"But the next morning, people's skin began itching. By midday, large blisters of yellow liquid were appearing on their skin and their eyes were swelling shut. By evening, several dozen were coughing blood. And by nightfall, just as the first ambulances were finally starting to arrive from Paducah and Mayfield, 17 people—12 of them members of Father Bryant's fledgling parish—were already dead, with 12 more to follow over the next two weeks, succumbing to everything from sepsis to pulmonary edema. They were essentially suffocating on their own blood. A scene beyond most people's worst nightmares."
Arkin could still vividly recall the stuffy, rotting, dimly lit shotgun shack in Royburg where, years earlier, he'd interviewed Lucricia Burris—a 60-year-old widow who looked 90 as she neared the inevitable end of a two-year battle with lung cancer. She was the sole surviving confidant of Father Collin Bryant in the whole of the parish community. The others had long since died of lung cancer, in all likelihood caused by their exposure to mustard gas from the industrial accident that sent the deadly yellow cloud through their small town decades earlier. Every few seconds, Lucricia had to take a breath from a plastic mask fed by a green oxygen tank next to her filthy armchair. The stale and overly humid air in her house had the sweet-sour smell of sickness. Of approaching death. Arkin remembered sitting on a terribly uncomfortable wooden piano stool, though there was no piano to be seen, as Lucricia did her best to answer his questions, her skin faded from deep brown to a sickly ashen, her exhausted eyes sunken back in their sockets. Every few minutes, overwhelmed with sorrow for those who'd been lost, she would shake her head and wipe the streaming tears from her eyes, as though it had all happened only yesterday. Yet whenever Arkin asked if he could make her more comfortable, or offered a sympathetic word, she brushed him off with a polite comment like "oh, don't worry about me, young man. This is just the way life goes." No denial. No bitterness. Just calm acceptance. Arkin couldn't fathom it.
"Of course, Father Bryant was devastated by the loss of life," she'd told him. "The loss of parishioners and other townsfolk he'd grown close to, as if they were his own blood. But what really got to him was what happened afterward."
"Afterward?" Arkin had asked, gently drawing her forward.
"The response. And the lack of response."
Arkin remembered nodding silently, patiently, despite his unease with the decay and reminders of death all around him, knowing in his gut that what was to be found between the lines of Lucricia's story held the keys to his case.
It had taken hours for the first ambulances to arrive, she told him. While waiting for help, Father Bryant had folks set up beds in the school cafeteria and tried to take care of people, tried to comfort them as best he could, between reading last rites. He'd kept a stiff upper lip, doing what needed to be done. But then, someone carried in a young boy of five, name of Gladman Mathis, a boy whom Bryant had befriended soon after arriving in Royburg. Like Bryant in his own youth, Mathis had an absentee father—in Mathis' case, because his father had been drafted into the Army and was stuck in Vietnam. Bryant took it upon himself to stand in, as best he could, for the father. They were often seen playing catch together. Bryant even bought him a baseball glove as a fifth birthday present. When they carried the disfigured, dying boy into the cafeteria and lay him on a cot, Bryant went to his side and never left. It was as if no one else existed for him anymore. He tried to sit the boy up, to help him clear the fluid from his lungs. But when he did so, Mathis choked, trying to scream from the pain of Bryant touching his raw, burned, blistered skin. So Bryant just held the boy's little hand. Held it for more than two hours, as the boy stared up at him in agony, terrified, gurgling as he struggled to breathe. Held it until a bubbling froth of blood rose up in his windpipe and spilled down his chin as he finally went limp. Then Bryant reached down and gathered the boy's body up in his giant arms and held him. Just held him in his arms, resting his own forehead against the top of the boy's head, for a long, long time.
In the aftermath, dozens were taken to Paducah for treatment, several of them never to return. Twenty-four dead in less than a week. Yet there was no mention of it in the national news. None. And not only that, but nobody came to explain what happened, let alone apologize. All they said was that there had been an accident at a factory on the other side of the river. People died, ambulances came and went, and that was that.
"You know," Lucricia said, "at Father Bryant's next mass, he didn't know what to say at sermon. He just stood there at the altar in front of what was left of us all, and when he tried to speak, he wept. But the next week we invited him to our house for chicken dinner and he was different. He was quiet. He seemed very angry. He said things would have gone differently if Royburg was a rich white town. He said they never would have built a dangerous factory across the river from a rich white town in the first place. Said he was going to call the archdiocese and the papers and the TV news stations and make people take notice."
"So Father Bryant did what he said he was going to do, called and wrote, and wrote and called every public official and news source he could, even after the archdiocese ordered him to stop. For a long time, nothing happened. But finally one day, oh, maybe three months later, a man from the Army shows up and goes door-to-door telling everyone we're going to get something special to recognize our sacrifice. So a week after that, we all assemble in front of the general store where they've set up this little stage with a big, new American flag hanging behind it, and this supply colonel from Fort Campbell gets up there and tells us about the cost of freedom, and how that plant across the river is important to our national defense, and that the whole country, from our soldiers in Vietnam to our factory workers back home, must make sacrifices to safeguard America. He asks us to never again speak of what happened here. He says we are heroes for being brave through the terrible tragedy and asks us to accept medals of patriotism on behalf of a grateful nation. Then his assistant brings a big cardboard box up to the stage and the colonel opens it and begins, one-by-one, having us come up to the stage to receive a little silver-colored aluminum star pin set on a 2-inch piece of red, white, and blue ribbon. We each take a pin, and the colonel shakes our hands. Then he leaves in his big black car while his staff stays behind to take down the flag and the little stage. And all this time, Father Bryant stands in the background watching, his skin burning red and sweating like he has fever."
"After that, things slowly got back to normal. Well, not normal, because a lot of people were gone, and others continued to have breathing troubles. Things were never the same. But we carried on. Father Bryant said mass every Sunday, did confession, baptized our babies and such. But something was different with him. For one, he stopped trying to bring new people into the parish. Just up and stopped. And there was something different about his sermons. They'd started to sound sort of hollow. Like he was reading them from a book. Like they weren't coming from the heart."
"He was going through the motions," Arkin offered, his voice soft.
"Yes, sir. Going through the motions. And he let his hair and beard grow long and crazy. Look," she'd said, pulling a grainy, bent, black-and-white photograph from the very back of a worn Bible sitting on her end table. Bryant stood in Easter habit at the center of a line of parishioners dressed in their Sunday best, two youngsters in altar boy regalia. "That's me right there," Lucricia said, pointing to a beautiful woman of 30, standing to Bryant's immediate right. All but Bryant were smiling. He alone looked somber, hard, his beard and hair grown long and wild. Something about his eyes held Arkin. It could have been an anomaly, a product of distortion in the low-quality film, but Arkin doubted it. His gut told him that it was anger. Fuming, burning anger. Then it hit him—Arkin was looking at the eyes of a newborn fanatic. Or perhaps, more accurately, a fanatic emerging from a lifelong gestation.
"He took to going on long paddles in his canoe out on the Mississippi," she continued. "He'd paddle way out to the middle, and then just sit there like he was in a trance, sometimes for hou
rs." She took another breath from the mask. "I could watch him from my sun porch, just sitting out there, rain or shine, hot or cold. I worried about him. So one day I find him sitting on an old leather chair in the rectory's screened-in porch, just staring out at the sunset like he was a thousand miles away, and I finally ask him, I say, 'Father, what is troubling you? Is it still the accident? Because if it is, you got to let it go or it will break your heart, and that would serve no purpose.' Imagine, me saying this to a priest." She chuckled before drawing another breath from the mask. "But he just sat there like he didn't even hear. 'We need you here,' I says. 'You got to know there wasn't nothing you could have done to stop it. There wasn't nothing you could have done.' That seemed to wake him up a bit. He at least turned to look at me. Then you know what he says to me? He says 'Lucricia, I really don't know that that's true.' I don't understand what he's trying to say. Then he says, do I remember when the Army came and gave out those little aluminum star pins. Of course I remember, I tell him. Do I remember the flag, he asks me. The big, beautiful flag that hung behind the colonel. Looked like it was made of a very fine silk. Yes, I say. I remember that beautiful stars and stripes. Biggest flag I ever seen. 'You know,' he says, 'at the end of the ceremony, they folded that magnificent flag up and took it with them in a shiny new protective steel case. And all they left us was the little aluminum star pins.'"
*****
"And then," Arkin said to the rapt Pratt and Morrison, still sitting in the conference room, "in November 1974, Father Collin Bryant, founder and rector of the ill-fated Holy Trinity Parish, Royburg, Kentucky, disappeared from the face of the earth."
"Disappeared?" Pratt asked, snapping Arkin from his storyteller's trance.
"Needless to say, the police didn't respond to the townfolks' missing persons report for days. When they finally did, at the behest of an alarmed archdiocese, all they found was his swamped canoe stuck in overhanging branches along the left bank of the Mississippi, about three miles downriver."
"He drowned?"
"That's what everyone thought."
"But. . . ."
"But," Arkin echoed with a weary sigh, "I need some espresso."
"Oh, hell no!" Morrison said. "You aren't going to leave us hanging like that."
"You can both read the hard copy of the file when it gets here. I need a double-shot with a plate of chorizo and eggs. Anybody want to go to Carver's with me?"
"For someone who's as militant as you are about fitness and nutrition, I'm perplexed by your weakness for Carver's Mexican scramble. All those egg yolks? All that chorizo?"
"It's my kryptonite."
"It'll be the death of you."
"There are worse ways to go."
"Yes, sir. Yes, there are."
*****
That afternoon, Arkin locked up his office, went to the basement locker room to change clothes for his daily ride home, and slipped out the service entrance with his mountain bike. He chose one of his favorite routes—a trail that climbed high above the river just to the west of town, then dropped back down to Highway 550 north of Trimble. It was a trail he'd been riding since first moving to Durango. As usual, he timed himself.
The trail was unusually dusty, probably because it hadn't rained in many days. He blew past several casual riders, huffing and puffing, as the trail climbed out of town. At one point, he thought he might have seen a bobcat out of the corner of his eye. But he couldn't be sure. He was too focused on the trail, on his exertion, to be aware of much else.
Soon his thighs began to burn. Then his calves. Then his lungs. His watch beeped at one-minute intervals. He kept count. Ten minutes. Twenty. Twenty-five. His personal best time to the trail's apex—a point marked by an informal viewpoint on a boulder outcropping—was 27 minutes and 16 seconds. From somewhere within, the urge to beat the record rose inside him. He always rode with intensity. But now he stepped it up. His ride became a race. A race against time. It was going to be close.
He rose higher on his pedals. Put more energy into each down-stroke. Twenty-six minutes. His lungs ached for mercy. His mouth was utterly dry and dusty, his tongue feeling fat, like a foreign object in his own mouth. Twenty-six-thirty. As it sometimes did, his late father's voice echoed through his mind. Come on! Your effort's pathetic! Twenty-seven. A pinhead hemorrhage appeared astride a tiny burst capillary in the corner of his left eye. His thighs and calves began to lose strength, still burning. He began to lock his knees on the down-stroke to let his weight take some of the burden from his failing muscles. His breathing became wide-mouthed gasping. Come on, you damned weakling!
He crossed his imaginary finish line and hit the stop button on his watch timer at 27 minutes 32 seconds. He fell from his bike, crawled from the trail and into the brush on his hands and knees, and threw up. After a minute or so, he caught his breath and sat up. He looked at his watch, saw the figure on the timer, then fell onto his back in the bushes. You lose again. You disappoint me again. Are you sure you're my son?
TWELVE
Hannah had to sit down halfway through wrapping Kayla Pratt's birthday present. Nate got her a glass of apple juice and insisted that she lie down on the couch while he finished the wrapping job. Then he suggested they just stay home. The Pratts would understand. But she said she wouldn't miss Kayla's birthday come hell or high water, so Arkin helped her to the car and drove across town to the party.
Kayla ran to the door to greet them, and they each knelt down—Hannah wincing as she did so—to receive her hugs and kisses. She smelled like coconut, probably from a kids' shampoo. Arkin couldn't believe she was already 5. It seemed just yesterday he and Hannah were driving John and Ella Pratt home from the hospital with their new baby. He hugged Kayla tight, wishing he could protect her from the whole world. But life didn't work that way. She wasn't even his child. He didn't have one. He and Hannah couldn't. The thought left him cold.
"How is our beautiful princess?" Hannah asked
"That's a big present," Kayla said, eyeballing the large box they'd brought.
"That big present is for you," Arkin said, tickling her with a finger poke to the belly.
"Can I take that to the gift table for you?" Ella Pratt asked as she entered the hallway. "Thanks so much for coming."
Pratt came in dressed like he was ready for a round of golf at the cheapest golf course on Earth, handed Hannah something he described as "a vitamin-rich smoothie just for you," then grinned as he shoved a bottle of grape soda into Arkin's hand.
"Thanks, John."
Over the next two hours, Morrison and several other families with young children from the Pratt's LDS ward arrived. Everyone milled around as Arkin and Morrison stood outside watching Pratt grill two dozen hotdogs.
"How come I don't see any Dr. Seuss books in your house?" Arkin asked Pratt. "How can a kid grow up American without reading Dr. Seuss?"
"Dr. Seuss is a tree-hugging left-wing elitist who poisons the minds of children."
"You're mentally ill. And it's bad luck to disparage the dead."
Pratt winked at him as he continued to work the barbeque. Everyone ate hotdogs and birthday cake until they felt bloated, then watched Kayla open her birthday presents. She opened the large box from the Arkins to reveal a stack of books—the entire Dr. Seuss collection. Seeing it, Pratt gave Arkin a grin from across the room, then shot him a middle finger disguised as a scratch of his forehead.
Hannah tried to help Ella clean up, but Ella wouldn't hear of it and made Hannah sit in a comfortable chair in the kitchen and talk to her while she stood and did all the dishes. Meanwhile, Arkin and Morrison followed Pratt into the backyard where he was keeping an eye on his newly walking son, Jake. Jake puttered around, squatting here and there to pick blades of grass from their perfect yard, at one point squealing with delight at the discovery of a small caterpillar.
Pratt, his face bearing an odd expression, turned to face Arkin. "Hey, uh, Nate," he said, sounding hesitant.
"Hey, uh, what?"
"Ella and I were talking—"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, we just want you to know we're here for you. Anything you need. Really."
Deep down, Arkin knew exactly what Pratt was getting at. But he refused to let his understanding come to the surface easily. "What are you talking about?"
"You know, if Hannah—well, if she gets worse. If things get worse."
"Ah."
Morrison turned on his heels and faced away from Pratt and Arkin, as if meaning to give them some modicum of privacy even though they all stood in a fairly small triangle. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans, pursed his lips, and stared down at his own boots as though contemplative, uncomfortable, even sad. He kicked at a small gray pebble that had been knocked into the grass from an adjoining gravel drainage trench.
"We could set up a bed for her in my den so that Ella could keep an eye on her during the day while we're at work. We can move my desk out of there, move a few of the kids toys, no sweat."
"That's very. . . ."
"The kids will try to make her have tea parties with them, but Ella can keep 'em mostly corralled."
Arkin cleared his throat. "You are both very kind."
"Well." Pratt searched for the right expression. "You're both like family."
His well-intentioned words hit Arkin like a punch in the gut. He'd been trying to convince himself that Hannah was doing just fine, and that her degraded appearance the night they came back from the Cortez crime scene was nothing more than an illusion caused by the feeble porch lighting at their house. But if the others thought she looked worse, then she probably did. His heart sank and he began, once again, to worry.
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