Whippoorwill

by Joseph Monninger

  “I want to talk to my dad. And I’m not his girl.”

  “Your dad is on his way.”

  I thought of the night when I heard Danny and his dad fighting. Like thunder on a summer night. Like voices over water.

  “Have you caught Wally?” I asked.

  “Who’s Wally?”

  “The dog that was with us.”

  The cowboy cop looked at the female cop. She shook her head.

  “They’ll do their best,” she said. “Does he have a tag on his collar?”

  I nodded.

  “Not a license,” I said. “Just a tag with his name on it and a phone number.”

  “Let’s make sure we get the dog,” the cowboy officer said to the female officer.

  She nodded.

  “Is that your dog?” he asked.

  “Danny’s dog.”

  “You said you weren’t his girl, but were you dating Danny?”

  “Not really. I grew up next to him.”

  “But you’re all the way up here. Were you heading north?”

  “What do you mean? We had to come north to get here from where we live.”

  “To Canada. Some people go across a border when they get into trouble. Did Danny suggest you go north? Maybe to hide out with him?”

  “No, he never said anything like that. Danny’s not like that. You’re making him out to be too sophisticated or something.”

  “So you came up to see . . . the statue? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Yes. Today was an in-service at my school. We had a free day, that’s all.”

  “Did Danny act unusual in any way?”

  “He seemed a little jumpy, maybe. Not really, though. His phone rang a lot.”

  “That was us phoning to get in touch with him. We’re not trying to be hard on Danny. You know that, right? But something happened in that house and we’re trying to sort it out.”

  “You said they fought.”

  “That’s what it looks like. The house was broken up, mostly the kitchen. We figure the dad might have been drinking. Maybe he was drunker than he knew and Danny got the advantage of him. Pretty ugly scene. If Danny did it, he should have called someone. An ambulance. But it looks like he just left.”

  “Danny wouldn’t do that. He’s not like that.”

  “People do lots of things, Clair. Things you couldn’t imagine. I hate to break it to you.”

  “Danny’s not like that.”

  “Only a few people are really like that, as you say. People get pushed and massaged into things. Everyday people. Did Danny and his dad have a history together? Did Danny talk to you about that? Did they fight a lot, would you say?”

  “His dad was violent. That’s what people said.”

  “We’ve heard some of that. A difficult man, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  He let out a long breath. He seemed satisfied with my answers.

  “You hungry at all?” he asked. “Or is your stomach still upset?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Anything else you can tell us about Danny and his dad?”

  I shook my head.

  “You know it would be wrong to withhold information if you had it. You know that, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, we’re done here for a while.”

  “Will you check to see if they got Wally? Please? He’s not to blame for any of this.”

  He turned to the female police officer. She nodded.

  “I’ll check that,” she said.

  I heard Danny scream a little later. It was a horrible scream. It didn’t come from pain or from injury, but from something deep down, something frightened and animal and dark.

  “Danny’s pretty much coming clean about all this. How are you feeling?” the cowboy cop asked a little later.

  “How do you mean he’s coming clean? He’s confessing?”

  “He tried to defend himself from his father. It’s pretty much what we thought.”

  “He admitted that?”

  “It was about the dog, partly. His dad wanted the dog out of the house. It was an argument and it escalated.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “No, I’m afraid not.”

  “For a minute?”

  “Not for any time at all, I’m afraid. Danny’s in a lot of trouble, Clair. The way you could help is to try to reconstruct the past couple of days.”

  “There’s nothing to reconstruct.”

  “There’s always something to reconstruct,” the cowboy-eyed cop said.

  He smiled. A real pal.

  “Danny needed attention a little lately. That’s the only difference.”

  “How do you mean, needed attention?”

  “He was around a lot. He wanted to do things with me.”

  “Okay. Like this ride up here today?”

  I nodded.

  “After last night, he probably didn’t want to be home much.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It will be a pretty big story because of the father-son angle. These things usually are.”

  “He didn’t know what to do.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “For the last time, I didn’t know anything about this. I just know Danny.”

  I put my hands over my eyes. I suddenly felt exhausted. I could have slept in about one second if I had the chance.

  “It happens a lot, you know. Abuse. Then retaliation. You almost can’t blame the boy.”

  “No one deserves to get his head crushed in by a car battery.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Is my dad here yet?”

  “Soon.”

  “So, I’m free to go?”

  “We want to have a conversation with you and your dad.”

  “Then?”

  “Probably so.”

  “What’s going to happen to Danny?”

  “Oh, he’ll be transferred downstate. He’s just shy of eighteen so he’ll be in a young adult population jail. YDSU . . . youth detention.”

  “Danny won’t make it.”

  “You never know. I’m not saying it will be easy, but sometimes prison pushes someone in a new direction. Sometimes it works.”

  “Danny’s just full of hot air. I mean, he’s really not a bad kid.”

  “A little bit more than hot air, but I get your point.”

  “Don’t you have to prove he did it?”

  “He confessed, Clair. He confessed almost at once. He was carrying around a lot of guilt. It was probably a relief to let some of it go.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “I’m sure it must feel that way. Is there anything else you can tell us? Good or bad? The best way to help Danny now is to give the full picture. Did you ever see his dad abuse him? Anything like that?”

  “No, not specifically. He didn’t talk about him, but my dad and Jebby said Elwood was rough.”

  “Who’s Jebby?”

  “A guy who grew up in town. He knew Elwood from way back.”

  “There’s a couple of domestic abuse police calls on Elwood. Back in the day. He wasn’t a Boy Scout, that’s for sure.”

  I put my head down on the table. I didn’t feel like talking anymore. I couldn’t think straight anymore.

  “Please try to find Wally,” I said.

  “We’re on it.”

  “And what about his car? Danny’s car?”

  “We’ll tow it out and put it in impound. It’s probably already on its way.”

  The female officer answered a knock at the door. She turned to me.

  “Your dad’s here,” she said.

  Eighteen

  “WE JUST WANTED to go over a few things,” the cowboy-eyed cop said to my dad and me.

  We no longer sat in the holding room. We sat in someone’s office, someone with a big desk and a big window behind it. It was dark now. My dad held my hand. He didn’t like cops much, but he also knew not to cross them. He listened.

  “Da
nny’s left the building,” the cop said. “He’s on his way downstate. Concord, I think. Probably Concord.”

  My dad nodded. He squeezed my hand.

  “We believe your daughter, Clair here, we believe she had no previous knowledge of the event in question.”

  Again my dad nodded. I hated how the cop used such twisted language. I had heard it around me all afternoon. Previous knowledge. Incarceration. Mitigating circumstances. They tried to be careful with their language and only made it worse by doing so.

  “It’s a very sad event. A sad thing to happen in a boy’s life. And of course it’s a great tragedy for Elwood’s extended family.”

  “Elwood deserved killing if anyone did,” my father said, shocking me.

  “Now that’s an interesting thing to say in this light. In the current situation.”

  “He beat his wife.”

  “Still and all. We can’t kill people. I think you’d agree with me there, wouldn’t you?”

  My dad squeezed my hand again. He really didn’t like cops. The cop didn’t wait for my dad to answer before going on.

  “What we wanted to talk about . . . if your daughter remembers anything that might be germane to the case, to Danny’s situation, we’d appreciate it if she would get in touch with us. Will you do that?”

  “The boy needs care,” Dad said. “He needs some adult help.”

  “We’re agreed on that. He’ll get some counseling for sure. I can’t go on record here, but I feel sorry for the boy. I do. I’m sure his rage didn’t rise out of nowhere. That will probably be an easy case for the defense to make.”

  My dad moved his neck around, trying to loosen it.

  “It’s been a long day,” my dad said.

  “Okay, you’re right. Time to call it a day. I’m sorry to have met you under such difficult circumstances, Clair,” the cowboy cop said, rising. “I’ll let you get going. It’s a long ride home.”

  I shook hands with the cowboy cop. Dad did too. I asked on the way out if anyone had found Wally and no one met my eyes when they answered no.

  In a TV movie, or on a show, I would have bawled my head off as soon as I climbed into our old truck with Dad, but I didn’t feel like crying. I felt dead and hard inside. I also felt cold. I asked Dad to turn the heat on high for a while, and he did, even though the night wasn’t too bad. We drove awhile without talking. I turned the heat down after we had gone a few miles and Dad cracked his window. It felt like traveling through time. We had the lights from the dashboard, and the lights casting ahead of us, but otherwise the road could have led us anywhere.

  “You okay?” Dad asked, and reached over and took my hand.

  “Not really okay, Dad.”

  “You know what I mean. What can I do for you?”

  “You think he did it?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m afraid so,” he said. “Just a momentary thing, maybe. He probably argued with his dad and then he saw a way to smash him really hard and he did. I don’t know. No one will know. Danny probably doesn’t know.”

  “Was Elwood really brutal with his wife?”

  “From all accounts,” he said, nodding again. “I guess it was pretty bad. He didn’t just have a temper . . . It was more than that. He couldn’t stand to be embarrassed or contradicted.”

  “Things were going pretty well for Danny. I don’t know why he put up with it all these years and then snapped one night when things were okay in his life. It doesn’t add up.”

  “Hard to know things like that. You know how when we go hiking or go down a river in the canoe? And how sometimes there are trees dangling over the river?”

  “Widow makers. That’s what you always called them.”

  “Yep. One day, in one particular second, those trees give way. Who knows why? I bet if you could figure everything out, every last detail and all the physics of it, then you could see why the tree dropped when it did. But if you can’t get the details right, then it just looks like the tree decided to drop for no reason.”

  “So, we’ll never know?”

  He wiggled my hand a little.

  “Probably not. Not more than we know already.”

  I shrugged. Wally had been in the kitchen with him. That’s what I imagined. That might have been why they fought.

  “He was filled with guilt, Clair. I’m sure of that. Don’t let people spin it into a big, ghoulish thing. They’ll try. He’d just had enough and he broke, that’s all. He probably was abused all his life.”

  “I hate thinking of him in that house alone. With Elwood just doing things over and over to him.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  “He used me to be away from it.”

  “He used you because he liked you and because you were kind. That only credits you, Clair. It’s nothing bad or dirty. Nothing you should feel guilty about.”

  I made him stop near the field where we had lost Wally. I wasn’t 100 percent sure it was the same field, because it was dark now and I couldn’t see any tire tracks leading out onto the soil. But I stood outside and called awhile, even shook a plastic bag, hoping Wally would think it was food if he was out in the dark, listening. Dad stood next to me and didn’t say anything. We drove home mostly in silence after that.

  It’s obvious, but it’s worth saying: A boy can be a dog. Anyone can be a dog. You get what you put into a person, the same way you get what you put into a dog. You fill a dog with hate and that’s what you get back. Father Jasper warns about playing tug of war with a dog because, he asks, What are you teaching it? You’re teaching the dog that you can fight each other, wrestle, and if the dog wins, he thinks he’s dominant. Also, on the day when you need a shoe back, and the dog has it, then why shouldn’t he think you have to hold a tug of war for it? You taught him it was okay to challenge you.

  That was one of the things that happened to Danny, I think. I think his dad played tug of war all his life with his kid, and one day his kid played back.

  When we arrived home, we saw yellow police tape strung up at Danny’s house. You could tell in a glance that lots of people had been there. The new spring grass in the backyard had been trampled down, and cars had made tire marks up on the lawn where people had parked. The house appeared haunted. It looked dark and worried, almost frowning. That made me wonder, because just that morning I hadn’t felt anything about the Stewarts’ house one way or the other. It had just been a house, but now that I knew what had gone on inside it, I had a whole different feeling about it. I stood for a while on the back porch watching it. Our house phone rang a lot and there were a ton of messages on my cell, but I left them alone.

  My dad came out a little later with two cups of tea. It was a nice night. He handed me one, and he saw I was looking at the Stewarts’ house and he asked if I was okay.

  “You wonder what goes on in people’s houses,” I said. “And now I know you can’t ever be sure.”

  “This is just one thing, Clair. Don’t generalize it out.”

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “That we can’t know what goes on in someone else’s house? That’s true. But we can’t know the good things, either. We can’t know about the happiness that might be there.”

  “You don’t think he planned it, do you?”

  Dad stuck out his lower lip, then shook his head.

  “No, I don’t think so. They probably got going arguing and then it went to a place it hadn’t been before. Maybe it was the first time Danny ever fought back. Maybe knowing you made him realize he deserved not to be hit or assaulted by his father. You and Wally, maybe you made that clear to him.”

  I felt close to tears again. I thought of Wally wandering the north woods by himself, not knowing what to do or where to go and it tore me up. Then I thought of Danny in a prison somewhere, wearing a jump suit and flip-flops, and it made something burn inside me. I felt like I had something to answer for, that I had set a thing in motion without knowing where it might take us all.

  “I sa
w Mom’s statue,” I said, throwing it on like you would a piece of brush once you had a fire going well. I didn’t care where it landed or how it caught. I felt as though everything needed to come out.

  Dad sipped his tea. He sat on the porch railing.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “It’s a good statue. It was covered with vines.”

  “I’m glad you saw it.”

  “Why didn’t you take me to see it?”

  He didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was quiet and thoughtful.

  “I don’t know exactly,” he said. “I could make up a reason now and try to cover for myself, but I don’t think either of us is in the mood for that. I guess I told myself it would only stir things up. Besides, they put it up a long time ago. I wasn’t even sure it was still there. But that’s not really an excuse.”

  “It is the only statue Mom ever sold.”

  “I know, Clair.”

  “That statue is a lot like Mom. Is that why you didn’t want to show me?”

  “Probably. It’s hard to know what your heart wants to tell you sometimes. Your mom used to put her whole self into her projects. It was something I loved about her and admired. I work, but part of me holds back. Your mom wasn’t like that. She gave herself completely to the things she did, so seeing that statue would be like seeing her again. Seeing her best part, and maybe I was afraid to do that. I don’t know. I haven’t sorted it out in my mind completely. I’m sorry now that I didn’t take you up there. It was a mistake and I apologize.”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel bad about it, Dad. I’m trying to understand things. I feel like a lot of things I thought I knew aren’t so steady anymore.”

  “I know. I can see how that would be.”

  “You think it will be a big story?”

  “I think so, Clair. People like reading about this type of thing. It won’t go national or anything, but it will be news around here. Probably around the state.”

  “Am I going to be the girlfriend in the story?”

  “I don’t think we should talk to anyone in the press, if that’s what you mean. Do you? There’s no upside to it. It won’t help Danny at all. Maybe in the courts we can help him, but in the public eye he’s just going to be the crazy kid who tried to kill his father with a car battery.”