The first time he’d saved this man, he’d asked the basics. Name, address, who should be called. The question of the authorities never came up. The authorities would never again be the ones Perry called. The man refused to answer for his identity, but when he pointed out Marion Road, Perry thought he had the guy’s number. The road was nearly impassable. Deep furrows ridged the gravel like weather-beaten skin. But beyond the modest homes plunked close to the shoulder, a stretch of marsh formed a boundary between one type of family dwelling and another. Past the marsh stood a scattering of mysterious places. Brick walls enclosed sprawling complexes built for secretive, tight-knit clans who corralled the generations under a single roof. Gangsters, or drug lords. Foreigners, or the loony local militia. Crowded sheaves of aspen and maple protected the vast yards from street view. The crummy road, the overgrown shoulder, all natural riggings for fiercely guarded privacy. The man must hail from these secret clans. Such membership would explain both the need for escape and its impossibility. A hit and run under cover of night would be the best possible death, perhaps the only one.
But the house where Perry deposited the man was on the ordinary side of the marsh. A sturdy, well-painted ranch tucked into a pine grove. A broad gravel driveway, a lean-to carport, the porch light burned out or never switched on. A sensible home sheltering a family able and willing to ease this man’s nighttime torments. Not a place of unkindness or neglect. Obliviousness, perhaps, caused by life’s routine distractions, or perhaps the man was a brilliant sneak.
—But do you know who else I am?
After tomorrow’s positive identification, Perry would need to become someone else, but the man would not answer his question.
Perry hated the sight of Elsa peeking at him from all the familiar places. He’d have just convinced himself again that she’d found freedom in a place of sunshine and opportunity; and there she’d be, beautiful as ever, lobbing the lowball flirtation. In the high school parking lot he passed on his way to a property, she’d be leaning against some boy’s Chevy sedan, one slender leg tented against the car door like an ostrich. Her dark hair would swirl in the breeze. She’d throw him a glance like he wasn’t yet forgiven. Keep driving, she meant. Keep driving. Tough to pass her by without stopping to stare at her with that hungry grief. Allow himself to drink her in before reminding himself that this was another girl, because his daughter would not still be sixteen and hanging around the high school parking lot.
Sometimes, too, when he had to drive out to the rental near I-94, she’d be loitering near the cart rack at the new Walmart past the Industrial Park. This annoyed him, since how would she know this new place? When she left, the Walmart had been Wagner’s U-Pik. Strawberry rows stacked to the horizon like lipstick smears. Kids gorged on fruit while their mothers filled their buckets for them. Once he’d sworn Elsa was smoking and eating strawberries from a Walmart plastic pint container. Leaning against the cart rack, staring at him. Keep driving. He’d pulled a U-turn right in the middle of Michigan Avenue, blown into the Walmart lot. Peeled over to the rack like a punk dragster burning rubber, only to find the girl’s embers and nibbled strawberry hulls scattered at the carts’ wheels.
Perry fell feverish with her ball busting, if that’s what these sightings were. Accusations, her lack of forgiveness, but what had he done to earn her cruelty? He didn’t know, or he couldn’t remember, or what was worse, he’d done nothing at all. Children might count anything their parents did as a crime.
The Other Family’s suspicion made sense, Perry understood this. Past a certain age, a man alone is always a sole suspect. His wife had left him without warning. Left her daughter behind with Perry, something others felt a mother wouldn’t do. Once the Other Family thought of Perry as their daughter’s killer, they’d suspected him of doing away with his wife, too. Ellen had, in fact, moved back in with her parents in upstate New York, a two-day drive from their town. He’d dropped Elsa in Detroit once so she could take the Amtrak to visit. When Ellen passed away from breast cancer, Perry hadn’t run a local obituary. Pure spite at the time, his lust to erase her from the town.
After he’d grown used to being the suspect in the girls’ deaths, it felt natural to become the suspect in his wife’s fate. Denise and her family had been relative newcomers before the girls disappeared. They arrived in town long after Ellen’s passing. They wouldn’t ever know Ellen’s friends, the few townies she kept in touch with before she died. Elsa would have stopped talking about her mother long ago. By the time Perry was a suspect, few if any remembered Ellen, except that he’d had a wife who vanished one day. After his arrest, two and two were put together. Even after he was cleared of official suspicion over the girls, the Other Family looked at him as a man capable of multiple crimes. They avoided him in the Farmer Jack aisle, and so did those others whom Perry used to get along with well. They spoke of him, said unkind things he could easily disprove, if he didn’t rely so much upon this special regard.
Wasn’t it better to be thought of as a killer than a man left helpless? Better to be thought of at all, not so lonely that way.
—One gets used to grief, Perry tried to explain on the turn to Marion Road.
The man sneezed. The car hit a pothole, dipped hard, jostled the man against the door.
—You don’t think you ever will. It’s like a change in altitude, a climb to a higher ledge. You know that down there you felt different. But now the difference is what’s familiar.
Perry didn’t know if any of it was sinking in. The man drew Perry’s coat tighter around his shoulders and neck. Squeezed a hand between the seat cushion.
—There’s no climbing back down, is the thing, Perry told the man.
Some nights Perry felt the impulse to take this man to his home, get him good and drunk, exchange frank talk about secrets that needed extraction. Except for his kindness to this man, in all other ways Perry had fulfilled the Other Family’s special regard. He neglected his properties. He was slow to respond to his tenants’ complaints. Some situations had teetered toward the dangerous. Threats to life, the tenants charged. An unplated electrical outlet shot voltage up a young mother’s arm. A bat bit a little girl after the family had requested an exterminator. An elderly woman broke a hip stumbling over chipped pavement in the apartment lot. Perry wouldn’t call his emotions over these mishaps satisfaction, but the incidents eased his grief in ways he didn’t care to understand.
Perry achieved a dossier of complaints. He enjoyed minor run-ins with the authorities, the same men who had interrogated him during his arrest, who still believed him guilty, who, tomorrow, would not convert him back to innocence when his daughter’s identity was confirmed. Perry became known to cheap lawyers and the Sixteenth District Court. Over time Perry learned how to win cases, avoid damages. He kept his rents and deposits low. Despite his reputation, his rentals boasted full occupancy.
The wind kicked up, worrying the aspen. Marion Road’s trees had not been carved into horseshoes for the power lines. Marion was designated a Natural Beauty road, which forbade the authorities’ shearing.
—I’m not grieving. It was the closest the man had ever come to arguing.
—You’re not thinking this thing through, Perry told him.
—I’m perfectly happy.
This could mean anything, which irritated the hell out of Perry.
—Did you ever stop to think that if I do hit you, I will be your killer? What kind of guilt is that to saddle a man with?
—Quit pulling over, then.
Which was also beside the point. The man couldn’t focus at all. Over the crest of a distant hill down Marion, a pair of headlights wobbled, rattled by the road’s furrows. Nothing could hold steady out here. He never let Elsa drive these backcountry roads for fear she’d land in a ditch. The wide, sturdy bridge over the lake he’d considered perfectly safe.
No use reasoning with a crazy man’s addled view of things, but Perry was wound up.
—What if it’s not me who ru
ns you over? I can stand it, probably, living with killing you. But what if some kid comes along? What will you be doing to their life?
—A kid would be absolved even more quickly than you for being inexperienced.
At times the man spoke like this. Formal, lucid, still guided by logical training he must have cultivated in a past life.
—You’re not seeing my point.
The man shrank into Perry’s coat.
—You aren’t seeing my point. I don’t care what happens to the driver who kills me.
Here was something the Other Family and the authorities didn’t know. Only he and Elsa knew the agony Perry could endure to save her life.
What father and daughter didn’t argue at times, especially over the way a fifteen-year-old girl should dress? Those tight jeans with the lurid stitching on the back pocket, for one. A decorative element meant to draw the male eye, no other purpose to it. They’re in style, she warned when he suggested a more generous fit.
Then, buried in the drawer under her flannel pajamas, he’d discovered a stash of delicate things from a local boutique. Expensive, impractical, all lace and peep. Either Elsa wanted someone, or she already had him. Which was fine, no problem, except she was hiding the boy as she was hiding these delicate things. Perry knew from Ellen that once a woman hoards one secret, she will be hungry to collect others. He suspected Ellen had lied about living with her parents, until she fell ill and then she died in that place, this he knew to be true. But he remained convinced she’d left him for another, whether he could prove it or not.
He couldn’t have Elsa getting off on deception, so he’d suggested she invite the young man over to dinner.
She’d suggested he mind his own fucking business and stay the fuck out of her room. He’d missed this depth charge because she didn’t look like a woman, not yet.
When he left the living room to give them both a moment, she snatched his keys and tore out of the driveway in the Mustang, which wasn’t, yet, hers. He’d intended to let her blow off steam, but she’d laid a patch to goad him and the grinding of his specialty radials infuriated him. His first instinct was to overtake her on Judd, guide her to the shoulder. But a rainstorm made the Mustang a blur of taillights, and he was afraid he’d crush her in the new F-150.
She fishtailed the turn onto Marion Road. The gravel was soup. Mud splashed his cab and windshield. Aspen and swamp birch groaned under a boomerang wind. Ahead the Mustang’s taillights bobbled. The car skidded, overcorrected, veered across the road toward the cattails clustered in the marsh. But Elsa recovered at the shoulder, peeled back into the middle of the road. Gunned it like she was afraid he’d overtake her, although he was hanging back, petrified she’d end up in the fetid water, sink into the long, dark grasses where he’d never reach her.
On the other side of the marsh, he breathed easier. The wind quieted, the rain lightened to a patter. Keep driving, keep driving. Then, at the first complex’s driveway, the Mustang lurched violently to the left. Elsa threw on the brakes. She might have been all right if she hadn’t hit a deep pothole. Water rooster-tailed from the Mustang’s bumper. The tires lost traction, flung the back end ninety degrees. Elsa skidded straight into a bank of mailboxes flanking the drive’s apron. A metal box flew up, thudded along Perry’s hood, crashed into his windshield. Perry yanked the wheel. Stupid instinct. The F-150 threatened to spin out right into the Mustang’s rear. Perry whirled his wheel, pumped the brake, finessed a stop just a foot from her bumper.
Elsa flew out of the car. Hair streaming, jeans soaked in blotchy dark patches. Perry kept his headlights lit. Ahead of the Mustang a metal gate stretched the length of the drive. A rusted chain braided the gate post. Elsa knelt to cradle a dark bundle in her arms. Perry glimpsed sharp ivory fangs, black grinning gums, a grizzled snout. One of those attack breeds, a Doberman, probably. Black fur glossy with mud and blood. Too wounded to bark. A soft, bubbly gurgle mixed with the rain’s gentle drum and the hum of the truck’s idle. Elsa was weeping. Her blouse was ripped at the sleeve. The cuff was already crimson.
Perry took her elbow, hauled her up. He’ll bite you, is how he explained his roughness.
I know.
Which made no sense, and she was wrenching away from Perry’s hold to return to the dog. If he’s dying, biting is all he can do anymore, Perry told her. It sounded like a plea.
On the other side of the gate loose gravel rolled. A figure hovered behind the gate on the edge of the headlights’ glow. It didn’t occur to Perry then that he hadn’t heard footsteps, that the figure hadn’t approached from down the driveway. Later he’d understand that the man had been watching them all along, but he dismissed the notion that Elsa planned to meet him. She’d had no time to place a call before speeding off in the Mustang. And her plunge into the driveway had been to avoid the animal, not a deliberate turn.
Elsa stopped struggling, alert to the man Perry couldn’t quite see.
Suddenly the other side of the gate was populated. The original man made a muffled, bleak sound. Slowly other men slid into the shallow drainage ditch on either side of the gate, emerged into the headlights. Dressed in camouflage, soaked with rain. Men of indeterminate origin and purpose. Elsa stood perfectly still. A wail, thin as filament, seeped from the dog’s throat.
Perry pushed his daughter toward the idling truck. Go.
Elsa ran, good girl. The F-150 roared, skidded backward. The headlights scudded down Marion Road. Perry’s jaw exploded. A cracking below his ear numbed the side of his head and then set it afire. He hit the gravel hard, face down in the puddle. Boots swished near his shoulder, chucked water over his back. When he sat up and pushed the mud and blood from his eyes, he was hit again. Kicked in the belly, the knee. He opened his eyes once when he heard the dog moan. He couldn’t have, it was too dark, but for a moment Perry thought he saw the gaping gash in the dog’s abdomen. A constellation of purplish organs spilled to the gravel, or maybe he was seeing his own raw flesh oozing into the water.
He’d been allowed to crawl to the Mustang and drive away. He’d been watched on the drive down Marion, first by the men, then by Elsa, who was idling at the turn down Judd Road, waiting for him. He’d always wonder what her next move would have been had Perry never arrived at that intersection. It made of the episode a certain sense that Elsa never called the authorities for help.
When he became a suspect, he’d been tempted to tell the authorities about the episode. Prove he’d risked life and limb for his daughter. Suggest there were other dangers to the community besides Perry. But he hadn’t. Loyalty to Elsa, he thought. He didn’t want her viewed as rash or wayward, mixed up with the wrong crowd, when he knew for a fact that the incident marked the end of her association with Marion Road. Afterward she partied with the ordinary kids at the gravel pit. He wouldn’t admit that his real motive was admiration for the clans, these men who would build compounds and beat back intruders and silence one of their own to protect what was theirs.
Years later he understood why her words about the dog hadn’t made sense. She must have said I know him, and the him had been swallowed by the rain.
Elsa had told Denise of this incident. He knew because the Other Family asked him about it once. Wondered if his beating could be related to the girls’ disappearance. They’d approached him angrily but warily, as if he were the brute. Elsa had changed a few facts, as kids will. Told Denise Perry had chased her down Marion, had made her drive too fast to see the dog in time. At the time, it irritated the hell out of Perry. But maybe Elsa saw it that way. Maybe what she remembered was the argument, not Perry standing his ground while she escaped, but wasn’t it natural for a child to recall what had driven her to recklessness, rather than the consequences?
Wasn’t quite her birthday when he’d handed Elsa the keys and title to his Mustang. The bruises along his jaw had healed by then. His nose had a battered stance to it, a bit off kilter at the tip, a crazy-fucker jaunt he grew to like. Elsa avoided looking at the damage. She�
��d lock her blue eyes directly on his or skirt his face altogether when they spoke. He’d noticed this same tendency in the Other Family, how they never were able to look at him straight.
Maybe he’d meant the Mustang as a gift and that was all there was to it. Maybe he’d meant to tell his daughter that the next time she ruffled the gravel in their drive he wouldn’t follow her. If that’s what he’d meant, he’d kept his word.
When it came to kids, keeping your word could end up being your biggest mistake.
—Do you even know if you want to die? Perry asked the man, more out of spite than curiosity.
—I do, the man replied promptly.
Which was a confirmation of one sort and a denial of another. The man pushed Perry’s coat off his shoulders, crunched his shirt collar up his neck. Pointed out his driveway, still a quarter mile up the road, as if Perry had never been there before. Flashed that straight reliant smile, so odd, because what did a man have to smile about if he loathed being alive?
Perry slowed down over a riffle in the road. The truck listed and rocked. The tires thumped dully in the potholes.
—You don’t know what this will do to the people who love you, he told the man.
The man held out his hand to Perry. Opened his fist, dropped something light and flashy into Perry’s lap.
—Not a thought that ever comes to mind, he said.
Well, it was an agreement of sorts. Perry fished the object from his lap. Held it up as the oncoming car’s lamplight cartwheeled through the windshield. A silver bauble, a flash like a smile.
Perry was trapped in a leap to an airless place. Vertigo rushed in, sour and noisy. How had this man come to possess Elsa’s earring? He would have been no more than a child when Elsa went missing. But as with many men, his true age was hard to judge.
States of Motion Page 21
