The Bright Spot Read online

  Nobody seemed to be following us, but how could we tell? This vehicle had a number; each point on this road, a numerical identity. The road knew exactly where we were. Any cop could ask the road. If someone was looking for us, we’d likely be found. Like Bea said, you can’t leave the board. Might as well head for the king in his castle.

  When Stan and Dee ran out of muscles, diets, disciplines, and breathing (miles and miles of breathing), they talked wrestling—she was a fan in her youth—and Stan said one reason he quit was because of the ’ware.

  “You hurt yourself, and you don’t even know it. You just keep on with the routine. The other guy could be really hurt, and you’re still whaling away on him, the crowd booing you. The ’ware ruins it. No spontaneity. Where’s the art?”

  Dee, whose husband’s outfit wrote the wrestling ’ware—they wrote all the sportsware and most everything else one way or another—couldn’t agree more.

  “I like acting a lot better,” he said. “You’ll like it too,” he assured her. Stan wanted everyone to be happy. I wondered idly if someone could find happiness doing something they had no talent for, but hadn’t found the answer before I finally drifted off to sleep. Lu woke me when we got close, and I took in my new home. Or hideout, I guess you might say.

  The war had done all right by Williamsburg. The war was practically a Norfolk export, and Williamsburg offered the closest decent round of golf. The money boys and generals who hung around to make sure the whole business ran smoothly lived here in communities so much like The Lakes at Llewellyn you’d think they were the same place, and you’d be right. I wondered if the developers ran a toy-cop academy somewhere to staff the gates, though there didn’t seem to be too much riffraff around here to keep out. Maybe the rich people didn’t trust each other not to steal their putters.

  Golf courses were everywhere. Except for the difficulty of getting past those pesky suburban gates and the military installations lurking down at the end of every lonely road, you could play one continuous round of golf around the town, 450 holes or so, and counting. And that didn’t count the miniature-golf courses in town. Sod farming was clearly a key support industry. Somewhere they dedicated themselves to growing perfect grass—perfect fairway grass, perfect putting grass, perfect grass to park your cart on. Grass so perfect it could make you weep, the way it had those sprinklers sobbing every morning, pumping the wetlands dry, filling them up with perfect grass food. Maybe that’s where they recruited the toy cops—from the young sod farmers, longing for the exciting life of gatekeeper.

  In the heart of this affluent husk, the patriotic tourist attraction, Colonial Williamsburg—along with its attendant pancake houses, motels, shoppes, and B & B’s—soldiered on. It was originally bankrolled by John D. Rockefeller Jr. during the Depression, when the past—at least the version served here—definitely looked better than the future. It was a “living-history museum,” a few square blocks where actors and history buffs were paid a pittance to pretend it was 1775 for the edification and inspiration of ticket holders. Catering as it did to the dwindling middle class, times had been tough for years. Patriotism hadn’t sold like it used to. People asked embarrassing questions about slavery and Indians and poor people that were generally depressing to answer, and the place had been in danger of becoming out-of-date.

  But then, early in the war, the President made a speech here—with the fife-and-drum boys warming up the crowd—that attempted to equate his war with the reputed virtues of the American Revolution—the famous (or infamous, depending on your politics)— “Exporters of Freedom” speech—and the financially troubled place got a healthy infusion of cash. Suddenly all its languishing grant requests were golden, and they couldn’t ask for too much. That’s what bankrolled the virtual that Dumfries and Kennemeyer were in, among other enhancements. The Prez outspent John D. Jr. to insure that freedom didn’t go bankrupt on his watch and hurt his chances for reelection. After all, he had an export business to run. Bang, bang. You’re free.

  The town had long been a crossroads, where the rich planters came to wrangle over land, slaves, and tobacco. No fewer than a half-dozen roads converged on the place and pumped it with cars. I wouldn’t be doing my jaywalking trick around here. If there was a break in the traffic larger than a few centimeters, I’m sure somebody somewhere lost his job over it.

  Colonial Williamsburg itself was a carless, ’wareless oasis smack-dab in the middle, and that’s where we were staying, or as close as we could get, at the Liberty Lodge, a place that claimed to be “Family Owned and Operated Since 1963.” Unless the family had always been Egyptian refugees, they weren’t talking the same family, but they didn’t have anybody on ’ware, and they allowed pets. The woman who checked us in took one look at Buck and said, “Chow-Peke mix. Good dog. Very smart.” And pleasant too, I told her. I liked the place just fine.

  Lu and I formally blew off our halfhearted attempt to conceal our relationship from our coworkers and got a room together. We hadn’t been alone since we’d become engaged. Maybe the news flash of where our genetic material came from should’ve “changed everything,” as characters in crisis are fond of saying. But when you came right down to it, what would we do differently? What difference did it make? Call us shallow, but we didn’t want to talk about it. We had one thing on our minds and set ourselves to reassuring each other that nothing had changed that mattered.

  Meanwhile, Dee said she’d feel safer if Stan roomed with her, and they took the room next to ours. The four of us played honeymoon for a couple of days, emerging occasionally to try a different stack of pancakes. I never realized the founding fathers were such big fans of white flour and corn syrup.

  Nobody tried to kill us. We decided we’d given trouble the slip, or it’d run the other way in the confusion.

  When we got around to asking, it was easy securing permission to use Colonial Williamsburg for Billy and the Big Guy. They seemed thrilled to have us. I considered the possibility that there might be something to this Southern hospitality thing I’d heard so much about, or maybe they were just desperate.

  We started working as soon as the rest of the company showed up, and it was great, getting back to work, back in character. Victor liked the eighteenth century. He felt right at home in the Enlightenment. We established a routine that kept us away from ’ware workers and kept us in a crowd. It wasn’t hard. The ’ware workers mostly labored out in the communities and couldn’t afford to live anywhere closer than Newport News. You could see them queued up each morning at the gates, ready to clean, to serve, to fix, to labor, and leave when the job was done.

  The cooks who flipped our pancakes were mostly illegals or felons who couldn’t get a ’ware job, burned-out ’ware workers, and allergics, the unfortunates blessed with an immune system that took exception to ’ware, setting up shop in the heart of downtown. They were cheaper than ’ware workers, and we favored businesses where profit margins were slim to anorexic.

  Billy and the Big Guy even got the hoped-for publicity, and the increasing numbers of tourists who hung around while we recorded gave us an audience to play to. Even William was happy, despite the fact that in a few short weeks a talking Buck had totally eclipsed his cute-ness numbers. As the man-boy pointed out, he managed to bang a different patriotic tourist’s lonely wife practically every night—while the dog, who was fixed, got zip. William was an actor after Vincente’s heart.

  But if James Dumfries was around, we found little evidence of him, except in the rather dull theater lobby where his picture hung. The virtual it came from, never updated since the war, still creaked along, one of the most dreadful things I’ve ever seen in my life. But if bad art was the worst that was going to happen around here, I wasn’t about to complain.

  Maybe we’d actually been clever, given the bad guys the slip. Maybe someone was just trying to scare us off, and it’d worked. Weeks went by and nothing happened. Pretty soon it felt like we were just here to work, and that was fine with me.


  But we never could make contact with Murphy, and we couldn’t stop looking over our shoulders. The news kept playing along with the frame being built around Ed Kennemeyer’s killers, as well as the sleeper cell story. Mr. Lester was indeed named Hero of the Homeland.

  Lu and I talked a lot about our mysterious origins, but what was there to say? We were orphans who now had each other. We certainly didn’t want to change that. We were used to the idea of not having parents. However we were conceived or why, we’d lived our lives. They were ours now. At least that was our stated position: Free will now! Free will forever! I’m sure the cosmos was shaking in its boots.

  We decided to marry in the spring. We’d heard it was pretty here. Wally said we’d be staying awhile. The going-back-to-the-American-Revolution angle was prompting an incredible spike in our numbers. After World War II, it was our most popular war. If we didn’t stop ourselves, we’d soon be famous, just like I’d always wanted. I hoped that would make it more difficult for whoever was trying to kill us.

  All the time, deep down, I knew I was kidding myself. This thing wasn’t over yet. But, call it denial if you like, I didn’t see any reason to rush to the tragic conclusion. This wasn’t Hamlet. Nobody was going to jump up and applaud when it was over. Nobody was going to take any bows. They’d just haul the bodies to the bone-yard and lower them into the earth.

  Curtain.

  TOO LATE

  15

  I think we agree, the past is over.

  —GEORGE WALKER BUSH

  EVERY DAY, RAIN OR SHINE, MORNING AND NIGHT, Buck needed his constitutional. The two of us explored the motel grounds in the mornings. But Lu and I made a habit of walking him together in the evenings. It was a great walking town, and it gave us a chance to unwind at the end of the day. This cold night, however, Gary called in a panic about something just as we were out the door, and Lu waved me and Buck on.

  I took him to his favorite place this time of night. It had everything—other dogs, lots of people to make a fuss over him, and the smell of roasting flesh in the air. While Lu and I preferred the woods and gardens, Buck fancied a promenade of an evening down Duke of Gloucester Street with his nose held high. In this place forever poised on the eve of the Revolution, the question on every tongue wasn’t “What price freedom?” but “How long is the wait for a table?”

  Customers huddled around campfires outside the pricey taverns—part of that colonial fleecing experience—wondering if the food could possibly be worth the money and the wait. What the hell—they were on vacation. We weren’t. Judging from these prices, the colonists must’ve been richer than the history books let on. There were no bread-and-cheese joints around here, no places that served a decent bowl of porridge with a side of jerky. These places were more nouveau olde by way of the Culinary Institute of Taos, with lots of cloned-grown venison and pheasant thrown in to give it the gamey tang of the colonies.

  For the price of four entrées and drinks you could set yourself up with a nice hot-dog cart for a season and make a fortune. Not that they’d let you. I asked in city hall. “What if I had the really good sauerkraut, and hot mustard?” The answer was still no, but with a laugh that friendlied up the clerk. She helped me track down James Dumfries’ substantial real estate holdings in town, even printed up a list for me.

  They were mostly in the commercial shell around the colonial center. It took weeks to check them all out, handing out cards everywhere I went—might as well advertise while I was at it. But Dumfries wasn’t living on any of it as far as I could tell, unless he was hiding in the back booth at Mama Don’s Pancake Plantation.

  I tried following the money. I’ve never been good at that. It always eludes me. I didn’t get far. Mama Don sent me to the smarmy realtor who took care of business for Dumfries, keeping the properties leased and more or less repaired, collecting and depositing rents. It seemed like he would tell me anything in hopes of selling me a timeshare—a deal that sounded to me like a recurring motel reservation, but I’m no better with property than I am with money. Wherever James Dumfries was, Timeshare assured me, the man wasn’t hard up for cash, as long as he remembered his PIN numbers.

  Timeshare had never actually met Dumfries. If something came up he couldn’t handle on his own, he dealt with a lawyer in DC. He gave me the number. The lawyer had had the same gone-travelin’ message on his phone for the last month. The last time Timeshare actually talked to the lawyer, he said, was three winters ago when a pipe froze at Putts Mountain after the tenants-before-last skipped the lease without draining the pipes. “Busted all the waterfalls. The place is nothing without the waterfalls.” I quite agreed.

  I’d hit a dead end and couldn’t afford a timeshare. To tell you the truth, I was glad. I was sick to death of James Allen Dumfries, and as long as no one was trying to kill me, I had my heart set on forgetting him. Pros were looking for him, I reassured myself. They’d find him and lock him up long before he found me or I found him.

  Buck and I turned up toward the Governor’s Palace, trying to avoid the groups wandering around in the darkness with various guides lecturing away, doing a pretty good imitation of school. I’d had too many opportunities to eavesdrop already. They were everywhere, in tight little lantern-lit packs of about twenty or thirty, shuffling along, learning up a storm. The colonists would have called this a lanthorn! Simply fascinating. Gripping. Whenever I got too close, some hapless kid would spot Buck and yell, “Doggie!” upsetting the educational flow. I tugged him away, deeper into the darkness, before somebody called the principal on us.

  It was a busy night. There was a big veterans’ gathering in town. Some of the guys Lu met in Philly came by to watch us shoot. They brought along their grandkids, who got everybody’s autograph, even Wally’s. There seemed to be no shortage of grandkids on hand tonight, along with their dazed parents. It was like night school for zombies.

  Didn’t seem like much of a vacation to me. I hated school, but at least we had lights and heat and a place to sit most of the time. I figured it must be a puritan trade-off for the town’s other big attraction: shopping. For every spun factoid you swallowed, you allowed yourself a purchase. Whatever you had your heart set on, always wanted, deserved to give yourself after what you’d been through, whatever bit of junk might cheer you up, make you feel sexy, remind you of your vacation someday under a heavy coat of dust—what ever—you could buy it around here, and so much cheaper. But I’ve never been much of a shopper.

  Don’t get the wrong idea. I liked the place just fine. I liked working on location with an audience. We were a tighter, better cast and crew. Lu and I enjoyed our time off rambling in the woods with Buck, who figured he’d died and gone to doggy heaven. So what was my problem? Wasn’t I happy?

  That was the problem. I was plenty happy.

  I was put on this earth for a reason, one of the Bright Spot’s characters said once—a cracker fundie I had trouble taking seriously when I played him—and now here I was: I was put on this earth for a reason. I didn’t even want to think about what this reason had to do with the course of my life so far. I’d get too pissed off, and I had a lot more life to live. I was willing to let bygones be bygones. But from here on out, I’d work out my own reasons, thank you very much.

  Lu was in the same boat. Or maybe we were rowing in the same galley. How many of us were there, we wondered—redundant Jims and Galateas set upon some mysterious errand we didn’t understand? We could have a reunion like the vets. Say, don’t you look familiar!

  I preferred my previous assumption—that I had begun as the random coupling of the usual stereotypes abusing the usual drugs, resulting in me—a good old-fashioned burden to society who should be grateful I wasn’t dead.

  Lu preferred her romantic story of rich parents who perished in a fiery plane crash. Now those people who hired Bea to carry her looked like spooks deploying a future resource instead of rich people longing to spawn an heiress. She dealt with it better than I did: She cursed the whole business
a few times, then seemed to let it go.

  I was still working on it, and it was still working on me.

  The last time my identity changed, I did it myself, or at least paid to have it done. I paid a couple thousand bucks—I’m sure I was overcharged—and considered it a bargain. But there wasn’t any part of this life I wanted to chuck into the river. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to hang on to it. It was my DNA now, goddammit.

  Meanwhile, it was authentically dark on the football-field-size green fronting the Governor’s Palace, and I had to keep a sharp eye out to make sure I saw where Buck did his business. I’d never find it in the dark. My plastic bag was conspicuously at the ready, sticking out of my back pocket like Buck and I were playing flag football.

  I watched him snuffle in an endless state of hesitation, and listened to the snatches of passing tours. This close to the Palace, most were telling Lord Dunmore stories. Seems like every time he got in a sticky situation with the patriots, he threatened to free their slaves— two-fifths of the colony’s population and climbing. That must’ve put a chill into the freedom fighters.

  “Mr. Bainbridge,” a voice came out of the darkness. There was a man sitting on a hitching post, little more than a shadowy blob. The flicker of torchlight from the Palace played across his face, but not so much you could tell what he looked like.

  “Good evening,” I said, thinking he might be a fan.

  “Since you have disabled our surveillance, perhaps it is time for your rendezvous? Fortunately, you took out his surveillance as well. Gives us the opportunity to talk. Dumfries can’t be trusted, you know. He’s completely insane. You’re much safer if we’re involved, if we cooperate with one another. What is it the two of you hope to accomplish here, Mr. Bainbridge?”

  Dumfries can’t be trusted. Who the hell are you? I smelled cop, seriously bad cop. To go along with their surveillance. And I’d hoped I was just being paranoid. Now it’d broken down, and I was getting all the credit. Isn’t that always the way? I decided to play stupid. I was a natural, though there was something familiar about the guy I couldn’t quite place. “Buck and I? We’re making a virtual,” I said cheerily. “Right here in Colonial Williamsburg—you should come by tomorrow, when the sun’s up. You could meet everyone. We’ll be at the jail again, I believe. I’ll be the fellow in the stocks.”