“A touching thought,” I said.
Mac opened one eye, and looked at me. “Okay,” he said, “you think I’m full of shit, and you probably have your reasons.”
“Thank you.”
“But that doesn’t change the fact that you know something I need, and I’m gonna get it out of you one way or another, my friend.”
“Ah,” I said, “that’s better. Welcome back.”
“Ha.” Mac laughed out loud, as did I. And then, sitting there chuckling, I had the sudden thought that maybe I should reach out, if that’s the right word, and take the opportunity offered me to start draining the swamp of evasions in which I’d been paddling in circles for what felt like months. Maybe I should begin owning up. But what did it mean that the agent of my candor would be none other than the professionally slippery Mac Sterling? Then again, at this late date, what other options did I have?
“I’ll give you five minutes,” I said.
Mac shut his eyes for a brief moment, as if to savor his happiness, and then said softly, “Oh good.”
“But you’re a shit for ambushing me this way.”
He put his fist to his heart.
“Forgive me.”
“Doubtful,” I said.
He did his best to look abashed.
“Okay, let’s see,” I said, still frowning, “I’ll begin at the beginning. I did in fact meet the cops, as it turns out. You were right about that. I was just driving by, and I saw them parked on the side of the road, and I pulled off myself and asked them what was going on. They said they’d found
an old debris shelter, and had some stuff in an evidence bag they took away.”
As if afraid to derail my train of thought, Mac stared frozenly down at the table.
“After they drove off,” I said, “I sat there awhile in my car, and then I parked it out of sight across the road, and decided to investigate my hunch. I walked into the woods and followed an old trail I knew, a shortcut. The trail eventually led to the place where they’d just come from gathering evidence, the cops.”
“The covert,” he said. And then when he saw me recoil, he raised both his hands, and said, “Sorry, you talk, I’ll listen.”
“It wasn’t the covert,” I said, “but it was a clearing near the covert. Were you ever there?”
“Maybe once,” he said, and then, after a pause, “go on.”
“Well, I walked into that clearing, and obviously I was a little what, half freaked out, because I had this feeling, of course, that maybe something was going on. And then I heard it.”
“What?”
“The sound.”
“What sound?”
“A bird call,” I said, “that I recognized from long ago.”
Mac picked up his pen, his mouth falling open.
“No shit!”
“Yup. I remember I stood there a long time, trying to place that call. It seemed like it was kind of shifting in the wind a little bit, like it was coming from one place, and then another.”
“Rob had been a bird-watcher, hadn’t he?”
“Big time,” I said. “I even remember overhearing him trying to pick up a girl at a party by telling her he was ‘into the macho side of bird-watching,’ whatever that means.”
Carefully, holding my eye while doing so, Mac laughed.
“And then?” he asked, in a low voice.
“Then what?”
“Then what happened?”
“Then I followed the sound for a bit. But I was unsure, at first. There was a lot of wind noise, as I say, which made the whole thing a bit confusing. But finally, it seemed to me that it was coming from the original old covert.”
“Damn!”
“I know. I was pretty freaked by then, because I had a feeling that something real was definitely about to happen.”
The waitress approached the table with a pot of coffee, but Mac, before she could even speak, waved her away with a crisp big-city flick of the fingers. She stalked off in a huff.
“That wasn’t nice,” I said.
“I know,” he said impatiently. “And then?”
“Then the call came again, and it was definitely coming from the covert, I was sure of it. It had been many years since I’d been there, of course. Maybe ten or twenty, who knows. My heart was beating so hard as I neared it that I’m not even sure I could hear anymore.”
“I’m about to have a heart attack just listening to this,” said Mac.
“It was clear,” I went on, “that other people had discovered the hideout, because I could see some trash at the entrance to it.”
“Trash?”
“Yeah, old books, some rubbers, tin cans. Stuff like that.”
“Okay.”
“And I was freaking out now. My heart was really whamming in my chest, and I felt like maybe I was in the
Blair Witch Project
or something. But I forced myself to move forward, step by step. Then I reached the little opening to the covert. The call came again. I was certain I knew the call. I took a deep breath, and I ducked under the opening and then crouched in the dimness, while my eyes adjusted.”
I paused while Mac, placing both hands on the table, rose involuntarily a few inches upward from his seat.
“Then what?” he said in a breathless voice.
“Then I saw it, Mac.”
“What?”
“It.”
“What, it?” he whispered.
“This kind of huge-looking bluebirdy thing called a Steller’s jay. It looked at me like it knew something, and it made the call again, like someone gargling with marbles.”
“A what, a bird?” Mac said, slowly sitting down, uncomprehending. “What do you mean, a bird?”
“I know, I was flipping out. It seemed utterly impossible that a bird was sitting in the middle of this covert, in this enclosed space, and that it wasn’t afraid of me either. I have to tell you, Mac, it was pretty damn weird!”
“A bird?” I watched his face fall down a series of disappointed stairs. “Not a bird!”
“Yeah, what a letdown, right? Think how I felt.”
He looked at me, shook his head with a harsh, bitter
little laugh, leaned forward as if to say something nasty, and then pulled himself back again and retracted his hands to his chest like a poker player protecting his draw from prying eyes.
“A bird,” he repeated for about the fourth time, “you’re telling me a bird.”
“I’m telling you a bird.”
“That’s your story.”
“Yup.”
“Right.” And with that, abandoning any pretense of friendship, he stood up, grabbed his tape recorder, snapped his notebook closed, and, leaning down close, in a voice loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear, shouted, “Well fuck you to hell!”
Then he walk-jogged out the front door.
H
EART BEATING HARD
, I
LET MY EYES
adjust to the dimness and saw him sitting across from me, leaning back against a stump, and grinning. The impact was as violent as a physical blow, yet I also felt somehow that I’d been waiting for this moment for several days—or maybe, come to think of it, a long time.
“Hey,” he said, calmly.
A sound came out of my chest—something thick and unfledged—and then I lunged toward him, and a moment later we were slamming into each other and hugging furiously.
“Rob!” I cried into his neck. We leaned back and held each other’s elbows. “Unbelievable!”
“So how ya doing?” he asked.
“I just knew it!” I yelled.
He was skinnier than I’d ever seen him, skinnier even than he’d been a week before at New Russian Hall, and his
face, below the disorderly blond beard, was raw, reddish, and full of strange bumps and welts. Silently he put a long finger to his lips.
“The trees have ears,” he whispered. “Keep it down.”
“I can’t believe this!” I cried softly. “Rob, what’s going on? I mean,” I stumbled, “what’s going on!”
He scratched his chin energetically and smiled his canny old smile. “Well,” he said, “let’s see. I’m out in our childhood cave with one of my best hometown friends just now. And it’s a lovely summer day too. How’s by you?”
I laughed. “Where have you—you know I can’t quite get my mind around—what the hell are you doing here?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“You know that the whole world is looking for you, right?”
“So I understand.”
There was a beat of silence. The sun, interrupted by leaves, striped us with wicker-colored light. Birdsong bubbled in the trees around us.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“What’s up?” I laughed explosively for a moment, and then abruptly stopped. I shook my head. “I guess my first question,” I said, “is what the hell are we doing here at all? How did this happen?”
“Beats me,” he said calmly. “I guess the answer depends on whose version you’re reading, right? At bottom, who knows why things go down the way they do? Maybe Moses knows. Maybe Ahura Mazda knows. But I don’t know. I haven’t the faintest idea. The only thing I’m sure of, Nick, is that free will’s an illusion. In the big picture, things were always heading in exactly this direction.”
“What do you mean?”
“You asked how everything got this fucked up? Well, I’m telling you how,” he said. “I was always gonna fuck it up like this is how, and from the very start. There is no evidence that I would ever have done anything else. Philosophically speaking, that which
is
always trumps that which might have been. Have you ever heard of the
ding an sich
?”
“Please.” I made a pushing motion with my hands. “Not now, not today.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Just trying to oblige.”
We sat a moment.
“Okay,” he said quietly, half to himself, “I know that it’s weird to hear, but I can bail out my head with thought, and I can live in this little room where maybe it happened but if so it was crucially done by someone else, in some other time, in a parallel universe, maybe, and by a guy who was sorrowing and sad about it but who did it because he had no other choice. I can feel bad for that guy and girl, and I can even want to be their friend too, because I admire their purity of heart. I get this warm sympathetic buzz of thinking how I’ll be friends with a dead girl and an outlaw, and how it’ll be cool and
Bonnie and Clyde
and like that, and then I snap out of it and realize that I
am
him, and I
did
do that, and I begin to cry like a first-class pussy. I’ve done a lot of crying recently, if that makes you feel any better.”
I was confused. “Why should it make me feel any better?”
For a moment, neither of us said anything. Then he slowly raised his eyes to mine, and from far off, gave me the mildest, gentlest of smiles.
“My life is over,” he said.
“No it’s not!”
“Yes it is.”
“No it’s not. Fight back!”
“Like how?”
“Call the DA for starters, Rob. You plead temporary insanity or something, and throw yourself on the mercy of the court. They cut your sentence way down and we go from there. It’s a start.”
He was looking at me doubtfully. “It’s an end, Nick. So they cut my sentence from forty to thirty-five. So what? Do you know what it’s like in a state prison? Do you know what it’s actually like in those kinds of places? People come out of there with the shapes of their heads changed, singing songs in a language that no one else can understand.”
“It’s not summer camp, I know that, Rob. But you being you, you could make good on it somehow, write the tell-all book, get the media involved, do the charismatic jailhouse thing, turn it around in some way. I’m sure you could.”
Staring at the ground, he shook his head from side to side.
“It ain’t happening,” he said. Then he looked up at me, squinting. “You know the part in Kafka’s letters where he’s writing to his fiancée’s father, and explaining all the reasons they shouldn’t get married? He says that he’s irritable and self-involved and gives this whole laundry list of what a shit heel he is? Then he pauses, indents for a new paragraph, and he says, “‘At bottom, none of this bothers me in the least, as it’s merely the earthly reflection of a higher necessity.’”
“Jesus.”
“Well, what we’ve got here,” Rob said, “is one helluva higher necessity.”
There was a silence. High in the sky, passing exactly overhead, a plane snored loudly a moment.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “That you had to kill her?”
“Did I ever say I killed her?”
Saying nothing, I shut my eyes, placed my thumb and forefinger on the bridge of my nose, and began squeezing as hard as I could.
“I still can’t believe this is happening,” I said. “Forgive me for the love of God, but I can’t believe it’s happening.”
“You know what? I can’t believe it either,” he said. “I haven’t believed it from the moment it went down. But the world goes on, and the executioner’s horse does, in fact, scratch its innocent behind on a tree.”
“What?”
“Just some poem I always loved, about how the world is always going on in its big worldly way, despite your local little hand-wringing bullshit.”
“Look”—I leaned forward—“let’s get real here. There’s tons of people all over this state and probably country who love you, Rob, and would do anything for you, including coming forward to testify. You can use some kind of grief defense. Everybody knows what happened with that guy, Framkin, and I’m sure there are lots of sympathetic jurors out there waiting to do the right thing. You can tell them, who knows, that Shirley beat you with a violin when you were twelve. You can tell them a million things. It’s definitely worth a shot.”
“Beaten with a violin,” he said musingly. “I like that. I love the thought of being descended from a musical sadist.”
Looking at him, his face curled into a sardonic grin, I noticed that he looked more alive now, after a week on the lam, frayed by insomnia and exposure, than he’d looked when I’d seen him at New Russian Hall. It was the excitement of it; it was the drama of it; and it was the fact that he was in the middle of it, and administering the terms of it, that gave him strength, I thought.
“Lecture tours, movie tie-ins,” he was saying, “hell, if gangbangers can become household names, so can I.” He laughed. “God, am I going to miss you, Nick. I don’t think I realized how much till just this very second. But it’s too late to audition for the rehab to riches story, and nothing I do from here on in is ever gonna land me on a Cheerios box. Being wholesome is gonna have to wait till the next go-round, I’m afraid—”
“Rob, just think seriously a moment—”
“—along with the whole family thing, the inground pool and the little kids who look like fractions of you, running around saying, ‘Daddy this’ and ‘Daddy that.’”
“If we could just think concretely a second,” I said loudly.
Rob seemed suddenly startled. “But why?” he asked. “Why should we think concretely? And what’s there to think about? I’m not going to make it, Nick, okay? Get it through your well-meaning skull. I’m going down. I’m going down because the shit rises to the top and the cream curdles and rots and the best people you never hear of at all because they stay home, out of the line of fire, and
plant their gardens and live their lives. What’s right in my case is simply to go. I’ve thought about this a lot and it’s the only thing that makes sense. It’s also the best thing I can do to protect whatever crummy literary posterity I have left.”
“What do you mean, go?” I asked. “Go where? It’s become much harder to do the international-fugitive bit than it used to be, you know. What, like hiding out in the Virgin Islands?”
“That wasn’t the going I was thinking of, Nick.”
“No? Well, what then?”
“I’m afraid,” he said, “there’s only one way to square the equation here, and make what I did with Kate mean anything. That way is to remove both parties to the event.”
I was still looking puzzled, I guess, because he added simply, “I’d like to die on my own terms, get it?”
From far off, a speck of thought gathered shape and mass until it exploded in my mind as a word: “Suicide?”
He nodded slowly.
“Oh, come off it!”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t! Because it’s insane and crazy and wrong in a thousand ways!” I shouted. “Because you’re alive, not dead, and you’ve gotta stay that way! Oh don’t even start with that.” I was waving my arms. “Don’t even think that!”
“You love me,” he said, “don’t you.”
“What?” I put my hands down.
“Well, don’t you?”
“Love you? If you need to hear it, yes, of course I do.”
“Well, I love you too.”
“Good. So?”
“So it’s in that spirit, and with that in mind, that I’m telling you all this.”
“Well, great,” I said. “Well, that’s lovely. You like me so much you want me to know that you’re planning on killing yourself? That’s beautiful, Rob.”
“I know it’s difficult to swallow,” he said, “but there are reasons, and they’re important reasons, and in the bigger picture, that’s why we’ve come together today.”
He began fishing around in his backpack.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m procuring exhibit A,” he said, withdrawing from the bag a small shiny pistol. He put it on the ground between us. “Otherwise known as My Way Out.”
“I’m gonna go now,” I said.
“No, stay. Do you remember”—he reached back into the backpack and withdrew a handful of bullets, which he began loading into the pistol with little terminal clicking sounds—“that wicked good lunch your mom used to make for us when we were kids?”
I could feel the function of memory operating as a kind of pulling feeling about the mouth and temples, but I fought it. I said, “What are you doing, Rob?”
“She had this can of chicken gravy, and boiled this white rice to go with it, and poured the one on the other, and you and I, we used to go to your house and eat this stuff, which would barely fit the description of glue, and your mother used to call it chicken à la Framingham, and we loved it. I mean, I used to go home and tell my mother how great it was. Don’t you remember that?”
“Yes, I remember it, so what?”
“What about our heists, man, do you remember them?”
At twelve, dressed in studiously casual clothes and carrying under our arms a box carefully crafted so as to appear recently received from the post office, we had slipped into the town’s largest record store. The box had a cunningly concealed razor slit in its side, and while one of us distracted the cashier, the other whisked as many albums as possible through that slit and into the box.
“Yes,” I said, impatiently, “I do.”
“You,” said Rob, “were the best sentry a guy ever had.”
“Where are you going with this?” I asked.
“Funny,” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me, “the way how when you’re a kid, childhood feels like prison, but when you’re an adult it magically changes into the freest, purest span of time you ever knew. What a swindle, eh?”
“That’s true,” I admitted.
“And how when you’re little you think everything in the adult world is stable and never moving, like furniture, and your parents’ lives change with glacial slowness, like the dinosaurs dying over ten million years. And yet when you’re an adult, the older you get the faster it moves. You blink your eyes, and bang it’s the next year. You wake up from a nap, and dammit if it isn’t the very next year.”
“Fine, okay. You’ve now made two points in a row. Congratulations,” I said.
“I can’t do it.”
“Can’t do what?”
“I can’t do it, Nick.” And with that, with no warning at all, Rob’s eyes filled with tears. “I’ve tried for days and days to do it. I’ve put the muzzle in my mouth, at my temple, in my stomach, I even stuck the damn thing down my pants, but I can’t do it.”
“You can’t do it,” I said, “because you still have a shred of sanity left.”
“No, man”—the tears were spilling down his face—“I can’t do it because I don’t have the guts, okay? That’s the sad fucking truth—I’m scared.”
“Stop this,” I said sharply. “You can’t do it because it’s a sick act and you’re not sick. Disturbed maybe, but not sick. Come here.” He leaned forward and I cradled him in my arms, and he relaxed into my shoulder, sniffling a little. I said, “This is easy, Rob. This is a no-brainer. You simply march into the police station and present yourself. I’ll walk you the whole way.”
“No”—he stiffened instantly—“I have to go, Nick.” He drew away and looked at me. “I know that this is what I have to do. I
know
it. And I can’t pull it off myself. I just can’t.”
I grew suddenly cold, as a larger suspicion dawned on me. “Wait a minute,” I said, “what are you asking me?”
“You’re here,” Rob said, wiping his running nose on the back of a hand, “in the role of a best friend who’s appeared miraculously, because I stayed here specifically in the hope that you would.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.