The Interloper (23 page)

“Shut up!” said a window on the street, and I wanted to go to that window and silence forever whoever had uttered that hateful phrase at me. I did not. I remained focused. The dragon slayer does not chase frogs. Or curse the sky, no matter how black and cold it may get.

Where is your resolve? I asked myself.

This is one minor setback, I told myself.

My car’s trunk was full of resolve. I opened it there, under those color-shifting orange lights, those lights illuminating the empty space in which Raven’s truck had sat. And Raven’s tire tracks leading out of there, merging with and disappearing into the tracks of every red-blooded hillbilly who
lived in that miserable gray town. I had my trunk open, thank god, or I would have spent the night in a fury hunting down random yellers in random windows and firing precious bullets at orange lights until the police showed up.

From the lid of that trunk hung one little life-saving countervailing tungsten bulb, shining on my files and papers (which they have taken away in an effort to unmoor me, I now realize, it was to unmoor me they did that) with the clement glow of soft white light. Soft white light! My world now is fluorescent. I am trapped in a green-lit box without my papers or files. But the trunk, what I saw in the trunk, if it didn’t soothe me, at least it reminded me what was at stake.

I shed hot tears at the sight of CJ’s journal, at the photographs Raven and I had sent each other, at the letters, the pile of letters, the documents, the tangible documents attesting to the briefest window of time during which two hearts had opened themselves to each other, despite all the odds, as they say. Of course it was a trap, and Lily was fictional, but who would know that, if they were to stumble upon our correspondence? Patty hadn’t guessed it right away. I stood over the trunk in the cold night, flipping through pages, organizing my rage, focusing it. I had had a perfect opportunity and I had failed. I had succumbed to invisible forces. I would not succumb again. I could not allow myself to collapse into a tantrum. My mind turned involuntarily to the moment at which he had lit my cigarette, how I was so close to him. The pile of papers in the trunk. The gun under the seat. Raven somewhere out there. Owen.

What had Calvin Senior said? No one ever taught you to be a man. I’m teaching myself, I thought, I am following through
on this, I am going to make it right again, I am not going to let invisible forces hold me back. I have never truly followed through, I thought, I have never had anything to follow through on, I have never been given the opportunity to follow through on anything.

I drove to an all-night gas station and convenience mart. I filled the car with gas and my stomach with coffee and pastries. Mount Pleasant was not such a big place. I would find him again. The factotum behind the register told me where the creeks were. The creek, the ravine, the green shed with white trim … I would find the world Raven had described in his letters, and I would find Raven again. His house was here somewhere, it had to be, and I would have my second chance.

I drove up and down those streets at just above a walking pace. A light snow had begun to fall. When I wasn’t looking at every driveway, every little parking lot, every carport, I looked forward into a slow-motion undersea world, the result of which was that these roads and streets would unfold as long as I had the time and gasoline to drive them. Houses that looked like other houses went by one after another, the same parked cars again and again. I had driven onto some giant snowy Möbius strip. The screened-in porches floated past, as did the decrepit apartment buildings, the suburban-style homes. Fewer and fewer lights as I entered the early morning hours. My tires scraped the curb more than once as I tried to stay alert. There were police in that town, I know for a fact, but I don’t know where they were that night.

I drove, I stalked, Mount Pleasant slept.

Who were these people, I wondered, and what were their lives? Did they know they had a murderer in their midst as they lay there, peacefully dreaming? I must admit I had to stop the
car several times to wipe my eyes when I considered the contrast between these happy normal families and what had become of all of us, Stockings and Pattersons alike, as a result of Raven’s actions. With one squeeze of the trigger, he had stripped us of the right to be all those other people, all those innocent sleeping people.

Some hours later, I refilled with coffee at the convenience mart. The factotum had been replaced by another, who wanted to chat. I was all business. I returned to my car to sip my coffee and watched, in the dank colonnade stretching across the front of the convenience mart, a lone black bird, feathers in poor shape, pecking around the back of an out-of-order ice freezer. There was a pay phone. I needed to hear her. I thought she’d be at work, and that I’d get to hear the voicemail greeting she’d recorded for us, back in the halcyon days.

She picked up on the second ring.

“Hello?”

Her voice was groggy. A moment before, she’d been one of the sleeping innocents.

“Owen, is this you?”

It was me, and it wasn’t. I could not speak.

“Come home, Owen.”

She breathed. She sighed. The line went dead.

At that moment, I built a wall within myself. I could not rest, I could not tear down that wall or even peek over it or drill a hole in it until I had settled accounts with Raven. Listening to Patty’s voice, I had indulged a part of me I couldn’t afford to indulge. I was swirling with invisible forces. There was no room for the sloppiness of feeling, for the way Patty and the sleeping
innocents of Mount Pleasant had become involuntarily superimposed through some hidden operation of my emotion-brain. In the movie version, a shadow-Owen remains at the phone as I turn back and proceed to the car, coffee in hand.

I took to the streets again, endless snowflakes spinning in the cone of my headlights, the same houses, the same lawns. The roads became slippery. I stayed my course. The sun threatened in its barely perceptible indigo way. I must have driven every street in Mount Pleasant. The things we seek are always in the last place we look. I know why it’s so: because when we find them, we stop looking.

I found Raven’s truck parked at the curb in front of a modest bungalow. I pulled up behind that hateful red Dodge, leaving enough room so as not to arouse suspicion. I tried to turn off my headlights, but they would not turn off with the engine running, and the engine was the only thing keeping me warm. I retrieved the fuse chart from the glovebox, not to see whether I was dreaming this time—I was not—but to locate the fuse for the headlights. It released from its socket with a snap. I idled there, in the warm darkness, the sun on its way up, and waited, focused on the door to that little house. I considered ringing the bell, pumping him full of bullets, but the man I had met in the Hart’s Head seemed the type to answer the door with gun in hand. There would be no doorbell for Raven, just a surprise waiting for him at a point equidistant from his house and truck, a slightly familiar face, an arm, a hand, a gun. A few words. The end. I could wait all day. I had achieved a state. There was no doubt in me.

The sun rose. A fragile layer of white covered the mud and slush of gray Mount Pleasant. Birds sang to each other in the trees. The neighborhood sprang to life. Cars drove by. A burly man in a puffy blue jacket walked a pair of huskies down the street. I remained focused on the house, the door. Were Raven and Portia rising, dressing, making pancakes?

A yellow school bus struggled up the street, expelled a cloud of black smoke. I was reminded of something from my youth. When I was a child, I saw an advertisement in the back of a comic book for a series of punching dolls. They were pear-shaped vinyl inflatables, filled with sand at the bottom, and they would right themselves no matter how hard you hit them. Over and over again. One of them bore the image of an angry kangaroo, fitted with boxing gloves. Another was fashioned after an Asian martial arts expert, posed in a karate-chopping stance. But the one that struck me was the Penguin. He stood with his flipper-wings at his side, and his face was bright and open, with crossed
eyes and a big smile. Even today, thinking about it brings me to the verge of tears. He was an image of pure, stupid innocence, and no matter how many times you punched him, he would pop back up, undaunted, ready for more abuse. I bought fifteen before I ran out of allowance money. I never blew them up, just stacked them, still in their original packaging, under my childhood bed.

My car windows frosted up. I wiped at the glass with a cloth, always keeping clear a porthole through which I could see the front door. The sky was brightening, the light was crisp, the house was still. I should state for the record that I was quite in my right mind at this point, calm and without fear. I had never felt more rational in my life, despite what those shysters tried to claim before I was forced to dismiss them and defend myself in a court of law.

I was calm and rational and staring at the front of the house when I saw movement across the street. I wiped at the side window. I saw Raven and Portia, not exiting the front door of the house I’d been watching, but exiting another house altogether, across the street. I had been staring at the wrong house.

By the time I hopped out of my idling car, they were almost to the sidewalk. The air had gone frigid without the insulating layer of clouds. For some reason the sun wasn’t working very well. I proceeded toward Raven and Portia, annoyed that I had left behind my coat, that I would have to face them down while I was cold and they were comfortably dressed.

She was smaller than I had imagined her, and not as pretty.

They wore jackets and scarves, but their scarves weren’t wrapped around their necks, and their jackets were unzipped.
I could see Raven’s hat sticking out of his jacket pocket. They had just emerged from the womb of their home and were still warm with its heat. There was a cat in their front window, watching them go. This was my brain playing tricks on me, trying to get me to focus on the wrong thing. The cat would be well taken care of. I pictured Portia caring for it as she nursed her grief.

I walked quickly to intercept them. When I arrived at a point between them and the truck, I tried to stop too abruptly and lost my footing on the slushy road. I fell with a squish.

They were bearing down on me, now, and Portia wore a look of concern on her face. Raven smiled as if amused by my fall. I rose to my feet.

“You alright there?” Portia asked.

She was about to approach when she saw the gun in my hand. I raised the Glock. They froze at the edge of the lawn. Whenever I think of this moment, it is as if everything went into slow motion. Joe Dogwalker, on his return trip, had seen me lifting the weapon and was already on his way to tackle me from the side. And while I would have loved to give Raven a nice long speech before wiping him from the face of the earth, I simply pointed the gun directly at his face, some ten or twelve feet away, and pulled the trigger.

First there was the gun’s report, then I was tackled to the ground by the blue-jacketed Dogwalker, who crushed me into the ice and snow of the street even as he wrested the gun from my hand. I let my face fall into the muck. It didn’t feel cold at all.

I lay there on the ground, held down by Joe Dogwalker,
his putrid-breath huskies lapping at my face, until the police arrived. I bled from the nose. Pain bloomed in my shoulder and became more and more intense as I waited.

Sirens. This will probably come as no surprise, but when you shoot someone and are injured in the process, you typically have to wait for the second ambulance.

Not until I was lifted from the ground by a fresh-faced young cop did I see the first ambulance, into which they were loading an unconscious Portia Snow. What had happened to Raven? Nothing. He stood at the back doors of the ambulance, helping the medics load Portia inside.

How had I had missed him? I am no slouch with a pistol, and I had lined Raven up perfectly with the muzzle of the gun before pulling the trigger. If I had missed him, it must have been by a millimeter, I thought. And what about Portia? Had she fainted from fear?

I don’t know how the physical world failed to heed my intentions that morning, or how a gun pointed at a man from a distance of ten or twelve feet could miss him so egregiously, or how—and this I did not discover until later, until I was in my own ambulance and the same fresh-faced officer of the peace was reading me my rights—the bullet which should have grazed Raven, if not penetrated his skull right between the eyes, ended up traveling through Portia Snow instead.

I am certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that the gun was pointed directly at Raven when I pulled the trigger. I am certain, too, that I heard the gun’s report well before I felt any shove from the side.

My ambulance sped through town. We were driving down the wrong side of the road. I could see the police escort through the back window. I shut my eyes. The pain in my shoulder spiked with every bump in the road, every turn, every acceleration and deceleration. The police radio squawked. Paramedics. Portia Snow had died on the way to the hospital.

I share a cell with an older inmate named Clarence, who stabbed someone to death while robbing a car wash, of all things, in late 1997. He has been before the parole board more times than he cares to count, but they seem to have something against him. My only true companion, with gold-leaf cover and acid-free paper, is a book someone cruelly abandoned in the prison library:
The Greatest Love Poems of All Time
. I carry it everywhere I go, the pink satin bookmark at Walt Whitman’s “To a Stranger.”

I cannot help but return in my mind to the moment I pulled the trigger, to the gun’s report, to the tackle. Raven had been right in front of me, staring confidently into the gun barrel, not surprised in the least that I was going to shoot him. She stood well off to the side. There was no way she could have jumped in front of him before I pulled the trigger. Physics took a vacation. There is no other explanation. I hadn’t driven all those miles to shoot Portia Snow, despite what the cockamamie prosecutor had to say on the matter.