Willnot (15 page)

So at about two in the morning, unable to sleep, again I found myself at the hospital, sitting at Mr. Arnold’s bedside thinking how differently it had worked out for Roy and for him and remembering what Gordie said, that much of the time we don’t help them live longer, or better, we only change the way they die. The hospital was so quiet and empty-feeling that tumbleweed blowing through the hallways wouldn’t have surprised. That felt pretty much like what was going on in my mind as well.

There wasn’t anything I could do, of course, and no, nothing she could get me when Sharon came in from the nurses’ station to ask, and within the hour, because affixing one’s unfulfillable longings to something concrete and attainable makes practical if ineffective sense, I pulled into the same parking lot Mr. Arnold had visited on his way to us, to get coffee at Bea’s Diner.

She was sitting at a booth back by the kitchen doors, jean jacket over a yellow T-shirt. The diner wasn’t as ghost-townish as the hospital had seemed, but the patrons sat scattered about, as though each had chosen a seat to maximize distance from every other. She smiled when she saw me, lifted a hand to point to the seat opposite her. A waiter came out from behind the counter and followed me back, menu and wipe rag in hand. I asked for coffee. Did she want anything? No.

I watched the waiter walk away. Left-leg prosthesis from about midthigh, stance belied only by the limp. Tattoo. Early thirties. Ex-military.

“Everyone said you were gone.”

“I was.”

“And yet.”

“Exactly. And yet.”

“There would seem to be little remaining here to hold the bureau’s interest.”

The waiter returned to tell us the coffee was stale, he was brewing a fresh pot. We thanked him.

“I’m on leave,” she said. “Voluntary. Not that I’ll have a job when I go back. That’s how it works. Anyone who doesn’t want to be there—” She finished her coffee, scummy milk floating on top; it had been sitting for some time. “You spend this huge chunk of your life getting where you want to be, busting your butt for it, then one day you look around and think—”

“That your butt doesn’t so much like being busted?”

“That you’re on automatic.”

On his way back to the counter, the waiter (I’d caught his name tag this time:
D’MITRI
) stopped at a table to check on an elderly man asleep there, head almost horizontal on the back of the booth, mouth open. His Adam’s apple was the size of a tennis ball.

“So here you are, at liberty. Which seems …”

“Random?”

“Remarkable.”

“And wholly unmeditated. I got in, I drove, this is where the car stopped. All in all, not a bad place to be at liberty, given the town’s history.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Same as before, Best Western.”

We talked on through most of the new pot of coffee. I told her about Nathan’s break for freedom, Bobby showing up again, Bobby leaving again, Roy’s MI, our trucker stuck in the bend between being and not. Patrons decamped, others replaced them. The sleeper woke, ordered breakfast, and promptly fell asleep again.

Upon requesting leave, Theodora told me, she cited family issues. Her superiors must know she had no family, but this was
a request seldom denied. The ensuing interview took place in pure code, what was said, even body language, bearing little resemblance to what was meant.

“Four minutes in, it came to me that this was like one of those jokes you don’t get, even though you know it’s funny. My line supervisor did the interview. I started imagining his head blowing up like a balloon when he spoke, deflating when he stopped. It was hypnotic.”

“That must have helped you get through.”

“Or past.”

“And now?”

“Hang out, I guess. Slow down. Talk to people. Remember.”

“Sounds good. Foot’s in the door, quite a world out there beyond it.” I scooted to the edge of the booth. “Have to go. I left a note for Richard, and a voice mail. But he worries.”

“That’s good too.”

She stood when I did, held back waiting for the cue, stepped forward to shake hands.

“You get tired of the Best Western and all that luxury,” I said, “we have a spare room. Go native, get your Margaret Mead on.”

She bent to retrieve her shoulder bag. “I did hear you and your partner are always taking in strays.”

“We’re strays ourselves.”

“Hope
that
’s not contagious.” Tilting the pan, Richard pushed down on the spatula to drain before dealing portions of salmon onto our plates. Steamed zucchini and carrots waited. “First the sheriff gets sidelined. Then your friend Bobby goes off the reservation. Now Agent Ogden—out of there. You’re not thinking about a sabbatical, are you? Taking up another line of work?”

“What else could I do?”

“Not a pretty picture, you sitting around the house all day musing on your ill-spent youth.”

“Don’t know about ill. Spent, yes. But with a few dollars left.”

“And change.”

“We hope.”

Nathan, Richard told me, would be taking a class at the state college next semester, the extension campus at Arborville, two towns over. With a half-formed thought of finding something to engage and challenge the boy, Richard went browsing online and discovered that a woman he’d gone to graduate school with, one of the brightest people he’d ever met though surreptitiously so, “never spoke up in class, then on tests turned in these essays that read as though they’d been carved in stone,” was chair of the history department. An audit was all they could swing, no credit but no charge either, and everyone was excited. The course? U.S. History: The First Year.

“You were happy to see Agent Ogden again,” Richard said as we cleared the table. “Should I worry?”

“Not a heterosexual bone in my body.”

“You want to know one of the first things I remember about you?”

“My charming, dangerous smile.”

“One of the other things.”

“Okay.”

“You’d talk about people. Patients, friends, people from your past. And you’d never mention their gender. Then, we’d been together less than a month, we went to New Orleans, stayed in that hotel tucked away back behind the flower shop—Anne Street? Both owners were named Carl, and every time we went through the lobby slash office they were sniping at one another.”

“They even looked alike.”

“And sounded alike. Same voice, same accent, cadence.”

“Visions of our own future?”

“Not even remotely. You’d told me about the washboard player at the weekend jam outside Jackson Square. What was mounted on the washboard, the cross-rhythms. Somehow you neglected to mention that she was a she, wore a tank top, and every once in a while when she got to going especially hard, her tit fell out.”

“The world is filled with beautiful things.”

“She’d tuck it back in, never miss a beat.”

“True talent.”

We’d loaded the washer and were doing a general wipe-down. Richard asked what I thought of the salmon.

“Had a bit of an edge to it.”

“You’re always saying it’s bland and mushy, so I tried marinating it in lemon juice, pepper and white wine.”

“I approve.”

“We should start hitting the farmers’ market again on Saturdays for veggies. Not a lot of choice in the stores right now.”

“Have I told you that for years I was certain my grandfather hadn’t ever eaten a vegetable? Never saw one on his plate, or on the table. Biscuits, fried meat, cornbread, potatoes, grits. Gravy.”

“That was your father’s dad, right?”

“Yes.”

“You ever rethink the whole child thing, Lamar? How we’re missing something that’s such a major part of life?”

“As I’ve said, I never understood the pull. Never felt it. That need just got left out when I was put together. Are we missing something? I’m sure we are. But that’s why we read, isn’t it. Why
we become involved with others. To get a sense of those lives we can’t have.”

Mr. Arnold, our trucker, died that night. They called from the hospital and left a message. Neither Richard nor I heard the phone.

My grandfather, my father’s father, was a carpenter. He used to tell me how he’d find old pennies left under windowsills by the original builders. They were left there to date the construction—handshakes sent across the years.

We find, or conjure, what continuity we can.

Or: Three people are playing dominoes. It’s a modern deck, each denomination of pips a different color. Everyone’s chattering away as you play, and you begin to suspect that, while you lay down your tiles according to pip count, the player to your left is doing so in regard to color, and the player on your right sails by on pattern recognition.

Three people, all with different takes on the world, essentially
seeing
a different world.

Think of the energies required to bend those into conformance and hold them there.

Over the next weeks we had a run of flu, not a particularly virulent strain, but any flu needs watching, especially with the young, the elderly, and those compromised by chronic disease or disorder. I went to the sheriff’s home to check on him. Maryanne
called all our patients fitting those categories and had them come in for a quick checkup. For three days the office was full. The lab over by the college to which we sent blood work must have thought a minor epidemic had hit.

Nobody talked about the bodies anymore, or the shooting, but these were tucked away at the back of our minds and hung, if not palpably then patently, in the air we breathed. Willnot was a lake into which rocks had been thrown; mud still swirled.

Weeks went by. Late one afternoon the office had cleared out and Sheriff Hobbes showed up bearing, as he said, gifts: coffee for the two of us, and some strain of flowery-smelling tea for Maryanne.

Settled in my office, we sipped coffee as though time were on indeterminate hold and our plastic cups would never empty. Sunlight had begun to move across the floor toward the window on its way to withdrawing.

“Can’t remember you ever coming here before,” I said.

“Had no need.”

“And now?”

He shook his head. Drank coffee.

“You know how a thing will get caught in your mind, Lamar? Not something that matters usually. Lines from a song, a place you used to live, that time you ruined your favorite shirt changing a tire. Gets where you want to tilt your head to one side like in a cartoon, beat on the other to knock it out, but it won’t go.”

I didn’t speak, let him pace himself.

“I’ve been thinking about Bobby, that whole mess. Nothing about it adds up. This morning around two, three, I’m slogging through the house thinking how good a bourbon would taste. Now, that happens, a man had best find work to do. So I took a look at what had got stuck in my head and been rolling around in
there. Spent the rest of the morning on the phone. The Marine Corps does not, they claim, have a soldier on any of their rosters by the name of Bobby Lowndes. Or Brandon Lowndes. FBI headquarters could confirm an agent by the name of Theodora Ogden but knew nothing about an AWOL marine.”

“If he’s what he says—”

“I couldn’t even get someone to talk to me at the CIA number. NSA said not their bailiwick or words to that effect. Finally I called up an old friend. We served together; he went career and is still on the desk in Washington. He said let him make some calls, he’d get back to me. He did, and pretty soon too—with a big
Sorry, Roy
.”

“And you were surprised?”

“Maybe I got it out of my head. Maybe that’s all the good I figured it would do. That, and just being busy. Doing something.”

“You want me to make more coffee?”

“No, but thanks.”

I finished mine, and put the cup beside his on the desk.

“Years ago I was catching up on reading all my father’s books. One of them,
Pit Stop World
, hit a chord in me that wouldn’t stop twanging. So I cited the Freedom of Information Act and requested the FBI file on my father. He’d always claimed he was just writing entertainment, but those early novels seemed to me unmistakably political. They must have seemed so to others as well. The file came in an envelope big enough to hold a family Bible, a stack of paper three or four inches high. When I began shuffling through, I found that anything of substance had been redacted in heavy black marker. All that remained were typed agent reports of contacts, “Subject said to have resided at,” “Informant approached,” and such. Then blocks of black. That and book reviews, many torn from fanzines cranked out on old
mimeograph machines. That’s about as forthcoming as I ever expect our government to be. But why is Bobby still on your mind?”

“Good question. Three nights ago I was driving around, just to get out of the house—”

“Two in the morning you’re supposed to be resting after an MI, and instead you’re up poking around in your head and on the phone. Now driving. What would your doctor say if he knew?”

“Well, I guess now he does. Anyway, I swung out by the highway, just rambling really, then hit some of the old back roads into town. Haven’t been out there, on those, since the highway and new state road went in. Probably no one has. I’d swear the ruts I left last time are still there. I was coming slow around a long curve, had the lights off since the moon was full and it was such a beautiful night, stars every which way. That’s when I saw Bobby.”

“Bobby left weeks ago.”

“Apparently not. Who else is going to be out there that time of night, Lamar? Or at all? And disappear like that. I hit the lights, but he was gone.”

“And you’re sure it was him?”

“Size, gait, the way he moved. Had to be. I went out again that afternoon and hoofed it around the area, didn’t come across anything. Camp, caches, evidence of buried refuse.”

“I’d be surprised if you did.”

“But he’s out there, Lamar. Why is he still here?”

Hope my having been here doesn’t bring anything else on you,
Bobby had said. I saw him standing on the porch, light from the kitchen reaching out weakly into the yard and letting go, a single cricket somewhere down in the floorboards sounding big as a badger.
I’d better get along.