River Road (23 page)

“That could be Troy's connection,” McAffrey said, pulling out his notebook and writing something in it.

“But what does this all have to do with Leia?” I asked.

“Maybe Leia found out what Troy was doing and threatened to turn him in.”

“Hmm. Leia could be righteous, and Troy certainly was angry with her when we spoke on the bus, but I don't see Leia being that concerned about drug use, unless . . .” I remembered Leia's paper. “Unless she knew Shawna Williams had started using again. That might have made Leia look at drug use differently. Then, yeah, she might have threatened to turn Troy in for dealing.”

“And he went after her in the car.”

“It could have been an accident,” I said, hating to think of Troy running over Leia in cold blood.

“Might have been, but leaving you and Ross Ballantine to die in that barn was no accident.”

“Are you going to bring him in?”

“Detective Haight's out looking for him now.” McAffrey looked at his watch. “I'd better get going back to the station, but I could give you a lift home first. Your doctor said you were good to go.”

I remembered the last time he'd driven me home. “Are you going to take me for another glimpse into my dreary future living in a trailer park?”

He gave me a long, assessing look that brought the blood back to my cheeks. “You look like you've seen enough today,” he said finally. “No detours this time. I promise.”

*  *  *

I met McAffrey downstairs after I'd been discharged and gotten dressed. He was on his phone. He looked unhappy.

“Haight hasn't been able to find Troy,” he said. “He didn't show up this morning for his shift at his father's garage. I'm afraid he's done a runner, which doesn't look good for him.”

“He was often late for class,” I offered.

“You don't want to think it's him, do you?”

“No,” I admitted. I could picture Troy accidentally hitting Leia and fleeing the scene in a panic, but when I tried to imagine him leading Ross out to his car and deliberately leaving him to die—or closing the barn door on me—my mind balked. Maybe I just didn't want to imagine any student of mine hating me so much that they would kill me. But that could just have been my vanity.

I rode again in the front passenger's seat. We drove south on Route 9 and turned west on 199, past a farm stand closed for the season and a low-lying orchard, under a dark, overcast sky. The road climbed from there up a steep hill. As we passed Van's Auto I glanced out the window and saw a boy in a familiar purple and gold sweatshirt bent over a truck's engine.

“Hey, I think that's Troy.”

McAffrey followed my gaze and then swung the car into Van's, blocking the entrance. “Stay here,” he barked, jumping out of the car.

I hadn't really thought he would stop. I felt a qualm that I'd set a policeman onto Troy, but then it was better if McAffrey didn't think that Troy had run away. I still was having trouble imagining Troy as a killer. He was bent over the engine of a red pickup truck, using a wrench to loosen something, his face red in the cold air. When he looked up and saw McAffrey approaching he tensed, looked behind him, then hauled back his arm and threw the wrench at McAffrey.

I screamed as McAffrey ducked and Troy ran past him and past the police car. I could see his face as he streaked by. His eye caught mine and the panic turned to something else. I opened the door and got out, calling Troy's name, but he was already past me, in the road—running directly in front of an eighteen-wheeler barreling down the hill. There was no way the truck would be able to stop in time. McAffrey saw it too. He'd reached the edge of the road, his feet skidding on ice and rutted snow. I saw his muscles bunching, getting ready to sprint into the middle of the road to make a lunge for Troy.

“Joe! Don't!” His arms pinwheeled as if caught in a current. Troy gave one glance over his shoulder and then leapt for the other side of the road. The truck thundered past us, horn blaring, brakes squealing, kicking up so much dirty snow and ice I wasn't sure if Troy had been hit or not. But then when the truck passed I caught a glimpse of a purple sweatshirt vanishing into the woods on the other side of the road. McAffrey sprinted across the road and disappeared into the woods.

I stood by the side of the road staring into the woods as if they were a dark lake that had swallowed both men, and I was waiting for them to come to the surface. Another man came to stand next to me. With his bulging stomach, balding head, and grease-stained hands, Troy Van Donk Sr. had none of his son's good looks, but he did have the same expression of fear on his face that I'd seen on Troy's as he'd run by.

“What's the boy gotten himself into now?” he asked, the angry tone belying the fear on his face.

I couldn't bear to tell him. “Sergeant McAffrey just wanted to ask him some questions . . . maybe he just got spooked.”

Troy Sr. shook his head, took out a bandana, and wiped the sweat that despite the cold beaded his forehead. “There's been something these last few weeks eating at him. He's mixed up in something. Goddamnit!” He spit into the dirt. “I knew no good would come of going to that college and mixing with spoiled rich kids, making him want things he couldn't have.”

I wanted to object, to tell him that his son was a talented writer, that he had promise, but then I pictured Troy and Leia outside Ross's barn, Leia in her red jacket, Troy in his purple sweatshirt, framed against the fiery backdrop of the sunset—all that youthful promise about to go up in flames—and thought that Troy Sr. had been right. No good had come of Troy's going to Acheron.

M
cAffrey came back half an hour later, his uniform soaked and covered in pine needles and burrs. “That kid of yours sure can run, Van,” he said to Troy Sr.

“What's he done, Joey?”

“I just need to talk to him. Tell him that if you see him. Tell him it'll go better for him if he comes in himself.”

“I will if I see him, but knowing my boy he's gone to ground. Back when he was little he'd go hide in those woods when he was angry or scared. Stayed in there a week once when some girlie broke his heart.”

“Temperature's going down below zero tonight,” McAffrey said, looking up at the darkening sky. “He'll be looking for a warmer place to bed down. You call me if you see him, Van, and I'll make sure he gets a fair hearing.”

Troy Sr. squinted at McAffrey as if trying to bring him into focus. Then he looked up at the sky too. “Yep, it's gonna be a cold one,” he said as if all they'd been talking about was the weather. Then he nodded at me and walked away, his broad back stooped and round-shouldered. I remembered Dottie telling me she'd gone to high school with him. I tried to picture him as a young man. Then I thought of how Troy must see his father. He'd written in one of his stories about a young man who
“saw himself turning into his old man with every grease stain, every backache, every bad choice.” I had written in the margin, “Beautiful! But you can write yourself a better future.” That's what going to Acheron was supposed to offer him—a different future from his father's—but what if Leia had threatened to turn him in for dealing? That bright future would have gone up in smoke. Would he have killed her to keep that future and keep from turning into his old man?

We didn't talk much on the drive back to my house. McAffrey looked angry, but whether at me or himself I couldn't tell. When we pulled up to the house there were two surprises—the drive was plowed and my car was parked in it.

“My car!” I said, surprised at how glad I was to see the seven-year-old Honda Civic. The front hood was dented, giving it a disreputable air, but it looked drivable.

“My big surprise,” he said. “I was over at the impound lot signing release forms when I got the call on the radio. I had a friend bring it over and plow the driveway so you'd have someplace to keep it . . .” His voice trailed off and he looked embarrassed.

“Do you do that for all your suspects when they've been proven innocent, Sergeant McAffrey?”

He smiled. “You called me Joe before.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling embarrassed myself now. “I thought you were about to fling yourself in front of that truck.”

“So it takes a life-threatening situation for me to achieve first-name status?”

“I guess that
is
what it took,” I admitted.

“Well, now that you've started there's no going back to Sergeant McAffrey.”

“Okay . . .
Joe
. As long as you call me Nan.”

“Okay . . .
Nan
.” He held out his hand to shake mine. His grip was warm and firm. When I let go and turned to go into my empty house I could still feel the heat of it cradled in my palm, like the live ember
ancient Romans carried into their homes to light their hearths on sacred days.

*  *  *

I needed all the warmth I could get. Joe (I said his name to myself like a teenager doodling her crush's name on her school notebooks) had been right. The wind, which had been blowing all day, had brought in colder air with the night. I turned up the heat and closed all the windows tight and made a fire in the woodstove. I sat next to it, bundled in a SUNY Acheron sweatshirt and sweatpants, drinking hot tea. I thought of adding a shot of Glenlivet to it but then I thought of Joe's face when he said he thought I'd seen enough and I didn't want to prove him wrong. Maybe there was still time to change what my future looked like.

In the spirit of starting over I sorted through all the papers from the semester, burning what I didn't need anymore—extra syllabi, campus memos and flyers—and filing students' papers. When I came across one of Troy's, though, I sat back in the rocking chair and read it.

It was the first draft of a story about a young man named Uli wandering around Poughkeepsie one night. Troy had taken my Margaret Atwood quote about making the risky trip to the Underworld to heart and based his story on
The Odyssey
, which he'd read in my Great Books class the year before. Uli was clearly supposed to be a modern Ulysses, and his travels through the streets, bars, twenty-four-hour convenience stores, derelict houses, and projects of Poughkeepsie were supposed to be his odyssey—his ten-year journey home from the wars. The spelling and grammar were abysmal, but the dialogue was great and the scenes were funny updates on the wanderings of Odysseus. Uli is detained by a witchy ex-girlfriend named Calinda Lipschitz. He and his best friend, called Jay Crew for his preppy attire, wander into a bar called Circe's Den. The bar is shaped like a ship and adorned by a wooden figurehead of a buxom woman that the locals call the Sea Witch. There they meet three Siren-like prostitutes who lure them into an alley and steal
Jay Crew's wallet. Uli escapes, but then must navigate his way between a patrol cop's cruiser and an angry dealer named Scully—so named for a skull tattoo on his shaved head but also an obvious nod to the monster Scylla—to whom he owes money. He descends into the “underworld” of the projects, looking for a friend to loan him the money to pay Scully back and take the bus to Ithaca where his girlfriend, Penny Lopez, a freshman at Cornell, has been posting pictures of herself at a frat party with a bunch of drunk frat boys. The story ended with Uli lost in the projects. I'd written Troy a long comment, praising his dialogue, sense of scene-building, and inventiveness, suggesting he clean up his spelling and grammar, and urging him to finish the story for his final assignment. I'd made a copy and given him back the original. At the bottom I'd written, “I want to see Uli make it home!” and added, “I'm assuming that while based on personal experience much of this is fictional. But if there's anything you want to talk about, my door is always open.” I'd added a smiley face. It wasn't a winky face, but it might as well have been. The story made it clear that Troy had interactions with dangerous drug dealers, but I'd pretended that the work was strictly fictional. But what was I supposed to do? Turn Troy's story over to the counseling center?

It was one of the quandaries of teaching writing to undergraduates. I often saw things in my students' stories that reflected troubling circumstances—drug use, depression, abusive families. If I turned every one of them in to the counseling center I'd lose the trust of my students. Over the years I'd referred three students there—one who had admitted to being depressed and wrote a story about killing himself, one who had written a story about shooting everyone he knew, and one from a girl who wrote about an abusive sexual relationship. The depressed student had dropped out, the “shooter” had laughed in my face and written on his student evaluation that “for a writer Professor Lewis has a fundamental lack of imagination and sense of humor,” and the girl in the abusive relationship had thanked me for making her face her problems.

So when I read Troy's story about drug dealers in Poughkeepsie I thought it was likely based on some real life experience but that it was probably exaggerated. I knew he was a fan of hard-boiled crime writers like George Pelecanos and Richard Price. A lot of my white students affected black street language and clothing. When we workshopped Troy's story, Aleesha had rolled her eyes and asked why “all you white boys try to sound black.” But she'd also admitted that Troy sounded like he knew the neighborhood. “Circe's Den is Noah's Ark, right? I live right around the corner.” Leia had said—

What had Leia said?

I sat, staring at the fire, trying to remember. I pictured my students sitting in a circle, Troy slumped in his chair, hood up, listening to the comments with a bored look on his face, which I could tell was as much an affectation as the gangsta language in his piece. I could tell by the jitter in his leg that he'd been nervous about being critiqued and from the way his body had slowly relaxed that he was pleased with the way the workshop was going. His peers really liked the story. Then Leia had said something that made everybody laugh. What had she said?