by Tim Johnston
He turned back to Sutter’s stormdoor. In the inside door was a small square of window, head-high, thin white curtain drawn over it on the other side.
He coughed. He scratched at the back of his head. He looked at the stack of firewood. Finally he went down the steps once more and closed up the van’s double doors with more bang than necessary and took one more look at the house—nothing—then climbed into the cab and turned over the engine and pulled out into the street. Three, four blocks away he stopped at the yellow light and sat there through the red.
Hell, you don’t even know that girl. Scare her to death showing up like that.
A car honked and he said, “All right, all right,” and drove through the green and then without signaling or braking he pulled a sudden left into the Phillips 66 and navigated the van around the pumps and back toward the road—pulling out onto the road again and accelerating back the way he’d come and just making the yellow, and there were no more lights after that and when he reached the house he pulled nose-first into the drive and left the van running. He went up the porchsteps and pushed his finger into the button and listened to the two-note chime sounding inside the house. Waited. Pushed the button again. Then he opened up the stormdoor and rapped on the square of glass.
“Audrey—?” He’d never said her name aloud that he remembered and it felt strange in his throat and strange in his ears.
He waited. Rapped again.
“Son of a bitch,” he said, and the door was not locked.
The room was dark, and so cold he saw his breath. But cold as it was the smell was strong and no mistaking it. Daylight spilled in around him and in this light something moved and he stepped aside to let in more light, and a white face rose up from the sofa, up from a dark mound of coverings. Bleary, unfocusing eyes blinking in pain at the light. In confusion.
“Daddy . . . ?” she said. Her voice so thin and hoarse. And then he realized she couldn’t see anything but his shape and he stepped in and shut the door behind him and said, “No, it’s Gordon here. Gordon Burke.”
“. . . Who?”
“Gordon Burke. Why’s it so cold in here?”
“Oh,” she said, and her head dropped from view again. As if she could not hold it up a second longer.
He came closer. She’d piled every kind of covering over herself—blankets, jackets, sleeping bags. Like a great cocoon. Mail was strewn across the coffee table, and even in that gloom he recognized the Water & Gas envelope. final notice printed slantwise in red, as if hand-stamped by some angry little lackey.
“How long have you been lying here in the cold like this?”
From down in her cocoon she said, “I’m sorry.” Or seemed to say.
“Audrey,” he said.
She didn’t answer. He stepped between the coffee table and the sofa and nearly kicked over the small plastic wastebasket there on the floor. Slosh of liquid and a sharper stink of vomit. He moved it so he could get closer.
“I’m going to feel your forehead now.”
No answer, and he moved aside the clinging hair and shaped his hand to her forehead. Holy God.
“OK,” he said, “that’s it. I’m taking you to the hospital.” He began peeling back the layers one by one.
“No,” she said, weakly reaching for the peeled-away layers.
“No argument here. You are burning up.” He peeled her down to the last thin damp blanket and stopped. Then peeled that slowly until he saw that she was wearing a shirt—red flannel shirt many sizes too big. She was folded up inside the shirt, and from the knees down she wore thick dark socks. She lay curled up and shivering. Heat and sweat and sickness rising from her in a rank steam.
“Please,” she said, “don’t.”
“Can you stand up? Come on, I’ll help you.”
Slowly she rose to sitting and the moment she did so she reached for the wastebasket. He held it for her, held her hair as she heaved and coughed and spat. Almost nothing came up.
“Come on.” Helping her to her feet. Her father’s jacket was among the layers and he found it and got her to put her arms through the sleeves, cast and all, and as she stood swaying he reached down and fed the zipper and drew the metal tab up to her chin. “Here, let’s get these boots on you.”
“Mr. Burke,” she said.
“Yep.” He was trying to help with the boot and at the same time keep his grip on her arm so she wouldn’t fall over. He was doing it all wrong.
“I can’t go back there.”
He looked up at her. He had to think a moment.
“We’re not going up there,” he said. “We’re going to Charlotte.”
She shook her head. “Not there either. Can’t go to a hospital.”
“You have a fever and you’re dehydrated.”
“Please, Mr. Burke.”
“Audrey . . .”
“Please, Mr. Burke.”
35
He was five minutes late and Jeff was already sitting at the bar with his arms crossed before him and a half-gone glass of beer at his elbow, his face lifted toward the TV above the back bar. Two other men sat at the bar in much the same posture, and all three glanced over their shoulders to see who had come through the door and all three turned back to the TV once they’d seen. No other sound in the bar but the sounds of the game, the announcers and the crowd and the squeaking sneakers.
He took the stool to Jeff’s left and the man behind the bar flipped him a cardboard coaster and asked what he could get him and Jeff said, “Mike, this is a old, old buddy of mine, Danny Young. Danny, this is Mike. He’s good people.” Danny shook the man’s hand and watched his face to see if the name meant anything to him, but he saw no such sign. He ordered a beer and Mike stepped away to draw it.
“You still follow the Gophers?” Jeff said. He was watching the game again and Danny watched too.
“Not much.”
“Smart man. Nothing but aggravation and heartbreak.”
Mike returned with the beer, and after he’d stepped away again they raised their glasses and clinked them together and Jeff said, “Old friends,” and they drank and set the glasses down again. On the TV a young man stood at the free-throw line and they all watched to see if he would make his shots and when he did the man to Danny’s left slapped the bar and said, “Praise the Lord.”
Danny looked over his shoulder at the half dozen empty tables, their surfaces stained red and blue with the neon in the front window. Four booths along the back wall, all unoccupied. A dark and timeless place. A place their own grandfathers might have gone to in a time before there were televisions.
They watched the game. They drank their beers. Jeff asked Danny about his jobs, the places he’d lived, and Danny told him about his travels as he remembered them, unable to make them sound more interesting than they were. After a silence he asked Jeff how his mother was and Jeff shrugged.
“Still alive,” he said. “Still up there in Rochester at the home.”
“You get up there to see her?”
“Holidays. Mother’s Day. She don’t even know who I am anymore. Sometimes she thinks I’m my dad. Sometimes she thinks I’m this guy George Munroe, who I guess was some kid she knew in high school.”
Danny shook his head, no idea what to say.
“Katie works up there now,” Jeff said.
“In Rochester?”
“In the home. As a nurse. Mom doesn’t know her from any of the other nurses.”
Jeff watched the game, and Danny watched too but he was seeing Katie Goss. Her thick blond hair and her dark eyes. Her smell of strawberries and her laugh—she was a good laugher and you had to shush her at night when you snuck her in, and even put your hand over her mouth, because she’d laugh when you touched her, when you kissed her anywhere below the neck, Shh, shh, your hearts beating because you must be quiet, you must be quiet and secret. Summer nights with the windows open and the bugs so loud in their rhythm, their one great pulsing song and Oh Danny, she’d say, Oh Danny. Both of you
too young to know how sweet, how fine. To know what could be lost.
Jeff said, “Aw, Jesus Christ” to something in the game, and Danny took a drink of his beer.
“I heard she got married,” he said. “Had a kid. A little girl.”
“That what you heard?”
“Ma wrote something, a few years back.”
Jeff took a drink and set his beer down again. “Had the kid but never got married. Guy was a total douche. Left her high and dry.”
Danny shook his head, in real sadness. “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said, and Jeff shrugged again and said, “It is what it is, man.” And saying this he looked at Danny, as if to give greater weight to the words, and Danny held his eyes—eyes of childhood, eyes of boyhood in the face of this man sitting at the bar drinking his beer, a man still in his mechanic’s jacket and smelling of the garage.
Jeff turned back to the game. Then he gave Danny a backhanded swat to the arm. “You wanna sit at a table? This game is killing me, man.” And they took a table far enough from the bar that they would not be overheard by the men at the bar but not so far that the men would wonder what it was they had to move so far away to discuss, and when they sat they arranged themselves so both had a view of the game, as if that were still their top priority. The man who’d sat to Danny’s left watched the move dull-eyed over his shoulder, and Danny and Jeff returned his look until at last he swung his head back around and lifted his glass and drank, the back side of his skull gleaming under a few dark strings of hair.
“Saw you out there talking to Wabash this morning,” Jeff said. He’d put his boots up on one of the empty chair seats and crossed them at the ankles and likewise crossed his arms, and his eyes were still on the game.
“He felt like a chat, I guess,” Danny said.
“What’d he have to say?”
“He seemed mainly to want to tell me what a small town it is.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I guess I might just want to think about that.”
Jeff picked up his glass and before taking his drink said, “Well, maybe you might.”
Danny looked over but Jeff kept his eyes on the game.
“You got something on your mind, Jeff?”
“Just saying,” Jeff said. “A man might wonder what you’re doing back here, Dan.”
“I don’t know why a man would. I’ve been back plenty of times.”
“I know it. Big Man always tells me. Christmastime, usually. But then you go back to wherever. You don’t go driving him to work. You don’t go parking your truck in the lot and walking right in. Standing around jawing with Wabash all day.”
Danny looked at him, then looked away.
“I guess I shouldn’t have bothered you, Jeff.”
“Aw, shit.” Jeff brought his boots to the floor, and the man at the bar with the stringy hair glanced back at the sound, his brows bunched up over the dark mound of his shoulder. Jeff waited for him to turn away again.
“It ain’t about that, Dan, and you know it.”
“What it’s about?”
“You know what it’s about.” Jeff leaned forward, and Danny turned, the better to face him, and they looked into each other’s eyes—and finally with a smirk Jeff said in a lowered voice, “It’s about what everybody has always said every time they’ve seen you back here and what they’re gonna say now—especially now.”
“Why especially now?”
Jeff looked at him. “Seriously?”
Danny waited.
“Not two weeks since those two girls went into the river down in Iowa? One of them dead and the other the sheriff’s daughter. What sheriff? The sheriff who let that son of a bitch Danny Young go scot-free and who is now dead himself in the ground.”
Danny stared at Jeff, Jeff staring back.
“I gotta say, Jeff. I thought you of all people would cut me a little slack.”
“Why me of all people, Dan?”
Danny looked at him. Sitting there waiting. All tensed up like some kind of animal. Spring-loaded. It made him so tired, suddenly. Then in a voice only Jeff could hear he said, “We drove right by her, Jeff. We both of us drove right by where it happened. Where they say she went into the river.”
Jeff shook his head and laughed but there was no humor in it. “That ain’t what you mean.”
There was a disturbance at the bar and they both turned to watch as the man with the stringy hair righted himself and stood blinking glassily at the room. At the two of them sitting there. He let go of the bar and made his way step by step to the dim hallway, then pushed his way into the men’s room and forced the wonky door shut behind him.
“I was the one they wanted,” Danny said. “That’s all that’s ever mattered to anyone.”
Jeff said nothing to that. They sat staring at each other. So many years to their friendship. All the years up to that night ten years ago—years of play, of school, of hockey on the frozen lake, summer camp. Of secret hideouts and talk of girls and then the girls themselves. And then all the years after when they said nothing more about it and did not see each other or even talk on the phone but just got on with their strange, separate, suddenly adult lives.
“What,” said Danny. “You think I’d come back here to say something now I never said back then? That I’d just suddenly start telling some other story?”
“Maybe you figured enough time has passed nobody’d do nothin about it now anyhow. Statue of limitations or some such shit.”
“There ain’t no statute of limitations for that, Jeff.”
“Well, that’s a fuckin relief.” He drank his beer and looked at the TV, and Danny looked too but the game had ended and the news was on. The bartender had gone somewhere out of view. The remaining man at the bar appeared to be asleep on his forearms. In all the time they’d been in the tavern no one else had come in or left. As if the world outside had stopped for that time. As if the last of the world were right here in this dark and random place.
“What I told them was the truth, Jeff. I was out there chasing down that goddam dog and I didn’t see anything else. Not a God damn thing. End of story.”
Jeff took a breath and let it out and all the fight seemed to go out of him with the breath.
“Shit, Dan. It coulda been either one of us. They had us at the bar and they had me as the old boyfriend but they had you in the park. But it coulda just as easily been me.”
“You weren’t the old boyfriend. You didn’t even date her, technically.”
“She didn’t date anyone technically.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
Jeff ran his thumb down the curve of his beer glass. “I had a thing for her, though. You know I did.”
“A lot of guys had a thing for her.”
“You knew I did, though. And you knew how drunk I was. Shit. I’d be sitting in jail right now. And my Ma would be in the state hospital in a paper gown with all the crazies. Or dead. Which would be preferable, actually.”
“They had no case, Jeff.”
Jeff shook his head. “That sheriff, Sutter, and that deputy, what was his name?”
“Moran.”
“Moran. With those bug eyes of his. They sure didn’t like nothing about either one of us, did they.”
“No, they did not.”
Danny looked into his beer. Jeff sat pulling at the whiskers on his chin. Then he said, “Tell you one thing I never could figure.”
“What’s that.”
“Why old Gordo stuck up for me with Wabash, after all that. I never would of got that job otherwise.”
“He knew about your ma. He knew you needed the work.”
“Maybe. But I think it was about Big Man, mostly. I think he had a soft spot there.”
“Maybe,” said Danny. “But I’ll tell you something.”
Jeff waited.
“Marky never would’ve got that job without you there with him. You’ve watched out for him, Jeff, and I won’t ever forget that. None of us will.�
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Jeff rolled his eyes. “Don’t be thanking me, for Christ’s sake.” He shook his head dismally. “All these years. All that time away from your family.”
Danny looked down at the floor, at his boots. “How about this,” he said. “How about we just give the whole subject a rest. That work for you?”
“That works for me. You just watch your ass, Danny-boy, all right? There’s no telling what some folks might do.”
“I’ll watch my ass.”
Danny raised his glass and after a moment Jeff raised his too and as they did so the men’s room door rattled open and the drunk man emerged and came toward them on a wandering course. He reached their table and stood balancing himself. Wet pink eyes disappearing in long, slow blinks.
“A word of caution, boys, if you will allow it,” he said, and swung his face from one of them to the other. Danny looked to Jeff, and Jeff looked to Danny but before either could speak the man said, “He is everywhere, boys. Everywhere. Even here, in this reportedly godforsaken place,” and he raised both hands and looked to the ceiling like a man preparing to catch something, and holding this pose he began to pitch forward, slowly, like a great statue falling, and he would have crashed face-first into their table except that both of them rose at once to take an arm and stop his fall and set him back on his feet again.
He nodded at them in turn. Patted their hands. Their shoulders.
“You see?” he said. “Even here, boys. Even here.”
36
He’d come out of the men’s room wiping his hands on his jeans to dry them, and Jeff was not at the table and he thought he’d gone ahead but then he saw him at the bar. Jeff, he’d said, reaching him before he could order, taking hold of his arm. Come on, Jeff, we said we were going.