River of Heaven

by Lee Martin

  I reach out—it’s that easy, really, ridiculous as it may seem—and grab the gun from Herbert Zwilling. Just like that, it comes out of his hand and I hold it on him.

  Arthur lays his hands on Maddie. Just the softest touch on her shoulders to let her know she’s still among the living. “Honey,” he says, his voice barely a whisper, the sound of every breath that ever left this world. “Honey, it’s okay. You’re right here.”

  Maddie lets him hold her. He wraps his arms around her and gathers her in.

  I HAVE ROPE IN MY BASEMENT, AND ARTHUR, THE OLD SAILOR, knows knots: cat’s paw, Turk’s head, sheet bend. He learned them all in the Navy and is quite eager now to put them to use to restrain Herbert Zwilling, while Maddie is safe in Arthur’s house.

  “Don’t waste time with that,” I tell him. “Call the police.”

  “No, we need to tie him down,” he says, and I can see there’s no use arguing with him.

  “Sit,” I tell Herbert Zwilling, stunned by how little this shakes me. I’ve never held a gun in my life, but I’ve watched Cal and I know how to make it look like I mean business.

  “Mister,” says Herbert Zwilling. He sits on the wooden folding chair and lets Arthur pull his arms back behind him. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.”

  “Don’t talk,” I tell him.

  “I mean it,” he says. “This is way too big for the likes of you.”

  The likes of me? The words get inside me, and I can’t stop myself. I stick the barrel of the gun into Herbert Zwilling’s throat, jam it hard against his Adam’s apple. He tips his head back, but I won’t let him go. I keep bearing down, and I can see him swallow, can hear a little gurgle in his throat.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I say, and I hold that gun there while Arthur goes to work with the rope. When he’s securing the last of the knots, I tell him I’m going upstairs to call the police.

  Just as I reach for the phone, Maddie comes through my kitchen door. She’s dressed now in jeans and a sweater and dragging a coat by one arm. “I want to know what’s going on.” She sits on a kitchen chair, her coat draped over her lap. She squints at me as if she’s trying to make sense of everything. “Sam?” she says.

  I imagine what she sees when she looks at me. This old man holding this gun, this man who took her into his house when she was desperate to escape her grandfather. She trusted me with the story of her mother—“the real story,” she called it. She knew what Dewey meant to me without me even having to tell her. “If he was special to you,” she said, “it’s okay.” Now, here I am. Now here’s this gun. I can barely look at her, not wanting to be this sort of man. I remember the moment when I saw Cal on the television, coming out of that grain elevator, the danger over. The reporter on CNN called him a hero, and right now, standing here with this gun, looking at Maddie, I know how that made Cal feel, like an impostor.

  “You were walking in your sleep,” I tell her.

  That’s what it feels like now—this night, my whole life after Dewey—a sleepy fog. I’ve always been trying to find the boy I was. I left him back there on the railroad trestle singing with Dewey. One of the last times I truly felt joy.

  My phone rings. Its shrill noise shakes me.

  What can I do but answer? This is the way it is, isn’t it? You can think you don’t have a prayer, and then a phone rings or a door opens, and you feel your life shooting on ahead of you. Maybe it was going that way all along but you didn’t know it, and now all you can do is hang on and wait to see what’s waiting on the other end.

  I pick up the phone, and suddenly I can’t find my voice, the events of the evening too much for me.

  “Sammy?” the voice on the phone finally says, and I know it’s Cal. “Sammy?” he says. “You asleep?”

  This is my brother, somewhere in the night, somewhere on the run. I want to tell him to come back. Come home, I want to say, and we’ll lie in the dark and talk our quiet talk the way we did when we were boys. Blood to blood. You’ll tell me everything there is to say, and I’ll hold it inside me forever. Hold your secrets until I’m dead and gone. But I know he can’t come back. Nothing here is safe. Herbert Zwilling is bound and gagged in the basement, but are there others, men like Leonard Mink, out there tonight looking for Cal?

  “No, I’m not asleep,” I tell him. “Cal, I’m right here.”

  “I wanted to make sure you’re all right.” I hear the noise of highway traffic, the blare of a horn fading as a diesel truck goes by. Cal’s voice is jazzed up with fear. “Sammy, I’m sorry.”

  “About the way you left with Stump? It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t have any other choice.”

  “I had choices all up and down the line. You know that. I could have come out a different man than I am now.” For a good while, he doesn’t say anything. There’s only the traffic noise, and what sounds like the wind pushing a can across pavement, and what I guess is the squeal of a metal sign rocking on its hinges. I imagine him at a pay phone—you can still find them here in the middle of the country—maybe at a truck stop, maybe at a gas station closed now for the night. I think of him braced against that wind. “If I’d stayed home.” Now his voice is barely a whisper. “If I’d never left Rat Town, Sammy. If I hadn’t been hotheaded like the old man.”

  “Dad,” I say. “He could never make room for who I was.”

  “He loved you.”

  “You, too,” I tell him.

  The basement door flies open and bangs back against the kitchen counter. The noise startles me so badly I drop the phone.

  Then everything speeds up.

  Arthur stumbles up from the basement, Herbert Zwilling behind him, his arm barred across Arthur’s throat, the knots of rope, somehow ineffectual, loosed and gone.

  I swing the gun toward them.

  “Grandpa,” says Maddie.

  Herbert Zwilling tells her to shut up.

  “Put that gun down,” he says to me. “Put it on the table where I can reach it. I mean it. Do it now, or I’ll break your buddy’s neck.”

  He tightens his arm, and Arthur’s head goes back. He shuts his eyes tight.

  I line up the pistol’s sight with Herbert Zwilling’s left temple. I try to convince myself I can pull the trigger. One shot clean to the brain. But here’s Arthur’s face so close to Herbert Zwilling’s. No room for error, and, of course, even as my finger tightens on the trigger, and I tell myself to squeeze it, I know I won’t. I know the only thing I can do is to lay the pistol on the table exactly how Herbert Zwilling has told me. He picks it up.

  Then it happens: A bullet to Arthur’s head, and he slips to the floor.

  This is the way it is. Why should I be surprised? We can think our lives are removed from it all, quaint and safe. We build a doghouse that’s the replica of a ship, learn recipes at the Seasoned Chefs, dress up and play tough guy at a New Year’s Eve party. Then a door opens and the evil comes inside and suddenly, the terror we’ve read about in headlines, watched on the evening news, is ours.

  My ears ring. I smell the blood, feel its odor settle on my tongue. The sickness rises up into my throat, and I choke it down.

  Maddie is crying. She’s put her coat over her head so she won’t see the bullet she’s sure is hers.

  Then I say to Herbert Zwilling, “She’s just a girl.” I say it like a prayer. “Please leave her be. She can’t hurt you.”

  He takes a few steps toward her, and that’s when I move. I lift her up from her chair and I wrap my arms around her, turning my back to Herbert Zwilling, doing the only thing I can, shielding her with my body.

  I hold her, and I wait.

  Then I feel the pistol’s barrel against the back of my head.

  “Put your coats on,” Herbert Zwilling says. “Both of you, and don’t say a word when we walk out the door. Just keep your mouths shut and do everything I tell you to do.”

  I DRIVE. “NICE AND EASY,” HERBERT ZWILLING SAYS. “YOU get me to where your brother is.
No tricks. Anything shaky and I’ll kill the girl.”

  He sits in the backseat of his Chevy Blazer, leaning forward, his gun held at Maddie’s head. She’s fidgeting with the strings that hang down from the hood of her coat. She’s flipped the hood over her head, as if that piece of insulated material can protect her. She’s still crying a little, a few whimpers and sniffles muffled inside the hood. When she speaks, her voice shakes.

  She says, “How fucked up is this?”

  And Herbert Zwilling shoves her head forward with the pistol’s barrel. “I’m back here, Mouth,” he says. “Remember me?” Again, he taps her head with the pistol. “The only reason I don’t shut you up right now—I mean forever, Mouth—is you’re going to come in handy soon.”

  “She’s just a girl,” I say like I did a few minutes earlier in my house, a house where I know Arthur’s body waits to be found, a house I can’t imagine ever seeming like mine again. “What could she possibly do?”

  “You,” Herbert Zwilling shouts, and he knocks my face a little with the pistol. “Drive.”

  Then it’s like we’ve all dissolved into a silent movie. I think of the episode of I Love Lucy that was playing the night I found Maddie in Stump’s house and told her to come inside. There they were—Lucy and Ethel and Ricky and Fred—gathered around the piano, singing, and watching them, Maddie and I understood something: the shadows looming ahead.

  Now we glide along Highway 130 on our way to Evansville. In the middle of the night, there’s hardly any traffic at all, but from time to time we meet a car and the headlights come into the Blazer, and I imagine what the other driver must see for just an instant: an old man, his jaw set; a girl with a hood over her head; a man in the backseat, each of them staring straight down the road.

  AT GRAYVILLE, WE GET ON INTERSTATE 64, AND SOON WE’RE in Indiana, heading east to Highway 41, which takes us south to the city. It’s here, at a stoplight near Dress Regional Airport, the lights of the city spreading out before me, that I realize I have no idea where Nancy Finn lives, wouldn’t begin to know how to find Larkspur Lane.

  Evansville isn’t Mt. Gilead—no sir, not by a long shot—not a one-horse town where you might drive up and down streets until you hit a neighborhood that seems like it might be right. You’d hit Orchard Farms, maybe, and see those streets—Peach Tree, Apple Blossom, Cherry Blossom—and you’d think, hallelujah, Cider Court must be just around the corner.

  No, here in Evansville, this river town nestled in close to the Ohio, the streets spread out, east from the inner city to Highway 41 and beyond to Green River Road and out to the Warrick County line, and west along the Lloyd Expressway to Posey County, and south past Ellis Park Race Track before the high arching bridge crosses the Ohio into Kentucky, and north up here to the airport, where I sit at a red light, wondering what to do.

  Herbert Zwilling is getting nervous. “So where is it?” he says. “Where’s this place we’re going? Where’s this Larkspur Lane?”

  And I tell him the truth. Sometimes that’s all you can do. “I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know? What do you mean you don’t know? You’ve got the address.”

  I lie. “My brother. Cal. He wrote down that address. That’s all I know. What do you want with him anyway?”

  “Like you don’t know? Like he never told you.” Herbert Zwilling laughs—an exaggerated laugh, the way people used to write in letters when they wanted to call attention to a joke or a teasing tone of voice. “Ha,” he says. “Ha, ha.” Then he leans over the front seat. He puts his mouth next to my ear, and he whispers. “He’s the one, Pops. The one I’ve got to find.”

  The light turns green, and for a moment I can’t bring myself to accelerate through the intersection. I glance over at Maddie, who still has the hood over her head.

  “We’re not getting out of this, are we?” I say.

  “Pops, I don’t think you’ve got a prayer.”

  Then Maddie says, “Turn left.”

  Herbert Zwilling laughs. “So you calling the shots now, Mouth? Is that it?”

  Maddie’s voice is calm now. “It’s not far. Larkspur Lane. Just on the other side of the airport. Turn left.” A car behind me honks, and I make the left turn. Then I narrow my eyes and look at Maddie, wondering how in the world she knows anything about Larkspur Lane. Then I remember the trip she and Arthur made to Evansville after Christmas so she could go to the mall. “I’ve been there,” she says. “I was there with…” Here her voice breaks and she goes dumb. I know, then, that when Arthur took her to Evansville, they must have stopped in to visit with Nancy Finn, and now Maddie is choked with the truth that her grandfather is dead.

  Herbert Zwilling won’t let her be. “Who lives there, Mouth?”

  “Duncan Hines’s grandmother,” she says.

  Herbert Zwilling slaps her head with the palm of his hand. “Don’t fuck with me. Duncan Hines, my ass, and I suppose his grandmother is Betty Crocker. Now who lives there?”

  “She’s telling the truth,” I say. “Nancy Finn lives there. As hard as it may be to believe, her grandson’s name is indeed Duncan Hines.”

  Herbert Zwilling shifts his head over close to mine. I feel his breath on my face, turn away from its sour smell, something close to old milk. “So now we’re all telling the truth. That’s good. You know what they say about the truth making you free. You believe that, Pops?”

  What I want to ask Herbert Zwilling is this: what good is the truth when it never brings back the dead? When more often than not it only makes clear our failures of courage and heart? That’s what I should have told Duncan that day he took me to the police annex and showed me that box of Dewey’s clothes. No, the truth doesn’t set us free. Not when it traps us in the moment where we failed to love someone enough. It leaves us stagger-blind, feeling in the dark, trying to find our way back to our living.

  I wish I could agree with Herbert Zwilling. I wish I could say, “Yes, the truth will make us free.” But I can’t. Not now. Not on this night when Arthur is dead, and I’m here with Maddie and Herbert Zwilling on our way to Nancy Finn’s where God knows what will happen.

  “Sure, I believe it,” I tell Herbert Zwilling because I think it’s what he wants to hear.

  “Then you’re an idiot,” he says, and I keep driving, listening as Maddie tells me where to turn.

  We drive through a neighborhood of ranch houses and Cape Cods, set off along the open fields that surround the airport and its landing strips. Picture windows and second-story dormers sometimes frame rectangles of light that I glimpse through the branches of the leafless trees along the curbs. The streets have names like Foxglove and Coneflower and Delphinium, and what a sweet joy it would be if I lived here and were coming home to one of those houses where there was a light in the window and someone waiting up to welcome me.

  At the end of a street, I see the runway lights at the airport stretching off to the horizon. A small plane is setting down. The prop engine buzzes and hums in the otherwise quiet night.

  “Right,” says Maddie, and I see the sign for Larkspur Lane.

  The house numbers are painted on the curbs, black numbers on white rectangles. I creep along, thinking what would have happened if Maddie hadn’t admitted she knew exactly where Nancy Finn lived. Would Herbert Zwilling have made me stop somewhere—an all-night convenience store, perhaps—to ask directions? And what if the person I asked didn’t know how to find Larkspur Lane, or the next person, or the one after that? What if no one on this night could tell us where it was? Would Herbert Zwilling have let us go? Or would he have shot us dead? That’s one thing we’ll never know because now I see 5214, and parked in the driveway is Cal’s Explorer, the driver’s door open, the dome light on. In an instant, I feel so much love for my brother because I see I’ve been right all along. I imagine him inside that house telling Nancy exactly what happened with Dewey that night at the tracks.

  “Park on the street,” Herbert Zwilling tells me, “and douse the lights. No need
to announce ourselves just yet.” He pulls the hood from Maddie’s head. “That’s where you come in, Mouth.” Her hair is mussed and tangled, and her face seems so small to me—small and pale and full of fear. I want to reach over and pull the hood back up over her head, anything to keep her safe.

  But Herbert Zwilling has his hand closed around her neck. “I want you to go up there,” he says. “I want you to knock on that door, and ask for Cal Brady. He’s scared. He’s on the run. If he knows he’s cornered, it’s hard to tell what he’ll do. I’d rather put him in a place where he doesn’t have a choice. That’s where you come in, Mouth. I want you to give him the fact of the matter. Tell him his brother is out here in this truck. Tell him he’s got a gun to his head. Tell him to come out here, or his brother’s dead.” Herbert Zwilling chuckles. “He wouldn’t want that, would he, brother? Hasn’t he always loved you?”

  The question drives to my heart, and for a moment I can’t make an answer. Then I say, “I guess we’ll see.”

  Herbert Zwilling is laughing hard now. “You’ve got a sense of humor, Pops. I’ll give you that. What else can you do, right?”

  Maddie reaches up and tries to pat her hair down. For just an instant, I see her fingers trembling. Then Herbert Zwilling slaps them away. “Move,” he tells her. “Now.”

  She opens the truck door and steps out into the night. I think of the story Arthur told me about the time she was barefoot, and her mother locked her out of the house. She slept in the garage with rags tied around her feet. I’m about to roll down my window and shout for her to run. Run, I’ll tell her, hoping that she’ll understand that she can vanish into the night and let whatever’s going to happen go on without her. Go, I’ll tell her, meaning, it’s all right, you owe us nothing, Cal and me. That day I found you on the deck of Stump’s ship, you were stepping into bad luck, and you didn’t know it. Run.

  But before I can say a word, Stump climbs down from the front seat of Cal’s Explorer. He eases himself out the open door, and the dome light lets me see him clearly just an instant before he’s in the dark.