The chief of police paused in the doorway, holding on to both sides of the frame as though he was trying to remain standing. He looked terrible, his hair pushed forward, his shirt wrinkled and not all the way tucked in on one side. Stubble made the skin of his face appear pale and waxy, as if a thumb pressed into it would leave a dent. His eyes were red and unfocused like a drunk’s, but T.L. knew that Weyant didn’t drink.
“My daughter’s knocked up,” he said, his voice shredded and hoarse. “I just came from the hospital. They confirmed it. She says you’re not the father. Is that true?”
T.L. went still, his fingers curled against his legs. He was wearing the jeans he’d had on yesterday, the ones he’d dropped on the floor when he’d gone to bed, exhausted, after closing up the store. They were softened from wear, the seams frayed. He tugged at loose threads while he tried to look Weyant in the eye.
“That’s what she told me.” Sir, he added automatically in his mind, but he wouldn’t give the man the satisfaction. Not now. Too much had happened, he’d been accused once too often. All he’d done was what seemed right, every step of the way.
At first, Elizabeth said the baby was his. It was only later, when he refused to consider moving to L.A. with her and the baby, that she changed her tune. He should have believed her then. He should have backed off then. But T.L. had known only one direction since he went to live with Myron: ahead. Keep moving ahead, because behind you was a place you never wanted to return to.
“What do you say?” Weyant leaned in, as though some barrier prevented him from coming into the room. He brought with him a faint smell of cooked onions, not unpleasant. Whatever Elizabeth’s mom had made for dinner hours ago.
T.L. felt the fight drain out of him, like air from an inner tube that had run over a nail. He’d thought he would stand up to Weyant, take full advantage of his youth and anything else he could think of to blunt the man’s attack. Now he just felt exhausted.
“You can’t keep me in here,” he said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“So get up and fucking walk out.”
The word, coming from the chief, was shocking. He was straitlaced to the core, the sort of man who parted his hair and shined his own shoes. They regarded each other for a moment, and then the chief seemed to change his mind. “Your uncle’s sitting out there in my waiting room.”
“Yeah, I know. He followed the car over here when they brought me in. Nobody said he couldn’t.”
“It’s a free country.” The chief rubbed the bridge of his nose with one of his meaty hands. “You know he broke my nose once. He ever tell you that?”
“What?”
Weyant regarded him carefully. “You know we knew each other. Back in the nineties.”
“You wrestled,” T.L. said uncertainly, something Myron had told him when he started seeing Elizabeth. Be careful of him, Myron had cautioned. He doesn’t fight fair. “You went into the army when he was still in high school.”
“Yeah. But I’m asking you, did you know me and your uncle have a history?”
T.L. shook his head, bewildered.
Weyant waited him out, drumming his fingers on the table. “All right. Never mind that. I want a statement from you. What happened that day, to that boy. Taylor Capparelli.”
“Could I...” T.L.’s voice was dangerously close to cracking. He cleared his throat, sat up a little straighter in the chair. “I want Myron here. I’ll tell you everything right now, you let him come in here.”
“Your uncle’s got the res lawyer out of bed. He’s heading over now. Might as well wait for him.” He ran a hand through his hair, messing up the part. “Might as well make it a fucking party. Christ.”
THE LAWYER, JACK Cook, had taught T.L. to tie flies. There had been five or six eight-year-old Cub Scouts around a banquet table in the rec hall where the troop held their meetings. Mr. Cook and Mr. Whitecalf wore their tan scout leader shirts over their work clothes, their polyester button-downs and stained ties. Mr. Whitecalf sold insurance, and the two men were the only dads T.L. knew who wore ties to work.
Mr. Cook’s son had already been in high school then, living with his mother downstate. As far as T.L. knew, they’d never reconciled and Mr. Cook never remarried. He had a stroke a few years ago; he was hard to understand now and didn’t use his left hand. He still drove and fished, but the limp appendage added to his general air of disheveled shabbiness, and for a fleeting second T.L. wished there was someone else who could come in here and make Weyant feel small.
The recorder was on and they had moved into a bigger room to accommodate all four of them. It smelled of burnt popcorn and air freshener. There was a fake Christmas tree wrapped in a garbage bag in the corner, its stiff branches poking through the plastic.
Mr. Cook had accepted a cup of coffee, which seemed like poor strategy. Also, he had an actual yellow pad. T.L. suspected that a better attorney would have a laptop. Myron sat with his arms folded across his chest, staring at Weyant as though this was a livestock auction and the chief was leading one underfed calf after another up across the block. It was nearly four in the morning.
“I’d caught a walleye but it was less than a foot long and I threw it back,” T.L. began, choosing a scratch on the table to focus his attention on. “I’d had good luck at that spot before, but it was early in the afternoon and I wasn’t catching much.”
He’d gone farther out that day than he should have, but he had his ice picks at hand, laced through his sleeves so that he’d be able to pull himself out in seconds if worst came to worst. He’d learned about the ice in Boy Scouts too. It had been his friend Alan’s dad who demonstrated how to distribute your body weight if the ice started to give out under you, facedown in his Carhartt jacket on a sloping field of switchgrass since the lake had only begun to freeze for the season. How they threw themselves into it, a bunch of ten-year-old kids in dirty Wranglers and stiff shirts that their mothers sewed their badges on, all but T.L., whose badges were glued in place by Myron, so that the shirt could never be washed. They pressed themselves into the scratchy ground and giggled as Alan’s paunchy, bald father yelled, “This is serious, boys, this is life and death—”
T.L. had no death wish, but he was in a gloomy mood. On that frigid day, the postholiday pall lay heavy on the town. Plastic garland hung twisted and limp from street posts, and the Walmart parking lot was full of people returning the gifts they’d received. He’d texted Elizabeth twice the day before, and again she’d ignored him.
He was on the ice by one, having spent the morning helping Myron retag the remainder of the holiday merchandise, the crap that didn’t sell at half off. Now it was 80 percent off and the reservation kids would come and buy it. T.L. had stopped for a Subway sandwich on his way to the lake and he ate it after he got his line in the water, tossing the crusts into the water and watching the fathead minnows come to the surface to nibble at them, tiny mouths jerking, bodies twisting and bumping against one another.
It was almost two o’clock when the white truck came down the road to the public beach and parked a hundred feet back from his own truck. Two figures got out; from this distance it wasn’t possible to make out much about them other than one was tall and one was average. The truck was new, shiny and big. T.L. figured it was bought with oil money.
Both men dug knit caps from their pockets and pulled them over their heads. They were the type of cap with holes for eyes, the cheap orange ones you could get for six bucks at Walmart. They walked down to the lake, struggling through patches of jutting weeds and scabs of dirty snow, and started out on the ice toward him.
The shorter one had a baseball bat.
That was when T.L. got scared. He would have run, but he couldn’t safely go any farther out on the lake. Behind the ice was honeycombed and uneven. Two hundred yards away he could see water shimmering in the sun.
That left only one escape route. If he didn’t go toward the men, he could go to the right, but the shore dipped at that point and he woul
d have an extra fifty yards of ice to cross. A man on land could easily outrun him. Two men could trap him and take away his options.
T.L. stood his ground, hand on his belt where he kept his bait knife in a leather sheath that had belonged to his grandfather. He eyed the auger lying on the ice, wondered if he should make a grab for it.
His considered the possibilities. Most likely, these were nothing but hopheads—there were plenty of them these days, guys who couldn’t get through a shift without a hit of meth or Adderall. They went on benders between hitches, coming back on the job more strung out than when they’d left. In town, the pharmacy had been broken into twice, looted of prescription uppers; men coming out of bars and nightclubs were held up for their cash and phones.
Maybe these two would take his truck. It wasn’t worth more than three thousand, thirty-four hundred tops, and there they were with a new Silverado. Still, desperation made people do crazy shit. In his wallet was thirty bucks and Elizabeth’s senior portrait, which he had promised himself he would get rid of.
“T.L. Collier,” the short one said, passing the bat from one hand to the other and ending that line of thought. They knew him, but T.L. didn’t recognize the voice.
“Yeah?” He stood with his hands hanging at his sides, his legs slightly apart. He’d played football in the fall, putting in a dismal season but welcoming the distraction from the breakup, and he was feeling strong. He’d take either of these guys in a fair fight. Together—and with the bat—he didn’t stand a chance. “Tell me what you want and you can be on your way. I’m going to reach for my keys, now. Keys to my truck? Okay? You want them?”
His hand hovered outside his pocket, considering going for the knife. But one swing of the bat, even a clumsy one, would knock it from his hand.
“I know what you did to Elizabeth,” the short one said. “I saw.”
T.L. blinked. Everything shifted. Elizabeth flashed in his mind—the last time he’d seen her, before her dress rehearsal for her fall choir concert. It had a Halloween theme, and she’d been wearing a glittering mask that she pushed up on her forehead. It held her hair back, and as she turned away it gave the illusion of a jeweled crown, and she’d looked like a movie star from the old days, like Grace Kelly. That was when she’d told him she couldn’t see him anymore.
“I haven’t seen her in months,” he said. Then he told a lie. “She doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“That why you beat her, man? That why she’s black-and-blue under her clothes? You’re a fucking coward, hurting her where no one can see it!”
The taller one said something that T.L. couldn’t hear, his voice low and steady.
“You’re going to stay away from her, man.” The tall one stepped forward, close enough that T.L. could see the fringe of light brown hair coming out of the bottom of the cap. His eyes were narrowed and intense through the holes. “You hear? Don’t talk to her, don’t call her, don’t text her, don’t even say her name.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” T.L. said. He had no idea what they thought he’d done. Beat her? The last time he’d touched Elizabeth, he’d wound that silky hair of hers around his hand, pulled her gently closer, inhaled her perfume, and she had whimpered—but not from pain. Her body, pale and almost shimmering in the faint light of the setting sun, stretched across the truck’s bench seat in the middle of an alfalfa field early in October, had been perfect. Flawless.
Had someone else done something to her? But who? He’d never seen these guys in his life, and besides, how would Elizabeth meet a rig man? As he cast about for an explanation, out of the corner of his eyes he saw the shorter one get a two-hand grip on the bat and get ready to charge him.
T.L. tried to sidestep, but he was too slow and the bat caught him across the hip. He heard wood on bone before he felt it. The blow was hard enough to knock him to the ice, pain shooting through his body. The guy raised the bat and T.L. was sure he was going to bring it down on his head. His friend tried to stop him, grabbing for the bat, blocking the hit, and it crashed down on T.L.’s groin, glancing off his thigh in an agony of pain that made him gasp. He rolled onto his side in time to throw up on the ice.
“Stop! Paul, Jesus!” The tall one wrestled for the bat. T.L. forced himself to roll to his knees. He’d absorbed most of the hit in his gut. He didn’t think his hip bone was broken. Maybe a rib or two. He tried to crawl, got a few feet away and felt rather than heard a cracking deep in the ice.
The others must have sensed it too because they paused, long enough for T.L. to grab his knife. He nearly dropped it before getting a good grip on the handle.
The tall one had wrested the bat free. He flung it toward shore, and the sound of it skittering across the ice reminded T.L. of pickup hockey games, a handful of boys and a single chipped puck, half of them with branches for sticks. “Paul!” the guy yelled again, holding onto his friend’s sleeve. “Enough!”
“It’s not enough until I know he’s going to stay away from her,” he said, kicking T.L. as he tried to crawl sideways out of the way. He reached for the guy’s foot as he landed another kick, and held on. He slid and fell, his friend losing his grip on him, and landed on T.L., causing waves of agony through his battered hip. As he writhed in pain, the guy went for his throat, clutching and shoving. T.L. tried to push him off, but he had leverage, his knee on his gut.
It happened without thought—T.L. arced his wrist out and then slammed it into the other man’s side, into the puffy orange down coat. It was only when it lodged fast that he realized what he’d done. He let go immediately, the handle protruding from the jacket only for a second as the guy lurched clumsily off of him, before falling to the ice. A blooming spot of red appeared on the torn fabric of the coat.
T.L. had no idea how badly he had wounded the man, but he was coming toward him again, ignoring the injury, so that had to be good, right? T.L. scrambled on his hands and knees like a crab, trying to ignore the pain, and it wasn’t until the lake sighed and splintered again that he realized he had been heading backward. The wrong way.
“Watch out!” he yelled, because if they didn’t get off the cracking ice, they were all dead. The injured man went still, cocking his head, and T.L. knew he heard it too. The cracking was splintering and racing toward them along invisible fissures and fault lines below the opaque white surface. Underneath, the black water was hungry for them.
He went flat on his stomach, arms and legs spread like a child making snow angels, and T.L. knew he’d learned the same thing, wherever he came from. How not to die when the ice reaches for you.
The other one hadn’t.
He was looking at his feet, dumbfounded, as the first large crack split the ice and the water rushed over his boots. At first that was all it was, an inch or two, flooding the listing plane of ice. T.L. was already scrambling backward, body pressed flat and legs and arms extended, his weight distributed as widely as possible. The injured man was flat on his stomach too, but he wasn’t moving. He was screaming and reaching for his friend.
“Get down get down get down—”
But he didn’t. And then the ice took him.
“HE ALMOST DIDN’T make it,” T.L. said. Someone had put a plastic cup of water in front of him. He was thirsty, his throat raw and his lips dry and cracking. But he didn’t reach for the water.
“Who? Paul?” Weyant had barely reacted to the story, fixing him with that unblinking gaze. Jack Cook seemed to be trying to stay awake, his eyelids drooping more than usual. Only Myron looked upset, putting his hand flat against his sternum and swallowing hard.
“Paul. Yes. When Taylor went in, Paul was back two, three feet from where the ice broke. He went forward a few inches and I turned back around. I thought—I don’t know, I guess I thought maybe I could grab his boots and pull him, keep him from going in. But, you know...”
“He’d been beating you.” Finally unable to restrain himself, Myron burst out. “He was irrational. You would have been crazy to help, he could have got you b
oth killed.”
T.L. didn’t meet his uncle’s gaze. He pressed his teeth together, welcomed the ache in his skull. “He tried to reach out for Taylor, but Taylor was fighting the water. You know. Doing everything wrong.”
No one said anything, but everyone in the room could visualize what had happened. It took only ninety seconds in the water before you had no chance of saving yourself.
“What did you do after, Theodore?”
The chief’s voice had a hard edge. The name was jarring in a small way; no one had called T.L. by his given name since he was a child. Even his driver’s license said T.L. Weyant knew that; when Elizabeth had brought him to dinner, he’d shook his hand and stared him down and said “T.L.” as though it was a curse.
“I... went to my truck.”
“When you left, you believed that Taylor was dead and Paul was injured.”
“Hey,” Myron said, placing his hand flat on the table. A warning. “Those boys tried to kill him.”
“We don’t know that.” Some dull animosity lingered between the two men. “I understand Theodore feared for his life, but Paul and Taylor may have been just trying to send a message. A warning.”
“He said that kid had the bat raised up in two hands, coming down on his skull. You want to tell me that ain’t attempted murder?”
“It’s okay,” T.L. cut in. “Myron, it’s all right.” He shifted his gaze back to the chief. “I got off the ice, first thing. That’s what I learned to do. Once it starts to go, you don’t know where it reaches to. I stayed down until I was close to the shore. Then I got up and I ran to my truck.”
He crawled and slithered and felt the ice’s angry drumline pounding its finale through his body. Ice got in his mouth and scraped his face and caked every crevice of his clothes, and Paul was yelling something that T.L. couldn’t make out. Panic, that was for sure, terror and grief.
T.L. had never watched a man die on the ice, but there was that winter when the deer broke through and three of them watched from the shore, him and Mark and Keith. They’d been getting high around a driftwood fire, the joint burning down to nothing as they watched, transfixed by the sheer desperation in the deer’s thrashing, the stillness when it finally gave up and sank, something he would never forget.
The Moon Pool Page 25