by Cutter Wood
“Were you drinking?” I said.
His face froze for a moment. “Nah, man. I mean I’d have a beer, but, nah, not like that.”
“Somebody I talked to said you were drinking pretty hard. They said after she disappeared, you ended up sleeping in a shed down on Fourteenth Street.”
“Who said that?” He leaned toward me, searching my face, then suddenly backed away. “Nah, man, I wasn’t drinking. She just thought I was going back to my old ways, hanging out with the wrong sorts of people. That’s what always aggravates me about females. They knew who you was when they started dating you, then why do they want you to change?”
For a while, neither of us said anything. I thought of Erin at home in Iowa, wondered if we had become destranged, wondered what we would talk about when I returned.
“Me and you,” he said. “We have some sort of repertoire.”
He looked up at the clock.
“Hold up,” he said. “We’re about to run out of time, and I need to ask you something.” He began reading the inside of his wrist. “Can you get me A Feast for Crows? It’s book four in that Games of Thrones series.”
“I’ll see if I can find it. You like those?”
“Yeah, bro. I’m about to the last book.”
“You know that he’s still writing them?”
His forehead wrinkled. “For real?”
“Yeah, there are two more he hasn’t finished. People are starting to think he doesn’t know how to end it.”
Bill sat silent for a moment. “Well, that’s ’cause he doesn’t know how to kill people.”
8: All the Lives
There were a lot of questions that I never found the answer to in Florida—sometimes because no one could tell me, often because there wasn’t one. At some point during that year, for instance, it must have occurred to Tom Buehler that the course of his life had been permanently altered. Where was he when the realization came? Skimming the pool at the motel? Eating cereal and sliced grapefruit? Driving the bridge to Cortez? And what did he do? He and Sabine had long been husband and wife in name only. By that fall, he had his own girlfriend. It had been an insult that Sabine carried on her affair at the motel, and it was tempting to think Tom would have been relieved by her disappearance. In some measure, perhaps he was. However, a lover’s indifference so often engenders only more love; it seemed just as likely Tom was devastated by her loss. A little while after the disappearance, beside a road on Anna Maria, a man discovered a suitcase full of photographs of Sabine. Questioned by detectives, Tom freely admitted he had put it there, and the newspapers proceeded to make some to-do over it. The event did seem important somehow, but it was difficult to say why. Eventually, everyone forgot about the abandoned suitcase. There wasn’t a law against throwing things away.
I wished I could have been present during Robert Corona’s brief cruise down Fourteenth. How it must have felt to swing out onto the road a few hours short of dawn, to punch the gas and roll down the windows and run the cool night air. Even a life of regular incarceration is punctuated by moments blind with the sense of possibility, and I wondered if Corona, in the quarter mile between the green light and the siren, had been allotted such a feeling of freedom.
But most of all, I was captivated by the relationship between Bill and Sabine. Had she spun her hair between two fingers when she worked? Did they ever dance? Did he know her middle name? Did he know why she was afraid of the dark? I knew that Bill had lied to me, but I knew, too, that even if he’d told me everything he remembered, it would hardly answer all the questions I had.
I had talked to one of the state’s attorneys about the case. Sitting at a table stacked with papers, he’d held a pen between his hands and looked out the window. “Even when they confess,” he said, “you still don’t get the truth.”
I left Florida that Tuesday, taking a plane from Tampa in the first hours of the morning. As a boy, the sight of the earth falling away beneath my feet had delighted me, but that day it only gave me a feeling of vague unease. I leaned my forehead against the plastic oval, as I always do, and watched the tarmac blur and disappear. The landscape flattened; the people shrank. First, the cars and the houses lost their definition, then whole neighborhoods became indistinguishable from one another. For a long time, a certain hill or highway or power plant remained apart from the mass. Soon, though, that too became another grayish fleck among many, and I was struck acutely by the sense of all the streets I would never walk, all the rooms I would never enter, all the lives not mine to live. I thought of the apartment in Iowa that no longer felt like my own, and of the woman waiting there whom I no longer knew how to love. Then with a fluttering of white, we burst through the clouds, and I closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
The arguments of lovers are such a constant that it’s easy to notice only the most egregious examples—the shouted dispute in the gas station parking lot, the door slammed in the adjoining apartment, the bruised cheek, the child outside the courtroom waiting to learn who’s won his custody. But it seems to me that some large part, perhaps the greater portion of this violence, since undoubtedly, even in its most mild form, it is violence, is carried out in low voices, or maybe without words at all, almost unconsciously, in the turning of a shoulder at the kitchen sink or the casting of a glance.
During that trip to Florida, as I traveled from the sheriff’s office to the prison, as I spread the newspaper open on the passenger-side seat to review the day’s fresh horrors, the fear that descended upon me was not of the cursory cruelty of human affairs but of my own part in it. When I considered the death of Sabine Musil-Buehler in its specifics—when I thought, for instance, of the blouse she chose the day she disappeared, the radio still tuned to her favorite station in the stolen car, the blood that indicated how the body, almost like a piece of luggage, had been pulled from the back seat—I recoiled in horror. I had no interest in the murder; I knew that I could never commit such a crime. But I recognized a kinship, however faint, between that act and the uncaring words that had already become a habit in my own relationship. I didn’t see myself succumbing to the rage of Bill Cumber, but I knew I was capable, as my grandfather had been, of the offhand comment, the exasperated sigh, which over time can be just as lethal as physical force.
That day, as the plane reached its altitude, I felt the need to write down an account of exactly what had happened between Bill and Sabine. I could use this story as a sort of Venn diagram, it seemed to me, isolating all my own worst inclinations in the overlap and then excising them. But the story I wanted to tell could not be reconstructed from the few facts assembled by the sheriff’s office. It had little to do with my note cards or my interviews. A love affair makes sense only to the lovers, and so I wanted to tell the story as Bill and Sabine might have told it, a simple story, by necessity an act of the imagination, about two people who tried, and failed, to be in love. As the Sarasota reporter had explained to me, if I wanted the truth, I would have to make it up. At that height, with the peninsula laid out below, it wasn’t difficult to begin.
Seen from above, Florida emerges from the continent like the appendage of an amoeba: brown and green with a border of near-white sand. The clouds sweep across it so slowly they appear not to move at all. On the Atlantic side, the ocean floor drops off steeply into a color almost black, but on the western flank, the water remains shallow and blue far out into the Gulf of Mexico. Around the middle of the peninsula, there is a break in the line, and a two-tongued channel pushes inland forming the deepwater bay of Tampa, and here, right at the bay’s mouth, is the island of Anna Maria, shaped like an elongated comma, a lump of sand and dirt in the north, trailing behind it a long drawn-out tail. Running the length of the island, almost like a spine, is a curving two-lane road, and though much of the land is taken up with houses and pools, there are also palms and banyans and oaks, and great violet shadows of bougainvillea.
The sun is beginning to rise on a few pale-yellow buildings. The breeze moves softly in
the shade, carrying with it the sour reek of the canals. Having watched the whole night through, a hawk sits in a pine above the motel and dozes, and the first pelicans appear in ungainly formation on the horizon. In a rustling of nylon, two women walk past, and the first truck goes by, stirring up the sand and dust that had settled on the road in the night. The sun begins to burn on the rooftops, and one by one the air conditioners grunt and spin to life in the windows of the motel rooms. Now the people in the rooms begin to stir. A girl listens to the waves breaking. A father urinates quietly, so as not to wake his family. A woman lies in bed with the curtains drawn and tries not to think about work. For a minute, all is stillness and calm, and the guests teeter on that edge between the liquid beauty of their dreams and the solidity of life.
In the years since the motel was built, the island has been caught up in a series of construction booms and busts, each of which has left its mark. Gone are the cinder-block bungalows with corrugated roofs and screened-in porches, and with them, the retired fighter pilots standing watch over a barbecue while their wives mix pitchers of concentrate. In their place have arisen a progression of vacation homes: the 1980s deco, with its tube-steel railings and glass brick windows; and next door, the terra-cotta Tuscan villa with a smoked-glass cupola and automatic hurricane shutters. The newest houses sport a lighthearted Gothic style: aluminum roofs and pastel siding, and white finials that taper into fine, pike points. Now, in early 2008, with the latest construction frenzy nearing its peak, the road by the motel is jammed, even though the sun has been up only an hour, with cement mixers and pile drivers and flatbeds loaded with thirty-foot palms, the rental cars of tourists, and the contractors’ sparkling new pickups. From this stream of pickup trucks, one diverges, cuts across the road, and pulls into a space outside the motel.
Through the blinds on the glass door, the sun throws a series of slanted stripes across the objects in the motel office, revealing on its surface a room almost indistinguishable from a thousand other motel offices. There is a desk full of papers, a calendar with an image of footprints on a beach, a varnished plywood board with rows of brass keys hanging from nails. On one wall, a black plastic credit-card machine is mounted, and on the desk there is a large gray computer. In a corner, a rack lists to the side beneath the weight of brochures: Captain Kathe’s boat trips, Fish Hole miniature golf. In a cage by the office door, the only sign of eccentricity: a green parrot, its head tucked beneath its wing.
This parrot is too apt. I recall that Poe, in his first conception of the raven, envisioned a parrot, and it is so patently a literary device that I would reject the idea out of hand if I hadn’t once seen him. He is dappled green, the same dappled green of the forests that were his homeland. His eyelids are chalky and gray. In the final minutes of sleep, they twitch restlessly. How old he is, what images hurtle through his brain in that avian dark, we can’t say with certainty any more than he could. But if he is a bird, he must sing. When Tom Buehler steps down from his pickup truck, the parrot wakes with a start and launches into the monologue that will carry him through evening: nursery rhymes and snippets of conversation, and thanks to a persistent nine-year-old from Queens who stayed here last summer, the occasional murmur of “Asshole, asshole, asshole.”
No great leap of the imagination is required to fathom the feelings of a man for his wife’s parrot, especially if the marriage has soured. He doesn’t give the bird a glance. “Asshole back at you,” he says, and passes by. Tom wears a faded polo, white shorts, and tennis sneakers, and after a hunt for his keys—they were in his pocket all along—he unlocks the office door. The room remains cool and dim from the night, and for a few minutes, in that pleasant half dark, he sits with his eyes closed, not yet prepared to think about anything.
It seems that both too much time and not enough has passed when the mailman knocks at the office door. He cups a hand to the glass, smiling as he peers in. From his bag, he pulls a few handfuls of catalogues and envelopes, and plods off to the next delivery. There are announcements of patio furniture sales and one-time offers at new low interest rates; solicitations for abandoned dogs, for hungry children, for rivers and trees. Among these is a letter in a plain white envelope. Addressed to Tom in rounded, almost girlish script, it has no return mark. On the back, a faint blue stamp bears the imprint State of Florida, Department of Corrections.
Tom doesn’t open it. These letters have been coming every two weeks for the past year. They’re from a man he once hired to do odd jobs around the motel. Three days he worked with Tom, and on the third, the deputies arrived. With all the guests watching, the man was arrested for arson. The letters all say the same thing: I need help. I need a friend. I need money. Tom is a kind person, but he’s also a businessman. Who knows how his clientele was affected when the cruiser pulled into the lot. Without even bothering to crumple it, he drops the letter in the trash.
Most of the guests have already gone off on their adventures by the time Sabine arrives that afternoon in her convertible. She is a woman who prefers her mornings to herself, and at this hour, her hair is still damp from the shower. In her left hand, she carries a mug, of coffee or maybe of tea, which she tries to keep from spilling as with the right hand she maneuvers a cardboard box from the passenger seat. If she doesn’t radiate happiness and contentment, she at least seems to have about her an openness to the day’s sensations. She bumps the car door closed with her hip and grimaces at the swirling dust kicked up by the traffic. The bird shrieks her name as she enters the office, as she lowers the box to the floor, as she raises the mug to her lips, and he does not stop shrieking until she has gone over to the cage and said a few words to him and filled his dishes with seed and water. Tom is nowhere to be seen, but the letter is still there in the wastebasket.
She opens it, and her eyes follow the words, but she is not really reading. She is thinking the toilet in room 12 is still leaking, the cable bill is past due, she’s supposed to meet Ellen for lunch. When she gets to the end of the letter, she returns it to the trash; it has done little to stir her compassion. By the time she reaches the storage room and unpacks the box of toilet paper, she has forgotten everything but the man’s name: William J. Cumber. But as the day goes on, the letter resurfaces in her mind from time to time. Something in it, the care with which it was written, the abjectness of it, or perhaps something in how casually she had dismissed it, keeps her from forgetting it entirely. At the end of the day, she is working at the computer when suddenly she stops and pulls the letter out of the trash again. She reads it more slowly this time, and when she is done, she gets a page of letterhead and writes the man a kind but firm explanation of why the motel will be unable to help him. Dear Mr. Cumber . . .
She sends this letter Tuesday morning. On Friday, the mailman leaves a plain white envelope addressed to Sabine Musil-Buehler.
9: Furlough
Bill knows it’s morning when the man two cells down begins to clear his throat. Soon, the steel door at the end of the hall clanks open, the guard’s sneakers squelch along the linoleum corridor, and one of the other inmates, an Arkansas boy, begins whistling “Yankee Doodle.”
The window in Bill’s cell is three feet high and about the width of a spread palm, and slowly, as if thinking to itself, the sky within that rectangle swirls and brightens. The window looks out on the exercise yard and beyond it to another cellblock, and by sitting up in bed and pressing his face all the way to one side, Bill can see a tree out on the boulevard beyond the prison fence. More often, with the bedsheet wrapped around him, he looks up at the sky, a prism of blue across which planes pass silently a few times an hour. Puddle jumpers to Sarasota, someone told him, but that’s just hearsay. They could be going anywhere.
The halls resound with the shouts and mutters of men as they file in a line, one by one, toward the cafeteria. With half a cigarette tucked behind his ear, Bill follows along. At his table, he moves the food around his plate, listening as this or that man reads aloud from a letter. He has taken
the cigarette down from his ear and is turning it in his fingers when someone slaps him on the shoulder and says he has mail.
The letter has already been opened by the guards, and when he holds it up, the ragged edge of the slit envelope is illuminated by the fluorescent ceiling light. Most of the prisoners have finished their meals, and the room is loud with talk and the clatter of plates and cups. Even though he’s sitting down, he can’t get his eyes to focus on the small, neat handwriting. The words are jumbled on the paper. He finally pushes his tray away and smooths the letter out over the tabletop, then moves his fingers along beneath the lines as he reads.
“Who wrote you?” his cellmate says.
“Your sister.”
“Shut up.”
When he finishes, his eyes return to one phrase. I wish there were more I could do.
His cellmate pulls the envelope across the table and inspects the handwriting. “A lady.”
From the prison in St. Petersburg to the motel is about an hour and a half, and from that day forward hardly a week goes by that the mail truck doesn’t carry one of his letters with it over the bridge and across Tampa Bay.
When her second letter arrives, he rushes through it once. When he comes to some noteworthy moment, a particularly kind word, a revelation of some aspect of her personality, he calls out to his cellmate and reads the passage aloud. Having arrived at the end, he scrutinizes the signature—looking for what, he couldn’t say—and satisfying himself with its authenticity, he returns to the beginning and rushes through the letter again. He reads it more times than he can remember, each time gleaning a little more meaning, and each time causing his cellmate to stare out the window with a little more studious disinterest.
