Authors: Richard Ford
“Yes, sir,” I said, though I didn’t know what “secret agent” meant.
“Now.” He straightened his arms and took a firmer grip on the steering wheel and stared ahead into the snow whirl. “You may hear some things said tonight—when we get out here—that may surprise you. These two may say I’ve done things I haven’t done. Do you understand? That’s probably happened to you before. Somebody thought you did something you didn’t do. That’s what all secret agents have to live with. I’m one myself.”
I felt I had to say yes or he would suspect I knew what he’d done—which could turn out badly for me. Although I was going to hear the story anyway. Knowing it beforehand couldn’t make a difference now. But I said, “Yes, sir,” though it wasn’t true. I’d never been accused unjustly.
“Now, if you hear me say to these two that you’re my son,” Remlinger said, “just don’t contradict me. Do you understand? Is that satisfactory? Even though I’m not?”
We were in sight of the Partreau elevator, prominent in the snowy dark, the familiar vacant buildings all but invisible along the highway frontage. Charley’s trailer sat beside his Quonset, inside light visible through the cracks in the paper window coverings. His truck was missing. The Overflow House also had lights on inside. The Americans’ Chrysler sat in the crumbled street, snow accumulating on its windshield and hood. We were going in there.
But I was shocked that Remlinger would say I was his son. I’d entertained my private thoughts of that nature, but they’d vanished when Charley had said what he’d said in the truck the day before. Remlinger saying such a thing was outlandish and made me begin to feel sick in my stomach, and not able to concentrate on what else he was asking me. No matter what I’d half imagined, Arthur Remlinger wasn’t my father. My father was in jail in North Dakota. He wasn’t this man in the hat in the dark.
“You don’t talk enough. Charley said that.” Remlinger looked at me sternly. We’d turned down South Alberta Street, the Buick bumping and swaying over the potholes and chunks of pavement the elements had ruined. The vacant houses were ahead of us in the headlights; the broken carnival rides, the caragana row. “Have these men spoken to you?” We were coming to a stop behind the Americans’ car, its license plate covered in snow and ice. It was no longer raining, only snowing.
“No, sir,” I said. I hadn’t said it was agreeable for him to say I was his son. Everything about him was a deception. I didn’t know why I had to be a part of it. He, of course, didn’t care if I agreed or didn’t.
“See here now,” Remlinger said, shutting the motor off, then the headlights, making himself an imposing figure in his hat. He took a heavy breath. His jacket squeezed together and gave off its leather odor. “There’s no reason for you to get all upset. Just let me show these two yokels the kind of man I am. You don’t have to say anything.”
He was no longer pretending being here was about hunting or gambling or girls. He hadn’t told me anything, but he was admitting I knew—since he knew.
I took in a deep breath of my own and tried to work the sick feeling down out of my throat. The whirring under my ribs hadn’t stopped. I wanted to say that I wouldn’t go inside. I didn’t want to breathe the spoiled smells and rotted plaster dust, have its ceiling press on me, the gloomy, shimmering fluorescent ring like a jail cell. I barely knew how one thing “meant” something else. But the shack, with the two Americans waiting inside for us,
meant
something bad I didn’t want to get close to again.
Except if I didn’t go, there’d be a ruckus. Remlinger had a violent temper—Charley had said so—made up of his frustrations. And while he’d never done anything bad to me, he could turn against me if I insisted on staying. His interest in me was nothing. That’s how human beings were, I thought—unattached to most of the things they said or felt.
It would just be easier if I went. The Americans could explain their position in the reasonable way I believed was natural to them. Remlinger could deny everything and deceive them. Then they could leave. Tomorrow I could tell Florence I was ready to go to Winnipeg. Remlinger, I thought, would do nothing to stop me. Altogether, it would save me from something worse.
“I’m not upset,” I said, the nausea gone out of my throat, banished by realizing I’d make everything easier by going inside.
“I thought you were experiencing an unsteady moment,” Remlinger said. His face was in shadow. He shifted in the car seat, scuffed his boots on the floor.
“I didn’t have that,” I said.
“Well, good. Because there’s nothing to be afraid of with these two. They don’t know a thing. We don’t have to be in here long. Afterward we can go have supper with Flo.”
“All right,” I said. I thought how happy I’d be if Florence was here. She would have something to say to keep me in the car with her. But I was by myself, and that was how it would be. Remlinger got out of the car, and I got out, and we started toward the shack together.
R
EMLINGER KNOCKED ON THE SMALL DOOR INSIDE
the windowed vestibule. I was behind him. The door opened almost at once. The older man, Jepps, was there smiling, wearing his toupee and a green plaid shirt and wool pants that looked new. Crosley sat on one of the two cots in the shadows, wearing a heavy wool coat because it was cold inside, the way it always was. He stared at us intently. They seemed like different men from the Americans I’d watched register-in the day before, and later speak to Remlinger in the bar. They seemed to have a purpose that the tiny room barely held, as if it had gotten smaller. Though it was the same kitchen where I’d slept. Everything the same. The cold-dirt odor that made you think bare ground was directly beneath the linoleum, mingled with the lavender-candle scent I’d introduced. One of them had been smoking a cigar.
The hot-plate burners were turned on and bright red to create heat. The fluorescent ring glowed, giving off poor light. The stuffed coyote still stood on top of the ice box, and the door to the back room—where I’d moved cardboard boxes—was shut. (A third person might be there, I thought. I didn’t know who.) The Americans’ suitcases were all that was different from when I’d lived there. Standing behind Remlinger, I wondered what the Americans were expecting to do, how they would bring up the subject they were there to bring up, having driven so far. They believed he was who they were looking for. Where were their pistols kept?
“I thought I’d bring my son along with me,” Remlinger said loudly. His voice and accent had become different—more at ease. He had had to stoop to come in the low door. He put his hand on top of his fedora to keep from dislodging it. We instantly filled the room up and I felt not able to breathe naturally.
Jepps looked at Crosley on the cot with his two knees together. Crosley shook his head. “We didn’t know you had any son.”
Remlinger reached his hand around to my shoulder where I stood behind him, nearer the door. “It might not seem like it at first, but it’s a good place for a boy to grow up, up here,” he said. “It’s safe and clean.”
“I see,” Jepps said. He had a loose jaw when he talked, which made him seem to be always smiling.
Remlinger let several seconds elapse. He seemed completely at ease.
Jepps stuck both his hands in his trouser pockets and wiggled his fingers inside. “We need to talk about something, Arthur.”
“That’s what you said before,” Remlinger said. “That’s why we’re out here tonight.”
“It might be better if we talked about it alone,” Jepps said. “Do you know what I mean?”
“Is it not to talk about shooting geese?” Remlinger said, acting surprised. “I thought that’s what you cared to do. Possibly there’re other things you want me to arrange for you.”
“No,” Crosley said. The cot was down in the shadows beside the cold window on which sat my lavender candle.
“We don’t want to cause any trouble for you, Arthur,” Jepps said and sat down on the old straight-back chair where I’d hung my shirt and trousers. He leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. His belly was tight and hard under his green shirt. Underneath my cot were some of the postcard pictures of the naked women that I’d left behind. No one would find them.
“I truly appreciate that,” Remlinger said. “I do.”
“We think . . . ,” Crosley said. He paused, as if the next thing he was going to say would be significant and he wanted to think it over a last time. He looked up at Arthur and blinked several times. “We think . . . ,” he said again, then paused again.
“I used to be a police officer,” Jepps said, interrupting him. “I arrested lots of people. You can imagine—in Detroit.” Jepps smiled in his loose-jaw way that wasn’t smiling. “Many of the ones I arrested and who went on into jail—for years, sometimes—didn’t really need to go. They’d only done one thing wrong. And because I caught them for it, and they could explain to me what they’d done, I knew they would never have crossed that line again. Do you know what I mean, Mr. Remlinger?” Jepps for the first time appeared to give us his serious face. He looked right up at Arthur as if he—Jepps—was used to being paid attention to and wanted to be paid attention to now. They were to the serious purpose they’d come all the way out here to act on.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “That makes sense all right. Must be common.”
(When I think back on it now, fifty years later, from another century, I might’ve sensed then that Arthur could shoot both Jepps and Crosley but hadn’t formulated the idea fully and was still carrying on as though he would deny everything. But he was listening to them. People sometimes speak and mistakenly believe they are the only ones listening. They speak only for their own ear, and forget that others hear them. Jepps and Crosley were following a path they believed to be one of reason and that had their purpose in mind. That’s how they’d decided they would succeed. They didn’t know that Arthur had given up on reason long ago.)
“What we believe,” Crosley began deliberately, “is that the only right and good that can come out of this is to put the record straight, Mr. Remlinger. We have no force to bring against you here. It’s another country. We understand that.”
“Maybe you could tell me what you’re talking about. Couldn’t you?” Arthur said and adjusted his boot on the cracked linoleum. His leather jacket rubbed against itself again. He still had his hat on over his fine blond hair. The kitchen was airless and overheated.
“You could put your life in order just by talking plainly to us, I think,” Crosley said and nodded at Arthur. “We came here not knowing what we’d do. We don’t want to cause trouble now. If we just went back knowing the facts, that would be plenty.”
Remlinger pulled me nearer to him. “What would I agree to?” he said. “Or what would I have to tell you? You can plainly see I don’t know. I’m not a mysterious person. I’m not impersonating anyone. My birth records are on file in the Berrien County Court House, in Michigan.”
“We know that,” Crosley said. He shook his head again and seemed frustrated. “This is not a thing your son should hear.”
“I don’t know why not,” Remlinger said. He was making a fool of them. They knew it. Even I knew it. They probably knew I wasn’t his son.
“You can aerate a bad conscience,” Jepps said. That was the word he used.
Aerate.
“The people I arrest—or that I did—always felt better making a declaration, even if they feared it. Sometimes even years later, like you. We’ll go home and you’ll never see us again, Mr. Remlinger.”
“I’d be sorry not to see you again,” Arthur said and smiled. “But what would I need to declare?” No one so far had said the words that told the reason for our being there. No one wanted to, I believed. The Americans, Charley said, lacked conviction for their mission and probably wouldn’t say them. Remlinger wouldn’t. We could’ve left then and nothing would’ve gone on further. A Mexican standoff. No one had any stomach for the words.
“That you set off an explosion . . . ,” Crosley said abruptly, and had to clear his throat right in the middle of what I thought he wouldn’t say and may instantly have regretted saying. “And a man died. It was a long time ago. And we’re . . .” Here he lost his air as if the whole thing was too much for him. I hated to hear those words, but I also wanted to hear them. The tiny room was charged by them. Crosley seemed like a weakling for being afraid.
“We’re what?” Remlinger said. He was haughty, as if he’d gained a great advantage over Jepps and Crosley and they were of much less consequence for having revealed themselves. “That’s laughable,” Remlinger said. “I did no such thing.”
I was at that moment thinking—feeling the weight of words: Had they ever even known the murdered man? They’d come there on no more than a notion, and now, without conviction, had accused a man of murder, a man they also didn’t know, and whose only connection to the crime was that he’d done it. Though importantly—to him—he hadn’t meant to. Remlinger, however, had no intention of “aerating” his conscience. The contrary was true.
Jepps and Crosley had forgotten about not wanting to say this in front of me. Though I knew everything and wasn’t shocked and knew shock wasn’t in my face. Remlinger was not acting like a man who knew nothing about a murder, only like a person
claiming
to know nothing about one. This would’ve been the thing they’d come so far to observe. He’d as much as admitted it by saying, “I did no such thing.” Each one was sacrificing something—a strength—to achieve an advance toward a goal. Remlinger had told the truth when he said I would learn something valuable. I learned that things made only of words and thoughts can become physical acts.
“We thought an honest way of doing this would be the best,” Jepps said. “Give you the chance to liberate your heart.”
“What if I have nothing to tell you? To liberate?” Remlinger said derisively. “And if this idea is groundless?”
“We don’t think it is,” Crosley said, having recovered his air but still sounding weakened. He had taken a handkerchief out of his pants pocket, spit something into it, then folded it away. He was very afraid.