Walt

by Russell Wangersky

  Dean looked at the car — an unmarked beater from the police pool, one of those dark, low-slung Dodges with no hubcaps. The driver’s door was open, the keys in the ignition and the warning bell ringing steadily, almost apologetically, against the wind.

  Winter ducks, saltwater fish–eating ducks, were lurking along the edge of the foam, bobbing backwards over the crests without seeming to move, escaping before the waves had a chance to break over them.

  He heard the radio through the open door of the car — Communications asking why their calls to his cellphone were going straight to voicemail.

  “Doing interviews,” he said sharply into the microphone, already regretting the weight of the lie. And then they told him to come back in.

  He put the microphone in its silver bracket on the dashboard and looked out through the windshield at the water for a little while longer before putting the car into reverse.

  Back at the station, an almost dead-eyed senior lawyer from the Department of Justice had explained the new assignment matter-of-factly: “It’s you and Sergeant Scoville, and it’s nothing sexy like a cold case team or anything. There aren’t enough cases to make that worthwhile. Call it a bag of best practices. You’ll be devil’s advocate on other investigations, picking holes in cases, and you’ll fill in the rest of your time looking at old cases that have gone nowhere so that the files stay open. It’s just going to be the way it’s going to be.”

  The lawyer stared at him steadily, as if daring him to say anything.

  “It’s the minister’s idea, and it’s probably because of something he saw on television some night. And then the chief agreed to it, because, when it’s the minister’s idea, you just go with it and get some results that will look good in the paper. It’s politics, and you’re pawns. And the other cops are probably going to hate you, because you’ll trample all over their work and they’ll think you’re just out for the glory.”

  The minister. The chief. Dean didn’t know either of them well — he’d met the chief only a few times — but he did know from experience about police departments and priorities. Stats and profiling had been a priority for a while, and then it wasn’t, and that’s how he’d lost that office, tree and all.

  Dean also knew about how you could measure those priorities simply by looking at the office space you got and the furniture that came with it. And the message he and Scoville were clearly being sent was that they shouldn’t expect anything. They had cast-off desks hauled up from the basement of the station instead of the new modular stuff, and those desks were crammed into an office that had previously held one detective and now held two. No windows at all.

  “You guys are here because you’re supposed to be self-starters. Or you’re low maintenance. Or something like that. But don’t make any mistakes: your job is to make sure your ties are straight and your jackets buttoned. Stand back there and let the chief and the minister answer the questions. You’re not to do any talking.”

  The lawyer looked at the two detectives as if he didn’t expect any talking from them either. And there wasn’t any. After he left, Dean looked down to make sure that his tie was, in fact, still straight. He’d heard a similar speech before, back when they’d taken him from Robbery and plunked him down on his own with a computer and a textbook on spreadsheets. He’d been called a self-starter then, too.

  It was quiet in the office, the lawyer’s words hanging. Dean looked across at Scoville, who had been in arson and who was now here, holding a coffee. Dean watched him stretch his blunt-fingered hands up over his head.

  “Low maintenance?” Scoville said. “Mostly that means we won’t complain. Been there.”

  The minister might want results, but Dean had already decided that the chief couldn’t really care less. That’s why he and Scoville were on the squad. Dean knew his results from stats had been almost impossible to pin down empirically — and Scoville was a stubborn cop no one ever wanted to work with, not even in Arson, where the work was dirty and cold and endless. A place where Jim Scoville could happily dig around up to his knees in wet charcoal and never have to speak to another living person. Because Scoville didn’t like talking — in fact, he didn’t seem to like anyone or anything outside the job. Maybe that wasn’t completely a bad thing: lately, Dean didn’t like talking either.

  Dean knew they’d made a team out of two cops who didn’t even really want to be in the same room with each other. From the outside, it must’ve looked like a science experiment — the kind that wouldn’t work.

  Chapter 6

  Nov 15 — You know how sometimes you’ll just stop and be sure there’s someone watching you, but you look around and you can’t see anyone? I feel like that a lot, and I can’t seem to shake it. I don’t know. It’s unsettling, and I don’t like it at all.

  Sometimes, I think I catch a glimpse of someone, but I’m not sure. And then when I look around, everyone’s just so ordinary. Maybe it’s living alone: Daniel’s here when he wants to be, but there’s a lot of time he’s not. When there were three of us in the house, it was a lot of fun, but Heather and Sue got jobs away, and they both wanted out of the lease. I got them to pay a bit to let them out, and I like having the place on my own, but it’s right at the edge of what I can afford. I worry about that. But I worry for a lot of reasons. Maybe I’m just being paranoid.

  Chapter 7

  Pasta

  pasta sauce

  peppers

  cucumber

  spinach

  green onion

  tomato

  bagels

  garlic bread?

  chick peas

  olives

  snacks for work

  cream cheese

  cheese (cheddar)

  milk

  diet pepsi

  Sometimes, you can just read a list and immediately get the whole picture, not only of what’s for dinner, but the whole darned thing, the big ball of wax that’s their lives — who they are, what kind of house they live in, what kind of money they make, the little box of a car they drive, even the kind of magazine subscriptions that would show up in the mailbox out front.

  Even the little breaks on the list tell you something — those parts where there’s a little indecision, some hesitation, like the person’s trying to do something just a little bit different but isn’t sure they actually should. Those are the parts you work on most, the ones you worry at like a piece of loose thread on the sleeve of your shirt, the ones that offer the best information when you set your mind to decoding them. In any relationship there are unspoken rules, and those critical marks show the lines we’re afraid to step over.

  That question mark after garlic bread, like someone’s trying to decide if it would be too much — or the brackets, just to make sure you don’t fuck up and pick the wrong kind of cheese, and someone gives you that face. Sometimes it’s the small things that actually complete the story.

  I can see her in my head — I know it’s a her, and not because of the Diet Pepsi, either. I know because that list was in red ink and because of the wide loops curling down under the g’s, just the shape of them, big and full and swinging wide. I know it as well as if I had seen the shopping list laid out flat on the counter with a pen beside it before she went to the store, as if she were going out shopping for me and I looked up from the table and over at her and said, “I guess I know what’s for dinner.”

  I know something else, too: I know I could skim through that list and then go out and fill the cart with a whole bunch of other things, and that I could wheel it up to the front of the store for her and know that every single extra thing I chose would be right.

  What the note says for sure: spaghetti for dinner, a side salad, the cheat of pouring the sauce right out of the jar but then bulking up easy and fast with fresh vegetables. Garlic bread from the deli counter, tossed into the oven and pulled out hot like it was a “
Good Housekeeping” magic trick or something. Nothing wrong with that, other than the fact that she feels like she has to do it.

  I’m sure it’s a woman on her way home from a full-time job, already busy enough to be more than pissed off over the fact that she’s the only one worrying about dinner. There are little bits worth underlining: almost everything on the list is there to meet someone else’s needs. I see it all the time; I can pick out ten women working from lists just like that in the store at any one time. Drink boxes they never drink out of, oven-cooked French fries they don’t actually eat because they are afraid of packing on a pound or two, cookies resolutely without nuts to pack in lunches sent to schools with endless allergy rules.

  You can see their world if you let your vision go kind of soft: I feel like I’m right there — like I could find my way to their bathroom blindfolded, a bathroom in a house I’ve never been in.

  That’s me sitting on the kitchen countertop, watching, when she gets home. That’s the way I imagine it, as if I’m sitting right in the middle of the action and the conflict and the clipped little sentences that married couples start to bat back and forth so sharply, those sentences where only the two of them can hear the weight of the dropped words and the importance of the slipping, downhill intonation. Words flying right over the heads of the youngsters spooling around their legs, kids asking for one more snack because they can’t wait even another minute for dinner.

  “How was your day?” — but with the sentence dropping down flat at the end so you know the speaker couldn’t actually care less about the answer. Drive in a car with those couples on a highway road trip, even without the kids, and the same old lines of conflict are inked in the fact that he wants a chicken sandwich and she wants a place that can at least make good coffee: “I’ve already had two bad cups of coffee today,” like it’s a scorecard and she’s just plain owed.

  You can’t top two bad cups of coffee, the acid, roiling nastiness of them, even with a pair of chicken sandwiches, so you fold your hand at the first real coffee place you see. Well, you should fold your hand, but often the stakes don’t let you. There’s too much riding, for each of you, on being the one to win the hand.

  And you’re keeping score. It’s not easy to admit it when you’re looking right at the person you’re playing against, but late at night, I’m sure our ceilings all look the same, hovering up there in the dark, and the best you can say is that the counting is quiet and precise, and that the grand totals are underlined every bit as clearly as if a legion of accountants had been at work, making sure the totals are perfectly correct on both sides of the ledger.

  Maybe there’s a way out of that.

  Mary and I never found it.

  But I still wonder: maybe if someone’s willing to come out of their own little fortress for just a minute or two, take that step or two forward. Maybe be the first one to back down (but not absolutely always the first one to back down, because that’s just surrender). Maybe that would be the way.

  Looking at the note again, I imagine she’s a store regular.

  There are so many of those women moving through the store, travelling in their close-held, personal little bee-dance patterns, it’s like loose schools of fish, so much the same and yet keeping a distinct and constant distance between each other. As if they can recognize themselves.

  Sometimes I think I can only hope that they don’t all get together and make a vicious little club — imagine that.

  They’d have the same set of frustrations and complaints, they’d be facing the same unfair, uncaring world, and you know it would mean they’d build up on top of each other like a thunder cloud, complaint on complaint like a wobbly tower reaching right up into the stratosphere, coiling around on itself and only growing more intense and unpredictable.

  Picking out how the men in their lives had let them down.

  Now that’s a club where you’d want to avoid being the only invited male guest, let me tell you: women with the corners of their mouths pulled down hard and the lines growing fast enough there for you to know it’s an attitude that’s quickly becoming permanent, ingrained. I’ve seen enough of that to know exactly what it means, to know that it doesn’t ever run in reverse.

  Mary was like that, eight years in — the mouth-turned-down part, I mean.

  I think it arrives at the moment when sheer, unstoppable disappointment trumps everything else, trumps it and overwhelms it and buries it in the backyard after killing it with the sharp edge of a shovel.

  Because there’s a line you cross where the weight of disappointment becomes overwhelming.

  A point where it just comes at you from all directions whenever you think about doing anything at all.

  I look back and think that it happened fast in our house, faster than it probably should have, just a handful of years in, when married life should either still be a long-running, unrecognized honeymoon or a nest of squalling accidental kids.

  Eight years in was when Mary realized The Grand Plan wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

  The Grand Plan.

  Part One — get out of Rabbittown, preferably married.

  Part Two — make just enough appearances with the man to let everyone in the old neighbourhood know just how good you’ve got it, then hightail it right back out of Rabbittown once you’ve shown it all off. Even if you don’t really have it good at all. Then have kids quick, settle down. For us, Part Two was where it all hit the rocks.

  Part Three — I don’t think we ever got close to Part Three.

  In fact, I don’t think I was ever close enough to make out what Part Three was even supposed to be — and I think that was exactly where the big disappointment came from for Mary.

  My gears slipped. And at just the wrong time.

  Chapter 8

  bananas

  Butter

  Whipping cream

  ginger ale

  Everything about that list just says “comfort food.” Or dessert. Something with a hint of “please rescue me.” Sometimes, there’s no one coming to the rescue. I see them more often than you’d think, grocery lists that read like life rings. From all kinds of people; I mean, you might expect desperation from some people — tired, worn out, stressed housewives maybe. But it’s anyone, really, picking up chips and dip or crackers or instant pizzas. I can look out my front window and anyone walking by might be lugging their own particular safety net home, filling no hole, solving nothing.

  Home for me?

  McKay Street in east end St. John’s, nothing that special, row houses up and down both sides of the street, an older neighbourhood forced to fancy up fast to try and keep up with the house prices. And I don’t really have much truck with anyone who lives down here, I have to tell you. I really don’t have much time for the effort of being neighbourly. I keep to myself, and the only time I see anyone is when I’m in the backyard, going out the front door, or having a look at the emergency vehicles — police or fire or ambulance — pulling up to someone else’s door, someone else unwillingly spilling the details of their private life right out there in front of me all over the pavement.

  Out back, there’s just a little postage stamp of yard, the remaining scrap of geometry left over when all the ordinary pieces have been cut out of an irregular city block. Everyone else with full rectangles of yard, us, midway through the block but still stuck with the leftovers. The backyard used to be Mary’s space — I was in charge of the lawn mowing and the occasional large fallen tree limb, but she did the flower beds and planted the tall currants that still stand all along the fence in the back, idiot red repeating berries that come back every year and shrivel away into tight little knots when no one picks them but the birds. Gardens: there’s a little bit of the resurrection in the whole thing, right? Every time the poppies rip open red in the early summer, or in the fall when the dead-heads of the old flowers are standing around waiting to b
e knocked flat by the snow, I think of her out there with the dirt on her hands and on her knees.

  That was a sight, for sure, Mary rising up from the edge of the garden and the soil and coming toward me. I don’t know — she had a way of just letting whatever was in her hands fall, forgotten, arms limp as if they didn’t matter at all, and I never knew, would never know, whether that was device, design, or the way she really felt. But it would shake its way right into me, every time. Take my breath literally away.

  She’d look straight at me, raising herself up from the dirt, and it made me feel like there wasn’t another single thing in the world that mattered to her.

  She shed things, and walk straight toward me, the only man in the entire universe.

  There are a lot of things I may have forgotten, but I haven’t forgotten that.

  And the yard? I may be trying hard to forget all about it, but it certainly hasn’t forgotten Mary.

  Flowers have a way of setting their roots into you. A couple of years might go by when I don’t see anything at all out in the yard except the poppies, and then a spindly little columbine, some refugee from one of Mary’s constant past plantings, will shoot up and open its flowers like a bunch of staring eyes and rude little mouths, and it will drive me right out of the yard all over again. Can’t even stand to look at them, like they’re accusing me of something.

  Big maples throw their branches in over the sides of that yard like great open hands with far too many fingers — there is not one single maple tree in my yard, but the shade from their crowns cuts over the fence in semicircles onto the grass in half a dozen places. Every one of my neighbours has one, and year after year, their offspring try to set up shop in my yard as well. Every spring, it’s a regiment of brave little stupid maples lifting their heads up above the grass, reaching always up, those two blunt little seed-leaves first, and then the pair of unfurling flags they wave to prove they are maples, after all. And every year, I mow them down, one clean sweep from house to fence and back again and they’re done, no second chances until next year’s brigade comes ashore.