I heard the agent take a long, deep breath, and then I heard him exhale it. “Captain Decker’s in the ICU at Vanderbilt Hospital,” he finally said. “He’s lost a lot of blood. They’re not sure if he’s going to make it.”
“Oh dear God,” I said. “He did go to the prison, didn’t he? This happened to him there.”
“What makes you say that, Dr. Brockton?”
“Because he mentioned it a couple days ago, when I saw him. He’s working a case involving an inmate there. Nick Satterfield. The serial killer. Satterfield’s . . . girlfriend, his groupie—I don’t know what to call her—she helped Satterfield send a threat to me. A threat and an amputated finger. Decker came to see me a few days ago, to tell me they’d arrested her. While he was here, he said something about paying a visit to Satterfield.”
“What, exactly, did he say?”
I hesitated; I didn’t want to create more problems for Decker, but I didn’t see any clear alternative to the truth. “He said he might go see Satterfield, might rattle his cage a bit.”
“Did he use those words? ‘Rattle his cage’?”
“I think so. Would you please just tell me what’s happened?”
“Bear with me, Dr. Brockton. Was it Captain Decker who suggested rattling Satterfield’s cage? Or was it you?”
“What?” He didn’t respond. “No, it wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Decker who mentioned it, but he wasn’t serious. He was just talking, you know?”
“No, sir, I don’t know,” he said. “What I do know is that Captain Decker went to see Mr. Satterfield. And there was a violent confrontation in the interview room. And Captain Decker nearly bled out on the floor.”
I had a terrible sense of déjà vu—of Satterfield uncoiling and striking down a good man, out of pure malevolence and unadulterated evil.
“I don’t understand how that could happen,” I said. “Aren’t the prisoners behind glass, or bars, or a wire screen, or something? Aren’t they shackled, or cuffed? Or at least guarded?”
“Captain Decker requested a private interview,” the agent said. “In a room. And he asked the guard to remove the prisoner’s restraints.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Jesus. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know, sir. I thought maybe you could tell me.”
“But what happened? You said Decker lost a lot of blood. Did Satterfield have a knife? A shiv—is that what it’s called?”
“He had a razor blade,” said Fielding. “Hidden in his mouth. He must’ve been expecting trouble.”
“He was causing the trouble,” I snapped. “He sent that finger, and he waited. It was a trap. Bait. And how the hell did he get hold of a razor blade?”
“You’d be amazed what inmates can get hold of. Drugs. Phones. Weapons. Women. Anyhow, by the time the guards got in and broke up the fight, Decker was cut pretty bad. Satterfield went for the neck—he cut the jugular vein, and he was still cutting when they pulled him off. Almost got the carotid artery, the ER docs said.”
“That sick sonofabitch,” I said. I didn’t know whether to weep or scream. “I guess he just wants to take as many people down with him as he can.”
“That’s not the way he tells it, Dr. Brockton,” said the agent.
“What do you mean?” I was echoing the question Fielding had asked two minutes earlier, but my tone—unlike his—was anything but casual.
“Satterfield says it was self-defense. Says Decker was trying to kill him. Says Decker came there to kill him.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “That can’t be true.”
“No? That’s not all he says, Dr. Brockton. He says Decker was doing it for you.”
“Oh, bullshit,” I snapped.
“For you and your wife,” the agent went on. “Decker told Satterfield you and your wife promised him ten thousand dollars.”
“How dare you?” My voice sounded both loud and muffled—as if I were shouting, but shouting from somewhere far away. “Do you even know who Satterfield is, and what he’s done?”
“Yes, sir, actually, I am familiar with Satterfield’s record.”
The words “Satterfield’s record” seemed a mockery to me.
“Do you know what he did, actually, to the four women he killed?”
“I’ve seen the autopsy reports, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s only a small part of what I mean,” I snapped. “Can you imagine the pain and the terror he put those women through, on their way to those autopsy reports?”
“No, sir, I guess I can’t.”
“I guess not. And do you know that he cut off my wife’s finger—in front of me, and our son, and his girlfriend—just for kicks? Just to give us a little taste of what he had in store for us?”
“I am aware of that,” he said. “And I certainly don’t condone it.”
“Don’t condone it?” I was practically roaring now. “Well, that’s mighty big of you, Agent Fielding, not to condone it.”
“Dr. Brockton? Sir? I need you to take a step back and calm down. I’m sorry if my choice of words offended you. No doubt about it, Satterfield’s done terrible things. But those things aren’t the issue right now. The issue right now is, he’s alleging crimes have been committed, by Captain Deck—”
“Give me a break,” I interrupted. “You’re going to take a convicted serial killer’s word over a police officer’s?”
“Let me finish,” he said. “He’s alleging crimes were committed by Captain Decker, and by you and your wife. Attempted murder by Captain Decker, and conspiracy to commit murder, by you and your wife.”
“My wife,” I spat, “is dying. And frankly, Agent Fielding, in light of that, I don’t give a good goddamn what Satterfield says. If you’ve got an ounce of decency in you, neither will you.”
Whatever response he had to that, I didn’t hear it. I had already hit “end.”
AFTER THE CALL ABOUT DECKER, I LEFT CAMPUS—AS if by leaving my office, I could leave my worries—and headed toward home. But as I turned west onto Kingston Pike—toward the mansions that signaled the boundary of Sequoyah Hills—I felt myself slowing, and then turning into the parking lot of Second Presbyterian Church. Our church: the church where Kathleen and I had worshipped for years, first as young marrieds, then as young parents, then as youth-group leaders for Jeff and his friends.
The church, a soaring neo-Gothic structure of tan sandstone, sat high on a green rise, looking timeless and serene. Blessedly, the sanctuary was both unlocked and empty, its stained-glass windows ablaze with afternoon light. Slipping into a pew near the back, I bowed my head and prayed—or tried to pray. But the words felt lost in space; they echoed in my heart as loudly as they might have echoed in the vault of the nave, had I shouted them at the top of my lungs.
Tucked into racks on the backs of the pews, alongside well-worn copies of the Presbyterian Hymnal, were copies of the Bible, not so worn. Slipping a Bible from the nearest rack, I flipped through it until I came to the Book of Job. I’d never actually read it, but I’d heard the story countless times over the years: Job was a good and pious man, brought to the breaking point by an onslaught of misfortunes. Through it all—tragedy upon tragedy, all of them undeserved—Job’s faith held firm, and in the end, God rewarded him. Maybe I could learn something from Job, I thought, as I began to read. Maybe Job could help me make sense of what was happening, or at least help me face it with faith and peace. Maybe Job could even teach me how to do the real trick: to snatch True Happiness from the bloody jaws of tragedy.
The story’s opening was much as I had expected: God praises Job’s piety to Satan, and Satan responds by taunting God—challenging God. “He’s rich and happy,” Satan sneers. “Of course he’s pious.” And so begins a contest, a wager, between God and Satan; a tug-of-war, with Job as the rope, tested by a torrent of tragedies. In the space of a single chapter, a series of messengers arrives, one on the heels of another, reciting loss upon loss—all Job’s possessions—7,000 sheep, 3
,000 camels, 500 teams of oxen, 500 female donkeys—as well as the demise of all of his farmhands, shepherds, and servants.
But worse—far, far worse—is yet to come. Another messenger arrives immediately, informing Job that his seven sons and three daughters, feasting together in a son’s house, have all perished in a fierce, house-leveling windstorm. Like each of the prior bearers of bad tidings, this one concludes by saying, “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
The litany of his losses complete, Job stands up, rips his clothes, and shaves his head. Then, a sentence later—to my astonishment—Job gets over it. In what struck me as the world’s swiftest resolution of grief, he simply shrugs it off. “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb,” he says, “and naked thither I shall return: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Baffled, I reread that passage—reread it several times, in fact; it didn’t take long. I stared and squinted at the page. “Them’s the breaks,” Job seemed to be saying. “Easy come, easy go.” By the time I’d read his words enough times to memorize them, I was no longer just puzzled; I was also, I realized, angry. I could understand, and I could admire, Job’s tranquility in the face of material losses. Stuff, after all, is only stuff, if you ignore the countless corpses of servants and livestock littering Job’s property. But to suffer such slight, offhand pain—a torn robe, a shaved head, and an “oh well”—at the death of his children? His ten children? I didn’t get it. I didn’t believe it. Was Job a man—an actual flesh-and-blood father? Or was he something else, some colder-blooded creature masquerading as a man?
I decided to give Job the benefit of the doubt, or at least to try. After all, I’d read only the first chapter. Maybe Job would get more real; more believable; more human.
Instead, Job got clobbered again.
In round two, God gives Satan permission to ruin Job’s health. Before you can say “Jack Robinson,” Job breaks out in boils from head to toe. Sitting in a pile of ashes, he’s reduced to scraping his scabrous, oozing skin with a shard of pottery.
It was there, midway through Chapter Two, that I came to an electrifying expression of humanity—but not from Job himself. From his wife. “Curse God and die,” she tells him, practically spitting the words through her tears. As I read those bitter words again and again—“Curse God and die”—it dawned on me that the bitterness must have poured directly from the fissure in her heart: a heart broken not just by her children’s deaths, but also by their father’s offhandedness and aloofness. In just four words, Job’s wife expressed deep, primal pain. Facing the loss of Kathleen, the person I loved best in all the world, I understood and liked and believed Job’s wife, in a way that I didn’t understand or like or believe Job.
And what is Job’s response to his anguished wife? He tells her to shut up. And then he begins to talk. And talk. And talk. For forty chapters, Job and four other guys talk. They argue about God, about suffering, and about Job himself. Why do the righteous suffer? Why do the wicked get off scot-free? How come God’s being such a jerk when I, Job, have played by all the rules?
As I read the debate—as Job kvetched ad nauseum about his undeserved suffering and his spotless conscience (“I’m pure gold,” he says at one point)—I found myself getting madder than ever.
Eventually even the Almighty has had enough of Job’s self-righteous whining. Speaking from a whirlwind in a mighty voice, God puts Job in his puny place, pointing out in no uncertain terms what a tiny, trivial, know-nothing Job is compared to God, the creator of the universe. Job apologizes, and at that point God rewards him: God cures Job’s pox, makes him richer than ever, and gives him a passel more kids. All’s well that ends well.
I closed the Bible, still confused, and still mad—furious, in fact, for reasons I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Tucking the book back into the rack alongside the hymnals, I stood up, stretched my back, and looked around at the magnificent architecture: the high, vaulted nave; the mighty stone columns; the graceful arches; the stained glass, its blues deepening to indigo in the waning light, its reds darkening into wine and blood.
I stepped outside and let the sanctuary door sigh shut. As it closed, I heard a latch snapping into place with a metallic click. Reaching back, I gave the handle a tug. The door, which had been open when I’d arrived, was now locked tight. Was it an omen? A punishment—banishment—for my cynical response to Job? Or was it simply a spring-loaded piece of steel popping into place, as it was designed to do?
It was after six when I pulled into the garage at home, but Kathleen’s space was still empty. I called her cell, but the call went straight to voice mail, which meant either that she was on a call or that her phone was switched off. She hadn’t left a note on the kitchen table, the usual place for notes; when I checked for messages on the home phone, I found voice mails from half a dozen reporters—including Athena Demopoulos of Nashville’s Channel 4 and Mike Malloy, Fox 5 News!—and, at the end, a message from Kathleen: “Hi, honey. I’ve gone to a meeting at the Wellness Community. A support group for people with cancer. I’ll call you when I get done.”
I listened to the message three times. Its matter-of-factness baffled me; from the brevity and the tone, she might just as easily have been telling me that she was at the grocery store, or swinging by the public library to return a book. I hung up the phone and wandered back to the bedroom, thinking, How did this happen? How did we become the cancer family? I half expected the doorbell to ring, and to find myself face-to-face with a neighbor delivering a casserole and pity.
Sitting on the bed to take off my shoes, I noticed the nightstand drawer slightly ajar. I reached out to close it, but then—instead—I slid it open. Nestled deep in the drawer, hidden beneath a wavy, outdated telephone directory, I found it: the nine-millimeter pistol loaned to me by Decker—Decker, who had foolishly, and perhaps fatally, put himself within striking distance of Satterfield’s fangs.
CONTRARY TO HER MESSAGE, KATHLEEN DID NOT call; she simply came home, unannounced, sometime after nine. “Tell me about the support group,” I said, anxious—desperate, perhaps—to reconnect with her; to feel that I was somehow a part of the experience, a part of her experience, a partner.
“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” she said, and I felt hurt and excluded. “I’m exhausted. What I’d really like is to take a shower and go to bed. Can we do that? Could we just curl up and go to sleep?”
“Of course,” I said. “Whatever you want.”
But I’d promised more than I could deliver. I lay awake for hours, trying to sort out the tailspin that was now our life. When at last I fell asleep, I dreamed of Job—a pair of cynical, sacrilegious dreams, both of them set at the end of Job’s tribulations.
In the first dream, God bent down and ruffled Job’s hair, scratching him behind the ears as if he were a dog, cooing, “Who’s a good boy? Job’s a good boy! What a good boy!” Then God lobbed a treat into the air, whereupon Job leapt into the air and caught the morsel in his mouth.
The second dream was even stranger than the first. In this one, God looked like a TV game-show host—specifically, like the host of Let’s Make a Deal—and Job was a contestant who had just won. To celebrate Job’s victory, the angel Gabriel gave a loud blast on his trumpet, and the Almighty beamed beneficently as the heavenly hosts clapped and cheered. When the applause subsided, God commanded, “Gabriel, tell Job what he’s just won!” The angel lowered his horn and said, in a silky announcer’s voice, “God, Job’s Grand Prize package starts with one thousand fertile female donkeys. But that’s only the beginning. To work the fields, Job gets a thousand teams of oxen—a total of two thousand oxen!” A woman in a skimpy robe led a donkey and an ox out to stand on the cloud beside Job. “To travel the deserts in style,” Gabriel went on, “Job receives six thousand new top-of-the-line dromedary camels! And to round out his livestock portfolio: how about fourteen thousand fluffy sheep!” As another woman led out a camel and a sheep, Job raised his
arms exultantly, and the angels cheered again. “But that’s not all, God,” continued Gabriel. “To make sure he has plenty of time to enjoy his new prosperity, Job gets another one hundred forty years of life!” More ecstatic applause ensued, along with a chorus of strumming harps; Job gasped and wiped away tears of gratitude with the sleeves of his robe. “Last but not least, Lord, Job gets a fabulous new family—ten new kids, twice as smart and good-looking as the old ones!” As the children appeared, all ten of them, Job whooped and hollered, pumping his fists in the air triumphantly.
I woke up at that, shocked from sleep by the irreverent image. As I got my bearings—lying beside Kathleen, outwardly in the same way I had for the past three decades, but with everything between us now changed—I found myself thinking about the one key character who had not appeared in my sacrilegious dreams: the same character who hadn’t, I suddenly realized, appeared in the Bible story’s happy ending. Job’s wife, I thought. Where’s the woman with the broken, bitter heart? I also thought of the ten new children. Were the new children conceived and carried by the same old wife? Did they fill the void left by the ten dead ones? Or are some losses beyond recompense or redemption?
I lay still, listening—listening for a whirlwind, and a Voice within it offering eloquent answers—but all I heard were crickets and cicadas, and the waning wail of a freight train keening somewhere in the distant dark.
I DIDN’T PRESSURE KATHLEEN TO DROP HER OPPOSITION to treatment—not overtly, at least—but I did persuade her, through a combination of cajoling and browbeating, to let me speak with Dr. Spitzer, the Vanderbilt specialist who had diagnosed her cancer. At the appointed time, we called him from our living room, sitting together but listening and talking separately, each on our own cordless phone. Kathleen spoke first, sounding oddly formal and slightly embarrassed to be imposing—or to have me imposing—on Spitzer’s time. Brushing aside her apology, he asked how she was feeling. “Pretty good, I guess, for a dying woman,” she said, and her matter-of-fact fatalism made me wince. “I get short of breath when I go up stairs. Also, I feel really bloated now, as you predicted, and I can’t eat more than a few bites before I feel stuffed.”
The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel Page 24