The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  Another breeze blew the yellow tape around the lawn, snagging weeds and blades of grass on its way.

  “I’m not the bad guy here,” he said quietly.

  “Michael, I want you to slow down a little. Why did you shoot Jeffrey?”

  “Because he comes into my town, marries a girl I know, and then kills her and dumps her in my river. On my watch. While she’s carrying my baby.”

  His face seemed to blur and then come back into focus as she tried to make sense of this.

  “I may not have been a lot of things,” he said. “I wasn’t the world’s greatest husband. I wasn’t the world’s greatest father. And I had more than my share of trouble with women. But I was always a servant of this community.”

  The word was buzzed and sizzled in the back of her brain. She realized she had no idea whether he was about to kill himself, kill her, or both.

  “Michael, I think we need to call Harold,” she said calmly. “Where’s your wife? Where are your children?”

  “They’re gone. It’s all gone. It wasn’t meant to last. You do your job for a little while and you’re either good or bad and then they throw the dirt over you and somebody else builds another anthill on top of that. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

  “I think you need to talk to somebody.”

  “I thought I was talking to YOU, Lynn.”

  Barry kept ducking and crawling among the tree stumps and sumac, trying to get a clear shot at Fallon from about fifteen yards. All these branches and shadows kept getting in the way. And the two of them were standing so close together, there was a chance he’d hit Lynn.

  “It’s all your fault,” he heard Fallon say. “Because you made me feel like there was more to it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lynn answered.

  Sorry? About what? He knelt down behind an elm trunk, trying to get a better angle.

  “Hey, you remember that one time we went swimming in the river?” Fallon was saying, his voice resonating down the slope. “Senior year. Right after they started to clean it up a little so it didn’t turn red every time they painted cars at the auto plant upstream?”

  Barry peeked out from behind the tree and saw Lynn listening with her shoulders tilted and her head hanging to the side, somehow looking smaller and more tentative than he was used to seeing her.

  “You remember how we got drunk and left our clothes on the rocks? Must’ve been October. Last good day of the year.”

  He watched his wife nod and touch the ends of her hair self-consciously. It was like seeing an old picture of her come to life.

  “You remember how cold the water was that day?” Fallon said. “Man, my nuts were up around my hips. It’s a miracle they still worked afterward. I couldn’t believe the current was so strong. You were like this little chick about half my size, but you were always twelve lengths ahead of me. I could never figure that out.”

  “I guess maybe I was just showing off.”

  There was a dip, a kind of concession in her voice. He saw them move a little closer together, and for a moment they looked like they were the real couple that belonged here, enjoying a sunny morning in front of their house, while he’d been turned into a trespasser. Everything seemed to get sucked down toward a draining funnel in the pit of Barry’s stomach. He started to stand up behind the tree. A shadow moved, giving him perhaps a foot or two of cover in the clearing.

  “I kept calling for you to come back, but you weren’t listening,” Fallon was saying. “You just kept going and going until I could hardly see you. But you know what I never told you?”

  “What?”

  Barry took a step out into the open and then crouched down against a rock, getting ready to fire.

  “That there was one second when I looked back over my shoulder and I saw the town. We must’ve been like two hundred yards out. And I realized I’d never seen it that way before, from that distance. And you know what? I didn’t like it. I don’t even know why, but I couldn’t stand to get that far away. I had to turn around and start swimming back right away. But you just kept going.”

  “I know,” said Lynn.

  “Lemme ask you something, Lynn.” Fallon started to reach for her arm. “Did you ever once think of looking back? Did you ever think of coming back for me?”

  As Barry stood up with the gun, Lynn forced herself not to look over at him, but something in the movement of her eyes alerted Mike. He whirled around, as if he’d been aware of Barry being there the whole time. He pulled the gun from his waistband and fired.

  Barry’s left side exploded in an angry red pop-spray. Lynn cried out as she saw him collapse against a sagging part of the fence. She heard mesh ripping, and then he was falling away from her, tumbling down the side of the hill and out of view.

  He felt stinging and air seeping through a hole in his chest. And then he was rolling down the side of the embankment, picking up speed, spinning in the wrong direction from the rest of the world, on his way to becoming just a body in the woods. He saw sky and then ground and then sky and then ground, as little pebbles and twigs stuck to his skin and tore at his clothes.

  He lost the gun and crashed sideways into a rotting tree stump some twenty yards down the incline, and found himself surrounded by discolored old fence posts and pickets with huge rusty nails sticking out of them. That idiot Anthony who’d replaced their old fence a few months ago must have just tossed the wood down over the side instead of tying it all up and taking it over to the town transfer station as he promised he would.

  Barry’s body took a pause and then screamed in agony. He wondered how long he’d be here before anyone found him. His thigh was ripped by rose thorns, the cap of his bad knee felt like it was on backward. His ankle was twisted at an impossible angle, and a warm ooze of blood had soaked the front of his shirt. So this is what it’s like. This is what it’s like to die within shouting distance of your home. He tried to pull himself up on the stump and call out to Lynn, but the rising wail of a siren coming down Prospect Road below drowned him out. Forty-eight years. That’s it. That’s all you get. He smelled pine and saw little white shreds of milkweed floating past his face, like pieces of a dream coming apart, and then he heard more sirens and the scampering of hooves somewhere high above him.

  As the police cars came tearing up the driveway, Mike grabbed Lynn by the throat, moved behind her, and jammed the barrel of the gun into her ear. Whatever fragile connection they’d made a few minutes ago was gone. He’d shot her husband. He smelled like emergency rooms and bad coffee, like stale sweat and the air after fireworks.

  A navy Buick pulled up in the shade of a great oak. Harold got out on the driver’s side, and Paco Ortiz climbed from the passenger seat.

  Two more Riverside Police patrol cars screeched to a noisy halt behind them, and a pair of officers jumped out of each one, assuming amateurish-looking shooter stances behind the open car doors, as if they’d never actually done this in real life. But to Lynn, it all seemed to be happening on a television playing in another room. She was dazed, seeing her husband falling off the edge of the world over and over again.

  “Hey, big man.” Harold put his hands up as he stepped out from under the oak branches. “What’s the story?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  She could feel Mike’s heart beating against the top of her spine. The stench of infection from his thumb turned her stomach. Where’s Barry? The shock was just starting to set in. Did I really just see the father of my children get shot?

  “I guess you didn’t get any of my messages,” said Harold, taking a cautious step forward.

  “I guess you didn’t get any of mine,” said Mike. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here, would we?”

  “You have me there, don’t you?” Harold gave a quiet chuckle, the undertaker trying to impose grace on squalid confusion.

  “Keep it where you got it, Chief.” The muzzle forced its way deeper into Lynn’s ear. “This is turning out to be one shitty day
so far.”

  “I know that.”

  What if he is dead? What am I going to do? Her thoughts were tumbling wildly.

  “He had it coming, Harold. He dumped her in the river like she was trash. And you were going to try and put it all on me.”

  “I know that too.”

  “So now what do we do?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Mike. I’m looking in for the signal.”

  A drop of greasy sweat on the back of her neck caused her to turn her head slightly and see some of Barry’s blood drying on the fence post. People get shot all the time and live. Sure, they do.

  “I’m not going to lie to you, man.” Harold shook his head. “It’s still a murder. Even with extenuating circumstances, we’re talking mandatory state time.”

  A few feet behind him, Paco Ortiz had his gun drawn and his arms extended in the shade of the oak.

  “That’s all right,” Mike said. “You don’t have to tell me what’s on the books.”

  “I’m just saying there’s time and there’s time. All right? I was thinking you’d maybe like to see the kids again before they get to be our age.”

  “You’re a little late on that one too, Chief. I got thrown out at home. Game’s over.”

  Baseball. My husband may be lying there bleeding to death, and they’re talking about baseball. Lynn tried to keep looking at the place where Barry had fallen, praying somehow he’d reappear, but Mike wrenched her face forward again, the mouth of the gun grinding a deep metal circle into the side of her head.

  “Let it go,” she said, her legs starting to tremble with cold marble knowledge that she could die here as well.

  “What?”

  The trembling started to work its way up her body. Where is Barry? Why isn’t he calling for me? Why don’t I hear his voice? Her nervous system was beginning to break down. You’re not outside the frame anymore. You’re the picture. Her eye began twitching. The sky became unnaturally bright. Stop it, she told herself. His forearm choked her, trying to get her to keep still.

  “You can’t keep holding on,” she said.

  She saw Harold give a tiny imperceptible nod, as if to say, Listen to the lady. Standing next to him, Paco closed one eye and looked down the sight of his Glock, focusing on Mike’s head just over her shoulder.

  “Just let it go,” she said. “I heard what you were telling me.”

  With that, she felt Mike’s lungs expand and compress against her back. The grip on her throat began to slip. The unibrowed sergeant who’d been ducking behind one of the patrol car doors started to rise with his gun. The slant of light Harold had been standing in widened, as if a door had opened in front of the sun.

  But then an acorn from the overhanging oak hit the hood of his Buick. Lynn saw it happen. A little breeze stirring the branches. A tiny nub falling and ricocheting off metal. Just a sign of the changing season. But the men, already on edge, panicked, thinking they’d been shot at. The sergeant with the monobrow ducked halfway into his car and fired wildly over the door, a bullet sizzling over Lynn’s head and splintering tree bark behind her.

  Muscles seizing, one arm crooked tight around Lynn’s neck, Mike shot back, fire jumping from his hand.

  The report echoed down the driveway and faded among the elms and oaks.

  Looking strangely befuddled, Harold slowly opened his navy jacket, as if he was checking the designer’s label.

  A red dot thickened like a wax seal over his breast pocket and then dripped down the front of his white shirt.

  “Oh my God!” Mike shouted. “Where’s your vest? Where’s your fucking vest?”

  Harold staggered back against the hood of his car and clapped his hand over the wound, blood pouring out between his fingers.

  “Are you insane?” Mike screamed at him. “I told you never to take it off. Didn’t I? Didn’t I?”

  Mike reeled back, still keeping Lynn in a half nelson, gasping and wheezing, “What’d I do? What’d I do?” under his breath. The other cops scrambled around Harold as he collapsed, trying to bear him up like the fallen king.

  “What happened?” Mike dragged Lynn back to the wooded edge of the slope. “What the fuck just happened?”

  “Okay. You have to give up now.” She gagged, hearing stirring in the brush behind her. “It’s over …”

  “But is he all right? Is Harold going to be all right?”

  The shock had loosened his grip on her neck again. She bolted, trying to pull away from him. He lunged after her off-balance, grabbing her by the collar. But then a sudden fierce grunt made them both turn at the same time.

  Barry smashed Michael in the side of the head with a fence post.

  Michael staggered back with the wood sticking to his temple and blood running down his cheek. Barry yanked it away, and Lynn saw there was a long crooked rusty nail on the end of it.

  Michael gave a long primal scream of anguish, as he cupped a hand over the wound. He spun around, and his other hand went up, firing the gun.

  Lynn hit the ground, covering her head as the bay window exploded behind her. When she looked up, Barry was hobbling frantically toward her, thinking she’d been shot. She started to wave and tell him she was all right.

  But then Mike lurched up right behind him, about to shoot him in the back of the head.

  “BARRY LOOK OUT!” She pointed behind him.

  He whirled around and hit Mike with the fence post again, flat in the face, right above the eye socket.

  Mike fell howling to his knees. The gun in his hand came up again, the hole a blind eye at the end of the barrel. Barry raised the wood above his head and brought it down on top of Mike’s skull, the wood splintering and making a sickening hollow thock as Mike fell face forward. Barry brought the post down a second time, and Mike’s whole body shuddered.

  “All right, that’s enough.” Lynn started running over.

  But Barry was in a tribal frenzy, clubbing him again and again, blood spattering with each blow.

  “Stop it!” She grabbed him and pinned his arms to his sides, trying to pull him back to his senses. “It’s done.”

  He pushed her aside and brought the wood down one more time across Mike’s back before he tossed it in disgust, finally exhausted and satisfied that the other man wasn’t getting up.

  Lynn reached up and took his face in her hands, forcing him to meet her eyes, dimly aware of Paco coming up into the yard and a phone ringing in the house.

  Gradually Barry’s breathing slowed, and after a few seconds, a crackling of twigs made both of them turn.

  Two gray-brown deer were bedded down at the edge of the property. Realizing they were being looked at, they both stood up at once and stared back at the humans, wondering what these strangers were doing on their trail. Then they turned and leaped away, supple-spined and indifferent, over the part of the fence that was still standing.

  63

  THE SNOW NEVER really came this year. Just a light wedge of frost before the holidays, not even enough to merit getting the driveway plowed. It was as if someone knew they already had enough cleaning up on their hands.

  All around town, slightly chewed-looking Christmas trees were lying on lawns and sidewalks, waiting to be picked up. The giant wreaths and snowflake decorations were coming down at the mall, and the post-holiday sale signs were going up. There were long lines to see the new movie about wizards and old demons in dark caves. On the radio, Afghan women were going to the hairdresser and painting their nails again, but a tall man had been caught trying to blow up a flight from Paris with explosives in his sneakers. Lynn heard the news and found herself wondering if it was the same flight they would’ve taken if they hadn’t ended up selling their tickets on eBay.

  “You got the check?” she asked as they left the closing at the lawyer’s office, across the street from the train station.

  “I got the check.” Barry patted the inside pocket under his bad shoulder.

  “You’ve still got fast hands.” She slid in on the driver
’s side of the Saab in the parking lot and unlocked the passenger’s door for him.

  “I can catch two flies at a time. I used to be able to catch three, but the flies found out about me.”

  They sat there quietly for a moment, not quite ready to go. The trunk was sagging with things they’d collected in their final walkthrough of the house, before the sale was finalized. They were loaded up with boxes of old linens, stray socks, second-best china, books that had been hiding under the bed for a year, pots that no one wanted at the final tag sale.

  “I didn’t see Emmie come in the conference room,” she said. “Did you?”

  “No. I just looked up from signing the papers, and there she was. She just materialized on the other side of the table while we were talking about when the oil company made deliveries.”

  “She looked good, I thought. Considering.”

  “Yeah. Considering.”

  This had been the season of funerals without the funeral director.

  Jeffrey’s was first. Saul quietly arranged for one of the national chains to spirit the body out of town and perform a service somewhere out near North Babylon on the island. According to Jeanine, no one from Riverside went. Michael’s funeral was a more complicated arrangement. Because he’d been suspended pending dismissal at the time of his death, there was no way to justify a full dress-blue, bagpipes, and war-drums ceremony. Instead there’d been an Irish wake that lasted for a few days, with Michael’s father propping himself up by the casket, warily accepting condolences from various cops, retired C.O.s, and half-forgotten friends who’d long since fled the Hollow. Again, there was no way Lynn would have attended, but Jeanine said that as acting chief, Paco Ortiz arranged for the family to receive three-quarter benefits.

  Harold’s was the last of the services. There were too many mourners for the old AME church in the Hollow to accommodate, so instead Saint Stephen’s was filled to the rafters with cops, town trustees, schoolteachers, Chamber of Commerce types, soccer moms, slacker dads, go-for-the-throat Wall Streeters, and, surprisingly, even a few local pot dealers who apparently held no grudge. It took a funeral to show the man knew everybody. Reverend Ezekiel P. Philips thundered from the pulpit about how Harold paid the price for being a pioneer, and sitting near the back, Lynn understood the larger point he was trying to make. But Emmie seemed far closer to the spirit of the man when she got up afterward and talked about Harold sitting in the living room late at night with the children asleep upstairs, paying his bills and watching a big polar bear on the Nature Channel, swimming back and forth across his little pond.