Fail

by Rick Skwiot

  “Amen,” came the response as all made the sign of the cross.

  “The grace and peace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.”

  “And also with you.”

  The priest introduced the holy water and sprinkled it about the worshippers.

  How long had it been since Gabriel had sat through a Mass? Other than weddings, a long time. The Mass proceeded: the kyrie, the gloria, the prayers, the liturgy, all of which he tuned out, focusing on Stone.

  Longish blond hair curling down to his jacket collar, rimless eyeglasses, gaunt, with chiseled features. Gabriel saw how a Hannibal waitress might find him exotic. When the communion rite began at the altar, Stone participated. Gabriel stayed put. It had been but scant days since his confession to Father Mohan, but he doubted he was still in a state of grace.

  “The peace of the Lord be with you always.”

  “And with your spirit.”

  “Have mercy on us. Grant us peace. Grant us peace.”

  “Behold the Lamb of God … supper of the Lamb.”

  “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed….”

  As Stone returned to his seat, their eyes met for an instant. He didn’t look haunted, like a man on the run. He looked peaceful. Or maybe quietly insane.

  After the service Gabriel watched Stone grab his parka from the coat rack in the vestibule and move outside looking over his shoulder. The professor stiff-legged it across the plowed parking lot toward a gray, twenty-year-old Chevrolet with a temporary tag taped in the back window. Gabriel loped after him in his slick-soled Italian loafers, side-stepping patches of ice. Stone flung open the door, lurched behind the steering wheel, and ground the starter. As Gabriel approached, the engine fired, a cloud of blue smoke bursting from its tailpipe.

  Stone threw the Chevy in gear. Gabriel raised his badge in front of the windshield.

  “Police! Turn off the fucking engine.”

  Their eyes met again through the glass. After a couple beats Stone lowered his head, shoulders sagging, and reached to kill the motor. Gabriel felt someone staring at him and turned to see a half dozen aged parishioners huddled together across the parking lot, mouths agape. He turned back and yanked open the car door.

  “Jonathan Stone … I’ve been searching for you.”

  Stone looked him up and down. “Friend or foe?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Let’s pray for the former.”

  In a booth at a downtown Quincy diner, Stone looked out the window to a park with tall oaks. Snow had begun to fall, and the bare branches wore a light sprinkling of white.

  “It was here, detective, in Washington Park, that Lincoln debated Douglas. Mark Twain—Sam Clemens then—would have been twenty-two, apprenticing as a riverboat pilot. Those debates are not unrelated to my work on Twain. Lincoln said, ‘I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.’ Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—set twenty years before abolition and published twenty years after—rephrased Lincoln’s posit. And now a hundred years after Twain’s death it still needs saying.”

  “So I gathered from your writing.”

  “What writing?”

  “‘Corruption in the public schools,’

  ‘Corruption in academia.’”

  “You found those?”

  A waitress arrived with water, coffee, and menus. When she had poured and left, Gabriel said:

  “Not me. Another officer.”

  Stone stroked his beard. “I guess I was naïve. Always had my nose buried in books. That’s what interested me and seemed of utmost importance. But then I got these students—ambitious inner-city kids who were trying to do something for themselves. They had been stoked with all these dreams but given none of the tools to achieve them. And when they spoke … when they spoke you could hear echoes of the runaway slave Jim.”

  Gabriel blew on his coffee and sipped. “You ran away too.”

  “I was facing some issues. Still am. As you likely know, I lost my job. Then there were some personal issues. It seemed time for me to spend forty days and forty nights in the wilderness.”

  “Issues like your wife’s unfaithfulness and criminal activity, which I was going over again last night.”

  “You found that too?”

  “The Gecko’s good. He’s our resident geek.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter now that I’ve made up my mind. At first I wasn’t sure what to do with all that. Despite her unfaithfulness, Ellen is still my wife. But not exposing what’s going on downtown—given that I could figure some effective way to do it—would be a sin of omission I wouldn’t want to live with.”

  Gabriel heaved a deep sigh and shook his head.

  “That’s a problem for you, detective?”

  The waitress returned and took their orders. When she had gone, Gabriel picked up his spoon and stirred his coffee. After a moment, he said, “I suspect that would make the mayor very unhappy.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  “And it would put you on Front Street.”

  “I understand that.”

  “I don’t think you do. You don’t understand how they operate downtown. They play hard. Angelo Cira is not Mafia but his uncle was. And he’s a tough ex-cop and -prosecutor.”

  “Meaning what? He would send some goon to ‘rub me out’ or whatever the phrase? Hard to believe.”

  “There’s a lot at stake here, Stone. Have you been to your cloud accounts in the last few days?”

  “No. Why?”

  “They—whoever ‘they’ are—have gone in and emptied them and are covering the electronic tracks you found. Plus I’m sure they’re putting tremendous pressure on your wife, for whatever that’s worth to you.”

  Gabriel decided his coffee needed sugar and poured some from a jar on the table before continuing. “Perhaps it’s better just to drop it. Go home, try to patch things up with the wife, focus on literature and language. That’s what you know best.”

  Stone leaned forward, forearms on the table cordoning his coffee cup. “But don’t you see they’re all related. They’re stealing money from the charter schools and mismanaging the rest, and it’s the students who pay the price. Your boss Cira is set to make millions on the backs of kids who don’t have a square chance. And it seems that you’re playing along too.”

  “I’m a realist, you’re an idealist. Everybody fudges. Ninety-eight percent of us manipulate our tax returns and insurance claims. We roll through stop signs and go five miles over the speed limit. We give customers more than they wanted and charge them for it. We all cheat just a little to give us an edge or help the team, but not enough to feel bad about ourselves. Maybe there’s one percent that never cheats and another percent that cheats big time—those are the ones my kind generally go after. It’s the way of the world, human nature. It’s how things work.”

  “But in this case, it’s not working. Kids are getting screwed. Everyone has only one chance in life to be young, to get the education needed to have even half a chance to succeed. These people are taking that one chance away and leaving these kids nothing. We have laws and covenants designed to help us rise above our nature. But they have to be enforced and followed and engrained in our culture, or ultimately we all lose. That’s not idealistic, that’s pragmatic.”

  The waitress returned with ham, eggs, hash browns, toast, and more coffee. Gabriel thought it a good time to redirect the conversation and save what he really needed to say for later, when they were alone and he could make his case more emphatically.

  “You were not an easy man to find, professor. No electronic trail whatsoever. Must have planned your escape.”

  Stone shook his head as he chewed. “Not at all. But it was as if Providence had a hand in it. I’d lost my job on Friday. That night I watched Ellen and her lover Cira together at the Christmas party. You can imagine what was going through my mind. Maybe you don’t have to imagine if you’ve
read ‘The Eddy.’ Some very primal and ugly currents swirling around inside me. I tried to get on top of those feelings and not let them degrade me and pull me down. I wasn’t successful.”

  Gabriel poked at his food and listened, watching Stone’s face.

  “When we got home, she went to the kitchen to swallow down some aspirins. I told her we had to talk. She said not tonight, she was tired. But I persisted. Told her I wanted to renew our marriage, to re-devote ourselves to each other. I remember her exact words:

  “‘You’re joking.’”

  “I told her I could forgive her for whatever she’d done, but that we had to start over fresh. Her reaction was to berate me. ‘What? You forgive me?’ She asked what had I ever contributed to the marriage. Told me to grow up, climb down out of my ivory tower, to stop living in a fantasy world. Then she turned and walked to the bedroom.

  “I didn’t sleep much. I lay there staring at her back, thinking of Cira’s hands on her. She had changed. Over the years, the access to power had altered her. The more people kissed her ass, the more she expected it from me. It was all about her. An intolerable situation for me.

  “I rose early and chronicled the events of the previous day in my journal. Then I took a look at the newspaper and read that a student of mine had been shot.”

  “Alonzo Watkins.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  “I met with Letty Tatum. She told me.”

  Stone raised his eyebrows. “My, you have been on the job. No Stone left unreturned.”

  “You were saying,...”

  “After I read about Alonzo I called the hospital but didn’t learn much. I exchanged emails with a priest who had been counseling me—”

  “Father Mohan.”

  “Right. And made an appointment for him to hear my confession that afternoon. I took a walk through Forest Park in the snow. It was beautiful. Hundreds of snow geese were on the ice near the boathouse, huddled together, quiet. Anyway, I trudged over to Barnes to see Alonzo, but he was in intensive care. I found out he’d been shot in the back, lung collapsed, but out of danger. I left a note for him, then drove to Saint Louis U., had a late lunch at a nearby pub, and met with Father Mohan. He heard my confession and gave me some good advice that reminded me of my duty to serve.”

  “I got the same lecture.”

  “It was dark when I came out. I drove around. I had so much churning around inside me … I ended up downtown. Went to the rooftop bar at the Marriott across from the ballpark. I looked down on where Stadium Towne would go, thinking about what Cira was skimming from the project and Ellen’s complicity in it, and the dropouts roaming the streets without jobs or prospects. I had a few Irish whiskeys—okay, more than a few—and needed some fresh air.” He paused and Gabriel waited, still watching Stone’s face, trying to get a sense of how set the man was on going public. Stone continued.

  “I walked across the street to the Old Courthouse. Stood there studying the statue of Dred Scott and his wife. That’s where they first petitioned for their freedom.”

  Gabriel nodded. “Learned about that in school.”

  “Without them Lincoln may have never become president, the Civil War may not have been fought—at least then—and Twain may not have written Huck Finn. Who knows what effect any action has downstream, I thought, even the smallest ripple. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I crossed to the Arch and walked through it and down the steps to the river. All of it was stirring inside—Mark Twain and the river, Huck and Jim, Ellen and Cira, DuWayne Hawkins and Betancourt, Alonzo, the corruption and the kickbacks, the schools being robbed, the kids getting fucked out of any real chance in life. The whole world seemed tainted—me included. My career a shambles, my marriage a wreck. Worse, my wife was up to her chin in a criminal conspiracy, and I didn’t know where my duty lay—or my loyalties. Didn’t know if I had the guts to expose her or if I should, or whether I would just join in the corruption. I was humiliated. I was a nobody, a loser, ineffectual….

  “I stood on the cobblestones at the river’s edge, drunk and crying. I’d lost my way. My life seemed so pointless and useless. Then I saw him. I must have sensed movement out the corner of my eye.”

  “You saw the jumper?”

  Stone looked up at Gabriel and held his gaze. “He was standing on the railing of Eads Bridge. Poised there with arms stretched like Christ on the cross. Spontaneously I yelled, ‘Don’t!’—though I’m sure he couldn’t hear me. He began tilting forward as if in slow motion, then the free fall. He hit the water hard. I guess seeing someone die is nothing to you.”

  “That’s not an easy thing to witness for anyone.”

  “It was horrific. Suicide is a mortal sin.”

  “I know, I’m Catholic, too.”

  “A car was parked on the wharf, windows steamed. A young black guy jumped out zipping his pants. He looked at me. ‘Damn! You see that?’ We stood on the bank scouring the river, but what with the ice floes and the dark…”

  Stone shook his head and took in a breath.

  “His girlfriend came out the other side of the car. I asked if they had a cell phone. She called 911. I felt sick. I sat down on the curb, leaning against a post. I saw the guy telling his girlfriend something. They got back in the car and drove off. I waited.

  “After awhile a police car came. I figured they would want to talk to me. But the car just drove past slowly and didn’t even stop. Maybe they didn’t see me sitting there.

  “I sat staring at the river as if hoping the jumper might resurface, resurrected. I sat thinking what a gift life is, and how ephemeral. And how I was wasting mine. A bad marriage, stupid career choices, a naïve intellectuality that got me nowhere. A cuckold. A nothing.”

  “Yeah, you had a couple rough days.”

  Stone looked askance at Gabriel. “I suspect your job makes you blasé and cynical.”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t being sarcastic. I didn’t mean to diminish your problems and your suffering. But maybe you’re being too hard on yourself. You weren’t the one cheating. Your head was being messed with, but your heart was in the right place.”

  “For all the good that does. You know how a man’s judged in this world, detective, not by what’s in his heart but by what he does. Twain said it: “The streets of Hell are paved with good intentions.” For once, I needed to act. But it had to be the right action. And I needed time to figure out what it ought to be.”

  “And you thought of Huck.”

  “I wasn’t thinking clearly but, yeah, that somehow came to me as I sat wondering about the man in the river and what might have driven him to it. I recalled how Huck had orchestrated the appearance of his demise—his own disappearance in the river—to escape his father. If Ellen thought she’d lost me—if she felt the same thing I had felt seeing that man die, if she realized what a sacred treasure we have in life—maybe she’d come to her senses and do the right thing. At the same time, I’m sure I wanted to hurt her and saw the potential to damage Angelo Cira as well. But I didn’t know if I should—or could.

  “Thus my decision to go walkabout. I sat there in the snow figuring how to do it, how to disappear like Huck. If I left Ellen’s car in the Arch garage, that might associate me with the jumper as long as there was no further trace of me. Which of course ruled out credit cards, plane tickets, Internet presence, cell phones, et cetera.

  “I took the MetroLink home. I knew Ellen would be off at some political function. I had some cash hidden away—money I’d been secretly saving for years from freelance work, book reviews, and such. Almost four thousand.”

  “For just such an occasion?”

  Stone laughed coldly. “We never had a honeymoon. Got married when we were grad students. Then she started working at the TV station, and we never seemed to have time. When she went to work for the mayor I thought we could finally do it. I wanted to surprise her. But she surprised me first.

  “Anyway, I got the money and went on her computer. Mark Twain as always was on my
brain, along with my dissertation. I figured to finally finish it with some uninterrupted work over the next few weeks and thought Hannibal might help me evoke him. I found that a Trailways bus would leave the airport for Hannibal at seven-fifty Sunday morning. I left my cell phone behind and took the train to the airport. I spent the night in the terminal dozing in a chair alongside other passengers.

  “Next morning the bus ride in the snow calmed me and fortified me. Rural America is still beautiful, still solid. I knocked around Hannibal for a few days and bought the Chevy off a used car lot for twelve hundred bucks. Saw an ad in the newspaper for weekly rates at a hotel in Quincy and passed St. Anthony’s on the way, where I started going to Mass.”

  “Patron saint of missing persons.”

  “Of course that occurred to me. A little too clever perhaps.”

  “Just as well. I needed to find you.”

  “I can guess why. Cira sent you.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Your wife’s also worried about you. At least now I can reassure her that you’re all right. But there’s more to it than that.”

  “What is your role here, detective?”

  The waitress brought the check and Gabriel reached for it. “I’d like to play St. Christopher and carry you safely to the other shore. But that may not be that simple.”

  - 22 -

  The snow whipped around them as they walked through the park where Lincoln debated Douglas. They turned and headed down toward the river. No traffic, an eerie quiet.

  “Thanks for breakfast,” said Stone from beneath the hood of his olive parka.

  “Expense account. Besides, you’re on a budget.”

  “For the time being.”

  “Prospects?”

  “Got a job starting in a few weeks teaching English at a charter high school in North St. Louis. A colleague there hooked me up.”

  “Sounds right for you.”

  “Even though I haven’t yet started, it feels like a calling.”

  On the riverfront the snow streamed in from the Missouri side. There they found a tavern that was just opening for lunch.

  Once inside, Gabriel stomped snow from his shoes and brushed it from his hair. They ordered whiskey shots—Jack Daniel’s for Gabriel, Jameson for Stone—and sat on barstools staring at The Weather Channel on a muted TV over the bar. The satellite map showed white, snow, over northern Missouri and Illinois and blue, ice, further south.