City of the Sun (28 page)

“I’ll drive,” Behr said as they walked outside into a day the color of a battered tin pan and crossed the parking lot. It was a strange, unnecessary statement as they’d been in Behr’s car all day and he had the keys.

Paul thought about home and Carol and how much he’d tell her. “I’m not waiting for the police. I’m going,” he said aloud. “To Ciudad del Sol. To find out what happened to him.”

“I know,” Behr said. “I just told you: I’ll drive.”

Behr bought flowers and was waiting in front of her building when she got home from work. She drove up in a Miata, parked, and climbed out, slinging a leather bag across her shoulder. She hadn’t expected him, that was clear, but it wasn’t just surprise that spread across her face with her smile.

“He returns,” she said, stopping for a moment, then walking toward him.

“It’s me,” he said back. “How are you, Susan?” She had looked beautiful all made up on their date. Today she was wearing her work clothes — a jacket over a blouse — and her makeup was lighter or had worn off, the slight lines by her eyes more visible. But he saw her more clearly without the layer, and with her hair pulled back as it was. She was beautiful.

He’d felt idiotic sitting there, the bouquet filling his car with a wet earthy smell. All the hesitation left him when she smiled.

“Pretty,” she said, accepting the flowers.

“They were closing and were out of roses.”

“Would you stop?” she said, her eyes flickering up over the tops of the flowers as she smelled them.

“So …” he said.

“So, what’s up?”

“I’m going away for a while.”

“You are?” It seemed to sadden her a bit. “That case?”

“Right.” He felt his heart beating hard under his shirt.

“Where to? If it’s not confidential.”

It wasn’t, but he didn’t want to get into the details. He didn’t want to bring that part of his life to her.

“A bad place.”

“Uh-uh,” she said.

“No?” he asked.

“I’m the in or out type, Frank, and I called you after the other night ‘cause I’m in. Which are you?”

“I’m going to the border, to Mexico,” he said, and moved toward her. “I’m in.” She reached her hand behind his head and pulled him to her, and they kissed.

The night had been almost unreal, and now it was nearly over. Blue light glowed around the edges of the shades and told them it was time. She didn’t lie next to him as usual, but instead across him, like in the old days, her head on his chest, her hair spread over his torso. Paul’s heart beat steady and implacable beneath her ear. It was a sound she hadn’t heard in so long. Neither of them was asleep but in a waking state that was nearly indistinguishable. They’d talked half the night, until Paul had talked himself out, relating all the facts of the case. She wondered if she knew everything now. She felt she did — all that mattered, anyway. He’d told her what he’d learned. Horrible things. They’d begun the conversation standing in the kitchen, then moved to the bedroom. Then they’d sat on the edge of the bed. She’d found herself moving closer and closer to him as the hours progressed. Her husband was brave and unrelenting, she saw it now, and didn’t understand how she’d missed it for so long. At a point in his story their hands found each other in gestures of comfort. When he told her where he was going, she grasped him in fear.

The hour had grown late when she felt it: The current that had been dead between them for as long as she could remember, half of which she considered extinct within her, switched on once again. She reached for him just as he leaned toward her. She met his kiss and felt herself fall into his open mouth. He was tentative at first, touching her as if she were a fragile thing, as if she were made of mist and he might fall through her. But she responded and the touches grew. The room was dark. They shed their clothes. They pressed their bodies against each other in need and relief and love. He moved on top of her and she was solid beneath him, substantial. His smell and the weight of him on her were familiar and intoxicating. Tears of bittersweet joy rolled from the corners of her eyes. For a moment Jamie was gone completely. Not in the agonizing way that he had been for all these months, but in the way he used to be even when he was safe in his room and they went to the special world that husbands and wives occupy for precious moments. They talked in tongues, garbled sounds of passion flying from their mouths.

“Carol,” he said into the darkness.

“Yes?” she answered.

“You’re right, we should do a burial for him: a headstone, a memorial service. I can wait until after that to go.”

She squeezed his hand. “When you get back,” she said.

It wasn’t all he wanted to say.

“It’s no death wish. I’m afraid I’ll get hurt, that I won’t come back. But I’m more afraid of not going.”

She found his strength contagious and she remained infected with it now. “First go and find out what happened to our son, or someone else’s. Then come home to me,” she said.

She felt him smile. Her hand slipped into his in the coming dawn. Their hands began a familiar, playful wrestle that was their lost ritual in moments of intimacy. Their thumbs danced together, brushing softly, speaking silently their love.

Behr sat outside in his idling car. He saw a few lights on inside the house piercing the morning semidarkness. He wondered why he was even there, when driving on alone and leaving Paul behind was the smart move. It was out of allegiance, he realized. And then there was the fact that Paul would show up on his own if Behr left him behind. He considered honking the horn despite the hour. All the times he’d picked up his employer in the past he’d never needed to do that, for Paul would be waiting for him outside or would come out within an instant of his arrival. And of all those times he’d only seen Carol pass by a window once or twice. She was either out most of the time or moving about the depths of the house like a spirit.

Today, though, the screen door swung open and she appeared, in the flesh, wearing sweat pants and a faded sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her face was fresh and clean of makeup. She looked both young and ravaged at the same time, and the combination was a beautiful one. He lowered the window as she approached. He half expected to hear that Paul wouldn’t be going, that the trip seemed too dangerous, and that he shouldn’t come around anymore.

“Come in,” she said, “I’m going to cook you two a hot breakfast before you go.”

THEY DROVE TOWARD A HORIZON
of gunmetal blue. As they crossed out of state they passed the custom cutters working their way north on the harvest run. They were out even though it was just past dawn, as there was no dew and the wind was blowing from the south. Formations of combines swept across stands of red clover. In the distance, the massive machines trembled under dust clouds of their own making, as they cut and gathered the standing crop, threshed the seed from the stem, separated the chaff, and spit the stem back to the ground.

The radio was tuned to AM and pulled in a broadcast of a farm report. The familiar cadence brought Behr back to his own youth, to his father’s pickup truck as they listened to news that was vitally important to their survival. “Though acres and yield will be down,” the local elevator man informed, “late winter conditions were ideal. Wheat broke winter dormancy and went into its final growth cycle early. Moisture level is fourteen percent now, perfect for a young harvest and a chance to double crop …”

The station didn’t last much longer before it lost reception. Paul switched off the radio and they rode in silence, looking out the windows. Cutting was fast work, and before long the fields they passed held only stubble. They continued on over featureless plain under an empty sky.

Behr nearly detoured past Linda’s out of habit as he did anytime he drove south. It was an automatic response whenever he was near Vallonia. There had long been an ache inside him, a throbbing sense of emptiness in the place she used to fill, like the phantom pain people claimed after they’d lost a limb to amputation. It was a feeling he took for granted for many years, and he had developed an almost perverse familiarity with it. But as they blazed past the exit he would’ve taken to get to her, the ache was only a brief, reflexive thought that didn’t occupy nearly the amount of space as his thoughts of Susan. As they drove on, though, she, too, was pulled from his mind, replaced by speculation on what they would find and face in Ciudad del Sol and of what he’d packed in the trunk under a piece of carpet in the large spare tire well.

The sun was high in the sky and sliced through the windshield like an acetylene torch when they crossed into Missouri, and almost by force of momentum they started talking.

“What went down between you and Captain Pomeroy?” Paul asked.

Behr drove for another mile or so looking for a comfortable way to rest his injured arm while he considered how best to answer.

“When you’re a cop,” he began, easing the car around a road-killed possum drying in the sun, “the city you work in becomes
your
city. It’s your concern. You give yourself to it. Accidents. Emergencies. Fires. Riots. Shootings. Whatever. If it happens, you show up, whether you’re on duty or not, even after you retire. And you expect something back for that. Something small. You expect to belong to it as much as it belongs to you.” Behr told Paul about the relationship between his partner and Pomeroy, the shooting, the grudge. “The way he ran me,” Behr finished, “Pomeroy took that belonging away from me.”

They filled up in Sikeston and Behr stayed behind the wheel. They approached the next topic like swimmers entering an extremely cold mountain lake.

“He was full of contradictions, Jamie was,” Paul said. “Shy, but also self-possessed. It would take him a minute when he walked into a new situation, the first day of school, or a kid’s birthday party, or whatever. He’d just take it in quietly, start figuring out his place there. Before long he’d start picking up volume and speed. Then he’d become himself again, like he was at home, running around, laughing, and talking. …” He tapered off, not used to the subject despite it all. As much as they discussed the details of the case, Paul had never ventured to discuss personal memories with Behr. But the man’s simple recollections pushed him to his own.

“Tim was laughing all the time. He was a big boy.”

“Not a surprise.”

“A bruiser. A lineman in a diaper even when he was a baby. The world seemed to bounce off him. He broke everything in the house at least once.” Behr smiled and grimaced as the humor still carried an edge of pain.

“How come you didn’t have more?” Paul asked.

“Couldn’t. Linda, my ex-wife, had complications with Tim. You?”

“Should’ve. Thought we would. But as the years went by with Jamie we just seemed … complete.”

They had waded in ankle-deep, the water’s temperature seizing their breath and discouraging them from going further. But they braced and continued.

“I know …” Paul began, and then adjusted his words. “I mean I try and tell myself … that every minute with him was a gift to be appreciated. I keep waiting for the sense of failure to lift so I can do it that way.”

It was a partial question and Behr’s answer was wordless, a shift of body, a sound related to a sigh from which only an unfortunate few could draw meaning. Silence reigned for another sixty miles. The dark greens of the blooming deciduous trees gave way to a more faded landscape of pale yellow and sage.

“I wish I would’ve just been happier every day, with my wife and son, back when I had everything,” Behr said as they passed by a sign advertising the turnoff to Jesse James’s birthplace several miles ahead. “I found myself always looking forward to another time, though, to a vacation or a promotion or the summer, when things were gonna be perfect. I didn’t realize it was already those times every morning or at the end of the day, depending on the shift I worked. And during the Little League games … the shit he’d come home from school having learned—”

“From his friends, not in class—”

“Exactly.” Both men’s smiles slid away.

Paul’s head nodded slowly, as if the inside of the car was a space capsule at zero gravity. “Luck always seems like it belongs to someone else,” he said. He thought of the breakfast before they’d left. Carol had cooked the bacon and eggs just right and the coffee had been the proper strength. Though there had been little talk, it had been abidingly pleasant between the three of them, as it might’ve been if he and Behr were setting off for a day of fishing and not into the unknown. He’d once heard an idea that at the end, one didn’t remember life as a whole but as just a string of moments. If that was the case, then that morning’s breakfast was one of them.

“All we have are moments,” Paul said aloud, as if Behr were privy to his thoughts.

“Yeah,” Behr agreed, sounding complete in his understanding.

They drove through the night, a blanket of blackness pierced only by the headlights of big rigs and the bright gas station signs along the highway, as Arkansas and Texas passed beneath their wheels. They pulled off the interstate to buy chips and sodas and to switch drivers, but didn’t stop for the night. The distance was twelve hundred miles and they’d figured on it taking twenty-five or twenty-six hours. They made it in closer to twenty-two. They were south of Austin when the night had run out. Morning had come and the landscape had gone from high steppe to desert by the time they reached Laredo and the border. They bought ten gallons of drinking water and finally reclined their seats for a few hours’ sleep before they headed south and west into a notch of land that was sand, scrub, and chaparral, where they finally joined a line of cars waiting to cross over the river bridge.

Ciudad del Sol
. A sickening sense of dread covered Paul along with a thin coating of dust as they rolled in from the U.S. side with barely a glance from the Mexican border guards. Paul caught Behr’s eyes absorbing the details of the checkpoint and followed suit, scoping the American guards on the return side who, even now, took only slightly more care than their Mexican counterparts. Traffic had snarled among tired coils of rusted wire and chain link that halfheartedly secured the area. He wasn’t sure if there was any significance to it, or which details he was supposed to remember, but he attempted to catalog it all nonetheless.