All That I Have Read online

  Tracy turned red. I thought for a second he was going to jump me. But then he shook his head. He held up his hand toward me. He nodded. He sat down on the bed.

  “Start again,” said Tracy.

  “Good idea,” I said. I waited for him to go on.

  Six rigs in that lot.

  Tracy rubbed both his hands over his face, roughly, like he was trying to keep himself awake. His eyes were red, and they flew around the room, up, down, and into the corners, like little red birds, trapped. I sat on the room’s other bed, facing him. Our knees almost touched between the beds.

  Six rigs.

  “These are not patient people, Sheriff,” Tracy said.

  I nodded.

  “They send their guys up here after your friend Sean Duke,” he said, “and they don’t find him, or he gets by them. So what? Do you think they’re going to quit? Do you think they’re going to say, ‘Oh, okay, you win?’ ”

  “I thought you didn’t know nothing about that. You said you didn’t.”

  “Come on, Sheriff,” said Tracy. “What do you want me to say, here? Yes, I know about the people they sent. I also know they’ll send more. They sent one, then two. They’ll send five, ten, as many as it takes until they find him.”

  I nodded. Six rigs out front of the Ethan Allen. That’s a funny word, ain’t it: rig?

  “They won’t stop there, either,” Tracy went on. “They’ll go to people they think can help them find him. They’ll go to those people’s families. There’s nothing they won’t do. They will go after — Sheriff, they will destroy — anybody who gets in their way, anybody who doesn’t help them get what they want. That includes you, Sheriff.”

  “It includes you, too, don’t it?”

  “Why do you think I’m here?”

  “What’s in their strongbox?” I asked Tracy.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who’s the fellow was up at the house the other day? Hair slicked down. Didn’t have a lot to say for himself. Who’s he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You talk to him, don’t you?”

  “As little as possible.”

  “But some. What do you call him?”

  “Mr. Smith. I call him Mr. Smith. Help me, Sheriff. Tell me you’ll find that kid before they do. For his sake, for yours. For mine.”

  “I don’t see what you’ve got to be worried about,” I told him. “You’re their insurance man, ain’t you?”

  “I’m not performing,” said Tracy. “What they want to happen isn’t happening. I’m not making it happen. Sheriff? Are you listening, Sheriff?”

  Rig. It’s an old-fashioned word, ain’t it? It means something more like a buggy or a carriage, a horse-drawn outfit, than an outfit with a motor to it. But we call a car or a truck a rig. Six rigs. Six rigs in the lot out there, right now. The people who drove them here were in these rooms, right here, separated by these thin Sheetrock walls, doing what the Ethan Allen was set up to have them do. They were doing it right now.

  “Sheriff? Are you hearing me, Sheriff?”

  “Say what?”

  “There was a guy, my predecessor,” said Tracy. “At a firm in the city. He handled things for them.”

  “For Mr. Smith?”

  “That’s right,” said Tracy. “Something got fouled up, some arrangement they had — I don’t know the details. Something they didn’t feel went right, on my predecessor’s watch. You understand?”

  I nodded.

  “He and his wife and daughter were driving the girl up to her school in Massachusetts one weekend. They never made it, never got there. They disappeared. All three of them. They were never found. Their remains, their car, their things — nothing. Gone.”

  I nodded.

  “What do you think about that?” Tracy asked me.

  “If your daughter goes to school in Massachusetts, put her on the train.”

  “This is no joke, Sheriff.”

  “I know it ain’t,” I said. “But I don’t run this kid. Sean. I don’t boss him. Suppose I did. Suppose I could find him. What if he don’t have their strongbox anymore?”

  “Then he’s dead.”

  “What if nobody has it? What if Sean says he couldn’t get into it, so he dumped it? Lost it. Threw it in the river.”

  “Then he’s dead. These people want their safe. They don’t want a story.”

  “Then there’s more fellows on their way up here to get Sean?”

  “Count on it.”

  “You know who they are?”

  “No.”

  “You know when they’re coming?”

  “No.”

  “Can you put me together with Mr. Smith?”

  Tracy looked at me. “You want to meet Smith?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to reason with him.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Can you get him up here?”

  “You’re kidding yourself,” said Tracy. “You have no idea what you’re getting into.”

  “Can you?”

  “Maybe,” said Tracy.

  “Well, then,” I said.

  I wanted to get done with Mr. Tracy. I wanted not to have to talk to him, not to have to talk to anybody for a minute. I needed a minute. I left Tracy in his room and went out to the truck. I sat in the truck. I rolled the window down, then I rolled it back up. Six rigs in the parking lot at the Ethan Allen. Four of them I didn’t know. Two I did. One was Sean’s truck. The other rig was Clemmie’s.

  I sat in the truck. I needed a minute. I knew I had to get out of there, I had to get out of that lot. I started my engine, but I didn’t leave the motel. Instead, I found myself backing out of my place, pulling the truck around behind the building, and parking at its end, just at the corner. I could see the lot, but most of the truck was behind the building. I turned off the engine and sat. I watched the parking lot. What was I doing?

  What was I doing? I couldn’t be here. I started the engine again and was reaching to put the truck in gear when a door opens at the other end of the Ethan Allen, and Clemmie and Sean come out. They might have been a hundred feet from me. Sean goes first, Clemmie a couple of steps behind him. He goes to his truck, climbs in. He rolls the window down. Clemmie’s car is parked beside Sean’s. She unlocks it and opens the door as Sean starts up, backs out, drives to the lot’s exit, and turns left on the highway. He’s gone. Just like that. While I’m watching them, Sean and Clemmie don’t touch. As far as I can tell, they don’t even speak.

  Clemmie’s standing at the door of her car. For a second, she watches Sean drive off, then she turns to get into her car. She looks over the roof of her car, in my direction. She stops. The sun is in her eyes; she can’t see much. Clemmie shades her eyes with her hand and looks across the parking lot, at me. Can she see me, in the truck? No. Can she see the truck? Sure, she can see part of it. Can she tell whose truck it is? Don’t know. She gets in her car, starts the engine, and backs out of her place. She heads for the exit. Near the exit she stops, waits. Her backup lights go on. She’s going to make sure the truck ain’t mine. But what if it is? I know you, Clementine. You don’t want to step off the bridge here. Not really. Do you?

  Clemmie changes her mind. Her backup lights go off, and she rolls slowly to the exit, turns right, and takes off.

  14

  THERE SHE WAS

  Okay. Alright. Take a minute. What have we got, here?

  What have we got? Well, you know what we’ve got. There she was. There Clemmie was, with Sean, at ten am in a by-the-hour motel out on the highway. You know what. But, the thing is, questions. Questions come up. Such as, for how long? For months? For years? Is today at the Ethan Allen, maybe, the first time? It might be. And what if it was, would that make a difference? Would anything make a difference?

  You have to think it ain’t the first time, though, don’t you? And then a lot of little things come piling in: looks, things she said, times she w
asn’t home, times she ran late, times she was at a friend’s. Were those times other — were they other times? Some of them? All of them?

  And what about those friends? Whose friends? Who knows about this, besides Clemmie and Sean, and now, me? Who don’t know about it? Nobody? Everybody? Addison? Beverly? Errol? The ladies in the post office? In the bank? Their cats and dogs? Who’s sorry for me and I don’t even know it? How big horns has Sean hung on me, here? Spikes? Full rack? Question is: How big of a fool have I been made out to be?

  And by Sean? Well, why not? Think about it. Sean needed to see me the other night. He worked it very neat. Well, but Sean ain’t neat. But Clemmie is. Sean found me the way he did because Clemmie ran out of sugar and sent me for more. No. Clemmie might run out of salt, but never sugar. Sweet girl that she is.

  But Sean? That sad, sad little boy. Well, but he ain’t a little boy anymore. No, he isn’t, she said. Everybody knows Sean Duke. Everybody? He’s a popular young man. He is? He’s got a nice mouth. A nice mouth? What does that mean, exactly? He’s not my type, she said. He’s not? What do you do with the ones that are, then, Clemmie? Clementine. Oh, my darling, oh, my darling, and so on.

  Okay. What happens now? The biggest question of all. The question for me. What am I going to do? Now we come down onto the tough one. Not what’s Clemmie doing, when, with who — all things I can’t do anything about — but what am I going to do? What’s my move? Things only I can do anything about.

  Well, it looks like you’ve got a range of choices, from doing nothing to blowing everybody up. As for blowing everybody up, I’ve seen what happens when people take that road. I’ve seen it more than once. Blowing everybody up don’t always go the way you think it ought to.

  For example, years ago we had this fellow Mort, lived over in Dead River Settlement, right the other side of the old bridge, worked at the AO plant in Brattleboro. One morning he starts feeling poorly at work; there’s a bug going around. Mort clocks out, comes home at lunchtime. Walks into his house, place is quiet, his wife’s not around. Mort’s feeling worse and worse, decides he’ll lie down. Goes up to the bedroom, opens the door, and here’s the wife in the rack with the oil-burner repairman.

  Well, Mort’s got a temper on him, it looks like. He reckons he’ll blow everybody up. He’s in shape to do it, too, because he’s got a .38 in the nightstand right beside the bed. Thing is, the wife knows it’s there, too, and, the situation being the way it is, she’s a lot closer to the nightstand than Mort. If she and the oilburner fellow can get themselves untangled, they can beat Mort to the draw. Mort sees this.

  So, not thinking too clearly, he turns around and runs downstairs for his twelve-gauge, grabs it, runs back upstairs, busts into the bedroom to find the oil-burner fellow putting on his pants and no sign of the wife. Mort blasts the oil-burner fellow with the twelve-gauge and gets down on his hands and knees to look under the bed for the wife, going to blast her, too, when here the lady comes jumping out of the closet, stark naked except for the .38. She gives Mort all six, dead center. I mean, she punches his ticket for good, right there.

  Mrs. Mort puts her clothes on, calls the police. Well, there’s quite a considerable flap, of course, but, upshot is, it’s a clear case of self-defense. The oil-burner fellow gives his evidence; he took a couple of pellets, but Mort was wide on him and he recovers okay. He and Mort’s wife sell the house and move to Florida. Not Mort, though. Mort’s still here.

  No, blowing everybody up don’t always come out right. Plus, in my case, blowing everybody up would set kind of a poor example in a law enforcement officer, wouldn’t it?

  So, go to the other end of the range. Do I do nothing? That don’t seem possible either, but look at it. It’s like sheriffing, ain’t it? There’s different ways of doing nothing. It makes a difference who knows what. I know what I know. But it makes a difference what Clemmie knows. I saw Clemmie at the Ethan Allen. Did Clemmie see me? I know what I know. Does she know I know? Does she know I know she knows I know? You can give yourself a headache with stuff like this. It is what it is — but what is it?

  And then what happens? Last question. Suppose I don’t blow everybody up, but we don’t do nothing, either. Suppose we break up. How do we do that, exactly? Who breaks, and where to? I’m not talking about furniture and dishes. I’m not even talking about houses, bank accounts. I mean who goes, and where? It ain’t like Clemmie and I can go our separate ways. We don’t have separate ways. Clemmie’s New York mom chucked her marriage to Addison and went home. Clemmie and I can’t do that. We can’t chuck our marriage and go home. We are home.

  Things will change now, they’ll have to. But how can they? Well, we’ll find out, won’t we? And after all, you expect that. You know things will change. You expect the future to be different, more or less. But the past is different, too.

  The past is different now. The past has changed. That’s what I can’t get used to. You expect change in the future, but you reckon the past is set, it’s permanent. No, it ain’t. The past, my past, our past, is different now. It’s different since I spotted Sean and Clemmie at the Ethan Allen. All those years, we haven’t been having the life I thought we’d been having. It’s as though you thought you were the cavalry and one day you realize you’re the Indians. You’ve been wrong, you’ve been off about everything, off right from the start. And the start wasn’t yesterday, it wasn’t last week or last month. We’re talking about years, here.

  The first time I saw Clemmie, that I remember, she was thirteen or fourteen, and she and a bunch of her Brattleboro cousins were hanging around the cold drinks table at Taft’s while the bigger kids and Taft and his men made hay. I was working for Taft that summer. I got down from the load we had brought in and went to the table, dry as dust. Taft had the usual drinks in bottles and cans, and he had a big bowl of what the older people called dipper, which Taft made up out of cold spring water, molasses, ginger, and vinegar, and which was supposed to quench your thirst better than anything.

  I filled myself up a jar of dipper, and Clemmie, who was standing by watching me, said, “My Lord, are you really going to drink that stuff? You should have a Coke.”

  “Who says?” I asked her. I drank my dipper.

  “I do.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Clementine Jessup.”

  Clementine Jessup. I can’t say I took special notice of her that day. Yes, she was on the pretty side: she had light brown or dark blonde hair and freckles. But a lot of kids have freckles. And yes, she was sassy, but a lot of girls that age are sassy — maybe more are sassy than ain’t. I didn’t pay much attention at the time. I had other things on my mind, I guess. A couple of weeks after that day at Taft’s, I was in Long Beach, then Da Nang. Got done with them and came home, dubbed around, wound up in the state police, as I have told.

  So it was five, six years later on another early summer day during my first year as a trooper that I saw Clemmie again. I was patrolling on the river road in Cardiff, a quiet two-lane, just cruising along, when this little VW Beetle comes flying by me on a double line, I mean flying, doing about seventy. For a second I didn’t believe it, thought I’d been asleep dreaming: nobody blows out a state police patrol car like that, not unless they’ve just robbed a bank. But there was the VW, in the distance ahead, getting smaller fast. I lit up and took off after it, pulled it over just at the Gilead line. Walked up to the car, and here’s Clemmie, digging her license out of her handbag, her hair in her face, and her summer dress pulled up into her lap on top of about five miles of bare legs. There she was. Some days in May, June, being a speed cop is the best job in the world.

  “I know, I know,” Clemmie said when I was standing beside her window. “I was over the speed limit.”

  “You were over it by about a hundred percent, ma’am,” I said. “Didn’t you see me? A police car? That was a police car you just passed. You were doing at least seventy when you went by me.”

  “I was in a hurry,” said Clemmie. She h
anded me her license, and I read the name on it and looked at her again — at her face — to find her doing the same to me.

  “I know you,” Clemmie said.

  “Yes, I guess you do.”

  “My Lord, Lucian Wing,” said Clemmie.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been around.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “Well, I’ve been in the service.”

  “I had the biggest crush on you,” Clemmie said.

  “You did?”

  “I did. You were older, though. You were out of school. You didn’t know I was alive.”

  “Sure, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t,” said Clemmie. “You didn’t then. But you do now.”

  I gave her her ticket and sent her on her way. We began to see each other here and there, first by chance, then not. Things moved along, I guess, and by and by we began talking about making the business official. We did that, and we also bought our little place here, started getting set up.

  One night, when we’d been married a year or less, we were lying there half asleep, talking things over, the way you do, and Clemmie started recalling when she first knew we were into something, the two of us.

  “I’d had a crush on you,” Clemmie remembered. “But that was nothing. That was years back. I was a little kid then. Later you were away, and later still, you were here and I liked you well enough, I guess, but I didn’t think much about it. You were older.”

  “Older?” I said. “What? Six years?”

  “It seemed like a lot then,” said Clemmie. “And it was odd, because even though I wasn’t all that attracted, wasn’t thinking about you all the time or anything like that, still there was something about you that was stuck in my mind and that I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t anything you did, or said, or any way you looked or didn’t look. It was just this thing about you. This question.

  “I didn’t know what it was,” Clemmie went on. “It was like trying to remember something, like a name, and you can’t, you can’t quite reach it, you can’t quite say it. I mean, it drove me nuts. Was it something you’d done that I’d forgotten? Was it something somebody had said about you? Was it that you were funny, or serious, or nice, or not-nice? No, I knew it was nothing like that. I couldn’t place it. And then one day — I think I’ll always remember this — I hadn’t seen you for a couple of days, wasn’t thinking about you at all, and I came downstairs in our house and there was Daddy standing on a chair hanging a picture on the wall in the sitting room. He was up on a chair and he was pounding a nail into the wall with a hammer, for the picture. But the chair was uneven, and so was the floor. He was unsteady up there. And I watched him, and I thought, he’d better watch out, he’s pretty shaky, he could fall. What if he should fall? He’s all alone. And that second, bingo. It came to me, not about Daddy — about you. And I said, My Lord, that’s it. That’s what it is about Lucian. He’s not funny or serious. He’s not strong or weak. He’s not good or bad. He’s not the right guy or the wrong guy. He’s my husband.”