Over Tumbled Graves

by Jess Walter

  He walked back to the cattle trail, trying to figure out what made this calf walk away from the herd. He’d seen these cattle, Angela’s neighbor’s—maybe thirty head—moving through the field beyond Angela’s house, on the other side of the fence he was fixing. In the afternoon they made their way in a tight single file down the trail toward the creek and drinking water. The cattle spread out along the creek like a stain on the earth, and in the evening Lenny would stand on Angela’s porch with a glass of sun tea and watch them gather again without any apparent signal and begin making their way single-file back to the fields, where they would graze all morning. More than likely the accident happened at night when the calf couldn’t see well, but that still didn’t explain it. Maybe something scared the calf away from the herd. A dog. Or a coyote. Lenny looked for prints near the cattle trail, but dogs and coyotes were so light, and he was so inexperienced at tracking, that he couldn’t make out anything. It frustrated him, to be able to see so clearly what happened—a calf fell in a ditch—without knowing how or why.

  He’d always believed that the why of things didn’t matter; the outcome was the only thing worth knowing. It was another kind of torture trying to figure out why, as pointless and cruel as a calf trying to scramble up the soft walls of a ditch. He stood over the coulee, put his gloves back on, and jumped into the ditch, landing next to the dead calf. The flies buzzed around him, then settled back on the calf’s head. The walls of the coulee were almost as tall as he was, and he could barely see out. Lenny grabbed the calf by its ankles, two in each of his gloved hands, and swung it up and over the side of the draw. It landed above him with a sigh of dust.

  As he crawled out, the dirt gave way beneath his boots and he experienced for a moment the animal’s panic. Outside the coulee, he knocked the dirt from his gloves, picked the calf up by its legs again, swung it in the air, and draped it over his shoulders. He began walking to the neighbor’s house, dry grass crunching beneath the boots. He walked through the field, along the creek, and up the dirt driveway between Angela’s cabin and the neighbor’s tin-roofed house. The house was built around a single-wide trailer and stood among a light stand of birch trees. By the time Lenny reached the driveway he was nearly sick from the heat and the smell of the calf. The neighbor was standing next to the house as if he’d been expecting someone. Pushing seventy, he had a shock of gray hair that rose from his head like a cold flame.

  “Whatcha got?” he called when Lenny was close enough.

  “He must’ve fallen into the…into the coulee.” Lenny came up the driveway and swung the calf down into the gravel between the tire tracks, a few feet from the old rancher’s shoes. Lenny coughed and spit into the dirt next to the driveway.

  The old farmer’s cheeks were dusted with wiry gray whiskers that he scratched as he looked down at his dead calf. A spaniel dog sniffed around the animal’s head; the man kicked at the dog and it scampered away sideways.

  “Shit,” the neighbor said finally. “That’s too bad.”

  Lenny removed a glove and stuck his hand out for the neighbor to shake and he did. “I’m Gene,” Lenny said. “I’m…uh…staying up there with Angela.”

  But the old rancher didn’t introduce himself, just looked down at the calf, and so Lenny did too. Lying on its side like that the calf seemed so slender, almost two-dimensional, like a painting.

  “Angela got pigs up there?” the neighbor asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Pigs.” Finally the old man looked up. “I ain’t got any pigs to feed it to. I gave up my pigs, shoot, goin’ on a couple a years now.”

  “No,” Lenny said. “She doesn’t have any pigs.”

  “That is a shame,” the old guy said, then he kicked at the dead animal. “Hate to see it go to waste.”

  Lenny put his gloves back on. “So what do you suppose happened?”

  “Hmm?”

  “To the calf. What do you think happened?”

  “Fell in a ditch.”

  “Yeah, I mean…well, does that happen a lot?”

  He shrugged. “Some.”

  “Do you know what causes it?”

  “The herd runs and a few go in the wrong direction.”

  “What makes ’em run?”

  “Thunder, mostly.”

  Lenny looked down at the calf and remembered the electrical storm two nights earlier, a couple of quiet flashes and then a flash and a boom right after. “And do they usually die like this?”

  “If they don’t get out or if I don’t hear ’em and pull ’em out.”

  “You ever seen one fall in?”

  The neighbor thought about this. “No. Guess I haven’t.”

  They were quiet for a moment and then Lenny banged his gloves together where his thumbs met his forefingers. He wiggled his fingers in his gloves. “Well, I just couldn’t figure out how it happened. That’s all.”

  The old man squinted at Lenny. “You know, they ain’t particularly smart animals. ’Specially the little ones.”

  “No,” Lenny said, “I guess not.” He nodded to the old rancher and began walking back along the driveway. Maybe he’d be like the old rancher someday, accepting of all the troubles in the world, the basic principle that small ones don’t stand much of a chance and that a clap of thunder can panic even the most sedate animal.

  Little plumes of dust erupted in front of his feet as Lenny moved along the dirt road toward Angela’s cabin. At the top of the hill, the pickup truck that delivered the mail was parked at the bank of mailboxes where the dirt road met the highway and so Lenny headed up that way, thrusting his hands in the pockets of his one pair of jeans. It was a small bearable moment, this one—these boots and these jeans and the neighbor and the dirt plumes of the driveway. He’d shaved his beard and his hair was growing back and Angela dyed it white blond so that it covered his head like first snow.

  The big mailbox held a power bill and a Pottery Barn catalogue and an envelope from Spokane County Superior Court. It took a moment for Lenny to recognize Angela’s husband’s name—David Nickell—on the envelope. Another moment to remember that he had used that name to request documents.

  He tore into the envelope. On top was a receipt for the copies and a note from the clerk saying this particular civil suit had just been settled. Lenny flipped through thirty pages of court files, beginning with the complaint, which said the building and alley where the body was found had been owned by SMRC, a real estate company in Seattle and had been purchased for $95,000 cash in January of this year by John Landers, the owner of the boat dealership across the street. When Landers began renovating the building and announced that an electronics company would move in, the real estate people from Seattle sued, saying that Landers had arranged to lease the building while it was still under the Seattle company’s ownership and that by not telling them about the electronics company’s interest, Landers withheld information that would have made the property more valuable before the sale.

  Next came the defendant’s statement, a short summary from John Landers in which he admitted having preliminary talks with the electronics company about relocating to the building on East Sprague if he purchased it, but that the deal was

  contingent upon marked improvements being made not only to that property, but to the surrounding neighborhood. Such improvements were by no means guaranteed, and indeed were engendered by Landers’ Cove alone in the form of after-hours security, capital renovations, and property purchases at great cost to its business and its cash reserves.

  Lenny let the pages fall to his side and he stared down the road to Angela’s cabin. It had sounded so crazy that day in the park, like conspiracy talk, like the pimp was just making something up to keep from getting killed. He said that he hadn’t killed Shelly—of course, Lenny didn’t believe him—and had no idea who did. He said that a few days after Shelly disappeared, some old guy stopped him in an alley, and had warned him that he needed to move his girls out of the neighborhood or it would be on his hea
d. Lenny had thought the whole story was bullshit, but when he began snooping around the boat dealership and the businesses around it, he found the body in the refrigerator.

  He wished he was smarter, that he could put things together in his mind. He’d talked to hookers, read through classified ads, looked at deeds of trust, and tried to figure out who would want to get rid of the hookers. But none of it made sense. A person acquires a certain understanding of the world—knows, for instance, that water flows downhill—and anything different is incomprehensible. Maybe he knew no more about people like John Landers than he did about thunder and cattle.

  Lenny started back for the house, which sat on a small rise above the creek, in the shade of a stand of tamarack trees. It would have been good to stay here. He liked how Angela sometimes waited for him on the porch in her apron, supper on the table.

  At the house, Lenny changed out of his workshirt and dirty jeans and into his khaki pants and black T-shirt, the clothes he’d arrived in. He tried to picture what he would do when he came face-to-face with Mr. John Landers. Would he shoot the man like he’d done at the pawnshop? Would the clap of gunshot surprise him a little and give him pause again? Or was he a different man now?

  He grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote her name, “Angela,” and then stopped and stared at the page. Finally, he wrote, “Had to go to Spokane. Don’t wait up.” It would have been cool to get some cattle of his own. That would have been something.

  He started to write the name “Gene,” but crossed it out and wrote “Lenny” on the bottom of the note. Then he lifted the pen to his mouth, chewed on the cap, put it back to the paper, and just above his name wrote “Love.”

  46

  At 6 P.M., halfway into his second-to-last shift as a Spokane police officer, Alan Dupree sat in his car by the river, using a radar gun to gauge the speed of seagulls. They were hard to measure individually, but a few times he managed to get a good reading. One swooping gull cruised along at eighteen miles per hour. Another beat its wings and coasted into a headwind to slow down for a landing, and Dupree watched the red digital readout decrease to two, the gull hovering in the air for a moment and then settling onto the surface of the river. Flying at two miles per hour! Amazing. People made some easy things so hard.

  He nodded politely to people walking by his car and they made faces that seemed like appropriate reactions to a uniformed police officer measuring the speed of flying birds. This was the best day he could remember in some time; he wasn’t defined by the fact that he was a police officer or the fact that his marriage was dying. Today he was just Alan, and Alan was curious about the speed of seagulls. He’d never thought of the job as the problem between him and Debbie, not really, and he hated guys who blamed their careers or their friends or anything else for being a shitty husband. But now, when he could so easily imagine not being a police officer, the job seemed all-consuming and he was surprised that he and Debbie had made it as long as they had.

  Life in the park was winding down; bored with flying, the gulls settled one by one on the concrete steps above the river, waiting for someone to begin tossing bread so they could resume their life’s work, stealing from the park’s ducks. Dupree looked around for other things to gauge. A duck swam by at two miles per hour, a kid on Rollerblades went by at seven, and finally Dupree started his car.

  The dispatcher asked if he could swing by a prowler call on the lower South Hill. They were having trouble getting officers there because of two traffic accidents. Dupree drove along the freeway and got off at the Altamont exit, where he would drive through one of the worst neighborhoods in the city to get to one of the best.

  The tired houses and dead lawns at the base of the South Hill reminded him of an old theory. The theory of yard relativity. He believed you could tell a criminal by the amount of yardwork he did. He’d first come up with the theory in neighborhoods like this one, responding to a thousand fights and drug deals and domestics, and after a time it dawned on him that he was almost never called to houses with well-kept yards. This wasn’t an economic or racial thing. It was a pure yardwork thing, the basic theory being that criminals don’t have the patience for yardwork. That’s what crime is, he believed—a lack of patience. Want to get rich quick? Get laid without all the work? Want to get rid of your business partner without the trouble of suing him or paying him off? That’s the difference between criminals and real people. Patience.

  And in better neighborhoods? Dupree’s car moved up Altamont, climbing the South Hill to South Altamont Boulevard, the change in income even more drastic than the elevation. The theory applied here too. There were probably white-collar criminals up here, and Dupree would have bet they hired lawn services rather than trim the roses on the porch themselves. Like those guys responsible for the failure of banks: They probably all had gardeners. Yardwork is a time for reflection, for engaging the subconscious, a time when guilty people can’t escape themselves.

  Like all good theories, this one might even lead to practical application, assuming he could find some causal relationship between lawn care and crime. Maybe they should force drug dealers to mow their lawns. Turn prisons into groundskeeping companies.

  Dupree drove along South Altamont Boulevard, the big, old houses tracing the bluff that overlooked the city. The dispatcher informed him that another car was clearing an accident and would be en route to the prowler call shortly. Dupree parked and climbed out of his car. The house was three stories, a century old, white with pillars. It would cost four times as much as the house he and Debbie had scrimped and saved to afford. Fifteen blocks away and here he was in a different universe.

  An old woman with gardening shears was standing in the driveway next door, pointing to the open front door of the white house.

  “I saw some lights being switched on in there, and then I saw the door was open,” the woman said. “John and Edith are at the lake. That’s why I called.”

  Dupree looked at her manicured rose bushes. “You did the right thing.”

  Of course he should wait for backup before going into a house where a prowler had been reported, but Dupree didn’t think anyone was inside, and these last two days on the job, he was damned if he wasn’t going to trust his judgment. He turned off his radio, stuck his head in the door, and yelled into the open foyer: “Any criminals here?”

  When no one answered, Dupree went straight to the small security panel; the burglar had snipped the line and taken the battery out of the wall monitor. Dupree went into the bathroom and saw the window the burglar had used, the small window above the shower. This guy was a pro.

  It made him nostalgic to think there were still professional burglars out there. In his mind they’d busted all the pros years earlier and all that was left was kids looking to get high, without the patience and intelligence it took to become a real burglar, who went around stealing bikes from garages and rifling through cars. But this guy knew what he was doing, and for the first time Dupree felt a tug of regret over retiring.

  Not that he had anything to stay around for. He was forty-eight. He had his twenty in, and six more for good measure—or self-punishment. Most of the guys he’d broken in with had retired or were retiring or were on disability, and now they were playing golf or working as security guards or private detectives, which meant running errands for the sleazy defense attorneys they’d complained about all those years.

  Dupree hoped that retiring would keep him from bitching about the continued erosion of the world he’d known. He didn’t want to finish up like some old, crotchety fart who couldn’t pull his own weight. He remembered when he’d started, how the old-timers still groused about having to read Miranda rights, about women in patrol cars, about waiting for a photographer to arrive at the crime scene before they started fucking with things. He was surprised by his own reluctance to change, his inability to recognize that Spivey might know a more advanced approach to homicide investigation. Most of all, he was surprised to realize how quickly he’d gotte
n so old.

  But the idea that an old-fashioned burglar was out there made him feel vital again. Needed. He thought about some of the old crooks, guys you’d pull over with complete burglary kits in their cars, guys who would get out of jail and single-handedly spike the burglary statistics, guys the detectives spoke about with some measure of respect, the way a pitcher admires a great hitter. The great burglars came from a few families, and there was a time you could just say the name “Gillick” or “Falco” and any cop would nod in grudging admiration.

  But as Dupree moved from room to room, his flashlight beam fell on an undisturbed landscape—no drawers thrown open or cords yanked from walls, none of the signs of a first-rate burglary, or even a pothead break-in for that matter. At the end of the house he came to a room with tucked walls and theater seats and a big-screen TV. The thief hadn’t even taken the TV. Or the stereo. The VCR was still there. It was strange. He made his way upstairs and found a bedroom, and on the dresser, a picture of the dignified, silver-haired couple who lived there, along with pictures of their three grown children wearing skicoats and posing on a mountain somewhere.

  Dupree held up the picture. Money. People who had it were happier and better-looking. He didn’t care what anyone said. He hardly ever responded to rapes or murders or child molestations in neighborhoods like this. The root of all evil? My ass. From what he’d seen, methamphetamine was the root of all evil. That and booze.

  Next to the photograph on the dresser was an unlocked jewelry box. Dupree opened it and could see right away that it hadn’t been disturbed, and that’s when he knew for certain this wasn’t a burglary. Jewelry is the first thing you steal—easy to carry, hard to trace, quick to fence. The neighbor had said the couple was away on vacation. Had she mentioned their names? John and something. He couldn’t remember. Dupree looked around for something with their names on it, but didn’t see anything.