by Lee Martin
Lordy, what a feeling goes through me. The sight of Stump, ambling along about his business, no thought in the world of how cruel people can be, makes me yearn for those days when it was just the two of us, no one else for me to have to answer to. His duck and potato, his house, a stroll through the neighborhood each morning and night. If I hadn’t built that house, Duncan wouldn’t have featured it in It’s Us, would never have found out that I knew Dewey, and Cal wouldn’t have seen my picture in the paper and come back to me when he was in trouble. Maybe Arthur wouldn’t have gotten involved with me, giving up on ever convincing me to attend the Seasoned Chefs, and Maddie wouldn’t have made my acquaintance and wouldn’t be out here now in the night kneeling down in the street, saying, “Here, Stump. Come on boy. Come here.”
“What the hell’s going on?” Herbert Zwilling says.
“It’s my dog,” I tell him.
I imagine Stump snoozing in Cal’s Explorer, then waking and seeing the open door and setting out to investigate. Now here’s a scent he recognizes, the scent of Maddie, and he starts to bark, that deep, baying gump. Hel-loo, it says. Hel-loo! It’s as if a gong is sounding or a church bell ringing. I haven’t heard this racket in too long—have feared I wouldn’t ever again—and before I have any thought of what the consequences will be, I’m out of the truck, stepping into the street.
“You.” I hear that one word from Herbert Zwilling, but it doesn’t stop me. Call me a fool. Call me an idiot in love with his life, in love with this dog, Stump, and this girl, Maddie, and my brother, Cal, who—I’m vaguely aware of this now—has come out the door of Nancy Finn’s house to see what all the hullabaloo is about. Call me a man who has the crazy thought that he can walk away from trouble, just walk away and be safe and happy on the other side of the world’s madness.
Then Herbert Zwilling has me. He grabs my coat at the back of my neck, balls the fabric up in his fist. The top of the zipper cuts into my throat. He yanks harder, and I come up on the tips of my toes.
“Hello, Cal,” he says. “It’s been a while.”
We’re shadows in the dark street, no more than a few feet apart, Maddie now hunkered down between us, her arms around Stump. There’s just enough of a moon so I can clearly see that Cal has come outside without his coat or hat and stands now, bareheaded, wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, the kind with a pouch pocket in the front. He takes his left hand from that pouch and scratches his head.
“Sammy?” he says. “Is it you?”
Herbert Zwilling loosens his grip a little, and I say, “Cal.” Just that. Just his name to let him know that, yes, it’s me.
And we stand here awhile in the cold and dark, waiting for someone to make the next move.
It doesn’t take long. Herbert Zwilling says to Cal, “I’ve got your brother, and you’re the only one who can save him.” Herbert Zwilling pushes me forward, his fist between my shoulder blades. “Tell him, Pops.”
“He killed Arthur,” I say. Maddie is sobbing now. She’s on her knees in the street, holding onto Stump, and she’s sobbing. “He shot him inside my house.”
“You had no call,” Cal says to Herbert Zwilling. “He didn’t have anything to do with you and me. My brother either. He’s got nothing at all to do with us.”
“Wrong place,” Herbert Zwilling says. “Wrong time.”
“Let him go,” Cal says.
“I can manage that. All it takes is for you to come over here.” Herbert Zwilling puts the gun to my temple, and I hear the hammer ratchet back. “You don’t want me to hurt him, do you?”
“Don’t do it,” I say to Cal. “Get Maddie and Stump and go back in the house. Call the police. Let him kill me. I’m ready.”
And I mean it—at least I persuade myself I do. Ready to cross to the other side. Ready to stand with my mother and father, and Arthur, and, yes, ready to face Dewey in whatever by and by awaits me.
But Cal says, “Hey, you asleep? Don’t be an idiot.”
“Maybe that’s what I need. A good, long sleep.”
A cloud passes over the moon, and Cal recedes into the dark. Then he’s standing in front of me. He finds my hand and squeezes it, the way Dewey did that night in the alley when we were fifteen and just walking home, no thought of the world around us.
Then Herbert Zwilling has his gun in Cal’s face. “All right,” he says, and Cal lets loose of my hand. For an instant, I try to grab it again, but I only grasp air, and then he’s gone.
At Herbert Zwilling’s truck, Cal turns back to me. “I took good care of your dog,” he says, and I swallow hard at this ache that comes into my throat. A line like that at a time like this.
Herbert Zwilling doesn’t stop at the truck. He shoves Cal ahead, and they go around the front, up over the curb and into the open field that surrounds the airport. They walk off into the darkness so far I can’t see them. For a good while there’s no noise save the wind and Maddie’s sobbing turned now to whimpers, and Stump’s toenails clicking over the street as he comes toward me. He’s got Cal’s scent, and he’s determined to follow it, but I reach down and grab his collar and make him heel.
Nancy Finn comes out onto her porch, calling for Cal, and at that moment, in the distance, a gun goes off. One shot, and then another.
I know I should move, should gather up Maddie and Nancy and Stump, hope there are keys in Cal’s truck, and drive us all away from this place. A porch light flips on at a house at the end of the street, but other than that there’s no sign that the neighbors have heard anything to give them alarm.
“What in the world?” Nancy says, but still, I don’t move.
I stand in the middle of the street, peering off into the darkness, and finally I see a figure coming from the field and I know right away from the set of his shoulders and the swing of his arms—the way I’d know him in heaven—it’s Cal.
“Call the police,” he says, when he’s standing in front of me, the Ruger Single Six in his hand. “I’ll tell them everything I know.”
18
THERE ARE, AT THE END OF EVERY STORY, EXPLANATIONS to make.
“I tried to keep Zwilling from knowing you were here,” I say to Cal, and for the first time I have a chance to tell him about Nancy Finn giving me her address at the New Year’s Eve party. “The notepaper she wrote it on was lying on the library table, and I tried to hide it from Zwilling, but he saw it.”
We’re standing outside, Cal now wearing his coat and hat. Nancy and Maddie and Stump are safe inside. Nancy has put the teakettle on the stove. What else do you do in the middle of the night when worry comes and you wait for the police to give you some sign that you can try to go back to your living?—and I’ve told her as much as I can stand to say. I’ve told her the man dead in the field was a man Cal had trouble with in Ohio. I’ve told her about Arthur. “Oh, Sammy,” Nancy said, and she wrapped her arms around Maddie and called her dear one. “Oh, dear one,” she said. “I know where you are right now. I know what it is to lose someone.”
“I didn’t mean for you to get into the middle of this,” Cal says. “Really, Sammy. I didn’t, but things happen, don’t they?”
“I’m just glad you’re all right. I’m glad it’s over.” I reach out and put my arm across his shoulders. “I can’t tell you what it means to me that you’ve finally told Nancy the truth.”
Cal draws back, and my arm falls to my side. “Told her?”
“You told me if trouble came, you’d come to this address to take care of something.” The cold air stings my eyes. “Didn’t you come to tell her the real story about Dewey?”
“I came for that postal receipt,” Cal says. “The one I signed when that box came to Zwilling’s grain elevator, the one that went back to the sender. I thought if I could get that receipt and destroy it, maybe I could go to the police, and they’d save me from Zwilling.”
My head swims with the thought of how foolish I’ve been. “Why would you come here after that receipt?”
“You’re not goi
ng to believe this, Sammy, but Mora Grove figured it all out, exactly where that receipt might be.” He pauses, giving me time to take this in. Then, finally, he goes on to explain that Mora recalled that Jacob Hendrik, the man who had mailed that box, was involved with a woman named Nancy Hines. “Mora poked around,” Cal says, “and found out that Hendrik was dead, and this Nancy Hines had moved away from Michigan, had left Cadillac, for Evansville, and maybe, just maybe, she had that receipt packed away with all of Hendrik’s things.”
I remember now, the story Nancy told at the Cabbage Rose on New Year’s Eve about living with a man she called Henk—a nickname, I imagine now, for this Jacob Hendrik. But as knotty as Cal’s stories have been, I’m slow to buy all this.
“Henk?” I say.
Cal nods. “That’s what everyone called him.”
“Did Nancy know about the militia?”
“I can’t say what she knew.” Cal glances behind him at the lighted window, trying to catch a glimpse, I imagine, of Nancy Finn. “I just know she was with this Hendrik, and then he died, and now here she is. I thought it was worth a shot to see what might be what. I came here on New Year’s Eve as soon as I left Mt. Gilead, but she wasn’t here. Her house was shut up tight. I got a motel and waited until tonight to make my move.”
Something still puzzles me. “Cal,” I say, “Mora Grove told you about Nancy Hines. How did you know she was talking about Nancy Finn from Rat Town?”
“I didn’t know for sure, but once I was back in Mt. Gilead and there was that boy, that Duncan Hines, and he said his grandmother was Nancy Finn, I started to wonder. I remembered a time when Hendrik stopped by in Edon, and I saw a woman in his car, a woman with red hair, and I thought, well, that looks like Nancy Finn, but wouldn’t that be crazy? I almost went out and said something to her, just to get a closer look.”
It is crazy, I want to tell him, everything that’s adding up on this night, but all I can do is listen, curiosity getting the better of me.
“Then, right before I left Ohio to come to Mt. Gilead, Mora told me that Nancy might have that receipt.” Cal folds his arms across his chest and stomps his feet to try to stay warm. “I’d have come down here right away to see about it, but I was afraid if I did I’d tell the story about Dewey. I wanted to do that for your sake, Sammy. Believe me, I did, but every time I tried to imagine it, I couldn’t face the truth any more than I could back in 1955. I hoped we could go on living there in your house—you and me and Maddie and Stump, you know, a family—and I’d never have to try to get that receipt to protect myself. Then you told me it was time, and I understood.” Cal curls his fingers into fists and bangs them together. “Damn it, Sammy. Now I wonder what would have happened if I’d gone out to that car that day in Ohio and said something to Nancy. Who knows? Maybe I’d have told her everything about Dewey, and then something would have changed in me, and I’d have gotten myself out of that militia.”
I let the word hang in the air, the cold air that stings my throat when I take a breath. “The militia,” I finally say. “Cal, were you in it?”
He lets his head hang for a moment. Then he lifts it and looks me in the eye. “I was in it,” he said, “but, Sammy, I was trying my best to get out.”
“Oklahoma City?” I ask.
“No, nothing like that.”
The wind is up now, coming through the trees. I watch the bare branches shake. I feel like I’m at the point of no return with Cal, that point where he won’t matter to me at all in just a while. I’m tired of lies and stories that turn back on themselves and questions of what he did or didn’t do. I’m tired of waiting for him to do the right thing and tell the truth about Dewey. I know I could have done it myself, but I let Cal tell me what we should and shouldn’t say.
“Did you get what you came for?” I ask him. “Did you get that receipt?”
“I never had the chance. I remembered I’d left the truck door open, and I stepped outside and there you were.”
I see Nancy pass by the window, carrying a cup of tea to Maddie, who sits on the sofa, Stump stretched out across her lap. Nancy is in her robe. She hasn’t taken the time to put in her dentures, and her mouth is caved in like it was the night my father and I went to the Finns’ to pay our respects over Dewey and she was there on the couch with her mother and sister, their mouths twisted with their wailing.
“Cal, if we tell her, we should tell her together.”
“You’re right,” he says. “The both of us.” He rubs a hand over his face. “I’d be a fool if I didn’t know it after this mess with Zwilling. You can’t run away from what you do in your life, Sammy. I tried to after that night at the tracks. That’s why I joined the Army and went away. I couldn’t stay in Rat Town with that secret. I was afraid sometime I’d say something—maybe I’d have too much to drink some night at one of those juke joints—and I wouldn’t be able to keep it in.” He pauses, and I can tell he’s thinking this all out, trying to decide what he’s ready to do. “I know it’s time for both of us to own up,” he says, “but I’m not sure I can do it. Sammy, I told you. I’m no hero. I expect you know that now.”
A police car comes up the street, its red lights swirling and lighting up the houses all along Larkspur Lane. Cal hitches up his pants and squares his shoulders. He steps out toward the police car, and I watch him go.
He turns back to me. “I didn’t want anyone to ever know how it came to be that you and Dewey ended up at that trestle. When I left, Sammy, I carried that part of the story with me, too. Remember that. I wasn’t just looking out for myself. I was looking out for you.”
YOU CAN’T KILL A MAN, NO MATTER WHO THAT MAN IS, NO matter the evil he’s done, and not have to answer the whys of it. We all know, don’t we, that the snares and traps in our passways are only the doors to the crumbled-up folks we are when we’re alone with ourselves? We know this truth no matter how much we’d like to say we don’t. We know the responsibility for the world and its hurts always lies with us.
So I find my voice, and I say to the two policemen who come, “There’s a man dead in my house in Illinois.”
“Did you kill him?” one of the policemen asks. He’s a man with loose, wrinkled skin on his throat, a man who’s been around long enough to size me up and make the assumption he does.
It takes me a while to answer, trying to figure what to make of the fact that my life has come to the point where this man can take one look at me and assume such a thing.
“I didn’t pull the trigger,” I finally say. “It was that man. The one out in the field.”
Then we start to sort it out, the story of Herbert Zwilling and why he was in my house and how he came to kill Arthur.
An ambulance comes, and the other policeman—this one younger, his cheeks and nose red with the cold—points the way. He’s already been out in the field with his flashlight and now he uses it to direct the ambulance driver to Herbert Zwilling’s body. The ambulance pulls up over the curb and rocks across the ruts in the frozen field.
Maddie and Nancy are on the porch watching.
“Who are they?” the older policeman asks, and I have to tell him that Maddie was with me when the murders took place in my house. “A witness?” he says, and I tell him, yes. I tell him the man dead in my house is her grandfather. I say that her mother is dead and no one knows where her father is, and the truth is she’s got no one in the world except me and Vera—“A nice lady back home,” I say. “A lady who didn’t have anything to do with all of this.”—and Nancy Finn, who stands now with her arm across Maddie’s shoulders.
“Sorry,” he says, “but we’ll have to talk to her. The girl. We’ll have to go downtown and sort this all out.”
Which we do. We sit in an interrogation room with detectives—Cal in one room and me in another, each of us telling our stories.
And Maddie tells hers, too. I get a glimpse of her walking down the hall with a female police detective, and another woman, this one in sweatpants and sneakers, a long wool coat
draped over her arm, her blonde hair back in a ponytail, crease marks on her cheek from being too recently asleep. I imagine she’s a social worker or whatever they call the folks who come in at a time like this to try to make everything less traumatic for a young girl like Maddie.
I try to tell my story as plainly as I can, but there’s so much to put in about Arthur and the ship we built for Stump, and then Cal showed up, and he told me the story of Leonard Mink and the plot to blow up the Sears Tower, and now I know he was more involved than he first let on. I imagine him in his own interrogation room trying to tell his story in a way that will allow him to walk away, free.
Of course, the detectives ask me why Cal was at Nancy Finn’s, and I can’t bring myself to say anything about what Cal’s told me about that postal receipt. I want to believe that Nancy had no knowledge of Hendrik’s involvement in the Michigan Militia, and I can’t stand the thought of bringing more trouble into her life.
“Old friend,” I say. “Someone we both knew when we were boys.”
By now, the detectives have been in touch with the police in Mt. Gilead, and I assume that officers have gone to my house and confirmed that yes, indeed, there’s a body there, a man with a bullet in his head.
One of the detectives is flossing his teeth. “You’ve got a mess in your house.” He throws the strand of floss into a metal trash can. “A dead man just like you told us. The girl tells the same story. A hell of a thing for her to have to go through.”
“I’d like to see her,” I say. “Maddie.” For an instant, I believe that the sound of me saying her name will be enough to tell the detectives exactly how much love I feel for her, how sorry I am for everything I’ve brought into her life, how I want to be there for her now to let her know she can count on me. Then I see that I have to say more, so I tell the detectives about the trouble that she and Arthur had and how for a time she lived in my house. Then I went to Vera’s New Year’s Eve party at the Cabbage Rose and saw how Arthur should be the one she depended on. Now that he’s gone, I have to be that person for Maddie. That’s what I promise myself sitting here in the interrogation room. That’s what I tell the detectives, and the one who hasn’t been saying much, the one sitting slumped in his chair, tapping a pencil on the desk, says, “The courts will decide guardianship.”