Jonathon King - Shadow Men

He was using the voice of his pulpit now, and I looked over at the corner.

"But the sins of the father aren't chemicals and chromosomes, sir. And in the end we are all, each one of us, much more than just DNA."

With that he turned and climbed down the stairs and walked out into the sunlight.

I had to work my way to the corner, pushing away cardboard boxes full of old electrical supplies, cartons of cracked, dusty pottery, a wooden keg of half-rusted nails. I brushed away cobwebs and was forced to bend farther over as the roof sloped. It was hot and I was stirring up motes of dust-I could feel the particles in the back of my throat when I tried to breathe through my mouth.

Finally the weak light caught the raw pine of a crate lying flat in the deepest part of the corner. I pulled up one edge and was able to stand the piece on one side. It was about as long as the distance from my shoulder to my fingertips and as wide and deep as a piano bench. It was more awkward than heavy. I wrestled it out of its hiding place and backed out, carrying it to a cleared spot on the floorboards.

The wood was dry and clean but almost brittle with age. I used the bar and pried off the entire top panel. The contents were packed in a dried moss of some kind, not much different from the paper confetti used today. I pulled it away and uncovered a long scabbard made of dark leather that was cracked and split. I untied the top flap but before reaching inside, I looked around and found a ripped but dry section of old towel and covered my hand. Then I carefully withdrew the stock half of a Winchester.405 Takedown. The rifle had to be nearly a hundred years old and was stunning. The plating on the fixed box magazine was tarnished, but the scrollwork along the lever action was gorgeous and as intricate as any I'd ever seen. I reached back into the scabbard and from a separate compartment slid out the barrel half. The base was threaded, and even with some spots of rust showing, I was able to twist it smoothly into the receiver. It was the same kind of gun that Teddy Roosevelt had used in his African hunting exploits.

I didn't touch the surfaces of the gun but laid it down on the opened scabbard while I checked the rest of the crate. Buried in the moss at one corner was a small wooden box of ammunition. The cartridges were at least three inches tall and the tips big and heavy. Roosevelt had called the.405 cartridge "Big Medicine" for its power to drop a water buffalo, gator or man. At the other end of the crate I found a leather-bound book. The initials JWJ were stamped in gold relief into its nearly black cover. The pages inside were yellowed and felt like dried leaves between my fingers, but the faded markings and tooled letters were still legible. It appeared to be some kind of ledger. Rows of calculations were on some pages, along with entries for quantities bought or sold and the amounts. On other pages were diagrams and drawings of machines and plans for buildings. The light was poor, so I stood and cradled the book in one hand while carefully turning the pages. When I finally determined the dates, I skipped forward to 1924.

Among those pages I found a crude map. Its dominant feature was a straight hatched line, apparently depicting a rail line. I could make out the west terminus as Everglades City, while the opposite end was scratched "Miami." Along the hatch marks, childlike drawings of tree palms were spaced at odd intervals, and at each of these was a cluster of faded X's. Two at one spot, three at another, six farther to the right toward Miami. The spots also bore numbers above the tree drawings, which I recognized as longitude and latitude indices. And beneath the X's were dollar amounts much like the prices marked in earlier pages. The left, and I assumed western group, where there were two X's, was marked "II-$600.00." The three X's were marked "III-$900.00." The eastern grouping was marked "IIII I-$1,800.00." I began to feel nauseated as I stared at the figures and went down on one knee, with the book still balanced on the other. Sweat was now running in rivulets down my back, and I pulled at the front of my shirt to tighten the fabric and soak up the moisture between my shoulder blades. I wiped at my eyes and carefully turned the page to the subsequent rows of the ledger. There, listed under the name "Noren," were the same figures, dated and grouped "ea./$300 +.15 ammunition." Gator hides, I knew, were going for $1.50 a foot in those days. John William was not killing alligators for three hundred dollars apiece. Even the most luscious and illegal flamingo plumes did not bring those kinds of prices.

I placed the book back in the crate, rewrapped the Winchester and tamped the panel back into place on the crate. I used the pry bar to reset the nails, and with the crate held tight against my chest, climbed back down the staircase and snapped the light off. The reverend Jefferson did not show himself again. He may have been in the house, having lunch with his wife. He may have been out in the back rows of his garden. He may have been somewhere quiet and cool where he went to pray alone.

I carried the crate to my truck and slid it into the space behind the seats on top of my bag. I climbed in, started the engine and kicked on the AC. The reverend's sedan and family van were still parked side by side, and I watched the front of the house as I backed away but saw no movement at the curtains or the door. As I drove away I kept my eyes on the rearview mirror until the dust billowed up and the house and the oaks disappeared.

When I got to Billy's it was late and the overnight desk manager looked long and hard at the crate under my arm as he passed me through.

"Good evening, Mr. Freeman," he said with his stiff British accent. "Mr. Manchester is still out for the evening."

I nodded and continued to the elevator.

"Do you require the freight elevator, sir?" he said, still looking with disdain at the wooden box, judging perhaps its rough corners and the damage they might do to the paneled walls.

"No. I'm fine," I said as the regular elevator doors slid open.

The apartment was lit, although the lamps and recessed spots were dimmed. Billy remembered well his days in a chopped-up tenement building in North Philly, where the lights would be shut down sometimes for days because of blown fuses or blown deadlines for making the payments. He never wanted to come home to a dark house again.

I laid the crate on the carpeted floor and went to the guest room and found a large bath towel in the bathroom linen closet. My own image in the mirror stopped me. The light blue oxford shirt I'd worn to church that morning was creased and rumpled, and so was the face above it. The skin was deeply tanned, left even darker by the unshaven stubble. The crow's-feet were pronounced and pouches of skin hung beneath my eyes, the exhaustion of hours on the road. I leaned in closer. I didn't have a mirror at the river shack and sometimes didn't look at myself for weeks at a time, and even then, not closely or seriously. The reverend's last words had followed me for the entire drive back, and I looked into the black irises of my eyes. Was my father in there? And if so, which one? The relentless cop who wouldn't let a child-killer go unpunished? Or an alcoholic racist who beat his wife? Or both? Or neither? "We leave more than DNA behind," the living William Jefferson had said. But how much more? The answers weren't in the mirror.

I took the towel with me out to the living room and spread it out on Billy's polished wood dining table, then carefully laid the crate on it. I used a screwdriver from the utility drawer to pry the top off and took out the ledger. Under better light I sat at the kitchen bar counter and studied the pages while sipping cold bottles of beer from the refrigerator. The man had been meticulous. If my interpretations were right, John William had recorded every dime he had paid out or taken in from the time he landed in Everglades City until 1962, when he'd blown his brains out in his barn one late summer night. The entries were filled with figures, dates, mileage, the running costs of supplies and their changes from year to year. But there was not a single sentence of opinion or emotion or aesthetic description in all the dry, yellowed pages.