by Tom Wright
“Hey, Biscuit.”
I opened my eyes and saw L.A. looking down at me. Gram and Dr. Ballard were at Don’s desk talking with him and another detective.
“We’re going home,” L.A. said. She looked white and tired.
“I want to wait and see Earl,” I said, imagining him being dragged across the squad room swearing and struggling and having to be subdued by force, losing a shoe, his shirt torn half off, maybe a little blood running down from one ear.
“Don’s not gonna let us do that,” said L.A. “Anyway, Gram wants to go home. She says we’ve all had more than enough criminal justice for one day, and she wants to be in her own kitchen again and know we’re safe at the pool, swimming.”
I could see there was no arguing with this. I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles. “Did you have to tell everything again?”
She just looked at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Tired as she was, there was something hard and dangerous in her eyes. I didn’t say anything else. I stood up and we all walked toward the exit, my thoughts a million miles from where they should have been.
RECKONING
1 | Mental Powers
LATE IN THE afternoon of the day before the Minnesota trip L.A., Diana and I leaned back in the kind of folding lawn chairs that people who didn’t have to answer to Gram called “chase lounges,” lined up on the back patio at Diana’s house like old tourists on a cruise. Six sneakers in a row, four tidy and clean, two big and shabby and at least a year past white. Nobody saying anything.
Diana and L.A. were doing that feline thing girls do where their eyes are closed but they’re nowhere close to being asleep, just listening to everything and thinking their own thoughts, but I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to feel.
Don had said Cam’s trial would be set for sometime in the fall, and everybody expected him to eventually end up in Huntsville for what he did to L.A. Hot Earl wouldn’t go to death row, because there was no death penalty now, but he was behind bars for good. The danger was past.
But apparently some things left part of their energy behind after they were gone, like an odor, because I didn’t feel one damn bit safe. Or maybe it was just that I understood the world better now than I used to.
Diana had done her best to talk L.A. into coming to Minnesota with us, but L.A. was sticking to her guns. I banged it into my head that Gram and L.A. were going to be all right, that it was practically impossible to fool or sneak up on either of them, that they were both probably tougher than me anyway.
Then something else occurred to me.
I said, “Maybe we could dedicate the trip to Dee. Have a little ceremony or something.”
L.A. glanced at me, then closed her eyes again without saying anything.
Diana said, “I think we should just let him rest in peace. That’s what he wanted.”
The silence tried to come back, but I wasn’t ready for it yet. “Hard to believe it’s all over,” I said.
“Don’t start,” said Diana.
“Just saying.”
“Shut up,” said L.A.
So that’s where we left that.
BY SOME unknown method Don had been able to get Diana and Marge organized and loaded up early enough to pick me up at Gram’s before six in the morning with the eastern sky still hanging halfway between gray and pink. L.A. came out of her room wearing an old robe of Gram’s, her hair sticking out in dimensions Einstein never thought of, opened one eye about a sixteenth of an inch, said, “’Bye,” and went back to bed. On the front porch Gram hugged me fiercely and pressed two twenty-dollar bills into my hand.
When I threw my duffel in the rear of the wagon and piled in next to Diana in the back seat, she held out a slice of toast with a fried sausage patty folded into it, saying, “Travelin’ rations.”
Cities are cocoons, and after a while they can make you forget they’re not the real world. As we headed out through Richardson and Plano and on into the misty countryside, making it all the way to McKinney while the morning light was still low and coppery, the open sky wide and clean, the whole concept of living in the middle of miles and miles of buildings jammed together, surrounded by the endless honking roar of traffic, made less and less sense to me.
Don was what Gram called a jehu, not mean or reckless behind the wheel, just a fast, focused driver who was like L.A. in knowing exactly what to expect from the other traffic and having absolutely no fear. He drove the big Impala wagon on the principle that he owned all the space around him, we had places to go and we weren’t out here to homestead the damn highway. I recognized this as an extension of his being a cop and a boss and knew that as long as everybody else respected his thinking we’d all be okay.
Diana, having no fear either, slept most of the time. She was like a cat, able to conk out anywhere, anytime, in any position. I liked watching her sleep, I think because of the soft way she breathed and the peaceful look on her face, the peacefulness being something I admired and envied. She woke up like a cat too, stretching the way a cat does, even down to crossing her eyes and showing the tip of her tongue, and she’d be wide awake in a couple of seconds.
As we drove, the countryside changed gradually, evolving away from hills, trees and forty-acre farms toward corn, cotton, soybean and sorghum fields that stretched away to the horizon. Double-winged crop dusters dropped in over the telephone lines to skim along the vegetable rows like big yellow dragonflies, and here and there the black walking beams of oil wells rocked like huge mechanical woodpeckers in the endless landscape.
We saw what was left of a rabbit completely flattened on the pavement except for one big ear sticking straight up and looking as good as new. Like he was listening down the empty highway with that one sad ear. A quotation I’d heard from Gram came into my mind:
What dies in summer never knows
Summer’s death nor bitter snows
“That was a jackrabbit,” said Don. “I think technically they’re hares. Bigger than cottontails, and all legs and ears to help them keep away from the coyotes. Hares and rabbits have got to be fast; they’re the Big Macs of the animal kingdom.”
Diana said, “Daddy!”
He glanced in the rearview mirror. “I’ve never seen it myself, but I hear the coyotes use a tag-team system to hunt them. A jackrabbit can outrun just about anything that gets after it except a greyhound.”
This mystified Diana. “How’d you know it was a bus that got him?” she said.
Don laughed. “I guess they didn’t evolve to compete with the internal combustion engine, at that,” he said. “You can bet something chased that guy out into the traffic if it was daytime. Otherwise he’d have slept all day. But more likely it was night, and he got blinded by somebody’s headlights.”
“Poor old hopper,” Diana said.
Don decided to let Diana and me do some of the driving, and I drew the first shift.
Marge was okay about it, but I could tell Diana was worried that my driving time would cut into hers. She was no pouter, though.
“Me next,” she said as I slid in behind the wheel.
I won’t say I was fearless, but the only thing that really worried me was messing up in front of Don. When I eventually managed to get some control over that, I actually started taking some pleasure in driving, maintaining a kind of steady wide-angle attention and feeling like an airline captain, all the lives aboard safe in my capable hands. We cruised on like this until Marge and Diana started talking about restrooms, and I pulled into the driveway of a Texaco station that had a café next door.
All of us but Don had cheeseburgers with french fries and Cokes. He ordered coffee and eggs with corned beef hash, which I thought looked and smelled like fried dog food.
“Yankee habit I picked up,” he said, shoveling the stuff into his mouth.
Watching him, Marge gave a little shiver.
Then it was Diana’s turn to drive. I shut out of my mind all the lethal possibilities this involved an
d gradually lost myself in fantasies of what it must have been like to live in frontier days when there were hostile Indians looking to scalp you on a moment’s notice, and no police or telephones or electricity. People must have had to be ready for trouble at all times, carrying their rifles out to the fields with them and scanning the horizon constantly as they plowed.
But I’d noticed that in the movies it seemed to be mainly young to middle-aged guys who got scalped, and I wasn’t sure why. Don had said fifty was pretty old back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which gave me the idea that it must have been in your best interest to age fast out here, at least if you wanted to keep your hair. I tried picturing Don and Marge as fifty and old, with white hair and no teeth, shuffling along their porch or rocking side by side in chairs. Obviously there was no way they could run from Indians in that condition, and I doubted they’d be able to see well enough to shoot straight either, so they’d have to rely on the fact that savages had less interest in old people’s scalps for some reason, possibly because of the white color. Or maybe it was just that the old people got sly about not letting the Indians know where they were.
Old people could certainly be like that. Gram was a good example. She was unbelievably crafty at times, which I assumed was on account of her age as much as her intelligence and education. But I remembered her pronouncement about the difference between intelligent and smart, which definitely held true for me and most of the kids I was acquainted with. Of course, in my case I preferred to believe the underlying problem was mostly ignorance, which can always be fixed. Dumb, on the other hand, is there for the duration.
Of course there are a lot of different ways of being smart. Don had this quality of seeming to need help and wanting to listen that made people talk their heads off to him, and you could end up thinking you’d had a conversation with him when he hadn’t said anything at all. And sometimes he had a way of being slow to catch on, of just not getting it. For example, after Jack got beat up he did his best to interest Don in the idea that he’d been set up by Murval Briscoe and that Murval ought to get in trouble about it. But somehow Don had a hard time catching his drift.
“A police officer in on it, you’re thinkin’?” he said. “Geez, that’s a hell of a thought.” He pulled on his lip and looked at Jack.
“Hey, I’b ju tayin dah how it loogs,” said Jack.
“Y’know,” said Don, “we did talk to Murval and that fella that put your lights out, what was his name, Arthron Weed I think it was—a lefty—used to be a middleweight fighting out of Beaumont or someplace like that—”
“Basser tugger-bunch me,” said Jack.
“And the way it lays out, looks like it was just a nasty coincidence him and Officer Briscoe being in that area talking about some thefts people were having down there. Right when you happened to show up.”
“Goddab butchwhagger,” said Jack.
“I heard you kinda mouthed off to Arthron, but I’m sure that can’t be right. Called him a burr-head and whatnot?”
Jack shook his head half an inch from side to side.
“Guy happened to be a pro and just took you off the clock right then and there. That was a shit break, Jack. Lucky Murval was able to settle the guy down before it got any worse.”
“Hey, g’mon,” said Jack.
“It’s perplexing,” said Don.
“I’b terious!” said Jack.
“Now that we’re talking police conspiracy here, I can’t tell you how bad that confuses me.”
“Looga me!”
“Been over the whole case personally, jot by tittle, and still not a clue in sight.”
“Buh hey!”
“Wouldn’t surprise me too much if we never do solve the damn thing.”
Knowing Don, I wasn’t holding my breath either. But none of this really did much to remedy my feelings of ignorance about the whole concept of smartness, which for me still seemed slippery as a fish. Like a lot of other things. I settled for hoping the increasing distance from home and Gram and L.A. would somehow scatter my confusions and neutralize my fears and endless nagging thoughts about everything I didn’t know.
Maybe it did, a little.
2 | Starry, Starry Night
WE STOPPED for the night at a place off the highway named the Mille Lacs, in the farm country of northern Iowa. Marge referred to it as a tourist court, a half circle of little houses, bungalows she called them, built around a graveled parking lot with a huge cottonwood at the center.
I lugged my duffel down to eleven, a yard-dog of a bungalow with a small television set on a folding table and a little bathroom with peeling paint in the shower. Above the bed hung a faded cardboard picture of a moose standing in the water at the edge of a lake with mountains in the background.
By the time I’d put my toothbrush and toothpaste in the bathroom and figured out the television channels, it was getting dark outside. I looked at the sagging bed with its two flat pillows, hoping everything was all right with L.A. and Gram and wondering what I’d dream about tonight and sort of wishing I didn’t have to sleep. Hearing a knock at the door, I opened it, and there stood Diana, bright as a candle flame under the yellow bug light over the door. Her snug jeans demonstrated her body in a way that almost vapor-locked my mind.
“Wanta go for a walk?” she said.
“What’d your mom say?”
“Don’t be too late.”
I grabbed my sweater. “Let’s go.”
Beyond the lights of the court a soft darkness surrounded us, the moon not up yet, the sky glowing faintly along the western horizon but black and full of stars overhead. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote yipped a few times and howled, and a few seconds later a dozen more chimed in.
We walked along the shoulder of the road for a while, listening to the crunch of our steps in the gravel. I could smell the wild cherry Life Saver Diana was sucking on.
“How about if we went over into that field?” she said. On the other side of a barbed-wire fence we could make out the slope of a pasture and a few trees blacking out the stars along the skyline.
“You okay for the fence?”
“Sure.” She did a quick skip and hop in her sneakers. “I’m an old cowhand from the Rio Grande.”
I spread the top two strands of wire to let her step through, then she did the same for me. We walked through the short grass toward the top of the low rise, Diana humming “Happy Trails” under her breath. At the crest we stopped. All around us the stars burned thicker and deeper and brighter than I’d ever seen them, than I’d ever dreamed they could be. We sat on the grass.
Diana said, “It looks like forever.”
“There’s no such thing,” I said.
“What do you think’s really out there?”
“I don’t know. Everything, I guess.”
“Maybe people like us?”
“Not like you.”
She considered this for a while, gazing at the sky. “All that space,” she finally said. “I bet there’s at least four.”
I saw a sudden pinprick of new light among the stars that immediately grew into a greenish white fireball, elongating itself across the sky, brightening by the second. It flared and dimmed and flared again, leaving a glowing trail as it tracked straight through the constellations above us. There was no sound, but the thing was so bright I could see our shadows on the grass. The meteor continued overhead and on beyond us until it dwindled and finally disappeared at the other end of the sky.
Diana had scrambled around to watch and was now on all fours looking in the direction the fireball had gone. “Damn!” she said. “What was that?”
“Chunk of rock burning up in the atmosphere, I guess.” Dr. Kepler had actually taught me quite a bit about meteors, but I took so much time weighing out whether saying more would impress Diana or make me sound like a smart-ass that I lost the moment. I stared at the sky, wondering how anything so big and bright and obviously full of energy could be so silent.
Dia
na turned back around to sit beside me. “My heart’s thumping,” she said.
I leaned my head down and put my ear against her chest, feeling the valentine-shaped locket she wore under her sweatshirt and smelling the soap she’d bathed with and her Life Saver breath. I heard the lub-dub, lub-dub of her heart, a soft faraway thunder that actually did seem pretty fast. It got faster as I listened. So did her breathing.
“Don’t breathe,” I said. “I want to hear.”
“Schmuck.”
I lifted my head and put my mouth on hers, tasting her sweetness and instantly feeling lost in her. She held my shoulders as we kissed. After a minute, I drew back and looked at her. I tried to tell her how beautiful she was, but I don’t think anything came out but a whimper. I grabbed her to pull her to me and kiss her again, but she put her hands on my chest.
“We’ve gotta go back,” she said, breathing hard.
I released her and sat back, listening to her breathing and mine. I looked down at the Mille Lacs a million miles away, imagining Marge and Don in their bungalow watching television and not thinking about us at all. The infinite sky just kept hanging there all around us. After a while I said, “I don’t want to go.”
“I know, Bis,” she said, giving my forehead a little rap with her knuckles. “But we just gotta.”
Finally I nodded, got to my feet and gave her a hand up. She moved ahead of me along a path I was now beginning to see more clearly in the dark field as we walked back down through the stars toward the road.
In my bungalow I sat on the side of the bed and waited for my heart to settle down. After saying a silent prayer for L.A. and Gram and everyone else who had to make it through the night, I turned off the light and was asleep in a few minutes.
3 | What Goes Up
WHEN I WOKE in the morning the only dream I could remember featured Jazzy, sitting up to beg for a corn chip I was holding out to her. No cold sweat, no sensation of my heart trying to kick its way out of my chest, no hangover of danger or dread, and best of all, no memory of dead girls watching me sleep.