Whippoorwill

by Joseph Monninger

  And I also thought: Danny Stewart is my first kiss. He is my first kisser. His lips are the lips that I kissed first. I had no idea if that was a good thing or not.

  He took my hand when we walked to the car and he held open my door. Wally didn’t even budge, he was so tired from the swimming. The car smelled like wet dog, but that was okay, and Danny kissed my neck, right near the collarbone when I slid in on the passenger side, and I reached across and popped his door lock so that he could just come in and not fuss with his keys.

  “You’re a gentleman,” I said when he put the key in the ignition. “I appreciate that.”

  He shrugged and smiled. Then he started the engine and shifted into first, but his hand came over and grabbed mine, let it go to shift, grabbed it again, then let it go. I looked out the window and felt close to crying, close to laughing, close to a thousand things. I thought of my mom’s statue, the way the wind made it move in tiny pulses, the gears of the old bicycles clicking it awake and asking it to move.

  Sixteen

  FATHER JASPER SAYS every time a dog is euthanized because it misbehaves, it is a mark against humanity.

  Father Jasper says female dogs are better for a first-time dog owner, because female dogs tend to be more docile. Not always. But usually.

  I thought of Father Jasper when the state trooper pulled up behind us.

  I saw the car in the side-view mirror. In an instant about a dozen things occurred at once. I glanced at Danny and he glanced at me, and then his eyes flashed up to the rearview mirror. His body coiled; his hand reached for the gearshift and he pumped the clutch, and the engine that had been running smoothly all day suddenly burst into a loud roar and we took off. His phone buzzed again and again. I had been half asleep, half reclining against the window, but in a heartbeat that was over. I saw the lights shimmer on in the cop car, and a siren started, a squawk at least, and Wally turned on the back seat and looked at whatever was behind us.

  “Danny?” I said, because I couldn’t put it all together.

  We hit sixty in no time. Then the speedometer really began to climb, and I knew we were going too fast. Gravel pinged against the bottom of the car, and the blues, Muddy Waters, kicked out a driving, traveling beat, and it felt like we were in a movie, only not. This was real, dead real, and Danny kept moving his eyes from mirror to mirror, his hands expert on the gearshift and steering wheel.

  We hit seventy-eight miles an hour going around a turn. The back fishtailed a little, but then it straightened. Danny chewed his gum like a maniac. Wally sloshed around in the back seat, suddenly agitated and picking up on the new speed, his ears cocked high, trying to sort things out.

  “Stop it, Danny!” I yelled.

  Because the road was twisty. The road wasn’t going to let us stay on it, and I thought of my mother, and of the way she went off the road into a bridge abutment, and everything compacted and seized in me all at once. We could not travel at the speeds we were going and hope to make it much farther, but maybe that was what he wanted. As I thought it, he geared down and he ran the next stretch at close to a normal speed, but the cop car ran right on our bumper and I saw the Smokey Bear hat on the cop, and the lights flashed and flickered and made everything impatient.

  “Danny?” I asked. I couldn’t control my voice.

  A second cop car appeared in front of us. The cop had parked his vehicle perpendicular in a roadblock, and my mind scrambled. This is not happening, I thought, because the day had been fine, the day had been peaceful, and we had a couple dozen photos of the statue, and Wally had been great, and we had danced and kissed, and now a cop leaned against his car with a shotgun pointed at us. Another cop car tried to keep us pinned from behind, and Danny didn’t seem to question what was going on. That was the strangest thing of all, so I turned around and looked, and Wally barked, and then Danny, somehow, reversed past the cop car behind us, rolled the steering wheel like a bumper car, and he shot off across a cornfield.

  It was not the same cornfield we had walked in earlier when we stopped to take a photo at the forty-five-degree latitude sign, but it possessed the same stubble, the same ruts in the dirt, and I heard the car straining to gain traction, and I heard the cornstalks banging against the undercarriage, and not a bit of it made sense. The tires couldn’t grab and the car was not made for this kind of travel, and then Danny stopped and jumped out of the car and began running.

  He left the door open. Wally sprinted after him.

  I couldn’t have stopped Wally if I wanted to, if I had known what was going on. Wally thought it was a big game, and I watched as he bounded after Danny and kind of ticked Danny’s foot and Danny took a header into the dirt. Two cops ran after Danny, one fat and waddling, the other skinny and young, and the young one caught him, kept his gun on him. A third cop—I hadn’t seen the third one arrive, but he crept across the last fifty yards of cornfield with his gun raised at shoulder height—and shouted, “Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get on the ground.”

  It took a long time, relative to everything that had happened, to realize the cop meant me. That I was in the car. That I had to get out. And that a cop I had never met had a gun pointed at me and he seemed ready to use it.

  “Getoutandgetontheground, getoutandgetontheground, keep your hands up, getoutandkeepyourhandsontheground.”

  Over and over. And I still didn’t get that he meant me. I looked at him and he looked at me, and I saw he was young, not much older than I was, and his left hand held the wrist of his gun hand and the whole thing wobbled. He was scared. I saw that as plainly as I saw anything, but then Wally came bounding back, not sure what was going on, and I glimpsed that Danny was spread-eagle on the dirt, two cops sitting on him.

  I held up my hands like they do in television, and I opened the car door with one hand, then lifted it again. I moved my hands fast, so that he could see I didn’t have a pistol or any kind of weapon. Then I fell forward, crawling out, and the cop ran toward me. I saw his feet kicking up dirt as he ran, and it was all crazy, all nutty. Wally dodged the cop and ran to me, thinking we were playing somehow, and the cop covering me ran forward and stopped directly next to my head.

  “Do not move!” he enunciated.

  DO, space, NOT, space, MOVE.

  He had the gun pointing down at the ground, ready to use if he needed it. Veins stuck out along his neck, on his head, everywhere.

  “It’s the Stewart kid,” one of the cops on top of Danny yelled. “Confirmed.”

  “Put your hands behind your back,” the cop above me said.

  I did as I was told.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked. “Are you doing this because of the vines?”

  “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  He knelt in the center of my back. Hard. He deliberately put his full weight on me, and I felt my face go into the dirt. I tasted dirt on my lips and tongue. He buckled a plastic cuff around my wrist.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” the cop on my back said. “You have the right to be represented by an attorney.”

  “What is this about?” I asked, my voice broken and shaky.

  He kept talking, giving me my rights. I turned my head enough to see the two cops lifting Danny and bum-rushing him across the cornfield. They weren’t happy. Danny’s feet hardly touched the ground, and when they did, he stumbled. The cops seemed ticked off about that, too. They shook him between them. You could tell they wanted to grind him down, but the law prevented them from being as abusive as they wanted to be.

  Another cop showed up as the first one finished reciting my rights. They both helped me to my feet. Then they pushed me against Danny’s car. They patted me down.

  “You people are freaking crazy,” I said to them.

  “What’s your name, miss?” the cop who had held the gun on me said. The gun was gone. I was glad about that.

  “Clair Taylor.”

  “You spent the day with Danny Stewart?”

  “Yes.”
>
  “We are going to take you up to the patrol car and put you inside. Is that your dog, ma’am?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he friendly?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll call animal control for him. Right now we’re going to have to let him be.”

  “He’ll get lost. He’ll come to me if you let me call him.”

  “Ma’am, I don’t think that dog is your biggest concern right now.”

  “Where are you taking Danny?”

  “We could leash him,” the second cop said. “Will he come over if we call him?”

  “It depends.”

  “Here, boy,” the cop said.

  Wally looked at him, considered, then kept on sniffing, his legs shooting him forward into the brushwood along the edge of the river.

  “We’ll let someone know he’s here,” the one who had put his knee in my back said.

  “He’ll get lost,” I repeated. I said the words slowly so they would sink into these two dimwits.

  “Can’t help it right now.”

  They dragged me off the same way the other two cops had dragged off Danny. It was surreal; my toes only brushed the ground. We followed the car tracks back up to the road. Another police car had arrived and I caught a glimpse of Danny sitting in the back of the first car, his hands obviously behind his back. He had his head down. I tried to catch his eye, but they moved me along fast, and before I knew it I was in the back of the other cop car. It smelled of puke.

  “Is this all about the statue?” I asked, because I couldn’t think of anything else.

  “We’re taking you to the station now,” the driver said. He was a big guy with a nearly shaved head. I wondered why it was cops who always wanted to shave their heads. If I were the chief of police in any town, the first order I would give would be that all the cops had to have average hair length, not this skinhead crud that this guy wore.

  We drove off. The last thing I glimpsed in the field was Wally sniffing along the edge of the river. He ran like a dog free at last with nobody to bother him and not a thing to do but whatever came into his head.

  Seventeen

  SOMETIMES LIFE is like a television show. Sometimes you find yourself living through something, and you realize that the people doing the things to you are acting out a script they have seen on TV, and so are you, but neither one of you can say anything to stop it and you both go along in a crazy sort of dance.

  That’s what it felt like in the back of the car. That’s what it felt like when we arrived at the station in minutes, and more cars whizzed past us, and a bunch of cops closed around us and nearly lifted me from the car.

  They don’t have enough to do, I thought.

  It was overkill. The cops liked parading around and having something big and important to do, only it wasn’t big and important, I wasn’t big and important, and Danny was definitely small potatoes. But as they moved me inside, a female cop suddenly appearing at my side, I thought of Danny’s eyes, his flashing look back and forth to the mirrors, and I recalled how quickly he had begun to drive hard. He understood something the cops understood, but that didn’t add up, and I kept asking, as they pulled me along a small corridor, why they were doing this, what had we done, what was going on.

  We went into some sort of holding room, decorated exactly as it would be on a TV show, with a small table and a couple of metal chairs, and little else. The female cop patted me down again, but she didn’t try to be friendly, or share girl power, or anything like that. When she finished patting me down, she made me sit and she walked out and they locked the door. I started to cry, but it was a strangled kind of crying, filled with frustration and annoyance, and it ticked me off that they couldn’t simply tell me what was going on.

  After a while, maybe a half-hour, a new officer came in and the woman police officer came with him. She leaned against the wall. The new officer brought a pitcher of ice water and he poured me out a glass. Then he nodded at the woman officer and she went behind me and cut my hands free. I rubbed my wrists—just as they do on TV shows—and I reached forward and drank a glass of water. I drank two. The cop motioned that he was willing to pour me another, but I shook my head.

  The male officer smiled. He was older than anyone else I had met there, and he had short gray hair and a clean-shaven face, and he looked to be in good shape. He had gray-blue eyes and deep crow’s-feet around both eyes, so that when he smiled, he reminded me of a cowboy. I could tell he was trying to be calm, deliberately so, in order to defuse the entire situation. It was time for the talk, the TV show leveling between characters, and I sat and watched and knew how it had to start.

  “So, you’re Clair Taylor? Is that your name?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m Sheriff Hazleton. Have you been given your rights, Clair? Do you mind if I call you Clair?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Have you been given your rights?”

  “I think I’m too young for that.”

  He looked surprised. He smiled. His cowboy eyes crinkled.

  “You can always be apprised of your rights, Clair. But you are officially a minor, it’s true, because you are under eighteen, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “We have Danny next door. He seems very concerned that you not get involved in this.”

  “In what? Would somebody tell me what’s going on?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “We took the vines off the statue. Is that what you’re talking about?”

  The cowboy officer glanced at the woman officer. She didn’t say anything.

  “What vines?” he asked.

  “My mother has a statue here and it was covered with vines. Danny and I took the vines down.”

  Now he looked puzzled. He adjusted himself in the seat, uncrossing his legs and leaning forward a little.

  “What statue would that be?” he asked, examining me closely.

  “It’s a statue of a fly-fisherman. It’s on the Bolston town line.”

  “The bicycle statue,” the woman officer said to the cowboy. “The one with bicycle parts.”

  “Ohhhhh,” the cowboy officer said, nodding, finally putting it together. “Your mom made that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was covered with vines and you and Danny cut away the vines? Now I get it. Sorry. I was confused.”

  “Isn’t that why you chased us?” I asked, and I realized, saying it aloud, that it didn’t make sense as an explanation.

  “No, is that what you thought?”

  I nodded.

  “We chased you because Danny’s father was badly hurt. Did you know that?”

  “What? No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Danny’s dad. Elwood Stewart. He’s in the hospital.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “His skull is fractured. Badly fractured, actually. Someone hit him with a heavy object.”

  I stared at the cowboy officer. Then I looked over at the female officer. They both watched me closely.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t understand which part?”

  “I don’t understand any of it.”

  “Elwood Stewart—you know Elwood Stewart, don’t you?”

  “He’s my neighbor.”

  “And Danny’s father?”

  I nodded. They went at things so slowly, it drove me crazy.

  “Someone tried to kill him,” the cowboy cop said. “Looks like he was in a fight and someone hit him with a car battery. We’re fairly certain it was Danny.”

  “You’re making this up.”

  “Did you know about it?”

  “Know about what?”

  “That Danny had crashed a car battery into his father’s head?”

  “Know about it?” I repeated dumbly.

  “Did he inform you that Elwood, his father, was injured?”

  The cop enunciated carefully. Cops seemed to enunciate a lot.
/>   I shook my head.

  “The battery was nearby on the kitchen counter,” the female officer said. “And someone brought it down on the father’s head. It looked like they had a heck of a fight, but I’m guessing most of that was the father’s blood. From the looks of it, the father didn’t manage to bruise Danny much.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Danny wouldn’t kill anyone or even try to.”

  “I asked if Danny told you about the fight. He left his dad in pretty rough shape. If you knew about it and didn’t report it, you could be in a lot of trouble, Clair. You could be an accessory to a crime.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  I turned and threw up on the floor then. Just like that. No warning, no preparation. The cowboy cop pushed onto his feet and hopped away. He glanced at the female officer. She went out to get cleaning materials, I guessed. I threw up again.

  “Feel better?” the cowboy cop asked after the female cop cleaned things up. I couldn’t help thinking it was typical that a woman had to clean things up while a man stood by. But maybe it was a question of rank.

  “I guess.”

  “Danny says you didn’t know anything about it. Is that true?”

  “How do you know what Danny said?”

  “Two officers are interrogating him. I just talked to them while we cleaned up in here.”

  “I don’t know what any of this is about.”

  “Sure you do. You know Danny, right? And you know his dad. Sometime last night it seems Danny and his father got in a fight. You didn’t hear anything over at your house? You live next to him, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I live next to him, but I didn’t hear anything.”

  “Do you ever hear them fight?”

  I shrugged.

  “Do you?” he asked again.

  “Sometimes. But that doesn’t mean Danny did it.”

  “No, but if I don’t miss my guess, he’ll be confessing soon. That’s the catchy thing. It’s a hard thing to carry around an action like that. To not tell anyone, not even his girl.”