He told me this one time that he was going out to some village to pick something up. I asked him what he was gonna pick up, and he got all defensive, said I didn’t hear him right. That I was making shit up. Then he hung up on me.
You asked about him going out to the desert at home. He beat me up bad when I told Mom about it, so I wasn’t going to say anything about him doing it in the Army. I was just a kid when he went in.
The soldiers came to the house a couple weeks later and said he was dead. I was at school. Mom told me after that he got shot. She said they told her he would be home soon. But it was weeks before they sent him. And then there was no body. That was serious for Mom. She don’t want the ashes they gave her, said to the guy who brought them to the house, how am I going to visit my son? You burned him up! How do I even know this is him???
It was real tough on her. So I called them in Arlington and asked why they didn’t send Paulie’s body. But no one would give it to me straight. Just kept passing me from person to person who said they didn’t know. But that’s all bullshit. They’re supposed to send the body with a flag. We all seen it on the news. You ask me, the US Army didn’t want us lookin’ at the body. They didn’t want no one to know how my brother died.
We had the funeral anyway. I got a flag and we put it on a stand with a wreath at the church. There were lots of people.
A couple months later, Paulie’s stuff came in the mail. Mom couldn’t look at it. Just cried. So I opened it. It was just this little cardboard box with a uniform and his dog tags and a Bible. My brother never read the Bible in his life. Growing up, Mom tried to make him. Took him to church same as me. But he wouldn’t read it. No way. I don’t think it was his stuff. I mean, where was his wallet? Where was the watch my uncle gave him when he graduated from high school?
We got this letter once too. It was from a bank in Panama. Said there was a lot of money and Paulie needed to get it out because they had had it too long. When I told them he was dead, they wouldn’t talk to me without a lawyer. But you need money for a lawyer. We don’t have money.
Anyway. You find anything else? Mom’s been sick. I want to tell her some good news.
I started to type a reply, but it was all wrong. Angry and frustrated and suspicious. Just like him. And just like his message, it wasn’t going to get me anything I wanted. Instead, I watched the cursor blink until the screen on my phone went black.
I didn’t feel anything. Not like Mike Havers. Not like his mom. I was just angry that he wasn’t giving me what I wanted, that he wasn’t fitting together the pieces of my puzzle. And that’s no feeling to have about a dead kid. Or his brother.
My fingertips were white, I was gripping the phone so fiercely. Slowly, I put it down on the seat and curled my hand around the steering wheel again.
It didn’t matter what Mike Havers knew or didn’t know. Didn’t really matter. Kingman was there—had to have been. He’d been there when Private Havers sucked down his last breath. When Patrick Beale sucked down his. I knew it; every fiber of my being believed it to be true. And my fingernails ripped into the Bronco’s plastic-wrapped steering wheel when I thought about why Kingman knew my daughter and what he would do to her. What he had already done. What I was going to do when I caught him.
Out in the county, as I sped past the fields and the houses and the apple trees, I watched for Jimmy King. I watched for the unusual, the odd, the suspicious. Whatever it was that would solve the puzzle, that would right the wrong. I didn’t know where I would find it—whether I would find it—but I knew it was out there, somewhere, among the kids playing in sprinklers, the neighbors eating ice cream on the front lawn of the church. Somewhere, I would find that last bit of evidence that would take him down.
The truck rolled to a stop at an intersection. Without thinking, I drove straight ahead. I almost didn’t see the road sign, but when I did, my stomach dropped, my heart leapt into my throat. Still, I drove on, studying each of the little houses I passed every quarter of a mile, straining to see them in the last crimson rays of the sun just peeking over the hills. And then I was there: little brown house, big oak tree, sheriff’s cruiser in the drive. I pulled in behind it and turned off the engine, sat there for ages, watching the blue light of the television flashing through the flowered curtains as the evening deepened. Sat there until a cool breeze swept through the leaves and the open windows of the Bronco, until the crickets started to hum and sing.
The first time I had been there was a few years back, two, maybe three. There had been a barbecue, and there were people, lots of people: Meredith’s friends from the tribe, Darren’s from the Sheriff’s Office. A few people we had all been in school with. And me. But I’m not good at parties anymore. Haven’t been since the war.
I got there late, long after a line of vehicles had strung out along the road, late enough for me to study everything, to get comfortable enough to approach the house. The front door was open, but narrow and crowded. So I went around the side, a six-pack of weepy beer bottles in my left hand, my right hand free like my drill instructor always said it should be: free to salute, free to defend. But even the backyard was a mistake, with the coolers full of alcohol and the drunk cops and the sober Indians and the loud classic rock and the strings of Christmas lights shining dully in a tree dripping with overripe plums. I put the beer down and left, and when I slipped into my truck, I saw Darren watching me from the porch, one hand holding the screen door open, the other waving at someone leaving, but his eyes on me. And I knew I shouldn’t have come.
That night in August, there was no one. I was alone.
Darren wanted to know where I was. He wanted to know if I was safe. He wanted …
I took the keys out of the ignition and slid to the ground, closed the Bronco’s door as quietly as its ancient hinges allowed. Then I walked up to the front porch, still not sure if I should have come. But I knocked anyway, and the television went mute, then soft footsteps, bare footsteps, approached the door.
“Who is it?” Darren’s voice said loudly, clearly. His sheriff voice.
“It’s me,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. “Camille.”
The door opened, a little at first, then fully when he saw my face. He was still pulling on a rumpled white undershirt; his feet were bare below a pair of worn-out jeans. Quickly, he shifted the gun in his right hand behind his back.
“You got any sandwiches?” I said awkwardly, then smiled.
He held the door open. I walked in, my arm brushing against his. He closed the door, locked it. I stood in the tiny entrance hall, my back pressed up against the wall, watching him. He stepped into the living room, set his weapon down on the coffee table, the muscles on his back tight and lean through his thin shirt.
When he turned back, he started to say something but stopped. In the dim light of the hallway, I saw on his face that look, the one from the lot, from after the explosion, after I lost it, after I swore at him.
I looked away.
“You, uh …” he said quietly. “You want—”
“I should go,” I said abruptly, but I didn’t reach for the door.
“What?” Darren said, surprised.
I fumbled for words, so instead of saying it—saying anything—I just shook my head. I turned back toward the door, but before I could touch the doorknob, his hand wrapped around my wrist.
“Stay,” he whispered.
I breathed quickly, my chest barely moving. His fingers loosened, but I could feel the heat of his chest behind me, radiating against my shoulder. I turned toward him, and his fingers fell away. Mine reached out, touched the skin of his forearm, slid across the lean muscle there up to his bicep, relaxed and long. Below my fingers, his arm flexed; his hand slipped over my hip, and he pulled me closer.
I tilted my chin up and saw that look again, the one that was just for me. And I knew I shouldn’t have come.
18
I woke gasping for air.
My fists were clenched, arms rigid
, lungs straining for oxygen. Blood burned in my cheeks. The stink of a campfire drifted past my nostrils, the snap of a belt faded from my ears. And twisted in the threads of my nightmare, hovering in my mind’s eye was Oren, grinning greedily, viciously. My own personal demon.
Then faintly, the sound of something small and light—leaves?—smacking against glass. Painfully, I turned my head, my hair grinding beneath my scalp, fabric brushing against my earlobe. Window panes. Glass window panes flexing in a stiff wind, and beyond them, a line of hills—the eastern hills that roll into the Res—stained a sick yellow-gray in the predawn. Far off to the north, thunderclouds vomited thick streams of rain, a dark stain on the lightening sky.
I pushed myself up on my elbow, and a flowered sheet fell away from my bare chest. In the yard, unripe plums became projectiles.
Slowly, soundlessly, I rolled out of bed, stood tall, and looked down at my flat belly. I traced my fingers over the faded, shiny stretch marks that still shot across my hips, still snaked along the side of my breasts. I closed my eyes, ran my hands through my hair, pulled the tangles free. And when I opened them again, when I turned around, there was Darren, sleeping on his back, one arm tucked under his head, the sheet rising and falling with each deep breath. But in the half-light, in the silence, he could have been anyone. He could have been—
Ice ran down my spine.
I had to leave. A few moments later, I was in the living room, whipping on my clothes as I went. I was moving so fast I almost missed it. But when I sat on the leather couch and leaned forward to tie my boots, I discovered Darren’s secret. Files, four of them, stacked untidily, his white undershirt hastily thrown on top. I glanced over my shoulder at the bedroom door. I held my breath and listened for Darren’s slow inhale, his even exhale. Then I lifted off the shirt.
The first file was all notes: disorganized, cryptic, written in tiny, tidy handwriting. Darren’s.
The second file contained incident reports, dozens of them, going back years. For the most part, they were nothing exciting: a coke deal here, a small meth lab there. Besides the drugs, the only common thread was that the incidents had no common threads; they involved different people, different parts of the county, even the Res. The last report was about a fire and a death a few months back. The official conclusion was asphyxiation from smoke inhalation, but on the yellow sticky notes peppering the file, Darren called it suspicious, maybe homicide.
The third file contained other official documents: property deeds and legal documents at first. Then pay dirt. A Washington driver’s license report for James Kingman, his photo staring out at me from the page, like a mug shot. A California license for a Victor Calzón who looked eerily like the tattooed jackass Nick. Similar reports for other names I’d never heard: Leon Palmer, Garrison Taylor, half a dozen others. And a Form DD-214 discharging Captain James Kingman from active duty in the U.S. Army, effective January 26, 2010.
The fourth file was even better: transcripts. Most for conversations between Sergeant Darren Moses and an unnamed CI, a criminal informant. A couple of the more recent ones featured an unnamed federal agent, who was dangling witness protection in front of the increasingly fearful CI. Someplace far away, Texas maybe. Houston was a possibility. But all the transcripts had something to do with a large operation, an operation that the CI saw only through a keyhole, but a keyhole just big enough to reach through and pluck at the strings of a very sticky web.
The last transcript was for August 6. In it, the CI mentioned that something had the manager—whoever that was—spooked, so spooked that he’d ordered the immediate destruction of one of the most profitable labs. The CI said the manager hadn’t attended himself, but he’d sent his right hand, someone described only as the sergeant, and the CI to take care of it. He—the CI—described how they’d done it, how they’d piled up the lab equipment and all the ingredients that hadn’t been moved already into the living room, like a bonfire before a football game in the fall, how they’d taken a couple of machetes and cut down the tinder-dry plants near the outside walls, taken them into the little house and piled them around the stuff from the lab. How they’d torched the place with a few cheap matches and some high-tech propellant the sergeant had laid out ever so carefully and then, ever so carefully, lit, watching constantly, manically, fire extinguisher in hand. He and the CI prowled around the little house like cougars in the tall grass to control the burn in that very dry season in that very dry country so close to the town of Little Falls.
I raised my eyes to the open door of Darren Moses’s bedroom.
He hadn’t told me.
He had told me to stop, to lay low, to stay out of it. He had told me none of it had anything to do with Patrick Beale. That none of it had anything to do with me. Or my kid. But here, in his living room, was the proof.
No shit he wanted to know if I was safe.
When my blood stopped pounding, when my fists unclenched, I put the files back, threw the undershirt on top. Outside, the sky was as light as it was going to get behind those clouds. In the next room, Darren’s breathing was as steady as his lies.
I stood up and reached back, yanked my hair into a ponytail, pulled the rubber band off my wrist, and twisted once, twice. It snapped on my fingertips, caught in the loops, but I pulled them out and tugged my hair tight.
I was right and he had done wrong.
Time to go.
* * *
Visiting hours that Tuesday began at one o’clock, security clearance at twelve thirty. I got there at noon and ate a sandwich in the truck, parked under a tree. At the other end of the parking lot, behind a series of chain-link fences, the stained concrete prison loomed large and colorless; eight stories of rapists, murderers, drug traffickers, and worse—all of them bad enough for the feds. While I ate, a steady trickle of their family and friends—black, Latino, Asian, white—swung out of crappy cars and Audis, shuffled to the doors with the same angry glances around the parking lot, the same tinge of shame. I was the last one in.
Inside, the guards checked my ID and wrote my name in a logbook filled with curled pages. Then came the metal detector and the mandatory check-in for my stuff. Afterward, all of us—the visitors—filed into a long, narrow room flanked by guards on one side, pea-green desks and bulletproof glass on the other.
And then we waited.
A young woman bit her nails, glanced at one of the guards like she knew him, feared him. An older man dozed, his neatly shaved chin resting on a brown sweater vest that was fuzzed and unraveling at the hem. A toddler fussed and squirmed, tried to break free; his mother scolded quietly, like she was too exhausted to do even that.
On the other side of the glass, a thick steel door opened, and in walked two male guards, tall, hawk-eyed, their electronic keycards swinging from thick black belts. They were followed by a line of prisoners wearing orange jumpsuits and shiny handcuffs and wary, watchful looks. When they were all in, they stopped suddenly, then turned as one man and stood behind stools bolted into the ground. One of them made a face at the toddler, who giggled gleefully. Then a guard said something, a command barely audible through the glass, and the room was suddenly buzzing.
I picked up the phone receiver hanging beside the thick glass barrier.
“Camille Waresch,” said a voice I barely recognized.
“Billy Boykin.”
He smiled—smirked—his canines long and narrow and yellowed. But on the counter his pale hand, thin like a woman’s, rested calmly on the scarred Formica.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Can’t complain,” he said.
“How’s the food?”
He shrugged. “I’ve lost twenty pounds.”
“I thought you looked different.”
“Yeah, I look like hell.”
He did. We were the same age, but his black hair was shot through with gray, and the wrinkles on his face weren’t laugh lines. When he was young, when I’d known him, when he’d been Oren’s second in command, he’d be
en in the sun all year, his Irish skin baked brown, like he was just another boy from the Colville Res. Prison had made him pale, like a dirty sheet.
“I want to talk to you about something.”
“No shit,” he said and looked down, flexed his fingers.
“Something’s going on back home.”
“I been away a long time, Camille.”
He had, I knew he had. I’d heard he’d left the Okanogan, gone out to Seattle for a job—given where he was, I could imagine what kind—two, maybe three years before. Maybe longer. I just hoped it wasn’t too long.
“There was this kid—” I said. Started to say anyway.
“Yeah, I heard about it.” Billy tucked the phone receiver into the crook of his neck, began to pick at his fingernails. “The Beale kid, right?”
“Who told you?” I demanded.
He smiled slyly. “Oh, just one of my connections.”
“Who?”
Billy laughed. “Jesus Christ. Relax. My brother was down here a few days ago.”
“Right,” I said and tried to laugh. “Do you know what it was about?”
“About?” he said, curiously. “It was suicide, wasn’t it?”
“That what your brother told you?”
Billy shrugged. “Cops found the kid strung up in a barn. Looked pretty bad, but looked like suicide. Open and shut.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Billy’s thin fingers gripped the phone receiver as he straightened his neck and leaned in, his mouth almost on the glass. “How do you know?”
I leaned back, my free hand curled into a fist on my thigh, and stared him down. His tongue traced the front of his teeth, lifted his lip, flashed pink.
“Why you comin’ to me?” he said, settling back a little.
“You always knew what was going on. Back when, I mean.”
“I been gone more than a year. Hell,” he snorted, “two years. I been gone two years and you think I know what’s goin’ on up in the O-ka-no-gan,” he said, drawing out the county name like he was making fun of somebody.
Little Falls Page 18
