Land of the Blind

by Jess Walter

  “You must be Pete,” Caroline says, and shows her badge. She picks up Pete’s jeans, feels in them for a weapon, and comes away with a long pocketknife that she slides into her own pocket.

  “Anybody in here eighteen?” she asks the owl-eyed teenagers. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. You’ve all got twenty seconds to get your clothes and get out of here. And if I ever see any of you in here again, you’re going to jail.”

  As Caroline continues to look for weapons, the teenagers scramble into their shirts and shoes, grab their bags of Doritos, and hurry out the door. Only the flannel girl is left. She pulls on a pair of pants and wipes her bloody lip with a white T-shirt. “Where do I go?”

  “You his girlfriend?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old?”

  The girl considers lying. “I’m sixteen,” she says finally.

  Caroline gives her two dollars. “Go to the coffee shop across the street and get yourself a cup of hot chocolate. I’ll be over in a minute.” The girl leaves and Caroline turns back to Pete, who makes no move to cover himself or his sore testicles.

  “Bitch.”

  I could shoot him, Caroline thinks, and she immediately thinks about investigating her own crime: the trail of witnesses, the barrista, the teenagers, the father with the blond son, the girl who showed Caroline the door; Caroline’s handprint on Pete’s neck, the police slug in his chest. Maybe she’d confess, ask for three legal pads and some coffee and sit down next to Clark the Loon, drawing a line between all the events in her life and this one crime.

  “Pete,” she says, “you should get some friends your own age.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re a lucky man, Pete. I’m not gonna arrest you today.”

  Finally he pulls the dirty blanket over himself. Caroline walks to the window and looks down on the street. She sees the young flannel girl cross the street, swing around a parking meter, and go into the coffee shop. Caroline turns back to Pete.

  “I need some information about a guy named Clark. You know him?”

  “No.”

  Pete Decker is used to having cops ask if he knows someone. “Come on. Think. Clark something. About my age. Mid to late thirties. Dark hair. Good looking. Little over six feet tall. Has an eye patch.”

  With that last bit of information, Pete Decker sits up in bed and smiles. “Clark? No way. How is he?”

  “He’s okay. So you do know him?”

  “Sure, we was like…best friends when we were kids. You know, little kids. Rode bikes and shit. Before—” He doesn’t say before what.

  “You know his last name?” she asks.

  “Clark? Oh, fuck. Sure. You know. Clark…uh…starts with an M. I used to know it. You know, when we were kids. So how is Clark, man? Still the same?”

  Not knowing what he was like before, Caroline isn’t sure how to answer.

  “Man, I haven’t seen Clark in…fuck, years.”

  “You don’t keep in touch with him?”

  “Clark? Nah, man.” He looks around the one-room apartment. “Yeah, I don’t keep in touch with too many people from the old neighborhood, you know.”

  “Clark have a beef with anyone, someone he might have wanted to hurt?”

  “Clark? Nah,” he says. “No, everybody liked Clark. He’s funny. Smart as shit too. Get all A’s and shit. I used to tell him, ‘Clark, don’t worry about your ol’ buddy Pete. You go make something of yourself. Ol’ Pete, he’ll be fine.’ You know why? I used to kind of protect him from bullies ’n’ shit. We was tight.”

  Pete sits up in bed. “Yeah, Clark, he was the kind of guy you always knew would be okay. Played sports and banged all them cheerleaders, even with…” He raises his hand absentmindedly to his own left eye. “…You know, the accident and shit.”

  “Yeah, his eye. How’d that happen?”

  “Oh.” Pete looks around nervously, as if he’s wondering about the statute of limitations. “Some kind of accident. You know. Kids.”

  “When did you see Clark last?”

  “Huh.” Pete thinks. It does not appear to be his strong suit. “Oh. Probably 1979. Yeah. Probably then.”

  Caroline nods. She’s not sure whether to be upset that this has turned out to be nothing, or glad that Clark whose-last-name-starts-with-an-M the Loon told the truth when he said Pete Decker was nobody.

  “Okay, Pete,” she says, and she crouches in front of him. “In just the last ten minutes, you’ve committed six felonies. I’m gonna give you a break, but I need you to do some things for me. Four things. Can you do four things for me, Pete?”

  “Sure.” He sits up, all sunken cheeks and vacant eyes, and she knows he will do nothing, that twenty minutes after she leaves, the teenagers will be back and they will all be smoking crystal and watching Pete’s stolen TV. “Anything,” he says.

  She pulls out her notebook and writes, 1. GIRL. “That girl,” she says. “The one you hit. Never see her again. You understand? Send her home to her parents.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  2. TV, she writes. “This morning, you take this TV back where you stole it from.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Monday morning, you go to your probation officer and tell him that you’re using again and you need to get into treatment.” She writes, 3. Treatment.

  “Good,” he says, “I’ve been thinking that I need some help to…”

  She doesn’t bother listening.

  “And number four. You avoid me. Because if you don’t do all four of these things—and we both know you won’t—then I’m gonna shoot you in your fucking head. Do you understand?” She writes, 4. Me.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  Caroline rips the page from her notebook, tosses it on the bed, straightens up, and starts for the door.

  “Hey.” Pete has pulled the blanket up to his neck, suddenly modest. “Will you tell Clark I said hi?”

  She’s a little unsure what to make of this. “Sure,” she says.

  “And tell him that if I could, I would’ve voted for him last time.”

  And that, of course, is when it hits her. She stops cold at the door to Pete Decker’s apartment and closes her eyes. She did vote for him.

  4 | CLARK ANTHONY MASON

  Clark Anthony Mason works over the third legal pad just as he did the first two, almost in a state of self-hypnosis. Caroline watches him with a new kind of fascination. Tony Mason. No shit. He chews the end of his pen and takes a sip of the coffee she gave him. She didn’t say anything when she got back from Pete’s, just handed him the coffee and went to write an intelligence report encouraging the drug detectives to go back and visit Pete Decker. She looks in the window of Interview Two. So that’s Tony Mason. Now it’s obvious: the solid good looks, the weird diction, the politician’s bearing. Before, she couldn’t see past the dirty clothes, the long hair, and especially the eye patch. She kept running the current version of the Loon through her memory (Who do I know with an eye patch?) rather than trying to picture him without it.

  Caroline checks her watch. It’s going on nine o’clock Saturday morning. He’s been at this almost twelve hours. She walks back to her desk and flips through her Rolodex until she finds the number of a newspaper reporter she nearly dated before remembering that she hates newspaper reporters. She taps out the number and Evan O’Neal answers on the second ring.

  “Evan. It’s Caroline Mabry. I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

  “How you been, Caroline?” Evan covered cops back when she was on patrol, but now he’s a government reporter.

  “Good. I need to run a name past you: Tony Mason.”

  “The kid who ran against Nethercutt?” Kid. Only in politics does someone in his thirties qualify as a kid. But in truth he had seemed like a kid, standing at the opposite podium against the gray-haired four-term Republican, looking as though, if elected to the House of Representatives, he would act immediately to change the mascot and make Homecoming a formal dance.

 
; “Yeah, that Tony Mason.”

  “No shit? You seeing him now, Caroline?”

  Funny that a cop would call a reporter and the reporter would assume that it was about romance. She’s not sure if that says something about her, or Evan, or Tony Mason. She looks up, through the small window of the interview room. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I am seeing him,” she says.

  “You get fixed up?”

  “Something like that.”

  Evan is quiet for a moment.

  “What is it?” Caroline asks.

  “It’s just…I don’t know…you can do better.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I’m starting to think that. What do you know about him?”

  “Mason? Just that he got thirty-six percent and that was twice as much as anyone expected from such a lamb.”

  “Lamb?”

  “Yeah.” Evan shifts the phone. “Nethercutt owns the seat, just like Foley did before him, so the Democrats have to pick their spots, only take a big run every six years or so. The rest of the time, they just throw lambs to slaughter—an old labor tough or a cute young lawyer like Tony Mason. Some political outsider who gets outspent five-to-one and goes home disillusioned and broke.”

  Caroline writes down the word “lawyer.” She’s beginning to recall details of the election now, and she wonders if her lax memory has to do with her job, or the funk she’s been in, or if the loser in any election just naturally fades from memory that quickly—the Dukakis syndrome. “Wasn’t he rich?”

  “Mason? Yeah,” Evan says. “Cashed out some tech stock and spent all his money trying to get elected. That’s the only reason he even got thirty-six percent.”

  “Do you have a list of his donations?”

  “I got his filings at the office. Sure.”

  “Fax it to me?”

  “Monday?”

  “Today?”

  “It’s Saturday, Caroline.”

  “I know. But you owe me.” She gave Evan a tip once about a former police chief who drove around drunk at night, pulling over teenage girls and “frisking” them.

  “Okay,” Evan says. “But remind me to never go out with a cop.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m just not sure I could pass the background check.”

  She ignores this. “So does he sometimes go by the name Clark?”

  “That’s his real name. Clark Anthony Mason. He didn’t think the Maxwell House Dems would vote for someone with two last names. And he thought Anthony sounded too professorial or blue blood or something. If you can imagine some kid from the Valley worrying about being too blue blood.”

  Evan laughs as he remembers. “Boy, that’s classic lamb behavior, worrying about the menu while the restaurant burns down.”

  “What do you mean?” Caroline asked.

  “It’s just…here’s this kid, doesn’t look twenty-five years old, all stiff and square, grows up in the Valley and goes off to Seattle, comes home thinking they’re just going to hand him a congressional seat. And…Jesus, that eye.”

  “Yeah, he wears an eye patch,” she says. “I don’t remember that from the election.”

  “No, he wore one of those glass eyes, didn’t move at all. You got the feeling he sat in front of the mirror until he figured which angle the eye looked straight and not cockeyed. That was the only way he’d face people, straight on, without moving his eye. On his posters, he was always staring right at you. It was a little creepy, especially in the debates. Guy moved like a robot.”

  Caroline had just assumed he was stiff and liked that about him, that he didn’t seem polished. But mostly she voted for him because he was for gun control and Nethercutt wasn’t. Over time she’d become a one-issue voter. “I was trying to remember what exactly he ran on…”

  “Oh, the usual economic development crap; he was gonna bring high-tech jobs here. ’Course, back then, you couldn’t run for dogcatcher without promising you’d bring computer jobs to Spokane. I have to admit, your boy really sold it, though.”

  “So how did Nethercutt beat him?”

  “Mostly by ignoring him. Let the PACs and the issue people run the negative shit: that he was a flaming liberal, that he burned flags and liked Internet porn. And of course there was the Seattle thing.”

  She vaguely remembers television ads that had knocked Mason for going to college and working in Seattle, ads that accused him of being in the pocket of liberal Seattle power brokers.

  “Yeah, that provincial shit is the gold standard in Spokane,” Evan says. “We don’t trust anyone who doesn’t live here and we assume anyone who does live here is stupid.”

  “You know what he’s done since the election?” Caroline asks, and she thinks, I know what he’s doing. He’s sitting in my interview room, writing his memoirs.

  “No idea.”

  “But he’s not still involved in politics?” she asks.

  “Mason? Nah. Lambs never run a second time. They go back to their insurance offices, or their teaching jobs at the community college.” Evan clears his throat. “So, are you gonna keep going out with the guy?”

  “I don’t know,” Caroline says. She looks up in the window again and sees that Clark is still writing, that his face is shot with hard memories, with misgiving and regret. She leans forward and watches closely. And watching him like this she knows there is a body somewhere. Tell me, Clark. Who did you kill?

  Caroline sits back. “Yeah, you’re probably right,” she says to Evan on the phone. “I can do better.”

  …remember this plain distinction…your conscience is not a law.

  —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

  IV

  Statement of Fact

  1 | NOBODY EMERGES WHOLE

  Nobody emerges whole from childhood. I know this. And I don’t pretend to think that the shattering of my left eye that day on the south bank of the Spokane River was in some way unique or was an unfair burden, that it put my suffering on a par with the suffering of someone like Eli Boyle. Truth is, I have got along fine with one eye. I can’t say that it was a help in my run for the Fifth District congressional seat, or that I would knowingly choose the patches and glass eyes and dark sunglasses that I have worn since childhood, or that I have gone more than a day without shifting my gaze to the floor in the presence of the binocular, ever conscious of the fact that I am incapable of that most basic human communication—looking deep and straight in someone’s eyes.

  But except for the external nature of my scars, I don’t imagine myself different from any other adult, limping and scuffling and scurrying along with all manner of insecurities and fears and defects, the results of bad parentage and low self-esteem, of being unprepared and unprotected in a world that seems on its surface so inviting and safe. The world is not safe. I need only continue the story of Eli Boyle’s life to prove that.

  But I am afraid I won’t be able to offer a full accounting of Eli’s indignities, for instance during our junior high years—the classroom-clearing farts, the daily capture and rolling of boogers between his fingers, the untold humiliations dreamed up by his classmates. There is simply not time.

  So, Detective, in the event that I am unable to finish this statement, this story of Eli’s life and death, which is also in some small way, I realize, the story of my own life and death (and the string of failures that connects them), then at least I can offer some proof of fidelity to you, to this arrangement you have made with me, to the comfort and understanding of your two eyes.

  To you, Caroline, I offer this:

  I did it.

  I killed Eli Boyle.

  If such a statement is all the court wants, then I am happy to no longer be an officer of that temple of disasters. And if such a confession is all that is required for deeper forgiveness, well…I don’t look forward to the lines in heaven.

  I took my friend’s life, metaphorically and unintentionally when we were young, and then, two days ago, I ended it literally and with malice. And forever. And yet that is not the onl
y crime I have to confess, and it is certainly not the most heinous, and if you think Eli Boyle is the only victim of my greed and anger, then you underestimate the heart’s potential for darkness.

  You told me this process usually begins with a body.

  You may find Eli’s at a house at the west end of Cliff Drive, not in the main house, empty and cold, with its Gatsby staircase and deco chandeliers, but in the small, dank apartment above the garage out back. He is lying on the floor, in a lake of his own blood. He is on his left side, with his left arm behind him and his right against his head, as if something important has just occurred to him. There is a long black hole in his head, from his jaw to his scalp. I put the hole there.

  I will forever be haunted by the look on his face in the moments before the horrible event played itself out. I saw that look once before, a look of surrender, of disbelief, a look that asks how life can keep getting worse—a look I first saw on Eli Boyle’s face twenty years ago, during a moment that now seems like the first step toward his death, the first blow.

  We were in high school. (I skip the horror of junior high with the request that you pause a moment to calculate your own adolescent social pain, multiply it by a thousand, and figure that you are still well short of Eli Boyle’s.)

  We arrived the way every kid has ever arrived in high school, taller but no smarter than our elementary selves, swimming in self-consciousness, wishing at once to be universally loved and left alone. I had been fitted for my first glass eye, and hated the way it sat unmoving and creepy in its drooped socket, staring straight ahead while my other eye bounded like a puppy from corner to corner of my skull. I will share a few of my old nicknames, skipping over such obvious names as Cyclops and Patch and Cap’n Hook, names insulting only in their lack of imagination. My favorite—Dead Eye—worked on two levels, in that case to describe both my injury and my free-throw shooting accuracy in basketball. I appreciated Ol’ One Ball for its suggestiveness, McGoo for its canny reference to the old goggle-eyed cartoon character, Eye-nstein for its nod to my high grade point average, Glass for its jazzy simplicity, Lefty for its ironic coolness, and Lighthouse for its clean imagery.