Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  Now what state agency, Ross Wilk wondered, would be able to find out what the bill was for a new car? Why, Accounts and Purchases, of course, the department that employed Raymond Stoddard. And who would notice that what the state paid for a new Ford was out of line? An employee who had recently bought a car for himself, that’s who. And that employee might then point out this discrepancy to his superior, who in turn would report it to the governor.

  Furthermore, the governor learned that the connection between the state’s purchase of new Fords and state politicians was even tighter than first suspected. Robert Borglund was not only a heavy contributor to the Republican party, he was often mentioned as a future candidate for political office, perhaps the governorship. He was ambitious and wealthy; he was comfortable in front of the cameras (he appeared in all his own television commercials for Borglund Ford-Mercury); and he came across as confident, cheerful, honest, and direct. He was, in other words, a man cut from the same cloth as Monty Burnham.

  According to Ross Wilk, the men were more than similar personality types. They shared a political philosophy built on thrift, self-reliance, patriotism, and tough attitudes toward criminals and foreign governments. In practical terms most of these lofty values translated into little more than attempts to keep taxes low, to balance budgets, and to reject social programs. Both Monty Burnham and Bob Borglund liked to pretend—or perhaps they believed—that they had risen to stature and success on nothing more than strength of character and hard work. In truth, both men stepped into prosperous, established family businesses, and the businesses were the same—selling cars, specifically Fords.

  Ross Wilk believed that Monty Burnham had somehow influenced the system that awarded the contract for state vehicles—sales and service—to Borglund Ford-Mercury. Bob Borglund returned the favor by donating generously to Burnham’s campaigns and by sharing a portion of the state contract with Burnham Motors (also a Ford dealership), all on an unofficial basis, of course. And once again, Ross Wilk pointed out, a man with a new car (purchased at Borglund Ford-Mercury), a man who worked in the state’s Accounts and Purchases department, would be the one likely to discover and then unravel these strands of corruption.

  But if this man had his own connection to Senator Burnham—as Raymond Stoddard had—then he could perhaps be brought in on the plot. So instead of an employee who informed his superior of the corruption, there’s someone who, by virtue of his position in Accounts and Purchases, was able to contribute to the scheme. He could hide or alter documents, manipulate figures—he’d be a perfect partner. And maybe it was no recent discovery. Maybe it had gone on for years, an operation successful because many people benefited—maybe Raymond Stoddard’s new Ford was a payment for his participation—and so few people were harmed. Who would have thought this new governor would get so worked up over something as minor as what the state was being charged for an oil change? One discovery leads to another, and before long you have a man taking his own life to avoid the humiliation of being uncovered as a crook. And, Ross Wilk concluded, he takes down with him the fellow who talked him into being a part of the plot. Or maybe he wants to put a bullet in the good senator because he knows that the senator will sell him out to save his own hide.

  “I’m not convinced,” my father said.

  “Because the man was your friend, and you don’t want to believe it of him. But people don’t commit murder for noble reasons. And they kill themselves out of desperation. Shame. Even embarrassment. You know that.”

  “It just doesn’t feel right.”

  “Feel? What do feelings have to do with anything? What would old Professor Saint Clair say if he heard you talking like that? Evidence. Logic. Reasoning. That’s how guilt and innocence are determined. If you like, I can keep digging. I have no doubt the evidence is out there.”

  “Not necessary,” my father said, waving his hands at his old friend as if in surrender. “Not necessary.”

  Later that evening, after our guests had gone home, my father summoned my mother and me to the living room. My mother was in the midst of putting away the good china she had used for that day’s meal, and ordinarily she would have preferred to finish that task, but something in my father’s voice must have told her this matter couldn’t wait.

  He sat back in his overstuffed chair while my mother and I perched on the edge of the sofa’s cushions. He related Ross Wilk’s theory about the plot to overcharge the state, and with Raymond featured as a willing accomplice it was a convincing presentation. Nevertheless, as my father finished talking, he wore the same distressed look as when he had begun.

  My mother, on the other hand, received this latest hypothesis with a mixture of exuberance and relief. “Well, that’s as plausible as anything I’ve heard,” she said.

  “I suppose.”

  “What’s wrong? You act as if you’re disappointed. Why—because you didn’t crack the case? You and your detective friend?”

  Her remark struck me as cruel, yet my father didn’t flinch or attempt to defend himself.

  In the absence of any further comment from my father, my mother turned to me and volunteered her own explanation of where we had now arrived. “This is exactly why your father gets in trouble with some of his cases. He identifies too much with his client, and then when the verdict doesn’t come out the way they’d hoped, he takes it personally.”

  She rose and walked over to sit on the arm of my father’s chair, leaning her weight seductively against him and running her fingers through his hair. He stared straight ahead. “You probably thought,” my mother continued, “that your dad was only interested in finding out the truth of that awful day. What you didn’t know, what none of us knew, was that he had taken on Raymond Stoddard as a client. An unwilling client, of course. Since Raymond was dead, he was in no position to retain counsel. But in your father Raymond had a devoted advocate, an attorney working pro bono. Not only without pay but without even being asked. And an attorney who wouldn’t be satisfied with any verdict except one that found his client innocent.”

  Without saying another word, my father pushed himself to his feet and stalked out of the room.

  For another moment my mother remained balanced on the arm of the chair, and the fingers that had been combing my father’s thinning hair now scratched at the chair’s nubby upholstery. “I guess I got a little too close,” she said, and I knew she wasn’t talking about physical proximity. Then she rose too and left the living room, but while my father had gone down the hall toward the bedrooms, she went back to her kitchen.

  If I hadn’t known it before, that scene between my parents tried to teach me the lesson: Lies can unsettle us and send us angrily from the room, but the truth can do the same.

  Because time seems to have speeded up—and if it seems so, isn’t it so?—you feel as though you must act swiftly. Were you not so pressed for time, perhaps you would evaluate your options carefully, and with that care you might be more realistic. Instead, once you happen upon a workable strategy, you must commit to it unequivocally.

  For that reason you decide early on that it will be necessary to take your own life. You contemplated life in prison only for a moment, and perhaps not even for that long. You recalled a Sunday drive in the country, a mild March day when uncharacteristic warmth bumped against the cold of unmelted snow and a fog rose that made mid-afternoon as dusky as, well, dusk. The car swept around a curve and there it was—the state penitentiary, its walls burning their way blackly through the vapor, its stone towers too solid for a mist to cover. That was enough. Though on that day guilt had not yet encumbered your life, you stored away a realization unrealized until now—you could never handle life in prison. Not for a year and certainly not for ten.

  Besides, it might be that your suicide will be regarded not as an admission of guilt, an attempt to escape the inescapable, butas an expression of frustration and exhaustion—because he couldn’t convince the world of his innocence, he took the only way out available to him.
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br />   But you are not innocent. Oh, no. Even in those moments when you treat yourself most gently, when you interpret your actions as generously as possible, even in the depth of self-pity or at the height of indignation and self-justification, you still must admit: You are guilty.

  When your brother-in-law/old friend/former classmate came to you with the scheme to fix prices/misappropriate funds/embezzle/ steal/conspire, you knew what was being asked of you. Yes, yes; he talked you into it. Nothing was your idea, not initially. Only when you became necessary to a successful outcome, only then did you contribute what only you could contribute. But right from the start you knew. You knew and you assented. No matter that you were a minor (but essential) functionary in the plan; that role only adds pathos to your guilt; it does nothing to absolve you.

  Odd, how familiar it all is. Until recently, you’ve led a fairly respectable life, you’ve committed no previous criminal acts, yet this feeling of being ensnared, guilty, caught, trapped, culpable, is one you know. You took fifty cents from your mother’s purse. You stole a pack of your father’s cigarettes. You lied and told your girlfriend you wouldn’t be there, but then you were and so was she. The teacher compared your answers and your friend’s and found them the same. You denied, you dissembled, you cheated, you pilfered, you pretended. . . . And you were caught. The scale so different, the potatoes so small, yet the feeling the same, as if now you are fulfilling your entire life’s promise, finally enacting what you have rehearsed so long. Though now it may be the police/congressional committee/investigative journalist/government agent closing in on you, it feels no different from trudging home from grade school when you knew the phone call from the principal would arrive before you. It seemed then, as now, that the world was about to end.

  Now you know of course that it will be over only for you. Or . . . ?

  It’s the only question that remains. Should you take your brother-in-law/old friend/former classmate/colleague out with you? To do so would be murder, an act of rage, retribution, revenge, or, less grandly, of petulance, but murder without question. Yet it would also contain an element of justice. It’s quite possible that your death will end the investigation, close the case, stop the proceedings. Once, after all, a guilty party is identified and found, no one feels quite the same need to uncover another. So, who, if not you, can guarantee punishment to the blameworthy? In this you may well have a mission, a meaning, a reason for being that you never had when your life was innocently your own. . . .

  That story, if it can be called that, was published in Epiphanies, another now-defunct publication. It was one of the longest pieces ever to appear in the avant-garde magazine; many of the “discoveries and revelations,” as the editors said they featured in their pages, were no more than a paragraph. The story’s McInerney-fashionable (at the time) second-person point of view probably gave it special appeal to the Epiphanies staff, but its source, of course, was that conversation between Ross Wilk and my father when Mr. Wilk speculated that in the corruption of the workplace Raymond Stoddard’s murderous intention was born.

  It would not be accurate to say that I was able to observe an actual lightening of my mother’s spirit after the Wilks’ visit, but I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Wilk’s rendition of the murder-suicide and what led to it satisfied my mother. I never again heard her express any curiosity about those awful circumstances, and if she didn’t broadcast the Wilk theory to others, it was only because she didn’t believe it was hers to share.

  My father, on the other hand, resisted his friend’s interpretation and, to some extent, actively lobbied against it. I know because I was one of those he tried to dissuade from believing that Raymond Stoddard murdered Monty Burnham and then killed himself because he was involved in a political scandal.

  Every Halloween my father tried to organize his family for an evening of jack-o’-lantern decorating, an activity for which only he had any aptitude or enthusiasm. That year, however, I, unlike my mother and sister, was unable to come up with an excuse in time and so found myself sitting at the kitchen table alongside my father, both of us up to our elbows in pumpkin innards.

  He introduced the subject of Ross Wilk as abruptly as Mr. Wilk had begun talking about Raymond Stoddard just a few weeks earlier.

  “Ross Wilk is a helluva bright man,” my father said, “but he’s making the mistake a lot of people make. Just because something happens in a particular location doesn’t necessarily mean the location has anything to do with it. They see Monty Burnham being murdered in the capitol as important, and since the capitol is a government building, they think the murder must have to do with politics. But for legislators and state employees it’s the place they work, simple as that. Raymond knew Senator Burnham was in the building. Nothing more to it, as far as I’m concerned. If you want an explanation of why, you can’t allow yourself to be distracted with where.”

  My father was not being disingenuous; he believed that. But another set of beliefs was also at work in him and leading him away from Ross Wilk’s account. My father didn’t want place to figure at all in what Raymond Stoddard had done because my father wanted to dissociate his city and state from the crime.

  Although he didn’t belong to any service organizations—no membership in the Kiwanis Club or the Rotary Club—and though he found embarrassingly superficial and hollow the Babbittry of many of the community’s and state’s boosters, my father took second place to no one in his love for North Dakota. He cherished its homesteading heritage of hard work and stoicism, its paradoxical high-plains ethic of both self-reliance and neighborliness, its lack of pretense, and its unspoken credo of honesty and forthright plain speech. He was neither hunter nor fisherman, but he loved the state’s empty, almost featureless spaces, its shadowed valleys and sunlit prairies. Even North Dakota’s fabled extremes of weather were for my father nothing but the tests that made us all stronger for having passed them. He couldn’t stand the thought that people might see a connection between the state he loved and its most famous crime. It was bad enough that he and Raymond Stoddard and Monty Burnham shared a hometown—tainted forever by the murder—but he hoped that attempts to determine cause would concentrate on the murderer’s psyche and not the place where he pulled the trigger.

  I sympathized with my father’s position, but I couldn’t agree with it. I feebly believed at the time—and time has only firmed my belief—that what happens can’t be pulled apart from where.

  If we had been carving our pumpkins fifteen years in the future, my father’s jack-o’-lantern might have been characterized as wearing a Jimmy Carter grin. As it was, I couldn’t help but look at that horizontal, symmetrical smile and think of a Ford’s small-toothed grille.

  Every year the lawyer’s wife suggested that he draw the face on the pumpkin before he began to carve, but he always disregarded her advice. Instead he proceeded freestyle, cutting into the hollowed-out pumpkin with one of his tools of choice, a fish fileting knife or an old paring knife, both of which could be sharpened to a razor’s edge. Once the jack-o’-lantern’s first features took shape—a wolfish smile, an astonished eye, a flared nostril—he invented from that beginning, sometimes letting an accidental slice dictate the entire design. It was as close as he came to improvisation, to art, or perhaps even to spontaneity. Certainly nothing in his professional life—his specialty was advising oil companies on how to deal with western states’ land use policies and regulations—allowed him to act without a well-defined sense of outcome and consequence.

  The telephone rang, and though it was only a few feet from where he sat at the kitchen table, he called out to his wife to answer it. In explanation he held up his hands, still wet and slippery from scooping out the pumpkin’s stringy pulp.

  She had been engrossed in an episode of Ben Casey, but she rose from her chair in the living room and soon held out the phone to him, mouthing the words, “It’s Lee.”

  It was not a call the lawyer wanted to take, but he felt he had no choice. While h
e washed his hands, his wife patiently dangled the phone from its cord as if it were an object she didn’t want to bring near her mouth or ear. Just before he took it from her, she whispered, “He wants to ask for a favor.” Then she left the kitchen and returned to her television program.

  “Lee. What can I do for you?”

  “I hate to take you out of your house on a night like this”—the day had not been only cold, but once the sun had set, the wind occasionally tore loose a shower of fine-grained snow—“but I could sure use a hand. Can I get you down here?”

  The lawyer sighed, hoping the sound traveled through the wire. He knew he would say yes to the request, but he wanted Lee Mauer to hear his reluctance. “Can you give me a clue, Lee?”

  “It’s not something I’m eager to discuss over the phone.”

  The lawyer might have been puzzled, even worried, if someone else had made that statement, but Lee Mauer, a former police lieutenant, never missed an opportunity to dramatize or add intrigue to almost any situation. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Just come in the back door. I’m in the basement.”

  Since he was only crossing the street and walking a few houses down the block, the lawyer didn’t bother with a jacket. And he was familiar with the home he was visiting. His friend Raymond Stoddard had lived there until he had taken his own life the previous January, but it was still home to Raymond’s wife and son. Lee Mauer originally began visiting the house, in the lawyer’s company, to help the widow with yard work and light household repairs, but the lawyer’s wife believed that a romantic—and sexual—relationship had now developed between Mrs. Stoddard and the former police officer. The lawyer, however, seldom committed himself to belief without substantial evidence.