by Jeff Hull
“I have my dog at my house,” he said. “She’s a wonderful little dog. I need to feed her and let her out. Why don’t I go get some pizza from Pep’s and get my dog and I’ll bring them both back here? You’re going to need to eat, too.”
He could see her working that out, understood how it could feel both comforting and threatening to her.
“I’ll be back in less than an hour,” he said.
“What will I do?” she asked.
“Hm,” Tom said. “Well, can you think about where Mikie might be. You could take a shower …”
“My baby’s running for his life, and you’re talking to me about a shower,” she said. Tom noticed how close she had come to wailing it.
“It might just feel comforting. Hot water.” He could see that register.
“I’ll be back in less than an hour,” he said.
But he wasn’t.
He called in the pizza order while he drove home. He wanted to get Scout out, maybe bring her with him. It might be a long evening of not being home. He turned into his drive and crested the small rise, seeing the landscape fall away beyond, fall into sky and white distance. When he topped the rise and could see his house, he saw a car already there, a car he didn’t immediately know.
Tom drove slowly down the drive. Such a strange day, such strange things happening. The car was a low-slung sedan, not exactly useful for the kind of life most people led around Dumont. He saw the shape of the driver hunched in the seat. A young man-sized shape. He rolled slowly beside the vehicle.
Tom parked beside the car, looked over. The dark shape turned and had a face. Mike LaValle. It was impossible to think of him now as Mikie. Tom couldn’t help but wonder, how does one act in this situation? He thought about how much danger he might be sitting next to. Mike could have a gun. He had a knife. He couldn’t be too stable. It was possible he was unraveling, that he associated Tom with Matt, that he had an agenda. Which led to questions about how to act next. He could just drive away. Shift into reverse, turn around, drive fast out the driveway.
Call the sheriff, tell them to come get the kid. He had seen Mike’s eyes. Something made him not want to. He wanted to look away, like you do when you see a bear out in the woods, or a mean drunk in a bar. But right when Tom had been trying to figure out who it was, Mike had turned his face and looked right at Tom and their eyes had met. He couldn’t unsee those eyes.
They held defeat. Tom opened his door, stepped out and stood. He walked around the front of the truck and said, “Mike. How are you?”
Mike looked at the horizon, scratched the back of his head, and answered a different question. “I have these books,” he said. “Your books. I want to give them back to you.”
“Oh,” Tom said, “I’m in no hurry to get them back. You can keep them as long as you’re getting something out of them.”
Mike opened his car door, lifted up a brick of books, four of them. “Here,” he said. “I don’t think I’m going to get anything out of them anymore.”
“Okay,” Tom said. He didn’t want to move any closer, but he did. He took the books like it was no big deal, tucked them under his arm, gave Mike a searching look. “You wanna come in? I have to let my dog out.”
“Sure,” Mike said, “I guess.” Like he had nothing better to do. Like he wasn’t on the run in a way Tom could not imagine.
“Come on,” Tom said.
At the door, Tom could feel Mike at his back while he fumbled with the handle. Mike had come up fast and close. Tom thought maybe this was a huge mistake. Maybe Mike was only coming in to make sure he didn’t call the sheriff. But Mike didn’t seem that predatory. He didn’t seem to be hunting. He walked into Tom’s house and obviously wanted to see it. He peered around. First he petted Scout, who acted as if the floor was electrified and stepping on it for even fractions of a second sparked unbearable agony.
Tom held the door open and called Scout out. He was standing inches from the boy. He waved at his bookshelf. “There might be something there you find interesting. If there is, just grab it.” What he was thinking was: You’re going to have a lot of time to read in prison.
They spent some long, nervous moments with Mikie scanning the spines, pulling some books out and reading the backs or inside covers. He put them all back. Tom could tell he wished he didn’t have to. He stood and watched and pretended to watch Scout while she sniffed the aromatic news of what had happened in her yard since the last time she had been out.
“Did you ever do that workout, Mike? That one I gave you?” He knew Mike had—Caroline had told him—but wanted the boy to stay aware of connections.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Shit, yeah. I’ve been doing it every day for a while.”
“That’s great,” Tom said. “Great.”
Tom opened the door again, looked out into the snow for Scout. It’s funny, he thought, being at home on a cold and bright sunny day with a kid who killed somebody last night.
Mike stopped looking at the books, walked across Tom’s living room and sat on the couch. Which surprised Tom. What came next didn’t surprise him at all, but the deliberate gesture of comfort that set it up set him off guard. Tom sat in his armchair.
“You know what happened,” Mike said.
Tom wanted to be careful here. “I heard something happened. Everybody has heard different things. But I don’t know what actually happened.”
Mike slump on the couch and blew a huge sigh. He put his elbow on the couch arm and his hand came to his face and his fingers touched his lips gently, almost preciously.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Tom asked.
Mike cut a glance at him, looked away, stared out the window. His tone grew sleepy. “It’s prolly like they say.”
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I haven’t heard anything from anybody who was there. Most of what I heard was from your mom, and even she doesn’t know much.”
“You talked to my mom?”
“I went to your house, yes.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I,” Tom said, stretching it out, “thought she might need someone to talk to. She’s worried. She would really like to hear from you.”
“I can’t believe you went out there.” Tom couldn’t figure out if Mike was angry or impressed. The boy’s voice seemed to swerve between disinterest in everything around him to a piercing ferocity.
“I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but you would be doing a great thing for your mom if you just call her and let her know you’re alright.”
“You can let her know I’m alright.”
“I can. But it won’t be the same. She wants to hear your voice,” Tom said, and then thought to try, “like I would if you were my son.”
Maybe it was his thoughtful reckoning. Maybe they’d run out of things to say. A silence pervaded for the next little while, and Tom didn’t try to prick it. He kept looking at the kid on his couch, a pile of long bones leveraged in strange angles, a sharp, fierce face even in its obvious despair. But Tom couldn’t imagine this kid ending the undeniable, gonna-win, gonna-beat-you, gonna-star vitality that had been Matt Brunner. At every moment, Tom knew he should probably be calling the sheriff.
He would, when Mike left. Maybe right away, maybe a couple hours after the kid had a chance to get going. It occurred to him that he didn’t actually want Mike to be caught, to go into the system, though he supposed it was an eventuality and probably best for everybody. Even Mike. Between now and then there were spaces. The space between sympathy and kindness.
Between vindictive and shamed. Between what he knew everybody else would think and what he could live with. None of this would make him feel righteous, or even right. He’d already failed this boy so much. Why had they not sat like this months ago, sat and talked about books and history and heritage and hunting and girls and trouble and what was worth celebrating? Mike wiped the back of his hand across his face.
“I did it,” Mike said. “I’m not going to p
retend I didn’t. It was different than I thought it would be.”
Tom sat in silence, hearing the confession. It was what he’d always heard, the guilty always want to tell their story to someone.
“He was going to hurt me,” Mike said. “He was always going to hurt me.”
In his head, Tom was making the distinction between hurt and kill.
“I can go to Canada,” Mike said. “You can tell the cops or not. It doesn’t matter. I know so many little ranch roads that cross the border. They got Blackfeet reservations there, Peigans and Bloods. U.S. rules don’t matter.”
Tom pressed his lips together, nodded as if he were weighing the plan.
“Mike, why did you come here?”
“I don’t know. Bring your books back.”
“I’m going to ask again, because it matters. Why did you come here?”
“I don’t know. You always treated me nice. Better than most people.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Not really.”
“Okay,” Tom said, accepting the honesty.
“You knew him. You know what he’s like.”
“Yeah,” Tom said.
“I just wanted him to stop fucking with me. He was always fucking with me. I just wanted him to leave me alone and leave Josie alone.”
Tom’s first reaction was to say something about finding other ways to do that, but he was stuck with his own question. Why was Mike here? The enormity of what had happened meant the past was scorched earth. There was only next. Whether he could say it out loud, Mike must have come to him for help in figuring out how to get through the next part.
“Canada,” Tom said. “I can see why that sounds good. But that life, always running. Never seeing people you care about. Your mother. Josie …”
“Or I see them on visiting days, with handcuffs and all the shit?”
“Running is a dream, but it won’t be better,” Tom said.
“I’ve been having dreams about running,” Mike said. “About horses with white manes, running and running over the prairie and there’s never anywhere they’re going.”
Tom stood and peered around at his surroundings. He was going to let the dog in, he’d decided. He could hear her whining at the door. He wanted to give the boy some space. He didn’t know what Mike would do with it, though.
Mike sat up, scooted to the edge of the couch, propped his elbows on his thighs. His fingers seemed to be working out some intricate puzzle between his knees and he watched that process. Then he looked up, out the window, his eyes suddenly full of something, looking as if there were something to see out there instead of distance, something he might find right over the other side of those long horizon lines. Tom stood, stepped over to the couch, let his hand touch Mike’s shoulder. Mike didn’t acknowledge it.
“Your life won’t let you go, Mike. I can tell you have an idea of how it will be, but it won’t be that way. Even if you break clean, you have to live with you. You wake up every morning knowing everything you know about yourself. There’s no avoiding that. I can’t tell you what to do,” Tom said, “but I can tell you that sometimes the only way around the hardest parts is right through the middle of them.”
He patted Mike’s shoulder twice, then moved away, went to the door, let the dog in. Scout dashed for the boy but seemed to sense a trouble and veered instead to Tom. He scratched her ears, the back of her head, and then went into the kitchen and got her food from the pantry, filled her bowl. Scout ate every day like she was afraid he might pull the bowl away forever. Tom dumped her water bowl in the sink, then refilled it from the faucet. He spilled a little putting it back on the floor and got a towel to mop up the water. He didn’t hear the door open and close. He looked up when the engine started.
He watched through the window as Mike LaValle pulled out of his driveway. His eyes followed the car up the rise and he thought, I’ve failed again. He thought he should call the sheriff. First, he called Caroline Jensen.
* * *
On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Josie was walking from the high school to Pep’s after school, because they always did. Ainsley and Britnee always had cheese fries, though that seemed impossible in the days just after Matt Brunner had been stabbed to death. Impossible. But it was what they always did after school, before basketball practice, and she needed these girls now. She needed their physical presence, needed to know they were talking and thinking about the thing she couldn’t stop thinking about. Nothing they could do would ever change the things she knew, but she needed them with her to remind her of who she was. The car cruised up fast and halted, parked in front of them.
Ainsley let out a small scream. The day was sunny and bright in the way that only extreme cold can be bright—hard tight bands of pastel blues and whites stretching for endless miles in the sky, sun glittering on old snow. Josie knew he’d be slumped in the driver’s seat. Britnee grabbed her triceps and yanked her toward the bar, but Josie whirled her arm like a fencer and broke the grip.
“I have to …” Josie said.
“You don’t,” Britnee said, then to Ainsley, “Call 911.”
“He killed Matt,” Ainsley said. “What if he kills you?”
Ainsley tried to grab her, too, but Josie easily sidestepped and trotted the few steps to the car. Ainsley and Britnee both dug cell phones from their pockets. Mikie rolled the window down. He didn’t open the door. Josie did. She pulled the door open, leaned in and hugged him. He twisted and tried to return the embrace. He wound up hugging her arm.
“What did you do, Mikie?” she said into his neck. “What did you do?”
“I had to see you,” he whispered.
“They’re calling the sheriff,” she said.
“I don’t care. I’m not going to run away.”
She pulled back, her hands still on his shoulders, and squatted down in the open door space. She realized that part of her wanted to be hidden, though she knew she wasn’t.
“What did you do, Mikie?” she asked again, not a question in search of an answer, but an acknowledgment that a huge and permanent thing had occurred.
“It was gonna happen,” Mikie said.
Josie moved her hands, held his face. She wasn’t hearing what he was saying. Still squatting, she looked at Mikie, tried to remember a different version than this gaunt, exhausted boy with sinkhole eyes. She tried to remember him on top of her, the way he looked and felt to her in the backseat of this same car, by the reservoir that night.
But she failed, and she found herself holding his face and asking, Who is this boy? She felt so afraid for him. She knew what would come next would be horrible. She reached into the car, let her fingers run through his hair. She liked the feeling of his hair, the glossy strands falling over each other in her fingers like they were liquid.
“You’re turning yourself in,” she said.
“It was self-defense. Anybody who was there could see it. You could see it.”
Josie nodded, not sure of what she could see, not wanting to be told what she should see.
“Everybody saw it,” Mikie said. “He said he was going to kill me.”
Josie was glad she got to see him one more time. She was glad he wasn’t going to try to run anymore. She didn’t want to be part of any alibis. She didn’t want him to ask her that. Whatever happened to him would happen without her. Down the street she could see two sheriff’s deputies rush out of their headquarters and start running toward them.
Maybe it was that she didn’t have anything else to say. Or maybe it was that the deputies ran fast. Either way, nothing more was said before the two men crossed her vision at the hood of the car, and she stepped back suddenly to leave them a clear path to Mikie. She stood a few feet away as they tore him from the car, whipped him over the hood, slamming his head and wrenching his hands behind his back for the handcuffs.
And then Mikie was just walking down the street, right past Pep’s and the IGA and the abandoned real estate office like it was any other day—exce
pt he was walking fast, jostled, his hands cuffed behind his back and men holding onto each arm.
* * *
The trial happened quickly, less than three months later. There seemed no reason to delay. The courts had an opening for murder. The lawyers couldn’t come up with requests that would delay. There was no countervailing evidence. Tom had no desire to see the trial, but he’d been told he might be called as a character witness, and so he had to drive to Great Falls. Jenny wanted to go, too, but too many other people would be missing from school, she thought. She should stay and try to add to the normalcy. Tom drove by himself. He had never been to a trial. He’d been called for jury duty, but never asked to serve. He walked into the lobby of the La Quinta in Great Falls and saw Cal and Judy Frehse walking out. Of course Josie would be a witness, but he hadn’t thought about her being here. It seemed like too much to ask.
Cal greeted him a little too loudly, said, “Never thought we’d run into each other for this.”
“I don’t think this is good for Josie,” Judy said, letting that linger long enough for Tom to agree. When he didn’t, Judy said, “She’s obsessing over it. She needs to move on. This isn’t helping.”
“Maybe there can be some closure here.”
“I can’t imagine he’ll get off,” she said.
Tom made a face to say he couldn’t imagine it either, but who knew? “He never said he didn’t do it.”
Cal shook his head at his feet. “How the hell did this all happen, Tom?”
“I just can’t imagine,” Tom said. He really couldn’t. Six months ago he’d been looking forward to coaching the most talented football team he’d ever had. He’d felt excited after long years of not feeling excited. Six months ago.
“I thought for a long time that boy would be my son-in-law,” Cal said. “I thought I knew all about him. Then he jumped the rails. Maybe this Indian kid had something to do with that.”
“I wonder about that,” Tom said.
That night, Tom lay on the strange bed, a foam mattress that wanted to mold to the shape of his body. Nothing about that idea made it easy to sleep. He didn’t want to be called as a witness, by either side. Both attorneys had taken statements from him. Mike LaValle’s lawyer, a public defender in his mid-forties named Chris Gossens, sounded passionately perfunctory. From behind, you wouldn’t have to know he was a fat guy. Almost all the questions were leading, which was fine, he supposed in a deposition, but so obvious that Tom doubted the man’s cleverness. Still, Tom thought, if you were in your forties and still a public defender, you were either an ideologue or a failure, both of which were equally problematic. The prosecutor was pure prick.