False Memory

Dusty braked at a red traffic signal and regarded Skeet with skepticism. The name, identical to that of the protagonist in The Catcher in the Rye, seemed too pat to have been an invention.

“He changed it legally when he was twenty-one,” Skeet said. “Sam Farner was his born name.”

“Is this stoned talk or true talk?”

“True,” Skeet said. “Old Sam’s dad was a career military man. Colonel Thomas Jackson Farner. His mom, Luanne, she taught nursery school. Old Sam had a falling-out with them — after the colonel and Luanne finished putting him through college and after old Sam got a scholarship toward his master’s degree. Otherwise, he might’ve waited to have his falling-out, until his folks ponied up more tuition.”

Dusty knew Skeet’s father — the false Holden Caulfield — and knew him far too well, because the pretentious bastard was his stepfather. Trevor Penn Rhodes, Dusty’s father, was the second of their mother’s four husbands, and Holden Sam Caulfield Farner was her third. From before Dusty’s fourth birthday until past his fourteenth, this self-styled blue blood had ruled their family with a lofty sense of divine right, and with enough authoritarian zeal and sociopathic ferocity to earn praise from Hannibal Lecter. “He said his mother had been a professor at Princeton, his father at Rutgers. All those stories.

“Not biography,” Skeet insisted. “Just his cooked-up résumé.”

“Their tragic death in Chile?.

“Another lie.” In Skeet’s bloodshot eyes was a fierce light that might have been vengeance. For a moment, the kid appeared not sad at all, not drawn and gaunt and ruined, but full of a wild and barely contained glee.

Dusty said, “He had such a tremendous disagreement with Colonel Farner that he wanted to change his name?”

“I guess he liked The Catcher in the Rye.”

Dusty was amazed. “Maybe he liked it, but did he understand it?” Which was a dumb question. Skeet’s father was as shallow as a petri dish, culturing one short-lived enthusiasm after another, most of them as destructive as salmonella. “Who would want to be Holden Caulfield?”

“Sam Earner, my good old dad. And I’ll bet it hasn’t hurt the bastard’s career at the university. In his line of work, that name makes him memorable.”

A horn sounded behind them. The traffic signal had changed from red to green.

Resuming the drive to New Life, Dusty said, “Where did you learn all this?”

“To begin with — on the Internet.” Skeet sat up straighter, and with his bony hands, he smoothed his damp hair back from his face. “First, I checked out the faculty emeritus at Rutgers, on their web-site. Everyone who’d ever taught there. Same at Princeton. No one with his parents’ names had been professors at either place. His invented parents, I mean.”

With an unmistakable note of pride in his voice, Skeet recounted the tortuous route he’d followed in his search for the simple truth about his father. The investigation had required concerted effort and considerable creative thought, not to mention sober logic.

Dusty marveled that this fragile kid, ravaged by life as well as by his own addictions and compulsions, had been able to focus sharply enough and long enough to get the job done.

“My old man’s old man, Colonel Earner — he’s long dead,” Skeet said. “But Luanne, his mother, she’s alive. She’s seventy-eight, lives out in Cascade, Colorado.”

“Your grandmother,” Dusty said.

“Didn’t know she existed till three weeks ago. Talked to her on the phone twice. She seems real sweet, Dusty. Broke her heart when her only kid cut them out of his life.”

“Why did he?”

“Political convictions. Don’t ask me what that means.”

“He changes convictions with his designer socks,” Dusty said. “It must have been something else.”

“Not according to Luanne.”

Pride of accomplishment, which had given Skeet the strength to sit up straighter and lift his chin off his chest, was no longer sufficient to sustain him. Gradually he slid down and retreated turtle like into the steam, the wet smell, and the soggy folds of his loose rain-soaked clothes.

“You can’t afford all this again,” Skeet said as Dusty drove into the New Life Clinic parking lot.

“Don’t worry about it. I have two major jobs lined up. Besides, Martie’s designing all kinds of hideous deaths for Orcs and assorted monsters, and there’s serious bucks in that.”

“I don’t know if I can go through the program again.”

“You can. You jumped off a roof this morning. Hell, getting through rehab should be a piece of cake.”