Piper

by John E. Keegan

  “With God’s help, we’ll have the Herald up and printing by the fourth of July.” He looked over at the gaggle of employees in the street. “If I have anything to say about it, nobody’s going to miss a paycheck or send their kids to school without new cords and tennis shoes.” I had no idea where a shanty Irishman was going to get the lucre to back that promise up, but it didn’t surprise me he’d said it. Last night he was bawling like the world had ended and this morning he was promising everyone safe passage. Listening to him talk like that gave me goose bumps and reminded me of the Yeats poem he used to recite for us:

  I made my song a coat

  Covered with embroideries

  Out of old mythologies.

  Of course, in the poem, fools stole the coat and paraded it around as if it were their own and Yeats said let them take it:

  For there’s more enterprise

  In walking naked.

  Well, that’s about where we were. Naked.

  When Dad was done, everyone congratulated him and patted him on the back. His reservoir still had something left because his eyes watered as he moved through the staff trying to shake everyone’s hand or give them a hug. Seeing him this way helped me realize what the sadness in his phone call to Seamus meant. His job had become his life, so had these people, and poof, it was gone. We were either a gaggle of fools or charter members of Tom Scanlon’s Optimist Club for wanting to believe it was all going to be as easy as he said it would be, but if I let myself just focus on his steady blue eyes and the easy wave of his inky black hair as he walked through his people I was transported too. Some folks blabbered, showing you everything inside of them, and it was easy to tell that the pieces spewing out were nothing but trinkets and costume jewelry. Dad shuttered his innermost thoughts and, like the sand working inside the oyster, added value to them, so that when he finally shared them you knew you had experienced something precious.

  When he reached the edge of the crowd, he saw me and winked. I thought we were going to have a chance to talk, but Louise Mead was clinging to his arm. “Did you hear what he said, Piper?”

  “Yeah, that’s great news.”

  Because Louise pretty much controlled his whole right side, there was no way Dad could give me a hug so he stuck out his arm and brushed me around the back and shoulders like we were in-laws that didn’t care that much for each other. Somebody else cut in and hugged him, leaving just me and Louise standing there.

  “Have you seen your grandpa?” she whispered.

  “This morning?”

  “This morning, last night. They’re looking for him.”

  I felt panicky and looked up at Dad to make sure he wasn’t listening. “Maybe he went fishing or something with one of his buddies.” I knew I was way off on this one—his buddies were dead, it wasn’t fishing season, and he’d left without his dogs—but it was the first thing that flashed into my head. “He’ll show up. You know how he likes to wander.” Worrying about Willard had always been Mom’s job.

  There was a commotion over by the entryway. Two firemen emerged from the building carrying a stretcher. The heavyset one with a helmet pushed up on his forehead signaled to Dad. “Scanlon! Come here.”

  Dad disentangled himself from the crowd and stepped over the yellow tape. I followed. He’d said Scanlon, hadn’t he?

  The two firemen were kneeling down next to the lump in the middle of the stretcher, picking at it, and shining their lights on it. “I guess we weren’t as lucky as I told you last night, Tom.”

  Dad tried to push me around behind him, but I could see everything. The body was in a fetal position with the fists in front of its face, the skin shriveled onto its emaciated frame, and no hair. Around the waist I could make out a leather belt that had been grafted onto the torso like a strip of pepperoni. I didn’t want to look, but at the same time I couldn’t not look. Something in the back of my mind registered the thought that I was glad Mom had died by water and not by fire. The feet were crossed and I noticed a blackened metal medallion embedded into the shoe leather. I recognized the medallion. I’d seen it on a pair of Frye boots with stacked heels.

  “Lookit here,” one of the firemen said, holding a string of shells he’d pulled away from the neck.

  Dad knelt down next to the stretcher, practically touching the corpse, his shoulders caved and his back rounded. He put his hands over his face and I could see from the rocking of his body that he was weeping for the second time in less than twelve hours.

  “Who is it?” the fireman asked.

  The first time I’d seen those boots and the pukka shell necklace was in the hallway of the hospital just outside the emergency room where they had Mom. They belonged to someone I thought I hated, someone it was clear I’d never understood. Staring at those sunken, browless eye sockets, a whole new and equally gruesome picture was starting to form and my heart sank. Willard hadn’t just killed the town’s newspaper, he’d killed its nobility.

  “He’s the owner of the paper,” I said glumly. “John Carlisle.”

  I only half-assimilated what Dad was saying to the employees after we crossed back over the yellow tape because my head was buzzing with fear of what was going to happen to Willard. This wasn’t just the nursing home; this was hard time. Without his dogs, he’d die. Maybe we could prove he was insane or temporarily deranged. I could testify as to his memory lapses and the time warps. My God, he was the gentlest man I knew, he crossed streets to help people carry their groceries home. Didn’t there have to be malice aforethought to convict someone of murder? Whatever malice Willard might have once possessed had spilled onto the asparagus fields a long time ago.

  The women on the staff were bawling on each other’s shoulders, dabbing their eyes, buckling at the knees, and stealing glances at the ambulance that had come to take away the remains of John Carlisle. Even the TV people seemed hesitant to aim their cameras directly at the corpse. I was feeling weak too, both out of shock for John Carlisle and fear for what his death was going to do to my family. He’d already taken Mom. Now, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he was going to take out Mom’s father as well. I couldn’t let it happen. The axe was still in midswing. There was time to pull Willard’s neck off the block. If only I could find him.

  The staff followed Dad in a ragged formation across the street to Marge’s while I peeled off in the general direction of school, where I was supposed to be for a second period trigonometry exam on the properties of cosines and arccosines. Nobody at the paper would miss me; they weren’t used to seeing me until after school.

  A familiar black four-wheeler, with a coat of splattered mud like a waterline across the lower portion of the side panels and wheel covers, was parked in front of our house. I peered in at the seats as I went by.

  Dr. Miller was sitting at the kitchen table with Willard, who had a blanket draped over his shoulders and a cup of hot cocoa and a plate with a short stack of toast in front of him. His shoes and pants cuffs were as muddy as Dr. Miller’s four-wheeler.

  “Where you been?” I yelled. “I’ve been scared to death for you.”

  Willard blinked, bowed his head, and sort of pointed with a clump of fingers toward Dr. Miller.

  “What’s the matter? Why won’t he talk to me?”

  “Sit down,” Dr. Miller said. I scooted out the chair at the end of the table, keeping an eye on Willard, who was nibbling on his toast but leaving the crust, something I’d never seem him do before. “I found him out on Horse Heaven Highway sitting under a tree with his dog. I gave the dog some chow and put him downstairs with the others.” Dr. Miller’s voice was strong and slow and forced me to put the brakes on my panic. “Think he’s had a little exposure. His temperature was down a bit. Right now, he needs blood sugar.”

  This was going too slow for me. “What were you doing, Willard?”

  Again, Willard just fidgeted with his toast and muttered something.

  I looked over at Dr. Miller.

  “He’s gonna be okay af
ter some food and rest,” he said, blanketing Willard’s forearm with his hand. “Told me he was going to Bonnie Holliday’s, didn’t you big guy?” Willard rubbed a spot on his chin real hard and nodded in agreement. Not again. This was nuts. “Going there for Kitty’s birthday,” he told me. That was a new one. Usually, it was to fix the Studebaker.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  Dr. Miller stretched his long arms toward the ceiling and clasped his hands together for a yawn. “’Scuse me.” Then he put his hands behind his neck and bent his elbows back. “He didn’t say much else really. Didn’t have to. I could see he’d had a rough night.”

  It sounded as if Willard had kept his mouth shut. Maybe the confusion was cover. He always seemed to snap out of his little spells when it was time for supper. I’d even wondered if it wasn’t sometimes a way for him to give his mind a recess. “He’s done this before.”

  “His wanderings are legend.”

  I made a counterfeit chuckle. “I guess they are.”

  Willard had passed the first test. Dr. Miller was at the fire and even he hadn’t put two and two together. There weren’t very many people in Stampede as smart as Payton Miller, although Dad was certainly one of them. If Dr. Miller was fooled, maybe everyone else would be too, at least until Bagmore’s testimony received official sanction.

  I’d already decided on the walk home what I had to do, worked out the itinerary in my head. The only unknown was when I’d be able to put the plan into action, but now that Dr. Miller had brought him back, it could start as soon as Willard finished his cocoa and toast. It had to; we didn’t have that much time. While Willard blew on his cocoa, Dr. Miller made small talk about the dogs, which seemed to draw Willard out of his daze as he interjected simple but disconnected comments in response. Dr. Miller and I nodded intently each time Willard chimed in as if he were explaining the laws of thermodynamics. I asked Dr. Miller if there was any special medicine Willard needed and he excused himself to go out to his four-wheeler and brought back a brown plastic bottle with pills.

  “I use ’em for animals that are going to be shipped,” he said. “Give him half a one tonight after dinner. It’ll help him sleep.”

  “These are okay for humans?”

  He laughed. “You think I’d poison your gramps?”

  Willard and the dogs snuggled on the bed while I searched through the closet and drawers for everyday clothes and stuffed them into his hard-shell Samsonite with the broken hinges. There was room for a few luxuries too, like the Burlington Northern brakeman’s hat one of his bowling buddies had given him with Willard’s name stenciled on the side, a pack of Roi Tan cigars, and the cache of family pictures. I made him write the combination to the safe on a page in a magazine and, on the third try, I was able to pull out the brown paper sack with his stock certificates and bonds. I threw a clean pair of khaki pants onto the bed together with dry socks and a pair of shorts turned blue from laundering them with the darks. Willard saw no need for separate loads, told me it was wasted water. “Put these on,” I said.

  While he changed into his clothes, I rifled through Dad’s room until I found the keys to the Skylark, which had been stored in the spare garage over at the Socket Street house since the fender bender with Buzz Little. Dad had naively hung them on a high nail in his closet, probably assuming they’d be out of reach for a five-foot three geriatric delinquent, but this time Willard had a taller accomplice. I packed my own stuff into a duffel bag, favoring the more expensive things like sweaters over T-shirts that had been given to me as souvenirs from Sodality Retreats and Antique Car Festivals. I also threw in my diary, three Anais Nins, Portrait of an Artist, half a box of Tampons, and The Second Sex, which I’d purposely never given back to Rozene so I’d have an excuse for her to call me. I didn’t know when, if ever, I’d be back so these humble possessions would have to suffice as the contents of my time capsule. When I went back down to the basement, Willard was sitting on the oval rug next to the bed, surrounded by his dogs, still pantsless.

  “Come on, Willard! You gotta get dressed.”

  He looked down at his hairless, milky legs. “I forgot.”

  “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Don’t leave this room. And do the pants.”

  The garage doors sagged on their hinges and I had to lift them over the dead weeds in the crown between the wheel troughs to open them. Somebody must have used the car since Dad put it in storage because the blue tarp was in a heap on the floor. The smashed fender had been pried away from the tire. The whole place smelled like a litter box. A spider web the size of a continent had been spun from the outside mirror and antenna to the wall of the garage. I looked around on the dirt floor and found a brick with mortar stuck to one edge, held it above the spider web, and dropped it. The strands crackled like static electricity as the brick ripped through, hit the wheel of the hand mower, and bounced against my ankle. “Ouch!” This was beginning to feel like how I imagined Purgatory, nothing ever working right.

  The garage was so narrow I had to turn sideways to slip myself through the door and into the front seat, where I was greeted with the smell of cigar ash. The key with the square shoulders slipped easily into the ignition and the lights on the instrument panel came on as I turned it clockwise. Although I’d never taken driver’s ed, Mom had let me drive on her sketching trips into the countryside, apparently more fearful of missing a good landscape than of me missing a turn in the road. The engine labored, coughed, sputtered, and despite my pumping on the gas pedal, settled into a steady rhythm of futility. Err … err … err … err … err … err.

  I turned the key back to center and just sat there in case it was flooded, trying to imagine what Dad and the staff were doing and how much time I had. Marge had probably fixed them her iceberg lettuce and tomato salad, maybe spaghetti and meatballs, and toast sprinkled with Parmesan and garlic salt. When I tried again, the engine sounded like it was pulling old taffy the way it bogged down and quit. “Come on, you sack a shit!” I yelled, slapping the dashboard, making the little plastic hula girl swish and sway her hips. I hadn’t figured on the damage inactivity could inflict on the spirit of the internal combustion engine.

  I finally put it in neutral, climbed out, and braced myself between the back bumper and the garage to get it moving. The troughs in the driveway guided the wheels like the gutters of a bowling alley. To get over the hump in the “Y” where the driveway intersected the alley, I had to dig in and lift on the bumper. Then the car suddenly became lighter and I had to run to catch up. I jumped in and steered the car across a compost pile and through a couple of plastic garbage cans that tumbled out of the way like tenpins before I popped the clutch and the engine shuddered into being. Dirk had taught me how to start a car by compression, something he’d seen in American Graffiti.

  Willard didn’t make a very good fugitive. Contrary to my instructions, he was out in the back yard with one of the dogs when I pulled up in the Skylark. I left the car running and ran inside for our belongings. My duffel bag was heavier than Willard’s suitcase, probably because of all the books. We’d already loaded the four dogs into the car when Willard reminded me of their food, so I ran back to the basement, nested the rubber food dishes, and shoved them into the top of an open bag of Purina Chow. Willard had left the brakeman’s cap on the apple crate nightstand and I put it on. It was a little tight, but it fit.

  I thought of letting Willard drive until we were out of town, but he was still so dreamy and absent-minded I feared he would space out and get us into another wreck. Anyway, he wanted to ride in the backseat with the dogs, who were panting and gawking around as I counted them again through the rearview mirror. When I put my hand on the gearshift to put us in drive, I had a pang of conscience like a bone caught sideways in the throat. I remembered how often I’d regretted that Mom hadn’t left a note. It would have helped so much to have that connection.

  “Willard, stay here, I forgot something. And I mean in the car.”

  In the
kitchen I found a flyer for the St. Augustine’s Bazaar, turned it over, and wrote on the back:

  Dear Dad,

  I don’t want you to get all freaked out by this, but Willard and I are going away. Please don’t come searching for us. I’m almost of legal age and certainly will be by the time anyone finds us. I’m sorry I didn’t turn out as planned, but you and Mom have given me a good start and for that I will always be thankful. My timing is either the worst it can be or the best it can be. But I thought better to get all the crap out of the way at once. Even though you seldom show it, I can only guess at how much agony you’re in. I can’t tell you everything right now, but someday I hope I can, at least by letter. And don’t worry about Willard, he has his dogs, four of them (one died). Sorry to keep this from you too. I’ll be thinking of you always.

  Love,

  Piper

  PS. You’re a whale of a journalist and I’ve been proud to touch the raw material that you chiseled into statuary.

  I put the note in his bathroom sink in case he didn’t go into the kitchen for a while, and took a deep breath that caught at the edges going down. The note to Dad must have reminded me of something else I was leaving behind, because I went upstairs to retrieve Mom’s brass hand from my nightstand before heading out the front door.

  It was just bad luck that Mrs. Norman was out on her parking strip jockeying a recycle bin into place as we pulled out and I turned my head the other way as we went by. “Duck, Willard!” With the brakeman’s hat, maybe she wouldn’t recognize me. The escape would have worked better at night, but we didn’t have that luxury. The gathering at Marge’s wasn’t going to last all day. The Bagmore story would spread and, without the newspaper, Dad had no place to go but home. I watched out the rearview mirror to see if Mrs. Norman was writing down the license plate number, but she just stared after us and I hoped she didn’t have a good head for numbers.