The Detective's Garden (22 page)

“It’s embarrassing to say, but the handcuffs off my belt. The
thing is …”

“What’s the thing, Bill?”

“I had him, sir. I couldn’t bring myself to shoot.”

“It’s not a small thing to shoot someone, Officer.”

“Not for me, sir.”

Farmland began to give way to suburb and, in the dark sky
ahead, the flight lights of the helicopter swept toward him.
Charlie said, “I got to go soon, Bill. A few quick questions.
Where did you run across them?”

“Route 38, five miles west of a town called Malta.”

“Small town?” Charlie said.

“Really small.”

“What were they doing?” said Charlie.

“I caught them in my headlights, walking in a soybean
field.”

“You stopped them?” Charlie said. “By yourself?”

“First I called it in to dispatch.”

“You did the right thing, Bill.”

“There’s one last thing.”

“Go ahead,” Charlie said.

“I’m not sure about it, sir.”

“About what?” asked Charlie.

“Out there, in the fields, I saw four of them.”

IN THE EARLY
years, when Dominick came home on
furlough, they couldn’t get enough of each other. He and his
wife. Sarah. He loved the feel of her name in his mouth as much
he loved to fill his mouth with her fingers or earlobes or thighs.
He thought about her all the time. Sarah reading to the kids
in bed at night, all of them lying side by side, touching. Sar
ah walking out into the sun of the front porch, squinting out
into the brightness, sweeping her dark hair behind her ears,
unconsciously, each time it fell. Sarah kneeling in the garden,
the muscles in her forearms bunching as she dropped bulbs into
holes in the ground.

The kids went to sleep earlier then, King just a baby or tod
dler or small child, and Sarah looked tired, so tired, but she’d
stay up with him and get naked and drink cold beer by the fire.
They fell asleep interlocked like jigsaw pieces. The fire in the
hearth roared up as hot as the desert he’d come home from and,
pressed against his wife, he twitched in his sleep and whim
pered like a child and dreamed.

KING’S ARMS HELD
her father’s waist. The four-bay
shed smelled good. Oil and sawdust. The eastern sky was a blade of
light. Clarke motioned for Elsie’s car to pull behind the shed. She
stepped from the car. Her long dark hair was pinned against her
head with pink barrettes shaped like insects. Her nose was running
and she wiped at it twice with the back of her hand. Clarke lifted
his bag and King’s from the ground and tossed them into the Char
ger. No one else could move. The police sirens multiplied. Distantly
they heard the chop chop of a helicopter rotor. Dominick pulled the
armored vest from a duffel bag and put it on. He reached into a back
pack for a second handgun, which he pushed into his belt. Then he
slung the backpack over his shoulders. He opened a long duffel and
pulled out a scoped M1A Springfield Armory hunting rifle.

Elsie sat back in the driver’s seat of the Charger. Clarke guided
King by the arm and led her to the car. Next to the door, Domi
nick picked King up in his arms. He put his mouth next to her ear.
He whispered, “This is scary, isn’t it?” and King’s head nodded.

Dominick said, “You’re going to be fine, you know that?”

He felt King nod again, the weight of her head so slight
against his arm. “I love you so much,” Dominick said. He slid
his daughter into the backseat of the car and turned to Clarke
beside the passenger door. Clarke’s head looked first to one side
and then to the other as though listening to competing voices.
Dominick pulled his wallet from his leather satchel and fum
bled with bills and pressed them into Clarke’s hand. He was a
few inches taller than his son. He stood there absolutely still.

The light wind died and the air suddenly felt warmer. Their
breath came out in thin clouds.

“You head south, away from the sirens,” Dominick said. “I’ll
stop them here. For a little while.” He paused to wipe his lips.
“When I get out of this, I’ll head west on Route 88, cross the
Mississippi River, and be in Iowa. Then I’ll follow the river
north to the town of Bellevue.”

Clarke climbed into the passenger seat. “We’re not coming,”
he said.

“Maybe you’ll change your mind,” Dominick said. He put
his hands on Clarke’s shoulders and pressed down and, though
Clarke tried to stiffen his spine, his father’s great weight pressed
against him until he collapsed against the seat. His father’s
hand locked on his shoulder, holding him in place. He drew
the seatbelt across his son’s lap. Clarke’s face was so close to his
father’s that he felt the scrape of the hair on his father’s jaw.

“It’s okay,” Dominick said and he let go of his son and
slammed the door.

He didn’t watch them drive away but walked into the middle
of the old tar-and-chip road. He wanted all of those coming for
him to think he was all there was. He wanted them to focus, to
see him as the threat that eclipsed all others. The sirens were close,
the helicopter but a dot on the horizon. He closed his eyes. He
heard the stuttering approach of the helicopter and saw the gray
earth and mountains of the Shah-i-kot Valley and a line of Apaches
and CH-47 Chinooks coming in low, nap of the earth, with the
ground swirling into dust. He looked up. He dropped to one knee
on the road’s yellow dividing line. He swung the Springfield rifle
onto his shoulder, rested the elbow of the arm supporting the rifle
against his forward knee, and sighted north, up the road, to where
they would have to turn from the highway. He felt the air bellow
in and out of him as he breathed. The rising sun struck his face.
He squinted against the low-slanting light. What about light was
warm? He waited for the first car to make the turn. He felt steady.
He felt weightless. He felt good.

When the first police car turned onto North 2nd, its lights
washed the few houses that sat on the east side of the street.
Dominick tucked his chin and followed the scope down the
street, through the windshield. The tires of the second car
squealed as they made the turn. The sirens waffled back and
forth. He centered the crosshairs on a burly officer in the lead
car, on his harelip and on the cleft chin and on the tense bob
of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. Dominick took a deep
breath and held it until he tightened into a single thought,
until something in him swelled and filled the moment and ex
tended out upon the line between him and the harelip that he
could not miss. The weight of the gun rose off him like a dark
angel, and his head buzzed with the held breath, and he waited,
waited until the moment that the gun’s trigger pulled him.

The windshield shattered and the squad car gunned for
ward and veered right. It bucked over the curb and shot across
a blighted lawn and crashed into the corner of a dirty white
house. Dominick held still against the wall of sound. He did
not see the scatter of mildewed vinyl siding, or the hole in the
house, or the rear of the car and its dark spinning tires. He
did not think about the distance between his stance on the
road and the officer behind the glass, or about the speed of the
vehicle, or about the wind that blew from the east. He didn’t
think about what would come next, about the growing orb of
the helicopter, about which direction he might run or which
shabby house he might take cover behind. He did not think
of the way that, when he’d been home from the war, his wife
had cut unopened daffodils from the yard and left them on his
dresser. He did not think of the great unnameable fear that of
ten sat on him when he’d come home, a fear untethered from
any cause, that made him snap at Sarah and shove her against a
wall so that he found himself disgusted with his longing to be
away from them—his wife and children—and back where ev
erything was bloody and godawful enough to give him cause
to be the person he was. He did not think about those he had
killed at war, about the film that overwhelms one’s eyes, about
the arterial pump of blood, about the knife that cut flesh with
the ease with which a kitchen knife splits ribs. He did not
think about how he had once imagined people to be more sol
id, more sustained than they are, about what he’d learned of
fragility, especially his own. He did not think about the way
the honey his wife had left on the kitchen table solidified in
the jar from a translucent amber to something almost opaque.
He did not think about what his children must have thought
of him, or of what all children must think of all of the rest
of us. What he thought about—what he imagined in slow
sad steps—was all the times he had left his kids behind. The
good-byes whispered to an infant in a crib. Lifting the puppy
weight of a toddler from his neck. Waving back through the
window as he walked away from the house. Clarke and King
at the airport, Clarke with his hands in his pockets and King
tugging her mother’s hand out toward him as he walked away
from them through security in his gray-and-green uniform.
First it was Kosovo, then Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Af
ghanistan again, and all the times in between. Could he even
remember where he’d been? When had leaving begun to grow
easier? When had it started to feel harder to return to his fam
ily than it felt to leave them? When had his wife’s hair been
cut short? When had she begun to look like someone he’d
never known? When had the cabin that he’d built with his
own hands turned into something foreign?

In the middle of the road, Dominick Sawyer pivoted slight
ly on the ball of his left foot. The rifle moved half an inch.
The sole of his shoe against the chip-and-tar roadway sounded
like a cleared throat. The second police car bounced over a
pothole. He put his eye to the gun and the town of Malta win
nowed like a parfocal lens. The police car’s windshield held a
wavy reflection of the sunrise. The officer’s face was a round
of cured meat. Dominick took a deep breath. He possessed
a sight not his own. The gun had a purpose. He would not
stand in its way.

FROM THE COCKPIT
of the OH-58 helicopter, Char
lie Basin watched the line of flashing lights. The noise of the
rotors pushed at him like a great rhythmic wind. The line of
police cars jockeyed for position in the middle of a road that led
in both directions as far as he could see. The pilot’s eyes were
fixed on the town. The nose of the machine pointed downward.

The first cruiser turned into Malta and Charlie saw the tiny
figure of a man kneeling in the middle of the road. He pointed:
“There!” The figure cradled a long rifle and the first cruiser
cut sharply to the left and crashed halfway through a house.
The sound must have been gut-wrenching and horrendous but
Charlie could hear nothing at this distance over the chopping
of the helicopter blades. A split second later that growing fig
ure, Dominick Clarke Sawyer, turned his gun and a tiny fire
appeared at the barrel. The second cruiser twisted too sharp
ly, rolled across the cement and came down hard on its roof.
The windows broke and the side panels crumbled and pieces of
red taillight scattered, still scattered, across the road. Then the
squad car started to burn.

The helicopter was just outside the town. A small clutter of
mostly white houses. The line of cruisers began to brake be
hind the burning car. Dominick stood in the center of the road
as though he intended to sacrifice himself. For what moment
did he wait? Then his great shorn head tilted upward. His eyes
were grim slits. Light from somewhere glinted off the barrel of
the gun. It rose and fired and the helicopter jerked hard to the
left, sheering so low that the yellow-green of the grass rushed
toward Charlie. The chopper lifted and turned as if it wanted
to spin. The pilot jammed the cyclic stick forward and the he
licopter straightened and flew outside the boundaries of the
town and into the great dark fields.