Powers of Arrest

by Jon Talton

  Zack hooked up an iPod to some speakers and they belted out a play list from the 1980s. It was so Cincinnati, frozen in time. Then he opened up a cabinet and pulled out liquor bottles and glasses.

  “Red Hook cocktails, anyone?”

  “Me, me,” Heather purred, and the other girls laughed.

  “That is so legit,” Chelsea, one of the blondes, said. “I had my first last week. Wow.” The prospect even made her stop texting and put away her cell phone.

  As Men at Work sang, Zack expertly mixed the drinks, which looked like brown martinis and tasted of whiskey. Heather broke open the picnic basket and passed around food, but John didn’t feel hungry. Soon, they were on the second drink, talking about friends he didn’t know, and college plans he didn’t care about. They had all recently graduated and yet appeared so focused. They were younger, but he felt out of his league, felt, depressingly, like he was back at prep school.

  He had never fit in. He wasn’t Catholic, wasn’t an athlete, geek, academic star, or secret goth. Since graduating, he had drifted. John didn’t know what the hell he wanted to do. He only knew he didn’t want to be back in Cincinnati. Heather might have changed that, but she was barely with him now. It was a dynamic he had felt so many times before. He fell into a dark silence, feeling the knife he carried in his pocket, imagining what it might do to Zack’s handsome face. It was only a passing thought. His imaginings of how well this night might go were quickly fading.

  “And a chaser.” Zack passed around a bag of pills. Everybody took one but John.

  “A little ecstasy won’t hurt you, Borders, unless you’re narc’ing for your old man.”

  “Look, I don’t like ecstasy. That’s it.” John didn’t even especially like hard liquor, and he was feeling the Red Hooks.

  Heather popped one of the pills and drained her glass, letting out a war whoop.

  John had never done ecstasy, never done the hookups that were popular in school, especially among the rich Catholic kids at school. He had never been invited. He didn’t even want that. He wanted Heather. But his mind shifted into momentary optimism. Maybe the night would turn into something after all. He retrieved the bag and took two of the pills. Chelsea and Jennifer giggled.

  Zack smiled. “Now if anybody wants to use the little boat back there for some privacy…”

  The river rocked the boat rhythmically and a sweet smell came from the foliage on the bank. Maybe the boat would sink and he could rescue Heather, be a hero, and she would fall in love with him. The other blonde, Jennifer, was telling a story, the ghost ship of the Licking River…a paddle wheeler in the nineteenth century that suffered a boiler explosion killing everyone on board, but for years people would see that ship at night, passing noiselessly down the river.

  John couldn’t feel any effect from the pills. But he started talking.

  “See over there, to the west beyond the trees? It’s the old Decoursey Yard of the L&N Railroad. It was huge. Now it’s mostly abandoned and deserted, but the CSX main line between Cincinnati and Corbin runs through it.” He was like that. He knew odd things, but somehow they didn’t add up to much that anyone was interested in.

  “We should hike up there and see it,” Jennifer said. She was only wearing flip-flops.

  He kept his eyes on Heather. “You might not want to. There’s a story, where sometimes people see a man standing on the tracks, waving a red lantern. Like a warning. They say he’s dressed in railroad clothes from the nineteen-thirties. Nobody knows who he is. But he waves that red lantern across the tracks at the old Decoursey Yard, and when he does, the railroad shuts down for a while. The old timers say the red lantern means there’s going to be a wreck. So they stop the trains.” He paused, and saw they were paying attention to him. “So listen…No trains. That means the man must have been seen tonight. He’s right up that riverbank, over the trees.”

  “That’s a great story,” Heather said.

  “Trains are yesterday,” Zack said.

  John’s stomach was feeling the drinks. He should have eaten something. He set the glass aside and wondered how to keep Heather’s attention. He thought about talking her into the Zodiac and they could go off together, get away from these bores. The play list from the Reagan years ran on. Huey Lewis and the News gave way to Journey. I Want to Know What Love Is. John had always thought the song was a maudlin oldie. Now it filled his heart and he thought, yes, Heather, I do want to know. He tried to catch her eye.

  Sunday

  Chapter Two

  The moan awoke him, and for a second he thought about the mysterious man with the lantern, about the ghost ship. But it wasn’t that kind of moan.

  John didn’t know how much time had passed. The sky beyond the overhang of trees was inky, filled with stars. Jennifer and Chelsea had disappeared. A few feet away, he saw Heather embracing Zack. He was sitting in his captain’s chair and she was in his lap. The chair was turned to face the stern, where John was sprawled on the bench.

  “You were so busy up front with the Jennifer and Chelsea that I didn’t think you were interested in me,” Heather said.

  “Saving the best for last,” Zack said.

  The two were kissing deeply and he had his hand in her shorts. She moaned again.

  John felt sick but not from the liquor. Yet he sat there and pretended to be asleep, watching the thing unfold. Zack slipped off her light top and expertly unhooked her bra. Her skin glowed in the starlight as she sat on his lap, facing away from John. After a few minutes, she dropped to her knees and unzipped him.

  “My, my, what’s this?”

  It was a woman’s voice, husky, alien.

  “You like, babe?” Zack said.

  She laughed. “What do I do with it?”

  As she moved her head, John stared at Zack’s penis, transfixed.

  “Let me help.” Zack reached down to undo it. Heather leaned forward and her hair covered what came next. But it was clear what was happening. Her head bobbed up and down. The boat rocked gently and John wanted to kill them both. He wanted to kill himself. It was a feeling that only grew as he saw, through the slits of his eyes, Heather kick off her shorts and black panties, climb astride the captain’s chair, and reach down to put Mister Perfect’s penis inside her.

  “Fuck me!” she whispered.

  John felt his face grow a hot blush.

  They rocked against each other. Heather laughed and arched her back.

  It seemed to last for years. He watched the whole thing, the drill of betrayal boring into his middle, but also…arousal. Maybe he was a peeping Tom. A freak.

  They moved with ever-greater urgency until both were groaning loudly.

  Heather’s voice split the night. “Oh! You’re making me come.”

  John closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing. After awhile the powerful engines of the boat started and idled.

  “Hey, Borders, good nap?”

  Zack was grinning at him, his stubble no longer so perfect, his clothes half-on and half off. Heather hung on Zack, looking like a new Burberry scarf around the neck of a homeless man. She didn’t look at John.

  “It was what it was.” John sat upright on the bench.

  The two other girls appeared from the front of the boat, ahead of the open cabin, which held two seats where you could stretch out.

  “Did you girls have more fun?” Zack asked. He walked aft, leaned past John, and made fast the rope holding the Zodiac. “I love that boat,” he said.

  “Me, too.” John glared at him.

  They retraced their route back to the city, going slower this time, the little skiff barely noticeable behind them. The river was deserted now, the water nearly flat except for their unwelcome wake. He looked at his cell phone: almost four a.m.

  “Check it out,” Zack said. “We’re not the last ones at closing time.”

  The two other girls were exchanging embarrassed looks while giving John dirty glances. They dug into their bags and pulled on more substantial tops and j
eans.

  Zack pointed to the cabin cruiser, still tied up by the railroad bridge. On closer inspection, it was an older boat.

  “Rinker Fiesta 330,” Zack said. “Let’s have a little fun. Bet you somebody’s fucking in there. Probably one of our dads cheating…”

  “Don’t,” John said.

  “We wouldn’t want sex happening on a public waterway,” Zack said augustly.

  Heather laughed. She said, “Do it.”

  He aimed the spotlight and shot its powerful beam into the cabin. All John could think of was the memory of Heather’s back and pelvis moving against Zack, how her head went up and down on his lap as if she couldn’t get enough, stopping only long enough to pull her hair over one shoulder. And the sight of Zack’s cock out of his pants…

  Jennifer let out a gasp.

  John saw it. Bright slices of red were painted against the glass of the oval-shaped portholes. He could swear it wasn’t there when they went upriver.

  “That looks like blood,” Jennifer whispered.

  “We should get out of here.” Heather pulled herself away from Zack and slumped in the seat beside him.

  Zack played the light all across the boat. The decks were empty.

  “I mean it, we should go.” Heather put on her bra under her blouse.

  Zack stayed, holding the craft with the engines. They idled loudly, echoing off the trees and levees. Anyone inside couldn’t help but hear them.

  He yelled across. “Hey! Ahoy! Need help?”

  The cabin cruiser rocked gently at its mooring.

  “Why don’t you check it out, Borders? You should know this kind of shit, being a cop’s son and all.”

  John stared at the dark boat, now no more than ten feet away.

  “Stay here, John.” Heather looked at him, a blurry expression in her eyes.

  “Come alongside,” John said, standing.

  “John!”

  He ignored her and as the two craft gently bumped together he stepped across onto the stern of the other boat. “Got a flashlight?”

  Zack tossed him one, a heavy two-cell with a metal case, and he miraculously caught it.

  The boats were now side-by-side, but somehow Zack’s glistening Sea Ray seemed impossibly distant. The other boat was shrouded. John could not see the faces of his companions onboard the Sea Ray. The deck beneath his feet felt slick and breakable.

  “Anybody here?” he called, trying to keep the fear out of his voice.

  He ran the flashlight beam forward, past a bench, sink, and the driver’s seat. The helm. He didn’t know many nautical terms, despite his sailing trips from Boston. Here nothing looked amiss. The seats were pearl colored and clean, and there was no evidence of any partying, no beer cans, nothing.

  Ahead was the rectangular entrance to the cabin. It was totally black. The flashlight didn’t cut through the gloom at all. John felt his stomach tighten. It was only a few steps but they looked dangerous and the cabin far off. His interior voice was telling him not to go in there, to return to the Sea Ray and leave.

  He thought again of Heather, willed his feet forward, and ducked inside the cabin, taking the single step down.

  “Anybody…”

  The blood lay everywhere in the confined space, an area as tight as a funeral vault. A large amount pooled on the floor, soaking into the carpet, nearly reaching his shoes. More was flung in great spurts against the walls and portholes. He thought of photos he had seen in school, of Jackson Pollack painting.

  The flashlight exaggerated the color of the blood and its freshness, sluiced along cushions and dripping from a bench. Everywhere, that is, except on the face of the woman who lay on the bench staring at him with empty eyes. She had short wheat-colored hair and a face that maintained its attractiveness despite what had happened here. Her legs were parted wide. A stab of recognition hit him and he had a moment’s desire to venture deeper into the cabin, but no, he stopped.

  He wanted out with sudden panic. He ran a hand nervously through his hair and backed out quickly, the skin on the rear of his neck prickly. Then, again with unaccustomed grace, he hopped back across to Zack’s boat. Zack was in the rear, again working on the knots that secured the Zodiac. He was teasing the girls. “You take the little boat out for a love cruise…?

  “No,” a pouty response came.

  “She’s dead in there…” John tried to speak calmly, still supremely aware of Heather’s presence. “We’ve got to call the police.”

  Zack walked back to the helm, speaking over the exclamations of the girls.

  “What do you mean, dead?”

  “Dead, asshole,” John shouted. “Murdered. It’s a fucking Freddy Kruger house in that cabin.”

  Zack opened his mouth and nothing came out.

  He gunned the engine and they leapt out of the water. John fell painfully to the deck, but scrambled up again. He pushed his way forward, the images he had seen burned in his brain, grabbing Zack’s shoulder. The other man pulled away roughly and steered to the middle of the channel.

  “We have to go back!”

  “Back off, dawg, it’s my boat.”

  “She’s dead back there.”

  “Then there’s nothing we can do.”

  John fought for the wheel, unsuccessfully.

  “Go back!”

  “Are you crazy?” Zack shouted. “I’ve got a boat of ecstasy and drunk underage girls. No fucking way.”

  It was no use. The bright lights of downtown Cincinnati were in their faces and reflecting off Zack’s sleek, shaved head, as if they had suddenly emerged from the past into the present.

  Zack steered over to the Serpentine Wall and cut the engines, jumping out to tie up. He leaped back in and took the cell phone from John, rage in his bright blue eyes.

  “Don’t you get it, cop’s son? We’ll be the first goddamned suspects.”

  Monday

  Chapter Three

  With an hour to spare before her meeting started, Cheryl Beth locked her car and began her walk across campus. It was the loveliest day she had seen this year, as mother nature felt the intoxicating sense of her power to give rebirth. A rainstorm had come through in the early morning and now the day was sunny and warm. She gloried in the bright green of the Ohio buckeyes, the sweetgums with their star-shaped leaves, the dense beech trees. A woodpecker was working on an oak, a scarlet crown on his head. Her mother had taught her to identify trees when she was a little girl. She had given her that, at least.

  The morning fast-walks were important, Cheryl Beth knew. After she had turned forty, she could no longer keep weight off effortlessly. She was still an attractive woman, with light brown hair worn in a long shag cut and large brown eyes in a face that still held the too-young look that had often caused her to be underestimated. She smiled easily and men still noticed her. But she was trying to be healthier. Too many years as a nurse had taught her the senseless, incomprehensible ways our bodies could go wrong; no need to help the process along.

  Her surroundings made such worries seem impossible. The surreal beauty of Miami University never failed to move her. It was like a college setting out of a novel, with stately brick buildings, a lush, precisely maintained campus, and the quaint town of Oxford. The sense of safety was overwhelming. What a change from the grittiness of the old hospital in Cincinnati. She started through the dogwood grove that would take her to the Formal Gardens. It was one of her favorite spots.

  This was the first time in her career when she wasn’t practicing as an RN on a hospital staff. It felt strange to go to work as a teacher of nursing, not to be in scrubs but dressed up. She had worn scrubs for more than twenty years, working in the hardest jobs at the hospital that handled the toughest cases. She was known as the best pain management nurse in three states and wouldn’t dispute it. But she needed this break. She was a natural teacher, and the clinical part of the job still gave her hospital time.

  She liked her students, even though their reputation at “J. Crew U.” was sup
posedly that of clueless privilege. Many were older, starting new careers. A few were her age, and quite a number were men. The clinical work in the hospital came naturally. She cared less for the nursing classes that were held in Middletown and Hamilton, the onetime industrial towns being so forlorn. So she appreciated the few times she actually got to teach on the main campus. Some days she thought about moving to Oxford and saving the drive from Cincinnati, but it was still early in this new work and she couldn’t shake her love of the city. Her black Audi A4, her one serious indulgence, made the trip easier.

  Much of the time she missed the old hospital for all its flaws. She missed the patients, and especially her old coworkers and their mostly endearing eccentricities. The university had plenty of smart, pleasant people, but it was very politically correct. The old Redskins mascot had been changed to the Red Birds. The nursing faculty was highly capable, but she knew she could never make the dark jokes or have the irreverent fun with them that she so enjoyed with the staff at the hospital, things that had kept her sane.

  As she came closer to the Formal Gardens, she saw the police cars. She had only seen so many in a single place one other time. The cars were from the campus police, Oxford Police and Butler County Sheriff, all crowded together, many with their lights flashing.

  “I can’t let you go closer, Professor Wilson.”

  A young man with close-cropped hair, wrap-around sunglasses, and uniform stood on the sidewalk. He was a campus officer she had become acquainted with when he helped her get a jump-start on her car back in the winter. He had all manner of things on his uniform belt besides his gun and handcuffs, and she couldn’t say what half of them did. “Professor Wilson” was still new to her, and she urged her students to call her Cheryl Beth. But this young man was one of those who couldn’t break the habit. Maybe saying “professor” made them feel as if they were getting their money’s worth.

  “And you’re probably not going to tell me why.” She smiled and he reluctantly smiled back, shaking his head.