The True Detective

by Theodore Weesner

  One way or another, she tells herself, her drinks will mark an end and a beginning. This very summer night. She’ll sit at the bar, just like a customer, and take a look around herself. She hopes, she prays, that they kid her for coming in on her night off. They better, she thinks. It’s what she needs, she thinks, especially tonight.

  People would laugh if they knew of this mission she had undertaken, but it’s the only way she has thought of to get rid of his things. She has neither wood stove nor fireplace in her small house, and the town dump, with banker’s hours, run like a clinic, was out of the question, even if it did have a central incinerator. For it had sheds and office space, too, and the men who worked there examined everyone’s garbage in their bureaucratic authority. She could see them pinning up her son’s driver’s license, or the newspaper with the headline, TOWN’S FIRST MURDERER IN NINE YEARS, or even some of those pictures of little gay boys which, among other things, had been returned by the police. No, she did not want anyone keeping souvenirs, because if they did, she knew she would have no choice about staying here. She had similar fears about burying his things in the woods. A dog would dig everything up two years down the road, and it would be in the paper all over again, and she’d be paralyzed again in her helpless embarrassment. She has this plan then, heading south on 93, to turn into the elaborate Mall of New Hampshire, near Manchester, find a dumpster in the midst of its loading ramps, dump in everything, knowing it will make its way to a roaring incinerator which will reduce it to nothing, charge a blouse or stockings at Filene’s to validate the shopping excursion she has mentioned to friends at work, and return to her meeting with herself at the bar, to two or three or four short screwdrivers, to the first moments of the rest of her life.

  She drives on. Right now, to the right, the sun is a dusty orange ball between tree masses and curves in the land, is falling and fading quickly. There are shadows in the highway valleys, where night is coming up from the ground; a car passes across the green, landscaped median with its headlights on—she turns hers on, too—and she begins to have a sense not of driving south but of driving north in her childhood, riding in the back seat of her parents’ car in the summertime and heading north for recreation. It’s what people are doing here, she decides, what they do all summer. Drive north for recreation. For freedom, really. To be free of heart. Lake water, campsites, high spirits, and cocktails—freedom. So it will be for her, she thinks, in half an hour, when she has completed her task and is heading north again. It will be as it was then. Freedom.

  TURNING INTO THE mall, which at a distance looks a little like Las Vegas with its lights and neon reaching into the darkening sky, she is having doubts only about the urn. She hopes it will melt. She believes it will. Throwing it into a lake or river has occurred to her, but was rejected on a fear, an image, of some fisherman snagging it with a hook, dragging it in and reading the name, and everyone celebrating all over again the history she had produced. Nor did she care that all that was left of him might be reduced to smoke and disappear completely, for she had yet to burden herself with beliefs of forever after. She wants him gone, she tells herself. It’s pathetic, she knows, but she wants him to disappear entirely, for it seems her only chance.

  The dumpster she finds is in an ideal location. Driving slowly and carefully into an opening in the mall’s exterior, she finds herself, under floodlights, at the rear loading area of a supermarket and other rear entrances, next to a blue dumpster nearly as large as a railroad car. Turning off the motor, she slips from her car and goes around to open the trunk lid. Nearby, a generator runs insistently. She pauses, to double-check. An odor of decomposing food is in the air, but no one is around. From ground level, she can see on one end a tumbling stack of folded cardboard boxes and the thin wooden and wire crates used for shipping produce. Maybe the dumpster will be emptied soon. It satisfies her to think that the fire might take place as soon as tomorrow or the next day.

  She lifts out the urn first. Now or never, she thinks. Hefting it like a shotput up into the dumpster, she thinks ashes to ashes. It thunks! hitting at least close to the steel bottom. It will be covered, she thinks. If not now, with the boxes she has to empty, then with other garbage. She feels some relief. The worst is over. Good luck to you; good riddance, too, she thinks.

  Taking one of the cardboard boxes in hand, she carries it to the lip of the long steel tub, which is face high, and spills its contents over the side. Closed boxes would attract attention, she has thought. Loose papers, even that dirty magazine, would go unnoticed. She imagines the urn being covered already. She feels more relief. Okay, she says to herself.

  Lifting another box, she dumps it over the side. And another. If there is such a thing as another life, she thinks, I hope you’re happier there than you ever were here. Because it just never worked for you here, did it? She empties the contents of another small box, tosses the box in after. Burn, baby, burn, she thinks, as a card or slip of paper falls to the ground.

  There is one more box, which is heavy and which she shifts carefully to a resting place on the edge of the dumpster before tipping out its contents, She tips in the box itself. Checking the trunk, satisfied it is empty, she closes the lid. She feels more relief. Only then, stepping back around to the driver’s side, does she see again and reach down to pick up the scrap of paper which had fallen to the pavement. It is, of all things, a photograph of her which had appeared several years ago in the local paper when she had won a merchandise certificate for twenty-five dollars.

  He saved that, she thinks; she had not noticed it when she packed the cardboard boxes. To think he kept such a thing, she thinks. That he cut it out. Pausing, uncertain, she finally wads the piece of newsprint and tosses it into the dumpster, because she thinks it is going to make her cry.

  Starting her car, she backs around and drives out through the opening. In the floodlighted parking lot, deciding after all against shopping, anxious to be on her way, to be where she has thought to be and among others, she crosscuts through the black pasture of glistening cars and returns to the highway.

  She drives north. Only moments later, her car’s headlights are reaching into the darkness before her. She lights a cigarette. The cooling night air of northern New England flows through her windows as she drives. As on so many summer nights, there is moisture in the air, which is cooling, which makes appealing the dry interiors of cabins and houses and taverns, and as always, there is the darkness ahead.

  Something isn’t quite working, though, as the feeling of freedom she had anticipated keeps eluding her. She tries to have the feeling come up in her. She tries to recall what it was in childhood, what set of circumstances it was that gave to the rides north on summer nights their special thrill of expectation.

  Was it merely childhood? she wonders. Was it just a phase that one might never have back again. Were those small wonders of life spent or traded, never to be known a second time? Why did things so small, so passing, seem at times like this to be everything?

  IN HER WAKE, meanwhile, in the long steel dumpster, the wadded rectangle of newsprint had settled to a resting place among the other discarded documents and papers, the odd letters and the magazine of photographs, where, under the moving, star-salted sky, all tend slightly toward shifting and reopening under their own power, their own memory. They lie there as a mass of words and pictures, within the deflected light of the mall, within the faintest currents of summer air, as if in waiting, in some secret plan, to be found again.

  MATT WELLS

  HE IS WET-MOPPING a tile floor. It is the kitchen of a shop called the Bagelry, beyond the reach of the Newington Mall’s music but along its main line sixty or eighty yards from where Cormac is working at a midstream island called the Cookie Counter. Outside, outside the Mall’s music, it is this weekday in July, and he and Cormac are tending each minute toward a forbidden afternoon excursion, walking some, hitchhiking some, to Hampton Beach, where the midday sun is blazing down on the dark pavement, on green ocean
water and blond beach sand, and where, at this time of year, not to be there and to be of an age is not to be at all.

  At the same time that Matt’s heart is seized with beach fever, he is infatuated with his job. Sixteen now, it’s his first job ever, and that he is paid actual money once a week is but frosting on a larger reward. He has taken it on. The kitchen is his when he is there, and it is where he loves to be. Responsibility is something he has never quite known before, in the midst of adults, and when his boss, Mr. Dunn, remarked to him recently that he was a good worker, he couldn’t wait to be back at it. He earns minimum.

  He and Cormac are friends again, although Cormac may remain unaware that they were ever anything else. They hang out together, walk to and from the Mall when their haphazard work schedules coincide, and rarely telephone each other. It has occurred to Matt that he is pleased to have Cormac as a friend again, although he has never mentioned this to Cormac, no more than he would tell him of the exaggerated satisfaction he finds in his job, or anything of the other concerns which travel as steadily as underground streams through his mind’s passageways, such as being on his own, as he knows himself to be.

  Cormac is out there now. Hearing his voice from near the counter, Matt concludes his mopping right to the kitchen doorway, hangs up the mop in the storeroom, stuffs his apron into the plastic bucket there as instructed, and checks the clock—12:06—before inserting his time card for his satisfying slam and moving it to the out rack. Starting along the brief walkway, which turns into the customer area, he sees Cormac coming in; catching Matt’s arm, Cormac whispers, “Look who’s here.”

  Turning into the shop, Matt is saying, “Who?” but doesn’t need an answer as he sees, opposite the glass case by the cash register, Vanessa Dineen and her friend Barbara.

  “Matt, hello,” she says.

  “Hi,” Matt says.

  “You work here?” she says.

  “Yah, in the kitchen,” he says.

  “Ugh,” she says.

  “Oh, it’s not bad,” he says. “In fact, I sort of like it.” Caught momentarily between wanting to talk to her and the call of the beach, of Cormac, he adds, “We’re in a rush. How are you?”

  “I’m just fine. We’re going to be ushers, at Prescott Park, for the summer musicals.”

  Matt nods. He doesn’t know what to say. “That sounds great,” he says. And he says, “We have to go. Nice to see you. Take care.”

  “Bye,” she says.

  Walking away, he feels her at his back. Moments later, walking fiercely away from the Mall, they reach nearby Route 4, where, on the other side of a traffic light, they take up walking forward and backwards, throwing their thumbs out to the train lengths of cars set free periodically by the light. Illegal with Cormac’s parents and with Matt’s mother, hitchhiking here is illegal with the police, too, and they keep moving along the shoulder, looking to hitchhike and to be walking, should they spot a telltale white and blue light rig on top of an oncoming car. Vanessa is with him still, but she is fading now.

  “You ever gone to Prescott Park?” Cormac says.

  They go along, turn to walk backwards in the rush of another stream of cars.

  “I went once,” Cormac says. “You know, a musical. What it was like was a cat being squashed by a bulldozer; it kept screaming to this other cat that was being electrocuted. Both at once. Then everybody came out and swirled around for a while. Then the two cats came back to the center of the stage and screeched some more like they were being fed into a meat grinder together.”

  Matt smiles; he doesn’t say anything. After Vanessa—he seems to have let her slip away—other things are on his mind. It isn’t “meeting” his father, as he did, during the viewing hours at the funeral home, which moment he has replayed any number of times, perhaps daily. Nor is it seeing him rearrested at the cemetery after the service, and being stricken with an urge to fight for him, to help him escape, and only standing there, which moment he also relives, it seems, at least once a day. What is on his mind is the mailbox at home, which he discovered after his father was released yet again to return to Louisiana and sent a first check along with a note in the envelope asking him to write. After taking part of an afternoon and an evening at the kitchen table, composing the first letter of his life, and waiting a couple of days, he began checking the mail delivery. Coming home from school, and after school let out for the summer, when he wasn’t working, he watched for the mailman’s jeep, listened for his stopping at the three mailboxes on the front of the house, and zipped down the stairs and around the front of the house to check.

  “You don’t think that’s funny?” Cormac says.

  “What’s not funny?” Matt says.

  They are turning to walk backwards, for another rush of cars. Then they walk forward again. The mailbox is still on Matt’s mind. Old, wrinkled metal, painted white several times over, it is the top mailbox of the three, and if he walked up to it a hundred times, he came away a hundred times empty-handed, for there was never a second check or an answer to the letter he had mailed.

  “You’re lots of fun, Matt,” Cormac says as the string of cars passes.

  “I was thinking of something.”

  “What were you thinking of?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “You sure you want to go to the beach?”

  “We’re going. I’m going. We’re gonna have a good time.”

  “You know something, Matt? You’re getting weird.”

  This time, Matt does laugh. “I know,” he says.

  “You want to go to Prescott Park?”

  “I thought you didn’t like it.”

  “I changed my mind. You want to go?”

  “Sure. Let’s go.”

  “When? You want to go tonight?”

  “Sure. Let’s do it.”

  They pivot yet again, present their thumbs to another string of cars. As it is every summer, the Seacoast area traffic is heavy; as they walk along, as Matt is walking backwards, the excitement of being at the beach is returning to him. Turning, looking ahead once more and walking, he feels the excitement within him, even as there remains something unexcited within him, too, a scroll, a stone tablet containing thoughts, it seems, thoughts instructing him to keep looking ahead, to keep walking along as he is walking now, to forgo that approaching of the mailbox, which he knew all along would never present to him what he was looking for, to forgo looking behind him, to walk on his way as he is doing now.

  LT. GILBERT DULAC

  IN THE MIDWEST, a thousand miles away, driving a rental car he had reserved at Indianapolis International, the heavyweight detective is on a mission he has assigned himself, for its restorative and peaceful possibilities, to pick up and return to his home state a man facing embezzlement charges in the Seacoast area. Cruising along a major truck route into the heart of the country, he is letting his mind wander as it will, where it will, into the future as well as into the past, while he has both windows open in the dryly heated air and is taking in an aroma of the land, of new-mown hay, of timothy and wild basil, a smell he recalls from his childhood in Quebec or perhaps in Alberta where he spent a summer, on wagons rolling along dirt roads filled with rolls of the long green aromatic grasses of summer and home and well-being. On those evenings long ago his appetite was insatiable for all things in life into the night, but as he drives here now, even as he is in the process of kicking his tobacco habit, it is food alone which keeps taking up his attention. He is starved, he tells himself. Roast chicken, his stomach seems to tell him. Mashed potatoes and gravy. Mom’s Small-Town Truck Stop Diner in the Heart of the Heart of the Country. Pumpkin pie. Apple pie a la mode.

  Maybe not the a la mode, he thinks. Maybe not the pie either, and maybe not the gravy and the chicken skin, alas. But dinner, even if it is early afternoon. Lots of chicken. At least a memory of better times, he thinks. And having granted himself permission to take in a sizeable chicken dinner, he shifts away from thinking of foo
d itself, cruising along at a comfortable fifty and fifty-five, and lets his mind return to where it seems to have been moments earlier, back in the plains of western Canada, and the general idea of retirement he has been tending toward lately, and the question of whether a new challenge is in order, of whether work is healthy or he should seek out something stress-free and low-key, whether he and Beatrice should ever consider moving away from where they had come to feel so much at home. And back, too, as always, to that other, deeper thought, the necessity within him to tell her. He hasn’t; he knows at last—perhaps in this moment—that he must. Every day it has been killing him slightly. He must.

  It is in this preoccupied frame of mind and compelled by hunger, picking out the word Restaurant among others in a sky-high stack of neon, that Dulac lifts the car’s turn signal and glides onto the exit lane as it blends into an uphill ramp leaving the highway. From a stop sign at the top of the hill, he turns right twice, into an expanse of oil-soaked blacktop, perhaps a dozen acres, where as many as fifty or sixty eighteen- and twenty-two-wheelers are parked and an equal number of cars and pickups, all surrounding a complicated central building, rows of gas and diesel pumps, a truck wash and a double row of storage sheds a distance ahead.

  Parking, an entire roast chicken on his mind by now, he slips on his sports coat, locks up, and crosses to the building in the heated air, hearing the sparkle and hiss of the great sign above him and the oceanic roar of cars and trucks rolling by on the highway below, and he feels good again as he goes up a flight of wide steps and follows a red neon sign Restaurant→ around a partial wraparound porch where other signs say Motel→ and Arcade→. Only when he is in a cashier’s alcove, though, does he notice something different, even as it doesn’t inform him yet in any way. It is a thickness of stale cigarette smoke in the air, and another, fainter smell, ever so slightly sickening, of the deodorant used to sweeten cleaning solvent. Roast chicken remains on his mind, though, and his thought in this moment is that detecting these smells is the price of having kicked the habit, as he sees and continues through a double doorway topped by another red neon Restaurant sign.