The Redemption of Marvin Fuster by Patrick Sean Lee (best affordable ebook reader TXT) 📕

He shuffled south on Broadway toward his destination. 400 East 8th Avenue. The Boettcher Mansion, residence of the state’s governor, though he had absolutely no idea what he was supposed to do when he arrived. Just go, he was told.

He had seen the palatial residence once or twice over the years, when the spirit had moved him to leave the downtown area entirely and strike out on a leisurely hike or a larcenous reconnaissance mission through the surrounding neighborhoods. The last time was long ago, but the remembrance of it sitting like a splendid monarch on its vast grounds rose to new heights today.  What was there? Why on earth had he been directed to approach it?  Dressed in his filthy rags, and barefoot, he wouldn’t even be admitted with one of the afternoon tours. He wondered if Amy lived there; maybe she was the governor’s daughter, or God forbid, his wife. No, highly unlikely.  Richard Harris—that was his name, wasn’t it? Yes. Harris had to be in his late forties. Amy was, what? Twenty-five, or twenty-six?

Shit. 

Money…and success…buy beauty.

Then again…maybe she would be among the visitors? Just a visitor. Why was he supposed to go, if not to meet her? There was no other possibility, no other reason that made sense. The angel said...what was it? What? What?  

She is here, and we are watching her. 

Where, he thought, is here, if not where he was going?

The early afternoon was warm, but with a cool breeze out of the north rising and falling in fits and starts that lifted the thin, still-damp hair on his head. The park, the State Capitol Building on the opposite side of the street, and the Mission were far behind him now.  Here the thoroughfare was lined with older single or two-story commercial buildings, and teemed with traffic. Men and women with kids in tow came and went carrying shopping bags, in and out of glass doors that reflected stabs of sunlight as they swung open.

Marvin passed Bunsmeier’s Fine Apparel as he went along in a daze. He walked by the front display windows of the upscale Men’s clothing store, then stopped suddenly and backtracked. More mannequins dressed in fine suits, eyes of empty contentment looking outward, oblivious. He mimicked the pose of one of them as he feasted on the elegant attire it wore. There he was, or could be, outfitted like a banker or a thousand dollar an hour attorney.

I could steal that goddam’ suit if I put my mind to it. He turned his head and checked the street behind him. No cops. No hecklers.

Maybe I just will.

And maybe you should just get your ass to that mansion.  Maybe that’s what you should do.

Well, he didn’t say when…and why the hell am I goin’ there without shoes or socks, lookin’ like a basket of assholes, anyway?  This won’t take long, then I’ll show up an’ knock on the door like I was King Farouk. Maybe that’s what that thing meant.

That is precisely not what that thing meant. 

As Marvin surveyed the movements of the customers inside, two salesmen swooning over them, he began to ease his way to the door. Anselm was there waiting. When a voice from the far corner of the showroom distracted the customers and the sales staff, Marvin reached for the handle. He grabbed hold of the glistening chrome, but then stopped when a blinding flash burst in front of his eyes. He froze.

The thread inside him had awakened, slipping across a different, deeper region of his brain, burrowing now, touching a forgotten memory, or a dissipated dream—a life lived, perhaps, in a different eternity. Musical notes, at first. Only notes—rising from a soft and steadily growing field; spreading and pushing at the horizon in its birth. Flowers, then, with sun-swept faces of amber, pink, azure and crimson, raising their thousand leafy arms, waving at something overhead, or simply reaching skyward as their numbers grew, like a wave traversing a hidden reef. Endless fields growing and stretching in every direction as far as his eye could see. And then a high, clear voice beckoning him from everywhere at once.

Ne pas errer, mon Coeur, ne pas errer…

He recognized the lilting music, the soprano’s singing like a crystal knife opening his heart, moving the same note from word to word to word with clarity and an otherworldly beauty. His heart leapt, and he released his grip on the handle. Against all reason he had understood the command, and he knew whose voice had sung it.

Marvin stood immobile, blinded in the third dimension, immersed in the fourth with perfect vision. Anselm lifted a finger and his charge began the return. As the fields softened into blurs, the voice sang from far, far away in the fading mists.

My shepherd, the water divides us.

I cannot cross.

Sing to me, then, my love.

Come to me with your music

And your youth…your youth.

Yes, yes, I will.  I swear it.

He turned and left the entryway, continuing south along the street, unmindful of his surroundings, thinking of nothing but the piercing beauty of the voice. Amy had sung to him, and oh, how sweet the melody had been. He knew she was at his destination, waiting for him, and he quickened his pace.

Some sense of embarrassment prevented Marvin from approaching the mansion with confidence at first.  A sudden disbelief, or loss of faith, perhaps, coupled with the mirror that followed before him like a shadow in reverse. The rags he wore—had worn for what seemed an eternity—that suddenly shamed him more than ever. His face, his fingers with blackened nails. His feet without shoes.

 How can I…meet her? Is that what I’m planning? Really? Am I that stupid? He gazed down at his clothes, to his bare feet, and then into the gutter where a stream of water flowed lazily by. Amy’s face drifted along in the sparkle of it. Raising his head, she reappeared in the reflection of a store’s window across the street. Marvin shook his head and laughed at the question. 

  Yep.  I’m just about that stupid.  Screw my looks.

 He turned the corner onto 8th Avenue, no longer considering turning back, pulled by the idea, the compulsion to see Amy, which was stronger by far than the reality of what he was. The mansion atop Logan Hill came into view soon, tucked slightly back off the street behind a filigreed wrought iron fence. A three-story stately Georgian Revival, constructed with handcrafted red brick, white Ionic columns supporting a second story balcony residing above the front entrance. A beautiful set of French doors framed within the brick led to the balcony from somewhere on the second floor. The mansion’s trimming along the long eaves, dormers, and windows was the color of a freshly bloomed lily. He approached it warily, wrapped in his thoughts, and came to a halt behind a tall elm; sheltered from the street, but visible from any of the north-facing front windows, should anyone care to peek out at him. Which was unlikely. The place looked deserted.

  An hour passed, during which time Marvin looked up and down the street a dozen times, sat against the tree and peered up at the columned portico, moved to the edge of the parking and looked into the gutter, back again to the tree, to the far eastern edge of the property, back again to the tree, wondering when Amy would come walking out, or appear out of nowhere and go walking in.

  She is here, and we are watching her.

  Go to the Governor’s Mansion…

  Ah, bullshit.

Enough was enough. Marvin marched through the gate, up the steps, and then knocked on the front door. He waited. A moment passed without a response, and so he knocked again, this time louder.  The sheers moved seconds later, drawn by a fingertip. They remained parted for a breath or two, and then dropped closed again. The lock disengaged, and the door cracked open.

Standing before him was a man roughly forty years-old, dressed like a penguin, wearing the predatory look of a buzzard.

“Yes, Suh?” he asked in a deep-south accent. The man eyed Marvin suspiciously.

“Are you the governor?”   

There followed a pause, and what appeared to Marvin to be a tiny snarling of the guy’s lip, driven by the sight of his attire.

Finally. “No, Suh, ah am not. The govunuh is out. What can ah do fuh yuh?”

“I’m lookin’ for Amy. He told me to come here.  I’d find her here.”

“The govunuh?”

“Uh…no. Someone else.”

“Well, whoevuh ‘he’ is, Suh, he misinformed yuh. There is no one by that name who ruhsides in this home. Now, if yuh’ll excuse me…” He began to close the door.

“Wait!  Goddamit…”

The door clicked shut.

No one here by that name? Marvin wheeled around and scoured the sidewalk and the street beyond. Where the hell is she, then? I’d o’ seen her if she…He raised an eyebrow. Wait a minute…maybe whoever that Reb was, he was lyin’ to me. He glanced at his clothes again.  Yeah, that’s it. He was lyin’.

I’m goin’ in.

Marvin left the porch and strode east to the corner at Pennsylvania Avenue, the end of the mansion property. He found it disgraceful that there were no leaves, no twigs, not even a hairline crack in the sidewalk he walked on. The grass against the concrete must have been addressed as though it were a head of hair—the governor’s hair, clipped to an evenness and accuracy reserved for work by machinists. The shrubs on the inside of the fence were the same, and the lawn beyond. He spotted a slash of cement going from the street to the garage, and to the south of it some ways, a gazebo with a domed, metal roof, sitting in a depression in the perfect lawn.  There was no one in sight anywhere, but the double gates of the drive were open just slightly, and so he slipped in. Two red-breasted robins took flight from the ground a dozen feet to his right when he stepped through. He could have sworn they had their beak-noses turned up at the sight of him. But then, his weak eyes. Most likely just his imagination.

Somewhere inside that coliseum was at least one person, the guy with the southern exposure. Probably a hundred others, he gauged, scanning the back wall and the endless grounds to the south.

Jesus.  Ain’t nobody needs a spread this fuckin’ big…        

The thread dug in and twisted suddenly, forcefully, making its point.  Marvin grabbed his temples and winced.

Goddamit…ouch! Goshdarn it? That hurts like hell. 

What I say, huh? What…did I…say?

Lord almighty…Ouch! Gadzooks. No one needs a home this extravagant, so ostentati…what the blazes is happening?

The thread was happening. He had no idea. None. The thread of grace bore into him with the tenacity of an English schoolmaster, beating out the four-letter crap in the sewer of his grammatical memory bank. Disciplining the child who had crawled into his classroom from the gutter. Anselm sat laughing in the tree behind him, the same tree that had been occupied by the robins (who could have cared less about Marvin’s appearance—or his language). He moved a finger round and round, sending Webster’s in a painful stream of pulsing energy into Marvin’s brain. Then, Moby Dick. For Whom The Bell Tolls. Little Women. Oliver Twist. Anna Karenina.  None of these condensed or abridged. In the blink of an eye. 

Overload.

Marvin took a faltering step or two forward and collapsed onto the edge of the lawn. His eyes remained open, turned upward until nothing but the whites showed. Lying there he witnessed a light show rivaling the inside of a nuclear reactor momentarily, and then his world went black. 

Again.