Wolf Point (4 page)

If they really did tell him why he was being arrested, as they later claimed in court, he never heard it. He refused counsel. He asked them to recheck the name, address, and age of
this Thomas Walker they were after. He knew it was all a mistake and continued working with that assumption even after they carried his computer and monitor into the barren little room where he was seated behind a pitted wooden conference table; even after they plugged it in and booted it up and clicked through the image files till they came to a pornographic image and asked him if he had downloaded it from the Internet, and did he understand that it was a crime in the state of New York to possess child pornography. As he looked hard at the picture on the screen it began slowly and terrifyingly to sink in that it wasn’t a mistake at all, that he was indeed the man they had come to arrest.

The quiet in the little room at that moment was extraordinary. He wasn’t breathing, nor, it seemed, was anyone else. There were no uniformed officers present. The detective across from him, on the right of the computer, was probably in his forties, though he looked older, with bags under his eyes and developing jowls and graying hair combed over the center of his head where the hair had thinned to balding. An unattractive young woman, probably in her early thirties, leaned over the table on the other side of the computer. She was stick-figure thin, and her clothes—K-mart-quality blue slacks and maroon blouse—flopped around the bony projections of her shoulders, elbows, and knees. She was the one asking the questions while the others watched intently. It was as if somehow everyone understood that he was just then comprehending the situation.

He studied the picture on the monitor. In a cheap, wood-paneled
room that suggested the interior of a trailer in the closeness of its space, a pale-skinned older woman lay on a faded green sofa holding a young girl gently in her arms. He’d guess the woman was in her forties. The girl, though fully developed, was clearly very young. She might not yet have even reached her teens. They were both without clothes. Most of the woman’s body was covered by the girl’s. On the woman’s face was a benevolent, loving, motherly expression. She held the girl in a protecting embrace, one hand smoothing the girl’s hair, the other wrapped around her back, holding her shoulder. The girl’s cheek was pressed between the woman’s breasts. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open in an expression of sexual ecstasy, the kind of look a woman might have in the moment before climax. The older woman’s face and body were not unattractive, only worn by age. Her skin was slack and pale, furrowed with creases and lines and splotched here and there with mild discolorations. The girl in her arms was still perfect. Her skin was vibrant, her breasts full, her face utterly unmarked by time or experience. Her body seemed to glow in that woman’s arms as, in the bottom left foreground of the picture, seen only from the back and side, a man hunched over slightly in the act of penetrating the girl as the woman held her, and the girl pressed her cheek into the woman’s breast and opened her mouth in that moan almost audible in the picture. The hirsute body of the man was bulky and thick, bear-like in its partial crouch. He looked to be of an age with the woman, though his face wasn’t visible, only his body, the bulk of it weighing down the bottom of the picture,
his erection sliding into the downy hair that filled the perfect V between the girl’s legs.

The stick-figure woman asked the question again: Was he aware that it was a crime in the state of New York to possess child pornography?

T looked up from the picture to the woman asking the question. His arms and legs were shaking slightly. His stomach roiled. He said, “I didn’t do anything.”

The woman, her voice rising, answered, “You downloaded a picture of a child being raped. You kept it on your computer.”

T said, “But it was already there.”

“On your computer?” she said, incredulous.

“On the Internet.”

“But you downloaded it to your computer,” she said. “You looked at it with lust, for sexual pleasure.”

“With interest,” T said.

“Interest?” she said. “What do you mean, interest?”

“I mean the picture is interesting,” T said.

“Interesting?” She looked horrified.

“Interesting?” she repeated. “This is a child being raped, and you think it’s”—her hand shot out and she slapped him hard across the cheek— “interesting?”

The slap was hard enough to knock him back in his seat and leave the imprint of her hand on his face, but at the time he hardly felt it. It was as if his body had gone numb. He wanted to explain himself to the woman who had slapped him and he was too busy trying to formulate the words to pay
much attention to the physical blow. The other detectives had been shocked by the slap; he had seen it on their faces for a brief moment before they gathered themselves back to professional impassivity, as if there were nothing surprising at all in what had just happened. T wanted to direct the woman’s attention back to the picture. Look, he wanted to say. She’s not being raped. She’s been seduced by the older woman and given as a gift, an offering to the man’s desire. Look at the motherly tenderness in the older woman’s eyes, the way the young girl holds on to her, as if for reassurance. She’s been seduced. She’s been seduced by the older woman and delivered into the arena of sex. It’s terrible, I know, he wanted to say. In the real world, it’s terrible. But this is a picture. I was fascinated by a picture. I wasn’t sanctioning what happened, I was looking at an image. There’s a difference, he wanted to say. There’s an important difference. In the real world, it’s terrible, it’s a crime; but this is an image, a powerful, troubling, resonant image that reaches someplace deep and disturbing. I was interested in the image; I wasn’t sanctioning the act. I didn’t
do
anything, he wanted to say, except look at a picture.

But he never got to say any of it. Instead he watched the stick-figure woman as she went to a countertop sink in a corner and washed her hands, and then looked back at him one more time with loathing before leaving the room.

In the dark and quiet of the Rover, approaching Alexandria Bay, T drew in a deep, calming breath and tried to empty his mind. His muscles were knotted and stiff. He felt a headache
coming on. Alongside him, Jenny was stretched out with her head close to his thigh, her knees bent and her body hunched and cramped into an uncomfortable-looking S. He ran his fingers along a lock of her hair and could almost taste the texture of its silky waves. He moved the lead pipe away from her head, to the floor by her feet. She stirred with his movements and turned onto her back with her knees up in the air and her forehead jammed into the space between his thigh and the back of the seat.

Driving through the night, with Jenny and Lester sleeping, he thought of his own daughter, of family trips with her and her stepbrother sleeping buckled up in the back seat and Alicia, his wife, his daughter’s stepmother, sleeping trustingly alongside him. There were few things in this life that he liked better than driving at night with his family asleep around him—though even the memory of those moments seemed to come to him from another lifetime, from some other dimension of existence, one he had passed through in a dream before finding himself utterly different, in the current moment, at night, in a strange vehicle with a girl in red leather pants curled up where Alicia should be, and a man in the back seat instead of Evan, his stepson, whom he had raised from the age of two and whom he loved dearly and from whom he was now irrevocably separated, as he was separated from his own daughter, Maura, from his first marriage, who was herself now married and living in London and had a daughter of her own, whom she had painfully explained to him he could not under any circumstances ever be alone with, breaking his heart, reducing
him to tears in her sight before she even finished speaking. Not that any of it mattered; not that he had seen any of them in more than a year; now he was this other person, this other T Walker, leading this other, until recently, vacuous life.

By the time he exited Route 81 for Alexandria Bay, his palms were sweaty, he was nauseous, his skin was clammy, and he had a roaring headache. He picked up the scrap of yellow paper from the dash. The address read, “Cabin 12, Wolf Point.” He put the paper in his pocket and headed for a gas station just beyond the exit, where he could already see the figure of an old man hunched over some kind of reading material behind a plate-glass window. In the back seat, Lester moaned softly and started to snore.

By the time he found the cabin and peered in through grimy windows to the dark interior, it was almost eight. The old guy at the gas station had given him easy directions before asking if he was a friend of Chuck’s, to which T had nodded and said, “Chuck’s a buddy from way back,” and then popped two Advil and washed them down with a swig from an eight-ounce Perrier, which he had been delighted to find beside the various columns of brightly colored soft drinks. “Haven’t seen him in some time,” the old man said. “He’s fine,” T answered, “been busy,” and he pushed the remaining Perrier and a six-pack of Coke and the opened Advil bottle toward the cash register. “Let me have the big bucket of that fried chicken too,” he said, and pointed to the countertop glass case of
chicken pieces on racks under heat lamps. Then he paid for the gas and supplies and left with the red-and-white bucket of chicken under his arm and a plastic bag with the drinks in hand.

Wolf Point turned out to be a long scrap of rugged shore pushing out into the Saint Lawrence. It was lined with redwood cabins. T had parked the Rover under the wide, rambling crown of an oak tree and waited a moment to see if either of his hitchhikers would stir once the sound of the engine ceased and the loud silence of this still, dark place filled the car. They didn’t. Which wasn’t surprising, given that neither had stirred through the pumping of the gas and the exiting and entering and the dropping of the chicken and soft drinks on the car floor. If even the thick, greasy smell of Southern-fried chicken failed to wake them, no reason to be surprised that the swell of silence didn’t penetrate their sleep either. He took the black Mag light from the glove compartment, left them sleeping in the car, and climbed a hill to the cabins, all of which appeared to be empty. There were no cars in sight, no vehicles of any kind, only a grassy slope of land mostly hidden by darkness, and the moonlit outline of cabins against the sky.

The land fell off precipitously behind the first cabin, dropping several feet to the water. The buildings were close together in a zigzagging line that proceeded up a hill. He pointed the flashlight at a door, found the number 1 carved into the wood frame, and switched the light off before following a grassy trail from cabin to cabin until he reached the last one,
with the number 12 on the door. It was the largest of the group, on the tip of the peninsula, on a rocky promontory a good twenty feet above the water. He searched the interior through several dirty windows, moving the beam of light over the walls and floor, and was surprised to find the place comfortably furnished with rustic chairs and tables. There were two small bedrooms and one large one, with a mahogany sleigh bed and a black bearskin rug—the real thing, head and all—atop a larger plush white rug in front of a brick fireplace. Clearly, no one had been inside in some time. The surfaces were all covered with dust, the windows were grimy, and the kitchen counters were speckled with what looked like mouse droppings. He checked the front and back door and, finding them both locked, returned to the Rover, where Lester and Jenny were still sleeping soundly.

The temperature was dropping, but it was still a mild, summery night. He sat on the front bumper of the Rover in the dark and looked out over the Saint Lawrence as the rising moon cast its path of light over the purple-black river. Wind rustled through trees. He considered whether or not to wake Jenny and Lester, having delivered them, as promised, to the address scrawled he assumed in Jenny’s hand on Jenny’s scrap of paper. He had his own housing for the night yet to worry about, not to mention the still live possibility of being beaten and robbed and for all he knew murdered and dumped in the river. They still needed his car. They still needed his money. With that thought, he went back into the Rover and retrieved the length of pipe from the floor, where it lay alongside
Jenny’s purse. The interior light went on with the opening of the door, and he watched them both a moment to see if either would stir. Neither did. Lester lay on his stomach as if he were trying to wedge himself into the seam where the backrest and cushions met. Jenny lay on her back, fully stretched out across the seat, with one arm flung over her eyes and the other dangling to the floorboards, her fingers resting on the six-pack of Coke. Her blouse had pulled loose from her pants, leaving a six-inch swath of skin exposed under the bright interior light as if magnified. Between the straight line of red leather low on her hips and the pulled-back, silky fabric of the blouse, her bare skin soaked up the light. He was tempted to touch her there, to lay his hand against her belly, but he stuck the Mag light back in the glove compartment, retreated with the pipe, and closed the car door, not gently; when again neither of them moved, he tossed the pipe into the woods and started down toward the rocky inlet at the foot of the peninsula.

Close to the water he found an outcropping protected from the wind. Behind him in the moonlight, he could see the Rover parked under the oak tree’s umbrella of branches. In front of him, the river, and now a long black cargo vessel of some sort sliding into sight, coming out of the Atlantic heading west. He and Carolyn had once almost been killed by such a vessel. They had been fishing for hours, talking easily about politics and history and literature, with Carolyn doing most of the talking while T mostly listened avidly and threw in a comment here and there, but mostly he was enjoying the listening; then, for no reason, he looked behind him and saw a black wall of
steel bearing down on their fourteen-foot jon boat, which, compared to the leviathan looming over them, was as tiny as an insect. He managed to sputter out Carolyn’s name before nearly capsizing the boat as he scurried to the bow, where Carolyn was absorbed in watching the thin yellow filament of her fishing line. They laughed about that later, what he could have been thinking as he tried to run away from an oceangoing cargo ship by moving from the stern to the bow of their little jon boat. Carolyn, luckily, was more self-possessed. She started the outboard with a single hard yank of the engine cord and piloted the little boat out of the path of the ship with seconds to spare, the rush of water from the prow actually lifting them up and pushing them away from the more dangerous waters in its wake.