Reservation Road (23 page)

Dwight

My eyes opened. I was lying on my back on the leather sofa in the den, still in my clothes, hands tucked between my legs for warmth. A baby curled up. I couldn’t remember falling asleep, or why, or dreaming. For a few seconds I couldn’t remember anything. The gray light more like darkness than light, a kind of glow in it. I sat up and saw through the windows the snow falling quiet and steady, the world all covered over with white, and then I remembered that Sam was asleep, in my house, actually here, in his own room down the hall. And I believe I smiled to myself, thinking maybe, after breakfast, I’d take him sledding.

Then the refrigerator started up, came to life humming, and I looked toward the kitchen.

Ethan Learner was half in shadow but I could see him. I didn’t make a sound. He had a gun in his right hand and as I looked on he cocked back the hammer.

“Are you Dwight Arno?”

I must have nodded. Fear had turned me hardly conscious, able to think only about Sam. Sam here, asleep, here because I’d wanted it, begged for it, down on my knees to Ruth. Whatever else happened, I had to get this man and his gun out of the house before Sam woke up.

“Mr. Learner—”

“Be quiet.” It was all he said. His voice soft with a kind of lunatic calm, out on the fringe somewhere, as if not knowing itself how scared or angry it was. He came closer, passing in front of a window. His round glasses turned to silver dollars and then went gray again. He stopped about five feet away, the gun pointed down at the middle of my chest. “Move slowly,” he said.

I got up, my bad knee cracking as it unbent. My body a roadside breakdown, veritable junk. But then it happened, I felt it: a slight pause in him as I drew myself up, a shift in his makeup, inside hesitation, as if he’d lost the tune he was supposed to sing. Doubt sticking its head into the room: I must have outweighed him by thirty pounds.

I could see the gun better now. Big, serious, maybe antique. It looked like the army gun my old man had kept in his bedside drawer, memento of his days with a purpose and a team, days surely gone; a weapon kept, during his long slide to nowhere after my mother died, under no lock and no key, as if just waiting for me to get my hands on it. I’d taken that gun out just once, sneaked it off one night while he was passed out drunk, carried it burning hot in my pocket down blocks and through alleyways and across abandoned factory lots and out past the edge of town, where, fear-struck more than tough, I’d blasted a can of Schlitz into the afterworld. I knew the sound, the kick, the kind of hole a gun like this one made in tin or paper. The rest was just a good guess. The bullet enters the body, expands in the blink of an eye, blows a hole out my back the size, say, of a walnut, which happens also to be the size of my shrunken heart.

“Where’s your coat?” Learner said.

“Over there by the door.”

“Let’s go get it.”

I felt the gun graze my back as I went by him. There were things I thought to say but they were all about my son asleep down the hall, nothing he’d want to hear. So, moving for the door, I said nothing.
Get my coat,
I was thinking,
get out of this
house.
In an hour or two Sam wakes up alone, sees the snow out his window and thinks maybe about sledding, wanders down the hall into his old man’s room and finds the round bed unslept in and the bureau drawers emptied and the duffel bags stuffed with clothes, feels the first twinges of confusion. Then a check of the rest of the house and the discovery that Dad has skipped out. Again. This would be the worst part, and my heart ached for him. But he would get over it. One day. He had already survived worse from me. And he would be safe, not in danger because of me. He knew how to use the phone, knew his own number; eventually he’d call his mother—

“Put it on,” Learner said.

My coat was on a hook by the front door and I put it on.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”

I put my hand on the doorknob. It was my own boy I was thinking about, not his. Last night. My own boy asleep on the couch, the TV droning on, my arm around his shoulders: I pick him up and carry him to his room, his head lolling, his feet sticking out, and tuck him in. First time in my house, last time in my house; he never wakes. And now I was leaving him again. The snowy cold blowing through the crack underneath the front door. I thought what a cheap-shit house this was and how sorry I was to ever have lived in it. I was turning the doorknob when I heard Sam, faint but clear, calling me from the other end of the house.

“Dad!”

Learner froze. “Who’s that?” His voice when he finally got it out was a panicked, whispery mess.

I couldn’t answer.

He jammed the gun into my back. “Answer me.”

“My son,” I whispered.

“What?”

“My son.”

“Where?”

“In his room.”

“Oh, Christ,” he said. Sweat had suddenly appeared in tiny glistening beads all over his forehead.

“He’s just a kid,” I said. “He doesn’t know anything.”

“Shut up.”

“Dad!”

“Let me go in and talk to him.”

“No. Shut up.”

“Dad!”

“If I don’t go to him he’ll come out.”

“All right,” Learner said weakly. “Go.”

He steered me with the gun—the muzzle hard and nervous in my spine, leaving a mark—pushed me ahead of him, back across the den to the hall, down it. We stopped outside Sam’s door, which was partway open. From the hall I saw just the edge of one window, the strange gray-white morning coming in around the shade, beneath it the tiny glowing bulb of the nightlight. I stepped inside the room. Sam lay on the bed with the covers kicked off, wearing nothing but his underpants and a long-sleeve T-shirt. He was still sleepy, his hair mussed, his eyelids thick. I put a smile on my face and said, “Hey, sport.”

“Where were you? I woke up.”

“I can see that,” I said, not answering his question.

“What time’s it?”

“Too early for you to be asking.”

“You got your coat on,” he pointed out.

I’d forgotten I was wearing it. “Yeah, well, it’s snowing outside and real cold in here.” I sat down on the edge of the bed before he could say anything else. “As a matter of fact,” I went on, “what do you think you’re doing on top of the blankets? You catch a cold over here and your mother’s gonna let me have it. She’ll never let you come back.” I took a handful of the blankets and lifted them up so he could slip under. A waft of his smell came rising up with the warm, trapped air. “Listen to me, Sam, okay? I just want to check something. You know the phone number at your mother’s house?”

He didn’t answer right away. Then he nodded.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell it to me.”

He told it to me.

“So if you needed to, you could call her and get her to come pick you up here?”

He looked me in the eyes as if he sensed something. Finally, he nodded again.

“That’s my boy,” I said.

I heard Learner then, a noise so soft and invisible it wouldn’t mean anything unless you knew what it was: weight shifting from one foot to the other on the carpet. It made me hate his guts. I leaned over and put my arms around my son, half lifted him out of bed. He weighed next to nothing. I kissed his head and told him that I had to go into the office to work on a crisis—a legal problem involving someone very important—and that if I wasn’t back by the time the cartoons started on TV he should call his mother and have her come over and get him.

I let him go. His head dropped back on the pillow. He didn’t say anything, asked none of the obvious questions. Just kept looking at me. Till I stood up, tugging at the covers so they fit under his chin.

“You got all that?”

He nodded.

“Good. Go to sleep now, son.”

For me, he made a show of closing his eyes. I turned for the door.

“Dad?”

I stopped but didn’t look back. I was staring through the doorway at the outer half of Ethan Learner’s left boot on the powder blue shag carpet. The rest of him was hidden.

“What, Sam?”

“Can we go sledding later?”

“Sure we can,” I said. “Now go back to sleep.”

I went out of the room, closing the door behind me. Learner was there, and his gun too. He was sweating, pale as a ghost, and unable to look me in the eye.

Ethan

Call it a travesty, a terrible joke. Call it a mistake beyond reckoning.

Who can describe it? A boy’s singular voice. A father’s. A conversation about nothing—cold and phone numbers and sledding—that left me, there in the hallway, crippled with shame and guilt and longing. Left me weak.

This was the fatal habit of Polonius: to stand in the shadows listening, peering at life with half an eye, letting others take the risk of living and despising them for it. A gun loves this kind of coward the way a crutch loves the lame.

And then the conversation ended, and he came out of the room.

Outside. Snow again, falling feather-soft, a white like the Ice Age. Cold, cold air. He walked ahead of me. A powerful man, his back, all by itself, massive and intimidating. The truth was, he frightened me. Had he turned around even once during the walk up the road to my car, it might have all been over. Perhaps, silently counting our footsteps away from his house, we were both still thinking about the boy in his bed, covers pulled up. Asleep or awake.

“Where were you? I woke up.”

The voice like an echo that would not die.

But he didn’t turn around. He let the moment run until we were past the point of hearing. He never looked back, and I began to hate him again. He walked ahead of me as I’d ordered him to, taking for granted, it seemed, the potency of the weapon in my hand, if not the exhausted man who was supposed to use it; I watched the deep, patterned prints of his work boots in the fresh-made snow, laid out behind him like a series of messages. Otherwise he gave no sign of anything, was stoical as a saint, uncomplaining and righteous as a soldier. His back broad and straight, his head already sprinkled with snow but held high— tough, haunted, undissuadable, ridiculous, tragic. He cut a figure. But guilty of murdering a boy? He wasn’t saying. He was saying nothing. Doing what he was told. Leaving the talking and explaining and suffering and living to the people who claimed victimhood, who had been left gasping in his wake.

Dwight

It was an old Honda Accord, not well cared for, parked about a quarter-mile up the road. The snow made the walk longer. When we got there he opened both doors on the driver’s side and then stepped back with the gun pointed at my chest. The gun was shaking; he no longer seemed able to hold it still. He asked if I had gloves and I nodded and he told me to put them on.

“Now get in.”

A breeze was blowing falling snow into the car and onto the seats. I slid behind the wheel, looked immediately for the keys but they weren’t there. He closed my door. Then I heard him get in behind me and the other door close, and the keys landed on my lap. “Drive,” he said.

I drove past the mailbox with its blood-red flag laid down, past the bankrupt house, out of Box Corner altogether, away from my son. And while Learner gave me directions road by road, turn by turn, I prayed hard to a God I’d never properly given a shit about to look after Sam, please, to see him back to sleep right now, to follow him through all the troubles to come. Too late now. We were heading west on 44 toward Canaan and the headlights were pushing ahead into the fading dark of the road, and Learner’s breathing warmed my ear like an animal’s shallow pant. The road was wet under the tires, gravelly, and the snow fell onto the windshield in already melting particles, and the heater blew air as the wipers squeaked and clicked. Otherwise quiet. Anything I might have thought to say to help my case was a sick joke next to the facts of the matter, and I ruled against it. Despite the breathing he was calmer here in the car where the world was smaller, shrunk down to just the two of us and the gun, which he kept anxiously pressed against the side of my head. In the mirror I saw steam gradually climbing the lenses of his glasses, though he did not seem to notice it himself.

Outside Canaan, we came up on a pickup with a plow blade hitched to the front doing the roads, and Learner stuck the gun into my aching head good and hard, but when we were past the truck he eased up again, as if he didn’t have the nerve. When I checked back in the mirror I thought I saw for the very first time a man who, glimpsed unawares, was just about as scared as I was.

Ethan

I took him to the mountaintop. The wooden cabins, the lake; time of memory, of summer, my son’s life. A beautiful boy diving off a white float. The only place I had thought of—the lake at sunrise mirrored silver, at sunset the world on fire. And still my son dives, gets out, dives again.

I would make this man see all that he had failed to imagine. Would push his face deep into the beauty and the regret that he had never known existed—the sun on the lake and the breeze in the cattails and the canoe in the water and the father and son together and the horror of the bloody, headless swan—until this man could not breathe, until he was suffocated by his own emptiness. And then he would be dead, and I would leave him there.

The snow came down from a whitened sky. It fell on the tops of the pines alongside the road up Mount Riga, and much of it never made it to the ground; on the level crown of the mountain, though, the snow had covered everything. Shallow drifts clung to the steep sides of the gabled roof of the warden’s lightless cabin, in front of which stood the closed wooden gate.

I told him to stop the car and get out. The footpath leading to the other cabins was gone, whited out, and for several moments I stood there disoriented, the past snowed under. But then I found where I thought the footpath must have been, and with the weapon again at his back I marched him—no other word— toward the lake. I thought he might protest or plead, but he did not. Other than movement there was no evidence of spirit or feeling in him. If he was afraid, he did not show it. Even self-concern seemed beyond him: his head lowered against the falling snow, he trudged ahead like a blinkered packhorse. Countless snowflakes dropped down his gaping collar and landed on the exposed skin of his nape, but he made no move to cover himself. He did not seem to care any longer what happened to him, and so was without needs of any kind—no crime to which he felt compelled to confess, no contrition or remorse to express for the saving of his soul. He’d be gone soon, it would not be long now; and once he was gone, it would be the lot and daily torture of his victims to determine the extent of the damage done by him in the years generously referred to as his life. That would not be his problem. For he was evolution’s latest miracle: reduced to nothing, he had nothing to lose. He had been, in the final sum of things, just a transient, passing through without regard for life.

We came to cabin four, which looked not as it once had, but like a shack, a doll’s house, dressed over in white. Behind it the lake, the water at this hour, in the newfound winter, blackened, dimpled by falling snow. Swans gone. The white cake fallen or eaten. Not the place we had ever come to. Not the memory I had hunted down like a starving man. Not my son nor his death nor any reason why, but a mystery of unsung grief, forgotten memories, signs lost in weather.