I made it easy for Bobby in many ways. On Sunday evening, when I was preparing to leave to drive east, he asked me to meet him on the road heading up into Manitou County, at an old gas station that had been closed for at least as long as I’d lived there. I pulled in under the canopy that had once sheltered the pumps from the elements. Bobby jogged out of the shadows under the eaves of the garage and told me to pull my car around to the back. He said that he needed to drive me somewhere to show me something. I parked and then we drove together to the state hospital grounds. I recall being mildly annoyed because while I was getting mud on my shoes and slacks, Bobby was dressed in old khakis and sneakers. He had a flashlight to light the way as he hurried us through the groves. Finally we came to the clearing and Bobby stopped. I was out of breath; we both were panting in the dead quiet. He gestured at the running board of a small backhoe that was parked there and suggested that I sit. As I was lowering myself onto it, I noticed a dead crow lying on the ground. I pointed it out to Bobby.
“What the hell happened to it?” he said. “Take a look at it, would you?”
As I bent over to examine it more closely, not even the faintest presentiment came to me. He shot me in the back of the head.
Here Bobby was stricken by grief and guilt. He sat on the running board and wept over my body. As well he should have: I will stress once again that Bobby could have relied absolutely upon my aid and discretion; Bobby knew that, had always known it. Under other circumstances he would have valued it, and while he even wished that he could have valued it under these circumstances, my life stood between him and his own safety, between him and the fulfillment of his wishes, finally and most decisively between him and his gratification, and not long after he started digging the hole for my body, he began to blame me. It took over an hour for him to dig a hole deep enough to bury me in, strip me of my identification and belongings, fill the hole in, and disguise it. It took another hour to get back to my car, drive it down the fire road to the beach, and then walk back to the gas station. Finally he had to change his clothes and find a place to dump them and then a different place to dump my things. By the time he returned to Manitou Sands he was filled with self-righteousness. He felt good about himself. Gradually he came to feel, faintly at first and then fully and unselfconsciously, that I was to blame for my own death. And as his plan began to work as if of its own accord, so that the crime I was supposed to have committed became a story other people pressed upon him, a story that he pretended to accept only reluctantly, he began to believe that the story was true.
BOBBY ANTICIPATED THE heat he’d receive from our old cronies on Hylan Boulevard about this significant loss, and he felt that, steady hand that he was, he could ride it out. Throw himself into the job and earn his redemption. At his core, Bobby was an optimist, which marks him, perhaps, as the gambler he always denied he was at heart. Even at the end, he had trouble understanding what Hanshaw told him about what he’d brought upon himself. But so much crowded that simple, devious mind in its last moments. For example, he was still wondering what Kat Danhoff’s game could be.
While Kat is hardly innocent, she is not responsible for my reappearance as the storyteller Salteau. It’s more accurate to say that Salteau is responsible for her appearance on the scene. Her game is exactly as you might have surmised: to find a means to attain escape velocity yet again, having determined yet again that her situation is not to her liking. This woman, not so young anymore, who exists in a state of constant anticipation, who has never been capable of being, but only of looking forward to being, who views everyone and everything as a mirror in which she is reflected, was conjured by Salteau, by me, whom she instinctively recognizes, perhaps without putting it to herself quite this way, as the perfect distorting mirror. As for Alexander Mulligan (to whom Bobby devoted considerably less thought), he is always willing to join in a union of desperate people. He has a cultivated eye for the bored and the impatient — potential partners in crimes of passion, so to speak. This is properly characterized as a personality flaw, this unavailing search for perfect fulfillment with people who, and in circumstances that, distort and exaggerate the ordinary transactional aspects of human relationships, even (or especially) sexual relationships. Sandy Mulligan has never had an ordinary relationship with a woman in his entire life, as he himself has helpfully suggested in one of his moments of unwitting candor. And what about Rae, you ask, the wonderful and steadfast Rae? Married for two years when Sandy barged into her life, stirring in her the desire that things should become “interesting” once again. In omitting any mention of Rae’s marriage, Sandy was quite dishonest, but we must forgive him. A habitual liar, he overlooks the truth in this instance in order to cast Rae in the heroic role to which he believes she is entitled as a sort of consolation prize for his having deserted her (she is, I can assure you, far less interested in that than in the not-quite-as-generous-as-he-would-have-you-believe financial provisions that he has made for her and their children), and also to try to convince himself that in ending his marriage and fragmenting his household he has done something both extraordinary and necessary, when he knows perfectly well that it was neither of those two things.
Such people, I have learned, are no more or less flawed than anyone else — a Bobby, for example, is more flawed, vastly more flawed. But it’s the tiny destroyers like Sandy and Kat who have the greatest effect, wreak the most damage. And Salteau has, I have, summoned the two of them to grind harmlessly against each other, and to draw Bobby into my net.
PART 6. WITHOUT SHADOWS
44
I SPENT the next week recuperating. Locally, at least, the news dominated — a casino bigwig had been murdered, after all, and Argenziano’s criminal record came to light, prompting a state investigation. I kept checking the Mirror’s website to see if anything had been written about it by Kat, but Chicago apparently saw no need to import news of violence and corruption all the way from northern Michigan. Kat ignored two e-mail messages I sent her.
No one associated “Alex Mulligan,” a bit player and Cherry City resident several of the stories mentioned in passing, with the faintly scandalous author from New York, so I was left alone. Or so I thought, until I was contacted by the general counsel of the Boyd Foundation, who informed me that, at the instigation of an unnamed member of the board, he was initiating an inquiry into my personal conduct. As it turned out, the old Baptist sensibilities had not been completely purged from the institution, and the awarding of the fellowship was subject to a morals clause that, I was advised, I was suspected possibly of having violated. Remittance of my fellowship stipend would be suspended while the investigation was ongoing. With this story, I wasn’t so lucky: it got picked up by the usual schadenfreude sites, and then by the Times, and that was when I heard from Rae, or rather from her attorney, who wrote to assert that since my potential change in income arose from my “negligent and/or reckless behavior” the provision in our settlement that allowed for adjustments in support in the event of hardship would not, in her opinion, apply. Moreover, she added, my “unwarranted” remittance to Rae of $10,000 had made it clear to her that I was in perfectly adequate financial condition to continue supporting Rae “in the manner to which she has become accustomed.” Next, I got a call from Dylan.