The Interloper (2 page)

Here’s what I pieced together from the newspapers and the trial: CJ had been drinking in a seedy restaurant-bar in the Rockies called Diana’s Grill, not far from where he attended college. His girlfriend had broken up with him, and he’d gone to Diana’s to drown his sorrows. The toilet had overflowed earlier in the evening, so when nature called, he went out back to relieve himself, as was the local custom. There, he encountered two men, Henry Joseph Raven and his accomplice, Hoden Broadbent Murray. The men abducted CJ from the dirt lot behind the bar and took him to his Chevy Blazer. They drove him to a remote location in the mountains, some seventy-five miles away. There, Henry Raven shot CJ in the back of the head and left his body in some trees by the side of the road. Murray, upon hearing the gunshot, panicked and fled the scene in the Blazer. He had the foresight to reset the trip odometer. If he hadn’t, they might never have found CJ’s body. That courtesy, along with his
willingness to testify against Raven, earned him a lesser charge. Raven was apprehended a week later. His story, that the three men had been partying together all night, and that he had not been present when CJ was shot, was contradicted by several witnesses, prime among them his former accomplice, Murray. But Murray had struck a deal with the prosecutors, and had every reason to bend the story to his advantage. Prosecutors had to hang the case on forensics, matching the lead of the bullet found in CJ with the lead of bullets discovered at Raven’s home. In the end, Raven’s strategy of denial meant the difference between the death penalty and a twenty-some-year stint with the possibility of parole. In the library’s newspaper database, I cross-referenced “Henry Joseph Raven” and “miscarriage of justice.” My search returned fourteen hits, all opinion pages from Colorado and California newspapers.

Minerva stood over the serving dish. “Seconds?” she asked.

My plate was nowhere near clean; as a matter of fact, I was still cutting and chewing my dinner. “It’s delicious,” I said.

“I wondered if you want some more?”

I looked at my plate.

“Can I get back to you on that?”

Patty intervened. “He’s still eating, Mom. They’re not seconds if the firsts aren’t done yet.”

Minerva remained over the dish. “I just didn’t want his plate to go empty.” She gestured with a large two-pronged fork. “Besides, there’s still a nice big piece of steak left. Someone’s going to have to eat it.”

Calvin Senior looked up. He had tolerated his wife’s flavorless cooking since the doctor said he should cut down his salt
intake, and he had never complained about it once. But he wasn’t going to go as far as taking these leftovers to work.

“I’ve got lunch at the club tomorrow,” he said.

“We’re having a catered meeting,” Patty said.

Minerva turned to me. What could I say? I was working at home the next day. I would either eat it now or then. “I’d be happy to take it home for lunch, if you’re willing to wrap it up.”

She frowned and turned toward the kitchen with the dish.

“Mom!” Patty looked at her sternly. “We’re still eating.”

I scanned the table. Calvin Senior had finished, as had Patty. Minerva’s plate was empty save a bone and a few gristly bits. I was still eating. Not we. I.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“It is not okay,” said Patty. “It is rude to get up from the table before everyone has finished.”

“I’m almost there, anyway, and I’m a slow eater. Happens all the time.”

“It’s a matter of principle.”

It was not a matter of principle, exactly. Patty could become stubborn, ornery, obtuse, and downright rude whenever coming to my defense. She would ignore a thousand flaming arrows shot in her direction, but if a pebble landed at my feet, she would cry foul. Her loyalty to me was a badge of pride, and as such, it didn’t always conform to reality. It disturbed me that this one component of our love had survived while so many others had fallen by the wayside. This person, who in so many ways no longer resembled the woman I married—who wore nothing but black, who had switched to work the night shift, who rejected my clumsy attempts at intimacy—this person
clung to the detritus of our early love the way a castaway clings to a waterlogged mast.

“We’re not finished eating,” Patty said.

Minerva sat down. She knew she could not win this battle. I ate as quickly as I could, which due to my medical condition was not exceedingly quick. I tried, between bites, while the food was making its way around the curves and bumps of my scarred esophagus, to keep the conversation going.

“What we need here,” I said, “is CJ. He would have eaten up this stuff lickety-split.”

They all stared at their plates. I expected some laughter, a jump-started anecdote.

“He would have though, right?” I asked. “I mean, the kid could eat.”

“Please just finish,” Patty said.

After dinner Calvin Senior and I ended up in the den while Patty and her mother occupied themselves in the kitchen. Normally the four of us would have stayed together in the kitchen or the den, but that night we had rented
Vertigo
, and the boys had been assigned the task of prepping the video machine while the girls put together desserts. Setting up the video took only a moment. In an attempt to find some common ground with Calvin Senior, I tried to talk sports with him, but I was never much of a sports person, and so I ended up feeling as if I were a boy picking up his daughter for a first date. Though he had begun to warm to me somewhat, calling me “son” now and then—with a wink I never understood—I always felt a gap between myself and this bear of a man. Patty and her mother thought of him as a large, docile, cuddly creature, but I saw the claws, and I saw
that he was not afraid to display them to me at opportune moments. Life with his wife and daughter was a sort of act, an act he found pleasant to immerse himself in while also maintaining other acts for, say, the men at the club, or the secretaries at the office. The act he’d reserved for me had not really changed since I’d started dating Patty. There was something mildly distasteful in his getting chummy with the man who was intimate with his daughter and had such great potential to hurt her by turning out to be just another asshole. All men were assholes. The art of being a man was in acting like a gentleman and saving the frat boy crap for places like the club. I knew I could never replace Calvin Junior. Every time CJ was invoked, I felt that I was some sort of inadequate stand-in, a changeling, a pretender. My father-in-law did little to make this feeling go away.

The subject at the dinner table had been Calvin Junior, and now Calvin Senior seemed ready to continue it, albeit in a different key. He walked up to the mantle and picked up a picture. Images of CJ were interspersed among early Calvin and Minerva portraits, family vacation shots, and pictures of Patty blooming, awkwardly, in time-lapse. A shrine to CJ would have made me feel more comfortable. What they had up on the mantle did not acknowledge that CJ was gone at all. A burglar would have assumed that he was still a living, breathing member of the family. Over the years, of course, everyone would grow older but him.

Calvin Senior held up the picture, CJ on the beach with his surfboard, and said to me, as if to explain his thoughts in that moment of silence: “The guy who did this is in jail. When I think of what he did to my son, I think that prison rape is not such a bad thing.” He put the picture back. “I’d kill him with my bare
hands if I got the chance. But I won’t get the chance. I don’t want the chance, usually.”

The door to the kitchen clunked and swung open—my wife and her mother, holding desserts. Calvin Senior looked at me and shook his head almost imperceptibly. I understood. Not a word to anyone, the dissenting opinion is sealed up in its envelope, now try to pretend we were talking about something else. But they would go on talking about CJ, Patty would go on wearing black, Calvin Senior would go on steaming quietly, grumbling inside … the body decays, the memories jumble, the stories evolve, the photographs fade. We’re all hobbled together. Odds and ends. Bric-a-brac. CJ is: a buried body, Stocking talk, newspapers, videos and pictures, Raven’s account, a diary. I can’t put him back together. I can’t put myself back together. The pieces are me but not mine.

A month prior to that dinner at the Stockings, I had written to Henry Joseph Raven, using the pseudonym John Dark. This was the failure from the ashes of which my new plan would grow.

I remember that first encounter with Raven the way one remembers meeting one’s sweetheart, with fondness, and with a desire to go back and do it all over again. It was one of those unusually warm nights in Our Little Hamlet by the Sea; the temperature seemed to rise after the sun had gone down, and a fecund breeze perfumed the air. This, after an unremarkable muggy day. Patty was off at work; I had the house to myself. I’d discovered that the state maintained a complete database of prison inmates, accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and I had logged on to it. The house was quiet save the cats tumbling in the other room.

I clicked through some of the other captured convicts before I got to Raven—I knew he would be there and the anticipation was something I felt like drawing out. I saw men and women,
White, Black, Latino, Asian, all of them looking poor and poorly rested, defeated—though a few tried on a mask of defiance. Their crimes were listed along with their names and some other information, but the names of the crimes,
murder, manslaughter, assault with a deadly weapon
, provided little detail of their stories. You could stare at a picture long enough and imagine that plump, rosy-faced woman holding a gun under the counter and asking for all the money in the register, but since her story wasn’t there, you couldn’t be sure that was how it had happened. You were stuck with
armed robbery
. Shown a few in isolation, you might guess these individuals were victims of human rights violations, women who had just given birth, or men in drug rehab centers. But en masse they were malefactors.

He was waiting for me by the time I got down to the Rs, and he did not disappoint. He had the appearance of a murderer. Not all the murderers did. You could see in the way his eyes glared at the camera that he had no respect for human life. He looked hungry and tired, like he had been dragged out of bed moments before the picture was taken—it made sense, he had been on the lam for a week before they tracked him down. His eye sockets looked like they’d had billiard balls pushed into them. He had the stubbly, slack-jawed mien of a criminal who has finally been caught.

I swept aside my papers and cleared a space on my desk. I wrote several letters, each more cruel than the last, in an attempt to express my rage at the man responsible for CJ’s death, for ruining our lives, for replacing my wife with a grim shadow of her former self. After I’d torn up six drafts, I realized that a piece of hate mail was unlikely to wound him or even capture
his attention. So without a clear plan, I wrote as neutral a letter as possible, asking Henry Joseph Raven to be my pen-pal.

I took out a PO box down the street so he could reply without finding out who I was. Unless you have a fake ID, you have to sign up for a PO box under your own name. However, you are free to list names you want to receive mail under. I put John Dark on the list. Any mail coming to him, I was assured by a pimply faced clerk, would be delivered to my box. Also, he told me, I didn’t have to write “PO Box” or “Box #” as part of the address. I could write “Suite 1492”—giving the impression that I was writing from an actual room in an actual building.

I waited five days before checking the PO box. That would give my letter two days to get there, Raven a day to reply, and two days for his letter to make its way to me. There is no worse feeling than to open a mailbox and find it empty. Every day I
would convince myself that Raven’s response had been slipped into the slot of my mailbox, and that it was waiting there for me. I’d race to the mailbox, practically knocking people out of the way, pop open the box with my shiny little key and find … nothing. Day after day of nothing.

Then, one evening, an envelope. My heart was racing as I reached into the box and retrieved my paper quarry. Disappointment. A packet of coupons. Herald of the junk to come: Have You Seen This Child?, Amazing Grace Realty Wants to Sell You a Dream Home, Join our CD Club, Save the Children, Save the Animals, Save the Trees, Save the Earth, Save the Air. Addressed to Resident! The mail was coming in fine, just not from Henry Joseph Raven. I should reiterate that I had no actual plan as to how to respond to his response, if I were to get one. I trusted that I could improvise a way to make him pay for the suffering he had caused the Stockings. But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to get a response, because I could not devise any way other than venting my anger, which was unlikely to affect him.

After three weeks, I closed down the PO box. My anxiety about Raven’s not writing back to John Dark was displaced by a need to figure out how to tell Patty what I had done. I had never kept secrets from her, and I felt that somehow, in my failure, I needed to unburden myself. I took the day off from work to coincide with one of Patty’s “weekends”—she had Wednesdays and Thursdays off. We walked down to our local park. The marine layer hadn’t quite come in as far as our part of town, resulting in cool afternoon sunshine with half-clear skies. The park was full of kids, most of them in the playground section—“No Adults
Admitted Without Company of Children”—or by the dried-out fish pond. The empty concrete oval was full of young skateboarders trying their tricks.

The fish pond used to be full of water. I saw it once, as a teenager. I had spent the night in the park, after having taken the bus as far as it would take me away from my aunt and uncle’s house. I remember wondering, before the police found me, how long I could survive eating the fish that swam around in there.