you? Oh you’re big now.”
“No thanks to you,” said Jermaine, and it hadn’t needed any thought at all. Of course it hadn’t; in the back of his mind he’d always been writing this moment.
“Yes, yes I love you too my boy, my boy.” A smile made its way out from under his moustache, shattering his face into a maze of wrinkles. “Listen, it’s all coming together now, it’s all almost here. I’m so proud of you, you know that? I don’t know if I ever told you that. Did I ever tell you that?”
“You haven’t told me anything since I was ten.”
This only stirred the old man to more vigorous agreement. His head started jerking up and down like a drinking bird. “Quite right. Quite right. Quite right. Yes, that was cruel of me. But listen, I’ve got it all working now. I’ve finally gone and done it. Get your mother. Where’s your mother?”
“Sleeping.”
“Wake the silly bitch up, can’t she tell that we’re about to make it?” He started to laugh now, and it sounded like someone choking a goose to death. “I’ve gone and done it. I’ve pulled it off, and pulled it off. You both need to come with me before the heat is on.”
“We’re not interested,” said Jermaine, and he was telling the truth. He was tired with all his soul now, tired just looking at the stained old thing and his manic energy and his pointless words. He wanted to go to bed and never wake up. “Go now. Walk out the door and don’t come back for another forty years.”
“Are you deaf or an idiot or both, boy? We’re rich now. I took it, I took it from him. It’s mine now. I’m offering you both the chance of a lifetime, nonono I OFFERED you the chance of a lifetime and now it’s HERE, it’s DONE, it’s REAL. I promised and I delivered.” His hands were pawing at his sides now, feeling along his shapeless shirt and destroyed pants for something. “I got it. I finally got it. I had it before and I had to put it away but I got out and got it, I got it for real.” He shivered. “But it’s not on me. I put it down and it’s not on me. Listen to me, I can –”
“Go.” Jermaine had picked him up, when he wasn’t quite sure. It was much easier than he’d have thought it would be, if he’d thought of it before doing it. His father seemed to have a way of making him hasty. “Go again, like you did before. It should be easy.”
“No,” said the old man, his head shrinking into his neck like a turtle. “No no no, not again! I just got out! I was locked up tight, you have to believe that, yes, locked up so very tight, and now you want me to go back? You’re a cruel boy, a cruel boy from a cruel woman. She called me mean! She was mean! It’s not fair!”
Jermaine threw him. His arms weren’t as strong as they used to be and his back hurt and his tendons gave him these odd little twinges he couldn’t quite tell if he was imagining, but his father was no weightier than a cobweb so he didn’t so much as touch the stairs, floating across the marshy ground like a falling leaf. He settled atop the vegetation with a whisper of a slosh, which was immediately buried by his shriek.
“To hell with that! To hell with you both! See if I help you again! It’s here and I’m going to get it! I’ll get it now! And I won’t show you! I won’t share with you! It was the plan but not anymore and I’ll…I’ll-”
It wasn’t a very solid door, but Jermaine slammed it anyways.
***
“Who was that?”
Of course his mother had woken up. She stood in the kitchen, feet bedecked in cobwebs, hair trying to escape her skull, eyes suspicious and all too alert.
Jermaine didn’t like it when she was up this late. She seemed smarter than he was.
“Nobody,” he said.
“That was your father.”
“Nobody.”
She considered this, and nodded. “Yes. Yes, that’s right.”
And she went back to bed, still shuffling but purposeful.
***
There was still bread the next day, and no father. But Jermaine needed to feel like he was doing something useful, so he took out his old line and sat on the deck casting lines through the old screen window, enjoying the closest thing to a breeze the lake could muster.
“Your father never fished,” his mother told him. She had taken out the least-mouldy armchair for some almost-sunlight. “Hopeless with a rod and line, worse with a net. But he was an archaeologist, so he was much better with a shovel. Good for bait.” She snickered. “Not as good as me, though. I did my part just fine, oh yes. It was him that made the mess. Got caught, sticky fingers, sticky fingers. With fingers like that you’d think he could’ve been a better fisherman.”
Jermaine shrugged.
“Did I ever tell you about the time we plotted against the president? Regime change is the duty of the people, Hal told me, and since the people weren’t voting fast enough we might as well lend them a hand.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Of course that was all a lie, of course, of course. He just wanted something shiny, selfish thing, greedy boy.” She sighed. “Always greedy. Not like you, you know? You raised your daughters to be like that, didn’t you? Not like your father? Yes?”
“Yeah.”
“Good boy,” she said, patting his arm. “Good boy. Now, the president’s here, so you’d better go greet him while I put on my shoes.”
“Sure,” said Jermaine. Then Jermaine’s ears told him that they’d been hearing an engine approach for the past five minutes.
***
The president was different from how Jermaine remembered him, standing in the kitchen with a gun uncomfortable and damp in his hand. He had always been thick, true, but now he was fat; the kind of sleek unwrinkled fat you found on a frog’s belly, stretched and smoothed and covered in veins from living life half-marinated. The kitchen was practically overflowing with him.
Jermaine supposed he was different from how the president remembered him too – in the old days his eyes had sparkled, everyone had said. Now he was a man grown and they just sat there in his skull.
The president’s gaze met them, ignored them, passed over him smoothly and entirely, without a blink. Jermaine was part of the scenery, part of the background.
His mother, however, wasn’t. And she’d found her good shoes.
“Claire,” said the president.
“Hello!”
“Where is it?”
She shrugged. “Don’t know. Never found it. Hal lost it years back, silly thing.”
“Hal escaped prison three weeks ago, first place he’d have come was here. Tell me.”
“He didn’t trust me, you know? Never did. Stashed it somewhere before you came over and lied where he’d kept it. Haven’t bothered looking in years.”
“Tell me or I’ll shoot,” said the president.
“Oh poo, shoot what?” said Jermaine’s mother, waspishly. “I’m nothing but leather and flint now, and this place is such a swamp I’d be amazed if your gun can fire. Humidity’s an awful thing, isn’t it?”
“Shut up!”
“You were never one for first-hand violence anyways. Too much work. I agree with that, but I don’t agree with how you got other people to do it for you. Hypocrisy is an ugly thing.”
“Shut up!” said the president. “Shut up! I’m not here for this, I’m not here for you, I’m not even here to shoot anyone I just want my damned jewel back! Forty years it’s missing, now the thief breaks out, now his trail leads here, now his old bat of a hook-up is sitting on it! I’ve had enough! Give it back!”
“Nobody cares,” said Jermaine.
“I came here for answers,” snapped the president, “and I’ll have-”
“NOBODY CARES,” yelled Jermaine. “NOBODY! Mother’s senile and father’s a pathetic runaway and YOU haven’t been in power since my oldest daughter was born, and she isn’t even in the country anymore! The thing stolen from you has been missing for half a century? That’s half a century it hasn’t mattered. Nobody. Cares.”
The president looked more like a frog than ever, so puffed up like that. He opened his mouth to croak, but all that came out was a hiss, and THAT was drowned out by his mother’s laughter. She sounded half her age.
“A bitch and a bitch’s son, both ill-bred,” said the president, at last. “You match the old place like a set of chipped dishes. Stay here, by all means – I’ll throw away the key. Grow mouldy together, the three of you.”
Then he turned on his heel and stomped his way down the staircase, all eighteen stone of him, and on the third step down his heel came through the wood.
There were no splinters, there was no sawdust. Nothing but a soggy squish at first, until the first pair of big pale claws came racing up through the hole and seized the president’s pant-leg. He didn’t even scream he was so surprised.
Not right away, at least.
“The old ditch,” his mother told him, when the noises had stopped. All the noises, from everyone. Even the mosquitos seemed placid. Something in the air that had been bending for decades had finally snapped.
“Hmm?”
“The old ditch,” she repeated. “Best take the body there before they get too tucked into him. Or, god forbid, someone comes around. He WAS the president, you know. And he used to come here, back in the day.”
“Yeah, mother.”
She patted his cheek fondly. “You’re a good boy. Go on then. Scoot!”
And he did, although it was no picnic lugging that much president through that much underbrush. Every root and every branch caught a new scrap of clothing or pound of flesh, and if the president had been smooth and featureless in life he was a ragged thing indeed by the time he made it to his final resting place.
Jermaine dragged the body over the last hump and rolled it down the slope into the old, old ditch, where it refused to sink. Caught on something.
He swore filthily, reached down with a stick, shoved and shoved and the disturbance floated over right side up, neck side wrong, eyes all bulgy with leeches, and in one clutched fist something gleaming.
His father.
***
His mother liked the jewel well enough, but she lost it every week, so he put it on the high shelf.