In the Fall

by Jeffrey Lent

  “Jesus.” The word out of Jamie air out of rotten bellows.

  “No, He ain’t gonna be help to you now. Now, Vic Fortini, Vic, he’s one of those long slow fires, nothing slick or flashy about him, just one step after another. Hey listen, I know the man; he’s my father-in-law. One thing you got to understand, Pelham. He’s known where you was for years. Years and years. Think about that. His hand all fucked-up frozen and he just waits quiet and patient. Most of us, we think, There’s an opportunity in front of us, we better take it before it goes away. He could have come after you long since. So what do you think? What is it gives a man the confidence to sit back and wait? It’s something to ponder. I watch him myself, thinking maybe I’ll learn a thing or two. Shit, Pelham, I don’t know. But you got to look at the facts. All those years he waits and then here you are tonight. Like he knew this night was coming for you. What he told me was, Wait, Vinnie, let him come to you. He will, he will. That’s what he told me. And look, here you are.”

  Jamie said nothing. Nothing to say. His mind now a bright clear empty shining star. A small pith in absolute darkness.

  After a minute Pompelli said, “It’s funny, how something stupid sometimes can work in your favor. You, you’d gone farther away, gone to New York or Jersey or someplace, he probably wouldn’t have been so patient. Might have thought you could slip through and away. But you do something stupid, go—what? a hundred miles? So he knows right where you are. He keeps track of you without any effort at all. And you, I bet you worried for what—two, maybe three months? Looking over your shoulder. Bet you even thought you were laying low.” Pompelli paused and finally set the razor down, placing it on the green blotter before him. A pale rust of blood on the slice of moonlight blade. Looked back at Jamie. “Well? You got anything to say?”

  Jamie sat silent. His hands down now in his lap, the clotted towel a rough wrap over the tender flaring hand, the other hand wrapped over it all, all resting on top of his wet crotch. The tang of urine the only clear scent in the room to him.

  Pompelli said, “Sammy?” As if asking an opinion.

  The hand on top of his head gripped hard and drove down so Jamie’s forehead struck the desktop. Shattering the glass star. Shards red and silver emptying into the dark. The hand in his hair jerked him back upright. His eyes seemed to be bleeding.

  Pompelli said, “Talk to me. Tell me. You think it’s too much maybe? All those years walking around traded for this? But you got to remember that hand all fucked up. Kids laughing at him. Calling him names. Men too, laughing. Not out loud but the way men do. That hand, it made him a little less. Not to him. Never to him. But how people that don’t know any better, how they see it. You got to hand it to Victor. Think about it. All those people: for them, yesterday is just like today. Today just like tomorrow. No difference. The only difference at all is Victor; he’ll know. He’ll know. And you. I guess you know. But that don’t matter. Does it? Come on. Talk to me.”

  And Jamie, thinking at last, still silent, Let them. Whatever was to be extracted. All of it was theirs to take. Given over. All he wanted was Foster left be. It was all he asked. There was no answer. The world, the heavens, the universe were silent. As always.

  Pompelli pushed back from his desk, leaned back, his forearms down on the arms of the chair, his hands hanging loose over the curled ends. Jamie thought he looked tired. But then everything was tired. Pompelli frowned at him. As if disappointed. And for that one fine moment Jamie wanted to please him. His worst moment. Then Pompelli focused again and his face grew smooth. He said, “So nothing? No little thing? A small signal of remorse? A message I can pass along? Consider it: he might be moved. He might feel contrition. He’s an old man. Anything is possible. He could pay for a mass.”

  Jamie was silent.

  “Fuck it.” Pompelli stood out of his chair. Crossed the room and pulled back one of the drapes and looked out into the reflection of himself in the glass. Let the green fabric go so it covered what he saw. Turned back into the room. No longer looking at Jamie. He said, “Get him out of here. Give him a ride.”

  He could not stand. As if the messages his brain was sending were not being received. Nobody home down there, limbs sluggish, tired, running under water. The man Sammy did not touch him but the other two, Lester and the nameless one, helped him come upright out of the chair, their hands on him alert but relaxed, as if moving an animal. They turned him and steered him out of the room. His legs working now, one going before the other. They went out and down the steps and over the rough uneven yard to the big Dodge convertible where they put him into the backseat. Down the drive, parked by the side of the road, was the Carricks’ Ford. Jamie turned his head, spots going off behind his eyes, to face Sammy, still outside the car. He wet his lips, his tongue a thick rough thing. He said, “Save you the trouble. I’ll catch a ride with them.”

  Sammy leaned down, his hands on the doorframe, his face close to Jamie. Pleasantly he said, “Shut up.”

  Then he left Jamie seated in the car, Lester beside him, the nameless man again behind the wheel as Sammy walked down the drive, where he conferred with the Carricks. Then he walked back, slow and easy, and slid in beside Jamie. Without being told the driver put the car into gear and turned back toward Bethlehem. They went up the main street, empty, nothing moving, the summer shadows thrown by the streetlights deep and unmoving. They turned onto the Agassiz road and downshifted for the sharp climb out of town. Jamie shaking with the cold, unable to stop himself. They passed the last few houses, all dark, and then swept along, the bordering woods dark and soft and deep, the slip and ping of gravel flying up behind the car.

  Sammy, next to him, spoke into his ear. “You must be feeling pretty shitty.”

  Jamie said nothing. His knees jerking, his teeth a loose shaken bowl of bones.

  “That’s all right,” Sammy told him. “You’ll feel better after a bit.”

  The man Lester spoke up. “You remember what he said? When he came in with his little gun? Hold on boys. Ha-ha. Hold on boys.”

  “Shut up,” Sammy told him.

  They wound down the other lesser side of Mount Agassiz and onto the broad tableland stretching toward Franconia. The road here straightened. Far behind them, the pale lights of the Carricks’ Ford came after them. A long straight stretch. Sammy spoke up. “Give it the gas, Bishop.”

  There it was. It seemed important to Jamie, learning this missing name. As if something were completed. As if named, he might know these men. Odd, he thought: Sammy, Lester and Bishop. Wondered what it was about the driver that kept him on that slight remove, the lacking first name. Some measure of respect perhaps? Maybe Sammy wasn’t the boss of the three after all. Perhaps the silent man. Jamie felt he’d missed something crucial here.

  The big Dodge raced down the road, gravel spewing, the headlights a soft wash of color, the color the only warmth in the night.

  Sammy put his left hand up, ran it across Jamie’s shoulders, rubbed them through the coat, not roughly. He said, “Pick it up a little, Bishop.”

  Then, as the car jumped forward, he grabbed a hard big-twisted handful of Jamie’s jacket and pushed forward, sending Jamie’s head down toward his knees. At the same time Lester did the same on the other side and both men used their other hands to grasp Jamie’s thighs, underneath, just back of his knees. All this in one furious motion that continued as they lifted him up and threw him out of the back of the car.

  Face up, in the air. The stars still, distant, a moment suspended. Then down hard to bounce on the back of the Dodge, something in his back or shoulder cracking, and then down harder face first into the road. The diminishing funnel of engine sound from the Dodge the last place he traveled.

  A great horned owl high up in a hemlock one tier back from the road had been watching a vole in the high grass the other side of the road. When the automobile broke through the night the vole shrank tight against the earth and the owl tipped up on its talons, the muscles tensing where the wings lifted
from the back. Then the automobile was gone and the owl lifted off, a long dive swooping silent that with a single wingbeat carried it over the road and the strange bundle below and on into the grass where it seized up the vole and again a single beat lifted the bird back into the night. Up to a new perch.

  The Ford came to a stop fifty feet down the road. The man and woman got out and walked up the road to where he lay. As she passed the front of the car the woman stopped, stooped and lifted out the heavy elbowed crank and carried it with her. He was on his side in the road, one arm torn off his jacket and a splinter of bone showing through. Bloodfoam seething around his lips. A hand lying open on the gravel as if waiting for something to fill it, the hand a broken thing with a broad wound crusted over. Some feet away a stiffened towel. The turned-up side of his face was cut and scraped away where he’d struck the gravel and then turned or rolled over with the momentum. The man leaned close, his hands on his knees. Leaned and then stood quickly. Speaking, the peak of bile rounding and thickening his voice.

  “He’s done.”

  With the voice the head seemed to bounce up, the other arm raised away from his side where it had laid slack, the arm led up by the hand a short distance into the night, the hand opening and closing as if trying to grasp the night and draw it back.

  The woman said, “Jeeter, he’s not.”

  The hand fell back down.

  “I guess maybe he is.”

  “No,” she said. “We won’t risk the chance. Someone might come along.” She tried to hand him the crank.

  “No Amy,” he said. “I won’t do it. The man is dead. Can’t you see?”

  She looked at him then. The both of them shaking a little with the night. She hated him for the shaking, his and her own. She said, “You’re piss-poor of a man.” And she stepped the final step and raised the crank with both hands and brought it down once and then a second time on the head of the man on the road. Each time feeling the skull break and the crank pierce through and stick before she wrenched it free. Each time she brought it down and felt it first break into the skull she said Oh.

  The middle of the afternoon Patrick Jackson turned off the road and drove down the dirt track through the hemlocks and tamaracks to the house, another marshal following behind in the Chrysler found in the parking lot of the Forest Hills, empty of gas but with a small patch still reeking in the sand below the gas tank where someone had siphoned it out. One of the details he was choosing to overlook. The sky was piled up with clouds, the sun bright. The clouds would continue gathering as the heat built and sometime around nightfall it would storm.

  In the yard a pair of bird dogs trotted out to greet the cars. Jackson drove straight up before the house and stopped. The other marshal parked the Chrysler by the barn and came and got into the passenger side of Jackson’s car as Jackson got out. The boy was already out of the house, standing on the steps, watching all this take place. The younger of the bird dogs twisted in, tail working, to greet Jackson and he paused and ran his hand over the dog’s head. Looked up at the boy. Tall and lean, muscled the way his father had been, without bulk but strength in the ropy muscles. A rough-cut head of hair, black shining blue in the sunlight. His skin olive like his father’s but with a red cast beneath. A man that would appear suntanned year round, inside or out. His eyes dark, deepset, wide on Jackson.

  “What happened to him?” The boy standing on the step above Jackson, looking down at him, his hands loose at his sides. The bird dogs had come up and were sitting each to one side of him.

  Jackson took out his badge and spoke his name. Did not try to shake hands, knowing the boy didn’t want it, would resent it of him later. He said, “It looks like he ran out of gas and pulled off at the Forest Hills. We guess he was walking the Agassiz road, maybe hoping for a ride. It must’ve been pretty late. Somebody ran him over.”

  “Somebody ran him over?”

  “The way it looks. We think, maybe he’d been drinking, maybe was out in the road. If it was late, you know. And whoever came along, we’re thinking maybe they’d been drinking too, going too fast, maybe not even seeing what was in front of them. There wasn’t any skid marks.”

  “They didn’t stop?”

  “No, son. Not that we know.”

  “He’s dead then, you’re telling me.”

  “I’m awful sorry.”

  The boy didn’t say anything.

  Jackson said, “Listen. I never had any problems with your father. You understand me?”

  The boy was silent.

  Jackson said, “I got to ask you. Was he having problems, anything you knew about? Guessed about even. Anything out of the ordinary lately?”

  The boy’s eyes did not go off Jackson. After a moment he shook his head, slowly.

  Jackson said, “Clark there filled up the Chrysler with gas. You drive?”

  “Yuht.”

  “You got any family, anybody I can get ahold of for you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Anything at all I can do for you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I knew your mother a little bit. Always liked her.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  Jackson told him. Then said, “You think of anything, anything at all you want to tell me, you know how to get ahold of me.”

  The boy’s lips were a tight line. Then he said, “Am I safe here?”

  Jackson said, “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  And they stood looking at each other for some short time, each knowing the other knew more than would say, would be gotten out. Then Jackson said, “It was an accident is what we think. You shouldn’t have to worry. I’m sorry about your father, I truly am.”

  “That’s all right,” the boy said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  He sat that night with both downstairs doors locked and barred with furniture pushed up against them, sat upstairs on his bed with both dogs with him in the dark as the storm blew around the house, on the bed his pair of shotguns laid out both loaded; the little .410 his father had bought him years ago and the sixteen gauge L.C. Smith side-by-side he’d bought for himself the year before. After the storm sat listening to the water drip from the hemlock boughs, his window open. Some hours before dawn the sky cleared and it grew chill and then as dawn came on fog came off the river and filled the woods. He took the dogs out the backdoor, carrying the side-by-side, whistling them close with short soft chirps, watching around him in the fog. There was no one there. When they were done he took them back inside and barricaded the door again and fed the dogs. Then called them upstairs and left the window open and slept a few hours. Still dressed, blankets pulled up tight. The guns either side of him, the dogs at his feet. When he woke the sun was burning through the fog.

  Four days later he sat and walked and stood through the service and burial as if asleep although he’d not slept more than a handful of hours since his father’s death. The minister spoke words that he did not understand and that had nothing to do with his father. He sat alone in the front pew because that was where they put him. Left alone, he would’ve sat at the back. The number of people there surprised him, although he recognized most of them. When somebody spoke to him he answered them back but would later not recall a single word said. It was hot at the afternoon burial, the sun splintering off the polished wood box as it sank down into the hole. Somebody handed him a spade and he set to work until someone else took the spade away from him and he understood he wasn’t expected to finish the job, just start it. It seemed to him they ought to have left him alone to do it. It seemed to him it was his job to do. Afterward there was food that people had brought that the minister’s wife laid out in a room behind the church but he went in and saw the people standing and eating and talking to each other and he went back out. It was no place for him. Outside Patrick Jackson was squatted on his heels in the small shade of the Chrysler and Foster was not surprised to see him.

  Jackson said, “People need to do it. They
need to honor the dead but then they got to get on with things. It always seemed to me to be too fast but I never could figure out what would be the right amount of time. What would you do? Still, I can’t see eating a ham sandwich.”

  “No sir.”

  “You have any trouble, down there by the river?”

  “No sir.”

  “You all right then?”

  “My father’s dead.”

  “I know it,” Jackson said. “Mine too.”

  Two mornings later a Littleton attorney called Ewert Morse drove in and if he was surprised or alarmed to find Foster seated on the steps with a shotgun laid across his knees he did not show it. He wore a finely woven straw Panama and sweated mildly in the morning sun. He had with him the deed to the property and explained to Foster that two years before his father had changed the deed so it was in Foster’s name. The deed was on heavy paper folded three times and tied with a ribbon. Morse opened it to show him.

  “What do I have to do with it?”

  “Do with it? Why you don’t have to do anything. It’s just, it’s yours.”

  “What do I owe you for bringing it out here?”

  Morse shook his head. “You don’t owe me anything. It’s part of the service that your father already paid for.”

  “Can you hold on to it for me?”

  “I can.”

  “And what will that cost me?”

  “Won’t cost you a cent, until such a time you want to do something about it.”

  “Like what?”

  Morse shrugged. “If you wanted to sell it.”

  “Then what would it cost?”

  “Only the nominal fee for the transfer. Likely the new owner, the buyer, would pay. That’s how it works.”

  “I don’t plan to sell.”

  “Well then. I can just hold on to it for you. Or you can keep it yourself. It’s up to you. It’s yours.”

  “But it would be better off you held on to it.” Not quite a question.