The Caveman's Valentine

by George Dawes Green

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Romulus Ledbetter wasn't always homeless. He once was a devoted husband, father, and musician with a bright future. He now forages for food in the trash cans of the city's better neighborhoods and wages a strenuous one-man war against Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant, an evil -- and imaginary -- power broker who is responsible for society's ills, as well as the sinister Y- and Z-rays that are corrupting humankind. Then one wintry night, Rom finds a corpse at the mouth of his cave that rouses his well-defined sense of ethics and launches him on an obsessive quest for answers. Forced to reconnect with society, Rom leaves his world and journeys through a spiraling web of clues and hunches, straight into a sinister den of money, temptation, and murder--otherwise known as the "civilized" world.

Release date: March 1, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 323

Sample

 

LOVE LETTERS FROM THE CRITICS TO

THE CAVEMAN’S VALENTINE

 

“Amplitude, great vocal agility, profound subject matter, wit, and that gruff, riskful way with language…George Dawes Green has a great feel for what the American novel should be and he isn’t intimidated by it.”

—Keith Mano, New York Times Book Review

 

“A complex literary thriller that remains humorous while subtly attacking the excesses of our culture…Romulus’ character is so compelling that many readers will want to tear him from the page just to offer him a home-cooked meal....Character, plot, and style are braided so beautifully together that the whole book shines with its own wild light. The light of good writing. Or, as Romulus would say, ‘Divinity.’

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

“Masterly…[an] absorbing whodunit plot which he pursues with compelling narrative skill and a poet’s gift for language…Romulus Ledbetter becomes an ideal, versatile, and even indelible vehicle for capturing the alienation of our time.”

—Chicago Tribune

 

“Mesmerizing…a stunning detective character you won’t easily forget.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

 

“The most outrageously original protagonist and detective in years. Combined with a gripping plot and exhilarating execution, this first novel promises to be the beginning of a brilliant career.”

—Robert Campbell, author of Juice

 

“So much fun…wild and unpredictable, powerful and funny…one of those unique characters you’ll not soon forget. Mr. Green has a wonderfully quirky sense of humor…a voice so new and interesting, it screams for attention.”

—Washington Times

 

“This is top-flight stuff. The characters are fresh, the story is gripping, and the writing is just great. THE CAVEMAN’S VALENTINE is an original, and George Dawes Green is as good as they come.”

—Andrew Klavan, author of Don’t Say a Word

 

“Remarkable…superbly realized…Romulus is that rarity, a truly original character…Green makes a wonderful debut with this gripping, well-written portrait of modern dislocation and homelessness.”

—Publishers Weekly

 

“Skillful…hilarious…a must read for those who enjoy a quirky twist now and again…certain to raise eyebrows and bring praise as an extraordinary contribution to contemporary literature.”

—Commonwealth Journal

 

“An impressive debut by an exceptionally talented new writer. Romulus Ledbetter is certain to take his place as one of the most fascinating and freshly conceived characters in recent mystery fiction.”

—Marcia Muller, author of Wolf in the Shadows

 

“An engaging and action packed debut—with the quirkiness and contradictions of New York life arrayed in all their glory.”

—Kirkus Reviews

 

“A first-novel feat few seasoned writers would dare…Crazy as they make ’em and clever as they come, Ledbetter is one of the most original characters to surface in popular fiction in a long while....Green’s other incarnation as a poet reveals itself with striking images and turns of phrase. Sharply written, funny, and serious, this novel debut deserves more than a few valentines.”

—Flint Journal

 

“Buy this book....It is moving, sad, hilarious....The first-time author has taken big chances and gotten away with them.”

—Calgary Herald

 

“An absolute joy to read…Romulus Ledbetter is a character able to combine intelligence with sensitivity and forcefulness with compassion, the type of literary figure we want to probe and investigate and spend time with....It will be difficult to wait and see where he goes next.”

—West Coast Review of Books

 

“THE CAVEMAN’S VALENTINE is snappily plotted, but the crowning achievement of this delightful first novel is Romulus Ledbetter … truly original.”

—The Page Turner

 

“Nothing short of brilliant. It will make you laugh. And think. And hold your breath. And want to find out how it ends.”

—The Islander (St. Simons Island, GA)

 

“A lot of fun…you won’t be able to forget this book in a hurry.”

—San Mateo Times

 

“THE CAVEMAN’S VALENTINE is one of the most unique novels I have ever read. It is unique in plot, tone, and character and totally engrossing to boot....A solid rock of well-written enjoyment.”

—Inland Expire (Riverside, CA)

 

 

 

For beautiful Rachel

 

 

To Dr. Jeffrey Newton, for his profound insights into the subtleties of clinical paranoia, my deepest appreciation. And also my envy, for I believe he has fathomed the fragile machinery of Romulus Ledbetter’s imagination better than I ever will.

On the other hand, to those of Mr. Ledbetter’s early therapists who misdiagnosed his brain-typhoons as “schizophrenia” I wish to express my undying disdain. But then what can we expect—what, after all, can we ever expect from C. G. Stuyvesant’s most abject minions and toadies?

 

 

 

 

 

THE

CAVEMAN’S

VALENTINE

 

 

 

 

 

Y ou figure now you got me in your clutches, you going to read me, like a book, right?—going to look right into my brain and you going to read it page by page, like I was some cheap-jack midnight entertainment to make you forget the mess you’re in—right? Get you chuckling, get your greasy thumbprints all over my thoughts, get you through another miserable lonely night, right, Stuyvesant?”

“Who’s Stuyvesant?”

“You’re Stuyvesant.”

“I’m not Stuyvesant.”

“No, you’re a zit on Stuyvesant’s ass. But you’re Stuyvesant just the same. You’re all Stuyvesant.”

“I just want to take you to the shelter, Mr. Ledbetter.”

“But watch out when you’re in my skull, because I got legions of angels in there, and they’re going to beat the shit out of you with their little wings, and pick your limbs apart and spin you around and slide you on out of there. Oh, I’m going to crap you out and be free of you. You hear me? I’M GOING TO CRAP YOU OUT, STUYVESANT!”

“It’s the coldest night of the year, Mr. Ledbetter.”

“It is cold.”

“If you stay in this cave, you’ll freeze. You’ll die out here.”

“I might. The world turns, it takes some of us with it. But if I swallow your con, if I go to your damn smelter—”

“Shelter, Mr. Ledbetter.”

“Then I would die for sure.”

“Oh, the shelter’s . . . well, it’s not a hundred percent safe, but . . . at least it’s warm.”

“Damn right it’s warm. You know why it’s warm? Because you burn the bodies in the furnace! That’s why it’s warm. Our livers you serve for breakfast, and our hearts you sacrifice to Stuyvesant, and the rest you cook up in the furnace! To keep everybody toasty.”

“Mr. Ledbetter, I’m freezing out here.”

“Then go.”

“Your daughter asked me to come looking for you.”

Romulus Ledbetter glared at his visitor.

Then he sloughed off his blankets and came out of his cave and rose up to his full height. Rose up before the social worker the way in a nightmare a grizzly will rise on its hind legs and it’s too late to run. His hat was a Teflon saucepan lined with the furs of squirrels killed on the Henry Hudson Parkway. His stink was enormous. For a scarf he wore the “Week in Review” section of the Sunday New York Times.

“My daughter.”

There was a wheeze in his voice, and the big eyes in his black face looked off somewhere.

“She’s worried about you. She says tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day. She says how’s her old man going to be her valentine if he freezes to death?”

“Well, you tell her not to worry. You tell her for me, tell her maybe I’m low, maybe they knocked me low, but I’m still a free man.”

He stood there and simply loomed. Until at last the social worker shrugged and went away.

I t must have been much later that night, even colder, when Romulus Ledbetter half-woke in his cave to the sound of footsteps. Coming this way, up the park slope. In this cold with the air tense as piano wire you could pick up any sound, from a long way off, and what Romulus heard was these slow footsteps. And somebody huffing. Somebody was carrying something.

Romulus reached and pulled himself up out of the ooze of sleep. He listened.

Very close now, the steps.

They stuttered. A near-fall on the hard February crust. So not boots—whoever was out there was wearing slick soles. City shoes, money shoes. A grunt, then a muffled thud. Then the footsteps faded.

Still swaddled in blankets, Romulus stretched and grabbed the TV remote control and aimed it at his carcass of a Zenith, and zapped it on.

He watched the News.

The News was someone hurrying out of the park. A figure in crisp white coat and white cap. You could almost smell the new leather. The News followed the figure as it jogged through the dead-of-winter oaks. To the wall at the park’s edge, at Payson Street.

There, in the dark, an elegant white sedan waited. The white-cap figure slipped into it like a snake. The fancy car accelerated into its getaway. Romulus killed the picture.

The News, so what?

The News was all lies, always.

Come morning, though, when he woke and unwound himself from his cocoon of blankets, when he shook the cramps out of his limbs, and went out into the snow, and walked down the hill under the big beech tree to take a leak, when the steam rose up from his piss and he looked mildly into the clump of winter thorns before him, he found the valentine that had been left for him there.

T he nurse was hurrying down Dyckman Street, hunched against the cold and rushing for the bus, when she saw him. He was standing before a little three-sided telephone coop. She gave him a glance and it turned into a stare.

Look at that crazy man. Must be homeless by the looks of him but something of a house unto himself. He was a big man, icicles hung from the eaves of his beard, and he was pulling from the pockets of his many coats all sorts of weird attic bric-a-brac. Old theater tickets, children’s scissors, the skeleton of a shrew. Some of this stuff fell to the sidewalk without his even noticing.

Finally he fished out a quarter, which he also dropped. He looked down at it. Must be tough, she thought, for that swaddled-up giant to stoop. She stepped over and picked it up and put it in his glove—careful not to touch him. He didn’t say a word to her. He was in his own world. She leaned into the bitter breeze and went on her way.

R omulus dunked the quarter in the slot and tapped out his former telephone number. He was calling his daughter the cop.

But somehow the tapping turned into that coffee-perking song from the old ad. Poppa-poppa-POP-pop. He played it again, this time throwing in a few flat and sassy grace notes. His shivering got into the rhythm, and whenever his fingers hit two keys at once the phone laid a fart in his ear, and he was running somewhat berserk with this music when a voice interrupted him.

“This call requires a twenty-five-cent deposit.”

“Oh bullshit. Your boss already got my quarter.”

“This call requires—”

“No no no, you listen to me, Miss Machine. You might not have got the News yet but guess what—you’re a slave. Just like the rest of us. News is, you been sold down the river to ol’ Massa Stuyvesant, and you going—”

“This call requires—”

He pushed five keys at once—raucous trumpet-chord of truth.

Then a human operator came aboard, and he made the call collect. He gave his name as Blast from the Past. His daughter accepted the charges.

“Daddy.”

“Little Lulu. Did I wake you?”

“Oh no.”

“I did, didn’t I?”

He remembered how she used to love her sleep, and it pained him to think he’d pulled her out of it.

“It’s OK, Daddy.”

Then he heard in the background his former wife Sheila. Or maybe his present wife. Seventeen years since she’d kicked him out, but he’d never asked her if she had yet bothered to divorce him.

He heard her ask Lulu, “Where is he?”

He could picture her precisely. He saw her standing at the kitchen door in her house robe with her big eyes blazing. She was fixing Lulu and the telephone, fixing them with her chickenhawk gaze and she was still a great part of him, he figured—by his rough calculation about one-third of Romulus Ledbetter was still this woman with the raptor eyes.

“Mama wants to know where are you, Dad?”

“Huh? I’m home.”

“At your cave?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You got a telephone in your cave now?”

“Oh, all the amenities. Tell your mama that. TV, Cuisinart, quadraphonic CD—everything no respectable homeowner could live without.”

Squawking in the background.

“Mama says get your ass over to the shelter. Did Mr. Simms come by?”

“Mr. Simms I don’t know.”

“The social worker.”

“Oh yes. He came by. I took him downstairs to my study and we shot a game of snooker. Tell your mama to call off her hounds. I have a home. It’s not fancy but it suits me fine.”

Further squawking.

“Mama says if you freeze to death she’s not paying for your funeral.”

“Funeral. That reminds me. Why I’m calling.”

“Why are you calling, Daddy?”

“Stuyvesant killed somebody.”

Silence. Years ago she’d have shot back, “But Stuyvesant doesn’t exist, Daddy.” Or, “Daddy, Stuyvesant’s just a figment of your paranoia.” But now at last she’d given up arguing. Sad, when they quit arguing with him. She just gave him a weary sigh.

“That’s rough, Daddy.”

“This time I’ve got the evidence.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Persuasive evidence.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He left the body outside my cave.”

“What body?”

“Lulu. I’m a paranoiac, OK? I’ve been wasted by failure, right, you got it, you know your old man. But as to this dead thing outside my cave? Now this one I believe is just as real as you’d like it. I mean it’s so shiny-real it hurts the eyes to look at it.”

“Daddy?”

Note of concern. Maybe even a glimmer of credence. He thought of her as a five-year-old. Hair done up brilliantly in cornrows, believing every story he told her. And why had he told her such damned outrageous lies? Well, they were the truth, for one thing. And anyway, it was half her fault—why had she just sat there with her big eyes always believing him?

“Lulu?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Lulu, please don’t put up a fuss, OK? Please, child? Just please can you come on over here?”

T he body in question was a thing of sculptural beauty.

A young man, a white man—though white wasn’t the word. It didn’t begin.

Alabaster, that was better. Or phosphor.

Or ice.

Romulus, waiting for his daughter to come rid him of this horror, knelt with difficulty and reached down and touched the kid’s cheek. No give. No give at all—he yanked his fingers back. Yes, ice was the word: the body was frozen through.

A tattered coat, but wide open. The summer rayon shirt was buttonless. No laces on the sneakers. The chest and the belly and the ankles were all exposed—all frozen into stone, and all flawless in form. Perfect, finely muscled. In places there were long ruby-beaded lacerations, and some gray bruises, but Nature hadn’t inflicted those.

Even Romulus, who professed to no eye for this sort of thing, could see that Nature had been in a large, giving mood when it had made this boy.

Small nose, gentle chin. A long blond mane of hair. Wide feminine eyes that were open and gazing into the branches of the beech tree, or into the sky, or somewhere further. And Romulus was hard put to conceive of this work as anything you’d want to call dead.

Would you call any of the marble god-statues in Florence—would you call them dead?

W hite cap.” The detective looked down at his clipboard. “White coat. White car.” He shook his head at the meagerness of what he had written there. “That’s all you saw?”

“I said the car was fancy.”

“Oh yeah. Fancy white car. And where was this fancy white car again?”

“Down there.”

“Down there? You’re pointing at this tree.”

“I mean, on the other side of this hill.”

“Oh. But didn’t you say you were lying right here in this cave when you saw all this?”

“Right.”

The detective had a concave face. Like a satellite dish. Or a cake that had fallen. He was a smart-ass. He looked sidelong at Lulu. Lulu looked at the snow. The detective turned back to Romulus.

“Then if you were in this cave, how could you see the fancy white car?”

“I told you. Try listening for once, OK?”

“OK. I’ll try anything once.”

“I’m telling you, I saw the white car on my TV.”

“Oh. Sure, the TV in your cave. Now you’re talking.”

“And I can save you some time, I can tell you who the car belongs to. The car belongs to a man by the name of Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant.”

But the detective’s attention seemed to be wandering. He was watching the ambulance workers load the marble corpse onto a stretcher. They draped a dropcloth over the work and hauled it away. Then a cop came over and handed the detective an eelskin wallet, threadbare.

“Found it in his coat.”

The detective looked through it. Not much to look through, though. Supermarket receipts. A driver’s license, which the detective squinted at. Presently he passed the wallet back to the cop, who popped it into a plastic bag and took it away again.

Then the detective eyed the TV set that sat at the entrance to the cave. Spilling out of the back of the TV was a ponytail of frazzled wires that led nowhere.

“Hey, tell me something, Caveman. What kind of shows you get on that?”

“All the shows.”

“Like what?”

“Everything. The whole heady broth of American culture, right?”

“Right. You get cable?”

“Sure.”

The detective gave Lulu another look. A little worm of a smile slithering across his lips.

“Get any broadcasts from Mars?”

“No.”

The man kept looking at Lulu. Lulu had inherited the sweet shape her mother used to have, and the amazing ragged-edged irises. And also something else, a sort of anti-aura, something down-to-earth and knotty and impenetrable that fascinated men. And damned if this detective, this squash-faced beet-nose sucker, wasn’t leering at her. The blood began to pulse in Romulus’s temples. Stick to your own kind, fucker. He took a step forward, caught the detective in his shadow.

“Write it down.”

“Write what down?”

“The name of the murderer.”

“You mean ol’ Uncle North Wind? Hey, what’s the point of getting after him? I could book him, you know, but I’d never get an indictment. He’d blow down the frigging courthouse. You ever see the cheeks on that guy?”

“Write his name. What are you afraid of? Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant. Write it!”

Drumbeat of skull-blood, and a stirring of tiny wings inside his brain. Quickening toward a rage. But Lulu—only Lulu—kept it from boiling over. With a word.

“Daddy.”

Romulus let out a breath. Let his blood settle. He said:

“Well, tell him to write it, Lulu.”

“I can’t tell him anything, Daddy. This isn’t even my precinct. I’m just a nobody here, like you.”

But then the detective raised his clipboard again, and grinned a generous grin.

“Ah, what the hell, my friend. You got some help for me? Who am I to turn down help? So how do you spell ‘Cornelius’?”

L ater, nearly dark, Romulus was making his rounds, just shuffling along through one of the rich enclaves off Riverside Drive. His low-energy sleepwalk shuffle. Build up some momentum with a gait like this, you could go on forever, like a steamship. But when he came abreast of a familiar and reliable row of garbage cans, he pulled up.

A doorman across the street gave him a baleful eye.

Romulus ignored him. Lifted a lid.

Well OK, here was the afternoon newspaper anyway, not bad. He stuck it under his elbow.

The rest was just miscellaneous desk trash. But he gave the mess a quick stir anyway, just in case—and uncovered a trove, a gleaming trove! Sheet music! Sugary white-bread tunes. “Gentle on My Mind.” “The Impossible Dream.” “On the Road Again.” Some spoiled brat in the tower above him, practicing with sodden fingers every Tuesday and Thursday, till she was old enough to bail out, to ditch this foolishness.

But sheet music no matter how corny was always a pleasure to Romulus.

He took a sheaf of it and put it in his outermost coat, slid it through the tear in the lining. Then moved on before the doorman could start something.

He went about a block and it was getting dark and he was tired, he’d lost that momentum now, and he stopped where he was and sat on the sidewalk, with his back to the blond brick.

When he dipped his head, he caught a whiff of his own stink. A bubble of deep rank sincere stink. Made him ashamed of himself. Usually he showered and washed his clothes at least once a month at the Franciscans’ down on Broadway and 112th. Cleanliness—that was a point of pride with him. After all, he had his daughter’s reputation to think of. He had his handsome rocky home—homeowner’s pride. Could such an upstanding prophet in the community go about ill-groomed? But these last few weeks—such cold! He kept putting off going down to the Franciscans, kept waiting for a break in the weather—and pride had gotten itself frozen out.

Just frozen out.

Frozen, iced-over, snowed in . . .

He woke with a start. Shook his head to clear it. The newspaper was on his lap. He took it up, and braced himself.

He was ready to confront the Ice Apollo again, in a big front-page spread.

But the front page was enthralled by the VALENTINE GHOUL, who’d been caught digging up Andy Warhol’s grave. She swore that he’d asked her to. “He wants to be my love-zombie.”

Then pages two through six were communiqués from various SPURIOUS AND TRUMPED-UP WARS around the planet. The soldiers wore the same faces, just different uniforms. Of course. They were all extras.

Pages seven through twelve were taken up with the TEARFUL CONFESSIONS of pols who admitted to robbing the public blind but who promised to cut back just as soon as they could.

He was almost to the classifieds before he found what he was looking for.

HOMELESS MAN FOUND FROZEN TO DEATH

The lifeless body of Andrew Scott Gates, 20, was discovered early this morning in a remote section of Inwood Park on the northern tip of Manhattan. A preliminary autopsy report indicates that Mr. Gates was the victim of exposure to the sub-zero temperatures that have prevailed in the metropolitan area for more than a week.

Mr. Gates, an unemployed model, had been living since November at 144 East 4th Street, in a building owned by the city of New York but occupied by squatters.

Early this month, however, according to other tenants of the building, Mr. Gates had moved out onto the street. “He was depressed,” said Laurie Black, who lives with her husband in another room of the building. “He thought maybe he was dying of AIDS, and he kept talking about people out to get him.”

For some time after leaving the East 4th Street address, Mr. Gates had been noticed in and around the tent village at Tompkins Square Park. He had not been seen, however, for nearly a week.

Mr. Gates’s body may have lain undiscovered for several days, said Lieutenant Detective John Cork of the 34th Precinct. “It’s a little-trafficked area of the park. He might still be lying there if another homeless man hadn’t run across him.”

When found, the body was dressed in light summer clothes and an open coat. There were no indications of violence. Lieutenant Cork speculated that Mr. Gates may have been seeking shelter in one of the park’s shallow caves.

The police will conduct a thorough investigation, said Lieutenant Cork.

Mr. Gates is the third homeless man whose death has been attributed to the recent wave of arctic air. On Tuesday, an elderly Brooklyn man was found dead near a heating vent in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Yesterday an unemployed construction worker died of burn injuries he received when sparks from a cooking fire set ablaze his crude cardboard dwelling on West Street.

 

O farrago of lies! Lies and distortions.

The ol’ North Wind, sure. AKA Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant.

Mr. Gates’s body will be transferred to the Museum of Classical Ice Sculpture in SoHo, where it will be attended by seven vestal virgins from the Fashion Institute of Technology. If there’s ever a power failure, the remains will melt into a puddle and Stuyvesant’s minions will mop up that puddle and rinse it away and it will burble down the drain and into the sewers and the rivers and into the Atlantic Ocean and you can rest in peace then, Andrew Scott Gates, there’s not much more the bastards can do to you.

Easy, Romulus. Back off on the rage. Easy on the bitter visions. Remember that iniquity and injustice such as this are all in a day’s commerce here. Detach. Smile. Get out that sheet music and play.

T he bankruptcy lawyer was one of the best in New York, a man to whom even the grimmest of grim tidings brought enrichment. And as the tidings from all points of the compass were very grim indeed these days, he whistled cheerfully as he walked up from the corner, where the car had left him, to his apartment house.

Then he saw the bum. The bum was sitting on the sidewalk with his knees drawn up, and he was reading something and his head was rocking from side to side. He was in some kind of bum’s rapture. He was a big black man. He wore a pot for a hat, and several coats, one on top of the other, and out of the pocket of the topmost coat stuck the ends of a bunch of bananas—coal-black, oozing at the seams.

The bankruptcy lawyer was not dismayed by the sight of bums and beggars. As symbols of abysmal failure they also stood, of course, for his own prosperity. But more than that, he thought they represented—in the constancy, the intractability, of their numbers, despite every attempt in. . .