A red dust of snow fell before the neon sign and vanished. He smoked, and when the cigarette was gone he stubbed it out and turned the key and put the sedan in gear and drove out of the lot.
When he returned to the lot ten minutes later he was on foot, and he walked up to Radner’s Chevy and tried the driver’s door, then walked around and tried the passenger’s. He glanced around the lot; he watched the door to the bar, the red-stained flecks of snow in the neon, then pulled the thin metal tool from his hip and fed it down the glass into the guts of the door and felt with it for perhaps a second before he gave one quick yank and slipped the tool back under his belt.
The dome light came on with the opened door and he got into the truck and pulled the door shut and removed the plastic light cover and took out the little bulb and put it in the ashtray, replaced the cover and got out of the truck again and stood in the open door. He adjusted his mini MagLite for its tightest spot and roved it over the benchseat and the junk that lay there: plastic Mountain Dew bottles, mechanic’s rags, a rumpled back issue of Field & Stream, a black watchman’s cap, a flattened box of tissues. He probed the light under the benchseat on both sides of the tranny hump and saw nothing but garbage and dust and a long metallic ice scraper. In the glovebox he found a handgun, a Colt .45, with much of the factory bluing worn from the slide. The safety was on and a round was chambered. He slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, then slid the benchseat all the way forward and ran the spot over the garbage behind it, stirring it with his free hand. He saw a skinny wooden length and his heart jumped, but when he pulled the stick free it was another ice scraper, this one about as old as the truck.
He stood in the open door for a long while, darting the beam here and there, over and over again. Finally he slid the benchseat back and shut the door and peeled the rubber gloves from his hands and stuffed them in his pocket and wiped his slick hands on the sleeves of his jacket. He found his cigarettes and got one lit and, leaning his weight against the front fender, watched the gray door of the bar and the snow that fell red and silent in the light above it.
24
WHEN SHE TURNED from the stove he’d taken the chair at the table where her grandfather would sit in the evenings bent over his ledgers, sipping mug after mug of boiled black coffee, Gordon taking the chair with no thought of her memories, of course, but only because it gave him a direct line of sight, through the window, to the fire in the yard—the fire burning strong now, sending white smoke into the sky and filling the deep snow before it with a strange trembling blush. Good old hardwood this was, he said, oak and walnut, and after it had burned down to cinders they could dig the grave and it would all be done by the time she had to go pick up Marky from the garage and tell him… what? That their old Wyatt, their old friend, was gone forever.
Rachel turned from the stove with the two mugs and glanced at her feet so as not to step on him, not to trip over him—hot tea everywhere, shattered mugs, shattered bones!—and her heart broke again because he was not there, was nowhere in sight and never would be again, and she fought back her tears because it was only a dog after all and what was that next to the loss of a child, a daughter, your only child?
She set one of the mugs before Gordon and he looked away from the window to thank her. He hooked his big finger through the handle but did not lift the mug, instead sat looking into the steam, and how strange he should choose today of all days to show up, so that she would not have to be alone, not yet. Even if he just sat there, even if he never said another word.
He did not look up until she’d sat down and then he looked slowly around the kitchen, and when his gaze came around to her she wanted to hold it, to read his thoughts, but he moved on again, back to the window and the fire beyond. The pale tips of flame rising above the snow, the thick and twisting smoke.
“It’s a good old house out here,” he said. “It’s good you held on to it.”
She could just see his reflection in the glass. She lifted her mug and sipped and set it down again with care. The furnace had come on and the dusty heat blew on the dog’s empty blankets where they lay before the vent and blew the smell of him into the room.
“It gets noisy here, sometimes,” she said.
“Noisy?”
“Yes. Walking sounds where no one’s walking. Smells too. Cooking smells where no one’s cooking. Bathroom smells where no one’s been for hours.”
“You might have that toilet gasket checked.”
“I might have my gasket checked, you mean.”
“Didn’t say that. The mind gets… active when you’re on your own, that’s all. It can get to be a tricky son of a gun.”
His big hand lay on the table beside his mug, palm-down. Her own hand might cover half of it. She remembered standing on his porch that day in October as he held the stormdoor open but would not ask her in, nothing in his eyes to say he needed her or even knew her name, a gray-faced man whose heart had been torn out. The very worst thing, the unspeakable thing. He didn’t know then that the sheriff was looking for Danny. And neither did she.
Gordon turned the mug, and watching the turning said, “I guess you know all about those girls by now. Those two girls that went into the river.”
“Yes. You were the first person I thought of. I wondered if you’d seen it on the news, or if anyone would tell you. I…” She didn’t finish. Didn’t know how to finish.
“I drove on up to Rochester, night before last, to the hospital,” he said.
She watched him.
“I thought I wanted to see her,” he said, “but when I got there I realized what I really wanted to see was her father. Sutter. Wanted to see his face, what it looked like now.”
“And did you?”
“I did.” He nodded slowly. “He’s a sick man. He doesn’t hardly look like the same man.” He stared into the mug. “I guess I wanted to know did he have any better understanding now. Did he understand any better why I said the things I said to him. Back then.”
She waited. “And did he?”
He tilted his mug and frowned. “It just isn’t the same situation. What happened to his daughter, he’ll get over that. He’ll just pay more attention to every part of her life from here on out. Or as much of it as he gets to see. He won’t carry this thing that I carry around with me every day and every hour, these”—his hand circled in a buffing motion to the right of his temple—“thoughts that go through my head, these… ideas.”
He lowered the hand and looked at her from under his eyebrows, and a coldness poured into her.
He turned back to the window. The fire was burning down, the smoke thinner now and calmer.
“Is that why you—” she began, and faltered. “Is that why you came out here? Because of those two girls?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He turned back to her. “I saw your boy this morning. Marky.”
“You did?”
“At the garage. I had to take the van in. I hadn’t seen him in a while, I guess. For a second there I thought it was the other one. And then I remembered that that boy was long gone, and—”
He stopped. She was blotting up her tears with the handkerchief he’d given her earlier, outside, when she’d first turned and seen him standing there. The thin cloth damp now and no longer smelling so strongly of him as it did that first time.
“Ah, damn it,” he said. “Don’t listen to me.” Shifting his weight in the old chair. Patting the tabletop with his fingers. “I never should of come out here like this, out of the blue like this. I must be crazy.”
“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. I don’t know why you came but you came. You came, Gordon, and I’m so… I’m so grateful.”