The Detective's Garden (18 page)

The radio played songs about longing as Clarke and Elsie
bulleted down roads. The sun began to rise. At the center of
Clarke sat a deep sexual ache and his mind whirred with images
that had been only magazine fantasies to him the day before.
The furred arch between thin legs. The pliable lemniscate of
breasts. Nipples rising like time-stop photography of a burl
growing on a silver birch. The pornographic way that his body
could merge with another’s. Were there other ways of doing
things? The headlights of the oncoming cars splintered into
moving shards. All those people drove toward them and then
passed. A round-face woman in pink with one hand against her
cheek. A tiny blue car filled with shorn-headed boys. A black
Chevy Tahoe driven by a thin man in a navy suit. The suit’s
eyes narrowed, his brow furrowed like an accordion. His head
swung toward Clarke as the two cars passed one another, the
distance between them bridgeable by an arm.

Clarke turned to stare at the rear of the Chevy Tahoe. The
half-darkened windows. The brake lights that burned red.
It turned sharply to the side of the road. “Shit,” Clarke said.
“Drive.”

Elsie’s fingers curled against his thigh like fishhooks. “You
know that guy?”

“No,” he said. “Drive fast.” And Elsie pushed her foot down
heavily against the gas pedal.

Charlie Basin recognized the hulk of the boy behind a
cracked windshield. Two teenagers with their faces flushed red
in a tattered Dodge Charger. He knew that look. He’d once
caught his older son, Oswell, the unlikely one, naked in a car
with a fleshy girl whom Charlie had never seen before. Years
later, emptying the trash, he’d found two condoms in the bot
tom of Charlene’s wastebasket. Charlie leaned forward over the
steering wheel and wrinkled his brow and tried to get a better
look at the two kids in the car. Clarke Sawyer. His hair had been
shortened and died reddish brown. Clarke’s hand ran down the
arm of the girl in the driver’s seat. She had thick dark hair.
Swollen lips. The kind of skinny that makes you think of some
thing dead.

The kid’s eyes locked on his. He knows, Charlie thought.
This was his moment. He could get inside this kid and work
his way out. Through him he could reel in the father, go easy
on him, talk about shell shock, argue PTSD. This poor god
damned kid. Out on some kind of joyride. Look at him.

The cars flashed past one another and the insect eyes of brake
lights winked on the road ahead and Charlie swept the steering
wheel with one hand. The wheels caught at the pavement. His
whole body pushed forward against the seatbelt as he turned.

Elsie drove fast and poorly. She cut across a busy intersec
tion and the driver of a blue minivan braked hard enough to
slide and push his horn and peer at them over the dash with
soft wet eyes. Elsie gunned into a side road too fast and the
Charger spun. They came to a stop beside a street sign, the
engine stalled.

“Start it,” Clarke said.

Elsie turned the key and the ignition gave an electric hum and
the engine turned once and died. The black Tahoe pulled behind
them slowly as though there was no hurry at all. The driver’s
door cracked and the blue-suited man stepped out. Long, thin
cheeks. Clarke watched him out the rear window of the Char
ger. The man had his hands up. His face looked calm. He said,
“Clarke?” He spoke loud and slow. “I just need to talk to you.”

Clarke looked down at himself. His jeans were unzipped.
Elsie had shrunk into the seat. The bulk of her dark hair lay
against one freckled cheek. She said, “What do we do?” Her
hands still held the steering wheel.

“It’s okay,” Clarke said. He zipped up his pants. He reached
over and peeled her right hand from the plastic wheel and
placed it against her skirt. He looked at what lay around them.
They were on the side of the road next to a short run of yellow
grass that turned into a parking lot.

What did Clarke want? He couldn’t see it clearly. He wanted
to make decisions for himself and he didn’t want to sit in the
car, looking as afraid as he felt, while Elsie waited beside him.
He opened the door. He stepped out.

The suited man stopped beside the Chevy Tahoe’s fender. He
didn’t come any closer. He said, “My name is Charlie Basin. I’m
with the FBI.”

“Okay.”

“I’m looking for your father.”

“What’s he done?” Clarke asked.

Charlie Basin looked overly relaxed. His face sleepy, his
knees bent. He had kind tired eyes. He said, “You know Dallas
Pope, right? The sheriff?”

“I know him.”

“He’s dead. I think your father killed him.”

“No, he didn’t,” Clarke said. “He let him go.”

“I pulled him out of a drainpipe. He’s pretty dead.”

“If he did it,” Clarke said, “he’s probably got a reason.”

“Everybody’s always got a reason,” Charlie Basin said.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I need to find your father,” said Charlie Basin,
“and ask him.”

Very distantly a siren began. Clarke looked around. No one
was even looking in their direction. Fifty feet away cars passed
on the main road.

“You’re not in any trouble, kid,” Charlie Basin said. “I just
need to know where your dad is. Come over here and sit down.”

“Fuck you,” Clarke said. Clarke didn’t know what he want
ed to happen to his father but he wasn’t going to turn him in
because someone told him to. Clarke’s father was his to reject
when Clarke decided. Right now he wanted to be alone with
Elsie, to work out his thoughts with her. He’d left the door
open behind him. “Elsie,” he said, “start the car.”

Charlie Basin took a hesitant step forward and in his reluc
tance Clarke read fear. Clarke rolled his shoulders forward and
felt the bands of muscle. He knew he was big for his age, bigger
by far than Basin, and he felt an electric current crackle upward
into him from his gut. Why should he care what his father had
done? Clarke reached out for Basin in the way he might once
have reached out to smash one of his sister’s toys. He was going
to hurt the man badly enough to make him reconsider saying
that Dallas Pope was dead, but those smaller hands met his
and Clarke’s fingers bent backward and his body went with.
He could only see the ground over his shoulder, and then he
felt pressure along his arm and he stumbled forward over some
thing, Charlie Basin’s foot, and sprawled out against the cold
hard ground. Basin’s knee pressed into his back. Clarke’s arm
was still twisted behind him.

“Calm down, kid,” Charlie Basin said. “Everything’s going
to be—”

Flesh pressed against Clarke, but his back and arm were
freed, and he put his hands against the slurry of dirt and rock
that ran along the side of the road. Clarke pressed upward with
thick arms and felt the weight slide off him.

Charlie Basin lay facedown on the side of the road, bleeding
from behind his right ear. Elsie held a tire iron. She knelt be
side Basin and put her cheek next to his. “Good,” she said, “he’s
breathing.”

“Okay,” Clarke said, “okay, okay.”

In the trailer beside the Kishwaukee, Dominick sat on
the couch. His younger kid slept. His older was missing but
Clarke would come home again. Dominick knew how to wait.
He looked around the squalid trailer, then pushed the walls of
his hands into the wells of his eyes. He rubbed and felt hard
grit turning against his skin. Pinpricks. Tiny wheels. Tracer
rounds. Behind his eyelids, red waves burst into sad uninter
pretable forms.

NEAR TAKUR GHAR
mountain along the eastern edge
of the Shah-i-kot Valley, Dominick had sat beside all the other
Rangers in the belly of a twenty-seven-ton Chinook helicop
ter. Operation Anaconda. The rotors chopping above obscured
all other sounds. They flew at night. Nineteen rangers sent
to rescue a special operations SEAL team. How had it begun?
With a long flight, a wait long enough that hearts calmed and
legs ached and fear did not go away but calcified. At the tip of
Takur Ghar, Dominick’s face pressed against one of the Chi
nook’s round windows. Pure darkness broken by the flashing
line of light that marked the path of an RPG. The Chinook
tumbled in the air and the noise of the explosion overwhelmed
his thoughts. Bodies tumbled around him and people shout
ed and pushed their hands against him. When the Chinook
crumpled against the ground bullets began to ring from its
steel skin. Dominick picked himself up. He ran his hands over
his body, then over his M4 carbine. He looked up. One of the
pilots stumbled from the cabin, an arc of blood from his hand
rising six feet into the air. Other Rangers gathered around him.
Hard good men whom Dominick knew and loved and trusted.
Benny Ward and DeJesus and Floyd. He waved them forward
and they pressed out of the Chinook into heavy fire. They fell in
the snow and the cold bit them like a child’s teeth. How many
had been shot? There wasn’t time to count. He was okay, his
men okay. They’d crashed on a mountaintop near an al-Qae
da camp. They were pinned down. Bullets whistled overhead.
He felt the fear that would later make him feel ashamed. He
pushed his gloved hands against his face. DeJesus’s voice, loud
and high and vast, called in air support, AC-130 Spectres, then
F-15s with 20-mm multibarreled guns and heavy bombs. They
hunkered down and waited. The medics with the injured in the
Chinook waited for the bleeding to stop. The dead waited to be
picked up and carried out of the snow. Bullets waited for flesh.
Dominick’s team fired hundreds of rounds of suppressive fire
and they waited, waited for the moment when they’d be called
to push forward toward the nearby rocks or toward the al-Qae
da encampment or toward the lost Navy SEALs, and, when the
wait was finally over, their mouths would run dry, and their
guns would spit fire into foreign bodies, and that rare dazed
moment of fearlessness would set upon them.

When it came, when they pushed forward into the snow,
Dominick laughed. This was being alive. He could feel it coiled
inside him. Bullets whined near his helmet. The enemy’s hard
ened positions exploded with a heat that felt like it came from
inside his stomach. He pushed forward with DeJesus and Ward
and Floyd and, when he glanced to his sides, their faces flick
ered in and out. Shadow and light. He fired and they gained the
position between rocks. Burned al-Qaeda bodies, still smoking,
melting snow. They shot those who were still living. They oc
cupied the new position but it ended up feeling no different
from the position they’d occupied before. They found things
that weren’t theirs. AK-47s. A bayonet. A porno magazine. A
backpack filled with dates and rice. By an outcropping of rock,
they found a puddle of blood but no body, reddened footprints
loping toward another hill. Under a shrub, they found a dead
insurgent curled around his stomach wound. In a pool of melt
ed snow, they found a woman, long-haired and stripped to the
waist, drowned in bloody water no deeper than a sink. They
stared and stared. Somebody, maybe Floyd, made a joke about
her tits but nobody laughed. Finally, they had to stop looking.
They took deep breaths. They felt the cold air whistle into their
lungs. They felt themselves expand.

SOFT LIGHTS INTERRUPTED
the dark be
hind Charlie’s eyelids and a rough voice called his name. Why
couldn’t he wake up? Was he home? Charles Basin? The bed
beneath him had calcified. A hand washed across his face like
something he’d forgotten. Someone fumbled with his limbs,
cradled his head. What had happened to him? He had two chil
dren. One boy and one girl, right? Was that it? Was that what
he had? Someone was speaking to him again in a slow calm
voice. Rosamund? His wife needed him but his tongue wouldn’t
answer. He made a fist with one hand. The voice spoke again.
It was way too deep to be Rosamund’s. He felt himself being
lifted and set down again. A soft fabric beneath him. He heard
the static crackling of a two-way radio. Someone said his name
again—“Agent Basin?”—and he raised one shaking hand. He
felt someone hold the cold round metal of a stethoscope against
his chest. A band of fabric tightened on his upper arm. A finger
burrowed beneath one of his eyebrows and pulled his eyelid
open and the darkness cracked apart like dry earth.