Everything You Want Me to Be

by Mindy Mejia

  DEL / Saturday, May 10, 2008

  WINIFRED BLEW up the barn on the morning of the fishing opener. Usually Bud and I spent this day motoring the patrol boat around Lake Crosby, catching a mess of crappies too little to do anything with besides throw back. We went to Lake Michigan later in July, between planting and harvest, when Bud could afford a week away and after I’d dried out the Fourth of July idiots. That was our serious fishing trip. The opener was just so we could feel the line casting out over the water.

  The boys pulled practically all the lake patrol during the season. They confiscated alcohol and handed out tickets for not wearing life vests, but mostly worked on their tans. Everyone loved the lake shifts and I let the crew have them, except for the opener. That day had always been mine and Bud’s.

  We hadn’t talked since I’d arrested Lund and Bud knocked me down. I wanted to call but didn’t know what to say, and the days kept filling up with county business. Tommy’d become erratic and was pulled over for drunk driving. His parents talked the judge into giving him leniency on account of his loss. The station had a tractor turn over on the highway, a complaint of livestock theft, and a ninety-year-old who knocked over a light pole because his car was in the wrong gear. I filled out the paperwork and set up the detours, feeling all the while like I should apologize to Bud and not knowing what for. I passed him in town once or twice and we both lifted a hand from our steering wheels and kept driving in different directions. Finally, after the arraignment, I signed Winifred’s permit and called him. I told him I’d be on the lake during the blast for security.

  “I’m going with you,” Bud said, and hung up.

  On the morning of the blast, we dropped the boat in and parked the cruiser in front of the entrance to the lot at 5:00 a.m., well before dawn. I posted the Lake Closed sign next to the newspaper notice on the gate.

  “Warm already,” I commented as we pulled away from the dock.

  Bud sat in the passenger seat, looking ahead at the black water. His face was unreadable as he nodded. “It’s gonna be a scorcher this year.”

  Neither one of us spoke after that. The demo wasn’t scheduled for another hour, so I killed the motor and drifted into one of the better inlets, handing the bait to Bud. We cast out the lines in silence and waited. Every once in a while I turned to check the crew’s progress. They milled around the barn, a bunch of dark figures against the faint orange lightening up the horizon. A few days ago they’d strung up a net to catch the bits that were going to blast into the water, making it look like the barn was caught on a giant flyswatter.

  Bud didn’t turn around. When he got a bite, he didn’t even pull the fish out. Pull it up, I wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come. We both watched the line tug this way and that until the fish thrashed free of the hook and swam away.

  After a while the sun showed its face, throwing the cattails and weeds into that hollow first morning light. I reeled in my line.

  “It’s time.”

  Bud followed suit and set his pole aside without comment.

  “Better do one last sweep of the perimeter and then we can set up in the middle of the water. We’ll be well clear of the blast radius.”

  He nodded.

  I slowed down when we got to the launch, making sure nobody was trying to slip by the cruiser and set in anyway. There were plenty of cars lined up on the road, but folks were lounging on their hoods with binoculars—they’d come for the show. There’d been a lot of grumbling on the timing of the thing, and now no serious fishermen were bothering with the lake at all today.

  I motored over toward the east side by the barn, giving the demo crew a quick nod to let them know we were clear.

  “Fifteen minutes,” the foreman shouted from the bank. I waved and headed back to the middle of the lake.

  Bud’s stare seemed to harden when we pulled up near the barn, but he still didn’t have a word to say. Even though we’d shared plenty of quiet moments over the years, most of that had come from my side. Bud had always been the one who reached out, ready with a joke or a story about the kids. I’d lived with my silence until it was like a wife to me and I didn’t think twice about it. Bud’s silence was unnatural. I didn’t know how to break through it. There was a barrier between us now, a hard place that used to be easy.

  I positioned the boat and killed the motor. There wasn’t any breeze today, which was good. As the seconds ticked by, I couldn’t help tensing up, feeling that old nausea.

  “Damned if I’ll ever get used to explosions again,” I said, just to say something.

  We watched as the last of the men cleared out of the barn and drove their 4x4s in the direction of Winifred’s house, where they’d set up the controls. It was soon now.

  I wiped a rag over my forehead, which felt sweaty and cold. Bud let out a long, loud breath.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got any of that confiscated booze around here.”

  I was surprised—Bud didn’t drink. “I don’t. No one’s been on the water yet this year. And usually the boys’ll split whatever we do take. It doesn’t last long.”

  “Probably best anyway. It’s just . . . I can’t . . .”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t know.” He shook his head and his eyes seared into the barn. He wouldn’t look away from it.

  “You don’t know the first thing about having your daughter’s life ripped away from you, making you feel about as powerless as a gnat. And then to find out she was sleeping with her teacher—her married teacher. It was like I didn’t know her at all. I didn’t know my own flesh and blood.”

  “Hogwash. Course you knew her. She was a teenager, Bud. They think they’re in love and do stupid things. They all snap out of it eventually. Hattie would have, too.”

  “And him.” His rage took over again.

  “I sat across from him at Hattie’s conferences not two months ago and listened to him tell us what a bright, talented girl she was. And all the while he had his dirty hands under her skirt. God, he should rot in prison his whole life just for that. But then to take her life . . . to stab her in her heart . . .”

  Bud’s entire body was shaking now, the anger was pure and boiling in him and it had nowhere to go.

  “It’s not enough, Del. Prison’s not enough. I need to do something to him. I want to throw him in that barn right now. I want that son of a bitch blown into fish bait for what he did.”

  “Bud—” I didn’t know what I was going to say. I didn’t know if there was anything to say to something like that, but it didn’t matter because the blast tore open the morning sky.

  The barn exploded in a series of flashes and flying wood, then the smoke billowed out, hiding everything. Without thinking, I had snapped my hand to my holster and crouched behind the windshield of the boat. Bud didn’t seem to notice. As the smoke drifted away and the smell of dynamite singed the air, I eased up a little and took us closer to the shore. These demolition guys knew what they were doing. The barn was now a scrap heap of wood and rubble, half on land and half caught in their giant net.

  After a few minutes, the 4x4s returned and waved toward the boat to let us know we were all clear.

  “Well, that’s that.” I started to turn the boat around when Bud leaned over the side.

  “Wait.”

  He pointed at the water. Two sunnies had bubbled up to the surface, dead as doornails. As we stood there, another popped up. Then another.

  “There. Over there.”

  “Look at that one. He must be a three-pounder, at least.”

  All around us, fish floated on their sides, their silver bellies shining like a hundred streaks of light in the morning sun. We couldn’t count them all. They were everywhere.

  “Must have been the shock wave.” I’d felt it go through me, but assumed it was as much in my head as anyplace else. Seeing all these dead fish, though, well, it took the thing out of me. The tremors were already gone.

  We stood side by side, staring at the water.
>
  “Let’s go grab a drink, all right?”

  “Mmm.”

  I turned us away from the floating fish bodies and the demo crew swarming around the rubble, pointing the boat back to the launch. Just as we docked, dispatch came over the radio.

  “We’ve got a ten-fifty-two involving two vehicles out on highway twelve, right along the stretch by the lake. Del, are you still in the water?”

  “Just getting out, Nance. I’ll be there directly.” I was already halfway to the cruiser. “Sorry, Bud. You’ll have to come along and sit tight, unless you want to stay here. I’m sure Mona’d come by to pick you up.”

  But he was already in the passenger seat, buckling up. I hit the lights and gunned past the line of cars. A few of the watchers swung their binoculars on us.

  “What’s a ten-fifty-two?”

  “A crash with injuries.”

  It didn’t take long to find the accident. A semi was halfway to jackknifed on the shoulder and the driver stood nearby, frantically waving us down. As we pulled up, the pickup underneath the semi became visible, or what was left of it anyway. It was one of those monster-truck types by the look of it—a modified F150.

  I parked the cruiser in the middle of the lane to keep traffic to the left.

  “He ran right into me.” The driver started in as soon as I opened the door. “There was this huge freaking boom and then this truck came at me. I couldn’t get out of the way.”

  “What are you hauling back here?” I checked his fuel line to make sure it was intact.

  “Produce. Strawberries from California.” He stopped outside the wreckage, leaving me to work my way under the belly of the semi.

  “Hello there! Sheriff Goodman here. Can you hear me?”

  There was no answer.

  I saw a pair of boots walking around the far side of the truck.

  “Del!” It was Bud.

  I ducked through by the wheels and met him on the other side.

  “It’s Tommy’s truck,” Bud said. “Tommy Kinakis.”

  “Help me get the driver’s side door open.”

  We yanked it until there was a few feet of space to crawl through and I poked my head inside.

  Tommy looked like he’d been swallowed by the steering column of his truck. The whole dashboard was crushed against the seats, with Tommy slumped in between. Blood dripped off the wheel and over the shredded fabric, where some empty liquor bottles were lying. I reached to take a pulse without any hope. The boy’s eyes were open and blank.

  I backed out of the wreck and shook my head at Bud, then called dispatch for an ambulance on a DOA.

  “Jesus, he’s dead?” The truck driver held his head like it was going to fall off and paced in the ditch next to his cab. I left Bud to go talk to him.

  “Tell me again what happened. Slow it down this time.”

  “I was supposed to drop half the load in Rochester and half in Red Wing. I just left Rochester and was thinking I should have gassed up, and then this huge boom came out of nowhere.”

  “Demo crew blew a barn up right over that hill. Less than a mile away.”

  “Oh. Oh, okay.” He took to wiping his forehead.

  “So after the blast . . .”

  “It was then, right at the boom, that this truck ran into me. He was coming from the opposite direction and it looked like he just spun out, going at least seventy. His back end kind of swerved and I hit the brakes and tried to move to the shoulder. He was under me before I knew it. I heard the crunch and the whole rig jolted to a stop. I jumped out to see if he was hurt, and all I could make out was his head, but he didn’t move and he didn’t answer me when I yelled, so I ran back and called it in.”

  “No other cars coming at the same time? Anyone else see it?”

  “No, none. It’s pretty backwater out here. Maybe there was some afterwards, I don’t remember.”

  “Del!” Bud shouted and I looked to see him half inside Tommy’s truck.

  “Watch for that ambulance,” I told the driver, and jogged back. Could Tommy actually be alive? I hadn’t felt any heartbeat.

  “What is it?”

  Bud withdrew, staring inside the truck like someone had just poleaxed him in the back of the head. He held up a finger and pointed.

  I checked inside, but nothing had changed. Tommy was still dead. I didn’t smell any fuel.

  “The door,” Bud spat, and then I saw it.

  The inside panel of the driver’s-side door was cracked open, and there, stained dark with dried and crusted blood, was Mary Beth Lund’s chicken-butchering knife. The knife I’d dreamed about, the knife we couldn’t pull out of that lake. I leaned in farther and saw a rectangular box with buttons underneath the knife. I’d bet a thousand dollars it was Hattie’s missing camcorder.

  “Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

  Bud stepped up next to me and we stood there, staring at Tommy’s mutilated body, watching his blood congeal.

  “Lund,” Bud said, quiet and low, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. Peter Lund had confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. Maybe he thought he was protecting someone else or maybe he wanted to pay for his other sins, but in all likelihood he was going to rot in prison for the next twenty to thirty years, and the only thing in the world that would prevent that was right in front of us.

  I glanced at Bud. In the distance came the wail of the ambulance and another police siren. There was no time to think it through. No time to wonder about the morality of a man’s actions, whether he owed more to a friend or to the law and the country that depended on that law, no time to sift through the dozens of questions that would haunt me in the middle of the night for years to come, sitting up in a pitch-black living room staring at the neighbors’ cat and feeling like I had no right to wear a badge, that I had failed the institution I’d given my life to and not even knowing what that meant. The sirens came closer and closer and I turned to Bud, my oldest, broken friend, and I gave him back a crumb of what he’d lost of himself.

  “It’s your call.”

  Tears coursed down his unshaved cheeks. “I don’t know, Del.”

  “Decide for Hattie, then. Choose for her.”

  I watched as Bud’s hand slowly reached out, to either pry open that hidden compartment or to seal it from the world’s eyes forever. To reveal who had murdered his daughter or to sentence her lover to a lifetime of penance.

  His hand shook while he decided.

  DEL / Sunday, May 11, 2008

  JAKE AND I watched the tape from the beginning. Hattie’s image filled the interrogation room, bright and bubbling one minute, big-eyed and somber the next, telling us everything she had done in the last year of her short life. This was the diary I’d expected to find when I’d searched her room all those weeks ago.

  When the scene switched from her bedroom to the dark, splintered boards of the barn, we both sat up straighter. Everything in me tensed and went cold. Hattie was oblivious to any danger, bursting with details about her rendezvous with Lund and their plans to run away together. She was glowing, pulsing with life and hope. Then a squeaking noise pulled her gaze away from the camera and her face brightened.

  “Did you forget—”

  Her smile died. She tripped backward, away from the camera and from the person who’d just walked into the barn.

  “Tommy.”

  “You lying whore.”

  Hattie backed up until only her top half was visible. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was looking for you.” Tommy stepped into the frame, holding Mary Beth’s knife in one hand. “I went home and then came back. I drove along the back roads looking for you, to give you a ride because I felt bad about what I said.”

  “That’s sweet.” Her voice shook as she said it.

  “Then I checked the barn.”

  He kept walking forward, slowly, until he was in the far corner of the frame with Hattie, facing away from the camera.

  “And I see you sitting in Mr. Lun
d’s lap, making out with him like he just fucked you four ways from Sunday.”

  “Tommy, I can explain.”

  “I don’t need any explanation, Hattie! I got the picture! You won’t have sex with me, but you’re giving it away to one of our teachers. Does he give you good grades? Do you give him a blow job for every A?”

  “I’m in love with him, Tommy.” Hattie’s eyes kept bouncing to the knife.

  “So you’re cheating on me with a teacher. Letting him do all the things you tell me you won’t do. Were you laughing at me behind my back? Laughing at me while screwing him?”

  “No. No, I never laughed at you. I never . . . thought about you.” She took another step back and the floorboards creaked. She had to be close to the water’s edge now. “You were a really good boyfriend, Tommy. Really. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I didn’t think.”

  Suddenly she pointed to the blade in Tommy’s fist. “What are you doing with that?”

  “I’m going to get some answers out of you. I watched him leave and waited for you to come out. Then I found this.” He lifted it for the first time, pointing it at Hattie’s chest.

  “Can’t you just put it down? We’ll go somewhere, anywhere you want, and we’ll talk. I’ll tell you anything you want to know, the whole truth. I promise.”

  “Did you fuck him here?” he demanded, his voice rising.

  She hesitated before answering. “Yes.”

  “Then I want to talk right here.”

  They were only a few feet apart now.

  “How long have you been screwing our English teacher?”

  “Since January.”

  He stumbled back at that, opening up a little space between them. Hattie’s eyes flickered toward that gap and then back to his face. There was a tightly controlled panic in her features but a concentration, too, like she was working something out in her head.