The Current

by Tim Johnston

  “I’m sorry to do it, Sheriff. Like I said, I had a long night and I thought about a lot of things. And one thing I thought about . . . something I’d never really thought about before, was those times you brought her home. You remember that?”

  “I brought a lot of kids home to their folks, Gordon. Brought them home drunk, high, beat-up. But alive. Always alive.”

  “I know it. But she never talked about it.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “When you brought her home she wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Why would she? Would you?”

  “Maybe not. Just, thinking back on it, it seemed she was more than embarrassed. Seemed she was more than that.”

  Moran’s hands had been flat on the tabletop and now he lifted one in the air, palm out, as if to halt traffic. “All right, Gordon. Let’s just—slow down here a minute.” He leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Can you hear yourself, Gordon? Do you know what you’re saying?”

  Gordon did not look away.

  “Because I’m having a hard time believing what I’m hearing.” He sat looking into Gordon’s eyes. As if he might read there some other story altogether—or else the madness that would explain this one. Finally he shook his head and looked down at his hands on the table.

  “I’m trying real hard to stand in your shoes, Gordon, but it’s difficult. I’ve never gone through what you’ve gone though and I pray to God I never do. I just don’t see how a man would ever be the same after something like that.” He took a breath and looked off and let the air out slowly. “So I’m sitting here asking myself what’s the best thing to do right now, and there’s two or three ideas going around. But I think the best thing for me to do is just get on back to work and let you be.”

  He picked up his phone and gathered his jacket and his hat.

  “You never said,” Gordon said.

  “Never said what.”

  “If he’s crazy or not.”

  “Well, Gordon, you might ask yourself this: What would you expect me to say?”

  He stood from the booth and put his hat on. He got into his sheriff’s jacket, then pulled his wallet from the inside breast pocket, removed several bills and dropped them on the tabletop. He replaced the wallet and stood looking down on Gordon from under the hatbrim.

  “Crazy has got a way of spreading, Gordon. I just hope you’ve got sense enough not to be the one goes spreading it.” He held Gordon’s eyes, then he turned and made his way toward the door. He called, “So long” to the waitress and he clapped the old man on the back and yelled to him, “Seeya, Harold,” and then he pushed out through the door into the daylight and was gone.

  43

  When Gordon Burke came home the sun was just down and she was sitting on the edge of the porch with her boots on the step below and a mug of hot tea in her hands. She was wearing her father’s canvas jacket and a pair of faded Levi’s and a billcap she’d found in the downstairs coat closet. Under the jacket she wore a red fleece pullover and under that a white cotton tank top that smelled faintly of perfume. Or so she believed. His headlights swept through the trees, and she watched as he pulled up to the garage or whatever it was across the way and got out and walked to the rear of the van, opened the back doors, collected a large black garbage bag in one hand and several plastic grocery bags in the other and closed the doors again with his shoulder. He paused at the sight of her, then came along the path with the bags and stopped just short of the porchsteps and stood looking at her in the dusk.

  “You shouldn’t be out here in the cold,” he said, and his voice was strange. Like he himself was sick, or had talked himself hoarse. She looked at him more carefully: the unshaved, ashy face, the shadowed eyes.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Am I all right?”

  “You didn’t catch it, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t catch it. I just didn’t sleep too good last night.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault. Had nothing to do with you.”

  She sat looking at him. His eyes went to the billcap on her head but he said nothing.

  “What day is it?” she said.

  “Friday.”

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Two days, two nights.”

  She nodded. “Thank you. For bringing me here. For taking care of me.”

  He adjusted the bags in his grips, then set them down on the path. “Wasn’t just me,” he said. “Doc Van Allen came out and looked you over. You remember that?”

  “No. I didn’t think they did that anymore.”

  “Did what?”

  “House calls.”

  “They don’t.” He looked up at the sky, then at her again. “Anyway your fever broke, so I thought I’d take off for just a little bit.” He nudged the large garbage bag with the side of his boot. “Drove on down to post bond on your clothes.”

  She said nothing, and he said, “That’s a joke. There wasn’t no bond.”

  Her eyes began to sting. “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I had to talk to a man down there anyhow.”

  An owl hooted from the woods and he looked toward the trees as if he might see it, but there was nothing there to see. The trees. The snow. The cold early stars in the purple sky.

  She said, “I hope you don’t mind I found some clothes.”

  “No, I expected you might.”

  “Took a shower too. Maybe the best one I ever had.”

  He looked back at the van and said, “I got the luggage in the back of the van there. Your backpack. I don’t know if there’s much left you can use but I took it all anyhow. I think they put these clothes through some kind of wash but I don’t believe they ever heard of detergent down there. Thought I’d run them through again.”

  “I can do it.”

  “All right.” He looked at her. “You best come inside now.”

  “All right.”

  “I can take you on home later if you want. The gas and electric are back on.”

  She stared at him, her eyes stinging. “Mr. Burke . . .”

  “Mr. Burke nothing. I asked the woman there at Water & Gas, ‘Ma’am, what do you think is gonna happen to the waterpipes when you turn off the heat?’ She just looked at me.” He shook his head. “So then I go back to the house to light the furnace and water heater and guess what I see?”

  “What?”

  “I see that someone has left all the faucets dribbling.”

  “Someone must’ve broken in.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  She looked into her mug, the pale tea. Dark curve of sediment down there like a letter C against the white.

  “What are you drinking there?” he said.

  “Tea.”

  “Tea,” he said. “That’s gotta be over ten years old. Come on now,” he said. “Let’s get you inside and get some food in you.”

  He made spaghetti with meatballs and she ate two plates of it and wiped the plate clean with the last slice of garlic bread and ate that too, and then with her cup of coffee she ate a slice of store-bought cherry pie that had been warming in the oven and when that was gone she pushed the plate away from her and puffed her cheeks and blew.

  In the utility room off the kitchen her clothes were tumbling in the dryer. Zippers and jeans rivets ticking irregularly on the drum.

  She was looking around the kitchen and he looked too, as if he’d never done so before. Spare and neat and not much in the way of décor to suggest a wife and a daughter—their coming and going, their cooking, their teasing, their arguing. Their standing shoulder to shoulder at the sink. The sight of one or both of them at the window when he’d come home from work and was crossing the cold path toward that light, that warmth. He’d seen that, she knew. Felt that.

  He began to fuss with the plates and she said, “Let me do it. You drink your coffee,” and she stood and took the plates to the counter.

  “There’s
a good dishwasher there,” he said.

  “I’m a good dishwasher. Is that OK?”

  “Can you manage with that cast?”

  “I can manage anything with this thing.”

  Steam rose from the sink and she scrubbed the silverware first, thinking, Did Holly Burke hold this knife, eat from this fork? Her own reflection was in the window, but beyond that a skewed rectangle of light lay on the snow, her shape in the center of the rectangle like some parallel girl looking back at her. She said, “I had such crazy dreams. When I was sick.”

  “Fever dreams.”

  “I saw my father clear as day. He sat there on the bed and called me Deputy.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t a dream.”

  She turned to him. “You believe that?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I believe.” He looked down at his coffee, and she turned back to the sink. She watched her good hand moving white and slow under the suds.

  “When I went into the river that day,” she said, “when we went through the ice and we were in the water, I think I must’ve drowned. I think I must’ve died.”

  He said nothing. She heard him return the mug quietly to the tabletop. She turned around again. “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t have said that.”

  He shook his head and made a face that said it was nothing, no harm done.

  “What makes you think you drowned?” he said.

  “I saw things under there, in the water. I don’t know how else I could’ve seen them otherwise.” Before he could ask what she’d seen she said, “My dreams were like that, when I was sick. It was like being in that river all over again.”

  I felt her heart, she would’ve liked to tell him. All its pain but all its love too.

  He sat watching her. The laundry thumping and ticking.

  “I remember looking out the window upstairs and seeing two men standing in the snow talking,” she said.

  “That wasn’t no dream,” he said. “I come back upstairs and there you are lying on the floor by that window, and the window wide-open.”

  “Sorry.”

  He looked into his mug again. She turned back to the sink and began scrubbing the saucepan.

  “You hear what those two men said?” he said.

  The saucepan slipped out of her grip and splashed in the water. She retrieved it and resumed scrubbing.

  “I heard,” she said, “but I thought it was just part of the dream.”

  “What did you hear?”

  She worked at the saucepan. Then, without turning around, she told him what she’d heard—about the deputy, about the piece of cloth. Feverish, crazy things.

  Gordon was silent. She rinsed the saucepan one-handed and racked it.

  “You heard all that?” he said, and she turned to him again.

  “That was Danny Young,” she said.

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I didn’t think he lived here anymore.”

  “He doesn’t. But he’s back now. Came out here to tell me he didn’t do it. All these years later.”

  She leaned against the counter and dried her good hand with the dish towel.

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I don’t know.” He put his hand to his forehead. “I went down there and talked to that deputy. Sheriff, now.”

  “What did he say?” she said—and heard herself and said, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

  “He said what you’d expect him to say,” Gordon said. “Had an answer for everything.” He looked up again. Watching her standing there. “What?” he said.

  “What what?”

  “You were gonna say something.”

  She shook her head, but then she said it: “My dad didn’t like him.”

  “Who?”

  “Ed Moran.”

  “The world’s full of people who don’t like each other.”

  “I know. But I think—”

  He waited.

  “I think he knew something about him,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  She thought about that, but there was nothing specific, no single thing she could put into words. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I asked him one time why Moran was leaving the department and he didn’t say. He said it was none of my concern.”

  “Was he wrong?”

  She shook her head again. “But it was the way he said it. Like there was something there he didn’t want to talk about. Not with me, anyway.”

  Gordon narrowed his eyes at her. “If you’re trying to say he knew about this . . .”

  “No, not about this,” she said quickly. “Not about Holly. I mean—” she said, but then lost her voice in the rush of her thoughts . . . because if her father had known that Moran might’ve been involved in Holly’s death, if he’d had any suspicion whatsoever, then he never would’ve let him go down to Iowa like that—he’d have kept him in Minnesota until he had his case. Until he could bust him and hold him. And he certainly would not have allowed him to become an Iowa deputy . . . and so whatever he’d known, or whatever he’d suspected about the deputy, it hadn’t been enough to act on, and it hadn’t been enough to say something against him to the Iowa sheriff.

  Or did he just say nothing at all, as he’d done with her? None of your concern.

  “I don’t know what it was,” she said finally. “But it wasn’t about Holly. It couldn’t have been.”

  Gordon looked at her. Then he looked into his coffee again. Silent. Far away in his thoughts, in his pain, so that when he spoke again she knew it didn’t matter that she was there to hear it.

  “I watched that boy grow up. Him and his brother. Their daddy was my business partner. Our kids used to play together when they were little.” He tilted his mug, watching. “I saw the other one just a few days ago, over at Wabash’s. Or I guess it was longer ago than that.”

  “The other one?”

  “Other brother. Twin brother. Marky. He works there. And after that I go on out to their mother’s place, I don’t even know why, I haven’t said one word to that woman in ten years, and here she is trying to bury a dead dog in the frozen ground.” He shook his head. “The world is just too strange for words, that’s all.”

  She watched him. Then she stepped back to the table and sat down again.

  “So what are you going to do?” she said.

  He didn’t look up. “About what?”

  “About what he told you—what Danny Young told you.”

  He looked up then, and she felt the blood rising to her face.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he said.

  “You could go to the sheriff, Mr. Burke. Sheriff Halsey. Or a lawyer. I know a good one, I could—”

  “Lawyer? I don’t need no lawyer. And I can just see the sheriff’s face. This boy comes to tell me a story about a deputy—a full sheriff now—trying to frame him ten years ago? Hell, he’d lock me up.”

  “But there’s evidence now.”

  “There’s a piece of cloth ten years old, and I don’t even have it. He took it with him.”

  “But the sheriff—”

  Gordon pushed back from the table and stood, as if remembering something he’d forgotten to do, but then did nothing, just stood there. Then he went to the sink, and after a moment there was the sound of his mug going into the water, the dull, underwater note of it hitting bottom.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”

  He stood staring into the water. “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “But to tell you the truth, I wish like hell you never opened up that window. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

  She watched him. The back of his neck.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Burke,” she said. “Maybe I was supposed to open that window.”

  He glanced back at her then without quite looking at her. “Supposed to?”

  “Yes. If you think about how it all happened . . . me getting sick, you bringing the firewood, then bringing me here. Danny Young showing up like
that. The fact that it was my dad’s case . . .”

  He turned back to the kitchen window. “You’re a strange girl, you know that?” He was silent a long while, and she was too. Then he said to the window, “I went on up there to Rochester, to that hospital, when you were there. He tell you that—your dad?”

  “No.”

  “Well. Can’t say I’m surprised, after what I said to him.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “Said I wished it on him. What happened to you. It was a long time ago, but after he let that boy go, after he let Danny Young walk away, I wished it on him. Just so he’d know what it was like.”

  She watched him but he would not turn to look at her.

  “You don’t think . . .” she began. “Mr. Burke—you don’t think that had anything to do with what happened to me and Caroline, do you?”

  He didn’t move. Staring out the window.

  “Mr. Burke?”

  “I don’t know what I think. I just got a funny feeling that if you never went into that river, you and Caroline, Danny Young never would of come to show me that piece of cloth. And don’t even say it,” he said, turning toward her again. “I know how it sounds.”

  He held her eyes, then turned away again. “I just wanted you to know I wished for it, that’s all. I wanted you to know that about me.”

  She was silent, imagining that moment: Gordon Burke standing with her father in the hospital and telling him that—that he’d wished harm on her.

  “What did he say?” she said finally.

  “Who?”

  “My dad. When you told him that.”

  “Said what a decent man would say. Said he was sorry.”

  “He was, Mr. Burke,” she said. “He never got over it. He never stopped thinking about it. I know he didn’t. I know that’s why he went down there and shot that boy in the hand like that. It wasn’t just about me and Caroline. It was about Holly too, and Danny Young, and—”

  Gordon had raised his hand, and he kept it raised. As if demonstrating the act itself—how a hand was raised for its own shooting. “That was about you,” he said. “Trust me. I know what was in his heart. And I know he let that boy off easy.”

  “He shot a boy with no evidence, Mr. Burke.”