This Is What I Want (25 page)

The New York Times
,
Saturday, August 1, 2015

On this particular weekend, optimism seemed in short supply. The brother-on-brother violence that marred the town parade took a grisly turn when Henrik Kelvig ended up dead in his jail cell, apparently a suicide by hanging. The Richland (Mont.) County Coroner’s Office said a complete report won’t be available for several weeks.

“We had an inexperienced police chief who didn’t follow protocol,” Mayor Swarthbeck said by phone. “We’ve corrected that.” Calls to the erstwhile police chief, Underwood, were not returned, and it’s unclear what became of her. Swarthbeck said he didn’t know and that any official information about the chief was “a personnel matter.”

For some, the event called Jamboree may simply be a victim of the times, a small-town celebration squandered by a gold-rush mentality and all that comes with it.

“It’s a big moneymaker for us,” said Alfonso Medeiros, whose family parks a taco truck at Jamboree every year. “But it’s not as fun. You used to know everybody. Now you don’t. There’s not as much trust.”

MONDAY

THE CHIEF

The final, indisputable calculus for Adair Underwood lay in everything she hadn’t done. She hadn’t unpacked the boxes she lugged into the single-wide trailer three months earlier. She hadn’t put anything on the walls. She hadn’t spent a night in Grandview that wasn’t preoccupied with her job or LaMer, and what disasters those two had turned into. She hadn’t even signed a lease: Eldrick Sloane just let her pony up half the monthly rent every paycheck. Why wouldn’t he? He knew where she lived.

Those being the circumstances, it was easy enough for her to take the boxes back out and load them in her ancient Suburban, park her cruiser under the weather-worn carport, then leave an envelope stuffed with cash—enough to cover the month, which should have been plenty for Sloane—on the foldout kitchen table. She left her badge there, too. She had little doubt that John Swarthbeck would find it, maybe even before Eldrick Sloane did.

She took the gun, though. “Let them requisition it after I’m safely to where I’m going,” she said aloud as she finished moving out.

She wasn’t paranoid, she told herself.
A prepared cop is a good cop
.

In one of her last acts in Grandview, she called Captain Fuquay. The clock said he’d be into his third Scotch after the night shift. She could count on that, regardless of what his doctor might have told him was the prudent course.

“Well, yeah, Underwood, you can probably come back and get your job,” he said after a coughing fit of surprise at her question. “You sure? This was a big step for you, running your own show.”

“I’m sure. I liked your show.”

“Want to tell me why?”

“Yeah. After I get there.”

He grumbled phlegm into his end of the connection. “Well, come on, then. No guarantees. Gotta get it through the county commission. But you were a good hand, and we need somebody, and they usually give me what I ask for.”

Adair clutched the receiver in both hands. “That’s good enough for me,” she said.

The spitting sound of tires on gravel pulled Adair out of the dull trance of mopping the kitchen floor, her last act of compliance. It wasn’t as if the absurdity was lost on her—she was leaving a hell of a mess, and she knew it, but she couldn’t stomach sticking Eldrick Sloane with cleanup of his trailer on top of it.

She moved to the window and pulled the curtain aside, letting in a slice of moonlight. Joe LaMer slipped out of his pickup and looked toward the window. Adair narrowed the gap and held her gaze. He wore street clothes, a white T-shirt and jeans. Sakota would be home asleep by now, she figured. Grandview had entered an eight-hour period without a police presence, an occasional, and regrettable, concession to the clock and limited manpower.

LaMer moved toward her Suburban. He cupped his hands against the glass of the back window and peered in. He’d know now. Inconvenient, Adair figured, but also inevitable. She’d have been found out as soon as she didn’t show for work, and truth be told, she didn’t really expect a clean getaway. Maybe she didn’t even want one. She knew only that she saw no way to stay here, and no way to explain that to anyone.

She slipped the gun into the waistband of her sweatpants and took the direct route, banging out the front door and startling LaMer, who stumbled back from the Suburban.

“Why are you here, Joe?” She looked down on him from the landing.

“Came to see you.”

“Here I am.” She shifted from one foot to the other. LaMer slipped his hands in his pockets and tried to effect nonchalance.

“You going somewhere, Adair?”

She came down the stairs. She hoped he might retreat a piece, but he held his spot.

“Clearly,” she said.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

LaMer stepped toward Adair, and she stepped back, keeping the distance.

“This is silly,” he said. “You don’t want to do that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

He stepped forward again, and she backed against the fuselage of the trailer.

“But what about
Star Wars
?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

He took the hem of her T-shirt between his thumb and forefinger. “No. Come on, Adair.” He went to lift the shirt, and her hand found his, stopping him.

“Not here,” she said.

“No?”

“Let’s go inside.”

In the end, it was all surprisingly easy to take down Joe LaMer, with his own bravado and stupidity doing most of the work. He went up the stairs ahead of Adair and entered the trailer as if he were the lord of the place. She followed, digging out the gun from the back of her pants, and planted a foot in LaMer’s back in the living room. He spilled onto the floor, and she put the gun on him before he could make sense of what had happened.

“Why Alfonso?” she said.

LaMer held his hands up. “Come on. Put that away.”

Adair shoved the barrel against his nose. “Tell me.”

“Swarthbeck.”

“Why?”

“He talks too much. That’s what John said. Something about the way he talked to that reporter lady. You know John. It’s all gut feelings. Alfonso talks too much.”

“So do you.”

Adair pulled the gun back, then smacked LaMer in the head with it. The first crack got his attention. The second turned out his lights.

Adair closed up the trailer and locked the door. Her place sat at the end of the last residential street in town, tucked into the curve where Montana meets North Dakota. When she left, she followed the road out past Clancy Park, to where it joined Main Street. The corner sign on First Bank said 12:03 a.m. Grandview was finally, blessedly silent, moonlight shadows over downtown, not a car moving.

Adair turned right and pointed the Suburban toward the Dakota line, just a few hundred feet away. Maybe she could make Minot before she needed to rest. She had cash enough to get where she was going, anyway. No paper trail. Not with what she’d left behind. She figured that message would be delivered soon enough by LaMer’s compromised condition, and she could only hope she’d removed any incentive to chase her down and push the issue.

When the tires touched North Dakota asphalt, she let her breath go.

SAM

In fits and starts and bursts of energy propelled by supplemental oxygen, Blanche Loretta Kelvig spent the final year of her life cataloging and inventorying the artifacts of two families.

In the room where Sam and Henrik fought, slept, and conspired as boys, she had set out the things that belonged to Big Herschel that the boys might want, along with filled-out sheets from a yellow sticky pad that put details into the gaps. They would know Herschel’s white cowboy hat, gone to light brown from the years of dust, toil, and sweat and the days under the sun. But the spurs he wore in the Brockway Dairy Day Rodeo in ’55? That was before the boys were born, so Blanche’s uptight blue cursive pointed the way:

Your daddy won the all-around that year. He thought he was the king of it all. I told him that I wasn’t about to ride in a pickup from rodeo to rodeo and that he needed to come home and do right by me. And that’s what he did.

Over the washer and dryer, which Blanche wouldn’t accept until Sam insisted during Samuel’s senior year, were file folders with copies of every tax return on the farm, clear back to its purchase, a paper testimony to just how many times she and Big Herschel had managed to muscle the farm into solvency by the skin of their teeth. Along the tops, she had made note of the seminal occurrence of the year. Save for the boys’ birth years, the observations tended toward the meteorological and agricultural:

1963: The flood.

1971: We lost the breeding bull.

1978: Drought.

1979: Drought.

1980: Drought.

1981: Plenty of water, praise the Lord
.

All over the house, Sam found these guideposts to his history. His grandmother’s clothes iron, with the addendum that Grandma Kelvig
could have scared the clothes straight with her cackle.
A picture of Sam and Henrik that he didn’t recognize, the two of them standing in a mud puddle with their arms around each other, Henrik towering above Sam by head and shoulders.
See? You guys did get along.
Sam broke down when he found that, everything he’d tamped down after Henrik’s death coming up and through him, and he knew he’d never be able to put those regrets to rest. A paper tablecloth from his and Patricia’s wedding reception sent him into a fresh round of tears. The yellowed newspaper clipping of his Uncle John Henry’s obituary even got to him. John Henry had come home from Da Nang in a box and gone into the ground, and nobody had said anything else about him. But Mama had kept the hard record of it.

The breaking of morning shone through the east-facing windows, and Sam stood in the half-light, awash in his own memories and those he’d have to co-opt as the eldest Kelvig man standing.

He fell back to his mother’s favorite chair and set his head into his hands, and he waited for his will to regenerate.

The mayor came around at about seven. Sam didn’t notice that the house had been breached until Swarthbeck was standing in the kitchen. Sam was on his knees, packing dishes into a cardboard box.

“Need some help?” Swarthbeck said.

“No. I’ve got it. Didn’t hear you knock.” He put the best hard gaze on Swarthbeck that he could muster. Everything was an irritant now.

“Yeah, sorry. Blanche’s door was always open, you know?”

“I know.” Sam pushed to his feet, the rarely used muscles across his back and shoulders scolding his neglect. “What can I do for you, John?”

Swarthbeck stepped aside, clearing the path back to the living room, Sam’s hobbling destination.

“I was going to ask the same question of you,” the mayor said. “You doing all right?” He followed Sam’s lead.

Sam settled into his mother’s chair and motioned Swarthbeck to take the one opposite.

“I don’t suppose I’ll have much truck with ‘all right’ for a while,” he said.

“I know, Sammy. Hell of a thing, this weekend.”

“Hell of a thing,” Sam agreed.

His eyes found the ceiling, and still he could feel Swarthbeck staring him down, waiting for an opening. That was always the way with the mayor. Always an agenda. Sam wasn’t much inclined to give him a clear landing, the way he usually did. If Swarthbeck wanted something, he was going to have to be direct.

“Sammy,” Swarthbeck said, “this isn’t official or anything, but I want you to know I’m sorry about what Adair did with Henrik.”

Sam moved forward in his seat. “What did she do?”

“You know, not moving him to county lockup.”

“Oh, hell, I’m not worried about that.”

“It was against regulations, Sammy.”

“It wasn’t going to change anything.” Sam slumped back into the chair again.

“Well, I have to say, you’re being pretty magnanimous about this,” Swarthbeck said. Sam noted at once that the mayor sounded almost disappointed, and he figured the time had come for his own declaration.

“Listen, John, I’m done, all right?”

Swarthbeck clasped his hands and pitched forward a bit. “Done how?”

“Jamboree. It’s time for someone else to take it on.”

Swarthbeck smothered a dismissive chuckle. “Listen, things look pretty bleak right now, I get that, but—”

“I’ve been grinding on this awhile, John,” Sam said, a clear lie, yes, but one that served his purposes now. “I’ve got bigger fish.”

“Patricia?”

“Who told you?” Anger rose up in Sam.

“Sammy, come on.”

Sam swallowed. “Yes, Patricia. My kids. My business. This town. My attentions have not been where they should be.” He pursed his lips, cutting it off there. He had more he could say, about pride and forgetfulness, love and complacency, and how he wasn’t going to lose anybody else he loved to his own shortcomings, but Swarthbeck wasn’t entitled to any of that.

The mayor considered his watch. “I gotta go,” he said. “Keep your powder dry, OK? We’ll talk about this some more.”

“My answer isn’t changing, John.”

Swarthbeck rose and made for the door. “We’ll see.”

PATRICIA

Patricia emerged from a night of audacious dreams and marveled at her eagerness to see these days through. Lord, she’d missed Sam’s contours in the bed next to her. No denying that, and as her senses came into sharpness, she again felt the tinge of fear that he might not want to come back. She pushed it down with resolve and got herself dressed.

She found Samuel in the dining room, finishing off a bowl of the sugar-bomb cereal Denise had brought for her kids and left behind. He gave her a guilty grin. “I love this stuff.”

She tossed him a reproachful smile and then took note of the duffel bag on the table, packed tight with his belongings.

“Leaving today?”

“Yeah.” He grabbed the bag by the handles and brought it to the floor. “Drive to Billings tonight. Fly out in the morning.”

“Billings?”

“Yeah. I—” He stopped. His face contorted. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t fly into Bismarck?” she said.

“No.”

“And the point of this lie was?” She wore a smirk, and he picked up on the intent behind it.

He laughed. “I don’t even remember anymore. Can you believe that?”

“Probably not,” she said, the banter she’d so missed returning to her. “But I’ll accept it. The slate’s clear. But we’re not doing this anymore. Any of us. You got that?”

She cooked Samuel a proper breakfast and filled in the sleep-addled bits of her epiphany, and when he slid the puzzle pieces of his own plans to the middle of the table, she could see that it all fit together.

“You want to come to California?” he said.

She nodded. “Later this week. I want to get some things squared away for your father.”

“You can ride back with me in a couple of weeks,” he said. “Megan gave me a line on a job in Billings. I’m thinking maybe I could make a go of it there.”

“You wouldn’t mind your old mom helping to pack you up?”

“Mom, no. I’d be thrilled to have you there.”

When her eyes welled, she turned away from him, the old, familiar stoicism holding on. “I want to do something fun,” she said. She swallowed hard. “I want to know that I’m not all worn out yet.”

“You’re not.” He stood up and went to her. “I promise.”

He held her by the shoulders. She turned into him.

“Your father will be so happy that you’re coming back.”

He dipped his head, forced her to look at him. “Yeah?” he said. “Well, I’m not doing it for him. And I’m not doing it for you, either.” Then he laughed, and she wrapped her arms around him and held on.