Fever

by Sean Rowe

  He never opened his eyes. After a long time she started crying again, listening to his chest and then kissing his forehead, her hands cradling his head. Finally she stood up and put on her blouse and buttoned it, still crying. I got out of the backseat and closed the door and walked around to her side of the car.

  “It’s snowing,” she said, wiping her face.

  I looked, and it was. I hadn’t seen snow in ten years. It was coming down so softly in the darkness, the snowflakes glinting and disappearing in silence, white in the black night.

  27

  I HAD NOTICED the car in the distance coming toward us but I had my back to it, facing Julia. While I watched her she stopped crying, and her face went blank. She turned away from me with a jerk and reached into the front seat of the car as I looked behind me at the cruiser with its blue lights flashing, pulling over onto the shoulder and coming to a stop a few feet behind the U-Haul.

  The state trooper was going to be young, I was sure of that. I knew it before he got out of the car. He had pulled up too close to the trailer, blocking his own view of the Buick. When he opened his door and started getting out, I was even more sure of it; he got out too fast. If he had used the radio at all, it was only to give his location to the dispatcher. He hadn’t run the license plate. It was an out-of-state plate and would have taken longer than usual. And it was almost midnight, the end of a shift. This was probably his last stop, and not one he had expected to make. He got out of the cruiser, bringing his hat with him, and he was very young.

  I tried to think about what he was seeing: a middle-aged guy in jeans and a sweatshirt who had just walked over and leaned against the rear door on the driver’s side and folded his arms. A young woman standing on the other side of the car, shivering in the night breeze. Neither one dressed for the cold.

  “How y’all doin’?” he asked, approaching me. “Everything all right?”

  “Just stopped to stretch our legs,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Ma’am,” he added, giving Julia a good looking over. She didn’t say anything. “Kind of a bad place to be pulled over at,” he said, glancing into the front seat of the car. “You mind if I look at your license and proof of insurance?”

  “Oh, sure.” I shifted getting my wallet out, and he saw there was something in there beyond the rear window. He took a step back and reached to unsnap his holster. He was left-handed.

  “What is that in your backseat, sir?”

  “A real sick man, officer. My brother.”

  “Could you ask him to step out of the car, sir?”

  “I could, but I don’t think he’d be able to. In fact, we were thinking of taking him in to the nearest hospital. He seems like he’s taken a turn for the worse.”

  I was sure the trooper was thinking about his cruiser, wishing he had stayed in it a little longer. I wondered if he had noticed the shattered front window yet.

  “Folks,” he said, “I’m going to ask both of you to step up in front of your car there, a few feet in front of it, and just wait there for a minute.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  When we were standing in front of the car, he reached inside the Buick and turned on the headlights. I could see him giving the front seat of the car a careful look. I remembered the gun in the glove compartment. Then I heard the glove compartment thump open and heard it close again a moment later, as though there hadn’t been anything interesting for him to see inside it.

  He opened the back door. It was a full minute, more than a minute, before he closed it again, and then he didn’t close it all the way, but just sort of settled it shut.

  “Sir,” he said, “I’m going to ask you to come and get in the backseat of the patrol car, if you would, please. You wait right there, ma’am.”

  It was the first good idea he’d had, but he was going to screw it up, too. On the way to the cruiser, me walking ahead of him, he paused at the doors of the trailer and put his hand on the stock of his holstered pistol.

  “Do you mind showing me what you have inside this trailer?”

  “Is there something wrong, officer?”

  “No, nothing wrong. Would you show me what’s in there?”

  “Not without a search warrant.”

  “Oh,” he said after a moment.

  “Just joking.” I reached for the handle and unbolted the doors and swung them open.

  The trooper looked at the cardboard cartons inside.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s powdered condensed milk.”

  He thought about that.

  “Open one up for me, would you, sir?”

  I had been buying time, but I was going broke fast. I looked down, watching his pale, smallish hand resting on the top of the gun.

  “Sir?” he said.

  I opened one of the cardboard boxes and held it up. When he saw what was inside, packed tight in the clear plastic, he took his gun out of the holster.

  Then he was raising his pistol very quickly with a startled look on his face under the round, broad-brimmed hat. Julia had come around the side of the trailer so quietly I hadn’t heard her until the last moment. She was holding the gun straight out in both hands.

  The muzzle flash blinded me for an instant, but not before I saw the trooper’s head snap back, his hat falling off. I had grabbed the gun, grabbed her wrist so hard the gun fell from her hand. As I did it I saw the trooper start backward into the road, his pistol falling from his fingers, clattering, and his head hitting the pavement with a dull, wet smack. Julia had tripped and sat down, pulling me down with her onto my knees.

  “No!” I screamed into her face. “No!”

  I slapped her. She looked shocked and then began to cry and try to tear away from me. I grabbed her by the arms and shook her.

  “I didn’t have a choice!” she cried.

  “You always have a choice. Always!”

  She pushed hard against me and wrenched herself away. She got up and walked over to the cruiser and half sat against its hood.

  I WASN’T SURE it was worth doing, but I was doing it. We had to expect roadblocks and checkpoints, media saturation, extra state police and sheriff’s deputies going to alpha-bravo shifts to solve a cop shooting, and it was all going to happen fast. Doing what I was doing might slow it down, delay it. But it was costing time in the meanwhile.

  There was a boat ramp about five miles back the way we had come, marked with a sign, an emblem of a fish and a fishhook. She stayed a quarter mile behind me in the Buick while I drove the cruiser.

  It was a paved road off the four-lane highway, and I was grateful for that. It meant no trace of tire tracks. The radio crackled once, a dispatcher calling out to the trooper in the trunk. I turned the radio off and tried not to think about the young woman in the photo clipped on the little gooseneck notepad holder that stuck out from the dashboard next to the steering wheel. She had an engagement ring on her hand.

  The land dropped steadily through dense, wet forest, the access road going straight down to the edge of the Ohio River. I pulled into an empty parking lot with extra-long spaces for cars with trailers. There was one dim light on a post between two concrete boat ramps. Julia pulled in and parked but didn’t get out.

  I popped the trunk on the cruiser and looked inside, holding the trooper’s flashlight. The trooper stirred and groaned. Then he opened his eyes. He looked at me for a time before his eyes focused.

  “Am I shot?”

  “You’re shot in the hat,” I said.

  “What happened?”

  “You tripped and hit your head. Come on, try to stand up and get out of the trunk.”

  I held the gun on him while he struggled to sit up and then climbed out of the trunk. He stood beside the car with his hands cuffed behind him, shivering.

  I led him back into the woods the better part of two hundred yards, bringing one of the blankets from the Buick and a rain poncho from the patrol car.

  “Sit down. I’m
going to handcuff your foot to that tree root you see right there. It’s just for a few hours. I’ll call dispatch first thing in the morning and have someone pick you up.”

  When he was sitting down on the poncho, I unlocked the cuffs and freed his hands and then locked the cuffs again, one ring around his ankle, the other around the root of the tree. I draped the blanket over his shoulders and set his hat on the ground beside him.

  He picked up the hat and stuck his finger through the bullet hole in the crown.

  “Souvenir, I guess.”

  “I guess. How’s your head?”

  He touched the back of his scalp and looked at his hand. It was too dark for him to see if there was blood on it.

  “Seems OK.”

  “All right. I’m off then.”

  As I was backing away he said, “Could I ask you a favor?”

  “Go on.”

  “Today’s my birthday. My girlfriend’s making fried chicken.”

  “You mean your fiancée.”

  “Yeah. I’m not used to saying it that way. My fiancée. She’s making fried chicken.”

  “You want me to call her.”

  “She’s going to really worry.”

  I hesitated, then walked over and pointed the gun at him and took the pen out of his breast pocket.

  “What’s her number?”

  He told me. I knelt, keeping my distance, and put the gun and the flashlight on the wet earth and wrote the numbers on the palm of my hand, glancing at him while I did it.

  I WALKED BACK through the woods to the boat ramp and stood beside some riprap, watching a big barge out on the river fighting north against the current. Even near the riverbank the water moved along swiftly, and that helped what I was going to do.

  I made sure all the windows were closed in the cruiser and got it near the slope of the boat ramp, then drove with the door open and one foot skimming the concrete outside, giving it plenty of gas, and jumped out of the car as it hit the ramp. I had managed to slam the door shut as I bailed out and slid and sat down hard.

  The engine compartment sank, the car nose down, but the rest of the cruiser stuck up in the air. There was enough momentum to carry it out into the current. It rotated slowly while it bubbled and sank.

  28

  THE HOUSE WAS wood frame and looked down into a hollow from a hill behind a crossroads where cars never came anymore. At the crossroads was the tumbled-down bulk of what had been a gas station and general store. Along that side of the road, farther on, were half a dozen shacks even worse off than the store, and a big slag heap dusted with early-winter snow. More recently someone had brought in a house trailer, but it was burned out and empty now.

  A road left the cracked pavement and ran up over the hill. From the house you could see anyone who approached, but no one could see the house from the crossroads. Here and there, if you knew where to look, were holes in the sides of hills, doorways into the earth made for getting out the coal. All the machinery from the mines was long gone.

  The cutoff that led back to the big blast furnace had grown over until it was nothing more than a path through thick woods. I had looked around here one day after coming home from overseas, looked at the furnace that even then was covered in vines. There had been an uncle who came out to the mailbox by the road to talk. He lived in the house for some years after my father was gone and had the idea of putting up siding that looked like brick from a distance. The fake brick siding had come loose over the years, and now it flapped in the wind. There were various outbuildings: an old stable with a hayloft, once used for mules and now a tractor barn and toolshed; the remains of an outhouse; the smokehouse, its roof fallen in.

  The house might have made a good place for a standoff, but the more I thought about it and where it was, it seemed like a bad place to hide. Behind it the land dropped through woods to a broad rocky creek that ran full in winter. A railroad line followed the creek along its far bank. It was through these woods and across the deep creek that someone would have to travel to get out of the place if he couldn’t get out the front way. It was no one’s idea of a good escape route.

  If it were up to me I would have left the next day, but that was impossible. Julia would go outside and listen to the car radio and come back with what they had said about the young trooper and the roadside shooting. There was no way we were leaving there for at least a week, until things cooled down.

  The only heat was from a kerosene stove in the main room. I would wake up at night hearing the train whistle and then hear her moving around the house in the darkness or standing next to a window, looking out through a gap in the makeshift curtains we had put up. The baby-food jar sat on the table, half full of white powder. She would go to it, help herself to more of it, and be even more certain she had heard something or someone outside. I unloaded the two handguns and put them under the kitchen sink.

  That first night, I had backed the trailer into the low stable and uncoupled it from the car. Then, after I’d gotten the stove going in the house, I put a shovel in the backseat of the car and took the car down the lane to where the path went through the woods to the blast furnace.

  After it was done, I stood around blowing on my hands and tried to think of something to say, a prayer, but I couldn’t. In the end I said, “Well, we’ve wound up where we started,” thinking he’d laugh at that. I made my way around the furnace and pushed apart bushes here and there looking for the brick we had scratched our initials on when we were kids, but I couldn’t find it. Coming back I discovered a chunk of rotting wood I could tell was full of foxfire and would glow in the night. I left it for him, thinking that was pretty good, really.

  When I came back she didn’t say anything. The next day she wanted to know where he was buried but wouldn’t walk down there and look at the grave. She stayed in the house, as far from me as she could, hardly speaking, not eating. I wished I had talked more with her about what Fontana meant in her life. I didn’t understand it, and now, with her like she was, it wasn’t the time to ask. And so it went. Two weeks passed, then three.

  One morning I heard her in the bathroom, what sounded like coughing or choking, and sobbing. She was in there for a long time after the sounds stopped, and when she came out her eyes were red. She walked past me and lay down on the pallet next to the kerosene stove and pulled a quilt over her head.

  I waited until the afternoon light was fading before we started down the mountain in the car. She still wasn’t talking, but I thought she had begun to relax a bit by the time we reached the outskirts of the town. At one point I glanced at her and saw she was studying the calendar on the inside cover of her checkbook. She saw me watching her and put the checkbook away and turned toward the window.

  The town was getting ready for a big Saturday night. Away from the old downtown business section there were bright lights shining down on the parking lot of a shopping plaza and young guys in pickups cruising past with their girls. I found a place that sold kerosene and then discovered it was no longer a dry county and bought cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon and two bags of ice. We still needed kerosene to heat the house, but there was plenty of light in the darkness now; in the middle of the second night I had woken up to a blaze of lamps and the rattle of a broken ceiling fan. The power had come on, and I knew Jack had arranged it, no doubt long before we left Miami. The next day I picked up the telephone in the hallway and heard a dial tone, and it made me even more uneasy. The phone and the lights were connections to the outer world I didn’t want. They were a scent, a footprint in the snow, if you knew how to use them—a way to track us.

  Days before, Julia had found my uncle’s longbow and a quiver of hunting arrows hanging on the wall in the stable. They were the remains of a fad, and I remembered he had used the bow for only a season or two before going back to his rifle. On the way out of town I stopped at a sporting goods store and found a new bowstring, thinking this might get her going, give her something to focus on. I bought some cedar target arrows so sh
e wouldn’t have to use the old aluminum ones with their heavy broadhead tips. The four-bladed broadheads were rusty but still razor sharp and not something anyone civilized really wanted to look at. Next we parked in front of a grocery store, but a pair of police cruisers was idling side to side, the cops talking, and we decided to keep driving.

  Later, when the train whistle woke me up, and I was sure she was asleep, I crept into the bathroom, closed the door softly, and turned on the light. At the bottom of the wastebasket, underneath some tissue paper, a green-and-white box looked up at me. On its side it had a cartoon stork with a bundle in its beak and a picture of a happy man and woman, embracing. The woman was holding up a little stick, a test strip, for the man to examine.

  29

  THE NEXT DAY I woke up and she was gone. I had poured some coffee and walked outside to a stump and worked my way through two dozen chunks of oak with the splitting maul, trying to believe the car would come up the road with Julia in it and I would help her unload groceries. After half an hour I went around to the stable and checked on the money. About half of it was missing, along with the trailer.

  The edge of a white envelope stuck out from between two powdered-milk boxes. I opened it and pulled out a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of a birth certificate. The copy had been copied many times over, but the grainy print was clear enough. The words at the top said Florida State Board of Health. My wife’s name and signature were near the bottom, along with my name, typed in, and the date, November 11, 1976. The child had been a girl: Julia. Julia Shannon. I hereby certify that this child was born alive on the date stated above; next to that a doctor’s signature.