Obsessed: yes. He was obsessed. He thought of his grandmother. "Of course," she would say. "What nobler thing than to be a savior?"
Her prunelike lips would crinkle, and derision would light her raisin eyes.
WILLI PICKED THE PHONE OFF THE BED
, looked at the numbers, let his eyes follow the sequence that would connect him home. He calculated the eight-hour difference. His father might be up already in the early morning, drinking coffee and looking out at the dark Rhine below him, and the lights of Koblenz. The sound of the morning trains from the tracks along the river would be rising up the hill to him, coming through the glass of the large window, shaking it a little. If the phone rang, his father would turn to it until it rang a second time, then set his cup down on the coffee table, bending at the waist, and go to the phone and wait for the third ring—always—and then with his right hand pick the handset up, transfer it to his left, put it to his ear, speak.
Willi thought of how he used to rise in the early morning, too, and come out of his bedroom, to stand in silence, watching the lights of Koblenz with his father, listening to the trains rattling the windows, booming down the tracks along the Rhine, father and son standing like two sentries, not speaking. As still, as silent, as the bronze statue of Kaiser Wilhelm on his horse where the Rhine and Mosel Rivers met. They could see it from their window. A monstrosity, his father called that statue. A waste of money and a waste upon the eyes. Brass and water. Horse and rider. The lights of the city reflected in the river—deepdown lights that came up from the bottom and shone through the water. And he and his father standing there, as mute as the three horses now, in a suffering they could not name any more than the horses could fashion names for theirs.
Willi thought of the biblical Isaac. Had that Isaac spoken to his children? How silent could a man become, having stared at the blank, blue sky, and then seen the knife in it, and his father's face, set and determined, all self-horror willed away? How did Isaac make sense of his own children? They must have seemed strange to him. Improbable. A future not his. No wonder he was confused between his ear and his hand, unable to know Jacob by his voice—a father deceived by a future he had relinquished when he saw his own father's God-crazed, obedient, merciless eyes above the rocky altar. In his old-age blindness, did that face still appear before him, to steal from his other senses? And what did Willi's father see out there in the early-morning lights? What pattern did those lights make, shifting in the river's running, standing out against the sky? Did his father see a private constellation—an uplifted arm, the knife sharp as light itself, a child on a bed of sticks?
WHEN HE WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD
, Willi sought out his grandmother. He stood on the steps of an old house in the western part of Koblenz. Through a gap in the buildings, he could see the vineyards rising up the Mosel valley. He'd found his grandmother's name in the telephone directory. So easy. So close. He might have met his grandparents strolling a path along the Rhine from bridge to bridge. He might have passed them in a shop or on a street.
He left the bus two stops from the address he'd found and walked the remaining distance. He needed to approach gradually, to see the houses appear, their numbers progressing toward the one he sought. As he walked, he allowed himself to think that the address would be nonexistent—a house number that turned out to be, after all, a number only: a possible house but one that didn't exist. A hole in the sequence: 41, 43, 45, 49—but where was 47? He would stop, find 45 crowded against 49 with no space or empty lot between. Forty-seven would be simply not there: gone from space, time, memory, history. Not, and never been.
But 47 was there: a white door in the gray stone façade that ran from one corner of the block to the other. Willi stopped before it. He gathered it in.
He thought he could walk away. He didn't know that information has its own power. He thought that if he knew enough, he could batter down walls and obstacles. He did not think he might himself be battered.
G
REGGY LONGWELL'S WRIST FLICKED UPWARD
, and the pen he was holding left his fingers, slid, hit his coffee cup, and spun three times. Greggy laid his notepad down on the edge of the desk, then leaned far back in his chair, a spring in the pivot squeaking, and gazed at Earl across the dusty metal desktop. The window air conditioner in the small office wheezed and rattled, spewing out a moldy air, not cold enough to keep Earl from sweating but enough to make him clammy. He stared at the pen Greggy had flicked,
JIM'S WESTERN FEEDS
written in red letters across its barrel. On Greggy's notepad he could see Greggy had scrawled his name,
EARL WALKS ALONE
, in square letters, pressed hard into the paper.
Greggy laced his fingers across his stomach and turned his gaze away from Earl to look at the window, even though the air conditioner filled it completely. He sucked his teeth, then shook his head, turned his small, hard eyes back to Earl. In his exhaled breath, the ends of his sandy mustache briefly moved. Greggy was in his thirties, just starting to bald, just starting to turn soft. The ceiling light reflected off his forehead.
"Let me get this straight," he said. "You found some horses on Magnus Yarborough's land that're being hurt and starved."
Earl felt a drop of sweat start coldly down his side. He wanted to reach over and rub it, make it soak into his shirt, but he didn't, and it slid down, infinitely slow. He nodded, leaned back a little in the steel folding chair Greggy had pointed him to, and let his arm fall against his side, obtaining some relief.
"Yes," he said. "That's right."
Greggy looked down at his hands, and Earl couldn't help but follow his gaze: the pudgy fingers, black hair curling out of the knuckles, the wrinkled uniform over the fleshy belly into which those hands were pressed.
"So," Greggy said, meditatively, to his hands, "you're accusing Magnus Yarborough of abusing horses."
"I think they're hurt, you know? I think you should go look at them."
"You think I should go look at them," Greggy repeated.
He stared at his hands a moment longer, then looked at the air conditioner, then reached across the desk. His thumb and index finger hovered over the pen, then came down around it. He spun it, watched it circle, waited for it to stop, spun it again.
Still watching it, he said, "There's a reason you're on that side a the desk and I'm on this side. Reason is, on that side a the desk, you report things. On this side, I decide what to do about them. So I think maybe we should stick to that, don't you, Mr...."—he leaned away from the pen, glanced down at his notepad—"Walks Alone? I got that right? Earl Walks Alone?"
Earl nodded, staring at the pen, which had stopped, pointing right at him.
Greggy picked it up, circled Earl's name on the pad.
"I thought I got it right," he said. "You got a job, Earl?"
"I'm a student."
"A student." Greggy sounded as if he'd never heard of such a thing.
"At the high school. I'll graduate this year. I'm—"
He stopped himself. He was about to tell Greggy he had plans to attend college, maybe Harvard or Princeton. But Greggy might consider an Ivy Leaguer worse than an Indian. And an Ivy League Indian? The humor of it overcame Earl's anger.
The Ivy League Indian in the sheriff's office,
he narrated to himself.
Note how the sheriff is impressed with the Ivy League Indian's theories on things.
"Something funny here, Earl?"
Earl looked at his hands on his knees and composed his features.
"No."
"I don't think so, either. So why don't you tell me what's going on?"
"I don't know. That's why I came to you. So you could find out."
Greggy tapped the pen on the desk and stared at Earl. "That ain't what I mean, Earl, and I think you know it. But let me be clearer. You got something personal against Magnus Yarborough? Or is this some kind of AIM thing?"
"Aim thing?"
"Russell Means. Dennis Banks. You gonna tell me you ain't never heard a the American Indian Movement?"
"Oh. AIM. No, this isn't like that, you know? I found three starving horses, and—"
Greggy lifted his hand. "You already said. Just so I'm clear, this is something you're doing on your own, then?"
"Doing? I'm just reporting that..."
He stopped, seeing the uncompromising look on Greggy's face. A terrible, helpless feeling filled him, overwhelming and complete—as if all along he'd been empty and this feeling had been waiting to blow in and fill that emptiness. He could find nothing to say, and his hands on his knees seemed far away, and he seemed far away from himself. Greggy had reversed everything and was accusing Earl. Earl couldn't find his thoughts. Within the helplessness he felt a hideous and useless shame. He knew it was unjustified and hated himself for feeling it but couldn't expel it.
"Uh huh," Greggy said. "You're just reporting something. Well, Earl Walks Alone"—he peered at his notepad again—"let's just consider your report. You say you saw these horses from up by the TV towers. That right?"
"Yes." Earl despised himself for mumbling—and then despised the fact that he despised himself. It all circled inside him, and he couldn't get control.
"On a Friday night."
He forced himself to look up, to meet Greggy's gaze, to speak clearly. "That's right."
Greggy laughed dryly, unimpressed, little pilot light expulsions of sound. "Well, Earl, you must think I'm some kind a idiot."
Greggy's mouth stood half-open in a patronizing sneer, his left canine tooth jutting over his lower lip, showing through his untrimmed mustache. He balanced the pen straight up on the notepad, his index finger resting on the clicker.
"I know damn well what goes on up on Tower Hill on a Friday night," he said. "A bunch a—" his mouth twisted, he bit off the words. "If you think I'm going to disturb Magnus Yarborough because some—teenager who probably couldn't see ten yards claims to've seen horses a half-mile away in the dark—well, shit, Earl, you better start thinking different. The world don't work that way, and it's time you found out how it does work."
There was nothing funny here. There was no voice Earl could find to lift himself away from what was happening, no interior camera crew, no narrator to explain and get things wrong. But rising out of the helplessness he felt, Earl felt anger growing, stronger than the shame, pushing the shame aside.
"You don't have to disturb Magnus Yarborough," he said. "All you have to do is go up behind Lostman's Lake and see for yourself."
"Simple as that, is it?"
"It's as simple as that."
He held the sheriff's eyes, challenging him.
Greggy lifted his index finger, let the pen drop onto the notepad, watched it fall off the edge of the pad onto the desk, then leaned back in his chair again. "Simple as that," he said to the air conditioner.
He nodded to himself, then turned back to Earl. "Well, then, let me go over the sequence of events, make sure I got things clear. You saw these horses from the top of the hill, and then you said you went down there. And that's when you suspected they were being starved?"
His voice was friendlier now. Earl thought he might have a chance after all. "Yes," he said. "I went down there, and one of them was limping. And they were penned up in this small pen. Without a gate." He didn't mention Willi—that would only make Greggy more suspicious—and Carson had made it clear he thought his own involvement would create problems.
"Uh huh, then." Greggy picked up the pen again and wrote on the pad, murmuring, "Lame horses in small pasture," as he wrote. Then he looked back up at Earl. "That's very interesting, Earl. You musta been pretty close to them horses to observe them so well. Is that right?"
"Yes. I saw them real well. You can go up and look yourself, make up your own mind."
Earl felt he was getting somewhere now.
"I will make up my own mind, Earl," Greggy said mildly. "That's my job. But before I do, I need to get some other things clear. You can't see those horses from the lake. Is that right?"
"That's right. They were behind a hill."
"So how close were you to them? A hundred yards? Fifty?"
"I was right up next to them."
"Hmmm."
The sheriff seemed to be seriously considering what Earl was saying now.
"You were right up next to them," Greggy mused. "That is interesting, I must say." He reached up and ran his hand over his forehead, pushing strands of thin hair back. His balding forehead gleamed.
"I was," Earl said. "I wouldn't have come to you if I wasn't close enough to know something wrong was going on up there."
Greggy nodded. "And they were inside a small pen. And that pen was on Magnus Yarborough's land?"
"That's right."
"And you couldn't see this pen from the lake."
Earl was confused that Greggy would return to the question of seeing the pen from the lake. "Yes," he said. "I mean, no."
"Which is it, Earl?"
"No, you can't see it from the lake."
"So where can you see this pen from? That's what I'm tryin a get clear here. You were standin right next to this pen, you say. If I wanted a go check this out, where would I have to go?"
Greggy leaned forward in his chair, confidential, intent on Earl's answer.
"You've got to go over a hill," Earl said. "On the north side of the lake. The horses are hidden behind that hill. Out of sight of anything, you know?"
"Uh huh. I see. And at that lake public property goes what?—maybe fifty, seventy-five yards up? That about right?"
"I guess."
"I just want to be sure, you see. It seems pretty clear from what you're saying, I mean there ain't much doubt is there, that you were on Magnus Yarborough's land when you examined these horses?"
Earl stared at Greggy. The sheriff's tone was suddenly cold, all trace of friendliness gone. Earl realized he'd let himself be caught. He'd let himself believe the sheriff wanted justice. Earl's thoughts abandoned him, helplessness and shame returned, and the silence went on and on.