INHUMANUM: A THRILLER (Law of Retaliation Book 1) Page 6

  “Blow out the candle, Bonn!” Raquel yelled with more than a touch of hysteria. Troy startled.

  “He’s going to,” Troy snapped. “He’s just thinking of a name for the stupid dog.” Hedwig needed a drink, so she excused herself.

  Bonn pinched the candlewick to extinguish it. “I’ll think of one. I want to get to know him first. A name will come to me.” Bonn didn’t want to rename the dog. It wouldn’t be right to confuse him. A show dog would have papers somewhere. The papers would have his name on them.

  “He doesn’t look stupid,” Bonn added, “he looks hungry.”

  The retriever shook with excitement. He shifted back and forth on his front paws and watched the cupcake. He whined and willed the boy to give him the treat. Bonn knelt to offer the dog a bite of the cake. The retriever was raised on expensive kibble and broccoli stems drizzled with olive oil—he’d never tasted a baked good. Triumphant and elated, he unhinged his jaws and with a wet-mouthed swipe, took the whole cupcake—candle and all. He ran behind an overstuffed chair to swallow it. Bonn peered over the back of the chair as the dog gagged on the candle. The dog bobbed his head like an oil derrick and clacked his teeth. He stretched his neck out further and further. Hoark. Hoark. He took several unsure straight-legged steps to find the right place to vomit. He decided on Raquel’s beautiful new white Egyptian cotton throw rug. Troy’s phone rang as Raquel rounded the leather chair to rescue the rug. Hoark. The dog disgorged his stomach contents as Raquel hoisted and spun him away from the rug. The arc spattered a lower shelf of heavy folios like a Jackson Pollack painting. Troy surveyed the mess as Raquel inspected her new rug for shrapnel. The dog saw a broccoli stem and lurched out of Raquel’s grasp to grab it before she could. As the show dog lunged forward, his paws slipped about in the mess. He piled into a glass statue of a woman nursing a baby—a gift from Troy to Raquel when she was pregnant. The glass shattered. The dog, once “Best of Breed” at Westminster, fell onto a stiletto-shaped shard, which pierced his thin, shampoo-scented chest just behind the shoulder blade. Fine pink mist rasped from his nose and a smell of iron filled the room, but he had the stem. Just as he scrambled to his feet to gulp it back down, Troy grabbed his white leather collar, dragged the straight-legged dog to the door, and heaved him outside.

  Bonn followed Troy and looked past him into the front yard. The dog ran for the open front gate. He’d reached the relative safety of the road just as the wedge of a Corvette shot him skyward. Troy touched Bonn’s shoulder. He knew he should say something. The attorney gave the boy’s shoulder a squeeze and took a deep breath, but nothing came to him. The phone in the library rang and he had to take the call. “Send Hedwig out to look at him, OK?”

  Troy went into work. Raquel announced it was time for her to meditate. When Frau Hedwig finished cleaning up what she could, she ushered Bonn into the library and shut the door behind him. Of all the books in the room, the thesaurus was Bonn’s favorite. It was a paperback, so it stood out among its expensive leather-bound shelf mates. It was not a first edition or fancy in any way. It was a book to be used. Bonn let his eyes wander throughout the room. On a side table, a deck of cards sat protected under a bell jar. They looked like fortune telling cards and in a way, they were. The 1893 World’s Fair was a speculative gamble for the elite investors who fronted the money for the exhibits. To thank the patrons who made the fair possible, the most generous patrons were given a deck of the cards. Interesting pictures adorned them—a scandalous belly dancer named “Little Egypt” revealed her wares with a warm smile. A singer named “The Black Patti” wore a dress heavy with medals. One card showed a giant octopus. It was displayed from the ceiling and hovered over a wooly mammoth. Another card had a picture of a sideshow strongman, “Eugen Sandow.” The first time Bonn saw the card he was incredulous—he looked like a comic book character. Impossibly symmetrical, he looked to have muscles in places others didn’t. He appeared at ease behind the waxy curls of his mustache, though he held impossibly large weights above his head. He was more than an exposition athlete—he was an icon. There were other cards too. The original “Ferris wheel” had a card, as did a huge gun deemed “The Thunderer.” When fired, the behemoth used a half-ton of gunpowder to spit a projectile weighing more than a ton. There were fifty cards in all. The strongman card, however, was Bonn’s favorite. Bonn’s great grandfather, land and slave owner turned coal baron, provided thirty thousand dollars to the World’s Fair. Most of the money was used to construct the Ferris wheel—one of the fair’s only moneymakers. The fair’s organizer asked performers featured on the cards to autograph them for the man, an extra thanks to Templeton Maddox. Even the “Mammoth and Hell-fish” card had an illegible signature. Bonn liked to imagine that conjoined twins held the card out for the mammoth, while the beast signed the card with the tip of its trunk. Bonn flipped through the deck then fanned the cards back into the order his father expected to see.

  An old picture of Templeton Maddox sat just to the left of the bell jar. The man looked stern and chiseled. He wore a handlebar mustache. An expensive shotgun was cradled in the crook of one arm. Several limp pheasants hung from a strap in his hand opposite the gun and his foot rested jauntily on the running board of a Duesenberg. The driver of the car, a black man, was slightly out of focus. He appeared to be looking out of the windshield, crying. One hand was blurred on the way to his mouth, as if he saw a horror unveiling itself in front of the car and was prepared to stifle a sob, a scream, or both. Bonn’s father took phone calls, smoked cigars, and drank scotch in the library. After he lit each cigar, he seemed to salute Templeton—as if he paid homage to the patriarch and his grand pheasant-killing life. Bonn plucked the Eugen Sandow card from the deck, replaced the bell jar, and slid the card into his back pocket. He took the card with him when he crawled out of the library window each day, but he wasn’t quite ready to leave yet.

  A framed copy of the Bill of Rights was another of Bonn’s favorites. It stood alone behind thick glass just behind the bell jar. Bonn spent many hours in the library admiring “The Amendments.” There was a clarity about them he found comforting. The language was plain, but when he brought out the thesaurus and attempted to improve the messages, it was no use. Each word of each line was like a rock. Each rock settled through the fluff of lighter words to provide the most weight to The Amendments. The Amendments worked together to support freedom. Bonn appreciated the time, the wisdom—the vision it took to draft it. The authors couldn’t know what the future held, but planned for it regardless. They thought beyond themselves. Since neither his mother nor father seemed able to do so, the phenomenon fascinated him. It was a blueprint for justice and Bonn took it literally. What the nine-year-old didn’t know was this: the copy wasn’t a copy—rather, it was the original copy. Fourteen original copies of the Bill of Rights were produced. One for the federal government itself and one for each of the original thirteen states. The New York copy was thought to be lost in the 1911 fire at the New York State Capitol Building.

  Actually, a National Guardsman employed in the cleanup efforts after the fire diverted an armload of papers containing the document to his girlfriend on his way to the basement of the Calvary Baptist Church. The papers were wet but intact. That evening over bread and sausage they hung page after page of stolen parchment up by clothespins in a rented room. The guardsman was illiterate. He didn’t know what they had, but his girlfriend did. She took the still-sodden parchment to her bookie father before the young man awoke the next morning. It traveled from bookie to broker. Before it was dry the New York copy rested on the desk of Templeton Maddox. Enough money filtered back to the girl, and she bought a new Knox Roadster. She left the illiterate soldier-boy behind. Trusting the directions of hitchhikers and barkeeps, she journeyed west. She was penniless by Denver. She contracted syphilis while celebrating the sale of the roadster and continued her journey by rail, taking time to enjoy herself thoroughly at each hub. By January of 1913 her syphilis reached the tertiary stage. Her ens
uing dementia wouldn’t let her remember the fire, or even the car, let alone the damp piece of parchment that kicked off her adventure. Five years later, the last tight-lipped thug who helped funnel the treasure to Templeton Maddox was laid to rest, the victim of an appropriately angry husband. Templeton Maddox enjoyed smoking cigars while peacefully admiring the stolen document for another fifteen years before he died. Speculation was that a poorly extinguished cigar started the fire in Albany to begin with. The idea pleased the patriarch. As the document was passed down, generations of Maddox men were taught, each by their father, to salute the document—with a lit cigar.

  Bonn checked his pocket for the strongman card then stepped out through a window.

  He needed to walk.

  Blackness pushed at Ithaca. A half-hour into his walk, Bonn took shelter from a sudden deluge on the Cornell campus. The stones used to build Cornell looked identical to the stones at the Maddox house. It was a house with a lengthy history.

  The stonemasons may have been the same men.

  Bonn didn’t seek shelter for himself. It didn’t matter if he got wet—but the card must stay dry.

  He didn’t know why, but he needed it.

  Bonn hunched around the treasure in an alcove. He knelt to finger the carving on the cornerstone: Circa 1875. He imagined Eugen Sandow, there in that spot, tapping the message into the stone. It wouldn’t be a regular hammer—nothing about Mr. Sandow was regular—the head of the hammer would be the size of a loaf of bread. The stones would have feared him. The rain let up. Eugen was dry. Bonn put him back in his pocket and continued his walk. He was off campus now. He walked past the sandwich shops frequented by lavender-scented girls seeking pesto chicken salad, past houses. He paused to read the headlines on a newspaper in the front window of a magazine shop. Inside the shop were things to tempt most boys his age: video games, fiery balls of cinnamon to dare your friends to eat, bubblegum in the shape of tiny pizzas, hotdogs in orbit on their own Ferris wheel—tube-meat riders dripping fat-sizzles on the stainless steel field below. The newspaper was the only thing Bonn cared about.

  His father was on the front page.

  Troy had his arm draped, fraternal and celebratory, around a local criminal. The headline? “Acquitted.” It wasn’t a surprise. Money always won.

  Bonn ducked down an alleyway he had never noticed before. Metal sounds came from a block garage with a flat roof.

  Ping-tang. Ping. Ping-tang. Thump.

  Metal on metal.

  The door of the place was welded to heavy rollers nestled inside an I-beam. It reminded him of a train track. Inside, a short black man in blue coveralls hummed a tune to himself as he squatted by the fender of an old car. He had grease stains on his knees and back, yet a clean white collar jutted halfway up his heavily bearded face. He worked slowly, feeling inside a fender of the car with one hand while he tapped the metal back into shape with an odd flat-headed hammer.

  Bonn was fascinated. He didn’t notice the black and white dog that watched him from an old couch. The humming and the tapping seemed clean and real. Tangible. Here was a man doing something. Fixing something—creating new from old. The dog exploded in protest of the interloper, and the man jumped as if sprung from a toy peanut can.

  “Well there, young man, have you got something for me to fix? I could use a break from this old Goat.” The man held the hammer by its head and pointed the handle at the rusty Pontiac.

  “Why do you call your car a goat?”

  “Ah. That is not my car, son—that’s the high school car a rich dude brought me to iron out. Once it looks new again, he’ll drive it around and baby it. Never race it around like when he was a young man. He’ll probably put it up on blocks and pick the gravel out of the tires before putting it in his nice garage. He’ll think about life and mortality and remember the skirts he chased back in 1968.” The man put his hands on his hips and smiled at the car, nodding. He was not much taller than Bonn. He held a finger out in front of him and tilted his head, an animated indication that he intended to fully answer the boy’s question. “A ‘Goat’ is a GTO. Manufactured by Pontiac. It stands for ‘Grand Tempest Option.’ There’s a mouthful, huh? In sixty-eight, if you wanted a big floaty car to drive to grandma’s house, you bought the Bonneville—but if you had a few extra dollars to buy something less practical, you went for the GTO. A bunch of impractical dudes, who after they go to college call themselves ‘aficionados’ got together—started calling all GTOs ‘the Goat.’” Bonn looked the car over and nodded. The man nodded back and continued. “It’s a big pile of metal, but still five hundred pounds lighter than the Bonneville. If you get the idle screw right and have the money to put new tires on it every couple of months, it’s a fun car.” The man grinned as he spoke. He talked with his hands but rested them on his hips when his mouth was still. “There’s a lot to consider—when you, bear with me—by ‘you’ I mean Pontiac, or me, or yourself, set a goal to get a hunk of metal to whip around faster and faster. Europeans made lighter cars in 1968. They had less horsepower, but less weight.” The bearded man pantomimed cornering quickly, but looked wistful. “And maybe a little less soul.” He wasn’t still for long. He pulled a rag from his pocket and rubbed the nearest of the Pontiac’s doors. “Physics, young man—correct observations of the laws of physics are what make certain cars exciting to drive—but soul? Soul is what really makes a car like the GTO.”

  Bonn liked him.

  He didn’t speak down to him—he just talked. It felt respectful.

  The man frowned at the fender he’d been working on and squatted down to feel inside the panel. He looked at the ceiling as he palpated the metal, as if removing his eyes from the work allowed him extra understanding of the car’s secrets—as if he looked for divine help while he discreetly searched for the car’s soul. “The Goat was a status symbol. Proof of youth and virility—silly huh? I’m thankful for it actually. The phenomenon has kept me in business. These days women want a dude who drives a BMW—or she just buys herself one. Took all the fun out of the mating ritual, if you ask me—another bit of Americana lost.” His eyebrows shot up. He tapped confidently at the fender for a while. “I’m a throwback. I’m a machinist by trade, but I found my niche in bodywork. I see a day coming when no one will bother with the old ones. Soulless, fast little efficient cars will pop out of a machine—wreck one? No big deal—just dump the parts in a funnel on top. It’ll make a new one, at a subsidized cost. No need for people to tap it into shape again. They’ll be disposable just like the cars.” He paused to tap at the fender again. “For now, though, the ‘Goats’ come to me and Tidbit. No more drive-ins—no more drag races.” The man wiped his hands on the rag. “The folks who bought these cars new? And really drove them? Never sold them. Those are the folks that hope if I tap their ‘Goat’ back in shape it’ll bring back their vitality too.” He made a low whistle and picked a rock out of a tire with a screwdriver. “So we are a whole bunch of throwbacks—just passing around money and dreams.”

  The black and white dog inched her way toward Bonn. Her lips quivered. She laid her ears back. The man shook his head at her. She froze in her crouch and waited for him to have a change of heart. He might revoke his disapproval and give the command to attack after all, so she’d stay ready. “Tidbit? Are you planning to kill and eat this young man?” Tidbit flashed her eyes toward her master but kept the wedge of her head pointed at Bonn. “Would you consider, as an alternative to murder, going to check on the puppies while I get lunch?” The dog seemed to smile. She wagged. She looked at the man with soft-eyed adoration, then perked her ears, tilted her head, and swept her tongue quickly across both sets of whiskers, as if saying, You said you’d check on lunch. Did you forget? The curious man held his hand out to Bonn. “Manny Tott.”

  Bonn shook Manny’s hand without reviewing the rules for doing so. “Bonn Maddox.” Bonn watched the dog disappear behind a worn-out couch. “She looks like a Border Collie.”

  “You know your dogs, Mist
er Maddox.” Tidbit poked her head out in a menacing relapse, but Manny shot her a look and she disappeared again.

  “I prefer you call me Bonn.”

  “And you can call me Manny,” A buzzer went off behind some metal shelves brimming with odd-shaped cardboard boxes. “Excuse me. I’ve got a kidney pie in the oven. I’d better tend to it for a minute.” As Manny walked, Bonn couldn’t see his knees bend. He couldn’t tell if the man actually had knees—his coveralls were loose and the legs were rolled up. “She won’t bite you,” Manny’s voice came from behind the shelves. “Not unless you try to pick up one of her puppies.” An oven door creaked open and banged shut again. “She pushed out a litter so big they’re hard to count—a whole school of pig-fish.” Bonn looked around the shop.

  There were so many tools.

  Not just hand tools—complicated tools too, as if Manny made new parts for cars if he couldn’t fix the old ones. Bonn looked into a tin coffee can full of what looked like big flat washers. Manny emerged holding a pie with the detailing rag. It steamed from its thin silver tin. “That is hot.” He dropped the tin onto the oily workbench and wiped at his hands with the rag. “She stares me down too. When she gets bored mostly—even before the pups. When I don’t give her enough to do, she looks for odd jobs. It isn’t fair to her, really. She should be out nipping sheep. Maybe we’d all sleep better if she could do that a couple times a day.” Manny whistled as he cut wedges of the kidney pie and shook the sticky food onto coffee filters. “She’s good company for the most part.” Manny paused to frown in thought for a moment. “Well, not when I let my beard get too wooly. I think when I hunker down to work on these old Goats she might think I’m a sheep.” Tidbit tilted her head and perked her ears. She stared hungrily at the molten pie. “In a minute, girl. It’s still too hot.”