The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  If there were people in town who thought otherwise, then they knew well enough to keep their mouths shut. There was one bad moment at the funeral parlor when Charlie Hale, whose family had been preparing residents of the village for the journey beyond for more than a hundred years, implied that burial in hallowed ground might be denied due to the circumstances of death. It didn’t take long for Ernest Grey to set Charlie straight. Ernest took him outside, out of earshot of the boys’ mother, and he told Charlie precisely what he would do to any self-righteous fool who interfered with his son’s final resting place. After that, the funeral went ahead as scheduled, with half the town paying their respects. All the same, it would have brought Abe more comfort to have Frank laid to rest in the meadow where the tall grass smelled sweet and clean and wild dog roses climbed along the fence. It was lonesome out in the grass, but one afternoon Abe looked up to see his grandfather by the back door, watching. It was a windy day and the laundry on the line was waving back and forth with a snapping sound, as though something had broken apart in the sweet blue air.

  All during this time, Joey never questioned Abe if he put his fist through a plate-glass window or started a fight down at the parking lot of the Millstone. He didn’t need to ask why. And although twenty-two years had passed since that horrible year, Abe and Joey continued to run their lives in the same guarded manner, with Abe especially firm in his belief that it was always best to leave well enough alone. Don’t get involved was not just his motto, it was his creed, or at least it had been until now. Who knows why sorrow strikes on one day rather than another. Who can tell why certain circumstances rend a man’s heart. There was no reason for Abe to unbutton the dead boy’s black.coat, and yet he did exactly that. He knew the body should be left untouched until the forensics team arrived, but he folded back the heavy waterlogged fabric of the coat, and then he uncovered the boy’s face, in spite of those wide-open eyes. As he did so, a breeze began to rise, not that there was anything unusual about cold weather at this time of year; anyone who’d grown up in Haddan knew that a chill on the first of November meant that bad weather would surely last until spring.

  “What’s your guess?” Joey knelt down beside Abe. “Haddan School kid?”

  Joey tended to let Abe do the thinking. With all the pressure he had at home, he had enough on his mind without cluttering it up with suppositions and theories.

  “I’d say so.” Close up, the boy’s skin looked blue. There was a purple bruise on the forehead, so dark it was almost black. Most probably, the skull had smashed into rocks as the current carried the body downstream. “Poor kid.”

  “Poor kid, my ass.” The forensics guys were taking their time and when Joey glanced at his watch he knew he was going to miss Emily’s dance recital; his mother-in-law would bitch and moan about how he never thought about anyone but himself and Mary Beth would try her best not to accuse him of not being there for the children, which would only make him feel worse. “No one at the Haddan School is poor.”

  Kneeling there on the riverbank, Abe felt the cold seep through his clothes. His dark hair was too long, and now it was damp, and perhaps that was why he was shivering. He had always prided himself on being hardheaded, but this situation had somehow undone him. The dead boy was almost Abe’s height, but so thin his white shirt stuck to his ribs, as if he were already a skeleton. He couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds. Abe guessed that he was smart, too, like Frank, who’d been the valedictorian at Hamilton High and was scheduled to go off to Columbia in the fall. His whole life was ahead of him, that was the thing; it made no sense for a boy of seventeen to take his grandfather’s shotgun and turn it on himself.

  Joey stood up and placed one hand over his eyes; he strained to see the road through a grove of wild olive. Still no team from Hamilton. “I wish they’d take all those Haddan kids and launch them in a rocket back to Connecticut, or New York, or wherever the hell it is they come from.”

  Abe couldn’t help but observe that in spite of Joey’s resolute family values and the advice he dispensed on how much happier Abe would be if he settled down, the same old belligerent punk endured within. Joey was a scrapper and he always had been. One hot spring afternoon when they were kids, Joey had dived into Sixth Commandment Pond, naked as the day he was born, unaware that a band of Haddan School kids had hidden nearby, waiting for the opportunity to steal his clothes. Joey was shaking with cold by the time Abe found him, but he quickly heated things up that same night. They brought along Teddy Humphrey, who would fight anyone, anytime, anyplace. Before long they had ambushed a group of Haddan students on their way to the train station; they caught them unawares and beat the crap out of them, and it wasn’t until much later that Abe wondered why he and Joey hadn’t really cared whether or not this was the same troop that had been responsible for the theft at the pond.

  “You’re still wasting your time hating Haddan kids?” Abe was amazed by how single-minded his friend could be.

  “Each and every one. A little less so if they’re dead,” Joey admitted.

  Both men recalled the way old Dr. Howe had looked at them when their robbery case came to trial, as though they were insects, nothing more than specks in his universe. Dr. Howe was ancient by then, so weak he had to be carried into the court-house, but he’d had the energy to stand up and call them thugs, and why shouldn’t he? Wasn’t that what they’d been? Yet somehow they were the ones who felt violated each time a Haddan student recognized them in town and crossed over to the other side of the street. Maybe this dead boy would have done the same had he been their contemporary; maybe they would have been mere specks to him as well.

  “What’s your best guess?” Joey was thinking suicide, but he surely wasn’t about to say the word aloud in Abe’s presence. Although such incidents were rumored to happen at Haddan—a first-year student breaking under the academic rigors or collapsing from the social pressure—these matters were kept quiet, as had been the case with Francis Grey, the son of the chief of police and the grandson of a local hero as well. There hadn’t been an autopsy or a medical examiner’s investigation, only a closed casket. No questions asked.

  “I’d say accidental drowning.” Why shouldn’t that be Abe’s first guess? Accidents happened, after all, they happened all the time. Look away and a person might trip, he could fall down the stairs, crack his skull upon a stone, pick up a gun he thought was unloaded. It was possible to aim and fire before there was time to think. Death by misadventure, it was called. Death by mistake.

  “Yeah.” Joey nodded, relieved. “You’re probably right.”

  Abe and Joey would both much prefer a simple accident, rather than a complicated mess, like the death of Francis Grey. People in town who were a mile away at the time swore they could hear the shot. They still remember exactly where they were at that moment, out picking beans in their gardens or up in the bathroom, drawing a cool bath. It was the burning, white center of August, always an unmerciful month in Haddan, and the beech trees and raspberry bushes were dusty with heat. A storm had been predicted, and it was possible to smell rain in the air; neighbors stopped what they were doing, drawn to their windows and front porches. Many thought what they heard that afternoon was thunder. The echo rose above the village for a full minute, which to some people seemed an eternity, a reverberation they continue to hear whenever they close their eyes.

  Long ago, in the villages of Massachusetts, stones were set atop the graves of those responsible for their own deaths; such desperate spirits were said to walk, unable to give up the world of the living, the very world they’d denied themselves. In the towns of Cambridge and Bedford, Brewster and Hull, a stake was driven through the heart of any man who had taken his own life, and burials were hastily accomplished in a piece of farmland that was sure to be barren from that day on. There are those who believe that an individual who truly means to go through with a plan to take his own life can never be stopped. Those who live beside rivers and lakes insist it’s unl
ucky to save a drowning stranger, convinced that in the end such a man will surely turn on his rescuer. But some men can’t abide standing idly by when a body lies prone on the shore, and Abe couldn’t leave well enough alone and wait for forensics. He drew up the boy’s sopping white shirt and found a series of thin bloody lines along the stomach and chest. Rocks in the Haddan were sharp, and currents fast, so it made sense that a body would be battered from traveling downstream. The odd thing was, the blood still appeared to be flowing, with trickles issuing from the boy’s wounds.

  “What’s going on?” Joey fervently wished he was someplace else. He’d much prefer to have stayed in bed with Mary Beth, but if he couldn’t have that, he’d rather be out directing traffic on Route 17 than standing here with Abe.

  “He’s not done bleeding,” Abe said.

  There was a splash in the water and both men turned as if shot. The noisy culprit turned out to be nothing more than a water shrew, searching for a meal, but the little beast had done a fair job of spooking them. The shrew wasn’t the only thing that had rattled them. Both men knew that a corpse didn’t bleed.

  “I’ll bet water got under the scrapes and cuts and mixed with blood and now it’s all kind of leaking out. He’s waterlogged,” Joey said hopefully.

  Abe had heard that the blood of a murdered man will always liquefy rather than dry, and when he looked more closely he saw that several dark, oily pools had already collected on the ground. It was the scent of blood that had most probably drawn the shrew.

  “Tell me I’m right,” Joey said.

  There was silence except for the flow of the river and the call of a wood thrush. The hawthorns and oaks were almost bare, and although there were still a few stands of flowering witch hazel, the buds were so dry they disintegrated when the wind blew. The marshy riverbanks had already turned brown, and past the tangles of mulberry and bittersweet, the fields were browner still. It was possible to taste death out here, and the taste was not unlike swallowing stones.

  “Okay,” Joey said, “here’s another possibility. We probably shook him up when we took him out of the water. That’s why it seems like he’s still bleeding.” Joey was always nervous around a corpse, he had a sensitive stomach and a tendency toward queasiness. Once, when they’d been sent to retrieve the body of a newborn baby, neatly swaddled in a towel and deposited in a trash container behind the Haddan School, Joey had fainted. An autopsy concluded the infant was dead before birth, but the idea that someone would get rid of a newborn in such a callous way left the whole town disturbed. They never did find out who was responsible, and although Dr. Jones over at the school insisted that anyone in town could have had access to the Dumpster, the Haddan School Alumni Association bequeathed a recreation center to the village that same year.

  Such donations always followed a delicate situation at the school. The addition to the town library had been built after some Haddan kids out joyriding rammed their car into Sam Arthur’s station wagon when he was driving home from a town council meeting and Sam wound up in the hospital with two fractured ribs and a leg that had to be put back together again with metal pins. The new public tennis courts were the result of a drug bust that involved the son of a congressman. These gifts that had been presented to the town meant very little to Abe. He didn’t use the library and one evening of Ping-Pong with Joey and his kids at the rec center was enough to give him a headache. No, Abe was far more interested in this purple bruise on the boy’s forehead. He was interested in a wound that would not close.

  By now, there was an odd sensation in the back of Abe’s throat, as though something sharp had lodged there. It was a shard of someone’s death, and it didn’t belong to him but was there all the same. Already, Abe’s pale eyes had taken on a vacant look, always the telltale sign that he was about to wreck another part of his life. He’d alienate the chief, Glen Tiles, by refusing to let old Judge Aubrey off with a warning when the judge was stopped on his way home from the Millstone, driving with an elevated blood alcohol level, or he’d issue a citation to the mayor for speeding when every cop in Haddan knew to let him go with nothing more than a cheerful warning. These foolhardy actions applied to Abe’s personal life as well. He’d break up with some woman who was crazy about him, like that pretty Kelly Avon, who worked at the 5&10 Cent Bank, or he’d forget to pay his bills and not even notice that his electricity had been turned off until the milk in the refrigerator turned sour. If Joey hadn’t covered for Abe occasionally, he would surely have been fired by now, in spite of his father’s and grandfather’s reputations. Today, as he had so many times before, Joey tried his best to cheer Abe out of one of his black moods. On to the next subject, and more hopeful matters.

  “What happened last night?” Joey asked, knowing that Abe had taken out a new woman, someone he’d met at the scene of a traffic accident on Route 17. By now, Abe had been through most of the single women in Haddan and Hamilton alike, and they all knew he’d never commit. He had to look farther afield for women still willing to give him a chance.

  “It didn’t work out. We wanted different things. She wanted to talk.”

  “Maybe no one’s told you, Abe, but talking to a woman doesn’t mean you’re asking her to set a wedding date. How can I live vicariously through you at this rate? I’m not getting any excitement out of your love life. Too much complaining, not enough sex. You might as well be married.”

  “What can I say? I’ll try to have more meaningless one-night stands so I can report back to you.”

  They could hear sirens now, so Joey headed up toward the road in order to flag down their backup from Hamilton.

  “You do that,” Joey called cheerfully as he climbed the hillock.

  Abe stayed beside the boy, even though he knew it was risky. His grandfather had warned him that anyone who remained with a dead body for too long ran the risk of taking on its burden. In fact, Abe did feel weighted down, as though the air was too heavy, and in spite of his old leather jacket, he continued to shiver with cold. On this first day of November, he realized just how much he wanted to be alive. He wanted to listen to the river and hear birdsongs and feel the pain in his bad knee, which always acted up in damp weather. He wanted to get drunk and kiss some woman he truly desired. This boy he stood guard over would never do any of these things. His chances had been washed away, into the deepest pools of the river, those places where the biggest trout hid, huge fish, or so people said, with brilliant fins that reflected the sunlight upward, blinding fishermen and allowing for a clean getaway each and every time.

  Later in the morning, after the Haddan School had verified that one of their students was indeed missing, the drowned boy was wrapped in black plastic, then packed in ice to prepare him for the trip to Hamilton, since there weren’t facilities to do a proper autopsy in Haddan. Abe left work early; he went out behind the station to watch as the ambulance was made ready. Wright’s old police cruiser was parked beside the loading dock, kept mostly for sentimental reasons, although every so often Abe took it out for a spin. His grandfather liked to ride along the bumpy river road, and when Abe was growing up Wright often took his grandson along, although it wasn’t always trout Abe’s grandfather was searching for. He would leave Abe in the car and come back with bunches of blue flag, the native iris that grew along the banks. Those flowers had looked so small when held in Wright’s huge hands, as if they were little purple stars plucked from the sky. It was almost possible for a child to believe that if these flowers were tossed aloft, as high as a man could throw, they might never come down again.

  Some other big man pulling up wildflowers might have appeared to be a fool, but Wright Grey seemed like anything but. Riding back to the farm, Abe was always instructed to hold the flowers carefully and not to crush them. Every once in a while, on a hot spring day, a bee would accompany the irises into the car and they’d have to open all the windows. On several occasions the bee would stay along with them all the way home, buzzing like mad and flinging itself at the bouque
t; that’s how sweet those wild irises were. Wright never brought the flowers into the kitchen where Abe’s grandmother, Florence, was fixing supper. Instead, he walked out behind the house, to the fields where the tall grass grew and that woman he’d known long ago had found peace. Maybe that’s when Abe’s suspicious nature got ahold of him. Even back then, there seemed to be a truth he couldn’t quite get to, and now he wondered why he hadn’t fought harder to find it out and ask the simplest and most difficult question of all: Why?

  For the longest time, he had wished there was a way for him to speak to the dead. Not knowing was the thing that could haunt a man; it could follow him around for decades, year after year, until the accidental and the intentional had twisted into a single hanging rope of doubt. All Abe wanted was ten minutes with any boy who might have chosen to end his own life. Did you mean to do it? That’s all he wanted to ask. Did you cry out loud, your voice echoing upward through the treetops and clouds? Was it the blue sky you saw at the end or only a black curtain, falling down fast? Did your eyes stay open wide because you weren’t yet done with your life and you knew how much more there was to see, years of it, decades of it, a thousand nights and days you would no longer have?

  As the drowned boy was taken to Hamilton, he would surely turn blue along the way, just as silver trout did after they’d been hooked and stowed in a tackle bag, along with empty beer bottles and unused bait. In all probability, there were no facts to go after and nothing to prove, but the boy’s wounds nagged at him. Abe got into his grandfather’s car, deciding to follow the ambulance, at least for a while. He did this even though he was absolutely certain his life would be a whole lot less complicated if he’d only turn back.

  “Are we getting an escort?” the ambulance driver called through his open window when they stopped at the town line. Abe recognized the driver from back in high school, Chris Wyteck, who had played baseball and wrecked his arm senior year. It wasn’t yet happy hour, but the dirt lot of the Millstone was already half full. If the truth be told, Abe’s car was often parked among the Chevy vans and pickup trucks, a fact Joey Tosh tried to keep from Glen Tiles, as if it were possible to keep any secret in this town for long. But on this November afternoon, Abe didn’t have the slightest urge to take his regular seat at the bar. Truth was funny that way; once a man decided to go after it, he had to keep right on going no matter where the facts might lead.