Timothy Johnston - The Current

His big hand lay on the table beside his mug, palm-down. Her own hand might cover half of it. She remembered standing on his porch that day in October as he held the stormdoor open but would not ask her in, nothing in his eyes to say he needed her or even knew her name, a gray-faced man whose heart had been torn out. The very worst thing, the unspeakable thing. He didn’t know then that the sheriff was looking for Danny. And neither did she.

Gordon turned the mug, and watching the turning said, “I guess you know all about those girls by now. Those two girls that went into the river.”

“Yes. You were the first person I thought of. I wondered if you’d seen it on the news, or if anyone would tell you. I…” She didn’t finish. Didn’t know how to finish.

“I drove on up to Rochester, night before last, to the hospital,” he said.

She watched him.

“I thought I wanted to see her,” he said, “but when I got there I realized what I really wanted to see was her father. Sutter. Wanted to see his face, what it looked like now.”

“And did you?”

“I did.” He nodded slowly. “He’s a sick man. He doesn’t hardly look like the same man.” He stared into the mug. “I guess I wanted to know did he have any better understanding now. Did he understand any better why I said the things I said to him. Back then.”

She waited. “And did he?”

He tilted his mug and frowned. “It just isn’t the same situation. What happened to his daughter, he’ll get over that. He’ll just pay more attention to every part of her life from here on out. Or as much of it as he gets to see. He won’t carry this thing that I carry around with me every day and every hour, these”—his hand circled in a buffing motion to the right of his temple—“thoughts that go through my head, these… ideas.”

He lowered the hand and looked at her from under his eyebrows, and a coldness poured into her.

He turned back to the window. The fire was burning down, the smoke thinner now and calmer.

“Is that why you—” she began, and faltered. “Is that why you came out here? Because of those two girls?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” He turned back to her. “I saw your boy this morning. Marky.”

“You did?”

“At the garage. I had to take the van in. I hadn’t seen him in a while, I guess. For a second there I thought it was the other one. And then I remembered that that boy was long gone, and—”

He stopped. She was blotting up her tears with the handkerchief he’d given her earlier, outside, when she’d first turned and seen him standing there. The thin cloth damp now and no longer smelling so strongly of him as it did that first time.

“Ah, damn it,” he said. “Don’t listen to me.” Shifting his weight in the old chair. Patting the tabletop with his fingers. “I never should of come out here like this, out of the blue like this. I must be crazy.”

“Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. I don’t know why you came but you came. You came, Gordon, and I’m so… I’m so grateful.”

He turned once more to the window, and so did she. The fire had burned down out of view. A weaker cloud of smoke rising into the dusk. The light had dimmed in the kitchen too; soon she’d have to go pick up Marky.

“I sure didn’t come out here to talk about any of this,” he said. His shoulders raised with a deep breath and lowered again. He did not look at her. “I drove up to Rochester two nights ago and I saw your boy this morning and I guess that’s what put it in my head to see did you need any help out here.” She was nodding, yes, wiping at her eyes. “And now it looks like that fire is near about spent,” he said, “so why don’t we go on out there and see about giving that old boy a proper place to rest.”

AN HOUR LATER Radner pushed through the gray door and began to make his way to the truck, loose-legged and head-down, his face shielded by the bill of his cap.

Sutter got out of the truck and shut the passenger door behind him, wondering at the strangeness of his own legs, calling it the time he’d spent sitting in the cold truck waiting and not his nerves, or his sickness. He saw Radner look up at the slam of the truck door. Saw his eyes under the bill when he saw him, and saw his gait change hardly at all as he kept on, hands in his jacket pockets. He stopped a few feet short of the truck, of Sutter, and stood taking him in, jacket first, then the face. Then the rest, down to his boots.

“I know you,” Radner said. “You’re the man had me looking under his hood today.”

In his breath cloud Sutter smelled the Seagram’s and 7. A smell and a taste from the old days, before she got him to give it up for good.

“But you weren’t wearing that jacket earlier,” Radner said, raising one forefinger in the air and wagging it at him. Playacting a man who would not be duped.

“Is this your truck?” Sutter said.

Radner lowered the finger. “What’s the trouble, Sheriff?” At the movement of Sutter’s arm he glanced down, then showed his hands. “I’m an unarmed man here, Sheriff.”

Sutter studied him. The hooded eyes. The smirking and wet, almost girlish lips. Sutter raised the gun. It was his father’s old .38 revolver. Now his. He stepped aside and gestured with it.

“I want you to shut up and place your hands on the fender of the truck.”

“What’s this about, Sheriff?”

“What did I just say?”

Radner regarded him blankly, drunkenly. Then he stepped forward and put his hands on the fender of the truck.

“Spread your feet.”

Radner spread his feet and Sutter patted him down. He collected the young man’s keys and phone from his jacket pockets and slid them into his own. He glanced at the door of the bar. If anyone else came out it changed everything.

“Put your hands behind your head and lace your fingers.”

Radner did so and Sutter gripped the fingers in his free hand and pocketed the .38. He pulled the bracelets from the hip pocket of his jeans and drew down Radner’s left wrist and cuffed it, then drew down the right and cuffed it to its fellow.

Radner was glancing around the lot. “Where’s that Ford of yours, Sheriff? With the Minnesota plates and no whattayacallit. Official insignia.”

“I won’t tell you again to shut up.”

Sutter opened the truck door and gave Radner a push and Radner got himself in and Sutter shut the door, then walked around to the driver’s side and got in. The smell of the young mechanic had already filled the cab: booze and grease and gasoline.

“Whatever this is—” Radner began, and Sutter struck him with the back of his hand.

Radner sat looking at his lap, tasting his lower lip with his tongue.

“You want to say anything else?” Sutter said. He saw Radner’s eyes go to the door of the glovebox. “It’s a short drive,” Sutter said. “It won’t kill you to keep that mouth shut till we get there.”

The truck started up, the wipers swept snow from the glass, but under the snow was a film of ice and Sutter sat staring at it, his heart pounding—all that waiting and you never thought to scrape the windshield? He tried to crank down the window but it was either frozen or didn’t work, and finally he reached under Radner’s legs for the metallic scraper, got out of the truck again and went quickly and foolishly at the ice, and with each scrape he saw more of the cab, more of Radner, and it was like the reveal on one of those lotto games, one of those scratch-and-play cards, only this one told you not what you’d won but what you’d lost.

He turned left out of the lot and drove down the road two blocks and turned right, and then right again, down a lampless road where the buildings were all dark and window-boarded and the lots had not been plowed, and he pulled into a lot where the only tracks in the snow were his own tiretracks going in and the tracks of his boots coming out and he followed these to the back of the building, a one-time machine shop, according to the faded signage, and pulled up alongside his sedan and parked the truck and killed the engine.