Stillriver

by Andrew Rosenheim

  It seemed a sad, sour tale, and he sensed the difficulty she had in finding anything positive to say about her ‘fresh start’ in Grand Rapids. Her emotions were still living in Florida. And as Michael realized this, he started to feel depressed again, until suddenly he heard Nancy Sheringham’s voice, booming from the end of the table: ‘I don’t believe it.’

  She was staring up at the deck of the house, and Michael turned around to look. A man and a woman were standing looking down from the railings, both smiling, the woman very shyly. They were casually but stylishly dressed: she wore a white cotton skirt and pink sweater, the man a blue sports coat, white chinos and an open-necked dress shirt. They looked distinctively fresh, like a clean-cut couple modelling in a mail order catalogue. It was Kenny Williams, Michael realized, almost twenty years older than when seen last, but with the same wavy head of hair and the same confident smile.

  The couple came down the stairs and Michael saw that Kenny’s partner was pretty to the point of beauty, and much younger than the rest of them. She can’t be more than twenty-five, he thought. Donny caught his eye and raised his eyebrows in rueful appreciation of Kenny’s continuing appeal to attractive women.

  ‘You’ll recognize some of us,’ said Nancy, after hugging Kenny and shaking hands with the girlfriend. Kenny turned and looked down the tables, smiling at Donny and Brenda, and giving a surprised wave when he saw Cassie. ‘There’s Anthea Heaton,’ he announced loudly, and she blushed furiously beneath a taut smile. Kenny paused for a beat, like a veteran comedian. ‘Bet you’re glad asparagus season is over,’ and there was a sudden explosion of laughter from the rest of them.

  ‘Michael!’ he exclaimed when he saw him. ‘Now here’s a face I haven’t seen for a while.’ Nancy was trying to steer him towards the food. ‘I’ll come back to you and catch up.’

  Michael tried to talk some more with Anthea, but she seemed distracted now, and after a minute excused herself just as Kenny sat down with a full plate next to him. Kenny looked protectively towards his girlfriend, who was talking with Cassie and Lou; satisfied that she was being looked after he turned his attention towards Michael, who said, ‘Last time I saw you, you were planning to go to law school. Did you?’

  Kenny nodded as he chewed a chicken breast. ‘I’m a lawyer, in private practice now, but I used to be in the federal prosecutor’s office. Have they got anywhere with your father’s case?’

  Michael was startled but not offended by the bluntness. ‘You mean the police?’

  Kenny nodded. ‘When I heard about your father’s murder, I rang the DA in Muskegon. He said the cops didn’t have any leads at all. Is that still true?’

  Michael looked around him. There seemed no reason not to tell, so he explained about the baseball bat and the fingerprints.

  ‘The prints of a child? Maybe somebody borrowed the bat. You know, in a sandlot game.’

  ‘That’s what you’d normally think. But Gary swore he hadn’t taken the bat out of the basement for years. And I doubt my father lent it to somebody.’

  ‘Weird,’ said Kenny. ‘Any other evidence?’

  ‘A smudged footprint on the porch. But nothing else. Whoever did it planned the whole thing carefully. And that’s what’s so odd. Otherwise it just looks like a psycho – somebody moving through town, something like that.’

  Kenny said, ‘I mean, Stillriver’s changed; what place hasn’t? But it’s not a violent place. The worst you get is a fight in the bars on Saturday night.’ He wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. ‘Or outside the Dairy Queen. Remember that?’

  ‘I do,’ said Michael levelly. He knew that Kenny didn’t know what Ronald had done to him – no one there other than Cassie knew – but he still felt an ingénue’s blush start to fill his cheeks when Ronald’s name was mentioned.

  ‘He was a bit of a freak, you know,’ said Kenny, with the perverse admiration of an ex-prosecutor. ‘He’d stand out anywhere. He could kill somebody. What am I saying? I hear he did kill someone.’

  ‘He’s in jail in Texas.’

  ‘That explains it. I wondered what Cassie was doing back here. Boy, I never understood that one.’ He looked down the table where his girlfriend was still talking with Cassie. ‘Anyway,’ said Kenny, ‘the DA, when I talked to him, said something about a paramilitary connection. But what would the motive be?’

  ‘That’s what I still can’t figure out. My father had no interest in paramilitary goings on.’ He didn’t mention Gary.

  Kenny looked thoughtful as he bit on his chicken breast. ‘I had something to do with those people when I was with the feds. The Wayne County bunch.’

  ‘McVeigh’s people?’

  He nodded. ‘Most of the branches have fizzled out, but the worry isn’t about the old Militia so much as the members who’ve gone underground.’

  ‘Are there many of those?’

  ‘Not a lot. And not up here, I think. Though Raleigh Somerset, you know who I mean?’ When Michael nodded, Kenny said, ‘He was downstate near me but he’s back here now.’

  ‘He’s the paramilitary connection your colleagues are so interested in.’

  ‘He was in your year at school, not mine, so when I saw the name I recognized it but couldn’t really remember him. Then one of the agents showed me a photograph, and I thought, “I remember that big doofus.”’ He laughed lightly. ‘But he’s hard core. He knew McVeigh. We got onto him when he went to Germany. First time I ever heard from Interpol.’

  ‘Why was he in Germany?’

  ‘To make contact with neo-Nazi groups there. He knew the country – he was stationed there in the army before he got discharged.’

  ‘Honourable discharge?’

  ‘No.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Psychiatric condition. As I remember, one quack diagnosed him as paranoid schizophrenic, the other as psychopathic. Combine the two and it’s still called crazy.’ Kenny paused and looked at Michael. ‘Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.’

  And Kenny looked embarrassed enough that Michael changed the subject. ‘Did you drive up here to see your mom?’

  ‘No. She moved down to Arizona three years ago. The winters were just getting too much for her. I came up because I’m thinking of buying a place on the beach. If I can afford it. Prices are going through the roof. At least that’s what Larry Bottel says,’ Kenny added with a smile. ‘So it must be true.’

  ‘I never expected Larry to stay in Stillriver. I always assumed he’d want a bigger pond to fish in.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Kenny, ‘he’s doing very well. It’s not just summer houses, either: a lot of people are retiring to Stillriver. It’s got a nice way of life, after all. Shoot, sometimes I wish I’d stayed here.’

  ‘I think you’d have given Steve Atkinson a run for his money.’

  Kenny grinned. ‘It’s a little late now to start practising small town law. I’d probably be real bad at it.’

  ‘Are you married now?’ asked Michael, nodding towards Kenny’s friend at the end of the table.

  ‘No. And that’s the other thing. No one I’m likely to meet is going to want to live in Stillriver. Jackie over there, she’s not going to be satisfied with a social life where the weekly big event is the bandstand concert. Though she was nervous about coming here tonight.’

  ‘I can’t blame her for that, meeting a lot of strangers—’

  ‘No, not about that. She was nervous because she said she’d never been to a real farm before. So I told her the wild animals get locked up at night.’ He laughed with the confidence of someone living worlds away from his background but still at ease with it, and Michael envied him this equanimity.

  Janie Waters was sitting on Kenny’s far side, and now she turned round and started talking with him, so after a minute Michael got up and strolled out into the peach orchard, where he surprised Donny’s eldest boy and another kid smoking cigarettes behind a tree. He laughed and turned back, and when he got to the patio found that the farmers had gone home,
and the small group of his former classmates were sitting together. He looked at his oldest friends and felt a sudden sense of estrangement, thinking how most of them had stayed in or around Stillriver, and how even those who had left, like Kenny Williams, seemed able to return and reinsert themselves without effort into the place of their upbringing.

  As he approached they seemed to suppress a collective giggle. ‘Am I dressed that funny?’ he said with a smile, but felt slightly miffed.

  Donny shook his head. ‘We were just talking about your father. You may not know it, but the police interviewed every one of us, anybody who’d ever been his student.’

  Nancy Sheringham spoke up. ‘It turned out that when they asked us if we could remember anything he really felt strongly about, we all said the same thing.’

  ‘What was that?’

  And then in unison all of them chanted, ‘Potawatamee.’

  The local Indians, who, unlike their fierce Iroquois counterparts in other parts of the state, had posed no resistance to the early settlers in Atlantic County, timber cutters and then farmers, in the years before the Civil War. The small tribe had fished and hunted the land before the white arrivals, and then been pushed out of the valuable properties by the lake when the timber mills went up and the ships came in to dock, settling for a land grant in the 1850s out in the Back Country where they sort of survived by hunting, fishing, foraging and farming (badly).

  Nancy asked, ‘Do you remember the state requirements in Michigan history?’

  ‘How could anyone forget them?’ Michael replied. A whole term of tedium, learning which was the biggest county in the state (he couldn’t remember), the average alfalfa yield per acre, the population in the UP of non-Caucasians (roughly twelve).

  ‘I think your father found it as boring as we did. And we learned we could always get him off the subject if we said the magic word.’

  ‘Which was Potawatamee,’ said Donny.

  ‘He’d be off at the mention of the name, telling us stories. “One-eyed Joe” – you remember that one,’ said Nancy, and Donny, Cassie and Janie Waters nodded. ‘One day he even corralled the school bus and took us out to the Indian Cemetery in Elbridge.’

  He had taken Michael there too. It sat on a hill next to the old Baptist church, at a crossroads about eight miles west of Fennville. The church was shaded by large maples and a sole surviving elm, but the cemetery was an exposed two-acre square of bleached grass and dust. The headstones were wooden crosses, painted white, and unnamed.

  ‘We thought we were pulling the wool over his eyes. But on the very last day of school when we came into class, on everybody’s chair there was a copy of a pamphlet he’d written on the Chippewa. He’d signed every one with thanks to my inspirations. He’d known all along exactly what we were doing. But he didn’t mind.’

  Nancy paused and looked at Cassie, then again at Michael. ‘He never taught you, Michael, so you wouldn’t know, but he was a great storyteller in class. And he had a great sense of humour.’

  His father? Wry to be sure; a dry appreciation of the inevitable idiocies and minor comedies of small town life. But not what you would call a great sense of humour. Surely not. Surely? ‘I never heard that before,’ he said.

  Nancy shrugged. ‘No reason you should have. You were always touchy about being a teacher’s son.’

  His eyes widened and he looked at Cassie, who smiled at him reassuringly. Then Kenny filled the silence with a story about the night Nancy had got locked in the Burlington High School bathroom, and other stories followed this one, moving across the table like semaphores in the cool night air, while Michael remained behind with the Potawatamee and his father.

  They left a little after midnight, collecting the kids from the TV room upstairs, where along with half a dozen other small children they had crashed out in sleeping bags. Jack woke up just long enough to be deposited on the back seat, then promptly conked out again. Sally walked proudly under her own steam to the car, but was asleep by the time Michael had pulled out of the Sheringham’s half-moon drive.

  He drove the back way home, through Happy Valley, and as they clonked over the wooden bridge above the thin stream of the Still’s south branch, Cassie suddenly exclaimed, ‘Look! Can you pull over?’ He did, where the hill crested on the north side of the valley. Cassie opened her door and went and stood by the front of the car, and Michael followed, mystified, into the cooling night air. He found her leaning against the hood, gazing upwards. He looked up and saw why: a lush and lilac-coloured radiance spread like purple milk spilt across the sky.

  ‘Northern Lights,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen them in ages. You couldn’t in Texas.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  She laughed as she locked her arm with his. ‘Why do you think they’re called Northern Lights?’

  ‘I saw them once in Sweden,’ he said.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said Cassie, pinching him lightly on the arm as she had done in the early high school years of their romance.

  ‘I would have been too, but I didn’t know what they were.’ And he pinched her back.

  They got back in the car quietly. As he drove off, Cassie said, ‘It was nice to see Kenny.’

  ‘It’s funny how things changed. When we were kids he was always confident, but you couldn’t help thinking of him as younger. I didn’t have that sense at all tonight. It was almost like the return of the conquering hero. He’s done real well for himself.’

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ she protested. ‘You have too.’

  ‘Not in the same way,’ he said. He had chosen something else. He could hear Sarah’s angry voice – You’re throwing away your career. Do you really expect me to come with you and help you do it? He hadn’t and she didn’t. He sighed with the thought, then changed the subject. ‘By the way, where did Anthea Heaton go? One minute she was telling me about her terrible ex-husband and the next she’d disappeared.’

  ‘She went home to her mother’s. I think Kenny upset her.’

  ‘What, about the asparagus? She took offence at that, after all these years?’

  ‘Not that. I think she was hoping Kenny would show up on his own, especially since Nancy had made a point of telling him Anthea would be there.’

  ‘Can’t he bring his girlfriend if he wants?’

  ‘Sure he can – even if she is young enough to be his daughter. I know all about where I can buy designer clothes in Detroit now. Very useful.’

  What was this about? Cassie was never catty. He said, ‘Anthea’s single now, that’s the problem isn’t it? If she were still in Florida in her million-dollar house with a Hispanic maid she wouldn’t care less about Kenny’s girlfriend.’

  ‘You can’t exactly blame her, can you? She’s got two kids, no husband, and not much of a job apparently.’ Cassie paused, and then added in a low voice, ‘Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?’

  Michael felt they were close to the edge of something he didn’t want to fall into, so he stayed quiet. He drove into town, passed the wireworks and parked outside Cassie’s bungalow. He got out and opened the back door, gingerly lifting Jack out as Cassie did the same for little Sally. Inside, he put Jack into his bed, and when he came back into the kitchen waited for Cassie to return from Sally’s bedroom. ‘Can I get you a drink?’ she asked when she came back.

  ‘I better not. It’s late and I’d probably fall asleep.’

  ‘You can do that too, you know,’ she said, looking at him in the pale light of the kitchen’s overhead bulb.

  He understood at once; he had been waiting for such a sign for weeks now. But he shook his head slowly, smiling to lessen the blow, which would be to her pride – he didn’t believe she really wanted to jump on his bones this late and both of them dog-tired.

  ‘Let’s not do it this way, okay?’ he said. ‘Let’s do it at my house, when the kids aren’t around and you’re not tired and I’m not tired and we haven’t just had an argument.’

  ‘You don’t like my house?’ she aske
d sharply.

  ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘But I love you.’ He stopped for a second, suddenly realizing this was the first time he’d used the words in almost seven years. ‘And if that means I have to like your house I’ll do my best. Though I don’t think you like it much either.’ He mimicked her, but gently. ‘I always liked your house. Big rooms. High windows.’

  Cassie smiled faintly. ‘You sure know how to make a girl feel wanted.’

  ‘You know you’re wanted,’ he said, and ignored her deprecating snort. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said as he turned to go.

  ‘You’ll have to hide then,’ he said as he went through the door. ‘Because I’ll be looking for you. Goodnight.’

  And as he drove down the darkened street, then down the slope of Luke Street, heading for home, he hoped to himself that she did know how much he wanted her. And that she didn’t know how vulnerable she seemed right now. He had known her vulnerable before – God knows, you had to be vulnerable to run off at the age of twenty with Ronald Duverson. But she had never seemed this fragile or exposed to Michael, and he would have congratulated himself on his hard-won maturity, demonstrated by his not taking advantage of her, had he not wished so much that he had.

  3

  BOURBON AND BRANCH, a highball – whatever it was nowadays called, Michael was rewarding himself for taking the garbage out (the twins could no longer provide this service) by drinking a large bourbon and water with half a tray of ice cubes, when there was a knock on the back door and Steve Atkinson came in. Today he was wearing a canary yellow golf shirt with Atlantic Country Club monogrammed on its breast pocket, and checked trousers.