The Detective's Garden (36 page)

He followed. It was easy. He’d done this before. He let the
rage inside him follow her. It wasn’t really he who let her get
as far as the riverbank, or broke her neck, or weighted her body
with stones.

BEHIND THEM, AT
the top of the hill, police cars
rolled onto the gravel in a line and the officers spread out across
the grass. The fire had climbed out the windows of the house,
scaled the log walls, and rejoined the flames that burst through
the roof. From forty feet away, Charlie could feel the heat.
Charlie unloaded his rifle from the cargo area in the rear of the
Suburban. The police opened the cars’ deep trunks and pulled
out weapons and vests and gathered around Charlie Basin. He
put his mouth near the ear of the bearded officer in charge and
pointed out the path the Sawyers had taken. The officer in
charge barked orders and everyone began to move.

Behind the line of trees at the bank of the Susquehanna,
Dominick stopped. He set King on a tuft of soft grass. Their
feet nestled among tiny bluebells and giant-leafed skunk cab
bage. Clarke, straight-backed and tense, stood beside a fallen
log. He held still but looked like a person about to take a step
forward. The riverbank was littered with bone-white branch
es and hand-sized stones. Cattails leaned out toward the water
that was flat and broad and shallow.

It was at the edge of the Susquehanna that Clarke and King
began to separate, the fraternity of their minds to break, their
memories to diverge. Later they would begin the long process
of not thinking about the past. They would grow older. They
would live far from one another. Infrequently, they would turn
backward and face the currents of time that pushed them for
ward and briefly remember what lay behind. These moments
would be rare, but in them they would recall two separate ver
sions of their father on the riverbank.

Clarke and King would agree that he grabbed hold of both
of them. They would agree that his voice sounded like pressed
gravel. They agreed that he said, “Listen here, I’ve done some
thing wrong,” and that it was Clarke who in a trembling voice
asked, “What?”

But then the moment cleaved. A watershed. For Clarke,
their father said, “I can’t stomach telling you.” But King al
ready knew

None of them watched the hills where the police officers
threaded through the grass. Or the river otter that glided
through the shallows. Or the birds that swooped and flapped
and dove. Dominick swung the rifle from his back and put the
stock to his shoulder. He looked away from his children, past
the barrel of the rifle, past the thin trees, toward the thick liv
ing bodies coming after his kids. He sighted the first among
them. “Listen,” he said, “all flesh is grass.” He pushed the safety
off. He stiffened. He fired and turned, and fired and turned,
and fired.

THROUGHOUT OUR LIVES,
time wilts and curls
like a cut flower.

AHEAD OF CHARLIE
Basin, blood arched from the
rear of an officer’s head. His body hit the ground with a soft
ened thump. Charlie lay flat near the top of the hill. He inched
his rifle forward, braced the stock against his shoulder. To his
left and right, officers fell. Others scattered and hid. Blood pat
tered behind them like rain. Charlie burrowed into the dirt.
He breathed slowly and smelled mildew and worms and wet
earth tinged with manure. He watched a deer tick crawl across
the back of his hand. He let his eye run down the stock and
through the glass sight and then the riverbank leapt toward
him, the distant tree trunks suddenly close enough to see the
variegated bark, the broad leaves like spread hands, the burned
and filthy children, the giant man half behind a tree with his
rifle raised. A burst of fire from the barrel. A gunshot and a
scream to Charlie’s right. He drew in a deep breath. His finger
touched the trigger. He had shot men before but never before
had he felt like he was about to shoot himself.

Down by the riverbank, the two kids watched their father
stumble backward into the water. A puff at his chest, the black
fabric evaporating. The armor-piercing shell swiveled through
the vest. The sound of the single gunshot as distant and unten
able as a stranger’s life.

Their father caught himself with a palm against an adoles
cent elm. The leaves trembled on the thinnest branches. His
skin had opened above his sternum and his organs accepted the
bullet as though they had been waiting for such an intrusion all
along. Their father let go of his rifle and pressed a hand against
the rising blood. One of his feet slipped in the mud. He looked
from his children out to the river. Something fast and blurred
and winged dropped from the sky and skimmed the surface of
the water. Sap blew from the trees. Dominick felt his weight
shifting strangely beneath him. He stumbled,

impatient with the bounds between his life and another.
Water soaked into his shoes and socks. Mud sucked at his feet.
And so Dominick let his children go.

On the hill, police officers rose from the ground and
rushed over to those who had not risen. Voices chopped against
radio static. Charlie pressed himself to his knees, still watching.
Eye pressed to the rifle’s sight, he watched Dominick stumble,
catch himself, and, it seemed, face his children. The edges of
his skin looked like a sun-heated shoal. He seemed to shrug his
shoulders in some inestimable gesture of doubt, or purposeless
ness, or distaste, or discomfort beneath an unbearable weight.
He moved backward, the water rising past his knees, his waist.
The blood turned the river a living pink. When Dominick
went under, Charlie Basin couldn’t tell if he had awkwardly
dived or if he’d fallen.

He was borne on the flood of the river. His body flowed
around stones, rose toward the surface, toward the yellow
light and the hundreds of paper wasps that blurred in the air,
only to be swept toward the silt and rock bottom. He slowed
here, caught against a tire, against stone, against the tongues
of yellow-green riverweeds. Hand-sized perch scattered at his
approach. His pants caught on a branch and he hung there,
one leg rising to break the surface, as the current pressed and
tickled and worried the Wharncliffe knife from his belt, the
few bubbles from his mouth, and then the pants tore and he
flowed. Above him, the skin of the water flickered with light.
One hand, dragging along the river bottom, raised a slowly
expanding trail of silt.

Charlie had taken his eye from the gun sight. He waved
off the officers who came to shake his hand, to compliment his
shooting. Their voices were faded and distant. He put his fin
gers to his sternum, felt the fierce drum of his heart, fingered
the bullet hole that was not there. The officers rushed down
the hill toward the riverbank and the children and the man in
the water. They swept forward as one, the grass bending before
them. They called back and forth to each other as though they
were the limbs of a single body. The line of trees on the riv
erbank sheltered the sound of bootfall. They caught glimpses
of the gleaming river between mossy trunks, the rotted dock
hung on failing pilings, the two lost and filthy kids standing in
the water among the cattails and muddy footprints and anger,
and the paper wasps that swarmed from the willows.

Near the shallows, Clarke was silent. His throat clutched his
tongue. Standing beside him, King yelled for her father. Her
voice warbled. She remembered overlooking the Grand Coulee
Dam, and the water pooled beneath, and the way she had called
her father’s name quietly, and how he had come to stand beside
her. She was torn by memory, and the images came at her dou
bled up and overlaid. Within the ark of her remembrance came
the resurrection of a hundred other times she had called for her
father. She remembered standing beside him, their pants rolled
high and poles in hand, along the edgewaters of the Susque
hanna. Their skins smeared with dirt. Their toes curled in mud
or silt. The water lapping at their calves. She remembered, too,
the cold shock of the ocean in Maine, and the dark, and her
father’s deep laughter, and his warm hands.

Somewhere, her brother Clarke had found an emergency
blanket and put it over her shoulders. With shaking hands, he
held her, and together they watched the searchlights.

King remembered inflating inner tubes with her father and
walking past her mother lying on a towel beneath the plum
tree. She remembered a mist of bees rising from the ground as
she walked down through soy and alfalfa and winter wheat to
float in the river and yell out to her father behind her. With
Clarke holding her steady, she called out now. She called him
back, her father. In this place, she had many mouths and her
cries echoed across the water. Raising all her faces and working
her many lungs, she called him, then called him again. And,
carrying both promise and pestilence, he came.

The end