Happy Policeman (14 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two

“I want to see my family now,” DeWitt said.

“Yes,” Seresen replied, but stopped at the drugstore instead.

It had been damaged by fire. The back wall was scorched, and through a hole in the roof snow was falling, making a drift on the magazine rack. Hip-deep in snow, a swim-suited model on a six-year-old
Cosmopolitan
smiled glossily up at DeWitt.

He realized that Seresen was standing quietly at his shoulder. “There was more fighting while I was locked up.”

Seresen turned to watch his workers set electric appliances on the sooted linoleum: Mr. Coffees, woks, space heaters. “Things are better, now. I think the gasoline may be gone.”

“Look at me.”

Seresen turned those shrimp-pink eyes to him.

“Tell me the truth. Did you kill anybody?”

A worker stopped what he was doing to watch them with alarm.

“Yes, “ the Kol said.

DeWitt touched the snow near the
Cosmopolitan
model’s bare thigh. The paper had gone wavy with moisture, as if the woman were crinkling in on herself with cold; or with shame.

“Who? Curtis?”

“Yes. Because you believe it, it has come to be. Curtis is dead. Now that I have said it, it becomes true, so I am guilty as well.”

The corner stank of old damp smoke. DeWitt’s eyes stung. “My family?”

“Because you believe it and now I say it, your family is dead. In other worlds Torku kill humans and humans kill Torku with no reason other than your belief.”

“Seresen, are you lying again?”

“There are no lies. Not ever. In deciding what to have for breakfast, you alter existence. I tell you humans and Torku live in peace. Can’t you believe that?”

“I want to see.”

“Yes, yes.” Abruptly Seresen walked out of the store. Someone had painted an erect penis on the crosswalk sign’s stick figure, DeWitt saw as he climbed into the truck. And up the street, The Fashion Plate, like the bank and the police station, was gutted. The windows were shattered. Sweaters hung like thick, black liquid from distorted racks.

“Darnelle?” DeWitt asked.

“Dead, dead. Yes, all dead,” the Kol said in exasperation. They drove by the Biblical Truth Church, where a small crowd had gathered. DeWitt caught sight of a short, bulky figure standing with the rest.

“Stop the van.”

“No.”

“That’s Curtis back there. Stop the van!”

“No. “

DeWitt grabbed for the door handle, but the Torku worker stationed beside him was quicker, pinning him against the wall until the church was out of sight.

“Some people sleep there now. They gather to visit and share food. The church has electric central heating.”

DeWitt stopped struggling, and the Torku let him go. “Why didn’t you want me to speak to Curtis? What are you afraid he’ll say?”

“I think you will kill more people in other places, and I am tired of it. It is why we came here, to teach at least one of your people the truth, so resonance may be sustained. You are a perturbation in the universe. Those people at the church can’t help what they do, but you have been told the difference.”

“Did you ever wonder if there are people in those other places thinking bad things about us? I don’t see the point.”

“Responsibility is the point.” Seresen geared down. “Reciprocity is the point. The borders of existence are permeable. Who knows what we will decide for breakfast and in doing so change a world? We must treat each universe as gently as we treat our own.”

Ahead was a black kid in a blue snowsuit, his gloved hand raised like a crossing guard in an elementary school poster. The van crunched to a halt a good twenty feet from the boy.

The snow had stopped. Sun shone though a thin blanket of cloud, casting crystalline light over the day. DeWitt noticed how the light picked out the citrus-peel texture of the Torku’s dappled skin. The boy lowered his hand and stood, looking up the hill to his right.

DeWitt wondered what the kid was waiting for.

“Maybe we shouldn’t stop here,” he said.

Seresen ignored him. The van’s engine rumbled like a contented tiger. The vibration made the dashboard buzz.

“It’s dangerous stopping like this.”

The kid looked back at the van, then up the hill again. DeWitt wished he could see what the kid was seeing. The black child’s face was wrapped in a muffler; a hood was over his head.

Shrill screams, as sharp as rifle shots. DeWitt flinched, accidently pushing the Torku worker hard against the door.

Down the hill came a flash of red and yellow and black. A little girl was riding the snowy incline on an inner tube, her blond hair flying. Two more kids came sledding after, one riding on his stomach backward.

The kid in the blue snowsuit took a last look up the hill, then waved the van through.

As they drove past, DeWitt saw Denny standing with Linda. Linda was blowing up their old air mattress. Tammy was with a teenage boy DeWitt didn’t recognize.

“We are dead,” Seresen said. “Caught in an ambush by humans with gasoline bombs. Are you happy now?”

The Kol goosed the accelerator, jerking the van forward, making it fishtail. The Torku worker turned an anguished orange and his shapeless face crumpled into an expression of despair.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Sin wasn’t a stench, it was cockroaches. Jimmy Schoen knew that now. He could hear scuttling in the walls. When he walked the church floor, he felt the crunch of carapaces. Brown bodies crawled over the food on the table, food that the sinners had brought.

The church had the air of a tawdry winter festival. There was gaiety and laughing, but Schoen didn’t smile.

Couldn’t they see that the sinners dirtied things? That they left disease where they swarmed? But his parishioners talked proudly of Christian charity. They murmured God’s grace as they passed out sandwiches and punch.

Schoen frowned, a shepherd displeased with his sheep. The faithful had lost their conviction somewhere between the burning of Darnelle’s store and the holy conflagration of the pharmacy. In the end, his own congregation had put out the fires.

Schoen was cold despite the crowd. He pushed by Granger, avoiding the touch of his chitinous back.

“Dee Dee?” Schoen called.

Dee Dee and one of the bake-sale ladies bracketed Hubert Foster. His wife had still not fixed her hair.

“Dee Dee?” he said sharply. “We’ll go to the parsonage now.”

“Just a minute, hone I was going to get Hubie a Coke. Sharon, wouldn’t you like a Coke, too? And maybe another smidgen of Martha Johnson’s apple pie?”

“Do you think I should?” Sharon asked worriedly. “I feel bloated. What do you think?”

“Well,” Foster said after a moment’s study. “Just around the eyes.”

The woman squealed in dismay, and covered her face with her hands. “I knew it! I bet I’ve gained ten pounds—”

“Dee Dee?” Schoen asked.

Without turning, his wife waved a hand in his direction. “Now Sharon, you look just fine. I bet Hubie wouldn’t have noticed at all if you hadn’t called it to his attention. Maybe you’re just tired. Don’t you think that’s it, Hubie?” Dee Dee asked pointedly. “She just looks a little peaked.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Dee Dee?” Schoen raised his voice.

She patted Sharon’s knee. “See? That’s it. Just a little tired.”

“Maybe I will have that Coke, then,” Sharon said. She sounded uncertain. But when Dee Dee got to her feet, she added, “And half of a sour-cream brownie.”

Schoen caught his wife’s arm. “We’re leaving.”

“I would, honey. Believe me, I would. But there’s so much to take care of. Hubie wants a Coke. Sharon wants a Coke. I have to keep an eye on the coffee maker.” She pulled her arm from his grasp and went to the refreshment table.

Schoen stalked to the door, hearing whispers soft as six-legged feet in his wake. From the back of the church a shout of contemptuous laughter. Schoen’s face burned. He shouldered his way though the double doors and into a blast of icy wind.

Outside, adults had gathered to help children make a snowman. Children who came to Sunday school toiled alongside those who did not.

Morning, preacher,” the dope-dealing mayor said. “I been looking for Dee Dee. Where’d she run off to?”

Schoen didn’t stop. Head down, he shoved against the contrary wind, his coat flapping around him.

Chapter Thirty-Four

On the eighth day of DeWitt’s second imprisonment, Seresen woke him up. “We are going. You will drive.”

Seresen got into the squad car. DeWitt plucked the keys from the trunk and climbed behind the wheel. As the garage wall slid open to darkness, DeWitt checked his watch. Five-thirty in the morning.

“Deliveries?”

“No.”

DeWitt backed into the lot. The snow had melted, except for patches under the trees.

Seresen pointed. “This way.”

DeWitt turned right. “Where we going?”

“To Hell,” the Kol replied grumpily. “Isn’t that where Pastor Jimmy says you humans go if you do incorrect things?”

DeWitt followed Seresen’ s gestured direction, left. They were heading away from town.

“To Hell. You and I together. Isn’t that what you want?”

“Not really.”

“Then what is it you want?”

“Look, Seresen, I’m not going to get into an argument with you. “

“Yes, yes. I might kill you or something. You and I, we’ve killed before. Turn here.”

DeWitt nearly missed the turn. The entrance to the overgrown dirt trail was slick with muddy ice. The car skidded. DeWitt spun out of it with a dull patter of mud in the wheel wells.

Brush tickled the car doors. “We need a four-wheel drive for this, Seresen. We’re going to get stuck.”

After a mile or so of obdurate silence, Seresen ordered DeWitt to stop. “And turn off the engine, please. There is no need to waste gas.”

DeWitt obeyed. Wind chattered in the ice-coated branches. “Extinguish the headlights also. You will deplete the battery.”

DeWitt’s ears picked out the liquid sound of a stream to his right.

“Get out of the car,” Seresen said.

“Why? What are you going to do?”

“I will get out of the car as well.”

To their left the sun was rising, turning the sky a delicate pink. The alien made his way through the damp shadows and stopped under a pine. DeWitt slogged after.

“Stay here,” Seresen said.

DeWitt’s puzzled gaze followed him back down the incline to the car. When the alien opened the door, he startled a flock of grackles. Framed in the car’s interior glow, he turned to watch the birds’ raucous flight, as if reading pattern in it.

DeWitt hugged himself. The cold air held the crisp scent of evergreens and the mellow odor of sylvan decay. Down the hill he heard the car door slam. He waited for the sound of a hotwired starter. There was only more stirring of birds. A solitary bat flitted across the sky, its flight like a scrap of black paper.

The tip of DeWitt’s nose was cold. His nose ran. He snuffled and pulled his face lower into his beaver collar. A rising sun, still behind the hill to the east, was forcing the sky to choose between pink and apricot.

He glanced down the hill again. Seresen was a dark, motionless shape framed by the car window. DeWitt was tired, sleepy, and not in the best of moods. He wanted to give up, walk down the hill, and tell Seresen that he had won. Order, as DeWitt knew it, sucked. It had taken his wife, turned the town against him, made him a murder suspect. Law and order certainly hadn’t brought him peace. He looked down at his blue uniform and wondered why he ever wanted to be a policeman.

Then he noticed something orange by the trees. He walked toward it curiously. A piece of colored construction paper. No, a flagman’s signal somehow forgotten there in the forest debris.

He jumped back, slipped, and went down on one knee. The orange was a sleeve. In the sleeve was part of a hand, two of its fingers missing.

Scrabbling in the mud and leaves, DeWitt retreated, his pulse a kettledrum. “Oh,” he said in the small voice of a man who has walked in on a woman dressing.

Now that he knew what was lying in the shallow, rocky grave, he could see the patterned sole of a dirty Nike and a gourd shape that wore a patch of brown hair.

He sat down hard on a log. The red, bloated sun had climbed the hill and was peering at him through the trees by the time he decided that he could stand. Then he did what he knew he had to do. What order required. He walked over and studied the bodies.

The boys were on their stomachs, the older slightly over the younger, as though even now he was trying to protect him. Rain and wind had uncovered the backs of their heads, and patches of scalp showed in a parody of male pattern balding.

Even before DeWitt knelt, he knew what had caused their deaths. Holes had been punched through the yellowing craniums, as if beaked creatures inside had fought their way to birth. The murder weapon, a jagged piece of concrete, had been buried with the bodies.

He heard the
sluck-sluck
of footsteps in the mud. Seresen was coming up the hill.

DeWitt said sadly, “Look what you’ve done.”

A breeze rustled the pines. “Nothing has happened. You must say that.”

DeWitt got to his feet and dusted off his hands, a useless gesture. His pants were muddy from belt to cuff. “Fuck!” Picking up a clod of dirt, he threw it at a tree. “The problem with you people is that nothing’s real!”

“Everything is real. Belief the most real thing of all. I know that someplace the children are well and happy.”

“Why’d you do it? Because the boys hurt one of the Torku?”

Seresen turned on his flat heel and walked down to the car. “I will not play your ignorant game anymore.”

It was a long while before DeWitt came down and opened the trunk. He rummaged behind the trash bag of dope, around the evidence Foster–for mere survival–had planted against him. There he found the small camping shovel he kept for highway emergencies. He picked up the tire iron.

Walking around to the passenger side, he tapped the tire iron against the glass. “Get out.”

After a hesitation, the alien obeyed.

DeWitt pushed the camping shovel into the Kol’s hand. “Damn you. We’re going to bury the kids right this time.”