Silence. His chest neither rises nor falls. There is no movement in his extremities. No sound escapes his throat. What now lies before Diego is nothing more than a wax replica of a man he once knew.
‘Dead?’
Diego nods.
Ian closes his eyes and lets his head rest on the gravel.
‘You okay, Ian?’
No response.
Diego turns in a circle, feeling helpless and overwhelmed, and falls to a sitting position in the middle of the driveway as in the distance sirens wail.
Paramedics load Ian and Chief Davis into ambulances and declare William Francis Finch Jr, age forty-two, survived by wife and two children, dead. Diego wonders if he should call Debbie. It might be better to hear it from a friendly voice than from Sheriff Sizemore. The thought of having to put those words into the air makes him sick. Your husband is dead. With four words a world destroyed. And she’s already been through so much. He reaches for his cell phone. He has to call her. She’ll need a sympathetic ear.
But before he can dial, Henry’s brother Donald is coming down the driveway in a primer-gray El Camino with an expressionless expression on his face: blank as unmarked paper. He passes the ambulances as they wail their way out to Crouch Avenue and then the Mencken Regional Medical Center. The car comes to a stop behind Diego’s and Donald steps out.
‘What the hell-’
Diego walks up to him, grabs him by the arm, and leads him to his car. He yanks open the back door. He shoves Donald toward it. ‘Get in.’
‘What for?’
‘Get in the fucking car.’
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘Do you want to be?’
Donald looks at him over his shoulder for a moment, tonguing the inside of his cheek. And he must see the scene behind Diego as well: blood and bone splattered across the driveway, several police cars, a covered dead body, a dead dog. And the absences: Henry’s truck and the man himself. He must be able to piece at least some of it together. After a moment he nods and steps into the back of the car.
Diego waits till he pulls in his left leg and slams the door shut on him.
‘I don’t know anything about it.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Are you and your brother close?’
‘He’s twenty years older than me. Old enough to be my father.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘No, we’ve never been close.’
‘But you eat dinner at his house.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘You eat a lot of dinners with people you don’t like?’
‘I didn’t say I didn’t like him. I said we weren’t close. And except on weekends he ain’t there anyway.’
‘But you eat dinner at his house.’
‘Yeah, sometimes. I already said I do.’
‘Ever notice anything unusual?’
‘Unusual like what?’
‘Unusual like unusual. Use your brain.’
‘Henry and Bee have always been unusual.’
‘Like how?’
‘I don’t know.’ Donald scratches at his beard stubble. ‘Look, if you’re asking if I ever noticed anything criminal, the answer is no. I haven’t.’
‘Nothing?’
‘No.’
‘You never suspected they had a third person in their house?’
‘I don’t know. I guess not.’
‘Don’t guess.’
‘I never thought about it.’
‘Well, think about it now.’
‘No. I mean, I seen kid stuff around now and then, but I guess I thought it was from their own kid.’
‘They had a kid?’
‘Died over twelve years ago.’
Diego scratches his cheek. He remembers hearing this story before, maybe at Roberta’s, but he’s only spoken to Henry half a dozen times over the years, so it didn’t mean much to him-till now. ‘Boy or girl?’
‘Girl.’
‘How old was she?’
‘Not even one.’
‘How’d she die?’
‘Drowned in the tub.’
‘You only saw kid stuff that could belong to an infant?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’re searching the house.’
‘I know.’
‘And if we find stuff all over the house for a teenager we’ll know you’re lying.’
‘I know it. I’m not lying. I never thought about it.’
‘You don’t do much thinking, do you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t seem to know much either.’
Donald shrugs and exhales through his nostrils.
‘You never heard any noise?’
‘Not that I noticed.’
‘You really expect me to believe you lived in a trailer not twenty yards from Henry and Beatrice, that you ate dinner there sometimes, and you never had any idea that for seven years they were holding someone captive? That’s what you want me to believe?’
‘It’s the truth.’
‘And you don’t know where he might be headed?’
‘I already told you like an hour ago.’
‘And if you told the truth you should be able to remember what you said.’
‘I said I didn’t know but if I had to guess, Juarez by way of El Paso.’
‘Is your brother that fucking stupid?’
‘Well, he ain’t a Mensa member.’
‘But you think he’s dumb enough to try to cross a border with every cop in the state looking for him?’
‘I don’t know. It was just a guess.’
‘A pretty shit one. Your brother’s not that stupid and you know it.’
A knock at the door, and then it squeaks open.
Diego looks over his shoulder. Sheriff Sizemore pokes his Stetson-topped head into the room. He wipes at his mouth with his palm.
‘Officer Diego.’
‘It’s Officer Peña.’
‘Let’s talk.’
Diego nods, then gets to his feet and follows the sheriff out into the empty front room of the police station, making sure the door is locked on the younger Dean brother.
‘What is it, sheriff?’
‘You’ve been going in circles for over an hour.’
‘I know, but he’ll slip. I’m wearing him down.’
‘Look, this is our case. A county case. You don’t have the resources. I agreed to the hour outta courtesy for what happened to Officer Hunt’s daughter. For what happened to the chief. I know it means something to you guys. And, yeah, I thought maybe you’d be able to get something we could use. But one of ours got shot too, died, and the fucking hour is up, Officer Diego.’
‘Officer Peña. And I just need another thirty minutes.’
‘You can’t have it.’
‘I can’t have it?’
‘Nope.’
‘Well, what the fuck?’
The sheriff shrugs, seeming suddenly bored by the conversation. ‘That’s just the way it is,’ he says. ‘I got a manhunt going on and I’m done letting you dance in circles with our only possible source of information.’
Diego watches Sheriff Sizemore lead the younger Dean to the back of his car and put him into it. Then Sizemore looks back at Diego and nods. Diego does not nod back. Sizemore gets into his vehicle and drives way, taking Donald to the sheriff’s office down the street.
Diego tries to roll a cigarette, but his hands are shaky. He cannot seem to keep the tobacco in his paper. It shakes from the paper and falls to the asphalt. Finally, after his third try, he balls the rolling paper in his fist and throws it to the ground. He turns around and heads inside.
Didn’t really want a cigarette, anyway.
Picture a calm sea of oily black. Horizon to horizon: only this sea, flat and featureless. An entire planet covered in liquid midnight. A moon overhead like a silver dollar, and a few stars, but nothing more. There are no islands or trees. No fish or whales.
Just a dead calm. Nothing other than one man floating on his back in the middle of it: Ian. Ian, floating in darkness. Arms and legs spread like the Vitruvian Man. Eyes open. He looks toward the heavens expecting God, but all he gets is the voice of the darkness between the stars: a hollow call like a desert wind.
Then something touches his left hand. Someone touches his left hand. It is human. He is not alone. He tries to turn his head to the left but he cannot. Someone is stroking the web between thumb and index finger.
He doesn’t understand why he can’t turn his head to the left.
Open your eyes.
They are open: the moon like a silver dollar and the points of stars.
Open your eyes.
He does and the night sky gives way to a white ceiling, first out of focus and soft, then gaining sharpness. He blinks several times and turns his head to the left.
Debbie looks up from her lap. Her face is thin. She looks old, somehow, and tired. He has never thought that of her before, but he thinks it now. She is not wearing makeup and her eyes are red and the skin beneath them is blotchy and dark gray and the corners of her mouth are turned down.
‘Hi,’ he says, but it is little more than a whisper.
She says nothing at first, just looks at him. She wipes her nose, her red-rimmed nostrils, with the back of her wrist. Finally: ‘Bill’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Then he coughs, and there is that strange feeling like trying to breathe underwater. He coughs and coughs, and feels like phlegm or something should come up, but nothing does. His muscles tighten as he coughs and pain ripples through his body from the dropped-pebble point where the bullet said hello. He hears a strange liquid sucking sound from beneath a thin blanket which covers his torso. He lifts the blanket. A clear tube, a catheter about as big around as a woman’s pinky finger, sutured into his chest just under his armpit. Thread stitched through his flesh and then wrapped around the catheter to hold it into place. The skin pursed around it like lips around a straw, like some strange alien tulip. In the tube, blood and pus combined to form a thick pink liquid. A knot of it flows down the catheter to a small box on the floor with PLEUR-EVAC written on it.
He coughs again, and more liquid flows from his chest and into the tube. It hurts to cough. It hurts even to breathe.
‘Jesus,’ he says when he gets his breath back.
‘You were shot.’
After a moment, after he manages to get his breath back, he says, ‘I know.’
‘You had a collapsed lung.’
Ian nods.
Debbie frowns and looks down at her lap once more.
‘The twins are too young to remember Bill. They’ll grow up without any memories of their father to look back on.’
Ian is silent for a long time, lost on a strange raft of wooziness. Then what Deb said registers and he says, ‘Maybe-maybe that’s for the best. If it had to happen. Maybe you can’t miss something you don’t remember.’
Debbie shakes her head. ‘I don’t think it works that way.’
He squeezes Debbie’s hand. ‘I’m sorry about Bill. He made you happy. You deserve happiness.’
Debbie nods but says nothing. Instead she turns to look at an empty chair in the corner. She looks at it for a long time.
‘Did they get him at least? Is Maggie safe?’
Debbie shakes her head.
‘Bill’s dead, Chief Davis is in critical condition, he has no face, he’ll have to eat through a tube for the rest of his life, if he lives, and you’re here-yet that son of a bitch still has Maggie. It’s not right. It’s not fucking-’ Her voice chokes off and she looks down at her lap, and her shoulders shake.
‘We’ll get her back, Deb.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know, but we will. I’ll think of something.’
He squeezes her hand again, but then another coughing fit overwhelms him, sending pain through his body like poison, and more blood and pus drain from his lung and into the catheter flowing from his chest.
‘Oh, fuck,’ he says. Then, once he’s caught his breath, ‘I’ll think of something. I’ll think of something and I’ll get her back.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘Yes.’
Debbie nods. ‘Then I’ll believe it too.’
The sun, partially hidden behind the western horizon (looking to Maggie like a grapefruit-half laid face-down on a table), spills pink light into the evening sky. The Ford Ranger rolls along the road toward it though Maggie knows if that’s their destination they’ll never make it. This thought reminds her of a conversation she once had with her daddy. She asked him why moths like light bulbs so much and Daddy said they thought light bulbs were the moon, that moths at night used the moon for guidance and flew toward it constantly, though they never reached it, and that they did the same with light bulbs, but once they’d reached the light they had no idea what to do with it. The moon had taught them that they would never have to worry about actually reaching their destination.
‘That’s kind of sad,’ Maggie said.
But Daddy just shrugged and bit the end off a cigar.
Henry glances over her head to Beatrice. ‘How you feeling?’
‘I’m still bleeding. I feel dizzy. I don’t even know how I cut myself. Did you see, Sarah?’
Maggie shakes her head and looks down at the pool of blood on the floorboard. Then she looks to Beatrice’s pale and sweaty face. She almost escaped. Beatrice collapsed as Maggie’d imagined she would, dropped like a felled tree, screamed and went down, but Maggie forgot her plan to wait for Henry and tried to run by the woman to get upstairs, and Beatrice reached out and grabbed for her. She grabbed her ankle and said, ‘Sarah, what happened?’ and Maggie went sprawling forward and hit her face on the third step and felt a strange bending in her nose, and blood flowing down her face. Everything went gray, a gray fog swept in, and by the time it cleared Henry was downstairs, helping Beatrice up the stairs and locking the door behind them as they left the basement. A moment later he came down for her, picked her up, and brought her outside where her daddy lay bloody in the gravel with a hole in his chest.
‘Look up yonder,’ Henry says.
He points to a small brick house about a quarter mile from the road. A few horses graze on brown grass in the pink evening. The house looks quiet, a single window illuminated. A gray Dodge Ram pickup parked by the side of the house, under a carport made of weather-grayed four-by-fours and plywood. A tire swing dangles still and lonesome from a big oak tree in the front yard.
‘We’ll stop there,’ he says, ‘get you fixed up and get rid of this truck. We ain’t safe driving it.’
‘I still don’t understand what happened, Henry.’
‘I know it.’
‘I don’t know why we had to leave the dishes.’
‘We’re in some trouble with the law, Bee. I explained that already. Hell, you seen-’
‘I didn’t see anything.’
‘You seen the cops in the-’
‘I didn’t see nothing. I was in a lot of pain, Henry.’
He looks at Beatrice for a long time, an unreadable expression on his face. Maggie has no idea what to make of it. Nor of the conversation itself. Beatrice must have seen the blood, she must have seen the policemen lying motionless in the driveway. You can’t not see something like that. Yet she says otherwise.
‘How you feeling, Sarah?’
Maggie turns and looks at Beatrice. ‘Okay,’ she says.
‘You know we’ll get through this, right? You know we love you?’
Maggie does not respond. She looks up ahead to the house they are quickly approaching. She looks at the light in the window and wonders what kind of people live within it. She imagines a cowboy hat with salt-white sweat stains on it hanging from a rack by the door. A man in dirty coveralls sitting on a couch. A woman mending socks. A baby playing in the middle of the floor wearing nothing but a cloth diaper. She wonders if they’ll be able to help
her. If Henry stops there maybe she can get help. She can move her mouth silently when Henry’s looking the other direction. Help. Me. If she could just get help she would get away.
‘You better mind your behavior, too, Sarah, you hear?’
Her face goes hot. She feels as if she has been somehow caught. As if he has read her mind. As if he has shuffled through her thoughts like index cards and spied everything that was written there. As Borden so often did.
But Borden wasn’t real and Henry is.
Real enough to shoot her daddy, to leave him bleeding to death in a gravel driveway.
It’s her fault. If she hadn’t called him none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have come and he wouldn’t have gotten shot. None of the policemen she saw would have gotten shot. They’d be eating dinner with their families instead of in the hospital or dead.
‘Sarah?’
She looks up at Henry.
‘You hear me?’
She nods.
‘If we go in there and take care of business and nothing goes wrong, whoever lives in that house will still be alive when we leave. But if you try any funny business, they’re dead, and you’re not any better off than when they was alive. You hear?’
She nods again.
‘Good.’
‘You’re not really gonna kill nobody, are you, Henry?’
‘Quiet, Bee.’
‘But Henry.’
‘I mean it. Hush up.’
Beatrice looks out her window.
Henry reaches into his pocket and comes out with a kerchief. He spits on it and thrusts it toward Maggie. She takes it hesitantly, not knowing what to do with it. She can smell his spit and it makes her stomach turn.
‘Clean your face up,’ he says. ‘We can’t roll in looking like something from a horror movie.’
Henry pulls off Interstate 10 and rolls down a single-lane stretch of gray asphalt. The window is cracked and though evening is coming on quick the air is still unpleasantly hot.
He pulls to a stop in front of the brick house. A gate blocks the driveway. He steps from the truck to swing it open, so he can drive on in, but the gate is padlocked. He walks back to the truck, reaches into the open door, and honks the horn. It sounds very loud in the still evening air. He’s unsure about what he will say to whoever’s on the other side of that door, especially about what happened to Beatrice, but he’ll think of something. He usually does.
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