by John Harvey
Light-gray suit, something slightly off about the seams. Plucked from a mark-down rack at Mervyn’s, Dillard’s? Blue shirt that had ridden with him through many days just like this one, darkish red tie that from the look of deformations above and below the knot must turn out a different length most times it got tied. Clothes don’t make the man, but they rarely fail to announce to the world who he thinks he might be.
‘Sergeant Wootten. Bill.’ He sipped from his own cup. ‘You don’t have kids, do you, Mr Parker?’
Parker shook his head. The sergeant shook his in turn.
‘My boy? Sixteen? I swear I don’t know what to make of him, haven’t for years now. Not long ago he was running with a crowd they all had tattoos, you know? Things like beer can tabs in their ears, little silver balls hanging out of their noses. Then a month or so back he comes down to breakfast in a dark-blue suit, been wearing it ever since. Go figure.’
‘What can I do for you, Sergeant?’
‘Courtesy visit, more or less.’
‘You realise that I remember almost nothing of what happened?’
‘Yes, sir. I’m aware of that. Very little of what happened, and nothing from before. But paperwork’s right up there with death, taxes and tapeworms. Can’t get away from it.’
Holding up the empty cup, Parker told him thanks for the coffee. The sergeant took Parker’s cup, slipped his own inside it, dropped both in the trash can by the door.
‘I’ve read your statement, the accident reports, spoke with your doctors. No reason in any of that to take this any further.’
He walked to the window and stood quietly a moment. ‘Beautiful day. Not that most of them aren’t.’ He turned back. ‘Still don’t have a handle on what happened out there.’
‘Nor do I. You know what I remember of it. The rest is gone.’
‘Could come back to you later on, the doctors say. They also say you’re out of here tomorrow. Going home.’
‘Out of here, anyway.’
‘We’ll need a contact address in case something else comes up. Not that anything’s likely to. Give us a call.’
The sergeant held out his hand. Quentin shook it.
‘Best of luck to you, Mr Parker.’
When he was almost to the door: ‘One thing still bothers me, though. We can’t seem to find any record of you for these past four years. Where you were living, what you were doing. Almost like you didn’t exist.’
‘I’ve been in Europe.’
‘Well, that’s it then, isn’t it. Like I said: best of luck, Mr Parker.’
There was a time alone then, first in an apartment off Van Buren in central Phoenix where Quentin found comfort in the slam of car doors and the banging of wrenches against motors, in the rich roll of calls in Spanish across the parking lot and between buildings, in the pump and chug of accordions and conjunto bands from radios left on, it seemed, constantly; then, thinking he wanted to be truly alone, in an empty house just outside Cave Creek. Scouting it, he discovered credit-card receipts for two round-trip tickets to Italy, return date a month away. No neighbors within sight. He had little, few possessions, to move in. He parked the car safely away from the house.
There was a time, too, of aimless, intense driving, to Flagstaff, Dallas, El Paso, even once all the way to New York, road trips in which he’d leave the car only to eat and sleep, as often as not selecting some destination at random and driving there only to turn around and start back.
He thought little about his life before, about the four men he had killed, still less about his present life. It was as though he were suspended, waiting for something he could feel moving towards him, something that had been moving towards him for a long time.
‘Thanks for picking me up.’
‘You’re welcome. Guess I’d been kind of hoping you’d call.’
They pulled onto Black Canyon Freeway. Late afternoon, and traffic was heavy, getting heavier all the time, lines of cars zooming out of the cattle chutes. Clusters of industrial sheds – automotive specialty shops and the like – at roadside as they cleared the cloverleaf, then bordering walls above which thrust the narrow necks of palm trees and signage, sky beyond. The world was so full. Ribbons of scarlet, pink and chrome yellow blew out on the horizon as the sun began settling behind sawtooth mountains. Classical music on low, the age-old, timeless ache of cellos.
The world was so full.
‘Had breakfast?’ Julie asked.
Caught unawares, she’d thrown an old sweatshirt over grass-stained white jeans a couple sizes too large. Cheeks flushed, hair still wet from the shower. Nonetheless she’d taken time to ferret out and bring him a change of clothes. Her husband’s, Parker assumed. They had the smell of long storage about them.
‘Little late for that, don’t you think?’
‘Breakfast’s a state of mind. Like so much of life. More about rebirth, things starting up again, knowing they can, than it is about time of day. It’s also my favorite meal.’
‘Never was much of a breakfast person myself.’
‘You should give it a try.’
‘You’re right. I should.’
She nodded. ‘There’s a great café just ahead, breakfast twenty-fours a day, best in the valley. You got time?’
‘I don’t have much else.’
‘Good. We’ll stop, then. After that . . . You have a place to stay?’
‘No.’
‘Yes,’ Julie said. ‘Yes. You do.’
LIFE BEFORE THE WAR
John Straley
Afterward, when I was riding the train back to Anchorage, I noticed that the sky over the interior of Alaska was so vast it felt as if the top of my head was rising into the air. The few clouds around the top of Mount McKinley’s twenty-thousand-foot summit seemed like wisps of inconsequential smoke. This is the mountain the Athabaskan people call Denali or ‘The Great One’, and I would not have argued with them.
Earlier in the day I hadn’t noticed the mountain. I had been in a sour mood and it may have been because I was only serving a subpoena. The lawyer who had hired me to dump these papers had no understanding of Alaskan geography. He had called from Eugene, Oregon, and told me that cost was no object. His client wanted the papers served right away. He represented the wife in a divorce case and she knew her ex-husband was climbing McKinley. She wanted the papers dropped on him in the post-coital high he would be experiencing after he had summited North America’s tallest peak.
The lawyer had no idea where I lived in relation to Mount McKinley. Through a friend of his, he knew I was in Alaska. That I lived in the southeastern panhandle of the state meant nothing to him. To ask me to serve papers on someone near Denali would be like hiring an investigator from Baltimore to drop papers on someone in Montreal. Denali was a hell of a long way away: almost a day of flying, one leg west to Juneau, then an hour and a half by jet to Anchorage, and then a train ride of some two hundred miles to the town of Talkeetna, which served as headquarters for the area climbers.
I told him all this. I told him I lived on an island on the Gulf of Alaska and that there were easier ways to get his papers served but he didn’t listen. He had tried some Anchorage servers and apparently wasn’t happy with their attitude so he settled on me and whatever expenses I wanted to rack up. His client was paying for it and she was not particular. She was going to nail her ex for all the legal expenses anyway so, in a sense, I would just be spending his money.
The money, what there would be of it, didn’t matter much as I stood in front of Eagle’s Nest bar in Talkeetna. I had the papers sitting in my pocket and they felt less like a paycheck than an overdue library book I needed to dump. The husband’s name was Garth Holebrook; he was an anaesthesiologist from Portland. I had found him through talking to the kid who worked the desk at a flight service in Talkeetna. A plane had brought Dr Holebrook back from the base camp on the mountain and the kid knew that the climbers would be celebrating in the Eagle’s Nest.
Where I live, it rains har
d. Even in these early days of July the clouds can move in from the sea and curl against the mountains for weeks at a time. Living in southeastern Alaska is sometimes like living with a head cold. So for me the summer air in the northern interior has a biting narcotic thrill. The air is so dry and pure it can feel like a hit of cocaine. I looked through the one window into the bar to get a vague layout of where people were sitting, then I took a long breath in through my nose and walked into the clattering bar.
Serving court papers is a straightforward job. The server has no real authority other than his physical presence. The subpoena gains its authority from the judge. Once in the physical possession of the named recipient all arguments are channeled through the court. The server only has to identify the recipient and hand the papers over. The recipient doesn’t have to be happy about it. They don’t even have to hold them in their hands; they just have to acknowledge their receipt. Ripping them up in your face is acknowledgement enough. I keep a copy and take it back to the court, then I collect my hundred bucks and expenses.
My father had been a Superior Court judge. He had encouraged me to follow my sister’s path into law school, but I never did. He could never understand that I liked this end of the law. I liked talking to people and I liked the physical authority which comes from wandering around in the real world. I liked living out from under the tangle of legal jargon. Serving subpoenas had always been enough for me. I was happy to leave the arguments to my sister and my good father.
Inside the bar six men and three women were sitting at one long table near the back. The climbers sat behind pitchers of beer looking drowsy and a little bit sad. All of these well-heeled adventurers had reverse racoon tans: weathered faces but pale around the eyes. The men had their fleece shirtsleeves rolled up to their elbows and their two-hundred-dollar sunglasses perched on their foreheads. I sat in a booth across the bar and looked over the top of the lunch menu toward the table where I was fairly certain my guy was sitting.
I had a description of him from the lawyer. Dr Holebrook was forty-eight years old, had brown hair and brown eyes, was six foot three and weighed one hundred ninety pounds. He was sitting at the head of the table next to a blonde woman wearing a red beret and a white sleeveless undershirt. They were leaning toward one another, their heads almost touching, speaking softly.
I never drop papers on someone when it causes embarrassment, not if I can help it. I once had to serve papers on a Tongan prizefighter in Ketchikan. He was working for a logging outfit back in the days when logging camps were good places to hide out. He had a reputation for having a bad temper. I watched him for several days, in the bar or in the café early in the morning waiting for the rest of his crew to show up. He seemed like a friendly guy and was always in a conversation with the waitresses or someone at the counter. Finally I got him as he was coming out of the bathroom and he simply thanked me in a soft, almost feminine voice as he stuffed the papers in his sleeping-bag-sized cargo pockets.
Once I served a cab driver in Valdez and he started screaming so loudly he woke the neighbors. I was standing in his arctic entryway surrounded by boots and mismatched snowshoes. He had been hassled by everyone, he screamed. The police, the insurance company. He was sick of it, sick of everything. I didn’t try to argue with him. He had a knife in his hand and I backed away slowly. Even with the knife, I wasn’t afraid. His pride was just injured because I had gotten him out of bed in his dirty long underwear. He was sleepy and embarrassed but he still had enough sense not to kill the guy with the subpoena, for deep down he recognised me for what I was: the delivery boy.
My climber laughed and pushed back a bit in his chair. ‘No. No. No. You don’t understand. The gnostics were considered to be heretics. You see, they thought that everything in creation was corrupt.’ The blonde woman’s eyes glittered like chunks of ice and my climber gestured wildly around the bar.
‘You see, it was a special knowledge that led a person toward God. This was before faith as we think of it. The gnostics believed divinity was a matter of knowledge.’
‘So . . .’ the woman said and she wobbled in her chair . . . ‘you mean there was no God out here?’ and she gestured toward the window, by which she meant the world, Mount McKinley, New York, Kosovo and Jerusalem.
Dr Holebrook was feeling the heady rush of late-afternoon drunken metaphysics. He would not be happy to have the subpoena from his ex-wife.
‘There was no hippy, pantheist crap. The world was corrupt and the path to God was through knowledge alone. Knowledge you had to earn.’
He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms back over his head. He had a certain self-satisfied countenance that made me almost certain that now was not a good time to interrupt him. He was in the throes of happy abstract musings, trying hard to impress this beautiful woman. It was not a good time to let him know that his ex-wife was going to bring him back into court to take possession of the Range Rover and a thousand more dollars a month in child support.
But we all have the same amount of time in a day and there wasn’t enough in this particular one for me to wait much longer. I needed to catch a train. A couple of his drinking companions got up and left, saying something about grabbing a shower. I wanted to wait until he was a bit more alone before I dropped the paper on him. Ideally it would have been best to wait until the pretty blonde woman went for her shower. The combination of arrogance and flirting was a deadly one for the humiliation of a court order, but this woman was going to have to move along soon, or I was going to risk bruising the doctor’s vanity anyway.
Holebrook leaned in close and poured himself and the blonde woman another beer from a fresh pitcher. I settled in. I would get him when he got up from the table. If they were walking out the door I’d ask him to step aside, catch him so the woman could walk easily ahead of us. I’d call his name, act like an old friend or a patient that he didn’t quite recognise, wave her on as if it would just be a minute of inconsequential business and then I’d drop it on him.
I had another tonic water and lime. I hadn’t had a drink in three years and I wasn’t missing it. But even so, I felt foggy-headed and could feel the northern sunlight trying to pierce through the nail holes in the roof.
My father had been a climber of the old leather shoe and manila rope variety. He had done first ascents on six peaks in the southeastern panhandle. ‘Nothing spectacular,’ he often said dismissively. ‘Just a walk up a steep hill nobody else had had a reason to take.’ But he wasn’t really dismissing his achievement, he was dismissing everybody else who hadn’t done it.
He had taken me with him when I was twelve. It was only one time. I remember the approach up through the rainforest, hopping over the muddy little creeks and getting tangled in the brushy alder thickets along the rock slides. I remember my lungs burning before we even got to the alpine. I remembered the thrill of walking out into the alpine, and I would have been happy just sitting there all day. In the alpine the walking was clear and I could see the islands scattered out on the ocean below us. The steep pitch of the summit wasn’t calling me. I rested there on my back in the grass and ate both my candy bars while my father scowled at his watch.
Later, up on the face, my legs gave out, and when my thigh muscles spasmed as if I were trying to peddle an antique sewing machine, my father tried to talk me through it. ‘Focus,’ he said. ‘Feel your weight close in to the rock. Keep your three points anchored while you lift the fourth to the next higher point. Don’t look down.’
He was trying to be calm, and in his own way he was trying to be gentle, but I could feel the irritation in his voice ease down on me as if it were an extra surge of gravity trying to strip me off the rock. When I looked down I felt the wooziness of vertigo and dread that seemed to be some kind of pre-falling sensation. My muscles were both clinging to the rocks and wanting to let go.
He virtually pulled me up the side of the mountain that day. I was shaking when I reached the summit, but I did not cry. The world, the forested i
slands and rumpled hills, circled our perch as if my father had created them all just for me. ‘You did it, boy,’ he said. ‘You can think back on this day for the rest of your life and be proud.’ But of course it didn’t turn out that way.
My father’s life was built on certainty. He knew we could make it up the mountain and we did. This is what my mother loved about him and what she always doubted about me. She said I was never going to be a climber. She said I was too fond of finding ‘smoke’s way’ out of any difficult situation. She said this with what I later recognised was disdain, but for years I had honestly thought of it as a compliment.
The doctor stretched again. He and the blonde were the only two people at the table. He reached over and touched the side of her face, and then she got up from the table and walked over to the bathroom.
I tore the recipient’s yellow copy from the subpoena, pushed the original for the court into my pocket and walked over to the edge of the table with the yellow copy in my hand.
‘Dr Holebrook?’ I asked. He looked up at me with a dreamy expectation as if he were waiting for me to compliment him on his climb.
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling.
‘I’ve got some papers for you. They are from your wife’s lawyers. If you have any questions about them, there’s a number on the bottom you can call,’ and I gave him the subpoena.
He reached up and took it, then laid the paper flat on the table. He stood up slowly, letting out his breath as if he were trying to think of the words to thank me for my long trip out to find him. Then he punched me in the mouth.
I don’t know if Dr Holebrook had ever sucker-punched anyone before, but he definitely had a gift for it. The physics of a sucker punch are easy enough to understand. The more relaxed the recipient is, the more damage the blow inflicts. Getting in that first hard shot nine times out of ten ends whatever conflict there will be.
I thought of the beauty of this as I was lying on the floor. Blood was filling my mouth and as I leaned forward, first my lips and then my tongue pressed against the six teeth, three upper, three lower, which were folded back inside my mouth.