No Woods So Dark as These

by Randall Silvis

  Loughner shrugged and lifted his glass. “That’s why single malt scotch was invented.”

  “What’s that quote from Sophocles you remember?”

  “Forget it,” Loughner said.

  “Come on, Joe. I gave you one of my favorites. Let me hear yours.”

  “‘I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating.’”

  DeMarco felt a sudden stab high in his chest. “That’s a good one,” he said.

  “Seemed like it to me, anyway. When I was young and stupid.”

  DeMarco stood with his hands on the edge of the bar and gazed down the counter. Every stool full, all men his age or older. He could have been one of them. Another solitary man at the bar, trying to fill his emptiness the only way he knew how. The heaviness of that thought, that image, nearly knocked him off balance, made the room cant for a moment. Then he thought of Jayme and the room righted itself.

  He pulled away from the bar and crossed behind Loughner and went down to the opposite end and signaled to the barman. He took out a twenty and handed it to him and said, “Get my friend up there a shepherd’s pie, will you? You might want to switch him over to coffee too. He’s had more than enough for one night.”

  “I can do that,” the barman said.

  DeMarco returned to Loughner, then laid a hand on his shoulder. “It’s been good talking with you, Joe. Be careful on your way home.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Loughner said. “You too.”

  DeMarco went outside and onto the street with the traffic noise and lights and turned north toward the lake and started to walk. The air was cool and the sky black, every star blacked out by the lights from the city. He pulled out his phone and pressed the Call icon. When Jayme answered, she said, “I’ve been waiting to hear from you. How did it go?”

  “I’ll be on my way home soon, baby. Going to go stand on the dock for a while.”

  “You don’t want to talk about it yet?”

  “I’m just going to listen to the water for a while, okay? I won’t be long. How has your night been?”

  “Quiet,” she said. “Hero and I have been taking turns reading to each other. The Hundred and One Dalmatians.”

  “Ha,” he laughed, and felt the pain and heaviness subsiding from his chest. “You are such a lovely little liar.”

  One Hundred Three

  She was soundly asleep when he returned home, so he undressed and eased into bed beside her. His movements woke Hero, who stood and came around the bed to lie on the floor on that side for a while. DeMarco reached out and scratched between the dog’s ears and then lay on his back with his hands crossed atop his chest and began to wonder about all the drama in his life and whether or not any of it really mattered. It all felt very real and often troubling but what if life was nothing but a simulation or a hologram as many people said? Before the quantum scientists came along, Poe had written, “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” And before that, Shakespeare had said, “All the world’s a stage.” Plato had said that everything we see is a mere shadow of the real thing. And Descartes had said, “I think, therefore I am,” but had he stopped to consider that maybe he was thinking that thought because somebody else was thinking him thinking it?

  Less than 5 percent of the universe is composed of light, he told himself, and nearly six times that amount is composed of dark matter. So it made sense to calculate a human being as composed of a comparable ratio. As above, so below. The odds, then, were six to one that dark matter would eventually win the race. The big question concerned the nature of the remaining 68 percent of the universe and a human being. Some scientists called it dark energy and others called it empty space and it was called quintessence by others, including the ancient Greeks. Whatever it was called, it was the part making the universe expand at a faster and faster rate against all the rules of physics that predicted it should collapse into itself instead. And no one understood why.

  DeMarco had a hard enough time keeping track of his own shrinkages and expansions, let alone those of the known and unknown universe. He thought that maybe Jayme was the quintessence breaking all the rules of his personal physics, and he was not bothered in the least by that insubordination. He enjoyed every second of it and hoped it would never cease.

  And maybe, now that he thought about it, dark energy was the true nature of the being called God—that 68 percent of the universe that keeps growing and creating more of itself. He hoped it knew what it was doing. But it was too big an issue for a puny human being to ponder, especially when he was trying to fall asleep. So he turned his concentration to his quintessence instead, to the sweet sibilance of her breath as she slept and the warmth and scent and love that, if anything could, would be the only thing that might prevent him from collapsing into himself.

  Easy peasy, he thought. Like picking grape seeds off a wet tile floor.

  One Hundred Four

  As a very small boy he had learned the value of being quiet on the outside, keeping his hands and feet and downcast eyes perfectly still even though on the inside his emotions were raging, but on this night nearly half a century later he became aware of an expanding quietude on the inside as well. He had never learned that particular discipline and had always believed it could not be taught without years of practice, and so was surprised to lie there in his bed beside the woman he loved and recognize while she slept his own inner stillness. This was not the same as the stillness after sex or the quiet contentment and gratitude he sometimes felt in her presence. This was a kind of sleepy emptiness he had previously experienced only as a soldier, usually prior to an especially dangerous patrol or when bunking down with the knowledge that an explosive device could land nearby and send him into a permanent sleep. He had never felt this kind of quiet as a civilian. He had counted on it as a form of resignation borne of knowledge that what might or might not happen was wholly out of his control—a necessary resignation during times of war or else one’s fear would get the better of him and possibly infect others as well. But it was odd to be swaddled in such quietude now. Thank you, he thought to no one in particular, and was surprised and amused when he heard You’re welcome softly but clearly in a voice not his own inside his head.

  That too had never before happened to him, so he explained it away by telling himself that the answer was also his own thought, though not consciously generated. But then he heard, Your thoughts are my thoughts.

  That, too, was puzzling, but not enough to make him want to fight the sleep that was settling in. He allowed all bemusement to slide away and his body to grow heavy and his mind to fill with a soft and comforting darkness. He was well out of the war and no mortars or rocket fire or IEDs would be slung his way tonight or tomorrow or the next day. There wasn’t much in life a man could count on or predict but waking in one piece in the morning finally seemed to be a fairly safe bet to make.

  V

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes.

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  One Hundred Five

  Sometimes even after a good night’s sleep he would wake heavy with a nameless sorrow, as bereft and hopeless as if he had lost a fortune the previous day or had lost everyone he loved or had been humiliated beyond repair in front of a million people, and this was one of those mornings. The room was still dark, with only a somewhat less dark filling the window. He had no idea where this sorrow came from, especially after such a peaceful night, but by now he knew it well and was learning not to fear it. Maybe it was a matter of the wrong brain chemicals dripping out, a leakage over which he had no control, or maybe the lingering residue of a past life flaring up. Maybe the alignment of the stars and planets had sh
ifted in the night. If the nameless sorrow could be from one of those sources it could be from any of them. What mattered was not that he woke to sorrow but that he did not climb out of bed still wearing it like a lead robe. It had to be left on the bed so that he, disrobed, could tend to the work of the day.

  Fortunately he was learning to shrug off the robe by asking himself why he felt so hopeless and heavy and then ticking off the possible reasons and eliminating them one by one. No, he had not lost a fortune. No, he had not humiliated himself in front of a million people or even one person. No, he was not unhealthy nor destitute nor grotesquely and permanently deformed nor a man who corrupted children or abused animals or deliberately hurt others. He was a decent man like billions of others and only wanted to do something useful and good with his life. Yes, he had lost his mother and his son and his never-born daughter, and he had lost a lot of his past to things he wished now he had never done, but loss is the very foundation of life and to surrender to grief is the epitome of failure, and the bad things he had done all seemed at the time the proper things to do and were never done with malice in his heart. Well, maybe there was some malice in his heart for a couple of the bad things but mostly there was love for his mother as the basis for that malice. Besides, all of those incidents occurred long in his past, and for the next thirty years he had been trying his damnedest to be a good person. So damn the sorrow and the lead robe and the debilitating heaviness of life. He wasn’t going to let it ruin another day when so few days remained. He figured he had maybe twenty years left on this beautiful planet, maybe twenty-five, and he wasn’t going to spend them lying in bed feeling sorry for himself. There was work to do and even if there weren’t he was not going to waste another day. There was sunrise and sunset and the gloaming and the cool soft darkness of autumn. There was good food and music and a dog that woke him with its wet nose every morning and a fine, strong, honest and beautiful woman who loved him. There were bison made of hay and colleagues made of the finest virtues and intentions. And there were truly bad people whom he, if he did his job right, could prevent from doing any more harm. So there was no room left in his life for a nameless sorrow. No room left in his closet for a leaden robe that did nothing but weigh him down. There was another day and then maybe twenty more years of days after that, and nothing short of death itself was going to keep him from appreciating every last one of them.

  It was not yet 5:30 a.m. when DeMarco finally slipped out of bed after shedding the leaden robe. Today was a Sunday and he wanted to continue the tradition established just the previous Sunday of walking to the local Sheetz for their breakfast, and because he knew that the rest of the day, after their visit to the cemetery, would offer little opportunity for rest, he was looking forward to a silent walk with Hero through the cool clarity of morning. Later he would inform Captain Bowen about Joe Loughner and his incident in Elk County with Thomas Reddick Sr. He would relay his and Jayme’s suspicions and allow Bowen to decide how to handle the situation. It was, after all, a state police matter, and he and Jayme were no longer active members of the state police. Bowen would no doubt confer with his own superior, and up the chain of command the matter would go.

  DeMarco figured the odds at fifty-fifty that no actions would be taken against Loughner. Too many former arrests would be jeopardized. Maybe Joe suspected that already. Maybe he knew that nothing of consequence would happen to him. Maybe all he wanted was to share his guilt with somebody. Somebody in whom he had sensed an abundance of guilt already.

  For now DeMarco wanted to stop thinking about Joe Loughner. He gathered up his khakis and socks and a clean sweatshirt from the dresser, got his cell phone from the bedside table, then tiptoed downstairs with Hero at his heels. Hero waited at the back door while DeMarco dressed and shut off the alarm system. He laid his cell phone on the kitchen counter and used a finger to scrub his teeth with water from the sink. Soon they were outside. The morning smelled like fishing worms after a heavy rain. Like slimy things wriggling up from underground.

  Some writer had once made a list of rules about writing fiction and had placed as number one the admonition that no story should start with the weather. DeMarco stood in the dewy yard, holding to the leash while Hero completed his first tinkle of the morning, and thought that rule complete nonsense. The very idea of having a list of rules for writing fiction was nonsense, but the one about avoiding a description of the weather struck him as especially foolish. Every morning started with the weather; why shouldn’t a story? Weather was often not only the barometer of his mood but also the progenitor. This morning, for example, while inhaling the scent of damp grass and the light fog that enveloped him in a diaphanous haze, with a pale orange glow just now suffusing the eastern horizon, and his decision made to speak with Captain Bowen, and the image still in his head of Jayme sleeping peacefully in their bed, her breath deep and soft and even, and with the memory still fresh of the softness of her skin and the warmth and pleasant scent of her body under the sheet and cover, the weather had a calming effect on his mood. The air was too cool for just a sweatshirt but he liked the challenge of the chill and felt it strengthen him, liked the friendly competition between himself and the temperature and knew that he could beat it.

  With each breath of morning air DeMarco felt better. It had taken them two weeks to identify Reddick as the murderer and to put him behind bars. Despite Reddick’s boasts, DeMarco was confident that the man would never again experience a morning like this one. He also felt better about Miller and Flores, and about Georgina in the women’s shelter in Washington County. He had been uncomfortable with the thought of being any kind of mentor to them, but now he was feeling differently about it. He would do what he could for each of them. A person did not have to be a perfect human being to be of assistance to others. Kindness was all that was required. Maybe he wasn’t the wisest man in the world but he did have a lifetime of hard experience in his back pocket. Maybe making a lot of mistakes and learning from them was a kind of wisdom too.

  He and Hero walked in no hurry to the store on the corner across from the courthouse. The red light at the intersection was still blinking yellow. He tied Hero’s leash around a table leg on the patio, then went inside. The store was quiet, with only one other customer, a man at least eighty years old coming toward the door with a Payday candy bar in one hand and two Mounds Bars in the other. DeMarco smiled and held the door for him and thought, When I’m eighty, I will have candy bars for breakfast too.

  A pair of cashiers, neither more than twenty years old, chatted behind the counter while looking at their cell phones; a middle-aged woman was busy filling the coffee decanters. He stepped up to one of the screens and ordered two everything shmagelz and a sausage and cheese biscuit sandwich, then, while the order was being prepared, poured two large cappuccinos from the machine, capped them, and put two apple fritters in a sack.

  Out on the patio a few minutes later, he peeled open the wrapper on the sausage and cheese sandwich and laid it on the concrete. Hero picked the sandwich up off the wrapper as delicately as a graceful old woman at morning tea, flipped it into his mouth, chewed it twice, and swallowed. Then, ready for an encore, he looked up at DeMarco.

  “Sorry, boy. Only one. Mama’s rules.”

  The streets were brighter on the walk home, the air clearing, more people rising. He could smell the coffee in the bag in his right hand as he walked and the bagel sandwiches in the bag in his left; no aroma rose from the fritters but his mouth watered at the thought of biting through the crisp glaze of sugar and into the yeasty dough and apple filling.

  He was already feeling better about the day. When Jayme awoke he would warm up the sandwiches and coffee and the fritters. Then they would go to the cemetery to visit Ryan Jr. and his tiny sister. The visit would sadden them but also bring a measure of peace. Then he would call Bowen and rid himself and Jayme of the day’s only unpleasantness. And then they would make plans for the rest of their lives.
r />   He was feeling very good about the future when he unlocked the back door and came into the kitchen and saw the white envelope lying in the center of the little table. He had seen an envelope exactly like it on the floor of his foyer the previous summer. The sight of this one weakened and dizzied him, and for a few moments he could not believe what he was seeing. Then a wave of chilling fear washed over him and he dropped the leash and, already moving, tossed the three sacks of coffee and food toward the counter and raced into the living room and then up the stairs. He stood beside the bed, his breath too quick and shallow at first, his pulse thumping too loudly for him to determine if Jayme was breathing or not. There was something wrong with his vision too; he was seeing her through a gray mist, the rest of the room dark around the edges. But then she said “Mmm” and smiled in her sleep and the wave of relief that swept over him nearly drove him to his knees.

  Still unsteady, he retreated from the room and made his way back down the stairs. In the kitchen he saw that the coffee had spilled inside the sack and was dripping off the counter and onto the floor. But now he was getting angry and wanted to see what message Khatri had sent him this time. He used a paper towel to hold the envelope in place while he used a clean fork to lift the unsealed flap and carefully draw the single sheet of paper out onto the table.

  He leaned over it, nauseated and chilled but growing hot with rage, and read the typed message:

  Dear Sergeant Detective,

  Imagine what I might have done to her in your absence.

  Imagine what I will do to her if you refuse my invitation.