The Detective's Garden (12 page)

“Who am I?” said Dominick.

“I seen you on TV.”

So easily was he transformed. One second he was a father in
repose in a driver’s seat, a rock beside a river, the next he was
beside the truck with an arm pressed around Roseanne Small.
With Dominick squeezed so close to her thin old body, King
could see that he wasn’t their father anymore. This new man
was huge and strong and as foreign to her as another’s tongue.
Dominick’s hand squashed Roseanne’s mouth. His forearm was
thick with muscle. He held her hard enough that she stayed
still. He lifted her as though she was a briefcase or a hair dry
er—something practical and meant to be carried.

Clarke glanced around. The road was clear in both direc
tions. Snowflakes chased each other on the cement. The win
dows of the houses were almost all dark. Nobody jogged or
walked a dog or stumbled drunk. Behind them, in the main
house, the shape of Clarisse Parish darkened half a window.

Their father climbed the stairs to their room and set Rose
anne on the bed. Her limbs sprawled and the fur pooled around
her. The kids trailed after. Their father knelt beside the bed
as though he was about to pray. “Don’t talk now,” he said. It
remained unclear to each of them whom he was speaking to.

“You can’t do this!” Roseanne said. Long yellowed fingers
tightened around bed rails. Her feet scrabbled against the
sheets.

Their father sat on the edge of the bed. He laid his hand
gently on Roseanne’s ankle. “It’s okay,” he said. “You’re going
to be okay.” He looked at her and she looked back. Her cheeks
blew in and out with her breath. “This isn’t going to hurt,” he
said. He pulled the Beretta from under the bed and put it in the
holster attached to his belt. He turned to the kids. They stood
next to each other. He reached in his beaten satchel and tossed
Clarke a roll of duct tape. “Tie her up,” he said.

The children looked at one another. Clarke tightened up, a
current of electricity causing his muscles to jump. He didn’t
like this old woman. “How?” he said.

“Not too tight. But tight enough to take her a long time to
get out.”

By the window, King fingered the gingham curtains. She
felt faint. A single crystalline snowflake pressed against the
glass. Clarke tore the duct tape and it sounded as though some
great fabric was being ripped in two again and again. The cor
ners of the window fogged. The rear light was on at the main
house. King watched the back door open. A figure stood in
the opening. It could have been King’s mother. The silhouette
moved forward until, beneath the porch light, Clarisse walked
out in a gray housecoat. Her hair blew around her head in dark
threads. Her hands held her sides. Halfway down the driveway,
she stopped. She looked up. She mouthed King’s name.

“Dad,” King said, “she’s out there.”

“It’s okay,” Dominick said. “Go out and see what she wants.”

When King opened the apartment door, a half-dozen gulls
flew off the roof. She shuffled down the iced steps and up half
the driveway to meet Clarisse. Dominick took King’s place
at the window. His daughter looked so small beside the old
woman. King’s head bowed. She took Clarisse’s white wrin
kled hand. They leaned toward one another as they spoke.
King tipped her head upward and Clarisse leaned down.
Whatever noises they made were for each other’s ears alone,
swept aside by wind. Then King came running back. Her
shirt, an old red Henley of Clarke’s, flapped around her. Her
down-and-corduroy vest was unzipped. She moved outside
the view afforded by the window. The old floor joists shiv
ered as she ran up the steps, each leg a scrabbling piston. The
impact of ball of foot on board like an infant’s heartbeat. The
palpitation of the brief wooden landing. The doorknob turn
ing slowly to the left.

King looked bright-eyed and feverish. Her hair was damp.
She stopped still and stared at the old woman in furs, limp,
duct-taped and gagged on the bed. Roseanne Small’s eyes
pooled with spite.

King raised up on her tiptoes to whisper in her father’s ear,
“She says she didn’t see a thing.”

They left Roseanne Small tied on the bed and went to see
Clarisse Parish. Every light burned in her kitchen. A fluores
cent fixture was suspended overhead, two incandescent bulbs
hung beneath a wrought-iron pot rack, and five halogens ad
hered to the underside of the old cabinetry. Dominick and his
children squinted when they came in from the dark. They put
their hands up to shield their eyes. Clarisse Parish had poured
four glasses of milk.

“We owe you for the stay,” Dominick said. His head was too
close to the low ceiling. His hands tucked into the pockets of
his jacket.

“Sit,” Clarisse said. She wore a brown velvet skirt and a ca
ble-knit sweater and a pastel scarf around her neck. Clarke and
King took stools at the island. Dominick did not move. The
muscles clenched in his squared jaw and his unwashed hair
stuck to his head in a great block. “She’s a royal bitch,” Clarisse
said. “What exactly did you do with her?”

“Duct tape,” Clarke said.

Clarisse’s head fell back, and her mouth opened enough to
sip water, and she snorted. “I’ll wait until morning before I
find her,” she said. She smiled and her teeth looked like they
belonged to someone forty years younger.

“Thanks for this,” Dominick said. “I don’t know what to say.
You’ve been kind to us.”

Clarisse stood behind Clarke and King and put her hands
on their shoulders. “Drink your milk,” she said. Dominick still
had not moved past the doorway. His shoulders nearly touched
the edges of the door frame and his head was about even with
the lintel.

“What do we owe?” Dominick asked.

Clarisse took a canvas bag from a shelf and filled it with
canned peaches, beans, brown pears, a loaf of bread. “You’ll
need to eat,” she said. She looked straight at him and held up
the canvas sack. “And you can keep your money.”

Dominick pulled out his leather satchel and dug for his wal
let and began counting out bills. “I’m grateful,” he said, “but
we don’t need charity.”

Clarisse folded her hand over his. “Yes,” she said, “you do.”

When they drove out of Maine, the heat in the Ford was
stifling. No one spoke. The three of them sank inward toward
the kind of quiet antagonistic isolation that binds people un
happily together. Each of them felt conscious of how every
movement of any one of their bodies on the single leather seat
brought them into contact with another’s skin. When one
moved they all jostled. They passed through long tunnels of
skeletal trees and past arched banks of snow and water frozen
tight against the faces of cliffs. They drove without destination
until King fell asleep. They drove unmapped miles and Dom
inick’s eyes began to winnow closed until he pinched the thick
of his leg and turned to his son, Clarke, to see him passed out,
head back and mouth open. Dominick kept going. The Ford’s
metal frame hummed beneath them like something alive.
The truck seemed to float upon the road and the night to fly
against the windshield and minutes to uncount before them so
that the country opened up in time. Dominick had to pull the
wheel hard twice to keep the truck from spinning off into the
grass and the thin patches of snow, so he pushed the brakes and
turned onto a narrow dirt road and drove until the highway was
far enough behind them. He killed the engine and slept.

There, King dreamed. She dreamed of her past, of things
that had already occurred. She watched herself outside playing
with her mother. Her mom wore a deep green skirt and stood
behind King with her arms open. Even just two years ago,
King had been much smaller, so low to the ground. A child,
thought the new King. If she was no longer that kid, what was
she now? What had changed? Just her size? The A-frame cabin
sat behind them. She ran with her mother through a field be
ing overtaken by purple loosestrife. They ran in rings beneath
the trunk of the plum tree. King could see the shadows of her
brother and father in the house windows. On the roof, a section
of cedar shingles needed to be replaced. The window trim need
ed a new coat of paint. Her father must have been just home
from the desert. She remembered that he would fix these things
within weeks of getting home.

Her mother caught her up. Her shirt pressed against King’s
skin, her hair wreathed her face. King blew, trying to push the
strands away with air from her mouth. The King who watched
the two of them remembered that she had forgotten the smell
of her mom, the wood smoke and syrup and salt and vanil
la bean. Her mom smelled like something sweet baking and,
though the King in her mother’s arms struggled to escape, the
King who watched wanted to burrow into her soft warm heart.

King dropped free and ran to the woodpile. Each hurried
step sent up a small clump of earth. Her mother walked be
hind, breathing hard, smiling. Her cheeks had reddened. Her
hair was held in a ponytail by a bit of blue ribbon. At the wood
pile, King’s mother sat on the ground with her back against the
stacks. A double-sided ax stood buried in the chopping block.
“Here,” her mother said and patted the ground beside her. “I
want to show you something.”

“What is it?” King said.

“See that split log?”

“Which one?”

“The one at the bottom of the pile,” her mother said. “There’s
a notch in the bark.”

“That one?”

“Pull it out.”

“It’s at the bottom.”

“Just pull it.”

King pulled the log and it slid smoothly out. A half-cylinder
with its flat surface placed against the ground.

“Turn it over,” her mother said.

King flipped it. The heartwood had rotted out, leaving a
darkened hollow. King said, “It’s like a treasure chest!”

“What kind of things do you think we can hide in here?” her
mother asked.

The morning light woke King to the cold. Deep internal
shudders rumbled up from inside her. Her father’s breath was
visible inside the cab of the Ford. The insides of the windows
were lined with thin sheets of ice. King’s jaw chattered. “I’m
really cold,” she said.

“We all are,” said Dominick. He rubbed his hands together,
then slapped his thighs. “Let’s get out.”

“Outside?” said Clarke. “I don’t know.” He pulled his coat
tighter around him and slumped into the seat. A cornfield
stretched around them. The brown stumps of the stalks cov
ered by white frost.

“Let’s move,” Dominick said.

He ran them through drills. Sprints through the shallow
snow. Push-ups. Squats. There was a slight hill that he had
them run up and then crawl down. Their legs fishtailed in
the snow. They slid against one another and pushed off and
laughed and scrambled to their feet and raced back to their fa
ther. “Jumping jacks,” Dominick called. “Sit-ups.” When they
took off their coats, he nodded. “That’s good,” he said. When
they took off their shirts, he smiled like they had traveled closer
to a simple time in a simpler country.

CHARLIE BASIN WAS
in bed when his phone rang
on the nightstand. Rosamund leveraged herself up on one el
bow and her dark hair cascaded. “It’s awfully early,” she said.
“Something happened.”

Charlie rolled to one side. He rubbed his eyes and turned on
the lamp. Had something gone wrong? Was it his children?
Was it Charlene? He answered the phone. “Charlie Basin.”

“Hey, Charlie, I’m Jo-Ann Putnam, chief of the Wells Police
Department. Up in Maine. You looking for Dominick Clarke
Sawyer?”

“I am.” The white sheet lay across his chest. Hair sprout
ed like thin seedlings. Charlie looked at his wife beside him
and shook his head to say that everything was fine. Rosamund
smiled. Her eyes were deep wild pools. Her hand tunneled un
der the covers.

“He’s been here. Tied up a woman in her late sixties. Rose
anne Small.”

“Didn’t hurt her?”

“Nope.”

“Did he have two kids with him?” Rosamund’s hand touched
his side and her fingers spread and latched on to him and pulled.

“He sure did.”

“When did he tie her up?” Charlie Basin said.

“Last night. Duct-taped her, actually. She chewed her way
out, gave us a license-plate number. He’s driving a white Ford
F-150.”

“You put out an APB?” Charlie asked. His wife’s hand pulled
at him and she slid across the sheets until her warmth added
to his.

“We did.”

“Good,” Charlie said. “Try not to mess with anything. I’ll
be there soon.”

“One more thing. He didn’t tie her up.”

“Come again?”

“It was the older child, the boy, that did.”

Charlie hung up. He stopped Rosamund’s hand on his thigh.
Outside the window between clouds, the moon flashed like a
falling coin. Charlie glanced at his wife, then dialed his boss.
When Fry answered, Charlie said, “You up, Andy?”

“No,” Andy said. “Why are you?”

“Just got a call from a local police department,” Charlie said.
“Dominick Sawyer’s up in Maine.”

“Maine? What’s he doing in Maine? How many people do
you need, Charlie?”

“He’s out of there already,” Charlie said. “He tied somebody
up. A woman. I’ll go this one alone.”

THEY DIDN’T KNOW
where they were going. They
drove the small roads. The tires kicked up dirt and gravel and
dust into a dark plume behind the truck. They didn’t talk about
where they were headed or what they might find. They made ex
cuses to touch one another’s faces. “Hey, look at that!” and a hand
on a cheek and a finger pointed toward a heron slowly walking
beside a creek that wound though etiolated grass. And “There,
there!” and an elbow gently rested against the side of another
while one of their heads nodded toward a herd of whitetails eat
ing bark from the contorted trunks of dwarf apples. A whitetail’s
flag rose behind its rump and then, in concert, the deer stomped
against the earth, leaping above the shrubbery in perfect arcs.

In the afternoon, they told jokes and at each joke they
laughed outsized laughs.

When it got dark, they stopped driving and spent the night
alongside a road. They slept piled against each other until dawn
settled on them like a giant cataract. They stretched and yawned
and, taking a risk, Dominick drove the highways into New York
State, and the hills trammeled gently away from them. When
the F-150 shot beneath the graffiti-covered mouth of an under
pass, a police cruiser turned on its lights and inched to follow.

“Dad?” Clarke said. His head craned backward. His hand
grabbed his father’s forearm.

“I know,” Dominick said. “We should have already dumped
Howland’s truck.” His eyes were on the rearview mirror. He
gunned the truck and it jumped forward, the engine rumpling
like a congested lung. The Ford raced up the hill before it, the
cruiser falling behind but gathering speed, its headlamps fee
ble in the light. The siren washed distantly around them. They
crested the hill and sank toward the saddle point between two
hills. The police cruiser passed from sight, the hill sweeping up
between them like the rise of a dark volcanic mountain off the
seafloor. Dominick pushed the truck faster, toward the highway
exit. He watched the rearview mirror for headlights behind them
but they did not appear. He pulled through the exit fast, the tires
squealing, and onto an evergreen-lined street that ran toward the
small town of Keeseville, New York. He came to a red light,
turned right, traveled three blocks before turning into an alley,
pulled behind a Dumpster, and killed the engine. They sat in the
quiet, breathing. A long-dead leaf fell overhead. An orange cat
walked along the top of a white fence. They sat and waited.

After half an hour, Dominick started the engine again. “I’ve
got to be more careful,” he said. His hands were still anchored
to the steering wheel.

“With what?” King asked.

“With everything that happens from now on.”

They stopped at a well-lit gas station and Dominick paid
in cash. He came out past the glass walls and a bell rang on
the door. He walked past the neon signs that hung in the win
dows. He hunched his shoulders. A rounded man pumping gas
glanced at him, smiled. He wore oversized wire-rimmed glasses
and a gray scarf. “Cold,” the man said.

“Sure is,” said Dominick. He opened the door to the Ford
and tossed a paper sack onto King’s lap. “We’re dressing up
in disguises,” he said. Inside the paper bag was a pair of steel
scissors and three boxes of hair dye. Off black, medium auburn,
and light ash brown.

“I want black hair,” King said.

“You got it.”

“This is ridiculous,” Clarke said.

“Come on,” Dominick said. “Think of it like a game.”

They drove farther south and found a padlocked restroom near
Dix Mountain in the Adirondacks. A wooden sign read closed in
raised black letters. The narrow roads were deserted. The trails
unkempt. “This is it,” Dominick said. He took a pair of bolt cut
ters and a slim-jim, a small battery-powered drill, and a flathead
screwdriver from his duffel bag in the bed of the Ford and cut
the padlock with a single gesture. He found the water main in a
supply closet and turned it on. He twisted the knob by the faucet
until water sputtered into the sink. He pulled the pair of scissors
from his pocket and held them up. “Clarke?”

“Go ahead,” Clarke said. “Don’t make it too choppy.”

Dominick cut Clarke’s dusty brown hair to a one-inch length.
He handed him the medium auburn. “Wanna try this?” he said.

“Why not?” Clarke said. He almost smiled.

Dominick turned to King, who sat on a toilet tapping her
feet against the cement floor. “Your hair’s already growing out,”
Dominick said, “so we’ll let yours get longer.” He tossed her
the black dye. “Follow the directions,” he said.

The children spilled dye on the floor. They held their heads
over the sink. Despite the plastic gloves, they colored their
hands. When they were done, King looked at Clarke and
laughed. “Dad can’t cut hair,” she said. “But the new color isn’t
much different.”

“You look pretty different,” Clarke said. King’s newly black
hair was slicked to her head. “You look pretty good.”

Then they turned on their father. Clarke took the scissors to
his head. “How short?” he asked.

“Close as you can get it.”

Each lock of their father’s dark hair fell as slowly as a feather.
King pushed in. “Let me get a turn,” she said. When they fin
ished, Dominick stood in front of the mirror. He ran his hand
over his short, rough hair. His jaw had darkened with stubble
that he intended to let grow.

“You like it?” Clarke asked.

He ran his hand over his head. “Yeah, I like it,” he said. “Re
minds me of boot camp.”

“Can I feel it?” King said.

“Sure.”

Their feet made whisking sounds on the tile floor as they
congregated by the scuffed mirror to feel one another’s heads.
Patches of dye had spilled on their clothes. Their fingers were
darkened. It didn’t feel like dress-up anymore. King’s breath
came too quickly and her face set hard as baked earth. In front
of her, Clarke practiced styles of walking where he rolled his
shoulders, or strutted, or dragged one foot. He affected a bad
Boston accent until King almost smiled.

They went outside, where Dominick located the screwdriver
in his satchel, knelt by the Ford, and pulled the plates while the
kids waited beneath a giant fir.

“Look at this tree, it’s huge,” King said.

“What’re you doing, Dad?” asked Clarke.

The ground beneath the tree was soft with moss. King lay
down. “It smells good here,” she said.

“Wait here,” Dominick said. They looked up at him. His
two children. Two parallel lines. Knotted roots unearthed be
side them. “It won’t take long,” he said.

The entire time he was gone, they did not move. While they
waited, Clarke imagined what might happen if his father didn’t
come back. His thoughts crept inward like the cold. Where
would he and King go? What would they do? What had their
father changed them into? What would happen if he took
King’s hand and tried to lead her away right now?

The forest smelled good. Shelves of mushrooms bloomed
from reddish bark. Underfoot, a carpet of long pine needles. He
walked toward the sounds of civilization, the deep-earth rumble
of heavy trucks and the whoosh of air brakes. Electrical lines,
draped between transformers, hummed with static. A distant
horn. He walked out of the woods into a parking lot behind a
glassworks, a long tan building with hundreds of mullioned
glass windows. He walked among the rows of cars. He stopped
beside the tail of a gray Dodge Ram, looked quickly around, then
pulled the license plates from his satchel and switched them with
those on the truck. Then he jogged out of the parking lot into an
industrial neighborhood. Plumes of black smoke rose from great
chimneys. Machines clanked behind loading-bay doors. Dom
inick jogged slowly up and down a few streets until he found
another gray Dodge Ram. Again he switched the plates. Then he
opened the driver’s-side door with the slim-jim and pulled out
the drill from his satchel. He drilled two small holes through the
keyhole and into the lock pins. Then he turned the ignition with
the flat-head screwdriver and the engine guttered to life. Domi
nick pulled smoothly onto the road and drove to collect his two
kids from the bed of needles beneath the fir tree.

Driving west in the Dodge Ram, they crossed the Hudson Riv
er near its confluence with the Mohawk and followed green signs
to Cohoes Falls. They opened the windows and the cold rushed in.
They could hear the water before they could see it. The sound of a
great spigot. They parked on the side of the road and walked toward
the noise. Past the tree branches stood high rocky bluffs that looked
down at the broad falls. The water had churned white as butter. The
air was wet with mist, the noise loud enough that they couldn’t real
ly speak to one another. They were left to their own thoughts, their
own impressions. King thought about how cold the air must feel in
the thick mist that floated on top of the river. To Clarke, the water
at the base of the falls looked like it boiled. For Dominick, the river
basin was a great wound in the ground.

IN OCTOBER 2001,
Dominick had jumped out of a
Lockheed MC-130 and parachuted into Afghanistan to secure
a desert landing strip south of Kandahar. Objective rhino. Two
hundred men plummeting earthward. Private Floyd landed
hard and snapped his pinkie finger. This was for real. Every
thing was dun colored and dusty and the ground was covered
with small rocks. The land was flat but they could see moun
tains in the distance. DeJesus wrapped Floyd’s fingers together
with medical tape. DeJesus and Floyd and Benny Ward looked
like they belonged here. Did he? Did he look like that, too?
AC-130 gunships circled overhead. They moved out with psy
chological operations loudspeaker teams and cleared an enemy
compound. The Taliban surrendered or fled before them. They
were U.S. Army Rangers. They scared the shit out of people.