by S. M. Hulse
Afterward I go to the library, where I delete two emails from journalists and am surprised to find a third from the Elk Fork plein air festival inviting Josephine Grady to participate. I hesitate only a moment before replying with a brief acceptance, then print the message, wondering if Jo Faber would have received such a swift and enthusiastic response.
My last stop is the Gas-N-Go. I doubt Prospect will be able to sustain two gas stations much longer, and my money is on the one that sells groceries rather than moose-shaped slippers. I shouldn’t hasten Fuel Stop’s demise by shopping here—and usually I don’t—but Split Creek is a twenty-minute drive each way, and I want to ride Lockjaw before dark.
Devin is on the porch when I get home. I roll the window down. “Have you found Samuel?” I call. “Did something happen?”
He shakes his head. He’s sitting on the porch steps, hands clasped, elbows on his knees. No coat today, and no tie. I immediately wonder whether, like a presidential candidate dressing down at a swing state barbecue, this is supposed to make him more approachable, more relatable. Maybe he’s just hot.
Devin stays seated while I reassemble my chair, transfer into it, sling one canvas bag over the back of the chair, and settle the other in my lap. He stands only when I head for the ramp. “Grocery shopping?” It seems a clumsy effort, and I think an FBI agent should be able to fish for information with more finesse.
I tap the Hi, I’m: JO name tag on my shirt. “Work,” I say. Hold up the printout of the festival email. “Library.” Nudge the bag in my lap. “Groceries.” I go into the house, leave the door open behind me. “I thought you were supposed to know all this already.”
“Maybe I did,” he says, and if there were any lightness to the words, I could accept them as an invitation to abandon the adversarial positions we’ve taken up. But even if he were to grant me that opportunity, he’d expect too much in return. “I’m sure you’d have mentioned it to Sheriff Hawkins,” Devin continues, not sounding sure at all, “but your brother hasn’t tried to contact you, has he?”
Good of him to phrase it that way. Your brother … contact you. Not the other way around. “No,” I say. “He’s too careful for that.”
Devin nods. That much he believes. I wonder if he has any opinions about Samuel. Not professional opinions, not a profile, but thoughts about what kind of person Samuel is, apart from the bombing. It would be natural to speculate, wouldn’t it? Maybe not for someone like Devin. Maybe he’s just a human bloodhound, interested in whatever will help him track down my brother and nothing more. I put away the perishable items, leave the rest on the counter. I go back to the living room, take up my usual place by the hearth, wait for Devin to settle onto the couch. Its springs are shot, but he does his best to sit up straight. “You’ve been spending some time with Asa Truth.”
“He’s been here a couple times.” No sense pretending otherwise with that black car at the end of the drive.
“I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”
“Is that the official FBI position?”
He gives me the kind of look a parent might give a back-talking teenager.
“I went to the prayer service,” I say. “He gave me his card. A tree fell during the storm last week and trapped me on the other side of the creek. I called Asa and he cut it up for me. Came back a couple days later to return some things he’d borrowed.”
“You could have called me about the tree.”
“Yes,” I agree. “I could have.”
Devin sighs. “Okay,” he says. “Do what you want. I just don’t think it’s a very good idea. Not with his daughter still—”
“I get it,” I say. “Advice accepted. Your duty is done.”
He presses his lips together, and I think he might get angry, but the moment passes and he relaxes. I glance down at those immaculate boots of his. I’m starting to despise them. Samuel would. They seem like proof the folks who constitute the government don’t really understand life in this remote, rural place, that they see it only as a land for playacting.
Devin lets the silence grow until it’s uncomfortable, then asks, “Still no thoughts about where your brother might be?”
The question I’ve been anticipating. Dreading. “Canada?” I venture.
“We’re certainly looking into that possibility,” Devin says. “Did Samuel mention anything about Canada recently?”
I shake my head.
Devin takes a small notebook and a pen out of his shirt pocket, makes a brief note. The pen is a cheap ballpoint, the kind that come a dozen to a package, and I wonder if he tends to mislay them. “No other ideas?”
I wish I knew if Hawkins told him about our conversation at the Knock-Off. Ordinarily I think he’d keep quiet, try to protect me, but if he got it into his head that it was his duty … And what is my duty? To tell the FBI … what, exactly? A passing thought? A possibility? That my brother and I went somewhere together once, a long time ago? “No,” I hear myself say. “No other ideas.”
Devin looks at me for a long moment. “I worry you’re not telling me everything you could.” He says it gently, like he wouldn’t blame me if I weren’t. Even without a lifetime under Samuel’s suspicious tutelage, I’d know not to believe that.
But there’s a temptation to it: Tell him. I counter the thought immediately: There’s nothing to tell. Nothing I know, anyway, nothing for sure. Hawkins asking one leading question at the Knock-Off doesn’t mean anything.
There’s Asa, though. There’s Emily. There’s what my brother did.
If I tell Devin, it will be his burden. I’ll be right about the mountains or I’ll be wrong, but I won’t have to think about it anymore.
He is my brother, though, and Devin is FBI. My brother has a rifle, and the FBI has more.
I stay silent.
I expect Devin to leave when I don’t say anything else, but he doesn’t rise from the couch, watches me intently. “Your brother loves you very much,” he finally says. Fact, not reassurance. There’s something hard about the statement, despite the benign words. Something different from what I’ve heard in Devin’s voice before. “I’ve had a chance to read all those files. He sacrificed a lot to care for you after your mother was killed.”
“Yes, he did,” I say carefully. Devin hardly seems to hear.
“In fact, I’m a little surprised he detonated that bomb. Not because he doesn’t fit the profile in most ways; he does: smart, angry with his lot in life, quick to lay blame on others. But I’m surprised because of you. Well, you told me, didn’t you? He’d do anything for you.”
“And?” My voice faint even to my own ears.
Devin meets my eyes. “And I find myself wondering what he’d do if we charged his little sister with obstruction of justice.”
It’s a relief, in a way. Validation. I don’t trust Devin, or the FBI, and that doesn’t make me wrong or deluded or hostile; it makes me right.
I am suddenly less afraid of Devin, despite the threat, because I’m certain he wouldn’t have made it if he had any idea how close I came to telling him where my brother might be. He can’t read me as well as he thinks. His files and training and profiles only go so far; he doesn’t know Samuel, and he doesn’t know me.
He watches me a few seconds more, then claps his hands together, says, “Well, I’m sure it won’t come to that,” and leans back on the couch, a smile across his face as though it’s all been a joke.
I roll my chair backward a few inches before I can stop myself. Fold my hands, set them in my lap. “Is there anything else?”
Devin holds the smile a moment longer before he lets it fade. “Just one more thing.” He takes the notebook out again, flips through a few pages. I watch his eyes; they don’t move back and forth as they would if he were reading. “I said I’ve been looking over the files. About your brother. About his past, your past. And—this isn’t totally unusual, of course, different sources being compiled, that sort of thing—but something doesn’t quite make sense to me.”
I take a breath. Did Hawkins talk to him after all?
“I see a lot of reasons for your brother to have turned to extremism, Jo. A lot of reasons for him to hate the government. The restraining order that didn’t protect your mother. The threat of social services splitting the two of you up. Even the mining accident that killed your father—the investigation found that the government inspection a month prior should have flagged the risk of collapse, didn’t it?”
I nod, once.
“And now the house, of course.”
He’s not telling me anything I don’t know. I’ve lived in this house with Samuel all my life. I’ve watched him try out every crackpot antigovernment conspiracy theory to come along, and I’ve spent more hours than Devin ever will trying to figure out why all of it appealed to my brother, who should have been too smart for that kind of thing. “So what doesn’t make sense?” I ask. “Makes pretty damn good sense to me, you lay it all out like that.” I try to shake the anger I’m feeling. He wants me angry, or frightened.
“Well, you experienced all those things, too. And yet here you are, a bit jaded, maybe, but as far as I can tell, a law-abiding citizen. So what sets Samuel apart?”
“Aren’t men more likely to do these things?”
Devin tilts his head slightly but doesn’t answer. I should leave it at that, and don’t.
“He’s older,” I say. “Had more responsibility.”
Devin shakes his head. “On the other hand, when your mother died you were still a child. What could be more traumatic than losing a parent in that manner, at that age? And being injured the way you were on top of it.”
I don’t know what game he’s playing now, but I’m tired of it, and I sure as hell don’t need to listen to someone recite a litany of my life’s tragedies. “How many paraplegic terrorists have you apprehended, Agent Devin?”
He doesn’t blink. “My point,” he tells me coolly, “is that you arguably experienced even more trauma than your brother. You are, at the very least, on equal footing. But you are not a suspected terrorist, and your brother is, and I’m wondering why. Now, you’re right: you don’t fit the profile the way he does. But I’ve been doing this a long time, Jo; I know when I’m missing something. And there’s something I’m missing now. Something missing in the pages of those files.” He looks at me, and I work very hard to keep my expression neutral. Because he’s not talking about where Samuel is anymore. I take a breath, hold it, let it out. Hope I’m doing so convincingly, because I can’t seem to remember how long a person normally takes to breathe a single lungful of air. “I wonder what it is.”
The words land lightly, but as statement rather than question.
Devin stands abruptly, tugs on the cuffs of his sleeves. “It was good to check in with you, Jo.” He strides briskly to the door. “Keep talking with Sheriff Hawkins, and call if you think of anything.”
I don’t move for a long time after he has gone. When at last I do, I go to the window to see the final dying sliver of sun sink below the ridgeline. Too late to ride.
* * *
I dream about it that night. First time in ages, familiar as yesterday.
After the headlights, after the closet door shut, everything was dark. Deep dark, black dark. Closet dark, mine dark, night dark. All dark. Dark until it was red.
No sight, only sound. Those sounds, those echoes.
I wake suddenly, scramble for the lamp on the bedside table. Feel the panic recede only when light floods the bedroom, when silence settles.
I remember this time. Don’t call for Samuel. Know he isn’t there.
* * *
I have the next day off, so Lockjaw and I go into the mountains and ride the trails on the far side of Gethsemane Mine. The cabin is the other direction, closer to Eden, and I pretend I haven’t thought about that. The slopes are steep, but Lockjaw knows the trails well and has inherited the surefootedness of her donkey sire, so I give her a loose rein and let her choose her path. The trails meander along the contours of the slopes through coniferous forest, and trees rise tall on either side of the narrow path. When I look out over the eastern valley, I see it a slice at a time, each view punctuated by tall trunks, a timbered zoetrope glimpse of the landscape.
I love the gradations of color in these forests. When autumn comes, the larch will stand out bright as flames amid the evergreens, but I like the less spectacular view before me best. So many variations of green, so many subtle turns to a single color. I name them in my mind: cobalt turquoise, phthalo green, viridian green, chromium oxide green, sap green, green gold.
I stay on the trails longer than I should, and had Samuel been at the house, he’d have given me hell about it when I got back. I’ve attached a gel seat saver to my saddle, but I still have to be cautious of pressure sores, and long hours on a mule’s back aren’t the wisest idea. Even so, when I return to the barn I remove Lockjaw’s bridle and loosen her cinch, but leave her saddled and tied in her stall with a bulging hay net. I’ll ride again after lunch.
In the house, I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, then go to the table with pen and paper. I look at the blank sheet for a long time. Twice I set the tip of the pen to paper, twice take it away without making a mark. I sigh, reposition the pen in my hand. Molly mule for sale, I write.
* * *
There’s a note on Lockjaw’s stall door when I finish the second half of my ride. Supper at my place tonight. Come when you’re ready. —H.
Hawkins lives in the center of town, in one of the houses claustrophobically built up onto the lower reaches of the western slopes, the second-story window of one nearly level with the bottom porch step of the house above it. Hawkins’s place is halfway up, a narrow steep-roofed structure fronted by crabgrass and dandelions. Good view of the mountains, though. I park near the detached one-car garage, as close as I can get to the ramp at the rear of the house. It’s a rickety thing, warped planks of plywood rising a bit too steeply toward the house, one corner or another always coming un-nailed, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Hawkins says when he opens the door.
“I should’ve called.” And that’s it. We say no more about our last meeting at the Knock-Off or the days that have passed since.
Supper is microwaved frozen dinners. I’m not sure Hawkins has cooked a single meal since his wife moved out seven years ago. He has Salisbury steak and I have turkey and stuffing; Hawkins doesn’t care for turkey, so he bought it especially for me. We eat in his living room, on opposite ends of the couch, our meals balanced on trays on our laps. Afterward we watch a cop show on TV. It has a downer ending, where justice isn’t served and all the characters are angry but resigned about it.
“I did half the crap they do on this show, I wouldn’t be sheriff long.”
I shrug. “You might be okay. No one else wants the job.”
An old joke. Hawkins uncontested in the last three elections. I expect him to reward me with a brief smile, but he doesn’t. “Want a soda? I got Dr Pepper or Coke.”
“Coke’s good.”
He takes the trays into the kitchen, and I mute the television. I glance around the living room. I haven’t been here in a few months, but I know the house well. I spent a handful of Thanksgivings here, a couple Christmas Eves, dozens of mundane evenings like this one. It’s messier than usual, with junk mail piled on the coffee table, old copies of the Miner strewn beside the couch, and dust bunnies gathering in the corners; Lila’s influence is waning as Hawkins’s bachelorhood becomes more entrenched. But most things haven’t changed: the faded shag carpet, the wood paneling on the walls, the exposed beams of the ceiling. The paintings on the wall, one of which is mine and the rest of which look like they’ve been liberated from a roadside motel. The objects on the mantel: the framed photograph of Kev in uniform, the Purple Heart, the folded flag.
When I was younger, part of me was glad Samuel hadn’t been able to join up with Kev. It seemed like just one more
way to lose someone. After Kev’s death, I never thought much about it again other than to try to push aside a sort of guilty relief. Impossible not to wonder anew now, though. Instead of the thoughts I used to have—What if he’d gone? What if Kev had come back and he hadn’t?—I have new ones: What if he’d gone. What if he’d come back. What if it had given him something better to believe in.
I close my eyes, rub the bridge of my nose. There’s been a headache settled there for days, low but building. “You got an aspirin?” I call.
“Medicine cabinet,” Hawkins replies from the kitchen. “Might be a little past the expiration.”
In the small bathroom I reach to open the mirrored door. I find aspirin, yes, and also a small cluster of amber prescription bottles. Three are for serious painkillers, the kind they sent me to rehab with from the hospital; the label is torn from the fourth, just the glue and a few ragged shreds of paper left behind, but they look like more of the same. The bottles with labels are all prescribed to Hawkins: one from a doctor in Split Creek, one from a clinic in Idaho, the third from Spokane. Two are empty; the others are close.
He’s not hiding them. The first thing I think. Wouldn’t be hard to hide them from me; putting the bottles on the top shelf would do it. Not my business. But the sight of them makes me uneasy—there’s something almost disappointing in it: Opioids?—and I close the cabinet without taking an aspirin.
Hawkins is waiting on the couch when I return to the living room; I pull up alongside but stay in my chair. He hands me a cold can, the top already popped. “I saw you had a tree down.”
I wonder if I should say anything about the pills. “That storm last week.”
“Sorry I didn’t answer when you called. I tried you back and left a couple messages.”