“My God,” Kerry said when we drove up in front late Saturday morning, and I said, “Yeah, but I’m not surprised.” Neither of us had been by here since the estrangement.
Kerry hadn’t wanted to come with me. It had taken part of the morning to wear down her resistance, convince her that misery needs if not loves company. After all, I’d reminded her, she was the one who’d caved in first to Bobbie Jean and committed herself to the task of sifting and sorting right along with me. I may not know my wife as well as she knows me, but if I work at it I can usually push the right buttons and get her to agree to just about anything within reason.
We’d brought cardboard cartons with us; I hauled four out of the trunk and up onto the porch. The mailbox was stuffed full, and a number of magazines, catalogues, and oversize pieces of junk mail were strewn on the floor underneath. Bills, more junk, a letter to Bobbie Jean from somebody in South Carolina. I put all of it into one of the cartons while Kerry unlocked the door.
The place looked better inside, more or less the way I remembered it. Bobbie Jean’s domain and she’d always been a tidy housekeeper. Shadows filled the living room, but I could make out the shapes of the old familiar furniture, the big fireplace, the wall hangings. But what I stood staring at was the section of carpet stretching from the hallway into the living room. Less than ten years old, this carpet. The original, the one I was seeing in my mind’s eye, had been replaced on account of the bloodstains — blotches and smears that had soaked into the wool nap and couldn’t be eradicated. Little prickles of cold moved along my back. So much blood...
Sunday afternoon in August, nine years ago, not long after Dana left him for her Stanford professor. Eberhardt and me in the backyard drinking beer, commiserating while we wait for the coals in the barbecue to whiten. We step inside to open two more cans, ready the steaks, and the doorbell rings and he goes to answer it. I hear his voice exclaim, “What the hell—” and then the two gunshots, and I run in there and he’s down and the shooter is framed in the doorway with the smoking gun in his hand; and before I can react he pops me once, high in the chest, and I’m down, too, and he’s gone and I crawl around in my own blood until I reach Eberhardt, see the hole in his belly and the wound on the side of his head, and I think he’s dead, I think I must be dying, too...
The memory was so painfully sharp it might have happened a week or two ago instead of nine long years. The shooter, a hired gun, had been after Eberhardt and I’d gotten caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. And all because the honest, crook-hating cop had slipped and taken a bribe. And when he’d tried to back out, the man who had corrupted him had made him a target. The bribe nearly cost both of us our lives. It had cost Eberhardt his career. Not because the department found out about it, but because I did; and when I confronted him he’d seemed unable to forgive himself for what he’d done. If he had opted to sweep the whole thing under the rug I might have let him get away with it, but it would have ended our friendship and he didn’t want that on his conscience, too, he said. But he also hadn’t wanted to lose his pension, so he’d compromised by taking the early retirement. The easy way out for both of us. A man shouldn’t have to be punished for the rest of his life for one mistake, should he? An honest man, a good cop, a friend?
I never took anything in thirty years — not a nickel, not even a cup of coffee. His words to me in the hospital, after the shooter and the one who’d hired him had gotten what was coming to them. Tempted a couple of times; who doesn’t get tempted? But I never gave in. I didn’t think it was in me to give in... But things happen. Some things you prepare for, like you get old and tired. Some things you don’t prepare for, because you figure they can’t happen. Like your wife walking out on you, taking up with some other guy. Taking the guts right out of your life. You say to yourself: I got to hang on, it’ll all work out. So you hang on. What the hell else can you do? But then maybe you get tempted again, one day right out of the blue. Not small potatoes this time, a whole goddamn feast. And all you got to do is look the other way on something nobody gives a damn about anyway. You get mad, you say no at first — but maybe you keep on listening. And maybe you break open inside and for a little while you stop caring. And maybe the no turns to yes.
I’d thought I understood, and so I’d been the one to forgive, but now I wasn’t so sure. Could be he’d stopped caring for good back then. And some or all of what he’d said to me had been lies or bullshit. Could be he’d been jerking me around, playing me so I’d do just what I did — let him off the hook, take him in as a partner, teach him the ropes and carry him until he didn’t need me anymore. One thing for sure: I couldn’t forgive him again, for what he’d done to himself and to Bobbie Jean—
“Hey, are you okay?” Kerry’s voice in my ear, and a nudge to go with it. She’d turned on the lights; the shadows were gone. Her face, close to mine, showed concern.
“Yeah. Little trip down memory lane, that’s all.”
“Bad trip, from your expression. The time you and Eb were shot?”
I nodded. “Faster we get done and out of here, the better I’ll like it.”
“Where do you want to start?”
“Upstairs. I’ll take his study, you do the bedroom.”
We climbed the creaky staircase, went separate ways at the top. The last door on the left had originally led to a third bedroom; he’d converted it into a study for himself. More shadows, and the faint, stale residue of the lousy pipe tobacco he’d smoked. I opened the curtains partway to let it daylight. Everything in there was as I remembered it, too. Desk, sideboard, Naugahyde couch, overstuffed chair, bookcase with some out-of-date police manuals and a few other books stuffed into it, an electric Olympia beer sign on one wall. The framed photograph of our Police Academy graduating class was missing; so was his model train layout. Took the photo down because I was in it, maybe. Got rid of the model train because he’d lost interest in it, just as he’d lost interest in everything else that had once mattered to him.
At first it seemed that he hadn’t spent much time in here recently. The desktop was bare except for a telephone and a rack of pipes, and thin layers of dust had settled throughout. But then I saw that the ashtray on the chair arm was full of dottle, that a dirty glass and a nearly empty fifth of Four Roses were on the sideboard. And over near the chair you could still smell the bourbon that had slopped onto the carpet. He’d spent time in here, all right, the same as always. Sitting and smoking and swilling cheap whiskey. He’d called this room his sanctuary; Dana hadn’t been allowed in and Bobbie Jean probably hadn’t been, either. In the last year or so the sanctuary had turned into a drunkard’s crib.
I knelt in front of the sideboard. His safe was built into the bottom, concealed by a sliding panel. Small, just large enough to hold documents and a few valuables. I removed a full bottle of Four Roses and some extra glasses, slid the panel aside to expose the dial. He’d given me the combination long ago, “in case of emergency,” and I’d written it down in an old address book that I’d dug out last night. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had changed the combination, but it was still the same. So were some of the contents I’d seen the one other time I’d opened it. A small jewelry case that contained his wedding ring; his marriage license and final divorce decree; two insurance policies, both lapsed. None of it seemed to have been touched in a long time. Nine years ago the safe had also held his bribe — one thousand shares of stock in an electronics outfit that could have eventually been worth as much as six figures if the company had prospered — and fifteen hundred dollars in U.S. savings bonds, a bank savings passbook, and an envelope with a small amount of cash. All that was gone now. Long gone.