River of Heaven

by Lee Martin

  Maddie doesn’t say a word. I see her feet move over the floor until she’s out of my sight, and I imagine her going to Vera to give her a hug, to let her know that, yes, this is where she’d like to live.

  Then she says, “What about Sam-You-Am?”

  “Oh, sweetie,” Vera says. “I meant it when I said the two of you can stay here as long as you want. Both of you.”

  In the morning, Vera tells me that her attorney will file the proper papers and argue that since the court can’t locate Maddie’s father—and even if they could, how responsible has he proven himself to be?—and since no other relatives, no aunts or uncles or her mother’s parents, have any interest in the matter, Vera should be Maddie’s legal guardian.

  “So it’s settled,” she says.

  And I tell her, “Good.”

  After breakfast, I take Stump out on his leash and we walk a ways with Maddie, who’s now going to school.

  “Did Vera tell you?” she asks.

  “It’s the right thing,” I tell her, and she says she thinks so, too.

  Then she says, “You know you can stay with us.”

  “I know,” I say, and then I tell her to go on, she shouldn’t be late. I tell her I’ll be there when she gets home. Then I say to her the thing I’ve always wanted to say. “Maddie,” I say, “I love you.”

  She comes up on her tiptoes and kisses me on the cheek. “I love you, too,” she says. “Geez, Sam-You-Am, I thought you always knew that.”

  I CAN’T BRING MYSELF TO GO BACK HOME, UNABLE TO BEAR the thought of stepping into the kitchen and seeing where Arthur last lay. Days pass, and the police are in and out of my house. When they want to talk to me, they come here to Vera’s, and I tell them what I know. I tell them how Cal came to stay with me, how he said he was on the run because he knew too much about the people who had a plot to blow up the Sears Tower, people who even had something to do with the bombing in Oklahoma City. I don’t tell the police that he was in the Michigan Militia, and I’m surprised that I’m inclined to protect him. I guess he was right when he told me that the years couldn’t change what ran between us. Blood to blood. I tell the police instead that Herbert Zwilling showed up, and everything exploded and Arthur was dead.

  One day, an FBI investigator comes to talk to me. It’s a sunny day, one of those winter days when the temperature gets up to fifty, and folks allow themselves to dream of spring. The FBI man is bareheaded, and he hasn’t bothered with a topcoat. He’s wearing a dark suit and a white oxford shirt, the collar button undone and his necktie loosened. He introduces himself as Agent Schramm, and he says he’s come to talk about my brother.

  We sit on Vera’s sun porch, where she prunes her bonsai trees and tends to her orchids. We sit in the brilliant sunlight streaming in through the walls of glass, and she brings us tea to drink: tea in china cups on a tray with a small dish of lemon wedges, another of sugar cubes, and a cruet of milk, all this and a platter of shortbread cookies.

  “How can I help you?” I ask Agent Schramm after Vera leaves us to our business.

  “Mr. Brady, here’s the thing.” Schramm lifts his teacup to his mouth, purses his lips, and blows across the cup to cool the tea. “Your brother told us a story that was pretty far-fetched. This story about Jacob Hendrik and Leonard Mink and Herbert Zwilling. Lots of holes in that story. I can tell you that much.” Schramm sips from the teacup and immediately pulls back his head, the tea still too hot to drink. “Boy, that’s on fire,” he says. He sets the cup back on its saucer, and when he lifts his head to look at me, his jaw is set and his eyes are narrowed. “We’ve talked to Mora Grove, and she’s told us another story, one that checks out.” I wonder what sort of story she’s told to save herself from any suspicion. Schramm pours a little milk into his tea. He stirs it with the dainty silver spoon. “Zwilling and your brother had been involved in a dispute for a good while. Sooner or later, it was bound to boil over.”

  Schramm tells me a story of greed and hate so deep they can lead a man to violence. This Herbert Zwilling, he says, was a collector of unusual objects. “One-of-a-kind things, mainly,” Schramm says. “Things he could turn a nice profit on. Passion or money, Mr. Brady. So many murders come down to one of the two.”

  In this case, he says, Cal was one of Zwilling’s finders, one of the people who kept their eyes out for rare objects, anything they knew Zwilling would be interested in selling. He paid them a ten-percent commission. Then Cal found an item that Zwilling especially coveted, only Cal wouldn’t let him have it.

  “That’s why your brother was on the run, Mr. Brady.” Schramm folds his hands in his lap as if to say the matter is settled. “Zwilling was after him. He wasn’t a nice man. He wasn’t a patient man. He’d been in prison once for manslaughter. Let’s just say he was used to having whatever he wanted, and your brother knew he was in danger if he stayed in Ohio. We’ve talked to the right people, and we’ve found an item in your house, the object your brother was trying to keep from Zwilling. A gold-plated Coca-Cola glass. Only one like it in the world.”

  “No,” I say, and then I’m rushing to get it all out, the truth of how the glass was in that box of odds and ends I bought at the blind man’s auction. All the while I’m speaking, I’m thinking of how Cal first told me that Zwilling was a collector, that he had his eye out for just such a glass, and, Lord God, what a miracle it was that I had it. Then later, Cal said he’d made up the whole story, that he’d read about the glass in the Daily Mail and hadn’t thought for a minute that it was right there in my house.

  Schramm chuckles. “Now that, Mr. Brady, is truly an incredible story. A gold-plated Coca-Cola glass, only one like it in the world? A valuable thing like that tossed into a box of junk that you just happen to buy at an auction? I guess I’d have to say, that’s hard to swallow.”

  The two stories spin around in my head—the one I’ve lived through and the one that Schramm is telling me—and there’s just enough fact in both of them to make me unsure of everything I know in my heart to be true.

  I remember, then, the maps of downtown Chicago that Cal showed me. He had them in a manila envelope in the guest room at my house. He showed them to me and then put them in the bureau drawer. When he left the house on New Year’s Eve to look for Stump, he didn’t know that the message would come from Mora Grove—the one I’d deliver to him—and he’d have to run. The maps would still be in that bureau.

  “He showed me a map,” I tell Schramm. “A stack of maps. They showed the Sears Tower and the streets around it and the route Mink was going to take to the getaway car.” Suddenly I feel like Dorothy awaking from her dream of Oz, trying to tell everyone where she’d gone and the astounding things she’d seen and done. “Cal left those maps in the bureau in my guest room.”

  “Mr. Brady, we’ve gone through your house from top to bottom, looked through every nook and cranny, just like we have your brother’s truck. We haven’t found anything to give any substance at all to the story he’s telling.”

  “Are you saying I never saw those maps?”

  “I’m saying we haven’t seen them. That’s what I’m saying, Mr. Brady.”

  “But that man,” I say. “Hendrik. He mailed a box to Herbert Zwilling, and Cal signed for it. There’s a receipt. It may be at Nancy Finn’s house.”

  “Hendrik was a finder, too,” Schramm says. “Whatever he mailed to Zwilling was a collectible. Your brother’s signature on that receipt wouldn’t mean a thing. In fact, the reason he had Nancy Hines’s address—Nancy Finn, I guess you know her as—was because when Hendrik died, he had an item Zwilling wanted, but before he could lay hands on it, Nancy packed everything up and moved away from Michigan. It took Mora Grove a few years to track her down. She and your brother meant to get that item and make a profit on it.”

  I remember the brass button Nancy had on her choker at the New Year’s Eve party, the one that Arthur said might be a relic from the Titanic. Could that be the item Schramm’s talking about? Had Hendrik hid
den it away and never told Nancy a thing about it?

  “I know what I know,” I say, but my voice is quieter now, shaken by what I’m starting to realize. There are people in this country who get to say what the truth is, and more often than not, those people aren’t us, the ones who have to live with it.

  “People think they know things all the time,” Schramm says. “I’m here to tell you the facts, and the facts add up to this.” He stands up so he towers over me. “Your brother and Herbert Zwilling were involved in a business proposition that went sour, and Mr. Zwilling happened to be a dangerous man. Apparently, your brother knew that. He had a Ruger Single Six waiting for him when he came.”

  Schramm stands where he is for a good while, making sure, I know, that I get it, that I understand there will be no more discussion.

  “I bought that Coca-Cola glass in a box at an auction,” I can’t resist saying again.

  “Mr. Brady, you don’t impress me as a stupid man. I think you understand what I’m saying.”

  Then it hits me, the larger, uglier truth none of us is supposed to know. “It goes all the way to you, doesn’t it? Ruby Ridge, Waco, Oklahoma City, the Sears Tower.”

  Schramm laughs. “Me? Who am I?”

  “You’re the government,” I say. “Cal said there were people from the government involved.”

  Schramm puts his hands on the arms of my chair and leans close to me. His coat gapes open wide enough for me to see the snub-nose in his shoulder holster. “Now what in the world do you think the government would have to gain by covering over a terrorist plot?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, and my voice is shaking because really I don’t know at all.

  “This is America,” Schramm says. “People can say what they want, but there’s a difference between saying something and making it true. Facts, Mr. Brady. That’s what counts.”

  “Facts can disappear.”

  He winks at me. “Not the ones that matter. We make sure of that.”

  Finally, he walks over to a bamboo table where Vera has a bonsai tree. She’s posed a miniature boy beneath it and a collie dog. The boy has a fishing pole in his right hand. His left is on the collie’s head. A Lassie dog, sitting by his side. Schramm leans over to study those figures. “The detail is amazing, isn’t it?” He turns back to me. Again, he winks. “Mr. Brady, you’d almost swear it was real, wouldn’t you?”

  Like that, I understand, as Schramm said, that I can say anything I want, but it’s him, and the others like him, who have the facts that count.

  “What’s going to happen to Cal?” I ask.

  In Indiana, Schramm says, you can shoot a man if you’re convinced that he’s about to kill you, and not have to answer for it. Self-defense. You can kill a man and go back to your life.

  “So you’ve released him? Then where is he?”

  “Why, Mr. Brady, I really can’t say.”

  20

  JUST LIKE THAT, CAL DISAPPEARS. PUT SOMEWHERE, I HAVE no doubt, by people who don’t want him to talk. Like he said, when he was telling me about Mink and the Michigan Militia, someone might find him and put him where he’d never be able to say another word. “They show up one day and tap you on the shoulder,” he told me. “Then it’s too late. Then you’re gone.”

  So it is. Now that the investigators are finished with my house, I have things to see to. The fact is people aren’t murdered in houses without leaving blood and whatnot to clean from floors and walls. I know, because when I owned my custodial service, I sometimes did this work. Now, though, I can’t face it. I hire a company here in town. I give Duncan a key to my house and ask him to please make sure everything is taken care of.

  The days go by, and as they do, I wish I could say it starts to feel more and more as if none of this ever happened: Cal never came, never told me his stories about Leonard Mink, never put me in the path of Herbert Zwilling; and Arthur didn’t die. I wish it could be so, but, of course, it’s not like that at all. I wake each day, and in a matter of seconds, the truth washes over me and leaves me sinking into grief.

  Grief over the deaths of good people, Dewey Finn included. Heartache for the way our lives can divide into before and after. Here’s Maddie, so young and so much now to get beyond. She’s a tough girl, though. I’ve known that from the moment the butcher knife slipped from her sleeve and stuck its point into the deck of Stump’s ship. A tough girl, yes, but with a soft heart.

  One evening, Vera has a headache. She’s washing dishes, and Maddie and I are drying them and putting them away.

  “Oh, someone just stuck a pin in my voodoo doll.” Vera lets a plate slip back into the sudsy water, and she puts a hand to her head. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she says, the strongest oath I’ve ever heard her utter.

  I think about Bess and how she said to Arthur, “My head hurts,” and then fell to the floor already gone. “Do you need to go to the hospital?” I ask. “Do you need to go to the emergency room?”

  “Sam, it’s just a headache,” she says. “Really, ducky, not everything leads to disaster. I’ll be fine. I just need…”

  “Here you are,” Maddie says, and in a snap she’s produced aspirin and a glass of water.

  “Thank you, dear,” says Vera. “You’re an angel.”

  Throughout the evening, Maddie fusses over her, bringing her cups of feverfew tea and warm washcloths to lay across her forehead. She dims the lights and puts on Vera’s favorite CD, a soothing collection of harp music. We sit in the dark by the light of the fire and listen to “Down by the Sally Gardens” and “Scarborough Fair,” and “All in a Garden Green.”

  Outside, snow is falling—I can see it slanting down through the glow of the gaslights—but inside we’re cozy, Vera and Maddie snuggled together on the fainting couch by the fire. I’m content—downright thankful, I guess you’d say—to be here on this snowy night when, as Vera said, not everything turns to disaster. By bedtime, her headache is gone, and the three of us bid one another good night and go off to bed.

  I know, as I get under the covers and Stump settles himself beside me, that it isn’t fair for me to keep taking advantage of Vera’s graciousness. Some morning, I’ll have to get up and face the facts. I have a home in Orchard Farms, a home that has now been made spic and span and waits for Stump and me to come back to it. But for now, as I drift off to sleep, I’m quite happy to be here, snug and warm while the snow falls and the night deepens, to think of the way, only moments before, we were all comfortable by the fire—Vera and Maddie and me, and yes, even Stump, dozing near the hearth—we were all content in this house filled with love.

  IN THE MORNING, THE SUN IS SHINING, AND THE SNOW IN Vera’s backyard sparkles. A cardinal, his splash of red so brilliant against all that white, flies up to perch on a cedar tree bough, laced with snow.

  My mother always said when you saw a cardinal it meant company was coming, and sure enough when I make my way down to breakfast, I find Vera on the sun porch, chatting with Duncan.

  He’s brought me my house key, and now there’s no reason that I can’t go home. “Mr. Brady,” he says, “everything is shipshape.”

  I thank him. “Duncan,” I say, “you’re a good man.” I believe this, no matter that I’ve always felt uncomfortable around him because he’s on the trail of what really happened to Dewey. I stand here thinking that Dewey would have grown to be like this—dependable and eager to please. He would have been there, throughout my life, whenever I happened to need him. Of course, I’m romanticizing. Who knows the directions our lives might have gone had he lived? After all, more than anything, he wanted out of Rat Town. He might have gone so far he would have forgotten me. Or maybe—in my private dreams I like to think this would have been the truth—I would have gone with him, and we would have been, like Arthur and Bess, like Vera and her husband, lovers and companions until one of us left this world.

  This, I realize, is what I want most of all for Maddie: a future filled with love and marriage and a home where she and her fa
mily feel safe.

  She comes out onto the sun porch, munching on a piece of toast, her school bag hanging from her shoulder.

  Duncan blushes, and at first I think it’s because I’ve embarrassed him by calling attention to his goodness. Then I notice the way he’s looking at Maddie, and I understand in a flash that he has a crush on her. It doesn’t alarm me—nor would it Vera, I imagine, because Duncan, only three years older than Maddie, is one of those sweet boys, so rare these days, who doesn’t think he’s the center of the universe, would rather give the spotlight to ordinary folks and their uncommon talents or hobbies. In fact, he has just enough uncertainty about himself to make him endearing and the sort who would never take advantage of people.

  “When I saw it snowing last night,” Maddie says, “I thought for sure they’d cancel school. Now I’m going to be late for my first class. Vera, can you please drive me?”

  Vera is still in her robe. “Why, honey, I haven’t even combed my hair or put on my face.”

  Duncan comes to the rescue. “My car’s right outside,” he says.

  Maddie hesitates, waiting to see whether Vera or I have any objection.

  “Shake a leg, sugar,” Vera says. “Never keep a gentleman waiting.”

  I can see how good she is for Maddie, giving her a mother’s love, and through it, a way of becoming the girl she was—her heart and spirit returned—before the world began to beat on her.

  Once upon a time, I was the boy who sat on the railroad trestle singing songs with Dewey Finn. I loved him, but I didn’t have the words for what I felt. Or maybe I had them but I couldn’t let them out because I didn’t know who I was. But he knew. He knew all along. He risked that kiss in the alley, and to him it was the most natural thing in the world. Sammy, sweetheart, he said, and for just an instant, before I let my heart turn black and shrivel, the purest light of my essence flickered and flamed. I was that boy, the one in the alley who wanted to kiss Dewey back—just that brief moment, and then that boy was gone.