The Wishing Garden (15 page)

The dogs stopped barking. They came in one after the other, their fur standing on end. Jake put the letter
back in the wallet, then the wallet in the gun cabinet, and locked it.

Probably, he’d opened the gun cabinet during a nightmare last night; he’d done it before, though not in years. If the ghost had really been set on haunting him, he’d have managed to get a hold of that tooth Jake had flushed down the toilet thirteen years ago. He’d put a bloated body on the front doorstep. He’d stop messing around.

Jake walked out to the driveway and looked up. The ghost was not on the roof, but the air still reeked of tobacco. There was a godawful chill to the air.

He had one hell of a headache, and it got worse when the phone rang. He didn’t go to answer it; he’d never bothered with an answering machine and sometimes, if he was lucky, whoever was calling just gave up. This time, though, the ringing wouldn’t stop. Finally, he walked back inside and picked it up.

“Jake Grey,” he said.

“They’re draining the lake,” a woman’s voice said.

Jake leaned against the wall. “Mom?”

There was no answer. Whoever was on the other end had already hung up.

Cal Bentley liked to say he’d grown with the town. Back in 1959, when Prescott had one hardware store and less than ten thousand people, he’d been twenty-two years old and one hundred fifty pounds. Fresh out of the police academy in Phoenix, he’d been amazed society trusted him with a gun. He came from a long line of cops, but he was also young, and so in love with the prettiest girl in Prescott, anything could happen. If she left him for a richer man, he might lose his head and go on a shooting spree. If she stopped loving him, he might very well turn that gun on himself.

With thoughts like that, he was often amazed disaster never struck. If anyone had told him at twenty-two that he was going to get everything he wanted, he would have told them they were crazy, that no one had such luck.

He married Lois Akerman on June third, 1960. He gained weight right along with her when she got pregnant with their boy, Mike, and two years later, their girl, Lanie. She exercised most of hers off, but he grew accustomed to her blueberry pies, and he just kept growing. Now, nearly forty years after he showed up as a deputy sheriff in Yavapai County, he was chief of police and two hundred fifty pounds. Lois had tried to get him on all kinds of diets—all-protein, high-carb, Slim-Fast, Jenny Craig, but the truth was, being big worked to his advantage. Most of the punks he picked up for drunk driving or possession of marijuana knew he could smash them flat if he chose to, and because he hardly said a word, they could never read his intentions. They had no idea he wished they’d just go home and sleep off whatever was happening to them. They had no idea he felt guilty just looking at them, because the only difference between him and them was love and circumstance and plain old-fashioned luck.

He’d put away kids for life who were no worse than his own, and watched slick rapists walk away free. Forty years ago, he’d known black from white, he’d flashed his gun half a dozen times a day. In the last three months, he hadn’t taken it out once. He was cutting people slack left and right and if someone asked him why, he’d have to state the truth: He wanted to even up the playing field. Everyone was a little criminal, even himself.

He started going bad two years ago, when he went to arrest a sixteen-year-old for prostitution. She’d been hanging out by Teton’s Bar, propositioning anyone
who looked like he could pay her twenty-five dollars. Cal had shown her his badge as soon as she got in the car, and she hadn’t even tried to get away. She just slumped against the door and said “Fuck.”

Her legs and arms were spindles, but her stomach was already melon-sized and hard. He estimated she was six months along.

“You got parents?” he asked.

“Not as far as I’m concerned.”

Cal nodded. He had been fifty-nine years old at the time, and aiming to retire at sixty-two. He didn’t need this shit anymore. Both his kids had gone to college, married decent people, and made the trek home for Christmas every year. He knew how good life could be when people did what they were supposed to.

He drove to the corner, parked, then reached over and opened her door. “Get out,” he said.

“You serious?”

He sat staring straight ahead until she’d gone. Then he drove back to Teton’s, ordered an iced tea, and made sure she didn’t come back.

Since then, he’d let everyone from dope fiends to graffiti sprayers to runaways go. He was risking everything, his ample retirement and the respect of every sheriff on the force, and he didn’t give a damn. The problem was, he’d spent too much time with criminals. He’d begun to see their side.

In forty years on the force, he’d shot only one man, and even then he’d just knocked the automatic out of the thief’s hand. In the hospital afterward, the man, a forty-year-old accountant who’d orchestrated a string of burglaries in the area, had flipped him off with his bandaged finger.

“Some cop,” he’d said. “Can’t even shoot straight.”

Cal had leaned over the man and his nostrils flared. He’d smelled the same rank breath hundreds of
times before, the kind that came from way down deep, where a man had begun to decay. It rose up on the breath of people who would never amount to anything and knew it. Men who based their lives on get-rich-quick schemes and women who hoped a man would save them. Every time Cal got a whiff of them, he thanked God for Lois and the kids. He thanked God he’d been lucky enough to live a long, boring life, and he worried that he was due for catastrophe.

“You’re a sorry mess of a man,” he’d said. “You’re not worth the stain I’d get on my conscience from killing you.”

Cal had a tally of arrests while on the force. Three hundred twenty for rape. Thirty-three hundred burglary charges. A remarkable ten thousand two hundred DUIs. It sounded bad, but in nearly forty years, in a county that had grown to one hundred and fifty thousand, it was about average. He’d closed every case in town, except one, and that one wasn’t on the books. It was the mystery of Jake Grey.

Cal had met the man when he showed up in Prescott fifteen years ago and went to work for Ivan Olak, the cabinet maker. Lois had wanted new cherrywood kitchen cabinets, and he’d gone to Jake’s apartment on the edge of town to pick up the estimate. When Jake opened the door and noticed Cal’s uniform, he held out his hands, as if he were under arrest. His palms were up, revealing a scar on his left hand, puckered and blue. It had never been tended, that much was obvious. When Jake turned his hand slightly, Cal saw the scar on the other side too, a nice clean bullet wound, from the looks of it.

Over the years the scar would fade, but so would the man. Cal would watch Jake slowly cover up his face with a beard, and his life with dogs and deadwood, with no clue how to stop it.

“You’re Jake, right?” he asked. “Ivan sent me out for the estimate.”

Jake dropped his hands. He went for the estimate and held it out with his damaged hand.

“That’s quite a scar there,” Cal said.

Jake looked up. He wasn’t scared, as far as Cal could tell. He was waiting. And in fifteen years, Cal had not changed his mind about Jake. The man was still waiting. More than anything, it seemed, he wanted to be found out.

Cal had tried to oblige him. He’d run him through the computer and come up with a social security number, previous jobs, driver’s licenses. He’d discovered Jake had been born in Phoenix to Cheryl and Paul Grey. There was a death certificate on file for Paul Grey in 1972, cause of death cardiac arrest. Jake would have been eight at the time. Cheryl Grey remarried ten years later, her new husband a plumber named Roy Pillandro.

There was one outstanding bill on Jake’s account, to Smith’s Jewelers in Glendale. A half-carat diamond ring had never been paid off, and was eventually repossessed from its owner, Joanne Newsome.

The only other interesting piece of information was the missing persons report filed on Roy Pillandro in 1985, the year Jake turned up in Prescott. Roy was last seen on his forty-foot houseboat on Wawani Lake. He’d taken a single suitcase with him, and had not been heard from since.

Cal might have mentioned this, but that would have spoiled his afternoons at Jake’s cabin. If there was something bad in his friend’s past, he just didn’t want to know about it. Better to stand silently on Jake’s deck listening to the wind boomerang off Kemper Peak. When lightning flared, he didn’t run for cover. He didn’t even consider the fact that he could
lose everything. He just stood on the highest point of Jake’s deck and drank one of his friend’s beers in pure silence. He watched the maniac dogs run in circles. When the fireworks fizzled at dusk, and hummingbirds swooped in, mistaking his old high-school ruby ring for nectar, he was struck by the truth: He was a lucky man.

“What is he to you?” Lois often asked him. “What on earth do you do up there, because I know for a fact, Cal Bentley, that that man never says a word.”

Cal couldn’t answer, because if he did, he would break his wife’s heart. Jake was the man he would have been if he hadn’t fallen in love with her. He did not tell her that sometimes, despite all his luck, he looked in Jake’s eyes with pure envy.

So that was why the fax still sat on Cal’s desk. He stood with his back to it, staring out his office window at a day that had begun with frost on the ground, and was ending in steam rising off the high desert floor. Earthquake weather, they called it in California. Here in Prescott, though, only people got shook up. Within a few hours, when the storms moved in off Kemper Peak, the calls would start coming in about juveniles terrorizing the neighborhood and honest men up and leaving their wives. If dry lightning sprang up, it was entirely possible all hell might break loose.

The fax was from Dan Merrill, a deputy assigned to Wawani Lake now that they were draining it for the new Desert Sky Reservoir. Desert Sky would provide water for homes from Phoenix to Las Vegas, turn the desert into a sea of green lawns and golf courses. Cal had never said a word about this, but when he’d picked up two environmentalists on charges of tree spiking up by Thumb Butte, he’d listened to their plan of dynamiting the new reservoir, and set them free.

Cal walked back to his desk. He picked up the paper and his stomach began to churn.

Cal dropped the paper. He’d burn it, if he thought it would do any good.

Instead, he picked up the phone and called Jake. “Have you got anything to tell me?” he asked.

Jake must have heard the tension in his voice, because for a long time, he didn’t say a thing. Then one of the dogs barked, and he told him to be quiet.

“No,” he finally answered. “Should I?”

Cal heard thunder cracking behind him, a storm swirling up out of nowhere. He picked up the fax, then unlocked his top drawer. He slipped it inside and relocked the drawer.

“Not for now,” he said.

The old man’s garden was a riot of scents; it either threw a dog into a frenzy of sniffing ecstasy, or just made her mad. Sasha fell into the latter category. She
thought only two scents worthwhile: urine and food. One to mark territory, the other to satisfy desire. Anything else just complicated things, so every time Sasha padded through the old man’s redolent garden, she didn’t even grace it with her pee. Instead, she urinated on the concrete sidewalk, so at least one thing would be clear: Come closer only if you dared.

Today, Sasha followed the hat woman around the garden. She was that sweetest kind of human, smelling not of chemicals, but of what she’d eaten last, usually candy. As Sasha followed her, the garden lost its scent of confusion. It was no longer rock jasmine and chamomile this way, blueberry and a Doberman’s urine over there; it smelled only of the woman, of peppermint sticks and Juicy Fruit gum.

The woman stopped and arched her back. She took off her sun visor, ran her fingers through her hair, then put the visor back on. She glanced at Sasha. “Come along then,” she said.

They walked into the gazebo, and the woman sat on the redwood floor. Sasha circled her, feeling for indentations in the wood, the give of the floor. Finally, she chose a spot beside her and stretched out her aching legs.

The other dogs were in the street, chasing down a UPS truck. In seconds, Gabe was nipping at the brown bumper. He had no idea a shaggy mutt like him should not be able to run like that. It was some kind of gift from God. He leapt onto the van’s bumper, then jumped off. Leapt on and jumped off again. Once the van turned the corner, Gabe threw back his head and howled into the air.

Sasha pressed her nose into the hat woman’s pink belly. She wore a short halter top and skirt, with a gap of skin between so rich and moist, Sasha’s head swam. Dogs did not believe in love at first sight. A dog’s love
had to be earned, but once it was, it couldn’t be beaten out with whips or kicks or the meanest words. Nevertheless, Sasha was here, in love for no reason at all, pressing her nose against that belly, until the woman scratched her behind the ears and laughed.

“Greedy,” the hat woman said. “That’s what you are.” She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out a peppermint candy. She unwound the wrapper and held out the mint.

Sasha took it in her mouth and swirled it around her tongue. The sugar rush brought on the hallucination, because right in front of them, in deep shade, a pair of shadows crept toward them.

It was the woman and the good man. She was dancing and he was standing, then just when he started dancing too, she walked away. Sasha crushed the peppermint between her teeth and swallowed it.