by Richard Ford
He closed the door, leaving me in the cold car with hot air blowing under the dash. Through the driver’s window—snow turning to water on the glass—I watched his hat move back through the dark toward the shack’s door, which was ajar. He didn’t look around, or seem in any way hesitant. He had his pistol down at his left side, not hiding it, although it was small and the light was poor, so it might not have been noticed. I thought Jepps and Crosley might have their own pistols out and be holding them when Remlinger came inside. It made sense they wouldn’t have believed him, would know what was going to happen—if they knew what they were doing.
Remlinger walked in through the mud vestibule—the glass panes of which were gone. He stepped to the door and pushed it open with his boot foot.
Jepps, I could see, was still standing in the shallow light just as he had been. Crosley’s legs were all that was visible of him from where I was. He was still sitting on the cot. They only expected to be spoken to. They were the uncomplicated men they’d been described as being. Remlinger had misjudged the kind of men they were. He stepped forward into the lighted doorway. I saw Jepps’ face acknowledge him. And Arthur raised his silver pistol toward Jepps and shot him. I didn’t see him fall. But when Arthur advanced into the kitchen—to shoot Crosley—I saw Jepps lying on the linoleum, his big feet apart. Pop was the sound the pistol made. It was not a large caliber. A lady’s gun, I’ve heard such guns called. I heard no shouts or voices. My window was wound up, the heater blowing. But I also heard the shots that killed Crosley. One pop went off, and I saw Crosley moving clumsily to his right, trying to go behind the cot. Arthur stepped closer to him. I saw him very plainly point the silver pistol down to where Crosley had gone behind the cot to find protection. Arthur shot two more times. Pop. Pop. Then he looked around at the floor, almost casually, to where Jepps was, his left foot agitating up and down very fast. He aimed the pistol almost considerately at Jepps’ head or his face and fired another time. Pop. Five shots in all. Five pops. All of which I heard and saw through the open doorway from inside the Buick. Arthur looked down at Jepps as he put his pistol in the side pocket of his jacket. He said something very animated. He seemed to make a face at Jepps, and pointed a finger down at him, and thrust the finger at him three times, and spoke what were for me soundless words (though Jepps surely wasn’t aware). Words of reproval that expressed the things he felt. He turned then and looked out the open door, across the dark, snowy space separating us—my face framed in the car window, containing an expression I cannot imagine. He said something else then, directed at me, his lips moving vociferously, his big fedora still on his head, as if his words put right what he had just done. I felt I knew what these words meant, even if they never reached my ears. They meant, “Now, then. Now, that’s settled, isn’t it? Once and for all.”
Chapter 66
We buried the two Americans the night they were killed. It is a measure of the kind of man Arthur Remlinger was that he forced me to help Charley Quarters and Ollie Gedins (Mrs. Gedins’ son, the tall man in the cap and the windbreaker I’d seen in the Leonard parking yard) with the removal of the bodies out to the holes dug in the prairie where—should they have lived—the Americans would’ve shot geese the next morning with me as their “guide.” It is a second measure of him that he did not in the least take care of me, nor was he at all interested in me, nor did he have a better plan for me than what the spur of that moment provided; certainly not for widening my education other than for me to find out (all over again, in a much worse way) how many more things are possible than my fifteen-year-old mind could’ve imagined. When he thought of these events later, if he ever did, he would not have entertained a thought of me, might have forgotten even that I was there—like a hammer left in a photograph, present only to provide the scale, a point of reference, and that exhausts its value once the picture’s taken. He had, after all, given up on any scale he himself might’ve provided for himself, just as he’d given up on reason. He did only what he wanted to do, within limits he alone recognized. If you say he should never have brought me there that night, that he changed if not the course of my life, then at least the nature of it; risked my life (I might as easily have been shot and killed had things gone differently)—if you say these things, you would be correct. And it would’ve been entirely irrelevant to him. Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle. Other people were for the most part dead to him, as dead as the Americans we lumped in Charley’s truck that night, while Remlinger stood in the snowy shadows and smoked a cigarette and watched us. Put all these elements together and you’ll make as much sense as can be made.
Chapter 67
You would think the removal of the two dead bodies out of the Overflow House and into the bed of the pickup would be the most memorable event of that night, and possibly the most memorable action a person would ever perform—the sudden weight of them, whereas in life the bodies seemed not to have weight; the awfulness of that; the realization of what a change death brings. As I said, I was the one who picked up Jepps’ toupee where it had fallen onto the linoleum and lay in his dense, drying blood. But this is what I most vividly remember—the flimsy lightness of the strange, blood-soaked little topper. I don’t remember what the bodies themselves looked like, or how they smelled, or if they were loose or stiff, or what evidence there was of bullets being fired into them, or the smell of the powder (which must’ve filled the room), or even whether we carried them out like bundles, or dragged them by their hands or by their heels like the cadavers they’d become.
I do remember very well how fast the shooting and the killing took place. There were no dramatics to it, as in movies. It happened at once—almost as if it didn’t happen. Only then someone’s dead. I sometimes believe I was in the room when it happened, and not in the car. But that isn’t true.
I remember after the moment the shootings took place, the look on Arthur Remlinger’s face, talking to the dead men—the look of reproval—and then the look he gave me through the door to where I was watching, purely astonished. It was a look (I believed then) that meant he would kill me, too, if the spirit moved him, and I should know that. Murder was written on his face, the look that Jepps and Crosley had been seeking, but only saw in their last moments.
I remember that when the shooting happened and Remlinger looked at me, saying whatever he was saying, I—out of instinct—looked away. I turned my whole body from the window and saw through the other car window Charley Quarters, standing in his trailer door, the light behind him. He was wearing just an undershirt and his underpants in the cold. He was leaning on the door frame, watching. Perhaps he knew everything and was only waiting for his duties to take up.
The final thing I remember was that when we buried them—naked of their clothes, their suitcases and belongings bound for Charley’s burn can, their pistols and rings and shotguns bound for the South Saskatchewan River—we folded them into their holes, dug deep enough that coyotes and badgers wouldn’t reach them. It was relatively easy. I stood above them looking down—each man in his separate hole, several yards apart—then looked out toward the dark prairie, above which I could hear a goose up in the snowy sky, making the screams they make. And I could see—it was to my surprise, but I saw it—the red Leonard sign off in the night, where Fort Royal was, closer than I would’ve thought, the butler offering his martini glass. For a moment it seemed as though nothing had happened.
Can I even speak of the effect of witnessing the Americans’ killing—the effect on me? I’ll have to make the words up, since the true effect is silence.
You might think that over the years I thought a great deal about Arthur Remlinger, that he was an enigma, a figure worth long consideration. But you would be wrong. He was not in the least an enigma. I had believed for a while that he possessed significance, a rich subtext that was more than merely factual. But he did not, other than as the cause of three men’s deaths. He wanted significance, th
ere’s no doubt (Harvard, for example, and the first murder he committed). But he couldn’t overcome the absence that was his companion in life and that led him everywhere. Reverse-thinking, the habit that had me believing there was significance when there was only absence, may be a good trait in the abstract. (It made me seem more interesting to my mother than I was.) But reverse-thinking can be a matter of ignoring the obvious—a grave error—which can lead to all manner of treacherousness and more errors, and to death, as the two Americans found out.
Much more, though, than I’ve kept Remlinger in my memory, I have tried hard to keep the Americans—Jepps and Crosley—alive there; since, inasmuch as they disappeared forever and without a trace, my remembrance is the only afterlife they are likely to have. I’ve thought, as I said, that their deaths seem connected to my parents’ ruinous choice to rob a bank—with me as the constant, the connector, the heart of the logic. And before you say this is only fiddling, fingering tea leaves to invent a logic, think how close evil is to the normal goings-on that have nothing to do with evil. Through all these memorable events, normal life was what I was seeking to preserve for myself. When I think of those times—beginning with anticipating school in Great Falls, to our parents’ robbery, to my sister’s departure, to crossing into Canada, and the Americans’ death, stretching on to Winnipeg and to where I am today—it is all of a piece, like a musical score with movements, or a puzzle, wherein I am seeking to restore and maintain my life in a whole and acceptable state, regardless of the frontiers I’ve crossed. I know it’s only me who makes these connections. But not to try to make them is to commit yourself to the waves that toss you and dash you against the rocks of despair. There is much to learn here from the game of chess, whose individual engagements are all part of one long engagement seeking a condition not of adversity or conflict or defeat or even victory, but of the harmony underlying all.
Why Arthur Remlinger shot the two Americans I can only guess by trying to hold close to the obvious. Nothing was settled by it—only some time given back to him, postponing until later his disappearance into even profounder obscurity than Saskatchewan—the “foreign travel” he mentioned.
It’s possible he had thought it through. Not the way another person would think something through—measuring pros and cons and letting your thoughts and judgment guide your acts with the understanding that they might guide you away from those acts. Possibly he believed the Americans would eventually shoot him; and if not, then they at least would never let him rest (as he said), never go away, never not return; that they were more committed than he’d been given to think. Thinking something through, for him, was much more a matter of shooting them unless something unexpected made him not do it. Who knows what that something might’ve been, since it didn’t occur? Probably many people’s vision of “thinking something through” is of this nature: you do precisely what you want to do—if you can. Possibly he simply wanted to kill them: because they came to him at all and tried to reason with him; because the idea of talking made him furious—after years of silent frustration, longing, disappointment, isolation, waiting; possibly to be talked to by two ordinary nonentities from nowhere, who also meant him ill, might’ve infuriated him, since he possessed an elevated sense of his own intelligence; possibly to hear words like ‘aerate’ and ‘liberate,’ and to have it implied that the two Americans sympathized with him—all that might’ve made him suddenly approachable and then lethal. He may have long known unreason was his great failure. And he might simply have quit caring, accepted he could do no better, that unreason was his nature, and he deserved whatever he wanted from it. He was a murderer—just like, in a smaller way, my parents were bank robbers. Why hide it, he may have believed. Glory in it. Any time you murder two people there must be a quotient of insanity involved.
What was the outcome of it all—two murders? Little, that I personally know about. The Americans’ Chrysler was hidden in Charley’s Quonset, then driven down to the States by Ollie Gedins and one of his cousins, using the Americans’ identification, which no one at the U.S. border would’ve been careful enough to notice (it was Canada, it was 1960). The two Canadians checked themselves into the Hi-line Motel in Havre, Montana, using the names Jepps and Crosley; then quietly disappeared into the Montana night, leaving the car parked in front of the room, and the authorities to search for the men, believing they’d left Canada, gotten into Havre, then mysteriously gone out of sight. It’s possible the RCMP came to the Leonard later on, asking questions, showing photos. No one connected Arthur Remlinger to the deaths, just as they didn’t connect him to the bombing years before. In the case of Jepps and Crosley, buried out on the soon-frozen prairie (the ground had been just soft enough for the holes to be opened), there was never proof their deaths had even occurred. If someone came looking more closely—a wife, a relative up from Detroit—it would’ve been long after the time I’d taken the bus to Winnipeg.
Something certainly must’ve passed through the electrical currents of the Leonard in the days after the murders. Charley Quarters, however, continued taking Sports into the fields each morning. Remlinger continued circulating spiritedly through the dining room and the bar at night. I was forbidden to take part in anything, as if I was no longer trusted. But I was still allowed to eat in the kitchen, and stay in my room, to be at loose ends around the Leonard, or to roam the wintry streets of Fort Royal as I had in the warm days of September. I saw Charley Quarters’ half-ton on the street and in the parking yard behind the hotel. Once I encountered Arthur Remlinger in the lobby where the Americans had registered in. He was reading a letter. He looked up at me in a way he hadn’t ever before. He seemed energetic, as if at that moment he wished to express something to me he also hadn’t expressed—though his face quickly changed and seemed almost stern. “Sometimes, Dell, you have to cause trouble for things to be clear,” he said. “We all deserve a second chance”—which he’d said the night of the murders. What he said didn’t make sense, and I didn’t know what to say back. I’d seen him murder two people. I was beyond words. He put his letter in his coat pocket, and just walked away. I believe that was how he understood shooting two men and burying them in goose pits on the prairie: it was in behalf of a certain clarity he sought, and of relieving his suffering. I tried to understand it and reconcile it with how I felt—which was mortified and ashamed, as if some part of Remlinger’s absence had opened in me. But I never could.
I don’t know what Florence either did or didn’t know about the murders. My private view is that she knew about them, and at the same time didn’t. She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind. So much of life fits into that category. Marriage, for one thing. To do that was consistent with the little I knew about her.
On the fourth day after the murders—the eighteenth of October—Florence came to my room and woke me. She’d brought a pasteboard suitcase with leather latches, and stickers on the side that said PARIS and NEW ORLEANS and LAS VEGAS and NIAGARA FALLS. She set this on the dresser and said I couldn’t go the rest of my life with my belongings in a pillowcase. I could return it when I saw her again. She had a bus ticket, which she gave to me, along with a small oil painting she’d made, showing the caragana row at the back of the town of Partreau, the white bee hive boxes beyond, the prairie and blue sky fully painted in. “This is a better view than previous,” she said in a business-like way. “This’ll make you remember things more optimistically. The town is out of sight.” (This, as much as anything, made me think she knew about the murders.) I told her I liked the painting, which I did very much and was astonished to believe it was mine. It was what I should’ve told her about her other painting, and hoped this would compensate. I put my few clothes, my chess pieces, my Chess Fundamentals book and my roll-up cloth board, my two World Book volumes, the Building the Canadian Nation she’d given me, but not my Bee Sense book, which I’d given up on—all inside the suitcase. Which made it weighty. Together we walked downstairs, out of the hotel and down the blustery m
ain street of Fort Royal, to the barber shop where I’d gotten my hair cut in those last days, as if I knew something was going to happen to me. We stood inside the glass door, and Florence told me she was putting me on the bus, and I should stay on until Winnipeg—a distance of five hundred miles, which would take until early the next morning. Her son Roland would meet me there. I would live with him and be put in school and taught by the nuns, until things could be “properly sorted out.” It would all be fine and dandy. It was good I was leaving before the winter took its grip on life. There was really no use, she said, in saying more about things. She hugged me and kissed me when the bus arrived—things she’d never done, and that she only did then because she felt sorry for me. She would see me again, she said. I did not say good-bye to anyone but her. It was as if I’d already left some time before and was just catching up with myself. Ideas about parting, in which kind formalities are observed all around, turn out to be an exception in life rather than a rule.
I was, of course, very, very happy to be leaving. When I’d sat in the car after the shootings, and before the removal of the Americans, I’d looked around out Remlinger’s car windows at the Americans’ car and at Partreau, there in the dark and snow, and had decided it was a place made for murders, a place of absence and promises abandoned. I had almost escaped it, I thought, but finally I hadn’t. This, I felt—in my seat on the bus, rolling out of Fort Royal and Saskatchewan—seemed to be my last best chance.
I had very few looking-back thoughts as the bus plowed eastward. I have never been good at that. Events must sink into the ground and percolate up naturally again for me to pay them proper heed. Or else be forgotten. I didn’t for an instant think all the things that had happened to me would color how I thought of my parents and their much smaller crime. Neither did anything enhance my belief that I would ever see them again—though I wanted to. The uses that Remlinger had put me to—to be his audience, then to be his supposed source of interest, then to act the part of his son, then to be his surety, his witness and accomplice—were not things I was glad about. But they hadn’t, for all of it, kept me from climbing the steps on that bus, or kept me from a future I wanted to have.