Piper (33 page)

So why am I doing this? I think you know why and if I don't do it everyone else will know too. It's strange. For a person who always prided himself on not giving a whit what everyone else thought of him, I didn't think this would be necessary, but it is. There are some things worse than death and one of them is living in the shame of your own waste because that's what I've let myself become, a wastrel. I've wasted my relationships, of which there were precious few, and I've wasted the family name and the little talent I once possessed. No matter what happened in any trial, I would always be known as the village pervert. So this really isn't an act of self-destruction. It's too late for that.

There is much you could despise me for, including this, but there is one overarching offense I tried but could not forgive myself for. That's, of course, Kathryn. I wasted her too. Never in all the places I traveled or lived have I met someone who so unabashedly celebrated life. She had the ability to suspend her disbelief of the people and things that swirled around her. That's why she was such a marvelous artist and that's why she could befriend me. I would have left Stampede years ago if it weren't for the pleasure of watching her. But rest assured, Tom, it wasn't the way you must have suspected, even though you never accused me. She was faithful to you. That was a given. We both knew I wasn't worth her risking that. For me, sadly, she was cover. If I could attract an angel like her, how could anyone know me for what I really was? I was a fish out of water, but Kathryn quenched me with her kindness and her craziness. Frankly, without her, the value of my life plummeted to rubbish and it's time to just set a match to it.

I wasn't finished, but I had to put it down and wipe my eyes. My hands were trembling and the pressure in my head was building to the point I thought something ugly was going to just gush out. “This is so bleak,” I said, looking over at Dad. He must have been reading it again over my shoulder because he was crying. “I'm not sure I'm getting it all.” He reached his arm over and rubbed me in the center of my back, and I pushed in against him like a cat leans into someone's pet.

“When truth is buried,” he said, “it smolders until it finally explodes.”

The day she drowned was the bottom of the abyss. I wasn't even in the tub with her when it happened. I was having a smoke and we were just chatting when she went under to retrieve her wedding ring. It was all so typical of my ineptitude. When I couldn't pull her up, I tried to shut it off, but I didn't know where the switch was. I screamed for my yard boy, but by the time he turned it off it was too late. Before the police came, we put one of my spare bathing suits on her and I swore him to never tell what he'd seen. I paid him not to tell. People didn't need any more ideas than they already had. Of course, their fantasies, which I allowed to exist, were nonsense because I've never had carnal knowledge of a woman.

I stopped again. The words in the letter were like turpentine pouring through a funnel, but the opening in my brain was too small to let it all in at once. I had to let it back up and pass at its own speed.
The yard boy? Did that mean Dirk was there? Mom being wrestled around naked like a piece of sod. He'd never told me any of this. Why hadn't he told me
? I looked over at Dad and he gave me a look that perfectly reflected what I was feeling. Flattened. There was one more page.

About the newspaper, Tom, it's yours. I'm going to use enough gasoline to get rid of me as well as the galleys for tomorrow's print, but the fire department will put it out before much else is damaged. Don't worry, there will be no cans or blow torches to show how this started. It's an old building. They'll assume it was an electrical fire. I've had your name on my life insurance policies since Kathryn's death. You'll have enough to repair the damage, as long as you destroy this letter. They don't pay on suicides.

Unlike me, you have everything to live for—a flair for your trade, normal human appetites, and a precocious but untamed daughter. My watch of her has ended. She's all yours now. Seize the day, as they say. Win a Pulitzer. Remarry and rejoice.

I will be eternally in remorse for the pain I have caused you and Piper.

A friend still, I hope,

John J. Carlisle

I sucked in some air, reordered the pages of the onion skin stationary, and stuck them back into the envelope. My backbone was bent over like a willow shoot and I wanted to collapse onto the jail bed and digest what I'd read. There were voices murmuring at the other end of the hallway and laughter, probably more precinct humor. Odd man out, that part of his letter I had understood. As much as this was the Carlisles' town, it wasn't a town for John Carlisle. So why hadn't he gone back to New York or Paris or San Francisco? Was the territorial imperative so overpowering that someone as miscast as him insisted on staying? Accept me or die?

Dad patted me on the shoulder and I became aware of his presence again. He was giving me the respect of silence, the way he did that Christmas he gave me the Rubik's Cube and let me figure it out on my own.

“Do you believe him?” I said.

“Which part? As far as the Spigot Lake kids are concerned, I'm satisfied from my own investigation it was a case of parental hysteria. But I'm not sure he could have convinced a local jury of that. Not once they'd pegged him as the man he pretended not to be.”

“What about him and Mom?”

He winced. “That's harder. I tend to be agnostic in my own affairs.”

“He said he'd never known a woman. Why would he go to this much trouble to tell a lie?”

“Pride, shame, anger? I don't know.”

“Why can't we just accept it? There's nothing more you can do about it anyway.”

We were sitting side by side, staring at the floor. With the edge of his loafer, he was probing the seam where the linoleum buckled up. “I don't know what your mom did with him, but whatever happened I had it coming. I'd confused my job with my life.”

“You're being too Catholic, Dad.” Somewhere between the day Mom had drowned and me finishing the letter, he and I had traded places. I used to lament the fact he was able to get on with the rest of his life after her death, but once again I'd underestimated the ability of the human heart to harbor pain. “Why can't you just let the newspaper editor in you put a good spin on it?”

“Is that what you're going to do?”

I'd walked into another Tom Scanlon logic trap. He'd told me once that a fair deal was one in which you were willing to sit on either side.
You have to be willing to sell to your partner for the same price you'd buy him out
. If Dad had to accept John Carlisle's word, so did I. “I'm working on it,” I said. “Give me a few days. You were his partner for umpteen years. Reading this letter I feel like I've just met him.”

“He was dead right about one thing,” Dad said.

“What?” I expected him to explain what the letter meant about Carlisle's watch ending.

“You're untamed.”

“I hoped you'd say precocious.”

He rested his hand on my leg. “I didn't want to give you a big head.”

“You're going to destroy the letter, aren't you?”

“What would you do?”

“It seems like he owes you something.”

“Nobody owes anybody. We each got what we bargained for.”

I'd have to think about that one. In any event, I knew I was determined not to be saddled with the same compulsions of guilt Dad was. He'd dwelled too long on the scriptural side of the culture, while I'd already converted to the skepticism of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, the fabulous artificer Dad had introduced me to. Dedalus would help me adjust and revise this thing in my own mind until I could live with it.

“Are you ready to get out of jail?”

“Not if it means Willard has to stay in my place.”

“Who's being stubborn now? I think you should talk to him yourself.” He was still going to let me work the Rubik's Cube on my own. “I gotta go.”

“Can you do one thing?”

“What's that?”

“Make sure the dogs are okay.”

“I've taken care of the dogs.” The way he said it, so abruptly, made me think he'd called the pound.

“They take a cup of dry each with some wet mixed in.”

He waved me off. “I used to have a dog.”

“I didn't know that.”

“There's lots you don't know.”

I wondered if I should apologize for what I'd said last night. I'd obviously been guilty of the same thing I'd accused him of, making Mom Carlisle's lover. The only difference was he was willing to be honest about it and I was going to deny it to my grave. Maybe it was my peculiar vantage point, but I believed what Carlisle had said about him and Mom. Carlisle had proven Dad and me both infidels. There was something, however, I had to say. I made sure our eyes met. “I'm sorry about what happened to John Carlisle.”

He didn't say anything, and I realized it wasn't clear whether I was talking about Carlisle's life or his death, but it didn't matter because I knew Dad was suffering for both.

They gave Willard a lie detector test, which he passed, and released him, but I was still skeptical. I'd seen him walk through land mines of exploding truths and emerge unscathed.

He came by in the early afternoon, at Dad's request, wearing his fluorescent orange construction bib with yellow Velcro straps, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he'd just been here a few hours ago. “Say, these are nice rooms,” he said. “Plenty of privacy.”

He admitted he was at the paper that night, in the breezeway where the gas pump for the delivery truck was located. “I always go in there if I have to go to the bathroom.”

“You go in there to pee?”

“It's family property.”

“No, it's not. Dad just works there.”

“I thought he owned it.” He stuck his thumbs inside his vest. “Paddy was with me. He'll back me up.”

“What did the police say to your story?”

“They said I'm gonna have to find a new place to pee.” He laughed his wheezy laugh. “Course they never asked me about my cigar.”

“What cigar?”

“Set it down, took a leak, then I couldn't find it.”

“You set your cigar down by the gas pump?”

“Couldn't stick it in my pocket. Then someone came out of the paper and Paddy and I high-tailed it outta there.”

That someone had to have been Carlisle coming outside to fill his can with gasoline. Maybe Willard thought he
had
set the fire. Of course, if he had it would have been an accident, a careless old man's accident instead of the gruesome, premeditated finale that John Carlisle had insisted on.

Somewhere in this there was logic, maybe justice, something I should understand.

21

On the first Saturday in May, Willard and I took the dogs on a hike out to Harvey Field to watch the Stampede Air Show. It was supposed to include Nick Oster doing stunts in his crop duster, and a landing by a replica of the
Gossamer Albatross
, the human-powered craft that crossed the English Channel.

“Who's peddling it?” Willard wanted to know.

“Icarus,” I said, and he jerked his head around, throwing me a distrustful look. “You know, the guy who flew too close to the sun.”

“Never heard of him,” he said, straight-faced.

Willard wore his brakeman's cap to keep the sun out of his eyes and a pair of mechanic's coveralls. This time he looked like he really was stepping off to Bonnie Holliday's to work on her Studebaker. His gait, short abbreviated steps not always going in the same direction, reminded me of Charlie Chaplin. I carried a day pack full of tuna sandwiches, carrot sticks, and enough plastic bottles of water for us as well as the dogs. It was a perfect day for flying upside down and doing the loop: blue sky padded with gauzy clouds.

By the time we passed under the Carlisle Bridge, the sweat between my shoulder blades where the pack rested had made a washcloth out of my T-shirt and we stopped in the shade to give the dogs their first drink of water. I'd forgotten to bring a dish, so Willard cupped his hands and I poured water into them as the dogs fought like kindergartners at a fountain to get their turn. “The hand is still the best tool ever made,” he said. The only dog to act like a gentleman was Paddy and I petted him on the head to assure him we'd break open a fire hydrant if we ran out.

It turned out Dad had known about Willard's dogs all the time, which made me wonder what else he knew. “I got suspicious,” he said, “every time Willard came by the paper courting a different dog.” When I asked him why he didn't say something, he said, “I thought the secrecy would give you a reason to keep an eye on him.”

The heat rising in the distance off Highway Nine turned the asphalt into a shimmering stream. We walked on the shoulder and Willard tried to get the dogs to stay alongside us in the ditch. “This is where we need Freeway,” he said, one of the few times he'd mentioned Freeway since the day we buried him in the backyard. Maybe the fact he could mention him out loud meant he was getting over it.

In the galaxy of town events, the Air Show was right up there with the Antique Car Festival. Cars whizzed by us on the highway. Spectators were also arriving by air because I could see single engine planes circling Harvey Field like buzzards, then swooping down and disappearing.

“It ain't a paddle wheeler,” Willard said, pausing to catch his breath, “but isn't this going to be dandy?”

Our hike reminded me of the times I used to traipse through meadows next to the river with Mom, when we took off our shoes and skipped across the flower fields, letting stalks of heather, dogwood, and Indian paintbrushes weary our legs until we toppled over and lay there on our backs giggling, sucking in the sugary scent of the petals. Today, instead of the buzz of grasshoppers, we had the drone of airplanes. Instead of watching Mom replicate the landscape of an Alpine lake, we were going to watch someone replicate the flight of a bird against the skyscape. And instead of Mom, I had her father, but they both had that same childlike sense of awe that made them Coopers. Willard and I had never talked about the fact I was adopted and I wondered if he might have actually forgotten it somewhere along the way. I couldn't bring myself to say anything for fear it would break the bond between us.