“What boulder?”
“That’s about all I can think of,” he said. “Make sure I hear from you soon.”
I knew that I wasn’t going to work when I dropped him off at the Blue Bird. He got out without talking because I think we’d run out of words. Instead of driving onto the campus, I stopped across from the Blue Bird at the public phone and called the dispatcher. I didn’t tell her I was sick. I told her I wasn’t coming in and then I hung up. I drove out of town to the south and east and I went to the Tanners’.
She was in the same chair and wearing the same clothing and blanket. He was at the little woodstove, putting in a thick log that might smolder most of the morning. I liked the smell of the smoke but not the heat. My ribs and fingers were hurting and my headache was worse. The brightness of the sun behind the cloud cover moving in seemed to make my eyes throb.
I didn’t sit with her because I was afraid I’d end up with my head in her lap.
They said good morning, and I said it. They waited. The reverend, on his knees at the stove, sat on the three-inch brick fire floor like a little kid on the sidewalk, knees up near his face, his arms around his legs.
He finally said, “Oh dear.”
I said, “Did you know your daughter was having an affair? I don’t know if that’s the right word. I’m sorry for this. I think she was let’s say seeing someone. I figure she wouldn’t have bought expensive lacy underwear for a boy her age, right? They don’t do that. I figure the boys are so grateful, they don’t require anything like what I saw upstairs. Maybe I’m wrong. I’m going on one fact, one nonfact, one guess, and one lie. I’m figuring, to start, that a perfect girl who isn’t like any of the other girls in America wouldn’t get involved with seductive underwear unless it was something to do with sex and an older man. I’m sorry.”
“Whose lie?” Mrs. Tanner said. She had the blanket around her now, so I could hardly see her face. Her voice came out of the shadows it made, hooding her.
“Don’t you want to know the fact?” I was angry at them for not knowing, and I must have sounded it. “Wouldn’t a mom and dad want the fact first?”
She said, “All right, Jack. Please.”
“The sexy underwear in her bureau. Why didn’t you know about it?”
“I don’t pry,” she said. “We don’t.”
I said, “Why not? I thought you took care of her. Couldn’t you have looked? And let’s one of these days ask someone in law enforcement why they could look, and see the underwear and not read the receipt and know she had two pairs of it. That meant she was seeing this person a lot, maybe. Or maybe thinking about it. Figuring, knowing her, she’d need to wash and dry the one while she wore the other. Right?”
Mrs. Tanner took the upper part of the blanket down. Her hair looked like it was made of something artificial. Her complexion was changing, from the orange with a darkness underneath it to something like the skin of a lemon going bad. Her husband had his face down on his knees.
“The nonfact,” I said, and I almost whispered it. My voice didn’t want to come. My throat didn’t want to let the air out. I said, “The nonfact is what you don’t know. Or the diary you saw and burned or hid or made yourselves forget about. Or the diary she didn’t write because she was too smart. Or the underwear you didn’t know about. It’s something like that. It’s what this family didn’t ever talk about. That could be a guess, too.
“Except I’m guessing about who the man is. So it can’t count as a guess and it has to be a nonfact.”
She said, “I know you’re as upset as we are, Jack.”
“Could be,” I said. “And just because I sound like I hate you, or me, or everybody, I don’t want you thinking that’s all of it that I feel. Understand? Can we have a deal on that?”
The reverend looked at her.
I said, “I want a deal on that.”
The reverend nodded. His wife said, very low, “Yes. Thank you, Jack.”
“You wanted to know the lie?”
They waited.
“I’m going to come back in here in a minute or two. Will you wait for me?”
I turned. I left the car where it was. I walked in the road because they didn’t have a sidewalk in that town, and I had the gun in my left hand. I couldn’t have held it in my right. I went up Strodemaster’s drive and I opened his back door. He was in the bathrobe, frying bacon. I smelled the sausage and onions from the night before. Under it, I smelled what had rotted in the room.
I put the pistol into my right hand, though it didn’t want to hold it. I didn’t feel very much about the power of it this time. I wasn’t howling inside about my primitive strength. I couldn’t have been happy for a price. Maybe if someone gave me back my life with Fanny and Hannah. But that wasn’t in the small, smelly kitchen that was crowded with two big men breathing like cross-country runners, one of them in unlaced boots and a bathrobe. I simply wanted to be sure I fired it with some accuracy. But I couldn’t. It seems I closed my eyes.
I stuck my hand out and cupped the bottom of my fist where it met with the bottom of the pistol grip. My eyes were shut. I squeezed the rounds off slowly. It felt like every shot was a word or as close as I could come to words.
After four of them, I opened my eyes. I had put a gray-blue puckering hole in the enamel of the stove. I had placed a round in the wall behind the stove. I’d heard a ricochet off the frying pan. And the last one had disappeared. I wondered if it had gone into the cork rim of the chalkboard or into Strodemaster. He was crouched in front of his burning breakfast, with his hands on his ears. We could line him up with me and Rosalie, our hands in front of our eyes, I thought, and make that joke about monkeys not doing something. I smelled the cordite as well as the garbage now, and of course the burnt bacon in the greasy pan. I smelled the stink of my sweat. He wasn’t moving, and I was still in the firing stance.
We’d been taught in the MPs to startle people in rooms we broke into by shouting in those up-from-the-navel sergeant voices to stand still, put your hands on your head, et cetera. I didn’t have any strength today. I needed the audiovisual effects, I told myself. I hadn’t known, walking through his door, what I would do. I think maybe I was trying to kill him. I pretended to myself it was all a part of my plan—the door kicked in, the shots fired, the attention he would give me now.
He was still crouched, standing up at the stove, and his face was really a series of funny faces. He looked like a man pretending to be a clown in a spattered blue bathrobe.
I said, “Turn it off. And close your slovenly bathrobe.”
He said, “Jack.”
My ears were still full of the shots. I could smell the used loads and I could smell his last night’s sausages. And I was certain I could smell the rot I had smelled here before. It was Janice. We were standing in her. I let the pistol come up and I squeezed off again. The solid sound of the round striking into the floor at his feet, the spray of wood and linoleum splinters, made a strong argument.
I said, “Tighten your fucking bathrobe, goddamn it. No. Wait. A man shouldn’t dress like a boy. Don’t tighten it. Take the fucker off.”
He slowly stood. He pushed his glasses back up on his nose. He took his bathrobe off and held it out. I pointed to a chair and he dumped it. In a voice that sounded tinny after the shots, he said, “What’s wrong, big guy? Why the gunplay? Why the anger? I understand I got you into a search you didn’t want to be part of—”
“You lied to me two or three—I think it was three times,” I said. “Archie got me into it, not you. You wanted me out of it. That must be a compliment. I don’t care. I heard it and I heard it, and then I used what’s left of my brain to think about it. You. Archie thought it would help me out if I did something about getting back a missing girl. You were talking to him, and he made the suggestion. You were supposed to be so eager to find her, you had to say yes. Jesus, what’s not to say yes to? A broken-down campus cop who takes a week to find his dick in the men’s room. Right? So you came to
me and asked me and then as soon as you had an excuse, like when I stuck as much of my body as I could in front of a bunch of arms and legs, you came crying over to turn me free. That’s the part that’s the compliment, you fucker. That anything about me worried you. That you actually thought I could do anything. See anything. Hear anything.
“But you’re finally so goddamned convinced you’re smarter than everybody. Than the little girl you fucked and killed. Than her parents. Than half the law-enforcement officers in a couple of counties. Surely smarter than me. So you had to repeat the lie about who engaged my useless services. But you know, Professor Strodemaster, sir, Ph.D., even a poor dumb fuck like me sooner or later hears it when a wormy, phony, arrogant cocksucker lies and lies and lies.”
I saw spit pop out of my mouth. I heard my voice climb higher and higher. I did not forget I had a round left in the cylinder.
“And you sliced her apart here. And what’d you do after? Did you can her in her juices? Freeze her crotch so you could take it down to remember her by?”
He shook his head and gripped his glasses over the ears like they were coming off. He looked down an inch or so with a sorrowful face. “Jack, boy,” he said. “You’re talking to a fucking associate professor of physical sciences with tenure for life and an NSF grant in his package. We don’t do dismembering. The guys in biology do that. And they don’t do it to people. This is fucking college life we’re talking, Jack. You and I are employees of a school. The worst cutting up gets done is at parties, unless they’re scoring on one another’s wives. I’m a wronged, innocent associate professor, guy. I’m also your friend. Remember? And here. Consider this. I heard this, and I believe it to be true, seeing how punchy you’ve got. We are both of us men whose wives walked out. We’re both wronged. Are you hearing me, Jack?”
I always admired how some people could open their mouths and talk. They could talk and talk. But I didn’t think I wanted, now, to hear about my dreams, and especially not from Strodemaster. I tapped him on the soft part of the temple with the gun.
I said, “What’d you do, butcher her in the kitchen? Clog your septic up with her body parts? That’s why it stinks like that. You used some kind of scientific knife thing and you cut off her arms and legs first, and then I guess her head. Her head next? Did you slice off those tiny nipples? Didn’t you at least let her wear that sad little sexpot brassiere when you cut her up?
“You know,” I said, and I tapped him again, at the bridge of the nose, kind of hard, “sometimes they notch people up with their gun sights and then they go absolutely crazy a little and shoot up a tenured-for-life associate professor’s house. They let them bleed to death on the kitchen floor, where the girls got sliced and diced.”
I lifted my foot in its hard boot and I ran the lug sole down his leg, from the knee to the instep inside the loose tongue of his boot.
He vomited onto his boots and it spattered onto mine. I didn’t move back. I’ve had worse on my feet from drunks and speed freaks and I was taught to see it as a tactic. “Barf and run,” we used to call it.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, knocking his dirty glasses off. They fell into the vomit. He left them there, though he reached for his face a couple of times as if to adjust them. His face looked incomplete, a little younger. I felt like I could see it better. But I couldn’t read it, and I was glad. I didn’t want to understand his thoughts.
I’d raised a welt on his nose and a little dark streak on his temple. His leg was probably red down the shin, and that would hurt for a good part of a week. I thought at first the tears were from his vomiting, but he was crying for real.
“I could never hurt that child like that,” he said, snuffling. “Cut her up?”
“Well, I haven’t met that many killers,” I said, “and I never was smart enough to figure people out. That’s why it took me so long with you. What is it, you get off better with little girls? It’s some kind of psychological thing with you? Or was she one of those secret-rebellion kids who’s a miracle in the sack? And you of course were the super father physicist local community guy with the prick that was tenured for life and you were instructing her in whatever she couldn’t get in the preacher’s house. Holy shit, Randy. Did I leave any of it out?”
“Oh yes,” he said. He moved to the wall and stooped the way nearsighted people do. He picked up the chalk at the end of its red string and he faced me. He erased the map lines on the board with the side of his arm. Vomit and mucus ringed his mouth. His eyes looked soft and unfocused. He pointed with the chalk to the chalkboard and, peering in, made an X in a circle in the upper left-hand corner of the board. “Let this represent the emotions between us,” he said in a pleasant and even eager voice.
“Jack,” he said, “she was both a child and an adult. She was a woman. She was. Truly. The emotion is a difficult one to name, but not to feel, and we felt it. I’m trying through this crude iconography to suggest the flow of emotional power—” He made an arrow point from the X to the right of the board. “Here. This might represent the field of power that flowed from her house to mine and, naturally—” He made an arrow that moved back to the X.
“Let me add this for clarity,” he said. He circled a Y. “I’ll be Y,” he said. “Understand?
“Now.” He made a crude drawing of a house under X and another, sloppier, under Y. Below them, he crosshatched an area. “The corn-field behind our houses. We’ll assume the snow.” He looked up, smiling a boy’s shy smile. “I don’t know how to indicate the snow.”
He looked back at the chalkboard. “No,” he said. He wiped with his hand and forearm until most of his marks were gone.
“Try it this way,” he said, drawing a box with a rectangle in it. “Let X represent the bed.” He chalked an X into the rectangle. “Y, of course, is the house around it. And these”—he stabbed sharp small marks around the rectangle—“are tears. Not mine. I was the father, and the father never weeps. Well,” he said, looking at me with a friendly smile, “not that they know of, eh? She wept, Jack, like a baby. I comforted her, of course. That was what I did. But remonstrations, condemnations, confessions! She wanted us to confess. I think it was a momentary lapse to childhood from the small adult she’d become. I’ve seen it happen before. Children are like that, and we understand them.
“Jack, I urged her to be silent. To consider our pleasures, our friendship. We really shared a lot. We were silent, though. It was one of our conditions.”
I saw her sad mouth and the eyes that wanted so much to be happy. I saw her in the underwear her mother would call vulgar, and I closed my eyes against it. When I opened them, I saw Strodemaster bending to his board. But I couldn’t help seeing him roll her face into the bedclothes and lean on the back of her head until she suffocated. Or take her jaw in one large hand and cover her forehead with another, and jerk, so that her neck snapped and her eyes emptied out. Or, maybe, shake her and shake her and shake her and shake her until she simply broke.
He said, “Are you understanding all of this?”
He continued to lean down toward the chalkboard and study it. He slowly shook his head. With his forearm, he wiped and wiped.
“I don’t think I’ve made this clear,” he said. He looked at me and smiled sweetly with embarrassment. “And I’m the one they call a master teacher!”
I stepped toward him and my hand was up.
His face changed. When he spoke, his voice sounded thicker: “You can kill me, Jack, if you need to. But I have to tell you. It looks to me like something about this turned you on. Like you were with me for a while. Their little titties and their hands in your mouth.”
“I wouldn’t be you.”
“No, you can hit me all you want. I’m just tell—”
I used my left hand like a stiff board and I didn’t hit him all I wanted, maybe, but I hit him. I slapped his face. I was imagining how Mrs. Tanner would do it if she could. Left side, right side, left side, right side, left side, right. His face jolted. I was angry enough t
o do some damage.
“I don’t want to hear from you anymore how I’m your twin maniac brother. Because I am not a bad person. I am not, goddamn it. I am not a bad man.”
He had stumbled against the chalkboard, then moved forward to lean against the kitchen table. His feet were back in his vomit now. His smell had begun to rise. His face was bright red, with white spots on it from my palm and fingers and knuckles.
I said, “I want you to say now where she is. You can tell the state police about your love and then the terrible accident that happened when you were naked with but not meaning to fuck a fourteen-year-old girl who you killed without meaning to kill her. Your lawyer will tell you what to say so nobody believes you but you get off with time served and a free psychiatrist for life.”
“I wrapped her,” he said. “It was a sign of respect.” He turned toward the chalkboard but then faced me again. “I wound her in a sheet.”
“You buried her?”
“Of course.”
“Where?”
He pointed. The sleeve slid on his arm, and I saw strong muscles move. He was pointing toward the barn.
“In it?”
“Behind it.”
“In the ground?”
“In the snow above the ground. I’d have buried her properly, come spring.”
I saw her sad face come rising as the snow melted around her.
“You’ll have to show them.”
“I will.”
“First you have to walk to her mother’s house. Her mother and father’s house.”
“Not and talk to them.”
“Jesus, Professor, I hope I’m not making you uncomfortable or anything. I will not hesitate to fucking kill you. Putting your ass down would solve all kinds of problems, I want you to know. So just let’s do this.”
When we went down his back steps, we had his neighbors watching us. I guess they’d heard the shots. In little towns, they tell each other the news, and we had people in coats over bathrobes and nightgowns, pajamas or work clothes, on their porches or standing in their front walks when we covered the short distance to the Tanners’. Strodemaster was ahead of me, not wearing his glasses, wearing his dirty white T-shirt and holding his hands in his trouser pockets. He stumbled once because he stepped on his bootlace.
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