by John Straley
“I was ready to go to jail but Lance said he would take care of things. From there on in, we just did what had to be done.”
Lance moved his head back and forth and narrowed his small eyes. His hand was bone white and tense around the grips of the gun. He looked sad, angry, and confused. A slow-witted man without his mother’s tolerance for contradiction. A very dangerous man.
“But Todd?” I asked.
Emma lifted her rifle off her lap casually. “I was not… am not … going to let anything happen to my children. Your friend got between me and you. It was too bad. You started to stir things up and I didn’t want that.
“I saw my mother-in-law that day. Then I took the gun, and gave a man’s description to the police. That night I knocked on your door and waited. I thought you lived alone and I was thrown off by the half-wit. Then I thought you would be the next one out the door. I shot too soon. It was regrettable. It caused a lot of problems.”
“Problems. Well, yes. But I still think we can work something out,” I said. I looked at her carefully, searching for an angle.
“I think you’re absolutely right, Mr. Younger.” She lowered the rifle to her hip, apparently relaxed. And then she fired.
Walt rocked back and lay on the ground, sputtering. There was a tiny hole in his jacket just to the center of his breast pocket, but under his back a pool of blood spread into the mossy spruce needles and rotted alder leaves. He gasped, his hands still in his pockets, and then he lay still. The air was bitter with gunpowder. He looked undignified and forlorn, like a photograph of a victim from a cheap detective magazine.
“You two should not have interfered, Mr. Younger. You made too much noise.”
I said his name. I bent over him and spoke into his ear. I reached inside his pocket and took the .44 in my hands.
I stood up and took Norma by the elbow and pressed the muzzle of the gun to her temple.
“This is very sloppy. I don’t know what we are going to do.” I backed toward the water with absolutely no idea of what my next step might be.
“But if you or Lance start shooting again I’m going to have to … I don’t know … I guess …,” and I jammed the muzzle of the gun tighter against Norma’s scalp.
Lance looked back and forth between me and his mother and then down at Walt, dead on the ground. The pistol was still tight in Lance’s grip.
Norma’s body was rigid and she breathed in shallow gasps. I walked us backward awkwardly over the slick cobbles.
Emma stepped down and came toward her daughter and me. “I think you’re right. I’m sure we can work this out. Lance and I will get in the plane. We will fly to the beach just on the other side of the ridge. Let Norma go. She can hike over and meet us. We’ll say Mr. Robbins killed himself out of grief for his daughter. We’ll leave it at that. Now we’ll go to our plane, Mr. Younger.
She nodded to Lance and he moved toward a small inflatable kayak lying inside Walt’s tin skiff. I hadn’t agreed to the plan but it was being carried out. Lance launched the kayak and they both got in. With the two of them in it, the kayak looked foolishly small, like a bathtub toy. Lance paddled them out to the plane about fifty yards from shore. Once there, he handed their packs up to his mother and then the rifles.
Norma and I stood on the beach. I dropped my right hand holding the .44 to my side. She was sobbing.
They let some air out of the kayak and wedged it into the backseat of the plane. Emma got into the pilot’s seat and Lance balanced on the struts under the propeller to reach the passenger side. Once in, he reached behind his seat. The engine turned over and the propeller spun. Emma opened her door and yelled to Norma above the propwash, “Just walk to the beach across the point.” She turned the plane north, into the wind.
Lance raised the rifle to his shoulder. Norma screamed and ducked. I didn’t hear anything but the slug bit my left arm and spun me around to my knees.
Norma ran.
I braced myself on one knee and tried to steady the pistol. I fired twice into the cowling around the airplane motor. I saw nothing. The engine’s whine did not change pitch. Emma swung the plane away from the beach and gave it full throttle. It lumbered across the water and finally lifted into the air, water trailing from the floats.
The silence eased around us. Norma stood at the waterline. She watched the plane, shifting from foot to foot like a bowler doing a little body-English dance. She was crying as she watched. The plane, now three hundred feet off the water, banked to the west. It circled around as if to land again, and as it passed I saw oil streaking down the cowling, then black smoke. The engine sputtered. As a gust of wind came from the head of the inlet the plane tumbled, cart-wheeling in the air like a toy.
Norma stood still, not making a sound, as she watched the plane slide and flail its way into the water. But when the fuselage of the aircraft broke away from the floats and sank, she buried her face in her hands.
The plane’s supports bobbed up. A few moments later I saw two figures clamber up and cling to the aluminum floats. They hauled themselves clear of the water and leaned against the wrecked undercarriage.
There was aluminum debris and oil floating on the surface.
Some old-squaw ducks paddled nearby and the whales were feeding complacently a quarter of a mile to the south. Toddy was probably hooked up to some machine in the hospital and somewhere up the hill I imagined the bear was scratching at the roots of a skunk cabbage plant. And Walt was dead.
I sat on a rock, threw the gun down at my feet, and tried not to think about these things all at once.
SEVENTEEN
TODDY’S HOSPITAL BEDSIDE table looked like the shrine of Fatima. Every good Christian in town had taken the opportunity to try to win his simple heart for the Lord. I sat next to his bed in an armchair. The TV was on, but I had turned the radio off. Todd was playing some kind of electronic baseball game, holding it in his hands and bumping his thumbs around on buttons. He had four cans of juice on his table and a bucket of ice. Sitting on an extra TV stand was his fish tank. The killifish bumped against the glass and under the arches of a plastic castle. The fish tank had a large and stately presence in the room, like a national park.
“Cecil, are they going to arrest you for killing Mr. Robbins?” He did not look up.
“I told you. The police said they wanted to investigate thoroughly and they might take it to the grand jury, but they just didn’t know. They’re still going over the scene. Emma and the ‘kids’ went out to the house in Tee Harbor to wait.”
“Didn’t you tell the police what really happened?”
I strained in my chair and thought about asking him to put down the game if he wanted to talk about my participation in a killing. But I didn’t.
“Yes, I told them what happened. I went out to the Oso and used the radio to call the Coast Guard and the troopers. They came out by helicopter and fished Emma and Lance out of the water. I gave a statement that night, and the troopers patched up my arm.”
“Did Emma tell them what happened?”
“Well, Todd, I think she did. But I think she told them that I killed Walt and then tried to murder her family.”
“Doesn’t that worry you?”
“Yeah, a little. But I gave them the rifle and that should help. And I also have some insurance.”
“Insurance?”
“You know how sometimes I run my tape recorder without telling people?”
“I know.” And here he looked up from his game. “That’s not really fair is it, Cecil?”
“Well, it’s not illegal. And I made a pretty good tape of the whole scene down by the cabin.”
“Did you give it to the police?”
“Not yet. I want Emma to commit to her story. I want her to swear under oath and tell the world that she is absolutely sure that I threatened to shoot Walt unless he paid me to keep quiet about his murdering Louis. I want her to be frank and believable with an angelic look on her face—and then I’ll give them the tape. But I
’m going to wait and see. I’m going to give them the tape sometime. I just don’t know when.”
Toddy put his game down on the bed in the valley between his knees. He was tired and had been awake longer than he should have been. I had my jacket off and he looked at my arm where it was bandaged. He looked worried now, and his eyebrows knitted together in a long-held thought. He propped his glasses up off the bridge of his nose.
“There sure has been a lot of shooting.”
“Yeah.”
“And a lot of people killed. Why do you think that is, Cecil? I mean, we didn’t do anything to anybody, did we?” Toddy doesn’t cry when he is unhappy but he clenches his fists and starts to hyperventilate. He knotted his sheet in his fists.
“What’s wrong, buddy? Do you need something?” I almost rang for the nurse.
“Cecil. One of those ladies who came and brought me these books about the Bible and all of this stuff … you know? Well, she said that I got shot because God knew that I was a strong person. She said that I got shot because God loved me and was giving me a test that he knew I was strong enough to pass.”
He took his glasses off and looked at me with the dim sniffing gaze of someone who can’t see a thing without his glasses.
“That seems crazy to me, Cecil.”
“Me too, buddy.” I leaned over and cradled his bristly head in my arms and hugged him. “That’s crazy,” I whispered.
“I immediately thought that, when she said that stuff.” He leaned back and put his glasses on and smiled up at me with a bobbing, red-faced grin.
I leaned over his table and looked at some of the gifts on his bedside shrine.
“Speaking of good things. Did Hannah send you this?”
I picked up ajar of jam. I looked at the label taped on top of the gold lid. It read: “For Toddy—Salmonberry jam, Sitka. Picked by Hannah Elder and C. W. Younger/ ‘By sweetness alone it survives.’”
On my way to the hospital I had stopped by the bench in front of the home and the book was there. Someone had wrapped it in plastic, knowing it would be missed. The cover was limber with moisture, the paper almost pulp again. I had it tucked in my pocket next to my tape recorder.
“She said when I got out of the hospital she was coming to visit.”
“She did? You think I could have a taste?”
I started to twist off the lid, and then stopped to hear what he would say.
“Okay … I guess.”
He was smiling but his eyebrows were twitching and I knew he wanted the first taste. I dug around on his lunch tray, then spooned up as much as I could balance on a little plastic spoon and held it to his lips.
“Thank you,” he said and swallowed, then closed his eyes in a reverential grin of appreciation. “Ummmmm.”
I smelled it first as if it were an old bottle of wine. I thought of the warm, bitter taste in my mouth as Hannah and I had walked back from the graveyard. I thought of that summer and how far off it seemed, how long the winter would be. But then I tasted how sweet the berries were.
“Are you crying?” Todd looked up at me with that quizzical expression of a dog watching you undress. “Cecil?”
“It’s just very good jam, buddy. It’s nice to taste it.”
Todd was still a little feverish. He lay back in his bed and I cranked the head of it down and turned off the light. “I’ll be back tonight,” I said.
I eased my jacket on over my sore arm and walked out the door of the hospital. I had to go down to the home and give Mrs. Victor my final report. She already knew the facts. I’d spoken to her over the phone and she’d thanked me and asked me to help her find a good attorney for her grandchildren if they were going to have to stand trial. I thought that was funny, seeing as how it was her grandchild who pulled the trigger on her son. She said she understood that but she still wanted to help. She said it was never about blame, it was about making things right. She was a Christian and she knew about making the world right… but she still needed a lawyer. I told her to call Dickie Stein.
I asked Mrs. Victor over the phone how she knew that I was telling the truth and she told me that it just made sense. The police reports didn’t make sense, but my story did.
We didn’t mention the woman who had married a bear, and I didn’t ask her if it was a true story. I didn’t even ask her if she had just told it that way to ease me along the path of her own suspicions. I kept my peace. Most old stories don’t have anything to do with facts; they’re the box that all the facts came in.
It was an early snow for October and I knew it would turn to rain. My feet got soaked as I walked toward the cathedral. A raven circled from over the landfill and flapped the dense, snowy air above me. He landed on the stop sign in the main intersection in town. He had a red thread wrapped around his foot. Apparently, there was a kid who was desperate to trap a raven and was not going to be dissuaded.
I knew that the cathedral was locked and no one was there, but I also knew if I gave ten bucks to the right person after the bars closed, I could get in and stay there until they threw me out in the morning.
