Eddie looked at my denim jacket. I had sewn the slice in the left sleeve closed and had scrubbed out most of the blood. It was by my standards presentable, no worse off looking than I was.
“You need a winter coat,” he observed.
“I think Tina got me one for Christmas.”
He was looking out over the ocean again. I studied the side of his wrinkled, black face. He chewed on his unlit cigar pensively.
“What’s going on Eddie?” I said.
“I need to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“There’s something you should know.”
“What?”
“I just heard it myself an hour ago. I don’t think too many people know yet.”
“Know what?”
“It’s about Frank and … “
“And what?”
Eddie said nothing. He couldn’t look at me. He stared at the waves rolling in. The tide was moving out, somewhere between high and low.
“Frank and what, Eddie?”
He still didn’t say anything.
“Eddie.”
He turned his head and looked at me then. He had tears in his already glassy eyes.
“You heard about the FBI finding bodies in that clearing on the reservation?”
“Yeah.”
“In the last three days they’ve found eight, and they’re still looking.”
I shrugged, as if to assert that it had nothing to do with me now. “Okay.”
“They’ve been running checks, trying to identify the remains, find out who they were back when they were alive. They had four of the eight identified, but just a little while ago they figured out who the fifth was. According to the FBI this body had been buried there longer than any of the others they’ve found so far. They’re thinking that it might be the first body that had been buried there, the first victim. That’s their word, ‘victim’. They think that body has been in the ground for thirty years.”
The wind moved past my ears. I waited for more from Eddie, uncertain still what this had to do with me.
“I’m sorry, Mac, I don’t know how to tell you this.”
“Tell me what, Eddie?”
“Everything’s going so good for you now. But that’s when it hits us, right?”
“Eddie. Eddie, Jesus. What is it you can’t tell me?”
Tears sprang from his eyes and wormed their way down the creases in his skin. I was prepared for the worst, or at least thought I was.
“The body they just identified was … “
“It was what, Eddie?”
He looked at me square then.
“It was what, Eddie?”
He said something then that at first sounded to me like some kind of foreign language. It had no effect on me that I was aware of. But then the words arranged themselves into English in my brain and I took all of it, all it meant and all it was, right between the eyes.
A wave crashed and hissed. I heard birds, sea gulls or egrets. It hit me hard, and I never saw it coming.
“It was your father, Mac,” Eddie had said. “It was your father.”
Tomorrow is Christmas. It is clearly winter now. The trees are all bare and the ground and everything in it is frozen hard. I do little. Tina comes by with things and is sweet. There is suddenly so much silence in my life. There is so much time to think about all the cripples: Augie, Tommy Miller, Eddie, the man with the limp, the Chief, me, even Tina. So many pieces lost. It seems now finally done, all of it, though I’m not sure what to make of that. But I do know now that this didn’t start with Amy Curry dying in a freezing pond. It didn’t start when Tommy Miller and his friends tried to rape Tina. This all started some decades ago, when Frank caved in my father’s skull with a crow bar and buried him and the murder weapon in that clearing by the bay on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.
I hear they know all kinds of things, all kinds of remarkable details, that forensics is an amazing science. But I don’t really care about that. I know all I need to know. My father is dead, and has been most of my life. He is no longer just missing, and there is no need to wonder any longer just why it was he left and why he couldn’t take me with him. I realize that he has been out here all along, always nearby -- under my feet as I played in that clearing as a boy, a mile from Augie’s home, a mile from the college where I met Catherine, waiting in a shallow grave just south of Montauk Highway, just waiting for the day he would be found.
Soon Tina will arrive and ask if I want anything. I seldom eat or drink. I just sit here in this chair by this window and look at the photograph Tina has given me of four smiling friends, of my four fathers, and know that I am what I am because of them and that is all there is to it. They each, Frank, the Chief, Augie, and my father, have in one way or another made me, shaped me into what I am. I cannot fight it any longer. I know my place in this town for the first time in my life. I needn’t hide from it anymore. I sit now in my rooms and wait, wait for my next chance meeting with Gale, wait for some kind of move from the Chief, wait for Curry take his revenge against me, and I know now for once just what I am.
I am Declan MacManus, and tomorrow is Christmas, and what I hope for is a good winter coat all my own.
The End
Also by Daniel Judson
The Poisoned Rose, Book One of The Gin Palace Trilogy
The Gin Palace, Book Three of The Gin Palace Trilogy
The Darkest Place
The Water’s Edge
The Violet Hour
Voyeur
About the Author:
Daniel Judson, a Shamus Award winner and four-time finalist, is the author of seven acclaimed works: The Southampton Trilogy, comprised of The Darkest Place, The Water’s Edge, and Voyeur, as well as The Gin Palace Trilogy, comprised of The Poisoned Rose, The Bone Orchard, and The Gin Palace. He is also the author of a stand-alone novel, The Violet Hour.
Website:
danieljudsonbooks.com
Facebook:
Facebook/Daniel Judson
Twitter:
Twitter.com/DDanielJudson
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