Waking the Dead

by Scott Spencer

  The J. Edgar Hoover Building found itself surrounded by Washington’s tiny pornography district, a little Toonerville of trashy books and peep shows and movie theaters showing double features with titles like Box Lunch and Spurts Illustrated. The headquarters were designed under Hoover’s guidance and what was created was a contemporary fortress, a building that ended up looking like an enormous, gloomy Motor Vehicles Bureau run by civil servants who lived in dread the populace might come storming in to steal license plates. The Hoover Building was built without columns because Hoover thought Soviet agents might hide behind the columns. The windows closest to the ground were sufficiently high to be unattackable by thrown stones.

  When my taxi pulled next to the curb I opened the door and it hit the cement. The FBI headquarters were so massively heavy that all the streets around it were sinking: the distance from curb to street had tripled in ten years.

  I stood before the building. I heard the taxi pull away and after that there was a long deep roll of thunder. I seemed not to be able to move. The doors to the colorless building opened up and a big, fleshy, redheaded agent walked out, buttoning his raincoat, whistling to himself. He looked like a small-time college football player and he noticed me lurking in front of the headquarters. He gave me a quick, visual frisk and decided I was all right. He walked right by me, not so close as to make contact but close enough to let me know. Those guys all had a hunter’s knack for dominating prey. I listened to his footsteps disappear and then I was still there, still standing in front of headquarters, unable to get a step closer.

  And it was then I realized I would not be going in. Agent Donahue was probably already at his desk, with his boy’s blue Crayola drawing behind him—Sean, yes, that was the boy’s name, Sean—and the inscription proclaiming that “My Daddy is the Smurfiest.”Why had he suggested we meet here and not at his house? Or in a coffee shop, a Roy Rogers? They were probably developing a case I knew nothing about, following leads, making connections, endlessly spinning out possibilities as complex as the circuitry of the brain. Until this moment, standing before that monolith with the thunder rolling around the soft obsidian sky like a madman in a padded cell, I had believed that I could walk into a place like this—a DA’s office, a precinct—and have nothing to hide, nothing to fear. But all that had suddenly changed.

  I had not come here to tell them Sarah was alive but to ask them what tests had been run to identify the body they’d taken out of that white Volvo in Minneapolis. But what guarantee had I that it would stop there? Donahue had specified that we meet in his office; clearly this was not a social call. He would want to know why I was asking. If they had developed any intelligence about Sarah or about the people she was working with, something I might say might fit in, or serve as a lead.

  I didn’t dare speak to them. Suddenly every person inside that building was my mortal enemy and it really did break my heart. It was just so unbearably sad to me.

  And yet, even as I backed away and then turned on my heel, walking faster and faster, until my breath was coming in rapid, jagged gasps, I knew there was another reason I was fleeing. If Donahue could somehow show me real proof that it had been Sarah in that car, that meant I had burst through the membrane separating the rational from the irrational, and once you’re through it, you are running free. I didn’t want to know I had lost my mind. I didn’t want anyone to prove to me that she couldn’t possibly be alive.

  I DON’T REMEMBER where I spent that night. It was in a hotel. The next morning, Sunday, I was on a flight to Minneapolis. The day was frigid and bright; the sky was a high blue tent pitched on poles of ice. I had only one more stop to make: I had learned that Steven Mileski was working for the state of Minnesota as a Catholic chaplain in a place called the Lake Omega Home for Older Boys, which was a sort of year-round camp for boys between eleven and eighteen. But the money had run out quickly and now Lake Omega was all that existed of the original impulse, and it was left with taking care of boys with problems ranging from retardation to petty larceny. A year before, Newsweek had run a story about Lake Omega calling it something like “Little Houses on the Prairie for Kids at the End of the Road.” Accompanying the story was a photo of a staff meeting and sitting near the head of the table, right next to the mustachioed, ski-sweatered director, was Mileski, his long dark beard looking as heavy as a beaver’s tail, his eyes so deeply black they showed on the other side of the page.

  Lake Omega was a half-hour drive from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, near a town of Delft blue silos and yellow clapboard farmhouses called Center. The cab driver got directions to the place people in Center called the School. The roads were straight, the turns were sharp, the icy stubble in the cornfields stretched out and slowly undulated on to infinity. On either side of the macadam, the snow was piled three feet high. The driver was not a talker; he was content to drive and listen to Andy Williams and Skitch Henderson on the radio and I was sitting in the backseat with my hands on my knees, looking out the window, with my mind feeling as impenetrable to the plow of reason as those fields that came flashing by, flashing by, and which were now giving way to dark clumps of forestland. Finally, we came to a sign announcing THE LAKE OMEGA SCHOOL—AN EXPERIMENT IN SUCCESSFUL LIVING. The sign was burned into wood, lovingly crafted, rustic. Next to it, however, was an orange and black NO TRESPASSING sign bought in the local hardware store. The narrow road turning in toward the school was plowed, but access to it was blocked by a chain-link fence hung between two giant maples. The gate was locked.

  The cab driver stopped his car and turned around to face me. He had a long, soft face, droopy, rather mad-looking eyes, jug ears. “Do you have the key, sir?”

  “I’ll walk from here,” I said. I reached for my bag and realized with a sudden lurch that I’d left it in the Minneapolis airport, or on the plane, or in the Washington airport, or in my hotel … It hardly mattered: my credit cards were in my jacket. I paid the driver and gave him a correct tip. “Can you wait here?” I asked him as I stepped out of the cab.

  “I have to go back to the city,” he said.

  “I won’t be very long. An hour at most.”

  “I got to get back to the city,” he said. He opened his eyes wider for emphasis and they became perfectly egg-shaped.

  “Look here,” I said. “I’m a U.S. congressman from Illinois. And this is important.”

  He looked at me more closely, bringing me into focus with a few rapid blinks. I looked more like a fugitive from justice man a congressman. “Are you a Democrat or Republican?” he asked.

  I only wanted to give the answer that would have the best result. “I’m a Republican,” I said.

  He shook his head sadly. “I’m late as it is. I have to get back,” he said. And with that, he reached behind and closed the door. He made a U-turn. I stood there and watched as he drove away.

  I climbed the fence and flipped over. The air was cold and dry; each inhale seemed to X-ray my respiratory system. It was a winter several notches more intense than the winter I’d left. I was wearing the comfortable brown walking shoes I’d had on since the campaign had begun and the earth seemed to pump waves of its own frigid reality straight through my soles. I dug my hands into my coat pocket, hunched my shoulders, pressed on. The road wound its way through the woods; the low boughs of the conifers were bent down to the ground from the weight of the snow they held.

  It was a still, windless day; I could hear the busyness of the birds farther into the woods. I walked for perhaps a quarter mile and with each step I expected to be apprehended. But there was no sign of anyone. Finally, I came to Lake Omega itself, covered with ice and tracked-over snow. The sun was straight overhead and it seemed to tilt forward like a face over a crib. The sky was seamless and the trees around the lake were motionless, as if they had been sewn like the pattern oh a sweater—pine tree, pine tree, pine tree.

  I followed the road around the lake and then off to the right. I came to the cabins where the boys and their overseers live
d: cedar-shingled bunkhouses, each with a name over the door like Sunrise House or Rigor Hill, each with small curtainless windows, each with a potbellied stove hooked into a cinder-block chimney, each with eight narrow, militarily neat beds, each empty of people. I passed the basketball court. Someone had neglected to take down the nets and they hung there like thickly frozen lace, reflecting the sunlight.

  In front of me was a large white building, with a sloping roof and a wraparound porch. It looked like a hunting lodge. There were cross-country skis and snowshoes resting against the walls and next to the wooden steps was a sign that said LAKE OMEGA HALL—BE RIGHT ON OR GET RIGHT OUT. And behind Lake Omega Hall was a smaller A-frame, painted brown, with double doors and one large, rather homemade-looking stained-glass window. Through the stillness of the winter air, I heard sounds coming from the A-frame and I walked toward it, and as I did I realized I was walking over the slight icy indentations of hundreds of footprints.

  The double doors were opened and I walked into what was Lake Omega’s assembly hall as well as its chapel. Sixty or so boys sat in gunmetal-gray folding chairs, and as I saw the backs of their heads it seemed they all had identical Spartan haircuts. Near the door was a cast-iron wood stove, bending and curling the air above it with immense waves of heat. I quietly closed the doors behind me. Not one head turned. The attention of everyone was on the makeshift pulpit, where Father Mileski was standing, wearing black trousers, black shirt, collarless, with a down vest, bright green, completing the picture. In the last row there was an empty chair on the aisle. I quickly sat down in it, next to a broad-faced boy about seventeen, with light hair, blue eyes, acne. He glanced at me as I sat down. “Hi,”he said, with a quick smile. I said Hi back to him and he clicked his attention back toward Mileski while reaching over to shake my hand.

  “And when we suffer,” Mileski was saying, with his hands folded before him, standing without gesture, letting his eyes and his voice do it all, “when we suffer. As we have. As we do. As we shall. Do we suffer alone? Does suffering come and—single us out? No. No. NO! We are never so close to him as we are when we suffer. But what does that mean? Does that tell us to—to get high, to get drunk and drive Daddy’s new car into a tree? Hey, Dad, like wow, I did it to be nearer to Jesus Christ our Savior. No. Of course not. We have to try and find our way. We have to try and live good lives. But we do it with the sacred knowledge that we can’t. With the sacred knowledge that we will fall, we will fail, we will make a total royal mess out of just about everything. He does not reward our success. He rewards our effort. Let us harness our energies. Let us use some of that fantastic power and invention we’ve been using to foul up our lives, all those—calories we’ve been burning to make ourselves miserable. Let’s take just half of it and use it for making ourselves happy. And peaceful.” He paused and looked around at the faces before him. He took a deep breath and unclasped his hands. “I love you. And God loves you. He gave you his only Son. He let us nail his Son onto a cross because it was the only way he had to tell us how much he loves us. He has given us this earth. He has given us our lives. Let’s not screw it up. Amen.”

  At the end of the sermon, everyone stood. I stood as well; I hadn’t realized until coming into the warmth of the chapel how frozen I was. My face itched as it thawed. A boy standing to the left of Mileski began singing a hymn I had never heard before and everyone joined in. It was about wandering and finding your way home.There were lambs, there were shepherds, there were babbling brooks. It was awful. When the song finally ended, we all sat down. Mileski looked out at us. I slumped further down in my chair. He shook his head. “Guess what, guys? I don’t have anything more to say.” He clasped his hands together and placed them near his chin, bowing his head, closing his eyes. He stood like that for a few long moments until he said “Amen.” And we said Amen and then it was all over. Almost in perfect unison, the boys and the staff stood up and began filing out.

  I stood next to the stove. Each person who went by me tried to make eye contact. Since slinging the law around in Chicago, I had somehow forgotten that boys in trouble could be this white. They were blond, Nordic, well-built kids; they looked like they ought to be attending hockey camp or playing in the school band. Finally a staff member walked by me and stopped dead in his tracks. He was a portly guy in his forties, with a Beatle haircut and rimless glasses.

  “Who are you?” he asked, without the slightest attempt to put a friendly inflection on it.

  “I’m a friend of Steven Mileski’s,” I said. “I came from Chicago to see him.”

  As soon as I was questioned by a staff member, the once friendly faces of the boys turned suddenly suspicious, as if now that my stock was sinking they needed to disassociate from me.

  “Is he expecting you?” asked the staff member.

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He is.”

  “Would you mind saying how you got in here? Do you have a visitor’s pass?”

  “No, I don’t. I was in the area and I just came in.”

  The staff member nodded. He was satisfied to have proven his point, but he was uncertain where to go from there. I could guess from how he was leaning that he was considering taking me by the arm: his job had made him take the exercise of a certain petty authority for granted. “I think the best way to handle this is for me to bring you to Father Steve,” the staff member said, narrowing his eyes and nodding in a way, I suppose, that was meant to look somehow threatening.

  Mileski was surrounded by ten or so boys. A couple of staff members were standing nearby, looking on like secret service agents. One of the boys was saying, “Hey man, but if it’s in my head, it’s in my head, right?”

  “There’s a Frank Zappa song,” Mileski answered. “Before your time.”

  “I know Zappa, man,” the boy said. He was large, horse-faced, ponytailed.

  “Good. Zappa says: ‘What’s the ugliest part of your body? Some say it’s your nose, some say your toes. I say it’s your mind.’” All the boys laughed and Mileski smiled with real pleasure. He reached out and put his hand behind the boy’s head and said, “I knew you’d like that. You look like Zappa anyhow.”

  “Excuse me, Father Steve,” said my escort. “Someone’s here who says he’s a friend of yours.”

  Mileski turned to face us. I was holding myself rigid, not knowing how he would respond to seeing me. It seemed to take him a moment to fix upon who exactly I was: I was far out of context standing in that iced-in homemade chapel. But then his eyes widened and even through the opaque mesh of his beard I could see his broad smile. “Fielding!” he said, his voice a sonic boom. “Fielding!” He threw his arms out to the side and walked slowly, ceremoniously toward me. I felt rather frail and unsubstantial as I watched his ursine bulk approach me, slowly filling my entire field of vision. And now his arms were around me and he was pressing me into his massive chest. “What a wonderful surprise,” he said. And then, in a much quieter voice, almost a whisper into my ear, he said, “It just breaks my heart, Fielding. But it’s so good to see you.”

  I clapped him on the back, like a vanquished wrestler pounding the canvas. “I’ve got to talk to you, Steven. Is there someplace we can go?”

  “Sure, definitely. We’ll sit, talk. Just let me finish up here, OK?” He turned back to the boys and staff members, the hard core of his following at Lake Omega. They seemed as if they were used to looking up to him—it was a safe sort of admiration because not one of them was interested in or willing to live his life and so they didn’t really have to compare themselves to him. He was their unicorn. “Well,” he said, facing them and rubbing his hands together, “I guess that about wraps it up.” They smiled understanding smiles. Mileski saluted them and then turned on his heel and threw his arm around my shoulder. “My cabin’s just across the way,” he said. “You can join me for Twinkies and tea.”

  His cabin was the size of a small garage. It was painted the same dark pure
blue that the farmers in Center chose for their silos. Inside, there was a bed, a table with four wooden chairs, an old shabby carpet, a wicker bookcase. In the center was a potbellied stove with a small stack of split wood and a bucket of kindling next to it. Stuck in one corner was a two-burner gas range that seemed more suitable for a weekend camping trip than an actual domestic life. As soon as we came in, Mileski threw a couple of pieces of wood into the wood stove and then lit the gas range with a match and put on an old cast-iron kettle that was already filled with water. I stood near the door and looked on.

  “You know,” he said, crouching down a little so he could see the flame beneath the kettle, “I’ve been sort of expecting you.”

  “Why?”

  “I got a letter from Tim Stanton. Just two days ago. He told me that you appeared in his church. He didn’t know what to make of it.” Mileski turned and faced me. His smile was so broad, so easy and confident. “He said you seemed very upset, but you couldn’t, wouldn’t, talk about it. He always had a special fondness for you, as you know.”

  “No.That never occurred to me.” I gestured toward the chairs and table. “Do you mind?”

  “That’s what they’re for,” he said, with a cheerful shrug. He watched me sit down with a curious sort of attention. When I was seated, Mileski strode across the room and sat across from me.

  “It sure is good to see you, Fielding. As you see, I’ve been exiled to this little gulag. But. I’m trying to make the most of it. I’m not getting any support at all from the Church. Every two weeks I get a paycheck with the lovely seal of the State of Minnesota on it. All the Church does is allow me to do this. But.Things are changing. I may be able to serve as curate to a pretty interesting pastor in Joliet, Illinois.” He snorted and shook his head. “I know what you’re thinking. But after this place, Joliet will feel like the Bahamas.” He ran his massive hand through his thick hair. I wondered momentarily if it was a nervous gesture. “Of course,” he said, “you’ve had a lot of experience sending people to Joliet.”