South of Shiloh (30 page)

42

“PUBIC BONE TO TAIL BONE, BELLY BUTTON TO
spine, rib cage, sternum, head…it’s an articulation, every vertebrae should move individually into your curl…”

Intermediate Pilates at the River Valley Athletic Club.

Jenny, in running shorts and a sports bra, tucked in her chin, extended her arms, and lowered her back ever so slowly to the gym mat. The isometric torture anchored on her butt and her bare feet planted hip-width apart, in line with her bent knees. With her torso curved like a strung bow, she hovered six inches off the floor, five inches, trembling at four.

“Slower, lower,” the instructor commanded.

Jenny was a regular in this class. The other women knew, of course, and placed their red exercise mats at a respectful distance.

After her phone conversation with Deputy Beeman, she had left the center and returned home, where she’d spent two hours with Molly and her mom, sorting through family photos for the slide show the center would prepare, all the while thinking about the folder of Rane’s pictures she’d tucked out of sight on the top shelf of her closet.

Following the picture selection and the memory-sharing it involved, Molly sat down at the kitchen table with the grief group worksheets Patti had left. Jenny watched her study one, in particular, that prompted:
This is what my grief looks like
—over a gingerbread man silhouette.
Where do I feel in my body?
And then instructions to color-code a list of feelings: sad, scared, happy, angry, jealous, loving, and the one that jumped out at Jenny—GUILTY. Molly brought a box of colored pencils to the table and assigned happy and loving her favorite color, yellow. She drew a yellow heart on the outline’s chest and filled it in. Sad, scared, and angry became a chunky red square in the pit of the stomach. She did not ascribe a color or a location to jealous or guilty.

Jenny did, though, in her imagination; they would be gray, located below the yellow heart and the red square knot in the belly. Dirty gray, down there.

Then she gave Molly the leather-bound journal. At that point she’d decided she needed some sheer physical pain that had no emotional origin.

A fine speckle of sweat moistened her upper lip and her forehead as her stomach muscles curved in, threatening to crack. Less than a week into Paul’s death her body had taken on the lifeless density of vinyl. It was time to fight back.

“Dig; your abs should be totally engaged,” the instructor chanted as she padded among her prone students. “DIG.”

Jenny dug, first into her straining muscles, then into the past; anything but the present.

“If you’re doing it right you’ll feel the burn.”

Am I doing it right?

She imagined Paul’s body being trundled into an oven like a clay pot into a kiln. After the firing, the shards of unburned blackened bone would be compacted into particles. Maybe the burning and the crushing was taking place at exactly this moment. Gas jets, steel jaws, a belch of smoke.

“Roll up,” the instructor commanded.

But Jenny didn’t hear; she had muddled through ordinary deranged into the clarity of fire.

Molly seemed to take comfort from the idea that Paul would be reduced to dust and placed inside a container called a scatter urn, that it would come home with them and they’d have to pick a place in the house to situate it until the journey to Poobah.

Jenny could almost see her daughter’s young mind working: it’s like having a shrine. So now we’ve skipped right over Sunday school all the way back to ancestor worship?

Dad.

Her father had soldiered as an adviser to the South Vietnamese Army. He’d told her one story from the war, when she was twelve, not much older than Molly. Waiting in groups for the helicopter lift, the ARVN troopers would write prayers on slips of paper in the predawn gloom and then they’d burn the slips of paper.

“Why, Dad?”

“Because their dead ancestors could only read smoke.”

Jenny lay on her back and imagined the stoic helmeted faces her father had seen in the Asian darkness, flat of nose, wide of cheek. Indian-like faces flickering in the tiny blooms of flame.

What would Dad say about all this?

Cut the bullshit. Don’t kid yourself. Pass the potatoes.

She was losing track of the class now, lying flat on the floor, staring at the ceiling, arms loose at her sides in a yoga pose called Corpse.

The pixie-cut instructor appeared above her like a buff Tinker Bell, concern softening her strong features. A Stonebridge mom; they were acquainted.

“Jenny, are you okay?”

“Fine. Just need to rest a minute.”

The instructor stooped, squeezed her shoulder, and nodded. As she walked away, Jenny studied the sinuous tattoo that curled over the hem of her low cut tights up the small of her back and disappearing under her abbreviated T-shirt.

“Deep cleansing breath. I want to hear the exhale. Now for our favorite exercise. Teaser.”

Jenny, no tattoos, continued staring at the ceiling and remembering. Sometimes she’d catch her dad looking at her with this curious piercing expression; hope, pain, and wonder in his eyes. A look that said “I don’t deserve this beautifully formed, innocent child.” She had to travel to this last margin of herself, one foot in pain, the other in crazy, to make the connection.

She had caught Rane looking at her the same way. And then he disappeared.

Paul’s mother thought it was a mistake for Molly not to see her father one last time. Jenny couldn’t tell them the real reason for not allowing Molly to attend the private viewing.

There are no rules for this…

How can I agree to show Molly the corpse of her father when her father is in Mississippi doing God knows what for reasons I don’t fully understand?

The memory was, if anything, magnified by a wall of grief.

For a few days Rane had been warm, spontaneous, acceptably intoxicated on pure romance, and had driven Jenny to a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin. Jenny had no idea where they went. All she remembered was sequined sunlight flashing in the passing trees and the clean scent of the hollow of his neck. He’d introduced her to an older man, a man about her father’s age, with hair already going gray—an uncle named Mike—and his wife, who’d raised him after his parents died.

Jenny remembered a long autumn afternoon of turning maples and long silences.

This woman is special, the silence whispered. Let me show her to you. This only happens once. The rest is echo. Shadow. Smoke for the dead.

The memory scattered. Jenny frowned, serious now.

Maybe in Wisconsin she could find the aunt and uncle who could fill in the background on John Rane. She was mindful of the concern in Beeman’s voice on the phone. But if, as she now suspected, there was something scary in Rane, she was damn well going to protect Molly from it.

With sweats pulled on over her workout clothes, she sat in the Forester in the club parking lot. She arranged a notepad on her purse, stared at her cell phone, rolled a Sharpie between her thumb and forefinger.

Grab a straw.

She punched in 411. What city? St. Paul, Minnesota. What listing? The St. Paul Police Department. An operator, then a machine voice read the general information number.

Jenny punched the select option to connect to the number.

“St. Paul Police, how may I direct your call?”

“I need to contact an officer I met over ten years ago. I think he was a sergeant…”

“Do you have a name, ma’am; an assignment, a division?”

“I can’t recall the name but he had a Southern accent and his hair, well, he looked and talked like Elvis Presley…”

The operator chuckled. “I think you want Lieutenant Harry Cantrell in Homicide. He’s gone for the day but I’ll connect you to his voice mail.”

“Thank you.”

A moment later she heard Cantrell’s Midwesternized drawl on a machine. “This is Lieutenant Cantrell, St. Paul Homicide. Leave a message after the beep.”

“Lieutenant Cantrell, this is Jenny Edin. We met a long time ago at the Alcove Lounge in St. Paul. I was Jenny Hatton then. We met through a rookie cop named John Rane. You and he seemed to be close so I’m hoping you’ve kept in touch. Rane had an aunt and uncle I met briefly somewhere east of Hudson, Wisconsin. I need to reach them but I can’t remember their name. This is urgent so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.”

Jenny left her home and cell numbers, ended the call, and stared at the phone. She’d been putting off the next call but it was time for a reality check. She thumbed in the number.

“Patti? It’s Jenny. I know it’s short notice but could you get away for a little while to talk?”

43

THEY WOUND UP AT MARTHA’S MENU, A DOWNTOWN
restaurant where Beeman insisted on buying Rane the chicken-fried steak with red-eyed gravy and biscuits.

“Home cooking,” Rane said.

“Yep,” Beeman said with a slow grin. “This building? Used to be a whorehouse.”

Rane shook his head, looked out the restaurant window at a flag hanging over a storefront across the street. “Down home Mississippi. Still got the Rebel battle colors on your state flag.”

“Slow down, John. Technically, the thirteen stars on that Southern Cross stand for the original thirteen colonies, not the Confederate States. And the bars are red, white, and blue—the national colors.”

“Right,” Rane said.

Beeman frowned. “Whole state voted to keep that flag, two-to-one. Not just people look like me.” Beeman leaned back. “April 17, 2001. My daddy remembered where he was when Kennedy got shot. I remember where I was when the vote came in, on patrol between 72 and Kossuth.”

“Man,” Rane said, “I’m a long way from home.”

Driving back to his house, Beeman got around to asking, “So why the hat with the military badges?”

“I was told some military trimmings would help out down here so I dug it out of the closet,” Rane said.

“Goddamn, I guess,” Beeman grinned. “Thing is, I read you were a photographer in the army. How do you rate a combat rifle badge?”

“After I graduated out of photo school I talked them into letting me research whole blocks of training and then I’d go back and shoot it for
Army Times
.”

“Kinda like those books you wrote,” Beeman said.

“Yeah, the army’s where I started with that approach. So I picked up a list of MOS…”

“Uh-huh. So how many different MOS you go through?”

“Well, I did infantry AIT. Then airborne. The ranger school. Survival school. The mountain course at Fort Drum. By the time we went into Kuwait, I was attached to the 101st. Some artillery rounds fell a couple hundred yards from the battalion CP.” Rane tapped the black-and-green camo badge on his cap, above the jump wings. “And the colonel put everybody with an infantry MOS in for a combat infantry badge. I saw the pictures on your wall downstairs. You were on the sand, Beeman…”

“With the guard; they reconfigured us as MPs down in Hattiesburg at Camp Shelby.”

“So you know there was a lot of medal inflation in the Gulf War.”

“Yep. We had it easy, compared to those poor fuckers running over bombs and slogging street-to-street,” Beeman said as he drove up his driveway. They got out and climbed the deck stairs.

“Beer sound good?” Beeman offered. When Rane nodded, Beeman opened the sliding door to the kitchen. “Get comfortable. I’ll be right back after I unload this gun belt.”

A few minutes later Beeman returned. He’d changed into jeans, a loose flannel shirt, and worn moccasins. He carried two opened bottles of Dixie beer, handed one to Rane, and they sat on two facing wooden deck chairs. Beeman took a swallow of his beer, set the bottle down, and removed the corncob pipe and a packet of tobacco from his shirt pocket. Slowly, he filled the pipe, then struck a Blue Tip match with his thumbnail. He puffed and blew a meditative stream of cherry-scented smoke into the twilight.

Rane swigged his beer and watched the spreading evening quiet and Beeman watching him, puffing on his pipe; the glow of the bowl highlighting the faint, bemused smile on his face.

Rane reached into his haversack, pulled out the pack of Spirits and the Bic, and lit up.

“Surprised you smoke; thought they outlawed it up North,” Beeman said.

Rane lifted the bottle. “It’s the beer; old pattern.”

“Uh-huh. You got any more surprises? Anything you want to tell me, John?” Beeman asked casually.

Rane glanced around and said, “If I had an expert shooter hunting me with a rifle I wouldn’t sit out on this deck with the kitchen light on my back.”

Beeman pointed his pipe at Rane and said, “You’re changing the subject.”

“What do you mean?” Rane said, his voice steady and his face blank.

“I mean,” Beeman said slowly, “you didn’t come down here to take pictures, did you?”

Rane started to shrug it off but there was enough light left to see the edge of Beeman’s smile fade. Absent the smile, his face was at home in the closing darkness. Rane said nothing.

“Won’t beat around with you, John. I called Jenny Edin,” Beeman said.

Rane stared at Beeman, expressionless, a little off-balance. Like he’d just lost one leg of the chair he was sitting on.

“I called her,” Beeman continued, “’cause I saw you were carrying your camera in Paul’s haversack. His name’s right inside the flap. You got his uniform in your car. Most, but not all, the bloodstains scrubbed out.”

“What’d Jenny say?” Rane asked quietly.

“She said you’re down here trying to figure out how to be a father.”

Rane stared beyond Beeman into the twilight fuzzing the tree branches together across the broad lawn. Someone had been here and cleaned the dead catfish out of the pond.

Beeman circled a finger next to his ear. “She explained what’s been bugging me about you. How it was you I talked to on the phone last Saturday. When I met you I had your voice going round in the back of my head and couldn’t pin it down.”

“She told you about Molly,” Rane said.

“Uh-huh. It seems you didn’t have any problem with getting
started
on the father part; the screwing-the-woman part. Now, you going to tell how wearing a dead man’s clothes is gonna help you figure out the rest?” Beeman asked.

“Maybe I need to learn what he went through down here,” Rane said quietly.

“What? Researching getting shot?”

Rane shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”

“I believe that. From what I’ve seen so far, you’ve got all these snappy skills and you’re lost, ain’t you John? You don’t know where you’re at.” Beeman shook his head. “You got this veil between you and life, like a widow.”

Rane drained his beer, dropped his cigarette into the empty bottle, and stood up. “Okay, so now what?” he asked.

“Finish what we started. Go to Shiloh. Be worth getting shot at to see if you’ll actually take a picture,” Beeman said.

“You’re a tricky guy,” Rane said.

“Takes one to know one, huh?” Beeman said.

After an interval of silence, Rane said, “You’ve seen
High Noon
one too many times, Beeman. You want to fight a duel with this Nickels.”

“And what about you?” Beeman asked.

Rane ignored the question. “Look, I’m beat. All the driving. Getting thumped on today. I’m going to turn in.” He left Beeman sitting on his deck, smoking his pipe, and staring into the gathering dark, patiently dissecting the motives of Mitchell Lee Nickels. And John Rane.

He walked through the kitchen, noting that the ring was still twinkling on the kitchen table, went down the stairs, padded across the den under the gaze of Beeman’s ancestors, carried his travel kit to the bath, brushed his teeth, and got ready for bed.

Moments later, lights out, lying between clean sheets on the single mattress, he raised a hand and explored the darkness. A veil, he thought. Then, exhausted, he fell asleep to a faint rumble of thunder.