All That I Have Read online

  By the time I got back to the department from the Ethan Allen, I’d about decided that, for now, I’d go ahead and work this thing like a job of sheriffing. I’d sit tight and wait for what was going to happen to happen. Then I’d see. “Let it come to you,” Wingate said, “whatever it is.”

  It was a good plan, it usually is, but it didn’t work. It didn’t have a chance to work. I didn’t get to try it. When I got back to the department, I found Beverly had lost contact with Deputy Keen. His patrol car was at the Russians’ house, but he wasn’t with it. He’d gone missing. Where was he?

  15

  MORE COSSACKS

  They’d found him by the time I got there. He was unconscious and badly busted up, but he was alive, though how long for you didn’t know. Deputy Keen looked like he’d walked into the buzz saw. As I pulled in at the Russians’ house, the medics had just loaded him into the ambulance when his heart had quit. They had put the electric paddles to him to start him up again, and I found the deputy flopping around in the back of the ambulance like a big bass in the bottom of a rowboat.

  There was quite a crowd at the scene. Beverly had put out that an officer was unaccounted for and presumed to be in trouble. So by now the Russians’ place was like a law-enforcement zoo, with every kind of cop there is, including a couple of officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who’d been passing through.

  I found Trooper Timberlake. He said Buster Mayhew, the Russians’ caretaker, had come by to check the house and found Lyle’s patrol car there. The door was open, the engine was running. No sign of the deputy. Mayhew had used the radio in the patrol car to call the department — and here we all were.

  Deputy Keen had been found quickly, at the end of a blood trail where whoever worked him over had dragged him into the woods maybe a hundred feet from the house. His sidearm was on his belt; so was the rest of his equipment. He had a big gash on his forehead, a broken leg, and possibly a broken neck. Now he was on his way to the emergency room in Brattleboro. If he got there alive, he had a shot, one of the medics said.

  Buster Mayhew was standing around a little apart from the others, looking like he’d forgotten why he was there. I went over to him.

  “You didn’t see him at all, then?” I asked Buster.

  “See who?”

  “The deputy. Deputy Keen? The one just left in the ambulance?”

  “Oh. No, I didn’t see nobody.”

  “Did you look in the house?”

  “The house?”

  “That’s right, the house. This house. The house you caretake. Did you look inside at all, see was anybody around?”

  “Oh. No,” said Buster. “I mostly take care of the outside, you know.”

  “Okay,” I said. Making good use of Buster was not something that got easier with time, it didn’t look like.

  I decided to follow the ambulance to Brattleboro, see how Deputy Keen made out. Then, on the way down, here came Beverly on the radio about a disturbance at the trailer park in Monterey, Crystal Finn’s place. That made me think of Sean. Was he not taking off, after all? Was he still out in the high grass somewhere? He’d better not be. I turned off and went over to Monterey with the lights going.

  Sean wasn’t there, but he had been, and not long since. His clothes and other belongings were scattered all over the yard in front of the trailer: jeans, shirts, underwear, socks, sweatshirts, caps, a shaving kit, a set of barbells. Crystal Finn had thrown them all out the trailer’s door. Then she had kicked some of the clothes into a pile, and now she was on her knees before it with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other, trying to set fire to Sean’s clothes. She was having a hard time getting it to catch. When I got out of the truck and came over to her, Crystal looked up at me and said, “Oh, fuck, it’s you. You got any kerosene?” She was not sober.

  “Where’s Sean?”

  “Not here.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “About five seconds after he told me how he’s been two-timing me with some stuck-up bitch slut whore from Mount Zion.”

  “You mean Morgan Endor?”

  “I don’t know her name,” said Crystal. “If I did . . .”

  I remembered the shotgun Crystal had used on the Cossacks a couple of days ago. I didn’t see it. Maybe it was in the trailer. That was fine by me. It looked like Crystal had come down on the opposite end to mine of the range of choices open to the two-timed.

  “What happened?” I asked her.

  Crystal drank deeply from her beer and nearly tipped over backward. She sat on the ground in front of the pile of Sean’s clothes. A thin curl of smoke had begun to rise from the pile where she had been trying to light it.

  “What happened?” I asked her again.

  “What happened?” she said. “What happened is that that sack of shit, that pig, just got around to telling me he’s been sticking it to what’s-her-name, in Mount Zion, for four months. Four months.”

  “Let’s get you inside,” I said.

  “No,” said Crystal. “Go away.”

  “Come on,” I said. I got her elbow and started to lift her to her feet.

  “No,” said Crystal. “Cut it out.”

  “You’d rather be arrested?”

  “For what?”

  “Unpermitted burn,” I said.

  “Fuck you,” said Crystal. But she stood up, and with my arm around her waist so she didn’t fall, she made it to the trailer.

  “Get some sleep,” I told her.

  “Four months,” said Crystal. “Four months he’s been porking that whore. Four months. We only been together for six.”

  “Is he at her place, probably, then?”

  “I think I’m going to throw up,” said Crystal.

  “Go on inside,” I said. “You’ll be okay.”

  “I won’t be okay,” said Crystal. “I’ll never be okay.”

  “I need to know if Sean’s in Mount Zion now,” I said. “Is he?”

  “No, he’s gone,” said Crystal. “He left. He’s gone.” She started to cry. “Four months,” she said again. “Almost our whole time. It really fucks with your head, you know?”

  “It does,” I said. “I know.”

  I got Crystal into her trailer, got her laid out on her face on the divan. She went right to sleep. I found a blanket and covered her. Then I remembered her dog. I looked around. The dog was there, alright, sitting in the doorway to Crystal’s bedroom, looking straight at me. It was quite an animal: as it sat upright on its haunches, its head was a little above the height of my belt. It let out a low growl. I froze. I kept my eyes on the dog’s. Jackson.

  “Okay, Jackson,” I said. “Okay, now.”

  This dog had about taken an arm off one of those Russians the other day. But now it didn’t offer to move. It cocked its head to one side and gave its tail a wag. It watched me. I watched it. I took a step backward, toward the outside door. I took another.

  “Okay, Jackson,” I said again.

  Jackson stood. He walked over to Crystal, passed out on the divan. He sniffed her face, then he rested his head gently on her back and shifted his eyes to me. He sighed.

  “Okay, Jackson,” I said. I turned to the door. Crystal’s Ithaca was there, leaning against the wall. I broke it down. Then I opened the door and left the trailer, taking the barrels with me.

  I went on down to Brattleboro to the hospital. There I found the news was good. Deputy Keen was going to be alright. He was concussed, and his neck had been wrenched. But it wasn’t broken, and otherwise he had stabled out. His leg was badly fractured, though, and he had two cracked ribs; he’d be laid up for some weeks. He was awake. I could see him if I didn’t stay long.

  Deputy Keen lay in his hospital bed. He looked like an exhibit of what the doctors can do for you when they give it everything they’ve got. He had a big bandage on his head, his middle was taped, he wore a high neck brace, and his left leg, in a cast, was hoisted up on a chain hung from a r
ack above the bed.

  Trooper Timberlake was with him, and so were the two Mounties, big calm fellows who kept telling us they were going to have to get on their way back north and then didn’t move.

  The deputy was telling his story. There wasn’t much to it. He had gotten the idea that the key to this whole business was the Russians’ house. He reckoned either Sean or the Russians or all of them would turn up there sooner or later, so he’d been keeping an eye on the place as best he could. That morning, while I was counting rigs at the Ethan Allen, the deputy had been patrolling in Grenada. He’d driven up to the house, and, lo and behold, here was that big Mercedes parked in the drive.

  Lyle had stopped his patrol car a little way behind the Mercedes, got out, and started toward it, when the driver’s door opened and out climbed maybe the same Russian gorilla I’d seen driving Mr. Smith. Or maybe it wasn’t the same gorilla, because a second later the rest of the doors opened and three more gorillas just as big as the first one got out of the car. One of them leaned back into the rear and came out with a baseball bat. The four of them began walking toward Deputy Keen.

  Lyle told them to stand where they were, but he didn’t know how to say it in Russian, it looks like, so maybe they didn’t understand him. In any case, the four gorillas fanned out a little and kept on coming.

  Deputy Keen reckoned they were down onto it now, or close enough. He reached to unholster his service pistol — and the lights went out. Somebody must have snuck up on him from behind and sandbagged him. He woke up in the intensive care in Brattleboro.

  A nurse came in then and kicked us out. In the hospital parking lot, Trooper Timberlake and I shook hands with the Mounties, and they got back on the road. I went home. I knew I was out of time, here. The business with the Russians had to end. I had to make it end. I was pretty sure I knew how to do that. But I didn’t like it. In sheriffing, you don’t make things happen. You let them happen. You let them end, if you can. But you can’t, not always.

  It was late before I got home that night. I found Clemmie had gone to bed. That suited me. I went into our bedroom. She had left the light on for me. She lay with her back to my side of the bed, her shoulder uncovered. The strap on her nightgown had slipped down over her upper arm. I looked for a minute at the light brown freckles on her bare shoulder and back. I always liked Clemmie’s freckles. In the winter they nearly disappeared, but every summer they came back. They were some of the first things I had seen on her that day at Taft’s years ago when she was a kid, when we were both kids, when the only freckles I knew for sure she had were on her face.

  I didn’t wake her up. I turned the light out and went to the couch in the other room. I undressed and lay down on the couch. I lay on my back. I looked up overhead, where the tilted shadows wheeled and backed across the plaster ceiling as the lights of a car passing in the road came in the dark window. I waited for the next car, the next lights.

  Sean had a horse, a big hunter, withers high as your head, a stallion. He was up on it at the edge of the river, on the bank. Sean wanted to ride the stallion into the river and across, but the stallion wouldn’t go. Sean was putting his heels to it, and the horse kept balking and pivoting away from the river: it wouldn’t go into the water.

  I was on the river bank nearby. I was telling Sean he needed to get a blanket or a sack or something of that nature and put it over his stallion’s head so it couldn’t see the water. Then it would cross alright. Sean didn’t know that. He didn’t know horses. How would he? He didn’t know some horses are afraid of water, moving water, running water. Some horses are afraid of the river.

  Wingate was there, too. He stood to one side, also talking to Sean, or maybe he was talking to me. He said, “It’s like the difference between . . . It’s like the difference between . . . It’s like the difference between . . .” He never finished.

  Sean kept on spurring the stallion, and the stallion kept on shying and circling and dancing away from the river. Hours passed. More hours. It was never going to end, and then it did. It ended when Clemmie came down the bank, walked to the riverside where we were, took the reins from Sean, and led the stallion into the water and across. Easy as pie. On the other side, she slapped the stallion on its rump, and it galloped off with Sean bouncing up and down on its back. They were gone.

  The next morning I was up early. Clemmie was in the kitchen, at the sink. She turned to me as I came in.

  “You were late last night,” she said.

  “I was.”

  “You slept in the other room.”

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  Clemmie looked at me for a minute. Then she turned back to the sink.

  “Are you home for dinner?” she asked me.

  “Far as I know,” I said. “You?”

  “Far as I know.”

  16

  THE STAR

  Sean had some people to see, he’d said. I knew who one of those people was, didn’t I? Sean had some people to see, and then he had a long road ahead of him — or anyway I hoped he had. I hoped it like fury. The road was there. Let him take it.

  Would he be taking it by himself? Clemmie hadn’t been ready to step off the bridge yesterday at the Ethan Allen, but she’d stepped onto it. Was she ready now? Well, I’d find out pretty quick. Wouldn’t I? I’d find out soon enough, but before I did, I had people to see, myself.

  I drove up to Mount Zion about eleven Thursday. Morgan Endor came out the front door of her house and met me on the little porch.

  “Sean’s not here, Sheriff,” she said. “He’s gone away.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You do? How? He only left an hour ago. Have you seen him?”

  “Not today.”

  “Did he call you?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know he’s gone?”

  “He’s pissed in every corner of the pen. When you do that you find a new pen.”

  “Do you know where he’s going?”

  “No.”

  “I do.”

  “You think you do.”

  She smiled and nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “Won’t you come inside, Sheriff?”

  She led me through a sitting room and into her kitchen. Her cat was lying on the floor in the sun, but when I came in it got to its feet, stretched, and walked out of the room.

  “Sean said you’d probably be stopping by,” said Morgan Endor.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He left something for you.”

  “I thought he might.”

  “He left the thing you were asking about.”

  “Good.”

  She sat me down at a table and took the chair across from me. We sat facing each other, quite close. I’d guessed wrong about her age the other day, it looked like. I mean, I’d guessed wrong, again. I’d put her around forty, but now I saw there was a good deal of gray in her hair, and her hands were thin and dry. Morgan Endor was no forty: she was looking at fifty, no question, and maybe looking from the wrong side.

  “Sheriff?” she said. “Do you hear me?”

  “Say what?”

  “I said I want you to know Sean only brought it here last night, your thing,” she said. “It wasn’t here when you came last weekend. I didn’t know about it. I wasn’t lying to you.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “But you thought it,” she said. “You thought I was lying to protect Sean. You thought I was in love with Sean. You thought Sean had fucked me until my brains fell out. You thought Sean had fucked me stupid.”

  “It’s been known to happen,” I said.

  “Not to me,” said Morgan Endor.

  “No, probably not.”

  “Would you like to see my work with Sean?”

  “You mean your pictures?”

  “My pictures, yes.”

  “Maybe some other time.”

  “There is no other time, Sheriff,” she said. “They’ll be packed and shipped over the weekend. The
shippers will be here tomorrow, actually. I’m flying out of JFK Monday. Don’t you want to see them?”

  “I’d rather see the other thing,” I said. “The box.”

  “You can see that, too, Sheriff. You can see everything. Come with me.”

  We went into a hall and upstairs. The whole second floor of the house was one big room. It was fitted up like a picture gallery, full of light from a row of skylights in the roof, plain white walls, no carpets. Morgan Endor started walking slowly around the room, not speaking, and I followed her. We looked at the pictures hung on the walls. They were hung in a single band around the room, about eye height. Twenty-five or thirty pictures.

  I admit when the lady had first told me about taking pictures of Sean, I thought I knew what kind of pictures she was talking about. I was wrong. In each of the pictures Sean was looking straight into the camera, face-on. And in each he was wearing a different get-up, a different costume. Not simple costumes, either. In one Sean was dressed like one of the Three Musketeers, in velvet and lace and carrying a sword and wearing a hat with — what is a big feather they wore in their hats back then? — a hat with a plume. In one he was dressed like a western cowboy. Sean was a judge in a black robe, a priest in a dog collar, a skin diver with a face mask and a spear gun, an old-fashioned gent in a fancy suit and a vest. He was a farmer, a soldier, an astronaut, a Roman gladiator, an ancient Greek in one of the sheets they wore, a jockey in silks. I mean, there was even a photo of Sean dressed as a lady singer, like a nightclub singer, in a long gown, with makeup, a wig, and a string of pearls. There was one where he was dressed as a policeman.