The Current

by Tim Johnston

  “To arrest him?”

  “No, I couldn’t do that up here—I’d have to go through the whole extradition process and . . .” He waved his hand. “I was coming just to talk to him, to see how he wanted to go about it.”

  Audrey began to get up but then sat down again. Her legs wouldn’t do it.

  Moran stood and collected the tumbler from her and walked into the kitchen. The tap ran, and he returned and handed her the glass and took his seat again on the sofa.

  “Do you mind if I hold on to this?” He’d just finished thumbing through the little black notebook and he was holding it up.

  “Will I get it back?”

  “Of course. I’ll make copies of anything of relevance.” He slipped the notebook into the same breast pocket from which he’d taken his card.

  Audrey took another long drink and when she was finished he said, “I know he was sick, Audrey. I mean, I know the cancer had come back and that it was . . . that there was nothing . . .” He looked at the coffee table and shook his head. “I think between that and what happened to you, and to Caroline Price . . . Well, heck. I think it pushed him over some kind of edge.”

  He stopped. He seemed to study the remaining items on the table one by one: The watch. The Zippo lighter. The gun. She would like to have it in her hand, she realized—the good familiar weight of it. The silver finish rubbed off the forward edge of the cap by his thumb, and by hers too, flicking the cap in play for as long as he’d let her: the sound and the feel and the sparky smell of the flintwheel, the burning fuel.

  “You remember that girl ten years back who was pulled out of the river up here?” Moran said. “Holly Burke?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess it’s the same river, isn’t it?”

  She waited.

  “Well. We had a boy we knew did it sure as shit smells like shit—excuse my language. We had him in the same bar as her on the same night, and we had him drunk-driving in the same park later, Henry Sibley Park, where she went into the river. We had everything but hard evidence and a living witness, so what did we do?”

  “You let him go.”

  “We let him go. Made a whole lot of folks just mad as hell too. Her father most of all. As you can imagine. Gordon Burke. Who has not said one decent word about your dad or any of us ever since, I can promise you that.”

  Audrey looked down into the water of her glass. When she looked up again Moran was watching her. He said, “I don’t believe your dad ever got over that, Audrey. Letting that boy go. Never making an arrest. No trial. That boy walking free today, doing God knows what. I think your dad had that on his mind too, when he drove down to Iowa. I mean he was thinking about you, of course, and Caroline Price. But he was thinking about that other girl too, and it all just . . .” He shook his head again. Looking at her as if she might explain it to him. She said nothing.

  “I don’t even know what to say about it,” he said. “It just beats everything. On top of kidnapping and shooting that boy, he has gone and screwed the pooch on any kind of case we might have made against him for your assault, and maybe even Caroline’s death. The whole thing’s just a great big cluster-mess, that’s all. I don’t even know how I’m going to explain it to that girl’s family down in Georgia.”

  He fell silent. Mr. Larkin had finished with his driveway, or else stood as before, watching, listening. Her father’s watch lay ticking on the table. Then, like an old memory, she remembered the hospital—was it just that morning? Waiting for him in the wheelchair. The long walk through the halls. His body under the sheet. So thin. So gray . . .

  “How did he find him?” she said, and her voice seemed to snap the sheriff out of his own thoughts, whatever they were. He drew a sharp breath through his nostrils and shook his head again.

  “Looks like he just went driving around to the local garages, looking for some young grease monkey with scratches on his face. Found one. Waited to get him alone. Interrogated him. Shot him through the hand.”

  “But he had the scratches on his face?”

  “He had scratches on his face,” said Moran. “And a story for how he got them.”

  He watched her and she could see the anger in his eyes at all her father had done to his investigation. To his authority. To even more than that. Leaving him nothing but this daughter, this girl, to answer for it.

  He sat on the edge of the sofa, fingers laced again and mashing his palms together as if to crack a nut.

  “What’s his name?” she said. “The boy with the scratches.” She wanted the notebook back, suddenly. She could see its shape in the breast pocket of his shirt. She knew he would not give it back now.

  “I think I’d better not give you a name just yet,” he said.

  She thought a moment. “Because I might look him up online.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And that could bias you one way or another.”

  She tried to see him again: his face under the shadow of his cap. She could smell—taste—his hand over her mouth, the grease. His hot beer breath. The burning taste of pepper spray. But she could not see his face. She saw the other one rolling around on the concrete, hands to his face.

  “Can you say if he has a friend named Bud?” she said.

  “No, I can’t.”

  She watched him. “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Can’t. I have not found one person so far who admits to knowing any young man by the name of Bud.” He opened up his hands, palms to the ceiling, brought them together again. “Bud as in ‘buddy,’ it looks like.” He watched her. She saw him take her in as if he’d not looked closely before. He said, “Did they say anything else before then—before that moment outside the ladies’ room?”

  Something fluttered in her chest. She held his gaze. “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

  “I’m asking did you talk to them before—in the parking lot? Something like that?” Moran the sheriff, sitting there. Watching her with those eyes.

  “I’d have told you if I had,” she said.

  “Maybe you forgot. Like the backscratcher.” He gave a kind of smile, but it came too late.

  “I didn’t talk to those boys at all, Sheriff.”

  “It’s no crime if you did. Girls talk to boys, boys talk to girls.”

  She stared at him.

  “I’m just saying,” he said, “it would make more sense if there’d been some kind of . . . interaction, before they just showed up outside that ladies’ room.”

  She blinked at the sting in her eyes but she would not cry.

  “There was no interaction, Sheriff. They just showed up.”

  He raised one hand and said, “All right. I’m just making sure, that’s all.”

  She watched him. Then she looked away, toward the window. Night had fallen, and the room was repeated in the glass like a painting in its frame, their two seated figures the painting’s subject: Moran sitting there looking at her, she looking out at the viewer, who was herself.

  She turned back to him. “Is there anything else, or . . . ?”

  He said nothing. Then he sat up straighter and said, “Matter of fact there is,” and popped the snap on the other breast pocket of his shirt and wiggled something free—a short stack of white rectangles—and sat squaring them up in his hands as if about to deal them out. And so he was. “By the book I should bring you back to the station for this,” he said, “with witnesses other than myself. But under the circumstances . . .” He dealt out the rectangles; they were pictures, printed on photo stock, and he placed them one at a time on the coffee table all in a row, parallel to her father’s things and oriented so that she didn’t have to do anything but lean forward and look.

  “I just need you to look at these real careful, real slow, and tell me if you think any one of them is that boy who grabbed you.”

  Five pictures, and they made a poor hand: five young men of about the same age, all poorly shaven, blond to brown hair, eyes of all colors and all staring into the camera with the same dumb cri
minal emptiness.

  “What’s the tape on them for?” It was a little square of masking tape stuck to each of the pictures in the same place.

  “One of these boys has scratches on his face. Or what’s left of them. So I had to put tape on all of their pictures. Just try to ignore that. Look at their features. Their eyes.”

  She studied them one at a time, right to left. She wanted so badly to peel off the pieces of tape, to see the face that bore the scratches.

  “Anything?” he said.

  “It was dark,” she said.

  “Take your time.”

  She looked again, left to right, while her heart slid. She’d seen him so clearly, or believed she had, when she was in the hospital bed—when she’d seen him through Caroline’s eyes. Now she waited for one of the faces, one of the sets of eyes, to bring that vision back, to put the boy’s face together with the feel and the taste of his hand over her mouth. Instead, the more she stared at the faces in the pictures the more that vision, that clarity, slipped away from her, and when she closed her eyes it was not to give up but to hold on, to keep that feeling of Caroline—of being Caroline—alive in her heart.

  Moran said her name. And said it again before she opened her eyes.

  “Nothing?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “You’re sure?”

  She would not look at the pictures again. “Yes.”

  He sat watching her. Then he leaned forward and swept the pictures into a stack again and fit them back into his pocket and snapped the button to. He tapped his forefinger on his business card where it lay on the table. “You call me, Audrey. I mean it. Anything you need.”

  He stood then from the sofa and picked up his jacket and hat, and she stood to see him out and it was all a dream: the two of them in that living room, her father’s gun on the coffee table, even her voice when she heard it ask him what would happen next.

  “With what?”

  “With the case.”

  “Well, we’ll finish our investigation, our interviews, and then we’ll take everything to the county attorney and see what she says.”

  “What might she say?”

  “She might say let’s prosecute this SOB, for the assault at least. Or she might say we haven’t got enough even for that.”

  “I might know him if I saw him in person,” Audrey said.

  “Might,” said Moran.

  She opened the wooden door, and he pushed open the stormdoor and put on his hat. The snow had stopped. Mr. Larkin was gone, the light of his television playing now on the living room curtains and Larkin himself standing in the dark of some other room watching to see would that Iowa sheriff ever leave that house. What did he imagine was going on in there? Did he even know her father had died?

  “And what about my father?” she said, and Moran paused with one boot down on the first step.

  “What about him?”

  “I mean what he did down there.”

  Moran adjusted his hat. He squinted up at something in the night sky. “Well,” he said, his breath smoking. “They might pursue monetary compensation, I suppose. But as for criminal charges, under the circumstances . . .” He didn’t finish, and didn’t have to.

  “Thank you, Sheriff,” she said, and Moran nodded.

  “You have my card,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. I have your card.”

  28

  And then it was Sunday—a long day of sobbing and sleeping. Of dreaming and waking and remembering and sobbing again. Of finding him in everything she touched and smelled, from the paperbacks on the mantel to the stained coffee mug in the sink to the rounded cake of soap in the shower.

  Grandma Sutter and her husband, Kent, spent most of the day trying to take care of her, but then Kent told her they couldn’t stay, he had to get his wife away from this house for a while, just too many reminders of her son . . . and they were not gone fifteen minutes before the other son, Uncle John, arrived—but he was so restless and talky, so determined to keep her distracted, that finally she pretended to fall asleep on the sofa, then fell asleep for real, and when she woke up he was gone.

  Others came too: the same mothers of childhood friends who’d visited her in the hospital, bringing this time casseroles, bringing lasagna, Just put it in the oven at three-fifty, sweetie, or do you have a microwave . . . ?

  Lastly came another lawman, the man who’d replaced her father when he retired: Sheriff Wayne Halsey. The sheriff looking so awkward on the porch that she didn’t even bother inviting him in; she thanked him for checking on her, promised to call if she needed anything, watched him walk back to his cruiser, waved when he waved, then shut the wooden door again and locked it.

  The sofa was still warm, and she lay staring at her father’s things on the coffee table, listening to the ticking of his watch, and when she woke again it was morning—Monday morning. The weekend was over.

  She’d remembered to charge his phone, at least, and the first thing she saw when she lifted it was his face, next to hers—the two of them red-faced and smiling in their black knit caps.

  Audrey, this is a bad idea . . . Her father, the sheriff, mincing out onto the ice in the rented skates. He was from Illinois and had not played hockey as a kid, and had not been on any kind of skates since he was ten years old, he said.

  It’s like riding a bike, she said.

  Have you ever, in your life, seen me on a bike?

  She wiped her eyes, her face. Then she found the number she was looking for, and a woman answered the phone and put her on hold—no music, just fizzy silence. The phone smelled like smoke. The woman came back and told her yes, he could see her at ten thirty this morning, would that be all right?

  She was in the shower a long time, lathering and scrubbing and shaving all one-handed, a plastic bag rubber-banded over the cast, and afterwards she found socks and underclothes in her dresser and she stepped into a pair of old jeans once too tight and now too loose and she took an old flannel shirt from the hanger it had hung on untouched for maybe three years, and lastly she brushed out her hair and bound it tightly in a damp ponytail at the back of her head.

  The canvas jacket was too big and too heavy and it reeked of smoke, but her cast slipped right into it, and she loved it. She stood outside on the porch, squinting in the sunlight and rooting up the sunglasses from the breast pocket and putting them on, the glasses loose at her temples and heavy on her nose. Dark- green tint. The aviators he’d worn for years.

  The Ford sat where it always sat. A male nurse from the hospital had driven it while another nurse, a woman, had driven Audrey in a little car that stank of the nurse’s gym bag, both nurses making sure she got inside all right, that she would be all right—could they get her anything, was she sure they couldn’t call someone?—before leaving her alone in the house at last.

  Now, climbing into the Ford, she thought she’d cry again from the smell of it—the smokiness, yes, but also something beneath that, or within it, some old sheriffy scent or combination of scents that was the very smell of—what? Of safety.

  She didn’t cry. She scooted the seat forward, buckled up, made an adjustment to the rearview mirror, and put the Ford in gear, and with each of these movements her father’s watch slipped and swung on her wrist like a heavy bracelet.

  It had snowed but not enough to bring out the plows, and the river when she crossed it was snowy at its bends but clean at its center—glassy black ice maybe a foot thick, maybe more depending on the currents underneath, how fast or slow, and was there an equation for that, such as the rate of descent for a projectile depending on its weight and its speed? For ice thickness you’d have to figure temperature too. And the temperature over how many days. The ice on her river—their river, the Lower Black Root—had been thick but not thick enough. The current too fast there, rushing toward the dam where the water never froze.

  Oh, Audrey, sometimes I just love you.

  I know. It’s the same with me.

  She f
ed the meter with quarters from his console and crossed the sidewalk toward an image in the glass she took to be someone else altogether, someone on the other side of the glass coming out, before she realized it was her, and she removed the sunglasses and stowed them in the breast pocket of the canvas jacket and opened the glass door and stepped inside. Ten minutes later by her father’s watch the lawyer came up to her in his shirt and tie and took her good hand in both of his as she stood from the chair. “Audrey, I am so sorry. I am so sorry.” Holding on to her hand, looking into her eyes. “I came to see you at the hospital but you were absolutely conked out. How’s your arm?”

  “It’s fine, Mr. Trevor, thanks.”

  “Please, call me Tuck. What can I get you?” Letting go her hand and turning to the counter. “Debbie, is there yet some coffee back there?”

  She’d known him since she was young, tagging along with her father to the courthouse, or he’d show up at a campaign rally when her father had to campaign, or she’d see him at school, where his girls were in the class ahead of hers, the Trevor twins, a double dose of pretty and mean. Call me Tuck, he always said but she couldn’t do it.

  He walked her back to his office and told her to please sit, and before he’d even settled into his own chair behind his desk he said, “I don’t know where to begin, Audrey. All you’ve been through. Your friend Caroline. And now your father. I have to say I’m surprised to see you up and about at all.”

  On the wall behind him was a framed photograph of the Trevor twins in their high school graduation caps and gowns, their white smiles. They’d gone to a school out east, some big-deal college where they could go on being pretty and mean together.

  “He told me to come see you, if this happened,” she said.

  “Yes, he told me the same thing—to make sure you came to see me, that is. He wasn’t a man who liked to leave things to chance, was he.”

  She watched him—did he know? Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. What did it matter now anyway?

  She said, “I guess you know about what he did then.”