Red knife

THIRTEEN

That Sunday night Annie sat in front of her computer, trying to work on the final paper for her lit class. She was asking the question: Was it really William Shakespeare who’d penned the plays that all the world loved? She’d constructed the paper to be a kind of whodunit, presenting evidence that pointed toward various suspects: Marlowe, Raleigh, Bacon, Johnson. She needed to begin wrapping it up, but she sat staring at the screen, dreadfully aware that she didn’t care who’d written the plays, didn’t care about the paper, didn’t care about school at all. She was finished. All the seniors were finished. For the next few weeks, they were just going through the motions.

A message appeared on her screen. From Uly Kingbird. They’d IM’ed a lot while they were practicing the music they’d played that morning at church. thanks what4, she IM’ed back. thought i wanted to be alone this afternoon but i didn’t. the dark is no place for children and children we all are. more dylan more mine pretty pretty words don’t change anything. the worlds still an ugly place. the words come from somewhere beautiful inside you. your music comes from the same place.

He didn’t respond for a minute. She wondered if he was still online.

Then another message: i used to believe… what, she replied. nothing. late. good night.

She sat back and stared at the screen. She was about to turn her own computer off when a final message from Uly appeared. that every day is a chance for something better. but the truth is every day is a hole you try to climb out of. and one day you won’t.

Misty took forever going to sleep. By the time Lucinda laid the baby in the crib that she’d put up in Alejandro’s old room, she was exhausted. She went to her own bedroom and found Will sleeping deeply. She stood looking down at her husband and realized she was exhausted with him, too. It wasn’t that he was an awful man, a bad man, he was just a difficult man, a man hard to love. Even after more than a quarter century together, he was like a foreigner to her, speaking from a sensibility she couldn’t understand, following rituals she couldn’t appreciate. More than anything else, it was his silence that kept him a stranger. He spoke, yes, but often in a way that felt to her like silence. Years before, she’d thought of leaving him, but she had no way of supporting herself or her boys. And it wasn’t as if he was cruel to her, abused her, beat her. He never did.

When she was a girl in Los Angeles, in the backyard of her stepfather’s home there was a carob tree. It had been a beautiful thing, huge and shady. Under it her mother had put a little grotto, a bathtub virgin. Lucinda spent much time under the carob, daydreaming or praying to the Virgin Mary. Then one day the tree fell apart, just fell apart. The inside, it turned out, was completely rotten. As it collapsed, a huge section of the carob tree smashed the bathtub and its virgin. These days, Lucinda often thought of her marriage as being like that carob tree: something that was rotting from the inside and would someday simply crumble.

She took a blanket from the linen closet and stretched out on the sofa in the living room. From there, she could easily hear if the baby woke and began to cry. She’d always been a light sleeper.

She closed her eyes. Against the darkness splashed the image of Alejandro and Rayette, tangled in the meadow grass, their bodies torn open by the shotgun blasts. She sat up and stared at the curtains, drawn closed over the picture window. The curtains were new. Rayette had helped choose them, and while they considered fabric she had talked to Lucinda about her childhood.

When Rayette was seven, her mother had left her with her grandparents and gone to Minneapolis with a man named Douglas Bear. She’d promised to come back for Rayette when they were settled. That never happened. Her mother and Bear were killed in a head-on collision north of Cloquet. Her grandparents raised her, but they were not young and both were dead by the time Rayette hit fourteen. She was passed from relative to relative, giving them all trouble. At sixteen she chose to make her own way. It was her luck, she told Lucinda, that the way had led to Alejandro. It felt like finding God, she confided. She didn’t mean it in a sacrilegious way. It was just that she’d never known such hope before. Such happiness. He wasn’t a perfect man, but he loved her, and that made all the difference in the world.

Lucinda opened the curtains and looked out the window. The house stood just beyond the town limits of Aurora. It was a one-story rambler on a large lot with two young maples in front, near the road. The backyard abutted a stand of mixed spruce and poplar. Will had given her a small section of the property for her garden, but most of the yard was grass that, thanks to her husband, was thick and velvety all summer. He kept everything perfect and orderly. It had been the same at every place they’d lived, from Camp Pendleton to Camp Lejeune, with a dozen postings, foreign and domestic, in between. He was hard on the boys in that respect. No bikes left lying in the yard. No digging to China the way boys sometimes did. They both had their part in helping with the tasks, a strict duty roster that Will kept posted on the refrigerator and oversaw as rigidly as if the boys were part of his command rather than part of his family. When he retired from the military and opened his gun shop, Will had expected the boys to help out there as well. Alejandro had finally mutinied; he and Will began a battle that had seen an occasional truce but never an ending. Uly, on the other hand, never fought back. He bent beneath the weight of his father’s expectations, and it hurt Lucinda to see him burdened so.

She looked toward the lights of town, which she sometimes thought of as the campfires of strangers. She left the window, returned to the sofa, and lay down. She was afraid to close her eyes, afraid of what she would see in the darkness there. Almost immediately, however, her exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep.

She woke suddenly. It was still dark, still night. Had she heard Misty crying? She listened carefully and realized that what had waked her was the tiny squeak of the platform rocker in the corner of the living room. In the drift of light through the picture window, she saw Will’s face. He looked at peace. In his arms lay the baby, asleep against his chest.

It was the only moment of beauty in that whole brutal day, but it was almost enough.

The light on Stevie’s nightstand stayed on late, and when Cork went to bed, he poked his head in his son’s room. The little guy was wide awake, fingers laced behind his head, staring up at the ceiling.

“Lights out,” Cork said.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it always wrong to kill?”

Cork walked in and sat on the edge of Stevie’s bed. “Why are you asking?”

“Zip Downey told me that the Kingbirds sold drugs to kids. So maybe whoever killed them didn’t think it was wrong.”

“Killing somebody is never the right thing to do,” Cork said.

“You killed people,” Stevie said. It wasn’t an accusation.

“And I pray all the time to be forgiven.”

“Did you think it was wrong?”

He hesitated, then answered truthfully. “I don’t remember thinking about right and wrong when it happened. But I suppose somewhere in my head I must have believed it was the right thing to do.”

“But you just said-”

“I know. Stevie, I hope you never find yourself in a situation where you have to decide whether to kill someone. I hope that with all my heart. Whatever people thought of the Kingbirds and whatever the Kingbirds may have done, killing them wasn’t the answer. It was calculated, cold-blooded murder. It was wrong, absolutely wrong, and that’s all there is to it.”

The troubled look didn’t leave Stevie’s face. Cork had watched his son play at killing, using a stick or a golf club or an old curtain rod as a rifle. He’d never stepped in to stop it. When Cork was a boy-raised on John Wayne westerns-he’d played the same games. He believed that the real killing for which he was responsible as a man didn’t come from the games of his childhood, and taking a stick away from Stevie or any other boy who fought make-believe battles wouldn’t solve a thing.

“Do you understand?” he finally asked his son.

Stevie said, “If somebody killed you, I’d kill them back.”

“Then I guess I’d better do everything I can to make sure I stay alive, huh?”

He ruffled his son’s hair. Stevie didn’t smile.

“Promise?” Stevie said.

“I promise. Going to read for a while?”

“I guess so.”

Cork handed him the book on the nightstand, The Indian in the Cupboard. “See you in the morning.” He kissed Stevie’s forehead and went to his own bedroom.

Jo was almost asleep, nodding over one of her legal files that she’d brought to bed to study. Cork stood in the doorway, thinking Jo had twice asked him to promise that he wouldn’t put himself at risk in whatever trouble seemed to be coming to Tamarack County. He hadn’t been able to do that for her. Yet he hadn’t hesitated in making that same promise to his son. What was the difference, he wondered, and if he told her, would Jo understand?

Hell, why should she? He wasn’t certain he did.

Worse, he wasn’t certain it was a promise he could keep.