Piper (31 page)

“I was just suggesting the dogs ride with us.” I said it in a very calm, unobstructive voice, quietly enough so that the dispatcher on the other end wouldn't hear me. “Otherwise, the guy you want to question's going to have a heart attack on you. That's all.”

Steve spoke up. “You need assistance out there, trooper?”

Rasmussen punched the button down. “Negative. It's just a dame with a loose tongue. Don't insult me.”

“Roger. Tow truck and dog catcher on the way.”

We were getting farther and farther away from the paddle wheeler; it was more like we were drifting toward Niagara Falls in a barrel. How was I going to explain to Willard what lay ahead? He'd go along with anything but losing the dogs. They'd have to shoot him before he'd let go of them. I didn't know what the worst morning of his life had been, but this was probably going to offer some stiff competition unless I could think of something real fast. I'd heard of women getting out of speeding tickets by flirting with the trooper. There was a policeman from Machias who used to park himself across the street from the high school and pull over coeds who made illegal U-turns on the street in front of the school, until one day a teacher caught him in his patrol car with one, his pants pulled down to his knees. If I wasn't feeling so sexless, I might have been tempted to try something.

The trooper was becoming impatient and asked me to wake up Willard. “We can't question a man who's unconscious,” he said.

I whispered in Willard's ear, rocked him, petted the side of his face, but he just readjusted himself and kept on sleeping. The trooper poked him in the ribs and Paddy growled under his breath like he was going to tear a patch out of Rasmussen's ass.

“Sir, I wouldn't do that if I were you.”

We went back to the patrol car and I tried to make small talk, asking him where he was born, where he went to college, whether he was married (he didn't have a ring). He said he was Scandinavian and grew up in Ballard, where his parents still lived in a cracker box bungalow walking distance from Market Street. His older brother had gone to law school and would have become a lawyer except that he gave up on the bar exam after three tries and became a shoe salesman at Nordstroms.

“I guess I like the respect the badge gives me,” he said. “People give me a wide berth.”

“Isn't it a little fruitless writing up speeding tickets? Everyone speeds anyway.”

“You said your dad writes a newspaper. Does everyone read it?”

He had me on that one.

Just when I thought I was starting to get somewhere, Willard woke up and stumbled like a zombie from the Skylark back to the patrol car. He was in stocking feet and his hair stood up in spikes on his head like some new age Svengali who disdained material possessions and routine toiletry. The dogs were following him.

“Go easy,” I said. “Don't hit him yet with the part about the questions. Let me tell him that.”

The dogs were so proud to see Willard awake that they wagged and rubbed against the trooper's legs when he stepped out of the car to greet their leader, even Paddy, who'd almost lost it earlier. “Good morning, Mr. Cooper.”

Willard looked over at me, flattered but confused. “Do I know him?”

“I know your granddaughter.”

“How 'bout that?” Willard said, relieved. There was a red crease down one cheek where he'd slept on the upholstery cord. Willard squinted into the radiance of the haze the morning sun was trying to burn through. “Nice day, wouldn't you say?”

The trooper agreed we could feed the dogs before we did anything else and so we set their dishes out on the pavement between the cars. When Rasmussen bent down and petted them while they were eating, I could tell he'd already had his heart pickpocketed. There were no speeders in that group. Then he put Willard in the backseat and when the dogs scrambled in around him Rasmussen made a halfhearted effort to get them out, but the dogs just panted like he was speaking a language they'd never encountered.

“See? They're fine,” I said.

I was so dejected it made my ribs hurt when I had to take the bags out of the trunk of the Skylark and load them into the patrol car. We hadn't even dirtied our first set of underwear. I hadn't cracked a book or made a single entry in the diary. I'd imagined writing our own version of the
Canterbury Tales
before I ever saw Stampede again.

While the trooper was painting a pink fluorescent number on the back window of the Skylark, I finally had a chance to talk to Willard. “I thought you said the car was yours?”

“Tom made me sign it over.”

“You should have told me.”

Willard looked away, staring into the frontseat, defeated.

I didn't know why I'd said it so sharply. Dad was the one who'd pirated the car. If it was registered to Willard's son-in-law, wasn't that close enough? How could he steal his own car? The car didn't matter anyway. They had us for sleeping in a no camping zone, driving without a valid license, and suspicion of arson. “I'm sorry, Willard. I shouldn't have pulled over here in the first place. It's my fault. We're still going to the river though.” He turned to look at me and a sheepish grin broke out on his face. “They want to ask some questions when we get back there, but just let me do the talking, okay?”

“Back where?”

He still hadn't gotten it. And I hadn't even told him about Animal Control. I was trying to steer a course between truth and Willard's sanity and so far I'd favored sanity. “He wants us to go back to Stampede and start the trip over.”

When the trooper came back to the car, Diller was sitting in the driver's seat. The trooper smiled, picked up the pug with one hand under his belly and set him on the passenger side. “Not so fast, partner,” he said. Diller licked his hand and looked up at the trooper with those deep forehead furrows that were black in the bottom like someone had dug them in with a burnt stick. Diller's inscrutable stare must have been the straw that broke the camel's back because Rasmussen picked up the mike and called the dispatcher.

“Cancel Animal Control. I'll take care of the dogs.”

It was the first good news of the day and, I hoped, an omen of what was to come.

I reminded the trooper we hadn't eaten breakfast and he pulled off the freeway and took us to a McDonald's. To save having to cuff us, he used the drive-thru and I ordered a Sausage McMuffin, orange juice, and coffee. Willard insisted on pancakes again, with extra syrup, and the trooper ordered a large coffee and another Sausage McMuffin to split among the dogs. I tried to pay for Rasmussen's but he insisted on kicking in a couple of bucks. “Regulations,” he said. I counted sixty-nine dollars in my billfold, which would have been enough to last us past Montana before I had to wire for the money I'd put in savings from my work at the
Herald
or cash in any of Willard's stock.

Back on the road, Willard dozed off again with his plastic fork floating on the pool of syrup in the Styrofoam plate on his lap. The dogs slept too, leaving just me and Rasmussen, but I'd run out of chitchat. As we climbed the backside of Snoqualmie Pass, my ears plugged and I started to tighten, not just my muscles, but my heart. It was humiliating to be dragged back home after making such a belligerent exit, but that was just vanity. What was about to happen to Willard was life and death. I looked over at his slack jaws and wished Dr. Miller had given me pills to prevent him from admitting to what he'd done. False serums. Then it would be Willard's word against Condon Bagmore and Willard would win hands down in that one. Willard could lie to my dad about the dogs, but I couldn't count on it with a uniformed officer. He was too shot through with traditional values to lie to the police. That was up there with divorcing a woman just because she was a cold fish. You lived with the choices you made, come hell or high water. Pain built character. A man was only as good as his word.

Coming into Stampede, the trooper took the turnoff at Horse Heaven Highway, drove past the airport at Harvey Field, and stopped at the four-way intersection next to the double billboards where Dirk and I had smoked dope and talked sex. My stomach churned, threatening to surrender the McMuffin. I tried to look up Avenue “D” to the high school, but my eyes were bleary with anxiety. We turned on Commercial and drove past the rotten tooth in the block that used to be the
Herald
. The smoke had stopped, but I thought I could still smell the decay of burnt flesh.

The trooper drove into the alley and parked behind the police station, where there was a loading dock not unlike the one where George Pester used to stack the newspaper bundles for delivery, except this dock was for prisoners. Rasmussen cracked the windows, opened the door for Willard and me, and made sure the dogs stayed in the car. On the way into the police station, I slipped Willard another pill.

“Dr. Miller said you have to take another one.”

There was a little booth just inside the back door and a city policeman stepped out and patted us down. He skimmed the obvious places like my waist and hips and avoided the erogenous zones altogether. I didn't recognize the policeman.

“That's all right, Sergeant,” Rasmussen said. “I think they just want to ask the old man some questions about the fire.”

Willard flinched.
Damn
. We still hadn't worked out a story.

This must not have been the trooper's first visit to the Stampede Police Department because he seemed to know his way around, unless all small town police stations had the same floor plan. He led us down the hallway and I stopped Willard next to the drinking fountain and pointed to the pill in his pocket. While Willard was taking his pill, a plainclothesman in a tweed sport jacket greeted us.

“If it ain't Bonnie and Clyde,” he said, revealing a set of tobacco-stained teeth. This man I knew. He used to pass the collection basket at St. Augustine's and I could remember as a kid how his chin bulged out under his lower lip from the wad he kept down there. The first time I saw him spit a line of juice onto the tulips in front of church I almost puked. He must have been dying for a spit now because he took a sallow hanky out of an inside coat pocket, pressed it against his mouth, and studied me with his baggy eyes. Then he motioned us to go ahead of him and I pinched Willard's sleeve to slow him down. He was being led to slaughter.

Then the plainclothesman stepped between us like a cowpoke cutting a calf from the herd. “End of the line, Highpockets.” He stuck his tongue down in front of his teeth and tamped his chew. His tongue was dark when he spoke. “Put her in the other room.”

My face got real hot like it was going to burst. Willard turned as if to ask me with his eyes if this was all right, the same way he always did. In the story he remembered, the slave didn't get caught because his resourceful partner knew how to stay one step ahead of the law. Willard was shuffling sideways, still looking back at me. He had that same pitiful look the day Dr. Miller carried Freeway up from the basement and out to the four-wheeler. I didn't have to explain. This corridor was one way.

I expected bars, but my cell, if that's what it was, reminded me of my cubbyhole at the
Herald
, walls without windows. It figured that Stampede wouldn't have the real thing. We'd learned to live with facsimiles: a movie theater that was an aerobics club on weekdays, a mayor who was really the undertaker, and a city father who was a philanderer. There was a single door with a gap at the bottom that allowed me to hear mumbles of conversation out in the office. I wondered if Rasmussen had stuck around and what he'd done with the dogs. Compared to the plainclothesman, he'd turned out to be a prince. I twisted the knob, expecting it to be locked, and it opened, which meant I could escape, but that would leave them alone with Willard.

I kept expecting to see Dad come charging through the door, and dreading it. By now, someone must have told him they'd found us. Although I couldn't remember the detective's name, I knew he knew Dad. Who didn't? Maybe Dad was meeting with the insurance adjusters, or Carlisle's lawyers. Whatever consequence the law had devised for this, I knew it would have an end point when they'd unlock my cell, hand me back my billfold, and tell me to be on my way. Dad's disappointment would last a lifetime.

At five o'clock in the afternoon, they still hadn't bothered to ask about lunch, probably part of their modus operandi to make people talk. I hoped Willard's pill had kicked in. I opened the door and called out. “Can someone come here a minute?”

A new officer showed up, a beefy man with kind eyes. “What do you need?”

“My grandpa's diabetic and I have to give him his shot.” I stuck a hand in my pocket and bulged it out with my finger like that's where I was carrying the needle.

He had to think about it for a while. “You a nurse?”

“No, but I'm the one, you know, I give him shots.”

He said he had to ask someone and closed the door. This was like grammar school, where nobody did anything without asking permission. I got down on my knees and held my ear next to the crack under the door, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. Then there were footsteps and the doorknob bumped the side of my head as I was straightening up.

“Sorry,” he said. “You can see him they said, but just for the shot.”

The policeman led me down a long hall and through a steel doorway that looked like it was controlled electronically. Now we were in the real part of the jail, I thought, where they kept the men, but Willard's wasn't a cell either, at least not one with steel bars. It was some kind of holding room with a nicked-up table that had initials and names penned into the top of it and several straight-back wooden chairs. The plainclothesman was in one of the chairs and Willard was slouched over the table.

“If it isn't Florence Nightingale,” the plainclothesman said, not bothering to stand up. “Your grandpa acts like he has dropsy. What's the matter with him?”