“No,” he says.
He rips up the floor panel. There, wedged into the cavity where the spare tire and the jack should be, is the duffel with the cash.
“Z,” Healy says.
When he closes the trunk, he finds Z sitting in the driver’s seat—sideways, with his feet on the road. He stares blankly, Z, at the desert.
“They took the wrong one,” Healy says. “They didn’t take the cash. They took my bag. My bag with my ID. We need to go.”
Z doesn’t move.
“Hey,” Healy says, stepping into Z’s vacant gaze, clapping his hands. “We need to go.”
“Can’t,” Z says.
“Can’t?”
“They threw it.”
“Threw what?”
“The key,” says Z.
Healy leans into the car and checks.
“OK,” he says. “OK. Threw it where?”
Still absorbed by the vast and darkening expanse, the expense, Z says, “Out there.”
—
Never before has Healy appreciated the light’s astonishing complexity at this hour. It’s as if the shadows of the bushes are more tangled than the bushes. Still, he knows that what Z is doing—crawling around on his hands and knees, rooting through the sand—is wrong. One does not recognize the thing by looking at it. Resisting the impulse to focus, one lets the thing announce itself.
“What are you doing?” Z screams. Covered with sweat and earth, he stares up at Healy from the chaparral.
“You won’t find it that way,” Healy says.
Z doesn’t hear. “What if they took it with them?”
“You said they threw it.”
“But what if they didn’t?”
“You said that’s what you saw.”
“There was a gun in my mouth.”
“No,” Healy says. “The key is here.”
Z resumes digging through the sand a few moments longer, but then he gets up and joins Healy on the road. He points toward the city, an unreliable hallucination. “I’m going back to the crash,” he says. “Those people might still be there. They’ll help me. I can pretend to be one of them.”
“They’ll help you,” Healy says. “You can pretend.”
“I’ll send someone for you.”
“You’ll send someone for me.” The emotion in Healy’s voice disturbs Healy. His instinct is to cite a line from his contract. He tries to summon a relevant provision, the appropriate clause.
Suddenly, Z starts to jog away.
Healy watches him, stunned. He is a strong runner, Z. Soon Healy can barely hear the clap of his sandals on the asphalt. Then he can’t hear anything at all.
—
Two hundred thousand dollars! Maybe that will be enough. In the incident report, Healy will say that the gunmen made off with both bags, and who in the company will doubt him, after the ordeal he has been through, the litigation he could bring?
He will go straight home—straight to Boswell’s Boots. No more Mediterranean. No more hoisting up his liquor in a basket, standing at the window in his underwear and gas mask. To start with, a family vacation. Some remote and wooded place; somewhere by a river or a lake.
The sun has dropped away completely, and the temperature with it. Healy’s eyes are tired. The chimerical hues of dusk will not stay put. In the distance a pale burn precedes the moon. Healy thinks he sees its glow catch something in the chaparral. He scrambles down and falls upon the object.
What he discovers is an old tank shell from many years and wars ago. Inscrutable writing is engraved across the copper. For a long time, Healy stares at it. When next he looks up, he finds a pair of headlights that are far away but getting closer. They approach from the wrong direction. They belong to a Hilux.
Yes, they will return there, to that beautiful country, every summer. Without question, there will have to be a river or a lake. That way, Healy can teach his sons to swim. And then, when they’re older, he will teach them how to fish.
All he needs to do is find the key.
It was a four-hour drive, this time of year, from Grangeville to Kuna, and as usual it was dark out when Jeanne left the house. It was dark when she crossed the Camas Prairie, climbed the bald hills, and dropped into the astronomic void that was the Nez Perce valley. It was dark as she followed the moon, like a spooked shoal of silver carp, along the Salmon River; dark in Hells Canyon; dark all the way through the wooded gorges of Payete Forest. Dawn broke right on schedule, in Cascade. It revealed a wide plateau, lake marshing out to pasture, cylindrical hay bales, and steam lifting off immobile cattle. Jeanne unscrewed her thermos and filled the top. She cracked her window. During the winter, even here, in the flatland, there’d been perils. The peril of sliding off the road. The peril of some battery or engine trouble brought on by the cold. During the winter, each time she had reached the Idaho State Correctional Institution—each time she’d glimpsed the concrete complex, the razor wire, and the flags—the first thing Jeanne had felt, before the other things, was relief. Now it was spring. The way was clear. The air was warm. Jeanne sipped her coffee. Soon she would be there: sitting across a table from her son.
A few miles past Cascade, she topped a rise to find a vivified sky, a low bank of flame, black smoke. A man with a bandanna tied around his face stood in an irrigation ditch, using a blowtorch to ignite the brush. Gray ash stuck to the windshield and the Buick filled with a pungent odor of charred chokecherry and sage. When Jeanne emerged from the burn, she nearly rear-ended a flatbed inching up the road. She swerved into the other lane and pulled equal with its cab. A man wearing a John Deere hat and a handlebar mustache glowered down at her. Then he punched the gas, accelerating ahead.
Jeanne laughed and fell in behind. She was already thinking how she’d tell it to Rob. The mustache, hat. The translation of experience into relatable anecdote had become almost automatic with her. Throughout the week she collected gossip, committed to memory amusing incidents and things seen on TV. Sometimes, worried she’d forget stuff, she took notes and reviewed them in the waiting room. The pleasure Jeanne derived from all of this was not unlike the pleasure she’d derived from selecting what items to include in Rob’s care packages while he was overseas. It was the pleasure of coming across something that made her think, Rob will like that.
That’s what she was occupied with—how to describe the hick as comically as possible—when the flatbed bounced on a pothole and a split log was ejected from its load. The log turned slowly in the air, hit the asphalt ahead of the Buick, and launched straight at the windshield. It impacted with a crunching noise punctuated by the glass turning instantly opaque. Jeanne slammed the brakes and skidded to a halt. When she got out of the car, the flatbed was long gone. Someone was hollering. She turned and saw the farmer running toward her.
—
The first Thursday she’d gone to see Rob, almost a year ago, Jeanne had sat in the waiting room with the other visitors and realized with a start that all of them held Ziploc bags filled with quarters. By the time the young guard behind the desk received a message on his radio and instructed the visitors to follow him, Jeanne had convinced herself that the change was needed to use the plastic handsets that allowed communication across the soundproof glass. As she proceeded with the others through buzzing doors, down bright halls, and across a gravel and chain-link-fence perimeter watched over by armed men in tall towers, she imagined her handset clicking silent, a voice like a pay-phone operator’s announcing that her time was up, Rob moving his mouth mutely.
In fact there were no handsets, glass. There was just a large open room with lime-green walls, octagonal tables, and chrome-metal stools. The quarters were for a row of vending machines that sold candy bars and pop. Cup Noodles and breakfast burritos were also available for purchase. A microwave sat on a shelf; next to it stood a pair of salt and pepper shakers. As the visitors formed orderly lines at the machines, Jeanne studied one of the printed-out “guidelines” in plastic binder sleeves duct-taped to
the tabletops. All custody levels allowed brief closed-mouth kiss and embrace at beginning and end of session…Held hands must be in plain view for duration of session…Children ages six and under may sit on offender’s lap…Attire: conservative. No sleeveless garments, bare midriffs, scrubs, shorts, miniskirts, bare feet, spandex, low-cut and/or see-through apparel. Proper underclothing mandatory.
She became aware of someone standing over her and looked up at a middle-aged woman with short-cropped hair, a leather jacket, and a T-shirt featuring a wolf howling at a full, yellow moon. “He’ll be disappointed if you don’t get him any snacks,” the woman said. Then she set down on the table in front of Jeanne a shotgun roll of coins.
—
Although most of the glass was webbed and white, in the bottom corner remained a clear patch through which, by leaning over and stooping down, Jeanne could see enough to drive. As she approached the highway that would take her to Boise, and from Boise to Kuna, she had to steer by hewing to the center line. That was why she never saw the Idaho State Police car until it was right behind her, siren blaring. The trooper wore wraparound sunglasses and a black, flat-brimmed hat tilted at a steep angle like a drill sergeant’s. “Mind telling me what in the world you think you’re doing driving with a windshield like that?” he said.
After he had called a tow service, after the Buick had been brought to a nearby auto-body shop, and after Jeanne had persuaded one of the mechanics to drive her the rest of the way to the prison, she arrived to find several of the visitors getting in their cars. Others sat at a picnic table beneath an aluminum awning near the entrance. They often gathered there, the old hands, to smoke and talk before the long commutes back to the places they were from. Jeanne hurried past them, into the waiting room, and presented herself to the young guard behind the desk.
“Visitation’s over,” he said.
“I came from Grangeville,” Jeanne said. “My windshield…”
The guard shrugged.
The visitors were still at the table when she came out. Jeanne could feel them watching her as she continued to the parking lot. She’d never exchanged more than a few curt pleasantries with any of them. All these months, she had kept herself aloof. She knew that she was clinging to a notion that Rob was not like their men, and that she, therefore, was not like them. She wondered how long that would last.
—
The following Wednesday, instead of lying awake, waiting for the alarm, Jeanne got in the Buick and headed south. She drove all the way to Boise and, a few miles before the exit for Kuna, pulled into a truck stop. An electric palm tree radiated in the night; the words “Traveler’s Oasis” flashed amid its neon fronds. Jeanne parked behind a dumpster, away from the pumps but still inside the light of the sign. In the backseat she zipped herself up in Rob’s army-issue sleeping bag. Several times she woke to the clank and rev of semis downshifting off the highway. Doors slammed and men shouted. In the morning she used the diner bathroom to wash and brush her teeth. There were no towels. After rinsing her face, she kneeled beneath the hand dryer and closed her eyes against its burning roar.
She had plenty of time for breakfast. She took a booth by a window that looked onto the ramp. A waitress about Rob’s age, in a red apron and white kicks, poured her coffee. “Much farther to go?” she asked.
“Hm?” said Jeanne.
“On your trip,” the waitress said. “Almost there or are you just getting started?”
—
The way it worked was, the visitors seated themselves on the east sides of the tables and then the shift lieutenant spoke into his radio and a door on the west side of the room opened and the inmates filed through. Jeanne always tried to pick the same table, in the corner, which she liked to think offered some modicum of privacy. She arranged the candy bars and pop on the metal surface. The inmates entered one by one. They all wore jeans, collared T-shirts, gray belts, and denim jackets. Some wore blue slip-on shoes, others heavy work boots. The shoes were provided by the prison, the boots you had to buy from the commissary. Rob earned fifty cents an hour mopping floors, but Jeanne was allowed to add to his account and always made sure that its credit exceeded his weekly spending limit. She enjoyed imagining the cart stopping at his cell each Friday. She enjoyed picturing Rob receiving its deliveries: instant coffee, Top Ramen, new socks and boxers. Proper underclothing.
When Rob stepped through the door, Jeanne experienced the same instinctive jolt as usual: a kind of momentary lapse during which the cognitive dissonance that normally made living possible—the simultaneous acknowledgment of his situation and belief that he would emerge from it OK—short-circuited. The man who approached her table was enormous. The denim jacket that looked several sizes too large on most of the inmates stretched over his shoulders. His head was shaved. He wore a thick goatee. When he sat down he put his elbows on the table, made a fist with his left hand, and stroked it with his right. He stroked the fist as if it were a nervous animal. He did not mention the previous Thursday—the first Thursday since the beginning of his incarceration that Jeanne had failed to visit him—but Jeanne apologized anyway, as if he had reproached her, and recounted the whole story of the flatbed and the trooper. When she’d finished, Rob said, “So, this guy, did they get him?”
“Get who?”
“The guy. Jesus. Driving the truck? Who almost killed you? Did they arrest him or what?”
“Arrest him? I don’t think so, no.”
“What do you mean no? He almost killed you, right?”
“Did I say that? I shouldn’t have said that. It wasn’t that bad.”
“But it could’ve been,” Rob insisted. “It could’ve been that bad, easy. Did the cop take a description? Did this cop even file a report or anything?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Jeanne said.
Rob clamped his mouth shut and leaned back in disgust. “Unbelievable,” he said.
Jeanne changed the subject. “All week I kept having these thoughts. Another accident, the Buick breaking down, me missing another visit, you not knowing why. What would you think if—”
“I’d think you had something else to do.”
“Anyway,” said Jeanne, ignoring that, “there’s a TO just up the road from here. So I drove down last night and slept there.”
“You did what?”
“Slept at the TO. In the Buick. In your sleeping bag. This morning I even had time for—”
“Why would you do that?”
“I just told you why.”
Rob glared at her. “That was stupid,” he said.
“Stupid?” said Jeanne. “I guess I don’t see what’s stupid about it.”
“See that man over there?” Rob said.
Jeanne followed her son’s gaze to a middle-aged inmate with slicked-back hair, sitting across from a woman with a baby on her knee.
“That man stabbed someone with a screwdriver for no reason,” said Rob.
Jeanne nodded, waiting.
“Walked up and stabbed him,” Rob said.
When it became clear that Rob did not consider any further comment necessary, Jeanne said, “Speaking of screwdrivers, one of the curtain rods in the family room fell down. The thing pulled right out of the wall.”
“The bracket?”
“The thing the rod sits on. Is that the bracket?”
The kind of physical deflation that Jeanne knew this topic would prompt began in Rob’s fist and spread all the way to the wormlike vein pulsing in his brow. Home repairs. For the rest of the session, now, this is what they’d talk about. Brackets and rods and what tools were needed and how they were used.
—
Two months after he was discharged from the army, Rob punched Derick Leisure during a drunken scrap at the Blue Moon Saloon, inflicting a subdural contusion that, several hours later, while Derick was asleep on his parents’ couch, resulted in a substantial enough accumulation of blood to asphyxiate his brain. Two months. Jeanne still had not acclimated to the daily thrill of having
Rob around. Since that day, she had often considered how much easier it all might have been had she only been allowed a little bit more time with him—had that sense of fascination with his presence only lost a bit of its intensity—before he had to go away again. But also, she had come to realize that in some respects it was better to have a convict than a soldier for a son. At least in Kuna he was safe; at least from there Jeanne could be relatively sure he would eventually come home. It was a medium-security facility, and even the gang members—Aryan Knights, Norteños and Sureños, the handful of blacks who called themselves Crips—were above all concerned with staying out of max. That, in any case, was how Rob characterized the situation, and while Jeanne knew that the point was to reassure her, she could also sense that it was true: there was nothing in that place to which he was unequal.
She’d never felt like that about the wars.
—
That week at the Cash and Carry, the smaller of Grangeville’s two grocery markets, where Jeanne stocked produce and collected carts, she kept thinking about the inmate with the baby. She supposed that what Rob had been trying to tell her was that she was dangerously naïve, oblivious to the menace lurking everywhere, and it depressed her to imagine the world as he experienced it: a world in which any given person might stab you with a screwdriver.
The next Wednesday, at the Traveler’s Oasis, she bought silver sunshades to fit behind the Buick’s windshields. She didn’t tell Rob—not that week or any of the weeks that followed. As the weather warmed, she left the windows cracked and grew to appreciate the truck stop’s unique bouquet of tumbleweed and diesel. Awkwardly comported on the backseat to avoid the middle belt buckle, she slept better than she had in months. The coming and going of the semis, the hiss of their hydraulic brakes, the curses, laughter, and expectorations of the drivers—it all just reminded Jeanne how near she was to Kuna.
The visits, meanwhile, proceeded as usual: Jeanne questing after Rob, Rob eluding her.
Then one Thursday, during a session in late June, while Jeanne was describing her plans to attend a Fourth of July barbecue at a coworker’s house, Rob leaned forward and interrupted her.
These Heroic, Happy Dead Page 8
