The Lesson of Her Death (28 page)

Technically this was trespassing. But boundaries in the country aren’t what they are in the city. You could walk, hunt, fish on almost anybody’s land for miles around. As long as you left it in good shape, as long as the feeling was reciprocal, nobody made an issue.

Corde ducked under the wire fence, and slipped into the scruffy forest behind his property. He continued for
a ways then broke out into a clearing in the center of which was a huge rock some glacier had left behind, twenty feet high and smooth as a trout’s skin. Corde clambered onto the rock and sat in one of the indentations on the west side.

She wears a turquoise sweater high at the neck, half obscuring her fleshy throat.

To the south he could just see a charcoal gray roof, which seemed attached to a stand of adolescent pines though in fact it covered his own house. He noticed the discolored patch near the chimney where he had replaced the shingles last summer.

“You used to live in St. Louis, didn’t you?” Jennie Gebben asks.

Oh, she is pretty! Hair straight and long. Abundant breasts under the soft cloth. Sheer white stockings under the black jeans. She wears no shoes and he sees through the thin nylon red-nailed toes exceptionally long.

“Well, I did,” he answers. “As a matter of fact.” He clears his throat. He feels the closeness of the dormitory room. He smells incense. He smells spicy perfume.

“Eight, nine years ago? I was little then but weren’t you in the news or something?”

“All cops get on the air at one time or another. Press conference or something. Drug bust.”

Saturday night, January a year ago, branches click outside the dormitory window. Bill Corde sits on a chair and Jennie Gebben tucks her white-stockinged feet under her legs and lies back on the bed.

“It seems it was something more than that,” she says. “More than a press conference. Wait. I remember. It was …”

She stops speaking.

Bill Corde, sitting now on the flesh-smooth rock in the quiet town of New Lebanon, watched the sun grow lower to the horizon through a high tangle of brush and hemlock and young oaks soon to die from light starvation.

Shots fired! Shots fired! Ten-thirty-three. Unit to respond
.…

Each inch the sun fell, each thousand miles the earth turned away from it, he sensed the forest waking. Smells grew: loam, moss, leaves from last fall decomposing, bitter bark, musk, animal droppings.

… this session of the St. Louis Police Department Shooting Review Board. Incident number 84-403. Detective Sergeant William Corde, assigned to St. Louis County Grand Larceny, currently suspended from duty pending the outcome of this hearing
.…

Corde thought he’d be happy just being a hunter. He would have liked to live in the 1800s. Oh, there was a lot that amused and appealed to him about the Midwest at the end of the twentieth century. Like pickup trucks and televised Cardinals and Cubs games and pizza and computers and noncorrosive gunpowder. But if you asked him to be honest he’d say that he’d forgo it all to wake up one morning and walk downstairs to find Diane in front of a huge fireplace making johnnycakes in the beehive oven, then he and Jamie would go out to trap or hunt all day long among the miles and miles of forests just like this one.

A. Well, sir, the perpetrators
…

Q. You knew them to be armed with assault rifles?

A. Not with assault rifles, no, though we knew they were armed.… The perpetrators had taken the cash and jewelry and were still inside the store. I ordered my men into the alley behind the store. It was my intention to enter through a side door and take them by surprise
.

Corde listened to the snapping of some invisible animal making its way through the woods. He thought how odd it was that a creature was moving past him, probably no more than ten feet away, yet he sensed no danger. He felt if anything the indifference of the surroundings, as if he had been discounted by nature as something insignificant and not worth harming.

Q. Sergeant Corde, could you tell us then what happened?

A. Yes, sir. There were a number of exit doors leading from the stores into the alley. I had inadvertently told the men to enter through door 143
.

Q. Inadvertently?

A. That was a mistake. The door that opened onto the jewelry store was number 134. I
—

Q. You mixed up the numbers?

A. Yes, sir. In speaking with the fire inspector, he had told me the correct number of the door. I had written it down. But when I radioed to the men which door to enter, I read it backwards
.

Q. So the men entered the mall through the wrong door
.

A. No, they tried to. But that door was locked. As they were trying to get it open, thinking it was the correct door, the perpetrators ran into the alley and fired on the policemen. Their backs
—

Q. Whose backs?

A. The policemen’s backs were to the perpetrators. Two police officers were killed and two were wounded
.

Q. Have the perpetrators been apprehended?

A. To date, one has. The rest have not
.

He’d been suspended with half pay for six months but he quit the force a week before reinstatement. He sat around in his suburban home, thinking about the men who’d died, thinking of the kind of jobs he ought to get, replaying the incident a hundred times then a thousand times. He stopped going to church and didn’t even have the inclination to turn a bar or the bottle into his personal chapel. He spent his time with the TV, doing some security jobs, some construction work. Finally the mortgage payments on the trim suburban split-level outran their savings and with Sarah on the way they’d had no choice but to come back to New Lebanon.

Feed and grain, planing and sawing, teaching.… Long, long days. Then he’d seen the ad in the paper for a deputy and he’d applied.

After Bill and Diane had moved back to New Lebanon he had five years with his father before the stroke.
Five full years of opportunities to talk about what happened at the Fairway Mall. But what the two men spent those years on was pheasant loads and movies and carburetors and memories of their wife and mother.

One day, a month before the blood clot swapped a clear, complicated mind for one that was infinitely simple, Corde was crouched down, sharpening a mower blade in his father’s garage. He heard the footsteps and he looked up to see the old man standing hunched and pale, licking the top of a Dannon yogurt container. His father said, “’Bout time we deal with St. Louis, wouldn’t you say?” Corde stood, his knee popping and pushing him oh-so-slowly upward. He turned to face his father and cleared his throat. The elder Corde said solemnly, “Ten bucks says they’ll cave to New York.” Corde rolled grass flecks off his hands and dug into his pocket for a bill. “You’re on,” he said. His father wandered into the yard while Corde turned back to the iron blade in complete remorse.

Q. If someone else had read the number of the door to the policemen in the alley, the mishap might not have happened. Or if you had taken your time and read the number slowly?

A. (garbled)

Q. Could you repeat that please
.

A. The mishap probably would not have happened, no
.

He’d never told anyone in New Lebanon. The facts were there, somewhere in his file in St. Louis. If Steve Ribbon or Hammerback Ellison or Jim Slocum or Addie Kraskow of the
Register
wanted to go to the trouble to look it up, they would find everything. But the New Lebanon Sheriff’s Department simply glanced at his résumé and believed the truthful statement that the reason for termination from his last job was that he’d quit. They believed too his explanation that he had grown tired of fighting city riverfront crime and had wanted to move back to his peaceful home town. After all, he had a six-year-old son and a baby on the way.

Who’d think to look beyond that?

Another snap, nearby. Corde turned. The animal materialized. A buck. He saw two does not far off. He loved watching them. They were elegant in motion but when they stopped—always as if they were late for something vitally important and had time to give you just a brief look—they were completely regal. Corde wished he was a poet. He wanted badly to put into words what he felt at this moment: The knowledge in the deer’s eyes.

The melting sun.

The unseen movement of the woods at dusk.

The total sorrow when you fall short of the mark that you know God’s set for you.

With a single crack of wet wood, the deer were gone. Bill Corde scooted off the rock and slowly made his way to his twentieth-century home, with his pickup truck and television, and his family.

H
er biggest fear is that somehow her father has scared off the Sunshine Man.

It is now a couple of days in a row that her daddy has gotten up late, had breakfast with them and then been home before supper. But worse than that he had gone for long walks in the woods behind the house, the woods where the Sunshine Man lived. Sarah considers herself an expert on wizards and she knows that they resent people who don’t believe in them. Her father’s certainly a person like that.

Although she’s questioned Redford T. Redford at length about the wizard the bear has remained silent. She has left several presents and painstakingly written notes for the Sunshine Man in the magic circle. He has not picked them up or responded.

She has thought about running away again. But because her mother has agreed with Dr. Parker to keep her out of school for a while, Sarah is willing to postpone her escape plans. She listens to her books on tape, she looks at her picture books, she watches television, she plays with her stuffed animals.

At night Sarah sits and stares out the window. Once, when the waning moon is bright, she thinks she sees the form of a man walking through the woods. She flashes
her bedside light and waves. Whoever it might be stops and looks at the house but does not respond. He seems to vanish. She stares after him until the trees begin to sway and the night sky opens up in great cartwheeling streaks of stars and planets and giants and animals, then she crawls under the blankets. She holds tight to her piece of magic quartz and, knowing the Sunshine Man may be out there, sends him a message in her thoughts.

Sarah wishes her father would start working late again. And sure enough, after just two days, she gets this wish. He’s up and gone before breakfast, and home long after she’s gone to bed. One morning, when he hadn’t seen her for two days, her father left a note at the breakfast table for her; it sounded all stiff. Sarah sadly thinks the Sunshine Man is much smarter than her father.

She hopes the wizard will come back and make her smart. She believes he can do it. She also knows though that this will be a very hard wish to grant so she tells herself to be patient. She knows she’ll have to wait just a little while longer.

Philip closed his bedroom door and immediately they were warriors once again, tall and dignified and ever correct, struggling to understand this strange dimension.

Jano looked around the room. “Your sister here?”

“Nope.”

The boys who knew Philip’s sister, and that was a lot of boys, did not call her “Rose” or “Rosy”; they called her “Halpern,” which seemed to Philip to say everything there was to say about her.

Jano whispered urgently, “Well?”

“What?” Phathar shoved a dripping handful of popcorn from a half-gallon bag into his mouth.

He whispered, “Did you do it?” Jano’s eyes were red and it looked like there was a streak of dried snot under his nose. Phathar wondered if his friend had been crying
(Phathar assumed
he
was the only freshman boy who still cried).