by John Straley
“You know, you can live a long time with prostate cancer,” he said finally.
14
Home
It took several weeks for Todd to get his pictures back. I think he took twenty-five rolls of film into the drugstore to get developed. He plans to pay the bill in monthly installments. After we got home we sat around our kitchen table looking at the prints which he had spread out in a heap. Many of the shots were blurred: Eagles as specks against green. The backs of whales looking like chocolate chips floating in the sea. But the majority of the pictures were blurry and botched group-shot attempts. Most contained a streaky Todd half in and half out of the picture, either coming or going. Todd told me this was exactly what he liked about the shots. He said he was a verb in all of his memories and I was never really sure what he meant by that.
I fingered through the pile and picked a clear picture of Mr. Brenner standing on the dock in Victoria just as we were about to disembark from the Westward. He held an unlit cigar between his fingers. He was not looking at the camera but over the shoulder of whoever was taking the photograph. He looked distracted, as if someone was coming for him.
Isaac Brenner never got upgraded. He did visit Jane Marie and Todd and me in our palatial suite as we sailed down the inside passage for the last three days of our voyage. He was anxious and acted like he wanted to talk but never could bring himself around to the topic. I never pried because I didn’t really want to know. But by the way Brenner kept coming back to our suite I knew that he knew I had some knowledge of what really happened to Dr. Edwards that night out on the crew deck. Brenner had to know my knowledge of it.
On our last night out the Filipino kitchen crew was singing songs to all of the people eating in the dining room. They had a guitar. The social staff finally ran the last horse race in the Great Circle Lounge. I stayed in the suite and ordered a steak to be sent up. I was drinking bottled water with lemon twists and was reading a book of poetry from the ship’s library. Everyone else was down at the horse races when Brenner came to the suite. He settled in on the leather couch and we stared out at the dark and unlit forests that the ship was passing.
Finally, he blurted, “I don’t know how much you know about all this—” and I held my hand up.
“I don’t know anything and I don’t really want to know. I am not a priest or your lawyer. You can’t hire me, because I’m working for the cruise line. So I can’t promise you any confidentiality.” Then I paused and added, “I don’t mean to sound unfriendly. I’m just being square with you.”
“Understood,” Mr. Brenner said. Then, “Let’s just say hypothetically . . .” and he stared out the window. The wake of the ship billowed the green water, curling perfect waves onto the rocky shore of the narrow passage. He didn’t talk.
“Hypothetically,” I said.
“Yes. You know, I’m not talking about anything that actually happened but just a what if sort of thing.”
“Okay.”
Brenner cleared his throat. “Let’s just say I killed the son of a bitch.”
“All right,” I agreed and took a sip of water.
Brenner’s eyes were burning into mine. “I was concerned about what was going on. I talked to him about the first girl. I talked to him and he just brushed me off. But on the day before Paul died, that day we were at the glacier, I talked to the doctor again. He told me that things were backing up. It looked like people were going to wait until the end of the trip and he couldn’t let that happen. He was . . .”
“Watching out for the interests of his own organization. His own practice?” I offered.
Brenner snapped at me. “He was killing people, for God’s sake.”
“You were asking him to kill people,” I interrupted. “All your club members . . . L’Inconnue,” I said.
Brenner rocked back and sputtered, “Yes but he was killing them to suit the ship’s schedule. Not ours. How can it be murder if we—if I—stopped him?”
I thought for a second. Down in the heart of the ship there was a faint rumble as the engines changed pitch. I remembered a lecture a lawyer had once given me about self-defense and I trotted it out for Brenner: “A person can use deadly force to meet deadly force, or to prevent certain other crimes. That’s in the law.” I tipped my glass at him and added, “You have to have a reasonable expectation of imminent danger and you have to try to withdraw from that danger, if possible, before you resort to deadly force. So let’s say you—hypothetically—saw a person about to kill you. You could counter their deadly force right then. But you couldn’t wait and come back to it later, after the threat of death was no longer imminent.”
“What if . . .” Brenner took a sip of my water. He was not looking at me now. “I mean what if someone . . . a ship’s doctor, say . . . was injecting people with potassium chloride? Injecting it into their foot as they slept?” He was struggling.
“Mr. Brenner, were you worried Edwards was going to do this to you, without your permission?”
Brenner didn’t speak. The ice in my glass cracked as it melted.
“No.”
“What then . . . ?”
“He was overstepping his authority.”
“The authority Paul gave him.”
Brenner didn’t want to argue. He brushed the shoulder of his jacket as if something had unexpectedly alighted on him. He stood up suddenly and walked to the door of the suite. Then he turned back.
“You know, there is an interesting story about that L’Inconnue de la Seine. Of course I don’t know if it’s true or not.”
The trees passed in darkness on the banks of the narrow channel. There was just enough of the pale summer daylight to let me make out the tangle of limbs. An eagle sat atop a massive dead snag. Mr. Brenner kept on with his story.
“Remember everyone was in love with her image, this death mask of the young girl drowned in the river. She had become the center of the cult. Well sir, someone wanted to know more about this girl, and so they went to the artist who had made the death mask.” Mr. Brenner chewed on his unlit cigar. “Well, this reporter or whoever it was, heck I don’t know, a Shamus maybe, goes to the artist’s house and rings on the bell and who do you think answers?”
We passed abeam of the eagle and the giant bird lumbered into flight. I shrugged my shoulders and did not answer Mr. Brenner’s question.
“Well, sir, it was the artist’s wife, and it was also this girl, this beautiful face that everyone had believed was the poor dead girl dragged from the river.”
I took another sip of water. “So the whole thing was a hoax?”
Brenner clamped his hand on the handle of the cabin door. “Oh hell, they argue about it until this very day. I don’t know . . .” He stared absently out the window. “I just know I like that story better . . . but I guess that doesn’t make it the truth.”
He waved dismissively, as if he could brush the truth away like lint. Then he walked out the door.
Of course, now I’m back at home looking at the pictures and putting the whole thing together. I was half expecting the story to unravel when Mr. Standard found out about the mutilation to Paul’s body. I thought I would be ducking calls from lawyers, investigators, and cops, but I never heard a peep. Apparently, Mr. Standard was convinced he would get tapped for the killing of the doctor if he made a peep. This, I’m sure, was exactly the way both the cruise line and the ship’s company wanted to keep it.
Sonny Walters never even saw me off the ship in Victoria. There was a note under our suite door from the cruise line’s legal department reminding me that I had been hired pursuant to an in-house investigation and was subject to the privilege of confidentiality. The privilege expressly residing with the company, which meant I was supposed to keep my mouth shut until I heard from them. This was fine by me.
Rosalind and Cyril met us on the docks of Victoria and we all to
ok the bus downtown to have cappuccinos at a sidewalk cafe next to a tobacco shop. I had black coffee, actually, and Todd had a soda and a slice of carrot cake. Cyril seemed uncomfortable to be out in the open with some of the sheep. He winced whenever any of the crew walked anywhere near us. But he drank his espresso calmly, stirring the oily drink with great dignity. Rosalind was in a fine mood and seemed unconcerned with her impending deadline. When I asked about the angel book she waved me off and said only, “Oh. They don’t really care.” I was left to consider which “they” it was that didn’t really care. When we parted at the airport we had kisses all around and promises to write. Rosalind did write, as it turned out. There was a letter almost a year later enclosed in a first-edition copy of her Encyclopedia of Angels.
But the week after I got back to Sitka, I actually received a letter from Word himself. I couldn’t believe it. It was a simple letter thanking me for all of my help on the cruise and an apology for any of the minor difficulties that we had encountered on the Westward. I was most impressed by his stationery. It was very heavy felt bond with only his name and address across the top in beautiful Monotype Baskerville type. He enclosed one of his cards, which was wheat-colored with deep engraving: David Werdheimer and his San Francisco and New York addresses: No title, no nothing. If you had to ask what he did you obviously couldn’t afford him. This guy was so good I could almost brag about getting an ass-kicking from him. Almost.
At the heart of every death is an unknowable darkness. It certainly was dark on the back deck of the crew’s lookout the night the doctor went over the side of the Westward. I tried to bring some light to his death as the weeks rolled by, but I realized this light was only my imagination, and my imagination was telling me Isaac Brenner and Harold Standard together had chucked the doctor over the rail that night. But exactly how, I wasn’t sure. Certainly Mr. Standard and the doctor were on the crew deck and there had been an argument. Mr. Brenner could have been watching from the passenger’s fantail and he could have come down the inside passage. Mr. Standard may have knocked the doctor down and unconscious or the doctor may have hit his head going over the side. No one reported anyone crying out, but then the music was loud.
I believed Mr. Standard when he said he threw the life ring. But he must have had some role in getting the doctor up and over that railing. What goes through the minds of two old men who are about to kill someone? Here again, you’d like to make some sense of it. I’d like to imagine the words of grief for the lost son or of fear for your crowding and impending death. But truthfully I don’t know. They probably reacted out of some mutual confluence of fear. They both might have lifted the doctor by the armpits and helped him overboard. They heard the splash and the call of the birds and when he realized what he had done Mr. Standard sounded the alarm but Mr. Brenner just walked inside and went to the bar. And whether by agreement or happenstance it worked out well. If they both hinted to me, unofficially, they were solely to blame, then neither of them could be convicted as the sole killer of Dr. Edwards and each would be afraid to try and snitch on the other. It was much easier for the ship company to let the dead bury the dead and send the living on their way.
But of course I was guessing. All I knew for certain was that Grant McGowan, Paul, the pale girl, and the doctor were all dead. Some of them were ready for death. Some of them weren’t. And maybe they were all ghosts right now, drifting in the shadows, screaming the truth into my ear.
But I knew that I couldn’t hear them and I also knew I wasn’t ready to die because I was going over the pictures from my cruise. I looked at another photograph of Todd streaking across the frame with all of the awkward laughing expressions in the background. I smiled and listened to the birds. There was a pile of chocolate cake sitting out on the handrail of my deck over the channel. Gulls and ravens worked the air. There were a few fat pigeons planted in the crowd of squabbling birds.
The cake had been a gift. I had answered the door that afternoon and found myself face-to-face with Grant McGowan’s girlfriend Vicky. She was holding a cake pan covered with a blue-striped dishcloth. She didn’t want to come up. She just nodded at the cake, then she shoved it into my hands. Vicky walked a few steps down the street and turned back. Her mousy hair was stringy. She was wearing canvas coveralls. She slapped her hands against the sides of her legs.
“Cecil, I just wanted to say that I didn’t . . . I don’t really hate you,” she said at last.
“Thanks, Vicky,” I mumbled. Her skin looked gray and there were dark circles under her eyes. I could tell it was almost unbearably hard for her to have come this far, but I pressed on anyway: “I appreciate that. You sure you don’t want to come up and have a piece of this cake?”
She shook her head and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Naw, Cecil. I gotta go. I’ll just come back and get the pan.” She turned down the street and called over her shoulder. “Or you can bring it down to the boat, whenever . . .”
I got her to wait where she was and I ran upstairs. I brought down my old copy of Going for Coffee, an anthology of poetry about work from a Canadian publisher. The book was dog-eared and the paper cover was creased and leathery. Patrick Lane had even signed one of his poems on page 182. It was called “Just Living.” I handed the book to Vicky and she looked at it as if I were offering her a bribe.
“This was Grant’s,” I lied.
“I never saw this on the boat.”
“Oh, it was his,” I said. “Grant was really into this stuff.”
Vicky looked at me and silence fell like rain.
“Well. Thanks then,” she said, then turned and walked toward the corner by the fish plant where the hum of the generators swallowed the sound of her steps.
The cake was not all that good. It was some kind of chocolate applesauce but there was an odd taste, as if there had been bearing grease in the bowl she had used to mix it in. But I ate two slices, with a cup of coffee and toasted the poets of Canada. Then I fed the rest to the birds.
Toddy had a picture of the bear on the beach. In the snapshot the bear looked like a small brown stump, but the head jutted out from the roots in a bearlike way. I leaned back in my chair and looked at Jane Marie. She was wearing her black silk shirt but still had her gym shorts on from her soccer game. She had her hand on my shoulder. She looked at the photo of the bear in my hand. I kissed her hand and asked, “Do you think that bear really understood what you were saying to him?”
She wrinkled her nose and kissed me on the cheek, then plopped down and started to unlace her cleats. “The words? No, I doubt it.” Then she stared over at Todd, who was sorting through his photographs. “I suppose indifference is the most you should hope for from a brown bear.” Then she turned back to me. “But I do think it never hurts to show respect.”
She threw her cleats into the corner near the wood-stove. She took a deep breath and told me she was going to have a baby.
My head turned to a block of ice. Of course it all made sense—the moods and the illnesses. Jane Marie laughed and told me about the pregnancy as an accomplished fact. She had known before we went on the cruise. I was the father and there was no doubt about that. She was going to be a mother. She kissed me again and said only, “Cecil, you probably aren’t a very good detective but I think you’d make a passable father. You think about it, anyway.” Then she went to take a shower.
I started to slip into a daydream about having a baby. The damp waxy smell of their breath and that weird wobbly expression they have when you hold them for the first time. I was filled with a giddy kind of emptiness.
I could hear the shower running and Todd was humming to himself. “Did you know about this baby thing?” I asked him. He nodded emphatically, excited to demonstrate his superior intelligence.
“Actually, yes,” he said and then paused, delighted in drawing the moment out. “I have been aware of the situation from the outset.” He smiled.
“Jane Marie confided in me when she was first certain of her situation, and she asked me for my opinion.”
“And what did you tell her?” I looked down at my shoes.
“I told her you didn’t seem to mind looking stupid. That, I thought, spoke well of your potential role as a father.”
“That’s quite an endorsement. Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t mention it,” Todd said and went back to his pictures.
That next morning I had a job building a new fence around the chicken house. For as much fun as the cruise ship had been, they’d never offered to pay me any wages. I wrapped my sore hand in bandages and a leather glove, then packed a sandwich and a jug of tea, and walked out to the road.
It was a clear cool day at the end of summer, one that would have ordinarily made me melancholy. There was a steady light rain and a sharp edge to the cold air. High up in the mountains a light snow dusted the trees but there was blue sky out over the ocean. It was as if you could actually stand on the beach and watch summer leaving.
I started digging postholes in the soggy ground. The chickens ran around nervously and the dog with the blocky head and the sweet eyes watched me all day long, indifferent to what I was doing and what it might mean to his nightly raids. He watched me, panted and grinned: Happy, I thought, just to have some company.
Although my head was unthawing about the news of the baby I couldn’t shake the fact of it from my mind. After I dug the fourth posthole I realized I wasn’t worrying about the future. And by the time I drank my tea I had stopped worrying about anything at all. I had realized, finally, that no one really cared about this story of my life, whether it was tangled up like fishing line in the trees or not. No one cared about my failures or those corpses that haunted me from the dark, or if they did care they were tolerant enough not to let me know. And too, I knew, finally, that I didn’t care either, and as I threw a shovelful of wet dirt on that rare morning, it felt as if I had just been counted as one of the blessed.
