by John Straley
Kevin Sands spat at George Doggy and spoke with an icy voice of his own. “If he dies, you will never shut me up, you fucking piece-of-shit low-life.”
George reached around behind Kevin and took the heavy black flashlight from the utility belt of the officer holding Kevin’s cuffs.
“If he dies, you will never shut me up. I’ll be—”
George Doggy whipped the handle of the flashlight down across the forehead of the handcuffed man. The blow cracked against Kevin’s face and sounded vaguely as if we were back splitting wood. Kevin’s face blossomed with blood, and he fell down on the wet ground as if he had been dropped from a plane. Only one small kid actually saw the blow; everyone else was watching them load Sean into the ambulance, hoping, I suppose, to see exposed wounds.
The large cop must have wrenched his back when his prisoner fell. He hadn’t been watching either. The cop picked himself up stiffly and for some reason apologized to George Doggy.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he offered lamely.
“That’s all right, son.” Doggy handed him his flashlight back. “He was just making a move for your weapon and I needed to get his attention. We don’t have to mention it.”
“Thank you, sir,” the large cop said earnestly.
“Don’t mention it,” Doggy said with a smile. He turned away from Kevin and the officer, then spoke to me.
“What did you do with my truck? I hope to heck we can get it out of here.”
I pointed mutely toward his red pickup down in the ditch near the bottom of the hill. Kevin Sands was moaning. Someone had broken the lining of a chemical ice pack, wrapped it in paper towels, and laid it on the hood of the car. The large cop jammed Kevin’s face down on it.
The one little white kid who had seen the blow was staring at George Doggy with a mixture of fear and awe. Doggy waved to him and said, “Stay out of trouble now,” and the wide-eyed kid nodded his head in absolute agreement.
“You need a ride from here or what?” Doggy said to me. His voice was strangely conversational, I thought, for a man who had just assaulted a prisoner.
“No, I’m fine,” I lied.
He waved to me and ambled down the lane of emergency vehicles with the photo album, still wrapped in evidence tape, tucked under the arm of his canvas woodcutting coat.
4
I followed George Doggy down the hill for three steps, then turned and doubled back. Two of the officers watched me intently as I walked toward the scene. They had loaded Kevin in the back of a cruiser. People, women and skinny kids mostly, were still loitering around. Some were standing on their tiptoes trying to peer over the cops’ shoulders. I knew I couldn’t be seen asking questions or Pomfret would hustle me away. I sidled into the group of gawkers and listened to their conversation.
From my eavesdropping I pieced together how the police had ended up killing Patricia Ewers. One of the neighbors had called in a domestic argument. Patricia was out of control. Kevin Sands started wrestling with the cops trying to throw them out of the house. At some point Patricia had a gun in her hand and the young police officer shot her. I was guessing that it would all be laid out neatly in the police reports: Kevin was going to be held for assault on the officers and for an assault on Patricia.
Back up the hill a phone rang and a tired voice called a woman’s name. The cops slammed their car doors and the group of gawkers broke up and drifted away on the plank walkways sunk in the mud between their homes. I turned down the hill.
I walked the rest of the way home and crawled into bed without eating supper. Jane Marie looked in on me at suppertime but didn’t try to get me up. After washing the dishes she put the baby in her crib and came to bed. She cradled her body around my back as we lay on our sides.
I had a hard time believing it. Lying next to my lover that night I couldn’t help shivering. Why had Doggy talked about drugs? What was in the photo album that Sean was willing to kill me for? The night came on with gusts of wind rattling the upstairs windows. I heard an aluminum can rolling down the street.
As I drifted to sleep I thought I heard the hammer crack of a gun echoing around metal walls. I could taste gasoline in my mouth.
The morning came too soon, even though the sunlight did not. My family was “up and at ’em” before the fingers of the rose-colored dawn stretched over the wine-dark sea or however Homer had put it. It was early. It was dark. And it was time to hit the garage sales.
Going early to a garage sale had always seemed like checking into the hospital just before noon so you could get lunch. I could lie in bed all day long and not worry if anyone was going to get to those stacks of National Geographics before me, but there was a new urgency in my family and it was impossible to sleep with the clamor of pre-bargain anxiety.
I was on push-up number one hundred and sixty-two when Todd came into my room and gazed down at me with a clinical look of intense interest, as if he were checking to see whether I was dead yet and he would have to pick my body up by himself.
“Cecil, I have been looking at the street map and considering how we might want to approach the order in which we attend the various sales. Of course, one factor is when we will be leaving. Do you know when you will be ready to go? “
Todd was asking this with no sense of peevishness. He was merely curious. I lay facedown on our bedroom carpet breathing hard. I was wearing nothing but my underwear.
“Fifteen minutes. Five for the rest of the push-ups, five to dress, and five to drink a cup of coffee,” I said into the short nap of the rug.
“I see,” Todd said, then closed the door.
Todd has lived with me for some ten years now. He is my age, and yet I am his guardian. Todd has been called everything from retarded to autistic to learning impaired, but none of those labels really gets to the heart of who he is.
Todd is a pair of eyes and ears; he is a human instrument that takes in data and processes it according to certain prescribed rules, and these rules are designed by him to help him perform his vital function: gathering information. The problem, or perhaps the magic, is that all this information, while stored, is not integrated into what most of us think of as “a personality.” Todd forms attachments: to me, to his dog Wendell, and to Jane Marie, but only because he has memorized his part. He relates quite well to his dog, but he does not play with him. He feeds, speaks to and attends to Wendell, but he can’t really play with the dog because “playing” has an abstract purpose Todd can’t comprehend. Just as I cannot understand Arabic, he doesn’t read the social signals other people try to send him. As far as emotion goes, Todd knows frustration and panic. He can sense his own physical pleasure, but for any of the other emotional sensations which are not directly related to his presence, Todd has to play-act. He has little or no genuine empathy, not because he doesn’t recognize warmth in other people, but because he has nothing in his own heart to compare it to. This makes him by turns endearing and irritating. Todd is not so much a fish swimming in the river of this life as he is a net strung across it. He scoops up all the facts and makes his own idiosyncratic sense of them. Living with him is like living in an experimental theater production where a bad actor is playing the part of an affable middle-aged man.
Todd has serial passions, areas which grab his attention at the cost of almost all other things. Our house has revolved around caring for his dogs, studying photography, and building his vocabulary. But his newest passion is hunting for bargains, and he is aided in this endeavor by Jane Marie.
Todd takes lessons at a center for independent living where they stress the value of money management. When he discovered that there were people who were willing to part with items from their homes at well below the replacement cost, each purchase at a garage sale felt like pure profit to him.
Our house is now full of carnival glass and transistor radios, manual typewriters and downhill skis. We finally had to give
Todd an allotment of space in his room and the shed. Todd now sells his treasures on the first weekend of each month just to make room for more stuff, and hence, we end up having garage sales of our own.
Todd has grown more discriminating and now specializes in technical gear: cameras, projectors, tape recorders and such. He has less use for sporting equipment and will not buy a gun even if it is offered at a steal of a price. Todd was once shot through the chest by a person who was aiming for me, and this has soured Todd on the investment value of firearms. Jane Marie buys clothes for all our extended family and has informants out in the community looking for baby gear. Our phone almost melted down with calls one Saturday morning when a used car seat in perfect condition and an antique bassinet were going for two dollars each at eight o’clock over at Coast Guard housing.
Today Todd had heard rumors that there was a selection of super-8mm movie cameras offered up at a sale near the ferry terminal. Todd was very respectful of people who advertised “No early birds,” but neither did he want to sit by and let the day waste away to nothing. The thought of seeing someone walk away with a box of super-8mm cameras before he had even had a chance to hold them in his hands irritated him; it was as if I, by doing pushups in my underwear, was in fact holding his hand in a fire made of hundred-dollar bills.
So I stopped my push-ups at one hundred seventy-five and quickly got dressed.
Jane Marie was dressed and carrying Blossom in the crook of her arm. She handed me a cup of coffee. “Did Patricia get hold of you yesterday, Cecil? She sounded pretty upset.” I had not told Jane Marie about the shooting when she crawled into bed with me last night.
I sipped the coffee, stood close to Jane Marie, rubbed the top of my daughter’s head and stroked my thumb on 0the tiny coin purse of her cheek.
“Patricia was shot dead by a police officer last night.”
Jane Marie at first looked blank and then almost angry. She shifted Blossom to her other arm and curled her away from me as if she could shield our baby from the sadness of what I was saying.
“Oh . . . oh . . . oh . . .” was all Janie could say.
“Do you remember exactly what she said to you yesterday?” I put my arms around both of them. Jane Marie buried her head in the cleft of my neck and shoulder.
“She said she was sorry she had been rude to you.”
I was about to explain more when Todd poked his head up the stairs that lead down to the front door on Katlian Street. “I don’t mean to interrupt, Cecil, but I was wondering if it would be possible to drive out toward the ferry terminal now. This could be a very good opportunity to buy some rare cameras at a reasonable price, and while I know your time with Jane Marie and the new addition to the house is very—” I waved him off and looked at the woman who loved me and who suffered over every act of violence that came into our sphere. She nodded, managed a smile, and we went down the stairs. Todd would not have stopped nattering at us even if we had been weeping openly and smearing ashes in our hair.
To the veteran garage-salers, the entire town becomes a large party on weekend mornings, and the party, instead of moving from room to room in a house, moves from house to house depending on where the sales are. A conversation started over a box of cloth diapers on Wortman Loop could continue over a broken desk lamp on Edgecumbe Drive. The talk on this morning was all about the shooting.
There were various versions. One version had Kevin Sands killing a police officer, and another had a police officer killing a child. Many people knew that Patricia Ewers, the wife of the Mygirl mass murderer, was dead, and everyone assumed drugs were involved.
We ran into Paulla, a tireless garage-sale veteran. We were riffling through a box of paperback books, which turned out to be mostly Christian tracts and sci-fi fantasies, when Paulla tapped Jane Marie on the arm and told her she had seen a wonderful handmade quilt at a sale over on Jeff Davis Street. Paulla said she had almost bought it for Blossom but wasn’t sure if we needed anything like that. Jane Marie thanked her and Paulla continued on quickly, “Did you hear about Patricia Ewers? I heard Kevin Sands killed her. Why would he do that? It was her husband he hated. That woman never did anything wrong . . . that I know about at least.”
“Have you seen Jonathan Chevalier?” I asked.
Paulla was twisting the knobs of a handheld two-way radio that seemed to be dead. She said, “Dave told me he saw him outside the Pioneer Bar last night.” She set the radio down and looked at it without speaking for a moment as if she were lost in thought. Then she looked at us and her face was tired and sad. “Someone should tell Jonathan, I suppose. He had no love of Ewers either.”
Todd bought the entire box of super-8mm cameras and parts for six dollars. And although he looked happy, he wasn’t satisfied, for now there was the fixing and fussing and trying to assess just what their true value would be. This is the soul of the garage sale: assessing value on the things we don’t really want anymore. It’s a hard thing to do. How do you know what a piece of your life is worth, even a small and insignificant piece? For most of us, it’s really too painful to contemplate for long. We just sell it cheap and quickly turn away. But this was harder yet for Todd, because for whatever accident of neurological chemistry that had made him forever unique, Todd did not have a sense of his life the way we did. He would not cry over Jane Marie’s death, as he would not really cry over mine. He would seek more information and try to stuff more things into his memory, but in the end there would never be a fully feeling human being there. I looked at him and, as I so often did, I wanted to cry. I wanted to reach into his head and make the tiny adjustments necessary that would allow him to love and play and even grieve. But I knew he never would. Todd possessed a fine collection of human qualities without ever having the chance to become fully human himself. It made me mad when I thought about it that way, which is why I rarely do.
Jane Marie bought some plastic baby cups and a chair that could hook onto a countertop. She bought herself a blue wool sweater. She got me six rusty salmon lures which were very much like the ones I used to troll for king salmon and two cushions for our skiff.
Jane Marie drove us home by eleven o’clock. I had a call on the answering machine to come to the hospital immediately to see Sean Sands. It was a nurse from the hospital who called. She was whispering, giving the impression she was making the call covertly. I had to hurry, she said. Sean was to be released this morning and she said I needed to see him before that happened.
I walked down my street. The sky was dark, but it was no longer raining. As I walked past some of the oldest houses on Katlian Street, some Native families were working on one of the clan houses. The Coho house was owned by the members of the Coho clan. One elder and his family were allowed to live there with all of the regalia that belonged communally to the Coho people. The word of a powerful storm was making its way around Katlian Street, and the Cohos were shoring up their house. Some young men were on the metal roof nailing along the edges, and some of the women were screwing shutters onto the front windows. A child on a bike lounged over the front of his handlebars and took in the entire scene. From the roof, Mark waved down. “Cecil, you better get that roof of yours nailed on tight. They say it’s going to blow big time!” I waved at Mark and agreed. I knew he was right, but I had to go to the hospital before I could tighten up my house.
As I walked past, a gust of wind came unexpectedly from the west and the trees above the street churned and twisted. A raven sat hunched on an abandoned truck waiting for the garbage cans to blow over. He said nothing to me as I passed him.
At the hospital, the nurse who had called me was waiting near the entrance. She ushered me in as if we were sneaking past the guards. She said, “Good, you made it. He’s only got another half hour here. I think he really needs to talk to you.”
Sean was sitting on the edge of his bed in his street clothes: black sweatpants and camouflage T-shirt. His hai
r was neatly combed. Under his shirt I could see the bulge of bandages across his chest. His stomach hung over his waist, and he had that melancholy expression fat boys sometimes have when they are sitting at rest: their cheeks hang down, palling their eyes into thin crescent slits.
I shut the door before he lifted his head up and when he did, his eyes widened and his cheeks reddened.
“Where’s that book? My picture book?” the frightened boy asked.
“A policeman has it. What’s in that photo book, Sean?” I looked at him steadily, but he turned away.
“Just some stuff. Stuff that’s private. Nobody’s business. What policeman? Is he looking at it?”
“The old guy who was talking through the door—George. He took it. He said he wasn’t going to look at it. He really did wrap it in tape, you know.”
“Big deal,” Sean snorted. Then he looked at me hard. “Kev says you dropped a dime on him. Is that true? You ratted Kev out?”
“Sean,” I said, as I held my hands wide, palms open. I sat in a rocking chair at the end of the bed. “I don’t even know what Kevin was up to. I sure as hell couldn’t have ratted him out.”
The boy swung his feet and banged his heels against the bottom rail of the hospital bed. He looked straight at the floor without speaking.
“Why don’t you tell me what he was up to? I can help him, you know. I’ve helped Kevin get out of jams before. I’ll get him hooked up with a lawyer and I won’t talk to the cops. Just tell me what he’s up to.”
“So who’s got that picture book?” Sean swatted an invisible fly and asked the floor.
“I told you. That old guy. He’s retired now but they still sort of let him run things. Listen, I’ll get the book for you. Just tell me what Kevin was up to. What was in the safe? “