by Tom Bouman
I stood and moved away.
“You are going to sit and listen, or whatever I lost in these hills will stay lost.”
FOR ALL I KNEW, I was spending my days with Penny Pellings’s killer. But I worked when I could on the building, with O’Keeffe on and off, and he appeared to be none the wiser. Because he had no particular place to be, he often worked as long as Ed would let him, which overlapped with my own hours. One evening it got down to just me and Kevin left, tearing the skin off the barn in Susquehanna. Toward the end of a long day like that, you get punchy, body and mind. It’s when you’re likeliest to hurt yourself or someone else. We were tethered together, each on the end of a long rope, taking turns descending one side of the gambrel roof or the other, prying decayed decking away from the rafters and leaving empty space below us. Once we were done, we were supposed to burn the burn pile, which had grown to a mighty height, and make sure that it went out. A little diesel was all it took and the scrappy and rotten wood lit, sending sparks way high. Night was growing around us.
“I did some reading down in Mahanoy,” Kevin told me. “About the afterlife. Different ideas about the afterlife,” he said. He squatted and poked at the fire.
“Oh, yeah?” I could sense he was not done.
“You ever hear of the Empyrean Fields?” he asked me.
“Nope, where are they?”
“Oh, come on, man. The sky!”
“Sure.”
“The fire in the sky. The pure light, man. Clear light. Empyrean Fields, it’s where we all want to go. That’s just one name for heaven. How do we get there, that’s the question. In the Empyrean Fields it smells like smoke, you know why?”
“It’s a fairy tale,” I said, feeling surly. “We told stories because we needed to, and now we don’t. Who cares if it smells like smoke. This is our world. Our world smells like smoke.”
“Our world?” Kevin shook his head. “Well, you’re wrong.”
“What?”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “Look up. A power of love is telling you how to be, and you ain’t listening. You’re betting on yourself.”
“Fuckin A.”
“I don’t even believe you right now. You know it comes from us. The story comes from us, the only one that matters.”
“Yeah,” I said. That was my point.
“Sacrifice is the story. Sacrifice is how we save ourselves. I don’t see you as different from me. I save you, I save myself. It’s, isn’t that the way to the Empyrean Fields? They smell like smoke because the ancient ones burned offerings to get there. Sacrifices. You don’t want to listen.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You don’t have any sacrifices to make.”
“I’ve sacrificed plenty, Jailhouse Jesus. I’m here listening to you right now.”
“You don’t know everything.”
“HOW DO YOU THINK animals feel about dying?” Coleman Tod asked me. “You’re the hunter. You ought to know. Do they understand it?”
“They understand survival.”
We had switched up our schedule and moved our search to nights after a neighbor out hiking had stopped to ask Deputy Jackson a passel of questions. It was now past midnight in the woods near another corner of Maiden’s Grove Lake.
“The funny thing about people is, they just can’t believe it.” Moonlight pooled on the lake’s surface. “I once knew a girl who talked too much, and she had to go. She fought like hell not to. She couldn’t believe it. And then she could. She kept asking to make one call first. To write one note, take care of one thing. Of course, she couldn’t take care of anything. But knowing she had to go, what was so important to get done? She’d given her kid up to another family. She wanted this kid to never know she existed. She wanted to tell her boyfriend, whatever, the family, to keep her secret from the kid. That was interesting. Mostly they just can’t believe it. This one did. And that’s what she wanted. Imagine.”
“So what happened?”
“She disappeared,” he said, with a laugh. “She had to go, and she went. That’s how the story ends. Who gives a shit about the baby?”
“Why’d she have to go?”
“Another time.”
“Coleman? You don’t have to go through this alone.” I waited, then spoke again. “Do you remember me? We were at the bar in town. I was there talking to Joe Blaine, looking for a girl named Penny. I remember you there. Do you know me?”
He stayed silent. We slapped at mosquitoes and I held my tongue. Penny Pellings had never felt so close; if I could have, I would have tore his horde open to pull her free.
ONE TWILIGHT evening at Ed’s shop, he and I were chiseling pockets into timbers as classical music played on the radio. One of the garage doors was open, admitting many moths and the night itself, hushing through the trees outside and beckoning to me. A tap at the door, and Kevin O’Keeffe appeared. Neither Ed nor I had realized he was still at the Brennans’ place.
Kevin beckoned me outside. “I need a favor,” he said.
My call to Child Protective Services the next morning was partly successful. At Kevin’s parole hearing, a judge had limited his privileges to visit his daughter Eolande to one a week with a court-approved supervisor present. Eo’s caseworker Cassidy Reynolds had never liked him, Kevin told me, and he couldn’t connect with Eo while she was there hovering. Could I talk to Ms. Reynolds and get him some breathing room with his kid? The bargain I struck with the caseworker was that I could come with Kevin on a visit, never let him or Eo out of my sight, and Cassidy would spend the time with Sarah Cavanagh, the guardian, in the house.
I found Kevin late afternoon at the work site, and waited while he rinsed and sponged himself from a jug of water and put on a clean shirt. He carried with him a small package wrapped in a bandanna and tied with ribbon. I had on my most official uniform shirt—the one that stayed ironed—clean pants, no gun belt, hair combed, fresh. Kevin’s case might have been hopeless, and the gestures he had planned empty to all concerned but him. Still, I wanted to reflect well.
He was silent on the drive to Sarah Cavanagh’s place, gathered around the cloth-wrapped parcel in his lap, which he held in two hands. I asked what it was.
“A diamond,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?”
“A bubble.”
“Forget I asked.”
“What do you think you are?” Kevin asked. “What do you think you are?”
“A long-suffering—”
“I’ve heard of an indestructible drop in your heart. It’s from a book I read. This drop, diamond, whatever, is made from your mother and father, one red drop from the father, the other white. That indestructible thing is you. There’s a diamond inside of you. I’m serious, Henry. You’re the one who asked.”
“Forget it. Save it for your daughter.”
As we came to a stop in the driveway, he took a deep breath and smiled at me, his brow lifted, and his eyes terrified and sad. Cassidy Reynolds met us on the front steps in slacks and a little blazer, a dab of officialdom in a country place. She and Kevin exchanged pleasantries, and she reminded him not to expect too much, and not to try too much too soon. Eolande would set her own terms.
Inside, Kevin’s daughter wore a pink dress with a cartoon character on it, and was lolling on a couch in front of a television turned low.
“It calms her down,” Sarah Cavanagh said.
I don’t know about kids. I’m not sure I could have said what was supposed to be wrong with Eolande, except maybe a lack of curiosity and eye contact that I thought all toddlers kind of had. She was at least two years old by now, the blond hair she’d gotten from her daddy pulled into spouts.
“Eo,” said Sarah, loudly and with deliberation. “Kevin’s back. He’s going to visit us for a little bit today.”
The child turned to Sarah, gave Kevin a skeptical up-and-down beyond her years, and returned to her show. Kevin sat beside her on the couch, still cradling the present he’d brought. I accepted a cup of co
ffee and sat at the kitchen table in a chair with a view to the living room. This is it, I thought, and I hoped he saw it: you spend a lazy hour with someone you love, and it doesn’t have to be more. Before long Kevin requested to take Eo for a walk outside, and the women agreed, as long as I went too, and Sarah sat on the porch steps to put Eolande at ease.
Armed with bubble stuff and a wand, Eo waddled around the yard, marveling at bubbles and then popping them. I’d yet to hear her speak a word.
Kevin sidled up to me. “You ever wonder what they know?”
I shrugged.
“They’re so close to it; what do they remember? Could they tell you? Could you understand if they did? I don’t know.”
“What are they so close to, pal?”
“The in-between. Wherever they were, whatever, before they were here.”
“My niece used to talk about the mommy she had before my sister.” I shrugged again. “Nobody knows what she meant. Kids don’t understand things any more than us.”
Kevin thought about that. “In the end . . . she’s never going to understand me, alive or dead. And that’s good. But she contains me.”
For me, sensing Sarah’s unease, Cassidy Reynolds’s disapproval, and Eo’s indifference to Kevin’s attentions, the visit dragged on. When Cassidy stepped out to the front steps, it was a signal to wrap things up. Kevin knelt before his little munchkin, whose nose had started to drip, and placed the gift in her hands. Sarah stood up, and Cassidy took a few steps in their direction. I held up a hand. The little girl had no idea what she was holding, but she understood it was a present of some kind, and pulled at the cloth. Kevin helped her unwrap it: a round white stone, glittering.
“You’re not going to remember this,” Kevin said to himself. “Eo, baby, you have a mommy and a daddy. Hold this in the light: it’s not your mommy, but it’s the best way I can explain her. She . . . if you ever wonder about me . . . your mommy got lost, and I’m helping her get where she needs to be. If you can just remember that. I helped her.”
On the drive back to work, he cried without shame. In his sorrow I heard a faint harmonic of joy.
WHEN KEVIN failed to show up to work the following day, I wondered. His mother hadn’t seen him in a week. He stayed missing the day after, and I went out looking for his car in the usual places, and called Lieutenant Sleight with the make and model. The third day I got another call about a prowler by Swales’s place and thought, Kevin. This one came right to my station in the afternoon. I drove the patrol truck up and parked beside a small Japanese car with New York plates. At the edge of the black empty space where Kevin and Penny’s trailer once stood, I found not Kevin O’Keeffe but Bobby Chase. Tall, muscled, and shaven-headed, he held his hands clasped over his crotch and barely registered my arrival. I couldn’t see his eyes for the black sunglasses he had on.
Chase was the first to speak. “So he called you.”
“He’s going to complain if you don’t leave.”
“I better get out of here, then,” he said. “I ain’t going back.” He swept a finger and thumb under his eyes and replaced his sunglasses. “I mean,” he said, gesturing in front of him, helpless at the ruination.
“I know.”
“She was my girl,” he said. “You find her,” he said. “If O’Keeffe didn’t do this, then you explain it.”
“What makes you think he did?”
“That’s the way it always is. You think because he smiles in your face he won’t? He will. He has. Anybody can.”
“You a hundred percent on that?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” he said. “Did you know he kept her locked up? O’Keeffe did. In the bedroom. My cousin, locked up like a dog.”
“Like that girl up in the First Ward.”
Chase tensed, and violence was in the air. For a moment I thought he’d come for me, but he wrapped his head in his hands. “I can’t go back, I can’t go back. About the night at the tavern, please don’t. Rianne got me going, Dad got me going, I was drunk. He had her car. I want to start over. I just wish she was here.”
It wasn’t until the fifth day, the night rather, that something of Kevin O’Keeffe resurfaced. Miss Julie and I had returned to my place from burgers and beers at the High-Thyme, tipsy and leaning on each other as we walked from the truck to the front door. There was a message blinking on my answering machine. I pressed play.
“Yeah, Henry? Frank Sleight. Just calling to let you know O’Keeffe’s car was found on a back lot off Clinton Street here. It’d been there for I guess a couple days, and the lot owner called to have it towed. It’s been impounded. You want to give me a call, I can show you the place.”
In town, I met not Lieutentant Sleight but Detective Oates in plain clothes, in a parking lot beside the DMV office. Fifty yards back and one lot over was where Kevin had left Penny’s car nosed into the trees. In any direction, a man walking could find bars, hotels, highs including strong drink, crack, heroin, and bridges to jump off. Downtown, a man could board a coach bus to take him anywhere.
* * *
I HATED being so busy. Ed called and called; I told him I needed to take time off the building, and he cursed me. The township was not to be denied. In the late afternoon I heard a car stop in the parking lot with a familiar wince of brakes; Shelly Bray had come to visit once more. My office door was locked, and she twisted the knob and shook the door in its frame before thumping on it with her fists and feet. I hurried from behind my desk and let her in.
“Jesus,” I said. “Quit it. You can’t stay, you know that.”
Shelly wasn’t listening. “I feel sick,” she said. “You have any water?”
I freed a plastic bottle from under my desk and handed it over; it was warm, but she drank some anyway, then focused and turned to me.
“You have to go out there,” she said. “Wurlitzer’s dead.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Wasn’t he pretty old?”
“He’s lying out there. Josh won’t let me up. You have to go, Henry.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to. Henry, he killed my horse. My kids are home.”
Shelly followed my patrol truck in her car, but at my insistence she did not turn up the driveway, and I left her parked on the shoulder. As my tires crackled up the dirt driveway and the Bray house came into view, Joshua emerged with a nod of his head and folded arms. In a gesture of peace, I was without my gun belt, but kept a .22 mousegun in my pants pocket. Though I didn’t know Josh beyond a couple conversations a couple years ago, I had seen the guns in his basement. It being a Saturday, he was dressed for leisure. I couldn’t tell if he had something on him. I got out of the truck.
Into the silence between us I said, “Shelly came to see me at the station. She was upset. One of the horses died?”
Josh blinked impatiently. “Yes?”
“Well . . . can she see him?”
“No.”
Dismayed, I pressed on. “How did he die?”
“I shot him.”
“Okay, I need to see the horse.”
“If you must,” he said.
Behind the house, a golden field bordered the woods. Turkey vultures wheeled in the sky above. As I watched, one tumbled down to join others around a dark form in the grass. Joshua and I approached the place. Wurlitzer was a bay whose shine had been dulled by shagginess and patches of gray. I’d ridden him once, and though horses were not my favorite, he’d been a real sport. I hated to see him lying there in so much blood. Once the birds moved on, leaving only a cloud of green flies, I could see that the horse had been shot four times, high-caliber, three to the abdomen and one to the head. In the distance, Wurlitzer’s girlfriend Pinky, a rose-gray, raced along the fence by the tree line, keeping as far as she could get from the house and barn.
“What happened here?”
“He broke his leg this morning, and he went wild.” Josh shrugged. “He was scared, pacing, hurting himself. I had to do something.”
> A blade of bone emerged through the skin of Wurlitzer’s foreleg. “How’d he break it?”
“No idea. I just heard him carrying on, and I could see it was serious.”
“Shelly’s upset.”
“Yeah. Yeah. If she doesn’t like how I care for the animals, she can find a way to take them on herself. You have some land up by you, don’t you?”
“Did the kids see?”
“I don’t know. They probably did see something, yeah. I told them to stay in the front room. Of course that only made them curious.”
I looked at Joshua for a long moment. He looked back at me, waiting for something I wasn’t going to give him. He’d seen much more of me than I had of him, and as his eyes flicked up and down my person, I wondered what was in his head. His calm was perfect.
Back at the road, I swung the truck behind Shelly’s car and joined her in the passenger seat.
“You can’t go up there,” I said. I explained about the broken leg.
“You’re kidding me,” she said. “You bought that?”
“I don’t know if I did, but you still can’t go up.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I gave him the names of a couple excavators. He’s got to have it buried, he knows that. I’m sorry, Shel.”
She landed a punch to my neck and was winding up for another when I took her wrists. “Get out,” she said. “Get out. What are you going to do? Who’s going to take care of them? My god. Get out.”
* * *
AT THE CLOSE of a god-awful day Sheriff Dally came to assign me an overnight babysitting detail in the county lockup, just Coleman Tod and me.
“It’s not my shift,” I told him.
“He asked for you,” the sheriff told me. “Sorry about it.”
We sat for a minute at my desk with our heads bent over a map of the county. It was clear we were running out of places to search. There was a spot off of 37, and then on the edge of my township, a vast swamp of berms and channels leading nowhere, and emerald bogs cut off from the main body by the slow buildup of silt. Your one step could be on grass, your next step thigh-deep in rusty mire that was and wasn’t water. Known Stiobhard territory. They’d been clear with me, and I owed them a word about where we were going.