Envy the Night

by Michael Koryta

  Dan had grown up around here, and on long days and longer nights in Vietnam, he’d talked of the place. To Ezra, who’d never been more than forty miles from Detroit until he shipped out, the flowage had sounded like a dream world. Miles of towering dark forests, pristine lakes, islands. The island that Dan owned held appeal that Ezra couldn’t even put into words, but the longer they stayed overseas the more attached he grew to the idea of the place. He couldn’t go back to Detroit. Not if he hoped to avoid the sort of existence he’d left behind.

  Just before he’d enlisted, Ezra had gone out with his older brother, Ken, to settle up a debt. The sum owed was four hundred dollars. Ezra had held the arms of an alcoholic factory worker while his brother swung on the guy with a bottle. When the bottle fractured, Ken had hit him one more time in the face, a driving uppercut, and the jagged glass bit into the unconscious man’s chin and continued upward, peeling a strip of pink flesh off the bone from jaw to eye socket. They’d left him in the alley after emptying nine dollars from his pockets. The next day, Ezra went to talk to a recruiter.

  As his tour wound to a close, and the prospect of returning home became more real, Ezra made an official request to Dan: Could he head up to this place, this Willow Flowage, for just a few months, until he figured something else out?

  You’re shit-brained, Dan had said. It’s going to be winter, man. Three feet of snow on the ground, you want a cabin with no electricity?

  Snow doesn’t sound so bad right now, Ezra answered.

  Dan had agreed to it. He headed south for Miami while Ezra went north, Frank Temple taking his job with the marshals and landing in St. Louis at the time, right in the middle.

  Miami ruined Dan. The Willow saved Ezra. Absolutely saved Ezra. It was hard living but clean living, where you invested your strength and sweat into clearing snow and starting fires, not breaking legs and wielding guns. And there were certain moments, when the evening sun cast a pale red stain across silent snow or when an early spring wind blew up out of the lake with a surprising touch of warmth, that made you want to drop to your knees and thank whatever God you believed in—or maybe one you hadn’t believed in—for putting you in that place at that time.

  Ezra had been on the island five months when he learned his brother’s body had been found in the trunk of a Caprice off Lafayette in Detroit. He skipped the funeral. That summer, Dan and Frank came up for a visit, and Ezra made his pitch. He and Frank should pool resources and buy the additional parcel Dan owned on the point, build a cabin there and create a camp that they could share and pass down to their families. It was the sort of grand plan you can only have when you’re young and friendships seem guaranteed to last forever.

  Go on, Dan had laughed. I’ll sell you the land, man. But I’m not spending much time out on that damn island, middle of nowhere and nothing to do.

  Then sell it to me, Ezra suggested, the island already sacred ground to him.

  Dan shook his head. Slow, with some of the mocking humor gone from his face.

  Nah, he said. I can’t sell that one. Not the island. It’s in a trust, a legacy deal, to keep the state from taking it. The island goes way back in my family, you know that. I’ve got a son, and it’ll be his someday. I want it to be his.

  So he’d kept his island but rarely appeared there, and Ezra and Frank built a cabin on the smaller parcel around the point and shared some summers and memories. Now, with a few decades of separation, Ezra could look back on it and see that it had been the bellwether, Dan’s life moving in a different direction, to a place hidden from Ezra and Frank. The real shame was that it hadn’t stayed that way for Frank.

  Ezra had lived in the lake cabin for a time, but as soon as he could afford to he bought more land a few miles up the road and built his own house. Eventually Frank Temple bought the lake property in full, put it in a legacy trust for his son. Now it had been years since anyone spent a night in either the lake cabin or the one on the island. So much for the legacies.

  As he reached the top of the hill he left the road and moved toward the waterline, reentered the trees near where he imagined the car to be, and found it easily. Driven right up to the last tree, all those boughs mashed against it, bleeding sap onto the roof. He ducked beneath the branches, his jeans soaking in moisture when his knee touched the grass, and then came out at the back of the car. Reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew his lighter, flicked the wheel, and held the flame close to the bumper, so he could read the license plate.

  It was local. Wisconsin and Lincoln County. That was a surprise. He memorized the numbers and then took his thumb off the lighter and let the flame go out. He hadn’t expected a local vehicle. The only people he believed should have access to the island cabin were some thousand miles away. The Lexus had carried a Florida plate, as expected, but now it was gone, and this old heap with a local plate had taken its place. Why?

  He left the car and returned the way he’d come through the silent woods. When he reached his truck he decided to go the Willow Wood Lodge instead of home, have a drink and do some thinking before calling it a night. No tourists, this time of year. There were six cars in the parking lot when he arrived, laughter carrying outside. He walked in and found an empty stool at the far end of the bar, had hardly settled onto it before a glass of Wild Turkey and an ice water were placed in front of him. Carolyn, the bartender, didn’t need to wait on an order.

  “Glad you came in,” she said. “Been meaning to give you a call.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Dwight Simonton came in about an hour ago. You know Dwight.”

  “Sure. He’s a good man.”

  “He said somebody’s down at the Temple place. Said there was a fire going outside, somebody sitting there.”

  “Right idea, wrong owner. Somebody showed up at the island cabin.”

  Carolyn shook her head. “Dwight said it was the Temple place.”

  Ezra frowned. “I don’t think so. I was just out there today, had a look at it from the water. Nobody’s staying there. Been so long since anyone visited either one of those cabins, Dwight probably was confused. Heard something about the island cabin, got it mixed up.”

  Now Carolyn leaned back and raised her eyebrows. “Come on. Not a soul who lives on this lake doesn’t know the Temple place, after the way that crazy guy went out. Dwight told me the fire was right down on the point. You think Dwight can’t tell a fire on the island from one on the shore two miles away?”

  She was right; Dwight Simonton wouldn’t have made that mistake. He and his wife, Fran, had owned a place up here for more than a decade and were the closest things to neighbors the Temple cabin had. If Dwight said it was the Temple cabin, then it was the Temple cabin.

  “You don’t think,” she said, lowering her voice and leaning closer, “it’s his kid?”

  Of course it was his kid, responding to the message Ezra himself had left, but rather than confirm it, Ezra simply shrugged.

  “That’d be something,” Carolyn said.

  Yeah. That’d be something, all right. Ezra finished his bourbon without a word, tossed some money on the bar, and got to his feet.

  “You going down there?” Carolyn asked, her face alight with curiosity.

  “Figure I ought to.”

  She was ready with another question, but Ezra turned away and went to the door, stepped out into a night that now seemed electric. First there’d been the beautiful woman and her gray-haired companion in the Lexus. Then the Lexus was gone and the man hid a new car in the trees. Now someone, probably Frank’s son, was back at the Temple cabin. Ezra didn’t like the feel of it, the way this group was gathering on his lake. He was responsible for them, he knew. A generation later, maybe, but he’d brought them here all the same.

  11

  __________

  The letter was right where it belonged, framed on the wall beside the corresponding Silver Star. Frank read it while he drank his first beer, read from the date right down to President Harry S. Truman’s sig
nature.

  In grateful memory of Major Frank Temple, who died in the service of his country in the military operations of Korea, on August 22, 1950. He stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die, that freedom might live, and grow, and increase its blessings. Freedom lives, and through it he lives, in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.

  The letter had hung above his father’s childhood bed, the only tie Frank Temple II ever had to the soldier who’d died in Korea, leaving a wife six months pregnant with the son who would bear his name. Frank Temple II grew up without knowing a father but knowing plenty about his legacy—his name was a hero’s name. During D-Day, on beaches filled with heroic acts, the first Frank Temple and his comrades still stood out. Using grappling hooks and ropes, his Army Ranger battalion scaled the cliffs at Point du Hoc, stone towers looming a hundred feet over the sea and protected by German soldiers with clear lines of fire. Into the teeth of that rain of bullets climbed Temple and his fellow Rangers. Casualties were heavy, but the mission was accomplished.

  A tough act to follow, but Frank Temple II had done it for forty-five years. He had his war, Vietnam, where he served as a member of a specialized group so covert and so celebrated that it was still the subject of speculation decades later. MACV-SOG they’d been called: the Special Operations Group, elite soldiers whose chain of command seemed to end with the CIA instead of the Department of Defense. Temple II had matched his father’s Silver Star and Purple Heart, then come home to a career as a U.S. marshal, fathering a son who—of course—bore his name, his father’s name.

  “You’ve got a lot to live up to.” That was his mantra for Frank, a thought shared with the same casual frequency most people used for “Good morning,” a constant reminder that Frank’s was a line of brave men and heroic deeds.

  The hell of it was, Frank had always believed him. Believed in him, which was even worse. All the hero bullshit, the talk of honor and courage, it seemed to come from his father’s core. It was sacred. Right up until his father killed himself and a team of FBI agents arrived at the house, three months before Frank’s high school graduation, he’d believed in his father.

  Now, sitting beside a fire with a lukewarm beer in hand, he wondered how long that would have continued. If his father had never been caught, if those FBI agents had never showed up at the door, would they sit here together, sharing a laugh and a beer, Frank steadfast in his faith in the man across the fire from him? Or would he have grown wiser with age, smelled the lie in his father’s words, seen evil in eyes that had always looked on him with love?

  He would’ve been proud today, Frank thought. The way I brought the socket wrench down, the sound it made on the back of that guy’s skull, yeah, that’s Daddy’s boy right there.

  He laughed at that, the sort of laugh you can allow yourself when you’re drinking and alone. Laughed for longer than he should have, then lifted his beer to the cabin, a toast to his return. This was their place, a spot of memories shared only with his father, no interlopers here.

  He wanted to spill some tears, weep for his father. It had been four years since he’d last been able to do that. Driving through the Kentucky foothills in the middle of the night, listening to a radio station from some town he’d never heard of when the Pink Floyd song “Wish You Were Here” came on, began chewing at the edges of his brain, then danced right through the center of it when one softly sung line—“Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?”—wafted out of the speakers.

  There’d be no tears tonight, though, and maybe those he’d lost on a lonely highway in Kentucky would be the last. If this place, with all its good memories, didn’t affect him in that way, then no place ever would.

  He wouldn’t cry for his father here at the Willow, but he might kill for him. If Devin was really coming back . . . damn, but that would feel good. Frank could do it, too. Bet your ass he could do it. Years of lessons didn’t disappear that quickly, not when they were taught by somebody as good as his father.

  There’d been a day, sometime in the summer when he was fourteen, that his dad first broached the subject of justified killing. Really laid it out there. They’d been downstairs in the mat room, working out, Frank attacking and his father defending, blocking most of his attempts easily, but every now and then Frank would sneak a blow in. When he did, his father would smile. Glow, almost.

  They’d finished and were sitting together with their backs against the cold concrete wall, breathing hard, and his father had said, There’s a lot of bullshit to what I do, son. And to what I did. With the marshals now and the Army before.

  Frank thought he meant bullshit as in boring work, red tape and bureaucracy. That wasn’t it, though. As the sweat dried on Frank’s neck and back and his heart rate wound down to a slow, steady thump, his father had explained what he meant.

  We chase down guys who are evil bastards, Frank. I mean evil, you understand? Guys who steal and kill and rape and commit any other manner of crime, anything you can think of. Some of them go to prison. A lot of them don’t. They get off on some technicality, get some lawyer pulling tricks, whatever. But they go right back out on the street and hurt somebody else. I’m not saying the system doesn’t work sometimes . . . I’m saying it doesn’t all the time. There are guys the system can’t touch who aren’t worth the air they’re breathing. And there’s a way to settle it. A natural way.

  A natural way. That’s what his father thought of killing. That it was the most natural thing in the world, an inherent solution to human conflict, ageless and unsurpassed.

  Frank hadn’t said anything for a while, until it became obvious his father wanted some sort of response. Then he’d asked what all of that had to do with the Army.

  It’s the same thing. There’s this system in place, right, governments and generals and all the rest, and they’re supposed to keep the peace, and everybody wants them to do it without firing a shot. But you know what? They can’t. Because there are evil people in the world, son, and they’re going to keep doing evil things. And that keeps people like me in demand. People like me, and your grandfather, and you. Somebody who knows how to use a gun and knows when to use it.

  That was the first time Frank had been officially included in the list, and it made his head go a little light, the honor of that shared company hitting him deep in his fourteen-year-old boy’s heart.

  A few years later, his father’s body in the ground and face on the front page of the newspaper, the sad truth of moments like that one began to show itself to Frank. He understood what his father had been doing, understood that he’d been rationalizing with himself as much as he’d been offering a philosophy to Frank. But he believed what he said, too, and Frank saw the horror in that, saw the fallacy and savageness and the justification. Yes, the justification. It was still there. Smaller, maybe, weakened, maybe, but not obliterated. It couldn’t be. Because his father, evil man or not, was dead, and Devin Matteson—evil man for sure—was alive and free. Cut a deal, hung Frank’s father out to dry, and then walked away from it. No punishment, no penance, no pain. He deserved some of all of that. Damn sure deserved some pain.

  There’d been another conversation down in the basement that stood out in Frank’s memory, and again the true significance hadn’t hit for a few years. They’d been down there working on elbow strikes—vertical, horizontal, front, rear, up, down, Frank’s dad always demanding greater speed, greater power—while his mother played Tom Petty music loud upstairs, trying to drown them out, unhappy with the violent lessons her son was taking to so well.

  That day had been, Frank would later learn, exactly one week after his father came back from Florida having killed two men to avenge Dan Matteson’s death. One week living with the reality of it, maybe a couple of weeks of dealing with the decision itself. He’d paused to sip a beer—it was the first time Frank could remember his dad bringing anything but bottled water downstairs with him—and he’d studied his son with a critical eye.

  Fran
k, he’d said, suppose somebody takes me out one of these days.

  It had still seemed like a game right then, and Frank had answered, That can’t be done, nobody out there good enough, in a flip, teasing voice, thinking they were just working up to some of the chest-thumping bravado the old man liked to get into during a hard session. His eyes were different, though, darker and more intense.

  It can be done, Frank. Probably will be done, someday.

  Frank didn’t answer.

  Suppose it happens, his father had said, and suppose you know who’s responsible. What would you do?

  Still no answer.

  Frank? What would you do?

  Kill him, Frank said, hating how weak his voice sounded, like a little kid. I’d find him and I’d kill him.

  Pleasure in his father’s eyes. Respect. He’d nodded, finished his beer, and said, Damn right you would. Damn right. Then he’d laid a hand on Frank’s shoulder and said, You’re a good boy, Frank. Check that—you’re a good man.

  A few years later, Frank had been able to flash back on that conversation and once again see what had been working beneath the surface, see the rationalization, the justification, but there’d been something else there, too: a promise.

  I’d find him and I’d kill him.

  Frank Temple II had killed himself. No scores to settle. None.

  I’d find him and I’d kill him.

  Frank had endured a lot of pity over the years, some genuine, some false. Sometimes it would be expressed directly to him; other times it just showed in their eyes. Poor kid. Imagine having such a monster for a father. The problem, though, the one that Frank saw and nobody else ever could, was that he’d been a good father. Was a murderer, sure, got paid for it, yes, but while that might be enough to define him for the rest of the world, it didn’t work for Frank. Didn’t replace seventeen years of love. He was a good father. Frank wished he hadn’t been, at times. Wished that he’d come home drugged out and violent, knocked Frank and his mother around, threatened the neighbors, that he’d done all of those things that a murderer should do in his own home—but he hadn’t. He’d been quick with a joke and a kind word, supportive, interested. When Frank was eleven years old and struck out with the bases loaded to end his Little League team’s season, his father had held him in the car as he’d cried in shame and said, “Don’t worry, kid, next year we’ll cork your bat,” and the tears had turned to laughter.