Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  Dupree followed the ashamed boy and girl back to the edge of the meadow, where they disappeared into a crowd of three hundred people shaking their fists or holding their palms up toward the flatbed trailer that functioned as a stage. Dupree pulled out his earplugs and concentrated on the words coming from the white singer with blond dreadlocks. It took a while to catch up to the lyrics, but he heard: “Jew and Gentile…Abel’s brother Cain…Fire from heaven, cursed writhe in pain!” Dupree replaced his earplugs. But the radio strapped to his shoulder crackled and he had to remove one earplug, turning his head away from the music to hear the call on the radio. “David-four to David-one,” the voice on the other end repeated. “You there, Sergeant Dupree?”

  David-four was a roundish black kid with glasses named Kelvin Teague, and from what Dupree had seen after a month back on patrol, the brightest officer on Dupree’s shift. Dupree pressed the button for the microphone and covered his earpiece with his hand so that he could hear. “What’s up, Teague? The Christians giving you trouble?”

  “No, sir. I was just wondering if it would be reasonable force if I was to put this band out of its misery.”

  “I think we could justify that.”

  “This is unbearable. It’s like the opposite of music. Think they’d stop if I just started firing blindly toward the stage? I’ll try not to hit anyone.”

  Dupree checked his watch. “Ten minutes. You can make it ten more minutes. Then we’ll sweep through the park once and call it a night.”

  “Okay, but if these guys scream one more song about God, I’m gonna become an atheist and you’re gonna have to explain it to my mom.”

  Dupree put his flashlight back on his belt. He had gotten right back into the feel of being in uniform, especially the weight and security of the belt, the holster buckled over the handle of his gun. The belt gave him an odd sense of moral authority, an unambiguous idea of right and wrong that he had lacked as a detective in street clothes. Of course I’m a good guy. I’m wearing the belt. He sat down on a park bench.

  Teague continued talking into his ear. “What church encourages this shit, Sarge?”

  “No idea.”

  “Well, I wish they’d just pass out the poison Kool-Aid and get it over with.”

  “What do you say we keep the radio clear, Teague?”

  “It’s just…when the Bible says to ‘sing unto Him and talk of His wondrous works,’ you don’t think…?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “I mean, this ain’t a race thing, is it? Like am I maybe missing something? This ain’t, like…gospel for white people?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “I’d just hate to think of these guys in the same section of heaven as Al Green.”

  Dupree leaned back on the park bench. “Keep the radio clear, Teague.”

  The concert ended with a punk version of “Amazing Grace” and then the singer asked anyone who wanted to be saved to come toward the stage. The crowd parted and about twenty people came forward, palms in the air, and what had been a punk concert was now a revival, the sweating lead singer taking off his leather coat, getting down on the knees of his leather pants, and placing his hands on the foreheads of the people, mumbling as each of them came up. At the edges of the crowd those who had come for the music drifted away, but most of the people stayed, joining hands as the lead singer led them in prayer—“…and finally, Lord, we ask that the spirit moving this band may live inside each of these people…”

  Teague was coming toward him across the meadow. “This is gonna stick with me for a long time,” he said.

  As the band packed up its gear and the crowd dispersed, Dupree and Teague walked once more through the park, every few minutes Teague returning to the topic of the concert. “I can’t comprehend what I just saw. It’s like I saw a chicken driving a car. I’m God and I hear that shit, some bald kid with a nose ring singing about me like that? Fireballs, man. Grasshoppers. Plagues and shit.”

  At the west end of the park they dropped down a hill to the river and Dupree found himself at the base of the narrow footbridge where Caroline had chased Burn and Lenny Ryan three months earlier. This is where she stood, staring at Lenny on the bridge, at Burn in the water, trying to decide. He’d imagined it dozens of times; when he was on the task force he would go over it in his mind as if there was something in the short drama that he’d been missing, some key to the whole thing. But nothing ever materialized. Just the choice, three points on a triangle, the points in motion. Caroline here. Lenny Ryan there. Burn in the river. And that’s it. Dupree walked to the edge and looked over, but it was impossible to picture her desperation now, with the river just a trickle, the exposed black rocks of the waterfalls like something out of a horror film, the water behind the dam a shallow, still pool.

  Teague stood next to him. “So I guess they finally found that dealer that went over the dam. You hear that?”

  Dupree turned to him. “Yeah. That’s what I heard.”

  “Some kids found him this morning, up in Long Lake?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “And the guy who pushed him into the river, the guy killing all the hookers, you think he’s still in town?”

  There were no secrets in a police department, and Teague was constantly hitting Dupree up for some juice about his last assignment, something grisly perhaps, some bit of autopsy gossip he could trade over coffee with other patrol officers. Ever since coming back to patrol, Dupree had been fending Teague off. “You should ask Detective Spivey about that.”

  “Yeah, well, if he is still in town, that’s fucked. Guy’s like a killing machine, something out of the movies, huh?” Dupree didn’t respond, and Teague finally just shook his head and followed Dupree’s eyes to the dry riverbed beneath the bridge. They stared for a long time, at the water pooled up in the holes in the rock, at the small stream flowing at the center of a rock bed that, a few months earlier, had barely contained its rushing torrent, a river so loud and impressive, it ended conversations.

  “I hate floaters,” Teague said finally.

  “Yeah.”

  When they reached their cars at the turnout in front of the park, Teague asked Dupree if he wanted to kill the last ten minutes of their shift getting a latte at a new coffee house—the name of which Dupree didn’t recognize.

  “Right over by the cop shop. That old brick building on Monroe across from the bail bondsmen. The body-piercing clove-smokers hang out there. It’s fun to go in and watch ’em all check the stashes in their pockets.”

  Dupree said, “Why don’t you go ahead.”

  Teague climbed in his patrol car and drove off and then Dupree started his own car. He waited for Teague to clear himself to the radio dispatcher and then did the same.

  He drove slowly through downtown, the cast from the streetlights rolling across his patrol car, cruising slowly past the downtown bars that would cause trouble at closing time, four and a half hours from now, when they would release toxic clouds of wife beaters and drunk drivers and date rapists and vandals and worse. For now these men were loading up on booze, getting ready. Swing shift ended at nine-thirty, so Dupree would be off work when the drunks hit the street, home in his small apartment, watching Sports Center and waiting for the microwave timer to ding on his frozen burrito.

  At a traffic light some laughing kids looked over and saw him and became sober and still, staring straight ahead. Dupree followed their Ford Escort for a couple of blocks, but then lost interest and turned down Sprague.

  His car passed beneath a railway underpass, and Sprague Avenue around him turned from legitimate businesses to seedy storefronts, adult bookstores, and taverns—the center of prostitution in the city for as long as he could remember. But to his surprise the strip was all but deserted tonight: just a few cars parked in front of the same old taverns, no sign of the women who usually cruised Sprague or perched on the backs of bus benches, all but wearing “Open” signs on their tiny shirts. He had seen this before, o
f course, the fear driving hookers off the strip. He remembered, twelve or thirteen years ago, when Los Angeles gangs first made an appearance in Spokane and began a turf war that extended to the prostitutes run by the gangbangers. What Dupree thought of as the professional hookers had moved indoors then, or to the taverns and low-rent motels or to West Central on the other end of downtown, where a lower class of prostitute worked: teenage runaways, young male hookers, street people, mental patients.

  But this empty street felt different. That summer everyone seemed to sense that it was temporary, that the young men with guns would shoot each other and shoot each other’s whores until the thing was settled and then the women would return to their perches on the bus benches, to their walking routes. But there was something about the way Lenny Ryan had eluded capture that made this different. Since returning to patrol he’d noticed how people talked about Ryan, like a ghost, something otherworldly. It reminded Dupree of his first opinion of Ryan, as a natural phenomenon, a concentration of all the shit and darkness and everything.

  By the time it crossed Napa Street, Sprague was returning to legitimate shops and businesses that reflected the city—a city that in its heart was more used car than computer, more mobile home than condo. Spokane was what some people used to mean when they said “old-fashioned,” which was what some people said when they meant “unsophisticated,” which was what some people said when they meant “lower middle class,” which was what some people said when they meant “white trash.”

  Dupree listened to the radio traffic. Nothing much going on. He turned the car up Freya and began climbing the steep South Hill. The South Hill complicated the popular notion of Spokane as the trailer park of the Pacific Northwest; there were vast old money and culture in Spokane and pools of new money, and whatever vintage it was, the money in Spokane lived for the most part on the South Hill, between the streets of Twelfth and Fifty-seventh. As the lower middle class crept higher each year, the wealth had begun to slop over the backside of the South Hill, or to the far north, to new neighborhoods with a slot in the garage for the motor home and street names made up by the developers to sound English, exclusive, and rich: Lancaster Circle and Nottingham Place. Still, the numbered streets were home to some of the oldest and best neighborhoods in the city, and it had been important to Debbie to live up here, to send their children to South Hill schools on his salary as a cop and hers as a part-time speech therapist. So they’d followed that essential rule of real estate and bought the worst house in a good neighborhood, a little too far east, but as far south as they could afford, a nice, low-twenties block of the South Hill.

  Where the South Hill neighborhoods to the west were made up of Craftsman or Victorian, the houses on this street were newer, ranch-style or California splits, whites and browns, the basketball hoops and bicycles reflecting the ages of the kids in the neighborhood. It had seemed perfect six years earlier, for Debbie and Alan to move in with their children when everyone else on the block had children, as if they had found some perfect demographic center, someplace where they would always fit in.

  Her house—Dupree’s house too, he supposed, at least until the paperwork went through—sat in the middle of the block, white stucco, pitched roof, one story with an attic and basement, slightly smaller than the other houses. One-car garage. Every other house on this street had a two-car garage. Dupree slowed and stopped in front of the house. The lights were off. No strange cars in the driveway. No toys or bikes left out in the yard. Dupree shifted into park, turned the key back, and listened as his patrol car shut down. The neighborhood was quiet. He checked his watch. It was after ten. His shift was officially over. He thought about his apartment northwest of here and couldn’t imagine going there right now. He stared at his old house and imagined Marc inside, all twisted in his covers, facing sideways or backward, his feet hanging off the edge of the bed, and Staci, so still while she slept that sometimes he succumbed to the urge to put his hand in front of her nose and feel for warm breath.

  Dupree turned the radio off and sat quietly in the dark of his patrol car, watching the house. Wednesday night. He wondered if Debbie had gone to her book group meeting. What were they reading now? The last book he remembered on her nightstand was something like Yo-Yo Sisters. That had been right about the time he’d moved out. Surely, the book group had already discussed that book and moved on, but Dupree felt the sudden urge to find out what the Yo-Yo Sisters had been about—probably some female rapper’s self-help thing, or else just some excuse for women to talk about sex. That was the thing he’d realized about her book group: One of its chief reasons for being was that women need a context to talk about sex. It’s why all the magazines had those quizzes about sex (“Rate your lover!”). For all their reputation as noncommunicative, men could talk to buddies about sex anytime, during a football game, standing at the urinal, at a funeral. Women needed someone else to bring it up. Still, it kind of turned him on, thinking about the book group, imagining his wife in a roomful of equally fit and proper mothers and wives, talking about sex under the pretense of talking about a book about sex. And the funny thing was, the reading part is what made it seem so exciting to him. He didn’t care much for reading himself—no patience for it—but for some strange reason he had always been attracted to women who read, and if there was one thing about Debbie, she did love to read. And not just to waste time, or to appear smart; it was really important to her—the reading, of course, but also the fact that he liked that side of her. She once told him that he treated her as if she were the only person in the world capable of reading a book, and even though she was making fun of him when she said it, they both recognized the truth of that statement, a thing important to the core of their relationship, a thing that operated like a pilot light as the years slid by, maybe burning low, but ready to flame up when the partnership of raising kids and running a house gave way to the horny college freshmen they had once been. He didn’t know exactly where her reading and his appreciation of it fit into their lovemaking, but it did, somewhere between undressing with the lights off and squeezing their eyes closed, biting their lips, and falling off each other with great sighs.

  But over the years they dented and chipped away at too many things that would turn out to be important. That included Dupree’s appreciation of a well-read wife, and so they rarely talked about the books that Debbie read anymore. It seemed to him now that it had begun to get away from them at the Christmas party eight years ago—before Caroline had shot the wife beater, before they’d spent the night together, before he’d transferred off patrol—when Debbie insisted on having his entire shift over for a holiday drink. But you can’t have one drink with a cop, and so late in the evening Caroline and Debbie had found themselves standing next to each other in one of those awkward conversational circles, the two of them standing across from Dupree and Caroline’s date, some dope she’d known in high school. The dope brought up the full bookshelves all over the house, Debbie’s bookshelves, and Caroline—slopping beer on the carpet—drunkenly admitted to studying poetry in college. “Poetry…and criminal justice! Can you beat that? It’s like studying taxidermy and veterinary medicine.” She’d laughed. “My adviser just looked at me like I was nuts.” And Debbie had caught him staring at this young woman, and maybe that was the first time she had been jealous of Caroline, or at least his first awareness of it. Poetry and criminal justice. When Dupree had looked away from the young and vibrant and drunk and well-read Caroline, his wife was staring at him with eyes that showed both accusation and admission. And Dupree had just looked down at the wet carpet.

  It was funny. For twelve years Dupree had fantasized about being single and being with Caroline. And now that he’d finally left his wife, he hadn’t said a thing to Caroline. In his mind he felt like he was waiting for something, but what? Maybe it was Joel. Maybe seeing him at the bar that night had gotten to him, watching Joel struggle the way Dupree struggled to be a good person, to be a faithful, stand-up guy. Maybe he wanted to
give Joel every chance to succeed where he failed. Or maybe he didn’t feel worthy of her, since he’d been removed from the task force and Caroline remained on it. Or maybe it was just simple guilt over hurting his kids and Debbie. Or maybe or maybe or maybe…

  He stared at the big picture window in the living room and noticed that the curtains were open. That was strange. Debbie always closed those curtains at night. Well, almost always. Dupree could think of only a handful of occasions when he’d come home late and found those curtains still open, Debbie having fallen asleep with a book or with the TV on. So maybe she’d just fallen asleep again. He looked around the neighborhood. This was a quiet, safe place, no halfway houses nearby, no homes ornate enough to draw burglars of any repute, no taverns down the street spitting out drunks. He couldn’t think of a neighborhood in the city in which he would feel better having his children live.

  Still, those open curtains bothered him. There had been a petty burglar he’d arrested once, a guy named Turner, who would case houses by looking for open curtains. The thought of Turner or some other degenerate standing in front of his family’s ground-level window, checking out his family’s TV and stereo, just about made him sick. He unbuckled his belt and leaned back in the seat and fantasized sitting there all night in his patrol car, every night, guarding the house, protecting the people inside without having to deal with them. He imagined sitting in his car forever, the kids passing by every morning, avoiding his eyes as he started the car and drove slowly behind them, maybe running the lights without the siren, just to make sure they got to the bus safely. After a while they’d get used to it, and their friends, too, having a police car tail them every time they went for a ride on their bikes. He tried to remember the last time Marc had met his eyes. He felt irrelevant to the boy, as if he’d stopped existing once he’d moved out of the house. He thought again just how nice it would be to live in his car outside the house, to be able to see his children grow up without having to face how he’d hurt them.