No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  Behind his rimless glasses, Bowman’s eyes were lilac. His neat dark blond hair looked as if each strand had been individually barbered. Nothing moved in his face. His wife’s smile went back to Morgan.

  “Gerald has heard things about us. Perhaps you’d care to give him your side.”

  Morgan said, “I don’t have a side.”

  “Get in the car,” Bowman said to her quietly and walked around to the passenger side. Opening the door, he spoke over the roof, “I once had a cat like you, Morgan. He didn’t know enough to crap in the box.”

  The door closed, hard. Arlene opened hers and smiled with meaning. “It’s what I told you, James. He thinks you don’t know your place.”

  The car slid away, sharklike, through a rinse of sunshine. Felix, who had not moved from the pumps and had overheard bits and pieces, came over to Morgan. “My wife had a cat like that too, Chief. I made her get rid of it.”

  • • •

  Randolph and Suzy Jackson had had dinner at the country club and were now driving around the village green. As they passed the town hall Suzy spotted Chief Morgan. “Go around again,” she said, “there’s the chief.” He looked at her unwillingly. “You might as well get it over with,” she said.

  “Not now,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Do you want his resignation or not?”

  “Tomorrow,” he insisted. “It’s official business.”

  “Don’t be afraid of him, Randolph. Besides, I want to watch.”

  He drove past Tuck’s and made the swing back to the town hall, where the chief was watching them. “You stay here,” he said in an undertone and popped out of the car with a spring to his step, which faltered. “You got a minute, Jim?”

  “Sure,” Morgan said. Suzy Jackson smiled at him from the car, and he stooped forward. “How are you, Mrs. Jackson?”

  “Fine, Chief. You’re looking fit.”

  Jackson had him by the arm and ushered him closer to the town hall, almost to the stone steps. The evening air was buggy, sticky, skinned with heat. “I haven’t told you this, Jim, but I’ve been getting calls. The other selectmen have too. Orville Farnham tells me he gets them every day.”

  “What kind of calls?” Morgan asked.

  Jackson, who detested sticky situations of any kind, cleared his throat and gave himself a wider voice. “People think you’re protecting MacGregor. If the boy is a suspect — and people have heard he is — they want to know why he’s still wearing a uniform and carrying a weapon. It’s a legitimate question, Jim. Myself, personally, I think a leave of absence would be in order.”

  “I can’t do that,” Morgan said. “He’s getting socked with too much as it is.”

  Jackson looked around, looked back at the car, and rued the situation. He truly wasn’t a man who asked for much: a breeze on his back in the summer, a warm house in the winter, and his meals brought to him on a tray when he had a touch of something. “This is hard for me, Jim. Sometimes I wonder what the reward is in being a town father.”

  “A little more than being a police chief. What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Some of the people don’t think you’re doing your job, at least not one hundred percent. And then there’s talk about, you know, those women from the Heights.”

  “If you hadn’t sold all that woodland, we wouldn’t have the Heights, would we?”

  “Now you’re treading into matters don’t concern you, Jim. What I did with that woodland was for progress. A town that sits still dies.” He rose on his toes, galled that he should have to explain himself. “The point is — ”

  “The point is, Gerald Bowman’s been talking to you.”

  “He’s a resident, he has the right.”

  “He also made you rich.”

  “Look here, Jim, I’m my own man, always have been.” He felt his color rising, his exalted position in town questioned by one of his public servants. Morgan, expressionless, stared at him.

  “How’s your new Audi running?”

  His face burned, and his dinner at the country club now lay heavy, a burden in his belly. Returning from a political dinner in Andover, three sheets to the wind, he had cracked up his old Audi at the bend near Tish Hopkins’s farm. It had been the chief who pulled him out of the car, sobered him up, and drove him home no worse for the wear, though in the morning he warranted breakfast in bed. “You’re taking this all wrong, Jim.”

  “I’m trying not to.”

  “Take it in the spirit I’m giving it. Basically, I’m on your side, always have been.” He cleared his throat again. “All I’m saying is that people want the town to get back to normal business. They want this Lapham thing cleared up.”

  “So do I,” Morgan said without inflection. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

  “No, I guess that’s it. For now.”

  Morgan stretched his neck and waved an arm. “Good night, Mrs. Jackson.”

  Jackson watched him walk away and turn into the dark direction of the police station. That’s his home, Jackson thought, that’s where he lives.

  When he returned to his car, his wife gave him a sweeping look. “You bloody coward, you didn’t tell him.”

  “No, but I warned him.”

  • • •

  As soon as Morgan turned the corner of the town hall he was confronted by Matt MacGregor, who was in full uniform, his service revolver slung low. “I heard it all, Chief. You played him like a fucking piano, like you do the whole town. You should do a concert on the green, charge admission.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Morgan said, smelling beer on his breath. “Are you back to work?”

  “Right. I don’t want to use any more sick time.” He pulled at the visor of his cap and gave a hitch to his trousers. “You’re protecting me, that’s what I heard said. And you’re not going to take away my badge and gun. I’ve been socked with enough, that’s what you said.”

  “And that’s what I meant. Listen to me, Matt, can you listen to me?”

  “I’m listening. Like I’ve been listening every day since I put on the badge. You say something, I jump.”

  “You’re not listening.”

  “Go ‘head, I’m listening.”

  “I think I can put it together. If I work it right, get Junior Rayball alone in a perfect place, I think I can make him admit Papa incited him into using the rifle. I think Junior’s ready.”

  MacGregor staggered back a bit, and his eyes emptied. “You make it sound so simple, Chief. Life’s never simple. Ask me. I can tell you.” His voice snagged on something, then stumbled forth. “I thought I was going to have it all. Lydia would be my wife, and I even figured someday I’d have your job. That’s a laugh.”

  “Don’t count yourself out of anything, Matt.”

  “You giving me hope?” MacGregor said sardonically. Then he let out a belch, full force, which was what buddies of Morgan’s used to do in Vietnam to show disdain for everything in sight, including themselves.

  “Go home, Matt.”

  “I’m on duty.”

  “You’re going home. That’s an order.”

  Snapping to mock attention, MacGregor saluted. “Yes, sir. You’re the boss, you’re the commander. You’re Sherlock Holmes.”

  They trudged along, Morgan in the lead, to the dimly lit parking lot behind the town hall. Morgan went to Meg O’Brien’s old Plymouth, to the passenger side. He flung open the door. “Get in, I’ll drive you home.”

  “Then where are you going?”

  The Plymouth had a small knock in the motor. A single headlight affirmed the road, though Morgan could have driven it blind. This god-damn town of his. He knew every inch, where women still hung clothes on the line, where the young left their tissues and the elderly their tears, where his boyhood had ended with his father’s death and his manhood had begun with his marriage, each spot marked sweet and sour. He glanced at MacGregor, whose smile was unsavory.

  “I had you pegged, Chief. You got to her, didn’t you?”


  This was what he had been dreading. He had no defense and no explanation except a weak one. “It just happened, Matt. Neither of us planned it, that’s the truth.”

  “I don’t want the truth. The truth doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. Give me a big fucking lie, make me feel better.”

  The response made him feel worse and even more so when he pulled up at MacGregor’s house, where beer cans glinted in the uncut grass near the porch, where the light had been left lit for two days. A single can, squashed in the middle, stood cockeyed on the rail. He said, “Here we are.”

  MacGregor shoved the door open and got out, no argument, only a heavy grunt of exertion, which brought another belch, this one unintentional. He closed the door, but not securely. In a way that was almost graceful, he crouched down to peer in. “You’re having what I had, Chief. Now you know why I’m nuts about her.”

  Morgan shifted into gear. “Good night, Matt.”

  “Want me to tell you what she likes best?”

  The car fled. Too fast. He had not meant to push the accelerator that hard, and he slowed down. The night sky was brilliant. Every star seemed close. The lights were on at Lydia’s. She must not have gone to work, or else she was back early.

  The steps creaked. Instead of ringing the bell, he gave a light tap on the door and waited. Not long. She opened it and peered out at him. She was in the old robe, and her face was drawn, her streaky brown hair unbrushed. She spoke quietly and firmly:

  “Not tonight, James.”

  • • •

  The telephone, ringing insistently, woke him from a snoring sleep, and he battled a tangled sheet to free his legs and then, swinging out a blind arm into the dark, sent a little table lamp crashing to the floor. Moving on bare feet, he cut himself on shivers from the broken bulb. Senses battered, he clawed the wall in the passageway and produced a light that pained his eyes. Tracking blood, he groped his way into the vacant room, where the phone continued to shrill.

  “Hello!”

  A voice said, “Ready to clear your conscience, MacGregor?”

  His eyes shuttered tight. “Fuck you, Bakinowski! Fuck you and your mother too!” Then he ripped the cord free and threw the phone against the wall.

  10

  Chief Morgan woke early to another day of heat. Someone else was up early. A neighbor with a full-mouthed voice that jarred ears was calling her dog, a mongrel Morgan sometimes wished would run away and never come back. Had it been a shepherd he might have thought more of it, though he had got rid of his after Elizabeth’s death. Happily, for years the animal had had the run of Tish Hopkins’s farm, where it expired behind a chicken coop after a full life.

  He made coffee and carried a cup out to the car. He still had Meg O’Brien’s Plymouth. The mongrel, back, barked at him. Birds gusted from the neighbor’s maple. It was not yet seven o’clock. Driving with purpose, relishing his coffee, he was doubly aware of himself and of the tiny beats in the misty air, of the vigor of the emerging green, of the ready-for-business appearance of every tree, from which light dripped like water. This was his day, he knew it!

  He parked the car off the road, near the Rayball mailbox, and finished his coffee. Two swallows did it. Then he got out and, avoiding ruts, ambled up the gravel drive toward the weather-bitten house. He picked a berry on the way. A mosquito seeking a meal whined in his ear. He killed it.

  Papa’s pickup was there, Clement’s rental was not, which was what he had expected. Without the slightest sound he crept to the side of the house, to the window he knew was Junior’s, and peered through the blighted screen, where he smelled broken sleep. Junior was awake. He had almost expected that too. “It’s me,” he whispered and watched Junior nod from the bed. “Where’s your father?”

  “Sleepin’,” Junior whispered back, a willing partner in the conspiracy.

  “Can you come out? We don’t want to wake him.”

  Junior had slept half dressed, and it took him no time to put on the rest. He put naked feet into stinking socks and into frayed sneakers. Lifting the screen, careful of sound, he came out through the window. Then, without speaking, they slipped far from the house to the green shadows of pines full of bird clatter, where Morgan said, “What happened to your lip?”

  “I hurt it.”

  “What do you want to know about your mother?”

  Junior spoke as if with a taste of torment in his mouth, nothing to wash it out. “It was you that found her. Can you show me where?”

  Morgan’s composure was granite, though his eyes blinked. This was going too well. He did not want to spoil anything.

  “Clement and me used to look, but we didn’t know for sure where. We used to guess.”

  “I’ll show you,” Morgan said.

  They slid off toward the swamp, with the ground quickly giving in to uncertainty. What once might have been a path heaved up roots, beneath which water began to sparkle. They stepped around a rotting stump emerald with lichen, a mysterious growth that was part one thing and part another. Were they there for something else, Morgan might have explained the chemical mystery to him, which is what he would have done with his own child had Elizabeth lived long enough to give him one.

  Junior pointed. “We used to think it was there.”

  “No,” Morgan said, though he was quickly realizing he had no idea where it was and that one place might be as good as another. Birds and insects decorated the morning silence, weaving their own kinds of words into it. Morgan’s eyes roved. One spot looked likely, another less likely.

  Junior said, “Clement said it was farther in.”

  “Not too far.” The brush was rife with mosquitoes, which Morgan kept swatting. Junior stepped where it was quaggy and soaked his sneakers. After all these years, with new growth burgeoning and the old dying, it was impossible to tell where anything was. “Here,” Morgan said.

  Junior went down on his knees in the wet.

  “No, not there,” Morgan said. “I meant, here.” And with an emotion he could not explain, a sadness that should not have been his, he watched Junior move on his knees from the wet to the dry. It was too dry.

  “How could she of drowned here? There’s no water.”

  “There used to be,” Morgan said softly.

  Junior whispered, “Mama.”

  Morgan said, “Do you want me to go away for a while?”

  “No.” He got up, his jeans plastered to his knees. “Now I know, I can come back by myself. I can even show Clement.”

  “You never knew her, did you, Junior? You weren’t much more than a baby.”

  “I had a dream. I saw her face.”

  “She was a good woman, Junior.” Morgan was measuring his words. Each one had to cut. “She never hurt anyone. Nor did Mrs. Lapham.” As he spoke, Junior’s eyes went down, where the ground had become sacred. “I don’t blame you, Junior, not for what happened to either of them. I blame your father.”

  “Not for Mama. Mama did it herself.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I don’t know how to be sure,” he said. “I got no way.” Black flies appeared from nowhere and scratched the air. Morgan spoke through them. “Did you shoot Mrs. Lapham?”

  “No sir.”

  Morgan spoke fast. “But maybe you were there. I mean, maybe. We’re not talking for sure.”

  “Yes sir, maybe.”

  “Maybe you even had the gun in your hands. A rifle, wasn’t it?”

  Junior’s eyes came up. “Yes sir, a nice one.”

  “Maybe you even had your finger on the trigger.”

  “A little.”

  “You heard the shot.”

  “I thought it’d be bigger.”

  A happiness flooded Morgan. A sweet epiphany. Everything he had figured was true, everything imagined was real. “You did it, Junior.”

  “No sir.”

  OK, he was simply going too fast. An easy remedy. He’d skip over this and come back later. He slowed his voice. “Where’s the rifle
now?”

  “We threw it away.”

  “You and Papa?”

  “Yes sir, me and Papa.”

  Morgan’s voice went fast again, he couldn’t help it. “Where?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “But not here? You didn’t throw it away here?”

  “No sir.”

  “Maybe you threw it in Paget’s Pond.” Junior’s face reddened. “No sir, not there.”

  “Where, then?”

  “I can’t tell!” Junior said, and all of a sudden his breathing was disjointed. Simultaneously something clicked in Morgan’s brain, something spoke to him out of his own bone and blood. He was looking not at a killer but simply at a boy who had never become a man, at a half-man who had been a stunted child. He was seeing, in another kind of epiphany, two sides of a human equation.

  “You didn’t do it, did you, Junior?”

  The breathing was still harsh, raspy, not under full control. “No sir.”

  “Papa fired the rifle, not you.”

  “I ain’t say in’!”

  “Tell me!”

  “I can’t!” Junior shouted and began sinking to his knees, this time involuntarily, his breath going, his eyes leaping. Then he was on his back, thrashing, turning another color, not a pretty one. Morgan was beside him in a moment and cursing himself. What in Christ had he done? What kind of bottle had he unstopped? He grabbed Junior and did what he could.

  • • •

  When they emerged from the swamp, insects shrilling in their wake, Papa Rayball was sitting on a stump and eating cold cereal from a cracked bowl. He was wearing an old red shirt with the sleeves hacked off above the elbows. Slurping from the bowl, he looked like a hunter who feasted on his game and relished the umbles. Morgan, anticipating rage, saw a smile, one almost of triumph.

  “What’ve you been doin’ to my boy? He don’t look so good.”

  “He’s all right now,” Morgan said as Junior hung back.

  “I don’t know, I got my suspicions,” Papa said. “Maybe you got so many women, you want boys now. You sure you’re all right, Junior?”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “You know if the chief put his hands on you, you got a case against him. ‘Course, it’d be your word against his, and yours ain’t worth spit.” Papa winked, with cunning in his open eye. “Ain’t that right, Chief? Who’s gonna listen to a retard? I mean about anything?”