THE LAST BOY

by ROBERT H. LIEBERMAN

  “What did you find?” asked Sisler bending down to enter the hut.

  “Oh?” said Tripoli, startled out of his reverie.

  “Get a load of these, will you,” said Sisler, grabbing up one of the volumes and thumbing roughly through it. “Looks like it was written by some monks or something.”

  “Hey, take it easy!”Tripoli pulled the book away from Sisler and cradled it tenderly in his large hands. “It's evidence.”

  Tripoli kept moving around the hut.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know. I just got this vague feeling that I’m missing something—hey, get me a light,” he said. When Sisler came back with a flashlight, Tripoli found it. Hanging from a wooden peg on the wall was a whistle. It was red and white and made of plastic.

  “The sheep,” said Tripoli as they were packing up and getting ready for the trek out of the woods. “And these goats.” Tripoli counted them. There were two ewes and three lambs, a ram circling around them; a mother goat with a pair of twins, the trio pressed tight against an old billy with a beard.

  “Yeah, what about them?” asked Sisler.

  A man from State Police forensics had arrived and was shooting pictures of the interior of the Hermit's hut. A couple of the guys from IPD were carrying the old man's possessions out to the road. There certainly would be a grand jury investigation, and Tripoli knew the troopers and sheriff were already figuring out ways to cover their respective and collective asses.

  “We can’t just leave these poor animals here,” said Tripoli.

  The creatures still seemed terrified from all the commotion. They made him think of Danny. Leaving them would be like abandoning the boy here in the forest. How was he ever going to explain to Danny what they had done to the old man?

  “Why not?” said Sisler.“Let them just eat the fucking grass—or whatever they do.”

  “Chrissake Jerry, they’re domestic animals!”

  “So?”

  “I’ll keep them out at my place.”

  “Yeah? Okay. How we gonna get ’em there?”

  “I don’t know,” muttered Tripoli, preoccupied. “Get one of the rookies. Billy Van Ostrand's got a big four-wheeler, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, the poor old man,” said Sandy.

  “He had it coming to him,” said Larry as the office crew hunched in front of his TV.

  Molly chewed on the nail of her thumb as she watched CNN's footage of the troopers and SWAT team and sheriff's people emerging from the woods with their equipment and dogs.

  “You’d think with that army of people,” said Ben,“they’d be able to capture a harmless old man without killing him.”

  Then there was a long shot of the old man's hut and a sheet-covered lump close to the door that she guessed was his body. A close-up of the hut, a flimsy thing made out of nothing more than branches and a roof of what looked to be thatch. My God, Molly thought, this was where he held Danny through a whole miserable winter!

  Tasha stuck her head in the office.“There's a bunch of reporters here to see Molly and Danny.”

  “We’re not here,” said Molly and hurried back to her office. Danny stood at the window, pressing his cheek against the glass. Gently closing the door, she came up behind him and put her face near to his.

  He turned to her and his mouth came close to her ear. “But why?” he whispered, his lips quivering, “Why did they have to bother him? He never hurt anyone. I liked him. I liked being with him. And he taught me everything.”

  As he started to cry, her own eyes welled with tears. “Darling, darling,” she murmured.“My poor baby.”

  Danny turned and, burying his face in her breast, wept bitterly. Molly clung to him tightly, bringing her face close to his. Though she felt pity for Danny, hers were the tears of relief. It was over. The nightmare had come to an end.

  “He promised me,” said Danny between the sobs wracking his small frame. “He promised me that he wouldn’t hurt the man. Trip promised me.”

  “Oh, Sweetie, I know he didn’t mean to hurt him. He's a—”

  “He's a liar!” said Danny now pulling away angrily. “He's a dirty liar!”

  “No, Honey. You’re so wrong. Trip's a good man. I don’t know if you can understand right now. I know you’re upset, but I think you’ll come to understand things better. I’ve been so worried, so terribly worried. That I’d lose you again. And now there's no one who can take you away from me.”

  He stood staring at her.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  He continued to stare at her unblinkingly.

  “Oh, no!” she cried. She stopped breathing and her mind raced. “There are others. Is that it?”

  He didn’t answer. Just looked at her wide-eyed.

  “Tell me! Are there?” She grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.“Well, are there? Answer me for God sakes!”

  With the back of his hand, he wiped his eyes and, looking down at his feet, murmured in the tiniest voice,“I think so.”

  Tripoli kept trying to reach Molly at the office, but the lines were constantly tied up. He drove over, but the girl at the front desk said Molly had already left. She wasn’t at the trailer either, though a contingent of reporters were camped out there waiting for her and Danny.

  “I want everybody out of here!” he said, but the reporters just stared back at him. They knew their rights—or thought they did. “I’m not getting into a pissing contest with you guys. You’re on private property. Get off the fucking lawn or I’m going to have you all arrested. And I mean now!”

  Tripoli called for backups, and three minutes later two patrol cars pulled up. Pellegrino was in one of them. Then Sisler arrived in his car.

  “I want them all back. Back a hundred yards.”

  The reporters bitched and moaned as the officers cleared them away from Molly's trailer.

  “Quite a garden she's got here,” said Sisler, admiring the lush vines of squash and bushy tomato plants.

  “It's the boy's,”Tripoli said absently.

  “No kidding. He must have planted stuff real early. His beans are way ahead of ours.”

  Tripoli kept pacing aimlessly in front of the trailer. Where was Molly? He needed to talk to her. And Danny. He wanted to explain what had happened. He glanced over at Danny's garden. Sisler was right. It was amazingly advanced. The first thing that struck him was the color and sheer size of the leaves. They were a startling bright green and enormous. When he gingerly stepped into the patch, he realized that the trellised vines supported by long sticks stuck into the ground created a space shielded from the rest of the trailers, a kind of mystical, fragrant realm that seemed a world away from the squalor of the park. This from a little boy, he marveled.

  Then he noticed the arrangement. Danny had planted his vegetables in groups, his eggplants sat clustered with potatoes. Shallow rooting onions sat side by side with peppers. Tripoli's father had been an avid gardener, and this was precisely what he had sworn by: companion planting. Danny had even known what to do with the marigold seeds Tripoli had left. The bright yellow blossoms formed a protective ring around the garden, warding off bean beetles and nematodes and cabbage worm.

  Hastily scribbling a note, Tripoli called out to Pellegrino.

  “Do me a favor and stay put, okay?” He tore the paper from his pad.“And give this to her if she comes back,” he said.

  A few minutes after Tripoli left, Molly drove into the park and was beset by the crowd of cameramen clogging the road. Two officers cleared a way for her car and, when she reached her trailer, Pellegrino handed her Tripoli's note.

  She lead Danny into the trailer and a minute later she was back out in front with her phone, anxiously pacing back and forth.

  “I never forget to turn on my radio,” Tripoli said. He was just driving out of town and heading to his farm in Newfield. “When I’m in the car, I can’t have both radios on—they interfere with each other. You get feedback when you transmit. B
ut as soon as I step out, I always, always turn on my mobile.” His sounded frazzled, unhinged, as if he were ready to cry. This wasn’t the Tripoli she knew.“If I had just had the brains to turn the goddamn thing on, this would never have happened. Never!”

  “Listen,” she said in a clipped voice. “I don’t feel guilty. And I don’t see why you should, either. I don’t give a shit if they’re all dead.”

  What she said stopped him short.“All?”

  “There are others!”

  “Others?”

  “I thought it was just the old man. Get rid of him and—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  She told him what had happened.

  “Did Danny actually see other people out there?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. He won’t talk. Just that there were others.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  “No way!” she said. “You’re the last person in the world he wants to talk to.”

  “Oh damn, I really fucked up, didn’t I?”

  “No you didn’t,” she kept insisting.“What happened is right. He deserved it.”

  “No one deserves that.”’

  “The others,” she said, coming full circle. “They could be anybody. Anywhere.”

  “Let me at least—”

  “No!” she all but shouted. “Stay where you are. Everybody should just leave Danny alone.”

  The sun, a blazing globe, seemed enormous, dramatic, brighter and bigger than he could ever recall. Winding up the drive leading to his hilltop house, it flooded Tripoli's house and barn with a brilliant hue of reddish yellow, inflaming the colors and making the place look as though it were stage-lit.

  Set against a backdrop of dense, dark woods, the old Greek Revival looked better than he knew it was with its rundown barn and neglected five acres. It had lots of “possibilities,” as Kim used to say. But the paint was peeling and part of the roof was missing, a tarp held down with boards the only protection from storms. It needed just about everything: new siding, gutters, interior walls. Yeah, it had possibilities, endless possibilities for work. A place like this craved a family, not a single, divorced cop who was hardly ever around to take care of it or enjoy it, he thought bitterly.

  Yet, against his better judgment, he had hung on to the property. Abutting the Connecticut Hill wilderness area, it possessed a sense of space and tranquility. Returning here at the end of the day, Tripoli ruminated as he bounced up his potholed drive, he could leave behind the city and all its problems. He had always hoped that Molly would one day come out here with the boy, live with him, marry him. Hoped.

  Things now, however, just seemed to be going from bad to worse. Since the day that Danny had returned, he could feel Molly slipping away. And now, now he had let Danny down. Tripoli wondered if he could ever repair the damage he had done to the boy's trust. He thought about Danny's need to be outdoors and now he understood it perfectly. The way he felt, Tripoli didn’t care if he ever set foot again in that station house. What had transpired today sickened him, made him ashamed of being a cop. A peaceful old man had been killed. And in his doggedness he had been the catalyst, the one who kept instigating the other agencies to take action; he had led that trigger-happy pack right to the old guy's doorstep. And then—at the most critical moment—carelessly let his attention lapse.

  When he got out of the car, Tripoli heard the shouts of men in the field mingling with the forlorn cries of the sheep and goats locked in his old barn. Billy Van Ostrand's truck stood near the kitchen door caked with mud. Sisler and Van Ostrand were out in the meadow trying to tackle a billy goat that kept making end-runs around them.

  “Christ, you’ll never get him like that!” snapped Tripoli coming up behind them,“You’ve got to use your brains—not brute force.”

  “Well,” said Sisler brushing off his clothes.“What do you say we let you use your brains?”

  “Fine,” said Tripoli.“I’ll take care of this.”

  A moment later he regretted his brusqueness.“I didn’t mean to jump down your throat like that. I really appreciate the help.”

  “Yeah, any time,” said Sisler, hardly hiding his sarcasm, “Just say the word.”

  Young Van Ostrand, the knees of his uniform soaked with ooze, looked a little disgusted himself. “Got a hose so I can wash out the truck?” he asked tersely as Tripoli walked them back down the hill. “It's new. Used to be, at least.”

  It took nothing more than a bucket of grain and a measure of patience to entice the goat back to his friends. After he was sequestered in the barn, Tripoli went down to the local Agway. Talking his way into the just-closed store, he went right to the steel posts.

  “I’ll need a few dozen of these. And what have you got in the way of fencing?” he said moving quickly.“Got welded wire with big mesh?”

  He next found a big trough. “I’ll take this, too.”

  With the clerk's reluctant help, he managed to tie a couple of big rolls of the fencing to the roof of his car. And even as the two jockeyed the trough into the trunk, Tripoli kept thinking about the “others.” A cult, he wondered? Or had Danny just been imagining others? Finally, he tossed two sacks of cracked corn into the rear seat, then, tying down the lid of the trunk with a bungie cord, took off.

  With his car nearly scraping bottom, he headed out the Trumansburg Road toward the hospital, recalling images of the old Hermit lying in front of his hut. He remembered what Danny had said, about laws, human laws. Justice? The whole thing was sickening.

  As he drove onto the hospital grounds overlooking the lake, his mind went back to the hut. So perfectly constructed, it had been more like a nest than a house. He thought about how much the old man had taught Danny, thought about those old hand-lettered books, those beautifully illustrated texts, and felt like a grave robber who had stumbled upon an ancient find.

  The medical examiner's office sat secluded in the basement of the main building, in the rear behind the labs. Phil Yerka, the M. E., was in his office with Jimmy Teeter, who had flown in with the old Hermit's body. Teeter, settled in for the long haul, was sitting off to one side, his feet propped up on a desk. He was reading one of Yerka's hunting magazines, a cup of coffee perched in his lap. Yerka was at his desk, filling out papers. He glanced up at Tripoli, lifting his eyebrows so that they merged into a single line of dense black. The place smelled of formalin and antiseptic. Usually it didn’t bother Tripoli, but today it made him queasy.

  “Hey, Jimmy,” he asked,“You got someone lined up to cover for you on the next shift?” Tying up precious manpower around the clock for a dead body seemed like an awful waste, but he didn’t make the rules.

  “They’ll be sending up Paolangeli tonight,” said Teeter, looking up.

  “And the prints?”

  “We took ’em already. I was thinking that I’d bring them down when Paolangeli relieves me. That fast enough?”

  “Yeah, sure. No big rush at this point, is there?” he said, a note of sadness creeping into his voice.

  “Hey, how's the farming going?” asked Teeter with a knowing grin. One thing about the department: gossip spread fast. But Tripoli wasn’t in the mood for jokes and he turned to Yerka.“What's with the autopsy?” he asked.

  Yerka got up and stretched. Standing, he was more than a good head taller than Tripoli. When he took off his glasses, his eyes looked sunken and owl-like. “Day after tomorrow,” said the pathologist. “Might be late in the morning. Around eleven, say? I’ve got a slew of other bodies lined up. You want to be present, Trip? Of course, we’ll videotape it for posterity.”

  “Nah, I think I prefer to catch the movie,” said Tripoli in a wan attempt at humor. He couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the old man split up the middle and disemboweled, his brain and liver lying in a pan.

  “You want some coffee?”

  Tripoli thought about it.

  “You look like you need it,”Yerka added kindly.“Come on, my treat.”

  They walked
to the hospital cafeteria and each got a coffee and a cheese Danish. It was only when he took a bite that Tripoli realized he hadn’t eaten a thing since early morning. It had been a hell of a long day. He glanced around. A group of nurses who were on break sat at a nearby table gossiping and laughing. A young guy with a stethoscope slung around his neck sat down and joined them, and they all laughed at something he said. Tripoli was in a foul mood. Even here, he noticed, the place smelled of hospital. He tried eating without breathing through his nose.

  “So what the hell happened out there?” inquired Yerka, finally.

  “Don’t ask,” Tripoli played with the empty Styrofoam cup, breaking it up into little pieces. “They were out of fucking control. All these chiefs and no Indians. Every asshole with his finger on a trigger. I think they were dying for an adrenal rush, maybe some target practice, too.”

  Tripoli told Yerka how someone had lobbed in gas, twice. How the old man had never even coughed.

  “Yeah, that's what Teeter was telling me,” said the doctor.

  “And?”

  “Well,” said Yerka with a lift of his heavy brow, “I took a quick look when the body came in. There was no mucus at all. Nothing in the nose or throat. Clean. And he looks like he was a healthy guy—for his age.”