“At these levels, intelligence agencies may cultivate informal understandings as to jurisdiction. They come to see it’s best if they themselves depose whatever witnesses and gather whatever evidence, and any recommendations for correction are referred internally.”
“Referred internally,” Tilly said.
“The decisions that were taken regarding Hausmann were probably compelled by understandings of moral balance that Hausmann himself would have advocated were he—”
“What in the world is that, ‘moral balance’? I don’t even know what that means. You think you can do something and then undo it?”
“Why are we talking about this? Are you trying to rattle me? Are you still mad over your foot?”
“I never heard of that, ‘moral balance.’ Did you make that up? The girl is dead. What’s going to balance that?”
“Are you here to take ownership of the corpus of your trust or not?”
“No,” Tilly said. “I wanted to make sure you knew about that girl. I figured you did. I guess I was right.”
“Don’t be a loser your whole life. You know the money’s what you came here for. I paid the commission as agreed. I paid what was owed. Why are you rattling me? You’re needling and oppressing.”
“You feel that commission is a debt you owe against something you did wrong,” Tilly said. “Whatever Hausmann had coming to him, you can’t ever justify what happened to that girl, and I can’t either. By your code I’m the only one you can pay, because the people you really owe it to are dead. By your code, until I take that money the debt’s on you.”
“You are bound by a verbal contract to accept payment.”
“I figure if I don’t take your money then I never worked for you.”
“We gave you a car!”
“I figure I stole that car.” The cold air made Tilly’s body seem all the warmer under the blanket. He smelled piñon smoke from a chimney somewhere—the smell of eternal life happening right here around us and we were a part of it. “I had an idea just now while I was out. I forgot all about the future. The past too, for a minute, except I remembered I hadn’t eaten and I was hungry. All I need is a little to eat. Two tacos sounds good. That’ll be plenty.”
“Take your money,” Lorch said. “Go on. You take it right now.”
“As the money grows, I imagine the stink only gets harder for you to ignore. It’s like an organ inside you going to rot. We’re not so different, you and me. I wonder what kind of magic thing money is. You have to have it to live; it makes you sick; and it doesn’t exist.”
“‘Let no debt remain outstanding except the continuing debt to love one another,’” Lorch said. “That’s Romans thirteen, eight. I always tried to do right by you, Sergeant. Why won’t you do right by me?”
When Gloria came back with the tacos from the truck around the corner, there were three in the large paper sack marked D.E.T., along with a sheaf of documents in an accordion-style expansion folder embossed with the FLV logo, a convolution of stems and loops at once familiar and illegible, like his silverhead father’s mark.
He stuffed the folder back in the sack. He unwrapped one of the tacos and opened his teeth. And the combination of the flavors of the meat and chile and tortillas in his mouth was like music. If he had ever before known relief like this he had forgotten it. It had come to its perfection in the moment, because of the moment, and he had let it go. Every part of him awoke with gratitude.
Then he swallowed, and the moment was gone.
16
The drive home to Los Alamos took three hours, clear thinking time, the mind as clean as the cloudless northward sky. His mind became the sky. His thoughts were blue. They seemed to touch on no fixed object; and yet, in a region of the mind unlit by consciousness, unvisited except in dreams and visions, a wall was collapsing under the force of the past. He knew this only by the intensity of passing sensuous recollections—piñon smoke, chicken simmering in a foreign green sauce, hunger that tore the stomach. A woman standing at the cookstove spooning meat onto tortillas. He had buried her far from thought, but she had never lost her power. He touched again with his mind her electrifying skin, dusty, sticky, cool, and felt her ribs beneath.
Piñon smoke—the smell of hope destroyed and renewed in the same moment. The renewal occasioned by the destruction. Bobby and the world of friends he had promised had not been there. But she had.
The guard raised the yellow boom gate at the entrance to the condo complex, and Tilly parked, and Mavis shot over his lap out the open door. He unwrapped the third taco and threw it on the rock garden, and Mavis scampered over the rocks and swallowed the taco whole and sprinted past him into the dark foyer. He turned on the light of the small tiled kitchen, the cupboards too packed with cans to close, and sorted his mail.
Coupon books. One hundred fifty dollars cash back on Cellular+Cable+Internet bundle. Twenty percent off crystal healing workshops for new subscribers. A postcard alerting him to Mavis’s dental appointment next Thursday.
There was also a business envelope of wrong dimensions, metric dimensions. He flipped it right side up. The front bore a square stamp with the number 165 in a corner and the words Mitteldeutscher Fachwerkbau, 1644/64 Bad Münstereifel at the bottom. Above this caption was a painting of a six-story half-timbered building with many windows painted in white trim. Along the stamp’s upper border, the word Deutschland. The left corner of the envelope itself included more long unpronounceable words representing perhaps the return address of a church: what appeared to be a saint’s name was embedded in it.
He opened the envelope and took out the letter it contained and began to read. By the second page, what he was reading stopped him short. He folded the letter and returned it half read to the envelope and put the envelope in the kitchen utility drawer and closed it.
He looked at the drawer.
He poured himself a root beer, then he dumped it out and rinsed the glass and filled it with tap water and opened the drawer and took out the envelope and started the letter again from the beginning:
Dear Mr. Dwight Elliot Tilly,
I write this from underneath an accumulation of professional responsibilities so smothering I hardly have time to sleep. And yet here I am at two in the morning writing in regard to a dilemma that has been foisted upon me by forces beyond my control. Please do not disregard this correspondence assuming it may come from a hysteric or from someone with too much time on his hands.
I repeat. I have no time. But here I sit.
I am a Roman Catholic priest in the archdiocese of Hamburg, Germany. I have the pastorate of three parishes, within the territory of one of which is situated a children’s home, over which, I take pains to underscore, I have no legal or pastoral authority. Nonetheless, my attendance in the company of the children has become a regular expectation which I have been unsuccessful at shirking.
Slightly more than two years ago, personnel of the State Youth Authority placed in the care of this children’s home a boy of four to six years who had been found in the international airport Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel.
I attach here our earliest photo of him for your reference.
Shortly after he was discovered, he strived to communicate with airport personnel in a language unknown to any of them but now presumed to have been Estonian. By the end of the first day he had closed up, as it were, and spoke to no one further.
It was only after several weeks in the children’s home that he began to speak again a little. I beg you not to infer from the regrettable circumstance of his speaking only with me that I have formed with him a special bond. I have not. Nor that I take pride in his having taken me into trust. The boy speaks to me in English, in which I am conversant. This preference for the use of English seems to be the beginning and the end of his motivation in having, as it were, chosen me as his interlocutor.
Of his past, the boy does not re
late a thing and has as yet refused to give out his name. The desultory efforts of the authorities here to locate anyone responsible for his arrival at Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel have failed. Our most promising chance to place him with an adoptive family has also failed utterly. I will not get into the demoralizing details. In short, the judge said no. He even compelled us to sever the relationship with the would-be mother.
Last month I took the horns of the bull into my hands. With a certain moral suasion, I acquired from an element within the Kriminalpolizie an edited version of the PNR (passenger name record) listing the 35,438 ticketed and boarding passengers who had used Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel on the day at issue. Everything had been redacted but the names.
Here I admit I quailed, not at the length of the task, but at my inability to see how in practical terms I was to achieve it. I prayed before my computer and slept and awoke and prayed again, and on the second night a theory and a method came to me both at once.
I ask you to consider with me the possibility that his custodian, in dumping the boy, might not have acted according to plan, as I had always imagined, but instead might have improvised. That the custodian might have bought tickets for the boy and herself or himself but for some reason changed her or his mind and boarded alone. If you infer my pride in this hypothesis, you are mistaken. I am appalled not to have considered it before.
After two weeks’ study, taken from sleep, as I have nowhere else from which to take it, and having stricken from the ticketed list all the names of the actually departed, I find too many instances to mention of people missing their flights. (A strike in France and storms at Copenhagen caused delays and missed connections all day.) But I find just three instances in which a pair of ticketed passengers share a surname and in which only one of the two full names appears on the outgoing lists. One of these paired surnames derives from the Kwa language of the Igbo people from the Niger delta; another is shared by two passengers with female given names. These I have eliminated.
The third is shared by one male name and another sexually ambiguous name. Internet searches for the latter yield nothing. Searches for the former yield a criminal conviction in the American state of Maine for one Elroy P. Heflin, with a birth date in 1971. Cross-referencing the name with this year of birth yields nothing useful except the address (on a lien associated with a loan for a Nissan automobile) in Los Alamos, USA, that you will see printed on the envelope in which this letter will be enclosed. Please forgive any impertinence on my part in having telephoned the office of Los Alamos County Assessor to uncover your name in association with this property. I find online no references to persons seeming to be you and can infer no other connection between you and Mr. Heflin. I had hoped to encounter a relative but am forced instead to appeal to you, with the hope that you may be the landlord or subsequent owner of the domicile in which this Mr. Heflin once resided and that you might thereby be in a position to corroborate or to confirm the final hypothesis I shall describe below.
Please do not conclude from my investment in this endeavor that I wish my government to attempt to return the child to the care of someone who, if my guess is correct, has treated him so savagely. Note that I am not writing him directly at this address: even if he lived there now, it seems to me obvious my inquiry would meet only with more evasion. Please do not conclude either that I wish Mr. Heflin to be apprehended and convicted of a crime. Let the judgment of the Lord obtain.
My wish is more modest. Since the boy’s first arrival here, when at first he would not communicate with the others, he has begun to speak quite good German. If I were his relation, I would take pride in his alacrity. But so determined and successful have been his efforts to disclose nothing of the time that preceded his coming here and, as it were, to overwrite whatever he knew before with his new knowledge, that it is now my firm conviction the boy no longer remembers his name.
I turn to the adoption procedures laid out in section 6.3.2 of the Guidelines of the Working Group of State Youth Authorities which, for the sake of the child’s pedagogical and psychological development, explicitly contraindicates the changing or loss of the first name of the child.
If the child is incapable of carrying, in the present, the record of his past, it is the responsibility of those undertaking his guardianship to hold this knowledge for him until such time as his maturity allows him to carry it himself.
I wish in short only to verify that the entity—surname: Heflin; given name: Elroy Peace—is as I suspect the parent of the child in the enclosed photograph. And thereby to confirm that the entity in the original ticketing list—surname: Heflin; given name: Janis E.—is indeed that of the child installed here.
I hope for your corroboration and await your reply.
Yours very truly,
Rev. Werner W. Wurs
17
If only Elroy would talk with her, Louisa would be able to get this stuff off her chest. The shit, news, heart-scramble, all of it. Listen, there was a lot. She carried it inside her ribs, between the lungs: it crowded her breath. She took care of her body—she stretched and walked briskly on the highway sides with heavy rocks in her fists, and ate roughage, sardines, almonds, and drank calcium-fortified orange juice—but someday the weight she carried in front would buckle her backbones and leave her stooped, watching her feet as she walked. Just this once, let me tell you what’s been happening with me. She wouldn’t ask him any other favors.
Then after, if she could be of help to him, Elroy might contact her for whatever the passing need. She wasn’t asking him to buy the whole suite of family attachment software. They might just check in with each other from time to time. Maybe he needed somewhere to have his stateside mail forwarded while he was deployed. Something like that. Or maybe he had kids now, small kids with scabies, and what did you do to relieve the itching and the sores? She’d tell him over the phone how to make an oatmeal bath. Let me be a resource of some kind.
Every week, during the time he had been incarcerated at the prison in Los Lunas, she had written him a two-page letter in her Palmer hand. He responded to none of them. After a while her letters started returning to her, stamped ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN, so she reckoned he had got out of prison and had launched upon a new life. She knew he would make it. She knew.
She had chosen Leonard, her husband, over him. However reasonable her decision, however misguided, still she’d made a choice. No one else but she had been its author. Elroy in turn had meted out the consequences as was his right. She did not mean to appeal to his sense of what was fair. She did not mean to beg forgiveness. But if only he would talk to her she did mean to propose that they engage in an adult understanding. They need not overcome their grievances. They might even accept the grievances as facts. Similarly they might accept the fact that for sixteen years they had lived together as mother and son. History was rigid. To ignore it was phony. Why not use its rigidness as a support against the anguish of future uncertainties? He was not going to have had another mother. She was it.
Poor sweet star-crossed Leonard—just listen a minute and let me tell you what happened, then go on hating him if you want—tattooed and dentured Leonard; strung out Leonard whom she’d first seen dragging himself through the narrow lobby of the Office of Behavioral Clinicians with fear and determination in his eyes on his way to group; who got clean at last by God’s grace; who walked out of prison ready to be reborn; who wanted to marry her and whom she married; who years after his last fix still soaked their sheets in sweat from shame-dreams of getting high again; who woke up scratching the great saphenous vein on the inside of his thigh where in the dream he had injected the needle, woke up sure he was back in Pennsylvania, tying off in the passenger seat of his big brother’s Catalina, woke up in prison, woke up in a ditch.
“You ain’t either,” she said. “You’re in bed with me.”
And they went back to sleep together in the shotgun house they rented and woke up together in
daylight. And she dropped him off at the McAlester Army Ammunition Plant where he was employed as an assistant welder in the pallet production facility that produced the frames on which munitions were shipped from McAlester to naval and air force facilities all around the world. State of the art artillery projectiles. Warheads for the GPS-guided SLAM and Harpoon missile systems containing two hundred fifteen pounds each of Destex high explosive. And after work at the vast penitentiary called Big Mac, she picked him up in the Pontiac Sunbird they shared, and they went home.
After supper, she sent him back up to the Phillips 66 for bananas and aspirin. A state trooper pulled him over: the light above his rear license plate had gone out. Leonard knew every white trooper and policeman in Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, because he swept the floor and cleaned the toilets at the bar they frequented in Longtown, but this trooper was the same brown as his uniform shirt, hat, belt, holster, and the stripes of his pants, and he told Leonard to step away from the car. And while the trooper was feeling around the backseat of the Sunbird a backup unit pulled in behind them, and this second trooper approached them along the shoulder with his hand on his gun, glancing behind him at the interstate traffic. Coming closer he greeted Leonard by name, asking after Louisa’s flower garden, and announced that he hoped the other trooper wouldn’t find anything in the car here of a fellow Christian that might endanger his freedom after two felony drug convictions that were way in the past, paid for, repented of.
Leonard didn’t say anything.
The first trooper emerged from the Sunbird in the changeful light of the oncoming traffic, holding a crumpled lunch bag and asked the white trooper how he knew this gentleman, and the white trooper allowed that they might be acquainted via the McAlester Victory Baptist Church, but anyway the first trooper had better go about his search. And the first trooper apologized for the intrusion but once he’d run the plates he really did have to check the car, and both troopers later testified Leonard had acted always with the civility owed to their station as law enforcement officials. The first trooper pulled from the lunch bag the crusts of a baloney sandwich, a crushed and empty yellow box of Mallomars, and a nectarine pit. He handed them to Leonard, and Leonard took them. The first trooper stuffed himself back in Leonard’s car, and the white trooper said, Well, he’d better check Leonard’s person for formality’s sake and patted him down from the neck to the shoulders and at his armpit asked if Leonard might be carrying an unlawfully concealed weapon there up under his arm. And Leonard said, Naw, he wasn’t, and they laughed. Then, before the white trooper could pat him all the way down, a dispatcher called via the speaker-microphone looped by a Velcro strap to the epaulet of his uniform shirt and informed him he was needed to address a roofing ladder fallen on the interstate at the Route 64 overpass heading into Muldrow.
The Volunteer Page 34