The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

Half-Lives by Tim L. Williams

FROM Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

WHEN I TRACKED Terrell Cheatham’s grandmother from her last known address to the subsidized apartment she’d moved into after her husband’s death, she didn’t do any of the things I expected. Instead of slamming the door in my face or denying that her grandson lived with her, she invited me in for a cup of coffee and then added a shot of bourbon to my mug, “just to keep the cold out of my bones.” This was a long way from the reception a private investigator usually gets when running down bail jumps in southwest Memphis, where the average annual income is a few dollars higher than it is in Calcutta and even the most law-abiding residents see a white face as an intrusion from an alien and hostile world. I was so shocked I wanted to believe her when she insisted that her grandson was a “fine young man” who wouldn’t cause me “an ounce of trouble.”

Frances Cheatham seemed like a decent woman. She was in her late fifties or early sixties, still trim and attractive but with deep worry lines around her mouth and eyes, and I could tell she loved her grandson. From what I’d read in his jacket, Terrell Cheatham didn’t seem like the kind of kid who belonged in jail. At twenty, he had a single blemish on his record. It had been two years since his arrest for breaking into the video-game store, and he’d kept clean since then. He’d completed a semester of college, earning a spot on the honor roll before he dropped out to take a full-time job in the kitchen at a Tops Barbecue on Elvis Presley Boulevard. If he’d shown up for his court appearance a week and a half ago-in Memphis a trial two years after the offense is considered swift justice-Terrell would have faced no more than six months’ probation.

“Terrell’s momma left him when he was just a baby,” she said now, blowing at the steam rising off a fresh cup of coffee and then shrugging. “Our son Marcus Junior gave Terrell to us to raise, but he came to visit Terrell every weekend up until the time he was killed in a car wreck outside of Jackson, Mississippi.”

Her husband, Marcus Senior, had passed away less than a year ago. He was a good man, she said, one who’d worked for twenty-seven years as a night watchman at the West Parrish Industrial Park to put bread on the table and keep a roof over their heads.

“Bone cancer. He went fast, but don’t let anyone tell you fast and easy are the same thing.” Her smile was tired, maybe a little bitter. “I bet you hear your share of sad stories, don’t you, Mr. Raines. Probably get sick of them.”

I told her to call me Charlie and said how sorry I was about her loss. And she thanked me for that, even though we both knew words were little comfort.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, so we sat in silence for a few minutes before Frances Cheatham forced a smile and said it looked like both of us needed a refill. While she was in the kitchen, I went to look out the front window. The last of the light was seeping from a January sky. When you say Memphis, people think blistering August heat, but there are days in January and February when the skies are mold gray, a slanting, almost-frozen drizzle falls from dawn to midnight, and a wind whips across the Mississippi that makes you wonder if you haven’t been transported unaware from Beale Street to Boston. I was still standing at the window, dreading going back out into that cold, when a tall, scrawny kid dressed in a parka, sock cap, and sneakers crossed the street and headed into the parking lot.

“You see Terrell coming?” Frances Cheatham asked, handing me my coffee.

Before I could answer, a black Tahoe fishtailed into the lot, nearly slammed a row of parked cars, and then skidded to a stop. Peering over my shoulder, Frances Cheatham said, “Good Lord, they almost run right over Terrell.”

Outside, the SUV’s passenger door was slung open, and a man, fiftyish, white, not much bigger than an oak tree, got out. Terrell tried to run. Tried was the operative word. He didn’t even get started before the guy in the overcoat raised a sawed-off shotgun and squeezed the trigger.

“Oh sweet Jesus!” Frances Cheatham screamed in my ear.

I pulled my.45 from beneath my jacket and ran for the door. I’d just opened it when the shotgun roared again. I knew it was too late for Terrell Cheatham, but I ran anyway, taking the stairs two at a time and nearly slipping and falling halfway down. His grandmother ran behind me, calling on the name of the Lord with each step she took.

Just as we reached the lot, the Tahoe screeched away. I caught a glimpse of the driver-white, older than the shooter, thick, curly gray hair and glasses-but then the Tahoe was gone, heading northeast toward the interstate. Cursing, I stuffed my.45 back into my holster without having fired a shot.

Frances Cheatham hunkered beside her grandson, screaming his name again and again. Now that the shooting was over, a few faces had emerged from the apartments, staring at the scene, some of them whispering their prayers.

“I’ve called an ambulance,” a pretty girl about Terrell’s age shouted.

An ambulance wasn’t going to help. The first blast from the shotgun had caught him just below the kidneys; the second, fired point-blank, had taken off most of the back of his head.

“A PlayStation 3,” Frances Cheatham said when I touched her shoulder. “That’s why he robbed that store. That’s all my baby wanted. And just look at what someone done gone and did.”

Four days later, the homicide detective who’d caught Terrell Cheatham’s case finally got tired of dodging my calls and ducking down the back stairs and agreed to meet me for a late lunch. Ray Pardue was a stoop-shouldered man with thinning, sand-colored hair and a nervous grin that never quite made it to a full-blown smile. Now he pushed aside a platter of Neely’s barbecue spaghetti and gave me a pained expression.

“I feel as bad as you do for the kid’s grandmother. But Jesus Christ, Raines, where have you been living the last ten years? Kids in South Memphis get murdered every day. The Chamber of Commerce don’t advertise it in their See the River City brochures, but we both know the way it is.”

He was right, of course, but Terrell Cheatham’s murder was the only one I’d witnessed. “So you’ve got no leads.” I said.

“You were a cop. You know how it goes. You’re a day into one case when two or three more fall in your lap, so what do you do?”

“You focus on the easiest to solve.”

“It’s not that one victim’s more important than another, but a bird in the hand…” He paused while the waitress set fresh beers on the table. “You take a gang-related murder like Cheatham’s. Eventually someone will get pinched and want to make a deal. Until then, I got two other homicides to worry about.”

Gang-related. Terrell Cheatham’s murder hadn’t rated a lot of coverage. The local news stations were too busy covering the latest scandal in the mayor’s office and the groundbreaking for the Michael Montesi North Memphis Children’s Health and Recreational Center, a multimillion-dollar complex that was being built by Vincent “Little Vinnie” Montesi, head of the Italian mob in southwest Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, in honor of his son. The news anchor talked a lot about the tragedy of nine-year-old Michael Montesi’s death from leukemia and about the generosity of his grief-stricken father. They failed to mention all the kids who’d died from the drugs Montesi and his crew brought into the city, or the ones he’d orphaned during his reign at the head of the Montesi family. When you donate a few million dollars to a local charity, people tend to overlook the things you’ve done to make that money. The death of yet another black kid in a Memphis project didn’t have the same appeal to the public imagination, but during the terse, thirty-second spot that the murder had been given, the news anchor had used the same phrase. Gang-related. Unless South Memphis street gangs had started recruiting late-middle-aged white men, someone was making a serious mistake.

“The shooter and the driver were white,” I said. “I told that to the on-scene detective.”

“She noted it in her report, but we got a half-dozen other witnesses who say the perps were young black men, late teens or early twenties.” He stifled a belch with the back of his hand. “Acid reflux,” he said. “I chew Tums by the dozens, take this prescription medicine that costs a fortune, sleep with my bed propped up on bricks so that I got a crick in my neck all the time. Doesn’t do a damn bit of good.”

“I saw them. They were white.”

“And other people say they were young black men. What do you want me to tell you?” He pulled a five and a one from his wallet and dropped them on the table. “That should cover the tip.”

“A kid whose only criminal record comes from stealing a couple of video games gets his face blown off and y’all decide it’s gang-related, put it in a file, and forget it?”

He took a deep breath. “Look, Raines, I shouldn’t be telling you this, because it’s information that you got no right to have, but Terrell Cheatham was running with gang kids, two in particular. Demond Jones and Bop-Bop Drake. Drug dealers, pimps, suspects in a half-dozen robberies and a couple of murders. The way I figure it, either Cheatham got targeted by a rival gang or he had a falling-out with his good pals Bop-Bop and Demond.”

“Your other witnesses tell you that?”

“Surveillance tape, witnesses, informants.” He stood up, took his coat from the back of the chair. “And a guy who matched Cheatham’s description is a suspect in an attempted murder.”

“You’re serious?”

“A forty-six-year-old truck driver for a company called Mid-South Transport. He was making a delivery in the neighborhood and had engine trouble. The guy was sitting behind the wheel, trying to get the ignition to fire, when three black kids, we’re figuring Cheatham, Jones, and Drake, threw a Molotov cocktail at his truck.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and his eyes were hard and angry. “I guess they figured blowing up a white guy was a fun way to spend a Friday night. Maybe you ought to drive down to Southaven, take a good look at the burn scars, and then ask Don Ellis what priority he thinks this Cheatham kid’s murder ought to get.”

“Don Ellis? From Southaven?” I said. “I think I know him.”

“Well, you won’t recognize him if you do.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, but it didn’t matter. Pardue had already turned on his heel and was headed for the door.

Don Ellis’s house was a small, two-bedroom ranch in a neighborhood that had probably been nice ten years ago. I sat on a beer-stained sofa in his living room, asking myself why in the hell I was here. No one had hired me; I hadn’t been a cop in over ten years, and Terrell Cheatham’s life and death were none of my business anyway. But for two days I’d been worrying it like a bad tooth. I couldn’t get Frances Cheatham’s raw, wounded voice out of my head, couldn’t stop hearing her say, “A PlayStation 3, that’s all my baby wanted,” and couldn’t get a handle on Terrell Cheatham himself. Who was he? An honor student, a hard worker, and a loving grandson or a gangbanger who’d tried to burn an innocent man alive? Finally I’d given in, looked up Don Ellis’s address and number, made a call. Now I was waiting for him to identify Terrell Cheatham as one of his attackers so I could call the kid’s murder karma or justice and get back to the serious business of repossessing cars.

But it didn’t look as if it was going to be that easy. Don Ellis studied the photograph for a second, laid it back on the coffee table, and shook his head.

“He could have been one of them. But it was after midnight and the streetlights down there don’t ever seem to work.” He glanced at a picture of his ex-wife and his sons on the end table beside his wheelchair. “The truth is, the pain’s been so bad and I been so doped up that I’m kind of hazy about that whole night.”

I smiled and said sure, I understood. It was a lie, of course. Understand? I couldn’t even imagine. The burns were less than six weeks old-he’d only been out of the hospital for three days-and his face resembled a rubber Halloween mask that someone had snagged from a bonfire. The skin was bubbled and shiny, bright pink in most places but splotched with patches of bleached-out white just below his cheeks. The damaged facial muscles made it seem as if his lips were twisted into a permanent sneer, and he spoke with the halting slur of a stroke victim. It didn’t take a psychic to see his future: long hospital stays, multiple skin grafts, lots of pain.

“We should have kept in touch,” he said. “After we graduated, I mean. You get so busy you don’t realize you’re losing touch with all your friends.”

I said that’s just the way it was, but we were never really friends, just classmates on friendly terms. I hadn’t thought of him in years.

“So who is he?” Don finally asked.

He looked away from me when he asked the question, and I had the feeling that he remembered a lot more about the night he had been attacked than he said. Call it intuition if you want. That sounds a lot nicer than cynicism or paranoia.

“A twenty-year-old kid who had his head blown off by a shotgun a few days ago,” I said.

“The same age as my oldest boy.” He picked up the photograph of his family from the table. “You got kids, Charlie?”

“No. Just didn’t happen.”

There was a lot more to it than that, but catching up on old times has its limits.

“When you have kids, you want to give them everything.” He stared at the photograph and took a long breath that made him shudder. “What am I going to give them now? A truckload of debt? The thirty-three dollars I got left out of my SSI check?”

“Mid-South Transport isn’t paying you? If you’re in a union…”

“I’m not a truck driver. I’m a body man and painter, been doing it since the week I got out of school. The truck-driving thing was just on the side. After my divorce I had the free time, and with the boys starting college, I needed the extra money.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “I try to send Cass a little something extra when I can. We had twenty-one and a half good years and you never know. People get back together the same as they split up, right?”

“You worked nights. Local deliveries?”

“The general area, yeah. Sal Junior, my boss at the shop, hooked me up with the gig. The pay was good and in cash and what was I doing anyway? Sitting around here by myself, drinking too much beer.”

“Sal Junior.” I made a connection I didn’t want to make. “You work for the Arcados?”

His flinch was all the answer I needed. Arcado Automotive was the largest independent body shop in Memphis. Everyone knew that if you wanted a first-class paint job or if you needed a totaled ’67 Mustang restored to cherry perfection, you went to Arcado Automotive. Everyone in law enforcement also knew that the garage had been a front for the Montesi crime family since JFK was in the White House. If Sal Junior was involved with Mid-South Transport, it meant something very profitable and most likely very illegal was going on.

“What were you hauling for them, Don? Electronics? Television sets? Hijacked cigarettes?”

“Nothing like that. Just garbage,” he said. “And it didn’t have nothing to do with my attack, anyway. I’d unloaded my truck at the industrial park. We were on our way out of the neighborhood when the engine broke down.”

“I thought you were alone when it happened. You said we.”

His eyes darted away from me. “The drugs,” he said. “They make me fuzzy.”

“I’m not trying to accuse you of anything.”

“Look, Charlie. I’m tired, okay? I think I need to lie down.”

“Don…”

“I’m going to lie down.”

I got the message so I said sure, that was probably a good idea. Then he stopped me.

“Those kids who did this?”

“Yeah?”

He shivered a little, remembering. “I tell you the truth, Charlie. I think they just wanted to watch me burn.”

Frances Cheatham looked as if she’d lost five pounds and added ten years since the day her grandson died. She sat in her shadowed living room, surrounded by flowers and condolence cards and her photo albums, sipping straight bourbon from a coffee cup.

“I don’t see what my husband’s job has to do with Terrell.”

“I’m not sure that it does,” I said.

But that was only partly true. Nate Randolph, my old partner in the homicide division, had surprised me by not only returning my call but actually doing me a favor. A decade ago I’d ended up in a situation where I had a choice between destroying evidence that could have put the former head of the Montesi family, Fat Tony, in prison for twenty years or saving the life of a woman who was very close to me. The internal affairs investigation that followed my decision led me to resign from the Memphis P.D. Guilt by association ended Nate’s chance at making captain. Maybe his new wife had mellowed him.

Two years retired, Nate still had a lot of friends. It had taken him less than twenty minutes to find out that although they hadn’t been arrested, Bop-Bop Drake and Demond Jones were considered the only suspects in Terrell Cheatham’s murder and that four of the five witnesses who claimed the perps were young black men were employed at the West Parrish Industrial Park, the Depression-era sprawl of abandoned brick warehouses, corrugated tin shacks, rusted-out water and gasoline storage tanks, and collapsing docks on the banks of the Mississippi River just a few blocks from Frances Cheatham’s apartment. The park had last operated at full capacity back during the Vietnam War but somehow seemed to employ everyone on the scene of the murder as well as Frances Cheatham’s late husband.

“Terrell worked there, too, before he went to Tops,” I said.

“It was temporary work, is all. About the time Marcus found out he had cancer, Terrell’s job played out. Things always happen at the worst time.” She glared at me from over the rim of her coffee cup. “At least, that’s the way it works around here.”

“Your husband worked the night shift,” I said. “It’s odd, don’t you think? That the park would need twenty-four-hour security, I mean?”

“We were thankful to have a steady paycheck.”

“Did your husband or Terrell ever mention Mid-South Transport?”

“Not that I remember,” she said, but her eyes darted away from me.

“Mrs. Cheatham, you and I both know that Terrell was killed by two white men. Somehow five people claim the shooters were young and black. Four of the five work at the industrial park where your husband and grandson were employed. The fifth works for Mid-South Transport, a trucking company that makes regular deliveries to the park and one I’m fairly certain is a front for the Mafia. If your husband ever mentioned what goes on there…”

“He never said and I never asked.” She met my eyes. “I’ve not hired you for anything, and you’re not a cop, so I don’t know what you think you can do.”

It was a good question, and I didn’t really have an answer. Part of it was pride, maybe. I didn’t like being told that I hadn’t seen what I knew I had. But it was more than that. The pain I’d seen in Frances Cheatham’s face when she realized Terrell was dead and that impotent drowning feeling I’d had as I rushed into the parking lot a few minutes too late to do anything that mattered haunted my sleep. This was the only way I knew to put those memories to rest.

“If someone has threatened you or if you’re…”

“Ain’t no one done nothing,” she said, her voice quavering and angry. “But what does it matter anyway? Nothing you or me do is going to bring my grandson back, is it?”

“No, ma’am,” I admitted.

“Then what’s it matter?” She shook her head and reached for her coffee mug. “It doesn’t matter. Not now.” Her eyes flashed at me. “This was our home. We told ourselves if we raised him right, things could be different for him, that if you was fair to people they’d be fair to you, that if you did the right thing it would be right. We was stupid, and I’m just a fool. My husband was a good man and Terrell was, too. At least he was going to be.”

She stared into her empty coffee mug as if she could will whiskey to appear. After a minute she pulled herself from the couch, wobbling a little as she waited for me to stand.

“Sometimes you got to look after yourself. You can’t always be worrying about what ought to be. Sometimes you just got to take care of your own.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I agreed with her that sometimes you did. Then she reminded me that this was a dangerous neighborhood, especially for someone with my skin tone.

“What I’m saying,” she said, in case I hadn’t understood, “is that it would probably be best if you didn’t come down here anymore.”

Then she slammed the door. In the parking lot, a little boy, ten or eleven, maybe, stepped from between two cars. He was small, delicate-looking, with huge brown eyes that seemed to swallow his face, but he already had the walk, the aggressively slumped shoulders, the sneer of a gang kid. Ten years from now he’d have the jailhouse banter, the dead eyes, and the rap sheet to go with them-if he lived that long.

“You Raines, right? They some people want to see you.”

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“I’m telling you,” he said. “You pass that school up the block? See the courts in the back? Bop-Bop and Demond ballin’ up there.”

“Thanks for the message,” I said, opening my car door.

“So you going?”

“Depends on what they want.”

“Man, they don’t tell me what they want. They just say go get that white guy, tell him we got something to talk about.” He kicked at the pavement with the toe of a scuffed sneaker. “So?”

“You want a ride?”

He took an instinctive step backward and his large eyes got larger. “I don’t get in cars with strangers.”

“You tell me who you think had Terrell killed,” Demond Jones said.

He was a rangy kid with a bushy Afro, a slow smile, and a shark’s eyes. He sprawled on the icy metal bleachers near a fenced-in basketball court, his long legs stretched out in front of him, a Kool dangling from the corner of his mouth and a thirty-two-ounce can of Icehouse beer resting by his side. One row up, Bop-Bop Drake perched over his friend’s shoulder like an overgrown parrot.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about any of what they had said. I looked away, watched the four-on-four game on the court. Most of the players were good, but one was spectacular, quick and surefooted with a smooth jump shot and a crossover dribble that could blow out a defender’s ankle. I recognized him from sports reports on the local news. A sophomore in high school, he was being recruited by half the major universities in America and destined to be an NBA star, but none of the kids gathered around the courts were paying him any attention. Down here Demond and Bop-Bop were the stars, the heroes that all these thirteen- and fourteen-year-old kids wanted to be. It made sense. None of those kids had the talent of Kyrie Taylor, but they all knew they could learn to deal drugs or use a gun.

“You’re telling me you guys firebombed that truck for political reasons.” I finally said.

“We ain’t saying we did anything illegal at all,” Bop-Bop said. “I’m telling you that Terrell threw that Molotov because he was drunk and angry that they was killing us.”

“Genocide is the word Bop-Bop’s trying to think of,” Demond said. “That’s what Terrell kept saying when he was drunk. They’re committing genocide, just like in Rwanda, but nobody knows it. T-Bone was smart. Educated, you know?”

“He was in your gang.”

“What gang?” Bop-Bop asked. “There ain’t no gangs around here.”

“Terrell wasn’t in nothing. He just came to us because he knew I’d listen to what he had to say.”

“Why?” I asked. “Was there money involved?”

He gave me a slow grin. “You act like ’cause I do a little business I don’t care about nothing else. Making money is the American way, ain’t it?”

“He told you what was going on at the industrial park? Enlighten me.”

“I’m not clear on the particulars, but I know something ain’t right around here.”

“He said they were dumping?”

“Chemicals and all kinds of shit like that. Illegal stuff from all over. T-Bone said it’s why his granddad died of bone cancer.” For the first time, Demond’s eyes softened and I remembered that he wasn’t just a gangbanger or a monster but also a nineteen-year-old kid. “He said it was the reason my baby sister got leukemia.”

“There’s all kind of people sick down here. The apartments where I stay? I know at least six families got kids with cancer. You just go down to the Med, you’ll see,” Bop-Bop said.

“T-Bone had all kinds of numbers and things he’d gathered,” Demond said.

“He called it some foreign word,” Bop-Bop said.

Demond gave him a look. “Dossier. It ain’t foreign, man. It’s American.”

“Ain’t no word I ever used.”

“Damn, Bop-Bop, I know you went to school. Maybe you should have paid attention.” Demond looked back at me. “Terrell had pictures he’d taken on his cell phone while he was working there, notes about things his granddad had told him, this research he’d done on the Internet. He showed us that stuff ’cause he knew I’d be interested, since I watched my baby sister die of cancer.”

“What happened to it?”

“We ain’t got it. That’s for sure.”

“Why did you firebomb the truck?”

“Let’s just say Terrell might have put away a few too many and claimed he was going to take care of things his own damn self. A couple of his buddies might have gone with him, you know, maybe ’cause they thought he wasn’t really going to do anything.” He closed his eyes for a second. “Or maybe they went with him ’cause they were hurting pretty bad and wanted to strike out the same way he did because a little sister had died. Say this little sister was just six years old and crying for her brother to hold her hand but he was too scared because it hurt too damn much to see her that way.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“We all sorry, man.” He took a long drag from his cigarette and then elbowed Bop-Bop’s knee. “Tell him all of it.”

Bop-Bop cleared his throat and fidgeted. He seemed as nervous as an actor on opening night.

“Well. It’s like this.” He halted, coughed into his fist, tried again. “Okay, say these two friends and Bone are…”

“Just tell him what happened,” Demond said. “He ain’t a cop no more. Besides, if he says anything, it’s our word against his.”

Bop-Bop thought it over a moment and then shrugged. “We were all wasted, you know, and T-Bone, that’s what we called Terrell ’cause he was always talking about steaks, he kept saying they’d killed Paula, Demond’s little sister, kept saying they poisoned her and wasn’t no one going to do nothing but us. We were going to throw them bottles of gasoline through the front gates at the park, but on our way we saw the broken-down truck. T-Bone went crazy, yelling at them that they were child killers and as bad as the Nazis. Then he threw the Molotov and the truck caught on fire.”

“You keep saying them,” I said, remembering Don Ellis saying we broke down. “Were there two people in the truck?”

“That’s where things get complicated,” Demond said.

“Yeah, there was a guy in the passenger’s seat. He jumped out of the truck with a gun.”

“Maybe he had a gun,” Demond said. “But it don’t matter. He came out of the truck running toward us, and I put three bullets in his chest.”

Bop-Bop glanced around and then leaned a little closer. “Guy’s name was Giacomeli. We ran into him here and there in the kind of business we do.”

“Sam Giacomeli?”

“Called himself Sammy the Saint,” Demond said, snorting his disgust.

“You guys killed Paul Cardo’s nephew,” I said. “And Cardo is…”

“He’s with the Montesis,” Bop-Bop said.

“Not just with,” I said.

“We know who he is,” Demond said. “That’s why we sent for you.”

Bop-Bop nodded. “Word on the street is you’re in tight with Montesi.”

“That’s not…”

Demond cut me off before I could finish. “Just name us a price, man. I ain’t saying we’ll pay it, but it’ll give us a place to start negotiating.”

“You want to hire me?”

“We don’t care what you call it,” Demond said. “We just want you to make it go away.”

My first thought was that this was some kind of joke, but their eyes were desperately earnest. They kept watching me, waiting for me to say I could do something to help, the shaky smiles on their faces caught somewhere between hopeful and damned.

At eleven o’clock the next morning, I sat on a bench outside of the Physical Rehabilitation and Therapy building on the campus of Baptist Memorial Hospital and tried to make sense of it all. After I’d left Drake and Jones, I’d headed for the main branch of the Memphis library. Two hours later, I’d walked back out into the cold night with words like benzene, dioxin, and dichloromethane buzzing in my head. One sentence echoed: twenty-two billion pounds of toxic and hazardous chemicals released each year through illegal disposal. From New Jersey to Alabama, the mob had used its experience in late-night burial to make millions by handling sticky and usually toxic messes for corporate bosses who were more concerned with profit margins than questions. Whether they were in urban industrial wastelands or backwater burgs, the dump sites had at least two things in common: they were always located on the edge of poor, usually black neighborhoods and they continued to poison generations long after the dumping had been forgotten and both the mob’s and the corporate shareholders’ profits had been spent.

It was nearly eleven-thirty when a part-time home health aide parked Don Ellis’s Dodge minivan in front of the building and scurried around to help him to the front door. When I walked into the second-floor cafeteria, Don was waiting at a table near a row of vending machines, sipping Dr Pepper through a straw. “I’m glad you called. Since you came to the house I ain’t thought about nothing else. You left the picture of that kid at my house.” He shrugged. “I’m a coward these days, Charlie. I lost what little nerve I had.”

I felt sorry for him, but that didn’t stop me from asking questions. I’m still enough of a cop that it rarely does.

“We hauled lots of stuff,” he said. “Don’t ask me what it was, because I don’t know, other than there were vats and barrels of it, and it came in from everywhere. Even I could tell the logs and inspections were phony, but no one seemed to ask any questions.”

“How long?”

“For me, five years off and on.” He slurped his Dr Pepper, stared at a point somewhere past my head. “They’ve been dumping down there since the early seventies, I think, but that’s just a guess.”

“Why was Giacomeli with you?”

“It was just one of those things. He was at the industrial park on some kind of business. I don’t ask questions. I just drive trucks. Anyways, his Mazda broke down. I offered to take a look, but it was late and he said forget it, he’d just catch a ride back with me. Then the truck started acting up. The last thing I remember him saying was ‘Jesus Christ, two engines in one night, maybe I’m frigging cursed.’ Then those kids came from nowhere and…” His voice trailed off, and he chased his straw around with the tip of his tongue, finally gave up and licked his lips instead. “After the fire started, someone must have made a phone call, because when I woke up everyone was saying I was alone. A guy visited me in the ICU, told me that’s the way it happened and I didn’t want to complicate matters by saying any different.”

“Listen, Don,” I said. “I still got a few friends on the force.”

“Forget it,” he said, his voice loud enough to turn heads in our direction. “I’m telling you this ’cause it’s been on my mind a lot and you knew about it anyway, but I’m not talking to anyone else. Ever.”

“Don, something needs to be done.”

“Listen to me, Charlie. The thing I thought about while I was in the hospital was that maybe I had this coming, that maybe I deserved to die. But I got my boys and my ex-wife to think about.” He licked his lips again. “I said what I got to say. And I’m never going to say it again.”

I was furious. I wanted to tell him that he was right: he had become a coward. Maybe I even opened my mouth to do it, but the sight of him struggling to stand, his ruined face straining from the effort, left me wordless and ashamed.

Two hours later I lay on the asphalt outside my apartment building and stared up at the flushed and bloated face of the man who’d dented the back of my head with a pool cue and cracked a couple of my ribs with the toe of his snake-skinned cowboy boot. He looked familiar, but my mind was reeling from shock and pain, and I couldn’t quite get a handle on his name or who he was or why he seemed intent on killing me.

“Look here, Charlie. Moan a lot, thrash around like you’re really hurting, and this will go a lot quicker,” he said in a voice that sounded as if he started each day by gargling broken glass. “I tried to beg off this one, but you know how it is.” He stomped my left hand, ground the bones under his heel, grinned down at me. “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

If I’d had the strength to do anything except whimper and cringe and try to remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer, I would have told him that I didn’t really give a damn who he was. He could have been Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or the frigging Easter Bunny for all I cared. I just didn’t want him to hurt me anymore.

“It’s me, Frankie Giageos,” he said. “I guess I put on a few pounds, huh?”

I blinked cold sweat from my eyes, squinted up at his face, and saw a guy I used to know buried beneath a fresh fifty pounds of fat. Frankie Gee. The last I’d heard, he was in federal prison for conspiracy to commit mail fraud.

“You got out,” I said.

“Couple of months ago.”

Then he kicked me again, left side this time, and I felt a rib crack. Say what you wanted about Frankie Gee, he was a professional. Another kick to the solar plexus and then he took a step back and stood looking down at me, breathing hard, the air whistling through his nose and rattling in his chest.

“I’m getting too old for this crap,” he said, gasping for air.

“Me too,” I said.

“That’s pretty good, Charlie.” He wiped his face on his coat sleeve and pulled a pack of Camels from his inside pocket. “I got a message for you.”

I coughed hard, nearly passed out from the pain, but felt a little better when I saw that I’d spat out a mouthful of phlegm instead of blood. “Let me guess. Stay away from Parrish Industrial Park.”

He lit a cigarette with a gold Zippo. “You know this stuff already, why am I here?”

He glanced over his shoulder at a silver Lexus parked in a handicapped space. A heavyset man with gray curly hair was sitting behind the wheel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup while he watched us. I recognized him as the man who’d been driving the SUV when Terrell Cheatham was murdered. Seeing him here with Frankie Gee brought his name back to me. Jackie Marconi, a bottom-feeder who’d been doing grunt work for the mob since he was sixteen. It looked as if he’d taken a giant leap up the ladder.

“Jackie Macaroni sits in the car while you’re out…”

“‘Jackie Macaroni.’ That’s good,” Frankie said. “Since Tony retired and Vinnie’s been so screwed up over his kid, God rest his little soul, things ain’t the way they used to be. Between you and me, they ain’t right at all.”

“Cardo’s calling the shots,” I said.

“And Jackie there is the king turd in the toilet bowl.” He flicked his cigarette away, grunted as he stooped to retrieve the sawed-off pool cue. “Cardo’s serious about this one, Charlie. Next time I’ll have to put a bullet in your head. Only reason you got a pass this time is because even though Tony ain’t the boss no more, his opinion carries weight.” He took another quick glance back at the Lexus. “If he were to make a direct request on your behalf, people would be inclined to listen. You hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear you, Frankie.”

“You listening?”

“I hear you.”

“Same old Charlie R,” he said.

I wasn’t expecting the kick in the crotch. It caught me off-guard, sent stars shooting behind my eyes and the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit I’d gobbled for breakfast spewing onto the pavement. He hadn’t pulled the kick or tried to soften the blow. Like I said, Frankie Gee was a professional.

“When you talk to Tony, give him my best wishes,” he said.

I wiped the vomit from my mouth. “What makes you think I’m going to talk to Tony?”

“You’re stubborn, Charlie. Not stupid.”

When the Lexus pulled out of the lot, I curled up into a ball and lay on the asphalt, taking deep breaths of cold air until my stomach settled. A few curtains ruffled in the apartments across the way, but no one bothered to come out to help or took the trouble to call 911. Five minutes later, I crawled to my car and drove myself to the emergency room.

In a perfect world, his loyalty as an old friend and his commitment to justice, decency, and the American Way would have led Nate Randolph to use his influence to get the department to launch an investigation into illegal dumping and Terrell Cheatham’s murder. But no one seemed particularly interested.

“Call the EPA,” Nate said. “They got a hotline for things like this.”

“That’s all you got to say?”

“No,” he said, nodding at the can of Tecate I’d set on his new coffee table. “Either keep that damn thing in your hand or use a coaster.”

I reached for my beer, winced from the pain in my ribs. I’d gotten lucky. Only three were broken. The rest of me was so sore and swollen that I felt like I’d been locked into a barrel with a rabid wolverine and pitched over Niagara Falls.

“You’ve got nothing and you know it, Charlie,” he said. “The word of a couple of street punks? The truck driver’s going to deny everything.”

“Frankie Gee didn’t pay me a visit just to catch up on old times.”

“Being right don’t change anything.” He finished his beer and set the empty back down on a coaster. “Call the EPA. They go in with a search warrant and find anything out of the ordinary, the feds will be on Cardo like stink on an outhouse.”

“And by the time they get around to filing charges, all of the important witnesses will have disappeared and I’ll end up in the Mississippi River.”

He gave me a wicked grin. “Not my problem. I’m retired. Remember?”

I’ve seen movies and read books about ordinary people who are willing to disregard their own safety to testify against the mob or reveal the abuse of power by corrupt public officials or blow the whistle on corporate bosses who deny knowledge of the poisons they peddle. These people are real heroes, capable of putting the good of the whole in front of their own self-interest. I’ve always marveled at their courage and appreciated their sacrifice. But I’m not one of them. No one would describe my life as glamorous, and it’s a long way from what I’d imagined it would be when I was a kid, but I was in no hurry to throw it away. Instead of calling the EPA, I called in a favor from an old friend.

The next afternoon I exited the 240 loop at Summer Avenue. At his Uncle Tony’s request, Little Vinnie Montesi had agreed to spare me half an hour of his time. I’d expected him to choose one of the half-dozen Italian restaurants he frequented or, if I were lucky, the warehouse-sized gentleman’s club he owned on Brooks Road. Instead I’d been summoned to a Waffle House that sat between a run-down motel where half the guests cooked meth in their rooms and a convenience store that seemed to specialize in prepaid cell phones and $3-a-bottle wine.

When I stepped into the restaurant, the hairs tingled on the back of my neck and my pulse roared in my ears. Three broad-shouldered men hunched over coffee cups at the counter. I didn’t need to see their faces to know they were Montesi’s men, but Vinnie himself was nowhere around. A setup? The thought made my mouth dry and my pulse throb in my neck. It struck me that I was putting a lot of faith in the respect Little Vinnie might have for his uncle. Before his health and his age had led him to a condo in Sarasota, Florida, Fat Tony ran the Mafia in Memphis for twenty-five years. He was greedy, power-hungry, ruthless when it came to competition, but he was also a rational man, capable of great loyalty and occasional generosity when it came to his friends.

His nephew wasn’t just Tony’s opposite in physical appearance. Around police stations in Memphis, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama, the years since Tony retired and Vinnie took over were referred to as the Cokehead Reign of Terror. Vicious by nature and possessed by an addict’s megalomania, Little Vinnie Montesi had set about renegotiating all of the old understandings. Black drug dealers, redneck meth cookers, and point men for the Mexican drug cartels had been turning up in vacant lots, abandoned warehouses, and torched cars for the last six years. Now, looking at those three broad backs and all those empty booths, I wondered if I hadn’t made the worst mistake of a life that had been full of them.

Then one of the broad-shouldered men swiveled on his stool to face me, and my pulse and my nerves settled a little. Frankie Gee. I wondered what it said about my life and my chosen profession that seeing the guy who’d broken my ribs, stomped my hands, and nearly kicked my testicles into my sinus cavities was a comfort.

“Last booth,” Frankie Gee said.

The seats were empty, but a waffle swimming in blueberry syrup, a half glass of chocolate milk, and a platter of bacon sat on the table. I slid into the side opposite the food and waited. A couple of minutes later, Vinnie Montesi came from the men’s room, patting his face with a paper towel. In the movies people are always kissing the rings of Mafia bosses, but he didn’t even offer to shake my hand. Instead he slid into the booth and gave me a curt nod. I knew he was younger than me by a good seven years, but today he seemed much older. He was ten, maybe fifteen pounds lighter than I remembered, with dark bruises beneath his eyes and fresh patches of gray in his dark brown hair. His movements were wooden and lifeless, a million miles from the jerky, earthquake-beneath-the-skin manner of a coke addict on a binge. He looked as if his grief for his son had scooped out his insides and left a hollow shell.

He picked up the glass of chocolate milk but instead of drinking it sniffed the rim and then set it back down. “You like milk?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, and then shrugged. “Not really. I pretty much stick with coffee and beer.”

“I can’t stand the stuff,” he said. “Milk, I mean. Chocolate or white, either one. The taste makes me vomit, has since I was a kid.” He picked up the glass again, and his smile was crooked and damned. “Before he got sick, Michael drank it by the gallon. He loved this place. Waffles, bacon, sausage, fried eggs. My wife, she’s a health-food addict, always worrying about nitrates and sodium and on and on, but as long as Mikey was up to it, I’d bring him every Sunday.” He shut his eyes for a second. “I thought I’d never want to step foot in this place again, but now… now it’s where I come to feel peaceful. My wife, she goes to church. I come to this dump and order a bunch of food that makes me sick to my stomach.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, hating the hollow empty sound of the words as I spoke them.

He waved away my condolences. “My uncle likes you,” he said. “The way he ran things… well, they aren’t exactly my way, but that don’t mean I don’t appreciate him. Out of respect for him, I’ll listen, but I’m not making promises.”

When I finished telling him what I knew and what I suspected, he nodded to himself. Then he spent a couple of minutes staring at a point on the ceiling.

“I’ve heard what you got to say.”

“And?”

“Paul Cardo’s a businessman, so am I. The way we do things is, he deals with his problems and I deal with mine.”

“You’re saying you don’t know what goes on at West Parrish Industrial Park?”

“Don’t know and don’t care.”

“As long as you get your cut.”

His tongue darted over his upper lip. “I have a piece of advice for you, Charlie, and I’m giving it because of your friendship with my uncle. This thing you told me today? You don’t want to be telling it to anyone else, especially not anyone connected to the federal government. A thing like that…” He shrugged and gave me a rattlesnake’s grin. “Well, my affection for my uncle only goes so far.”

I took a deep breath, glanced at the untouched waffle and the half-empty glass of chocolate milk. “What did your son die of? It was cancer, right?”

“Leukemia,” he said, his voice as cold as wind blowing over an iceberg. “Don’t push me, Raines.”

“I was in the Med the other day,” I said. “The emergency room…”

“I heard about that, too.”

“When they finished with the X-rays and the bandages, I had a little extra time, so I visited a few people, most of them from South Memphis.”

“We’re done here,” he said.

I shook my head. “Take a ride with me.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Take a ride with me.”

He grimaced. “To the Med?”

“One hour. That’s all I’m asking. Then I go away and keep my mouth shut. You don’t have to worry about offending your Uncle Tony…”

“I’m not that worried.”

“Then it’ll save you the trouble of having me killed.”

My heart hammered and a little voice in the back of my head shouted that the only thing I was going to accomplish here was to get myself murdered, but I held my gaze as steady as I could. Then he caught me off-guard.

“Tony says you lost a child.”

Even though all that was over twenty years ago, I felt as if he’d sucker-punched me in the center of my chest. “A daughter. Stillborn,” I said. “It’s not the same.”

He nodded more to himself than me. “You ride with us and I’ll give you an hour.” Then he grabbed my wrist and leaned across the booth so that a passerby might have thought he was about to kiss me. “And if you ever try to use my son’s memory to jerk me around again, I won’t bother having someone kill you. I swear to God, I’ll do it myself.”

It didn’t take an hour. After twenty minutes on the pediatrics wing of the Regional Medical Center, he grabbed my arm and stared at me with the wild, trapped eyes of a rabbit caught in a snare.

“I got to get out of here,” he said. “I can’t breathe. I just can’t get any air.”

Frankie Gee and another, younger soldier who’d come up with us turned to me as Vinnie bolted past them, his head down, his hand clamped over his mouth. When I tried to follow him to the elevator, Frankie blocked my path.

“Why’d you bring him here?” Frankie asked, his dark eyes glassy beads set in fat. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“Trying to save my life,” I said.

Frankie’s expression made it clear that he no longer thought of me as a friend. “Yeah, well, good luck with that,” he said, but he stepped out of my way.

Vinnie Montesi sat on a brick wall just outside the entrance. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and he was frantically rummaging through his coat pockets.

“Lost my damn lighter again,” he said. “Did I have it at the Waffle House?”

I shook my head and handed him my Zippo. “You all right?”

He fired the tip of his cigarette, took a drag, and exhaled toward the gray clouds that drifted from across the river. “I spent two eternities in these frigging places. Michael was in Baptist Memorial,” he said. “But they’re all the same. They feel the same. Like hopelessness and loss and bad memories. When Mikey died, he held my hand. He was too weak to squeeze it or anything, but he held on as long as he could.”

“I didn’t…”

He flicked his hand to tell me to shut up. Then when Frankie Gee and the other guy stomped toward us, ready to break the rest of my ribs, he flicked his hand again.

“Those kids up there. We gave them cancer, didn’t we? The stuff we dumped at the park.”

“Not all of them,” I said.

“That’s why God did it,” he said. “Right? That’s why Mikey got leukemia. We dumped that crap and made a lot of people sick, so Mikey got cancer.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“Never mind that Paul Cardo’s been running this scam since the seventies or that my Uncle Tony raked in his share of the profits. I took my cut for six years so God killed my kid.” He exhaled smoke at the sky. “But what are you going to do? He’s God, right? The boss of bosses. You eat his crap and pretend you’re thankful.”

“I didn’t bring you here to hurt you,” I said, and wondered if my feeling sympathy for Vincent Montesi meant I’d gone crazy or the world had turned upside down.

“You know what I think? I don’t think God waits until the afterlife to punish you. I think he does it right here.” He flicked his cigarette away. “Way I see it? Screw eternity. Right here, right now is hell.”

“Maybe not,” I said, seizing what might have been the only opportunity I had to keep myself out of that cold, dark river. “Maybe every day is purgatory,” I said, grabbing at the shadow of a rope. “Maybe it’s your chance to put right what you did the day before.”

It was pretty lame, I guess. Something I might have heard on a late-night drunk or read on a men’s room wall. But it was all I had, and I was betting my life on it.

“Yeah?” he said, frowning, wanting to believe it. “Your chance to do what? Some kind of penance?”

I knew he’d taken the bait. “Maybe.”

A smile flittered around his lips and then died. “So maybe you can set things right, get to heaven where you can see…” He let the thought fade and buried it alongside the smile. “Shutting down a business like that would cause problems. Paulie wouldn’t be happy. I’d have to deal with it.” He closed his eyes, nodded to himself. “But you know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Three weeks,” he said. “That’s what I need to make sure there’s nothing that could cause me or Tony any trouble. Three weeks. Then you can call the feds, let them start getting that garbage out of there. That’s the only deal I’m going to offer.”

The people in South Memphis had been poisoned for over thirty years, so I figured three weeks wouldn’t matter that much one way or the other. If saving my life-and Demond and Bop-Bop and Don Ellis’s, I told myself to feel a little better-meant that some of the guilty would go free? Well, they always do, don’t they?

“All right,” I said.

He stood then, motioned for Frankie and the other guy to head to the parking garage. There was no question about it. I wasn’t invited.

“You really believe that?” he asked. “That every day is one more chance to do penance, settle old debts?”

“I want to,” I said.

He turned away and left me alone. But that was okay. I knew what I’d just done and that people were going to die because of it, and alone seemed like the right place for me to be.

How would you want it to end? If it could turn out any way you wanted, what would be different? I wasted a lot of time asking myself those questions. In the end, this is what happened.

Paulie Cardo and his mistress were found dead in her condo. According to Nate Randolph, the girl had been shot twice in the chest and hadn’t suffered. They kept Paul Cardo alive for a while. After a couple of beers, I can tell myself that I’m not responsible, but I know better. When you suggest the idea of penance to a violent man, there’s no reason to expect that his version of penance would be anything but violent.

In a perfect world, Demond and Bop-Bop would have realized the error of their ways. But of course that didn’t happen. Six weeks ago Bop-Bop was arrested for slitting Demond’s throat in a South Memphis pool hall. Most likely it was over an argument about the profits from their thriving drug business, but in perverse moments I wonder if Bop-Bop didn’t finally get tired of Demond’s vocabulary lessons and decide to silence him forever.

Vinnie Montesi has put on a few pounds and looks healthier, but I’d given him a balm for his conscience, not the key to a change of life. If you buy smack or coke or rent a prostitute anywhere from Dyersburg to Biloxi, odds are you’re still lining Vinnie’s pockets. Don Ellis committed suicide when the papers broke the story about chemical dumping in South Memphis. Maybe he did it because of the guilt or because he wanted to save his sons and his ex-wife from Vinnie Montesi’s brand of penance. Whatever the reason, I like to think that in the end, Don Ellis found his courage.

For the next two weeks, people who were connected to the industrial park or Mid-South Transport turned up in the unlikeliest of places-burning wrecks on the interstate, sandbars in the Mississippi, abandoned warehouses downtown. It was an actuary’s nightmare. I’d sentenced those people to death when I accepted Vinnie Montesi’s offer to give him three weeks to tie up loose ends. To help myself sleep at night, I pretended that what happened to them was justice.

Eventually the FBI and the EPA gave up their investigations. The mob members who seemed to be involved ended up just as dead as the potential witnesses who might have testified against them. The corporate bosses and hospital administrators and paid-for politicians who made all this possible were never named in an indictment. Any chance that the people who profited from the dumping could have been found went away when I cut my deal with Vinnie Montesi.

I’m just like everyone else. I find it hard to live with the cowardly, self-serving parts of myself. I told myself that if only I’d had Terrell Cheatham’s dossier, things would have been different, that I would have taken it to the papers or turned it over to the EPA and more of the guilty would have been identified. But thinking about the folder only brought more questions. What had happened to it? How had Cardo known where to find Terrell Cheatham but been clueless about Demond and Bop-Bop? That’s when I started thinking about what Frances Cheatham had said.

When I paid my third visit to her apartment, spring had finally come to Memphis. Dogwoods were blooming. The sun was bright gold, and the entire world, even the toxic wasteland part of it, was cloaked with green. But inside Frances Cheatham’s apartment, the shades were drawn and everything seemed to be coated with a layer of gray.

“He was a good boy,” she said, tapping a photo album with her index finger. “Smart, too. I should have listened.”

“He showed you his file. His dossier,” I said.

“Just like he showed me the roses or the rainbows he drew in school when he was a little child.” She picked up a glass and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “He loved his granddaddy, that’s why he wanted to stop it. But he brought it to me. He told me what it was, what them men had done. He wanted to take it to somebody at the paper. I told him to take it to Mr. Lewinski instead. He was the white man who was head of security at the park. They were holding back on Marcus’s pension.”

“His pension?”

“Nine hundred and thirteen dollars a month. He had that coming, Marcus did. He worked hard and it killed him. So when Terrell showed me all that, I told him to take it to Mr. Lewinski, to tell him to give us the money my husband earned or we’d make it public. Terrell didn’t want to. He kept saying it was wrong, that we had to do something, but I told him, ‘Son, the only person that ever does something for you is yourself.’ He loved me, so he let me talk him down. But you know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I told myself I was doing it for him, so he could have the money to go to college and get out of this neighborhood. But I was doing it for myself, too, because I was scared of ending up sleeping under an overpass and eating garbage. But I knew as soon as they sent him away and told him they’d call us that they meant to kill him. That’s why I was so glad to see you. I figured he’d be safe in jail.”

There was no point in telling her that half the cons and a third of the jailers were bought and paid for by men like Montesi and Cardo. Instead I said that she’d done the best she could. It didn’t matter anyway. Lewinski was one of the corpses who’d turned up in the river.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but the words just hung there.

On my way out the door, I stopped and looked back at her. She was tracing the photo album with the tip of her finger, cocooned in the guilt that would follow her to her grave. Then I thought about Vinnie Montesi drinking chocolate milk and staring at a syrup-covered waffle to hold on to the memory of his son and Demond Jones telling me that his little sister had begged him to make the pain go away. I thought about Don Ellis looking at his face in the mirror, wondering what had happened to the life he’d once known.

I closed the door behind me. Then I closed my eyes. For a moment I was back there in that hospital, smelling antiseptic and pine trees, listening to my wife weep and staring at the blue, lifeless lump that should have been my little girl.

A few blocks away, the cleanup at the industrial park was just beginning, but I knew it didn’t matter. In the end, we don’t dump the worst of our toxic waste in abandoned warehouses or slow-moving rivers. We carry it around in our memories until it’s safely buried six feet underground.

DANIEL WOODRELL

Returning the River

FROM The Outlaw Album

MY BROTHER LEFT no footprints as he fled. There’d been three nights of freeze, and the mud had stiffened until the sloped field lay as hard as any slant road. Morning light met rime on the furrows and laid a shine between rows of cornstalks cut to winter spikes, and my brother, Harky, a mutinous man with a fog patch of gray hair drifting to the small of his back and black-booted feet, crushed the faded stalks aside as he came to them, and only these broken spikes marked his passing. His strides were long but curiosity curled his path, spun it about in small pondering circles as he glanced behind, followed by abrupt, total shifts in forward direction. The mud was unblemished but for the debris of cornstalks, and some of the pale dried shucks were spotted by kerosene drippings. Harky still carried the fuming torch he’d made of a baseball bat and a wadded sheet, the torch he’d used to set the neighbor’s house afire, to make amends, to show his love, and flammable droplets fell beside him partway across the field.

Our father chased my brother. He chased him down the road from the burning house, into the field, wearing a white bathrobe and loose slippers. With each step he fell farther behind as his old sick feet skittered over uneven furrows and tripped. The nosepiece from his oxygen tube was yet pinched to his face, and a length of tube waved about while the robe flapped open. He fell repeatedly and stalks stabbed his skin broken at the ankles and hips. He stood up from the field six times, or only five, then again tripped over a furrow, collapsed to the frost, and lay there, face to the mud, withered fingers clenching at stalks, robe flung wide.

Smoke and shouts drifted from the neighbor’s house.

Father’s breathing could be heard beyond the fence line, up the road, the hoarse snatching after breath, rattling inhalations. He was raw beneath the robe, his skin ashen and his blood thinned by medications. The broken spots on his ankles and hips quickly turned blue and leaky. He held on to the oxygen tube with one hand, holding it still and inhaling, as if there might be a trapped bubble of pure oxygen his lungs could burst and pull through in shreds. Fogged eyeglasses hung from a cord around his neck, and his glum white private hair and forlorn flopping parts were open to the cold. He lay there weak as a babe, but a babe who’d already snuck a drink this morning, scotch, and chased it with a forbidden cigarette.

Across the mud and downslope he spotted Harky and his fog of hair scuttling from the field at the far end, plunging over the wire fence and into the thicket. Six-foot-two of man, with a jostling cloud riding his back and a blackened baseball bat in one hand.

Father rose to his knees, gasping, then stood and wobbled his way back to the road, legs too limber for firm strides, blood from his broken spots making lazy trails down his skin. Our father, the joking drunk who was so bitter when sober, shuffled past the edge of the fallow field, toward the big hunkered old house of glowering white that had been the home of our mother’s family for three generations before recent inheritance delivered it down to us Dewlins. Mother waited near the door, pacing between the four-sided pillars on the veranda where she’d played jacks as a girl, hopscotch, her eyes glistening and rounded with anger. Her hair was a carefully selected chestnut hue, girlishly long and casually brushed, and she wore a winter coat belted over her bedclothes. She watched our father limp to the house and did not reach out to help him until he climbed the steps. They both paused on the veranda and looked across the road, toward the flames dancing on the shiny new log cottage of the only close neighbor, a man named Gordon Mather Adams, a retired schoolteacher of some sort, a man I’d never spoken to, busy beside his eastern wall with a yellow garden hose and a panicked air, the excess water running from the flames down the slope of winter grass toward the river behind his house.

They stared for a few minutes, then she said, “I should’ve called in the fire, but…”

Father opened the door, crossed the threshold, and stepped onto the rug. He was bleeding from blue places, bleeding down his ankles, over that knob of bone, onto the large and intricate heirloom rug Mother’s people had always spread just inside the door, drop after drop.

Harky had waited for the holidays to fashion a torch and commit his spectacular act of penance, waited for me to be in the house, on the scene, his witness. Over the fence he’d gone, that fog bouncing about his head, into the forest, and I did not chase hard, did not even hurry, but let him spend his energy fleeing for a while. The trees stood towering gray and numb over us both, shorn of green uplift, the bark bared to the heavy sky and chapping wind. I suspect some stark limbs attempted to point Harky toward escape, others to wag in admonishment, blaming him for palming his pills and drinking whisky again. He hopped onto rocks in the creek to cross the stream, missed only one, and pushed up the slope with his left boot splashed and a sock growing soggy, choosing not to realize how the near future would treat a wet sock on a freezing day. The limb he’d trust most gestured this way, onto the animal path that curled around the hill in a spiral rising to the crest. He knocked aside branches and winter brambles with the baseball bat, and his feet crunched across wastes of leaves and twigs.

Harky is running toward places that aren’t there anymore. That limb aimed him in the direction of the vanished cabin our mother’s family first squatted in after they’d followed game trails west from Kentucky to claim these acres. He knows the general whereabouts of the old hearthstone, but the four walls have fallen and become mulch, and the yard is grown over with woods, blended again with the forest. One tree, many trees, where did the cabin sit? The rocks of the chimney were taken down and carted to the next house the Humphrieses built-high, wide, and white, across the creek on richer ground. In spring warmth the original spot might be found by looking for brighter colors paraded amid the bland grasses: irises, daffodils, columbine. Great-great-great-grandma with the first name blown from her headstone and lost for good was quick to put down flowers near the house, dollops of cultivation in the yard that meant we live here now, inside this wilderness, and those common perennials are the only remains of a family place abandoned.

In his sick final years Grandpa Humphries sold the pasture, the cornfields, the wooded hillocks and ridges, sold every acre but the two that made a lawn for the house. He’d feared he might live closer to forever than predicted and need those dollars to find rest in his mind. Harky kneels to our old ground and rubs his hands through the sodden leaves, pushing them aside, making one tiny clearing after another, looking for nubs, withered blades of green. His breath puffs signals that don’t last. Dead grasses fly to his clothes and cling. Dirt buries beneath his fingernails. He’s in high spirits for a man who knows that his parole will be revoked in about an hour, maybe two. There’s a pint bottle in his jacket and he stands up for a ruminative chug, but it is empty except for a few drops that are slow reaching his lips. He looks around the ground, studies trees he might know from years before, but doesn’t spot any old acquaintances, and moves on farther behind the hill. He just can’t find Granny-what’s-her-name’s flowers during this cold season.

The path is steep and vague in spots, barely there, with a few crashed trees to be crawled across or jumped. Running these woods, Harky is feeling redeemed in his bones, raised in his heart, a much better son now than he was before dawn. We’d often hunted this land together when down from the city during holidays, boys afield in joyous pursuit of the small and wild, sharing our single-shot Sears twenty-two, avoiding the tensions in the house for hours at a stretch. I’d pop squirrels from limbs, since they have more taste, but Harky favored rabbits because they were easier to skin. When snow had fallen over the meadows, he’d delight in tracking bunnies at dawn, stealthily following paw prints as they made circles easy to follow, then track the same paw prints around again, and again, never caring that if he just waited where he started, the rabbits would circle back within range and offer themselves to his aim: “But tracking is the fun part!” The air on the ridge is cold and smacks of fire, and when I make the turn at the crest, the pinnacle suddenly revealed, Harky is sitting calmly on a large slab rock watching the flames in the valley. That fog of hair drapes past where his ass meets the slab and dangles. The bat stood upright between his legs, black end down.

He said, “Think he’ll be happy now?”

“You didn’t get far.”

“I knew they’d send you-bring any whisky?”

The seal hadn’t been cracked on the bottle I handed to him. He busted the whisky open and swallowed a big peaty breakfast, released a deep groan of appreciation, and dropped the cap into his pocket. I sat on the slab beside him. The mess of smoke below had grown. Deputies were standing in the road, and the volunteer fire department was arriving in pickups, little cars, dusty vans, and the one official fire truck they kept ready at Bing Plimmer’s gas station.

“Is that house fully involved?”

Two men in waders dragged a hose toward the river, hunching away from the jumping heat. The deputies in the street seemed excited and were gathering around our mother, but she’s an old hand at this and stands still, with her arms folded, and listens without argument. Harky’s parole would be violated any minute now.

“I think that’s what they call it.”

“Then it might still burn down flat.”

“The man’ll only build it back again with insurance money. Maybe bigger.”

“But not in time.”

“He might live longer than you think.”

“No. He’ll die seein’ the river where it’s supposed to be again.”

Those distant faces so tiny in the valley turned together and stared roughly in our direction. Harky laughed at them, pointed with his fist, and thumped the ball bat to ground. The fire seemed to be winning. Gordon Mather Adams looked to be weeping. Mother had been angry since the foundation was poured, the first nail driven, and clapped her hands with gusto as the hot ruin spread. A sheriff’s car began to roll down the sloped road alongside the field. I swatted my brother on the knee and stood.

“Let’s get deeper into the woods,” I said. “Make it harder for them.”

“You want to run with me?”

He passed the bottle, and I said, “You’ll be gone a long time this time, Harky.”

“Ahh, I have friends in the slams, baby brother, so don’t worry.” He raised from the slab and shuffled his feet, then sat again and pulled the boot and sock from his wet foot. The skin looked red. He wrung the sock until droplets fell, then pulled it on damp and laced up. He stood, happy with himself and smiling at the smoke in the sky, the voices all excited in the distance. “I could use a new little TV. With better color. And headphones.”

Two walls were coming down. They folded inward and smashed across smoldering furniture and seared appliances, sparks bursting and riding the heat. The flames were renewed by the falling and frolicked. One more wall to fall and Father could die upstairs with the river back in his eyes.

I gave Harky the bottle, wiped my lips dry. “Today’s got to be worth a party.”

The sheriff’s car had stopped on the road and the deputy stood in the opened door talking into the radio, calling for help. He was studying the woods, looking for paths he might follow to give chase, but we remembered them all from before we were born and walked on laughing, down the spiraled path to low ground and away through a rough patch of scrub, into a small stand of pine trees and the knowing shadow they laid over us, our history, our trespassing boots.