by Larry Watson
Was it the smell of bourbon on his breath, distressingly similar to her mother’s when she would bend over Marie’s bed, ostensibly to wish her good night but really to scold Marie once more for that day’s minor misdeed? Was it that Gene, in this moment of sexual exigency, had stopped kissing her and his caresses had become unimaginatively monotonous, as if he were counting repetitions before moving on to another part of her body? Was it that her sweating skin was sticking to the upholstery and made a vulgar sucking sound whenever she shifted positions? Was there some symbolism in the location where they were parked that made it impossible for her to relax into the experience? They were secluded behind the museum, yet nearby was the state capitol, at seventeen stories the tallest building for hundreds and hundreds of miles, its rectangular height insistently phallic, its rows of windows inscrutably watchful, and when Marie lifted her hips to let Gene pull her shorts off, she tilted her head back and saw—or imagined she saw—the building and knew that what was happening was within its energy field. Or did the building cause her to make connections that could override even the oblivion-inducing ardor of sex? In that structure a man was murdered. I am practically naked in the murderer’s car. The murderer’s son’s hand is between my legs—
Whatever the cause, Marie pushed Gene away—
They had a quarrel, about what, Marie didn’t say, but just before Gene walked away, he said, “Maybe my dad had the right idea.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Had he been drinking?”
Marie nodded.
“Didn’t you go after him?”
“I couldn’t. Not right away. When I did, I couldn’t find him.”
“Maybe he went home.”
“I checked. I looked in his window. He’s not there. I know it.”
“Did you look”—I swallowed hard before asking this—“in the garage?”
She nodded again.
“And he walked away from his car?”
“I didn’t know if I should drive it or leave it there. Then I decided that where I was going to look for him I couldn’t drive. If he’d walked off into the trees on the capitol grounds, I’d have to be on foot to find him.”
“The trees? Why would he—” Suddenly I realized what she was telling me: Gene had threatened to hang himself, and the first opportunity that would present itself would be from the branch of a tree on the capitol grounds.
Usually no matter how much Gene Stoddard drank, he could keep the world in focus, but as he looked down at the nearly naked Marie Ryan, her outline kept blurring.
My next question was a coldly practical one: “Was he wearing a belt?”
He had the most difficulty with the borders on her body where her tanned flesh gave way to the pallor her swimsuit had created. But sometimes she had the straps down, or they shifted, or she wore longer shorts, or she borrowed a swimsuit from a friend and that allowed the sun to shine where before it had been forbidden, and the lines weren’t as sharp as they used to be. And the front seat of the car was dark, and Marie was moving sinuously under his touch and sight, and all that made it still harder to know where something left off and something else began. He could eliminate the problem by closing his eyes, but then even the darkness would shift and sway and he was liable to get sick. Besides, he couldn’t get enough of the sight of her—the sudden flash of white as her eyelids fluttered briefly open, the dark circles of her nipples, the faint shadows as her belly sank below her ribs, the brighter swell of her thighs. . . . He had to stare, yet the harder he stared the more unfocused everything became. It reminded him of being in first grade, when he was trying to learn how to read. He knew being able to read would come only from looking at those letters, yet he looked and looked and they would not yield what he needed from them.
It occurred to him then that his difficulty might be arising not from bourbon but from desire, swirling in him like those powerful currents that were said to rule the Missouri just below its murky surface. He unbuckled his belt.
Marie nodded, and with her index finger began to rub her lower lip, a gesture that meant—as I would have ample opportunity to learn in the future—that she was trying not to cry.
“Just a minute. I’ll get dressed and come right out.”
In my youth I was as modest as they come, yet at that moment I heedlessly dropped the sheet that covered me and reached for the clothes I had thrown onto a chair.
They had done this often enough that Marie knew what he wanted—or thought she did—and reached inside the waistband of his briefs.
“Huh-uh,” Gene said. “Not tonight. More. I want more.” He knew that wasn’t the way he should say it—it wasn’t the way he wanted to say it—yet when he tried to improve it, he only made it worse. “Not with your hand.”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “What?”
He pushed her back down. “You know.”
And when her eyes closed again and her head lolled to the side, and when she lifted her hips off the seat and let him pull down her shorts, Gene believed he would have what he had to have. But then she grabbed the waistband of her panties to keep them from slipping off with her shorts.
“Those too,” he said in a voice that he barely recognized as his own, but before she could answer or act, he lay down on top of her, hoping that his volume, his entire being, pressed down upon her would convey to her the urgency and import that his words couldn’t carry.
She lay unmoving under him for so long that Gene wondered if she had fallen asleep. Then it occurred to him that perhaps her stillness was a kind of permission. But he hadn’t done anything more than move his hand a few scant inches down her side when she spoke, and she obviously had no trouble locating the language or voice she needed.
“No,” Marie Ryan said.
Maybe, he told himself, she was talking out of a dream, and he kept her pinned under his weight.
But another single word issued from her—“Off!”—and this time action accompanied it. Somehow she got her hands between her chest and his and thrust him upward. He had been working on a construction crew that summer, and his own strength had increased significantly. Furthermore, he knew what the repetition of each task—lifting plywood sheets, carrying bricks and buckets of mortar, hoisting lengths of lumber—had done to harden each group of muscles, yet Marie’s strength astonished him, and Gene wondered what she had done over and over again in her life to give her the power to push him off her with what seemed to be such ease.
But Gene wasn’t about to give up. He knew, however, that if he was going to get what he desired, it would have to be with language. Up until that night Marie had let him have what he wanted, and all he had had to do was reach for it. But now what was he supposed to say? I want to fuck you, screw you, sink my cock into you? That was the vocabulary of his friends, of the men he worked with, and of his own mind, yet he knew that those words would get him nowhere.
Then Gene glanced out the window, and when he did, a better idea occurred to him. A short distance away was the capitol, its height hovering over them as if it were a spaceship slowly landing in that area. He usually tried not to look at the building—next to impossible since it loomed over the city and could be seen from every direction—because he couldn’t stop thinking of it as the place where his father’s life ended. Gene knew that wasn’t literally true—his father died in the garage—but if it weren’t for what had happened in the capitol . . .
He opened the car door and stepped out, then bent down and leaned back in. He would have thought she’d cover herself, but she sat up unashamed of her nakedness. Boys in the locker room were more self-conscious about their bodies than Marie Ryan.
“Maybe,” he said, “just maybe my dad had the right idea.”
He turned then and began to walk away, knowing that she’d call him back, knowing that by the time he climbed back into the car, she’d be lying back down, her panties off, her legs spread as wide as the front seat would allow—
I stayed close to the wall as I crept past m
y parents’ and sister’s bedrooms, knowing that the floor could creak and give me away if I walked down the middle. The screen door opened noiselessly, and then I was free, ready to join Marie in her search.
For the first few blocks as we walked, we watched for motion—Gene’s form under the light of a streetlamp or his silhouette against a house’s white wall or his shadow stretching toward us as he was backlit by the headlights of the occasional car—but once we entered the dark aisles of trees on the capitol grounds, we were on the alert for stillness—his lifeless body hanging from a low branch.
It was Marie’s idea that we search separately so we could cover a larger area in less time, and while I didn’t argue with her, I wasn’t convinced that was the best strategy. I didn’t want to be alone when I found him, and I didn’t want her to be either. We agreed that we’d shout out for the other if we saw Gene, no matter what his state.
Anyone walking through the North Dakota capitol grounds and its paved arboretum trail today would find the trees widely spaced and clearly labeled. Plaques set into the earth at the base of every bush or tree identify the Russian olive or the ponderosa pine or the Chinese or American elms or the green ash or the cottonwood. But on the night I hunted for my friend, the trees were more thickly planted, and they were simply trees—black vertical shapes whose trunks could be mistaken time and again for the hanging figure of a young man. Although the summer had been dry, the earth was soft and loamy underfoot, and I stumbled more than once because it was impossible to see where I was stepping. I was further slowed by having to walk hunched over, the only posture that allowed me to look upward and distinguish dark forms by examining them against the lighter darkness of the night sky. Had I had any foresight at all, I would have brought a flashlight, but then someone driving past or gazing out a window across the street might have seen a beam of light moving through the trees and called the police. More than once I wondered if that was exactly what we should have done.
Occasionally I could hear Marie, just a corridor or two away from me, and I could tell she was moving much faster than I, but then being in love equips us well for moving blindly through the dark.
Those of you who have been with me for these many pages must possess by now a sense of the man behind these words and of the boy behind that man. It should come as no shock or surprise to learn that I was ambivalent about my friend’s possible fate. I can’t say that I hoped to find him dead—to contemplate that prospect was not just horrifying and sorrowful but grisly—but I certainly calculated the advantages that might accrue to me if Gene were no longer alive. Marie would require solace, and I would be there to provide it. Furthermore, Gene would no longer block my path to Marie. But I also knew that loss can preserve love forever in a present state—seal it, as it were, in amber—and turn the loved one into a timeless ideal with whom no living human can compete.
After searching for close to two hours and not finding Gene, Marie and I finally gave up. But in a curious application of faith—belief in things unseen, as it is defined in the Old Testament—having not found him, we became convinced that he was dead. If not in the small night forest where we were searching, then hanging from another branch, beam, or rafter for someone else to find. We debated whether we should take his car back to his house, but decided that it would be too upsetting—to say nothing of mysterious—for Mrs. Stoddard to see the Ford parked in the driveway yet with her son nowhere to be found.
Marie wanted to check his house one more time, so we walked together away from the capitol and toward Keogh Street. As we stepped out of the trees and into the light, I dared put my hand on her shoulder, a gesture that I hoped she would read as intended only to comfort.
“God, your hand’s sweaty,” she said, and I took it away.
We were crossing Keogh, still a couple blocks from Gene’s house and mine, when a car approached. I’ve often wondered, since Marie and I turned toward the car simultaneously, what she saw and heard that caused her to begin running immediately toward its headlights. However, I too must have soon perceived the truth of the situation, because I never called out or ran after her, even when the car kept coming at her.
It was Gene, and by the time the car pulled alongside me, Marie was already inside. I looked in the open passenger window and saw that she was practically curled into his lap, and Gene had one hand on the steering wheel and the other arm casually draped around her. Marie’s face was turned from me, but I guessed tears of joy and relief were staining his shirt.
“Hey, man,” Gene said. “You want a ride?” It was difficult to imagine that anyone so cheerful might have been considered capable of suicide.
I shook my head and waved them on their way. They didn’t try to argue with me but sped off. I stood and watched the Ford’s taillights until they disappeared around the dip and curve that Keogh Street makes where it intersects with Cooke Avenue. Then I walked home, but when I got there I didn’t go inside.
Instead I sat on our front porch step. From there I could see when Gene returned home, no matter which direction he came from, yet it was unlikely he would notice me keeping my vigil. Time passed slowly, and every hour Gene didn’t appear made the next hour longer.
Dawn finally came, light suffusing the block so subtly and gradually that even the most attentive observer would have found it impossible to name the instant when darkness gave in to day. One moment the numbers on the house across the street couldn’t be read, and the next moment there they were. Preceding any visible glow was the chirp and twitter of birds, but they were soon in full-throated song, gloating or sighing that they had made it through another night. Gene had still not driven past, and that fact alone provided me with all the information I needed. I gave up and returned to my bed.
I tried many times to write a story about that night, but every effort frustrated me. Because there was so much backstory—the film term that my writing students invariably use when referring to almost anything in the past—I finally decided to limit the narrative by concentrating on what happened in the car between the two lovers, to write, in other words, a seduction story. Neither the male nor the female quite worked as the focus of narration, so I alternated points of view. Still the story wasn’t what I hoped it would be. Perhaps, as so often happens in life, the present has too little meaning when it’s not attached to the past, the past with its power to clarify and distill. And perhaps that story was simply not meant to be because it was willed into existence—over and over again—not by a desire to make something artful and true but by a compulsion to lacerate myself with my own imagination.
But while the Ford’s absence that night and early morning took on such importance in my psyche, the car’s actual appearance had, for another viewer, significance of quite a different sort. A friend of my father’s believed it explained Monty Burnham’s murder.
As law students at the University of North Dakota, Ross Wilk and my father roomed together, and while both eventually found themselves practicing law in Bismarck, Ross Wilk was a more financially successful attorney than my father. Mr. Wilk did a great deal of work for the oil companies that swarmed over the state in the 1950s, and though the boom didn’t last long, by the time it was over, Ross Wilk was a wealthy man and a partner in one of the city’s top law firms. He would gladly have brought my father into the practice, but my father always refused, citing as reason not his stubborn independence but that he didn’t “look good in a cowboy hat.” The remark made sense only to those familiar with Ross Wilk’s appearance and then only barely. Ross Wilk wore expensive, hand-tooled boots and wide-brimmed Stetsons, attire that wasn’t—and isn’t—especially unusual in Bismarck. (In his Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck said that the West began at the Missouri River, and Bismarck was built on the river’s eastern bank.) Ross Wilk, however, had no Western roots or cowboy experiences in his past. He came from a small town in northwestern Minnesota where his father had been a dentist. But he knew, in a way my father never did, how a persona could be shaped and
projected for one’s personal gain. An insider in state and local politics, Ross Wilk had considerable influence in both circles (largely through the Republican party). My father generally trusted his friend’s take on issues, believing they were arrived at by Mr. Wilk’s keen intellect and by his access to information that most citizens didn’t have.
Once or twice a year my parents had the Wilks over for dinner, and that was the occasion that brought Ross Wilk to our living room on a warm October day in 1961, nine months after Monty Burnham’s murder. Mr. Wilk looked down the street and saw the Stoddards’ Ford outside their house, and at the sight of the car, Ross Wilk tapped his index finger against our window. Along with his hat and boots, Ross Wilk affected a kind of Gary Cooper laconism, and he turned to my father (the wives were in the kitchen) and simply said, “There’s your answer.”
The men had not been talking about Raymond Stoddard or Monty Burnham, and Ross Wilk’s comment was made without preamble, but in Bismarck during that period—and nowhere was this more true than on Keogh Street—that subject was close enough to the surface of every conversation that it needed no introduction. Neither did Ross Wilk need any encouragement to give voice to his theory.
“For some reason when I learned that Raymond Stoddard had recently purchased a new Ford, I kept thinking that had to be important. I just didn’t know how. And then when I had a talk with the governor, who was mad as hell about the prices Bob Borglund was charging to make repairs on state vehicles, it all started to make sense.”
Robert Borglund owned a very successful Ford-Mercury dealership in Bismarck, and for years he had the contract for providing—and servicing—vehicles to the state. The arrangement seemed to work to everyone’s satisfaction until North Dakota elected a Democrat as governor. Then George Bartell, the new governor, found out that Borglund Ford-Mercury was charging the state exorbitant rates for routine repairs to its vehicles. When the governor began to look into that irregularity, he discovered an even greater one: The state was not receiving a particularly favorable price when it purchased its new cars.
