The Pinebox Vendetta Read online

  Where was he staying? Where’d he gotten those scars? Had Owen Gallagher gotten him released? (From where, exactly? Jamie wondered.)

  Oh, people were nice. He recognized joy in their eyes—a dead man come back alive. But he also saw, in some, something beyond joy. The old titillation.

  Unused to posturing or saying what he didn’t mean, Jamie revealed he’d been living in East Africa the entire decade. Only two people from his family had known: his mother and sister. Had he killed that war-criminal general on purpose?

  Yes. Absolutely.

  And when after a whirlwind of exchanges he found Sam Lessing in front of him, he almost said, I came to see you, and that’s all. For no other reason.

  Except that her daughter was standing right behind her—and Sam was wearing a wedding ring.

  Jamie had known about both. They had internet in Juba, of course, and he wasn’t above Googling her using his friend Muneeb’s Facebook account to see photos.

  The fact that Sam Lessing had a family and established life was almost beside the point. He’d come to see her and confirm those noble qualities he’d ascribed to her all these years in absentia were valid. To confirm the exalted place he’d given those college memories was deserved.

  He had been part of something wonderful—and it had nothing to do with his family or the Pruitts.

  It just was. Wonderful.

  Jamie had no intention of disrupting a marriage or confusing a daughter, or making Sam feel even the slightest bit awkward.

  Do no harm.

  She asked, “How are you?”

  Jamie returned to the moment—he’d been staring—and laughed softly at the anticlimax.

  “I’m well!” he said. “I love the air here. It’s like the flowers pull you around campus by the nose.”

  Juba used to smell great, too, before the oil drilling began on the outskirts. Jamie decided not to share this. He didn’t want to come off as the Great White Shaman dispensing wisdom on the Dark Continent.

  Sam pointed to a welt on his forearm. “That’s new. Is it…stable? Does it require treatment?”

  “No, no,” Jamie said. “It’s just from a sugarcane stalk. If your machete angle is off, they can…”

  He trailed off. Nice one, Shaman.

  Sam bobbed her head. “I have no response for that.”

  “You shouldn’t, yeah. My situation is totally unbelievable and requires no response.” He pointedly wiped his hands, one off the other. “So what about you? Happy?”

  “More or less.”

  “East Coast?”

  “Right. Brooklyn.”

  “Are you at all active in film, still?”

  “I am,” Sam said, “though not acting anymore. I’m on the production side. WNYC, in the city?”

  “Sure! That’s exciting!” Jamie winced at the falseness of his own reaction—he’d known exactly where she worked. “How do you find the studio?”

  “It has its moments,” Sam said. “It’s primarily a job, and occasionally inspiring. Like parenting.”

  She glanced wryly to her daughter, who passed a hand down her face in embarrassment. Even this—how the girl flattened her nose—was an echo of her mother.

  Jamie asked, “Are you in touch with many Davenporters? I saw Laurel.”

  “Here and there. I keep up with Laurel’s stuff, but in general I’m terrible. Most people probably assume I dropped off the face of the earth after school.”

  Now it was Sam’s turn to feel sheepish. She blushed and added, “Not to equate my lack of emailing with your, you know, actual ordeal.”

  He grinned. “Not at all. I deserve some scorn. We’ve been graduated twenty years and the sum-total of my correspondence has been what, a postcard? One postcard?”

  Sam’s face changed at this, a troubled twitch by the eyes. “You mean, er—that postcard I sent the first summer?”

  “Right. That, and then the one I sent back from Macedonia.”

  “I never got a postcard.”

  Jamie straightened up and looked behind, as though for pranksters. “I sent it to that Manhattan address, something like Eighth Ave. Started with a seven-two-eight, right? Seven-two-eight something?”

  He worried this could be construed as obsessive, but Sam’s squinting eyes were focused inward.

  “Right, right: seven-two-eight-four. Laurel and I lived in that apartment…”

  A moment later, her searching expression moved onto Jamie and they shared a long, complex look. He had assumed the mechanics of their drift apart for so long—a brief exchange of postcards, her interest fading due to geographical separation and other options in NYC—that he was struggling to place this new information.

  His head was spinning.

  Sam’s must have been, too. Her teeth gritted in what Jamie took for indignation—at the world, at circumstance.

  She said, “Star-crossed by the postal system. How rotten is that?”

  “Rotten,” he agreed, regaining his breath. “But I think I understand why I survived now.”

  Sam blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Juju.”

  When her confusion didn’t clear, he said, “An African term for karma. West African, really, though the Sudanese use it quite often.”

  “I see, but…still not getting the connection to postcards.”

  He smiled at her easy comebacks. “You started to ask before, how. How I survived. It was a miracle—about six miracles, one stacked on top of the next. For ten years, I’ve wondered what I did to deserve it.”

  He launched into the story of his escape from General Mahad’s yacht. His long-cultured immunity to King Cobra venom. The general’s tumblers, which had pushed this immunity to its very limits. Struggling through the Indian Ocean to one of the pirates’ skiffs, gasping, convulsing, his body on fire. Being nursed from his coma by rural Somali who assumed he’d been thrown off a slaver ship, his appearance was so thin and waxy.

  By the end of the story, Sam and her daughter both stared at him with an extra quarter-inch of forehead.

  The daughter said, “All that actually, like, happened?”

  “There are times when I doubt it myself,” Jamie said, “but yes. Unless the venom fried my memory.”

  “And afterward,” Sam began, ducking gingerly as though scared of triggering some flashback, “were you hiding? From that butcher-guy’s friends, or loyalists?”

  “Not really,” Jamie said. “Maybe for a few months. But after that, staying out of sight had nothing to do with General Mahad.”

  Sam immediately understood. “The feud. You were keeping your distance from the feud.”

  He nodded.

  She said, “Your mom and sister kept it secret, that you were alive?”

  “Right.”

  “Did you ever get to see them?”

  “Here and there, if business took them to Africa. Always in disguise, away from the press.”

  “Wasn’t it hard being cut off like that from everybody else?”

  “Some days,” Jamie admitted. “When the rainy season got bad, or if I hit a setback with my work there—after the Murle radicals burned our childhood literacy center to the ground? I thought about coming back. But then I’d think about the feud, and all the schemes and power plays, and I just…couldn’t.”

  Sam gave an empathetic wince. “Why now?”

  He considered blurting out the truth—Because I knew you’d be here—but thought better of it. “The twenty-year reunion seemed like, I dunno, a nice round number.”

  Boy, that sounded dopey.

  He continued, “I guess I started to worry I was waiting too long, that it would be weird reconnecting. But then the longer I waited, the weirder it got—and this reunion felt like maybe the point of no return.”

  Sam smiled. “From a weirdness perspective?”

  Jamie smiled, too. “Exactly.”

  Their eyes locked for several beats. The straps of Jamie’s rucksack began to feel tight.

  To fill the void, he sai
d, “How’s your family? Your parents are…one upstate New York, one in Philly?”

  It was a lame subject change, but Sam fielded it straight, relating that her mother had passed away but Dad was healthy and busy and refused to drive a foreign car—same as ever.

  They talked another ten minutes. Jamie asked whether Sam knew anything of his old hallmate Norah Fowler. She didn’t. She asked him about life in Juba. They chuckled remembering the band they’d “formed” (six practices in the Trumbull basement) junior year. Sam introduced her daughter, Joss, and somehow managed to make her the focus of every anecdote.

  I’ve managed to learn all about plie and rond de jambe, haven’t I?

  Even through these unexciting exchanges, Jamie felt his admiration for Sam growing—or reconstituting, more accurately. She was so attuned to others, so ready to pause a story when another person approached, so quick to deflect credit.

  Sam had been the same at Yale. Not necessarily making a splash in campus activism, but helping others in small but meaningful ways: covering a dining hall worker’s shift, seeking out the artist to compliment her at one of the many gallery shows they’d attended together. Never saccharine or showy. Just humane.

  It was this grace that made Jamie want to help Samantha Lessing. Because she needed help.

  Jamie had experience with people whose facade clashed with their true situation—the villager who smiles in gratitude for rations but lives in constant fear of tribal violence. They’re happy, but happy within bounds. They can smile but not with all their heart.

  He doubted Sam’s situation was life or death like those Africans’, but something was off. Some kink was holding her back, some plastic overwrap mistakenly left over a sunny window.

  The daughter, Joss, kept tugging her mother’s blazer.

  Sam muttered, “Not now, okay?”

  But the girl kept tugging and bulging her eyes—whatever it was couldn’t wait.

  “But you should,” the girl whispered. “Mom, if you—”

  “Joss, please.” Sam turned to Jamie with an apologetic shrug.

  “She can ask,” he said. “I don’t mind—I’m strange, this whole morning is strange. Go ahead. Ask anything.”

  The girl beamed, boosting up on her toes. Sam shook her head in defeat.

  “Fine,” she said. “Joss is bugging me to tell you about this documentary I’m working on. It’s about the pinebox vendetta, how it affected our class. I’m kinda looking into what the Pruitts did freshman year, how they hushed up Derek Dickerson’s death.”

  Jamie felt all the warmth that’d bloomed over the last hour—during this magical reuniting with Sam—die. The buildings of the quad around him felt suddenly taller, and like they were rimmed with steel pikes.

  Clearly noticing his reaction, she said, “It started before I knew you were…well, alive. And I completely wouldn’t want to exploit your situation if you felt—”

  “It’s cool,” Jamie recovered to say. “I mean, I know you—I know you’d do it in a classy way. Sounds like an interesting project.”

  Sam’s mouth pinched. She didn’t trust his blessing.

  She was right not to trust.

  Jamie did have objections. Just watching the daughter now, how her jaw set, how her stringy arms flexed. He knew exactly what was happening in that young mind. She imagined her mother landing a blow on the Pruitts—damaging them, exposing their dirty dealings. Justice would be served. The needle would tip incrementally their way.

  Jamie knew this yearning, this bottomless thirst, better than anyone. It fueled you. It drove you to heights you didn’t know you were capable of. It sustained you like food.

  But if you let it, it could also eat you from inside.

  Chapter 8

  Rock heard about Jamie Gallagher’s resurrection from Topher, his former DKE brother, as he and a third brother were hoovering lines of coke off a mirror. He assumed it was a joke at first.

  “Jamie Gallagher? Did he have fins and carry a triton?”

  “Nah,” Topher said. “He walked right in during that memorial. They said it was like a ghost drifting through the gates of Silliman.”

  Rock flexed the inside of his face, enlarging his sinuses, trying at once to speed the drug’s uptake and bring the wacko scene to mind.

  Jamie Gallagher had never made sense. The Gallaghers were loose and carefree, not just liberals but libertines—but Jamie’d been wound tighter than a Tijuana rod-ring. He was completely feckless, a namby-pamby. At Yale, people had always grouped him and Rock together because of the feud, but in fact they’d interacted little. Jamie had always acted vaguely scared of him, shying away at parties, turning away mumbling if Rock tried engaging.

  “I gotta see,” he said now. “I wonder if he went full native. Dreadlocks and syphilis. I’ll bet so. I’ll bet he wipes ass with his left hand.”

  Rock asked the room at large what the next official reunion event was. He’d been crafting his own schedule, a manic circuit of bars, hotel rooms, and dive food-joints he and his buds used to frequent.

  Topher said, “Whiffenpoofs concert, Old Campus.”

  Rock smacked his hands together. All-male singing groups made him want to stab his own eyes out, but he didn’t figure on doing much listening.

  He pointed at the last line of coke and said to his companion, “Halfsies?”

  The frat brother nodded.

  Rock covered one nostril, started at the base of the white-powder row, and mowed it down. Every speck.

  “Raincheck,” he promised, and headed for the door.

  Rock’s strides stretched out before him, devouring sidewalk panels. Dangerous thoughts sloshed through his well-greased brain. He wasn’t sure what to do with—or to—Jamie Gallagher, like a jackal circling an indeterminate animal, collecting scents, weighing strategies.

  Who was he walking over with? Rock had only a hazy idea. Topher he saw, oafing ahead with no flex in his trapezoids. Rock felt like Ross Jakes was in the mix, that horsey laugh honking intermittently from behind. Beyond that he had no clue.

  Rock’s notions of time were likewise murky. He knew only that he needed to be at New Haven Harbor by six o’clock when Marshall Pruitt’s chopper was to depart for Long Island and the Choosing. Nobody had solicited his attendance at the Choosing, but Marshall had assured him he would be admitted: any Pruitt, by blood or marriage, was eligible.

  Rock had asked what time Theresa Velasquez was arriving.

  “Already there,” the spymaster had said. “The favored few receive early access to Jonathan.”

  Now, thinking of Theresa sucking up to the ex-president with some BS ruminations on civility or fact-driven policies, Rock kicked the head of a street-planted sunflower clean off its stalk.

  He arrived at Old Campus and initially couldn’t find Jamie Gallagher. People kept holding him up, wanting his take on some issue or to share a toast.

  The toasts he accepted; the takes he refused; and the Whiffenpoofs’ warm-up scales he plugged his ears against.

  Finally, he spotted the dirt-yellow hair of Jamie Gallagher. (No dreadlocks yet.) He was standing around a table of sculpted fruit, mercifully far from the stage.

  Jamie stood with two females. One was a hot bohemian chick Rock found vaguely familiar. The other was younger. Also hot.

  Didn’t waste any time getting back in the game, did he?

  Rock walked over, legs wide and obliterating space. He had three inches over the group.

  The bohemian chick noticed him first. Her face—which had a pinkish pluck as Rock approached—turned black.

  Jamie Gallagher, who was hanging on the chick’s every word, noticed the change and turned. At the sight of Rock, he flinched half out of his Birkenstocks.

  “Jamie. Freaking. Gallagher.” Rock shook his head, marveling. “Not shark bait after all?”

  He thrust his hand forward, daring Gallagher not to shake. He did—with surprising strength.

  “Whoa now!” Rock said. “What’ve you been pu
tting in your Wheaties, tiger semen? We should box.”

  Jamie pulled his hand back. “I’m out. I’m not your enemy—I’m not here for that.” He shook his head. “I’m out. All the way.”

  Rock chuckled. “Out, huh? Man. How long were you unconscious for, down there at the bottom of the ocean? Just curious.”

  The bohemian chick stepped between them, her shoulder roughly brushing Rock’s.

  “Excuse me. I’m sure you don’t care, but we were having a conversation.” She squinted in the direction of his nose. “Maybe you ought to go find a glass of water. Check yourself into a clinic.”

  Again, Gallagher watched her like a lost man tracking the sun.

  Rock ignored the chick. “Tell me what you hear about Owen Gallagher. They’re running him out for a speech tomorrow, what’s he going to say?”

  “I’m out,” Jamie said again. “I don’t know one thing about Owen Gallagher or his plans. I’ve never even met him.”

  “I guess that’d be right. He came on the scene in 2012, you were still…” Rock made the gills motion over his cheeks. “How about your sis? Foxy Charlotte must have some coal in the fire, some Smart gizmo ready to take over the planet.”

  “I haven’t seen her since I got back.”

  “No kidding? That’s harsh. You’re off chasing tail”—Rock raised his eyebrows flatteringly at the chick—“before you even hook up with your family?”

  Gallagher seemed to be considering this—maybe Rock had hit a nerve—but the chick jumped in.

  “Don’t even engage with this…this oddity,” she said, gently pushing Gallagher away. “There’s no point.”

  “It’s a reunion,” Rock said. “What’re reunions for? Reflecting, connecting, engaging. Engage me.” He spread his arms wide in a show of forthrightness. “Engage!”

  “You’re disgusting.”

  Rock glanced to the side at the new speaker, the younger chick. Wrapping a strand of her own black hair around a slim finger.

  “You say that now,” he said with a rogue’s grin, “but give me an hour, forty-five minutes minimum, and I’ll convince you otherwise.”

  The older chick shoved him. “You should be locked up. People shouldn’t have to walk around and share air with you.”