Authors: Christopher Hebert
A few months before that first trip to Mexico, before all the business with Sergio began, Dobbs had gone north to his grandfather’s cabin. He’d told no one. By then his grandfather was dead. He’d passed away the year Dobbs started high school. Even though they’d hated the place, his parents hadn’t bothered trying to sell the old lake house. Possibly they’d forgotten all about it.
On the long drive there, Dobbs had taken mental inventory of his grandfather’s possessions, the things he’d cataloged as a kid and now, as an adult, felt ready to claim: a liquor cabinet full of Canadian Club, a Remington 870 in a velvet-lined case. And hovering on a winch above his grandfather’s dock, an aluminum fishing boat with the fifty-horsepower Evinrude.
The first night in the cabin, bent over the porch railing, Dobbs purged himself of the Canadian Club.
The next morning, still woozy, he took the Remington and all the shells, stacking them neatly in the prow of the boat. Pulling away from the dock, he steered the outboard motor toward the far shore of the lake, half a mile away.
As soon as he was clear, he opened the throttle. The fifty-horsepower bought at best a gallop across the still green water. When
he was maybe twenty yards from the steep, rocky bank, he dove starboard, surfacing just in time for the impact.
There was no explosion as the boat struck the sharp limestone, no ball of fire. No broken bones, either, that time. Dobbs kept treading, the pistons in his heart still firing, as the boat filled with water and tipped to the bottom of the lake.
Two months later he arrived in Mexico. He hadn’t been back to Minnesota since.
Dobbs had been sitting on the bench outside Caesars Palace for two hours when someone finally appeared, swimming toward him through the refracting waves of heat rising up from the concrete. Like everything else in his field of vision, the figure was a blur, but it wasn’t Gordo. The waves settled into something less distorted, something dark-haired and trim, and Dobbs allowed himself to believe he was seeing—could it be?—Sergio himself. His trouble really must be serious, Dobbs realized, if suddenly Sergio seemed like a comforting friend. Years had passed since Dobbs had seen him in person. Five, six? It seemed even longer ago. This time Sergio—or the figment of Sergio—had traded his apron for a business suit, but Dobbs would still have known him anywhere. With every stride, Sergio grew larger and more fixed, the black of his suit more saturated, but still Dobbs couldn’t be sure what he was seeing was real. Even when Sergio sat down beside him and took off his sunglasses, even when Dobbs saw the lines on Sergio’s face, he had doubts. But then a pair of girls strolled by in nearly transparent white capris, and Sergio turned to Dobbs and said, “Found yourself a girlfriend yet?”
Dobbs’s mouth felt as though it were full of ash.
“Let me buy you a drink,” Sergio said, and he led Dobbs over to the concession stand. Once there he pulled out a stool for Dobbs to sit. His every move was slow and solicitous. “I would’ve picked different circumstances,” Sergio said, “but it’s good to see you again.”
From the girl behind the counter, Sergio procured two glasses of perfectly normal proportions, and he set one down in front of Dobbs. No plastic bag, no straw. With his first sip, the beer seemed to sizzle on Dobbs’s tongue. The first thing he’d put in his mouth all day.
Sergio seemed unfazed by the heat, there in his black suit without even a glaze on his skin. He was turning the glass between his hands, his fingers wet with condensation. He looked sad, and Dobbs couldn’t help wondering if he’d been talking with Gordo. Had something been decided?
Sergio reached out and patted Dobbs’s hand, a gentle, fatherly gesture. A big gold watch peeked out from under his sleeve.
“There’s something I’ve always regretted,” he said.
Dobbs felt his arm turn to ice under Sergio’s touch.
“That day in the park, in Mexico,” he said. “I never asked what it was you wanted. We talked about so many things, but not that.”
There was a baseball game playing on the TV above the bar, the sound turned off, a slow, awkward pantomime. Dobbs could already feel the beer going to his head.
Sergio leaned closer. “Money, adventure. I should’ve asked.”
“What’s going to happen to them?” Dobbs said.
Them
. The people in the truck. He couldn’t bring himself to give them a name. He wondered what sort of explanations Gordo had offered, what kind of apologies and promises he’d made for the future, whether any of it had mattered.
Sergio folded his arms, and the gold watch disappeared. “What’s going to happen,” Sergio said, “is I’m giving you one chance to pay me back. This kind of thing is very bad for business. What’s the word?” Sergio said. “You’ve
tarnished
our reputation. I’m giving you one chance to make up your losses.”
Dobbs filled his lungs, and the air burned going down. He couldn’t begin to imagine how math like that could even be calculated. His glass, he suddenly realized, was empty.
A tall, dark-skinned woman strolled by in a clingy summer dress,
and Sergio’s eyes followed her down the steps to the street. But Dobbs went a different way, returning to that roadside in the middle of the desert, to the jaundiced moon looking on dumbly as he laced his fingers behind his head, the first two dead bodies lying in the brambles along the shoulder, the men Gordo claimed not to recognize stacking soft white bricks into their idling SUV. Was Dobbs the one who’d been naïve?
And then Sergio’s voice brought him back. He was saying something about Detroit, about Dobbs’s next assignment.
“Detroit?” Dobbs said, thinking he must have misunderstood.
Sergio slipped his sunglasses from his breast pocket. “It’s the new frontier.”
“Detroit?” Dobbs said again.
“The new Old West.”
It would be the closest Dobbs had been to home in years.
“You can’t afford any more mistakes,” Sergio said, rising to his feet.
Dobbs was no longer sure he could afford even the mistakes he’d already made.
Sergio was slipping away, moving across the plaza.
“Whatever happened to your wife?” Dobbs called to his back. “Your son?”
Sergio paused, already partly dissolved in the heat.
“Memories,” Sergio said. “Just like Gordo. You have to be able to let them go.”
Ruth Freeman had never cared for cars. At least not in the way her brothers did. When they were teenagers, it had all been about fins, the roads swollen with schools of these absurd terrestrial fish. The power, the speed—she got all that. She just never understood why there needed to be so many different kinds, so many she could never tell them apart. Whatever the distinctions were between a Dodge and a DeSoto, they meant nothing to her. She simply wanted one, she didn’t care what kind.
In 1956 her father brought home a brand-new two-tone Roadmaster with a grille like a sleeping toad. Her brothers got their turns first, and when they were done, Ruth slipped under her father’s arm and into the driver’s seat, wrapping her slim fingers around the knotty wheel. She was sixteen and had never driven before, but she had the posture and the gestures down pat.
“Will you teach me how?” she asked her father, who stood with his hand on the door, the smile wiped from his face. With a stiff laugh he
said no, no, no, her brothers would take her wherever she needed to go. And then he reached in and removed the keys from the ignition.
She made up her mind that very moment that she would never ask anything from him again.
Her father brought home a new car every couple of years. Her brothers inherited the old ones. In ’58, Gus got the Roadmaster. By then his friends were driving Corvettes and Thunderbirds—fish transformed into torpedoes—and the Roadmaster was already as boxy as a casket.
As for Ruth, she might not have cared so much about having nothing to drive if she could have taken a streetcar, but they’d ripped up the last of the tracks in ’53. And there was no dignity in a bus. So she did what any girl would do, and that summer when she turned eighteen, she told Francis Statler she’d go steady with him as long as he let her drive. He wasn’t the brightest boy, but he had dimples and held open doors and called everyone
sir
and
ma’am
. Besides, she’d known him forever. They lived only a few blocks apart in Palmer Woods, and although he went to Kingswood-Cranbrook and she went to Girls Catholic Central, their circles were more or less the same. They saw each other at socials and dances, at Tom Clay’s Saturday night balls at the armory. Francis was always staring at her through the bottom of an empty punch glass. In the summer they’d mingled deck chairs at the pool of the Detroit Golf Club, where their fathers shot rounds together. Her father worked in management at Ford, slowly edging his way up. Francis’s father was at GM, already a big cheese. On the fairway, Ruth’s father said Mr. Statler had a hopeless slice, but that didn’t stop the club from giving him his very own brass plaque at the top of the donor wall.
Francis Statler meant well, but he could never quite keep up, despite his father’s money. He wasn’t unattractive. Besides the dimples, he had deep hazel eyes and the straightest teeth Ruth had ever seen. His face was warm and inviting, but he parted his hair just like his father, and he’d been wearing the same plaid shirts since grade school.
Francis was either indifferent to fashions or unaware of them. He always stood out, the one boy clinging to cotton twill slacks in a world that had moved on to blue jeans. In ’58, when every teen in the city was coveting sport coupes, Francis bought a turquoise Edsel. At least it was a convertible. From the front, the car looked like a disgruntled koala bear, but all Francis cared about were the frills: touch-button transmission, glowing cyclops-eye speedometer, power windows and seats. He could afford every option they offered.
Some of her girlfriends expected Ruth to be embarrassed to be seen in something so uncool. “Doesn’t everyone stare?” Donna asked, but Ruth simply shrugged. Anything was better than nothing. And besides, people really didn’t stare at Francis. He somehow managed to get away with being strange. Were anyone to ask him his secret, Francis wouldn’t even have understood the question. Before Ruth took him up, Francis had no close friends. Hours might pass at the pool without anyone speaking a word to him, and yet the dopey dimpled smile never left his face. It was impossible to exclude someone who didn’t notice he was being excluded. Whatever was happening, Francis was always there. He became a sort of mascot, though no one could have said exactly what it was he represented. He rarely spoke, never danced, didn’t drink. And yet by the time he and Ruth made their arrangement, a belief had spread throughout both their high schools that the dullest parties were the ones from which Francis Statler happened to be missing. For every gathering, someone was invariably dispatched to ensure Francis’s arrival, after which Francis would spend the entire evening by himself, examining the host’s parents’ collection of ivory statuettes until it was time for someone to take him home.
For Ruth, the best thing about Francis Statler was that he didn’t mind handing her the keys. When they were together, the Edsel was hers. It was Ruth cruising Belle Isle with the top down, Ruth roaring north to the charred remains of Jefferson Beach. And there was Francis, grinning beside her with the wind in his teeth.
The only exception was Friday night. When they pulled into Ted’s drive-in, it would be Francis behind the wheel. Ruth insisted. As a ritual, Ted’s was sacred: the trays on the windows, Frantic Ernie Durham shouting his strained rhymes through the radio:
Ernie’s Record Racks! Whale of a sale! Whale of a sale!
Ted’s was a place where, for better or worse, boys had to be boys. Although of course Francis never seemed to notice all the jockeying and revving. He was the only one not craning his neck to watch each tight sweater flouncing by. Ruth supposed he was in love with her.
Everything in Francis was forgiven. It helped that he was rich. But that was another thing he seemed unaware of. She would always remember one night when she was fifteen, entering the dining room at the club to begin an excruciating meal with her family, and there was Francis Statler helping a busboy pick up the shards of a broken plate, the two of them kneeling side by side, searching among feet and legs, their heads thrust under the tablecloth together, like a pair of old-fashioned photographers. Francis’s father was ruddy with embarrassment, tugging at his son’s armpit, trying to pull him up. Unlike his son, who was quiet as a giraffe, Mr. Statler was incapable of speaking in anything less than a shout, and even the dishwashers could probably hear him repeating “That’s enough, son, that’s enough.” But Francis didn’t stop until every last piece had been collected, just as anyone other than his own father would have known to expect. Alfred P. Sloan himself could have been in the room, and even he would have said, “Oh, it’s just Francis Statler.”
But it wasn’t that Francis was a saint. Nor was he a savant. He was more a like a traveler in a foreign land who understood neither the language nor the customs but was quietly, respectfully accepting of everything he saw.
One July weekend, as was the tradition, Francis took Ruth (or rather she took him) to watch the hydroplanes skip like stones across the
murky Detroit River. Everyone they knew was there, and while the other boys shouted and clapped one another on the back, Francis sat with his hands folded in his lap, transfixed, as if God himself were presiding over the rumble and the wakes. Legs folded beneath her on the green plaid blanket, Ruth felt certain she saw the other girls, Donna among them, looking at Francis and then at her. She saw in their eyes not jealousy or judgment but a kind of distrust. They didn’t want to date Francis Statler themselves, but they didn’t want anyone else to, either. It wasn’t that he was like a brother to them—he was more like a newborn baby, someone vulnerable and helpless and in need of constant protection.
Maybe these girls didn’t believe Francis could be loved. Maybe Ruth didn’t believe it either. By then they’d been together three months, and he hadn’t made a single move.