That’s what Jeffords said, too, Kane thought. Time to move on. That’s fine for people who have a place to move on to. But where am I going? I have a hard time just leaving my apartment.
“I wish there was something I could say that would change your mind,” he said, a plea in his voice. He took a deep breath, then said more firmly, “Can you at least tell me what it is that convinced you we aren’t right for each other anymore?”
He really was baffled about that. After seven years away, they’d spent three weeks together and she’d sent him away. He’d thought things were going okay, considering. He had been getting a slow start back into the world, it was true, and she’d seemed a little tense around him, prickly really. And there was the sex, which she didn’t seem to really be participating in the way she once had. He was probably hard to get along with as well. You don’t go from years of having walls and bars everywhere you looked to living in twenty-first-century America without needing some time to adjust. But he loved her, and he thought she loved him, and that would be enough to carry them over this rough spot.
“What good would it do you to know?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that you stuck with me for all that time and then, all of a sudden, it’s over. I’m confused, I guess.”
Laurie walked over and sat at the table again. She reached out and put a hand over Kane’s folded ones.
“It wasn’t anything big,” she said. “It was a lot of little things. But the thing that did it was the way you dress.”
“The way I dress?” Kane said.
“You wear the same clothes all the time,” she said. “Blue shirt and jeans. You even had me buy another blue shirt, so you’d have one to wear while the other was being washed. Look at you. That’s what you’re wearing now. It’s like you’re still in prison and this is your uniform.” She took her hand off his and laid it on the side of his face. He could feel its warmth, and calluses, too. “You’re not the man I married, Nik, or the one I expected to get back from prison. Since you left, my world has gotten bigger, but yours has gotten so much smaller. You’ve got a lot of issues, Nik, a lot of things to resolve. And I just can’t wait around until you work it all out, if you ever do.”
Kane opened his mouth and closed it again. There wasn’t anything to say to that. He’d been proud of the way he’d gotten through his sentence. Not proud of some of the things he’d done inside, but proud of not being broken by the experience. He’d thought it hadn’t even marked him much, but Laurie saw it differently. He didn’t understand the decision it had led to, but he had to accept it, like so many things that had come his way since that night.
I guess I’ll have to do better living in the world, he thought, and for the first time he felt committed to going to Rejoice and finding the girl. At least it would force him to get out of the apartment.
He looked at Laurie’s face. This is probably as close to her as I’ll ever be again, he thought.
“Okay,” he said, “if that’s what you want. I’m not happy about it, I may never be, but you’ve got a right to your life.”
He reached up and gently took her hand and laid it on the table. Then he got to his feet.
“I really do need to pick up a few things,” he said. “I’m going out of town for a while. It’s work. I’ll get the rest of my stuff later, if that’s all right. I’ll be sure to call ahead. And I’ll sign the papers when I get back. Any way you want to settle things is fine.”
He went into the garage and got a sleeping bag and some camping gear and his big thermos. He loaded all that into the pickup. He stood looking at his locked gun case for a long time but made no move to open it. A judge had said he was no longer a felon, so he could use firearms, but he didn’t know if he’d ever handle one again.
He was taking out the last load, tire chains and his tool box, when he heard Laurie call, “Nikky.”
He went back into the house. She was standing at the top of the stairs. God, she’s beautiful, he thought.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I guess I just wanted to see you one more time.”
They stood looking at each other for several moments.
“Good-bye,” Kane said. He wouldn’t see her again if it could be avoided. He needed a clean break. He turned and walked away without another word.
Back at his apartment, he packed some clothes and shaving gear in a duffel bag and got ready for bed. He found he couldn’t sleep. Somewhere somebody was watching a reality show on television, and it sounded like a domestic dispute was heating up down the hall. He lay in his bed thinking about Laurie and his life with her, saddened and amazed that it was over. Thinking about it made him want to take a drink. More than one. Instead, he turned on his bedside lamp and picked up Donald Frame’s translation of Montaigne’s essays.
“Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to see them as a whole and in the same light,” he read, “for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible that they have come from the same shop.”
4
And they journeyed from Oboth, and pitched at Ijeabarim, in the
wilderness which is before Moab, toward the sunrising.
NUMBERS 21:11
KANE WAS AWAKENED EARLY THE NEXT MORNING BY THE sound of squeaking springs next door. He got out of bed and padded to the living room window. He couldn’t see two feet through the falling snow. He showered, dressed, and drank a couple of cups of coffee.
As he waited for the caffeine to wake him up, he thought about how strange it still was not to be on somebody else’s schedule. He missed that in a way, missed the predictability of it and not having to make decisions. That must have been one of the changes Laurie saw, he thought. Before I went in I was decisive, at home and especially at work. Sometimes too decisive for her, I suppose. Now I miss having someone tell me what to do with every minute. What am I? A child? One of those cons who can’t make it outside? No wonder she wants to be rid of me.
He heated and ate the previous night’s scaloppine, washed the dishes and coffeepot, and loaded snacks and bottled water into a day pack, along with as many books as he could fit. He took one last look around the apartment, put on a coat, picked up the duffel and day pack, and left, locking the door behind him. He walked down a flight and knocked on the building manager’s door. The guy, a recent arrival from someplace in Asia, looked like he hadn’t been out of bed long. It took a while, but Kane finally got the idea across that he wanted the manager to hold his mail if he got any. The manager seemed happy that it wasn’t a complaint of some sort, and closed the door nodding and smiling.
Downtown, Kane was lucky to find a parking spot in front of the Catholic cathedral. He let himself in a side door. The long wooden pews were empty, the only life in the big room coming from the flames of candles that danced in front of the statues of Jesus and his mother.
Kane had made his first communion in this church, wearing a hand-me-down white shirt and black dress shoes with holes in the soles. There were eight kids in his family—he was second-to-last—and never enough money for all the necessities, let alone luxuries. They’d been so poor that when his father drifted off in a cloud of failure and alcohol fumes the family’s standard of living didn’t drop much. He continued to attend the church through his youth and into his teenage years for reasons that were more practical than spiritual; without the parish’s charity, the Kane family’s situation would have been even more dire. His brothers and sisters approached the matter much the same way, but their mother had enough religious fervor for all of them.
When he went off to the military, Kane quit attending any church, and stayed away even after returning to Anchorage and joining the police force. But he’d been coming to the church again since he’d gotten out. He didn’t know why, but the visits made him feel better somehow. He knelt in front of a rack of prayer candles, slipped a dollar bill into the slot beneath them, and lit a candle. His mind groped for a prayer to say for his parents and came up with the response from the rosary:
“Holy Mary, mother of God,” he whispered, “pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
He said the same for each of the people he had killed. They ran through his mind like pictures fanned by a finger: small brown men during the war, then a pair of hopped-up killers coming out of a convenience store, where they’d murdered the clerk and a pair of customers. The next picture, the one that had put him in prison, was blurred, a dark shape holding what looked like a gun. He skipped over it quickly. Then the man he’d killed in prison. A lot of bodies, when you added them all up, he thought.
Kane wasn’t sure that the prayers would do any good for his soul, since he didn’t really feel sorry for most of the killings. But maybe praying would help the souls of the dead somehow.
Kane got up from the bank of candles, walked back a few pews, and knelt. The church was dim and cool and quiet, soothing. He waited, as he had since he was a boy, for God to say something to him.
He would settle for any word from above, but he really wanted God to answer a list of questions for him. The list had grown long over the years; it was so long that Kane had forgotten many of the questions. He remembered the first one: Why had God allowed Shamrock, his dog, to be run over by a truck? He remembered the most recent: Why was Laurie leaving him? Now he had a new one: Where is Faith Wright?
He’d never heard so much as a whisper from God in answer. He didn’t really expect one. He wasn’t sure there was a God. Even if there was, he couldn’t believe that God, whoever or whatever he, she, or it was, was directly involved in individual human lives. But somehow the awed boy in him continued to kneel in hope.
He tried to empty his mind but, as usual, failed. The blurry memories of the shooting kept creeping in. His pulse ran faster and faster and he clasped his hands harder and harder. But it was no use. He relaxed and let it all come back.
He was driving home from an after-work party. They’d been at the Blue Fox, celebrating his promotion to lieutenant. He was feeling no pain, humming to himself, but he had his home car completely under control. He was thinking about how to avoid an argument with Laurie about coming home late and, as she would put it, “stinko,” when
the “Officer needs assistance” call came over the radio. No cop could ignore that.
He was right on top of it, just two blocks away, so he was first on the scene. The neighborhood wasn’t a good one. The scene was poorly lit by a single streetlight and lights from the surrounding houses. The unit was slewed in the road, the driver’s door open, a shape sprawled half in, half out. Two figures were standing above it. One of them, the one closest, seemed to be doing some sort of dance.
His tires slipped when he braked, then grabbed as the studs dug in. He came out of the unit and drew his gun, keeping the door between himself and the two figures.
“Police officer!” he shouted. “Step away from the vehicle and put your hands on top of your head.”
The second figure tried to say something, but Kane ignored him.
“I said step away, now!” he shouted.
The closest figure turned toward him and started to raise its arm. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion now.
“Oh, Jesus, don’t do that!” the second figure called.
But the arm kept coming up, and Kane could see something in the hand, something that looked like a gun.
“Drop that!” he called. “Drop it now or I’ll shoot!”
The arm kept coming up. Kane centered his weapon on the figure’s chest and fired three times. The bullets threw the figure back against the door. Then Enfield Jessup, described later in the newspapers as “a twelve-year-old mentally challenged African-American youth who was big for his age,” fell on his face, dead.
“Oh, Christ, you shot Enfield!” the other figure screamed. “Why’d you wanta do that?”
“Get your hands up!” Kane shouted. The figure raised its hands. Kane moved out from behind the door, slipped on the ice, and went down, hitting his head. He must have been knocked out for a moment, he decided later, because the next thing he knew he was getting to his feet. He put a hand to the back of his head and it came away sticky with blood.
He could hear the sirens of other police vehicles approaching, but otherwise the only sound was his own labored breathing. A few faces peeked from behind curtains to see what had caused the gunshots. Even in the bad light, Kane could see both bodies lying as before. But of the other figure, there wasn’t a trace.
Kane walked to the bodies. The officer was still breathing, but Enfield Jessup was not. There was no gun in his hand or anywhere else in sight. As a police car came sliding to a halt behind him, he sank to his knees thinking, What have I done? Where’s the gun? What have I done?
Kane shook himself all over, got to his feet, and left the church. The snow was still coming down. The city was trying to go about its business, but the roads were littered with vehicles stuck in the snow. Beater cars, mostly, but he also saw an abandoned UPS van and a city bus that had gotten high-centered.
I hope this isn’t God’s way of telling me to stay put, he thought.
Traveling through an Alaska winter could be an adventure, and Kane was prepared. He wore long underwear, jeans, a blue work shirt, a pile vest, and old hiking boots over two pairs of polypropylene socks, one thick and one thin. He had a set of tire chains in the back of the pickup along with a shovel and a tow rope. An old parachute bag held camping gear, and his duffel of clothes sat on a foam pad and sleeping bag, his Kevlar vest lying beside it.
The cab contained cold-weather gear, hot coffee, snacks, and CDs. A set of United States Geological Survey maps of the area around Rejoice lay on the passenger’s seat, along with Montaigne’s essays and a copy of the Bible. He popped a Dylan CD into the player, and Bob started grating out “Love Sick.”