The Detective's Garden (35 page)

“Get up!” Dominick said. “Get the hell up, you’re still alive.”

King ran and the field grass was green at the base and
brown at the tip and it whispered against the denim of her
jeans. She sprawled under the plum. The roots, white like thin
fingers, curled up from underground. She pulled herself to the
tree with her arms, dragging herself across dirt, digging with
her hands, searching for what she did not want to find. A star
on a map drawn on a linen napkin. Nestled by the roots, a
single fieldstone. She pried her fingers around the rock’s edges.
She pulled and when the earth gave up its grip, she reached
into the hollow left behind. She found three small white finger
bones held together by grayish wormlike ligaments.

Sweat beaded on King’s skin. She was spotted with the
shadows of leaves. She shivered. She closed her eyes. There was
grit in her mouth. Reddish lights played behind her eyelids in
shapes that looked like foreign words.

Dominick set Charlie Basin in a lawn chair and tied him to
it with old cattle ropes pulled from a tin on the porch. Charlie’s
suit was torn at the lapel and the shoulder. Dominick threaded
a rope around his neck. Clarke and Elsie walked out from be
hind the boulder in the woods, their legs like ribbons tied into
a bow, their mouths huddled close.

When Charlie’s wits returned, he angled his neck toward
Dominick. “You don’t want to do this.”

“No kidding,” Dominick said. He pulled a rope tight around
Charlie’s feet. “When did I get what I wanted?”

“You complaining?” Charlie Basin asked. “You think you’re
not responsible?”

“Nope,” Dominick said. “That’s not what I think.”

“Your children are going to get hurt.”

“Not by my hand.”

A deep foreign intimacy exists in the relationship between
the man who ties the ropes and the man who is tied by them.
Charlie shifted in the lawn chair. He said, “You could just let
me go.”

“I don’t see how,” Dominick said.

“I called for backup,” Charlie said.

“It doesn’t surprise me.”

“Turn yourself in, Sawyer.”

“I don’t know,” Dominick said. “I’m pretty tired.”

“Jesus,” Charlie said, “I’m glad you didn’t shoot me.”

“It wasn’t you. I don’t give a shit about you.”

The sun fell strongly enough that Charlie could feel his face
burn. He twisted against the ropes. He inhaled and caught the
faint smell of manure and gasoline. He said, “Can I tell you
something?”

“If you want to,” Dominick said.

“I like King. She’s a good kid.”

In the field, when Elsie put her head under Clarke’s chin
and leaned against him, he knew it was over. Their hearts beat
at different rates. The sky was wide and open and empty. El
sie’s hands held him tight enough to leave an imprint of her
fingers on his arms. It felt good to be bound up like that, to be
contained by her idea of who he was. The sun was a pinprick
of heat and light. Clarke let his head fall so that his lips rested
against her dark hair. She spoke in a whisper against his throat.
She said, “It’s time for us to go.”

She said, “Let’s get out of this together.”

Clarke lifted his mouth from her head and felt the individual
hairs pasted to his lips. His voice was muffled. “I can’t leave,”
he said.

Elsie said, “I’m going.”

Already, Clarke was looking out beyond the two of them,
at his father kneeling beside the FBI agent, his head down as
if in penitence. The dandelions that his mother would once
have rooted from the grass. The A-frame cabin was lit like a
lantern from the inside and a thick dark smoke trailed from the
chimney.

“Dad,” Clarke’s voice was nearly a yell, “what’s that?” He
pointed toward the cabin’s glaring windows.

Charlie Basin strained against the rope to look toward the
A-frame. He jutted his chin toward the southern window. Be
yond the glass, a lean girlish figure did not move away from
the fire’s quick advance. “King!” Charlie called. A bedroom
window blew outward and a tongue of flame licked through
the glass-toothed hollow. The quick soundless explosion of a
whole house taking fire. Harsh light flickered outward around
the house in a wave. Dominick and Clarke’s shoulders collided
as they moved forward at the same time. The door in front of
them snapped like kindling and smoke poured out, hot and
dark as tar.

Flames ran up the drapes and across the floor. King stood
in the middle of the living room over a gas can. She breathed
and the smoke burned her lungs. She held her mother’s ring
finger in her hand. Fire lapped at the carpet by her feet and
burst upward and raced around her, chasing the scent of gas
oline. Something in the dark snapped and the great lumped
figures of her father and brother gasped and choked and small
dark clouds flew out of their mouths and rose to pool with the
swirling mass on the ceiling. Then one of them had her by the
arms and she was lifted and turned and swept back through the
darkness and the heat, and her skin stung and her eyes bleared.
And they were outside. They were free. Their throats raw and
choking. Their skins blackened. Coughing to let the clear air
fill their lungs. Knuckling the heat in their eyes until they
could see again.

A single siren began to well over the hills.

Holes, rimmed with fire, bloomed like flowers in his chil
dren’s T-shirts, and Dominick slapped at them with his hands.
He shushed though his kids made no sounds. The last plum
blossoms brushed through the air. Charlie Basin had flipped
over in the blue aluminum lawn chair and lay with his chest
against the grass, his brow furrowed, his gaze on them unwav
ering. Above the cabin, smoke massed into a great head. Black
er eyes against a black face. A vision that summed up what was
left and found it wanting.

Elsie walked down the white rock lane. Clarke watched as
she slipped. One ankle bent outward. She wobbled and caught
herself with one hand against the ground but she did not look
back.

The sirens multiplied into a chorus and the Sawyers filed
through the grass behind the house and past the plum tree
and down the hill toward the river. Dominick walked between
his two children. They passed through rectangular fields, past
lines of trees. The sirens behind them rose and fell over hills. A
plume of black smoke rose into the sky. Dominick hitched the
rifle higher on his shoulder. They were together and, whatever
else, he felt that this at least was right.

Clarke’s hands caught at his pockets and buried themselves.
He felt his chest expanding and shrinking. He watched King
and wondered what had come over her. She’d burned down
their house? Was she okay? Why didn’t she speak?

King clutched her mother’s finger. Her mind held to words
so hard that her mouth could not form them. Farmhouses
lumped in the distance. Red barns canted to one side. Wind
passed through hollow corncribs. King made small noises, the
starting ends of words that her father and brother did not have
time to address. She wanted to hold the finger in front of her
father’s face. She wanted to accuse him. She wanted to ask for
her mother’s ring back. She slowed and stumbled over an old
stone wall and her father swept her into his arms and moved
forward. King liked the feeling of having her weight borne and
she felt bad that she liked it. She opened her hand. Grayish bits
of skin and gristle and thin white bone. Her father’s eyes were
empty and King’s hand rose as of its own accord and touched
the dead finger to her father’s lips.

Dominick recoiled. His mouth drew into a thin line. He
held his wife’s child tight and looked at her. Tall grass shivered
at his feet. The sun lit them heavily and cast long shadows
ahead of them. His daughter weighed no more than a loaf of
bread. Must the failing light prefigure some coming fall? What
parts of him would his son and daughter carry forward?

“Dad,” King asked, “what’ve you done?”

HIS WIFE HAD
once said, “Why didn’t you die in the
war?” and Dominick’s insides had quivered like a struck bell.
He’d gagged on the anger that rose in his throat. She wished
he’d died? He
had
died. He’d been dead for a while now. He
took a step toward her. He was going to show her just what
death could do.

Then he squashed the thought, tried to hold his insides still.
He got a wool blanket from the bedroom closet, went to sleep
on the couch. In the morning, his insides still quivered. He
wanted to curse and spit on the floor. Instead he poured bowls
of cereal for his children. He poured them milk. He watched
them chew. He couldn’t look at his wife. He couldn’t speak.
He willed the war to come back and it did, in short flashes of
pleasure. For three days, he walked around in a kind of fog, his
insides ringing. When she confronted him again, her face was
like a dishrag. It was night. Her teeth were sharp. She yelled a
lot of things at him. He didn’t yell back. She shoved him, he
thought she shoved him. Didn’t she? Everything was mixed up.

The night went on a long time. She followed him around,
telling him things about himself that were true but weren’t
good. He tried not to listen. Instead, he tried to hold it all in
side him, the ringing bell, the war, all the things he had done
and seen, the fear and the rage, which maybe were the same
thing. He held in the good things, too. The hills and rivers
of Pennsylvania, and how he’d once known that his home had
been built by his own hands, and the way he loved his kids as
deeply as heartwood.

He could feel how everything good was being squeezed out
of him.

She pushed his shoulder. Her mouth contorted into a flat
line. He tried not to hear her. He watched her lips. “What’s
wrong with you?” she demanded.

He felt himself slip, a tear in some seam inside him. Visions
slipped out through the hole. A finger in the dirt. The quiver
ing on the inside moved out into his arms, then his fingers. It
felt cold. He looked down at his hands, shaking. His wife’s eyes
widened, her hair curled at her throat. She stopped talking.

The warm rage coursed through his veins, running out
through his shoulders, down his arms. For a moment, it burned
out the fear. He watched his hands stop shaking, his whole
body come dead still.

It was so easy this way. He reached and picked her up and
tossed her through the front door of the house. She spun like a
daisy wheel, landed on the grass. Bees rose and fell like confetti.
He grabbed the red scarf from the coatrack, pulled her off the
ground, dragged her to the hollow pine, and tied her there. She
coughed and spat and pleaded and he went back into the house.
He came out holding his Wharncliffe knife. She had worked
free of the scarf that bound her hands and he felt he both was
her husband and wasn’t. She darted toward the red-blossomed
plum. She seemed purposeful but he didn’t care. Purpose had
ceased to matter. He caught her before she reached the tree, just
to show her how easy this was, and held her down in the grass.

He carved off her ring finger with his knife. Blood ran over
her hand and dripped. She screamed and kicked at his face with
her heels, her feet hitting his head solidly. His grip loosened
as she slickened with blood. She turned and they scrabbled
over her finger in the dirt. She wasn’t going to let him have
the smallest piece of her. His hand closed on her wedding ring
but, with her good hand, his wife grabbed her finger out of
the grass. Dominick held the ring up and looked at it, at the
space it contained. His wife’s feet caught against the ground
and she ran, once again toward the plum tree. She held the red
scarf in her damaged hand. Her dress flapped around her. She
was bleeding. She was hurt. There wasn’t anywhere for her to
go. She threw herself on the ground beneath the plum tree and
began scrambling in the dirt. Dominick came up behind her
slowly. She glanced at him once, then she turned down the hill
toward the river and ran. She ran. She ran.