He talked in flat and unexaggerated tones befitting the reliance of facts.
The sheriff listened without interrupting and without taking notes. He stood across from Joe with rain water continuing to drip from his slicker as he rocked from foot to foot, the wad of tobacco rolling inside his left cheek. His hands remained on his hips.
After Joe finished, the sheriff asked, “How come you were upstairs after you found Gresham dead down here? Looking for something?”
Joe shook his head and said, “I thought whoever had killed Gresham might still be in the house. I checked the rooms.”
The sheriff nodded, but his nod lacked conviction. “Why didn’t you call my office and report this? They didn’t hear nothing from you.”
“I wanted to be certain that I was alone. I didn’t want somebody drilling me as well.”
“I see.”
“I wasn’t here that long before you arrived—”
“No,” the sheriff said and paused as he moved the tobacco to his other cheek. “That’s true, but. . . .” He left his thought hanging.
Joe could hear the indictment that flowed through the sheriff’s pause. He could envision the noose of that hanging silence strung around his neck.
Within the hour, three more of the sheriff’s deputies arrived, yawning and scratching their bellies and not at all pleased at having been called from a warm bed into a rainy night. They searched Joe’s car and the house while the sheriff and Joe remained in the silent entryway. He again heard the slide of desk drawers and the scoot of furniture across bare wood. Each deputy eventually reported that he could find nothing extraordinary other than a dead man and a rumpled rug. The opened desk drawer had not been ransacked. The whisky in the glasses was Scotch, real Scotch, good Scotch whisky from the spirit stills of Macallan. Nothing bathtub about it.
The sheriff kept his eyes turned on Joe as the last officer explained about the drawer and whiskey glasses. Joe recognized the sheriff’s understanding that Gresham had quite obviously known his killers.
“Two glasses of Scotch?”
“Yessir,” answered the same officer Joe had talked with at the accident scene.
“Two?”
“Yessir. One drunk by the dead guy in there.” He pointed over his shoulder toward the front room. “And the killer or one of the killers drunk part of the other.” Both the sheriff and his underling looked at Joe.
Joe shook his head. It’s one thing to dig your own damn hole; it’s quite another to just stumble into an already excavated pit.
The sheriff stepped closer, uncomfortably close. Slowly leaning in toward Joe and looking him hard in the eyes.
“Where you been tonight before you came here, before I saw you at that accident?” he asked.
“At home. Then at the restaurant where I was meeting Gresham.”
“You been drinking?”
“What do you think?”
“I think your breath smells like Scotch, or something like it. Same as in them glasses on the desk.”
Joe said nothing. The sheriff was tossing a bone with a string attached. Any bite from Joe and the sheriff would yank. With nothing to hide, anything he said seemed to incriminate him, so he stood straight and met the sheriff’s stare.
The sheriff sucked a breath through his teeth then said to Joe, “I like you, Joe, and I really hope you’ve got nothing to do with all this.” He nodded toward the room where Gresham lay, but he also meant the Frenchmen. He sighed before continuing, “I’ve never had any trouble with you other than your drinking down at Willie’s. I suppose that’s where you were?”
Joe nodded. “That’s where I was.”
The sheriff nodded. The movement of his head was long and slow. All the while he kept his eyes on Joe as though he were in a debate with himself. He finished nodding and said, “You keep in touch.”
“I’ll be around,” Joe said as he backed a step away from the sheriff.
He walked from the house. Squinting into the darkness ahead of him, he looked to the starless and moonless ceiling of night. Hard on his back, he felt the sheriff’s eyes as he rounded the car. He felt as though a crosshairs had been laid upon him. He forced himself to walk slowly.
Driving back to his apartment, he first thought through the circumstances of the night, a night that had left him unsteady and uncertain. Slowly, however, he came to the realization of loss. A man, a man who might have been his best friend, had died. A man who was certainly the only person with whom Joe had ever discussed the war and a man who had shared memories of the world turned wrong. All warmth had been lost in the night and the rain had fully turned to snow, a wet snow that came down in flakes the size of quarters. The hard snow on the hood and windshield of his automobile and the car’s whisk on the wet road fused in a background dirge to his lonely drive home.
In his apartment, Joe stripped and showered. He soaped and scrubbed himself vigorously as though the act of washing himself would cleanse him of both mud and memory. He brushed his teeth and stood naked in front of the mirror watching his hands shake with that involuntary palsy of an old man. He was not an old man. But he had seen what only old men should see, and he would never be young again.
Four years earlier, lying wounded in the mud of the Argonne Forest in Eastern France, Joe had fully understood both fear and mortality. Having woken from the morning roar of a mortar attack, he had been certain of his own death in the way a man is certain of little else. He was certain that he would die or that he had already died, for he felt no pain. With the return of his senses and the onset of his pain, however, he knew that he was alive, bleeding, and covered in the blood and body parts of other men. After that day, he would taste his own fear and sense his own mortality many times, returning time and again to the lessons of his lost youth as he woke from his dream in the middle of a barren sleep. The death of Gresham replayed his own wounding as well as deaths he had seen and even caused.
After hanging his wet clothes from the rod for the shower curtain, he poured himself a tumbler of bathtub whiskey in the kitchen and walked to his bedroom. He sat on the bed and cut the evening with a heavy drink and watched the rainwet snow on his window.
He finished the whiskey and fell into restless sleep. His dreams cowled the night, never allowing him that comfort of rest. He had dreams of dead men rising from a muddy barrens and he woke at three in the morning with the rain tapping a hard rhythm against his window.
II
“Hell holds no horrors for one who has seen that battlefield. Could Dante have walked beside me across that dreadful place, which had been transformed by human agency from a peaceful countryside to a garbage heap, a cesspool, and a charnel-house combined, he would never have written his Inferno, because the hell of his imagination would have seemed colourless and tame. The difficulty in writing about it is that people will not believe me. I shall be accused of imagination and exaggeration, whereas the truth is that no one could imagine, much less exaggerate, the horrors that I saw upon those rolling, chalky plains.”
—E. Alexander Powell, Vive la France, 1916
*Describing the First Battle of the Champagne*
HE LAY WITHOUT SLEEP. WELL BEFORE THE SUN WOULD RISE, HE continued to trace the cracks and shadows of his ceiling, intermittent light cast from the neon sign of an all-night diner across the street. After an hour of searching for the cool spots in his bed, he got up and walked the walls of his apartment. Another hour later, he poured his third cup of coffee. At ten minutes past six, the telephone rang.
“Joe.” It was Fleming, his editor at the Beacon, a man with a loud and gravelly voice much larger than his actual stature.
“Yes.” Joe leaned forward, his cup of coffee on the kitchen table between his elbows. He waited for Fleming to continue. While he waited he rubbed his finger into the old cigarette burns on the table’s Formica top. He knew what Fleming wanted. He knew what Fleming would probably ask and what Fleming would not ask.
Joe pressed the first two fingers of hi
s free hand into his temple and rubbed, lightly at first and then harder as he listened to the protracted silence fill with his and Fleming’s breathing. He had hoped that with the new day, some revelation would present itself, some discovery of the sheriff’s that would solve Gresham’s murder. From the rigid tone of Fleming’s voice, however, Joe knew that his own innocence may have been further drawn into question.
“I just talked with Sheriff Jackson,” rasped Fleming’s cigarette-stained voice. “What’s this about Gresham?”
“He’s dead,” Joe sighed.
“Murdered, the sheriff told me.”
“Murdered.” Joe nodded his head.
“What about it?”
“I don’t know any more than you do.”
“The sheriff said you were there. That maybe you even had something to do with it.”
Joe felt his anger rise and he spoke with heat. “What do you want me to say? Gresham was shot, killed. That’s what I know, all I know.”
“Ee-zee,” said Fleming, and Joe had the image of Fleming raising his hands, palms outward, as though calming a young boy.
“Damn, man, I found the body,” Joe said. “That’s all.” He continued to knead his temple, even though the pain in his head was much deeper and darker. His short outburst left him vaguely nauseous.
“So he said,” Fleming said and coughed, then held a hand over the mike of his telephone and said something to another person. He spoke back into the telephone, “Jackson also asked a lot of questions, about you and Gresham. Mostly about you. He seems to think that you are involved in this somehow. You and some Frenchmen from an automobile wreck. How about that?”
“The sheriff’s wrong.” Joe let that sit for a moment before adding, “I have the information on the wreck, and I’ll type that up this morning before coming in later.”
“First thing,” Fleming snapped, “and I mean first thing. As in an hour. Seven-thirty at the latest. And I’ll want something on Gresham for this afternoon. You give me what you know from last night, and I’ll have someone else begin working on any new angles.”
Covering me, Joe thought. He hung up and read through his notes.
Nothing. Just notes. They told what had happened. As to the meanings of the events, they might as well have been written in an ancient language. He decided, then, to follow the simple patterns of his life, the patterns that he had adopted since the war. Walk a straight path, write the articles, cover the stories, hope the loose ends of his life did not hitch around his neck like a bowknot.
Joe found his notebook and pen on the dresser, a Mont Blanc, green with his initials on the side. Rolling the capped pen between thumb and fingers, he thought momentarily of the woman, still almost a girl, who had given it to him. Alice Bright, freckled nose and light brown hair always pulled back but always some having escaped to flutter in the wind. They were high school sweethearts and had promised to each other in the way that kids do. Only a few months before he was set to return from France, he had received the letter from her. She had fallen in love, deep and real love, and was marrying and she hoped that he understood and she would always remember him with fondness.
He had received the letter while on R&R in some nameless French town, and with a few days before returning to the front he slipped past the guards and went into town. His sergeant, seeing him leave, called out, “Remember, Joe, an hour with Venus brings a month with Mercury,” but he did not stop Joe. Neither did Joe stop for the Padre who called to him. Religion had never been much in his life and following the deaths of his parents and the slaughterland of the war, he could not see a reason to talk with a God that allowed such things to happen. He found a French woman who could speak no English but could do other things.
As he sailed back from the war, he had come to realize how little was left for him in Terceo. His memories had become like smoke in a cracked jar, eventually emptying to nothing. He felt no pull to return to that high desert along the New Mexico border. He would one day, he knew, for there did remain a distant tug of a truth unknown.
He uncapped the pen and sat with his third cup of coffee to compose his stories, two brief articles that answered all of the questions he knew, but it was the questions he did not know that haunted him. As he wrote, he could feel himself slip into that comfortable world of absolutes that excluded any complications of life. It was a world as numbing as any drug.
Joe checked his clothes drying in the bathroom. After finding them still too wet to wear, he put on his other suit. Once the suit finally dried, he’d take it to the cleaners and get the blood off the pants. He finished his coffee. Then he rolled his copy and stuck it in the inside pocket of his overcoat and left for the Beacon’s offices downtown.
He drove the same streets he had driven for the past three years, wet with streams of rainwater in the gutters and dark under a hovering fog. Dark buildings, wetted by the previous night’s rain and snow, frowned on either side of the wet road as he drove through Greenwich. The buildings slumped together as though huddling for warmth, dark and ominous in the clouded day. He drove through the streets as though he drove through a shadowed valley.
The Beacon was housed in a tile building covering an entire city block and rising a half-dozen stories above the street and two below. The white tile had long ago faded gray from years of sun and rain and pigeon droppings. One corner tile, four-foot square, had broken in half sometime before Joe had first seen the building. The dark hole left after its falling looked like a vacant eye. Eleven soiled steps mounted from the sidewalk to the large double doors. The clamorous music of the streets, automobiles and streetcars and vendors, slowly faded behind those wood and glass doors as they swung closed behind Joe.
He walked up two flights of stairs to the newsroom, stopping just outside the doors to catch his breath. He could hear the steady clack of typewriters broken by loud talk and laughter. Footsteps danced across the fatigued and timeworn oak floor.
Joe opened the door and walked in. A pall fell over the room like a black curtain. Typewriters skipped a beat, loud talk muffled, laughter stopped, the dancing feet slid back against the outer walls of the room.
Nobody looked at him. That was what Joe noticed first. Some people looked his way while some waved their hands in imitation of a greeting. Even those few who waved quickly averted their eyes as though even looking at this leper might infect them. He walked through the room to the desk he had shared with Gresham and felt the blind scrutiny from everyone he passed. Heads turned and whispers swirled in his wake, rippling murmurs that placed him in the tension of having become a story. News travels fast.
He and Gresham had sat facing each other at the large double-sided desk. Gresham sat on the south with Joe the northsider. The side of the desk hugged the wall for both to pin ideas onto the bare wood. Pen lines bisected the wooden desktop at odd angles and a particularly deep line broke the plain until it fell in suicide over the desk’s edge. Joe trailed the tip of his finger along its ruinous course. He hung his overcoat on the rack and stood over the desk, fingering the piles of papers and opening the drawers with the feeling that he was at someone else’s desk. Everything remained not quite neat but also not messy, almost like he kept things. The stacks, however, were just off, the drawers a little more disorganized.
The door opened and the room’s muted noise fell off even further. Fleming’s unsteady gait approached. The man kept his office upstairs, one flight above the newsroom. Fleming likened himself as a bird of prey soaring above his hacks, but Joe had always thought of Fleming as a pigeon on the roof, ready to shit upon any writer with whom he was displeased.
Fleming would walk into the newsroom three times a day, the clockwork of a neurotic, seldom speaking during his tours but often pausing to look at individual reporters long enough to make the person nervous. That was his form of supervising, a nervous worker was a hungry worker, a hungry worker was a productive and compliant worker. Gresham was the only reporter who could not be intimidated by Fleming. Everyone k
new it, especially Fleming, who avoided the desk whenever Gresham was working.
“Joe,” Fleming said.
Joe turned and looked up from his seat. Fleming wore the same white shirt he may have worn the day before or the week or decade before that. Heavy suspenders held up the man’s pants and made his shirt bulge like a tattered flag. He had a ruddy face and veined nose, eyes bloodshot and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth with a perpetual half-inch of ash.
Joe nodded.
“You got the copy?” he asked, standing near Joe, attempting to loom over Joe.
Joe pointed to the papers he had placed on the desk.
“Mind if I take a look?” He did not wait for Joe’s answer but reached over Joe’s shoulder, picked up the papers and rounded the desk to sit in Gresham’s chair to read while Joe watched.
Dust motes floated in the muted light that came through the window above them. Joe stood and looked out the window at the morning fog that had been trapped in the shadows of the buildings across the street and at the small birds huddled on the glazed branches of empty trees, which stood like stick-figured prisoners in sidewalk planters.
He sat again and tapped his fingers on the arms of his chair as he watched Fleming read, comforted in being able to watch someone else. That was the life he knew and had become familiar with. He watched other people. He recorded their actions and asked for their thoughts. He witnessed the remains of people’s lives as though they were projected upon a screen. He preferred that, the distance and the reconstruction of the lost days and ways of other people’s lives.
Fleming nodded as he read. “Good,” he said. “Good. A dozen inches each? Good. I’ll take ’em right down and have ’em set for this afternoon’s edition.”
Death of a Century Page 3