The Detective's Garden (6 page)

“The sheriff’s car? Who found it?”

“A farmer,” Charlie Basin said. “On the side of a country
road. Not far from the Sawyer place.”

“What about Pope?”

“No sign of him yet.”

“You think he’s in the woods taking a long piss?”

“Let’s go take a look.”

THE TIRES OF
the F-150 ground flyspeck pieces of
themselves into the blacktop road. The oncoming cars drove
with their sun visors lowered to block the falling light. Clarke
and King rode alongside their father on the single broad seat.
King had her knees pulled to her chest and her eyes closed.

“Why’re those people after you?” Clarke asked. He was so
tired. His father held the steering wheel in a firm hand. He
filled the driver’s seat with purpose. He surveyed the road
ahead as though it belonged to him. If Clarke could understand
what his father had done, he’d know what he should do now. If
he could understand who and what his father was, he’d know
what to measure himself against and in accordance with.

“I haven’t always been a good father,” Dominick said. He
tapped his foot against the floor mat. “I made first sergeant
in the Army, sure. I got the Distinguished Service Cross, and
I’ve served in more than one war. But I also been in barracks
confinement. The war took a lot away from me. Now they’re
trying to take you, too.”

“Me and King?” Clarke asked. “What do they want us for?”

“Sometimes there’s no simple what for, Clarke.”

“Yes, there is.”

“Not that I know about.”

The distant flashing lights of airplanes dotted the sky. Some
thing dark and furred ducked into the brush at the side of the road.
Dominick reached over and put his hand on his son’s shoulder.

“Dad,” Clarke said, “I’m scared of you sometimes.”

“There’s nothing for you to be afraid of,” Dominick said. The truck
pushed against the night, bouncing on its worn struts. Dominick took
his hand off Clarke’s shoulder. “You don’t want to go to Maine?”

“No,” Clarke said.

“Listen, Clarke,” Dominick said, “I don’t think your moth
er’s coming back.”

Clarke said, “I know she’s not.”

King said, “I miss her.” She didn’t open her eyes. Through
the windshield a rectangle of light washed over them from top
to bottom.

“Me, too,” said Dominick.

“They have lobsters in Maine?” King asked.

“They do,” her father said.

“Can we get one?”

“You bet,” said Dominick.

“Will we pass through a big city?” King asked.

“No.”

“I’d like to see a city.”

“You’ve been to a city.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“You were pretty little. You don’t remember?”

They drove on. The road glittered like chitin beneath the
headlights. The children were quiet beside him on the seat.
Dominick watched his fingers on the steering wheel.

CHARLIE BASIN CIRCLED
Dallas Pope’s po
lice car and swept the ground with light. He wore plastic
gloves. He opened the front door, surveyed the vinyl seats,
the empty gun rack angling up from the floor, the sunglass
es on the dash. “Shotgun’s been lifted,” he called as if he
expected someone behind him to take note. He stood with
the door open. The full moon silvered the roadside beech
es. Half-lit clouds curled up like rolled carpets. Across the
road rose a bank of reddish rock. Just past the road’s shoul
der trailed a drainage ditch. He rocked back and his heels
crunched into the gravel beneath him. He walked ten paces
in front of the police car and toed the tire marks in the mud.
A second vehicle. “Well,” he called, “they’re in a truck.” He
put his hands in his pockets and squeezed his jacket around
him.

As though without intention, he strayed to the side of
the drainage ditch. Head-sized stones and dark gully weeds.
A dry mud bottom etched in sinuous lines. A snakeskin.
He hopped in and raised his light near his shoulder. A wet
wind blew inside the neck of his coat and he shivered. He
traced the light up the line of the ditch until it lit the round
opening of a steel pipe running beneath a farming lane. “Oh,
shit,” he said. He began to walk up the line of the ditch. He
shoved aside an evergreen branch with his foot. A ridge of
crabgrass. The jut of rusted steel formed into a great impen
etrable O.

He shouted, “Who’s going to take a look in there?”

FOUR MONTHS BEFORE
Clarke was born, Domi
nick and Sarah put on what finery they had and drove to Phil
adelphia. In a week Dominick would ship out for basic com
bat training at Fort Benning in Georgia. In Philadelphia, they
stood across the street from City Hall. The winter air still had
teeth, but the sky was a grand blue and, when they held still,
the sun heated their clothes and skin. Dominick wore a wool
jacket over the white shirt he’d pressed himself. Sarah had a
long wool coat trimmed with fur over a cream-colored brocade
dress. Their cheeks were reddened. They kept glancing at one
another, shyly, from beneath their brows. They held hands.
They looked away from each other and at City Hall. The gray-
and-white stone of the building was at home in the snow. A
bronze statue of William Penn stood on top of the clock tower.

“This is exciting,” Sarah said. Traffic moved through the
street. Cars blared horns. The sidewalk was battered by winter
boots. She took off her gloves and reached up and put her warm
fingers against his cold cheeks. “Let’s go in,” she said. “Let’s go
get our marriage license.”

One of Dominick’s gloved hands touched her stomach. “Af
ter basic, I should get to come home again,” he said. “For the
birth, anyway.”

“Are you nervous?” she asked. She put on a brave face.
“There’s no war, there’s nothing. You’ll be fine. You’ll sit
around and get fat.”

The piles of melting snow looked bluish in direct sunlight.
They turned toward the massive building. The pillars border
ing the doorways, and the pale stone, and the slate roof. They
stepped off the curb together and their feet squelched in the
slush.

At the entrance, Dominick stopped her by pulling on her
hand. He said, “You ought to come with me. Don’t you think?”

“I belong here,” she said. “I’m not going to be the kind of
woman who follows you around.” People lined up behind them.

He looked into her quiet curious face. He asked, “Will you
be okay alone?”

THEY WERE ON
the road. As King fell asleep against her
brother and Clarke’s head began to nod and straighten, Domi
nick felt an unspeakable pressure mount inside him, some dark
fermentation rising into his voice. Each word deep, missing the
crispness of its edges, spoken as if around something lodged in
his throat. “I love you both.”

“Okay,” Clarke said.

“They won’t let me keep you.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got to run, Clarke.”

“Okay.”

“I want you to come with me no matter what happens,”
Dominick said. “Will you come?”

Once, Clarke remembered, his father had arrived home un
expectedly, still in his camouflaged Army combat uniform and
beret. He gathered the kids up and drove them to Penn’s Cave.
His dad had been promoted recently, to master sergeant. Clarke
felt proud. Dominick knew the overly tanned guide at Penn’s
Cave who drove the boat on the cave’s waterways. They left the
cavern lights off and navigated by flashlight, the beams flash
ing down limestone corridors and across stalagmites and catch
ing against the trout that leapt from the water for the pellets
the guide tossed out. Another time Dominick took just Clarke
on a weeklong trip to the bottom of Pennsylvania’s grand can
yon. Dominick packed for both of them. Rifles. Sleeping bags.
Fishing line. Buck knives. Not nearly enough food: a bag of
peanuts, a handful of granola bars, powdered milk. Clarke tried
to ask a few questions about Iraq, but his father didn’t answer.
He said they would gather some of what they’d eat, but most
they’d have to kill.

So many unannounced trips swelled into Clarke’s mind like
links of chain. But each of them ended in the same way. The ex
citement of the journey was followed by letdown. Back home,
his father stepped into his combat uniform, hugged them all
too quickly, and left again. Clarke had spent much of his life
hoping his father would stay.

“Speak up, Clarke,” Dominick said. “Will you stay with me?”

Clarke stretched out against the truck’s seat, rolled his head
toward the window, held his eyes closed and his tongue tight.
Should he act like his father? Or should he act like what he’d
always wished his father could be?

Dominick waited for an answer until he forgot what he was
waiting for. Finally, he glanced beside him to see both his kids
asleep. He was tired, too, but he held his eyes wide open and
drove until he couldn’t drive anymore. In New York State, he
pulled into a rest stop. He nestled the Ford among the big rigs.

When the car stopped moving, the kids woke. They pulled
the mummy bags from the rear. Almost immediately Domi
nick’s breathing settled into the long even pull of sleep. The
kids looked at one another. Each was wide-eyed. The sky had
just begun to glow faintly to the east. Clarke pulled the door
handle gently and they slipped out and ran up the hills covered
with flat withered grass. They stopped at the edge of a stand of
rotting elms. King pointed into the thicket toward a child in a
hooded coat who had only half a face. They crept toward the kid
until the hood turned into a fallen branch and the half face to
peeling bark. The first salvo of light leapt over the horizon and
landed about them so that their limbs and the landscape star
tled into certainty. Rabbits chased each other across the grass.
King ran headlong back down the hill and Clarke sprinted after
her, and though he could only see King’s back he could feel the
wide childish smile that split her face like an old dream rising
into the living world.

In the truck their father slept hard. Clarke cracked the driv
er’s door. He’d gotten so big that King peered through the slit
between his ribs and arm. Her chin brushed Clarke’s shirt and
tickled. Clarke smelled yeasty, like something growing. Clarke
pulled their father’s beaten leather satchel from its position at his
feet, then shut the door softly and waited. Dominick didn’t stir.

King whispered up at him, “What’re you doing?”

“Going through his things,” Clarke said.

“What for?” King said.

“I want to know what’s what.” He put the satchel over his
shoulder and moved toward a weathered gray picnic table and
King followed at his heels asking questions. Was he looking for
candy? For chewing gum? What did he hope to find out? What
if they were caught? What was in it for them?

They emptied the satchel onto the tabletop. Their hands
sweat. The sun touched the windshield and as their father’s hair
fell across his face and his chest rose and fell slowly, they took
inventory of the possessions spread out on the table.

The Wharncliffe knife. A roll of duct tape. A dozen loose
bullets. A small metal President’s Hundred tab. A photo of
their mother in a two-piece swimsuit. Medicated Chapstick.

There was another photo, lined and frayed, of the two chil
dren from another time, Clarke holding an infant King awk
wardly in his arms, a worn mountain behind them.

Their father’s black-and-gold Ranger tab, dangling by loose
black thread. His driver’s license, which they spent a long time
with, calculating that he was thirty-three years old. “Dad’s that
old?” King whispered, and Clarke nodded in the heavy-head
ed way his father would have used to acknowledge such a sad
thing.