Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  ‘You want more? You want more?’ Duverson shouted at Dicky beneath him, and started to plant his left leg again, ready to score three more points with his right. The Vietnam vet suddenly materialized behind him and wrapped two stubby arms around Ronald’s chest and whispered something in his ear. With one sideways roll of his shoulders, Ronald freed himself, then turned and walked back and got in the cab, where he sat on the driver’s side impatiently, as if waiting for a friend to finish filling up at the gas pump.

  The rest of them surrounded Dicky Millicent and collectively breathed a sigh of relief as he slowly regained consciousness, indicated at first by a telltale moan, then by his ever so gradually beginning to sit up. Dicky rubbed the back of his head and explored the left side of his face with one careful hand. ‘What happened?’ he asked weakly.

  There was silence for a moment. Then the Vietnam vet with ‘registered hands’ spoke up. ‘Boy, you got on Ronald’s bad side. I’ve seen that mistake made before, and I recommend you don’t make it twice.’

  Michael and Kenny Williams told Donny all about it on Monday, during recess. Kenny said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It was scarier than shit.’

  Donny shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t be scared of him.’

  Michael looked at his friend. ‘Oh really?’

  Donny wouldn’t meet his eye. When he did he laughed, a little nervously. ‘Well, I might be a little scared.’

  ‘I hope so. Otherwise, you’re either crazy or stupid or both.’

  This seemed to touch a nerve. Donny wrinkled his nose and said, ‘I’ve got no problems with Ronald. If anybody ought to be worried, it’s you.’

  ‘What?’ He asked with a sudden sense of dread.

  Donny was nodding his head. ‘That’s right. Ronald’s a big fan of your friend.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Michael, feeling weak and a little sick, for he sensed he knew the answer to his question already.

  ‘Cassie, that’s who. He told Daryl Flynn he had his eye on her. Flynn said she was tight with you, and Ronald just laughed.’

  ‘Let’s go back in,’ said Michael, seconds before the bell rang.

  Three

  1

  ‘SEEN A GHOST?’

  It was Jock, joining him on the steel stairs outside the Portakabin where Michael had taken refuge when his mobile phone had rung. Inside the crew were playing a noisy game of cards while they waited yet again for the rain to stop.

  The two men stood in the drizzle, looking out over the grey loch. A low bank of dark cloud moved in from the west, further darkening the colours of the Western Isles in the distance, muted greens and flint blues. The amazing speed of weather fronts in Britain; little wonder the weathermen were so often wrong. In the Midwest fronts came in from the West in slow motion – a thunderstorm over the Rockies usually took three days to reach the Great Lakes, its arrival predictable virtually to the hour.

  He turned to Jock, who was struggling to put on an oilskin, and said, ‘It was Atkinson, the lawyer from home. My father left me the house.’

  ‘You’re surprised?’

  Michael nodded. ‘Completely. I’d always assumed he’d leave it to my brother. I think my brother assumed that, too.’

  ‘Did your father leave him anything?’

  ‘The Half.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s some land my father bought a long time ago. It was supposed to be ten acres, but they got the survey wrong and it turned out to be ten and a half. So we call it the Half.’ He remembered his father’s glee over the mistake.

  ‘What’s it worth?’ Jock was nothing if not beady-eyed.

  ‘Not much. But that was the whole point of it: the day it’s worth something is the day it’s not worth having – it means civilization is getting close.’

  ‘Did he leave much else?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘There are some shares, I guess, and maybe something in Detroit – I think that’s what Atkinson said. Most of that goes to Gary, but it can’t be very much.’ He sighed.

  ‘When did you last see your father?’

  ‘Almost seven years ago.’

  ‘Well then, it’s not as if it’s your doing, is it?’

  ‘I guess I better call Gary.’

  When he did, his brother sounded half-drunk, even though it was an early weekend afternoon in Stillriver. Michael rang from the living room of his rented bungalow, looking out towards the Kintails looming huge and impossibly green to the east.

  ‘Fucking Atkinson,’ Gary began almost at once. ‘When I asked him when Pop did this he said five or six months ago. When I asked him why he did it, he said it was covered by client confidentiality.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘How the hell do I know?’

  ‘Listen, we should talk about this.’

  ‘What’s there to say? I stay here looking after Pop, and what happens? Gary gets fucked. So what else is new?’

  Nothing is new, he wanted to say, since you’re doing the same old whining. And Pop looked after you. ‘When I get back we can sit down and sort things out. I’m not going to screw you.’

  Gary laughed harshly but Michael sensed he was close to tears. ‘There’s no need to screw me, Michael. Pop already has.’ And Gary put the phone down.

  He loved bridges: like geometry, they held a magic that intimacy did nothing to dispel. How does it stay up? That was the question he’d first asked himself when as a college sophomore he’d seen a photograph of a voussoir arch, Roman-built but still intact. In a sense, all of his training as an engineer – undergraduate major, the first job in the East, his Masters degree, all the travel and projects of recent years – had been his search for the answer. Intellectually, of course, he knew exactly why some bridges worked and some – the ones he was paid to encounter – threatened not to. But nothing, not all the computations of load-bearing force, or differential equations plotting tension/compression ratios, or slump tests to measure the viscosity of concrete, adequately explained the feeling of witnessing a simple miracle, on the very first day in Engineering 101, when he saw the picture of the bridge and thought, How? Like the theorem of Pythagoras, or even the smaller miracle of a curve ball in baseball, the beauty of bridges stood defiantly outside explanation. Bridges were geometry’s miracle made real.

  He’d taken this Scottish job partly out of time-bred sympathy for Jock, who had uncomplainingly assisted him in half a dozen foreign projects that took him far from his home in a suburb of Glasgow. Jock was rising seventy, squat and square, with arms like clubs from his early days as a brickie’s apprentice, when he’d carried countless pails of wet mortar. He was famously direct, although he also had a sentimental streak that took the form of a loyalty to Michael and kept him working; with Michael this had a counterpart in his own unwillingness to insist Jock call it a day. Jock’s knowledge of engineering was practical rather than book-learned – and thus most useful for those problems that had no obvious technical solutions. If he’d been less valuable, he would have been put out to pasture by the company three or four years before, when his wife Annie, a veteran of projects around the world, decided she was no longer willing to travel on the job with him, staying in Glasgow instead, where she read women’s novels and learned Gaelic at the Adult Education Centre.

  Yet for all his fondness for Jock, Michael was uncomfortable in Scotland. He was in magnificent country, but the persistent rain seemed to carry an emotional greyness, and it was hard to admire the view of anything, however conventionally breathtaking, when your socks and underclothes were soaked within minutes of stepping outside. The food, moreover, in the attractive phrase of an English contractor, was ‘terrible shite’, stodgy and lukewarm and visually unappealing. Too many root vegetables and greasy stews and sticky mashed potatoes. The beer in the village pub down the road was excellent, but the owners were visibly displeased if more than two members of the crew set foot in the place. Unless they were local.

  And this too h
ad surprised him – the hostility of the Scottish members of his crew. A surly nationalism seemed rife among those recruited locals who constituted the manual part of his labour force. They were junior in the job’s hierarchy to the skilled assemblers he had brought from England, and no amount of nationalist triumphalism could obscure the fact that they were being paid to take orders from their despised Sassenach neighbours. The result was sulky, uncooperative behaviour that slowed down the job and soured the atmosphere. Michael had looked forward to working with men who spoke English for once, but he found instead that a shared language merely facilitated the communication of complaint. And Jock seemed to feel personally responsible, no matter how much Michael tried to reassure him.

  Yet the biggest problem for Michael was not people, but the weather, and the fact that the job was being done on the cheap with no allowance from the local authority for any delays. They could curse and kick and scream all they wanted, but there was nothing Michael could do. He specialized in the mix of cement and water and ballast that constituted concrete, which provided the irony – for all that concrete was the newer, stronger, cheaper, and more flexible material – of putting him at the mercy of the elements in a way steel or even iron would not have. Because no advance had yet managed to allow concrete to be poured easily when it was raining.

  Job aside, the rain imposed an inactivity in which he had too much time to think. He dreamed about Stillriver for the first time in years, often having the same odd, geographical dream which found him walking the town streets, usually heading towards the drugstore, just as he had in real life during those teenage years when he’d been too young to drive yet felt too old to ride a bike (because it made it obvious – and how uncool – that he wasn’t old enough to drive). The dreams were almost sensuous in the tactile feel of the streets he walked; he could have drawn a mental map minutely detailing their slightest variations in grade – a gradual incline here, a slow downhill street there – even if he could not remember all their names.

  Increasingly, as the days passed, he brooded on his father’s murder, and found his bafflement at why he’d been killed as great as his wish to know who had done it. He sensed somehow that the answer to both questions (if he were ever to find answers) would be stunningly obvious, or completely incomprehensible – a lunatic killed his father on his way through town. Curiously perhaps, he felt he could live more easily with a senseless killing than a murderer with a ‘reason’ to kill, which only something in his father’s past could explain. A past which Michael didn’t know how to begin to explore. I don’t understand him even when he’s dead.

  He was used to thinking about his mother, especially alone late at night when he tried to sleep, or later, in the middle of the night, when he couldn’t. It had always brought a soothing if temporary comfort, though the memories were set-pieces, frozen against addition by her death so many years before: picking wild flowers with her at the Half or in the Meadows just up from town; watching her, the time he stole second base in the first inning and stood up to dust off his uniform, as she sat, surrounded by baseball fathers, and beamed at him, her pride moving across the diamond like a laser.

  But it was a novel experience to think so much about his father, the mysterious figure about whom he knew so little. Even Henry’s antecedents were a closed book to Henry’s son. ‘Pop,’ Michael had asked as a little boy, ‘What did your daddy do?’ And his father had said, ‘Not much,’ then changed the subject. Michael had tried a different tack: ‘What was your mom like, Pop?’ This time Henry Wolf had smiled, then shaken his head. ‘Oh, she died before you were even born, son. Even before I met your mother.’ After that Michael gave up.

  ‘Was your father some kind of a Jew?’ And Michael had replied to Jimmy Olds, ‘Not that I know of.’ Which was the truth. Growing up in Stillriver, Michael hadn’t really known what a Jew was, other than a term of abuse – you jewed me, don’t be such a jew. Jew wasn’t a person; Jew was an unpleasant synonym for avarice, the vernacular form of a casual anti-Semitism which, along with mild abuse of anything coming out of Washington, an aversion to homosexuality, and slight suspicion of anyone whose surname ended in a vowel, constituted the standing prejudices of rural Michigan. So had his father been among the reviled? Michael racked his brain for evidence, telltale signs he may have missed. But like the Jews of Atlantic County, there weren’t any. Unless, of course, his father had been a single, unrevealed exception. But why would that explain his murder?

  The reason for the murder was not the only mystery he pondered, as the rain continued and he found himself undistractable by his detective novels, or by meals in the pub and occasional walks with Jock. Why, for example, had Michael been left the house? It would have seemed almost a joke from the grave if it had not caused such hurt for his brother. Why would his father have turned against Gary? There was no doubting his brother’s ability to alienate virtually everyone, but his father’s tolerance had seemed lifelong, ironclad; something very dramatic would have had to happen to shake that. And nothing during Michael’s quick trip to Stillriver after the murder had suggested any such thing.

  And if Michael got the house, what was he supposed to do with it? All right, so he was going back to Stillriver for a while – if he were honest, he had known that from the moment Nancy Sheringham told him Cassie was back in town. But for how long? Did he think he was going home?

  He didn’t need a home, hadn’t for virtually his entire adult life. New York, even though he’d liked it, proved too alien for him to adopt and ultimately he had given up trying. Then his recent globe-trotting years, where he was happiest unfettered, until he decided he should at least have a base, a home in theory if not emotional practice. And so he’d bought the flat in Ealing, a suburb on the west side of London. It was near the High Street, on a quiet road of small houses, most of them still single-resident.

  Why Ealing? Well, a two bedroom flat there remained affordable; it was also near Heathrow and transportation into London’s centre was good. Which was the way to rationalize the fact that he simply hadn’t known where to go. If it had been up to Sarah, his ex-wife, he wouldn’t have had a roof over his head anywhere. There had been something almost perversely refreshing about her searing avarice during the divorce proceedings, especially since it was her family who had money, not his.

  It was therefore a good thing that Michael didn’t need a lot to live on. He was paid well, if erratically, and his outgoings were modest: accommodation was provided on the remote locations of his jobs, and often food – there had been an early job in the Philippines which hadn’t been within fifty miles of a store. So when his wanderlust had subsided, or at least was tempered by the desire for a base, he had been able to scrape together the down payment for the Ealing flat, then take on the ninety-five per cent mortgage he felt too old to have.

  He was happy enough to stay in the flat in between jobs, mooch around the Ealing neighbourhood, travel into central London centre for a show or a dinner with friends or colleagues who might be passing through. But it certainly wasn’t home. Lack of which had never bothered him before. So why now – more sophisticated, better educated, altogether more worldly than the young man who once drove out of Stillriver ‘for good’ – was he beginning to feel that deep at heart, in his innermost core, he was utterly and completely the product of the town he’d fled? He had always known you couldn’t go home again. But no one had ever told him you couldn’t ever really leave it, either.

  Ten days later it was still raining when Maguire, the detective from Muskegon, called him. ‘Are you planning on coming back here anytime soon?’

  ‘I was, but the weather’s not exactly cooperating.’

  ‘What’s the weather got to do with it?’

  ‘I’m replacing three quarters of a bridge over here. It’s concrete. You can’t lay it very easily when it’s raining. We haven’t had a wholly dry day since I got back.’

  ‘That’s funny. Neither have we. Maybe it’s global warming.’

&nbs
p; ‘Well, whatever it is it’s keeping me here for a while. I was hoping to get back for the fourth of July, but at this rate it will be August. Have you found out anything?’

  ‘No big breakthrough, but some leads.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘We think the killer was barefoot.’

  ‘Really?’ Michael said, but thought so what?

  ‘He left a smudged shoe print on the porch by the back door but it’s not very clear – Forensics think he took his shoes off before entering the house and left them on the porch.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Because he was being very careful. He not only planned this, he also knew what he was doing. There are no fibres from his clothes that we could find inside.’

  ‘So he was naked?’

  ‘Or not far from it. And he must have worn gloves because there weren’t any strange prints. In fact, the only prints they found upstairs were your father’s and your brother’s.’

  ‘So the killer was barefoot, half-naked, and didn’t leave any fingerprints. Really narrows things down, Detective.’

  Maguire ignored this. ‘Can I ask you about your father’s will?’

  ‘Is it one of these leads of yours?’

  ‘I want to know how it affects your brother.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

  ‘He’s refusing to talk to us.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was hoping you might tell me that.’

  Ping-pong. I ask this, you say that. So I ask something else. It was starting to get annoying. ‘Is my brother in trouble?’

  ‘I hope not. But I need him to come clean with us, especially about his friends in the Marines. I think he got more involved there than he lets on.’

  ‘Are you seriously trying to tell me he had something to do with my father’s death?’

  Maguire’s voice now grew more assertive. ‘I’m saying I’d like to clear him once and for all so I can concentrate on other areas. Without his cooperation that’s proving hard to do.’