Free The Wave by Walter Mosley Page B

condition had remained the same.
    Nella had just gone out to walk around the fair “to scope out the competition,” when the three men in suits came into the tent. I realized later that they must have been watching, waiting for Nella or me to walk away.
    Two of them seemed to be cast from the same mold. Dark suits. Tall and white with every hair and crease in place. The last man was tall also, but his light-colored suit was ill-fitting—loose in the chest and tight at the waist.
    The twins wandered around a bit and then settled near the entrance. There they pulled the canvas flap across the front, closing off the space to the public. I was about to ask them to move the fabric door back, when the man in the bad suit came up to me. He had one of my mugs in his hand.
    “Mr. Porter?” he said.
    “Yes?”
    “My name is Werner.”
    He had robin’s-egg-blue eyes and a craggy face that if it had been on a marble facade, you might have said got only the first treatment of sandblasting. The skin was pocked and mottled.
    “We have a problem,” Werner said.
    “What’s that?”
    “We’re looking for your father. Do you know where he is?”
    “In the grave,” I said. The cold in my gut almost doubled me over.
    The ugly stone face smiled.
    “This is no time for artifice, young man.”
    “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, mister. My father died nine years ago.”
    “Then why, may I ask, were his fingerprints found on a water glass in your house just recently?”

17
    They identified themselves as government agents but demurred when I asked what agency they worked for. They used a plastic tie to secure my wrists behind my back, then hurried me out of the street fair and into a black Lincoln Town Car. The dark-suited twins got in the front seat, while the lumpy agent sat next to me in back.
    “Can I see your identification again, Agent Werner?” I asked him.
    “You don’t need to see my identification,” he said. “You need to get your story straight.”
    “But—”
    “Wait until we get there,” he said.
    It was a very long drive. Because the men refused to answer my questions, I leaned my temple against the cold door-glass and closed my eyes. I imagined a vast blue sky with two great clouds. One was in the shape of a white rhinoceros, and the other was a feral snow hare. The winds blew the clouds together at an excruciatingly sluggish rate. Slowly, as they came together, the animals became a great blue-on-blue dragon.
    I couldn’t shake the vision. It wasn’t a dream or a mental construction. I thought at the time that it was a symptom of the great stress I was under, a way to escape my helplessness.
    At last we arrived at a house near the outskirts of Ventura, in a rural town called Fillmore. It had once been a working orange farm. There were still hundreds of citrus trees surrounding the house. The property was immense for a single dwelling, almost the size of a plantation. There were certainly no next-door neighbors to peek over the fence and ask what was going on.
    I was dragged into the adobe-style mansion and deposited on a large, shaggy sofa. It was white and smelled of cured wool.
    Werner sat on a hassock in front of me. I was leaning on my side because it was hard to sit upright with my hands restricted.
    “This is no joke,” he said.
    “What’s your first name?” I asked him.
    “Jim.”
    “Well, Agent Jim, I have no jokes to tell.”
    “Then let’s drop this shit about your father being dead, shall we?” he suggested.
    “There was a man at my house,” I said as calmly as I could. “He claimed to be my father. But he was no more than twenty.”
    “Where’d you meet this guy?” James Werner asked me.
    “He called me,” I said. “Crazy, hopeless kinds of calls. I went out and found him in the graveyard.”
    “What was he doing there?”
    “I don’t know. Sleeping on my father’s grave.”
    “You say that he looked like he was a young man?”
    “Absolutely. Almost