by Tim Johnston
He drove. The cigarette burning down.
“Shoot,” he said. “That never kept you from saying it before.”
Two hours later he stood near the trestle bridge, in the rutted and trampled snow there, looking down the beam of his MagLite at the river. The rupture had frozen over but was still visible by its outline of jagged ice. From where he stood it had the mouthy look of a great fish, a prehistoric monster, frozen at the moment of striking. He saw the iced-over hole and he saw the story it told but he could not see his daughter there, struggling to get out, pawing at the busted ice, pulled under into that coldness, that darkness, by the car as it rolled. Could not see that.
Of the car’s tiretracks going down there was nothing left; they’d been plowed under by the car’s body coming up. Nothing left of the tiretracks up top either, where the car had first come to rest; too many vehicles had come and gone and you couldn’t expect first responders to concern themselves overly about evidence—and he wouldn’t have it any other way in this case—but God damn.
He doused his light and stood at the top of the bank with his arms at his sides. The breath smoking from his nostrils. Winter smell of woodfire in the air. Listening, but not a sound. Then, from downriver, traveling some distance along the ice, the baying of a hound dog. Baying. Pausing. Baying again, but answered by nothing Sutter himself could hear in all that hushed valley. He crossed the road and got back in his sedan and shut the door and sat in a darker, closer silence.
Don’t even say it, she said after a moment, and he didn’t. But then he did: “Just one more stop,” he said, and turned the key in the ignition.
There was a pay phone at the corner of the station but when he went to pick up the receiver there was no receiver, no cable, and he moved on, passing the window—the woman sitting there, at work on her puzzles, much as he’d pictured her—and stepped inside.
“Oh,” she said, looking up from her work. “I didn’t see you pull up.”
Sutter turned and looked out the pane of glass and said, “No, I guess I parked out of view, didn’t I?”
“That’s all right. I guess you can park anywhere you like, Officer.”
She sat on her stool behind the counter, soft-faced and blond. The pin tag on her chest said pamela. He took in the cluttered countertop, the disposable lighters and ChapStick and other plastic junk for sale.
“Is it about the accident again?” the woman said. “Those two girls? Just so awful.”
Sutter shook his head—somber, dumbfounded. “It doesn’t get much more awful, does it?”
“No, sir. It just chills me to the bone to think about it.”
“It had to be mighty cold in that water.”
“Well, yeah, that—but I mean seeing those two girls just a few minutes before, right here? Right where you are standing now? I still can’t hardly believe it.”
“I guess you remember that night pretty clearly, ma’am.”
“I guess I’ll never forget it.”
He stood a moment, giving the comment room. Then he said, “I know they’ve already asked you questions up and down, ma’am, but I just want to ask one or two more, if you don’t mind.” He watched to see if she would look more carefully at his sheriff’s jacket, but she did not. Good warm jacket for a cold night, if anyone cared. Beneath it he wore a plain khaki shirt, no tie, and he wore jeans and a plain leather belt and his old leather workboots. His sheriff’s hat and belt and holster, his badge, were all back home in his bedroom closet. The county-issue .45 was back with the department, turned in one year ago on his last day, as per regulation.
The woman said, “I’ll answer whatever you want to ask me, Officer. If it’ll help, I’ll answer.”
“Thank you, ma’am—Pamela, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can call me Tom, Pamela.”
She placed her hands in her lap and waited. He glanced about the cramped little store. In a dark recess at the back an exit sign glowed above a metal firedoor. Adjacent to that door was a narrow wooden door leading, he guessed, to some kind of storage room or back office.
“You tend to be here by yourself, Pamela?”
“Yes, sir. Six to midnight on weeknights.”
He’d already looked for security cameras and seen none. “It doesn’t seem like the safest of shifts for a woman alone, if you don’t mind me saying.”
She laughed. “You’d have to be crazy to come here looking for money, or any other kind of nonsense. For one thing, Ron—that’s my boss—he takes all the day cash away at five p.m., and most folks use cards for the gas anymore. Heck, I asked for this shift. It’s nice and quiet, mostly.”
“And the other thing?”
“Sir?”
“You said for one thing,” he said. “Sounded like there was another thing.”
“Oh.” She glanced toward the back, the shadowed recess, and he saw the color come to her face like a sunburn. She flung a hand and said, “I was just gonna say that Ron, my boss, comes in kind of regular. At nights. He stops by to check on things.” She fussed with the ChapStick dispenser.
“But he wasn’t here that night?” Sutter said. “He didn’t stop by?”
“No, sir. Not that night.”
Sutter nodded. “You get a lot of regulars, then?” he said, and she looked up at him big-eyed and hot-faced and he added, “Customers, folks filling up.”
She gave a breathy laugh. “Oh, sure. Plenty. I mean, we’re the only station out this way you know, so.”
“How about a boy—a young man named Bud?”
She shook her head. “It’s like I told the sheriff before, I don’t know anyone named Bud around here. I mean he might’ve been in here, but I didn’t know him by name.”
“Did you know him by sight—him or the other boy?”
“When?”
“The night of the accident.”
Her face crimped in confusion. “Well, I mean, I already told the sheriff, Officer. I never saw those boys.”
Sutter watched her face, her eyes.
“Yes, I know. I know that’s what you told them.” He gave her a smile. “But just to be clear, Pamela: You saw nothing of those two boys whatsoever?”
“No, sir.”
“They never came into the station while you were here?”
“No, sir. I’ve seen plenty of boys come in here at night. I’ve seen some pretty sketchy characters. But no real trouble, ever, and I’ve been here, oh gosh, two years come March.”
He watched her. “What about their truck?”
“What about it?”
“Well, ma’am, what kind of truck was it?”
“I couldn’t tell you, Officer. I couldn’t even say it was a truck.”
Sutter looked out the window. “I guess it’d be hard to miss a truck pulling into the station, if you were sitting right here the whole time.”
“I was sitting here, all right. The whole time. I went to use the ladies’ once, but that was a good hour before those girls ever got here.”
“And you saw the girls’ car—the RAV4?”
“Yes, sir. They pulled up for gas right there at pump number one.”
“Mm-hmm,” said Sutter. “And how do you figure you never saw that truck?”
The woman sat up a little straighter. Somehow, the softness had left her face.
“Well, Officer, either that truck was never here, or else it was parked off to the side, same as you did.”
Sutter coughed into his fist.
“That’s sensible, Pamela. That helps a great deal. Thank you very much.”
“I’m only trying to help, Officer. I feel awful bad for those girls. But the first I ever heard of those two boys was when the sheriff came asking about them earlier, and I’ll tell you what I told him: if those boys were here, they’d of had to park where you parked, off to the side, and then they’d of had to walk around the back of the station to get to the restrooms on the other side. Otherwise I’d of seen ’em go by the window there.”
“No, sir. There’s no snow back there. We’re required by law to keep that sidewalk clear of snow and ice. It goes clear around the building. But I don’t know why anybody would go back there, unless they just plain didn’t want to be seen.”
Sutter stood looking at the back door. Then he looked out the window again.
“Did you see the girls leave?”
“I sure did.”
“How did they look?”
“Sir?”
“Did they seem frightened, upset?”
“They just seemed in a hurry. I figured they were trying to get out of the weather. It was sleeting pretty good. As you know.” She shook her head. “I sat here a good half hour before I realized they never brought the key back, and by then every sheriff’s car and ambulance and fire engine in the county was going by, and I just sat here wondering what in the world—”
“I’m sorry, Pamela—the key?”
“The key to the ladies’,” she said. “They took off without ever giving it back. Ron had to put in a whole new lock, cost him forty-five dollars.” She lifted the new key from below the counter to prove it.
“May I?” he said, and she handed it over. The new key was attached by a loop of shoelace to what looked like the sawed-off stick-handle of a plumber’s helper drilled through with a quarter-inch bit. ladies inked along the shaft in a blocky, near-angry hand.
“Can I ask, what was the old key attached to?”
“A backscratcher.”
“A backscratcher?”
She rolled her eyes. “I know. Ron asked the sheriff and them did they find his backscratcher in the girls’ car and they looked at him like he was crazy.”
“They didn’t find it,” Sutter said simply.
“No, sir.”
“Can I borrow this a minute?”
“Oh, sure. But they’ve been all in and out of there already, the sheriff and them.”
“I know. I just want to see for myself. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind. It’s just around the side of the building.”
“Thank you.” He began to lift his hand to the brim of his hat but stopped himself, as he was wearing no hat. At the door he turned back.
“Where was it from?”
“Sir?”
“Where’d the backscratcher come from?”
Her face clouded—and then brightened: “Phoenix, Arizona,” she said. “That was printed on it. Don’t ask me how it ended up here.”
He went around the side of the building and unlocked the ladies’ and flicked the switch and stood in the humming light. The dirty tile floor and the reek of old urine. A dinged sheet of aluminum where a mirror would normally hang, engraved forever with obscenities. Did the ugliness of places bring out the ugliness in people, or was it the other way around? He shut the door and stood where she’d stood. He sniffed the air and he could smell it: the hand over her mouth, the greasy right hand. His heart was pounding and he patted down his pockets before he remembered he’d left them in the other jacket, in the car, his smokes, and what a way to go, his heart banging itself to pieces because he couldn’t get his hands on his smokes—and on the very spot where his daughter had been cornered by those boys, those reeking punks, and would these be his last thoughts, these angry and hateful images, these smells?
That other time, when he’d woken up in the hospital, he’d had no warning, and no memory of any of it—no visions, no lights. Just nothing. Helping his deputies move desks around one second, in the hospital the next. The deputies, Halsey and Moser, had worked on him until the EMTs arrived.
You were just all the way gone, Sheriff, Wayne Halsey said later, and the doctor confirmed it. Full cardiac arrest. Full stop. Lights-out.
And it was those tests that led to finding the cancer. Double-whammy day.
But no connection between the two? he’d asked the doctor.
Other than the smoking? No. I’d say you mostly inherited the heart. It’s an old heart.
An old heart?
Older than you.
Will it last?
How do you mean?
I mean will it do the job before the cancer.
It darn near did.
What about those stents?
A temporary fix, said the doctor. What he needed was bypass. Double, maybe triple—he couldn’t really say until he got in there. And that was that. Sutter had watched his own father go through all that, a year of recovery only to die six months later sitting in his chair watching baseball.
He never told her about the heart. The cancer was enough. Audrey still in high school then. Nineteen when the cancer came back, a college girl, and he only told her because the money was running out and you didn’t want your daughter getting some kind of notice that her daddy had failed to pay her tuition. Or that her daddy was in the hospital taking his last breaths.
He did not want her to come home—had made her promise not to, but she’d broken that promise, and otherwise would never have come to this stinking place, would never have stopped here for gas with Caroline Price.
And if Caroline Price had not been with her, with her pepper spray and her toughness?
Caroline fought, Daddy. She fought them so beautifully.
He swept his beam all around the cleared pavement in front of the bathrooms and over the heaped up snow at the pavement’s edge and over the snowy, undisturbed reaches beyond—did he throw it? And how far could he throw it? Sutter ran his beam up the boughs of a solitary pine tree, then followed the beam down the length of sidewalk behind the building and around to the other side and trained it on the spaces where he’d parked next to the old Ford wagon. Then he took the key back to Pamela and thanked her again.
“Officer,” she said as he turned to go.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Are you all right?”
“Ma’am?”
“I mean, you just don’t look like you’re doing so hot there. I thought maybe you had the flu or something.”
“No, ma’am. It’s not the flu. Good night, now.”
17
It was just gray dawn when his crying woke her, and whatever she’d been dreaming fled from her like the warmth of the bed as she drew back the covers, as she sat up and pulled the robe around her—“It’s all right, boy, I’m up, I’m here”—and in the dark there was the weak thump of tail as she bent to collect him from his nest of blankets and old stuffed toys at the foot of the bed, the dog like an old stuffed thing himself with all the stuffing dragged out, all the living heaviness gone from him now, hardly more to this creature in her arms than the sack of skin and the brittle bones it held, the riddled bones, and her dream, whatever it was, was gone.
Downstairs she set him on his feet by the door and waggled her own feet into the soft boots there and fed her arms into her father’s old canvas jacket and unlocked and swung in the wooden door, “Watch your toes, boy,” and pushed open the stormdoor and followed him out onto the small wooden deck that overlooked the long slope of the yard and the wire fence and the fifty acres beyond that she rented to old Jimmy McVeigh, or, rather, to his sons now. The dog making his way over the top crust of snow to the iron clothesline bar, and no sound at that cold hour but the soft press of the snow under his paws. Stopping and lowering his haunches at the foot of the iron bar, no longer able to lift his leg, the snow hissing and steaming beneath him.
There he squatted, the dark outline of a dog in the glistening white. A thin and homely shadow of a dog, much as he’d looked when the boys had first brought him home, what—thirteen years ago? Brought him to her as if there would be no question, no resistance, this starved and dirty animal. Danny and Marky coming up the walk with the animal wobbling along behind them and nearly through the front door before she pushed them back outside, then reached to pull the boys toward her, to separate them from the animal, the shocking thing, a cre
ature that surely would’ve died given another day.
Get inside, she’d told them. She would call the pound, the Board of Health, the county sheriff.
But Danny had looked at her, and then at Marky, who with his strange agility had twisted free of her and stood petting the animal’s skull.
You know what they’ll do to him, Danny said quietly.
He was sly, her Daniel, so sly. And Marky knew at once what he meant, and the fight was over; she could never do that to her son.
Danny kneeled next to his brother and began stroking the dog’s ragged spine. What will we call him? he asked, and Marky said Snickers, but then rethought; the boys had been watching westerns on TV. Wyatt Earp! he said, and Danny nodded. The outlaw sheriff, he said.
Fifty feet of hose lay sun-heated in the grass and as they washed the filth from his coat Wyatt Earp stood docile, soaked, the more wasted and pathetic for his soaking, a living skeleton. Rachel at the kitchen window shaking her head. Her good fabric shears flashing in the sun as the boys snipped the burrs from the dog’s coat, the boys quiet and serious as surgeons. Danny emptying one of Roger’s old jelly jars of screws and pouring in lawnmower gas and dropping into this—he alone, not Marky, who could not be the cause of any creature’s death—tick after tick, some as fat as blueberries. They cleverly made a collar out of an old leather belt, and lastly they pooled their savings for the vet’s shots and for dogfood. The county would do the neutering for free.
Well. He’d been a good dog, after all. Smart, obedient, happy—devoted to Danny as if he’d never forgotten that day, that sudden change of fortune. When Danny went away, years later, leaving him behind with Rachel and Marky, he was not the same animal. His heart was broken. Sickness saw an opening.
Now in the dawn, in the cold, the dog returned to her. “Good boy,” she said and held open the stormdoor. So much life, so much love, and memory, and grief in such a short-lived life. Does he have any idea what a life is? What his might have meant?
In the kitchen she filled the kettle and lit the burners and took out the half can of dogfood from the fridge and spooned the remainder into the saucepan. She crushed up one of his pills and added that to the dogfood, and with the spoon began to break it all down over a low flame while he sat on his kitchen blankets, watching her, shivering with cold and pain. Rachel at the stove stirring his breakfast, her eyes on the window where the new day was coming, the sky growing pale in the east and you should put him down, Rachel. The only kind thing to do. The vet’s advice.