The Current

by Tim Johnston

  “Ed,” said Halsey.

  “What.”

  “Do you want to tell me about last night? About the river?”

  Moran shook his head. “Sure, Wayne, I’ll tell you about last night. I’ll tell you I had to go out on that ice to try to save that dumb-ass girl from drowning, risking my own goddam neck, and she clocks me with her goddam cast. I should’ve just let her drown, you want to know the truth. And now this.”

  “Why did you lie to me just now? About your ear?”

  “I guess we’ll have to chalk that one up to pride, Wayne. Didn’t want you to think some little girl coldcocked me.”

  “What were you doing in the park in the first place, Ed? What were you even doing up here?”

  “I told you, I’ve got an active investigation. I was actually looking for that girl so I could give her an update.”

  “You might’ve just called her.”

  “I might’ve, but I didn’t, and last I checked there’s no law against a law officer going to see his witness in person.”

  “Why’d she go out on the ice?”

  “You’ll have to ask her.”

  “I already did. She said to get away from you.”

  “She had no reason to get away from me.”

  “She thought she did.”

  “Nothing I can do about that, Wayne.”

  Halsey looked at him. Then he looked toward his Tahoe—the girl sitting there watching. The two mechanics in the garage bay watching. Wabash watching. The deputies with their weapons.

  He turned back to Moran. “Why didn’t you report it, Ed?” he said, and he saw the question land in the other man’s eyes, the flinch that played out in some way Halsey couldn’t even say, and he knew at once what Moran thought he was asking: Ten years ago, Ed—if you pulled Danny Young over that night in that park, why didn’t you report it?

  And why didn’t you ever say so, once he became a person of interest?

  And if the boy had brought it up himself, that day we watched the sheriff interviewing him—what would you have said then?

  But that wasn’t what Halsey was asking; this wasn’t the time for those questions.

  “Report what?” Moran said finally, and Halsey said, “Why didn’t you report a girl falling through the ice, Ed? Or a girl drowning, for all you knew?” And then he watched as this question landed too, the few seconds Moran took to process it, before looking away and shaking his head again.

  “I don’t know, Wayne. I don’t remember a whole lot after that cast on the side of my head. Except waking up on the ice half-froze to death—I remember that.”

  Halsey watched him. Then he said, “You want to come down to the station with me, Ed?”

  Moran took a breath and let it out. “No, Wayne, I do not. What I want is for you to move your vehicle so I can be on my way already.”

  Halsey said nothing. He nodded, then he said, “In that case, Ed, I’m going to have to ask you to step out of this vehicle now, with your hands in the air.”

  Moran didn’t move. “Don’t be an idiot, Wayne. You got no probable cause.”

  “I believe I do.” He drew his gun and held it one-handed at his side. Then with his free hand he lifted the latch and swung the door open. “Now show me your hands and get up out of the car for me, Ed.”

  Moran sat watching him. He looked again toward the Tahoe, the girl. He looked at the deputies. Then he put his hands in the air and stepped out of his cruiser.

  “This won’t stick, Wayne,” he said, turning, lacing his hands behind his head.

  “Spread your feet for me, Ed,” Halsey said. Moran did so, and Halsey took the laced fingers in his grip and holstered his gun and relieved Moran of his. He reached back with the .45 and one of his deputies stepped forward to take it from him. He drew Moran’s right wrist down and snapped on the cuff, then brought the left down and did the same, and when Moran was cuffed he turned him around and unbuckled his utility belt and handed that off to a deputy too.

  “You won’t be able to hold me,” Moran said.

  “We’ll see,” Halsey said. He asked Deputy Moser to get the rifle from the back seat and mind his fingerprints and the deputy did so, carrying the rifle by the barrel to his own cruiser and laying it with care on the back seat.

  Moran looked once more at the Tahoe, and Halsey looked too. The girl sat there as before. She had not put her head down but instead had watched it all. Halsey held Moran just above the elbow and he made him stand there so he could see the girl. So the girl could see him. But the girl’s eyes were not on Moran, they were on him.

  “Do you know what you’re doing here, Wayne?”

  “I’m busting you, Ed.”

  “You are killing me, Wayne. Some little girl tells you a story and you arrest me like this, in public, for the whole world to see? Small town like this. You’re killing me, Wayne. Just killing me.”

  He led Moran by the elbow toward Deputy Lowell’s cruiser. “Edward Moran,” Halsey said, “you might think about shutting that mouth of yours and waiting for your lawyer.”

  Throughout it all Moran had not looked once at the two young men standing in the bay of the garage, the mechanics, but he looked at them now—he looked at the two of them, and then he looked at Marky Young alone, and Marky Young did not look away. He kept his eyes on Moran’s, and even after the lady deputy took Moran from Sheriff Halsey and made him get into the back of her cruiser, placing her hand on the top of his head, on his hair, and even after the cruiser door was shut Moran continued to stare at Marky through the glass, and Marky did not look away. And after they were all gone—Moran and Sheriff Halsey and his deputies and the girl Audrey Sutter—Marky and Jeff went out into the cold and helped Mr. Wabash hook up Moran’s cruiser to the wrecker and they were standing in the cold yet when Mr. Wabash drove out of the lot, hauling the Escape behind him on his way to the sheriff’s impound lot.

  64

  The nurse who called her name and took her into the examination room was a young woman with dark eyes and an accent that made you think of islands, of great flowered plants and a turquoise sea. She’d never seen the beautiful nurse before and she wondered if she’d ever seen such a face her whole life before going south to school. As if such a face could not survive up here in so much whiteness, the way a parrot, or any other colorful thing, could not.

  The nurse took her temperature and blood pressure and wrote these things down and then said, “Come with me, baby,” and left her in the care of the radiologist, himself a young man whom she’d never seen before either, and she realized then that she didn’t recognize any of the staff on this floor, and that none recognized her, or gave any indication that they did—as if all of that, her long stay and her long walk on the last day to see her father behind the curtain, had happened in some other hospital, or some dream of a hospital. Which it hadn’t, of course, and when she saw Dr. Breece again for the first time since that day, the doctor floating into the examination room with the beautiful nurse behind him, she had to swallow down her heart, but after that she was all right.

  “How are you, Audrey?” He’d let his hair grow out just a little. He smelled as before of hand sanitizer and mint.

  “I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”

  “Never better.” He looked at her, and she held his eyes. “Any trouble with the cast?” he said.

  “Other than getting it wet, no.”

  He didn’t ask how it happened, getting it wet, but instead simply took the cast in his hands as if taking it from her, as if relieving her of its care. Turning it this way and that and her heart skipping, not because she thought he knew how it had been used and was looking for signs of that day on the river—that violence, those details had not been in the news, and certainly not her name; Sheriff Halsey had kept his promise about that—but because she thought he knew she’d intentionally not covered the cast when she’d taken her shower the night before.

  The doctor slipped two fingers between the padding and her forearm and slip
ped them out again and rubbed them with his thumb. He returned the cast to her and sat down to study the x-ray image on his computer screen, then checked her chart again, his lips pursed.

  “Five weeks is cutting it close,” he said. “But it was a clean break and the x-ray looks good. You’re a good healer.”

  “Thanks,” she said. The feeling of his fingers where he’d slipped them in under the cast remained in a distracting way.

  He watched her. Then he said, “Well, you drove all the way up here. Shall we cut that sucker off?”

  He uncapped a Sharpie and drew a line from one end of the cast to the other on both sides, top and underside, and the beautiful nurse handed him the cutter—it looked like one of the power tools from her father’s garage, the ones she’d thought about using herself—and the doctor explained how the blade did not spin but oscillated and therefore could not cut her skin, and then he thumbed it on and the little machine filled the room with its furious noise. He dipped the blade into the line he’d drawn and the vibrations traveled through her bones up to her teeth. He followed the line precisely end to end before turning the cast, and when both lines were cut the nurse handed him a large instrument like a pair of pliers and he inserted the instrument into the underside seam he’d made and moved along the seam, parting it until the cast cracked open like a clamshell and he slipped the entire thing from her arm. The nurse handed him scissors and he ran them under the damp padding, snipping, until that fell away too and her arm lay naked and pink and strange. As if it were not the one she remembered but had grown inside the cast into some other kind of arm.

  A rank, humid odor rose from it and she knew that the doctor and the beautiful nurse must smell it. The nurse, washing the arm with a warm cloth, said, “How’s that feel?” and Audrey looked into her dark eyes and smiled and nodded but could not answer.

  The doctor took the arm in his hands again and felt along the bone with his fingers and thumbs.

  “Does it still work?” he said, and she made a fist and opened it and rolled her wrist around until it popped deeply.

  “Works jim-dandy. Thank you.”

  “You’ll have to take it easy with that arm for another six weeks. No push-ups. No heavy lifting. No karate chops.”

  She looked at him.

  “Joking,” he said. He picked up the split purple shell and showed it to her. “Memento?”

  She wanted with all her heart to never see it again, to watch him drop it into the trash, but she’d promised the county attorney she’d keep it; they would put it back together again for the trial, with duct tape maybe, so she could show the judge and jury.

  And if you were not facing him at that moment, Miss Sutter, then how did you strike him?

  Like so.

  “Do you have a bag I can put it in?” she asked the doctor, and he handed the two pieces to the beautiful nurse.

  And why did you strike the deputy, Miss Sutter?

  Because he was trying to drown me.

  Was he?

  Yes.

  And how did you know that, Miss Sutter? Miss Sutter . . . ?

  The beautiful nurse was looking at her, holding the purple cast.

  “Sorry?” said Audrey.

  The nurse laughed and said in that voice of islands and waves, “I asked did you want that gift-wrapped too, baby?”

  65

  The weather had turned and the snow was dropping from the pines in heavy clumps, and when the sun hit the boughs you could smell the pine like you’d been sawing into it. By the middle of March the house was sold, and a week later it was empty and clean, and on that Saturday afternoon Gordon backed his van into the driveway and they loaded up the few remaining things she wanted to keep for herself—her own things and some of her father’s, such as his sheriff’s jacket and hat, his old rod and fly reel that had been his grandfather’s, the supposedly antique bass bookends she’d given him, and also certain precious things of her mother’s he’d kept for her—they loaded it all into the van and the car and then she stood on the porch for the last time, looking out over the cul-de-sac as her father had done so many mornings, smoking his first cigarette of the day. Finally she got into the sedan and backed out of the drive and waved good-bye to Mr. Larkin, who stood in his driveway watching them go and who was standing there still when they turned the corner and passed out of sight.

  Meltwater ran across the roads in streams and hissed under the tires and you could put the window down and smell the earth and you knew the winter wasn’t forever after all and the land would be green again, the river would flow again, and from the bridges you could see the slabs of ice jutting into the air, and if you pulled over and stood on the bank you could see the slabs moving and grinding against each other like icebergs, like ships, all in a tight puzzle-work of pieces and all of it moving together foot by foot downriver, cracking and popping and grinding as the river below swelled with the thaw and pushed and surged and would not be stopped.

  He pulled into the lot and cut the engine and they both got out and stood in the sun, breathing the air.

  “Ready?” she said, and he nodded.

  “Ready.”

  The graves were in the old part of the cemetery with all the old graves, including the graves of her grandparents on her mother’s side. Her father was from Illinois and had met her mother there, in college, and they’d come back here together so she could be close to her family. By the time Audrey was seven he was county sheriff and her mother, a high school counselor, was dying.

  The snow over the plot had melted away into the dirt, and in a few weeks the caretakers would lay down the sod; that was part of the deal and she didn’t have to worry about that.

  She took off the aviators and put them away, then stood reading her parents’ names on the stone, their dates. The inscription:

  More than all the rain that ever fell

  Or ever will

  More than all the sun that ever shined

  Or ever will

  Does that about cover it? he’d asked, holding her hand. The old engraver man standing by.

  Yes, Daddy. It’s perfect.

  Do you know how much she loved you?

  Yes, Daddy.

  Well, if you ever forget, there it is, right there.

  I won’t forget, Daddy.

  She told them the house had sold and the bills were paid and she was going back to school in the fall. She told them not to worry about her, and she told them she loved them and that she knew they were with her, that they looked out for her, and lastly she told them that she was not afraid of it now. Any of it.

  Then she turned and walked back to where he stood, his hands in his pockets, looking up into the big open sky, and she stopped before him and looked up too. Blue, cloudless sky as far as you could see. A single large bird—hawk, or eagle, maybe—riding the blue, way off in the distance.

  Holly Burke, or her body, had been buried in the new part of the cemetery, on the far side of the oak trees. A modest stone of white marble, rough around its edges but glass-smooth on the face.

  “Come up here with me,” he said, and she did so, and they stood before the stone in silence.

  Holly Catherine Burke

  Beloved Daughter

  A wind came to push at them head-on, and when he spoke the wind tried to carry his words off but she heard them clearly: “I know how people talked,” he said. “But she was a good girl. She was a good person and she was not afraid of anything.”

  She waited for him to say more but he didn’t. He lifted his face to the sun and shut his eyes. Her own eyes stung in the wind, and when she blinked, tears ran in cool tracks to her temples. There was so much she wanted to tell him it choked her heart. Finally, into that wind she said, “I told you that I thought I—that I thought I died, when Caroline and I went into the river. Remember?”

  He nodded, face to the sun, eyes shut. “I remember.”

  “I mean, I know I didn’t. Obviously. But if I had, it would’ve been all right. I wasn’t
scared and I wasn’t sad to lose my life and I didn’t feel alone. I wasn’t alone. That’s what I want to tell her mother. Her father. That’s why I have to go down there, Mr. Burke. So I can tell them it’s all right. That Caroline wasn’t afraid and she wasn’t alone and that she’s all right, now. I can tell them that, can’t I?”

  He turned to her and opened his eyes. Watching her face. Her eyes.

  “Yes. You can tell them that.”

  “And they’ll believe me?”

  He looked at the gravestone again. “I don’t know, Audrey. I don’t know if they will or not.”

  They stood there, the wind gusting at their clothes, and on this wind came the sound of the birds first, then the birds themselves—a pair of loons, directly overhead, their bellies flashing white against the blue, their calls like a wild hysteria for home, for all the feeding and nesting and mating of the lakes to the north.

  “I know your mind is made up,” Gordon said when the birds, and their cries, had passed on, “but that’s an awful long drive to do alone.”

  “I’ll be all right, Mr. Burke.”

  “I don’t want you driving through that town down there again. I don’t want you going anywhere near it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I’m serious here.”

  “I know. I promise.”

  They were silent again. Her heart was beating. He seemed ready to go, and if they went now, if they got in the van and drove back to his house, she would never say it, so before he could move she said it.

  “There’s something else I want to tell you. But I don’t want you to think I’m crazy.”

  He looked at her again. “You’re talking to a man who near about shot a sheriff—you know that, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and smiled, and he turned once more to the gravestone.

  “I can’t tell you how I know it,” she said. “I mean, I can tell you how I think I know, but that wouldn’t make it true.”