A Multitude of Sins (37 page)

And of course
yes
, the answer was that his face
was
in the
camera. More than once. That recognition did come back now. And of course he had touched it. And despite the fact that in two minutes or less he would walk quickly to the tourist center or the ranger station or to whatever there was, and make a call for emergency assistance, the camera needed to be removed. Since everything that would happen—happen to Frances, happen to him, happen to Mary, to Ed—could depend on what happened to this one camera and what it contained. Now being the significant time—he knew this from TV—with Frances suspended face-up to the empty sky and himself unscathed;
now
was the “critical period” that, in a thorough police investigation, had to be accounted for, challenged, scrutinized, gone over again and again and again. The time up to, during, and immediately after, would be considered and reconsidered to determine if he had killed Frances Bilandic and why that had suddenly become necessary. (Love gone sour? A sudden breakfast quarrel? Resentment repaid. An inexplicable act of passion or fury. A simple mistake. You could almost think you did do it, there were so many allowable reasons that you might’ve.)

Too bad, he thought, standing above the black camera, on its side on the black asphalt, too bad he hadn’t snapped Frances just at the moment she’d gone over. So many thousands of words would be saved by that luck. “Oh my.” Those were her last words to the world, apparently. He was the one who’d heard them. No one else knew that. He was very involved in this.

He grabbed the camera up then and, for a reason he wasn’t at all clear about, started back from the canyon rim toward the parking lot, not toward the tourist village where help was. Newly arrived Grand Canyon tourists-enthusiasts were strolling out of the lot in shorts and bright sweaters, carrying cameras, lugging backpacks, laughing about seeing “a big hole in the ground.” They would see him holding Frances’s camera. But there was nothing truly suspicious about him except that he was very tall and alone. Did his face look strange? Distressed?

A pay phone sat just at the border of the prettily landscaped parking lot, at the edge of some pinewoods. Pink wildflowers still grew here. Of course he should make the call. Do that much. Call in the emergency. Though there was no such thing as an anonymous call now. Everything flashed up on a screen someplace: “Howard Cameron is calling in a death.” Response would be instantaneous. And then what? He needed to think, as more visitors drifted past him chatting, chuckling. Call and say what? Explain what? Own up to what? (Since he hadn’t done anything but not take a picture.) Possibilities fluttered hotly in his face like cinders above a fire—none of them distinct or graspable, but all real, full of danger. And it was
so
so odd, he kept thinking: they had just arrived, and then she’d fallen in. He had wanted not to come.

He looked out across the sunny parking lot. The ranger in his campaign hat was waving vehicles past his little house, leaning in the car windows, smiling and joking with passengers. The sight of the ranger made him lonely, made him long to be miles and miles and miles from where he was—at home, or waking up, lying in bed, thinking about the day when he would sell a house, eat lunch with a friend, call his mother, drive to the playground, shoot baskets, then return at dusk to someone who loved and understood him. All that was real. All of that was possible if he didn’t call.

Though all of that would soon become a dream-life he’d never live again, since eventually, somehow he’d be trapped. Reeled in. You didn’t really get away with things. And he
had
come up here with Frances—if only just to fuck her; he
had
made crazy mistakes of judgment, mistakes of excess, of intemperance, of passion, of nearsightedness, of stupidity. Of course, they’d all seemed natural when he was doing them. But no one would see them that way. No one would take his part, even if it became clear and beyond any argument that he hadn’t pushed Frances Bilandic off the cliff (he
was
in the camera, his hands and feet, even his toenails
had
left traces in the car’s carpet, he
had
been seen with her often at the convention). Even if he was finally acquitted in court,
he was still guilty of so much that he might as well have done it. Who actually
did
do it—Frances had done it to herself—was just a matter of splitting hairs.
He
did it. “A fuck-up, oh what a fuck-up.” He said these words out loud as strangers walked past him. A young woman carrying a baby papoose-style glanced at him and smiled sympathetically. “I just should plan things. I can’t understand,” he said in agony, because of course there was no way out of this now.

So that he simply walked to the pay phone, shining there in the morning’s sun, looped the camera strap around his wrist and began to set the whole complicated machinery of responsibility into motion.

Later in the day, when he went to find the rental car to show the park police how they’d arrived at the Grand Canyon, it was gone. Howard stood, in his shorts and T-shirt, again in the warm parking lot, gazing at the taillights of cars and campers and vans and SUVs. He walked across into the next yellow-lined row—the one he knew was the wrong one—and looked there. Nothing he saw he recognized. The big fire chief’s car was gone. It seemed unimaginable. In the sunshine, with two officers watching him, it was as though he’d invented a car. Too bad, he thought, he hadn’t.

“I just don’t know,” he said, feeling tired, confused, but inexplicably smiling, as if he was lying. “We left it right here.” He pointed to a place where someone had parked a huge white Dodge Ram Charger and emptied the contents of an ashtray on the pavement. He thought oddly about the Tito Puente CD and the bottle of gin and Frances’s purse and her cell phone and her guidebook. All gone with the car.

One of the officers was a young, stiff, short-necked blonde not so different in her appearance from Frances Bilandic, but dressed in a tight, high-waisted beige uniform with a clean white T-shirt under her tunic. She was carrying an absurdly large black-gripped automatic pistol high on her plump little hip.
Jorgensen
was the name on her brass name-plate. “And you
are
sure you drove up here in a rental car?”
she said, looking up at Howard, her tiny periwinkle eyes blinking as though to penetrate him, see his soul, locate the wellspring cause of the profound dislike she’d begun to experience. His height, he thought, made him dislikable. Though who wouldn’t doubt his story?
He
doubted it. Nothing seemed very true.

“Yes,” he said, distracted. “I’m sure.” He watched a crow fly across the blue pane of sky above the lot. “You can call the rental-car company.
She
rented it. Not me.”

“And which rental-car company was that?” Officer Jorgensen said, continuing to ponder him, squinting.

“I don’t know,” he said and smiled. “I don’t know very much.”

“Did you notice anyone suspicious following you?” Suddenly she sounded almost sympathetic—as if no one
should’ve
followed him. He felt willing, since she was willing to be sympathetic, to think back through the day. Such a long day, so complicated with complex, terrible things. And now the stupid car. He could barely believe such a day had begun where it had, in the cool sunny breeze outside a teepee, watching an Indian woman sweep beetles off the stoop, while Frances slept. He remembered the Camaro with the flames on the side and the doughnut tire. And the little chapel where
Chris
died for everyone’s sins. He thought a moment about Frances saying, “Those were our ancient spirits,” last night, but couldn’t remember what had made her say that.

“No, I don’t think anyone followed us,” he said and shook his head. He looked back down the row of taillights. He felt he’d
have
to see the red Lincoln now. It would be there, like your wallet on the hall table—present, only for a time invisible. But no. It was far away. Something else hard to imagine.

He hadn’t done what Frances told him to do, of course, as if she’d been foreseeing everything. He remembered her advice at intervals through the day, when for a time suspicion fell upon him; when he’d been informed by a rescue crew member in a plaid shirt—while he was eating a sandwich— that Frances’s body had been recovered by use of a wire basket and cables, not a helicopter, and that her left arm had
indeed become separated; when he’d heard her next-of-kin had been informed, using cards from a small beaded wallet she’d carried—something he didn’t even know about; and when he had heard Ed’s name (surprisingly, Ed’s last name was Murphy); and when the name Weiboldt Company was spoken, and then the name of
his
wife and the town
he
lived in all sounding quite peculiar in the voices of strangers; on and on and on through the details of lives that now were affected, possibly spoiled, unquestionably made less good, even made impossible because of a few misguided occurrences, and by his questionable decision to stand up for them. At several intervals—sitting in a metal folding chair in a wood-paneled office with a window that looked out into the new-but-rustic visitors’ center—he thought again that he’d compounded a mistake with a worse mistake, and that he should’ve walked away, just as Frances had said; let all he was enduring now come out not in just one day, or maybe never come out. Every single thing he’d done for two days
could’ve
gone unnoticed. And instead of these lengthy, wrenching moments, he could’ve been in Phoenix considering how best to put the day’s events behind him and greet the evening. Though, of course, that might have turned out to be harder. Whereas what he had done—stayed, told, accepted—might actually be easier.

In the end, even before the afternoon was concluded, suspicion gradually lifted and settled on the concept of an accident. He had told it all, handed over the camera almost gratefully, endured the police officers’ disapproval, until something about him, he thought, something actually honest in his height, something in the patient way he sat in the folding chair, elbows on his bare knees, eyes on his large soft empty hands, and explained not without emotion, what had happened—all of that just began to seem true and almost, for a fleeting instant, to seem interesting. So that finally, without even declaring so precisely, the police accepted his story. And once another hour had passed, and three documents were filled out and signed, and his address noted, and his driver’s
license returned, and the names of officers and telephone numbers given, he was informed he was free to go. He noticed that it was three o’clock in the afternoon.

Though not before he had spoken briefly to Ed. The police woman had asked him if he wished to when she called, and he’d felt she wanted him to, that it was his duty, after all, given his position.

“I don’t really get all this,” Ed had said, his voice slow and gruff with emotion. He imagined Ed sitting in a dark room, a bitter, disheveled man (more or less the man he’d imagined having a fistfight with—Lon Chaney, Jr.). “What were you doing there?”

“I’m a friend,” Howard said, solemnly. “We drove up together.”

“Is that it?” Ed said. “A friend?”

“Yes,” Howard said, and paused. “That’s it. Basically.”

Ed laughed a dry mirthless laugh, and then possibly—Howard wasn’t sure, but possibly—he sobbed.

He wanted to say more to Ed, but neither one seemed to have any more to say, not even “I’m sorry.” And then Ed simply hung up.

For reasons he didn’t understand, a corporal from the Arizona Highway Patrol suggested they drive back down to where Howard could catch a bus back to Phoenix. The
STRIKE IT RICH
was where the bus stopped. One would be arriving late. He had the drinks coupons if there was a wait.

On the drive down, the officer wanted to talk about everything under the sun but seemed not to want to talk about what had transpired that day. He was a large, thick-shouldered, dark-haired man in his fifties, with a lined, square, attractively tanned face, whose beige uniform and pointed trooper’s hat seemed to fill up the driver’s seat. His name was Fitzgerald, and he was interested that Howard sold real estate, and that his deceased “friend” had, too. Trooper Fitzgerald said he’d moved to Arizona from Pittsburgh many
years before, because it was getting too crowded back east. Real estate, he believed, was the measure and key to everything. Everyone’s quality of life was measured out in real estate values, only it was in reverse: the higher the price, the worse the life. Though the sad truth, he believed, was that in not much time all you’d see (Officer Fitzgerald pointed straight out the windshield, down to where Howard had seen the multi-colored, multi-layered beautiful desert open up that morning, but where it now seemed purplish, smoggy gray), all that would be houses and parking lots and malls and offices and the whole array of the world’s ills that come of living too near to your neighbor: crime, poverty, hostility, deceit and insufficient air to breathe. These would presently descend like a plague, and it wouldn’t be long after that until the apocalypse. All the police in the world couldn’t stop that onslaught, he said. He nodded his head in deep agreement with himself.

“Are you pretty religious, then, I guess?” Howard asked.

Officer Fitzgerald wore his trooper’s hat set low on his big square head, almost touching his sunglasses rims. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said, exposing his big straight, white teeth gripping his lower lip. “You don’t need a book to know what’s coming. You just need to be able to count the bodies.”

“I guess that’s right,” Howard said, and suddenly felt uncomfortable wearing shorts in this man’s solemn presence. He looked at his bare knees and noticed again how he’d scraped them getting back over the wall after Frances died. Trying to escape. It was embarrassing. He thought of Frances saying he’d thank her all the way back to Phoenix. He couldn’t remember why she’d said that or even when. Then he thought of the night before, when he’d waked to find her on her hands and knees, staring down into his face in the dark. He’d smelled her sour breath, sensed her chest heaving like an animal’s. He’d believed she intended to speak to him, feared she would say terrible things—about him—things he’d never forget. But she’d said nothing, just stared as if her open eyes no longer possessed sight. After several
moments she’d lain back down on her side and said, “I don’t know you, do I? I don’t remember you.” And he’d said, “No, you don’t. We’ve never been introduced. But it’s all right.” She’d turned away from him then, faced the wall and slept. In the morning she’d remembered almost none of it. He hadn’t wanted to remind her. He’d thought of it as a kindness.