The lights of a police cruiser illuminated her car’s interior with the sad blue cast of a failing nightspot. Although she was driving barefoot, she hadn’t done anything obviously illegal. He’d see she was respectable. She watched in the mirror as he got out of the squad car and hitched himself in three places before beginning the slow walk to her side.
“Everything all right, ma’am?”
She’d had only two glasses of wine but wasn’t eager to pronounce the fact, and she was careful not to fumble the retrieval of her registration. He looked at her license, looked at her, then back to the picture, then to her, each time pausing a trifle longer.
“You heading home now, Ms. Mogrin?”
She nodded, thankful he hadn’t asked her to step out for a roadside exam.
“Just because there’s no traffic doesn’t make it okay to stop here. It’s posted.”
“I’m sorry. I was here this morning when Officer Hostetter got hurt. I came back to… offer a prayer.”
“I’m sure she’d appreciate your concern.” He tapped the license on the window rim. “So you know this’s not a good area to be stopping this time of night.”
“It’s on the way up, though, don’t you think? Someday, the city will come back to the river.” She couldn’t help it. Maybe that’s all her prayer was intended to be: something hopeful spoken over this bloodied soil.
“I care about what happens tonight,” he said, returning her papers. “You drive home safe and leave the riverside to us.”
She pulled away carefully and watched to be sure the officer didn’t follow. She couldn’t go home yet. That wasn’t a good place for forgetting, either.
She headed for the Interstate, dropped her windows so the crosswinds buffeted the interior and pushed to a practically legal eighty. At the Palisade exit she circled back, desert scrub to her right, orchards and vineyards on the left, the city ahead glowing like a radium dial.
It was Neulan’s fault. He had phoned her on his way out of town, for reasons she could only guess. It was her fault. Instead of hanging up, she agreed to meet him and chose the place. It was Brian’s fault. Playing the protector, his adrenaline-washed reflexes. It was their fault. The two of them each half-thinking and relying on the other. They should have simply walked away. Or called the police, admitted they were idiots and told an approximation of the truth before their mistakes became compounded by cover-up. But in their moment of panic, they could not arrange their acts into a plausible narrative of how Neulan had died.
In truth, she was gratified to have trapped a dazed Neulan at the cliff edge and to prod his faith, question his rectitude and accuse him of murders he refused to neither admit nor deny. Neulan pitching off Cold Shivers Point meant there would be no similar, self-justifying public forum. His anonymous end seemed just retribution for having reduced young women like Helen to a few lines in a memorial scholarship.
Brian, though, spiraled down into an anguish he could not quell. While she slumbered, he jolted up out of sleep, gasping, clawing back time. He was so keen to repair the world’s wounds and assume its burdens. That had always been the difference between them—and the attraction. She observed wrongs and he went forth to right them. It was as if she wielded his healing power.
One manic night, tossed by visions of flash floods and floating corpses, Brian riveted her with a question: What if it’s found?
It—the body, Neulan kept nameless. Their encounter had become the incident; Neulan’s fall, the mishap; their cover-up was resolution. Abstraction was best to deal with such worries. But bones were most stubborn things.
A click and a rustling told her Brian had returned. He was undressing in the dark by their apartment’s front door. So as not to wake her? He should have known her blood would be thundering, her senses alert to the faintest sound. Floorboards muttered his approach. His weight pressed a sigh from the mattress. She rolled to face him and was shocked to meet a foul marinade of sweat, gasoline and smoke.
Both of them stared at the four-o’clock ceiling.
“Is everything okay?” she whispered.
After a deep breath and long exhale to stop his voice from quaking, he said, “No, of course it’s not.” A moment later, he corrected himself. “I’ve never done this before, so how would I know?”
He was shivering. She sought his hand and found it over his sternum, cradling a fist. “I’m sorry you had to do this,” she said.
“Let’s not keep going over it,” he said. “It’s done.”
It was. But they could not resolve what it meant. Brian wanted to confess without implicating her. She refused to allow his sacrifice for what she believed was a proper outcome. They finally agreed they would come forth together or not at all. Their trust, which had always offset their differences, now cemented their conspiracy, and they continued to live in this suspended state of disagreement until the impasse devolved into a numbness that made them inaccessible to each other.
To atone, Brian chose to live according to his convictions; he jumped back into teaching. Meg fled the classroom, no longer willing to present herself as a moral figure; her solution was to reinvent herself. The effects of their split passed for its cause. Brian’s new job on a Hopi Indian reservation was incompatible with Meg’s new career in real estate. Her friends, who had weathered their own family decisions, thought they understood.
You’ve been a busy girl.
I wondered when you’d show up tonight.
I wouldn’t miss it. The scholarship’s in my honor, after all. But despite that, it’s been hard to get a thought in edgewise.
Is that what our conversations are—thoughts?
I think it’s best if we don’t get too analytical here. I thought I detected a whiff of him tonight. You know he’s not welcome.
Sorry. It was involuntary.
No kidding. Let’s talk about the girl.
What did you think of her?
If only Mom and Dad had named me something cool like Pandora!
You didn’t need the help.
I will take that as a compliment.
Do. I miss you, Hel.
You have made that plain, Madge, and I appreciate the effort.
So you approve.
Yes. She’s the best one so far.
But not the best ever.
No. That would take a miracle.
An unknown number from AZ, USA, sat in Meg’s missed calls the next morning. No message. A robocall or an out-of-state prospect? She sensed it was neither. She only knew one person in the 928 area code. Reaching out and retreating was about the only way she ever heard from Brian. His last actual words had come postmarked from Tuba City two years ago. No salutation, signature or return address. Nothing precisely personal in the eighteen lines of semierotic free verse that fell out of the envelope. She granted him the occasional bout of longing. On the chance his call on the day of Helen’s remembrance was something more than a coincidence, she called the number.
A woman answered—Food Mart—in what sounded like a Native American lilt. What sort of tale had Brian told so he could use the phone? He wasn’t a charmer, exactly, but he was trustworthy, definitely the type a woman would let behind the counter.
“I’d like to leave a message for Brian Mogrin if he comes in. Do you know him?”
“Maybe.”
“Then please write this down. Ready?”
“Go ahead.”
“No message is still a message.”
“That’s it?”
It was not. She wanted to say: Do you think you’re the only one with yearnings? If Brian had tired of his exile, she understood. Penance should have an end. But he must do better than no-return-address poetry and convenience store cryptograms.
“He’ll know the rest.”
Do you have any problems concentrating and/or remembering things?
—Vulnerability Index Prescreen for Single Adults
A shrill buzzing rose and fell, approached and departed, chattered as it slowed and then
screamed away again. Two circuits. Three. Then quiet. Not a weed whacker; they burned weeds out here. He checked the sky. The sheriff’s drone flew as high as four hundred feet so it might be hard to spot. Shouldn’t surveillance be silent? If the point was sowing intimidation, though, it was working. His noise-infected thoughts circled the idea of retreat.
Same reason he’d left the river. To choose a camp you had to understand who was there as well as who had been there the longest or who was strongest, because they set the rules and vetted the campers. Then you had to know who was allowed to ignore the rules, because there were always exceptions and hidden power struggles, and watch the watchers, looking for something to steal. The worst was all those voices worse for wear: pointless quarrels, selfish complaints, the ignorant things people said. The call and response of sleepers yelping at the drunks to shut up! and the drunks bellowing at the sleepers to go to hell!
At the first sign of Lord of the Flies, it was time to get out.
The zeeeeEEEEEEEEE started up again like line spooling from a hot reel. He saw three of them now, too big to be playing in the road with a radio-controlled car, drinking from what looked like tennis ball cans. They didn’t seem that dangerous but danger didn’t always look like itself. He checked the sheath in his sock, just in case. He hated carrying a knife but he didn’t want to be someone who died for disregarding the wisdom of the pack. Isaac was that fool who got robbed clubbed stabbed choked kicked to death in his camp because he didn’t listen, because he made himself too easy to take. So he listened and slept with Jake’s knife beneath his pad where he could find it. And each night its cold point edged a little closer to his heart.
Way too much sugar. Sometimes the bagel shop gave Isaac a day-old freebie if he’d take his coffee to go. None today but he took his order outside anyway. Always too much of this or not enough of that, a buzz in his head or a rumble in his gut. He didn’t starve or pig out but he had no routine, either. Non-refrigerateds, pull-top cans, cereal out of the box, denteds and expireds. Peanut butter, canned meats and beans for protein. Salted snacks, energy bars, pepperoni, Little Debbie cakes can’t go bad. Pickles had vitamins but no calories. He wasn’t a fan of fruit; if it was free, it was already too ripe. Cabbage was okay, just peel off the bad leaves. Brick cheese, scrape off the mold. Priced-for-Quick-Sale baskets, BOGO, Manager’s Special, Tuesday Tacos. Five-Dollar-Friday whole roasted chicken, too much to eat by himself so share it with somebody who shared back. Soup kitchen closed on weekends, so today it’s church-basement Wonder Bread sandwiches served with blessings at Whitman Park. Filling, but who puts margarine on a cheese sandwich? Some guys speed-bus the tables at the food court, but he had strict standards. Nobody’s leftovers for him. Creamer, sugar and ketchup packs only—but no more sugar today! No shoplifting and stay out of dumpsters, too. Isaac left that to the ones who couldn’t do any better. A pride thing. It saved money to live rentless but it cost you years, sniffles, soggy clothes, lost belongings, shrinkage of yourself. Living small made you seem smaller, less significant. Not many fat people living on the river. No master bedrooms or two-car garages. They had nothing but that wasn’t what put people like Isaac in a tent. It was having too much of something. Thoughts, panics, blues, smoke, drink, drugs, attitude. Like the sugar shakes he had right now. Maybe if he biked hard back to camp he could burn it off before he crashed.
Isaac Samson’s camp was almost perfect. Miles from the river and even further from the aimless flutter around the Bermuda Triangle of the shelter, Walmart and the mental health clinic. It was concealed in a thicket of ditchwater trees next to a leased hay field back from a stub road that ran between an office park and the Goodwill, where they didn’t care if he used the restroom. The Express Suites had a free breakfast where half the guests looked like they came from a shelter with their flannel pants and blank eyes. It was good to grab a banana, honey and some hard-boiled eggs, but he didn’t overdo it. The nearby mall was depressing in a bus-station-the-day-after-Christmas way and Security stink-eyed anyone with a backpack, but he could keep cool in the summer if he dressed clean, carried a book and stayed out of the stores.
Across the road were a few dozen vinyl-clad townhouses built right before the crash. The owners not foreclosed were too stunned from being underwater to do much of anything but work and watch TV with the blinds closed. Next door, a scatter of outbuildings behind a small house farmer-built with no particular style, now occupied by renters who either turned over quickly or whose appearance changed drastically according to the meth supply. On the face of it, maybe not a premier set-up but Isaac had a notarized letter from the landowner informing To Whom It May Concern that Isaac Samson had Barry Lester’s permission to camp there.
Barry collected rent off the books from the rough clan next door while waiting for the housing market to resume its northward march across his property. Isaac camped at the edge of the field in exchange for a couple hours a day at Freedom City, where Barry signed the paychecks. Well, not paychecks; Barry paid only in cash and only for special jobs like rigging a flagpole or setting up a bounce castle for a party.
Barry started out as Flag City, selling specialty flags via what they used to call mail order, mostly to customers who bought Made in America. His best products were U.S. military standards and POW-MIA flags, the fringed guidons used by color guards and in government buildings, school and custom rodeo banners sewed by relatives Barry’s Internet bride Mai brought over from Vietnam. The walk-in store stocked flags of all nations and denominations for patriots and party animals alike. The Confederate battle flag, Jolly Rogers, lapel pin flags and bunting, Broncos car pennants, boat flags with martini glasses and Playboy Bunnies, peace symbols, rainbows, Yin-Yang and Tibetan prayer flags, Catholic flags, Episcopalian flags. Just about anything except a Muslim flag or hammer and sickle. Swastikas were available but strictly behind the counter for collectors only.
Flag City’s glory time came post-9/11, but even an enthusiastic repeat flag customer only shows up about once a decade. Meanwhile Barry’s Chinese suppliers had figured out patriotism had certain price points and started selling below him, direct over the Internet. Compete, grow or die, that was capitalism, and Barry couldn’t afford to die. Some of his best Stars and Stripes and Don’t Tread On Me customers were into survivalism. One day Barry watched a prepper webinar that convinced him he wasn’t in the flag business, he was in the Preserving Our Way of Life business, which would kick into high gear once the central government and its fiat currency went bankrupt. He renamed the store Freedom City and stocked up on prepper specialty items. Unfortunately, the sales of home generators, water purifiers, hand-cranked radios and macaroni in ten-gallon tubs peaked without black helicopters and global collapse. So why not celebrate in the meantime with patriotic and holiday yard decorations? Get someone to go for Frosty the Snowman one winter, he might think about an Easter Bunny or a Jack-o-Lantern for next time the grandkids came over. Inflatables were an impulse buy. Nobody went shopping for a Hansel and Gretel popping from an oven. Barry’s customers had to see them full-size and in action so to speak, to be aware they could choose from Santas in all kinds of situations, even one coming out of an outhouse—add the laughing elf for twenty bucks more. The next Christmas they could add a Lamb of God Jesus or a blow-up nativity scene, although in Isaac’s opinion, the Mary and Joseph in that one looked too much like Cabbage Patch Kids.
Placed outdoors, the displays attracted attention from the heavy mall-bound traffic but also from kids who liked to shoot Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer with a pellet gun or relocate Frankenstein to a neighbor’s swimming pool. Since Barry was a desk potato and Mai weighed about as much as two of the sandbags used to anchor the displays, neither was keen about the daily set-up and tear-down required. They needed someone who’d work an hour in the morning and another at night, for next to nothing and no chance of advancement. Who better than the guy they caught mining cardboard in the Freedom City dumpster? A satisfactory arrangement all around.
/> Isaac’s time was constrained by his open-and-close, seven-day-a-week bargain with Barry. He had to fill the empty hours without his head overflowing. Moving, waiting, thinking, always thinking. Thoughts ballooned, threatening to carry him away. Or they snagged high in the trees. The voices he sometimes heard came from his own mind, he knew, at least now when they were silent. But somewhere real words were being formed by real lips and they gathered in unwaveable clouds of gnats and bats and wasps whose sting he could not reason away. He always carried a book as if it were a device to arrest his mind’s fibrillation. He’d find a story, trace a line at a time, turn the pages and lose himself in the flow. A book was coverpaperinkletterwordphrasesentenceparagraphpagechaptertheend. So few things were so finely connected like that.
He unrolled his yoga mat and settled against a bale filched from the hay field. He was half into a good story about a cowboy being squeezed off his land by a greater power. The same old story, really. The horse was going to die, but Isaac looked forward to that part, knowing his heart would be broken. He cried for whatever could turn out no other way than it always did. He cried for the good horses more than the good men because they were faithful, without any notion of their fate.
A line struck him. He unwrapped the crucifix of thick rubber bands around his notebook. He’d bought the entire stock of red and black cloth-bound volumes from a Barnes and Noble bargain table. In the reds he recorded passages from his reading, random observations, overheard conversations and rants. On visits to his storage unit, he copied the chronological entries into black books organized by categories: Coincidence, Wrong, Puzzle, Structure and Systems, Findings, Edison/Reagan and Elements of Control.
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