The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  In the woods, damp piles of leaves whirled up with every cold gust, frightening rabbits and foxes alike. Gus Pierce whistled as he went along, a sparse melody that soon disappeared in the wind. He thought about smoking a little weed, just to take the edge off, then decided against it. He could see the bonfire through the trees; he could hear his fellow students enjoying themselves. Because of this, he avoided the clearing as he made his way along the riverbank. He could hear wood rats nearby, a scurrying and then a splashing as they paddled in the shallows, fleeing his footsteps. Those rats were smart enough to make a trek through Lois Jeremy’s garden, then cross Main Street to search the Dumpsters for food; they were far too wary ever to be trapped by the boys from Chalk House the way those luckless rabbits were every year.

  Gus thought about Carlin in her black dress and how he’d made her cry. He thought about all the times he’d failed. He paid no attention to the sinking feeling he had that this might be his last chance, nor did he consider the rattle of his own destiny. He was ready to prove himself, on this night above all other nights. Throughout his life, August Pierce had been on the run, but now, at this cold and brutal hour, he began to slow down, ready to stand his ground. For the secret he’d recently discovered was that he had far more courage than he’d ever imagined, and for that unexpected gift, he thanked his lucky stars.

  THE RING AND THE DOVE

  THEY FOUND HIM ON THE FIRST morning of November, half a mile downriver, caught in a tangle of rushes and reeds on a clear blue day when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Everything but his black coat was submerged, so that at first it appeared as if something with wings had fallen from above, an enormously large bat or a crow without feathers, or perhaps an angel who had faltered, then drowned, in the tears of this poor tired world.

  Two local boys playing hooky discovered the body, and they never again cut school after that day. All these boys had wanted was to catch a trout or two, when they’d come upon something drifting in the shallow water at the bend where there was an old stand of willows. One of the boys guessed what they spied was only a large plastic bag drifting downstream, but the second boy noticed an object so white it was easily mistaken for a water lily. Only after being prodded with a stick did this flower reveal itself to be a human hand.

  When the boys realized what they’d discovered, they ran all the way home and pounded on their front doors, screaming for their mothers and vowing that from this day forward they’d always behave. Twenty minutes later, two members of the town police clambered through the chokeberry and the holly, down to the banks of the Haddan, where they waited uneasily for the forensics team from Hamilton to arrive. Both officers wished they hadn’t gotten out of bed that morning, not that either one would ever admit that sentiment out loud. These were men of duty who kept their feelings in check, not an easy task on this day. In spite of the height of the body, it was only a boy who’d been mired in a blanket of duckweed, just a boy who should have been starting his life, walking under the clear blue sky on such a rare and beautiful November day as this.

  The detectives who’d been called in made up exactly one fourth of the Haddan police force and had been best friends since second grade. Abel Grey and Joey Tosh had fished from this exact spot when they were eight years old; frankly, they’d cut school plenty in their day. They could easily find the best places to dig for bloodworms, and it would be hard to total the hours they’d spent waiting for a bite from one of the granddaddy trout that haunted the deep, green center of Sixth Commandment Pond. They knew this river better than most men know their own backyards, but today both Abe and Joey wished they were far from Haddan; they would have liked to be back in Canada, where they’d spent time this past July when Joey’s wife, Mary Beth, let him take off for two weeks with Abe. On the very last day of their trip, loons had led them to some of their best fishing. There, on a silvery slip of a lake in eastern Canada, a man could forget all his troubles. But some things are not so easily put aside, the heavy pull of the water, for instance, as they reached with two long sticks to turn the body over. The color of the drowned boy’s cold, pale skin. The gasping sound as they hauled him closer to shore, as if it were possible for the dead to draw one last breath.

  The morning had felt all wrong from the start; these two detectives shouldn’t have been assigned the case, but they’d traded shifts so that Drew Nelson could go to an out-of-town wedding and that act of fellowship had made them the guardians of this dead boy. The notion that snapping turtles or catfish might soon set to work on the remains forced them to act quickly. Both men also knew that eels had a particular taste for human flesh, and it was a relief that none had already begun to feast on the softer areas on the body, the nose and fingertips being favorite places, along with the smooth base of the throat.

  When they couldn’t bring him in with sticks, Joey Tosh ran to the car to get a tire iron from the trunk, and they used it to dislodge the leg that had become wedged fast beneath a rock. The sun was strong this morning, but the water was frigid. By the time the body had been brought to shore, both officers were chilled to the bone; their clothes had been drenched, their shoes filled with silt. Abe had gashed his finger on a sharp rock and Joey had pulled out his shoulder, and now all they had to show for such backbreaking work was a tall, skinny boy whose milky eyes were so unnerving that Abe went back to the car for his rain slicker, which he placed over the corpse’s face.

  “What a way to start the day.” Joey wiped some of the mud from his hands. He was thirty-eight and he had a great wife, three kids, with another one on the way, and a nice little house over on the west side of Haddan, on Belvedere Street, a block away from where he and Abe grew up. He also had a lot of bills coming in. Recently, he’d taken a weekend job as a security guard at the mall in Middletown for the extra cash. One thing he certainly didn’t need was a dead body and all the paperwork it would generate. But as soon as he started to yammer about how much he had waiting for him on his desk, Abe cut in; he knew exactly where Joey was headed.

  “You’re not weaseling out of doing the report,” Abe told him. “I’m keeping track. It’s definitely your turn.”

  Abe had the habit of second-guessing his friend and getting to most places first, and today was no exception. Back when they were in high school over in Hamilton, Abe had been the one all the girls had wanted. He was tall, with dark hair and pale blue eyes and a silent demeanor that could easily convince a woman he was listening to her, when he wasn’t really hearing a word she said. He was even better-looking now than he had been in school, so much so that several women in town, grown women with good marriages, had the habit of sitting in their parked cars to watch when Abe took over traffic duty from one of the uniformed officers during lunch hour at the elementary school. Some women in town tended to call the station at the slightest provocation—a raccoon on the front porch that was growling and acting peculiar, or keys accidentally locked in a car—all in the hope that Abe would be sent over and they could present him with a cup of coffee to show their gratitude after he’d chased off the raccoon or unlocked the car. If, after all he’d done for them, he happened to want more than coffee, that would be all right, too. That would be just dandy, as a matter of fact, although the truth was, it was extremely difficult to get Abel Grey’s attention. A woman could stand there half naked, and Abe would simply go about his business, asking which window had been broken into or where the suspicious footsteps had last been heard.

  In spite of Abel Grey’s good looks and the way women threw themselves at him, Joey had wound up married and Abe was still alone. In Haddan, it was common knowledge that any woman looking for a relationship was bound to be disappointed in Abe. He was too unsettled to lose his heart to anyone; he was detached at worst and distant at best, even he admitted that. He’d never once disagreed when a woman accused him of being cut off from his feelings and unwilling to commit. But here, on the banks of the Haddan, keeping watch over the drowned boy, Abe felt a wave of emotion, and that wasn’t li
ke him. Certainly, he’d seen dead bodies before; not more than a month had passed since he’d had to extricate two men from a crash over on Main Street, only to find neither one had survived. In a small town such as Haddan, police officers were often called upon to check on older residents when a ringing phone or doorbell went unanswered. On more than one occasion Abe had been the one to discover an elderly neighbor sprawled out on the kitchen floor, the victim of a stroke or an aneurysm.

  Up until now, the worst death Abe had seen in his duties as a police officer was the one he’d witnessed last spring, when he and Joey were called in to assist over in Hamilton. A fellow there had beaten his wife to death, then barricaded himself in his two-car garage, where he shot himself in the head before they could jimmy open the door. Afterward, there was so much blood they had to wash down the driveway with a fire hose. One of the forensics guys, Matt Farris, who’d grown up down the street from the murdered woman, went out in the field behind the house to vomit, while the rest of the men did their best to pretend to ignore him, along with all that blood and the smell of death in the mild April air.

  That incident in Hamilton had particularly affected Abe. IIe’d gone out and gotten drunk and disappeared for three days, until Joey finally found him out at his grandfather’s abandoned farm, sleeping on the floor in a pile of hay. Considering how people say nothing ever happens in small towns, Abe had seen plenty, but the only other corpse of a teenaged boy he’d seen before today was that of his own brother, Frank. They wouldn’t let him look, but he saw Frank anyway, there on the floor of his bedroom, and then, forever after, he wished he hadn’t. He wished that for once he’d listened to his father and waited outside, out in the yard where the cicadas were calling and the leaves of the hawthorns were folding in on themselves, in anticipation of rain.

  This boy on the riverbank was only a few years younger than Abe’s brother was in that horrible year, the one Abe and Joey still didn’t discuss. People in the village remembered it as the time there were no trout; a man could fish for hours, all day, if he liked, and not catch sight of a single one. Several environmentalists came out from Boston to investigate, but no one ever determined the cause. That wonderful species of silver trout seemed destined to become extinct, and people in town were simply going to have to learn to accept the loss, but the following spring, the trout reappeared, just like that. Pete Byers from over at the pharmacy was the first to notice. Although he himself was too gentle a soul to go fishing, and was known to faint at the sight of a bloodworm cut in two, Pete loved the river and walked its banks every morning, two miles out of town and two miles back. One fine day, as he headed for home, the river looked silver, and sure enough, when he knelt down, there were so many trout he would have been able to catch one in his bare hands, had he been so inclined.

  “I hate waiting around like this,” Joey Tosh said now as the two officers stood guard. He was tossing pebbles into the river, frightening the minnows that darted beneath the reeds. “Emily has a dance recital this afternoon and if I don’t pick up my mother-in-law by three and bring her over to the ballet school I’ll never hear the end of it from Mary Beth.”

  This particular bend in the river was muddy, with the depth of a wading pool; it wasn’t a place for drowning. Abe knelt to get a better look, knees in the muck. Even with the boy’s face covered, Abe knew the deceased was a stranger. If there was one thing to be thankful for, it was that he and Joey wouldn’t have to drive up to some friend’s or neighbor’s house, maybe one of the guys they’d fished with for years, and break the news about the loss of a son. “He’s not from around here.”

  Abe and Joey knew nearly everyone born and raised in Haddan, although with so much new construction on the outskirts of town and so many families relocating from Boston, it was definitely getting more difficult to place faces and names. Not long ago, every resident in the village was well acquainted with every family’s history, which could easily work against an individual who’d been in trouble. Abe and Joey, for instance, had been wild boys. As teenagers, they’d driven too fast, smoked as much marijuana as they could get ahold of, used fake IDs to buy liquor over in Hamilton, where nobody knew them by name. Perhaps because they were the sons of police officers, they seemed fated to get into as much trouble as possible. Certainly, no one had to talk them into bad behavior; they more than willingly obliged. Ernest Grey, Abe’s father, was the police chief until eight years ago, when he retired to Florida, following in the footsteps of his own father, Wright, who had been the chief before him for thirty years, and something of a local hero besides. Not only was Wright the best fisherman in town, he was renowned for his rescue of three foolish kids from the Haddan School who’d skated onto thin ice one unseasonably warm January day, boys who would have surely died had Wright not arrived with a rope and his own obstinate refusal to let them drown.

  Pell Tosh, Joey’s dad, was a good man as well; he was killed by a drunk driver while parked in his cruiser on Christmas Day in that same horrible year, the one they still didn’t discuss, even though they w ere now grown men, older than Pell had been when he died. They lost Frank Grey in August, Pell in December, and after that the boys were completely out of control. Who knows how long it might have gone on if they hadn’t at last been caught robbing old Dr. Howe’s house at the Haddan School? When their life of crime was revealed, people from the west side felt they’d been betrayed and those on the east side felt validated. They’d never liked those boys anyway; they hadn’t trusted them past the front door.

  There had been a big to-do about the robbery, with resentments between townspeople and students at an all-time high. Before long, there were fights in the parking lot behind the inn, serious, bloody altercations between boys from town and Haddan boys. One night, in the midst of a particularly heated confrontation, the granite eagle outside town hall was tipped over, its left wing permanently chipped. Every time Abe drove past that eagle he was reminded of that year, and this was the reason he usually took the long way into town, down Station Avenue and right onto Elm Drive, thereby managing to avoid both the statue and his memories.

  Other boys might have been sent to a juvenile detention facility, but Wright Grey spoke to Judge Aubrey, his fishing buddy, to ask for leniency. To make amends for their wrongdoings, Abe and Joey were forced to commit to a year of community service, sweeping floors at town hall and emptying trash cans at the library, which may well be another reason Abe stays away from both places. In spite of their punishment, Abe and Joey continued to rob houses the whole time they were completing their community service. It was like an addiction for them, an illegal balm that soothed their souls and kept their anger in check. Because neither one could deal with his grief, they did what seemed not only reasonable, but necessary at the time: they ignored their bereavement. They didn’t say a word, and they kept on breaking the law. Abe in particular couldn’t seem to stop. He wrecked cars and was suspended from Hamilton High three times in a single semester, a record that remains unmatched to this day. He and his father could not be in the same room without an argument breaking out, although both of them knew that every disagreement was based on a single shared perception that the wrong son had died.

  In the end, Abe moved out to live with his grandfather, and he stayed at Wright’s farm for nearly two years. Wright’s house was tilted, with small twisting steps leading up to the second floor, built for a time when men were shorter and their needs less complicated. The place was far more rustic than the houses in town, with a toilet that had only recently been tacked onto the back hall, and a kitchen sink made out of soapstone that was wide enough to comfortably gut a trout or bathe a hound dog. Every spring, flocks of blackbirds roosted on the property, gorging on wild blueberries.

  “I low can you stand living out here? Joey would say whenever he came to visit. He’d spend the longest time adjusting the TV antenna to try to pick up some reception on Wright’s old set, never with any success.

  Abe only shrugged when questioned, for the
truth was he didn’t like everything about his grandfather’s house. He didn’t like the mile and a half he had to walk to the school bus, or the canned food they ate six nights out of the week. What he did like, however, was the way dusk fell across the fields, in slats of shadow and light. He liked the sound of the blackbirds taking flight as he slammed through the back door, startling whole flocks into the sky. On mild evenings, Abe went to the meadow where a fence had been put up around a grassy area, unadorned except for some stones streaked with river mica. There was an unmarked grave inside the fence, the final resting place of someone his grandfather had known long ago, a woman who had always been searching for peace. It was peace that could be found here, both by the living and the dead, and Abe wished his brother had been buried out in the meadow as well. Their father, of course, would have never allowed that, for it would have been an admission that Frank had taken his own life. Abe’s parents had insisted Frank’s death was an accident.