by Reed Karaim
God, they made noise then. I felt it pulling at my chest, lifting me up and out of myself in a rush toward this pale ghost of a man standing above us. I stood with my back against the bus and wished Robin was still here. I wanted so badly to share this moment, this consummation. I wanted her to know that I was present, that I heard, that I felt. That I could believe.
VIII.
I CAUGHT a plane to Springfield the next morning and before noon I was heading down a familiar highway. The day was bright and clear, but as I approached Berthold the hills and fields became freighted with the chill of winter. Even with the corn swaying top-heavy in the breeze, the wind had a sharp edge, and despite the sun and swaths of green and gold, the knocked-about houses looked forlorn. Summer had no power here. There was too much borrowed memory clinging like December frost to my vision of the town.
I stomped on the porch of Bill Crane’s house when he didn’t answer my knock, but there was no one home. I walked around back and tried the door to the kitchen, then stood for a moment listening to the wind in the cornfield. On the far side of the field, the stand of trees around the abandoned mine gathered darkness despite the day.
The bar was empty. I sat in one of the booths and sipped a Coke. The television was on above the bar and I watched Crane tour part of Cincinnati with the governor of Ohio at his side. Myra floated briefly in the background, a square-brimmed black hat lending her the air of a vaudeville gangster. The sound was down and I felt as if I had snuck outside my own life and was peering back in through the keyhole. Crane stood in front of a storefront; you saw black faces behind a rope, and then a woman was rowing a canoe across a kitchen sink. The bartender turned her head and smiled.
More than twenty years ago Crane needed money. A few years later he came home twice without telling anyone. Six months ago he lied about it. Latrelle Gregory raised the possibility he had been bought, but there was no proof. But he had gone home unexpectedly a third time. I had a phone record that proved it. He had gone and he had also visited a clinic in the town of Phillips, which was near Roger Bushmill’s estate. Where did this leave me? On a barstool in Berthold about to sift through the ashes of his past one more time. Comb through any life long enough and you will find enough to build a mystery, enough to imagine anything you want about your subject. We are all saints and all demons when viewed from the proper angle. We are all beyond hope and worthy of redemption.
The ultimate and eternal bystander, she said. Was that fair, Robin? Would that be the lingering, last word when all this ends? Because this ends. You said so yourself. Yes, it does.
CNN returned from a commercial and I saw footage of a burning car, shattered windows, a man on his knees, blood pouring from his forehead while strangers taunted him in a semicircle, grotesque shadows dancing across the pavement. Here was another question: What did the crimes of the past matter in the face of the overwhelming need of the present?
“So you missed our little burg?”
Eddie Crane stood above me, heavy blunt-nailed hands hanging awkwardly at his side, shoulders moving with his thick neck as he turned his head to slip my gaze while his square face bent into a shy smile of recognition. He settled onto the stool beside me.
“So what’s my famous cousin up to these days?”
“About fifty-seven percent in the polls.”
He nodded and glanced at the bartender, who slid a glass under the beer tap.
“Thanks for seeing me again,” I said. “I’m sure you’ve had enough of this.”
He reached across the bar and took the glass as it slid toward him, raising and half-emptying it in a swallow.
“You know it’s a funny thing, but you people were all over the place at first. Christ, I thought we were going to have to start charging admission. But you know, hardly anybody comes by anymore. It’s like this part of the story’s been told.”
“Did you get the copy of the story I sent you?”
“Yeah. You did a nice job on that. Didn’t make fun of us half as much as some of the others.”
We sipped our drinks, Eddie waiting patiently as I tried to figure out where to start.
“I’m doing another story like that one,” I said, “and I’m just trying to get some new stuff. I’ve heard from a couple of people that Tom came home to visit when he had to run for the House and the Senate, and yet his brother says he didn’t stop by the house, and so I’m just sort of wondering where he went, who he talked to. I thought maybe he stopped to talk to you.”
Eddie rubbed his neck, thought for a moment, and shook his head. “We see him at family reunions and things, but he hasn’t come to visit us in a long time. I don’t remember anything like that. Maybe he went to see some of his big supporters like Roger Amb.” He smiled. “The boys with all the money.”
“I don’t think so. But Amb said he bumped into him. Out on . . .” I pulled my notebook out of my back pocket and flipped it open. “County 123.”
Eddie shrugged. “We don’t live out on that side of town.”
“Do you know who does?”
“Sure. But besides Amb I don’t know who he’d be visiting.”
“Does that road take you to Phillips?”
“Yeah. That would be the way you’d go. Why?”
“You know anyone he might go to see there? I heard he stopped by the clinic.”
He sipped his beer and stared at the bar. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders. “Lots of people up near Phillips. You’re paying a lot of attention to a couple of trips a long time ago, aren’t you?”
“Just curious. Thought it might be interesting who he talked to for advice back then. It’s hard to find something new after a while.”
Indirect light came softly through the narrow windows. The two deer heads mounted behind the bar floated in a somnolent haze. On the television children were fleeing across a narrow stone street somewhere far away, a bomb exploding in a silent shower of dust that seemed to push them through the air.
“I remember talking about the time when Tom’s mother died and he came home for the funeral,” I said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how hard that must have been.”
Eddie nodded.
“Tom stayed around for a while, right?”
“Yeah, he had all kinds of stuff to take care of. I mean, Bill, he’s all right now, but back then you couldn’t count on him for a dime.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Eddie shrugged shoulders that moved like a pair of frozen hams. He drained the last of his beer and the bartender, leaning forward on her stool, slid another glass under the tap.
“I don’t know. He had to get old Johnny—that was his dad—into a vets’ hospital. He had to see that somebody took care of the house.”
“It must have been hard. I remember you said the family didn’t have much money.”
“Hell, no.”
“How’d they manage, do you know?”
“You mean after she died?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Tommy finally got the old man into the hospital up in Springfield and I suppose that took care of it.”
“But money for the funeral and everything. How’d they manage all that?”
Eddie sat his beer down and swiveled his head and shoulders to look at me, his eyes strangely small and damp in the center of his broad sun-burned face.
“Wasn’t much of a funeral,” he said.
I drained my Coke and glanced absently at the drowsing bartender, as if my question hardly mattered.
“That’s too bad. It sounds like she was quite a woman.”
He swiveled back on his stool and pawed his beer glass. I knew I needed to back off for a while.
“You said he spent time with you when he came back?”
“Yeah.”
“And your other cousin and a woman, Maureen. An old classmate, right?”
“Mo, yeah, that’s right.”
I recalled the photograph Bill Crane had shown me, a girl with a sweet smile and a hair
do that bent in two curls under her face. She’d been holding Thomas Crane’s arm as they prepared to go to a dance. What where they then, seventeen?
“They dated in high school?”
“A little. They were friends. We were all friends.”
We both stared unhappily at dust-encrusted bottles of forgotten liqueurs on a shelf behind the bar.
“I’m just trying to understand a time in his life that seems important,” I said. “You read my other story. I’ve been fair.”
Eddie glanced at the drowsing bartender. We were the only customers this early in the afternoon. Perched over his stool, both hands awkwardly in front of him on the counter, he reminded me of a circus bear who has been asked to ride a unicycle. There was some trick expected of him he did not want to perform.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “That was the hardest time he had. Just between you and me, that’s the only time I ever saw Tom get drunk. We’d go driving and we might get plastered, sit out on the old bridge down by the river and watch the stars. I think he was lonely—he’d left everybody he knew back east—Mo and me were the only friends he really had here anymore. He was never close to that many people, really. I think maybe he cried on her shoulder a bit. Don’t use that, ‘cried on her shoulder,’ okay? I mean, hell, I don’t know.”
“Maureen Barstow.”
“Yeah. She was always sweet. Didn’t stay in town much longer than Tom did.”
“I don’t remember much about her in any stories.”
Eddie smiled the kind of sly smile he would never have dared the first time we met, but he knew me a little now, and he was prone to those sudden confidences that erupt awkwardly out of Midwesterners.
“You reporters,” he said. “You read each other’s stuff and you all come here and ask the same questions. If it ain’t in the last story somebody wrote, you don’t bother with it.”
I felt a weary disappointment in my craft.
“You know where she is now?”
Eddie shifted on his seat. “Haven’t talked to Mo in years.”
“But you don’t know where she lives?”
For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. He looked up at me for a long moment and then he shrugged. “In Phillips. Works at the clinic, I believe.”
His glass was empty and he was looking at the door.
“Eddie, there’s one other thing,” I said. “Roger Bushmill lent Tom some money back then, maybe several thousand dollars. You wouldn’t know why he needed that, would you?”
He turned his whole body to face me and I had plenty of time to watch the small stones of his eyes slide underwater.
“I don’t know a thing about money,” he said. “But Tommy wouldn’t take a dime if it wasn’t right.”
Information had no listing for a Maureen Barstow in or near Phillips, but the woman who answered the phone at the community library came up with an address. The town was forty miles down the highway, and it was the middle of the afternoon by the time I found the small bungalow on its postage-stamp lawn burnt crisp in the sun. Phillips was a farming community barely hanging on to life, and Barstow lived on the edge of town in a development of tract homes set down as nakedly as the toy houses on a Monopoly board.
I stood on the concrete step in the glare, considering the solitary crab-apple tree withering on the lawn and the Ford station wagon listing on its bald left tire in the driveway, when the door opened. A teenage girl wearing mirrored sunglasses and a baseball cap popped her gum and then dropped her chin to peer at me over the glasses.
“I’m looking for Maureen Barstow.”
Turning her head as if she could hardly be bothered, she shouted, “Mom!” and slid down the steps and toward the car—tall, slim and sullen, I thought, until she glanced up from behind the wheel and smiled briefly and brightly before pulling out of the driveway.
“You should see her when she’s in a bad mood.”
Maureen Barstow stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on a green-and-white striped apron. She was shorter than I would have guessed from photographs taken more than twenty years ago. The girlish prettiness, round cheeks and gentle eyes, had been sculpted by the years into something harder and more handsome, skin tight around a sharp jaw, lined and drawn around slate gray eyes. Her hair was businesslike and short; she wasn’t wearing makeup and she smelled like onions.
I told her who I was and she hesitated in the doorway.
“I really won’t take long,” I said. “I’d be happy to wait around town and do it after dinner if you’d prefer.”
The prospect of losing her evening seemed to make up her mind. She stepped back from the door, and I followed her into a kitchen with black-and-white tile and white pine cupboards. A large kettle simmered on the stove and a pile of chopped onions sat on a cutting board. She pulled another onion from a wicker basket. I leaned against the counter.
“Smells good,” I said.
“You’re from Washington?” She had a surprisingly husky voice. “Have you ever eaten at Bistro Bistro in Shirlington?”
“I don’t think so.”
She tilted her head toward the kettle. “This is their white chili.”
I must have looked surprised, because her broad mouth broke into a smile that seemed equally amused and defensive.
“You didn’t expect to find someone out here making chili from Bistro Bistro? The recipe was in Gourmet. If you want me to fulfill a midwestern stereotype, I could whip up something with cream of mushroom soup and hamburger.”
She chopped the onion with a short precise rocking of the knife back and forth, not bothering to look at what she was doing.
“How old’s your daughter?”
“Seventeen. But you’re not here to ask me questions about my daughter.”
“No.”
“What is it you want to know about Tom? Did we date? Yes, briefly in high school. Do I have anything to say about it? No, not really. He was a nice boy. He’ll make the country a great president. We’re all proud of him in this part of the country, you know.”
“You knew him later,” I said. “When he came back for his mother’s funeral.”
The knife made the blunt sound of an ax as it moved across the plastic board.
“We were still friends then.”
“I guess that was a hard time for him.”
She lifted the cutting board to the kettle and pushed the onions with the blade of the knife. They tumbled into the chili in a clump and broth splattered on the stove.
“Damn. His mother had died, his father was sick, his brother was off gallivanting around on his motorcycle. His sister came back for about a day and a half. Yes, you could say it was a hard time for Tom.”
She leaned against the counter, arms folded across the apron, eyes red but not crying.
“Is that what you came out here for? To see if his mother’s death was a bad time?”
“I’m just trying to understand a period I think is important.”
“Really? Two and a half months before the election? Isn’t it time to worry about the issues?”
“We have wiser men than I working on the issues.”
“Really.”
She pulled a paper towel off the roll under the sink and swabbed up the spill on the stove. Her hands were square with pale, businesslike fingers, one wrapped in a bandage. When she had finished, she leaned sideways against the counter. There was something in the way she raised her chin, the way her weight settled on one foot and she cocked the other leg, that reminded me of Robin.
There must have been a look of recognition in my eyes. It had the strangest effect on Maureen Barstow. She seemed terrified, and then slowly she smiled at me, as if maybe I held out the prospect of more understanding than she had expected.
“We were friends once a long time ago,” she said. “There’s really not much more to say.”
“Did he say anything to you about his finances at the time?”
Maureen jumped as if pinched and spun toward the pot.
>
“Oh damn, I forgot the cumin. You’re throwing off my cooking. I don’t remember a thing about his finances. Why don’t you just tell me what you’re after?”
“He was loaned or given some money by a man named Roger Bushmill back then,” I said. “And I just wonder why.”
She fumbled inside the cabinet above the counter for her cumin, pushing spices and sauces aside. A bottle was in the way and she slammed it upright on the counter. She stopped then, staring into the cupboard, her face red.
“I don’t know where it is. It’ll be tasteless without cumin.”
“Do you know anything about the money?”
“Tom never talked to me about his finances.”
“Do you remember him mentioning Bushmill?”
Her hand clenched the cupboard door and she seemed unable to take her eyes off the inside of the cabinet.
“He owns a couple of factories not that far from here,” I said. “Crane met him when he was hitchhiking into school as a kid.”
She shut the door with a surprising bang.
“It was a long time ago. I don’t remember who picked him up from school, for God’s sake. I don’t remember who he talked about. He was an honest man, that’s what I remember.”
She stood facing the closed cupboard, her forehead pink right up to her hair, her jaw set.
“I’ve got to go to the store,” she said. “I’m sorry. You’ll have to go.”
“There’s just one other thing,” I said. “He came back here before he ran for the House and the Senate and one other time without telling anyone. I know he called you at the clinic the last time. I was just wondering why.”
She sagged and her hand fell to the countertop, knocking the soy sauce over. It rolled off the edge of the counter and was falling toward the floor when I caught it. Maureen stared at the bottle in my hand as if waiting for it to explode.
“I don’t have anything more to say about Tom,” she said. “Good-bye.”
Driving back down the highway I watched the sun set, a snarled ball of red that hung squat and heavy on the edge of the earth and then unraveled across the fields. The news came on the radio and I listened to the latest polls. Crane had gained five points off of the debate and, for the first time, analysts were talking about the possibility of a landslide. The president was down south trying to shore up his base, but that’s where Crane was headed. The world had been rearranged and he was welcome everywhere. They ran a brief clip of his speech in Ohio and I thought I could hear a note of triumph escaping from deep within that carefully measured and reassuring voice: In two months we can begin the work of rebuilding the American community and the rest of the sentence drowned in cheers.