The Current

by Tim Johnston

  He found a beer at the back of the fridge and spiffed it open and took it into the living room and sat in his chair with his sockfeet up, drinking the beer and watching the fire play dimly in the dark face of the TV. He held the remote with his thumb over the button but did not push it. As to the question of a second vehicle, as to the question of possible foul play, no comment at this time.

  There was a sound, a thump, and he looked to the ceiling. Her room up there, directly overhead. At her noisiest just before she went out again, hopping around to her music, chucking shoes into her closet . . . and then down she’d come, clock-clocking down the hardwood stairs as some girlfriend or more likely some boy pulled up the drive and whooshing by in perfume and too much leg, See you later, Dad. Don’t wait up, Dad. And there you’d sit all night watching for headlights, listening for the slam of a car door, for the sound of her heels on the porchsteps . . .

  A log popped and whistled and settled onto its bed of coals. Small flames leaping for the flue and vanishing in midair, and he thought of Eileen Lindeman again and the story she’d told him—fifteen years old and getting out of that silver Buick and walking home. Just walking into the house like it was any other day. Going to school the next day. Going to college. Getting married. Getting divorced. Becoming a woman he himself would one day desire, and take to bed.

  And the man—the driver of the Buick? Walking into his own house that night with terror in his heart at what he’d almost done, and were the police looking for him at that very second? Kiss the wife hello. Kiss the kids. Sit down to dinner thinking of the fifteen-year-old girl who believed in God. Thinking of what he’d almost done. Almost become. Did that man go back to work the next day, make his money, pay his bills, raise his kids, live his life? An old man now, or dead, and what became of his desire? Did it fade with time, with age? Or did the thing you fought inside yourself just grow bigger, hungrier, until it took you over?

  He got up, intending to throw another log on the fire, but instead returned to the kitchen, and from there stepped into the utility room, flicking on the light, and squeezed himself between the washing machine and water heater, reaching back into the webby dark until his fingers touched what they felt for, until he could lift it free of the webs and lay it out before him on the washer. Canvas and leather, padded and heavy. The sound of a good zipper, then the smell of oiled lamb’s wool and metal and walnut rising from the opened case, and, more faintly, the cordite of the rounds that had been fired in the rifle’s chamber. Built into the case was a compartment with a Velcro flap. Just the one box? said the dealer. As if a single box of lethal bullets was not the norm, was strange even. Just the one, said Gordon.

  He hit the light switch on his way out and he hit the kitchen switch and he hit the switch that killed the sixty-watt bulb on the porch and he opened the door and put the gun to his shoulder and steadied himself against the jamb. He put his eye to the scope and turned the focus ring until the trunks of the pines at the edge of the clearing stepped forward, weirdly lit by nothing but the light from the snow, and so close it seemed you could reach out and touch them. And with such power of vision he scoped, he searched, panning left, then right in great sweeps, though he moved the rifle itself barely at all. He scoped, expecting any second to see something in the lens other than trees—a shape, a face in the dark, staring back at him with eyes that had no idea what they were seeing, what the man held in his hands in the darkness of the house. That sudden flash of light.

  The sound of the shot and the punch to his shoulder and the burst of white in the face of the tree and the great thrill in his heart were all instantaneous, and right away he lowered the rifle and looked for the casing where it had rung like a coin on the porch, picked it up still hot and put it his pocket and closed the door again.

  He returned to the utility room and zipped the rifle back into the case and set the case far back in the corner again, and all this he did in the dark. And still in the dark he got into his boots, his jacket, and he stepped onto the porch and turned the deadbolt with his key and went down the porchsteps and crossed the clearing to the outbuilding, and five minutes later he was on the 52 North, and fifteen minutes after that he pulled over to scrape the frost from the inside of the windshield, and “Just what in the hell,” he said, but not to the frost or to the van. “Why don’t you just mind your own business?” And after he’d scraped off enough frost, the frost falling like snow inside the cab, he put the van in gear again and drove on.

  6

  She stood at the kitchen window staring out at the night, and it was still that night ten years ago, the night her son came home with the wet dog, so that when the dog now shook itself at her feet, clapping its ears and rattling its tags, she looked down absently, unthinkingly, and was shocked by the sight of him—the hunched and wasted body, the whitened muzzle, the filmy eyes turned up to her, searching for her in the fog of his world—and it was the shock that returned her to her place in time, to this kitchen, this farmhouse where she lived now with the old dog and her other son.

  She took the dog’s face in her hands and felt his trembling and tried to soothe it from him with her touch and her voice but it was not enough, it never was anymore, and finally she stood again and picked up his vial of pills, shook one into a cereal bowl and began crushing it with a spoon. She folded the grit into a soft dog treat, and when she turned again his snout was already raised, his nose tracking the treat’s descent, his yellow teeth taking it gently from her fingertips.

  She watched him chew, swallow, lick his lips.

  “Go drink your water,” she said, and he limped over to his bowl and lapped sloppily, then turned to her once again, dripping water onto the floor she’d just mopped. Staring at her with those milky eyes, waiting to see what she would do next, where she would go. Rachel staring back at him, going nowhere, saying nothing. She was back in time again, at the old house, ten years ago. Danny had gone to help Jeff and she’d gone back to bed, she remembered. But half an hour later she heard him knocking about in his room and she’d gotten up again. The door to his room open, Danny hunched over and stuffing clothes into his duffel. Stink of wet dog in the room, and the dog lying on the bed, watching Danny’s every move.

  Now what are you doing? she’d said from the doorway.

  Gonna go see Cousin Jer, he said without turning. Shoot some birds.

  On a Wednesday night?

  Why not?

  T-shirts, a pair of jeans, purple Vikings sweatshirt.

  Danny, she said. It’s two thirty in the morning. Does he even know you’re coming?

  Of course he does, he said—it was all set up: he’d be at Jer’s in an hour, he’d sleep a couple of hours and then they’d head up to Uncle Rudy’s cabin. Back by Friday, maybe Saturday . . .

  Rachel stood watching him, confused and strangely heated. As if she’d done something stupid. Something embarrassing.

  And all this is fine with—your boss? she said, and her son paused then, they both did, as the idea of Gordon Burke came into the room: His smell of earth and copper, a certain kind of deodorant. His big good face. His hands. There’d been a few men over the years, after Roger, but there hadn’t been any for several years, and at forty-three, with two grown sons, she’d been ready to believe that that part was over for her. But it wasn’t, not quite. Gordon Burke’s daughter was still at home, Holly, a moody girl all her life and now a troubled girl who did not make things easy, and so the going was slow. But it was going. When the phone rang these days Rachel’s heart jumped. New bras and panties waited in her bureau. She’d gone down two sizes.

  The only reason Danny was out late tonight, with work in the morning, was because she and Gordon had made plans for the following night—Thursday night, a date—and Danny had agreed to stay home with his brother.

  I’ll call Gordon in the morning, he now said. Jeff will cover for me.

  And me? Rachel said, swatting at him lightly. Danny, we had a deal!

  He shrank from her and said
nothing. Then he said, You can still go out, Ma. I’ll take Big Man with me.

  Oh, you will, will you? Hunting? She stared at him, waiting for one of Marky’s howls to fill his head. Most recently it had been the torn heap of rabbit at Wyatt’s feet, but a mouse in a mousetrap could do the job.

  The bedroom window shook with the wind. The dog watching Danny and Danny standing there staring into space, frozen, his plans crashing. She couldn’t bear it.

  She shook her head, she sighed, and that was that: he was free. She’d see Gordon Burke in the morning, at the Plumbing & Supply. A change of plans, she’d say. Home-cooked dinner instead. She’d get Marky to turn in early . . .

  But Gordon Burke wasn’t at the Plumbing & Supply the next morning, his van wasn’t in the lot, and Rachel had followed Marky into the store with something childish, something silly and persistent jabbing at her heart.

  Big Man! Jeff Goss calling as they came in, and Marky raising his hand for a listless high five before disappearing into the back, stranding Rachel with no good-bye . . . because he felt what he felt, this boy, and what he felt this morning was that it was her fault Danny and Wyatt had gone off to the cabin without him, and nothing to do but let him feel it until he didn’t.

  She’d stood among the pipes and fittings. The smell of the place was a smell she loved: pipe dope and PVC glue and sweated copper and cigarettes and men. She remembered the summer when Gordon and Roger had bought the building and begun fixing it up. Sawdust in the nostrils, freckles of paint on all their faces. Rachel and Meredith had fallen for each other like schoolgirls, the kind of gushy, overnight friendship men don’t even try to understand. They’d both gotten pregnant the same month, and then, five months later, when Rachel and Roger learned there was trouble with the twins—one healthy, one not; they could terminate one to save one, or risk losing both—it was Meredith and Gordon who loaned them money for more tests, a second opinion, the monitoring that saved Danny’s life. He had his heart murmur, but he’d grown strong as a lion. And Marky . . . well, Marky was Marky. No one had seen that coming.

  Twelve years later, Roger was dead. The cancer they’d been fighting in one lung had jumped to the other like a clever rat. Rachel had to give up their share of the business to keep the house. Her and Meredith’s friendship began to falter, and she realized that, after all, it was the men, not the women, who kept the two families close.

  Then, a year after Meredith had moved out—had run off, actually, with a banker—here came Gordon Burke again, with jobs: custodial duties for Marky and the secrets of the trade for Danny. Gordon had never gotten around to changing the burke-young sign on the side of the building, and a hyphen that had once said family to Rachel, then loss (a minus sign), suddenly said family again. Gordon was involved with another woman by that time, Eileen Lindeman, but that was his business; it didn’t affect their own friendship, hers and Gordon’s, their history, one bit . . . and anyway it didn’t last, whatever that was with Eileen Lindeman.

  Now, standing among pipes and fittings, Rachel asked Jeff Goss if he knew when Gordon would be back, and the boy replied cheerfully, Can’t say, Mrs. Young. He hasn’t been in yet.

  Oh, she said, puzzled—actually bothered by this answer.

  Anything I can help you with, Mrs. Young?

  And there it was: Jeff Goss had opened up the store. Gordon had given him keys.

  She’d thought Danny was the only one.

  7

  At the front desk they told him she was in the ICU but when he got there they told him she’d been moved to the third floor, and when he got up there the girl at the desk said visiting hours were over and she was sorry but there was nothing she could do, he’d have to come back in the morning.

  Gordon stood looking down at the young woman in her chair. Her large brown eyes. A hundred small tight braids drawn back from her temples and collected in a thick snakeball on top of her head. monique rose, said her ID.

  “What about the father?” Gordon said, and the young woman’s brows bunched up.

  “Sir?”

  “Can the father go in there?”

  “Into her room? Yes, of course he can. But you are not the father.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “How do you know I’m not him.”

  The young woman turned her face a little to one side and spoke carefully. “Because I’ve seen him? Because I know him by sight?”

  “You know him by sight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Sir, I’m not sure I understand—”

  “Did you see him tonight?”

  “Yes, sir, but . . .”

  She looked Gordon up and down. She was looking for some evidence of his authority, of his right to ask her such questions. He could see that she found none.

  “Look,” he said more gently. “I drove all the way up here and all I’m asking now is can you go tell him that I’m here, and that I’d like to talk to him?”

  “Tell who?”

  “The father. Her father.”

  The young woman said nothing. Her mind was working.

  “He might be sleeping,” she said, and Gordon looked at her. He tried to give her a smile.

  “Trust me,” he said. “He’s not sleeping.”

  He took a seat in one of the plastic chairs and sat staring at nothing, the opposite wall, the TV up in the corner, and he stared at the dark screen of the TV for a long while before he realized that the man sitting back in its gloom, as if in another room altogether, or another world, must be himself; when he got out of his jacket in the overheated room, the man in the TV got out of his too. Some minutes later another man came into the image of the room, and into the room itself, and except that he was waiting for this man, expecting to see this man and no other come around the corner, Gordon would not have recognized him, and not because the man wasn’t in uniform. He saw what he’d already known but would have known anyway in that first glance, which was that this man coming toward him was not well. Considerably down in weight, his flannel shirt hanging on him as it would on a hanger, and when Gordon stood he saw that the man had grown shorter too, as old men do, though this man was a good five years younger than Gordon himself. And yet when the man put out his hand, Gordon was surprised by the strength of the grip. Surprised by the blueness of the eyes too, down in the wells of their sockets, blue and sharp as ever.

  “Gordon,” said the man in that same rough smoker’s voice.

  “Sheriff,” said Gordon. “How is she?”

  “She’s OK. She’s busted-up some, but she’s gonna be all right.”

  The man, Tom Sutter, passed his jacket from one hand to the other and stood looking at Gordon, Gordon looking at him. Sutter’s face so thin now. His hair, gone purely white, looked as if it would blow from his skull in a strong wind, like milkweed seeds. The man was sick and there was nothing to say about that. It was too big a thing to ever say aloud.

  The young woman behind the desk sat watching them. Light tubes hummed in the ceiling. Machines beeped behind doors.

  Sutter raised the jacket and said, “Well, you’re here, Gordon. Do you care to join a man for a smoke?”

  They had the shelter to themselves and they stood in its weak light, Sutter smoking and Gordon blowing into his hands. He put his hands back into his jacket pockets. Sutter was watching him.

  “I saw it on the news, is why I drove up here,” Gordon said.

  Sutter flicked the ash from his cigarette, raining tiny embers that flared out before they hit the ground. “She’s hardly been awake two minutes,” he said. “I’m not even sure what in the hell happened down there, except that she’s alive, and her friend isn’t.”

  Gordon looked down and toed his boot in the thin remains of ice. “I figured it was too soon to see her,” he said. “But I came anyway.”

  Sutter blew smoke and was silent.

  “I remember when she was just a litt
le girl,” Gordon said. “I remember seeing her sitting there in the cruiser that day. She couldn’t have been more than six years old.” He looked up again. Sutter was looking at the building.

  “No, she’s nineteen now,” Sutter said, “so she must’ve been nine back then. She’d been sick at school that day and I had to take her with me.” He turned back to Gordon. “I was always sorry about that.”

  “I knew you had your reasons. But, hell, seeing her there, just sitting there, waiting for you to come back to the car. I never did forget that.”

  Sutter took a pull on his cigarette and blew the smoke.

  “I won’t stand here and tell you I understand, now, Gordon, what you went through. Because I don’t. These situations, our situations, they aren’t the same, not even close. I know how God damn lucky I am—how lucky she is.” He shook his head. “I never could imagine what you were going through. And I can’t imagine what those folks down in Georgia are going through right now. A young woman like that. A daughter . . .” He coughed, then turned his face and coughed again, from the lungs, wet and ragged. He took a step away and spat, and stepped back and dropped his cigarette down the plastic throat of the receptacle.

  “Well,” he said. “I best be getting back.”

  “On the news they said there might of been a second vehicle,” Gordon said, and Sutter’s right hand, raised for shaking, lowered again.

  “I don’t know what bigmouth said that,” he said, “but if he was one of mine we’d have us some kind of talk.”

  Gordon watched the ex-sheriff’s face. His eyes. As he’d always watched them. What does this man know that he isn’t telling me? What right does any man have to know something about my daughter’s death that I don’t know?