The Quiet Boy

by Ben H. Winters

  Except clearly the client wasn’t interested.

  Richard was on his feet now, staring down at Beth on her side of the glass.

  “It’s the last thing you need, or Evie needs, after what we’ve been through.”

  “You’re tired of it. All of it. You’re tired of Wesley, and you’re tired of me.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t get to do this.” Beth was shouting at Richard. “You don’t get to just escape.”

  The guard was opening the door as Richard lumbered toward it.

  Beth shouted still louder. “No!” She banged on the table. All the crooks and their lovers looked over as she screamed at Richard as he was walking away.

  “You pussy,” she screamed, and Shenk cringed, and the guard stepped forward, and she kept on yelling. “You fucking coward.”

  The guard opened the thick door that would return her husband to the underworld, and Beth kept on yelling.

  “You asshole!”

  As he bore witness to this argument that had whirled up like a sandstorm, it occurred to Shenk the old performer that this whole thing felt like a kind of performance. Here was Rich, just being Rich all the way, his face all glower and his body like a big stubborn tree, and here was Beth the tragic woman, toy of time and fate, going full-force gale right here in the Pitchess visiting area, teetering on the hysterical. Both of them playing their part to the goddamn hilt.

  Beth turned on her heel, banged through the exit, and stormed down the hallway that would take them outside, and Shenk followed, considering her, all over again, all the way back from the beginning, this distraught wife and mother who all along had been the angry one, the one who seemed to suffer most the monstrousness of loss.

  Jay thought of his own wife, about what he might have done for her, in those last and most painful days. How far he might have gone to protect her.

  All the various facets of a lifetime of love.

  2.

  Bernie drove a cherry-red 1972 Chevy Impala that had belonged to his childless uncle Jasper. Bernie wasn’t a car guy, but he kept it pretty tuned up, kept the hood nice and shiny.

  The Impala was in the parking lot of the Pitchess Men’s Detention Center, surrounded by the beaters and pickup trucks the hard-luck stragglers drove to visit their fathers and lovers and cousins. Bernie was leaning against it, phone in hand, idly downscrolling, when Evie came out fuming. Bernie nodded, hey, and then waited. She leaned up against the car next to him. She was prettier without all the fucking makeup on. Bernie had told her that once, backstage: he had been on the sofa, getting his Fender in tune.

  “You look better without all that shit on your face, do you know that?”

  She had snorted at him over her shoulder. “What are you, a fucking cosmetician now?”

  Now he jammed his phone into his pocket, scratched his ear, and broke the silence.

  “Your dad all right?”

  “He’s hanging in,” she said. “But my mom’s out of her mind.”

  “Beth’s here?”

  “Yup.”

  He waited for her to say more, but that was it.

  He waited for her to tell him what she was so mad about, but she never did. Bernie had been making music lately with some different friends, when he wasn’t busy with Evie’s stuff. Just dicking around with some guys, doing some bass-forward neo–R & B kind of jammy stuff. They called themselves River Fever, and they were starting to think about playing out. Bernie’d been meaning to mention it to Evie, but he was afraid she would be pissed.

  Although, actually, what he was really worried about, he knew, was that she wouldn’t care.

  The anger had slowly melted off of Evie, and she got calm, just looking up at the sky, and then she said they oughta get going.

  “Sure,” said Bernie. “Let’s do it.”

  Something was on her mind, but Bernie couldn’t tell what it was. She was as elusive as her brother sometimes. All the Keeners were a mystery, hidden inside themselves, impossible to see.

  “You don’t want to wait for your mom?” he asked, and she emerged on cue, Beth Keener bursting out of the main door, walking fast, handbag jostling on her shoulder, the lawyer trailing behind.

  “No.” Evie opened the car door and got in. “I don’t.”

  3.

  The Rabbi peered into the post office, uncertain.

  This didn’t look right. He had come a long way, an impossibly long way, and he had the right address, but this place did not look like a post office. The burly dude behind the counter, with the baseball cap backward and the flannel shirt and the cigarette behind his ear, definitely didn’t look like a mailman.

  Ruben hovered at the threshold, letting the fog lift from his glasses, until the burly dude finished the pint glass of beer he was working on and put it down.

  “Don’t be shy, dude,” he called out heartily. “The post office is for everyone.”

  OK, then. Ruben stepped inside.

  He was unsteady on his feet—the journey from Eleanor Pileggi’s doorstep to Kusiaat, Alaska, had not been an easy one. The flight from Indy to Seattle was followed by five bewildered, nauseous hours at Sea-Tac, wandering dazed through the shopping concourse to buy boots and a black rain slicker and a waterproof backpack to replace his beat-up orange tote. Then came a connecting flight to Anchorage, leading immediately into a rushed, embarrassing incident in which he tried to buy a flight to Homer that cost more than Jay Shenk’s already strained credit limit could withstand. Instead he went to a charmless airport hotel, for an evening of confused browsing on the sluggish computer in the hotel’s “business center,” booking a ticket on something called the Alaska Marine Highway System—which Ruben thought was an actual highway until he got out of the taxi, looking for the bus stop, and was waved by a uniformed policeman toward the long gangplank that led to the ferry.

  Even when he got there, he wasn’t there yet. There was just one rental car place in Kusiaat County, run by a man named Ed and called Ed’s Cars, and Ed only had two vehicles available for rent. One was out already, so Ruben got the other, a beat-up Range Rover that Ruben had paid for—like everything else, from the rain jacket to the boat ride—with his father’s American Express card. What a moment it was going to be, presenting his invoice to Jay Shenk. Here, Dad—here’s what you owe me.

  On none of the legs of this journey had Ruben read a book or a magazine. On none of them did he browse his in-flight entertainment options. Instead he thought about Theresa Pileggi. Instead he tried to piece together what he knew, or thought he knew, or was pretending to himself he knew.

  After Keener, Pileggi abandons her life. Retreats. Flies home to Indianapolis.

  She is half-mad, and soon she is mad all the way; she of all people had fallen under the spell of Dennis, of his people, his movement, his story of the good and golden world. The whole ludicrous mythology that Ruben, all these years later, nevertheless could summon up in all its detail.

  Last November, she leaves. Before Thanksgiving, abruptly, without a word to her long-suffering mother. And then, sometime after that, Richard Keener gets a strange and upsetting phone call, the call that Evie had overheard. “Leave me alone,” he’d shouted. “You people leave me alone.”

  You people. More than one person. Pileggi and someone else. But who?

  —you know who, Ruben—

  And then she goes to Alaska—why Alaska?—to find what?—or who?

  —you know who, Rubie-boobie, you know you know—

  And from Alaska to Los Angeles, to Cosmo’s motel and Richard Keener.

  Two bullets in the wall, a lamp to the base of the skull.

  The Rabbi stood in the post office. There was slush on the edges of his boots. His glasses were smudged and befogged. The postman licked the beer from his lips and spoke loudly. “You look a mite befuddled, my man. What’s up?”

  “OK, so—”

  Where to start?

  “I have a question,” said Ruben, and the postman said, “I
got an answer. You first.”

  The low din of conversation and rock music filtered in from under the door. The Kusiaat post office shared a building and parking lot with the American Legion Hall.

  “Oh, but so just as a heads-up,” the postman said. “The metering scale, for weighing packages, is totally fucked. And anyway we’re outta stamps. So if you’re wanting to mail something, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  The postman had a second beer queued up behind the one he had finished, and now he took a healthy swallow. Besides the beer, he was eating a plate of chicken wings and mashed potatoes on a paper plate. He had a big head, with the mottled cheeks and dense beard one expects to see on the men of Alaska. Under his flannel shirt he wore a black Metallica T-shirt.

  “That’s OK, actually. That’s not what I’m here for.”

  “Ooh,” said the postman. “The plot thickens. You want postcards?”

  He pointed with his chicken wing to a small rack, over by the door, boasting a bedraggled array of what looked like homemade cards. Behind it was a display case, indifferently stacked with Priority Mail envelopes and boxes, the only actual physical evidence that this was a functioning postal facility.

  “I’m looking for a person.”

  “Oh yeah?” A wary expression came over the postman’s face. An Alaskan mistrust of people who were too interested in other people.

  “Here.”

  Ruben dug his phone out of his pocket and set it down on the narrow counter. He had kept the phone all juiced up, although he’d had no service since he got north of Anchorage. Leaning in close, he smelled the sauce of the chicken wings, the wheat of the beer. The tinge of sweat and stink coming off the postman’s collar.

  “A woman.” Ruben opened his photos and found the old picture of Theresa Pileggi, from her faculty page at UC Riverside. “Her.”

  The picture was a decade old, probably older, but the postman recognized it right away. He looked at Pileggi, then up at Ruben, then back at Pileggi.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sure. Yeah. I know her.”

  Before Ruben could allow himself the thrill of victory attendant on this information—he had done it, he had developed a hunch and followed a feeling and hauled his ass outside of the continental United States and he had been right, it was real—the guy pushed his cap back on his balding forehead and squinted at Ruben skeptically.

  “This gal? Is a friend of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like—a friendly friend?”

  For some reason, Ruben found the implication distressing. “Uh, no. Yeah. Not like…” And then, inexplicably: “She’s my sister.”

  This, apparently, was even harder to accept.

  “You don’t look like her brother.”

  “Well—yeah. I’m adopted.”

  Which was true, of course, but not strictly relevant.

  “Huh,” said the postman, nodding sagely.

  “Have you seen her, or not?”

  “Yeah,” said the postman. “I have.”

  “Recently?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ruben drew a breath, ready for the next question, and the door separating them from the American Legion Hall kicked open, and a man came in bearing a beer can in each fist. A burst of laughter and the chorus of Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” rolling through behind him.

  “Whaddup, bitch,” said the postman to the new arrival, who said, “Whaddup, dickface,” and then stopped short at the sight of Ruben, looked him over disapprovingly. “Who’s this?”

  “This, my dear Langstrom, is a man on a mission.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Langstrom set his beers down on the postal counter and wiped his hands on his jeans, as if to shake hands, but then he just kept right on staring. He was a narrow scrap of a guy, brightly red-faced and squinting, with greasy long hair drawn back in a snake of a ponytail. Like the postman, the postman’s friend wore a sleeveless T-shirt, but his arms were ropy and thin as two wires.

  “You’re never gonna guess who my man here is hunting for.”

  Langstrom squinted, which didn’t do anything for his face.

  “Who?”

  “Hey.” He pointed to Ruben. “Show Langstrom the picture.”

  The three of them huddled over the phone, and when Langstrom saw Pileggi he just whistled, through his front teeth, a long and loud whistle like he was calling an animal.

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s his sister,” said the postman.

  Langstrom squinted. “Really?”

  “He’s adopted. Fucking racist.”

  Langstrom grunted “Fuck you,” and then: “We have seen her, yeah. Did you tell him?”

  “Didn’t get a chance,” said the postman. “You came in pretty hot.”

  Langstrom gave the postman the finger, and the postman gave it back, Ruben waiting. His heart thumped. Once, twice.

  “Tell me what?”

  Theresa Pileggi had arrived at the post office on the first day of December, last year. Both men remembered her vividly. For one thing they didn’t get a hell of a lot of strangers up here—“There was her, and then…let’s see…you, I guess…”—and for another she was notably, woefully underdressed.

  “No coat, no hat. She was wearing like, office shoes or something. Wasn’t she?”

  “Yup. Fucking crazy.”

  Ruben did not move while he listened. He barely breathed. He stood absolutely still, like he used to, when he was a boy, when he was so concerned about appearing excited that he’d order himself to stand frozen in place.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “About what?”

  “This woman. My sister. How did she seem?”

  “Well…”

  The men looked at each other for a moment; a hesitant look. Shit, it’s the guy’s sister. Then the postman shrugged.

  “A little wild, man. A little off, you know? She was wanting to know how to get to the ranger station, OK? And I was like, you mean the visitors’ center? ’Cuz, you know, there’s the state park maybe six miles from here, and they just built this new visitors’ center—”

  “Didn’t just build it, dumbass. We were in elementary school.”

  “Kinda beside the point. But she was like—your sis, man, she was like, no, the ranger’s station, till I realized she was talking about Renzer Station, which was, like—what? No one goes out there.”

  “Why?” said Ruben. “What is Renzer Station?”

  “It’s a ranger station, like she said. From, like, 1930 or something. Up on Renzer’s Peak. But it’s decommissioned. Out of service or whatever.”

  “Way out of fucking service,” Langstrom put in.

  “Renzer is not like a super-frequently visited area up here. I don’t know if you noticed, we’re pretty remote. There isn’t any money for a working ranger station. Even the visitors’ center is only open, like, four hours a week. My uncle Jimmy’s father used to work up there, back in the day.”

  “That guy was a fucking loser.”

  “Who? Jimmy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He was a little retarded, is what he was.”

  “Yeah, and a child molester.”

  “Hey, so—” Ruben tapped his fingers on the counter to gather the dudes’ attention back in. “You said she seemed wild. By that, do you mean…” Ruben tried to think of another word but couldn’t. “Crazy?”

  The postman brayed laughter, while Langstrom just shook his head.

  “Bro,” he said. “I run the post office in Frozen Tits, Alaska, know what I’m saying? Everybody I meet’s at least a little crazy. That’s the baseline. But having said that, yeah, she was fucking crazy. You ever see a person’s eyes, and you’re like, whoa. It was like, wherever she’s going, she wants to get there bad. She needs to get there. I told her she was talking about a full-day hike, and she was gonna need to get a jacket. Maybe get ahold of some boots.”

  “And did she? Get the right
clothes and things?”

  It’s funny. Ruben felt scared for her. A rush of fear, like he was actually her brother, and he was racing to save her. But she was already dead. Whatever had happened, it was already done.

  “No, man. She just left. Right away. I swear to God, she saw what direction I was pointing and she just started walking.”

  Ruben had a coat. He had solid boots. He was ready.

  “Oh,” he said. “One more thing. Was she carrying a weapon?”

  “Your sister? No. Not that I saw. You talking about a gun?”

  “Yeah.” Ruben struggled a moment to remember. “A handgun? Eight millimeter—”

  But the postman was shaking his head. “Man, she didn’t even have a purse. If she was carrying any kind of gun, I’d of seen it.”

  “Right. Of course. Well, listen. Thank you.” He zipped up his coat and turned to the door. “Thanks for all the information.”

  “Hey, though, wait,” said Langstrom. “My cousin Terry sells knives and shit outta his house over by the diner, if you’re looking?”

  “He doesn’t want Terry’s bullshit knives, man.”

  Ruben had stopped listening. His mind had turned to what he now understood was coming next.

  He opened the door, pushed out into the cold.

  The Rabbi was on his way.

  April 5, 2010

  What Shenk needed was a good jury.

  You always needed a good jury, of course; you prayed for it, you strategized toward it. Sometimes, if you could afford it, which Shenk absolutely could not on this occasion, you paid a smug focus-group hustler to help you secure one.

  Shenk used to have a golfing buddy named Mickey Trevaney, a Glendale-based slip-and-fall guy who said that jury selection was like the first song of a Broadway show: it doesn’t matter how amazing the rest of your production is, if you whiffed the opening number your ass was toast.