by Steve Amick
The sheriff stood resolute. “You can’t do this.” He shook his head and removed his sunglasses, folding them and slipping them into his breast pocket. “Not that I don’t understand your grief, sir.”
How could he? Von himself hardly understood it. The radio in the sheriff’s patrol car crackled and he leaned back into the open window and scooped up the handmike. “Yeah! Hatchert here.”
Von could hear Janey Struska on the other end. “Down at the bootlegger’s place,” she said. “Possible break-in. Probably just kids, but maybe you ought to—”
“Hang tight,” Hatchert said into the mike. “I’ll handle this. Call the real estate guy, whoever’s got the listing, tell him to meet me there. Do not enter.”
“Right,” she said.
Hatchert threw the radio mike back through the window, swung the door wide and slid in behind the wheel. Before he pulled out, he jabbed his finger toward them. “You people just sit tight, please. I know this is a very difficult time for you, but there’s a right way and a wrong way. I’ll try to send someone over to . . . retrieve the body.” He roared out of there, the cruiser bouncing back down the rutted road. They watched him go, the plume of dust as he rocked back up onto the paved road, the lights and siren wailing into the distance as he roared south on 31.
“Okay,” Carol said. “Keep going.”
Von wasn’t sure how to proceed. He felt like he was underwater, every movement an effort. Maybe they shouldn’t be doing this. He just wanted to lie down in the tall grass and take a breather. He looked at Santi, Santi looked back. And then they heard, again, the crunch of gravel.
At first, he thought the sheriff was back, the unlit light bar of the cruiser bobbling along above the line of tall grass, heading back up the dirt path toward them. But when the car rounded the last turn and pulled up close, he saw now it was just Janey.
“Probably ought to keep it short and simple, Mr. vonBushberger.” She was staring past him, at the crate with the baby. “It’ll take him twenty minutes to get down there, five to figure out nothing’s shaking, maybe ten to speed back pissed off. So you probably want to get it all done in a half an hour, if you could.”
He understood now what she had done, calling in a false report in order to divert her boss. Pretty risky behavior. She could easily lose her job, and for what? She hardly knew the family. He thought maybe Brenda knew her slightly when they were kids, but that was it. No special connection—just someone who understood the place, the people. He said, “Thanks, Janey.”
She nodded, waved off his thanks like it was nothing, gave a sad little smile, and put the cruiser back in gear. He wanted to tell her he’d help back her if she decided to run during the next election, that he knew several other prominent local men who would support her campaign, but this wasn’t the time to talk about that. He had a grandkid to bury.
57
HATCHERT BARRELED TOWARD HER from the opposite direction, flashing his lights for Janey to stop, and they pulled alongside, window to window, blocking traffic on the main drag, right in front of T.G.I.Fudge. The power windows, she could tell from his grimace, weren’t moving fast enough for his liking. But he didn’t speak until they were all the way down, probably because he wanted to point his finger at her, jabbing it so close it crossed into the window of her own cruiser. For a long moment, he said nothing, just jabbed and set his jaw.
“We’re issued sidearms, you know, Hatchert. You don’t have to make one with your finger and go ‘Peeoww! Peeoww!’”
“Your resignation. My desk. First thing in the A.M.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Not going to happen.”
Hatchert pulled the finger back a little but kept pointing. “You want to challenge me, Struska?”
“What do you think I’ve been doing?” She thought about that, reconsidered. “No, that’s not exactly true. I haven’t been doing it nearly as much as I should.”
“Fine,” he said. “Then we go in front of the council and the whole thing gets ugly.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think you want to do that.” Reenie Huff and her grandson were crossing on matching razor scooters in front of her cruiser, squinting in at her, and Janey smiled and waved. She didn’t do it to illustrate what she was about to say to Hatchert, but because that’s just what she did. It was part of her job, really. Wave to people and say hello and show them everything’s the way they think it is. The grandkid lagged behind, not as adept as Reenie, and so Janey gave him his own separate wave, as encouragement, before turning to face her boss again. “You really want to do that? Put it in the hands of people who’ve known me all my life, people I went to high school with? People who know Von, went to high school with him, or with his kids—remember: the father of that baby you’re so riled up about? These are people who come to Von every year for good fruit and pies. You think you stand a chance in that arena? Really? What element of this equation are you missing—you never had one of his pies? That it?”
There was a deerfly buzzing around in the cruiser now. This is what happened when you let the hot air in, damn it. She lifted her trooper hat off the shotgun seat and shooed the fly out the window, hoping it would cross over into Hatchert’s vehicle.
He was silent, picking his words, and they were still blocking traffic, but she told herself it was time to keep her mouth shut and wait the other person out. Let the silence do the negotiating. She’d said enough. It was out there. Let it sit there. She did that, biting her tongue. And she wondered if this was something she’d picked up by hanging around Roger Drinkwater lately. Of course, for his part, Roger was more chatty and sarcastic than she’d thought him to be, back when he was her coach, so maybe it was a fair trade. Maybe they were rubbing off on each other some.
Meanwhile, Hatchert was starting to squirm against the vinyl, gripping and ungripping his steering wheel. “Look,” he said, and in that one word she heard him start to backpedal, hedge the thing, turn Mr. Politician, “forget about the resigning, okay? Fine. But just—in the future—you’re really going to have to learn to do things my way.”
She laughed. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I am. I thought for a while I might have to, but I really don’t think so now. Not so much. Look, I’m from here, okay? I’m a local. I’m not going anywhere. You, on the other hand . . . I don’t know how long you’ll be visiting, but you’re just passing through.” With that, she put it in first, out of there.
JULY INTO AUGUST
58
AFTER THE FUNERAL, Von spent most of his time at the county hospital. It felt as if he could describe every piece of junk food in the vending machine by heart. Not just the brand names, but the exact wrinkles of each package, the tiny and alarming “sell by” dates just visible on some. There was that one sun-faded Zagnut in particular that he felt he’d known all his life.
He wasn’t sure what he should do there. Marita was handling the being-in-a-coma part, and his son was handling the watching-Marita-being-in-a-coma part. Carol’s duties worked out to be mostly as liaison officer: she went for coffee and did the crossword puzzle and tried to make Jack more comfortable when he fell asleep with his head on Marita’s bed, the rest of him half on a chair, half on the floor. It also seemed to Von, judging by Carol’s breath, that part of her job might also be to sneak back on the cigarettes, but he didn’t think this was the time to chide her about that.
The doctor, though not making any promises, seemed fairly convinced Marita’s chances were good. Her nonbrain injuries were under control, and he’d been consulting with a neurologist down in Ann Arbor who thought it fairly likely that she would eventually come out of the coma.
Even Marita’s own father was practical enough to force himself not to abandon his crew and his responsibilities back at the orchard. He came in for a couple hours every evening; if no one was heading back to the hospital at the time, he would drive himself, illegally, on the old International Farmall with the sprayer still hitched to it on account of it was such a hairy bitch
to monkey with, getting it on and off—putt-putting along at twenty miles an hour, tops, way over on the shoulder. Von knew, after several days of this, that someone at the sheriff’s office must have gotten wind of this road hazard by now but was turning a blind eye. He expected he had Janey Struska to thank for that, too.
On the fifth day, Carol told him to go home. Then, when that failed, to get the hell home, and finally, quietly, to get the fuck home. “Listen,” she said, doing that thing she did on occasion to ensure she had his full attention—standing very close, looking up into his eyes and literally grabbing his balls, squeezing him through his pants, not painfully but not exactly lovingly either—“Are you listening to me, Hubert vonBushberger?”
“Yes.”
“Good: like HELL if you think I’m going to stand out in the snow watching the bank auction off the place because you decided to have some sort of ‘inner turmoil’ at the height of the season. Think again if that’s your plan.” She kept her voice low, level, but it was clear it was time to go home and check on things there.
“Well,” he said, trying to save a little face. “I guess I could use a shave and a shower . . .”
TO HIS SURPRISE, everything was in fairly good shape back home, considering. The small stand had been repaired, repainted, and dragged back into its original position, in line with the road. As a precaution to any future idiots who might plow into the shoulder at seventy miles an hour, someone had laid out an arrangement of old tires, painted a bright orange, as homemade traffic cones. They wouldn’t physically stop cars, of course, but they would at least serve as warning that you were about to hit something significant. Brenda told him that Miki had done it personally: “He’s way behind on his slides, on his research, but he wants to help.”
“Well,” Von said, “I appreciate the pitching in.” He figured she could interpret that as both of them pitching in, if she wanted to relay his thanks to the guy that way. Or not. She told him the bug count was holding, still low for that time of year, so she’d instructed the spray crew to hold off that week. Von grunted, only vaguely aware what she was telling him. To a certain extent, it still just all sounded like a muted noise in his ear, like distant traffic. “Sounds fine,” he said. “Whatever you decide . . .”
She walked him over to the porch to show him the books for the week, a thing they normally did at the kitchen table, facing each other, like they were two regular business associates with appointments and contracts. She explained the table was too cluttered and so sat him down on the porch swing, and then plunked herself down, right up against him. It felt nice. It seemed like he hadn’t touched another person all week, though he certainly must have—he must have hugged Carol and Jack back at the hospital. Brenda showed him in her binder the expense line and the gross profit line on the two road stands, the shipped product and the local, and the projected line for the net and the following week. It all seemed about average. If he hadn’t known there’d been an accident, if he was just skimming through the accounts, he probably wouldn’t be able to tell anything had happened here, just from the numbers.
“I suppose,” he said, sighing, “I ought to go out to the back fields with Santi tomorrow, see if it’s time to shake the last of those Royal Anns.”
Brenda shook her head. “Actually, we went ahead and sent in the shaker trucks yesterday.” She bit her lip. “I know, I know— It’s not my call to make. But I had Miki look at them, too, and some of Santi’s senior guys, and they all thought I was right, and well, we just thought we should make a decision and not bug you.”
This was surprising as hell—she’d never before made a decision that held that much financial significance. Not on her own. And it wasn’t that she wasn’t qualified—hell, how qualified was he? He’d never had a fraction of the horticultural education of those two, Brenda and her blossom boy. It was just that she’d never shown any inclination to make decisions like that. She maintained the books and kept it all organized, charted patterns and offered suggestions, but she never made actual decisions. Let alone handing out orders to an entire crew.
To show her it was fine, she’d done good, he pulled her closer, patting her arm, and kissed her forehead. He asked if she smelled fish.
“That’s Miki,” she said. “He’s cooking dinner.”
When they went inside, he found dinner was something that looked like a lot of little cocktail hors d’oeuvres, only maybe less appetizing. Miki was still bustling around, laying out the finishing touches. With his glasses and white apron, he looked like he was working in his lab. Brenda explained it was sushi, which was a little surprising, given that she’d just said he was cooking. But he didn’t object. He sat down with his daughter and her fiancé and they held hands and said grace, during which he mentioned, by name, his son and his son’s wife and there was a little pause at the end, right before he said amen, where he asked—not out loud, just in his head—for a blessing on the little grandkid who hadn’t quite made it.
Miki began serving and explaining what each item was. After about the third description, Von held up his hand and said, “Okay, that’s okay. I think maybe they’ll slide down better unexplained . . .”
It all seemed very quiet, like half the house had blown away in a big windstorm. Because there were only three of them, he wasn’t in his usual chair at the head of the table, but in the middle, where they sat bunched up. From this unfortunate position he could see the phone, hanging on the wall in the kitchen, and he kept thinking it was going to ring. Brenda said, so low she was almost whispering, “Please eat, Daddy.” She hadn’t called him that in maybe a billion years, way back sometime when he wore his hair long, just over his ears so it poked out of his cap like a fringe, and she used to ride around on his shoulders wherever she could. Any chore he had to do around the place, anything that didn’t involve stooping down a lot, he’d scoop her up and perch her up there and he’d feel her little fingers hanging on to that dopey hair he had, like the handles on the little plastic wheeled pony she rode around the cement slab in the big barn—the only substitute they had for a sidewalk around the place—and she’d say, “I steer you, Daddy,” tugging on those hair-handles, and he’d say, “Yes, you do, pumpkin. You sure do.”
He looked at her now and he understood what she was saying—the words at least—tapping his plate with her fork, and he looked down at the food spread out before him. It was sort of pretty, he had to admit—the colors and the precision of it. Very orderly and artistic, he had to give it that. And if nothing else, a real nice gesture on the boy’s part. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for doing all this, Miki.”
Miki smiled and raised his index finger.
Oh Christ, Von thought. Guy’s going to make another goddamn toast. It’d be that night they announced their engagement, all over again. But he was just reciting some quotation, probably some ancient Oriental: “Every family has bad memories.”
After letting it sink in, Von said, “True enough,” because it actually was. It helped a little to think of it from that perspective. This was all weather. Bad weather, but still, the kind of thing that had visited families as far back as centuries before Christ, even way on the other side of the world, where some wise man, probably with the one long gray chin whisker, cooked up this saying. That’s how families worked, everywhere, all the time. No one was exempt.
“The Godfather III,” Miki said. “Michael Corleone says it.”
Okay, so it was Mario Puzo, not Confucius. Von ate the sushi. He cleared his plate and tried to smile about it. The guy had put some time into the meal, so why criticize? Granted, it wasn’t like he’d been slaving over a hot stove, but he imagined there must have been some time put into it. Some of the doodads were rolled up and stuff. A tiny sliver of carrot was on top of one of them—that had to take at least a couple minutes, just that alone.
After dinner, after pie and the dishes, after he convinced the two of them they didn’t have to keep him company, that he was fine, the kids finally retired to
Miki’s camper. Von sat on the porch, rocking for a while, then went inside and took down the old family albums his wife kept stacked up on the player piano that never worked. Several albums down, he found the ones that covered his own childhood and he looked closely at the shots of his dad as a man in his twenties and thirties. Von clicked on the piano light for better inspection, trying to recall, in his mind, all the photos he’d ever seen of Al Capone.
He closed the albums and squeezed them back into the pile, right where Carol had left them, then dug out the earlier ones, the ones with baby pictures of his dad, and shots of his grandfather and grandmother, Karl and Dor, courting and in wedding garb and posed in front of a toboggan, looking young and fun and full of fire.
In the professional studio baby photos of his dad, Fred, his lips seemed full and bee-stung, his cheeks jowly, but come on—all babies looked a little like Al Capone, didn’t they? More accurately, wasn’t it more a matter of Al Capone looking like a baby?
There were candids of his dad with his grandparents, a blobby bundle in the arms of Grandpa Karl, sitting out on the well cover that was still there, straight out the back of the house. There was nothing definitive to be found in these albums—frankly, Von didn’t feel like he looked like either one of them—and he knew for sure he was related to that baby, his dad, by blood. Unless, of course, there was some big secret he didn’t know about his mom as well. Like maybe she’d slept with an Eskimo behind his dad’s back.
He decided this had probably been a bad idea, looking at these pictures. Rather than making him more sure of himself, looking at them made it all cloudier. He got out the first one again and flipped to the school shots of himself and his siblings: there they were, lined up in a row, him (fourth grade), his sister Harriet (second grade), his sister Francy (first grade), and his brother, Emil (kindergarten), who died of pneumonia about two years later, probably from swimming in the pit vat, which they weren’t supposed to do. He looked at all the eyes. Then at all the noses. Then at all the mouths.
