Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

“Your husband?”

“That’s right. All those nutty stories of hers and that’s the one she decided to stick with.”

“Did… do you think-”

I’d never seen someone turn so red so fast. “He never touched that girl! Never! End of story. Albert was a kind person. He never even swatted bugs. That was my job.”

“Why did she say it?”

“Lord, don’t ask me. That girl had more problems than a math book. She said it and she refused to take it back and that was that. I begged her. I wanted to hit her, but I didn’t. Of course it devastated Albert. It devastated all of us. There was a trial, the newspapers, the whole thing. I think back on that time and I want to throw up. In the end, it didn’t stick, ’cause there was nothing to stick. He was innocent. Whoever it was who really did it to her got off scot-free. Margaret had already started her drinking problem. She had moved out of here already. We couldn’t keep her. The Catholic Charities were helping her out. I saw what she was doing with that drinking, and I thought… God forgive me for this, but I thought, Good. Drink. Go ahead. If it doesn’t kill you, maybe it’ll kill the baby.”

“What baby?”

“What baby? Margaret’s baby. What baby do you think?”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. King. You’re losing me.”

“The baby. Margaret’s baby. That girl was raped. It got her pregnant. All the nutty stuff she was doing and saying, she didn’t tell anyone until it was too late. She’d refuse to have an abortion, in any case. She’d gotten all holy at that point.”

“Did she have the child?”

“Oh yeah. She had it. Baby girl. She held her for all of ten seconds, then…” Ruth snapped her pudgy fingers. “Off to adoption. Never saw her again.”

She leaned down and scooped the dog off the floor, then straightened and held it to her chest. It kicked, but she ignored it. I took ten long seconds of silence. My brain was going muddy. I wasn’t even certain why it was I’d come out here in the first place.

“Mrs. King… there was a suicide note. Did the police return that note to you?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Could I see it?”

She was already shaking her head even before I’d completed the question.

“Afraid you can’t. James took it.”

THERE WERE THREE OF THEM. ONE WAS IN THE METAL BUCKET, suspended from a small crane affixed in the bed of the green Parks Department truck. He had a chain saw and was running it like a knife through butter, hacking off the small limbs of one of the large oaks in Carl Schurz Park. The other two, on the ground, were taking up the fallen limbs and tossing them into the growling machine that was hooked to the back of the truck. The limbs came out of the chute on the other end, reduced to chips. A call to the Arsenal in Central Park asking after James King had led me to the eastern edge of Manhattan. I was lucky. The storm had passed, but not before cracking off part of a large limb on one of the trees in Carl Schurz Park. James King was pulling a little O.T. to help take down the rest of the limb.

The bulge of land where Gracie Mansion was situated was visible several hundred yards to the south. As I approached, the man suspended from the crane called out something to his colleagues on the ground. They both took several steps backward. One of them almost bumped into me. He placed a gloved hand on my chest. “Hold up, buddy.”

I saw that a rope had been tied around one of the larger limbs, the loose end of it run through a Y in the tree and coiled around a large spike that had been driven into the trunk about five feet up from the ground. As I watched, the man in the tree worked his chain saw through the large limb. When he was halfway through it, it buckled downward but was held in place partway by the rope. The man continued with the saw. He broke through, and the limb dropped several feet, then jerked to a halt as the rope brought it up short. Instead of falling to the ground, the limb remained in midair, rocking back and forth. And ten dollars to the person who doesn’t think of someone being hanged from a tree until dead.

I took a few steps closer to the truck. The guy who had stopped me asked, “You want something?”

“I’m looking for James King.”

“You’re looking at him.”

“You’re him?”

“No. Him.” He jerked his gloved thumb toward the man with the chain saw. The man in the trees was wearing a white safety helmet and a pair of protective goggles. The goggles made him look like a bug. The man on the ground called up to him, “Hey, Jimmy! Someone here to see you, man.”

James King pulled a lever in his bucket, and immediately the crane began to lower him. He gazed down at me as he descended, or so it seemed; it was difficult to tell because of the goggles. He held the chain saw up near his chest, as if at arms. The blade caught the sunlight on the way down. The bucket was swinging closer to me than I’d expected, and my temptation was to step back. I resisted it. For one thing, the wood chipper was only a few feet behind me. It was still running, still humming, still ready for whatever might be tossed into it. But more than that, an image flashed through my mind. It was of the boy at the parade. The boy with the balloon. It was the image of him standing by as his mother was being placed in the back of an ambulance. The shadow of the bucket swung over my head. But I didn’t budge. This just wasn’t the time to give, not even an inch.

The bucket stopped less than a foot from the ground. James King stepped out of it. He was still holding the chain saw at arms. Above him, directly over his head, the large severed limb continued to sway and rock, side to side.

IT WASN’T HIM.

He was an angry man, possibly a violent man. When he pulled off his helmet and goggles, I saw a man in his late twenties already losing his thinning hair. He had enough of his mother’s face to warrant some sympathies. The thought even dashed swiftly through my brain that he had the eyes of his mother’s dog. His skin was ruddy, recently and harshly burned by the sun. He wore a thick Fu Manchu-style mustache, in need of a trim. There was practically more hair on his lip than remained on his head. He lit up a cigarette while we talked, and the smoke seemed to leach right into his skin.

He sat on the retaining wall overlooking the river. He’d set the chain saw down gently next to him, as if he might snatch it back up without warning.

“I still hate her. I guess I’ll rot in hell, but I can’t help it. She destroyed my family. Here’re my parents, taking her in, and what does she do? She puts a spike right in my father’s heart. Then what? She turns around and becomes a nun ? She was a little teenage slut, and then she becomes a nun? That’s great, huh? I guess she’s ‘saved.’ ” He made the sarcastic quotation marks in the air. “How about saving my damn father? Ever think of that? Do you know what happens to a person’s reputation when he gets accused of something like that? He got cleared, but so what? The stain is there, man. You can’t get it out. Everywhere he went after that, you could just see it. He was the guy who maybe raped his own niece. He lost friends. He lost his job. His life was over, it was just a matter of waiting around until he died. Meanwhile, little bitch Maggie is off with her nuns. Well, I guess she finally got her ending, too. My crazy mother went to the funeral. Not me, man. No way in hell. As far as I’m concerned, they couldn’t dig her grave deep enough. All the way to hell’s what I’d like. Jesus. Don’t get me started.”

It was a little late to avoid. He finished his cigarette and lit another one. The move was seamless.