by Larry Watson
“Maybe there’s something in those war years,” my mother suggested. “Could Monty Burnham have been Ray’s commanding officer? Maybe there was something unfair about Monty Burnham’s promotion or—”
She hadn’t finished before my father began shaking his head. “Didn’t work that way. Anger, jealousy, resentment—sure, there was bad blood among the men. No shortage of it. But by the time we mustered out, we were ready to put it all behind us. Wartime grudges don’t have any staying power, in my experience.”
“Did you and Ray talk about the war?”
“Never.”
“Never? That’s hard to believe.”
Not for me. Many of my friends had fathers who had been in the war, and some of them never got over it. Or wouldn’t let themselves. My friend Stan Gronlund, for example, never stopped talking about his father’s experiences as an Air Force bombardier, but in that, Stan was simply imitating his father, who was amazingly adept at relating almost everything to his years in the military. Jim Kieper’s father had what amounted to a World War II shrine in his basement, consisting mostly of German military artifacts—helmets; medals; binoculars; bayonets; a disarmed grenade; even a singed, bullet-punctured swastika flag. But my father and Raymond Stoddard brought home no souvenirs, and they passed no war stories on to their sons.
“Don’t believe it, then,” my father said. “But it was so.”
My mother shrugged. “What about the job that Ray drank himself out of? Was that in Wembley? Or here?”
“That was here. And to tell you the truth, I’m inclined to give Ray a pass on that one. When they first moved to Bismarck, he was doing construction work, and then during the winter when things were slow he took a job as night clerk at the Frontier. Construction picked up, but he didn’t want to let go of the extra money. Anyway, he was burning the candle at both ends, and one night they had some sort of small scale emergency at the hotel—a small fire back in the kitchen or something—and Ray wasn’t at the desk, where he was supposed to be. He was off catching forty winks somewhere. When the manager of the Frontier caught wind of it, he fired Ray.”
“What did his drinking have to do with it?”
Now it was my father’s turn to shrug. “The manager smelled liquor on Ray’s breath, and the bartender said that Ray had been in the bar that night, so the manager put one and one together and got three. He assumed Ray was drunk and sleeping it off.”
“But Ray was drinking then?”
My father leaned forward and with the heel of his hand rubbed the coffee table’s glass top. If he had seen a smudge there, it wouldn’t last long, not in my mother’s home. “What makes us think he ever quit? Maybe he just got it under control.”
“I suppose I just assumed . . .”
My father looked at me, the first time I had been included as more than a listener. “Well? Did you see any evidence that Mr. Stoddard was still drinking?”
“He might have been. I once saw a couple empties in their garbage can.”
“Bourbon?” my father asked.
I didn’t want to appear too knowledgeable. “Old Crow? It was a brown bottle. A little one.”
“Bourbon,” my father concluded. “Raymond once said he was too fond of bourbon.”
“When was this?” my mother asked.
“I can’t remember exactly,” I answered. “Last summer, maybe? We were just goofing around and the garbage can tipped over.”
“No, no,” she said, nodding in my father’s direction. “I mean, when did Ray confess this fondness for bourbon?”
My father sat back again. “A summer evening a few years back. We’d both been mowing our lawns, and Ray just wandered up the street. This was a driveway conversation, nothing more.”
“But how did it come out, about the bourbon?”
“I don’t know. Hot weather? Wouldn’t a beer hit the spot? And Ray said bourbon had always been his drink of choice. You call it a confession. It was nothing like that. Small talk is what it was.”
“Did Burt say anything about why Ray and Alma came to Bismarck in the first place?”
“Burt didn’t. But I have the answer to that one. He came to build houses. Alma’s brother was a foreman with the construction company Ray went to work for. He still is, for that matter. Harbring Construction has Len Harbring’s name over the door, but Alma’s brother runs the outfit. I’m not sure why Ray quit them. I suppose because working for the state is steadier.”
“But if he was still drinking. . . .”
“Alcohol doesn’t explain murder. A man in trouble with the bottle might take his own life, but not another’s.” He clapped his hands on his thighs and rocked back and forth. “None of it makes any sense.”
“Burt didn’t have anything else to say?”
“Nothing comes to mind. What he kept coming back to was the business about Alma once going out with Monty Burnham.” He looked at my mother. “Is that something you could ask her about?”
“Alma and I don’t have that kind of relationship.” My mother’s tone was icy. “We never have.”
“Could you ask Iris?” The Friedrichs lived next door to the Stoddards, and Iris Friedrich was Alma Stoddard’s closest friend. “See if Alma ever said anything to her about Monty Burnham?”
“And what would that make me?” My mother answered her own question. “A snoop and a gossip.” There were no worse labels that could be hung on her.
“Then we’re stuck,” my father said. He reached for his cigarettes—then stopped, balled up his fist, and pounded it into his other open hand. “God damn it! I keep thinking I should go down there and grab Ray by the shoulders and shake him and talk some sense into the man!”
My mother reached out and, as if she were playing rock, scissors, paper with my father, covered his fist with her hand before he could strike his palm again. Her gesture told me that she had long known what I had just learned—that in my father grief and rage could wrap themselves as tightly together as those fingers that were seeking something to punch.
“You don’t have to take this on yourself, you know,” she said gently. “This isn’t a mystery you have to solve.” Only my mother could have spoken to him in this way and have her words calm rather than anger him further.
In our home the living room draperies were seldom drawn, but since the traffic on Keogh Street, usually limited to its few residents, had increased significantly in the past twenty-four hours, my mother had closed the curtains just after Gene and his mother came over. Cars traveled slowly up and down the street as they would have a few weeks earlier when Bismarck residents patrolled the city’s neighborhoods to look at the Christmas lights and decorations. Now, of course, they were searching for the Stoddard residence, hoping perhaps that its blank rectangles of glass, stucco, and wood might give off a unique and lurid glow.
But even if our curtains had been open, they would have revealed at that moment a tableau so ordinary that not even the most curious would look twice. Under a framed reproduction of a Constable landscape, father, mother, and son sat together on a sofa covered in a gray-green fabric. The three of them might have gathered to have a talk about the dangers of smoking—even as the parents lit their own cigarettes—or about the son’s slipping grades in geometry. Perhaps they were asking him if he understood how important it was that he apply himself to his studies. On the television across the room Jack Paar spoke and gestured with a flamboyance rare among Midwestern men. Nothing—nothing whatsoever—in the scene revealed that a bomb had exploded on the block or that these people would henceforth have to live in its wreckage. If their faces were uncontorted by anguish, it was only because they had all learned the consoling power of the prayer of selfishness—Thank God it’s not us, thank God it’s not us, thank God it’s not us.
There was something in my parents’ conversation that night that I found especially puzzling. I couldn’t understand why they—why my mother, really—had passed so swiftly over the fact that Monty Burnham and Alma Stoddard had once
dated. In my view, nothing of greater significance had, to that point, been revealed that could approach a motive for Raymond Stoddard. Yet my mother seemed to think that because they had both been teenagers at the time, the relationship couldn’t have been of consequence. Had she been standing where I had been only a few weeks earlier, next to the pool tables at Midway Bowling Lanes, and had she seen and heard Russell Batt, a classmate of mine, she might have realized how easily a ruined adolescent romance can turn someone’s thoughts to murder.
Russell Batt and Jennifer Oslund had been a couple since junior high school, but then suddenly—no one quite knew what the exact sequence of events was—just after Thanksgiving she dropped Russell and began to date Curt Forney. Since Russell still loved Jennifer, he blamed Curt for the breakup, and that night at the bowling alley Russell was waiting for Curt to walk through the door. When he did, Russell said, he’d kill him.
A tall, raw-boned, rope-muscled kid, Russell Batt had grown up on a farm and had moved to Bismarck as a sixth grader. He was quick-tempered and belligerent, and almost from the moment he arrived in town, he had been getting into fistfights. But it wasn’t just his history and pugnacious nature that convinced those of us who listened to him that night that his rants were more than talk.
He had opened his jacket to reveal, tucked into the waistband of his jeans, a stag-handled hunting knife. Lest anyone think it was just a prop, he pulled it from its leather sheath, allowing its curved blade to glint in the overhead light meant to illuminate the green felt of the billiard tables. “I’m going to slip this between his ribs,” Russell said, “before he can say a goddamn thing. I don’t give a shit what his side of it is.” Russell was drunk, but to those of us gathered around him, that only enhanced his credibility.
Curt Forney, however, didn’t enter Midway Bowling Lanes that night, and whether that was because someone warned him in advance or headed him off in the parking lot, I never knew. Besides, there was no reason to believe that Russell’s vow had any temporal boundaries. If he didn’t kill Curt then, he’d do it another time.
If Curt Forney had appeared, would we—those of us clustered around Russell Batt and basking in his menace—have tried to intercede on Curt’s behalf? I like to think we would have, although Russell’s jealousy, anger, and murderous determination shrunk all of us; we were boys listening to a man’s threats.
We were spared that awful responsibility not just by Curt’s nonappearance but by an intercession. Also at the Midway lanes was the former Janice Robichaud. A coarsely pretty woman in her early twenties, Janice was married to Russell’s older brother, Morris, but that night she was bowling with her girlfriends. Someone who had overheard Russell sought out Janice and told her what Russell was threatening to do. The bowling lanes and the pool tables were some distance from each other, but when Janice learned of her brother-in-law’s agitated state, she headed toward him at a dead run.
She made no attempt to calm Russell with compassion or soft words. Neither did she try to mount a moral appeal. Instead, she lit furiously into him as soon as she was within shouting distance.
“You’re talking about throwing your life away for what—that two-timing little twat? And you think that will bring her back to you? She’ll hate your fucking guts. Now get the hell out of here, and if I hear about any more of this bullshit, I’m telling your brother, and he’ll kick your ass from here to Fargo.”
Her tirade awed and terrified us, and it obviously made an impression on Russell as well. No harm befell Curt Forney on that night or any other, but neither did his relationship with Jennifer Oslund last. Before the end of the school year she was dating Chuck Vogel, and after Chuck, Wes Lahr, and after Wes, someone else, but never again Russell Batt. Or Curt Forney. When Jennifer left for college, she seemed to leave Bismarck for good, while Russell married Nancy Lawler, and the two of them settled on the city’s south side to raise their family.
But what if—what if Raymond Stoddard were made of the same combustible material as Russell Batt, although of the slower-burning sort? What if the passion that almost instantly burst into flame in Russell smoldered for years in Raymond Stoddard until he too was ready to kill the one who . . . who . . . Here, of course, my speculations bumped against reality. If there were once a competition for Alma Shumate, Raymond Stoddard was the winner, not Monty Burnham. But because I was reluctant to admit, even to myself, that I had nothing to offer from my limited store of observations and experiences that could explain Raymond Stoddard, I tried to invent a set of circumstances that would still involve a romantic triangle.
Yes, Raymond and Alma ended up together, but Ray worried that Monty Burnham remained Alma’s real love, so when Ray had an opportunity to leave Wembley, he jumped at it. The Stoddards moved to Bismarck not for Ray’s higher-paying job but because Ray wanted to remove his wife from the town where her former boyfriend was a constant presence. Ray’s strategy worked. Or so he believed, though he couldn’t keep from worrying that his former rival might someday reappear and win Alma back. Ray’s concerns increased when Monty Burnham was elected to the state senate, which meant that as a legislator he would come to Bismarck every other year when congress convened.
And, finally, exactly what Ray feared came to pass. On a blustery winter day, Alma Stoddard took the bus downtown. Her destination was Schreiber’s Fabric Shop, where she hoped to find some material with which to re-cover a chair. When she left the store, the wind was gusting so hard—little clouds of fine-grained snow billowed down the street and even the traffic light posts were swaying—that she decided to duck into the Coffee Cup Café for a few minutes of warmth. Meanwhile, Monty Burnham was also in downtown Bismarck. He was supposed to meet with an oil abstractor, but since he was early, he decided to wait across the street in the café with the frosted windows and the neon sign of a cup and saucer. When Monty, now Senator, walked in, he spotted Alma—he recognized her immediately—and without invitation sat down at her table.
Alma was not only shy but uncomfortable. No other customers were in the establishment, and there they were—sitting together at a table in the corner. It might have looked as though this had been an arranged meeting! Or maybe her discomfort came not entirely from her concern over what other people might think but from her own feelings. Over the years, she had thought often of Monty Burnham and had wondered what her life would have been if she had stayed with him. Which was harder to imagine—being married to a wealthy well-known man or being married to a charming ebullient man who seemed to smile his way through every day? Monty Burnham was both of those.
Alma shrank back from Monty Burnham’s presence, which only made him strive harder to wrest a smile or laugh from her. Nostalgia was the tactic he chose. “Remember the night of the holiday party that ended with us marching through the streets of Wembley at two o’clock in the morning singing Christmas carols? Remember when we put sugar in the gas tank of old Mr. Pettinger’s Reo? Remember when we drove to Devils Lake for the county fair, and on the way back my car broke down and it was close to dawn when we finally pulled up in front of your house and your mother came striding down the driveway and didn’t say a word but damned near dragged you back inside? Remember the night you told me you feared we were becoming too serious and that we should stop seeing each other? That practically destroyed me, and the very next day I left Wembley and drove into Canada. I took a job on a cattle ranch outside Calgary, and when I returned, you were engaged to Ray Stoddard. . . .” No, no. On that day, their first reunion in years, Monty Burnham would keep the tone light. “I bent over in Mrs. Schmidt’s class and split the seat of my pants—remember?” Finally, finally, he got a smile from Alma, and once he did, successful car salesman and skillful politician that he was, Monty Burnham knew he was home free.
They arranged to meet again, but Alma didn’t want it to be in a place so public. When he suggested that he come to her home, Alma could think of nothing but all the windows up and down Keogh Street, and in each one she imagined a woman peering o
ut and wondering, who could that be entering the Stoddard home? He looks like that politician. . . .
“What about my place,” Monty Burnham suggested. “During the legislative session I rent a little basement apartment over on Avenue B. You can park in the alley and enter through the side door. . . .”
This plot required adjustment. Their renewed relationship moved too quickly. Perhaps they met in just this way, but years ago, and they never saw each other in the two years between legislative sessions. But gradually over time, Alma Stoddard and Monty Burnham fell in love again. They not only met clandestinely, they also exchanged letters, and while Raymond Stoddard was searching for . . . for a needle, yes, a needle—he had a sliver that could be extracted only with a needle—he opened his wife’s sewing kit. He accidentally lifted the box’s top tray, the one containing all the spools of colorful thread (I was of course picturing my mother’s sewing kit), and when he did, he found the letters Monty Burnham had been sending Alma. None of the envelopes had a return address—in case Alma’s husband would be the one to pick up the mail one day—but as soon as Ray saw the signature—“Monty”—he knew. In fact, he didn’t have to read more than that name and the closing that preceded it—“Love”—to realize the worst: He had lost his wife.