The Detective's Garden (28 page)

“What do you mean?” Charlie said.

“I felt so worried about the kids,” she said. “I didn’t know
what to do, so I called the police. I said I was his wife. I said I
thought he was hurting his kids.”

When he got off the phone, Charlie let his frame drop to the
floor. A short cream carpet. The smell of antiseptic. The day
curled ahead of him like a question mark. He lost himself in
the physical rhythm of his push-up routine. He listened to his
breathing. Someone began to run water in an adjacent room.
He felt at home in hotel rooms, he’d lived half his life in them.
His face brushed the carpet. His muscles began to tighten. His
stomach began to churn. His body to live.

What makes a man hunt other men? What but a desire to
look anywhere, no matter how brutal and low, other than at
himself?

BENJAMIN WARD’S HOUSE
was a fortress. He
led them through the hallways. The wide pine boards creaked
beneath their feet. Every wall was white and clean. Benny had
little furniture beyond a leather couch, a table and chairs. He
pointed out what mattered. Reinforced concrete walls. Steel
shutters at each window. A gun rack. A bomb-shelter basement
lined with a hundred gallons of water and canned foods stacked
on steel shelves. Beside the fuse box, dozens of car batteries had
been wired together and connected to the main power line.

“What are you scared of?” King asked. She stood beside him.

“I’m not that scared anymore,” Benny said.

“You’ve been scared before?” King said.

“Sure.”

“What’d you do all this for?”

“I don’t know,” Benny said. “It’s home. I feel comfortable in
here.” He picked up a can of beets and set it atop another can of
beets. “Don’t you feel safe?”

“Is something bad going to happen?”

“Sure, something bad will happen.” He waved his hand
around him. “And none of this will do us any good.”

Upstairs, Dominick sat on the couch. His body hurt. He
heard his children’s lighter footsteps on the basement stairs,
then Benny Ward’s clodding weight. Benny showed Dominick
and King to separate rooms in the main house. For dinner they
had pasta and sausages and sweet pickles. They said good-night.

Clarke and Elsie shared a cabin. The bed was old and
bowed in the middle so they rolled inward and each encysted
to the other. In the morning they woke with their limbs twined
together. Their tongues adhered to the insides of their mouths.
The green flowered sheets stuck to their skins. They lay in the
bed and the room lightened in visible increments, as though
someone outside held great sheaves of papers against the win
dows and cast them aside piece by piece.

It took some time to peel themselves apart. Elsie sat on the
edge of the bed. “I’m homesick,” she said.

“You are?”

They got up, reassembling themselves. Combed their hair.
Gargled. Brushed their teeth. Slipped their legs into cold jeans.
Clarke parted the yellow window curtains suddenly with both
hands.

To the east, the clouds were pasted to the hills. A large
brown puddle stretched across the ground outside the window.
Rain puckered the water into tiny closing mouths. Rivulets
etched jagged paths down the glass. Elsie’s hand fell gently on
his shoulder and turned him toward her. Dark wet hair curled
across her forehead. Her eyelashes were clotted with mascara.
Her eyes were tactile and wet. “What’re we going to do?” she
asked.

“Isn’t this enough?”

“For a little while,” she said. “Sometimes I feel bad again.
Like I did before.”

“I think we all feel bad part of the time.”

Outside, on the main house deck, in the near dark of the
morning, Dominick stood beside Benny Ward. They were three
feet apart—two huge men. Neither of them said anything. The
eastern sky was the color of rust. Each of them stewed in the
memories that rose in the company of the other.

A crown of gold light rose on the eastern horizon. Swallows
dipped beneath branches and turned. Dominick reached out
and put his hand on Benny’s shoulder. He said, “I remember
that roadside IED going off under our lead Stryker like the
world gone up in smoke, and all that dust.”

“Yeah,” Benny said. “The small-arms fire. Must have been a
grenade knocked me out cold. I woke to see you lying ten feet
over, against the side of a building, your face covered in blood.”
Benny Ward shook his head. “When you opened your eyes, you
said, ‘We’re still here.’”

“Not a scratch on you,” Dominick said.

“Two luckiest guys in Iraq.” Benny clicked an odd noise, as
if encouraging an animal to move.

“Then we fucked some shit up,” Dominick said.

“It was a long walk back.”

In the early afternoon, Clarke and Elsie walked out into
the woods, far from the house and even farther from the road.
Clarke dragged stones into a rough circle. Elsie gathered dead
wood. The sun stroked them with a soft warm hand.

“Are you glad we’re alone together?” Elsie said.

“Uh-huh, I am.”

She held him off with one hand against his clavicle.

“We barely know each other,” she said.

Their elbows scraped moss from the trunks of trees. They
rolled on the ground crushing the ferns’ fronds. They breathed
into each other’s mouths until they grew light-headed. They
pulled off each other’s clothes. Each felt something desperate
and hungry in the other’s touch. They left prints of the things
they did in the dirt. They had no sense of how alien they might
have looked from another angle or from a greater distance. Two
soft figures and their thin limbs. Their pale skins like scars
among the browns and greens of the dewed leaves and the var
iegated earth and the tessellated bark. They scrabbled atop and
inside one another as though trying to disassociate from age-
old wounds.

Afterward they lay on the warm ground with their hearts
beating in their ears. Their limbs twined into a fragile human
scaffolding. The dirt beneath them was wet. Clarke rolled on
his side to face her. The corners of her eyes were screwed tight.
“What is it?” he said.

She said, “It’s a funny thing that I said.”

“What is?”

“Alone together.”

On the beach, King walked next to Benny Ward. Waves
crashed against the shore and pulled back. The siphons of clams
pushed through holes in the sand and squirted as King walked.
Seaweed disintegrated in great piles. The shells of dead crea
tures lay half buried in sand.

“You ever see whales out there?” King asked.

“Sometimes.”

“You do? What kind? Are they big?”

“Gray whales,” Benny said. “They’re really big, but they
look small in the ocean. Over there, by the islands, I’ve seen
orcas. Killer whales.”

The brown house slipped invisibly behind the bluff. The
beach turned to a churn of driftwood that they picked their way
through with bandy legs. Then the driftwood gave way to a
tumble of rounded stones and crabs skittered beneath their feet.

“You live here all alone?” King asked. She swung her arms
at her sides.

“I used to be married,” Benny said. “But she left. I’m hard
to live with.”

“You don’t seem hard to live with.”

“Thank you.”

The rocky beach ended in a sandstone cliff. Sea stacks rose
from the ocean and mussels clung to stones in wide tide pools.
White-tentacled anemones withdrew into themselves when
King’s finger approached. Orange and red starfish climbed
atop one another with their arms moving in slow even arcs.
Reddish crabs tucked beneath rocks. King put her fingers
in her mouth, tasting the salt. Benny Ward squatted on his
haunches.

“It’s like another world in there,” King said.

“It’s weird,” said Benny.

“How far are we from home?” King asked.

“Not far.”

“It feels really far.”

In time they gathered around the picnic table beneath
the shade of the apple tree near the house. They drank
tea from tin cups. Benny Ward cut great slices of mel
on. Then they took guns from the cabinets and shot at
human-shaped targets pinned to hay bales. They walked
down to the oceanside and pushed their toes into the wa
ter and felt the deep chill. They watched the tide come
in and go out again. They let their bare feet feel the sun-
warmed stones. They buried shells in sand. They dug for
clams and baked them in an open fire. At twilight, Dom
inick and Benny drank cheap beer and Dominick passed
cans to Clarke and Elsie and then shrugged and raised his
eyebrows and let King have a few sips.

They passed a few days this way. They played checkers and
gin rummy. They took turns washing the dishes. They felt
peaceful and temporary, as if the things they did were a pale
mimicry of simpler lives. They spoke to each other softly. They
tiptoed. They felt it could not last, felt it inside them, a kind of
fragile shell around each of their hearts.

CHARLIE SAT UP
in bed to answer his cell phone.
The sheet rumpled down by his waist. How tired he was. His
arms wanted rest. “Agent Basin?” a voice asked. Deep as a well.
Saddened, too. A voice that had lost any sense of itself.

“Go ahead,” Charlie said. The deep voice didn’t respond.
Charlie rose from the bed and cracked the motel drapes. He
looked out at the sidewalk in Leavenworth, Washington. A
dark car passed beneath a streetlight. Charlie watched the dust
corkscrew behind the wheels and listened to the breathing at
the other end of the phone. “Who is this?” he asked.

The deep voice started to speak and broke, then started
again. “The reward,” it said. “I’m calling about the money.”

“What’s your name?” Charlie said.

“I was with the Seventy-Fifth Ranger regiment.”

“You’re calling about Dominick Sawyer?” Charlie said.

“That’s right,” said the voice. “He’s here in my house. He’s
my friend.”

“DAD,” KING SAID,
“how long will this last?”

“Not long,” her father said.

“Why not?”

“Nothing lasts very long.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know why not.”

“Where do we go next?”

“I don’t know that, either, King.”

Sitting beside one another on the porch steps, Dominick and
King and Clarke were quiet for a little while. It was dark. All
of them had their hands folded in their laps.

“What was the war like?” Clarke asked.

“The war?” said Dominick.

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you kill people?”

“Jesus, kid.”

“Did it feel bad?” King said.

“I don’t know. I guess it did. Like being a piece of a machine.
I was afraid so often that I got numb.”

“Did you want to leave?” Clarke asked.

“I tried not to think about it. Sometimes it felt really bad.”

“Did you want to come home?” Clarke pushed.

“At first I wanted to. Sometimes it didn’t feel like anything,
like nothing happened at all, like people were just smoke.”

The three Sawyers rose from the porch and walked down the
trail to the beach. They sat in a line on the sand. Father beside
daughter beside son. Bits of light tippled against the waves.
Night birds cried in forlorn voices. King kicked her heels.
Clarke smelled of oil and wood smoke. Dominick told Clarke
and King that their mother had been eaten by bees.

“Eaten,” he said. His voice was faint and whispery. “By bees.”