Homicide My Own (25 page)

Now, the cigarette hangs stuck to his lips, and he stands nonplused. It is not a truck just like Jimmy’s—it
is
Jimmy’s truck, backed into the same spot, and this wet night no different really from that one, except that he is old now. His breath comes hard.

He walks an arc over rutted tracks and goes into a stand of trees, as before. He squats for a moment, the shotgun level across his legs, and he listens, as before, and, as before, he hears: murmurs, the mouth music of a young girl, a sleepy giggle, filling him with desire and despair.

Only several steps separate him from the driver’s side. As he takes the steps the window slowly rolls down. He is not only seen and noted, he is recognized.

The hooded head is turned slightly toward Jeannie and blocks part of her face. Will no one say anything, this time? He feels no rage, this time. Only a blackness in his heart and a thing he must redo. He pumps a shell into the chamber.

But a high-pitched whistle shrieks above his head and he crouches involuntarily and looks above: a golden shower of sparks bouncing light off the fog. He is eye-level with the window. They look at him as though
he
were the ghost, and he himself is sure of nothing now.

He rises to his full height. He brings up the shotgun and now the air around him, on all sides, is hammered: explosions on all four sides.He feels compressed, unable to breathe freely. The next explosion is his own, fired into the cab of the truck. But no one is inside. The passenger door is open. He looks for them. They are running into the trees, hand in hand, screaming, either in terror or delight, or both. He pumps again and shoots over the hood of the truck, but they have disappeared.

The sky lights up again, cracking, chattering, exploding. He is blinded by the light, deafened by the din. He looks for his spent shells.

In a flash of light, he sees the Spokane cop, in the clearing, in uniform, just standing there, watching him, studying him. This is the one the Indians say is the reincarnation of Jeannie. He pumps another shell into the chamber and puts the shotgun to his shoulder.

It was an outrageous plan, off-the-wall, according to no book, as if we had ever read any of those books. We were not tacticians, not detectives nor sting operatives. What we were was: “See the man, see the woman, domestic dispute at, tail light out, expired plates, rear door ajar at, dead dog at…”

It was the kind of plan behind which, if done well, someone was likely to be shot. Engineered by Odd, who was at best in a dream state, it was the kind of plan in which
everyone
would get shot.

Odd stood there in the clearing, arms akimbo, under the lights and the pounding of the ingeniously platformed fireworks set up by Calvin and Rap Boy, the Indian pyrotechnos, staring down the killer of his former self, daring him to do it again, on into eternity, if it worked out that way, because that’s as good a hell as any.

Having helped with lighting the fuses, with perfect timing, I must say, I hunkered down behind a tree and now had three choices: shoot Nascine (not an option, really, I’m a terrible shot), watch my partner bite it, or take the running dive and try to knock Odd out of the pellet pattern. I took the dive, ready for anything but where I would land.

Korea. In the dead of winter.

Chosin Reservoir.

A place I had never heard of, yet now was suddenly as well-observed as an ancient curse.

It was cold enough to freeze the blood of the corpses we were using as barricades. There were four of us left alive: Gertz, Fischer, my boyhood pal Tommy Hill, and me, Clarence Washington. Tommy and I had played basketball together, at Overbrook High, Philadelphia. After graduation we went to work on the same day at the same plant, Standard Pressed Steel. Now we were U.S. Marines, making a stand, surrounded by our frozen dead, trying to knock out a sniper’s nest, so that at best we could go somewhere else to get killed.

The Chinese had 120,000 men; we had 15,000.

A wave of them came at us. We would be overrun. We shot from the hip.

Gertz went down and a second later Fischer’s face exploded.

“Good bye,” said Tommy.

“I love you,” said I.

I took a bayonet in the arm, reached around for my fallen weapon and came up with a camp shovel. I sliced half-way through the neck of the soldier behind the bayonet and drove the shovel into the chest of another. I pushed Tommy away from one thrust, only to throw him into the path of another. Then, all the air I had went out through my chest at the point of the bayonet that went into my back, and that’s the last I knew of it, until this very moment, this moment of flying through the air, heart pounding, to knock Odd away from the shot Nascine took at him.

We lay in the mud, looking at each other, Tommy, Odd, Tommy, Odd….Quinn, Clarence, Quinn, Clarence.

“My God,” he said, “we’ve always been together!”

“You were there, just now?”

“Korea.”

We held each other, now on the wet American soil, pinned down again, this time by Nascine, who stood over us and pumped a fresh shell into the chamber. Honestly, neither one of us cared. He didn’t matter anymore.

The Deputy put the shotgun to his shoulder.

“Why did you suddenly want to buy the truck?” I asked. “Just curious.”

“You don’t know?” he asked.

“I do,” said Odd. “When you killed Jimmy, Jeannie tried to run. You chased her and brought her down with a baton blow, back of her knee. You were going to finish her off right there, right here, in the mud, but the look of fear in her face aroused the real monster in you, the one that has always lived there. You dragged her to the back of the truck, out of the rain, on the mover’s pad Jimmy had spread out back there, and you raped her. You raped her with the boy she loved sitting in the cab, where she could see him, with his head blown off. Then you sat her next to him, and by that time she welcomed the shot that you fired. The only hard evidence, the notebook, you stole, so you had no worries. Until I came along, because I would know, wouldn’t I? And in the years that have passed, DNA would be discovered, and the back of that truck was still loaded with your DNA, your semen, and no way to explain it.”

“Guess what?” he said. “I’m gettin’ a little aroused right now. But, c’mon, you can tell me, how do you know all that?”

“You don’t know?” said Odd, giving his own words back to him.

“That shit about you being Jeannie, reincarnated? No, that don’t fly.”

“Jeannie talked herself into loving you, for about two minutes. It was how she tried to deal with her own shame….and disgust.”

“Disgust?”

“Disgust and confusion. It was her first time. She was young and inexperienced. She didn’t understand why a grown man would cry like a baby, after an orgasm.”

If I could have touched Nascine with a stick at that moment, he would have cracked into a thousand little pieces. But I was still in the mud with Odd, watching the Deputy’s finger on the trigger.

”Good bye,” said Odd.

“I love you,” said I.

Now, from the trees behind us, a sharp crack, and Nascine yanked back as though on a string, right out of one of his clamming boots.

Odd and I disembraced each other.

Chief Shining Pony walked out of the trees behind us, cradling a 30-30 carbine. He didn’t ask after our well-being, and he didn’t check out Nascine. He didn’t have to. Some deaths have a way of leaving no doubt. What he did say, with an economy I appreciated, was, “That’s that.”

“Thought you didn’t want any part of this,” I said.

“Only this part.”

I sat where I was and watched Nascine. He lay motionless, his mouth open to the fog, his body slowly settling into the mud. What now, I wondered. Clarity gone, all linkage broken, attachments let go, fluids drying, skin cooling. Not a life led well; an existence gone monstrous. Was it over? All that was over, I realized, was that nicotine stained body lying in the mud. The true Nascine was moving on. Would he get it right this time, would he find compassion and identification with his fellow human beings? Would he even be a human being, or did he lose that blessing? Would I know him when I saw him again, or should I always be aware that he could be anybody?

I arose from the mud with a sense of calm and well-being. My felon and his willing victim were probably half-way to Canada. I could care less.

20.

We hit I-90 East just as dawn was cracking, or as is the case in Seattle, insinuating itself. This time, Odd was driving. One of his tapes was on. “Driving-into-Dawn Music.”

Against all my predictions, Houser and Stacey had done the right thing, finding their way to Tribal Headquarters and calling 911. So we were taking Houser back after all and our careers, at least for now, were still intact. Of course, we had Stacey and her mother too, all in the cage in the back, their luggage filling our trunk, with our muddy uniforms. We were back in our casual civvies.

When we went back to the Coyotes and woke everybody up, Odd was the one who told them who had killed their son, so long ago. They took the info and just nodded. Cammy, the newly widowed, had a tearful moment and closed the book on a lifetime of regret. Chief Shining Pony had stayed behind to deal with the minutia of a violent death and the closing of a 33-year-old murder case.

Odd took an hour and went off alone to talk to the woman who used to be his mother in another life. Whatever happened there I don’t know and Odd never said.

We had a lot to talk about, the five of us, and the rehash carried us all the way to Ellensberg. His underaged girlfriend was concerned about what would happen to Houser now.

“Can’t you put in a good word for him? He did help you.”

“Sure,” I said, “we’ll say that he was very helpful.”

“You’re not just saying that?” asked Stacey, ever distrustful of me.

“Credit where credit’s due. He may be a disgusting short-eyes, but he did help catch a killer, and he didn’t give us any trouble, unless you count chewing up on his wrists.”

“I went a little out of control,” said Houser.

“You’ll still have to do some time, probably,” I said.

“How much?”

“Don’t know. Make a deal. Go for…for digital penetration. How much can a finger-fuck be worth?”

“Now who’s being disgusting?” said Stacey.

“Besides, it’s not true,” said Houser. “We wouldn’t do that.”

“Then make a deal for the least of what you did do. I could care.”

I could. I was colossally disinterested in the outcome of Houser’s case, or in their peculiar sex life, or in my own peculiar sex life or lack of same. There is more under the heavens.

By Moses Lake, Stacey and Houser had each fallen asleep against one of Gwen’s shoulders. Gwen, propped up on each side, her head back, fell asleep as well.

We waited until then to broach the subject of our mutual past, so to speak.

“Have you ever even
been
in Philadelphia?” I asked him.

“Not in my life. You?”

“A few times. With the old man, to see the Phillies play. Once with some girlfriends to see a Little Richard concert. It was the big city to me, pretty intimidating.”

Yet now, driving across the Washington prairie, we could both see our old neighborhood, our school, the sights and sounds of Standard Pressed Steel, where we worked together before the war. We could see Paris Island and Marine boot camp. And we could see the battle of Chosin Reservoir, at least from our limited perspective, and we could feel the bone-breaking cold and finally the wounds that killed us both.