Last Ragged Breath

by Julia Keller

  At the word “security,” the man’s head jerked again. He was looking past Fogelsong, toward the north side of the store, where the empty propane containers were stacked for refilling. It was dark there. The lights covered most of the lot and the front of the store, but there were a few areas—slivers, really, no more than that—that fell in between, out of the reach of the lights and, more significantly, out of the reach of the video surveillance equipment.

  “Okay,” Green Plaid said hurriedly, still looking past Fogelsong. “Will do.”

  “Well, this is interesting,” Fogelsong said, his voice deliberately affable, easygoing. Keeping things on a nice even keel. He had taken a few steps around the truck cab, where he had a better view of the pumps. “You don’t seem to be getting yourself any gas right now, mister. Which makes me wonder why you stopped by here tonight in the first place.”

  Fogelsong’s heartbeat was accelerating. Cold as it was, he was aware of the moisture on his palms. He had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Green Plaid, more than likely, was here to pick up a drug shipment. He’d been coming regularly to the Highway Haven so that he could figure out the security layout. Tonight, he’d pulled up to the pumps because that’s what trucks were supposed to do. If he hadn’t, if he’d parked his truck in the shadows, that would have looked suspicious on the security cameras, catching somebody’s attention. The person he was here to meet was probably over by the side of the building, waiting for the signal, whereupon that second man would slither out and make the exchange with Green Plaid, keeping to the side of the truck where the cameras didn’t reach.

  Of course, I might be wrong, Fogelsong cautioned himself. He had to act carefully and decisively, but not do anything provocative. A small voice in the back of his head told him he ought to just call 911 and get a state trooper out here and be done with it. Let them get to the bottom of things. But he knew what he was doing.

  Hell, he thought. I was a sheriff for more than thirty years. I think I can handle this fat-assed bastard and his pal. And there was also a part of him—he wouldn’t have admitted this out loud, but it was true, all the same—that looked forward to Bell’s reaction when word got back to her that it was him, Nick Fogelsong, who had busted up a drug transaction. Maybe a big one. Maybe one related to that new gang. He hadn’t put himself so far out to pasture that he couldn’t do the job anymore.

  “Tell you what, mister,” Fogelsong said. “Why don’t you and I take a little stroll? How would that be? Bet you’d like to stretch your legs, after being cooped up in that rig of yours for so danged long. Let’s just walk over there to the side of the store—the place you’ve been looking at so hard, ever since I approached you—and we’ll see what’s what. Okay?”

  Fogelsong turned to face the store, so that he could point to the shadowy space alongside it. To the place where the accomplice surely waited. Now he reached out to procure Green Plaid’s puffy arm.

  “Come on, now,” Fogelsong said. “Nobody wants any trouble here tonight.”

  At that moment, Fogelsong felt a sharp, hot sunburst of pain in his chest, a pummeling force that knocked him backward, and he heard the crisp zing of a bullet. He slammed hard against the door of the truck cab, arms spread out, mouth open. He slid in a heavy heap to the concrete. The concrete was cold, but he was in no shape to notice.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The night before the beginning of a major trial always brought a certain anxiety to Bell Elkins. No matter how meticulous she and her assistants had been in their preparation, she was never sure she was ready. Granted, not much happened on the first day of a trial—but still. It set the tone. If either side was lackluster, tentative, feeling their way, it showed.

  The hour was late. Her head was bent over a stack of notebooks on her desk. She was going over the story she would be telling in her opening statement later in the week. Jury selection would take up most of the first few days, along with the back-and-forth motions between her and the defense that were necessary but that still induced exasperated sighs from everyone in the courtroom, including the lawyers who had filed them. A trial without a blizzard of motions just didn’t feel right to anybody, Bell had decided long ago; it would be like a hospital without that odd smell. You wouldn’t know what to do if it suddenly smelled good. You certainly wouldn’t trust it.

  At 11:48 P.M., she rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and turned off the lamp on her desk.

  She wished she had Nick Fogelsong to help her think this through. The night before a trial, he’d always been an excellent confidante. Good with strategy—and good with wisdom, too, wisdom being a solid arch over mere strategy, like an ancient bridge over the shifting, sliding river. She wondered what he was up to tonight. They hadn’t seen each other since the day he’d ambushed her in JP’s. A day when she’d been rude to him, cold and withholding. Miffed at his assumption that he could just walk right back into her life as if he were still sheriff.

  Late as it was, he’d be home from work by now. Gone to bed, most likely. Reading by the light of the lamp on the bedside table, with Mary Sue beside him.

  Lord, she thought. If only this was a simple, good guy–bad guy trial. A lot of her major cases these days involved drug trafficking, and with those, it was easy to argue the county’s case. The defendants were scumbags. Prosecution was a breeze. But Royce Dillard was different. She had an inkling of what he’d been through in his life: the loss of his parents at a tragically young age, an inability to adjust to the world, the constant rubbing worry brought on by poverty. She knew he was guilty—the evidence was what it was—and she would make sure he was punished for what he’d done. Still, she entertained a fragile hope that he would, at some point in the trial, decide to tell them why he’d killed Hackel. If he told the story, and if he then changed his plea to guilty, she could agree to a sentence that took into account the provocation for his crime. He would serve time, but he would not die in prison. That scenario, however, required him to be forthcoming with them.

  An idea occurred to her. I can’t convince him, Bell thought. And Serena can’t, either. But maybe he can convince himself.

  She opened her desk drawer.

  * * *

  Chess Rader was on duty tonight. With so few deputies, the county had to rely on civilian employees to take the overnight shifts at the jail. Rader was a young man with whom Bell had dealt three years ago, when his grandfather was murdered in a case of mistaken identity. He was a good kid. A little cocky, but she didn’t mind that. She could come across as a little cocky herself.

  “You’re up late,” Rader said.

  “Price of the job,” she said. On to business. “I’d like a moment with Royce Dillard.”

  “Need me to join you?”

  “I do.”

  Even though her visit had nothing to do with trial testimony, she wanted a witness. It was a matter of protocol.

  She followed Chess Rader down the cinder-block tunnel past the row of jail cells, where the only sounds were the grizzled snores of the drunks and the nightmare mutterings of the meth addicts. At night the jail felt even grayer and lonelier than usual; the feeling of human desperation lingered like a greasy sheet hung from a high window to air it out.

  Royce was sitting on the bed. She knew he’d be up.

  Chess worked the key. Bell entered the cell. All she carried was a notebook. It had a cardboard cover and pages ruled with thin blue lines. The cover had been stamped with a pattern meant to suggest marble, the black and the white patches swirled. She had picked up a dozen of the notebooks last September at the back-to-school sale at Lymon’s Market. They’d been stacked up in a display that included white plastic bottles of Elmer’s Glue, with the little orange tips; plaid reels of Scotch tape; three-ring binders; cellophane-wrapped packs of unsharpened pencils. Bell always bought school supplies in the fall, even though Carla was long past needing them—she had graduated from high school, for heaven’s sake—and stored them in her office, deep in a desk dr
awer. It was a ritual Bell had hung on to. She wasn’t sure why.

  “How’s Goldie?” Dillard said. Eyes on the wall.

  “She’s fine. Look here, Royce. Your trial starts tomorrow. When it’s over, you could go to prison for the rest of your life. That’s a very real possibility.”

  “I didn’t kill the man. Been saying that over and over again.” He squinted and grimaced, as if he’d been trying to add up the number of cinder blocks in the wall and had lost count. “So why are you here?”

  “Brought you something.”

  She handed him the notebook. He stared hard at the cardboard cover and its marbled design before accepting it.

  “What’s this for?”

  “I want you to write down everything you remember about that day.”

  Royce put the notebook across his knees. He knew she didn’t mean the day of the murder. She meant February 26, 1972. It was the only day that really mattered to him.

  “When the trial’s recessed each afternoon,” she said, “you could do it then. Bound to help clear your head. You’ll have to get a pen from Chess here or whoever’s on jail duty. They’ll have to watch you while you write. And then you have to give the pen back.” Prisoners could not keep pens; too many times, they’d been used as weapons, or as syringes by canny addicts.

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “Can’t force you,” Bell said. “But I think it’s a good idea.”

  He considered her words.

  “Okay,” he finally said. He lifted the notebook and waggled it, the way you shake a wrapped-up gift to hear the rattle so you can guess what’s inside. He shrugged. “I’ll give it a try. Write down my damned story. But what’re you gonna do with it once I’m done?”

  “It’s not for me,” Bell said. “It’s for you.”

  1972

  Lundale, West Virginia

  I remember sitting in a basket in the yard. A straw basket. The sides were scratchy and all I had on was a little bitty diaper, and so I’d end up with these red marks all over my arms and legs, where the pointy ends of the straw would work their way loose from the weaving and nick my skin.

  Now, what kind of mother—I can hear you thinking that, as if you’d spoken the words out loud—what kind of mother puts a two-year-old baby in a scratchy basket, when he keeps on getting himself cut in there? Well, the truth is, I wanted to be in that basket. All the time. My great-aunt Bessie Truax told me that. When my mother would go outside on nice days to put the clean wet washing on the line—almost nobody had a clothes dryer back then, not in Logan County—she had to take me with her, so’s I wouldn’t get into trouble in the house, and I screamed and I yelled and I squirmed like an ornery little devil until she put me in that basket. I didn’t care if it was scratchy. I loved that basket. Felt safe in there, I guess.

  I didn’t have nothing to be scared about—not yet, anyway—but still I felt safe.

  Bessie told me the story about the basket so many times that I’m not sure if I really remember it or if I just think I do. You can’t tell sometimes. Memory’s a hard thing to figure. Your memories are like these little bits of colored glass, all jumbled together in your head, shifting and clacking like a box of peanut brittle. Some of the bits may come from things you think you remember, but a lot of the bits come from other people. And their memories come from bits they’ve picked up from other people. And those other people—their bits, too, come partially from themselves but partially from other people, too. If you put all the bits together, and you manage to find the shapes that fit with other shapes, I guess you’d make yourself a big glass rainbow. All these pieces of colored glass, rising over top of your life, with the light shining right through it.

  There’s a scar on my left hip that I believe came from the morning of the flood. I can’t be sure. No one can be sure about anything that’s related to that day. Aunt Bessie said I might have gotten the scar when we were fighting our way out of the house, and my mother grabbed me. By that time the water was so deep that our furniture was floating. Can you imagine that, seeing your chairs and your table and all the things on your kitchen counter just go past you, go right on by, like they were toys in the bathtub? And maybe, Bessie said, maybe a sharp edge of something caught me and cut me. When they found me, they said, I had blood all over me, and when they wiped it away it was all coming from the one long cut. The other cuts and scrapes on other parts of me all healed up real nice, but the one on my hip there, it left a scar.

  They made me talk to this woman once. I was just a little kid, in school. Maybe third grade. She was old. She wore a real nice dress and had pretty shoes, and she smelled real good. I didn’t mind talking to her, even though under normal circumstances I didn’t much like talking to anybody. And never about that morning. Anyway, she told me about this thing called “survivor syndrome.” It’s a real medical thing, like the cancer. Or like having a bad heart. There are five parts to it. And the first part is called the “death imprint.” It means the pictures that stay in your head when something real bad happens. Even if you can’t recollect the pictures on your own, even if you don’t know that the pictures are there, they’re still there, all right.

  The lady was talking about the things I saw and heard: my mother holding me one minute and just gone the next, and then the feeling of being thrown up in the air like I was. My father, they tell me, was holding me out in front of him, trying to keep me clear of the rising water. Before I knew what was happening I was going way way WAY up in the air, toward the black sky, and even though nobody believes me—they say I was too young to remember—I swear I looked into that sky and it was like looking into the heart of the devil himself, because it was so black. Terrible black. People were yelling and screaming and crying, and I heard somebody say ELLIE OH ELLIE and somebody else say GOD GOD and then I heard THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD I SHALL NOT WANT HE MAKETH ME TO and after that, there was a roaring sound and a big whooshing sound, like the world was being torn into tiny bits, and then more dark.

  The lady, the one at the school that day, told me my memories were the first part of the survivor syndrome. The death imprint. And while I now understand that she meant the pictures in my mind, the ones that won’t go away, even if you don’t know you are remembering them, at first I didn’t understand her. When she said the words, I thought she meant a real imprint, like a tattoo. Like the scar on my hip. I’ve seen it, I said to her. I’ve seen my death imprint. She shook her head and said, No, Royce, honey—that’s what she called me, Royce honey, like honey was my middle name, and the funny thing is, I did not mind that, even though my middle name is Enoch—no, the death imprint isn’t something you can see, it’s something you feel when you remember. It’s imprinted on your mind, Royce honey. Not your body. But even now, when I think about the words “death imprint,” I think about that long cut, the scar that’s still there.

  She gave me a typed-up list of all five parts of the syndrome. She told me I would want to have the list for later, when I grew up and could understand it better. It might help me, she said. I read that list over so many times that I memorized it:

  DEATH IMPRINT

  DEATH GUILT

  NUMBING

  IMPAIRED HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS

  SIGNIFICANCE

  At the time I didn’t know what most of those words meant but she gave me the list anyway and she said, You’ll understand them one day, Royce honey. You will.

  * * *

  So they sent me to live with Bessie Truax, my great-aunt. She was my mother’s aunt. She lived in a town called Acker’s Gap.

  I don’t remember the first part of my time there. Bessie told me that I slept a lot, and that sometimes I’d wake up and I’d be yelling and kicking, and she would have to come in and settle me down. I had my own room at Bessie’s house. Her son, Chuck, had died when he was twelve years old, and that’s how she was able to take me. Chuck’s room was now my room. His stuff was still in there. When I got a little older and had my own stuff, Bessie t
ook away Chuck’s things—he had posters of some Cincinnati Reds players and a bunch of Matchbox cars, and there was an old cigar box filled with stacks of baseball cards and a few marbles rolling around—and she said, “This is your room now, Royce. You do with it what you will. Go ahead now.” I don’t know what happened to Chuck’s dad. Bessie never talked about him. Nobody else did either.

  Acker’s Gap was a good place to grow up. A real good place. It was a lot slower in those days. There was even a bus that could take you into town if you wanted to go. There’s no bus anymore. People have cars. And if you don’t have a car, you’re out of luck. Unless you like to walk, which I do.

  Every so often, someone would ask me about Buffalo Creek. There was a lot of interest at first. On the one-year anniversary, a TV station sent a reporter down to interview me—although “interview” is not the right word to use when you’re talking about a three-year-old, I guess. Bessie told me later that the lady reporter stood me up on a chair and told the cameraman to just keep rolling, no matter what. The reporter asked me my name and how old I was and that kind of thing, the things you ask a three-year-old, and I was shy at first but then it was okay, Bessie said. The reporter asked me to sing a song and I said, “What kind of song?” and she said, “Any song.” So I started singing, “Jesus loves me, yes I know, for the Bible tells me so,” and the reporter stopped me and said, “I bet your mama taught you that song. Does it make you sad to sing it?” I think she was hoping to make me cry. Anyway, I giggled. That’s what Bessie said I did. I giggled and I said, “No, we sing that song at Sunday school!” The reporter said, “Well, can you sing a song that your mama taught you?” That reporter, Bessie said, would not give up. She really wanted to make me cry. But I just shook my head. I don’t remember my mother singing any songs. Maybe she did sing to me, but I have forgotten the songs. Pretty soon the reporter said something to the cameraman and he lifted the camera off his shoulder and they went away. Then Bessie asked me if I wanted a hot dog for lunch. Funny—I can remember that hot dog a lot better than I can remember the reporter. That’s a three-year-old for you.