Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  Michael sighed. ‘I’ll try and talk to him. But believe me, he’s not hiding anything.’

  ‘I’d feel more certain of that if I thought you’d told me everything, too.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Patsy?’

  ‘Who?’ but Michael knew. There was a long silence until Michael grudgingly filled it. ‘You mean the letter?’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention it?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I meant to tell you but I forgot. Then I meant to call you but what with one thing or another I hadn’t got round to it. I don’t know who she is.’

  ‘Well, neither do we. So if you get any creative thoughts about it, this time don’t keep them to yourself.’

  ‘I hear you,’ said Michael. Then feeling chastened he said, ‘Listen, I’ll try and reach my brother, though the way he’s feeling right now he doesn’t want to talk to me, either.’

  ‘Do that,’ said Maguire. ‘And let me know when you’re coming back.’ There was a long pause. ‘Please.’

  His conversation with Maguire stoked Michael’s curiosity about the Michigan Marines, and he tried to learn more about the outfit from the internet. It seemed sensible to start with its progenitor, so using Google, he rapidly found the Michigan Militia website. What he discovered, however, was almost disappointingly pallid; there was no sign of neo-Nazis at work, or of extremists preparing themselves for insurrection. The emphasis instead was overwhelmingly educational – courses, exercises, training, all conducted at weekends throughout the state, most of them outdoors. The usefulness of the instruction struck Michael as a little questionable – he didn’t know a lot of people who were commonly caught in the wilderness without food, transport, shelter and a method for making fire – but as far as he could see the ethos espoused was firmly Boy Scout rather than Hitler Youth. There were repeated injunctions about behaviour (no unauthorized weapons, no distribution of literature; failure to obey any instructor’s orders would result in instant expulsion) which suggested real efforts being made to distance the organization from its less savoury former association, in the public’s mind at any rate, with supremacist groups. And in justification of all this traipsing around the Michigan woods no particular ideology was invoked, other than a general alarmist view that the world was going to hell and the only sure way to survive the inevitable if unspecified catastrophe to come was to pass Level Three Sharpshooting & Sniper Skills.

  His heart leaped when he found a link to the Michigan Marines, which he immediately pursued. The homepage he arrived at listed three branches, one of them in Atlantic County – Commander: Raleigh Somerset. The rest of the site (not that there was much of it) consisted of listings of impending exercises and ‘military manoeuvres’, and ‘Events’, which Michael soon realized really meant barbecues and picnics (Bring the family, the site exhorted). The Atlantic County list had not been updated for three months.

  He widened his search, and began poking around groups further out on the fringe, looking for far-right organizations in the Midwest. There was plenty there, most of it inflammatory and very angry indeed; he hadn’t realized you could use epithets on the web (nigger, kike, rag heads were not uncommon) which anyone would shy away from putting into print. Google only got him so far, but its selection of semi-respectable URLs (only a demi-monde of the lunatic fringe, not the truly subterranean) provided further links to more rabid sites, and in these he began hunting for Raleigh Somerset.

  After several hours’ hard work on an expensive phone connection he found him at last, participating in a chat room operating in the anodyne-sounding Populist States of America website. From an editorial mention on the main site, he discovered that Raleigh was a frequent contributor to these online discussions, and Michael tried to find out what sort of thing Raleigh talked about. The problem he immediately encountered was that to enter the chat room you needed not only a handle and password, but also had to provide a real name and address (for mailing purposes the site claimed). Michael Wolf, Anfernachie, Scotland, seemed a little revealing for the son of a homicide victim, so after some thought, Michael substituted the name Luke Appleby and gave 72 Nixon Road, Elbridge, Michigan, as his address.

  Three days later, returning from fishing one of the small lochs, he found a terse email in the dummy mailbox he had set up. There was no Appleby listed either in the local Atlantic County telephone directory or the electoral roll, the message informed him; furthermore, a chat room member who lived locally had, at the site postmaster’s request, done some investigating and had reported that there was no such address on Nixon Road. Wondering if this local member were Raleigh, Michael came to the email’s concluding sign off: Access Denied.

  Suddenly, at the beginning of August, they got six days of hot, sunny weather with barely a hint of breeze, and they worked virtually round the clock mixing and pouring until the seal on the final layover was complete and he stood in a cherry-picker extended high above the span, looking down on a finished job.

  He stayed the night at Jock’s in Glasgow, and took him and his wife to dinner in the city centre, an old restaurant in a cellar, with leather booths. They sat for a long time over coffee and liqueurs, reminiscing about the places they’d worked in the past six years. ‘So how long are you going to be away?’ asked Annie suddenly, and Michael sensed Jock’s eyes on him.

  ‘I don’t know. It may be some time.’

  Annie was as direct as Jock. ‘Have you got somebody back there?’

  He smiled weakly. ‘I did have, Annie. But that was long ago.’

  ‘I’m taking a break myself,’ said Jock, and Michael and Annie looked at each other. This was as close to a retirement statement as anyone would get from Jock. ‘At least until you come back,’ he added.

  Michael nodded. ‘Sure, Jock. I’ll keep you posted.’

  He caught an early plane for Heathrow and took a taxi to the flat in Ealing. He called Gary and again got the answering machine – he left a message asking him to turn the heat on in their father’s house. My house now, he said to himself, but it sounded unnatural. There was no point calling the house itself since there was no answering machine; it had been hard enough in recent years even to get his father to pick up the phone.

  He put on his one suit – Brooks Brothers, dark blue, chosen by Sarah almost a decade before – and travelled by Underground to the company’s headquarters in the City. There, in the squat block near Liverpool Street Station, he found most of the personnel had changed. Streatley, his former boss, was long gone, having moved with his second wife and their new baby to a rival based in Stuttgart, and Michael found himself talking to an Englishman whom he had never met.

  ‘No completion bonus, I’m afraid,’ the man announced before Michael had said anything. ‘If anything the Scottish authorities would like some money back.’

  ‘I suppose they think the weather is a Sassenach plot,’ said Michael.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the man, looking through a thick sheaf of papers, ‘I’ve got a delamination job in Denmark, pretty short term that, and a longer one in Dubai. They say Dubai’s rather nice, actually. You’re not a Jew, are you?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘I’m going back to the States for a little while. I’ve got some family business back home to attend to.’

  For the first time the man across the desk scrutinized Michael. ‘For how long?’

  ‘Hard to tell. Three or four months, maybe longer.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Don’t make it longer than a month if you can help it.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  The man was shaking his head, as if in sorrow at Michael’s myopia. ‘Business is booming,’ he said. ‘I’ve got more jobs than I can fill. But it won’t last. And then you may not find it so easy to get back into the game. You freelance people have to understand that it’s all very well to be independent, but when push comes to shove we’re going to be looking for people who are reliable, people who will take jobs when we n
eed them. People who act just like regular employees.’

  Michael looked at the man benignly. ‘There doesn’t seem much point being freelance if you end up running around like a chicken with his head cut off – just like any “regular employee”.’

  The man waved a dismissive hand. ‘I’ll give you a month to make up your mind. I can’t keep the job open any longer than that.’

  2

  As he drove over the Junction bridge he found the river just as high, which was surprising for August. There was scaffolding on one side. About time too.

  The house was cold and empty. Either Gary hadn’t got his message or he had ignored it. Michael had not spoken with his brother for six weeks, since the angry conversation about their father’s will. Michael had had no opportunity to ask him about his involvement with the Michigan Marines.

  He managed to light the boiler in the dank basement and gradually the house warmed up. Upstairs he found Gary’s room completely bare now, and then in the kitchen he discovered the freezer empty, and all the canned goods in the cupboards gone. His heart lifted when he saw a solitary beer in the fridge, but it was open and completely flat.

  This time he sat in the living room, where years before his father would sit reading, while his mother knitted next to him or read herself as they listened to music. Michael and Gary would sit on the floor, playing a board game spread out on the Mojave patterned rug his parents had received as a wedding present. He sat now in his father’s chair and tried to read the New York Times he’d bought at the airport in Chicago, forcing himself to stay up to beat jet lag. But why? What precisely did he have to do? And why was he assuming he would be back for a while? He looked around the cavernous living room and thought, This is no house for a single man. What am I doing here?

  He was still dreaming about Cassie when the pounding woke him. His first thought as he tried to extricate himself from the sticky web of sleep was that piles were being driven into a dry river bed; the second was that someone, bizarrely, was at the front door downstairs.

  Looking at his watch he saw that his anti-jet lag strategy had worked, for he had managed to sleep until almost nine. As he moved carefully down the steep stairway in his boxer shorts and a T-shirt he saw through the fan window above the tall front door that the day was fine and sun-filled. As he turned the knob the pounding stopped, but the door was stuck. He used brute force and pulled, and suddenly it came free. ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed, just getting out of the way of the heavy swinging door.

  Donny, standing back on the steps, laughed loudly. ‘About time,’ he said.

  ‘The last person to use this entrance was a UPS driver twenty years ago.’ He shook hands with his friend. ‘How’d you know I was here?’

  ‘I didn’t. I just saw the car. Getting paranoid are we?’

  Michael stood aside to let him in, and they walked into the living room and sat down. ‘There’s no coffee, there’s no bread, there’s no milk. I only got here late last night and discovered Gary’s cleaned the place out. You want a glass of water?’

  Donny stood up. ‘Tell you what. You wake yourself up while I run downtown and get some Java. What do you want to eat? Toasted bagel?’

  ‘Bagel? In Stillriver?’

  ‘New York comes to the Midwest.’

  He showered, shaved and dressed and finally felt awake when he joined Donny in the kitchen. ‘So how’s the summer been?’

  ‘Terrible. It rained most of July, then started again last week. It only stopped yesterday.’

  ‘I thought I’d be getting away from the rain coming here. It must have put a dent in business if the weather’s been that bad.’

  Donny shrugged. ‘I guess so. To tell you the truth, it’s been an odd time anyway.’

  ‘Because of the murder?’

  Donny nodded. ‘The police say they’re exploring all sorts of leads, but they haven’t given out any news or seemed to make any real progress. On the surface, life’s gone back to normal – what else are you going to do? But it isn’t really the same. People are scared, and they’ll stay that way until they find your dad’s killer.’

  ‘If they find Pop’s killer. You know, it might have been a drifter, some one-off burglar who isn’t even in Michigan any more.’

  They pondered this in silence, until Donny said, ‘Listen, I’ve got a problem with the Junction bridge. Me and my boss can’t seem to agree. I was hoping you might be able to give me some advice.’

  And as Michael ate his bagel, Donny explained. He was in charge of the small crew repairing the Junction bridge and was following the plans of his superior, the county’s one qualified engineer. ‘The thing is,’ explained Donny, ‘I don’t think Cassavantes knows what he’s doing. Only I’m not an engineer so I can’t really challenge him.’

  ‘What do you think he’s got wrong?’

  ‘He’s only resupporting one side – the upstream side – because he says it’s the current flow that’s weakened the concrete of the supporting piers there. I think the whole thing’s wonky. But if I’m right they’d have to close the entire bridge – the way it is now only one lane will get shut down. And nobody wants the bridge out of commission, especially in summer. You’ve got four miles detour to come into town the other way.’

  ‘So how can I help?’

  ‘Come have a look and tell me what you think.’ Donny paused. ‘Just a quick look,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Unofficial. I can’t pay you anything.’

  ‘You can’t?’ said Michael in mock outrage. ‘Don’t you understand who you’re talking to? Why, I charge seventeen hundred dollars an hour to look at some of the world’s most famous bridges. So you expect me to look at a lower peninsula piece of pissant work for free?’ He felt he was just warming up. ‘Gratis as the Romans would say? Pro bono work? You think I’m running a charity, boy?’

  Donny was smiling by now. ‘Is this what they call jet lag?’

  *

  What Michael had not appreciated, flying back, was that he was arriving in time for Homecoming weekend. Now he found himself, late that afternoon, walking with much of the Washington clan – Donny, Brenda, their two younger kids on bikes – to watch the parade. Other families were also hurrying downtown in a quick-moving, ragged procession of T-shirts and shorts and bicycles and strollers. It was an entirely unsinister version of the crowd scenes of sci-fi movies of the ’50s, in which inhabitants moved en masse towards the Town Hall to discuss how to combat the giant blobs threatening to invade their small town Eden.

  They passed Cassie’s old house, where the new extension was still under construction. ‘Who did she sell it to?’ he asked.

  ‘Summer people with deep pockets,’ Donny said loudly.

  ‘Hush,’ said Brenda, but she laughed. She was a big woman, whose vast thighs filled her Bermuda shorts, but with oddly petite features – a button nose, jujube lips and eyes like small collar buttons. She had a pretty face and a sunny disposition, which had been the perfect antidote to Donny’s broken heart when Nancy dumped him. Brenda sometimes teased Donny that he still carried a torch for Nancy, which was probably true, and made Michael admire her even more and think her right for Donny. His friend would have hated farming. He was too sociable: Donny liked having neighbours within shouting distance, with half the children of the neighbourhood playing with his own kids in their backyard.

  ‘A lot of building going on,’ said Michael, for he could see several other houses along the street that were now being turned into modular hodgepodges of affluence. ‘More money than sense,’ Alvin had liked to say about any obvious excess, and that is how Michael felt about these supplementary constructions. For the enlarged houses dwarfed their lots, and lost their former elegant simplicity of line and material (wood, wood, and more wood). Improvements in the manufacture of aluminium siding, formerly available only in telltale thick nine-inch board, meant it could be used to ape the thin lines of the original white pine in a sleek, modern mockery of the old wood’s rough grace. It seemed typical of the pseudo-pr
eservationists whom his father had despised that they put commemorative plaques on buildings whose spirit they were effectively destroying.

  ‘You know,’ Michael announced as they neared Main Street, ‘when I was back in May I never got downtown. Not even to drive through. I expect it’s changed.’

  ‘I’m not saying anything,’ said Donny as they turned onto Main Street by the Methodist church. Crowds were already beginning to line both sides of the street, and Michael felt the strongest sense of déjà vu as he began to walk down the street. It was as if he were wearing bifocal, sometimes even trifocal glasses, with different lenses for different eras. For what he saw now was paralleled by a visual memory of what he had seen as a boy, then as a young man. The different presentations seemed to run as separate strands, like the multiple applications of his laptop, except that here the different windows merged in a mysterious confluence of memory and time.

  ‘What happened to Dumas’s?’ he asked, pointing at its former corner location, the excuse for his first assignation with Cassie.

  ‘Dumas’s?’ asked Donny, dumbfounded. ‘That’s a long time ago, Michael. You’ve been back since it changed.’

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ he said slowly, starting to remember what had initially replaced it – a retail storefront for a talented wood-carver, who sold oak candle holders and elegant maple boxes in summer. During the rest of the year he might make the occasional commissioned piece, usually a Christmas present (one year Alvin Simpson had given his wife a walnut wardrobe; some lady in Burlington had commissioned three blanket chests), but was forced to supplement his income by working as a carpenter for a local contractor. It must have always been a touch and go enterprise; now Michael could see that ‘go’ had triumphed in the long run. In its place stood a shop of such elegant pretension that he thought for a minute he was in London’s South Kensington, or taking a break in Stockholm after a job on one of the western islands. Gourmet coffee has come to Michigan, he thought with a smirk, looking at the hand-painted canisters high on a shelf carrying coffee beans from all over the world. Takeaway cups of latte, cappuccino and espresso were all on offer, and fancy baked goods behind glass. Time was, the only choice in coffee in this small town was with cream or without. ‘They’ll never make it,’ said Michael, thinking of his youth, when a few stores utterly reliant on summer trade would open and inevitably fail. ‘Here in May,’ Alvin would say, shaking his head as another T-shirt shop opened its doors, ‘but not to stay,’ as he gleefully watched them go bust during the cold months out of season.