The Detective's Garden (23 page)

ELSIE DROVE OUT
of Malta, and King pressed her
face to the Charger’s rear window. “What’s going to happen to
Dad?” she asked. “I can’t see anything.”

From the driver’s seat, Elsie’s hand slipped over to hold
Clarke’s bouncing thigh. She was driving too fast. “Oh, Jesus,”
she said. “Oh, Jesus!” Then her jaw clenched tight. The road
was deeply pitted. The rising light flushed against the windows
and the interior of the car felt warm and soft and artificial. A
bug cracked against the front windshield.

“Don’t speed,” Clarke said. “Get on a busier street.”

“What’s going to happen?” King said.

“I don’t know.”

Elsie pointed ahead toward Route 88 with its stream of cars.
King’s face flattened against the glass. Not a single car traveled
the road behind them. The Dodge nosed onto the access ramp
and distantly the gunshots began.

Elsie’s hands tapped against the steering wheel and she kept
reaching up with one hand to wipe at her eyes.

In the backseat, King’s head pressed against Clarke’s head
rest. She spoke quietly. “Is she okay?” King asked.

“You know,” Elsie said, “I can fucking hear you.”

“Are you okay?” Clarke said.

Elsie said, “That’s a stupid goddamn question.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Clarke said. “I want you to be all
right.”

The Charger kept drifting toward the side of the road and
running over the castellated rumble strip at the shoulder so
that the wheels juddered up and down. “I want to ask some
thing,” Elsie said. “Back there in the trailer. What was that salt
in the bathtub?”

“A ghost,” King said, “maybe.”

Elsie said, “A ghost?”

“No kidding,” King said.

“No such thing,” Clarke said.

“Whose ghost is it?”

“It’s bullshit,” Clarke said. “I haven’t thought about it.”

“Ghosts don’t belong to people,” King said. “They belong
to themselves.”

They were quiet for a while. Weakness poured between
them as among parts of an hourglass. Elsie pulled herself to
gether as King began to fall apart. “We left Dad behind,” King
said. “What’s going to happen to us?” She held to the back
of Clarke’s seat. Between the front seats she could see Clarke’s
hand on top of Elsie’s, their fingers woven together. Elsie had
small bitten nails. Clarke rubbed his thumb over the knuckle
of her pinkie. “Did you hear me?” King said. “What’s going to
happen to us now?”

“I heard you,” Clarke said.

“What’s going to happen? What do we do?”

“He said he was going to go to Bellevue,” Elsie said. She
drove slowly enough that faster cars hummed past. Her free
foot tapped hollowly against the floor mat.

“I want to go,” King said. “I want to meet Dad there.” Her
hands pinched the back of the headrest.

“Did you see all the police?” Elsie asked.

“There were so many of them,” Clarke said.

“You don’t think he’s coming?” King said. “I do. I do think
he’s coming. Don’t you?” Her voice was smaller than her body.
“I don’t know what to do.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” said Clarke.

“That’s right,” Elsie said. “We’ll take care of you.”

“I don’t think so,” said King

“If you’ll let us,” Elsie said, “we’ll be like your mom and
dad.”

They drove, and clouds massed until the sky was almost as
dark as night. The car was warm. King stretched out prone on
the backseat, one arm dangling over the edge. She let her eyes
close. Clarke and Elsie glanced back at her as lights winked on
and marked the houses among the fields. The road hummed
beneath them and the car hiccupped over the seams in the con
crete. Headlights washed through the windshield, over the
three of them, and on down the road in the direction of what
they had left behind. Sleep closed around King like a great
soft mouth and her dreams licked at her with long tongues.
Soft reddish flesh squeezed white. The zebra-striped shadows
of trees stretching out over a yellow field. Her hand engulfed
by her mother’s. The hand’s dense warmth. A cup inside a cup
and something stirring within. Something flitting and crawl
ing like an itch inside her closed palm. She turned and looked
at her mother’s arms and saw that she wore a blue sweatshirt
and a red scarf and inside the cuffs of the sweatshirt wasps hung
on the threads with thin black legs. She shuddered but did not
let go of her mother’s hand. She looked at her mother’s soft face,
at the widening of her mouth, the thick lip skin stretching
taut until her jaw seemed to unhinge and widen further as if, if
King was to watch her long enough, she would turn inside out.

King woke to a parked car. Her eyes were closed beneath
an unsettling stillness. A wet sound. A quiet slapping. A lip
unsticking from skin. A heavy breath. She opened her eyes. In
the passenger seat, Elsie’s breasts were smooth and her hands
were pressed against the ceiling. Her dark hair waved around
her face in tangles so that King caught glimpses through brief
opening and closing apertures, glimpses of shoulder bone, and
navel, and the heaving void of her brother beneath Elsie. Elsie’s
eyes were closed, and her mouth open, and her tongue pressed
against her teeth. King could hear her breathing, or them
breathing, like something being consumed, and she fell back
against the cushion and kicked out at the seats and screamed
and screamed.

“Oh, my God, King,” Clarke said. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want to go with you,” King said. “I want to go with
Dad.”

“What for?”

“Take me to Bellevue.”

“He’s not coming,” said Clarke.

“He is, too.”

“He’s dangerous,” Clarke said. “I think he’s going to get you
hurt.”

“I don’t care,” King said. “I want to find him.”

“I’m sorry, King,” Clarke said.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me.”

“Something,” King said. “I could see it.”

“It’s normal, King.”

“I could see it.”

“See what?” said Clarke.

“Something buzzing inside you. I’ve never seen you like that
before.”

“It’s just sex, King.”

“No, it isn’t. I saw something inside you.”

“What is it you think you saw?”

“There’s something gone wrong.”

On North 2nd Street in Malta, Illinois, Dominick let the
gun continue firing until the magazine emptied, then he ran.
The duffel on his back thumped against his spine. He was off
the road in two steps, across a front lawn in three more. He
hopped a low white fence and sprinted across backyards, past a
yellow plastic children’s pool, a toy car, a trampoline. He hur
tled some chain-link and ducked beneath a pear tree and raced
through a brick-lined bed of ivy circling a white-painted Ma
donna. Something far behind him exploded and a great thrust
of air pushed at his back. An empty doghouse sat in the most
direct path, and he jumped it. He lost count of the number of
yards, each one increasing the distance between them and him.
He didn’t think they had fired a single shot. Had they? A few
fence lines ahead, a bone-dry irrigation ditch ran between two
fields studded with dried cornstalks. The light struck harshly
against the sharp lines of his face. He’d be too easy to see out
there. Two blocks over lay a road that continued south. The
road ran past an occasional house or farm. He looked behind
him at the run of yards. No one in sight. When he turned back
toward the field, he caught some dark movement in the irri
gation ditch. A trickle of water? A snake? Then a dark cloud
pushed in front of the low sun, and darkness gathered along the
bottom of the ditch, and a pale fog began to gather against the
ground and catch at the edges of things. He ran from the shel
ter of Malta, Illinois. The clouds descended and pooled in the
irrigation ditch and spread across the fields and the darkness
inside the split earth reached out toward him. He stumbled
inside, and his hand scrabbled among the white bottom rocks,
and the wet air licked his face. He pitched himself forward into
dark heedless arms.

THE GROUND RUSHED
toward the glass that
curved in front of Charlie Basin’s face. There was a high-pitched
whine. The helicopter pilot did not spare him a glance. Charlie
clutched the edges of his seat and the seatbelt burrowed into
his shoulder. Ahead of them a thin line of trees marked the
transition from one field to the next. The ground was a dark
blur. This wasn’t how he wanted his life to end. He wanted to
work things out with Charlene, to talk to his wife, to Oswell.
He wanted to ask his daughter if she could see forgiveness any
where ahead. The helicopter shot forward and lowered toward
the ground as if it was going to land like a small plane. A
run-on landing. When the skids touched ground they threw
up dark plumes of earth. They skittered and came to a teeter
ing halt. Charlie and the pilot threw open the doors, and they
stumbled out into the sweet air, and Charlie bent forward on
his knees and emptied his stomach.

DOMINICK EMERGED FROM
the irrigation ditch
beside a farm that sat tight against the road heading south. A red
grain truck idled beside a nest of silos. The fog lapped at its wheels.
He swung himself up by the wing mirror, lifted the cold handle of
the door, and swung into the passenger seat. The man behind the
wheel wore blue jeans and a short-sleeved button-down with the
name Elvis embroidered over the left breast pocket. His lower lip
bulged. He turned toward Dominick. “Goddamn,” he said, “you
surprised me some bit.” He eyed the rifle over Dominick’s shoul
der and the green duffel that he dropped at his feet.

“Drive,” Dominick said.

“All right,” the driver said. He shifted the truck into gear
and pulled onto the road. “Where you want me to go?”

“What’s south of here?” Dominick asked.

“Shabbona ain’t much over five miles.”

“Pick up the pace some.”

“That an M1A?” The driver tilted his head toward the rifle.

“That’s right,” Dominick said.

“Where you headed?”

“You have children, Elvis?”

“One fully grown. My name ain’t Elvis. This one is my
brother’s shirt. He don’t need it. He’s locked up in Statesville.”

“What’ll I call you, then?” Dominick said.

“My name’s Allen Straub. You aren’t gonna hurt me, are you?”

“What’s in Shabbona, Allen?”

“What’s there? Shit, we’re a pretty small town. Got a bank.
A florist. A gun shop. A supermarket. There’s the country club.
Shabbona State Park.”

“This park pretty big?” Dominick asked.

“Damned big, I’d say.”

The clouds cleared and the moon slowly rose as Elsie
and Clarke and King drove the three hours to Bellevue, Iowa.
Clarke drummed his fingers against the dashboard. Out here,
on their own, he felt scared and no longer angry. Goose bumps
kept rising on his arms. He didn’t know where to take these
two, he didn’t even know how to pretend he did. His father
probably wouldn’t make it to Bellevue, anyway. How could he?
But if he did, his father wouldn’t hesitate. He’d know what to
do. Clarke wanted that kind of certainty. He wanted to be able
to see his next step as though it was drawn in a thin red line on
an old map.

They crossed the Mississippi River on a steel-and-concrete
bridge. The river snaked beneath them, its turgid brown-green
water curving by pylons. They turned north and drove along
the west bank for mile after mile. Blackbirds sat among tufted
cattails. Red-tipped branches leaned over the water.