The Best American Mystery Stories Part 19

"Yeah, well, it's a good thing," McQueen said. "I haven't run across too many geniuses working this job."

Rizzo laughed and crumpled up the wrappings spread across his lap. "Amen," he said.

They sat in silence, Rizzo smoking, McQueen watching the people and cars moving around the parking lot.

"Hey, Joe," McQueen said after awhile. "Your theory about this neighborhood is a little bit off base. For a place supposed to be all Italian, I notice a lot of Asians around. Not to mention the Russians."

Rizzo waved a hand through his cigarette smoke. "Yeah, somebody's got to wait the tables in the Chinese restaurants and drive car service. You still can't throw a rock without hitting a f.u.c.king guinea."

The Motorola crackled to life at McQueen's side. It was dispatch directing them to call the precinct via telephone. McQueen took his cell from his jacket pocket as Rizzo keyed the radio and gave a curt "Ten-four."

McQueen placed the call and the desk put him through to the squad. A detective named Borrelli came on the line. McQueen listened. His eyes narrowed and, taking a pen from his s.h.i.+rt, he scribbled on the back of a newspaper. He hung up the phone and turned to Rizzo.

"We've got him," he said softly.

Rizzo belched loudly. "Got who?"

McQueen leaned forward and started the engine. He switched on the headlights and pulled away. After three weeks in Bensonhurst, he no longer needed directions. He knew where he was going.

"Flain," he said. "Peter Flain."

Rizzo reached back, pulled on his shoulder belt, and buckled up. "Imagine that," he said with a faint grin. "And here we was, just a minute ago, talking about a.s.sholes. Imagine that."

McQueen drove hard and quickly toward Eighteenth Avenue. Traffic was light, and he carefully jumped a red signal at Bay Parkway and turned left onto Seventy-fifth Street. He accelerated to Eighteenth Avenue and turned right.

As he drove, he reflected on the investigation that was now about to unfold.

It had been Rizzo who had gotten it started when he recalled the prior crimes with the same pattern. He had asked around the precinct and someone remembered the name of the perp. Flain. Peter Flain.

The precinct computer had spit out his last known address in the Bronx and the parole officer a.s.signed to the junkie ex-con. A call to the officer told them that Flain had been living in the Bronx for some years, serving out his parole without incident. He had been placed in a methadone program and was clean. Then, about three months ago, he disappeared. His parole officer checked around in the Bronx, but Flain had simply vanished. The officer put a violation on Flain's parole and notified the state police, the New York Supreme Court, and NYPD headquarters. And that's where it had ended, as far as he was concerned.

McQueen had printed a color print from the computer and a.s.sembled the photo array. Amy Taylor picked Flain's face from it. Flain had returned to the Six-two Precinct.

Then Rizzo had really gone to work. He spent the better part of a four-to-midnight hitting every known junkie haunt in the precinct. He had made it known he wanted Flain. He had made it known that he would not be happy with any bar, poolroom, candy store, or after-hours joint that would harbor Flain and fail to give him up with a phone call to the squad.

And tonight, that call had been made.

McQueen swung the Chevy into the curb, killing the lights as the car rolled to a slow stop. Three storefronts down, just off the corner of Sixty-ninth Street, the faded fluorescent of the Keyboard Bar shone in the night. He twisted the key to shut off the engine. As he reached for the door handle and was about to pull it open, he felt the firm, tight grasp of Rizzo's large hand on his right shoulder. He turned to face him.

Rizzo's face held no sign of emotion. When he spoke, it was in a low, conversational tone. McQueen had never heard the older man enunciate more clearly. "Kid," Rizzo began, "I know you like this girl. And I know you took her out to dinner last week. Now, we both know you shouldn't even be working this collar since you been seeing the victim socially. I been working with you for three weeks now, and you're a good cop. But this here is the first bit of real s.h.i.+t we had to do. Let me handle it. Don't be stupid. We pinch him and read him the rights and off he goes." Rizzo paused and let his dark brown eyes run over McQueen's face. When they returned to the cold blue of McQueen's own eyes, they bored in.

"Right?" Rizzo asked.

McQueen nodded. "Just one thing, Joe."

Rizzo let his hand slide gently off McQueen's shoulder.

"What?" he asked.

"I'll process it. I'll walk him through central booking. I'll do the paperwork. Just do me one favor."

"What?" Rizzo repeated.

"I don't know any Brooklyn ADAs. I need you to talk to the ADA writing tonight. I want this to go hard. Two top counts, D felonies. a.s.sault two and s.e.xual abuse one. I don't want this p.r.i.c.k copping to an A misdemeanor a.s.sault or some bulls.h.i.+t E felony. OK?"

Rizzo smiled, and McQueen became aware of the tension that had been hidden in the older man's face only as he saw it melt away. "Sure, kid," he nodded. "I'll go down there myself and cash in a favor. No problem." He pushed his face in the direction of the bar and said, "Now, let's go get him."

Rizzo walked in first and went directly to the bar. McQueen hung back near the door, his back angled to the bare barroom wall. His eyes adjusted to the dimness of the large room and he scanned the half-dozen drinkers scattered along its length. He noticed two empty barstools with drinks and money and cigarettes spread before them on the worn Formica surface. At least two people were in the place somewhere, but not visible. He glanced over at Joe Rizzo.

Rizzo stood silently, his forearms resting on the bar. The bartender, a man of about sixty, was slowly walking toward him.

"h.e.l.lo, Andrew," McQueen heard Rizzo say. "How the h.e.l.l you been?" McQueen watched as the two men, out of earshot of the others, whispered briefly to one another. McQueen noticed the start of nervous stirrings as the drinkers came to realize that something was suddenly different here. He saw a small envelope drop to the floor at the feet of one man.

Rizzo stepped away from the bar and came back to McQueen.

He smiled. "This joint is so crooked, old Andrew over there would give up Jesus Christ Himself to keep me away from here." With a flick of his index finger, Rizzo indicated the men's room at the very rear in the left corner.

"Our boy's in there. Ain't feeling too chipper this evening, according to Andrew. Flain's back on the junk, hard. He's been sucking down c.o.kes all night. Andrew says he's been in there for twenty minutes."

McQueen looked at the distant door. "Must have nodded off."

Rizzo twisted his lips. "Or he read Andrew like a book and climbed out the f.u.c.king window. Lets us go see."

Rizzo started toward the men's room, unb.u.t.toning his coat with his left hand as he walked. McQueen suddenly became aware of the weight of the 9mm Clock automatic belted to his own right hip. His groin broke into a sudden sweat as he realized he couldn't remember having chambered a round before leaving his apartment for work. He unb.u.t.toned his coat and followed his partner.

The men's room was small. A urinal hung on the wall to their left, br.i.m.m.i.n.g with dark urine and blackened cigarette b.u.t.ts. A cracked mirror hung above a blue-green stained sink. The metallic rattle of a worn, useless ventilation fan clamored. The stench of disinfectant surrendered to - what? - vomit? Yes, vomit.

The single stall stood against the wall before them. The door was closed. Feet showed beneath it.

McQueen reached for his Clock and watched as Rizzo slipped an ancient-looking Colt revolver from under his coat.

Then Rizzo leaned his weight back, his shoulder brus.h.i.+ng against McQueen's chest, and heaved a heavy foot at the stress point of the stall door. He threw his weight behind it, and as the door flew inward, he stepped deftly aside, at the same time gently shoving McQueen the other way. The door crashed against the stall occupant and Rizzo rushed forward, holding the bouncing door back with one hand, pointing the Colt with the other.

Peter Flain sat motionless on the toilet. His pants and underwear lay crumpled around his ankles. His legs were spread wide, pale and varicosed, and capped by bony knees. His head hung forward onto his chest, still. McQueen's eyes fell on the man's greasy black hair. Flain's dirty gray s.h.i.+rt was covered with a brown, foamy, blood-streaked vomit. More blood, dark and thick, ran from his nostrils and pooled in the crook of his chin. His fists were clenched.

Rizzo leaned forward and, carefully avoiding the fluids, lay two fingers across the jugular.

He stood erect and holstered his gun. He turned to McQueen.

"Morte, "he said. "The p.r.i.c.k died on us!"

McQueen looked away from Rizzo and back to Flain. He tried to feel what he felt, but couldn't. "Well," he said, just to hear his own voice.

Rizzo let the door swing closed on the sight of Flain. He turned to McQueen with sudden anger on his face. "You know what this means?" he said.

McQueen watched as the door swung slowly back open. He looked at Flain, but spoke to Rizzo.

"It means he's dead. It's over."

Rizzo shook his head angrily. "No, no, that's not what it f.u.c.king means. It means no conviction. No guilty plea. It means, 'Investigation abated by death'! That's what it means."

McQueen shook his head. "So?" he asked. "So what?"

Rizzo frowned and leaned back against the tiled wall. Some of the anger left him. "So what?" he said, now more sad than angry. "I'll tell you 'so what.' Without a conviction or a plea, we don't clear this case. We don't clear this case, we don't get credit for it. We don't clear this case, we did all this s.h.i.+t for nothing. f.u.c.ker would have died tonight anyway, with or without us bustin' our a.s.ses to find him."

They stood in silence for a moment. Then, suddenly, Rizzo brightened. He turned to McQueen with a sly grin, and when he spoke, he did so in a softer tone.

"Unless," he said, "unless we start to get smart."

In six years on the job, McQueen had been present in other places, at other times, with other cops, when one of them had said, "Unless ..." with just such a grin. He felt his facial muscles begin to tighten.

"What, Joe? Unless what?"

"Un-less when we got here, came in the john, this guy was still alive. In acute respiratory distress. Pukin' on himself. Scared, real scared 'cause he knew this was the final overdose. And we, well, we tried to help, but we ain't doctors, right? So he knows he's gonna die and he says to us, 'I'm sorry.' And we say, 'What, Pete, sorry about what?' And he says, 'I'm sorry about that girl, that last pretty girl, in the subway. I shouldn'ta done that.' And I say to him, 'Done what, Pete, what'd you do?' And he says, 'I did like I did before, with the others, with the knife.' And then, just like that, he drops dead!"

McQueen wrinkled his forehead. "I'm not following this, Joe. How does that change anything?"

Rizzo leaned closer to McQueen. "It changes everything," he whispered, holding his thumb to his fingers and shaking his hand, palm up, at McQueen's face. "Don't you get it? It's a deathbed confession, rock-solid evidence, even admissible in court. Bang - case closed! And we're the ones who closed it. Don't you see? It's f.u.c.king beautiful."

McQueen looked back at the grotesque body of the dead junkie. He felt bile rising in his throat, and he swallowed it down.

He shook his head slowly, his eyes still on the corpse.

"Jesus, Joe," he said, the bile searing at his throat. "Jesus Christ, Joe, that's not right. We can't do that. That's just f.u.c.king wrong!"

Rizzo reddened, the anger suddenly coming back to him.

"Kid," he said, "don't make me say you owe me. Don't make me say it. I took this case on for you, remember?"

But it was not the way McQueen remembered it. He looked into the older man's eyes.

"Jesus, Joe," he said.

Rizzo shook his head, "Jesus got nothin' to do with it."

"It's wrong, Joe," McQueen said, even as his ears flushed red with the realization of what they were about to do. "It's just wrong."

Rizzo leaned in close, speaking more softly, directly into McQueen's ear. The sound of people approaching the men's room forced an urgency into his voice. McQueen felt the warmth of Rizzo's breath touching him.

"I tole you this, kid. I already tole you this. There is no right. There is no wrong." He turned and looked down at the hideous corpse. "There just is."

DAVID MEANS.

Sault Ste. Marie.

From Harper's Magazine.

ERNIE DUG IN with the tip of his penknife, scratching a line into the plastic top of the display case, following the miniature lock system as it stepped down between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. At the window, Marsha ignored us both and stood blowing clouds of smoke at the vista ... a supertanker rising slowly in the lock, hefted by water ... as if it mattered that the system was fully functioning and freight was moving up and down the great seaway. As if it mattered that ore was being transported from the hinterlands of Duluth (a nullifyingly boring place) to the eastern seaboard and points beyond. As if it mattered that the visitor's center stood bathed in sunlight, while behind the gift counter an old lady sat reading a paperback and doing her best to ignore the dry scratch of Ernie's knife, raising her rheumy eyes on occasion, reaching up to adjust her magnificent hair with the flat of her band. - I'm gonna go see that guy I know, Tull, about the boat I was telling you about, Ernie announced, handing me the knife. He tossed his long black hair to the side, reached into his pants, yanked out his ridiculously long-barreled .44 Remington Magnum, pointed it at the lady, and said - But first I'm going to rob this old bag. - Stick 'em up, he said, moving toward the lady, who stared over the top of her paperback. Her face was ancient; the skin drooped from her jaw, and on her chin bits of hair collected faintly into something that looked like a Vand.y.k.e. A barmaid beauty remained in her face, along with a stony resilience. Her saving feature was a great big pool of silvery hair that rose like a nest and stood secured by an arrangement of bobby pins and a very fine hairnet. - Take whatever you want, she said in a husky voice, lifting her hands out in a gesture of offering. - As a matter of fact, shoot me if you feel inclined. It's not going to matter to me. I'm pus.h.i.+ng eighty. I've lived the life I'm going to live and I've seen plenty of things and had my heart broken and I've got rheumatoid arthritis in these knuckles so bad I can hardly hold a pencil to paper. (She lifted her hand and turned it over so we could see the claw formation of her fingers.) - And putting numbers into the cash register is painful. -Jesus Christ, Ernie said, shooting you would just be doing the world a favor, and too much fun, and he tucked the gun back in his pants, adjusted the hem of his s.h.i.+rt, and went to find this guy with the boat. Marsha maintained her place at the window, lit another cigarette, and stared at the boat while I took Ernie's knife from the top of the display case and began scratching where he left off. Finished with the matter, the old lady behind the gift counter raised the paperback up to her face and began reading. Outside, the superfreighter rose with leisure; it was one of those long ore boats, a football field in length, with guys on bicycles making the journey from bow to stern. There was probably great beauty in its immensity, in the way it emerged from the lower parts of the seaway, lifted by the water. But I didn't see it. At that time in my life, it was just one more industrial relic in my face.

A few minutes later, when Ernie shot the guy named Tull in the parking lot, the gun produced a tight little report that bounced off the side of the freighter that was sitting up in the lock, waiting for the go-ahead. The weight line along the s.h.i.+p's hull was far above the visitor's station; below the white stripe, the skin of the hull was shoddy with flakes of rust and barnacle scars. The s.h.i.+p looked ashamed of itself exposed for the whole world to see, like a lady with her skirt blown up. The name on the bow, in bright white letters, was Henry Jackman. Looking down at us, a crew member raised his hand against the glare. What he saw was a sad scene: a ring of blue gun smoke lingering around the guy Ernie shot, who was muttering the word f.u.c.k and bowing down while blood pooled around his crotch. By the time we scrambled to the truck and got out of there, he was trembling softly on the pavement, as if he were trying to limbo-dance under an impossibly low bar. I can a.s.sure you now, the guy didn't die that morning. A year later we came face-to-face at an amus.e.m.e.nt park near Bay City, and he looked perfectly fine, strapped into a contraption that would - a few seconds after our eyes met - roll him into a triple corkscrew at eighty miles an hour. I like to imagine that the roller-coaster ride shook his vision of me into an aberration that stuck in his mind for the rest of his earthly life.

For what it's worth, the back streets of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, were made of concrete with nubs of stone mixed in, crisscrossed with crevices, pa.s.sing grand old homes fallen into disrepair - homes breathing the smell of mildew and dry rot from their broken windows. Ernie drove with his hand up at the noon position while the police sirens wove through the afternoon heat behind us. The sound was frail, distant, and meaningless. We'd heard the same thing at least a dozen times in the past three weeks, from town to town, always respectfully distant, unraveling, twisting around like a smoke in a breeze until it disappeared. Ernie had a knack for guiding us out of bad situations. We stuck up a convenience store, taking off with fifty bucks and five green-and-white cartons of menthol cigarettes. Then a few days later we hogtied a liquor-store clerk and made off with a box of Cutty Sark and five rolls of Michigan scratch-off Lotto tickets. Under Ernie's leaders.h.i.+p, we tied up our victims with bravado, in front of the fish-eyed video monitors, our heads in balaclavas. We put up the V sign and shouted: Liberation for all! For good measure, we turned to the camera and yelled: Patty Hearst lives! The next morning the Detroit Free Press Sunday edition carried a photo, dramatically smudgy, of the three of us bent and rounded off by the lens, with our guns in the air. The accompanying article speculated on our significance. According to the article, we were a highly disciplined group with strong connections to California, our gusto and verve reflecting a nationwide resurgence of Weathermen-type radicals. -A place to launch the boat will provide itself, Ernie said, sealing his lips around his dangling cigarette and pulling in smoke. Marsha rooted in the glove box and found a flaying knife, serrated and brutal-looking, with a smear of dried blood on the oak handle. She handed it to me, dug around some more, and found a baggie with pills, little blue numbers; a couple of bright reds, all mystery and portent. She spun it around a few times and then gave out a long yodel that left our ears tingling. Marsha was a champion yodeler. Of course we popped the pills and swallowed them dry while Ernie raged through the center of town, running two red lights, yanking the boat behind us like an afterthought. Marsha had her feet on the dash, and her hair tangled beautifully around her eyes and against her lips. It was the best feeling in the world to be running from the law with a boat in tow, fishtailing around corners, tossing our back wheels into the remnants of the turn, rattling wildly over the potholes, roaring through a s.h.i.+thole town that was desperately trying to stay afloat in the modern world and finding itself sinking deeper into squalor beneath a sky that unfurled blue and deep. All this along with drugs that were, thank Christ, swiftly going about their perplexing work, turning the whole show inside out and making us acutely aware of the fact that above all we were nothing much more than a collection of raw sensations. Marsha's legs emerging beautiful from her fringed cutoff shorts - the shorts are another story - and her bare toes, with her nails painted cherry red, wiggling in the breeze from the window. The seaway at the bottom of the street, spread out in front of a few lonely houses, driftwood gray, rickety and grand, baking in the summer heat. They crackled with dryness. They looked ready to explode into flames. They looked bereft of all hope. In front of a Victorian, a single dog, held taut by a long length of rope, barked and tried to break free, turning and twisting and looping the full circ.u.mference of his plight. We parked across the street, got out of the truck, and looked at him while he, in turn, looked back. He was barking SOS. Over and over again. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Bark bark bark. Until finally Ernie yanked his gun from his belt, pointed quickly, with both hands extended out for stability, and released a shot that materialized as a burst of blooming dust near the dog; then another shot that went over his head and splintered a porch rail. The dog stopped barking and the startled air glimmered, got brighter, s.h.i.+ny around the edges, and then fell back into the kind of dull haze you find only in small towns in summer, with no one around but a dog who has finally lost the desire to bark. The dog sat staring at us. He was perfectly fine but stone-still. Out in the water a container s.h.i.+p stood with solemnity, as if dumbfounded by its own pa.s.sage, covered in bright green tarps. - We're gonna drop her right here, Ernie said, unleas.h.i.+ng the boat, throwing back restraining straps, trying to look like he knew what he was doing. The water was a five-foot fall from the corrugated steel and poured cement b.u.t.tress of the wall. The Army Corps of Engineers had constructed a breakwall of ridiculous proportions. We lifted the hitch, removed it from the ball, and wiggled the trailer over so that the bow of the boat hung over the edge. Then without consultation - working off the mutual energies of our highs - we lifted the trailer and spilled the boat over the edge. It landed in the water with a plop, worked hard to right itself, coming to terms with its new place in the world, settling back as Ernie manipulated the rope and urged it along to some ladder rungs. To claim this was anything but a love story would be to put Sault Ste. Marie in a poor light. The depleted look in the sky and the sensation of the pills working in our bloodstream, enlivening the water, the slap and pop of the metal hull over the waves. The superfreighter (the one with green tarps) looming at our approach. To go into those details too much would be to bypa.s.s the essential fact of the matter. I was deeply in love with Marsha. Nothing else in the universe mattered. I would have killed for her, I would have swallowed the earth like an egg-eating snake. I would have turned inside out in my own skin. I was certain that I might have stepped from the boat and walked on the water, making little shuffling movements, conserving my energy, doing what Jesus did but only better. Jesus walked on water to prove a point. I would have done it for the h.e.l.l of it. Just for fun. To prove my love. Up at the bow Ernie stood with his heel on the gunwale, one elbow resting on a knee, looking like the figurehead on a Viking s.h.i.+p. I sat in the back with Marsha, watching as she held the rubber grip and guided the motor with her suspiciously well-groomed fingers. I could see in the jitteriness of her fingers that she was about to swing the boat violently to the side. Maybe not as some deeply mean-spirited act but just as a joke on Ernie, who was staring straight ahead, making little hoots, patting his gun, and saying, - We're coming to get you. We're gonna highjack us a motherf.u.c.king superfreighter, boys. I put my hand over Marsha's and held it there. Her legs, caught in the fringed grip of her tight cutoff jeans, were gleaming with spray. (She'd amputated the pants back in a hotel in Manistee, laying them over her naked thighs while we watched, tweaking the loose threads out to make them just right.) Tiny beads of water clung to the downy hairs along the top of her thighs, fringed with her cutoff jeans, nipping and tucking up into her crotch. Who knows? Maybe she was looking at my legs, too, stretched against her own, the white half-moon of my knees poking through the holes in my jeans. When I put my hand over hers I felt our forces conjoin into a desire to toss Ernie overboard.

Two nights later we were alone in an old motel, far up in the nether regions of the Upper Peninsula, near the town of Houghton, where her friend Charlene had OD'ed a few years back. Same hotel, exactly. Same room too. She'd persuaded me that she had to go and hold a wake for her dead friend. (- I gotta go to the same hotel, she said. - The same room.) The hotel was frequented mainly by sailors, merchant-marine types, a defiled place with soggy rank carpet padding and dirty towels. In bed we finished off a few of Tull's pills. Marsha was naked, resting on her side as she talked to me in a solemn voice about Charlene and how much they had meant to each other one summer, and how, when her own father was on a rage, they would go hide out near the airport, along the fence out there, hanging out and watching the occasional plane arrive, spinning its propellers wildly and making tipping wing gestures as if in a struggle to conjure the elements of flight. Smoking joints and talking softly, they poured out secrets the way only stoner girls can - topping each other's admissions, one after the other, matter-of-factly saying yeah, I did this guy who lived in Detroit and was a dealer and he, like, he like was married and we took his car out to the beach and spent two days doing it. Listening to her talk, it was easy to imagine the two of them sitting out there in the hackweed and elderberry on cooler summer nights, watching the silent airstrips, cracked and neglected, waiting for the flight from Chicago. I'd spent my own time out in that spot. It was where Marsha and I figured out that we were bound by coincidence: our fathers had both worked to their deaths in the paint booth at Fisher Body, making sure the enamel was spread evenly, suffering from the gaps in their masks, from inhaled solvents, and from producing quality automobiles.

I was naked on the bed with Marsha, slightly buzzed, but not stoned out of my sense of awareness. I ran my hand along her hip and down into the concave smoothness of her waist while she, in turn, reached around and pawed and cupped my a.s.s, pulling me forward against her as she cried softly in my ear, just wisps of breath, about nothing in particular except that we were about to have s.e.x. I was going to roll her over softly, expose her a.s.s, find myself against her, and then press my lips to her shoulder blades as I sank in. When I got to that point, I became aware of the ashen cinder-block smell of the hotel room, the rubber of the damp carpet padding, the walls smeared with mildew, and the large russet stains that marked the dripping zone inside the tub and along the upper rim of the toilet. Outside, the hotel - peeling pink stucco, with a pale blue slide curling into an empty pool - stood along an old road, a logging route, still littered with the relics of a long-past tourist boom. The woods across from the place were thick with undergrowth, and the gaps between trees seemed filled with the dark matter of interstellar s.p.a.ce. When we checked in it was just past sunset, but the light was already drawn away by the forest. It went on for miles and miles. Just looking at it too long would be to get lost, to wander in circles. You could feel the fact that we were far up along the top edge of the United States; the north pole began its pull around there, and the aurora borealis spread across the sky. I like to think that we both came out of our skin, together, in one of those o.r.g.a.s.mic unifications. I like to think that two extremely lonely souls - both fearing that they had just killed another human being - united themselves carnally for some wider, greater sense of the universe; I like to think that maybe for one moment in my life, I reached up and ran my hand through G.o.d's hair. But who knows? Who really knows? The truth remains lodged back in that moment, and that moment is gone, and all I can honestly attest to is that we did feel a deep affection for our lost comrade Ernie at the very moment we were both engaged in fornication. (That's the word Ernie used: I'd like to fornicate with that one over there, or I'm going to find me some fornication.) We lay on the bed and let the breeze come through the hotel window - cool and full of yellow pine dust - across our damp bellies. The air of northern Michigan never quite matches the freshness of Canada. There's usually a dull iron-ore residue in it, or the smell of dead flies acc.u.mulating between the stones onsh.o.r.e. Staring up at the ceiling, Marsha felt compelled to talk about her dead friend. She lit a smoke and took a deep inhalation and let it sift from between her teeth. (I was endlessly attracted to the big unfixed gap-tooth s.p.a.ce between her two front ones.) Here's the story she told me in as much detail as I can muster: ~ * ~.

Charlene was a hard-core drifter, born in Sarnia, Ontario, across the lake from Port Huron. Her grandmother on her mother's side raised her, except for a few summers - the ones in our town - with her deranged auto-worker father. She was pa.s.sed on to her grandfather on her father's side for some reason, up in Nova Scotia. Her grandfather was an edgy, hard drinker who abused her viciously. Along her a.s.s were little four-leaf-clover scar formations. She ran away from her grandfather, back to her grandmother in Sarnia, and then ran away from her and crossed the International Bridge to Detroit, where she hooked up with a guy named Stan, a maintenance worker at a nursing home, who fixed air conditioners and cleared dementia-plugged toilets. Stan was into cooking crank in his spare time. They set up a lab in a house near Dearborn, in a pretty nice neighborhood, actually. Then one day there was an explosion and Stan got a face full of battery acid. She left him behind and hooked up with another cooker, named King, who had a large operation in a house near Saginaw. She worked with him and helped out, but she never touched the stuff and was angelic and pious about it. Even King saw a kind of beauty in Charlene's abstinence, Marsha said. For all the abuse she had suffered she had a spiritual kind of calm. Her eyes were, like, this amazingly deep blue color. Aside from her scars and all, she still had the whitest, purest skin, Snow White skin, the kind that you just want to touch, like a cool smooth stone. She just got more and more beautiful until eventually the guy named King couldn't stand the gentleness in her eyes and, maybe to try to change things around, he started to beat her face like a punching bag. One afternoon, under the influence of his own product, he had a couple of friends hold her down while he struck her face with a meat pounder, just hammered it, until she was close to death - maybe actually dead. Maybe she left her body and floated above herself and looked down and saw a guy with long s.h.a.ggy hair and a silver meat hammer bas.h.i.+ng her face in and decided it just wasn't worth dying in that kind of situation and so went back into her body. (Marsha was pretty firm in her belief about this part.) Charlene's cheekbones were broken, her teeth shattered. It took about twenty operations on her jaw and teeth just to chew again. Even then, chewing never felt right; her fake teeth slipped from the roof of her mouth, she talked funny, and a ringing sounded in her ears when she tried to smile. When she laughed too hard, her mouth would clamp up and she'd hear a chiming sound, high in pitch, like bells, and then the sound of windswept rain, or wind in a sh.e.l.l, or wind through guy wires, or a dry, dusty windswept street, or the rustling of tissue paper, or a sizzling like a single slice of bacon in a pan, or a dial tone endlessly unwinding in her eardrum. Forever she was up over herself looking down, watching King go at her, the two guys holding onto her shoulders, her legs scissor-kicking, the flash of the hammer until it was impossible to know what was going on beneath the blood. When Marsha met her again - a year or so later, in the break room at Wal-Mart, she had this weirdly deranged face; the out-of-place features demanded some thought to put straight. I mean it was a mess, Marsha said. Her nose was folded over. The Detroit team of plastic and oral surgeons just couldn't put poor Charlene back together again. A total Humpty Dumpty. No one was going to spend large amounts of money on a face of a drifter, anyway. Marsha forced herself to look. Then Charlene told her the story of King, the reasons for the damage, and the whole time Marsha didn't remove her eyes from the nose, the warped cheeks, the fishlike mouth. She tried as hard as she could to see where the beauty had gone and what Charlene must've been like before King mashed her face, the angelic part, because she kind of doubted her on that part of the story. As far as she could remember, from their nights together getting stoned outside the airport fence, Charlene had been, well, just a normal-looking kid. But listening to her talk, she put the pieces together and saw that, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe this mishmash of features had once been beautiful. Her eyes were certainly bright blue, and wide, and she had pale milky skin. That night after work they decided to go out together, not to a bar where she'd get ha.s.sled but just to buy some beer and go to Charlene's apartment and drink. She had some little pills she called goners, good G.o.d goners, something like that. So they went to her apartment, took the pills, drank some beer, and decided to watch Blue Velvet. Whatever transpired next, according to Marsha, was amazing and incredibly sensual; they were stoned together, watching the movie, and suddenly between them there grew a hugely powerful sense of closeness; when Marsha looked down at her on the couch, Charlene appeared to her too gorgeous not to kiss (that's how she put it, exactly). Her mouth was funny because her teeth were out, so it was just softness and nothing else, and then, somehow, they undressed - I mean it wasn't like a first for either of us, Marsha said - and she fell down between Charlene's knees, and made her come, and then they spent the night together. A few days later, Charlene quit her job and split for Canada, back over the bridge, and then the next thing Marsha heard she was up north at this hotel with some guys and then she OD'ed.

The story - and the way she told it to me, early in the morning, just before dawn - as both of us slid down from our highs, our bodies tingling and half asleep, turned me on in a grotesque way. To get a hard-on based on a story of abuse seemed wrong, but it happened, and we made love to each other again, for the second time, and we both came wildly and lay there for a while until she made her confession. - I made that up, completely. I never knew a drifter named Charlene from Canada, and I certainly wouldn't sleep with a f.u.c.kface reject like that. No way. I just felt like telling a story. I felt like making one up for you. I thought it would be interesting and maybe shed some light on the world. The idea - the angelic girl, the perfect girl, the one with perfect beauty getting all mashed up like that. That's something I think about a lot. She sat up, smoking a cigarette, stretching her legs out. Dawn was breaking outside. I imagined the light plunging through the trees, and the log trucks roaring past. For a minute I felt like knocking her on the head. I imagined pinning her down and giving her face a go with a meat hammer. But I found it easy to forgive her because the story she made up had sparked wild and fanciful s.e.x. I kissed her and looked into her eyes and noticed that they were sad and didn't move away from mine (but that's not what I noticed). What did I notice? I can't put words to it except to say she had an elegiac sadness there, and an unearned calm, and that something had been stolen from her pupils. - You weren't making that up, I said. - You couldn't make that s.h.i.+t up, she responded, holding her voice flat and cold. - So it was all true. - I didn't say that. I just said you couldn't make that s.h.i.+t up.

We're gonna get nailed for what we did, she said, later, as we ate breakfast. Around us truckers in their long-billed caps leaned into plates of food, clinking the heavy silverware, devouring eggs in communal silence. A waitress was dropping dirty dishes into the slop sink, lifting each of them up and letting them fall, as if to test the durability of high-grade, restaurant-quality plates. - We're gonna get nailed, I agreed. I wasn't up for an argument about it. The fact was, our stream of luck would go on flowing for a while longer. Then I'd lose Marsha and start searching for a Charlene. For his part, the world could devour plenty of Ernies; each day they vaporized into the country's huge horizon. - He's probably dead. He knew how to swim, but he didn't look too confident in his stroke. - Yeah, I agreed. Ernie had bobbed up to the surface shouting profanities and striking out in our direction with a weird sidestroke. His las.h.i.+ng hands sustained just his upper body. The rest was sunken out of sight and opened us up to speculation as to whether his boots were on or off. After he was tossed from the boat, he stayed under a long, long time. When he bobbed up, his face had a wrinkled, babyish look of betrayal. He blew water at us, cleared his lips, and in a firm voice said, - You're dead, man, both of you. Then he cursed my mother and father and the day they were born, Marsha's c.u.n.t and her a.s.s and her mother and father and G.o.d and the elements and the ice-cold water of the seaway and the s.h.i.+p, which was about four hundred yards away ( - come on, motherf.u.c.kers, save my a.s.s). He kept shouting like this until a mouthful of water gagged him. We were swinging around, opening it up full-throttle, looping around, sending a wake in his direction and heading in. When we got to the breakwall we turned and saw that he was still out there, splas.h.i.+ng, barely visible. The s.h.i.+p loomed stupidly in the background, oblivious to his situation. A single gull spiraled overhead, providing us with an omen to talk about later. (Gulls are G.o.d's death searchers, Marsha told me. Don't be fooled by their white feathers or any of that s.h.i.+t. Gulls are best at finding the dead.) Then we got back in Tull's truck and headed through town and out, just following roads north toward Houghton, leaving Ernie to whatever destiny he had as one more aberration adrift in the St. Lawrence Seaway system. For a long time we didn't say a word. We just drove. The radio was playing an old Neil Young song. We turned it up, and then up some more, and left it loud like that, until it was just so much rattling noise.

KENT NELSON.

Public Trouble.

From The Antioch Review.

WE SHOULD HAVE BEEN more alert, all of us, more aware. Those closer to the circ.u.mstances, like Ivo Darius and his wife, Frieda, might have figured out something was wrong, but they were busy feeding cattle and had used the downtime in winter to build an aluminum storage shed. The dental hygienist, Sara Warren, who also lived out there, could have said more, but why would she? Of course Emily Jefferson's silence was understandable, but she didn't enter the picture until later, when it was too late to change the course of events. We have all pointed at social services, but they can't be involved until someone comes forward, unless there's public trouble - malnourishment, truancy from school, a suspicious bruise. And there wasn't. But even with full knowledge in advance, could we have done anything? Even if all of us together had been vigilant for the signs, even if someone had spoken up, could we have prevented it from happening?

Everyone knew the Olshanskys. The father, Del, worked part-time at the loading dock at Wal-Mart, and we often saw him in town at the Silver Nugget on Main Street or on the town's embarra.s.sing highway strip at the bowling alley, or Taco Bell, or the Branding Iron. He was a handsome man - dark eyes, a strong nose, chin and jaw unshaved, the way movie stars appear these days. If he'd cared at all for appearances, he might have been called das.h.i.+ng. He looked like the sort who'd lose his temper and get into bar fights, but no, he was calm, offhand, halfway pleasant, no matter what he'd had to drink. His appearance was rough - his jeans had holes in the knees, and his s.h.i.+rts were torn - and he didn't have much ambition. That isn't a crime. The sheriff, all of us in town, had seen a lot of men worse than Del, lots of couples worse than Del and Billie Jean.

The Olshanskys lived out past the landfill in the pinon-juniper foothills where there wasn't much water. They had dug a well and watered a patch of gra.s.s bordered by rocks worn smooth by the river. There was an Elcar-fenced pen for a dog, too, though when we were there - in the winter, when this all happened - there wasn't a dog. The house was really a trailer they'd added on to. In front they'd built a porch with a green plastic snowshed roof slanting to one side, and a facade of cinder blocks to hide the cheap vinyl siding. In back, they'd cobbled on two bedrooms with views of the Sangre de Cristos. Billie Jean was a nurse's a.s.sistant at the hospital, just a hundred beds, but apparently she had time for a garden because there was a raised bed inside railroad ties and hauled-in topsoil. We don't know what she grew because the plants were black and draped in snow.

Most of us don't blame Del and Billie Jean. We think it started at that school, though who knows whether a beginning to such a thing can be deciphered. Even if it didn't start at the school, the place was a catalyst. It had to be. Before that, for the first several years they were around, the Olshansky kids had gone to the public school. They lived in town most of that time, and even for two years after they moved to the trailer, the kids took the school bus in. Danielle, the oldest, was Billie Jean's daughter from a former marriage. She was a smart kid, and one of the English teachers, Mary Padua, thought Danielle had a photographic memory, because she recited "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and often wrote answers on exams in the exact same words that were in the texts. If she'd wanted to, she could have gone to college, but college wasn't an ambition for most high school students here, and after graduation she moved upriver to Nathrop and worked as a scheduler for raft trips.