The Ruinous Sweep

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  And instantly, Donovan did.

  He was back in the apartment again, alone with the corpse of his father. He was standing, staring at the body of this man lying, not on the floor the way he’d left him, but on his La-Z-Boy, reclined all the way back, his body contorted, his face a hideous shambles — a World War I landscape — his jawbone cracked, his cheekbone poking through. A face from a nightmare. Then the apartment door flew open and Kali walked in. Kali and some stranger. Kali stopped and covered her mouth with her hands to stifle a scream.

  The apartment went out like the lighter had done a moment earlier. There was just the two of them again, him and his father.

  “I didn’t do it!” Donovan cried. “I didn’t touch you!”

  “The bat, Dono,” said his father.

  The bat. His bat. It had been leaning there against the coffee table, its sides wet with gore.

  “But . . .”

  “You can run all you like, son, but you can’t outrun the truth.” Then his father took the lighter from his pocket again and flicked it on for one last look. That’s what Dono thought he was up to, but instead his father was scanning the ground.

  “Where’d you put it?” he said.

  “Put what?”

  “The money.”

  “I —”

  “Don’t bother lying to me. I don’t want it all. Just some. Just . . . just enough.” His father straightened up, as best he could, and stared at Donovan. “I need it, okay?”

  Donovan shifted aside, got shakily to his knees, turned, and lifted the rotten piece of particleboard upon which he’d been sitting. He dug out the briefcase, opened it, turned it toward his father, and then moved away a yard or so. The lighter picked out a distorted smile. Al kneeled before the briefcase and grabbed a handful of bills, shoving them in the pocket of his sweats.

  “Just because you’re dead,” he said, “doesn’t mean you don’t need this stuff.”

  “I’m not dead,” said Donovan.

  “Who said I was talking about you?”

  Donovan swallowed, watched his father take another handful of cash. He watched the breeze grab at it greedily, and some of the bills flew off into the night before Al could shove the bundle into his pocket.

  “This is how you know you’re in hell,” said Al. He held up another bundle of hundreds, shaking them at Dono. He chuckled. “You can bet if there’s a heaven, the angels don’t have pockets.”

  He stopped. Maybe his own pockets were full or he’d just had enough. He climbed to his feet, almost pitching forward, regained his balance. He stared at Donovan one more time, shaking his head, then, flicking off the lighter, he turned, stood for a moment, swaying as if the wind might be enough to knock him over, before shambling toward the forest, the swamp.

  Laughing.

  He was laughing. Donovan watched until he couldn’t see him anymore, until he faded into the darkness. Even then he could hear the laughter. Then nothing.

  “I killed him,” said Donovan to no one.

  Somewhere in the night an owl called. He guessed it was an owl. Something out hunting. He listened. Imagined some scurrying rodent squealing as its feet left the ground, squealing at the rush of air under huge wings, squealing and writhing just before its back snapped under a powerful beak.

  Bee stood there as Inspector Stills and Sergeant Bell waited for the elevator, neither of them looking back at her. What had changed? The elevator dinged and chugged open. Then it closed on the detectives, dinged again, and was gone. She tried to put together the lengthy sequence of questions and her responses, the knowing looks from one to the other, the sudden coolness when she’d explained to them about Donovan being a gentleman and taking the high road. There had been violence: “a chaotic scene,” Bell had called it. There was something they’d said — something at the center of her unease — something that tied these random thoughts together. What was it?

  He plays ball.

  Bell had glanced at Stills then, and she had nodded. Nodded gravely.

  She told Donovan all about it. She sat in the twilight of the ICU, leaning forward in her chair, her voice level and pitched low. Keeping it cool. No drama. Poor guy didn’t need any more drama. But he did need to know where things stood in case he had something to say.

  “I believe in you, Turn,” she said. “Trust me. Let me help you.”

  She watched him for any sign of understanding. Nothing. So she talked on, told him everything the detectives had said, everything they had insinuated, let him know the score, counting on his fighting spirit to rally.

  “Give me something to go on,” she said. “I’ll do the rest.”

  He was not at peace. He was motionless, but beyond the bruises and abrasions on his face, she saw that he was troubled.

  “Whatever happened, Turner, I’m on your side.” She said it over and over again. Nights and days went by, months, years, millennia. For, after all, they were not on the earth anymore, but in a windowless space capsule circling the globe in minutes.

  “If you can hear me at all and if there’s anything I need to know, I’m listening.”

  She waited, to no avail. There was no flicker of an eyelid, no minute raising of a finger from the bright-white sheets. No low groan she might interpret as “I hear you.”

  “You did not hurt your father,” she said. “Okay? I know that about you. That isn’t what happened. Do you hear me?”

  Her gaze drifted to the green calligraphy readout, as if it might actually spell out a denial. “You are alive” was all it said. Some consolation.

  Had he really rested his head in the palm of her hand earlier? Probably not. She offered him her hand again, gently stroked his cheek. He neither welcomed it nor turned away.

  But words did come from time to time. She began to think she could see them forming in his face. See his lips quiver as he prepared to speak. The same words she’d heard earlier, words not much different than swallows and whimpers — with way more vowels than consonants. Her father had torn his rotator cuff a couple of years back, and for months he would utter little moans when he forgot and reached too high for something on a shelf or tried to tuck in his shirt. “Uh”s and “Ow”s and “Argh”s. Sometimes he would spontaneously groan handing a bowl of pasta across the table. She wished her father were there right now. Both of her parents. She had never felt so alone. So far away from home.

  “Ji-uh,” he said.

  Bee was jarred back to full consciousness.

  “Ji-uh?” she asked, reaching into her bag for her journal.

  He seemed almost to shake his head. “Ji-eee,” he said.

  She wrote it down and underlined it. “Go on, Turner. Anything, okay?”

  “Ji,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Jim?”

  He thrashed weakly, but enough to make his point. She went through the alphabet: jia . . . jib . . . jic . . . jid . . . jiff . . . jig . . . Jill —”

  “Jill!” he said, pouncing on the word. She had to imagine the Ls but they were there.

  “Jill,” he said again. And then nothing. Another few earth orbits. “Ji-eee.”

  “Got it,” she said. She leaned close to him. “I’m writing this all down,” she told him. “Everything you say, Turn.”

  She listened and watched and saw his lips move. “Jill.”

  “Jill?” she asked.

  “Jill-eee,” he said, as if correcting her.

  And she said, “Jilly?”

  His eyes flickered. She gasped as if “Jilly” might be the Open Sesame word. But his lids didn’t open. Instead, he went still again. Exhausted.

  Bee was no longer tired. Her circadian rhythms did their thing, reminding her that twenty-four hours earlier, she had woken up to her phone’s irritating alarm. Five o’clock. She’d kicked off the covers after only a moment’s hesitation, padded to the kitchen to make some sweet tea, then hurried back to her bed to curl up with Adventures in World History to prep for a quiz that morning. While she could sleep in till all h
ours given the chance, she had come to realize that her brain was especially clear in the wee hours. I am a morning person, she had thought, which didn’t make much sense if she intended to make a career as a stage manager. She didn’t mind that she worked the Friday evening shift. She would have time to go home from school, shower, eat something, have a little rest, and go to work. She could make a cappuccino with her eyes closed, and she could smile and apologize to the girl who had asked for low fat and whip her up a new one in no time flat. And there were other benefits to getting up early. Breakfast with at least one of her parents. This Friday morning it had been both of them.

  Twenty-four hours ago.

  Funny how the world could change like that.

  Gerry came in and Bee quietly closed the journal, leaving her thumb in to mark her place. The nurse laid her hands on Bee’s shoulders again and squeezed. “That must have been tough,” she said.

  It took Bee a moment to get what she was saying. “The interrogation?”

  Gerry nodded. Bee nodded. Gerry seemed to be waiting for more but Bee was in no state to share. Gerry seemed to understand. She went about her work.

  “My shift ends at six,” she said. “Maybe yours should, too, yeah?” She turned to face Bee. “You need to go home, girl. Get yourself a shower.” She nodded encouragingly, modeling the response she was hoping for. Then she turned to look at Donovan. She glanced back at Bee with her fingers holding the cross around her neck. “He’s not going anywhere,” she said.

  But that was the point, wasn’t it? He might.

  “What if he dies and there’s no one here for him?” Bee whispered. “He’d be all alone.”

  Gerry did her the honor of taking the question seriously. She rested one hand on her hip while her other kept hold of the cross.

  “Well, if he’s been conscious, then he’d know you were here with him for half the night, so how could he begrudge you some downtime? And if he isn’t conscious — wasn’t, not one bit — then, honey, it won’t matter anyway.”

  Bee thought about it. “That’s not a very good answer,” she said.

  Gerry’s face melted into a sad smile. “I’m a nurse,” she said. “You want a better answer, there’s a chaplain on duty.”

  Bee held up her hands in surrender. “It’s okay,” she said. “I know you’re right.” She slipped her finger out of the journal and placed the little Moleskine back into her THEATER IS MY BAG bag as Gerry continued her survey of the patient and his machine. “No word about his mom?” Bee asked. But even before Gerry shook her head, she knew there couldn’t have been or she would have been told.

  “You get home to your own mama,” said Gerry as she left the room. “Get some sleep.”

  “I will,” said Bee. “Promise.” But she waited until the swinging door closed again behind her.

  “You heard her, Turn,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere. Got it?” She stood and gazed at him, then turned to leave. She had only walked three steps when he spoke again.

  “Jilly,” he said.

  He ran. He looked back at his father’s apartment block. They were coming through the door, Kali and the stranger. He wasn’t sure how he got out of the apartment, how he slipped past them, but he did — a runner avoiding a tag at home plate. Safe! But not safe — not even vaguely — not if they caught him. They’d kill him if they caught him for what he did. He didn’t remember doing it, but they weren’t going to listen. He ran across Carling Avenue, four lanes, Friday-night busy. He timed his run; cars zipped past him sending rooster tails of rain to drench him, honking their horns, their brakes squealing. Somehow, he made it to the median. Someone shouted, “Idiot!” He ignored them, looked back the way he came, saw headlights pulling out of the apartment driveway. There was no entry to the eastbound lane so the vehicle had to turn west. It was a pickup, he’d seen it downstairs when he’d come back to the apartment. He looked to his right, dashed from the median to the south side of the thoroughfare. More honking, more braking.

  “Moron!”

  “You out of your fucking tree?”

  Yes, he thought. Definitely. He ran eastward, glancing back from time to time for a bus. He saw the pickup pull a U-turn at the first intersection west of the apartment. He ran, then turned to face the headlights and threw out his thumb. No one stopped. It was raining, bad. He ran again, pulling up his hood. Then he turned, stuck his thumb out, ran some more. The traffic crawled, but the pickup was gaining on him, changing lanes, coming on fast, and still no bus. There was never a damn bus! He ran, turned, threw out his thumb, and finally a crapped-out van swerved across two lanes to pull up at the curb. The passenger side window powered down to the smiling face of a dude with dreads. “Need a lift, man?” Donovan pulled open the door, closed it hard behind him.

  Al’s girlfriends came and went; they never lasted. Donovan had learned something about patience in that regard. No matter how loud they were, or witless or messy, how much they tried to befriend him — or come on to him when his father wasn’t looking — they eventually saw the light. The latest had been Kali: Kali O’Connor. She had lasted longer than most. Kali O’Connor: aging hippie from somewhere out in the boonies with I’ll-take-you-home-again-Kathleen hair, red as the pickup Donovan had seen parked outside the apartment. Maybe even from the same paint source. She had aspirations to write. To her, Al wasn’t an out-of-work journalist; he was someone who had published, a font of wisdom. That’s what she had thought until she learned what everybody learned after a while: how infrequently the fountain was actually turned on. How little dribbled out of it.

  Kali had left, a month or so ago, as far as Donovan could remember. But it was her, all right, her and some beefy, grim-looking guy he’d never seen before. Flat-faced and sporting a mullet, with a low center of gravity and the swagger of a barroom scrapper. His father’s slide from grace had landed him in a country tattered around the edges and peopled by all manner of fallen comrades: addicts and losers and barstool prophets; the let-down, it-wasn’t-my-fault crowd. Folks mostly waiting for the ax to fall. Or the bat.

  For the third time, Donovan woke up, this time without the alarm of a door slamming. He peered into the dark, praying his battered father was not returning. A man with a face made as ugly as the words that came out of it.

  He looked at the briefcase. Closed it, snapped it shut, flinched at the noise the locks made.

  Just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you don’t need this stuff.

  Was he dead? Could you even ask the question if you were? Then again, his father had looked like a walking corpse: a funeral waiting to happen. No, Donovan thought. I’m not there, not yet. This might be a kind of hell he was in, but it was hell on earth. He gazed up at the sky. Surely, there was no moonlight in hell.

  He reburied the briefcase under the rotten particleboard. Gone. Out of sight, out of mind. Was that what he had done with his father’s murder? Had he buried it down so deep he couldn’t recall what really happened?

  Back to mama. That’s a good boy.

  He’d done exactly that, fled to his home. But when? Was it when he left the apartment the first time? He shook his head. That made no sense. He and Mom and Scott lived in the Glebe — nine or ten miles from his father’s place. There’s no way he’d have gone all that way home and then come back. So later, after the second time, after escaping Kali and her friend in the pickup.

  He slowly shook his head, trying to piece it together. There was a hole in his memory. A black hole with all the gravity a black hole tended to have. He tried to peer down into it, then stepped back from the edge, afraid of being dragged into a darkness that could tear you apart, reduce you to atoms.

  He thought of his mother. Had to fight not to sob. She wasn’t at home. She and Scott had gone camping. And now that door opened, too, and he remembered.

  “In April?”

  “No black flies,” said Scott.

  “And no bears,” said Trish.

  Scott threw up his hands. “Whoa, now! I can
’t guarantee there’ll be no bears.”

  Then Trish pounded on Scott’s chest with both her fists until he gathered her into a hug. They were laughing about it, about canoeing in Algonquin Park when the lakes were only just free of ice and there were no tourists and it would be just them and the wilderness.

  “There may be bears just coming out of hibernation and hungry,” Scott said, and got another beating for it.

  “You guys are totally nuts,” Donovan said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Trish, beaming. “You want to know how crazy?”

  “I’ll bite,” said Donovan.

  “This crazy,” said his mother. She extricated herself from Scott’s embrace, found her purse, and took out her cell phone. “Watch this, fellas,” she said. And she placed the phone gently but resolutely on the kitchen island.

  “You’re leaving your phone,” said Donovan.

  Trish nodded.

  Scott laughed. “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Trish shook her head.

  Scott and Donovan exchanged mock-startled expressions. “Mom, your phone is, like, crack. You won’t make it twenty miles without going into serious withdrawal.”

  “Break out in a cold sweat,” said Scott.

  She folded her arms. “I’m doing it. Cold turkey.”

  Scott clapped. “So I get you for a whole long weekend with no business associates? Sweet.”

  Trish’s face broke out in a radiant smile. “My two gorgeous men,” she said. “Do you really think there’s anything I can’t do?”

  Scott pretended to give it some thought. He looked at Donovan. They conferred. Then they both shook their heads. “Woman strong,” said Scott. “Woman bigger than handheld device.”

  “Yes!” said Trish, flexing her biceps. “Hear me roar.” Which she did, a mama lion.

  Donovan could see the cell phone on the kitchen island. He was standing alone in the house. They had gone. They had gone camping and it was night and he was alone in the house and his father was dead. He had gone home. But he didn’t phone 911, because . . . Because his mother’s phone was password protected — thumbprint protected. And there was no house phone. No other phones in the whole world. Besides . . . Something happened . . . He was home, then he wasn’t home, which made no sense, and . . . everything went blurry.