Stephen White - Blinded

The elk had done their courting thing that night with philharmonic aplomb. Although the dance steps of the majestic bulls and their harems of cows were difficult to discern during the prime dusk time period, the acoustics that night were perfect. The bugling bulls sent their baritone calls bouncing off the granite faces in the park, and the eerie echoes quieted even the most restless Homo sapiens in the audience.

“That’s when it hit me that Sherry was kind of unhappy. That night.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He had wiped his plate clean and held up his mug for a refill of decaf before I realized he’d said all he planned to say about that night in the park. Me? I had a feeling there was more to discuss.

The waitress hustled over and topped off Sam’s coffee mug. “There are a lot of rules after a heart attack. No caffeine for a while-that’s one of them,” he said. “As far as things I miss, it would be hard to choose between caffeine and nitrates.”

“Sex?”

“I hope that’s not an offer. If it is, you’re a dead man.”

I offered a grudging smile. Were I with a patient, clinical protocol would have had me waiting silently, feigning patience, for Sam to return to the topic of his troubled marriage. But with Sam I didn’t have to follow any protocol. I said, “So that’s it? That’s all you’re going to say about Sherry? That you knew she was unhappy?”

“She was showing me something. Maybe I wasn’t able to see it. What more is there to say?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Did you notice anything?” he asked me.

“That night? No.”

Sam caught the waitress’s attention and pantomimed a request for the check. “Sherry said she was restless. That’s the word she used. She was thinking of selling the flower shop. Maybe going back to school.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“That’s because she said it to me, not to you. You and Lauren and the kids were running ahead of us.”

“ ‘Restless’ for Sherry meant unhappy with you?”

“You know, you go back and look for clues. That’s what I’ve been doing, anyway. I wonder what I missed. Whether I should have done something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something different. Maybe I let stuff slide that I shouldn’t have let slide. Anyway, that’s one of the things I’m thinking I did wrong. Other times I think it’s all her shit. I go back and forth. I have a lot of time on my hands.”

“That night? What did you say to Sherry?”

“Probably not the right thing.”

I sipped some water. “Why? What did you say?”

The waitress brought our check, sliding it to an empty spot on the table pretty much exactly halfway between us. She stacked all the plates and mugs in a careful cascade up one forearm. I watched closely; not even a glint of recognition flashed between her and Sam.

He said, “I don’t remember exactly. I’m sure it wasn’t what she wanted me to say.”

I grabbed the check. Sam dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table.

“You’re paying. That’s the tip,” he said.

“What about you, Sam? Are you happy?”

Did I get an answer?

Did Gold Hill have a Starbucks?

Almost halfway back to Boulder I asked, “What’s the story with the waitress? Your meeting in the back of the café?”

A quarter of a mile of contemplation later he apparently decided that he was going to answer me.

“Four weeks ago last night she was with some girlfriends at a club downtown. One of those places on Walnut, not far from your office. I’m not going to say which one. You can probably guess. Maybe you read about it in the Camera . But she was on my turf. She got drunk-she admits that. She met some guys-she admits that-and she agreed to go to an after-party at some frat house by CU. She admits that. She decided to let them drive her over there in their car. She admits that. Crappy judgment after crappy judgment after crappy judgment, and she admits every bit of it.”

His left hand snaked from the steering wheel to his upper abdomen, his thumb pressing on his sternum.

“On the way over to the Hill for the after-party, she was sexually assaulted in the back of a Chevy van.”

“Raped?”

“Sexually assaulted.”

The distinction was obviously important. I was curious why. Prurient interest? No. Just enduring curiosity about the perverse imagination of assholes on alcohol. But I didn’t ask for any more details. Sam wouldn’t have wanted me to know any intimate details of the waitress’s horror. I liked that about him.

“And?”

“And it turns out that of all the people she’s had to deal with about what happened that night, she trusts me the most. Go figure.”

Sam paused. I think he was giving me the opportunity to make the mistake of saying something snide. I didn’t.

“I’ve been concerned that if I wasn’t around to hold her hand as this thing got closer to trial, she might get shy and drop the charges. The cops and the DA? We try real hard to make it okay, but the truth is that it’s a bitch to be a sexual assault victim in the system we have. So I wanted to tell this girl personally about the heart attack and let her know that I’d be gone for a while but that I’d be back on the job to, you know, help her before this thing went to court.”

I wasn’t surprised at Sam’s generosity, though his sensitivity sometimes snuck up on me.

That moment a sharp gust of wind exploded out of the west, which was behind us. The heavy car seemed to levitate like an amusement park ride about to careen down some ersatz mountainside. The sheer eighty-foot drop five feet from my window served as a reminder that this particular mountainside wasn’t exactly ersatz.

I craned my neck to look behind us and saw that a thick bank of clouds had popped up and begun to shroud the highest peaks on the Divide.

Sam didn’t turn around.

He said, “Told you. We’re going to get blasted. Weather here is goofy.”

We beat the approaching front down the mountain, though not by much. From our vantage on the street in front of Sam’s house where he had parked his Cherokee, the army of clouds marching over the Divide had the determination of the Allies assaulting Normandy.

We were about to get blasted.

“You have rehab today?” I asked.

“Not until Monday. You know what they do there? These young kids in these dorky matching sweatsuits hook me up to all this heart monitor crap, and I do calisthenics with a bunch of old people, then they watch me walk on the treadmill, and then-then-they act like I’m lying when I tell them what I ate the day before. That’s the entire drill. I don’t see how that’s supposed to help my heart, unless terminal aggravation is their frigging goal.”

“You’ll give it a chance, though? The rehab? I’m sure a big part of rehab is attitude.”

“Don’t talk to me about attitude. I’m feeling a little better every day. I think the medicine is helping. The beta-blockers. I’m more mellow, you know? That can’t be all bad, right?”

I recognized that he hadn’t answered my question about giving rehabilitation a chance.

“Of course not,” I said.

He changed the subject once more. “I heard you made an unscheduled appearance at the execution of that search warrant yesterday.” After he spoke, he punctuated his words by finally pounding the shift lever forward into park. I noted that he wasn’t terribly kind to his transmission.

“Is anything a secret in this town? Jeez. I’m surprised my picture’s not in this morning’s Camera .”

Sam laughed, first time all morning. I liked the sound of it, even if the joke was at my expense.

“I got a personal invitation from the search warrantee, Sam. Nobody knows that my friendly neighborhood cop gave me a heads-up. Did they find what they were looking for?”