The Detective's Garden (25 page)

“You’re all right with me coming with you?” Elsie asked.

“I am.”

“That’s good,” she said.

“Maybe it’s good, maybe not,” Dominick said. He point
ed at his children. “They’re the only things that make my life
decent.”

“HAVE YOU TALKED
to her?” Charlie Basin asked.
He sat on the side of a small road near a telephone pole, fields
lying out in all directions. Buzzards circled around a barren patch
of ground. Through the phone, he could hear the clip of Rosa
mund’s shoes on the kitchen tile, a dish clinking into the sink.

“It’s Oswell’s birthday next week. We’re having a party. She’s
coming. Charlene’s coming.”

“What do you mean she’s coming?”

“She got out of the hospital yesterday.”

“That’s it? It’s over? Just like that?”

“I don’t think it means she’s entirely okay, Charlie,” Rosa
mund said. “It means she’s better. She’s still seeing a therapist
as an outpatient.”

“But she won’t pull something like this again?”

She took a deep breath. “We’ll miss you at the party. Are you
all right?”

“It’s a mess here, Ros,” Charlie said. “I’ve got the bureau
and the cops canvassing everywhere.” He thought of the smell
of home-baked bread, and the depth of the leather chair that
was his to read in, and the small arts-and-crafts table where
he’d left Netherland opened and half finished, and the flag
stone patio he’d built with the help of his children, and the
wet bar with its shining glass decanters of scotch. “I have no
idea where they are.”

“He got away?” Rosamund asked. “On foot?”

“Uh-huh. Let’s not talk about it.”

“Okay,” Rosamund said. “What should we talk about?”

“I don’t know. Maine. A summer house. Did I tell you I saw
a fox while I was up there?”

“I miss you, Charlie. The house feels hollow without you
here.”

IN THE NIGHT,
while Elsie drove, King sat in the
passenger seat. Dominick and Clarke felt cramped in the
back.

“Clarke,” Dominick said, “we have to talk to each other.”

“No, we don’t.”

“How else are we going to get through this?”

“We’re not going to get through this,” Clarke said. “Don’t
you know that?”

“Sure, we will.”

“You don’t know what will happen,” Clarke said. “You al
ways pretend like you do.”

“That’s true, I guess,” Dominick said. “I want us all to stay
together.”

The road ahead played with conflicting lights and the night
moved around them like a river. The dash glowed a spectral
blue. The car smelled like athletic socks.

“So you’re worried about where we’re going to go next?”
Dominick asked.

“There’s nowhere,” said Clarke.

“Sure there is. There’s a whole world.”

For days they drove. The roads were like tarred veins. They
stopped at picnic areas and rest stops and ate green apples, cu
cumbers, canned pork and beans. They drove across the young
drift plains in Iowa, whose constancy suggested that the world
might be a willful reiteration of a few small ideas. In the bad
lands of Nebraska, the car disappeared among striped rocks
etched into great pinnacles and buttes and spires. They got out
of the car and sat on ancient stones. They marveled and picked
up pamphlets that told them about thirty-seven-million-year-
old Oligocene fossil beds that held the evolutionary stories of
horses and rhinoceroses. They looked out at a land that was
vast and seemed dead. They drove on through South Dakota
and Wyoming and Montana and detoured through Yellowstone
and walked among the remains of stone trees. Broken stubs
of immense trunks exposed hardened growth rings. Concentri
cally fractured rings of rock had eroded into pieces that could
be carried away inside coat pockets. White-topped mountains
rose around them in a semicircle. Mountains of so grand a scale
that each could have held dozens of their Pennsylvanian moun
tains inside. They drove and they stopped and a rhythm estab
lished itself and, in this, they felt a kind of safety, a sense of
their human concord. They stood looking out at the contorted
lodgepole pines. They put their hands to the rear of their hips
and stretched their backs. They brushed their teeth and spat
milk on the ground. They traded places in the car with polite
words. They pushed the accelerator through the slow climbs up
mountain passes and then raced down steep inclines so fast that
the landscape around them blurred into something as loose and
unfixed as failing wallpaper.

King sometimes got excited. She asked a lot of questions.
She said, “Where do we go from here?”

Her father answered her: “As far as we can.”

They slept in the car beside mammoth brick buildings.
Smoke rose from industrial chimneys whose tips burned with
fire. An alleyway beside them was filled with stacked pallets
and broken cement. The air was ripe with saltpeter.

They slept in a field beside a lake. The flat water rainbowed
with petroleum. Fish afloat with pale open eyes.

They slept on cold stone. They wrapped themselves in their
mummy bags. They padded blankets beneath them but still
felt the hard mouth of the world siphoning heat.

In the Rockies they turned south. Though it was near noon,
darkness beset the car in a gust of wind. Fingernail-sized hail
bounced off the windshield. Air swept from the south and
rocked them back and forth and pilloried the clouds into a
great dark human shape whose head hung loosely on a thin
insubstantial rope. Something struck the roof and left an inden
tation of great teeth. The car stumbled and moved again. They
stared forward, loath to relinquish control. The road switch
backed upward among ponderosa pines and a latticework of
branches and pine needles shook around them. The brakes bit
hard and the car began to slow and the night glowed red. An
uprooted tree had fallen across the road. Great strips of bark
hung like razored skin. Mammoth limbs had snapped beneath
the tree’s own weight. To one side of the road, the roots wove
together into a filthy nest.

“That’s it,” Dominick said. “We’ve got to turn around.” The
car shuddered to a halt.

They turned back north. In the rearview mirror, the figure in
the dark clouds opened its arms. The hail became a light rain
and the light rain turned to a warm breeze and the puddles at
the sides of the road shrank and dried up and turned to a run of
wildflowers. Ahead, the clouds opened up and the sun struck
the wet road until it shone bright and white and obliterating.

“This can’t go on,” Clarke said.

“Why not?” asked Dominick.

“There has to be a destination.”

“What for?”

“We’ll run out of money,” Clarke said. “Out of gas.”

“So what?” Dominick said.

“What’ll we do then?”

“Walk.”

“Walk where?” Clarke said.

“You’re not going to let go of this, are you?” said Dominick.

“How can I let go?”

“You’re going to have to learn,” Dominick said. “But right
now I’ll tell you where we’re going.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got an old friend.”

“What kind of old friend?”

“Ex-Army friend,” Dominick said.

“Where’s he at?” said Clarke.

“Outside a town called Bellingham. In Washington state.”

“That’s where we’re going?”

“That’s where we’re going,” Dominick said. “He’ll set us
straight. He’ll help us.”

The four travelers took what time they were offered. They
got out of the car to stare at rock formations that looked like
human faces. They picked butterfly weed and angel’s trumpet
and wild petunia and vased them in soda bottles. They stopped
at convenience stores and bought one another donuts or jellied
fruits. Clarke and Elsie held hands and interlaced their fingers.
They stopped at night, when all human luster had been extin
guished, and they lay on the hood of the car and looked up at all
the stars combining into great swathes of light. They touched
one another. They drove until their muscles cramped and one of
them groaned, and they got out with the sun burning overhead,
and they ran, tight-limbed and awkward, until their bodies un
clenched and their breathing came hard and raw. They leaned for
ward and braced their hands on their knees, their skins loose and
slick with sweat. They stood amid crescents of thorned brambles
and pointed things out to one another. Look there, a lazy creek
bottomed with translucent pebbles. Or over there, a mounting
scuttle of blue hills. Clarke and Elsie stood close enough to feel
each other’s heat. Dominick dropped to his knees. King turned
her face toward the cloudless sky. They gathered round. They
smiled at one another and it was not in consolation.

In Idaho, they peed off the sides of unnamed roads. Four
dark silhouettes. The sky behind them covered in a pale rosa
cea. When Elsie squatted, she said, “Turn your heads.” Birds
twittered unseen among the thorny scrub brush. The heads of
the four shadows turned, and some bird of prey whirled and
screamed against the sun, and urine ran in rivulets across dry
earth. The bird’s high raw bark was the sound of something
split open for good.

It was night when they passed from Idaho’s panhandle into
eastern Washington state. The earth was a light dusty brown.
Dominick stopped at a roadside recycling bin and pulled a black
bag filled with glass out of the bin and pushed it into the car’s
trunk. They slept in the car until morning and then drove out
along a small road, past sweet-clover pastures and white fences
in great rectangles around quarter horses. He pulled over when
they hadn’t seen a farm in miles and bumped the Honda slow
ly through a brown field. The dead seeded grass pressed into
ruts. The car stopped amid fluttering aspens. Dominick pulled
duffel bags from the trunk. He spread a blanket on the ground
and laid four handguns out in a line. Beretta M9. Glock G22.
Ruger SP101. Smith & Wesson .357. He hefted the black trash
bag, walked thirty paces, and began setting bottles against the
ground and atop a stump. Light prismed though brown and
green and clear glass.

Clarke bounced on his toes. Elsie clapped her hands. “This is
going to be fun,” she said.

Dominick picked the Beretta off the blanket. “The purpose
of the handgun is to kill people. Pick one up.” Each of them
did. “You ever fire a gun before?”

“Not really,” said Elsie.

“King can teach you.”

The children squared their shoulders and shot at bottles. Af
ter each cracking shot, there was a dead eerie silence in which
they understood that they hadn’t known they had been hear
ing cricket chirps and goldfinch whistles until the sounds were
absent. Standing beside Elsie, King plugged her ears with
her index fingers. Elsie shrugged her shoulders and took aim.
Dominick stood just behind Clarke, watching. Making small
corrections. His boy’s eyes ovaled into the shape of eggs. Bottles
exploded in a line as though connected by a fuse. Glass arced
into the sunlit air. Hot. Burning like a thousand tiny suns.

WHEN CHARLIE BASIN
got home, the party was
in full swing. He could feel the music from the street. Some
thing with bass that he didn’t like at all. Through the front bay
window, he could see his son. In his right hand, Oswell held an
orange martini. His Adam’s apple was prominent. He wore a
blue-and-red cone-shaped birthday hat, which had likely been
Rosamund’s idea. Oswell was a good sport. He was talking to
old friends, boys from the neighborhood whom Charlie remem
bered as thin and covered in dirt but who, look here, had grown
paunches and wide faces. Between them, they had lost an awful
lot of hair, but they looked to Charlie, as they would always
look, like children. In front of this crowd, Oswell moved his
hands a lot, as though he was drawing pictures. Where was Oz’s
sister? Where was Charlene?