The Detective's Garden (15 page)

“Hurt her how?”

“Hit her.”

“Oh. Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. She met somebody else. That’s why I’m with my
aunt. It’s just for a little while.”

They were quiet. The moon looked like an empty plate.
Clarke didn’t know why she’d told him these things about her
family but he could feel what the options were. He could clam
up. Which meant leaving this girl who wanted to press close
to him and kiss him with her undead breath. Or he could stay
and talk. Tell her one or two things. Maybe ask a few questions.

He asked, “How do you tell if someone’s a bad person?”

“Who?”

“Anybody. Your aunt or your dad. Or my dad. It doesn’t
matter.”

“You’ve got to say who,” Elsie said. “Or I won’t fucking
answer.”

“Me, then.”

“What’ve you done?” Elsie said.

“My dad doesn’t want me to talk about this stuff.”

“Do you care what he wants?”

“Sometimes,” Clarke said. He paused. “No.”

“I want to know things about you,” Elsie said.

“You won’t tell anybody?” said Clarke.

“No. I won’t.”

“Okay. We’re on the run from the cops.”

“What’d you do?”

“I tied up an old woman.”

Just before sunset, a half-mile from the tree house, King
paddled the canoe down the Kishwaukee River. Past stock-still
herons fishing for bluegill. A bald eagle’s nest pyred atop a pine
tree. Near the bank, sharp rocks rose to the surface. A turtle
slowly climbed atop another turtle, their hard shells clicking
together. King held the paddle tightly with both palms. The
sun felt like soft warm hands on her skin.

She drifted and paddled in turns. She pulled the dictionary
from her pocket and rifled through the pages and looked at
renascence. She came to the cement footing of a bridge that
arched over her. A road hummed above. King splashed into the
shallows and tied the canoe to a sapling. Her feet left wet prints
in the gray dust on the cement. She scrambled up the embank
ment to a gas station. A Sunoco. On one side of the lot was an
air pump. On the other a pay phone. A paunchy couple argued
over a slip of paper as they pumped gas. She walked to the pay
phone and dialed the operator and asked to place a collect call
to Jon Howland. The phone rang with a faint echo.

“King?” Jon Howland said. “You guys okay?”

“I got a favor to ask you,” King said.

“Where you at?”

“I’d better not say.”

“All right.”

“Can you go over to our woodpile?” King said. “Look for a
big loose log with a notch at the bottom of the pile. It’s hollow.”

There was a pause. “Can I talk to your father?” Jon Howland
asked.

“I don’t want him to know about this.”

“Okay, King, I’ll get it done.”

“Thanks. You can’t call here. I’ll call you.”

“What’s in this log?”

“Maybe nothing. I don’t know.”

DOMINICK REMEMBERED THE
times that he
and his wife had gotten along well. He remembered how, when
he’d come home from Operation Enduring Freedom, his fat
infant daughter had been replaced by a thinner toddler. She
could walk. She could say, “Da da.” Below Sarah’s waist, Clarke
peeked at him from under the V of her legs. His daughter’s
hair was the same brown as his wife’s. She held King up before
him by the armpits and King struggled as though she had no
interest in rising for any will other than her own.

Dominick threw himself into the idea of home. He fash
ioned a child’s bamboo fishing pole. He carried King in a pack
on his back and Clarke in his arms. Down by the Susquehanna
River, they watched their red-and-white bobbers float down
stream. They waded in the shallows. Dominick held King as
she slapped the flat of her small palm against the water. His
wife walked down the hill with a basket of tomato sandwiches.
She nursed King against a burled oak and Dominick ate sitting
beside Clarke. When the kids fell asleep beneath a shade tree,
Dominick and Sarah lay back in the grass. This was what Dom
inick wanted, what he dreamed of when he was gone. When
he looked at his wife, he was assaulted by the ferocity of his
own love. Paper wasps flitted among the leaves of the aspens.
The hills were patchworked with the shadows of clouds. He
couldn’t stop smiling even if his fatherhood was a pretense.

In the evenings, he built a long freestanding woodshed. He
painted the bedroom. He pressure-washed the log cabin and
resealed it with tung oil, and regrouted the kitchen floor, and
rolled insulation into the attic. When he dropped into bed,
covered in primer and bits of pink fiberglass, his wife flopped
beside him. She flung one arm so that it lay across his chest. He
rolled halfway toward her and watched as her eyes opened and
closed more and more slowly. When had his own eyes begun to
close? What terrible dreams had he dreamed?

In the morning, Clarke burst into their room to find his
parents asleep in their clothes. The door slammed against the
wall and woke Dominick and Sarah at the same time. Clarke
wore long blue pajamas. He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
Dominick waved Clarke in. His wife’s arm was still across him
and he picked it up and felt its weight. He did not feel rested
at all. His son flopped onto the bed and crawled over Dominick
into the hollow between his parents’ bodies, and they waited
together for the baby to cry.

THE AIRPLANE JOLTED
against something and
shuddered and threw Charlie Basin awake. His eyes were closed.
Fear arched like electricity through his body as he bounced.
The seatbelt cut his waist and he jostled into his seat. There was
a lot of time contained within the millisecond it took his eyes
to open. Enough time to wonder if time itself was a function
of his mind, a kind of gatekeeping device to elide one moment
with the next, the easy passage of the Boeing 747 into a mid
flight crash with a commuter plane, or a lightning strike, or a
sudden halting mechanical failure, or the loss of a wing. All bad
things come together at once.

Without time, the plane could not crash but would al
ways be crashing. Without time, the present becomes an
unfettered umbrella, expanding like some dark tulip of a
universe. Without time, the future opens up before us as
accessibly as the past. And there aboard the airplane, with
all of our eyes still closed, we think of our two children with
their slim faces that are timelines of our own. Do they look
up? Do pieces of metal tear apart in midair and rain down
upon our kids? Is that great roaring sound from the wind
or the crash or is it somehow greater than either of those
things? One thing is not nearly as distinct from the next as
we must necessarily believe. We think of our children, and
we are with them, both of them at once, as though what had
separated us before had been as thin as thought. One stoops
at a broad desk and the pencil in his hands loops against
yellow paper. Oswell. His eyes are watery with fatigue. The
other, Charlene, lies half underneath a pale-skinned boy on
a hospital bed. A discarded law book on a brightly lit floor.
Then nurses or orderlies sweep in and pull the boy out by his
arms. We don’t want to be here with our daughter in such a
private moment but when we turn to the pale window, the
orange behind our closed eyelids, we see another son, a huge
boy with auburn hair and his arms wrapped around a girl,
their lips mashed softly together like the mouths of two sea
cucumbers.

Charlie’s eyes opened and closed again. Beneath his eyelids,
his pupils began to dilate. In the fraction of time before Char
lie’s eyes bounced open again, a thin girl wrapped in a blue
blanket screams as she stands in a shallow river. A great com
munal heart pounds once in Charlie’s chest. He is no longer
his own, until time stutters forward and his eyes open into a
separate dream.

Charlie Basin looked out the window at the needle-shaped
control tower and the rushing lines and the smaller jolt of the
front wheels pounding into the runway. The cabin of the plane
held the passengers together the way that a rib cage holds heart
and lungs and spleen. Sweat leapt to his skin. He reached inside
his coat and steadied his hand on the handle of his gun. He
leaned his head forward and pressed it against the small cold
window. The sun slanted over the edge of the earth between
two great bands of clouds in broad semicircles. One a sunny
rose, the other a slate gray. Two clashing visions of the future.
The beautiful collision of two colored smoke rings.

WHEN THE SAWYERS
all collected in the house
again, each of them carried a secret. They carried them careful
ly, like they’d carry a glass jar overfilled with water. Annie had
gone home in fits and starts as if pulled by an invisible string.
She walked away, turned, came back to Dominick.

“I might be gone for a few days,” she said.

“I know.”

“I’ve got to make sure I’m not watched before I come back.”

“Go on,” he said.

“I’ll bring some food,” she said. She walked down the drive
way, turned back, rubbed her eyes, watched her brother waving
her on.

When she was gone, Dominick wanted to do something to
bring them all together. He wanted his kids to relax so they
could be the family they ought to have been. So, on the next
warmer afternoon, he gathered white bread, bologna, mustard,
American cheese singles and made sandwiches and packed
them in a basket for a picnic on the lawn. That night, he found
a deck of cards beside the television set and they all knelt by the
coffee table and played gin rummy. In the morning, he found
two fishing rods in the basement and tied on weights and bob
bers and they fished off the island right in the backyard, in the
curve of the Kishwaukee River. The light shone pale and cool
through the branches of the hackberry trees. He tried to get his
kids to talk. He asked questions but they weren’t interesting
in answering. The fishing was good, though, surprising for a
small muddy river. King’s bobber dipped twice and she pulled
up a smallmouth bass, then Dominick caught three walleyes in
a row. He pulled out the hooks and tossed the fish into a bucket
filled with water.

Clarke kept moving away on his own, casting his line far
upriver toward a dark hollow beneath a fallen tree. Dominick
sat beside King on the cold ground. He held his hands out
in front of him, looking at the calluses, at how the deep lines
intersected with smaller lines and the smaller lines intersected
with lines even smaller still.

“What is it?” King asked.

“What’s what?” said Dominick.

“What’re you doing?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“It’s cold out here,” she said.

“I know.”

“Maybe we should go in.”

“Maybe,” Dominick said. “But doesn’t the sun feel good?”

They angled their faces toward the light. They watched
Clarke set his pole in the grass and step onto a stone in the river.
He moved quickly from rock to rock, sometimes leaning over
to touch a stone with a bare hand. The moving water caught
his reflection in bits and pieces. A piece of red sweatshirt, a coin
of light skin, a brown shoe. He scrambled alongside the river
bank, jumped toward a small cliff, caught at roots and scram
bled upward into the brush.

“There’s poison ivy in there,” Dominick said.

“Clarke doesn’t get it,” King said.

“What do you mean, he doesn’t get it?”