Way the Crow Flies (66 page)

He passes the message centre on his left—had he not popped in there yesterday for Sharon McCarroll’s boarding pass, had he not delivered it personally, he would never have found out about Froelich spotting Fried. So much of this game is about chance and making the most of it. Human intelligence.
Humint
. Simon is right, it’s vastly underrated.

When a U-2 spy plane is shot down, when an Igor Gouzenko surfaces, the public gets a glimpse behind the veil. But hundreds of men like Simon are working around the clock, fighting invisible battles, scoring silent victories, so that each morning the world can look the same as it did the day before. And we can continue to take it all for granted, and to have faith: the sun will rise, the sky will not be full of airplanes, will not be obliterated by an air-raid siren.

He passes the intrepid Spitfire, its nose tilted toward the stars, and crosses the Huron County road. He is among a quiet handful of people who know how precious and fragile it all is. Behind the
tranquility of everyday life, something unstable is multiplying; something that wants to assert the primacy of chaos. Jack has, very briefly and quite unremarkably, worked behind the scenes so that his family and millions of others never have to find out. He enters the PMQs with an expansive feeling in his chest.

“Then why didn’t your air force man come forward, if he saw you?”

“Maybe he got posted.”

Rick is past hunger, feeling sick now, what time is it? They think I strangled Claire McCarroll. “Maybe he’s not from the station, maybe he was just here on course and he left the next day.”

“What servicemen do you know who have recently left the station?”

“I don’t know.”

“But he knew you—he waved, according to you—how do you explain that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know much,” says Rick’s friend from the passenger side—the one who punched him in the gut when he stopped running. He is sitting on a chair tilted against the wall, taking notes.

“I want to call my dad.”

“Trouble is, buddy,” says the big cop, “there were no departures from the station that week. No courses finishing, no postings, no one away on leave. We checked, eh?”

Rick stares at the scarred tabletop.

“How do you explain that, young man?” asks Bradley.

“I can’t.”

“I can.” Rick waits. Bradley says, “It never happened.”

A bad dream. “I want my mother,” says Rick and bites his lip, feeling himself redden with the approach of tears, ambushed by the potency of the universal phrase. He looks up. The big cop is grinning at him.

Jack runs up the steps and into his house. “What’s for supper, I’m starved”—but the kitchen is empty. No dinner smells, the table not set. “Mimi? … Kids?” What’s happened?
I went away and something happened
. The cuckoo clock startles him; he reaches for the phone,
for Mimi’s pop-up tin address book—although he hasn’t a clue how to decode her filing system—and catches sight of the note on the fridge, “We’re across the street at the Froelichs’.” He breathes again. He wants a beer. Maybe Henry’s got a good Löwenbräu on ice.

He is about to knock on the Froelichs’ door when the bejesus police dog lunges at him through the screen—“Rex!” Colleen seizes his collar. “He thought you were another cop.” She turns and disappears down the hall, and Jack enters. A record is blaring on the hi-fi.
Bambi
.

“Dad!” Madeleine scrambles from the living-room floor and runs to him.

“Hi old buddy.”

“Hi Dad,” says his son, absorbed in a Meccano creation.

The Froelichs’ living room is chaotic—laundry hamper, newspapers, playpen, toys. The young gal in the wheelchair doesn’t seem to register his arrival so Jack doesn’t greet her. He finds his wife in the kitchen, feeding the two baby boys, one screaming. He grins at the sight; he’ll tease her about it later, but it looks good on her, a baby at the end of each spoon, strained peaches in their hair. But she doesn’t smile back, just says, “There’s soup on the stove. Ricky Froelich’s been arrested.”

“What?” Jack hesitates, but the soup smells good. “What for?” He reaches toward the stove and lifts the lid on the pot.

“Claire,” says Mimi.

The metal is hot but it takes a second for that message to get through, so that, by the time Jack replaces the lid on the pot, the pads of his thumb and forefinger are shiny and seared.

“Claire?” he says, his lips drying. The word dissolves like a capsule in his gut, spreading outward.
Claire
. He takes a breath. Sits at the kitchen table, the little boys racketing their fists against their high-chair trays. Mimi is sliding peach goo from their faces, folding it expertly into their mouths. He watches her lips move and struggles to follow what she is saying—the Froelichs have gone to look for their son, the police came and took away his clothes, claimed not to know where the boy was being held. She goes to the sink to rinse the bowls.

“Why?” says Jack. She hasn’t heard him over the din. “Why?” he repeats.

Mimi says, “They don’t believe his alibi.”

Jack examines the word “alibi”—like a strange fish on the end of his line. He sees Colleen in the doorway. She says, “I’ll put ’em to bed, I’ll change ’em,” barely moving her mouth, eyes more guarded than ever.

Mimi says, “You’re a good helper, Colleen, let’s you and me do it together.”

Jack is alone at the kitchen table. In the living room, Shirley Temple’s intimate tones boom from the hi-fi, a certain plaintive sexy catch in her voice.
His alibi
. How did he miss it? What he should have known. The boy on the road with his sister and his dog … a trick of perspective. Jack makes the realization that his memory of the event has been from Rick’s point of view: the blue car, oncoming into the sun, bounce of light off the windshield obliterating all but the shape of a hat behind the wheel; a hand raised in greeting, a man waving. And as the car passes, the dent in the rear bumper, the yellow sticker.

Now Jack plays the same memory from his own vantage point behind the wheel. He sees Rick jogging on the road with his sister and dog, pushing the wheelchair. The boy lifts a hand to shield his eyes against the sudden glare of sun. Then he raises an arm, tentative, in response to Jack’s wave. Wednesday afternoon. When the little girl went missing.

The police were never interested in what the boy saw. They were interested in whether or not anyone saw the boy. “On the afternoon of Wednesday, April tenth,” is what Bradley asked. That must have been the time of the murder. Even thinking or saying “the time of the murder” seems to bring order to an obscenely disordered event. No one should call it anything; to name it is to include it in the world, and it should not be included.

Jack stares at the kitchen table; grey Formica sparkles blend with crumbs, a ring of milk. He folds his hands next to a wad of bills blotched transparent with butter.

He was just doing his job, it never entered his mind…. But who in his right mind could have imagined the police were after Ricky Froelich? He shakes his head—now that the “war criminal” is out of the picture, the picture is suddenly clear:
Rick was the last one seen with her. Rick found the body
—knew where to look for it,
according to the police. And now, thanks to Jack, they can say,
Rick lied about his alibi
. The police were not impeded in their deductions by the knowledge of what a nice boy Ricky Froelich is. To them, he is just a male juvenile.

A sizzling—Jack looks up, the soup is boiling over. He gets up, turns off the heat. Warms his hands over the mess.

From the hi-fi a pert command, “Wake up, wake up! Wake up, friend Owl!”

Inspector Bradley’s face is inscrutable, his voice as expressionless as if he were reading from an instruction manual. “You left your sister in her wheelchair and, accompanied by your dog, you lured Claire McCarroll into the field, where you attempted to rape her, and when she threatened to tell, you killed her.”

“What’s so funny, Rick?” asks the cop from the chair.

“Nothing.”

“Something must be funny, you’re laughing.”

“It’s crazy, that’s all.” He tried not to laugh, but it turned out that tears were easier to fend off. It is funny. It’s eight-thirty and he has been in this room for five hours, he hasn’t peed, he hasn’t eaten, he has told the same story countless times, they are saying he would leave his sister alone in her wheelchair—“I would never leave my sister alone in her—” He is laughing so hard that tears trickle down his face. He lays his head down on his arms on the table. Heaving.

“What did you say?”

“You should ask her,” says Rick, wiping tears.

“Ask who, Rick?” says Inspector Bradley.

“My sister. She was with me the whole time. She knows.”

Inspector Bradley says nothing. The big cop sips his Coke and asks, “What good’s that going to do, Rick?”

“She can tell you, I didn’t do it.”

“She can’t tell us diddly-squat, Ricky.”

“Yes she can, she was—”

“She’s retarded.”

Rick is so tired. He looks from the man in the suit to the man in the uniform and says, “Fuck you.”

Madeleine reaches into the Lowney’s candy tin that Mike brought from home and fishes out a green army man poised to hurl a grenade. Like a good book, it’s impossible to tire of the Bambi story record. Shirley Temple’s grown-up voice compels you to listen to the bittersweet end, her voice tearful yet brave, it’s the sound of your own heart. “When Bambi and his mother came to the edge of the meadow, they approached it with great caution for the meadow was wide open.”

She surveys the impenetrable phalanx she has arranged around Elizabeth’s wheelchair, repositions a prone sniper and feels a wet drop on the nape of her neck. Oh no, she realizes, Elizabeth drool. But you can’t get mad at her, she can’t help it. Madeleine looks up.

It wasn’t drool. It was a tear.

“Don’t worry, Elizabeth,” says Madeleine, in the exaggerated kindly tone reserved for cats and toddlers. “Ricky will be home soon.”

They have stripped him. They are searching his body for traces.

“How did this happen, young man?”

Rick says nothing. He looks down at the unknown doctor genuflecting before him. He has lifted Rick’s penis with a wooden tongue depressor—a Popsicle stick.

“You stick it in a tree knot?” asks the cop.

The doctor gives him a look and the cop folds his arms, muttering, “This is making me sick.”

A lesion on the side of the shaft below the glans, about the size of a dime. The doctor writes, then asks again, “What is it?”

Rick says, “
Ci qouai ca?”

“I beg your pardon?” says the doctor.

“What the hell did you just say?” asks the cop.

Rick says nothing. Inspector Bradley waits impassively. A second uniformed officer takes a picture of Rick’s penis. There is the sound of a commotion outside the room.

Rick knows the sore on his penis is from his denim shorts. From swimming in the freezing quarry on Sunday, then putting them back on without underwear. He says nothing as he zips his fly back up.

The doctor examines Rick’s arms, face and neck with a magnifying glass. They are looking for evidence of a struggle. They have searched his clothes for an object, a mark, a stain, anything he might possess.

Inspector Bradley says, “Let’s start from the beginning, Rick. Where did you go once you got to the intersection? Try to remember.”

“Asseye de ti rappeli.”
He remembers metal beds. Women with hard voices and white shoes, taking him along by the arm. Murky linoleum with white streaks, the smell of beans cooking, the smell of pee.

“What did you say to get the little girl to go with you?”

“En pchit fee
,” says Rick.

“Cut that out,” says the cop from his chair.

“We’ve got all night, Rick,” says Bradley. “Try to remember, son.”

He remembers the curious feeling of recollecting from time to time that he had a sister. It was as though the word “sister” had come to mean something that you used to have. Sisters were not things you hung onto. They didn’t die, they just quite naturally disappeared. When brother and sister saw one another again, it was as if Rick had awoken from a spell. He swore he would never fall asleep away from anybody of his, ever again.

When he and Colleen turn twenty-one it will be up to them whether they go back to it their real last name—their first one—Pellegrim. His father played Cajun music and sang. Rick doesn’t know where he was from, he never said, nor would he say whether he was Canadian or American, but he claimed Indian blood. He had fought in the Pacific. He had no passport, yet they were always crossing the border in the car—there were places then. Back roads across the Medicine Line. Rick’s mother had long black hair, her features round and sweet. Her eyes dark and twinkly like Rick’s. Genevieve.

They followed the rodeos. His father wore a cowboy hat and a fringed buckskin jacket with an eagle embroidered on the back in beads, the work of their mother’s hands. She was from the Red River Valley, and one day Rick will go back and see if anyone is left. This is what he possesses. It fits into a very small bundle that you could hang on a stick if you had to up and leave.
Ousque ji rest? Chu en woyaugeur, ji rest partou
.

“Speak English,” says the cop.

They are alone. The inspector and the doctor have left. Another noise in the hall—Rick recognizes his mother’s voice. He turns and simultaneously doubles over in pain. The cop has kicked him in the nuts with his thick knee, still bent, blue fabric straining. The door
opens and Inspector Bradley comes in before the officer can use his boot. The inspector places Rick under arrest for the rape and murder of Claire McCarroll and advises him of his rights under the law. Then Rick’s parents come in. Rick is grateful that he is fully clothed when he sees his mother.

She takes one look at him and screams at Inspector Bradley, “What’ve you bastards done to him!” But the uniformed officer has left the room, and it’s no good how loudly his mother insists she is taking him home, the arguments of his father, the professorial outrage in his voice, none of it makes any difference.