The Dark Room(66)

“Why?” Cain asked. “You’re what—eighty, eighty-one?”

“Ninety-two.”

He looked like he was a hundred and fifty, like he could tell a credible story about riding into Mexico with the cavalry, looking for signs of Pancho Villa. He’d put on a camelhair coat with plaid patches at the elbows, and wore an SFPD ball cap that he’d probably picked up when Cain was in grade school.

“But your eyes are okay,” Cain said. “I see you looking at things.”

“Most of the time, sure,” MacDowell said. “My eyes were never the problem. But I drive out, and sometimes I get lost. They think my brain’s a scrambled egg—my daughter, I mean. And my son-in-law. But it’s not my brain, either. It’s the map in my head—it’s thirty years past its expiration date. I was getting lost on my own street. I didn’t recognize the houses anymore.”

“You look for a landmark and it’s not there.”

“They used to be there,” MacDowell said. “All the houses, the buildings. The people who lived in them.”

“Sure.”

“Summertime, they ate their dinners in the backyards and they got it on upstairs with the windows open. They raised children, had fights. But most of the time it was happily ever after. You know what I’m talking about?”

“It’s still that way.”

“It’s how it was for me. But then sometimes they killed each other and we’d come to pick through the wreckage. You know that, too. What you don’t know is that the world isn’t pausing for you. It just goes on. You don’t own anything—it all belongs to time.”

“You remember 1985?”

“Like yesterday,” he said. “Better than yesterday.”

“Now you’re just messing with me.”

“You wish,” MacDowell asked. “That was the year I turned sixty. My daughter married, my wife passed. Five years left till I pulled the pin. The kids on the squad called me the old man. You believe that? I’ve been an old man almost as long as you’ve been alive. I could tell you stories.”

They came off the bridge and Cain drove them to the Richmond, MacDowell’s old neighborhood.

“We’ll go down Geary to get to the Western,” Cain said. “You can tell me some stories on the way.”



“Pull over here,” MacDowell said. “Four blocks, and I finally recognize something.”

Cain turned to the curb and parked alongside a fire hydrant. MacDowell was looking through the driver’s-side window, at the buildings on the other side of the street. There was a row house, a catastrophe of green-painted redwood. It had been a bar as long as Cain could remember. Next door was a low red house, the sign above the sidewalk mostly in Korean. The English at the bottom said CHARCOAL BARBECUE. Its windows were caked in decades of soot. To the right of that was a single-story stucco building with a dark glass door. No sign out front, and no windows. Aside from the door, the only thing on the front wall was the rusted mechanical bell of a burglar alarm.

“That used to be a church,” MacDowell said. “I’m talking ’seventy-nine. A storefront operation, Jim Jones type of shit. We got the call in July. Coldest Sunday I can remember. And rain—you’ve never seen rain like it.”

“What happened?”

“Middle of the sermon, a man walks in that front door, already has his gun out. He plugs the reverend in the forehead. One shot. He steps back out, puts the gun in his waistband, and goes into the bar like nothing happened.”

“No kidding.”

“Time we show up, he’s on his third beer,” MacDowell said. “They used to have Pabst on draft. I sit down next to him, casual as anything, and take his gun off him. He doesn’t mind a bit. He asks if I want a drink, and I figure what the hell. So I pass his gun to my partner and the two of us have a beer. My partner’s standing behind him with a gun in each hand.”

“Why’d he do it?”

“He used to have the reverend over for dinner. He had a fifteen-year-old daughter. You can see where this is going.”

“She was pregnant?”

“Twins, it turned out.”

“What’d he get?”

“Twenty,” MacDowell said. “In Folsom. Funny thing was, he turned into a preacher. Ordained, all that.”

“Where’s he now?”

“I lost track,” MacDowell said. He was still looking at the bar. “Half the guys we arrested, they were all right. You know?”

“Sure.”

“Kind of guys you could sit down with, have a beer. It wouldn’t seem that far out of line. But that was the only time I actually did.”

Cain checked his side-view mirror, then pulled back into the right lane. A few blocks later, they stopped again in front of a faded yellow house. In ’82 it had been an unlicensed daycare. Ten, fifteen kids under the age of two. Upstairs there was a workshop where eight naked women sat around a long table. Each woman had a metric laboratory scale, a box of glassine bags, and a brick of heroin. There were two televisions in the house. One upstairs and one downstairs. When MacDowell and his partner came in, everyone was watching Sesame Street. The kids, the women, the three guards with guns.

Cain drove off again, and they started looking for the scene of a triple homicide MacDowell had caught in ’77 but couldn’t find it. They looked for twenty minutes, MacDowell shaking his head at every turn, looking at the streets that no longer made any sense to him. The old houses had been cut up into new apartments, and the old apartment buildings gutted and turned into massive single-family homes. A complete inversion of the world MacDowell had known.