by Thomas Perry
Jane pulled the car into the driveway and her eyes instantly took in the state of the neighborhood. She had been looking at these same sights since she had first stood upright and been able to see over the hedges to survey the world while she was playing. The houses in this block had been built before the turn of the century for the people who worked in the factories and shipyards that were no longer here, and the trees were tall and thick, their roots pushing the blocks of the sidewalks up into rakish tilts that had made roller skating dangerous. Her front yard looked lush and green and needed cutting, the blades thick and wet from the rain she had missed while she was away. The clapboards of the narrow two-story house always had looked soft and organic to her because the dozens of layers of paint spread on by generations of Whitefields had made the corners rounded. She saw the curtain on Jake Reinert’s corner window twitch aside and she knew he had heard the car’s engine in the driveway next door.
She walked to her front door, unlocked it, and slipped inside to punch the code on her alarm keypad before the alarm could go off. She left her front door open so Jake would know that she was willing to talk. She walked into the kitchen, poured coffee into the filter of the coffee-maker, opened the freezer and unwrapped a frozen square of corn bread and a package of blueberries, and started to defrost them in the microwave oven.
Jane heard Jake on the porch, his footsteps heavy and a little stiff. “Come on in,” she called, then went back to the cupboard for honey. The microwave bell chimed, and she had the corn bread, berries, and honey on the kitchen table before Jake was comfortably seated. She heard him strain a little to ease himself down with his arms.
“I brought your mail,” said Jake. He set a pile of letters on the table.
“Thanks. Arthritis acting up?”
“It’s just the winters,” said Jake.
“Cold nights getting to you?”
“Yeah, too damned many of them.”
He watched her bustling around getting cups, plates, and silverware. Nothing escaped his notice. She was wearing heavier makeup than usual, and her right eye was half closed and the high cheekbone on that side seemed tight—not puffy, exactly, but swollen. She still moved quickly and gracefully, but she didn’t pick up things in groups: she lifted each one and set it down before she picked up the next. He judged it was probably a sprained wrist.
Jake had known Jane Whitefield for all of her thirty-two years, had known her mother for a few years before that, and her father all his life. He had come into this same kitchen as a child and watched her grandmother lay out corn bread, berries, and honey for him on this same table. Seneca women obeyed some ancient law that said that anybody who came in at any time of the day or night got fed.
He had not merely known Jane Whitefield, he had been around to see her coming, but it had been only two years ago that he had accidentally discovered what little Janie had grown up to do with herself. From the look of her, it had gotten harder lately. He said, “Rough trip this time?” He had suspected he would feel like an idiot if he said it this way, and he did; a woman who made her living by taking fugitives away from their troubles and into hiding probably didn’t have any kind of trips but rough ones. He had said it that way because it acknowledged that he knew the nature of her business and implied that he wasn’t shocked by it anymore. He considered this a necessary piece of hypocrisy.
To Jake’s surprise Jane didn’t take the chance he had given her to shrug it off or make a joke out of it. “Yeah,” she said. “It was awful.” She set a plate of corn bread in front of him and started to eat her own, but then set the fork back down. “I always thought the way it would end was that one day I would get sick of people and decide they weren’t worth the trouble anymore. That probably won’t be how it happens. I lost two of them, Jake.”
“Lost them?” he said. “You mean you can’t find them?”
“No.” She spoke clearly but with the quiet voice that made him know what she was going to say, because people spoke in low voices about the dead. “I got them killed.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I mean, I know what happened, but not how. We—the three of us—were taking a little boy to California. There was an ambush. I didn’t read it in time because it wasn’t a dark alley or a lonely road. It was a courthouse. The other two had to stop and buy me time to get the boy inside where he would be safe.”
“I’m sorry,” Jake said. That was what people said when somebody died. A man his age ought to have thought of something better than that by now, but if he had, he never remembered it when he needed it.
“Somebody outsmarted me. He knew what bait to use, and somehow he must have figured out a way to be sure that this lawyer—the one who died—knew it was there. But the trap he set wasn’t for a lawyer. It was for someone like me.”
“How do you know that?”
“He knew that I would find a way to get the boy into the courthouse before it opened in the morning, or at least study the building so I knew the entrances and exits and who was supposed to be where. So at the last minute he had them transfer the case to a different court.”
Jake ate some of the corn bread and honey, and thought about what she had said. “Who is he, a cop?”
She said, “He was tracking the boy all over the country for years. If you run into a crooked cop, you can almost always avoid him by driving past the city line. There’s hardly ever a good enough reason to follow you beyond it. On one side of the line he’s just about invulnerable. On the other, he has no legal power and the local police wonder what he’s up to. No,” she said. “I think he’s something else.”
Jake stopped pretending not to stare at her face. “How did you get hurt?”
When she lifted her hands out of her lap and picked up her coffee cup he saw her knuckles and fingers. “At the courthouse,” she said.
Jake ate his corn bread, drank his coffee, and considered. What she had wrong with her looked like one shot to the side of her face, but there was a lot of damage to her hands and wrists and probably elbows from somebody’s teeth and facial bones. It was possible somebody was dead that she hadn’t mentioned. “Should I be listening for sirens?”
“No. There was a judge who made sure I got out before it got to that stage.” She noticed his puzzled look. “There are people like that. I don’t know if I ever told you about that part of it. People who have no reason to take risks will do it. He knew he could get into trouble—probably get disbarred or something—but he did it anyway.”
Jake answered, “People one at a time are a lot more appetizing than you would think if you look at them all at once.” He shrugged. “So you came home.”
She shook her head. “I was trying, but something else happened on the way home. There was a woman I ran into. She heard somebody talking about me in jail in California. She needed my help to get out of trouble. I started to do it. Then I realized I couldn’t. I gave her some identification and some advice and left.”
“Was she in danger when you left?”
“No.”
“Then that’s a good place to stop,” he said.
She looked at him over the rim of her coffee cup. He couldn’t see her mouth, just the deep strange blue of her eyes against her olive skin. To Jake it was like looking at both of Jane’s parents at once. The skin and the long black hair that wreathed her face were all Seneca. But there was her mother too, the liquid blue eyes that had originated somewhere far from here in northern Europe. He tried to talk to the eyes because he had some superstitious feeling that he had something in common with them, some hope of talking to somebody behind them who shared at least one or two assumptions. But even before he began, he knew that it was nonsense. It was like thinking she was her mother because she was wearing her mother’s dress. “I don’t want to start giving you advice,” he lied. “I never have, in spite of the fact that if everybody listened to me they’d all be a hell of a lot less erratic, since I seldom contradict myself. But I know something about h
ow time works. No matter what you do with yourself, the day comes when it ends. You die or go into something else. If you spent your time catching fish, no matter how long you stuck at it, on the day you quit there would still be some fish out there somewhere. Not only can you not go back out and get them, but you shouldn’t try.”
Jane stood up and changed into the young woman next door again. She picked up the plates carefully, one at a time, and put them in the sink. She stood tall and straight, with her long black hair naturally parting to hang down her back, and began to clean her kitchen.
Jake stood up too and signified that he understood that their meeting was over. “Well, thanks for the snack, but I’ve got a lot to do in the yard before supper. It gets dark so damned early now, I barely have time to wake up before the streetlights go on.”
Jane turned to him and gave him a small kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, Jake.”
“I’ll be home if you need anything,” he said as he walked to the door. “I don’t imagine much of what’s in your refrigerator bears looking at by now.” He stopped and glared suspiciously at the keypad on the wall by the door. “Can I open this without going deaf?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s turned off.”
He walked outside. “Don’t forget to turn it on again.”
Jane closed the door and stood beside it to listen to his footsteps going down the wooden steps and scraping on the sidewalk before she moved away. She walked back into the kitchen, washed the dishes, wiped the counters, and turned off the lights. She had cleaned the oven and emptied the shelves of the refrigerator before she had left to pick up Timmy and Mona in Chicago, so she could think of no justification for doing anything more in here. She walked out into the living room. She had given the whole house a nervous cleaning before she had left, and it had been closed tight with the furnace thermostat set to 50 degrees just to keep the pipes from freezing if the winds coming out of Canada turned fierce early, so there wasn’t even any dust.
She climbed the old varnished staircase and walked into her bedroom. The telephone answering machine glowed with a steady, unblinking zero. She stripped off the clothes she had been wearing since she had left Michigan, stuffed them into the laundry bag she kept in her closet, then walked into the bathroom. She ran the water so that it cascaded into the tub hot, turned the air steamy, and condensed on the mirrors.
She stepped into the tub and let the water rise until it was close to the rim, then turned it off, leaned back, and closed her eyes. She had slept very little for the past few days, waiting until Mary Perkins was settled and breathing deep, regular breaths before she stood up, moved a chair to the best window, and sat watching the street outside the motel. Whenever she had begun to doze off, she had found herself sinking into a dream about Timothy Phillips.
She sat up, washed her hair, then lay back down and submerged her head to let the hot water soak away the shampoo and sting the bruises and abrasions on her cheek and jaw. She held her breath for a minute and a half, hearing the old, hollow sound of the pipes, feeling her hair floating up around her face and shoulders like a cloud of soft seaweed. Then she slowly lifted her head above the surface and arched her back to let the long, heavy hair hang down her back, draining along her spine. She lay back to feel the water cleaning every part of her body, slowly dissolving away the feeling of dirt, like a stain, that she always felt when she had been locked in a jail. The showers they had in jails could never wash it out. It had to come off in water she found outside.
Jane stayed in the water until it was cold, and then got out and dried herself gingerly with a big, thick towel, wrapped it around her, and brushed out her hair. Her skin was tender now, as though all of her pores had opened and the grime of the trip had been taken away, and then beneath that, a whole layer of skin cells had come off. She felt new.
She put on a clean gray sweatshirt, some soft faded blue jeans, and white socks, then lay on her bed facing the ceiling, her arms away from her body. She consciously relaxed each muscle, first her feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, then her fingers, hands, wrists, forearms, biceps, then her back muscles one pair at a time, from the waist to the shoulders, and fell asleep.
Jake Reinert raked the leaves in his back yard and put them into a new bushel basket. The problem with planting trees when you were young was that the damned things got bigger and more vigorous while you got older and stiffer, until you found one day that you were too old to pick up all the leaves. His problem was worse than most, because his grandfather had planted the one over his head right now. It was absurd to keep picking up sycamore leaves, but it was the first task that had presented itself while he was looking for a way to keep himself from thinking about Jane. The problem was that raking took so little thought that he kept coming back to her.
He remembered the day he had started worrying fulltime, when Jane was ten or eleven. Jake had been working in the chemical plant up in the Falls. It was good money for those days, but it was heavy and hard, and the danger of it was constant. There were caustic chemicals that would have to be poured from the big vats a few times each day, and tiny droplets might hit your overalls without your noticing it. By the end of the shift there would be men in the shop whose clothes were already disintegrating, with pinholes through their pants and shirts that were getting big enough to meet each other. In those days nobody said much about it because this was a part of the country where most people worked in the heat of open-hearth steel mills, risked their limbs beside drop-forges or hydraulic presses, or worked in the lumberyards, where anything that made a noise had the capacity to cut you in two.
There were a number of Indian fellows in the part of the plant where Jake worked. There were a few Tuscaroras from the reservation in Lewiston, two or three Mohawks who came over the Rainbow Bridge before dawn every morning from Brantsford, Ontario, and four Senecas—two from Cattaraugus and two from Tonawanda. They were always playing practical jokes on each other and shouting across the shop in their languages and then laughing. At lunchtime they all sat around one of the long workbenches that was covered with butcher paper and played as many hands of euchre as they could in half an hour, slapping cards down so fast that sometimes it was hard to see them. There were about ten in the shop but only eight played, so there were two games going at a time. They made tally marks on the butcher paper to keep score. Euchre usually went to ten, but they played to a hundred.
Jake had watched them for his first couple of shifts on the job when one day he heard an enormous roar of laughter. One of their interminable games had ended. The two losers sat in their places looking as solemn and wooden as any movie fan would have liked. The two winners stood over them and gleefully flipped the cards against their noses while everybody else pointed and laughed. If the loser was caught laughing or even let a muscle of his face change, the penalty was doubled. Jake didn’t need to have it explained to him. They were playing for Nosey, just like kids had when he was growing up. Later, after he knew them better, they had corrected him. The name of the game was some Indian word—they all sounded like “yadadadadadada” to him. So he said, “What’s it mean?” and one of them thought for a second, and then said, “Nosey.”
They accepted Jake without appearing to notice that they had, and during the summer, when people took their vacation time, he would be the one they asked to sit in for the absent player. One late July he had sat down with his lunch and eyed the tally marks on the butcher paper, pretty certain that if he and his partner, Doyle Winthrop, didn’t get lucky this was their day to go home with red noses. Or redder, in Doyle’s case.
One of the Mohawks came in from the loading dock looking grim. He talked to two of the others in low tones and then one of the others talked to three more on the other end of the shop. Finally Doyle Winthrop looked back at the bench, stared at Jake for a moment, and then came to sit down.
Doyle leaned on his elbows across the table, stared directly into Jake’s eyes, and said, “You were a friend of Henry Whitefield’s, weren’
t you?”
After that the details didn’t much matter, but Jake listened to them anyway. Henry was an ironworker. He had been part of a gang, all of them Iroquois, who had been out west someplace building a big bridge. Doyle said a cable that was holding the girder Henry was walking on had snapped, and down went Henry. Theirs was the generation that had fought in Europe and the Pacific, and the memory of it hadn’t gotten hazy in the few years since. The Iroquois Confederacy had officially and independently declared war on Germany, and all of this little band that had somehow come to include Jake Reinert had seen friends blown apart by heavy weapons. They were all acquainted with the feeling, but none of them spoke again that day.
Jake had gone home early and found his wife, Margaret, already next door with Jane and her mother. Over the years after that he had tried to be helpful, but they weren’t the sort of women who needed much help. Jane had been good at schoolwork, and had never had the sort of critical shortage of boys that would have required a fatherly man to come over and tell her the story of the ugly duckling. She managed to get herself a scholarship to Cornell and apparently did whatever they required of her, because they gave her a diploma at the end of it.
Jake had only begun to worry about Jane in earnest again a year or so after that, when her mother died. Here she was a young, strikingly attractive girl with a college degree and the whole world out there waiting for her. She came back, moved into the old house next door, and lived there all alone. She had always held jobs in the summers when she was home from school, but now, as nearly as he could tell, her movements weren’t regular enough to accommodate any job he had ever heard of. She was not merely secretive about what she did, she was opaque.
