Timmy Calvino

Timmy Calvino by Devon Pitlor O temps, suspends ton vol! et vous, heures propices, Suspendez votre cours! Laissez-nous savourer les rapides délices Des plus beaux de nos jours! (Alphonse de Lamartine, Le Lac, 1820)

I. My neighbor’s request

I hardly knew Matthew Gordon Calvino, Esq., but he promised me some free legal services, pro bono, as he said, if I would do him a favor. He wanted me to check up on his son Timmy on both Thursday and Friday of the week following. Both he and his wife Myra would be in court those days, and it had been negotiated with eleven year old Timmy that he was “too mature” for a babysitter. Lawyers, I suppose, negotiate with their children, and now he was negotiating with me. “Your billable hours,” Matthew said, “will be between eight am Thursday and five pm Friday. Check on Timmy as much as you can. I know you are home working on a story now, so you can just drop in to make sure everything is all right.” He

fished into his pocket and found a house key without dropping the garden hose he was using, and ended by saying that “Timmy will expect it. Just don’t act too bossy. Make sure he’s safe and so on. Then leave. Keep your eye on the house. Part of the contract is that Timmy doesn’t have any visitors those days.” Again Calvino lapsed into his accustomed legalese. He had a contract with his eleven year old son instead of a babysitter and a billable hour neighbor in me to look in now and then. Agreeing to keep an eye on Timmy turned out to be perhaps the worst mistake I ever made in my life, and that is more or less the substance of this story. It is the story of how I discovered that nothing I thought mattered really mattered in the end and of how I learned to look at time and events with a detached dispassion whereupon reaching the last word of the final chapter, nothing really did matter anymore---except a largely unexperienced sensation commonly called love, love that would only brush past me as part of someone else's life into which I could only hope to gain a small and fleeting view as if glancing into the dimly lit window of passing train car by night.

II. Jumping ahead Two weeks after my billable hours with Timmy Calvino, the child became front page news all over the state and region and maybe the nation. His picture flashed across the television every hour for a while, and a large, unattractive billboard bearing his likeness was erected near the local mall complete with a phone number of who to call if one had a lead on his whereabouts. He had simply walked off into thin air. Another missing, molested, perhaps abused, perhaps abducted child. He lacked nothing but his own milk carton, but I doubt they do that anymore. It was, in my opinion, always a stupid idea. The milk cartons I mean. But when Timmy disappeared, it was for good, and reluctantly I add that I knew how and why, things that I have been unable to relate up until now. Timmy would cause me some personal loss too. Caitlin, my bedmate, would begin to find me lacking in passion, and that also is part of the real story of Timmy Calvino. Within a month, Caitlin would only be a faint memory, and even her indentation in my down mattress would eventually smooth out, and I would no longer be working for Coriander Press and no longer be doing most of

the things my life as a journalist had led me to do over the years preceding Timmy Calvino. I would be interviewed several times as a suspect by the police and FBI, and I would never collect any sort of billable services from the Calvino Legal Group, husband and wife, both of whom would be still convinced that I had some sort of nefarious hand in Timmy’s disappearance, which to a large extent I did. In short, my life would change. I cannot say that it would change for the better or for the worse. It would just change. One goes along believing that all the touchstones of the world which surrounds us are real until one day an unseen and unexpected threshold is crossed into another reality, one which has been there all the time, lurking invisibly on the unexplored borderlands of tangible truth. Because of Timmy Calvino, I was destined to cross that threshhold to a point from which one can never actually return. Because of Timmy Calvino my life stretched out before me as a somewhat worthless wasteland that I was merely forced to endure, rather than embellish, during the rest of my weary march toward inevitable death. III. Timmy Calvino

I had seen Timmy next door since he was about five years old. A spoiled, snotty, solitary onlychild, raised in a huge house full of books and pièces d’art by two aging parents who doted over his every word. He was a sallow, pallid kid with deepset dark eyes that seemed too big for his head and full lips which seemed almost too sensual for any child, lips which could turn from a smile to a sneer in seconds, lips that seemed to reflect the desire for immediate adulthood. Timmy played electronic games and rode his bike around the neighborhood like most other children in the subdivision, but he seemed to have few permanent friends. A look of abstract boredom continually creased his features, and he treated his parents with a flippant attitude which bordered closely on disdain. Other than his bratty side, there did not seem to be anything unusual about Timmy Calvino. Oh yes, he was slightly dreamy and looked anaemic all the time, but that I credited to the rarified lifestyle of his barrister parents, their dusty tomes and browning doilies and stained antimacassars which seemed to drape over every outdated piece of overstuffed furniture in the house. In many ways I had pity for this child who seemed to long for the vitality of the

sunlight and the verdant green of a forest playground. I pictured him like a woodland elf stranded in barren, treeless plot of domestic concrete and totally unable to regain his mushroom patch somewhere in fantasyland. Other than that, I took very little notice. There was, however, never any indication that Timmy would ever be any kind of trouble to me or to anyone else. He was just another sickly kid stranded in suburbia. But for the promised legal services, I did my duty. On Friday, June 11th at a respectable 10 am, I knocked at the door and was met by Timmy with sleep in his eyes and wearing red velveteen pajamas. “I’m okay,” he snapped ready to slam the door in my face. “Just checking,” I said, “It is part of my contract.” “Yes,”agreed Timmy, this time stepping back from the door and sitting on a curved divan placed in the alcove. He seemed to want me to come in and look over the house. I said I would be back later and to call if he needed anything. “I need a lot of things,” he said paradoxically, “but you can’t provide them.” In spite of his usual insolence, I was shocked to

hear such a strange reply from an eleven year old. But then again, this was the precocious child of two wealthy lawyers. They each probably spoke to one another that way all the time. IV. I return unexpectedly The day passed without event. I watched Timmy's huge house from my study window and wondered, as always, if he ever got outside. His bike was tossed against the brick wall bordering the garden pool, and lately it never seemed to be used anymore. A beautiful summer day had passed with me bent over my keyboard and Timmy apparently confined to the inner bowels of the Calvino mansion. Something seemed wrong in the picture. A fatherly thought suddenly sprang to mind. I would go over on my duty visit and take Timmy outside, to play ball, to eat a hamburger, to watch a butterfly, whatever. When I got tired of knocking at the massive cedar door, I let myself in. A strange, operatic like music was faintly audible from upstairs. The house smelled like starched sheets and clean dust. I walked upstairs, trying to make as much noise as possible. As I approached his bedroom, the music stopped. A strange odor filled the hallway air, an

odor that reminded me of my grandfather, but at the time I could not say why. I knocked at Timmy's bedroom door and heard a grunt that sounded like "Come in," so I did. In an armchair before me sat Timmy, eyes glazed over. His slight body looked ridiculous in the chair. He looked every year of his eleven summers, but his enormous black eyes fixed me in a way that went far beyond measurable age. His lips, always too large and sensual for his youthful face, curled immediately into the famous sneer, only this time it was more intense and expressed a disdain that went deepr than any I had seen before. "Hired help," he said. "A man babysitter. My contract with Matthew and Myra specifically stipulated that..." "No babysitters," I interjected. "I'm just a concerned neighbor." "A concerned neighbor with a housekey." "Yes, your dad gave me one."

"And you used it." Timmy dismissed me with a casual wave of the hand and busied himself pinching and rolling some black tobacco-looking substance betweeen his hands My immediate thought went to drugs, and Timmy, suspecting this, arched an ironic eye in my direction and said "black Syrian latakia--from Sevastapol. Flake. You have to rub it before you smoke it. No one seems to know how to do that anymore. He took a rubbed plug from his palm and deftly inserted it into a large, brownstained meerchaum pipe which had been lying on the marble table at his side. Finding a too-long wooden match, he lit the foul-smelling substance and took several deep puffs. His eyes slitted with obvious satisfaction. Reaching down into a cadenza cabinet, he produced a carafe of brown liquor. "Cognac," he said casually as he spilled two tumblers full of it and offered me one. "Cognac," it's from France. France is a country." I collapsed somewhat in wonder into the adjacent chair and watched while an eleven year old boy drew large black clouds of smoke from a pipe larger than his chin and sipped cognac from a twirled snifter. "Have a drink," he said. "You may need it."

I started to protest when Timmy issued me his full and commanding gaze. His coal-black eyes seemed to say "Don't bother." He puffed some more on the meerchaum and sipped a little more of the brandy. Then he rose briefly and put the needle of an old turntable player on a wavy record. A whining operatic tune wafted from the scratchy disc. Something Italian or German, I could not tell which. A soprano and and basso in a duet. A sense of tragedy and a passion. Something from an antique market. The Calvinos liked antiques. As quickly as he began the music, he ended it with an abrupt lift of the phonograh needle. "You wouldn't understand," he sighed rising to his feet and searching through a small wooden case of antiquated looking syringes. "I'm going to do a solution in a minute, and you can watch if you like. Four percent pure Cambodian opium. That's the dose. Then I may sleep. Or I may do something else." Weakly and in shock, I asked if Timmy's parents had any idea of his vices. He smirked again and

asked me if I really thought so. "By agreement, my room is inviolable to the Calvinos, esquires. We negotiated that when I was seven years old. I hold up my end of the deal and they hold up theirs. They smell the latakia sometimes, but they know it is not marijuana. That satisfies them. I call it incense. They accept that." "But why, " I stammered... "They wanted a son. They got one. I was some kind of miracle of birth because they were both in their late forties. I honor them and treat them well and call them Dad and Mom and remember holidays, as they do for me. They provide me with shelter and clothes, and I cause them no trouble at all. Even as a baby, I did not cry much. I potty trained myself. No kid at my school can top me in my grades, and I'm not bad at gymnastics or tennis either. What more could two aging lawyers ask for? "A normal son who listens to progressive music, hangs around kids his own age and doesn't drink brandy or shoot opium," I quipped. That made Timmy Calvino's lips curl into the nearest thing to a smile that I had ever seen crease

his visage. V. An injection between the toes. Yes, he did it, and I watched him. "Between the toes so no one knows," he muttered, dropping the syringe on the matted carpet and reclining backward into his chair. He drifted off into a reverie right in front of me. His huge black eyes squeezed into slits. His oversized lips pursed and muttering something about "The Dutch and typhoid from the dirty water." Oblivious to my presence, he rolled over on his side and repeated the name Marianne again and again. Bits and pieces of a story came out: The shelling went on day and night. It was like a non-stop earthquake. People, soldiers, battlefield nurses---Marianne was one---were blown to bits. The shrapnel was cutting them to shreds. There was no food. Typhoid claimed more lives than the Dutch cannons. They ate the boiled paste of dead horses and rats. Chevril. It tasted like manure smelled. Some incompetent called Buller kept trying to reach them, and some general called Botha wouldn't let him. More died. 118 days of hell. They even contemplated eating one another. The nurses died first of the disease. Finally, help

came. But too late. Hundreds were dead. The nurse Marianne was among them. Typhoid again. They held out but they were only the skeletons of soldiers. Marianne was dead. Marianne was dead. I listened in awe, contemplating what to do. An eleven year old boy had just given himself an injection of opium and was blathering nonsense about some war, some siege, in front of me. I started to call 911, but something stopped me. The child stopped talking and fell off into what appeared to be a peaceful slumber. I pulled a blanket over him and walked downstairs. Something about the Calvino house seemed to be choking the life out of me, so I walked into the garden, still stunned. If Timmy had overdosed, I would be an accomplice. The police would arrest me for not stopping him. Fear welled up in my chest, and yes, cowardice. I felt like a trapped rat. I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to. The Calvinos had specifically said not to call them because they would be in a closed courtroom. The police were not an option. With sunlight glaring in my eyes, I re-entered the house and went unpstairs. Timmy was still sideways in the armchair and snoring. His breathing seemed regular. I decided to wait a few hours and then check on him again. Caitlin would be home from

work by now. She would know something was wrong the minute she saw me, but she would politely try to ignore it. I grabbed a bottle of some kind of white alcohol from a sidebar and poured myself a huge glassful and downed it in one gulp, regaining thus a bit of sanity and balance. I checked on Timmy once more and went back home. Caitlin was working on a musical score and thankfully did not want to be bothered. I went back to my computer and stared at the draft of an article that I had been composing about Taco Revenge, a local band. Somehow the words, albeit mine, seemed foreign to me. My adjectives for the Taco Revenge performance danced in front of my eyes like ingots of germinating bacteria. They meant nothing. I had another drink, this time of my own whiskey, and tried to remember the names or places that Timmy had mentioned. The only word that came to my mind was "chevril." Timmy had given it a funny emphasis. It was something they had to eat to stay alive. I planned to search for the word and wrote it on a scrap of paper. But sleep overtook me. A troubled night followed filled with dreams that I could not remember upon waking. But my

own grandfather was there smoking his pipe and smelling just like Timmy and his room. VI. Timmy visits. The next day Caitlin was off to her studio earlier than usual, and I steeled myself for a visit to the Calvino house. It was, after all, a part of my contract. It was another bright June Friday. Only a few easy steps next door would take me into a world of harsh trepidation. It was like a journey that I was compelled to make inside a realm filled with evil. I began to leave the house to check on Timmy when I heard the clatter of a bicycle by my front gate. Peering timidly through the side curtains, I saw that it was Timmy Calvino---alive, active and fresh---parking his bike. He may have been out riding in the quiet streets all morning. Or he may have only taken it from next door. He came up the pathway and knocked. He did not wait for me to invite him in. Sitting down in the first chair he encountered in the living room, he smiled up at me and said "Have you abrogated your contract? You were supposed to come over and check on me."

I stammered something about his habits, his drugs. "Forget that shit," he said dismissively, looking around eyeing the sparse contents of my house. "I do what I want in my room. Where is your bitch? Gone off to work, I suppose. Gone off to work while you stay here and write your little music reviews. What kind of love is that? What kind of passion? You probably fuck her now and then, and the two of you think you have something going. You have no concept of what real love is." Again I was taken aback by the cold maturity of his words, but I automatically checked my impulse to correct him. Timmy Calvino was some kind of prodigy, far beyond his years, and in the back of my mind, I knew there was a story here. Something more interesting than Taco Revenge or any of the other mediocre local bands I reviewed for Coriander. I decided not to show any shock and put up a calm façade. A part of my act was to ask Timmy if he wanted a cigarette. He took one from me and examined it. "Hay," he said, giving it back. "You all smoke hay. I prefer rich tasting Turkish caporal. I know you don't have any of that."

"I can go to the tobacco store and get some," I countered still guarding a calm front. "I have my own, as you have seen." "What is your story, anyway?" I asked feigning a slight indifference. "Have you spent too many hours alone? And where do you get your...your stuff? I mean your tobacco and your powder opium and your needle and your big pipe?" "From a sucker like you," said Timmy grinning. "She provides me when I run out. Old friend of the family." "How do you get away with it?" "Easy. I told you it is in the contract. Matthew and Myra, mom and dad if you want, allow me privacy in my own room in exchange for being trouble-free and a good student. Outside like here today, I do nothing strange. It is all in my room. And don't even think of informing them." "Why not? Wouldn't that be my duty? I mean, I have a contract too." Timmy glanced around the living room. It must

have been both emptier and brighter than what he was used to within the dreary, shaded confines of his house. He scrunched his lips up again into a semi-sneer which turned to a kind of sinister grin. Then a look of plastic innocence came over his face. His black eyes opened full wide, and he held his palms upward. "I'm just a pretty kid," he cooed, "and you are nothing but a child molester." "I never..." "I know," he said returning to a more calculating demeanor, "but who will believe it? You let yourself into my house and came into my room. Who knows what we did there, what you demanded of me? I'm only eleven years old, remember? You're the adult here. In my view, you could be quite out of line. I could describe things like a boy can." "Sounds like blackmail to me." "It is blackmail. And I won't hesitate to use it either." Timmy at once rose to his feet and walked to the

door. Standing on the steps, he reminded me that today was the last day of my "engagement" and that there was no need to come over again. Matthew and Myra would be home by evening, and all would be well. "But," he concluded finding a new thought, "you do need to check on me one more time. I have two things to show you. And in a couple of weeks, you need to babysit again and drive me somewhere. I'll tell you about that later. It will be your last service to me. If you refuse, get ready for a visit from the local morality police. Come by around three today. Just let yourself in. And come alone." VII. The Calvinos return early Matthew met me halfway between his mansion and my house. He seemed pleased. He had a checkbook in one hand and a voucher for several hours of free legal services in the other. It was my choice. I sensed the aura of coming legal problems with a certain song publisher and chose the billable hours. As it turned out, the voucher was never honored. The Calvinos had apparently won their case, some

convoluted film copyright deal that involved millions. Calvino spared me the details with a wink of the eye and with a little rub of thumb against forefinger which meant money. He asked me to join him on his rear patio for a drink. Myra, his wife, was downstairs with Timmy "getting reacquainted." We sat down on polished concrete benches and Matthew poured out some sangria from a glass pitcher he had previously placed on the table. He swizzled the ice and fruit around in his glass and looked at me with a strange glint in his eye as if he were appraising me. "Timmy did not seem happy to see us come home so early," he said. "You two must have hit it off together." I agreed that Timmy was no problem and that I had hardly needed to check on him more than a couple of times. This seemed to amuse Matthew. He took a long swallow of his sangria and told me how Timmy had been a miracle. I had heard the story before. Myra was over forty-seven when she suddenly discovered she was pregnant, and the pregnancy did not go well. Timmy's birth, a month in advance, had required the assistance of several specialists. One came from as far as Switzerland. But Matthew, being legal rather than medical, did not tell me the details of the precarious birth, only that it was very costly. He finished his brief account by

saying that Myra had been impregnated in the usual way, "in case I was wondering." "He's mine all the way," finished Calvino. "But he doesn't look or act much like me." I was close to the point of hinting at some of Timmy's strange habits when I looked up and saw the boy's pale white face staring down at me from an upstairs window. The huge eyes fixed mine with an inexpressible calmness. In fear, I held my tongue. "Yep, mine all the way," repeated Matthew Calvino. I knew better but said nothing. We finished our drinks, shook hands and I carried Matthew's legal vouchers to my study and began to rewrite a piece that was long overdue on a vocal group called Hacque. Once again my own written words danced meaninglessly before my eyes, and my audience notes seemed to make no sense whatever. In the voice mail were three urgent requests from Coriander reminding me of the past due deadline. But the story seemed hollow and without focus. Timmy Calvino and his unvarnished threat loomed in my mind. Then the phone rang. I was expecting Caitlin's usual "I'll be late" call, but it

was Timmy. His voice was strained and terse. "Matt and Myra are going out for a victory dinner with the client at seven. I'll be sick by that time, and you will need to come up and check on me. Matthew will inform you of this. Don't fail to come." Timmy clicked the phone off without awaiting my reply. Around six o'clock, on cue, Matthew was knocking on the door. He had the house key again in his hand. "Timmy has some kind of stomach flu and diarrhea. He can't go out with us. Would you mind...?" I took the key and said "Of course not." Further payment wasn't even mentioned. VIII. In Timmy's room again There was, of course, no illness. Timmy was smoking his meerchaum and preparing his injection. Papers and pictures were scattered all across his bed. Amongst these were some ancient graying photographs of a pretty woman wearing a white uniform and leaning with some soldiers against a cannon. It looked like material from Matthew Brady's coverage of the Civil War which I had many times seen in albums. Timmy invited

me to sort through all the pictures. In some were soldiers swathed in yards of bandages and bleeding from the eyes and mouth. In others, there were row upon row of ostensibly dead soldiers arrayed on stretchers beside a train marked Intombi Hospital. The soldiers wore pith helmets and some had kilts. These were definitely not combattants in the Civil War. In every picture, there fluttered women, sisters of mercy, nurses, and among these, always the same stunning woman as in the first enlargement I was given. "Over 600 dead of typhoid fever alone," said Timmy. "And the shelling never stopped. The atmosphere was always heavy with black powder, and that caused many of the men to collapse from respiratory ailments. Bullets flew in from all the directions too. You never knew who was going to be hit next. They let one train go out each week to Intombi with the drastically wounded, most of whom died on the train before ever reaching the hospital. We ran out of places to bury the dead and began piling them up and setting them ablaze. Dysentery and typhoid were everywhere. All we had was dirty water from the Klip and there was not always time to boil it. It needed to sit for days for the mud to settle, and that was where the

microbes dwelled: in the mud. By the third month we had all consigned one another to the dead. Buller was not coming. He never would. In another month, a field marshal named Lord Roberts finally reached us, and the siege was lifted. By that time nearly two thousand were dead. And she was one of them." Timmy pointed to the attractive woman who was continually seen attending the sick and wounded. "Marianne!! She was there for me. A carnival back in Trowbridge...an old gypsy woman said we both had the Star of Rebirth on our foreheads. Only the old Tzigane could see it and then only for a shilling and half-pence apiece. But we were in love, Marianne and I. We had been so since childhood growing up in the green paddocks of Wiltshire. What were a few bob to learn that we would spend all of eternity together because a sideshow gypsy assured us it was true? Marianne even joined with the Lancers when I was shipped into the Natal. She could have remained in Durban. Hell, she could have remained in Wiltshire. I was a brash volunteer under White's command, a badly run collection of bumpkin regiments hastily formed into a rag tag army. A good third of them were Ghurkas brought in from India. We reckoned they would do most of the

fighting. It looked like an easy walk until Joubert and Botha saw an opportunity to cut off and destroy us. Marianne and I saw one another every day. She managed that very well. We edged between the tents and sometimes managed to lie down in the shell tortured mud ridges together as the Dutch rockets exploded over our heads. We kissed. That was all. Our marriage would be consummated after the war, after the "easy victory" Kitchener kept telling us was ours. We were both marked by the Star of Rebirth anyway and knew that we had been lovers in a past life and would be again in a future one. Just children at war we were, not one of us older than twentytwo. But in love, so much in love." With this Timmy collapsed headfirst on the piles of photographs and pounded his little bony fists into the mattress blurting muffled epithets into the bedspread. I put a hand on his shoulder to console him, and he rolled over with a glare of true malevolence burning in his eyes. I started to say that everything would be all right, but he stopped me short. "What do you know of love? Love across the

ages? Do you realize that I'm talking about two people on a doomed battlefield in a damned siege that ended in 1900. 118 days of death. Dysentery, typhus, exploding mortar shells, and eating chevril until it made you so nauseous that you couldn't walk. But we believed in the Star of Rebirth. Others had seen it on our foreheads too. Village women. Africans. Zulus. We were chosen by fate itself. We needed to make it out together." "Out of where," I asked. "Ladysmith," Timmy snarled annoyed that I had not caught that detail before. "Go home and read about the siege of Ladysmith. You can find it all on your computer. Search using the word chevril, the guts and bones of dead horses boiled into a fetid paste, our only food. Use chevril as a search term. Go learn. Go now. Go make shallow love to your lady. Go drink wine and eat tapas in some glassy cafe under plastic ferns. But don't try to understand Marianne and me. You are incapable of it. Go." As I was walking down the hall stairs, Timmy shouted once again for me to stop. He shuffled down to my level with a tiny curved pistol in his hand, another antique, a single shot firing cap

derringer-type gun. "It's a Remager," he said coldly. "Very close to what they issued us to conceal on our person if the Dutch ever took us prisoners. One shot to the head and it would be over. But I never did it. I was too afraid, unnerved by the shelling, aghast at the site of Marianne dying on a hospital stretcher in a fever delirium from which she would never escape. We were marched out to the ramparts, and an hour later she was tossed on the day's burn pile. Another would take her stretcher place on the hospital train to Intombi. I should have used the pistol, but I didn't. The next time I will." IX. A week of quiet incertainty Caitlin was in Los Angeles for a show, or at least that is what she claimed. With great dispassion, I would learn later that she was actually in Philadelphia with her new love interest. Little by little, she had grown weary of my inattention and lack of energy and had once told me that she had no plans to spend the rest of her life with a cheap band reviewer for an alternate magazine that no one even read any more. In so many ways, I felt relieved that she was gone. My sanity had become fragile since the time spent with Timmy Calvino--for I had done exactly what they boy had asked

me to do. I had searched the internet for chevril, Remager single-shots, Buller, the Klip River, Botha and Joubert, and in multiple web entries too numerous to read, too compelling not to read, I learned about the horrible siege of Ladysmith from November 2nd 1899 to February 28, 1900. 118 days of hell. The Boers had the British trapped in Ladysmith like rats in a steel cage and were killing them off little by little until finally a British batallion broke through and relieved the hundred or so walking corpses that remained, most of whom would die in the days following from the general typhoid which all had contracted. Some must have survived because fifty years later they had a reunion. A bunch of old men in a crescent photo. Survivors. Timmy Calvino, or whatever his name was then, must have been in the scanty group photo. I printed it and had a mind to ask him which one he was, but I never got around to doing that. And Timmy had other plans for me. X. Conclusion: Timmy's final plan Matthew Calvino was either going to write me a check again or negotiate some extra billable hours pro bono. He sat on the patio with an enormous smile breaking across his aging face.

"Timmy really likes you. He said you took him outside and threw a ball and rode your bike with him." I neither had a bike nor a ball, so I recognized Timmy's duplicity at once in his father's words. I agreed solemnly that Timmy was a nice boy who needed to get out more. Matthew and Myra trusted me. They planned a Saturday visit to the sulfur baths at Grandmeer and wondered if I would take Timmy out to a little itinerant carnival that was camping for a few nights down in the Water Park. Timmy had said the other kids were going with their parents, and that he would like me to take him so as not to disturb the elder Calvinos in their sulfur bath retreat. I glanced up mechanically at his bedroom window, expecting to see his huge black eyes daring me not to protest, but the window was empty. The survivor of Ladysmith was probably ensconced in some sort of opiate delirium, assured that I would comply completely. And so I agreed. I told Matthew it was "on the house" because I too liked these little neighborhood fairs myself. "I like the dart and dunking games," I said. "I'll take Timmy whenever he wants."

Calvino, satisfied, put away his checkbook and told me that Timmy wanted to go that very afternoon if I wasn't busy, and all the world knew I wasn't busy because Caitlin was long gone and I didn't seem to be writing about vocal groups anymore. I had already been let go by Coriander, and it didn't seem to matter. An hour later, Timmy Calvino---all seventy pounds of him---was sitting beside me in the Jeep. A slight bulge in the lower pocked of his cargo pants told me that he was either carrying a cellphone or his single shot pistol or both. Quietly, I started to head toward the Water Park and the carnival, but Timmy told me in a flat tone to turn the other direction and keep driving down Westbank Highway until he said to stop. We drove on in silence. Finally, I said "Ladysmith" under my breath, and Timmy shook his head. A look of the most abject sadness covered his wan visage. His dark eyes grew wet and began to droop downward toward his lap. He folded his hands and bowed his head even farther and sobbed quietly. "I'm sorry" was all that he managed to get out. Farther down the road he began looking around from side to side and spotted a huge, three story brick building which fronted on Makepeace Drive on the other side.

"Park in the rear," he said. Timmy, his eyes still pleading and wet, reached into his shirt and brought out a plastic zip-up pencil case which had his name stenciled on it along with the logo of his school. He handed it to me. "A full confession is in here. Not the real confession which they would never believe but a confession nonetheless. I left out all the details other than the part about blackmailing you. It is all written in my handwriting and covered with my fingerprints. You will need to give it to the police. They should believe you. I just said that I loved my parents, but I could no longer go on living with them. I didn't give any reasons beyond that. It also says you were manipulated to help me and that you are innocent. There is nothing about the siege of Ladysmith in it. That would be too crazy for any of them to understand. There is nothing about Marianne either." Timmy jumped out of the Jeep and came to my side. "Let's go," he said with determination. Your name is on the visitation list. All you will have to do is show them your license. I am your nephew and a great nephew of your "great-grandaunt," Miss Adella Prudhom. Miss Prudhom is 96 and blind, suffers from terminal dementia and

won't know you from a tree stump. Her hours in this world are thankfully limited. No one ever visits her." He went on to hastily explain that the woman whom he had often tricked into procuring tobacco, opium, syringes and old photographs from a British dealer worked in the facility and that it was she who had put me on the visitation list. I wondered what penalties Timmy had threatened her with and how he had done it. "Used to be my nanny," he said distractedly, "until I was old enough to negotiate myself out of nannies." The assisted living home was a necropolis of the virtual dead and the near dying. Ambulances lined up near the main circular driveway to carry away bodies. We went directly into the hospice wing. I flashed my ID, and a bored attendant pointed down a dark hall to a room on the left. Halfway past the nurse station, Timmy took the lead and strode purposefully into a ward room, past several hunched and lumped bodies disappearing into rollaway beds and to the side of a gnarled bundle of near-death crouched on a bed illuminated only by sickly sunlight light filtering through a filthy window pane. The thing was Adella Prudhom, a leathery mass of what had once been life. He took her by the hand, and her

creased face looked up into his. The white orbs of her blind eyes seemed to brighten. Amidst the wrinkles on her forehead, I thought I saw the trace of a kind of star, but that may have only been my imagination. In a raspy death rattle, the woman said "This time?" Timmy squeezed her hand and said "Yes." Then he let her hand drop, and the corpse heaved a heavy breath. As we left the wardroom, I heard it say "This time?"once again. Timmy told me to check out and ask the attendant how long Mrs. Prudhom had. The graying black man looked at a chart and said that it was good that I made it because she could go any minute now. All the arrangements for her cremation were at hand. "Let's go," Timmy snapped. "Fast. Timing is important in these things. You can see that. I should have shot myself dead on that rampart the minute I heard about Marianne's death. As it turned out, she got to live an entire life without me. She never married, and it must have been horrible. It's that thing about love that I have been telling you. Something I know you have no ability to understand. I shudder to think what her life as Adella Prudhom must have been. She died

that day at Ladysmith and came back too soon. Without me. I was a coward. This time I won't be." On Timmy's demand, we drove to the Water Park and walked onto the midway of the little carnival. Men and women beckoned us from booths to try our luck at dart and gun games. Spinning wheels rolled everywhere, lights flashed; we walked on, Timmy leading. As we passed a fortune telling booth, an old gypsy woman made the sign of the cross upon looking at Timmy's head and snapped the curtain of her booth closed. At the far end of the midway the actual water park began. Like a strange sprinting reebok, Timmy jumped over the fence and turned back to look at me. "Go home." he said. "Tell them I ran off. Give them the papers. Good luck and thanks. And remember that no power on earth is stronger than love. Love, real love, outlives time." In the dark shadows, Timmy darted off into the brushy entrance of an abandoned water conduit pipe. I could hear his feet clang against the ancient metal until the sound became too distant. The drain pipes ran out for miles underground they said.

But Timmy didn't go miles. Muffled but still distinct. I heard the report of a single shot deep within the piping. Whatever Timmy's name had once been it would be again, and it would be with Marianne---not Adella---and that would last for all eternity. _______________________ Devon Pitlor May, 2009