Oregon Hill

by Howard Owen

  One day, when Jackson gently suggested that he was indeed getting his ass handed to him, the guy said, “Hell, she’s sleeping with half the General Assembly. No wonder she knows everything.”

  “Well,” Jackson said, “maybe you better start sleeping with somebody, too.”

  The story, of course, is about Martin Fell’s attempted suicide. Kate is concerned that some people will see it as some kind of confession of guilt. I tell her that I doubt it. Capable wordsmith that I am, I’ve made sure any chimp will draw the connection between Fell’s return to the general population and his decision to end his life.

  The story is a little coy about how Fell got thrown to the wolves again. “Officials said they weren’t sure why Fell was taken from his private cell, where he’d been placed for his own protection earlier, but promised a thorough investigation in a timely manner.”

  The blog posting was less subtle. I’m starting to enjoy a place where you apparently can just let loose and write anything, where innuendo is king. Oh, they tell us it’s real journalism, but if it’s real journalism, why isn’t anybody editing what I write on there? And why are we giving it away? I think they check it to make sure I don’t put “fuck” in a story or malign the paper, but otherwise, it’s open season.

  So, my blog asks some questions as pointed as a thumbtack on a publisher’s chair:

  Why was Martin Fell taken out of protective custody? Rumor has it that everyone knows who threw him back into the GP, so why are they protecting the guy? Is it true that this jailer claims he was told by “someone” to move Fell, but he doesn’t know who? Is it true that this jailer has a longtime friendship with someone high up in the police department with a strong interest in Martin Fell’s case?

  Kate’s read the blog, too.

  “You’re holding out on me,” she says, and I have to concede that she’s right.

  “You don’t need to know everything,” I tell her.

  “I never did know everything. That was part of the problem. Trust.”

  “Neither one of us knew everything,” is the best I can do. “Sometimes, you don’t really want to know everything.”

  Still, I’d like to give her a reason to have at least a modicum of trust right now. We are on the same side of the net here, even if I do, as always, prefer to play singles.

  So I tell her about Robert Jenkins.

  She seems less than impressed.

  “He was best buds with Shiflett in high school?” she says. “I doubt that’s going to get us far in court.”

  I can’t really explain to her how long friendships—and grudges—can last on Oregon Hill. I could tell her how Custalow and R.P. and Goat Jackson and Andy Peroni have been my best friends since grade school. I’ve done that before, and she just sees it as a failure to grow up. She still thinks I’m some kind of freak instead of the Hill norm. Her father was military, and she had a new set of friends every time she moved when she was a kid. She doesn’t know where any of them are now.

  “I can always make new friends,” she told me once. At the time, I considered myself a friend, among other things. It shook me a little.

  She’s looking for something solid, and I’m not ready to give her all the hard, cold facts just yet. In good time, Kate. In good time.

  Custalow is pretty calm, for a man who may have one day of gainful employment left. The board meeting’s tomorrow, and the way Feldman looks at me whenever we pass in the lobby— where he hangs out like a bird in a snowstorm, hoping for stray crumbs of gossip—does not bode well.

  “You might be back to paying the rent by yourself pretty soon,” he said yesterday. He was definitely smirking when he said it. Usually, I don’t let McGrumpy get to me, but I was hurting. So I told him to fuck himself. It seemed to please him. Feldman’s pushing eighty, and I guess he knows I won’t hit him. He’ll probably complain to the rest of the board about that tomorrow, too, in addition to telling everyone who passes through the lobby what a rude bastard I am.

  Today, Abe is actually whistling while he scrambles us some eggs. I realize he’s been waiting for me to get my ass out of bed. It’s almost ten thirty.

  “You look like hell,” he observes. I reply that I’ve heard that before. He says that I’m exceeding myself this morning, and I ask him if he’d like me to put a paper bag over my head.

  “Nah,” he says, smiling into the electric skillet, “it’s growing on me.”

  I observe that he seems rather sanguine for somebody who’s soon going to have to explain to his parole officer why he doesn’t have a job anymore.

  “Oh,” he says, “I wouldn’t worry. Things have a way of working out.”

  In Abe Custalow’s life, things definitely have not always worked out, so his optimism is a little surprising. I assume that he’s had so much crap fall on his head over the years that what’s coming tomorrow will just seem like a little shit dandruff.

  The New York Times didn’t make it up to the sixth floor, as usual. After my belated breakfast, I go down to the lobby in the hope that someone hasn’t stolen it already. Kate started a subscription just before she left, and I’ve kept it up, mainly for the Sunday crossword, which I usually finish about Thursday.

  There’s one left on the counter, next to the guard—an overweight VCU student whom we pay twelve bucks an hour to sleep.

  “I guess this one’s mine,” I tell him.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I was just about to bring that up.”

  “Well,” I say, “just sit back. You need your rest.”

  My sarcasm, as usual, is wasted.

  Clara Westbrook comes in as I’m going back upstairs. Her daughter is helping her with her little oxygen buddy. She still goes to church, although I don’t know for how much longer.

  “I heard what you said to Mr. Feldman,” she says, and I observe that I guess I should apologize.

  “Don’t,” she says. “He deserved it.”

  I ask her how she’s doing. I sense that her daughter doesn’t know about Christina Chadwick.

  “I’m fine,” she says. “Just got back from church. Confession is good for the soul, I guess.”

  She looks up and gives me kind of a sad smile. Her daughter doesn’t see anything wrong with an Episcopalian talking about confession, but Clara and I know she’s not talking about church.

  I’m able to talk Custalow into going for a drive. The sun’s shining, the Redskins, as usual, are not worthy of our attention, and the baseball playoff game isn’t until tonight.

  I insist on driving. Other than the possibility of scaring another motorist into running off the highway, there’s no reason I shouldn’t, I tell Custalow.

  There’s still a dark spot by the driver’s side door where I park. God, I hope I broke that bastard’s jaw.

  If Custalow wonders why I’m making a fairly comprehensive tour of the Fan, Oregon Hill and Randolph before we head out of town, he keeps it to himself. Even before prison, he was prone not to pry.

  We stop briefly at Peggy’s. Abe waits in the car. No, Peggy hasn’t seen Awesome Dude since we last talked. Yeah, she’s a little worried. Les waves to me from the living room, where he’s settled in the easiest chair Peggy has, a beer in his hand and a basket of chips at his side. His face has the hopeful glow of a kid getting up on Christmas morning. Part of Les’s apparent dementia must be an ability to forget that the Redskins always lose.

  When I come back out, Abe is sitting behind the wheel. I don’t argue. It does feel good to just sit back and let somebody else drive.

  “Where to?” he asks.

  I guide him over to Maplewood, where Phil Patterson is outside washing his truck. No, he hasn’t seen Awesome in a few days, figures he’s gone to the shelters. He says if I see him to tell him to come by and get the rest of his crap.

  “Just left it lying out there in the shed. I keep telling him he ought to go south, like the geese, when it gets cold,” Patterson tells me, then he laughs. “Well, I guess the geese don’t go sou
th either anymore. Damn park’s full of goose crap.”

  I tell him I guess it most be global warming.

  “Bullshit,” he says. “What happened to your face?”

  “The Dude is missing?” Custalow asks as we’re driving away.

  “He might be.”

  We head west, then north, then west again. Route 33 is a ridiculous excuse for a U.S. highway. It’s a four-lane for about two feet after you leave 295, and then it’s your basic two-lane country road, lots of curves, not even a bike lane alongside.

  When we get to the bridge where the South Anna bisects it, I tell Abe to turn off. There’s a boat landing to the right.

  “We going fishing?” he asks me.

  “Kind of.”

  “Probably should’ve brought some poles.”

  We’re about four miles upstream from where they found Isabel Ducharme’s body. The cops have been here already and did what they called an extensive search for clues. But the city police were depending on the locals to do the groundwork, so I’m thinking that “extensive” is a relative term.

  There are two trucks in the gravel lot, belonging to people who probably parked their other vehicles down where State 54 crosses the South Anna, and are now freezing their asses off in canoes somewhere between here and there.

  I zip up. It’s one of those days that feels so good inside a sun-blessed car and so bad when you get out and the wind slaps you upside the head.

  There’s nothing much to see, and I’m sure Custalow wonders what we’re doing out here in God’s country; but I know this is the easiest, most logical access to the river upstream from where they found Isabel’s body.

  I walk down the boat ramp and then wander as far off it as I can get without ruining a decent pair of shoes.

  The trees and the rest of the vegetation are all yellow and red. It makes me want to take a trip up to Skyline Drive.

  “Liberal bastard leaves,” R.P. muttered, the last time the two of us went into the mountains to climb Old Rag. “They’re changing later, trying to convince us that global warming is real. Don’t fall for that socialist crap.”

  I need to introduce him to Phil Patterson.

  I break off a branch that’ll do for a makeshift walking stick and edge out to where the dirt turns to mud. I’m maybe twenty feet from the ramp when I see something unnatural mostly hidden in the weeds up ahead.

  Custalow has worn manly shoes, the kind that’ll sustain you in anything from a foot of snow to a foot of river mud. He steps out to where I’m pointing and comes back with a little cobaltblue rectangle, made of something vaguely resembling plastic. It’s a spiritual cousin to those bird-stranglers that hold six-packs together, destined to be here long after we’re gone, mankind’s most successful attempt at immortality. Something for the colo-nists of Alpha Boogaaboogaa Six to marvel over when they pick over the dessicated bones of our human-free planet a million years from now.

  The blue rectangle probably was once surrounded by paper. The outside of the paper would have borne a stamp and some verbiage promising an irresistible offer inside, perhaps even warning of dire consequences should the envelope not be opened.

  I suppose the paper, and whatever else accompanied it, are long gone, washed down the river or disintegrated by the elements.

  Maybe the addressee picked up his mail on the way out. Maybe it was sitting on a car seat. Maybe it fell out of the car when that person opened the door, for whatever reason, at this deserted landing. If it were night, maybe that person didn’t realize he’d lost something, and maybe junk mail like this wouldn’t have been missed when he returned to wherever he came from.

  Custalow brushes the card off, then sticks it down into the water that stops a few inches from his right boot, washing it off.

  He reads it and then hands it to me. His eyes seem a little wider than usual. I haven’t shared all I know with Abe, either.

  I look at the card, then put it in my shirt pocket.

  Neither of us speaks as we walk back to the car.

  We head back to town, the radio confirming that we were wise to deny the Redskins our Sunday afternoon attention. Abe doesn’t question me when I direct him to turn right off Cary Street.

  Windsor Farms is the kind of neighborhood that makes a couple of guys from Oregon Hill feel like we ought to be trimming the boxwoods or bringing in some mulch. Like we ought to explain what the hell white trash like us is doing here. (Ironically, as we both know, it’s possible to be white trash without even being white.)

  The streets are all curves and cul-de-sacs. The message is clear: If you don’t know where you are, you don’t belong here.

  I have the address, I think I know where we’re headed, but still it takes us fifteen minutes. Custalow is somewhere between uneasy and exasperated. Finally, though, we find it, identified only by the street number. No name.

  I go in alone. Just by being Custalow, big, wide, ethnic and somewhat muddy, he could draw the cops.

  I ring the bell twice before it is opened, if only a few inches. With the bright, setting sun behind me, I can see inside.

  A female voice, old and quavering, asks me what I want.

  “Mrs. Chadwick?” I ask, feeling like a twelve-year-old kid trying to sell tickets to a chicken-and-barbecue dinner.

  “Mrs. Chadwick is lying down,” the voice responds, and my ears pick up the African-American accent. I imagine a family retainer of long decades’ service. Maybe, when Christina Chadwick dies, they’ll just bury her faithful servant, too.

  I press ahead. I present my business card, and the hand, light tan like my own, takes it after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Would you please tell Mrs. Chadwick that I’d like to ask her about Isabel Ducharme?”

  The hand pauses, and I think for a moment that she’s just going to drop the card on the ground.

  “Just a moment,” she says. The hand goes away and the door closes.

  It seems like ten minutes before it opens again. It’s still only cracked a few inches, and I can see now that there’s a chain attached on the inside.

  The voice, surprisingly strong, is pure Richmond West End, the kind of voice that inevitably will ask of you at a cocktail party, “Who are your people?”

  “What do you want?” she asks.

  “I wanted to ask you about Isabel Ducharme, the girl who was murdered a couple of weeks ago.”

  There is a pause.

  “I don’t know any Isabel Ducharme,” she says. I can barely make out her milky blue eyes on the other side of the chain.

  I can’t mention Clara. Christina would know who let her secret out.

  “You were at her memorial.”

  Another pause.

  “Young man, I go to many funerals these days, too many. It’s what old people do.”

  “But you didn’t know her?”

  I can barely make out a sigh.

  “It touched my heart, that girl dying like that . . .”

  There is a pause, as if she is mustering some kind of inner strength.

  “Excuse me,” she says, her voice sounding suddenly equal to her age.

  There is silence for half a minute, then the maid comes back.

  “You will have to leave,” she says. “Mrs. Chadwick is not well.”

  If I don’t, she informs me, the police will be summoned.

  “Home, James,” I tell Custalow.

  “You’re not getting into something you can’t get out of, are you?” he asks me after we park the car. We both have our heads on swivels, but nothing moves in the fast-approaching darkness except the drug entrepreneurs across the street.

  “I took the reporter’s oath,” I tell him. “Don’t share anything until you’re ready to write.”

  “Look,” he says, stopping in the alleyway, “this isn’t just getting a story. I know that guy. You know him. You fuck with him, he’ll hurt you.”

  I tell him I know what he’s saying, and I appreciate it.

  “But something’s not rig
ht,” is the best way I can put it.

  “Yeah,” he says, “there’s a lot that’s not right. But you’ve got to pick your fights.”

  That’s rich, coming from a guy who once fought four boys, all older than him, because they were picking on a skinny kid who had just enough African-American blood in him to make him an easy target.

  “I know,” I tell him. “Thing is, I’ve picked this one.”

  When we get back, there are three calls on my machine.

  The first one’s from Peggy, who wants to know if I’m coming over to watch the Dodgers and Phillies with Les tonight.

  The second one’s from Sally at the paper.

  “Just wanted to give you a heads-up,” she says. She’s speaking softly, almost whispering, a rarity for Sally. “Rumor is we’re having another round of layoffs, starting tomorrow. You might want to be here.”

  Damn. It’s been about eight months since the last time. Twelve staffers got the ax, and none of them deserved it. They called people at home and told them the publisher wanted to see them at an appropriate time the next day. Grubby set aside thirty minutes for each departing soul. Being good journalists, pretty much everyone knew he or she was on the block, but they had to show up anyhow, to find out what if any benefits they had coming, what kind of head start the suits were giving them in their race to beat poverty to the finish line.

  The numbers skewed severely toward the old-timers. It isn’t age discrimination, was the way the discharged city editor’s lawyer explained it to him, it’s wage discrimination. If you’ve been around twenty or thirty years, you make more money than the kids do. And there’s no law against wage discrimination.

  With a quarter-century of experience working against me, I’m hesitant to take the third call.

  I’m relieved for a moment when I hear Andi’s voice, but then I’m not.

  “Daddy,” she says, “Can you come get me?”

  She called less than thirty minutes ago. I’m at her apartment in fifteen minutes.

  She’d gotten a call. The guy asked her if she wanted to wind up like Isabel Ducharme. He said he’d been watching her, and that she had a good future, if she didn’t lose her head.