by Lee Martin
“Giddy up,” Maddie says, and with that, she and Duncan are on their way.
AFTER BREAKFAST, I DECIDE I CAN’T PUT IT OFF ANY LONGER. I whistle for Stump and help him up into the cab of my Jeep. I ask him if he’s ready, and he gives a little snort and sits up straight, looking out the windshield, as if he knows exactly where we’re going, is a little impatient, really, put off just a tad that it’s taken us so long to go home.
In Orchard Farms, the snow plows have been down the streets, but still I creep along, letting the place come back to me gradually, taking inventory with the new eyes absence has given me of the sights I once took for granted or barely noticed: the Arbor Park Grade School, snowflakes cut from paper, taped to the windows; the stone goose still dressed in a Santa suit on the front porch of a house; the brightly colored whirligigs twisting from the bare trees in a yard; the brick wishing well in another; the white squirrels scurrying over power lines, across roofs, over limbs; the ears of corn, some gnawed down to the red cobs, left on spikes nailed to trees for the squirrels to feed on. A man on the corner of my street, a man my age whose name I’ve never known, is shoveling his walks, and he waves at me as I drive by, as if we’ve been friendly and he’s welcoming me back to the neighborhood. For an instant, I let myself wonder what it would be like to knock on his door someday and say hello.
My driveway is filled with snow, so I park along the street. Stump gets one look at his ship—yes, it’s here just as we left it—and scrabbles around the front seat, eager for me to open the door and let him out.
But for a moment, I can’t do it, overwhelmed, as I am, by the memory of Arthur using his snowblower to clear my drive, coming in afterward for a cup of coffee. Then, of course, it all comes back to me: the nights we spent watching old movies on TV, the hours we worked together building Stump’s ship, the andouille jambalaya he brought to share with me that autumn evening when neither of us knew what lay ahead.
The one thing I’m learning—of course, it’s silly that I never fully appreciated this until now since it’s something that’s always been true—is that time keeps moving. Like I said, this isn’t rocket science, but sometimes it takes the world to shake for us to feel the undeniable fact of that rattle around in our bones. A new day comes, and no matter what your life has brought, you try to keep up with the hours unfolding before you. If you can manage to keep your spirit away from the inclination to give up, you eventually lift a foot, you take a step, you go on, as I do now, opening my Jeep door, and swinging my foot down to the ground. I let Stump out, and together we walk through the gate into our side yard.
Stump goes directly to his ship. I make sure the gate is closed behind me, and then I face the house, which looks for all the world exactly like the house I left with Maddie and Herbert Zwilling on a night that sometimes seems as if it happened to someone else and at other times seems so fresh I swear it’s happening again, and, for the life of me, I can’t stop it.
I take a glance behind me at Arthur’s house, and the first thing I note is that there’s no smoke spiraling from the chimney, no fire in the Franklin stove. All the drapes are closed, and again I have to face the fact that Arthur is gone.
A boy—late for school, I assume—comes running down the sidewalk, long tail of his sock hat flying out behind him. He lifts a hand to greet me. “Hey, Enis McMeanus,” he says and then speeds on by, leaving me to recognize him as the boy who first came to see Stump’s house and told the joke about the pirate, the boy who lost his scarf on the day after Christmas.
He races on down the sidewalk now, and I feel my heart stretch out to him because he’s reminded me, with that silly name, that good, decent living goes on despite the stir of evil that’s always with us.
My house smells of cleaning solution, a hint of bleach and ammonia beneath a stronger scent of pine. I stand in the middle of my kitchen, where I watched Herbert Zwilling put a bullet into Arthur’s head, and it comes to me that if someone walked in here now, someone who didn’t know the truth, there’d be nothing to tip them off, no sign at all of the horrible thing that happened here. But for Maddie and me, that night with Herbert Zwilling is something we’ll never escape. It visits me now in my dreams, and the only relief I take from this—selfishly take, I admit—comes from knowing that no matter where Maddie ends up living, no matter where she goes in this world, she and I will always be bound by what we watched here.
In the guest bedroom, I go to the bureau and open the drawers, but the only things I find are the spare sheets and pillowcases I’ve always stored in them. I don’t find the manila envelope of maps that Cal showed me. In fact, I don’t find any sign of Cal at all, not in the bureau drawers, or in the closet, or on the nightstand. When he ran with Stump on New Year’s Eve, he left behind toiletries, clothes, CDs, but there’s none of it here now, Schramm and the other agents having made away with every trace. The only thing to remind me of the days Cal spent here is the lamp beside the bed, the one with the explorers’ routes curving across the oceans, that and the sheets still folded and tucked (I lift up the bedspread to check) in those hospital corners my mother taught the two of us when we were boys.
I go into my own room, and here, folded neatly on top of my dresser, is the flannel shirt Cal bought me for Christmas, the shirt Maddie wore one morning when she was cold. I pick it up and press it to my face, and her scent is still there, just the faintest scent of baby powder and vanilla. I’m not ashamed to tell you this, how I stand here, comforted by that smell and the soft flannel and the fact that the sun is streaming through my window, and in the side yard Stump is curling up on the deck of his ship.
I go out into the yard, and I stand in the brilliant sunlight, trying to convince myself that all we need is a spirit to take hold of us, something to lift us and carry us through the rest of our days. Call it Enis McMeanus. Call it this dog, Stump, this sailing, Captain Stump, glad to again be the commander of his ship. Call it Maddie. Call it Vera. Call it Duncan Hines. Call it the good lives of good people. Count the ways, as I intend to do from now on, that I deserve to be among their number.
The man from the house on the corner is coming down the sidewalk. He has a round, friendly face, and when he smiles at me, though I don’t know a thing about him, I fall in love with the lines around his eyes.
“You’ve been gone,” he says. “You and your dog.”
I never knew this man had taken any notice of me at all.
“Yes,” I tell him, “but now we’re back.”
MARCH AND ITS TANTALIZING WARM DAYS TURN SUDDENLY to cold and snow blankets the daffodils before the month goes out like a lamb. Then one morning in April—the grass is a green so brilliant it’s impossible to remember from year to year—I hear Stump barking, and I go to the window to see what’s caught his fancy.
It’s Duncan, just now coming through the gate. I wait to see that he closes the gate behind him. He latches it and gives it a shake to make sure it’s secure. Then he squats down and claps his hands, and Stump waddles over to him for a good rub and belly scratch.
I step out into the yard to see why Duncan’s come to visit. He hears the screen door shut, and he rises out of his crouch and gives me the news.
“They found a truck like your brother’s.” He says it to me plain, no hint of pleasure or regret in his voice, just a newsman stating a fact. The state police found a Ford Explorer abandoned along a river road down by Grayville, no more than thirty-five miles from here. “It was burned out,” he says. “There were no plates on it, but they traced the VIN. You know, the vehicle identification number stamped into that metal plate on the dash?”
I listen to him. Then I ask the question I have to ask. “Was he in it? Cal? Was he in the truck?”
Duncan hands me this morning’s Evansville Courier folded to a small item: BODY FOUND IN CAR NEAR GRAYVILLE. “Like I said, no license plates. Just that VIN, and they traced it and found out it was registered in Ohio. Registered to Calvin Brady.”
At first, I can’t fi
nd room inside me for the fact that Cal’s dead. “So it’s him?” I ask Duncan. “Not someone else? They’re sure.”
“Dental records, Mr. Brady.”
“No one’s come to tell me,” I say. “The police haven’t come.”
If that hasn’t happened, I try to reason, then maybe I can pretend awhile longer that Cal’s still alive. Then it starts to sink in, and I can’t deny the fact that someone set fire to that Explorer with Cal still in it—either folks connected with the Michigan Militia or the FBI, or even Cal himself, no longer able to live with his guilt.
“That’s what I’m doing.” Duncan says this as kindly as he can. “I’m telling it to you right now.”
And I can’t stop myself. His voice is so gentle, and now that Cal’s gone the secret is mine and only mine, and I have to admit I’m not strong enough to carry it any longer. I tell Duncan everything he’s been trying to learn. I tell him the story of the tracks and what really went on there.
IT WAS APRIL AND THE RIVER WAS RISING, AND I SAW DEWEY heading toward the railroad trestle. He was taking the long way around because of the floodwaters. He had to make his way out of Rat Town to Christy and then down the B and O tracks that cut past the grain elevator. Since the night he’d kissed me and called me his sweetheart, I’d kept him out of my life. Then I called him a queer and Arthur and those other boys heard me, and I let the guilt eat away at me until I couldn’t stand it anymore. So when I saw Dewey that night—that April night—I knew where he was going, and I knew what I had to do.
I caught up with him at the trestle. “Dewey,” I said, and he turned around and waited.
He was standoffish at first, hurt and pouting. He had his hands in the pockets of his dungarees, and he kept stubbing at the rocks in the rail bed with the toe of his Keds.
“Thought you didn’t want anything to do with a queer,” he said.
The floodwaters stretched out across the fields. I picked up a rock and slung it off the trestle and watched it plunk down into that water. The ripples spread out. Then there wasn’t any noise save the sound of a crow calling overhead, and I had to make myself look at Dewey, and I told him I was sorry. Sorry for saying what I did in front of the pool hall, sorry for whatever misery I’d caused him.
He had on that blue and yellow striped shirt. It was tucked into his dungarees, and he was wearing that concho belt, the one with the treasure chest buckle that locked. He took his hands out of his pockets and patted his unruly red hair as if with a touch he could flatten it down and make himself more acceptable. The gesture shot straight to my heart, so shy and beautiful it made him, the way he’d been the night he took my hand without saying a word and we walked down the dark alley.
Now, he was hooking his thumbs into his belt and rocking up on the balls of his feet as if he had all the confidence in the world. “Sammy,” he said. “You love me, don’t you?”
I was balanced on a rail, and through my sneakers, I could feel a vibration in the arches of my feet. Off in the distance, a train whistle sounded, and I knew it was the National Limited coming and soon it would swing through the big curve to our west, and Dewey and I would have to get off the tracks.
“Aw, don’t talk like that,” I said. “Jesus, Dewey.”
He gave me that grin, the one that always got me, made me feel like I always wanted to be near it. Then he slipped a finger between his dungarees and his belt, unzipping that leather pouch where he kept the key that unlocked his treasure chest buckle. He held the key out to me. “Key to my heart, Sammy,” he said, joking, and I took it. I even sang a little of that Doris Day song, “If I Give My Heart to You,” and Dewey joined in on the tune’s bridge, that part about always being as you are with me tonight, and for a moment it was like it used to be those evenings when we sat on the trestle and sang together.
Then Dewey took my hand, and he leaned his face in close to mine, and he closed his eyes, waiting, I knew, for me to kiss him.
That’s when I heard a noise off in the woods, a snap of a twig, and when I looked, I saw a flash of color, a blaze of red, and I recognized Arthur Pope, as he ducked farther into the brush and headed back toward town, removed forever from what was about to happen.
Then I heard footsteps on the gravel roadbed behind me. I turned around and saw Cal coming down the tracks. I saw him, and everything I thought I’d got beyond, every fear of being who I really was, went scattering out into the air.
I shoved Dewey in the chest. He stumbled backwards a little ways along the rail bed. Then his heels caught the lifted edge of a tie, and he fell, twisting so he ended up lying along one of the rails, his arm slung over it, his head resting on a tie. He was stunned. I could see that, but I kept waiting for him to get to his feet. Then he said, “I’m stuck.”
On the inside of the rail, two spikes went down through an iron cleat into the wooden tie. The heads of the spikes weren’t flush against the cleat. They stood up just enough for a belt loop on Dewey’s dungarees to fit over one, which wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that somehow, when his body twisted, one of the belt’s conchos—those slim, round disks—had tilted up and hooked itself between the belt loop and the spike head, essentially acting like a button, one on a shirt turned inside out, nearly impossible to undo. The truth was Dewey was held fast to that railroad spike, and just then I heard the engine of the National Limited—heard it before I ever saw it in the curve.
“The key,” Dewey said, and I realized I was still holding the key to the treasure chest buckle and that he wanted to unlock it and slip the belt out of as many loops as he could, unfasten his dungarees and wriggle out of them, all before the National Limited’s engine was upon him.
He reached out his hand to me, and I took a step forward, meaning to give him the key.
Then I heard Cal call my name. He was close enough now to grab me by the arm. “Leave him,” he said.
I remember that I hesitated for just a fraction of a second, not enough time to mean anything at all, but it does to me now, the memory of that split second when I resisted, when I could have broken free from Cal. Then, to my surprise—and this is the thing that haunts me—I let him drag me down the embankment to the woods below.
The last image I have of Dewey is his face, eyes wide open with fear, as he reached out to me. “Sammy,” he said. “Don’t leave me. Sammy, please.”
By then, Cal and I were running down the embankment. I heard Dewey’s voice one more time. “Sammy.” Then there was only the noise of the National Limited, and any other sound got swallowed up in its roar—did Dewey, so desperate with fear, summon the strength to tear his belt in two, or did the force of the accident rend it?—and then the squealing of the wheels over the rails as the engineer tried to stop.
In the woods, hidden from the view of anyone on that train, I pounded my fists into Cal’s chest, and he let me do that, let me beat against him because there was nothing else I could do with the rage I felt.
“You left him there,” I said to Cal.
“You’re the one who pushed him,” Cal said, and I knew it was true. I’d pushed Dewey, and he’d fallen, and then the train was coming and there was nothing I could do—nothing I’d ever be able to do—to make that not happen.
Finally, Cal grabbed me by my wrists, and he shook me. “We can’t tell,” he said. “We can’t ever tell.”
The ground was starting to puddle with floodwater. I tucked the key to Dewey’s belt buckle into my pocket, and Cal and I made our way back into town, where we waited for the news to come.
I TELL DUNCAN ALL OF THIS, THE WHOLE STORY, AND HE stands in my yard, his face going slack with disbelief.
What’s more, I tell him the most important thing, the thing I’ve carried with me ever after, the thing I never even said to Cal. I tell Duncan I’m not sure whether I didn’t try to help Dewey because there wasn’t enough time or because I didn’t want to, because, in my youth-fed, ignorant way of thinking, for just the briefest moment I believed that I could walk a
way from that trestle, saved. I didn’t know, when I let Cal drag me away from Dewey, that even as we ran down the embankment, locked together with our secret, we were already starting to run away from each other, two brothers coming apart.
“You,” says Duncan, and then he can’t find any other words, stunned as he is, choked with what I know is disgust, poleaxed by exactly how ugly this life can be. “I can hardly believe it. How could you do it? How could you leave him there to die?”
That’s when I reach into my trousers pocket and take out my coin purse. I squeeze it open and take out the key I’ve kept all these years. I let it lie on my open palm.
Duncan understands immediately what I’m showing him. He reaches out his hand, his fingers trembling, and I let him take the key from me, let him hold it, such a dainty key, but the thing that now makes Dewey’s death and my account of it real to him.
“You,” he says again.
“Yes,” I tell him. “Me.”
He closes his fingers, and the key disappears into his fist. “You know, I’ll have to tell this to my grandmother,” he says.
I close my eyes, imagining what Nancy will think when she finally learns the truth. “I’ll tell her myself,” I say.
When I open my eyes, I see that Duncan has unclenched his fist and here on his palm is the key. He expects me to take it, and it’s clear he wants me to always have it to remind me, as it has all these years, of what went on that night at the tracks, to remind me of how I failed Dewey, to remind me that I loved him and yet that love wasn’t enough because I closed off what my heart was telling me.
So I take the key, and that’s how it ends, this long story between my family and Dewey Finn’s, ends on this day when I know my brother is gone from me forever, this brilliant day in April, no rain in sight like there was all those years ago when Rat Town was flooding and Dewey was still alive. No, it’s sunny now. It’s springtime, and it’s sunny, and Stump is rolling over on the grass, letting the sun shine down on his belly.