by John Straley
I’d been walking ten minutes when a rusted Chevy truck pulled over twenty yards down the road and Gary Gouker heaved open the passenger-side door. Gary was my gym partner and I knew why he had stopped.
“C, man, where you been? Have you been to the gym? I kind of slacked off after you didn’t show up those times, Cecil.”
“I’m going to cut wood for Doggy,” I said, as if that explained everything in my life.
“Cutting wood’s good,” Gary agreed. I jumped onto the bench seat, which sagged badly to the outside of the vehicle.
“I can’t drive you out there. I’ve got a guy coming in with a job. He’s been on me. I mean on me! Sent his kid to drag my ass out of the coffee shop. He’s probably up at my shop right now. I’ll drive you to the corner.”
I looked through the cracked windshield. The corner was some hundred yards away.
“Yeah, good,” I said and slammed the door. Gary was a machinist and a blues harmonica player. His father had been the mill manager here for years and Gary had worked there too, but that was long ago now. The mill was closed, his dad was dead, and Gary’s real love was the blues harmonica.
“What d’ya think of getting Cary Bell up here for Alaska Day? If not him, I’m pretty sure I could get Paul deLay. What d’ya think?”
“Perfect,” I said. “Get them both and promise to take them fishing. I’m sure two great blues players would give anything to play Sitka, Alaska.”
That was all the conversation we had because we were at the corner already.
Gary let me off and drove away quickly with a wave. There was a three-legged dog sniffing the stop sign by the funeral home and when he peed on it I noticed that he swung around so he didn’t have to worry about lifting a leg. “Convenient,” I thought, and stuck out my thumb. Only five miles to go.
I hadn’t thought of the Mygirl killings since our daughter had been born three months ago. I hadn’t had many coherent thoughts since I saw her push her way out into the light. She had been blood-slick and angry. We had decided to name her Blossom and despite my smile in the hospital room I had hated the birth experience with all the screaming and the blood. It reminded me of a bar fight without the drugs and the music. When the nurse started to hand my daughter to me, my first reaction was to shy away, thinking that this creature who had just bullied her way out of my lover’s stomach must be some sort of enraged snapping turtle. I wasn’t sure her name fit her.
The three-legged dog sniffed my leg. He was some kind of lab-husky-terrier beast, friendly, and I was sure he had an empty bladder. I thought of Blossom and wondered if we would get another dog for our house. My roommate Todd had a Staffordshire terrier named Wendell who seemed fine, but many of our friends were almost hysterical with anxiety over having Wendell around the baby and had tried to convince us to take Wendell out into the woods for a long dirt nap. I’ve noticed that we parents can justify almost anything in the name of protecting our children. Anything, including executing other people’s dogs, or even their children if necessary. I had sided with the Staffordshire terrier. “How soft is that?” I wanted to ask Mr. Harrison Teller, with his belly for murder.
Bob Rose stopped in his coughing VW van. He was off to Sandy Beach to check the surfbreak. He told me Nels, Mark, and Steve were going to meet him there because a swell was running from the storm. The break “should really be working,” he said. Bob had curly red hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a thick wet suit pulled off his shoulders as he drove, and although he seemed interested in the surf, he wasn’t stoked. When we got to the beach, none of his friends were there and the waves looked puny. Bob didn’t seem to mind. He took a thermos out from under the seat and watched the waves intently as he poured himself a cup of cocoa. “Wait for the tide a bit,” he said to himself, and I got the idea that this ritual of watching and waiting was as much part of the surf scene as actually getting wet.
I got out of the van and saw Jude and his sister Rachel standing by the rail watching the sun come up and pointing out the eagles to a woman standing between them. Jude waved me over and introduced me to his mother. Jude is a lawyer and has helped me out over the years, so it paid for me to be civil. Jude is handsome and funny and fairly successful, but in spite of all that he’s a decent guy.
“This is my mother, Jammikins,” he said, and I looked at him evenly because I never really know when Jude is joking. When I shook the woman’s hand she smiled pleasantly and didn’t appear to be laughing, so I said nothing about her name.
“Cecil is a detective,” Rachel said brightly.
Jammikins looked at me with some vague tourist-like interest. “Really?” she said as she scanned my clothes: torn wool jacket, dirty purple scarf, and tattered canvas pants. I looked more like a Siberian street urchin than I did James Bond.
“I’m cutting wood today,” I explained, then shook hands all around and walked out to the road hoping to get a longer ride to my job, but there were fewer cars coming this far out. I was past the big grocery store, and the liquor store at the far end of the road had shut down years before. If a ferry was coming in there was hope, but I couldn’t remember the ferry schedule. Once again I stuck out my thumb, thinking that, like prayer, it couldn’t hurt.
Teller thought I’d lost my belly for murder because I had stopped drinking, and had turned away from the intense comradeship forged in ugly murder trials. Teller liked to drink. Drinking with his investigator was the one form of comradeship he could tolerate.
But I had stopped tolerating it. The drinking and the lawyerly comradeship that had always been as thin as stone soup. Trial lawyers love their investigators the way bird hunters love their dogs: their affection is heartfelt and intense at the moment, but it’s understood the hunter will eventually get another dog.
I remember when I stopped drinking. I remember the moment but not the exact place. I was in a bathtub in a strange hotel room. It was a tiny plastic tub with a thick ring of gray-green soap scum. The bath water was cement gray and cold. The skin on my feet was soft as a sea anemone’s. I held the barrel of a revolver in my mouth and propped my elbows on the islands of my knees. I remember how the front sight rattled against my teeth, how the gun oil tasted metallic on my tongue and slicked my lips.
I pulled back the hammer, then eased it down. I stepped out of the tub and toweled off. I knew I wanted a drink but I also knew I wasn’t going to drink anymore. I don’t know why. “Some haystacks have no needles,” William Stafford wrote somewhere, and maybe he’s right.
Only three cars had passed. None stopped. I looked up the hillside and noticed I was near Sean and Kevin Sands’s trailer. I thought about calling George Doggy and telling him I was still on my way. And I should stop and talk to the Sandses. For one thing, I could get Patricia Ewers off my conscience. And for another, in the last few months I had tried to befriend the younger Sands brother, Sean, and had promised I would drop by but I hadn’t yet. Sean’s brother Kevin didn’t like surprises of the “just dropping by” variety, but I now could use the excuse of needing to use their phone to justify my visit. If I walked quickly, I could manage to get to Doggy’s in twenty minutes or so, even if I didn’t get a ride.
Doggy would understand. Besides being a retired police detective, George Doggy was an old family friend who had offered to pay me to help him put up firewood for the year. George was the retired head of the Alaska State Troopers. He had been a hunting companion of my father’s and a confidant to several governors all the way back to territorial days. Doggy was a man who had lived the Alaskan life before jet service and during the era of steamships and dog teams. He had run things, and would come into service if a commissioner or governor asked nicely.
Doggy had been shot several times in his duties, once while working a case I had gotten him mixed up in, and more than any person in my life he was invested in shaping me up. I have to say that he had grown more relaxed in his semireti
rement and had taken on the kind of philosophical laissez-faire that some people can accommodate if they’ve outlived most of the people they ever loved, which meant George’s lectures were getting shorter and the war stories longer. At least Doggy was talking to me. Harrison Teller had dropped out of sight after Richard Ewers’s trial ended.
In the last six months Doggy had grown noticeably more irritable. He appeared more distracted; he would sometimes pause a long time to find a word and would snap at anyone who tried to supply it. I think he was getting to be an old man, and it bothered him.
Doggy has suggested that I was trying to take Sean, the younger Sands brother, under my wing solely out of the guilt I felt for what I had done to free his family’s murderer. That’s not entirely true. I had always liked Kevin Sands as an alternative suspect during the Ewers trial. He had the profile, repressed hostility and explosive temper. He had a history of violent arguments, some with his own father. Unfortunately for my theory Kevin also had two alibi witnesses: his brother Sean and Jonathan Chevalier. Sean swore consistently that when the shooting started on the Mygirl Kevin had thrown him down on the floor and hidden him under the bunk until Jonathan Chevalier broke through the door and got them out of the fire. Jonathan backed this story up. Teller could possibly have sold Kevin as a murderer to the jury but could never have broken down his two witnesses who had both lost family members themselves and were unshakable in their testimony.
But I had always looked for something in Kevin, something that might tell me more about who had done the shooting on the scow. That . . . and my concern for his little brother made me stay close to the both of them. Even before the murders on the Mygirl, the Sands brothers were seriously troubled young people. But afterwards they consistently got into trouble and needed legal help. I had worked their cases for free. But it’s true I couldn’t shake the image of the dead bodies in the burned-out scow. Kevin Sands was so hardened I suspected I wouldn’t glean any new information from him. But Sean was different. If Richard Ewers wasn’t the killer and Sean knew it, I suspected he would someday have to let it slip. That was part of the reason I wanted to help him. That, and the fact that I wanted some tiny new bit of information that might change the plotline of my own nightmares.
George Doggy had tried to warn me off helping Sean Sands. “Forget about it, Cecil. That boy’s damaged too bad. He’ll do life in prison on the installment plan,” Doggy had told me.
Sean Sands was twelve and Kevin was twenty-one that September, and by that time I had worked for Kevin’s lawyers on at least ten different cases. Kevin had been tough even before the murder of his family. As a juvenile, Kevin had lit fires, broken into schools, and been accused of killing pets. Now he bullied people for money and, I was told, expedited various criminal activities. As far as I knew, he had avoided the more obvious forms of vice like drinking and drugs. I figured Kevin liked the buzz he got from being in the atmosphere of violence.
Someone once told me that because God did not abide in time the way human beings had to, He could prevent suffering that had occurred in the past. I stopped and fished a pebble out of my shoe and watched a raven watching me from a wire. I wondered if it were possible for God to prevent the pain the Sands brothers had felt in their lives.
If God could relieve suffering in the past, why wouldn’t He do it for the Sands brothers? Maybe they had to be more deserving. Certainly Kevin hadn’t made it easy. At every juncture in his life he seemed to lead with sullen rage. He was keen with attention, as if his hungry eyes could suck up light. His little brother, Sean, was a dreamy boy. He had been held back a grade in school, so I think he felt awkward and too big, but he could show sensitivity. He had become a fat kid who liked camping, and his eyes held some sadness and empathy that couldn’t be detected in his brother’s.
I looked out toward the bay and beyond to the Gulf of Alaska. Up the hill the daylight had spread through the forest. The sun seemed to illuminate each needle of every hemlock and spruce tree. To the west, the breeze freshened and the black clouds edged a little closer. I was struck by a feeling that I urgently wanted to remember this moment all my life, but at the time I had no idea why.
I had decided to see if there was anything I could do for Sean because I knew I hadn’t really helped Kevin by assisting him in his criminal cases. In his last case, Kevin had slashed a young fisherman’s forehead with a hunting knife so deeply that the flap of skin hung down over the fisherman’s eyes. Even when the stunned fisherman held up the flap of skin, the flow of blood blinded him so he had to be led by hand up the harbor ramp to the waiting ambulance.
Kevin was thin and blond, with strange, vacant good looks. When I talked to Kevin in jail and asked him why he had slashed the man, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “I don’t know. He just kind of pissed me off.” He was wearing a green prison jumpsuit, and his doughy white face was as vexed as if he were waiting for the ferry.
As a defense investigator I am supposed to fill out my client’s experience for the court. I am supposed to find all the complex mitigating factors that will help explain actions that might otherwise seem bizarre. But as far as I could tell, there really was no more to the story with Kevin. It really was as easy as that: the fisherman had “kind of pissed him off,” so he cut his face. Maybe all the empathy he had ever felt for anyone had been burned on board the Mygirl along with his parents and little sister.
The psychiatrist from Chicago who shrank Kevin the last time didn’t want to give us a written report, which is always a little worrying for a defense team. The doctor spoke slowly over the phone so we could hear him through the static. “There are some clients you can easily describe as delusional. They are experiencing a reality which no one else does, which can be very dramatic and fairly straightforward to treat, but this doesn’t describe Mr. Sands. There are others you can say have a particular type of personality disorder resulting in enhanced psychosexual impulse problems. These clients are overcome with repressed rage and are unable to control themselves—Ted Bundy, perhaps, or Gacy. This does not really apply to Mr. Sands either. Others could be said to have character disorders which cause them to have eccentric or unique moral values systems. They simply believe different things and are acting in accordance with those beliefs. Even that doesn’t apply to Mr. Sands, although he is close. He has some . . . humanity . . . let’s call it—but it appears his ability to appreciate anyone else’s suffering is . . . diminishing. This may be partially due to the posttraumatic stress he has suffered with the loss of his family, but that doesn’t account for his condition. He is close to his younger brother but apparently not to anyone else. He has impulse control problems, which you might expect of a young man affected by his kind of stress. He’s defensive and guarded, but my greatest fear for this young man is that he will become . . .” and the doctor paused as if he didn’t really want to even say the words. “My fear is that Kevin Sands has turned into something very much like the person who stole his family from him. He may be becoming what could only be called . . .”—he coughed, then finished quickly—“. . . a monster.”
I thought of the inside of the scow as it had appeared in my dreams—iron decks, slick with blood and quiet, thick with gasoline fumes just as someone was striking a match. The doctor continued, “A person of this sort is sane and, in a sense, normal in most respects, but they like to cause pain—death even—out of the merest bored interest. A person like this will murder someone, will make them suffer, not out of some explosive rage, but out of some vague interest stemming from boredom. This person kills other humans the way you might eat one more doughnut, Mr. Younger,” and he paused, “even though you know you shouldn’t. This is my fear for Kevin Sands.”
We got Kevin off on the assault charges. He had a plausible self-defense claim, and we were lucky the victim testified and Kevin never had to. There was no written psychological report; the shrink stayed in Chicago and never came near the cou
rtroom. The lawyer’s closing argument was a rambling flag-waver filled with non sequiturs about the Constitution and the right to bear arms, even sharpened fishing knives, and the jury was unable to reach a verdict. After a lot of bluster and bluffing the DA finally dismissed. The fisherman with the cut face sat outside the courtroom after we all filed out. Kevin didn’t acknowledge him sitting there. The fisherman shook his head and stared down at the floor. Kevin chuckled and blew him a kiss just as I pushed him into the waiting elevator.
The Sands boys had been the survivors in my most important murder case. Kevin Sands let me work on his cases even though he hated me, even though he knew I suspected him in the murder of his own parents, even though I had tried to befriend his younger brother, hoping that I might save him from becoming a monster, too. Kevin saw right through me but it didn’t hurt my pride. I don’t have much practice at doing good, so I hadn’t developed that much of it—pride, that is. So little practice, in fact, that I had no words to reply to Patricia Ewers when she came to me again for help. In her eyes, just by talking to these boys, I was sleeping with the enemy. She might even consider me a suspect in the disappearance of her husband. I couldn’t blame her.
I looked up at the trailer park where old cars lay near the ditches with their hoods open like dark mouths. Ravens picked apart the garbage bags piled near the firewood stacks. I suspected that Kevin was bullying or abusing Sean. I didn’t even want to fully examine what I suspected, and as I stood there looking up at their trailer, I remember now that I felt a strange pain near my heart and some kind of pressure behind my eyes as if I might start crying. I wondered if, in the same way God could prevent things in the past, perhaps He could make someone experience future suffering. Maybe that was what I had been feeling ever since the Ewers verdict: suffering that sat inside me like a swallowed pin, inching closer and closer to my heart until finally I would not remember anything—the pin, the heart, or a fine, mild day before a storm came ashore.
