This Is What I Want

by Craig Lancaster

Samuel lay in bed and took in every syllable of the awfulness playing out a door over. More than once, he thought he ought to retrieve his earbuds and cue up some music on his phone, and every time he squelched that plan in favor of continuing to eavesdrop. He didn’t want to know any of this, and yet he figured not knowing would be worse.

  His phone buzzed. He checked it. Denise, downstairs.

  Can you believe this bullshit?

  No, he wrote back.

  We’re leaving in the morning. Shame on Mom.

  Nobody is coating themselves in glory tonight.

  You should go, too. Maybe you had the right idea.

  No. I’m staying. It will look better in the morning.

  Suit yourself.

  He heard the door open and then close. Footfalls across the hardwood. The creaking of the couch as his mother settled in.

  He turned on his light and went to the closet, rooting through the boxed-up remainders of the life he’d once had here, until he found the stack of blankets she always stored for the winter nights that left his room, facing north, so much colder than the rest of the house. He chose a thin one, a lightly woven wool, and he carried it into the living room and lay it across her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and she reached across the distance. He put his hand out and grasped hers.

  “It’s going to be OK,” he said.

  “Promise?” She said it with a hopeful lilt.

  “It’s going to be OK. I love you. Good night.”

  MAMA

  When her beginning and her end collided in the same moment, Blanche Kelvig couldn’t have imagined where she would be. Not with Big Herschel on the farm, raising up two boys they loved—one who made them proud, and one who seemed to live for confounding them. She was not at the center of her weekly knitting social or helping Sam with his mathematics or fetching Henrik from some bit of trouble.

  No, she opened her windows and she looked out across an expanse of McKenzie County bottomland, lush and radiant and clear and bright on a late July day. She pegged the calendar by the height of the corn, she twirled in the gingham dress her mother sewed for her by hand, and she looked out again to see her father coming up the lane, for once his day done before the sun went down. The smell of boiled ham and potato dumplings rode on the air currents of the farmhouse, finding her nose, and she raced downstairs to see Pap and Mommy, and to set the table with softened butter and maple syrup, just the way Pap liked.

  They all sat down together—Pap and Mommy and John Henry and Blanche and Benjamin—and they said grace, to thank the good Lord for his wisdom and generosity and the blessing he offered that they might have this moment. Peace, happiness, and love—every bit of love that had ever come her way—settled on Blanche, and then the roof of the farmhouse rocketed skyward, blown to pieces that evaporated into the blue sky, and she was not afraid. She ascended from where she sat, riding on a cloud, and she was not afraid. She rose until she could see nothing except the boundless wonder of infinity, and she was not afraid.

  And when Big Herschel reached out, clasped her hand, and said, “Walk with me, won’t you, my love? I have someone you’ll want to meet,” Blanche mouthed her final words:

  “Oh, wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.”

  SAM

  The Kelvigs huddled in a semicircle under the relentless fluorescents. The early-morning phone call from the hospital had roused an uneasy house, and though their alliances were frayed, they made the trip together in the predawn mist. Now, in a hospital foyer flickering like a dream, Randy sat in a plastic chair and held Chase, while Randall Junior’s sleeping head slumped against his father’s shoulder. Samuel and Denise and Sam and Patricia looked at the letter Sam held, the one the nurses had found under the dead hands of his mother. Sam read aloud while the others followed along.

  In the event of my death . . .

  I’m too old and too tired to be anything but direct. This is what I want.

  I want to be cremated and my ashes spread in the places I loved. That’s the farm where Herschel and I raised you boys, and the river bottoms in North Dakota where I played in my young days. You know the places. I’ve shown them to you many times before. I want no services or memorials. You know I was here, and that’s enough.

  I want the house razed and the farm sold or otherwise disposed of. Get what you want out of the house and let it go. I know you will. Let the land go, the mineral rights, too, and be done with it. It’s just soil and trees, and it’s been divisive for too long. Get rid of it, and go on with your lives. This is what I want.

  Forgive your brother. Maybe you can’t forget it, and maybe you shouldn’t, but there’s nothing you can feel about him that will make things worse for him than they already are. The best thing you can do is remove some of his burden. Do it, please. For me, if not for yourself.

  Accept your son. Completely, everything he is. If you have a hardness in your heart because of what you think the good book says, then I have failed you. The older I got, the more I believed in God, and the more I believed that what I could know of Him from words on the page was a mystery beyond my comprehension. The mystery and the beauty are all that count, anyway. This is your boy, your flesh and blood. Love him. This is what I want. It’s what God wants, too, or my life has been squandered on believing.

  I have seen what is coming for me. I have been wishing for it for years now, and I believe Providence and I are on the same page now. I do not fear death. I welcome it.

  You’ve been a good son, you’ve turned into a fine man, and if your life is all I accomplished with mine, I’ve done a very good thing, indeed.

  I’ll see you again.

  Love,

  Your Mama

  Wet eyes and dry mouths beheld the moment. Sam folded the letter, taking care to use the creases his mother had already made, and he tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  He looked at his son, his daughter, and his wife, with love and anger and hurt and desire and hopelessness percolating in his gut.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s that.”

  THE CHIEF

  Sleep never came for Adair Underwood.

  She finished her evening in the early-morning hours by handing out her deputies’ pay packets and thanking them for their service. “There’ll be jobs for all of you in a year, if you want an encore,” she’d told them, and she found it curious that she received only noncommittal shrugs right down the line.

  She made it back to her trailer just after three in the morning and had a staring contest with the digital clock. She remembered the words of Captain Fuquay from her first year in the department: “A tired cop is a compromised cop. Compromised in judgment. Compromised in readiness. Compromised in usefulness.” She didn’t figure she could make a living second-guessing someone with Fuquay’s credentials, but it still left her stumped: What can you do about it if you’ve already fallen into the tired trap?

  Judgment? That’s debatable, she thought. It probably wasn’t her wisest move ever to track down and follow the Rexford kid the night before. After a while, she hadn’t even made a secret of it. She saw him coming out of the Country Basket and tipped her hat to him. Later, up on Telegraph Hill, he’d slowed down to a few miles per hour below the speed limit, baiting her. She just tailed him to the Frandsen ranch, where he executed a perfect three-point turnaround in the access road and went back to town.

  Readiness? She sure as hell hadn’t been ready for what happened to Alfonso Medeiros, nor for his seeming nonchalance about what had brought him to such a sorry state of affairs. She also didn’t much like what she was thinking. She couldn’t forget Sakota’s face, the utter revulsion at what he’d seen. Sam’s son, too. A couple of the deputies-for-hire had walked down, and they, too, registered at least some physical reaction to the beating Alfonso had taken. These were hardened men, from the big city. But LaMer, after Alfonso had gone to the hospital, when she’d
finally caught up with her deputy and filled him in? Joe had nodded impassively and said, “Seems like Alfonso’s always getting himself into some trouble.”

  Usefulness? Adair was beginning to wonder. By her count, she had, at minimum, a kid who might or might not be killing dogs, a mayor who might or might not be undermining her at every juncture, and a deputy whose alliance might or might not be with her—and with whom she might or might not be infatuated. And she was nowhere near being able to put any of those problems, or herself, to bed.

  And now she could hear Fuquay’s voice in her ear again. “Nice work, Underwood. Tell me, are you a natural-born fuckup, or did you take a class?”

  Around five, she gave up on a notion so quaint as rest and went into the kitchen, hauling out cookie sheets and all the makings of some homemade chocolate chip cookies, save for the chips themselves, which she ended up fetching from the Country Basket while wearing a pair of gym shorts and last summer’s ratty flip-flops. “No Twinkies?” Berry Fagan asked her, and she rewarded his tepid joke with a middle finger that sent him rolling off in peals of laughter. Crossing the parking lot to her cruiser, she waved at Sam Kelvig, who passed by on Main Street with a full car. As she wondered what he was up to at this hour, she figured she might as well swing some breakfast by the jail for his brother. Hell of a weekend, she thought. The people I was gung ho to arrest got turned out, and this poor bastard Henrik looks like he’ll be in there awhile.

  She reversed course and headed back into the store to heat up a couple of breakfast sandwiches. Berry, all three hundred freckled pounds of him, wandered back from the stockroom and said, “Hey, Adair, what do you call a cop who jacks off too much?”

  The microwave ding signaled her to remove one sandwich and put another in.

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”

  “Pulled pork,” Fagan said. “Get it?”

  Adair closed her eyes and silently begged for the microwave to finish its business.

  “Adair, do you get it?”

  Ding.

  She scooped the sandwich out and put a fiver on the countertop for Berry. “I get it,” she said. “I’ll be back later to arrest you for crimes against humor.”

  Berry horse-wheezed out a laugh. “Good one.”

  “I’m serious, Berry. Quit for your own sake.”

  At the station, when she saw the flash of white higher on the wall than any such thing should be, she knew, certain as she stood there. She didn’t need to see the bedsheet that had been fashioned into a rope or Henrik’s purpling face or lolled-out tongue or the puddle below his stocking feet where he’d wet himself in his convulsions.

  The brown paper bag hit the floor, and Adair broke for her office down the hall on a dead run so she could get her key and bring Sam’s brother down. Every movement was frantic and disjointed, every thought sharpened for collision with the next one, every panicked impulse immediately offset by an admonition deep within her to slow down and proceed with deliberation.

  Once inside her own door, she forced herself to sit until her breathing leveled out. There was nothing she could do for Henrik now that a few minutes would compromise. At last, she tested her breath and tested her voice, and then she placed the calls to the emergency response team and the county coroner.

  And as she did so, as she gave the rote, even-keeled account of where she was and what she’d seen, all Adair could think about was the oven back at her trailer, set at 350 degrees and waiting for her to come home.

  A tired cop is an unfocused cop.

  THE MAYOR

  Swarthbeck sat at the Kelvigs’ kitchen table and took in the faces twisted in pain. He met every one of them by looking them in the eye. That’s damn hard to do when there’s a world of hurt dropping down onto things, but it’s the respectful approach. He’d come here, to their home, to give them the bad news about Henrik, and he intended to honor their pain.

  “Hung himself?” Sam said for the second time, as if the question might get a more palatable answer if he gave it another whirl. Nobody else was doing much talking. Junior was looking down at his laced hands. Patricia, strangely distant it seemed to Swarthbeck, sobbed into a napkin. The girl, Denise, and her family hung back a bit.

  “Yeah, Sammy. I’m really sorry.”

  Swarthbeck really was sorry, and not just because he was here piling more bad news on a family that had plenty of it already. He hadn’t gotten the word about Blanche before arriving at the Kelvig house, so when he’d opened things by saying, “Sorry I’m coming by so early on a Sunday,” Sam had blurted out, “We just got back ourselves. Mama died.” That had made Swarthbeck’s subsequent words all the more difficult to say.

  That’s grief sometimes, Swarthbeck thought to himself as he gave Sam a pursed-lip smile. It doesn’t stop at kicking in your door. It’ll kick in your teeth, too, just for good measure.

  “Do they know when it happened?” Sam asked.

  “Not yet. Coroner’s on it. He was a little cheesed off, truth be told. Said Henrik should have been in county lockup, which is probably true. But hell, it was the weekend. Adair figured she could just move him Monday when he got arraigned. Can’t blame her for that.”

  “No, of course not.” The words dragged out of Sam in a diffused way, like maybe he hadn’t even heard what Swarthbeck had said. Understandable, the mayor supposed.

  “And listen, Sammy, you all stay up here and take care of each other,” Swarthbeck said, unable to keep himself from fixating on Sam’s bandaged head. “We’ve got two things left, a breakfast and this Ridgeley thing. We can get people to cover for you. Hell, Eldrick Sloane’s never read a book in his life, but he can set out some folding chairs in the park for Raleigh.”

  Sam’s boy looked up. “I’ll help out at the breakfast.”

  “I’ll be at the book club,” Sam said.

  Patricia started to speak. “No—” Sam cut her off with a look drenched in a kind of nastiness that caused even Swarthbeck to move his chair back a few inches.

  “Sammy,” he said, “maybe she ought to do it, considering—”

  Sam short-circuited him, too. “She’s not going to be there.”

  Swarthbeck figured he’d seen enough of this, and figured the town had seen enough, too. “You’re not going to be there, either,” the mayor told Sam. “You’ve got plenty of work right in this house, looks like to me. You got that?”

  Sam chewed hard on the inside of his cheek and said nothing.

  “You got that, Sammy?”

  “Yeah,” Sam said at last, too mocking by half. “I got that.”

  It was a curious scene, one that gave Swarthbeck plenty to ponder as he drove back to Chief Underwood’s office to do what he’d already had on his agenda before the coroner called and changed his plans. He’d come loaded for bear on his first pass through the office, ready to sit her ass down and deliver the facts of Grandview life if she fought him about going out to see Sam and his family. Other than showing mild surprise that he knew about Henrik—and he cleared that right up by saying Coroner Keith Goodnight wouldn’t piss in Grandview without mayoral permission—Adair had been accepting of his presence and his offer to break the news to the Kelvigs. That bought her a reprieve, but not a pardon.

  Now, he strode into her office and found her there in full uniform, ready to get back on the job. He closed the door behind him.

  “I thought you weren’t working today,” he said.

  “Henrik Kelvig kind of changed my plans. Figure I better be around.”

  “Good idea.” Swarthbeck poured himself into the chair opposite her.

  “How’s Sam holding up?” she asked.

  “He’s tough. You know his mom died, too?”

  “That’s what Goodnight said.”

  Swarthbeck pitched himself forward and put his hands on Adair’s desk.

  “I didn’t
come for the small talk,” he said.

  “I didn’t expect so.”

  “What are you doing, Adair?”

  “Talking to you.”

  His hands still clasped, Swarthbeck brought his forefingers to a steeple and pointed them at her. “Sassing me is not going to work.”

  “I thought I was being funny. Tell me your issue.”

  The mayor never broke his gaze. “Why are you harassing a teenage boy?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “John Rexford. You know what I’m talking about.”

  He watched her fingers as she shuffled some papers on her desk. A little quiver to them. Not much, but enough.

  “Well?” he said.

  “If you know about that, then you must also know what we heard about him.”

  “You mean what some kid who was skulking around town last night said?”

  Adair cleared her throat. “Yes.”

  “That’s not exactly evidence, is it?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re not exactly Sherlock Fucking Holmes, are you?”

  Her voice quavered. “You don’t have to curse at me, John.”

  He slapped his hand on her desk, and the sound of it jarred her. “Oh, believe me, I’m exercising great fucking control here, Miss Underwood. This is a gross misuse of your duty, Chief.” She winced and he was glad, because he intended to mock her. “We hired you to run a little police department in a little town, not Scotland Fucking Yard. You harassed the son of this city’s lead attorney. Do you think that was wise?”

  “I think—”

  “That’s not a question that needs an answer. Henrik’s dead because you couldn’t be bothered to take him to county—”

  “Wait a minute. You told me yesterday—”

  “Shut up, Adair. Just shut your goddamn mouth. You’re still in your probation period, aren’t you? One hundred and twenty days. Do you think I’d have any trouble at all getting the votes on the town council to shit-can your ass tomorrow? Do you? You might as well have killed Sam Kelvig’s brother. Which way do you think he’s going to vote, if it comes to that?”