Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘I thought it was you!’ Donny was beaming, his vast features – fat cheeks and a wide grin – almost engulfing his tiny nose. As Donny stomped towards him, Michael thought, He must weigh 250 pounds, remembering the beanpole kid of his childhood. Donny was six foot three but seemed shorter now. Was it the extra weight? Maybe the hair, which had been cut as short as the crew cuts they had sported as kids. Back then they had been inseparable, which meant that Michael was happy enough to wallow now in the soft soap of reunited buddies, though as far as he was concerned there was a piece or two of grit in the lather.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Michael, pointing at Donny’s rod, ‘you’ve become some sort of “fly” fisherman. I never thought you’d switch from worms.’ Donny’s face changed expression. As he started to speak, Michael interrupted him. ‘Don’t you say how sorry you are. I couldn’t stand it.’

  Donny shook his head. ‘But I am sorry. You all right?’

  ‘I’m okay. To tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet. It all still seems a little unreal.’

  ‘I bet it does,’ said Donny, laying his rod down flat on the back of his truck. ‘Believe me, none of us can believe it either.’

  Michael wanted to change the subject, so he pointed at the bridge. ‘Water’s high.’

  ‘I’ll say. You seen the Junction?’ Michael nodded and Donny shook his head. ‘I’ve been telling them for three years they’ve got to do something about it. They’ve scheduled a rebuild.’ Then he hissed, ‘For 2006.’

  Michael stared at the wooden bridge while thinking of the larger, concrete one downstream. ‘It’s got cracks and water stains and signs of spalling.’

  ‘What’s spalling?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ he said dryly. ‘Just concrete buckling where the internal reinforcements have corroded. I bet the piers are worse than the deck since they’re sitting in the water. If they move, the beam may go and the whole thing will collapse.’

  ‘Maybe you should be telling them instead of me.’

  ‘It wouldn’t take that much for them to go.’ By which of course he meant something extraordinary would have to happen – a grocery truck, heavy-laden, skids and hits the railing. Or a speedboat, perversely going upriver instead of staying in the lake, strikes the pier full on. Or . . . who knows, who can predict a disaster made terrible precisely because it is so unpredictable? And the bridge gives way, entirely unexpectedly, and against all odds – which are of course phenomenally remote. Risk analysis was a ‘discipline’ with which Michael had enjoyed some contact, as in: Mr Wolf, all things being equal and the political situation in the Sudan attaining equilibrium, would you say the odds of the Utaki Bridge collapsing within two hundred years were less than 0.5%? It had always struck him as a futile exercise, for what did 0.5% mean? To his impatient way of thinking, either disaster happened or it didn’t; either a bridge collapsed, a causeway slithered into the sea, a river flooded and drowned a city’s thousands, or . . . it didn’t. Simple enough, but then, he wasn’t in the business of reassuring insurance companies.

  He looked at Donny. ‘Is money the problem? I thought the economy was booming. I thought even Oscar Peters could get rich from the internet.’

  Donny looked contemplative. ‘Oscar died, you know. Choked to death on a chicken bone.’

  ‘Jimmy Olds said so.’ There was a pause, then Michael asked, ‘So how have you been?’

  ‘Good,’ said Donny. ‘Brenda’s fine, kids are okay, though they’ll be teenagers soon enough. Still, the kids in town don’t seem to smoke dope the way we used to, and thank God there’s not much hard drugs here. Who can get mad at them for drinking beer? You’ll have to come by and see us all. How long you here for?’

  ‘Funeral’s Tuesday, then I got to get back. I’ll try and come round tomorrow. If not, I’ll be back again.’

  ‘What else did Jimmy say? They got any idea who did it?’

  ‘No.’ He told Donny about the swastika. When he’d finished Donny was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Ever since they discovered that one of McVeigh’s accomplices was a Michigan Militia member the authorities have started seeing paramilitaries behind everything.’

  ‘I thought the Militia barely existed any more.’

  ‘It doesn’t. But there’s a splinter group up here. Though how you have a splinter of a splinter is beyond me.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘You remember Raleigh Somerset? You know, the kid in Fennville who went to school here for a little while.’

  ‘Oh, the dumb guy with the big ears.’ He remembered him from junior high. Raleigh was bigger than the rest of them, even bigger than Donny, but awkward with it and very stupid, given to bragging about the exploits of his father and brothers in almost moronic fashion: his daddy knew the President, his brother had flown on Air Force One. Stupid lies, like the fabrications of a grade school braggart, entirely unconvincing to an audience who possessed the scepticism of early adolescence. Even Michael’s father, usually scrupulous not to comment on his students, found Raleigh preposterous. ‘Imagination is a good thing to have, but young Raleigh kind of overdoes it.’

  ‘That’s him,’ said Donny. ‘The one who almost drowned.’

  ‘Ronald saved him,’ Michael interjected, so Donny wouldn’t feel he had to avoid the name of Raleigh’s rescuer.

  ‘That’s right. Ronald jumped in and pulled him out of the channel. Anyway, Raleigh moved to Detroit and joined the Militia down there. He got in some trouble; I heard they had him before a Grand Jury. Then he moved back here – he’s got a place out by Walkerville now, not far from the Half – and started holding meetings. He doesn’t call it the Militia any more; he calls it the Michigan Marines.’

  ‘Membership booming?’

  ‘Of course not. I mean, honestly, nobody admits to liking the government, but what exactly does that mean? Almost everything’s state or local government, and it’s kind of hard to get very worked up about the Post Office. But a bunch of them get together out by Spring Valley, and it’s Raleigh who organizes things. To be honest, I think it’s mainly social. If they’re not out in the woods playing war games they’re sitting around drinking beer.’ Donny looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘I don’t think the swastika has anything to do with them. I mean, why would a bunch of rednecks want to hurt your dad?’

  ‘Jimmy asked me if Pop might have been a Jew.’

  ‘Your father?’ Donny looked surprised. ‘I thought he was Episcopalian. You used to go to church when we were kids.’

  ‘Sunday school. He’d only go once in a while – Christmas, Easter, that kind of thing. It was my mother who cared about it.’

  ‘Yeah, but he did go. He wouldn’t have if he’d been Jewish, would he now?’

  Michael shrugged. ‘He’d have been hard-pressed to do much about it if he was a Jew. I haven’t seen any synagogues around here lately, have you?’ Michael looked out across the flood plain and could just make out a duck blind that sat halfway across the vast basin of grass and water. ‘I never knew a lot about my father’s background. He didn’t ever talk about it. Not that we talked very much the last few years.’ He fell silent at this. Does a letter count? he wondered, remembering the last surprising communication from his father, just a few months before.

  ‘That’s no more your fault than his. You’d have got close again.’

  Again? He and his father had never been close. Michael sighed. ‘I feel bad I’ll never know. Anyway, all I really know is that he came from Detroit, and couldn’t wait to get out of there.’

  ‘Well, whatever he was, he wasn’t a Jew while he was here, was he? If his own son didn’t think he was it doesn’t seem like the Marines would either.’ Donny took off his waders and threw them in the back of the truck, then retrieved his work boots and put them on without bending down, standing there with the laces untied. ‘It’s good to see you, Michael, but I got to get going or there won’t be anyone home to look after the kids. Try and come by tomorrow. Please?’r />
  ‘I will,’ he said. ‘But relax, I’ll be back soon anyway.’

  ‘What’s soon mean? Christmas? You going to spend the new millennium night with all of us here?’ Donny laughed.

  Michael shook his head. ‘No, I’ll be back before then.’ An image of Cassie on the beach entered his head, wading into Lake Michigan wearing oversized basketball shorts and a T-shirt, laughing at him laughing at her. ‘You’ll see me this summer,’ he said, fully aware he’d said Christmas to Nancy.

  ‘Good,’ said Donny, climbing into the truck. He started the engine and put it in gear. As he started to roll away he stuck his head out and suddenly stopped the truck. ‘Michael, have you been out to Sheringham’s yet?’

  ‘I’m on my way back from there. Why?’

  Donny looked uncomfortable. ‘So Nancy told you, right?’

  Donny was the last person he was going to confide in. ‘Yeah, she told me all right.’

  ‘That’s okay then. See ya.’ And he drove away in a spray of gravel, as Michael thought, Yes, everybody, I know she’s back, and then turned and looked for fish under the bridge.

  4

  ON SUNDAY A detective named Maguire came up from Muskegon to conduct a formal interview. They sat in the living room while Jimmy Olds hovered, a little embarrassed, in the kitchen.

  Michael had not expected someone out of Raymond Chandler, but Maguire still came as something of a surprise. The surname matched an expectation of ethnicity derived from the television of Michael’s youth – Kojak, Banacek, Mannix – but there seemed nothing particularly Irish about the young man who now sat across from him. He was trim and had the build of a lightweight boxer – long hanging arms, almost simian, wide shoulders and a dancer’s tiny tapered waist. He wore a blue blazer, white shirt, spanking yellow tie, and tasselled loafers; the effect was natty, and reinforced by his hair, which was straight and neatly styled with a part on the left side. Although probably only half a dozen years younger than Michael, he looked just out of his teens, for despite the addition of a neat moustache his face was youthful and unlined, and his expression managed to be alert and polite at the same time. He looked the kind of young man you would happily allow to take your teenage daughter waterskiing. Waterskiing? thought Michael, imagining the snobbish snickers of his east coast friends and his east coast ex-wife. Yes, waterskiing. Fuck them.

  Maguire taped the interview, and began with the kind of formal questions – ‘Please state your full name and current address,’ – which made Michael feel as if he were a suspect. When he asked about Michael’s whereabouts on the night of the murder, Michael got out the stub of his plane ticket and showed the dated stamp in his passport. There was a faint but perceptible relaxation in Maguire’s manner.

  Maguire said, ‘I was hoping to get a better sense of your father. Where did he come from?’

  ‘Detroit, though I’m not sure what part of the city. He moved up here a few years after the Korean War. He served in that.’

  ‘Is there family still down there?’

  ‘None that I know of. He was an only child. His father left when he was a boy and his mother died after he came back from Korea. He never mentioned any cousins. I think his mother had a brother but he never talked about him. I’m pretty sure they weren’t in touch.’

  ‘So he didn’t have any family at all?’

  ‘No. We just knew my mother’s family.’

  ‘Was your mother local?’

  ‘Grand Rapids.’

  ‘And there is still family there?’

  He thought of his myriad cousins. ‘Lots of it. They were lumber people, then lawyers.’ Why am I telling him that? Slow down, he told himself, since Maguire’s questions were coming right on the heels of his replies.

  ‘Did they get on with your father?’

  Meaning did they dislike him sufficiently to murder him, twenty-odd years after his wife, their relative, had died? ‘Well enough, I think.’

  ‘How did your mother and father meet?’

  ‘My mother’s parents had a house on South Beach – that’s the other side of Stillriver Lake. There’s an association, sort of a compound, with Grand Rapids people who built summer houses there a long time ago. My mother would come up here every summer with her folks. She met my father at a Yacht Club dance, one thing led to another and they got married.’

  ‘And that was okay with her parents?’

  Michael looked at the youthful detective. The man is only doing his job, he told himself. Don’t get mad. ‘There was nothing unrespectable about my father. He just didn’t have any family.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Maguire. ‘But he does sound a little unusual.’

  Michael shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t put it quite that way.’

  ‘Would others?’

  ‘He always got along with people. He was friendly, and he liked living here.’ He remembered once asking his father why he hadn’t wanted to teach in a bigger school, a bigger town. His father had snorted. ‘Why eat crackers if your pantry’s full of dinner rolls?’

  Maguire stared at Michael, then asked, ‘Yes, but did he fit in?’

  What are you, an anthropologist? ‘There was nothing eccentric about him. He was simply a little – and I stress the word “little” – reserved. Even with us.’

  ‘Did he get on with your neighbours?’

  ‘He did in my time; I’d be surprised if that had changed. You must have spoken to them.’

  ‘I have.’ Maguire took out a small spiral notebook from his jacket and flipped through its pages. He spoke rapidly as he looked at his notes. ‘The Jenkinses say he was the ideal neighbour. They heard nothing the other night. Billy Decatur said he’d known him all his life – his grandmother used to live there. He and his wife were asleep. Harry Montague and his wife were at a crafts fair in Mount Pleasant and spent the night there.’

  ‘Who is Harry Montague?’

  Maguire looked surprised, then pointed with a thumb in the kitty-corner direction. Oh, thought Michael, the Mean Man’s son.

  Maguire continued, ‘Benny Wagner had two sets of guests staying in his B & B; we’re still checking them, but they were couples and seem ordinary enough. Same goes for him. The Bogles, well,’ and he looked up and grinned, ‘they’re something, aren’t they?’

  Michael said, ‘We never had any trouble with any of them. Believe it or not.’

  ‘Actually, I believe you. In any case, all the brothers were in Baldwin that night. We’ve checked their story and it’s true. Their sister was the only one here. There are others I talked to if you want to hear about them, but I’ve done the neighbourhood pretty thoroughly, and it looks clean to me.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Michael said, thinking he hadn’t asked for any of this.

  ‘Tell me something,’ asked Maguire. ‘Were you close to your father?’

  ‘Well, not recently. I hadn’t seen him in six years.’

  ‘Was your brother closer to him than you when you were kids?’

  ‘Yeah. He was my father’s favourite.’

  ‘Did you mind that?’

  ‘No.’ Are you being a psychologist now? I only minded after she died. I was her favourite.

  ‘Six years is a long time not to see your father.’

  ‘I work overseas. It’s not easy to get back.’

  ‘Still,’ Maguire said, and looked at Michael, letting the word hang in the air.

  ‘There was no bust-up. We just didn’t see each other. I called him once in a while – on his birthday and Christmas.’

  ‘Was he Jewish? I’m only wondering because of the swastika.’

  ‘Jimmy Olds asked me that already, and I told him not as far as I know. He wasn’t especially religious, but he sometimes went to church. He certainly never said he was a Jew.’

  ‘Your brother told me categorically your father wasn’t Jewish. Does that mean you might have thought he was?’

  ‘It never even crossed my mind.’

  ‘You’re separated, right?’


  Gary must have told him that. ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Are you still in touch with your ex-wife?’

  ‘She’s the one who called me about my father. Gary rang her because he couldn’t track me down.’

  ‘Your brother indicated that your wife didn’t seem to like your father very much.’ Thanks, little brother. What else did you tell this guy? ‘She barely knew him.’

  ‘Still, did she have any grounds for disliking him?’

  ‘Only the grounds of social superiority.’ Michael laughed for the first time. ‘She was from the kind of family who thought that the slaves should be freed in order to become domestic servants. That’s not the kind of attitude that would endear her to my father. He disliked all sorts of things, but he was never a snob, and he never liked labelling people. When folks started publicizing their roots – you know, “I’m proud to be Polish”, that kind of thing – my father was contemptuous. He thought the whole point of America was to forget about that stuff.’

  ‘Was he prejudiced himself?’

  ‘Well, like I say, he didn’t like groups or labels. But he wasn’t a Nazi if that’s what you’re getting at. He didn’t put the swastika on. There was a black family in town. My father always went out of his way to be nice to them. A lot of people did the opposite.’ Yeah, and what did that really count for? He remembered a stand-up comic in New York announcing, ‘Some of my best friends are niggers . . .’ The audience had sat in stunned silence, until a black man near the stage started laughing. He looked at Maguire. ‘Which are you thinking he was anyway, a fascist or a Jew?’

  ‘I was hoping you’d tell me. What about the Michigan Marines?’

  ‘What about them? Until yesterday I’d never even heard of them.’

  Maguire nodded. ‘How would your father have felt about them?’

  ‘He’d think they were a sick joke.’

  Maguire’s eyes widened. ‘And your brother?’