This Is What I Want (9 page)

THE CHIEF

Adair sat in her cruiser behind a cottonwood windbreak on the southern edge of town, positioned as if running point on a speed trap—a reasonable place to be, given the impending event and the steady rush of cars heading into Grandview. The radar, however, was not engaged. She had instead descended deep into a phone call.

The whole series of things stuck in her craw, and Swarthbeck’s unconscionable actions stood at the top of the roster. That was a crime scene, or at least needed to be treated like one until some answers came through, and the mayor should have known it. It frosted Adair’s ass now that she hadn’t run some police tape around it. The hell with the mayor and his desire to get some sleep. That was plainly a lie. And then Joe LaMer with his I-wouldn’t-cross-the-mayor posturing. What the hell was that about?

She’d made her rounds after lunch, hit the checkpoints, offered to help with setup, chased some kids away from potential mischief around the food trucks that lay silent in Clancy Park. She’d done her damn job, but more than that, she’d stewed on this thing until her anger went on full boil. That’s when she drove out to the town line and looked for a release valve.

On the other end of the call, back in Cass County, her mentor and former commanding officer, Jim Fuquay, took it all in and dispensed questions and advice in equal measures.

“What do you think caused the explosion, Underwood?” It made her smile, even now, to hear him call her that. Not just because it was reminiscent of another time, but because from the start Fuquay had inspired memories of her father, and hearing her last name bantered about injected just enough dissonance into that association to keep her grief at bay. In her own head, though, a raspy, barked “Underwood” followed the same path as Linus Underwood’s “darling girl.” It went straight to the most sentimental part of her.

“I don’t know, Cap. Not my area. I’ve heard some stuff about him, though. Selling moonshine and things like that.”

“So that’s why they call it Montucky, I guess.” Fuquay chortled at his own joke. “You check it out?”

“Of course. Nothing to it, that I can find out.”

“Doesn’t surprise me. And nobody talked, I’m guessing.”

“Cap, I’m not exactly rolling in informants here. I’m an outsider. I’m a curiosity, the chick cop.” Just that afternoon, in fact, some smart-ass kid who couldn’t have been north of fourteen looked at her and slipped a tongue between his two fingers, as if that were something original. Little fucker.

“I don’t know, then,” Fuquay said. “You might have some obstruction of justice there—or you might just have a mayor who wanted a clean town to show off when the big party started. Do you like this guy?”

“Does it matter?”

He cleared his throat, then dealt with a full-on coughing attack. “Sorry about that. No, I don’t suppose it does. But if you like him and you’re worried, that tells me you’re keeping an even keel. That’s good. I don’t have to tell you to be careful.”

“No.”

Another coughing fit busted in.

“You all right, Cap?”

“As the one-eyed man said, I am what I am.” At once, Adair wished she were there. “I know this much for sure,” he said. “You’ve got a deputy who’s talking out of turn. You need to stomp a mudhole in his ass for that, and make it stick, or you’re going to have bigger problems.”

“I know.”

“Then what’d you call me for?” That rasp again, a laugh, and then another coughing fit. She knew not to press her luck by asking about his health again. She’d just have to worry silently.

“I guess to get backup on being right,” she said. “It’s lonely sometimes.”

“Well, Underwood, you said a mouthful there, didn’t you?”

About twenty minutes later, Sakota’s voice came bounding across the radio as Adair made her downward run off Telegraph Hill.

“Adair, you better get down here.”

“Where?”

“Grandview bridge.”

Jesus on a palomino. “You’re out of jurisdiction, Officer.”

“McKenzie County sheriff called, asked for us to go out there until they could spring somebody loose. Joe took the call, and he called me.”

Adair’s cauldron tilted again and spilled a few more gallons. “We’re going to have to do a refresher on chain of command, you know that?”

At that, LaMer broke in. “Just come, Adair.”

Adair threw on the lights and challenged the cruiser by pushing her foot to the floor. The bile, the nausea, rose up in her. Her officers hadn’t been willing to talk freely on open air. That meant that whatever it was would be bad. She tightened her grip on the wheel and began putting her concentration on dispassion. She’d seen some depravity. In North Dakota, that first year on the job, she’d worked the scene of a dismemberment, a young woman’s arms and legs and fingers and toes seemingly plucked from her body like ripened fruit. You can’t get used to something like that. You just tighten up and you get on with it. Dispassion. That was the key. You could cry in solitude later if you needed to.

Two miles past the state line, she whipped the cruiser off the highway, down the rutted dirt road that led to the shoreline. Maybe three dozen people lingered there in a tight clump, a couple of them talking to Officer Sakota, the rest watching LaMer, who was down the shore a piece, standing next to a black garbage bag.

She got out and approached Sakota, all six feet of him looking vomitus green. “What is it?”

“Our missing dog, I think. This one”—here, he indicated the young woman, maybe seventeen, who stood next to him—“stepped on it.”

“Jesus,” Adair said.

The girl’s chin quivered, and a friend wrapped her in an embrace. Adair kept moving toward the spot where LaMer worked. Once there, she reached down and pulled back a flap that LaMer had cut into the plastic bag. A putrid blast of air belched up, immeasurably worse than any rotten meat Adair had ever smelled. The dead eye of a Chihuahua stared back at her.

“My god,” she said. “That our dog?”

“I think so.” LaMer stood a few steps away. He had his T-shirt hiked over his nose and mouth.

Adair covered up with one hand and took another look. Bloated entrails spilled from puncture wounds in the Chihuahua. “He’s been tore up,” she said. “Figure he was used as bait? We looking at dog fights?”

“That’s what I’m figuring.”

“How many dogs are we missing in town?” she asked.

“Just Mina Pollard’s, I think,” LaMer said. “This one.”

She looked back at the congregation along the shore, then checked her watch. Coming up hard on four p.m.

“OK, here’s the deal,” Adair said. “I want you to stay here until the McKenzie sheriff arrives. I’m going to go get those people out of here and head back to town with Phil. Now listen to me: This isn’t our case. It’s North Dakota’s, but I want you here to hand it off, and then come straight back because we’ve got a lot of our own problems.”

“Sure thing.”

She looked at the bag and felt the stirrings of revolt by her lunch.

“Has anybody had a good look at that?”

LaMer pointed at the crowd gathered on the shore. “You mean them?”

“Yeah.”

“Just the girl and her boyfriend. I guess she came out of the water like a shot. He pulled out the bag. That’s when we got called.”

“But the others would have seen at least that, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Adair lifted her face to the clouds and closed her eyes. She thought she’d do just about anything to keep Mina Pollard from having to know too much about this.

“OK,” she finally said. “Those people are going to talk. Nothing we can do about that. We can keep from making it worse by not saying anything that we don’t get officially from McKenzie County. You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“OK,” she said. “I’m going back to town. I’ll find Mina and talk to her. You get back as soon as you can, understand?”

MAMA

Blanche sat in her chair, the window AC unit blowing cold air on her neck, and she held tight to the hand of the boy who’d come back to see her at last. Little Samuel—not so little anymore, of course, in fact a full-grown man on his own in the great yawping world—was her favorite of the grandchildren, not that she had a whole passel of choices. There was Samuel or Denise, a rude girl that one, always sneering and back talking. Of course, Blanche reminded herself, you love all the little children, for they are God’s creations, but it was a sin to lie, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t like Samuel best.

She patted his hand, and he looked at her again, and she smiled. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. Blanche had given a lot of thought to dying—she thought of it every day, and she was ready, oh, Lord, yes, she was—but she’d also hoped that Samuel would come to see her again before she departed. She was all the time asking Sam when his boy would be back, and Sam would mumble something about the cost of airfare, and she knew her son wasn’t telling her the full truth about his own boy.
What can I do about that?
she often wondered. The answer: Nothing. Nothing at all.

Sam, her son, came back into the living room with the ice water Blanche had asked him to fetch. She took it in both hands and held it like a scepter, feeling the coolness from the sweaty glass on her hands.

“You sure you don’t want to come tonight, Mama?” Sam asked.

Blanche put the glass to her lips, which were cracked like a dry lake bed. She drank gingerly, careful not to spill but also treasuring the ripple that rode to the back of her mouth, down her gullet to her insides, spreading out and cooling her down as it traveled. When she was done, she found only shallow breath, and Sam reached for the cup so she could lie back and let the oxygen do its job.

“No,” she said, closing her eyes. “Not tonight.” Not tomorrow, either, for that matter, but Blanche knew that one wasn’t up for a vote. Tomorrow, she’d have to be there. Ten years for Sam running Jamboree, ten years since Samuel graduated and left, and she was this year’s Queen of the Grandview Parade. A banner day for the Kelvig family. She would have to wear a dress—a light one in this heat. Blanche remembered that Patricia said she’d come over and help with the makeup and the tiara. A tiara, perfectly silly.

“We can have Norby bring you a plate, if you want.”

Blanche opened her eyes. “Norby? Who’s Norby?”

“That’s me, Grandma.”

Sam broke in. “It’s what he wants to be called now.”

Blanche waited for a couple of toots from her oxygenator. “But you have a perfectly good name. Samuel Einar Kelvig Junior. Do you know how you got that name?”

“Yes.”

“Well, apparently you don’t. Samuel was my father, a great man. He worked his whole life and didn’t have much, but he put up the money for your Grandpa Herschel and me to buy this farm, because that’s the kind of man he was. Einar was your great-grandpa’s favorite uncle back in Norway. These are fine names.”

“Yes, Grandma, I know. But Norby’s a family name, too. That’s why I picked it. Shouldn’t I get to call myself what I want?”

This is a confused boy,
Blanche decided. She figured it fell to her to set him straight on his mother’s father, a man of such prickliness that even his own kinfolk would cross the street to avoid him.

“Dennis Norby was the biggest no-account, lowdown dirty scoundrel this county’s seen in many a year,” she said. She had more harsh words on deck but couldn’t find the air for it. Wheezing set in.

“Take it easy, Mama,” Sam said.

Blanche’s eyes grew wider the more belabored her breathing became, until at last the oxygenator caught up with her and filled her lungs again. She curled a finger at her grandson and beckoned him to move closer. Norby leaned over the arm of the couch, almost to where he was half in her lap.

“Honor your name,” she whispered. “You come from good people.” She reached out and gripped his hand. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, Grandma.”

“A name tells you something about yourself, where you come from. It’s something you can rely on when you don’t have anything else.” Her eyes drew wide again, and she waited for replenishment. Norby hung his head and waited.

“Mama, it’s OK,” Sam said. He moved in on her and brushed her hair back with his thumb. Norby held on, and a fresh shot of oxygen got her going again.

“Remember who you are,” she said.

“I will,” Norby told her.

NORBY

They rode back to town in Sam’s pickup. The sun, with hours to go before it slipped below the western horizon, had begun spackling the sky in pinks and oranges. Norby leaned toward his father, looking for the temperature reading outside. Eighty-seven degrees. The night ahead would call for short sleeves and plenty of mosquito spray. During Jamboree, it was ever thus.

“Tell me about Grandpa Norby,” he said to his father.

Sam wiggled his fingers on the steering wheel and took a quick glance at Norby in the passenger seat. Norby caught, and appreciated, a tight smile that played across his lips. “Didn’t know the man, really. We were just in grade school when he passed.”

“How’d he die?”

“Liver gave out, I guess.”

“Alcohol?”

“Yeah.”

This was the game Norby remembered. It wasn’t that his folks didn’t have feelings, exactly. Everybody does, and Norby knew enough about how to get at them that he’d stung the old man and his mother more than a few times. It’s just that when anyone dared venture into territory where difficult feelings would have to be discussed—regret or shame, in particular—a not-so-subtle shift to shutdown mode kicked in. They’d keep answering questions, sure, but there’d be no substance to the answers. Eventually, you just give up. It’s easier to leave it to the wind.

Norby tried another way in. “Grandma sure didn’t like him, I guess.”

“I guess.”

“Was he as bad as all that?”

“I don’t really know. You’d have to ask your mother.”

Norby clammed up. This was getting nowhere. He felt foolish about his appropriation of the name and the way it had just made everything worse with his father. It had been such a snap decision, anyway. When Norby felt like he’d run as far from home as he could and still needed some distance, he’d fixated on his mother’s maiden name: Norby.
That’d work,
he remembered thinking. It came out easily enough in his first wave of classes in Missoula. “Call me Norby.” They called him that, and he became that, in a practical sense. No legalities, no stationery to change, no fuss, no muss. It hadn’t been until Derek called him by the name, in front of his parents, that there had been any reason to explain, and then all of his explanations plummeted to the earth, impotent. No matter how he presented it, the facts still came out against his interests. He’d forsaken the name he’d been given, turned his back on his father, brought shame into the house. No one had said any of that, of course, other than Denise. That’s the thing about a place where feelings aren’t given room to breathe. The vacuum pulls in everything else. He’d talked about who he was, what he wanted, how he viewed himself in this world. He’d tried to explain it. They’d sat grim-faced and silent.

Sam made the last turn toward the house.

“Almost time for supper,” Norby said.

“Yep. You can use the shower downstairs if you want.”

Norby sat at the kitchen table, watching Denise dandle baby Chase on her knee after the little nipper had raised holy hell when placed into Norby’s arms. Next to her sat Randy, wiping Randall Junior’s snot from the shoulder of his shirt. Food for the town supper, ready for transport, formed a mound between them. As soon as their parents were ready, they could head for the door.

“Uncle Henrik, huh?” Denise said.

“Yeah, down at the park,” Norby said. “It was creepy, the way he talked to Dad.”

“Well, he
is
a creep.”

“He came and saw me, what was it—a year ago? Two?” Randy looked at Denise, who shrugged. “Maybe two. Anyway, he asked for a job in the rail yard. I told him, ‘Well, you know, Henrik, you’ll have to pass a piss test.
’ ”
Randy let loose with a braying laugh. “He said he’d get back to me.”

“Dad seemed pretty rattled.”

“What do you mean, rattled?” Denise said.

“Shook up. You know. Bothered.”

“Dad’s got enough to worry about without his idiot brother showing up,” she said.

“I guess.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You guess. I know.”

“Honey,” Randy broke in.

“No, listen, I’m just going to say this and be done with it, OK?” That shut her husband right down. Norby waited for it. It wasn’t like he could stop what was coming. Might as well lean into the inevitable pitch.

Denise craned forward, her voice low.

“They won’t tell you this, because they’re nice people,” she said, “but you’re breaking their hearts.”

“I am?”

“Yes, you are,” she fairly hissed. “Don’t smart off to me.”

Randy tried again. “Couldn’t we do this another—”

“They’re trying hard,” she said. “Maybe you’d notice that if you came around more often. We’re here all the time and all we hear is
Samuel this, Samuel that, I wish Samuel could be with us
. It’s getting old. And you don’t care.”

“I’m here now.”

“Well, congratulations. You only made Mom beg and plead. How courteous of you.”

Norby tried to find valor in silence. Ten or fifteen years earlier, he might have batted her volleys back at her for the balance of the evening, quietly drawing a thrill from his uncanny knack for making her angrier even as his own tone remained level. It was almost Pavlovian, the way he could bring Denise to a boil just by repeating what she said back to her without inflection. But now he watched as her anger grew, his nephew’s head bobbed with advancing speed as her knee fired like a piston, and Randy looked increasingly worried that the situation would spin out of control. It was the rare talent who could make Randy Sternslaw appear to be the reasonable one in a social interaction, so bully for Denise on that count.

“Come here, buddy,” Norby said, reaching a hand across to three-year-old Randall Junior. He liked the towheaded little boy. Randall Junior took Norby’s hand and toddled over from his father’s side.

Norby tugged at the bill of the little boy’s cap. “Minnesota Twins, huh? Do you like baseball?”

The boy balanced himself with his left hand on Norby’s knee. His right hand balled up into a fist and drove into Norby’s crotch. Direct hit. As Norby’s knees slammed together, the ache moved into the pit of his stomach.

“He’s a dick hitter,” Randy said, a bit too cheerfully.

Denise made no effort at concealing her glee. “I think that puts it in perspective, don’t you?”