Two Days Gone

by Randall Silvis

  A red-winged blackbird flitted past DeMarco, so close that, had he been quick enough, he could have reached out and grabbed it, could have caught it in his hand. The bird stiffened its wings and glided low over the water. It rested on the tip of a reed at the water’s edge. The reed swayed back and forth under the bird’s weight—so gracefully, DeMarco thought, like water.

  He became aware then, as if it had materialized out of nowhere, of the roar of a panel truck as it crossed the bridge. The rumble sent a chill through him, a frisson of fear. Strangely, his wife came to mind, and he hoped she was all right, hoped that whatever stranger she had taken to her bed the night before had been kind to her, tender, and had not given her what she craved. He turned his back to the vehicle, but its wake of cold air blasted over him. He wiped the dampness from the corner of his eye.

  The troopers were watching him, waiting. Their stillness angered him. But he bit down hard on his anger. It was an old anger, he knew, and misdirected. “All right, let’s get to it!” he shouted. “I want Thomas Huston sitting in the back of my vehicle, alive and well and cuffed, by the time the sun goes down on this fine October day.”

  Three

  On a low hillock nearly a hundred yards back from the water, in a shallow cave beneath an overhanging rock, a depression only five feet wide, two feet high, and maybe three feet deep, behind three boughs of spruce he had broken off and dragged to the cave at dusk the night before, Thomas Huston lay curled tight, his knees drawn close to his chest. Through the fragrant needles, he watched a thin light seeping into the forest. He knew that if he stretched his legs, numb from lack of movement, both feet tingling, a chill would rattle through him, cutting all the way to the bone. Then he would have to crawl out of his burrow, climb to his feet like a human being, try to make some sense of the world. This, he did not want to do. He did not feel capable of either the necessary decisions or the action. He believed that if he moved, he would probably start vomiting again, and there was nothing left in his stomach to expel. There was only blood and bile, the viscera itself, though he felt himself to be eviscerated already, as hollowed out as the four Cornish game hens he had made for dinner on Saturday night, the last meal he had prepared; those four tiny carcasses he had rinsed in cold water, patted dry, stuffed with bread crumbs and mushrooms spiced with sage and basil and thyme. No, he would not mind dry heaving if it resulted in unconsciousness, if he could annihilate all sentience through dry heaving, send himself into oblivion. He had only to let one of the four horrible images float to the surface of his mind and a pain like none he had ever experienced would seize him and double him up again, twist him into a rigid knot of agony whose only release, short-lived and painful itself, would be an animallike scream.

  Think about dinner, he told himself, the last time you had anything to eat. Go back to where it started. Think it all through.

  The four naked little birds lay lined up on a cutting board, their chests split open. A handful of stuffing. Slip it inside, work it in snugly. The scents of sweet basil and chopped onion. The heat rising from the oven. In the living room, sitting cross-legged around the coffee table, Claire and Tommy and Lissie played Monopoly. Tommy was the real estate baron; he snapped up every property he could get his hands on. And little Davy, sweet, tireless Davy—time after time after time after time, he pulled the string on his Barnyard See’n Say. The cow says Moo! The rooster says Cock-a-doodle-doo!

  Yes, that was real. Saturday night was real. But the rest of it… How could it be?

  Fricatives, he thought. Affricates. Diphthongs.

  Those were the words he had turned over in his mind that night, first during dinner, then later, in bed with his wife. He had intended to write them down, add them to the list he was compiling for his protagonist. His protagonist was a logophile, a man who liked words for their sounds more than their meanings, a man who would walk around saying “fricatives” just for the pleasure of it. The words had come to Huston while he was thinking about his protagonist, trying to envision and create a nuanced portrait of him. As often happened when Huston got into the head of a character, words would come to him as if straight from the character’s mouth, words that Huston might have no conscious understanding of, no clear idea as to their meaning. He would hear the words and write them down and, as he had meant to do on Saturday night, would later look up their meanings to be certain he had used the words correctly. Invariably, he would discover that he had, and what a pleasing discovery it would be, this mystery of creation, this sense of story as a gift from somewhere else.

  But on Saturday night, he had not had an opportunity to reassure himself as to the precise meanings of the new words his protagonist had given him. Now the protagonist was silent, and now Huston was numb with cold and hunger and disbelief, a man in a cave in a situation that could only be fictional, was too horrific to be believed.

  The story had changed. No computer, no pen. No ink, no paper.

  “Fricatives,” Huston whispered to the tangerine light as it bled through the spruce bows. “Affricates. Diphthongs.”

  A click inside his head. A screen shot filling his field of vision. He winced and pulled away, turned his face to the dirt. Image as pain. Memory a thrust and stab, a thousand synchronized blades.

  His mind felt like a junkyard choked full of disparate parts. Like a huge jigsaw puzzle somebody had kicked all over the room. Here’s a piece of blue sky. Here’s a piece with the corner of an eye in it. Is this a bird’s wing? Is this brown grass or a strand of silky hair?

  Any minute now, he kept telling himself, any minute now, he would manage to push himself up and out of this nightmare. “Wake up!” he scolded himself again and this time shook his head so hard that a pain stabbed into his left eye, sent a surge of nausea tumbling through his stomach. “Wake up, for Chrissakes!”

  He remembered going online after dinner, checking the Times’s website. And there it was, there it had been, The Desperate Summer, still number eight after seven weeks. That was real. “Is it better than Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent?” Michiko Kakutani had written. “I think it is.”

  He had the actual clipping in a folder in his file cabinet, kept all his clippings there, sometimes took the folder out and read through the clippings just to remind himself that they were real, that he wasn’t dreaming his good fortune. Yes, they were real. Words made real in pulped wood, cotton rag, and ink. Wholly and tangibly real.

  The dog says Woof!

  The duck says Quack!

  Then he saw little Davy again, the baby asleep. He closed his eyes and again heard the baby’s breath, that sweet whisper of life, the rise and fall of the little chest. He felt the knife heavy in his own hand. But was it his hand? How could it have been? Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Who was it that had said that? It was Macbeth, right? Half-mad Macbeth. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind…?

  Art thou?

  “Art thou?” Huston asked. His body tightened in a spasm of grief, clenched in upon itself, and a stifled moan worked its way up from his chest, a moan as taut as stretched sinew, as sharp as honed steel.

  “Please, God,” Thomas Huston groaned into the dirt. “Please, please, please, God. Please just let me wake up.”

  Four

  The previous summer, a Friday in July. DeMarco had spent the morning at a hearing in the courthouse, where he had testified that a drug-addled wife beater had taken two shots at him, then had thrown down his handgun and invited DeMarco into the house for a glass of iced tea. The man claimed he had never aimed to shoot DeMarco or anybody else, and DeMarco admitted that the nearest of the two bullets had knocked the lid off a garbage can some six and a half feet to his left.

  The judge asked, “Are you saying that you never felt your life was in peril?”

  “I feel like my life is in peril every time I climb out of bed
,” DeMarco answered. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  The wife beater was ordered to complete eight weeks of rehab, after which he would serve 120 days for reckless endangerment.

  Now, at a few minutes after eleven, DeMarco returned to the barracks with two cups of convenience store coffee—one black, for him, and a hazelnut cappuccino, for his station commander. As usual, DeMarco had to suppress a smile when he walked into the office and found Sergeant Kyle Bowen there behind the long mahogany desk, looking very serious, very busy, and very young.

  DeMarco handed him the coffee. “I see it’s bring-your-son-to-work-day again. Daddy taking a pee break?”

  Bowen peeled the lid off the cardboard cup and sniffed. “What is this, hazelnut?”

  “It’s what you always drink, isn’t it?”

  “I’m going to write it down and pin it to your jacket, I swear. Mocha is fine. Vanilla is fine. Plain French roast with two creams and one sugar is fine. Anything is fine except hazelnut. Why do you keep doing this to me?”

  “You’re too young to drink coffee. It will stunt your growth.”

  Bowen pushed the cup to the outer edge of his desk. “So what did he get?”

  “Two months rehab, four months to contemplate the error of his ways.”

  “Jesus. Another victory for the criminally insane.”

  “But job security for us,” DeMarco said.

  Bowen shook his head, tore a sheet of paper off his notepad, and handed it to DeMarco. “How about laying this on Jenny’s desk on your way past?”

  “She’s out again?”

  “Fourth time in two weeks.”

  “Preggers for sure.”

  “No doubt.”

  “When are you going to tell your wife?”

  “Here’s an idea: go get some work done.”

  DeMarco smiled and brought the sheet of paper close enough to read. “T. Huston?” he said. “Thomas Huston?”

  “Did I invite you to read that?”

  “You didn’t invite me not to.”

  “Don’t read it. It’s for Jenny, not you.”

  “Info request,” DeMarco read. “T. Huston. Writer.” He lowered the paper and looked at Bowen. “What kind of info is he looking for?”

  “The kind Jenny provides.”

  “Is this his home number or the university?”

  “You are not public relations. You got nothing to do, go grab a radar gun.”

  DeMarco folded the paper and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “I need a break from the criminals. You ever read this guy? Or are you still working your way through the Hardy Boys?”

  “Let Jenny do her job, would you, please? And you do yours.”

  “This guy writes dark stuff. Seriously dark. Jenny’s all puppies and roses. I’ll take this one.”

  Bowen sat back straight in his chair, put both hands on the edge of his desk. “You know, I don’t mind the coffee pranks and the other abuse, but don’t you think you should maybe just once do what I ask you to do?”

  DeMarco rubbed his cheek. “You familiar with an old song by Johnny Cash? ‘A Boy Named Sue’? You’re my Sue.”

  “So you’re trying to toughen me up, is that it?”

  “You can thank me when you make lieutenant.”

  Bowen leaned forward and brought his hands together, rubbed a thumb across the palm of his other hand. “Is it because of my dad?”

  “Hey, your dad’s a good man. He did what he had to do. And he made the right decision. How is the old goat anyway? Still shuffleboard champ of Tampa–Saint Pete?”

  “He says when you were my age, you were ramrod straight. Eye of the tiger and all that. But afterward…it was almost like you wanted to get demoted.”

  DeMarco gazed at the ceiling and made a popping sound with his lips. Then he looked down at Bowen again. “Are we done reminiscing here?” He patted his jacket pocket. “Some of us adults have work to do.”

  “Go,” Bowen told him and waved him away. “Just go.”

  DeMarco reached for the cup. “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Five

  DeMarco first met Huston at a place called Dino’s, a small, narrow brick building shaped like a diner, its six booths all lined up against the long window overlooking busy State Street. “I don’t often get down this way,” Huston told him. “It’s closer for us to go to Erie for everything. But I like it here. I like the feel of it.”

  DeMarco nodded, smiled, sipped his sweet tea. He had recognized Huston from the photos on his book jackets. None showed the writer in a coat and tie, yet DeMarco was still pleasantly surprised by the day’s growth of stubble on Huston’s cheeks, the washed-out jeans and dark blue T-shirt. Except for his six-foot height, he reminded DeMarco of a young Jack Kerouac.

  Huston took off his navy-blue baseball cap and laid it on the seat, then finger combed his hair while he considered the sandwich board behind the counter. “What’s good here?” he asked.

  “When I come, it’s for the eggplant parm or the junkyard dogs.”

  “So how about we split the twelve-inch eggplant parm and an order of four dogs? They have iced coffee here?”

  “I’m sure they can pour some of yesterday’s over ice for you, no problem.”

  “That’s how I make it at home,” Huston said.

  DeMarco leaned back against the booth and allowed himself to relax. He had dealt with academics before and had found most of them either socially dysfunctional or condescending. But here was a respected professor from a private, very expensive college, a critically acclaimed novelist, big-screen handsome, still young—DeMarco felt both envy and a sudden, unexpected fondness for the man.

  “So who are the Tigers?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The baseball cap. Those aren’t Detroit’s colors.”

  “My boy’s Little League team last year. I was an assistant coach.”

  “Was?”

  “They moved him up to PONY League this year. I could’ve helped out again, but Claire, my wife, she thought it was time I take a step back, you know? Time to let him be his own man for a change.”

  DeMarco read the look on Huston’s face. “Not easy to do, huh?”

  “Fathers and sons, you know? It’s hard to be a spectator.”

  This time, it was Huston’s turn to read the subtle change in the other man’s eyes. “You have children, Officer? Is that the proper way to address you, by the way? Or do you prefer ‘Trooper’? ‘Sergeant’?”

  “Ryan will do. And no, no children.”

  “Ryan is my baby’s middle name. David Ryan Huston.”

  “Good name,” DeMarco said.

  Huston nodded toward the gold band on DeMarco’s left hand. “You’re married, though.”

  “Separated.”

  “Sorry, man.”

  “Hey. Life,” DeMarco said. He looked down at the table, squared up the paper place mat.

  Huston did not allow the awkward moment to linger. “So what’s it like being an officer of the law?”

  “It’s great. You get to see humanity at its worst day in and day out. What’s it like being a professor?”

  Huston smiled. “You know how many academics it takes to change a lightbulb?”

  “How many?”

  “Four to form a committee, two to write a report, one to file a grievance with the union, and one to ask the secretary to call the janitor.”

  DeMarco smiled.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Huston said. “I love my students. And I get a lot from them. Their passion, you know? That fire in the belly.”

  DeMarco started to nod but then stopped himself. What did he know about passion? The fire in his belly had been snuffed a long time ago. “So your new book,” he said, “this one you’re working on. It’s about the state police?”

 
“A trooper is one of the main characters, yeah.”

  “One of the good guys?”

  “Good guys, bad guys…it’s all fairly ambiguous, you know?”

  “It’s been fairly ambiguous in all of your novels, seems to me.”

  “So you’re a reader.”

  “Got into the habit when I first met my wife. She’s an English teacher. She kind of insisted that if I wanted to date her, I had to broaden my literary horizons.”

  “Thank God for the annealing effect of women,” Huston said. “So then, are you familiar with Nabokov’s Lolita?”

  “Heard of it but haven’t read it. Isn’t it about an older man’s involvement with a young girl?”

  “Right. And there’s this character named Quilty, the narrator’s nemesis. I’m thinking of making him a state trooper.”

  The server appeared at their table then, a thin Asian girl in a crisp, white uniform. Huston gave their order and engaged her in pleasant conversation for another minute or so. When she walked away, he turned to see DeMarco smiling.

  “I wasn’t flirting with her,” Huston said.

  “I know. You didn’t look at her butt when she left.”

  “Did you?”

  “It’s a very fine butt.”

  Huston grinned. “You’re not what I expected in a policeman.”

  “You’re not what I expected in a pompous ass,” DeMarco said. “So anyway, back to this guy in your book who’s based on me. He’s extremely good-looking, right? Sort of a George Clooney type.”

  “Not a bad choice,” Huston said. “Clooney is quite convincing at playing bumblers.”

  “Wait a minute. My character is a bumbler?”

  “In Nabokov’s novel, yes. He’s rigid. He’s obsessed. He’s a moralizer who refuses to see the immorality of his own actions.”

  “Tell you what,” DeMarco said. “It’s probably better to just leave me out of the story. That way I won’t have to arrest you for something.”

  They met on three more occasions that summer. At the second meeting, again at Dino’s, Huston quizzed DeMarco on the hierarchy of authority in the state police organization, who did what, the types of firearms they carried, under what conditions the state police assisted or overrode the local police. But he also talked at length about his own life, his wife and three children, all obviously adored.