by Dan Chaon
Cheryl could see clearly where that road would lead.
• • •
But she couldn’t help thinking about it. Wendell was everywhere—not only in the sayings of Wild Bill, but in the notes and papers Tobe brought home with him from the office, in the broody melancholy he trailed behind him when he was up late, pacing the house. In the various duties she found herself performing for Wendell’s sake—reviewing her own brief testimony at the trial, at Tobe’s request; going with Tobe to the new lawyer’s office on a Saturday morning.
Sitting in the office, she didn’t know why she had agreed to come along. The lawyer whom Tobe had chosen to replace him, Jerry Wasserman, was a transplanted Chicagoan who seemed even more out of place in Cheyenne than she did, despite the fact that he wore cowboy boots. He had a lilting, iambic voice, and was ready to discuss detail after detail. She frowned, touching her finger to her mouth as Tobe and his brothers leaned forward intently. What was she doing here?
“I’m extremely pleased by the way the appeal is shaping up,” Wasserman was saying. “It’s clear that the case had some setbacks, but to my mind the evidence is stronger than ever in your brother’s favor.” He cleared his throat. “I’d like to outline three main points for the judge, which I think will be quite—quite!—convincing.”
Cheryl looked over at Karissa, who was sitting very upright in her chair, with her hands folded and her eyes wide, as if she were about to be interrogated. Carlin shifted irritably.
“I know we’ve talked about this before,” Carlin said gruffly. “But I still can’t get over the fact that the jury that convicted him was seventy-five percent female. I mean, that’s something we ought to be talking about. It’s just—it’s just wrong, that’s my feeling.”
“Well,” said Wasserman. “The jury selection is something we need to discuss, but it’s not at the forefront of the agenda. We have to get through the appeals process first.” He shuffled some papers in front of him, guiltily. “Let me turn your attention to the first page of the document I’ve given you, here …”
How dull he was, Cheryl thought, looking down at the first page, which had been photocopied from a law book. How could he possibly be more passionate or convincing than Tobe had been, in the first trial? Tobe had been so fervent, she thought, so certain of Wendell’s innocence. But perhaps that had not been the best thing.
Maybe his confidence had worked against him. She remembered the way he had declared himself to the jury, folding his arms. “This is a case without evidence,” he said. “Without any physical evidence!” And he had said it with such certainty that it had seemed true. The crime scenes had yielded nothing that had connected Wendell to the crimes; the attacker, whoever he was, had been extremely careful. There was no hair, no blood, no semen. The victims had been made to kneel in the bathtub as the attacker forced them to perform various degrading acts, and afterwards, the attacker had left them there, turning the shower on them as he dusted and vacuumed. There wasn’t a single fingerprint.
But there was this: In three of the cases, witnesses claimed to have seen Wendell’s pickup parked on a street nearby. A man matching Wendell’s description had been seen hurrying down the fire escape behind the apartment of one of the women.
And this: The final victim, Jenni Martinez, had been a former girlfriend of Wendell’s. Once, after they’d broken up, Wendell got drunk and sang loud love songs beneath her window. He’d left peaceably when the police came.
“Peaceably!” Tobe noted. These were the actions of a romantic, not a rapist! Besides which, Wendell had an alibi for the night the Martinez girl was raped. He’d been at Cheryl and Tobe’s house, playing cards, and he’d slept that night on their sofa. In order for him to have committed the crime, he’d have had to feign sleep, sneaking out from under the bedding Cheryl had arranged for him on the living room sofa, without being noticed. Then, he’d have had to sneak back into the house, returning in the early morning so that Cheryl would discover him when she woke up. She had testified: He was on the couch, the blankets twisted around him, snoring softly. She was easily awakened; she felt sure that she would have heard if he’d left in the middle of the night. It was, Tobe told the jury, “a highly improbable, almost fantastical version of events.”
But the jury had believed Jenni Martinez, who was certain that she’d recognized his voice. His laugh. They had believed the prosecutor, who had pointed out that there had been no more such rapes since Jenni Martinez had identified Wendell. After Wendell’s arrest, the string of assaults had ceased.
After a moment, she tried to tune back in to what Wasserman was saying. She ought to be paying attention. For Tobe’s sake, she ought to be trying to examine the possibility of Wendell’s innocence more rationally, without bias. She read the words carefully, one by one. But what she saw was Wendell’s face, the way he’d looked as one of the assaulted women had testified: bored, passive, even vaguely amused as the woman had tremulously, with great emotion, recounted her tale.
Whatever.
• • •
That night, Tobe was once again in his study, working as she sat on the couch, watching television. He came out a couple of times, waving to her vaguely as he walked through the living room, toward the kitchen, toward the refrigerator, another beer.
She waited up. But when he finally came into the bedroom he seemed annoyed that she was still awake, and he took off his clothes silently, turning off the light before he slipped into bed, a distance emanating from him. She pressed her breasts against his back, her arms wrapped around him, but he was still. She rubbed her feet against his, and he let out a slow, disinterested breath.
“What are you thinking about,” she said, and he shifted his legs.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Thinking about Wendell again, I suppose.”
“It will be all right,” she said, though she felt the weight of her own dishonesty settle over her. “I know it.” She smoothed her hand across his hair.
“You’re not a lawyer,” he said. “You don’t know how badly flawed the legal system is.”
“Well,” she said.
“It’s a joke,” he said. “I mean, the prosecutor didn’t prove his case. All he did was parade a bunch of victims across the stage. How can you compete with that? It’s all drama.”
“Yes,” she said. She kissed the back of his neck, but he was already drifting into sleep, or pretending to. He shrugged against her arms, nuzzling into his pillow.
• • •
One of the things that had always secretly bothered her about Wendell was his resemblance to Tobe. He was a younger, and—yes, admit it—sexier version of her husband. The shoulders, the legs; the small hardness of her husband’s mouth that she had loved was even better on Wendell’s face, that sly shift of his gray eyes, which Wendell knew was attractive, while Tobe did not. Tobe tended toward pudginess, while Wendell was lean, while Wendell worked on mail-order machines, which brought out the muscles of his stomach. In the summer, coming in from playing basketball with Tobe in the driveway, Wendell had almost stunned her, and she recalled her high school infatuation with a certain athletic shape of the male body. She watched as he bent his naked torso toward the open refrigerator, looking for something to drink. He looked up at her, his eyes slanted cautiously as he lifted a can of grape soda to his lips.
Stupid cunt. It gave her a nasty jolt, because that was what his look said—a brief but steady look that was so full of leering scorn that her shy fascination with his muscled stomach seemed suddenly dirty, even dangerous. She had felt herself blushing with embarrassment.
She had not said anything to Tobe about it. There was nothing to say, really. Wendell hadn’t done anything, and in fact he was always polite when he spoke to her, even when he was confronting her with his “beliefs.” He would go into some tirade about some issue that he held dear—gun control, or affirmative action, et cetera, and then he would turn to Cheryl, smiling: “Of course, I suppose there are differences of opinion,” he
would say, almost courtly. She remembered him looking at her once, during one of these discussions, his eyes glinting with some withheld emotion. “I wish I could think like you, Cheryl,” he said. “I guess I’m just a cynic, but I don’t believe that people are good, deep down. Maybe that’s my problem.” Later, Tobe told her not to take him seriously. “He’s young,” Tobe would say, rolling his eyes. “I don’t know where he comes up with this asinine stuff. But he’s got a good heart, you know.”
Could she disagree? Could she say, no, he’s actually a deeply hateful person?
But the feeling didn’t go away. Instead, as the first snow came in early November, she was aware of a growing unease. With the end of daylight savings time, she woke in darkness, and when she went downstairs to make coffee, she could sense Wild Bill’s silent, malevolent presence. He ruffled his feathers when she turned on the light, cocking his head so he could stare at her with the dark bead of his eye. By that time, she and Tobe had visited Wendell in prison, once, and Tobe was making regular, weekly phone calls to him. On Jodie’s birthday, Wendell had sent a handmade card, a striking, pen-and-ink drawing of a spotted leopard in a jungle, the twisted vines above him spelling out, “Happy Birthday, sweet Jodie.” It was, she had to admit, quite beautiful, and must have taken him a long time. But why a leopard? Why was it crouched as if hunting, its tail a snakelike whip? There was a moment, going through the mail, when she’d seen Jodie’s name written in Wendell’s careful, spiked cursive, that she’d almost thrown the letter away.
There was another small incident that week. They were sitting at dinner. She had just finished serving up a casserole she’d made, which reminded her, nostalgically, of her childhood. She set Evan’s plate in front of him and he sniffed at the steam that rose from it.
“Mmmm,” he said. “Smells like pussy.”
“Evan!” she said. Her heart shrank, and she flinched again when she glanced at Tobe, who had his hand over his mouth, trying to hold back a laugh. He widened his eyes at her.
“Evan, where on earth did you hear something like that?” she said, and she knew that her voice was too confrontational, because the boy looked around guiltily.
“That’s what Wild Bill says when I give him his food,” Evan said. He shrugged, uncertainly. “Wild Bill says it.”
“Well, son,” Tobe said. He had recovered his composure, and gave Evan a serious face. “That’s not a nice thing to say. That’s not something that Wild Bill should be saying, either.”
“Why not?” Evan said. And Cheryl had opened her mouth to speak, but then thought better of it. She would do more damage than good, she thought.
“It’s just something that sounds rude,” she said at last.
“Dad,” Evan said. “What does ‘pussy’ mean?”
Cheryl and Tobe exchanged glances.
“It means a cat,” Tobe said, and Evan’s face creased with puzzlement for a moment.
“Oh,” Evan said at last. Tobe looked over at her and shrugged.
Later, after the children were asleep, Tobe said, “I’m really sorry, honey.”
“Yes,” she said. She was in bed, trying hard to read a novel, though she felt too unsettled. She watched as he chuckled, shaking his head. “Good God!” he said with amused exasperation. “Wendell can be such an asshole. I thought I would die when Evan said that.” After a moment, he sat down on the bed and put his fingers through his hair. “That stupid Playboy stuff,” he said. “We’re lucky the bird didn’t testify.”
He meant this as a joke, and so she smiled. Oh, Tobe, she thought, for she could feel, even then, his affection for his younger brother. He was already making an anecdote to tell to Carlin and Randy, who would find it hilarious. She closed her eyes as Tobe put the back of his fingers to her earlobe, stroking.
“Poor baby,” he said. “What’s wrong? You seem really depressed lately.”
After a moment, she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I am.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know I’ve been really distracted, with Wendell and everything.” She watched as he sipped thoughtfully from the glass of beer he’d brought with him. Soon, he would disappear into his office, with the papers he had to prepare for tomorrow.
“It’s not you,” she said, after a moment. “Maybe it’s the weather,” she said.
“Yeah,” Tobe said. He gave her a puzzled look. For he knew that there was a time when she would have told him, she would have plunged ahead, carefully but deliberately, until she had made her points. That was what he had expected.
But now she didn’t elaborate. Something—she couldn’t say what—made her withdraw, and instead she smiled for him. “It’s okay,” she said.
• • •
Wild Bill had begun to molt. He would pull out his own feathers distractedly, and soon his gray, naked flesh was prominently visible in patches. His body was similar to the Cornish game hens she occasionally prepared, only different in that he was alive and not fully plucked. The molting, or something else, made him cranky, and as Thanksgiving approached, he was sullen and almost wholly silent, at least to her. There were times, alone with him in the kitchen, that she would try to make believe that he was just a bird, that nothing was wrong. She would turn on the television, to distract her, and Wild Bill would listen, absorbing every line of dialogue.
They were alone again together, she and Wild Bill, when Wendell telephoned. It was the second day in less than two weeks that she’d called in sick to work, that she’d stayed in bed, dozing, until well past eleven. She was sitting at the kitchen table, brooding over a cup of tea, a little guilty because she was not really ill. Wild Bill had been peaceful, half-asleep, but he ruffled his feathers and clicked his beak as she answered the phone.
At first, when he spoke, there was simply an unnerving sense of dislocation. He used to call her, from time to time, especially when she and Tobe were first married. “Hey,” he’d say, “how’s it going?” And then a long silence would unravel after she said, “Fine,” the sound of Wendell thinking, moistening his lips, shaping unspoken words with his tongue. He was young back then, barely twenty when she was pregnant with Jodie, and she used to expect his calls, even look forward to them, listening as he hesitantly began to tell her about a book he’d read, or asked her to listen as he played the piano, the tiny sound blurred through the phone line.
This was what she thought of at first, this long ago time when he was still just a kid, a boy with, she suspected, a kind of crush on her. This was what she thought of when he said, “Cheryl?” hesitantly, and it took her a moment to calibrate her mind, to span the time and events of the last eight years and realize that here he was now, a convicted rapist, calling her from prison. “Cheryl?” he said, and she stood over the dirty dishes in the sink, a single Lucky Charm stuck to the side of one of the children’s cereal bowls.
“Wendell?” she said, and she was aware of a kind of watery dread filling her up—her mouth, her nose, her eyes. “Where are you?” she said, and he let out a short laugh.
“I’m in jail,” he said. “Where did you think?”
“Oh,” she said, and she heard his breath through the phone line, could picture the booth where he was sitting, the little room that they’d sat in when they’d visited, the elementary school colors, the mural of a rearing mustang with mountains and lightning behind it.
“So,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“It’s going fine,” she said—perhaps a bit too stiffly. “Are you calling for Tobe? Because he’s at his office.…”
“No,” Wendell said, and he was silent for a moment, maybe offended at her tone. She could sense his expression tightening, and when he spoke again there was something hooded in his voice. “Actually,” he said, “I was calling for you.”
“For me?” she said, and her insides contracted. She couldn’t imagine how this would be allowed—that he’d have such freedom with the phone—and it alarmed her. “Why would you want to talk to me?” she said, and her
voice was both artificially breezy and strained. “I … I can’t do anything for you.”
Silence again. She put her hand into the soapy water of the sink and began to rub the silverware with her sponge, her hands working as his presence descended into her kitchen.
“I’ve just been thinking about you,” he said, in the same hooded, almost sinuous way. “I was … thinking about how we used to talk, you know, when you and Tobe first moved back to Cheyenne. I used to think that you knew me better than anybody else. Did you know that? Because you’re smart. You’re a lot smarter than Tobe, you know, and the rest of them—Randy, Carlin, that stupid … moron, Karissa. Jesus! I used to think, What is she doing here? What is she doing in this family? I guess that’s why I’ve always felt weirdly close to you. You were the one person—” he said, and she waited for him to finish his sentence, but he didn’t. He seemed to loom close, a voice from nearby, floating above her, and she could feel her throat constricting. What? she thought, and she had an image of Jenni Martinez, her wrists bound, tears leaking from her blindfold. He would have spoken to her in this way, soft, insidious, as if he were regretfully blaming her for his own emotions.
“Wendell,” she said, and tried to think of what to say. “I think … it must be very hard for you right now. But I don’t know that … I’m really the person. I certainly don’t think that I’m the one person, as you say. Maybe you should talk to Tobe?”