Into Thin Air

by Thomas Zigal

  Otto Muller wanted his sons to follow in his footsteps but Kurt rebelled early against piano lessons and by the age of eight was running away into the cedar thicket on Red Mountain to escape the daily hour of practice. Bert reluctantly persevered into his early teens, to please their bewildered father, but showed no facility for music and was finally permitted to put away the violin.

  Kurt looked around the study at the shelves of intimidating hardbound books, fat as Bibles, unopened for a score of years and gathering dust, his father’s prized library of the great classics, the modern masters. Many volumes were autographed by the dandruff-specked geniuses who had written them and somehow passed through Otto Muller’s remote life here in the mountains. Albert Schweitzer, Thornton Wilder, Rudolf Carnap, José Ortega y Gasset. He wanted his sons to read them all, but of course they never did. ‘I want you to read Goethe in the original,’ he told them once. But of course they never would. They could speak German like Munich schoolchildren, but reading and writing required greater skill, and by the time they reached high school they refused to enroll in the language courses their father implored them to take.

  ‘You have no respect for your heritage,’ he scolded them often. ‘You are throwing away your birthright. Shame on you for not caring where you come from.’

  But hadn’t he himself fled to America because he hated the Germans? If their mother had stayed, wouldn’t she have perished in the death camps like her father and sister?

  ‘I didn’t hate the Germans, I hated Hitler and what he stood for,’ he argued. ‘There is a difference. But you two, you are trying to deny who you are.’

  But they knew who they were. They were Americans. Theirs was a great rugged land of snowcapped peaks and sparkling streams and rich green forests of Douglas firs that towered in the sun. This was their birthright, and this was who they became. Tall, strong, sunburned youths, their playground the Elk Range and the Continental Divide. They took to the slopes in winter, and to the trout creeks late in spring. They backpacked for days into the alpine wilderness and made their meals from what the earth provided, berries and small game. They learned to scale sheer rock walls with ropes and pitons and cleated boots; they rafted the killer rapids at the bottom of lost canyons in the parched, windswept lands known only to a vanished Anasazi.

  The Muller boys knew who they were. They had inherited the earth. For a handful of wild and sheltered years they thought they were invincible.

  ‘You must be Rudi’s sons,’ their father sometimes teased them. ‘He is the great outdoorsman. Go and worry him to pay for all your outdoor toys.’

  But the boys would not have traded their father for a dozen Rudi Pfeils. Otto Muller was a reserved intellectual with an eccentric’s private laugh and a penchant for stiff, convoluted speech, but whenever he emerged from the seclusion of his study he gave his sons so much affection and attention they could not help but love him. Silly songs, riddles, esoteric jokes. He saved all of his warmth for them.

  Kurt imagined his own son sitting with a dinosaur book in a quiet corner of the day care center and wondered if he knew his father was saving the best part of himself for him.

  Rousing himself from the stuffy heat of the study, he glanced into his lap and remembered why he’d come here. He opened Omar Quiroga’s book and began to skim the early chapters, reading about the excesses of Juan Perón, the years under Isabel, and the historical setting for the military junta of the mid-1970s. When he reached the section about the secret atrocities and how Quiroga was arrested, he thought back to Graciela’s story of her own incarceration and the death of her husband.

  For another half hour he read Quiroga’s account of his torture by the military police. The journalist gave nicknames to everyone, even his fellow inmates. One was a Dr. Madonna he had known for many years, since the university. This doctor was eventually assigned to care for dying prisoners.

  Kurt sat up, reading quickly:

  From time to time, if Dr. Madonna allowed the soldier in charge of the night shift to fondle her a bit, the cur would permit the doctor and me to sleep together in the same cot and soothe our aching spirits. As long as he could watch.

  Graciela. He was certain it was her. He closed the book, quietly relieved that she had not lied to him about everything.

  He set the book aside and went to the kitchen to make a sandwich. While he was arranging the bread and sliced turkey on the tile counter, the phone rang. He turned up the machine’s volume to monitor the message.

  “Hello, Lennon,” Meg began. “This is Mom calling from Oregon. How are you doing, sweetheart? I miss you bunches and bunches.”

  There was nothing of the confusion and anguish he could sometimes hear in her voice, that familiar tightness in her throat. This sounded like the old Meg, the bright-eyed girlish Meg, the woman he’d once been in love with.

  “I’m feeling a whole lot better now. The doctor says it won’t be much longer till I’m completely well. Then I’ll be able to come and see you. I miss you so much, sweet pea.”

  It was all a carefully fabricated lie. There was no doctor, no course of therapy, no quarantine. This was the only way Meg could live with herself, and Kurt didn’t have the heart to contradict the story, not in front of Lennon. How else could he explain to a five-year-old that his mother was searching for something more, that she was obsessed with things that couldn’t be seen or measured in any way that mattered, and that she’d chosen instead to live with strangers on a soybean farm in another state? Kurt didn’t understand it himself.

  “How are your friends Justin and Sean? I hope you guys are still good buddies. There’s a wonderful book I’m going to send you, and you can share it with them at school.”

  Twenty years later he could still remember with astonishing clarity the day he’d met Meg at Crater Lake. He had hiked up with Bert and Maya and Zack Crawford to eat acid, lie on his back near the water, and watch the face of God in the clouds. After several hours he nodded out, and when he opened his eyes again, a radiant auburn-haired angel was kneeling over him, snapping photographs of his sunburned face. She had come to the lake on a field trip with her photography program.

  “It tells you how to grow your own organic vegetables. Daddy or your teacher can read it to you. Maybe you can talk your father into planting a nice healthy garden.”

  Kurt lifted the receiver. “Hello, Meg,” he said. She sounded so mindlessly joyful he felt like interrupting her.

  “Kurt,” she said. His voice startled her. “I didn’t think you’d be home this time of day.”

  “I’m going through a career transition,” he said, “so there’s a little more flexibility in my schedule.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “I resigned,” he said. “I’m not the sheriff anymore.”

  A moment of hesitation. “That surprises me,” she said. “I wasn’t aware you were thinking about quitting.”

  “There are a lot of things about my life you’re not aware of, Meg.”

  Another moment passed in which she seemed to be considering his rebuke. “What are you going to do about income?” she asked, that dry tightness creeping into her voice. “Will Lennon be all right? We still have a pretty good stash in savings, don’t we?”

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said. “We still have savings, and I’ll find another job.”

  “Doing what, for heaven’s sake? Working at a tackle shop?” she said, her annoyance growing. “You’ve never had the training for a real job, Kurt. We’ve got Lennon’s college to think about.”

  “You know, for a barefoot Sufi you’re starting to sound downright middle class, my dear.”

  “This isn’t funny, Kurt.”

  “Don’t stress out on me, Meg, I’ll find something. I don’t know. Something. Maybe Matt Heron will hire me to teach Conflict Resolution.”

  “I can’t believe you’re joking about this. Don’t you realize you’ve just raised the volume of interference in your life to about level ten? Thi
s makes the picture very unclear. I don’t like the idea of my son doing without.”

  “Then stop living with Bubba Ram Horn, or whatever his name is, and get a fucking job, Meg. Send the kid some money. Better still, come give him some love.”

  Kurt could hear the faint white hiss of long distance. She hadn’t hung up.

  “Does he miss me?” she asked, finally.

  “Of course he misses you. You’re his mother.”

  “He asks about me?”

  Kurt stroked his face, an old habit. Feeling the smooth skin left him uneasy. “Tell you the truth, Meg,” he said, his voice softer now, “he hardly ever talks about you anymore.”

  Meg began to cry, a gentle grieving. He could hear her trying to clear her throat to speak.

  “Take your time, Peaches,” he said, using his old nickname for her. “There’s no hurry. I’ve got all afternoon if you want to talk.”

  He waited in silence. He was willing to listen day and night if it would make their lives better.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said when she had recovered enough to speak. “I haven’t been happy in a long, long time.”

  “I know,” Kurt said.

  “I’m beginning to feel as if nothing is ever going to make me happy again.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “What should I do, Kurt? You were always so good at giving directions. Tell me what I should do.”

  “I can’t, Meg,” he said. “I don’t know what you should do.”

  “I’m afraid to come home.”

  Kurt didn’t understand how she could feel this way. Not even in his most angry moments during the divorce proceedings, when the judge was handing away his child to a woman who believed that crystals can cure cancer and bring about world peace, did he ever threaten or try to intimidate her.

  “Come on, don’t be silly,” he said. “You know you don’t have to worry about me.”

  She exhaled a long deep breath, sniffed, cleared her throat. She tried to say something but emotion overcame her again and she hesitated, fighting tears. “It’s not you I’m worried about,” she managed to say.

  With Meg that could mean anything. She might be worried about betraying her beliefs, or returning to the sloughed-off skin of a dead life, to familiar faces and cold, accusatory eyes on the streets of a small town. But then suddenly Kurt realized she was afraid of something altogether different.

  “Meg,” he said, “is there something you need to tell me?”

  He thought her response might take forever. He waited, listening to her troubled breathing.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, there are things you ought to know. But I don’t think I’m ready to talk about them yet. I need more time. Oh, Kurt, I’m so afraid. I worry so much about Lennon. And you too. I don’t know if you’ll ever forgive me.”

  “Talk to me, Meg,” he said. “Tell me what it is. We’ll all be better off if you do.”

  She sighed again. “Not right now,” she said. “I just can’t. Please forgive me, Kurt. Give Lennon a big kiss for me. Hug him. Please.”

  He held the receiver, waiting. There was a click. Dial tone. Twelve hundred miles between them.

  Chapter twelve

  Shortly before the three o’clock meeting with Muffin, Kurt returned to Star Meadow. The walking paths were missing their usual meditative strollers; a lone groundskeeper ambled across the lawn in front of the geodesic conference center, surveying a cascade of sprinklers. There was an air of abandonment in the village, and Kurt wondered if the murder had shut down the seminar on Global Unity.

  He parked in front of the log dormitory and walked up the steps to what had been Quiroga’s lodging. The door was unlocked and the room appeared tidy and uninhabited. The Feds had scoured the place clean.

  He knelt down in front of the refrigerator and snapped off the black plastic motor guard. Cheek to the floor, he saw immediately what he was hoping to find—the broken stem of a wineglass still lodged underneath a tangle of grease-caked wires.

  Staggs and company must not have small children at home, he thought, or they’d spend more time looking for things on their hands and knees.

  He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and reached in to extract the stem. It was about three inches long, a clear crystal shard with a jagged tip and a tiny piece of the base still intact. Resting in his handkerchief the stem looked like the broken shaft of a dart. When he raised it to his nose he could detect the faint scent of burgundy.

  Libbie McCullough glanced up at him from the receptionist’s desk, then resumed mixing her usual hideous concoction of honey, brewer’s yeast, and aloe vera juice. For years now she had been trying to convert the entire department to the vegetarian life, insisting that the elimination of red meat in cops was the first step toward creating a more peaceful planet. So far she’d won over only one believer, and he had been killed in a fiery wreck.

  “May I help you?” she asked. She glanced up again, licking honey from her long finger. “Oh my god, Kurt! I didn’t recognize you.”

  Her bewildered smile disappeared and she began to treat him with functionary distance, as though he were a stranger who’d come in to pay off his parking tickets.

  “Would you like some refreshment while you wait?” she asked mechanically, holding up the blender.

  “No, thanks, Libbie.”

  “Have a seat, please,” she said. “I’ll let her know you’re here.”

  So that’s how it was going to be, he thought. Eight years sharing a thousand confidences, a thousand petty grievances, meant nothing to her now that he was no longer her boss.

  The door to his old office was fifteen feet away but Libbie buzzed the intercom.

  “Don’t jerk me around, Libbie,” Kurt said. He walked over to the door and turned the glass knob.

  “No, Kurt!”

  He saw now why Libbie was acting so strangely. Neal Staggs sat across the desk from Muffin, his navy-blue blazer draped over the back of a metal folding chair. The shoulder holster strapped to his white dress shirt gave him the appearance of a lantern-jawed G-man out of the Hoover era.

  “Darnit, Kurt Muller!” Libbie said, rising from her desk to grab his arm.

  “Kurt?” Muffin said, standing, her brow wrinkled.

  His beard. He kept forgetting it was gone.

  “I’m sorry,” Libbie apologized. “I asked him to wait.”

  “It’s okay, miss,” Staggs said. He stood up slowly, extending himself to his full height, hitching his chin. Kurt sensed he was being sized up by a slightly smaller man worried about his moves. “Mr. Muller and I are ready to talk.”

  Kurt chucked back the bill of his baseball cap. “You got that right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  This sudden semblance of cooperation surprised Muffin, but she recovered quickly and asked Libbie to close the door and hold all phone calls.

  “I just want to state right up front,” Muffin said, tensely rearranging items on her desk—stapler, Scotch-tape dispenser, paperweight—“that I’m not satisfied with Agent Staggs’s line of thinking in this matter and I’ve told him so.”

  Staggs began to pace the tight office space, hands in his pockets, offering an indifferent smile. He obviously didn’t care what she thought.

  “The man’s paid to come up with theories,” Kurt said, barely able to control his contempt. “He’s got one about me, I want to hear it.”

  Staggs continued to pace, his eyes cast downward at his gleaming black shoes. “Yeah, I’ve got a theory, Muller,” he said. “I’ve got a theory you’re up to your jockstrap in dirt, ace, and your fairy fiefdom out here in the mountains is coming down around your ears. You don’t have much time left, my friend. We’ve laid the pieces on the table and they’re ready to fit in place for a grand jury. Kurt Muller’s looking at a long vacation punching license plates,” he said, “and learning fun new games with the boys in the shower.”

  “Agent Staggs,” Muffin said sternly, “thi
s meeting doesn’t have to turn into—”

  “Look,” Staggs interrupted, raising his hand. “I’ve been patient with this office long enough. I don’t see proof one that you or anybody else out here is getting the job done in law enforcement, Deputy Brown. And I don’t have time to wait for you to sweet-talk this guy while important evidence washes down the river. We’ve got to move, and we’ve got to move now. Either you push the man to the wall, or I’m going to push him for you.” He glanced at his gold watch, twenty-five years of service. “It’s your play, Deputy. Take your best swing.”

  Muffin looked rattled. The color drained from her face. She was slow to respond.

  “The agent thinks you’re running a major drug operation in the Valley,” she said finally, her eyes shifting to Kurt. “You and Jake Pfeil.”

  Kurt laughed in disbelief.

  “A grand jury isn’t going to find this such a yuck,” Staggs said. “Not after I play them some nice clear tapes featuring Jake Pfeil on the car phone.”

  He reached inside a pocket of the blazer and pulled out a mini cassette. “To give you a little preview,” he said, clicking a button. Jake’s voice came on immediately: “Don’t worry about Muller. Muller won’t be a problem. He’s a standup guy. We’ve known each other since we were kids. Our families were close.”

  Muffin turned a questioning eye on the man who had given her her first job out of the academy.

  “What is this shit?” Kurt said.

  Staggs clicked off the recorder and smiled at him. “Trust me, there’s more,” he said. “And the grand jury is going to be real curious about your numbers, Muller. In ten years you’ve busted maybe a dozen people in this valley for drug possession. All of them coke heads who showed up babbling at their real-estate desks, or waving a gun in a motel lobby—the kind of stoned-out creeps nobody could miss, not even a freaking nun. That’s your record, hoss. Check the sheets. In ten years maybe a dozen pathetic sociopaths begging for help.”