Reservation Road

by John Burnham Schwartz

  “You got all that?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. Go to sleep now, son.”

  For me, he made a show of closing his eyes. I turned for the door.

  “Dad?”

  I stopped but didn’t look back. I was staring through the doorway at the outer half of Ethan Learner’s left boot on the powder blue shag carpet. The rest of him was hidden.

  “What, Sam?”

  “Can we go sledding later?”

  “Sure we can,” I said. “Now go back to sleep.”

  I went out of the room, closing the door behind me. Learner was there, and his gun too. He was sweating, pale as a ghost, and unable to look me in the eye.

  Ethan

  Call it a travesty, a terrible joke. Call it a mistake beyond reckoning.

  Who can describe it? A boy’s singular voice. A father’s. A conversation about nothing—cold and phone numbers and sledding—that left me, there in the hallway, crippled with shame and guilt and longing. Left me weak.

  This was the fatal habit of Polonius: to stand in the shadows listening, peering at life with half an eye, letting others take the risk of living and despising them for it. A gun loves this kind of coward the way a crutch loves the lame.

  And then the conversation ended, and he came out of the room.

  Outside. Snow again, falling feather-soft, a white like the Ice Age. Cold, cold air. He walked ahead of me. A powerful man, his back, all by itself, massive and intimidating. The truth was, he frightened me. Had he turned around even once during the walk up the road to my car, it might have all been over. Perhaps, silently counting our footsteps away from his house, we were both still thinking about the boy in his bed, covers pulled up. Asleep or awake.

  “Where were you? I woke up.”

  The voice like an echo that would not die.

  But he didn’t turn around. He let the moment run until we were past the point of hearing. He never looked back, and I began to hate him again. He walked ahead of me as I’d ordered him to, taking for granted, it seemed, the potency of the weapon in my hand, if not the exhausted man who was supposed to use it; I watched the deep, patterned prints of his work boots in the fresh-made snow, laid out behind him like a series of messages. Otherwise he gave no sign of anything, was stoical as a saint, uncomplaining and righteous as a soldier. His back broad and straight, his head already sprinkled with snow but held high— tough, haunted, undissuadable, ridiculous, tragic. He cut a figure. But guilty of murdering a boy? He wasn’t saying. He was saying nothing. Doing what he was told. Leaving the talking and explaining and suffering and living to the people who claimed victimhood, who had been left gasping in his wake.

  Dwight

  It was an old Honda Accord, not well cared for, parked about a quarter-mile up the road. The snow made the walk longer. When we got there he opened both doors on the driver’s side and then stepped back with the gun pointed at my chest. The gun was shaking; he no longer seemed able to hold it still. He asked if I had gloves and I nodded and he told me to put them on.

  “Now get in.”

  A breeze was blowing falling snow into the car and onto the seats. I slid behind the wheel, looked immediately for the keys but they weren’t there. He closed my door. Then I heard him get in behind me and the other door close, and the keys landed on my lap. “Drive,” he said.

  I drove past the mailbox with its blood-red flag laid down, past the bankrupt house, out of Box Corner altogether, away from my son. And while Learner gave me directions road by road, turn by turn, I prayed hard to a God I’d never properly given a shit about to look after Sam, please, to see him back to sleep right now, to follow him through all the troubles to come. Too late now. We were heading west on 44 toward Canaan and the headlights were pushing ahead into the fading dark of the road, and Learner’s breathing warmed my ear like an animal’s shallow pant. The road was wet under the tires, gravelly, and the snow fell onto the windshield in already melting particles, and the heater blew air as the wipers squeaked and clicked. Otherwise quiet. Anything I might have thought to say to help my case was a sick joke next to the facts of the matter, and I ruled against it. Despite the breathing he was calmer here in the car where the world was smaller, shrunk down to just the two of us and the gun, which he kept anxiously pressed against the side of my head. In the mirror I saw steam gradually climbing the lenses of his glasses, though he did not seem to notice it himself.

  Outside Canaan, we came up on a pickup with a plow blade hitched to the front doing the roads, and Learner stuck the gun into my aching head good and hard, but when we were past the truck he eased up again, as if he didn’t have the nerve. When I checked back in the mirror I thought I saw for the very first time a man who, glimpsed unawares, was just about as scared as I was.

  Ethan

  I took him to the mountaintop. The wooden cabins, the lake; time of memory, of summer, my son’s life. A beautiful boy diving off a white float. The only place I had thought of—the lake at sunrise mirrored silver, at sunset the world on fire. And still my son dives, gets out, dives again.

  I would make this man see all that he had failed to imagine. Would push his face deep into the beauty and the regret that he had never known existed—the sun on the lake and the breeze in the cattails and the canoe in the water and the father and son together and the horror of the bloody, headless swan—until this man could not breathe, until he was suffocated by his own emptiness. And then he would be dead, and I would leave him there.

  The snow came down from a whitened sky. It fell on the tops of the pines alongside the road up Mount Riga, and much of it never made it to the ground; on the level crown of the mountain, though, the snow had covered everything. Shallow drifts clung to the steep sides of the gabled roof of the warden’s lightless cabin, in front of which stood the closed wooden gate.

  I told him to stop the car and get out. The footpath leading to the other cabins was gone, whited out, and for several moments I stood there disoriented, the past snowed under. But then I found where I thought the footpath must have been, and with the weapon again at his back I marched him—no other word— toward the lake. I thought he might protest or plead, but he did not. Other than movement there was no evidence of spirit or feeling in him. If he was afraid, he did not show it. Even self-concern seemed beyond him: his head lowered against the falling snow, he trudged ahead like a blinkered packhorse. Countless snowflakes dropped down his gaping collar and landed on the exposed skin of his nape, but he made no move to cover himself. He did not seem to care any longer what happened to him, and so was without needs of any kind—no crime to which he felt compelled to confess, no contrition or remorse to express for the saving of his soul. He’d be gone soon, it would not be long now; and once he was gone, it would be the lot and daily torture of his victims to determine the extent of the damage done by him in the years generously referred to as his life. That would not be his problem. For he was evolution’s latest miracle: reduced to nothing, he had nothing to lose. He had been, in the final sum of things, just a transient, passing through without regard for life.

  We came to cabin four, which looked not as it once had, but like a shack, a doll’s house, dressed over in white. Behind it the lake, the water at this hour, in the newfound winter, blackened, dimpled by falling snow. Swans gone. The white cake fallen or eaten. Not the place we had ever come to. Not the memory I had hunted down like a starving man. Not my son nor his death nor any reason why, but a mystery of unsung grief, forgotten memories, signs lost in weather.

  Dwight

  It was a cabin no different from any other. For too long he kept me out front of it, staring through me as if I wasn’t there, while the snow came down on us like confetti. A single word carved above the door—“Hyacinth”—and behind the cabin nothing but the lake.

  Then suddenly he had the gun aimed at my face and was saying, “Walk around the side of the cabin.”

  His voice was quiet, the gun steady. I could feel it happening now. I trie
d to think of something to say to him, but there was nothing. No big speech. No fear any more, just tiredness. I lowered my head and began walking around back of the cabin.

  You dream what you’re able under such circumstances; you dream your limit. I found mine where I’d left my son, in his room, in bed. I hoped he was asleep. I had the blankets in my hand and felt the warm trapped air rising up from his body.

  Halfway around the cabin, Learner’s foot caught on something—tree root, shrub, rock, I didn’t know—and he stumbled forward. He gave a grunt. He had lost all control over his feet, and his gun arm came down and his shoulder collided with my back, and what happened next was no more than pure instinct: my elbow jumped back and I smashed him in the face.

  He was on his knees, moaning softly, his hands covering his nose, which was bleeding and probably broken; his eyes lost in a blind squint of pain and disorientation—I saw his glasses on the ground in front of him. The gun sitting in the snow three feet away. He might have tried for it, but he didn’t.

  I didn’t think twice. I picked up the gun and put it in my coat pocket and stepped around him, heading back to the path. This, too, was instinct. But then I took my time. I made a point of not looking back.

  The future lay before me, I might have thought. All of a sudden, and again. Sundays on the ball field with Sam, meat on the grill. A bright movie sequel with all the old characters and my son as the star.

  Except I couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see him.

  Ahead, through the scrim of falling snow, there was just this: two other cabins by the lakeside, white covering their rooftops. And they were no different, it seemed to me, from the one Learner had tried so hard to reach, like a piece of the past he’d wanted to hold in his fist as he struck me down. For his own reasons. Somewhere beyond it was his car, and the road back down to Salisbury. That was all.

  I walked a little way, and then, thinking I heard him behind me, I stopped and turned around.

  He was still there. I saw him through the snow, by the little two-bit cabin on the lake. And he was weeping. On his knees in a cold white world, on all fours like an animal, his face buried in his hands which were buried in snow. Around him the splatter of blood. A man humped on the ground as if in the aftermath of a prayer so full of loss that in the end it had left him broken.

  I stood looking at him, unable to turn away. The sky falling down white. Maybe it was a kind of dead reckoning, my own position fixed at this point in time according to the one true and immovable thing, which was a man on his knees. I had taken from him everything there was to take, and had wanted none of it, had hoped and tried to avoid it, had regretted it deeply. But I had taken his boy just the same. And so now I went back to him.

  Ethan

  There is a kind of failure that defies understanding. No map can be drawn of it. The best one can do is to shout into the darkness behind in the hope that some distant echo will return to illuminate even partially the road chosen, the wrong turns made, the hubris and misguided love and circumstance that brought one to this place where there is no light at all, no road ahead and no turns to contemplate, nothing to think about that is not already buried and past. Somewhere back I had misplaced my son, had lost sight of his memory, which was the one truth that remained after his death, and had instead followed something false, which was not worthy of him.

  I heard him walk away, his footsteps heavy and plodding through the snow. He was disappearing. From my hole in the ground I witnessed none of it, but kept my eyes shut tight, my bleeding, numb face in my hands. I could not seem to stop weeping, could not even imagine it. My only dream then was to never get up.

  The footsteps were already close when I heard them again. I was too beaten to feel any surprise at his return, nor was I afraid any more; it was with a great force of effort that I raised myself off my arms at all. Then I was kneeling upright and he was standing there. My head swam with dizziness, and my eyes, useless without my glasses, struggled in vain to focus, but he remained just a massive, blurred figure, like some vague totem looming over me. His arm, hazy and thick as a fencepost, outstretched toward me, his brown-gloved hand not three feet from my face.

  “Take these,” he was saying.

  His hand came closer. The snow fell upon it and now the thing in his fingers shot off tiny facets of light like a coin held and turned under a lamp. It was my glasses. They were small and insignificant-looking on the leathered palm of his hand, and he held them as though afraid of crushing them, with his fingers spread far to the sides. I reached out and took the glasses and they were as cold as if they’d been frozen. I put them on, fitting the curved wire earpieces around my ears. Where the nosepieces touched my face, the swollen bridge of my nose felt as if it had been sawed in two, and I breathed in sharply through my mouth, my head afloat again in a sea of dizziness. Then the pain retreated to mere numbness and I could see his face.

  “I was going to leave you,” he said.

  He reached into the pocket of his coat and pulled out the gun. I felt no clenching of muscles, no fear; all that was gone now. In his hand the gun was the color of smoke and looked darker and strange and more like a machine. I simply stared at it.

  “But I ran once, and I didn’t get anywhere that I can see,” he said. He looked at the ground. “Where would I go?”

  He let the gun drop from his hand. It fell onto the snow between us and we both looked down at the spot where it lay. The barrel was pointing at him.

  “I’ve got a son,” he said. “Ten years old like your boy was. That doesn’t seem fair to you, and it’s not.” He paused, his breath turning white in the cold, the snow falling silently onto his shoulders and head. He stared past me at the lake. “And it’s not fair that I’ve been a poor father to Sam, failed him a million different ways and kept failing him, while you were a good father to your son. I don’t know you, but I know that you were a good father to him. And I know it’s not fair. It is not right.”

  His eyes returned to the ground between us, the gun there. He remained absolutely still. He seemed for the moment almost complacent. Yet beneath the dark stubble on his cheeks the muscles in his jaw stood rigid with effort.

  I said, “You took his life like it was nothing and then you went on with your own as if you had a right.”

  “I was afraid.”

  “That’s not good enough,” I said.

  I picked up the gun. Slowly I got to my feet. My gloves were stiff with blood, and through them I could feel the metallic cold. My knees too were wet and numb from the snow and no longer felt as if they belonged to me. With my thumb I pulled back the hammer. Then I was standing, holding the gun aimed at his chest, my finger braced against the trigger.

  He stood motionless, his breath pluming the air.

  Then he nodded once.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Now he seemed to be waiting for me to pull the trigger and be done with it. Not tranquil, but resigned, expectant. It could not have been mistaken for an act. I tried to avoid looking him in the face, but I could no longer help it; though neither of us moved an inch, the silence and the passing seconds seemed somehow to be pushing us together. His eyes, set wide in a broad, weather-beaten face, were brown and surprisingly soft, and I saw the pronounced dark circles beneath them.

  I let the gun drop to my side and turned away from him.

  And then for a long time nothing happened.

  I saw the cabin, and the lake, and it was a place in winter.

  I saw his son sleeping in his bed.

  “I want . . .” I said, and saw only the snow.

  He stood there looking at me.

  “The police . . .” I said then, but it sounded like nowhere at all. I put the gun in my pocket and left it there. “Will you tell them what you did?”

  After a while he said, “Yes.”

  Then he was silent. The snow fell down on him and stayed. His feet shifted, and he raised his gloved hands in the air as though he were giving himself up to me.

&n
bsp; “No,” I said. I saw him with the police, and it meant nothing, changed nothing. “No.” I was shaking my head, seeing his son awake now and standing in the cold, empty house.

  I began to walk.

  He called after me. “Where are you going?”

  I stopped and turned. “Go back to your son,” I told him.

  Dwight Arno said nothing. His hands dropped to his sides and for the first time I knew he was afraid. I walked out to the path. I did not stop. I left him there on the mountain, in the snow, alone.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For shelter, support, nourishment, care, wit, wisdom, friendship, forbearance, and always sound literary judgment, my love, gratitude, and particular thanks to William and Paula Merwin, Alan and Louise Schwartz, Jane Kramer and Vincent Crapanzano, Margaret McElderry, Matthew Schwartz and Karen Levesque, Ileene Smith, David and Jean Halberstam, Ann Arensberg and Dick Grossman, Timothy Dugan, Amanda Urban, Robin Desser, Heather Schroder, Pico, and, above all, Aleksandra.

  John Burnham Schwartz

  Reservation Road

  John Burnham Schwartz is the author of Bicycle Days. He lives in New York City with his wife, filmmaker Aleksandra Crapanzano.

  ALSO BY JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ

  Bicycle Days

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 1999

  Copyright © 1998 by John Burnham Schwartz

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.