Day One (40 page)

Danny shivers on the bench. Luellen looks back at him, her face worried. Luellen. Or—?

“You’ve always reminded me of someone I used to know, another man who helped me. Pastor Sanders.” I’ve never been mistaken for a holy man before. “You probably have a lot of questions.”

I could write a book. “You don’t need to stay with me. Someone will come.”

She continues to gaze at Danny. He rubs his cheek and sighs. “Where else would I go?”

Somewhere rattling around behind the pain is the thought that I want her to be away from here before the police arrive, Danny with her. This mess will take a year to sort out, and I don’t want her to be tangled up in it.

“Who ... ?”

I hesitate. Maybe I don’t want to get into this. Maybe I want to let her be who she is. Danny is safe now, the man who came to take him is gone. Eager is dead, of that I’m sure. Maybe what I want is to let things drift backward a bit, back to a time when all I knew about her was that her name was Luellen Bronstein and she was
the young mother of a good little boy who called me Mister Skin. I can’t go back too far, because nothing I can do or say will unshoot Mitch Bronstein’s gun. But maybe that doesn’t matter anyway. His path will be veering off on its own no matter who the girl beside me really is. And mine as well. The pain in my gut is a credible augury of my own fate. Every passing moment brings me a little bit closer to too late.

Luellen strokes my forehead. “When I was a little girl, I wanted to grow my hair out and wear it like a dress.”

The grass is cold against my wet ass. I lick my lips. Wince.

“Yes, I know what it sounds like. But I was young. What did I know?”

I think of Danny finding his way into my backyard. Looking for a place he thought was safe. No way he could know about Big Ed. He knew about the birds, though. “Maybe you knew more than you realize.” My voice is a whisper.

“The thing is, I remember thinking it. I remember telling my family. I even remember my mother getting angry at me about it. I can picture it all in my mind. But I can’t remember what it felt like. That little girl who wanted to dress in hair is gone. She’s just a snapshot in my mind, faded and cracked. Everything else is gone. Forgotten.”

I don’t have the strength to respond, but Luellen doesn’t need my encouragement.

“I miss her.”

She’s so young. I want to explain to her how as you grow older you leave behind a whole long history of shed skins. The girl she misses is just one of many, one who will never be truly gone. I have my own long history of the forgotten, the men and boys I once was. My newest iteration formed bare days before when I let my feelings for another young woman overcome reason. And before him was the Shiftless Skin, retired and without purpose, a man with nowhere
to go, only places he’d been. Going back, the Skins I’d shed pile up like discarded clothes. Detective Skins, first Property, then Person Crimes. Eventually Homicide. Officer Skins, schools and traffic and patrol. Skin the student. Skin the enlisted man, Vietnam MP. Teenaged Skin with the ugly mug and oft-bloodied fists. I miss all of them, a little. Glad I’ve left them behind too, a little. And kept them all close by. A little. But how am I going to explain to this girl, this lost girl who stepped into another’s skin in order to protect something important? How can I get her to understand that what she’s lost, what she’s forgotten, is just a piece of what it means to be alive?

I close my eyes. I want her to get away. The way the bodies are piled up around us, it’s hard to imagine another threat, but I still know too little about what’s been going on to be sure. Big Ed, the grandfather, the crazy tweaker. The man with the divot in his head. It’s all a jumble in my head, stirred into a roiling soup by the fire of my wound. I draw a breath, feel my whole body tremble with the pain.

Luellen strokes my forehead again. “This is all my fault, you know.”

I find that hard to believe. “What did you do?”

“Besides try to kill my husband?”

I attempt a wry smile. Probably comes off as a grimace. “Mitch does inspire a certain—”

“Not Mitch. Mitch has always been kind to me. Kinder than I deserve.” She sighs and shakes her head. “No, the man who came, the man ...” Her voice trails off, and I realize she speaking of the stranger.

“The man with the injury to his head.”

“My husband. His name is Stuart.”

“But—?”

“Yes.” She breathes, long and slow. “I guess I can now add bigamist to my list of crimes.”

“You didn’t know until tonight he was still alive.”

“The last time I saw him, I jammed a pair of scissors into his head.”

“Why?” A shadow passes over her face and I regret the question. I know a host of reasons a young woman like Luellen might need to stab her husband. “You don’t have to answer.”

She smiles, tight and bitter. “Just seemed like a good idea at the time.” She strokes my forehead, a mother’s gesture. “It’s all so complicated.”

Isn’t everything?

“Mitch came home from work with something his firm was doing. Pro bono work for an environmental advocacy group. It was no big deal. He does a lot of that sort of thing and usually I don’t pay much attention. But he left a stack of papers sitting on the kitchen table and something caught my eye. My father’s name.”

“What did your father have to do with environmental advocacy?”

“My family has a lot of land, thousands of acres in Givern Valley, a lot of it wetlands. One of the things Mitch’s client did was facilitate land swaps between private owners and the Bureau of Land Management, or with the Nature Conservancy, groups like that. The goal is to move threatened habitat into protection. My father’s name was on a memo, one of a list of people who had been approached by this organization. Federal policy has been shifting in recent years to be more favorable to private land owners and I guess environmental groups are trying to get more land under protection before policy makes it too difficult to arrange affordable deals. I don’t know the specifics, but this group had approached my father and made an offer for his wetlands, but he wasn’t interested. According to the memo, they were working on better offers for the listed land owners who resisted their initial overtures.”

“And you called him about it.”

“How did you know?”

“That woman, she was your sister, right? She said she heard her father talking to you about Danny.”

Her expression darkens, a confirmation. I wait, too weak to push her on the matter. She doesn’t make me wait long.

“I was calling him to tell him I would make the deal.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When I left, he gave me the land. Everything, to protect it.”

“And no one knows.”

She nods. “If anyone looks hard enough, they can find out. Officially he sold the land to a holding company with layers of lawyers to hide my interest, and then leased it back. The details aren’t important. The point is he couldn’t make any deals without my signature. So I called to tell him it was okay. He should take whatever they offered so long as it was enough for him to retire. If there was anything left for Danny, that was fine. But the point was I didn’t care about the land. I live here now. I have a new life. I’m married to a man whose values are very different from the values of the place I came from. I wanted to be free.”

“How did your father feel about it?”

“He hated the idea of the Kern homestead going to dirt worshippers.”

“But you told him to sell anyway.”

“The whole world is changing around us. If I can’t save the life my father lives, maybe I can at least keep Hiram Spaneker from taking it away from him.”

From what little I’d seen of him, it was hard to argue. I force a nod past the pain. “But Myra had an opinion on the matter.”

“You’ve seen her.” She gestures toward the body. “One of the reasons my father gave it all to me was to keep it out of her hands.” She looks away from me, her eyes welling up. “She killed him, I believe. Someone did. I saw a news story online a day or so after the last time he and I spoke.”

That’s easy to believe. If not her, then Big Ed with her help.

“What was supposed to happen up here?”

“Hiram said he would trade Danny for the Kern land.” She draws a breath. “I knew better than that though.”

“You were going to kill him.”

“The threat against my family needed to end.”

I’m not sure what to make of this young woman beside me. For all her evident regret, she exudes a degree of conviction I’ve never known myself. I have no way of comprehending what she’s been through to bring her to this end. So determined, so focused. Danny, a boy who wasn’t even her blood, yet who she would protect unto death.

She turns to me. “What are you going to tell the police?”

“I plan to die during questioning.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you turned me in. And so long as Danny is safe, I don’t care.”

I take my time responding. In one sense, I’ve already answered. I answered when I took the gun from Eager, when I waded into the storm. I answered when I put Myra down like a rabid dog. I answered when I let the stranger take the gun and leave. After all that, was I going to up and turn over this young woman for the crime of protecting the child she loves?

“Near as I could see, Lu, that old fellow and his henchman were trying to steal your boy. The police might take issue with you going solo, but they’ll get over it. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve done nothing wrong.”

She drops her head. I feel the heavy shake of her sobs. I try to raise an arm to comfort her. After a moment, she speaks into my jacket. “Do you think he’ll be okay?”

“Who?”

“Eager.”

I don’t want to tell her what I’m sure is true.

“I told him to go to the hospital, but he wouldn’t and I was too focused on Danny to insist.”

“Eager wouldn’t have listened if you had.”

“He got hurt because of me. And now he’s dead, isn’t he?”

A shadow seems to cross over her face. I wish there was some comfort I could offer her. All I have feels like thin gruel. “He wanted to protect you.”

“He always has, since the day we met.”

“Three years ago.”

“At first, he thought I was the one who died up here that day. A couple of weeks later, when he saw me with Danny, I realized what I had to do. Who I had to be.”

“And he helped you.”

“Do you think he’ll be okay?”

I’m not sure what she’s asking me. I’m not a religious man, and if she is herself, it’s a side of her I’ve never seen. Mitch’s religion always seemed to be the Church of Mitch, but there was obviously more at work in that house across from my own than I’ve ever understood. I stare into the darkness, uncertain and in pain. Afraid I don’t know the right thing to say. Ruby Jane would know. My Ruby Jane. But she isn’t here, and it’s just me, battered and gut-shot, and now a felon in my own right. Am I being asked to judge whether Eager will find his way to heaven or hell? How can I even know? But I understand now all he cared about was Luellen. Ellie. This young woman. “He loved you.” My voice sounds more hesitant than my intent, but I can see in her eyes her recognition of the truth in my words. “I think he’s fine, Luellen. Maybe for the first time in years.”

Fresh tears fall, joining the rain on her cheeks and flashing blue and red in the darkness. For a moment the sight confuses me, and I think it’s a trick of my own fading consciousness. What’s next, a tunnel of light? I chuckle, surprised it doesn’t hurt too bad. One more sign I’m dying, I guess. I look into the sky, which has grown brighter. The branches of the fir trees and Harvey’s Scott’s arm stand
out in stark relief against a breathing grey flood. Through shreds in the clouds I catch a glimpse of Orion’s Belt. The cold flutters against my face like tatters of lace. An unlikely snow in Portland in November. Yet I know the snow sometimes kisses the hilltops while down in the flats below we are granted only the numbing, indifferent rain. The lights continue to flash and I rotate my head, slowly, weakly, then laugh again. Not the tunnel of light after all.

Just a patrol car.

November 19 - 5:22 pm

S
wirling faces in the blue and red light, some I recognize, many I don’t. Michael Masliah, Sergeant Kuhl. EMTs swarm over me like flies. Masliah gazes down at me with sad-eyed pity before he gently leads Luellen and Danny to his car. Kuhl looks like he wants to spit on me, as if a button in the belly is less than I deserve. Maybe he’s right. The pain in my stomach is so great I feel nothing when they insert the IV. I do feel something when the first compress is packed into my wound. “Can you hear me, sir? Can you hear me?”
Jesus, yes.
“Can you hear me?”
Yes, goddammit.
But I’m talking only in my head. “Sir, sir?” A light flashes in my eyes. “What? I you.” Then there’s Susan. I don’t see her arrive. “Okay, sir, we’re going to lift you, okay?” She’s just there, materialized like a phantom, stalking at the perimeter of the scene, scowling at the bodies. She doesn’t even know who these people are yet, Myra the tweaker, George the Flea. Only the name Big Ed Gillespie will mean anything to her, though knowing it won’t help her frame of mind. But her expression softens when she gets to Luellen, who sits clutching Danny against her chest in the back of Masliah’s car.