World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(70)
She’s got guns, in case she needs to use a gun.
And then I roll out, just after midnight on October 3, with that one particular memory, of me and Naomi at Mr. Chow’s, threaded through my ribs like a red ribbon.
It’s a quiet ride. Not a lot of people out on the road tonight; not a lot of action on the streets. Probably most places in the world are blue towns tonight, everybody deep into their last round of praying or drinking or laughing, doing whatever there is left to do before everything changes or dies. I roll through Rotary and pass by the house with the semicircular blast wall, the redbrick ranch house on Downing Road. I don’t know if it’s the same fella who shot at me with the machine gun, but there is some fella up on the roof, with a John Deere cap and a massive belly, surrounded by his family: a middle-aged woman in her Sunday best, plus two teenage daughters and a little boy. They’re all up there on the roof, at rigid attention in the moonlight, saluting an American flag.
I find my way to State Road 4 going south. I remember the route. I’ve always been good at spatial geography: getting a sense of a place or a system of roads or a perpetrator’s place of residence, registering the small details in my head and keeping them straight.
In a perfect world I wouldn’t sleep tonight, of course, I’d stay up somehow, but my body doesn’t know what day it is, and my eyes are bleary and I’m veering off the road. I find my same rest stop as before and I fold up my coat in the same way and after three hours of sleep I am awoken by the bright distinct howl of a train whistle, which seems impossible. But then I open my eyes and stumble to my feet and stand there watching it pass, way off in the distance, wondering if I’m dreaming. A long freight train rolling slowly across Ohio, smoke pouring from the engine.
I pee in the woods, get back on the bike, and keep on going.
*
Pink sky at sunrise, autumn morning chill.
I heard Officer Burdell once, in the kitchen at Police House, talking with Officer Katz about her plans for the last day. She said she was going to spend it thinking about “all the things that suck eggs about being alive. Having a body and that. Hemorrhoids and stomachaches and the flu.”
I felt at the time like this was a bad strategy, and I feel that way now. I take one hand off the bars of the Schwinn and send the Night Bird an air salute, back in Furman, Mass. Send one along to Trish McConnell while I’m at it.
Then I put my hands back on the handlebars and make my turn at the fruit stand. Singing again, as loud as I can, each line caught by the wind and carried off over my shoulder, little snatches of melody, bits and pieces from Desire.
*
I hear the dog before I see him, three fine bright barks devolving into a growly canine coughing fit, cough/bark, cough/bark, then just cough, cough, cough as Houdini limps with determination from behind that shed out to see me.
“Here, boy,” I say, and my heart swells just looking at him, loping and shuffling along toward me across the slight roll of the farmland.
The autumn corn is halfway through its harvest, half the stalks still burdened, half tilting, barren. There’s a pumpkin patch I hadn’t noticed before, in a dirt corner just to the right of the front porch, green winding vines and fat orange globes. Two of the women are up on the porch, two of the daughters or daughters-in-law, sitting on hard chairs in their long dresses and bonnets, sewing or knitting, working on blankets for the winter. They rise at my approach and smile nervously and take each other’s hands, and I ask politely if I might speak to Atlee, and they go to fetch him.
Houdini ducks in and out of my footsteps, snorfeling at the dirt, and I bend and scratch the white fur behind his head, and he growls low and contented. Someone’s given the guy a bath. Someone trimmed his fur, too, combed out all the bugs and burrs. He almost looks like he did when I met him, puckish little creature scampering around the filthy home of a drug dealer on Bog Bow Road. We look at each other and I smile, and he smiles too, I think. You thought I was gone, too, didn’t you, Hen? You did, huh? Or not. Who knows? You never know what a dog is thinking, not really.
Atlee Miller doesn’t ask after the outcome of my investigation, and I don’t volunteer any information. We exchange nods and I point to the wagon.
“I brought back your jackhammer. Thank you.”
He waves one hand. “Not sure I’ll need it.”
“My sister—she thinks we might all live. Somehow. So I thought it couldn’t hurt to bring it back.”
“Can’t hurt,” says Atlee, and he nods. “Can’t hurt.”
We’re talking quietly out on the lawn. I can see the rest of the family behind him, the kids and the teenagers and the aunts and uncles and cousins, framed in the big windows of the house, reacting to my return.
“I thought I might stay for lunch,” I say. “If you’ll have me.”
“Oh, sure,” he says. Maybe even the hint of a smile somewhere in the gray of his beard. “Stay as long as you want.”
*
In the busy hour before lunchtime I am mostly a silent presence in the house: the tall stranger alone in a corner like furniture. I smile politely at the women, make funny faces at the little boys and girls. I do not experience, as I had feared, any unwelcome rush of memory, no bloody moving pictures behind my eyelids. The house smells like bread. The children are giggling, carrying precarious trays of cutlery out from the kitchen. One of Atlee’s sons has hurt his back farming, and so when there is difficulty in wrestling a heavy wooden table out from the kitchen, I get up and lend what strength I have.