Authors: Richard Ford
“Yes,” Remlinger said. “But if I say it is, that’s because it is. And if you two’re not able to go back to wherever you live, satisfied, then what’s going to happen?” It was just a matter of their wills now. No facts were in contest.
“Well, we’ll have to talk about that,” Jepps said. He stood up. I thought about the pistols—possibly already taken out, loaded, and put away close by. No one was telling much of the truth here: that Jepps and Crosley had no intention to come this distance and then go away; that they had more conviction than was believed. It was only a matter of deciding on what basis they would do what they meant to do. My presence was possibly the only reason they didn’t do it at that moment. That was my use—to keep things in their places, provide a pause for Remlinger to be able to see his situation clearly. I was his point of reference.
“I admit I have something I can tell you,” Remlinger said. He sighed deeply, in a way calculated for Jepps and Crosley to hear. “Maybe it’ll satisfy you.”
“We’ll be glad to know about it.” Jepps looked approvingly at Crosley, who nodded.
“You’re right that Dell doesn’t need to hear it. I’ll put him in the car.” Remlinger was talking about me without the slightest acknowledgment that I was there beside him. Whatever he hadn’t formulated in his thinking before (but that I’d sensed he soon would), he had now formulated. What was in his mind was settled. It was one more use he needed to put me to.
“Very fine,” Jepps said. “We’ll be waiting right here for you.”
“I’ll be just a moment,” Remlinger said. “Is that all right with you, Dell? You can wait in the car?”
“It’s all right with me,” I said.
“I won’t be long,” Remlinger said.
ARTHUR MARCHED ME
out into the cold to the silent Buick, his grip tight on my shoulder, as if I was going to be punished. Snow was settling down in larger flakes. The wind had gone off and it was colder. Charley’s truck was parked in front of his trailer. Light seeped under its door. Mrs. Gedins’ white dog sat on the truck’s hood, for warmth.
“These two are ridiculous,” Arthur said. He seemed angry—a way he hadn’t been inside. He’d seemed resigned, and before that haughty. He pulled open the car door and pushed me in behind the wheel. “Start it up,” he said. “Get the heat going. I don’t want you freezing.” He reached in and pulled on the headlights, which shone through the drifting snow toward the house relics down South Alberta Street.
“What are you going to tell them?” I thought for an instant he might slide in beside me. I moved toward the passenger side.
“What they need to hear,” he said. “They’ll never leave me alone now.” He reached a hand up under the driver’s sun visor and took down the small silver pistol I’d seen in his rooms. It wasn’t in its shoulder holster. It was there by itself. “I’ll try to make this plain to them.” He breathed in, then out. It was almost a gasp. “Just stay where you are,” he said. “I’ll come right back. Then we’ll go have supper.”
He closed the door, leaving me in the cold car with hot air blowing under the dash. Through the driver’s window—snow turning to water on the glass—I watched his hat move back through the dark toward the shack’s door, which was ajar. He didn’t look around, or seem in any way hesitant. He had his pistol down at his left side, not hiding it, although it was small and the light was poor, so it might not have been noticed. I thought Jepps and Crosley might have their own pistols out and be holding them when Remlinger came inside. It made sense they wouldn’t have believed him, would know what was going to happen—if they knew what they were doing.
Remlinger walked in through the mud vestibule—the glass panes of which were gone. He stepped to the door and pushed it open with his boot foot.
Jepps, I could see, was still standing in the shallow light just as he had been. Crosley’s legs were all that was visible of him from where I was. He was still sitting on the cot. They only expected to be spoken to. They were the uncomplicated men they’d been described as being. Remlinger had misjudged the kind of men they were. He stepped forward into the lighted doorway. I saw Jepps’ face acknowledge him. And Arthur raised his silver pistol toward Jepps and shot him. I didn’t see him fall. But when Arthur advanced into the kitchen—to shoot Crosley—I saw Jepps lying on the linoleum, his big feet apart.
Pop
was the sound the pistol made. It was not a large caliber. A lady’s gun, I’ve heard such guns called. I heard no shouts or voices. My window was wound up, the heater blowing. But I also heard the shots that killed Crosley. One
pop
went off, and I saw Crosley moving clumsily to his right, trying to go behind the cot. Arthur stepped closer to him. I saw him very plainly point the silver pistol down to where Crosley had gone behind the cot to find protection. Arthur shot two more times.
Pop. Pop.
Then he looked around at the floor, almost casually, to where Jepps was, his left foot agitating up and down very fast. He aimed the pistol almost considerately at Jepps’ head or his face and fired another time.
Pop.
Five shots in all. Five pops. All of which I heard and saw through the open doorway from inside the Buick. Arthur looked down at Jepps as he put his pistol in the side pocket of his jacket. He said something very animated. He seemed to make a face at Jepps, and pointed a finger down at him, and thrust the finger at him three times, and spoke what were for me soundless words (though Jepps surely wasn’t aware). Words of reproval that expressed the things he felt. He turned then and looked out the open door, across the dark, snowy space separating us—my face framed in the car window, containing an expression I cannot imagine. He said something else then, directed at me, his lips moving vociferously, his big fedora still on his head, as if his words put right what he had just done. I felt I knew what these words meant, even if they never reached my ears. They meant, “Now, then. Now, that’s settled, isn’t it? Once and for all.”
W
E BURIED THE TWO AMERICANS THE NIGHT
they were killed. It is a measure of the kind of man Arthur Remlinger was that he forced me to help Charley Quarters and Ollie Gedins (Mrs. Gedins’ son, the tall man in the cap and the windbreaker I’d seen in the Leonard parking yard) with the removal of the bodies out to the holes dug in the prairie where—should they have lived—the Americans would’ve shot geese the next morning with me as their “guide.” It is a second measure of him that he did not in the least take care of me, nor was he at all interested in me, nor did he have a better plan for me than what the spur of that moment provided; certainly not for widening my education other than for me to find out (all over again, in a much worse way) how many more things are possible than my fifteen-year-old mind could’ve imagined. When he thought of these events later, if he ever did, he would not have entertained a thought of me, might have forgotten even that I was there—like a hammer left in a photograph, present only to provide the scale, a point of reference, and that exhausts its value once the picture’s taken. He had, after all, given up on any scale he himself might’ve provided for himself, just as he’d given up on reason. He did only what he wanted to do, within limits he alone recognized. If you say he should never have brought me there that night, that he changed if not the course of my life, then at least the nature of it; risked my life (I might as easily have been shot and killed had things gone differently)—if you say these things, you would be correct. And it would’ve been entirely irrelevant to him. Things happen when people are not where they belong, and the world moves forward and back by that principle. Other people were for the most part dead to him, as dead as the Americans we lumped in Charley’s truck that night, while Remlinger stood in the snowy shadows and smoked a cigarette and watched us. Put all these elements together and you’ll make as much sense as can be made.
Y
OU WOULD THINK THE REMOVAL OF THE TWO
dead bodies out of the Overflow House and into the bed of the pickup would be the most memorable event of that night, and possibly the most memorable action a person would ever perform—the sudden weight of them, whereas in life the bodies seemed not to have weight; the awfulness of that; the realization of what a change death brings. As I said, I was the one who picked up Jepps’ toupee where it had fallen onto the linoleum and lay in his dense, drying blood. But this is what I most vividly remember—the flimsy lightness of the strange, blood-soaked little topper. I don’t remember what the bodies themselves looked like, or how they smelled, or if they were loose or stiff, or what evidence there was of bullets being fired into them, or the smell of the powder (which must’ve filled the room), or even whether we carried them out like bundles, or dragged them by their hands or by their heels like the cadavers they’d become.
I do remember very well how fast the shooting and the killing took place. There were no dramatics to it, as in movies. It happened at once—almost as if it didn’t happen. Only then someone’s dead. I sometimes believe I was in the room when it happened, and not in the car. But that isn’t true.
I remember after the moment the shootings took place, the look on Arthur Remlinger’s face, talking to the dead men—the look of reproval—and then the look he gave me through the door to where I was watching, purely astonished. It was a look (I believed then) that meant he would kill me, too, if the spirit moved him, and I should know that. Murder
was
written on his face, the look that Jepps and Crosley had been seeking, but only saw in their last moments.
I remember that when the shooting happened and Remlinger looked at me, saying whatever he was saying, I—out of instinct—looked away. I turned my whole body from the window and saw through the other car window Charley Quarters, standing in his trailer door, the light behind him. He was wearing just an undershirt and his underpants in the cold. He was leaning on the door frame, watching. Perhaps he knew everything and was only waiting for his duties to take up.
The final thing I remember was that when we buried them—naked of their clothes, their suitcases and belongings bound for Charley’s burn can, their pistols and rings and shotguns bound for the South Saskatchewan River—we folded them into their holes, dug deep enough that coyotes and badgers wouldn’t reach them. It was relatively easy. I stood above them looking down—each man in his separate hole, several yards apart—then looked out toward the dark prairie, above which I could hear a goose up in the snowy sky, making the screams they make. And I could see—it was to my surprise, but I saw it—the red Leonard sign off in the night, where Fort Royal was, closer than I would’ve thought, the butler offering his martini glass. For a moment it seemed as though nothing had happened.
CAN I EVEN SPEAK
of the effect of witnessing the Americans’ killing—the effect on me? I’ll have to make the words up, since the true effect is silence.
You might think that over the years I thought a great deal about Arthur Remlinger, that he was an enigma, a figure worth long consideration. But you would be wrong. He was not in the least an enigma. I had believed for a while that he possessed significance, a rich subtext that was more than merely factual. But he did not, other than as the cause of three men’s deaths. He
wanted
significance, there’s no doubt (Harvard, for example, and the first murder he committed). But he couldn’t overcome the absence that was his companion in life and that led him everywhere. Reverse-thinking, the habit that had me believing there was significance when there was only absence, may be a good trait in the abstract. (It made me seem more interesting to my mother than I was.) But reverse-thinking can be a matter of ignoring the obvious—a grave error—which can lead to all manner of treacherousness and more errors, and to death, as the two Americans found out.
Much more, though, than I’ve kept Remlinger in my memory, I have tried hard to keep the Americans—Jepps and Crosley—alive there; since, inasmuch as they disappeared forever and without a trace, my remembrance is the only afterlife they are likely to have. I’ve thought, as I said, that their deaths seem connected to my parents’ ruinous choice to rob a bank—with me as the constant, the connector, the heart of the logic. And before you say this is only fiddling, fingering tea leaves to invent a logic, think how close evil is to the normal goings-on that have nothing to do with evil. Through all these memorable events, normal life was what I was seeking to preserve for myself. When I think of those times—beginning with anticipating school in Great Falls, to our parents’ robbery, to my sister’s departure, to crossing into Canada, and the Americans’ death, stretching on to Winnipeg and to where I am today—it is all of a piece, like a musical score with movements, or a puzzle, wherein I am seeking to restore and maintain my life in a whole and acceptable state, regardless of the frontiers I’ve crossed. I know it’s only me who makes these connections. But not to try to make them is to commit yourself to the waves that toss you and dash you against the rocks of despair. There is much to learn here from the game of chess, whose individual engagements are all part of one long engagement seeking a condition not of adversity or conflict or defeat or even victory, but of the harmony underlying all.
Why Arthur Remlinger shot the two Americans I can only guess by trying to hold close to the obvious. Nothing was settled by it—only some time given back to him, postponing until later his disappearance into even profounder obscurity than Saskatchewan—the “foreign travel” he mentioned.
It’s possible he had thought it through. Not the way another person would think something through—measuring pros and cons and letting your thoughts and judgment guide your acts with the understanding that they might guide you
away
from those acts. Possibly he believed the Americans would eventually shoot
him;
and if not, then they at least would never let him rest (as he said), never go away, never
not
return; that they were more committed than he’d been given to think. Thinking something through, for him, was much more a matter of shooting them unless something unexpected made him
not
do it. Who knows what that something might’ve been, since it didn’t occur? Probably many people’s vision of “thinking something through” is of this nature: you do precisely what you want to do—if you can. Possibly he simply
wanted
to kill them: because they came to him
at all
and tried to reason with him; because the idea of
talking
made him furious—after years of silent frustration, longing, disappointment, isolation, waiting; possibly to be talked to by two ordinary nonentities from nowhere, who also meant him ill, might’ve infuriated him, since he possessed an elevated sense of his own intelligence; possibly to hear words like ‘aerate’ and ‘liberate,’ and to have it implied that the two Americans sympathized with him—all that might’ve made him suddenly approachable and then lethal. He may have long known unreason was his great failure. And he might simply have quit caring, accepted he could do no better, that unreason was his nature, and he deserved whatever he wanted from it. He was a murderer—just like, in a smaller way, my parents were bank robbers. Why hide it, he may have believed. Glory in it. Any time you murder two people there must be a quotient of insanity involved.