All That I Have Read online

  “That one’s for you, Sheriff,” said Morgan Endor.

  “For me?”

  “I’ll sell it to you. Of course, you’ll have to wait until the show is over.”

  “The show?”

  “The show in Paris, Sheriff. Paris, France? Remember? I told you.”

  “So you did.”

  I looked around the room. We had seen all the pictures. We were standing in front of the one of Sean as a cop.

  “I’ll reserve this one,” she said. “The gallery won’t sell it. You can have it when the show comes down.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Five thousand dollars,” said Morgan. “Or, no, we’ll say fortyfive hundred. Law enforcement discount.”

  “Out of my range.”

  “Really? Pity. But, I’m curious, Sheriff. What do you think? What do you see?” She swept her arm around the room.

  What did I see? All those pictures, all those clothes. All those different people, all Sean. At first they were funny, more than anything, I guess; then they weren’t. Sean was always looking out at you with the same kind of look, no look, like he was having his photo taken at the motor vehicle department for his driver’s license. He didn’t care what get-up he had on, didn’t even know, maybe. Was he having fun? It didn’t look that way. Was he pretending to be whatever he was dressed up to be? That would be fun, wouldn’t it, for a while anyway? But no, he wasn’t. Sean wasn’t part of what he was doing. He was the little kid in the graveyard again, in his too-big jacket and his too-long tie, waiting while the grownups buried his father.

  “What do you see?” Morgan Endor asked again.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s always him, ain’t it?”

  “That’s right, Sheriff. It’s always Sean. That’s why I used him.”

  I nodded.

  “Sean is all inside,” she said. “I told you that earlier. He lives inside himself, he never comes outside, he doesn’t even know there is such a place as outside himself. That’s why he appears the way he does in these images. Wherever you put him, he’s always the same. That’s what you see.”

  “That’s what you see. I see a dumb kid in a bunch of funny clothes you hung on him to play some game of your own.”

  “You underestimate me, Sheriff,” she said. “You certainly underestimate Sean. What Sean has you can’t buy, you can’t acquire. He’s like an actor, a great actor. Don’t you see? Give Sean any part. He’s in it, but it’s as you say: He’s always Sean. You always know him. Sean’s a star, Sheriff.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “Of course you don’t. Do you know why you don’t see it?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re the same thing — the same as Sean. More than Sean.”

  “I’m a star?”

  “To your fingertips, Sheriff. I’m only sorry it wasn’t you who came to fix my roof.”

  “I ain’t.”

  “We should work together, actually. We should do a series. We really should.”

  “A series?”

  “A series of images, like these,” said Morgan Endor. “You’d see what I mean, I promise you, you would. What about it? I’ll be back in Vermont next spring.”

  “I thought you didn’t work on old men,” I said.

  “In your case, Sheriff, I’d consider making an exception. I could take you, Sheriff. I could take you all the way.”

  “No chance,” I said.

  “But why not?”

  “I can’t tell you all the reasons.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “There’s too many.”

  “How many?”

  “I’m not an educated man,” I told her. “I can’t count that high.”

  She smiled. “You make my point, Sheriff,” she said.

  “You want to show me what Sean left for me now?” I said.

  “Alright, Sheriff.”

  We went back downstairs and into a little room off the kitchen, a bedroom. On the floor was a steel safe about the size of a case of beer — a bigger thing than I’d have thought. And solid. There were some scars in its finish from the shots Sean and Crystal had fired at it, but them aside, that safe might have been sitting on the shelf in the safe store, brand new. Only Sean would have thought he could get into that thing with a sledgehammer, or with a gun, the way they do on TV.

  “There’s a note,” said Morgan Endor.

  It was lying on top of the safe, a piece of lined paper, folded once. I picked it up and opened it.

  SHERF LUCIN

  HERS YOUR FOKIG BOX. GIVE IT TO YOUR FUKIG KOMIE SPIKS + TELL THEM TO STUCK IT. TELL KRISTLL THT DEPTY IS A PUSY. HA

  RESPETFULY

  S. DUKE

  PS TELL CLAMMY I SAD BI. HA

  “Clammy’s my wife,” I said. “Clemmie.”

  “I know who Clemmie is.”

  “She and Sean are friends.”

  “I know that, too, Sheriff.”

  “Sean told you?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know, then?”

  “Don’t worry about Clemmie, Sheriff. She isn’t going anywhere.”

  “She ain’t? Ain’t she a star, too, like the rest of us?”

  “No. She’s not.”

  “She’s just the regular thing, then? The straight thing? Is that it?”

  “That’s it, Sheriff.”

  “But there’s Sean,” I said. “What about Sean?”

  “What about him? Do you think she wants Sean?”

  “I don’t know what she wants.”

  “I do.”

  “What?”

  “You.”

  “Me? She’s got me.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t think so.”

  Morgan Endor was looking at me. She shook her head. Then she said, “You’re a smart man, Sheriff — as stars go, I mean. You want to open your eyes, though.”

  “They are open.”

  She smiled at me.

  “You think so, Sheriff?” she asked. She turned and led the way back into her sitting room. I carried the safe. Her cat must have known I was getting ready to leave, because it came into the room, found the patch of sun it had left earlier, and flopped down on the floor.

  “What happens to the cat?” I asked Morgan Endor.

  “How do you mean, Sheriff?”

  “You’re leaving. You won’t be back till next year. Cat’s not going to Paris with you.”

  “No.”

  “What do you do about it, then?”

  “Nothing,” said Morgan Endor. “The cat can take care of itself.”

  I’m a star, the lady said. That’s a good thing to be, ain’t it, a star? I’ve been called a lot of things, but that’s a new one. Well, it’s changing times, ain’t it? The way I said before, we’ve got different kinds of people passing through here from what there used to be. Take the Russians. Take Morgan Endor. People you never do get.

  But you can get them partway. The Russians? I get them. They’re evildoers. Morgan Endor? Don’t know. I could take you all the way, Sheriff. I doubt it. I doubt it like hell. But I don’t know. And it don’t matter, now. Sean’s off. Maybe I didn’t get Morgan Endor all the way through, or even close, but I got enough. I got more than Sean. (Well, according to what you mean by “got.”) With Morgan Endor, Sean was like — what is the insect where in mating the fellow climbs onto the lady and goes right to his work, keeps at it, having a hell of a time, and then when he gets done he finds she’s eaten him up from the head down to the shoulders? Like a big, long-necked grasshopper, it is. With Morgan, that was Sean. He thought he was the do-er. He wasn’t. He was the do-ee. I wondered if he’d ever figure that out.

  And where does Morgan get so smart about Clemmie? Who Clemmie is, what Clemmie’s going to do or not do, what Clemmie wants. She don’t even know Clemmie. She don’t know Clemmie, she don’t know me. We don’t need some foreigner, some artist, to tell us what we want. We can take care of ourselves, Clemmie and me.

  1
7

  EVERYBODY LOVES HONEY

  “Well,” Wingate said, “that don’t help; that don’t tell you much, does it? That don’t help much, putting it that way.”

  “That’s the way you put it,” I said.

  “No, it ain’t,” said Wingate.

  We were sitting out back at Wingate’s. He had a little yard behind his place in South Cardiff. Wingate didn’t get around very well the last couple of years, but he could still mostly take care of himself. He had a visiting nurse who came in every other day, and he had friends who stopped by to lend a hand, or just to visit. I was one of them. I got over to Wingate’s every couple of weeks. “Going to Delphi,” Addison called it. Good old Addison.

  A brook ran at the bottom of Wingate’s yard. We sat in a couple of camp chairs set up on the grass and listened to the brook running over its stones and watched Wingate’s bees coming and going around their hives. We didn’t talk a lot. The older Wingate grew, the less he had to say. When you were with him, you got to be the same way, it looked like.

  “How’s your deputy?” Wingate asked at last.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Nurse Penelope, there, told me.”

  “You don’t miss much, do you?”

  “Not much,” said Wingate. “I can’t. You want to know what’s going on, you want to know what’s developing, get yourself a visiting nurse. She’ll let you know, whether you want her to or not — especially if it’s bad.”

  “He’ll be okay, they say. Might take awhile,” I said.

  “He’s a ball of fire, ain’t he?” said Wingate. “That deputy.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Nurse Penelope said he took on eight, nine men.”

  “Five. They took him on, more like.”

  “Still,” said Wingate. “That’s a coming young fellow, there, ain’t he? Injured in the line of duty? He’s up for a commendation, they say.”

  “They say.”

  “That kind of thing goes good in the papers,” said Wingate. “Attracts attention. For a young fellow looking to rise, I mean.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It looks good to the voters,” said Wingate.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Shows energy,” said Wingate. “Shows initiative. Not like your old time-servers, just sit around and let things slide.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Voters like to see that, initiative.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “ ’Course,” said Wingate, “it may show initiative, but it don’t show a lot of sense, it don’t show a lot of smarts, does it, to get into that kind of thing to begin with? Five on one? No backup?”

  I didn’t answer him. We sat for a while and watched the bees. Wingate had three hives set up in a row at the edge of the woods that went along the brook.

  “Not much of a year for honey,” said Wingate after a few minutes.

  “No?”

  “Not really. Haven’t had a good year in some time. Cold springs, maybe. Bee diseases. And then, fellow down the road had six hives. Bear came in one night, smashed them all up. Totaled them. He had to start again from scratch.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Now the fellow’s put in a big steel fence, an electric fence, around his hives. I saw it. Quite a setup. You don’t know if he’s running bees or a prison.”

  “No fence for you, though, I guess?” I said.

  “I guess not,” said Wingate. “I don’t like them.”

  “Ain’t you afraid the same bear will come down the mountain one night and get your hives?”

  “No, I ain’t. No bear will try it on around my place.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m the sheriff.”

  “You’re retired.”

  “Bear don’t know that.”

  “Do you remember that fellow Mort?” I asked. “Over here in Dead River?”

  “Shot by his missus?” said Wingate.

  “That one.”

  “Sure, I remember him,” said Wingate. “Hard to forget a thing like that, ain’t it?”

  “How do you do something like that?” I asked.

  “Nothing to it,” said Wingate. “You point the gun. You pull the trigger. Gun goes bang. You’ve done it.”

  “I don’t mean her,” I said. “I mean him. Mort. He was ready to blow them both up. He tried to do it, too. How do you do that? How do you get there?”

  “You lose it, it looks like,” said Wingate.

  “But how? How do you lose it?”

  Wingate shook his head.

  “ ’Course,” I said, “some people would say he was right, Mort. Some did say it.”

  “Some people will say anything,” said Wingate. “It ain’t right if you’re dead.”

  “No.”

  “Nothing develops, nothing gets better if you’re dead. You’re alive, things can get better.”

  “They can also get worse.”

  Wingate shrugged. “Well . . .”

  “Tough to come home and find her like that, with some fellow,” I said.

  “Sure, it’s tough,” said Wingate. “But people are going to do what they’re going to do, it looks like. You can’t stop them. You shouldn’t try. That’s where you get in trouble.”

  “Mort thought he could stop them,” I said.

  “Be hard to prove he was right, though, wouldn’t it?” said Wingate. “With the way things developed.”

  Now a cat came walking into Wingate’s yard from the left, not sneaking around, but walking stiff-legged, almost strutting. It passed near the beehives, slowed down, looked at us, and went on across and out of the yard. We had a good crop of cats, here and there, that summer, no question.

  “Whose cat?” I asked Wingate.

  “Next door’s,” said Wingate. “He comes through every day about now. He’d like to get to the hives, too, but he knows what would happen if he tried.”

  “What would happen?”

  “He’d get stung.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I thought you meant you’d get after him some way.”

  “No,” said Wingate. “There ain’t much I could do to him. The bees can take care of themselves.”

  “Except for if it’s a bear,” I said.

  “Well, yes. Except for then,” said Wingate.

  “Or a cold spring, or bee diseases,” I said. Wingate nodded.

  “I didn’t know a cat would go for honey,” I said.

  “Everybody loves honey,” said Wingate.

  We sat without talking for some little time.

  “Nurse Penelope said she heard, she understood it was out-ofstaters busted up your deputy, there,” said Wingate.

  “They’re Russians,” I said.

  “That’s out of state, ain’t it?”

  “It is.”

  “They’re a pretty rank outfit, I guess,” said Wingate.

  “They are.”

  “What are you going to do about them?”

  “I’m going to make them go away,” I said.

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “I’m going to reason with them,” I said.

  “Same way you reasoned with the Duke boy?”

  “Sean?”

  “That one. He was mixed up in that thing, wasn’t he? What happened with him?”

  “That nurse keeps you right up to speed, don’t she?”

  “I told you.”

  “I cut him loose.”

  “You did?”

  “That’s right. He’s moved on.”

  “I thought he broke into their place up on the Gold Coast,” said Wingate.

  “He did.”

  “And you cut him loose?”

  “I did.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “I do,” said Wingate. “It’s in the Bible. Fellow’s a shepherd, fellow has a hundred sheep. One goes missing. What does he do? He goes after the one, leaves the other ninety-
nine. Good luck to them. They can take care of themselves. Does that make sense? Well, no, it don’t. Not really. The value’s in the ninety-nine, ain’t it? Not in the one. You write off the one. That makes sense. What the Bible fellow did don’t make sense, but he did it anyway. Everybody does.”

  “Is that why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why I cut Sean loose?”

  “That’s one reason, ain’t it?”

  “There’s another?”

  “There’s always another,” said Wingate.

  He leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on his knees. He looked out across the yard, past the beehives, and into the woods.

  “I used to tell you,” he said, “you deputies? Years ago? I used to say, ‘You go out as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.’ ”

  “I remember. That’s the Bible again, ain’t it?”

  “You bet.”

  “You’re all over the Bible today, ain’t you?”

  “Nurse Penelope’s a lay reader,” said Wingate.

  “I might have known.”

  “You’ve about got the dove part down, it looks like,” said Wingate. “You might need to work on the serpent part.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I got that part down, too. Plus, the serpent part ain’t sheriffing.”

  “It ain’t?”

  “No. People are going to do what they’re going to do.”

  “Well,” Wingate said, “but that don’t tell you too much, does it? That don’t help much, putting it that way.”

  “That’s the way you put it,” I said.

  “No,” said Wingate. “I put it that you were to do the job. Never mind how it sounds later, when you say it right out — just do it at the time you’ve got it to do. Do your job. I put it that way. Do the job.”

  “But you didn’t say what the job was.”