Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  To hell with you, Nick Fogelsong. You think I can’t do it without you? Watch me. You just watch me.

  She shook her head. She made the turn.

  “Mrs. Elkins?”

  Mathers, unnerved by her silence, sounded anxious, tentative. He added, “Still on the line, ma’am?”

  “Yeah. Almost there.”

  Chapter Seven

  Nick Fogelsong had once had a friend named Bert Cousins with whom he occasionally shared a beer or three. Nick wasn’t much of a drinker, but Bert was, and thus if you wanted to spend time with Bert, you were better off matching him drink for drink, instead of listening to him take potshots at your manhood all evening long. Bert had made a small fortune as a concrete contractor over in Swinton Falls, and he’d been a reliable contributor to Nick’s campaigns during all those successful runs for sheriff, and so Nick owed him. They would get together two or three times a year, have dinner, laugh too loud, drink too much, then call their wives to pick them up. Nick’s clanging headache the next day was, he thought, generally worth it. And as it happened, it wasn’t a dilemma with which he had long to reckon; Bert Cousins, two years younger than he was, had died in November from colon cancer, a gaunt and stony-eyed ghost of himself.

  Nick always remembered one of their earliest conversations. Each man was embarking on his fourth—or was it fifth?—Budweiser at Sloppy Sam’s, a bar in Swinton Falls, when Bert leaned over the table in the booth, its wood all liquid-shiny with a slick yellow varnish, and poked a finger in Nick’s face. “Happens to you, too, right?” Nick didn’t know what his friend was talking about, and told him so. Bert grinned and shook his head and said, “Oh, come on. I mean, getting tired of the same thing at home, night after night.” Turned out that Bert Cousins was determined to reveal that he was having an affair. His wife, Gloria, just didn’t excite him anymore, at least not in the way that a woman named Liz Something-or-Other, a waitress he’d met over in Chester, could do. Nick didn’t catch Liz’s last name and didn’t ask Bert to repeat it. He didn’t care what her name was. And he didn’t want to hear Bert’s confession, because he knew that it was less about confessing than about wanting to have Nick confirm that he, too, had thought about it, that he, too, had either cheated on Mary Sue or was seriously considering it.

  One thing Nick had learned from all those years of being a sheriff was this: People wanted solidarity in their sins. They wanted the comfort of company when they misbehaved. That’s why they confessed so often, right on the spot, in those needy, wheedling tones that used to drive him crazy: You know what I mean, right? Under the circumstances, you would’ve done the same thing, right? Right, Sheriff? It was almost as if, Nick thought, people believed the shame and the guilt might be lessened that way, split up and parceled out and spread around, so that no one person bore the total weight of the remorse.

  When he told Bert no—no, he’d never cheated on Mary Sue, and no, he didn’t desire to do so—Bert hooted his disbelief and his disdain, but Nick didn’t care. It was the truth. Nick Fogelsong had first seen Mary Sue at a church picnic more than a quarter century ago. The moment was a dividing line in his life; there was a definite Before and an absolute After. As he tried to explain to Bert, it wasn’t that he was some goody two-shoes, or was trying on halos for size; he just had no interest in any other woman, in that way. Mary Sue was funny and smart and beautiful, and there was a life force in her—that was the only description that worked, “life force,” even though Nick had never previously used the phrase and was surprised when it popped out of his mouth—that seemed to deepen all the colors of the world.

  It was still true, all these years later. Despite everything.

  Nick sat across the dining room table from her and finished the final bite of his chili. Saturdays were typically his longest days at the Highway Haven, and this one was longer than usual; a few hours after Bell left, a trucker had miscalculated the distance when he was backing up to the pump and had sideswiped it. He hadn’t knocked it over—that would’ve necessitated urgent requests to a dozen different fire-rescue units and the evacuation of half the county, not to mention the filing of about ten thousand forms with the EPA—but he’d bumped it, and that meant a temporary shutoff and a lot of complications. It wasn’t a crisis, but it was a major pain in the ass.

  And the day had started off with another kind of aggravation: Bell’s visit. Clearly, she was still sore at him for giving up the sheriff’s job, for deciding not to run for reelection and taking the position at the Highway Haven. Nowadays she was stiff and formal with him, faintly condescending, and too polite, like a damned stranger. What was the statute of limitations for being pissed off at somebody? Whatever it is, Nick thought, Belfa will stretch it out longer. No doubt about that. He didn’t see her often these days, but when he did, the atmosphere wasn’t easy and comfortable. Not like it had been for all those years.

  He had arrived home half an hour ago, kicked off his hard black shoes, pulled off his tie, and sat down to dinner. The sight of Mary Sue across the table—her hair, her face, her eyes—had put him in mind of that night with Bert Cousins, and Bert’s question, and Nick’s quick uncomplicated answer: No.

  “One more bite,” he said amiably, “and I swear I’ll pop wide open.”

  “Well, we don’t want that. Think of the mess it’ll make.”

  He grinned and dropped his spoon into the empty bowl. That produced a pair of nervous plinks as the spoon hit first the ceramic bottom and then the side. He wiped his mouth on a white paper napkin. He crumpled the napkin into a tidy wad and left it next to his bread plate.

  The dining room was big, too big, really, for just two people. The whole house was like that: It was a rambling, shingle-sided place that had once belonged to a mine foreman and his family. Four children and an elderly aunt, in addition to the foreman and his wife, had once lived here comfortably. Then the foreman was transferred to a mining operation out in Wyoming—the new West Virginia, Nick had heard it called, although he doubted that the people of Wyoming would embrace the label willingly—and Nick had purchased it. Back then, a decade or so into his marriage, he was still sure that he and Mary Sue would have a family. Not four kids—Lord!—but maybe two. At least one.

  Nowadays, the large house got on his nerves sometimes. The rooms had high ceilings and wide windows, and there was a broad backyard that went on and on until finally it ran underneath a jagged shelf of mountain called Smithson’s Rock. The day after he and Mary Sue moved in, a proud and happy Nick Fogelsong had taken an exploratory stroll around the property, like a squire with his walking stick and his spaniel, and when he came to that shadowy space beneath Smithson’s Rock, he bent over and took a few scooting steps forward. His toe bumped a soft edge. It was a pile of comic books. Nick plucked one off the top. There was a handwritten note taped there:

  To the new kid who moves in here. I’m Corey. I’m eight years old and we are going to Wyoming. These are my comic books. I’m leaving them for you, okay? This is a great place for a fort. PS I hope you are a boy.

  There wouldn’t be any children here, boy or girl. If Nick hadn’t known that on the day he and Mary Sue moved in, he surely knew it now.

  “If you get hungry again later, there’s plenty left,” Mary Sue said.

  She had stopped eating after a few bites, her dinner finished, but she continued to sit with him, her chin in her hand, her elbow propped on the table next to her glass of sweet tea. She had once been lovely, but the mental illness with which she had long contended had left its mark, like a line high on the sand where the tide had reached before sliding back again. Her gray face was too long. She was too thin. Too solemn. It was the joy of Nick Fogelsong’s life now when he could make her laugh.

  “I gotta say, though—man, oh, man, that’s good chili,” he said. “Best yet.”

  “Well, I made enough for Bell, too. Wish she’d been able to join us.”

  “Said she had a date tonight.” He used the same skeptical inflection he had rou
tinely used for reporting a suspect’s exceptionally lame alibi.

  “No reason why not. She’s allowed to have a social life, isn’t she?”

  “Not what I meant.”

  “Oh.” Mary Sue nodded. “You mean—what about Clay?”

  Nick shifted his feet under the table. “Not even sure they’re in close touch anymore.”

  “They are. I hear from Clay myself from time to time. He calls here, looking for you. Never likes to trouble you at work. We end up talking for quite a while. He loves her. I’m sure of it.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Oh, heavens, no. I’m extrapolating from the things he says. His observations. Being away has given him a new way of looking at the world.”

  “I thought the old way was working just fine,” Nick muttered. “Never understood why he’s got to go all that way—Boston, Massachusetts, for crying out loud—just to read a bunch of books.”

  “It’s called graduate school.”

  “I know what it’s called.” Nick was a great reader himself, a man who felt half-dressed unless he had a book in his hand. It wasn’t the books he had a problem with. “I just don’t think that’s where he belongs. Makes no sense to me.”

  Mary Sue smiled. Her smile was edged with irony. “Oh. I see. So Belfa’s supposed to give you the benefit of the doubt and accept your decision to leave the sheriff’s office—but you won’t extend the same favor to Clay about his decision to go to MIT?”

  Nick grunted. She was right, dammit. And now he’d have to pretend to be perturbed about that. But he wasn’t. Not really. He enjoyed it when she challenged him, calling him out on his hypocrisy, after which they’d laugh. This was how it had been between them all the time, until she got sick. These glimmers from the past, these stray moments of casual happiness, kept him going. They enabled him to get through the hard times, times when her disease seemed to stand in every doorway and block out all the light.

  “Anyway,” he said, “Bell can date anybody she pleases. Not my lookout anymore. She doesn’t talk to me. Not about personal matters.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “I guess.” He shrugged. “Her loss.”

  “Nick, there’s nothing wrong with admitting that you miss somebody.”

  “I didn’t say I missed her. It’s just damned awkward, that’s all. I still have to deal with her. Security matters at the stores, you know? But if she can’t get past the fact that I’m not sheriff anymore—well, too bad.”

  “Give it time.”

  “Got no choice.”

  “Speaking of security—did you ask her about Albright? You’ve been concerned about that, I know.”

  “Nope. Never had the chance. She was in a hurry.” He scratched an ear. “Maybe I’m worrying about nothing. Not everybody keeps good records. I can get a little sloppy myself. And Walter’s an old man. Probably just got tired. All those years with the state police and then a security job. Law enforcement’s no picnic. Takes a toll.” Walter Albright’s incident reports for the months before his firing were spotty, irregular, with few specifics. It was almost as if he thought he could make the negatives go away by ignoring them. Nick heard that he’d built himself a palace of a house with some money his wife had inherited and settled down into a comfortable retirement. Should’ve done it sooner.

  Mary Sue picked up her bowl. She started to rise, intending to clear the table. Nick waved her back down in her seat.

  “We’ll clean up in a bit,” he said. He was restless tonight, just as he’d often been after dinner back when he was sheriff and they waited for the next lightning-strike of bad news.

  His simple request to delay the cleanup had thrown her, knocking her off her rhythm, but she didn’t want him to know that. And so she shrugged—whatever—and put her bowl back in the precise spot where it had been. She would try. She always tried.

  But she was rattled now. Her plan for the next few minutes had been to collect the plates and bowls and silverware and stack them all in the dishwasher, then to check the contents of the refrigerator and the cupboards and make the penciled list for Lymon’s Market. Sunday was food-shopping day. Mary Sue planned her time minute by minute; it was the price she paid for being able to function, for keeping her mood pitched to a livable level.

  “Guess I thought Belfa would understand why I had to make the change,” he said. “You remember how it used to be. I mean, did we ever make it through a whole danged meal—not to mention a week’s vacation—without being interrupted by a phone call? Or a dozen phone calls? Always another crisis.” Nick didn’t like making speeches but he made one now anyway, revving himself up, because he needed to make sure she understood: It wasn’t you. He never wanted Mary Sue to think she was the reason he’d given up the sheriff’s job. Yes, her illness was part of it—he’d taken a leave of absence the year before, they’d gone to Chicago to see a specialist there, she’d tried a new antipsychotic medication—but only a part. The biggest reason? He was tired to the bone. And sick of other people’s problems. That was it. Really.

  “You remember,” he said. “Know you do. If it wasn’t a traffic accident, it’d be a drowning. Or a drug overdose. Or a fistfight. A fire. Or somebody’s car getting stolen. Or their cat. Or their lawnmower. Or just somebody bellyaching about something. I got so goddamned sick of it, Mary Sue, all the time, year after year. I know you know that, but sometimes I don’t think anybody can really know just how deep it ran in me. I was getting to be a cranky old fart. All I saw was people at their very worst. I was starting to—”

  Abruptly, he stopped talking. She had come around to his side of the table. Instead of getting up, he wrapped his arms around her waist and turned his face into her apron. She stroked the back of his head. He could smell her hands, and the pungent scent of the onions she’d chopped to put in the chili, and he knew that his head was greasy with sweat, after his long workday. But it didn’t matter. She was trying to soothe him, console him, just as he had often consoled her, and those other things—smells and sweat, the body’s small persistent betrayals—were irrelevant. Over the years they’d gone back and forth like this, healer and wounded, changing roles as the need arose. If, in the final reckoning, her problems had been more profound than his, if her mental instability had kept their lives churned up while his issues were ordinary, a matter of a bad day every now and again, then so be it.

  “You did a good job for this town for so many, many years,” she said, her voice soft, with a gentle ripple moving through it, like a sheet hung out to dry in a mild spring breeze. “You gave it everything you had. All of your time and your energy and your passion. You were a hell of a sheriff. But it’s all over with now.”

  She meant to be kind, so he couldn’t tell her what he was really thinking: That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.

  * * *

  Later, dinner dishes loaded and dishwasher under way, the furry thrum of its work sounding like another kind of digestion, they retreated to the big living room. Nick sat in his recliner with a book open on his lap—An Army at Dawn by Rick Atkinson—and Mary Sue occupied a small corner of the couch, her long legs tucked up under her, watching a TV show with the sound turned low. The phone rang. They looked at each other. It felt at once like one of those Saturday nights before he’d changed jobs, when they would barely be settled into their chairs when the phone exploded over and over again like a series of benign bombs, leaving the evening in shreds and tatters. Those nights, Nick had rarely bothered to take off his boots after he got home for dinner. He knew he’d just have to put them back on again, along with his hat and his coat and his holster.

  “Hey, Nickie, my man.”

  Nick recognized the voice of Vince Dobbs, grandson of Bundy Barnes, a Raythune County commissioner. Vince ran a car wash a mile or so outside the city limits. He and Nick had gone to Acker’s Gap High School together. That was about the only thing they had in common.

  “Just wanna make sure you heard,” Vince went on. He spoke rapidly,
so rapidly that Nick had once compared his cadence to a squirrel’s frisky scamper. “Gonna be all over town by morning. ’Member the guy who was running the show around here for the resort? Big man? Lotsa hair? Kinda loud? Real asshole?”

  “Ed Hackel.”

  “That’s the one. Well, they found him dead this morning and it weren’t no natural causes. And guess who got dragged in for questioning? Okay, you’ll never guess, so I’m gonna tell you. Royce Dillard.”

  Nick scratched his cheek. The twinge he’d just felt had nothing to do with any special kinship with Hackel or Dillard; it was the fact that, until a few months ago, no one had had to call and tell him the news. He knew the news. He knew it ahead of everybody else—including a nosy fool like Vince Dobbs.

  “Huh.” He didn’t want to give Vince the satisfaction of his interest.

  “Yeah. Guy’s head was all bashed in, way I hear it. Big ole mess.”

  Gossip was a commodity, a fungible, tradable article of commerce. It was currency. And always before, Nick had controlled the asset side of things; he was the one who decided to whom to dole it out, and when, and how much. Now he was on the outside. Now he was no different from Vince Dobbs. Or Rhonda Lovejoy, come to that, one of Bell’s assistant prosecutors, another renowned purveyor of local information—except that Rhonda, given her position, would already know a hell of a lot more than he did.

  Two homicides had occurred since Nick had left the sheriff’s office in November, but they were routine, unexciting: First, a domestic violence case in December, for which the crazy-jealous SOB was now serving a life sentence at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex. And then there was a shooting death on New Year’s Eve at a tattoo parlor along Route 6; the perpetrator had thoughtfully shot himself after shooting his girlfriend, saving the county the trouble and expense of a trial. At the news of those tragedies, Nick had felt only relief. He wasn’t responsible anymore. Let Pam Harrison handle them.