Timothy Johnston - The Current

“Is that supposed to prove something?”

“No, sir. Only…”

“Only what.”

“Only why didn’t he ever say he pulled me over? Why wouldn’t he say that?”

Gordon closed and opened his eyes. Black flies swarming all through his vision. A great hard fist pounding on his heart.

“Why didn’t you say it?” he said. “Why didn’t you say the deputy pulled you over?”

“Because I thought they already knew. I thought the sheriff knew. But he never asked me, Mr. Burke. He never asked me about the deputy pulling me over.”

The boy staring at him and Gordon blinking—blinking away the black flies until he could see the boy’s eyes again. Open and blue and looking into his.

“The deputy,” Gordon said. “That’s what you’re telling me. The deputy put it on your truck.”

The boy said nothing.

“He put it on your truck and he never told the sheriff he pulled you over.”

“Why wouldn’t he tell him, Mr. Burke?”

“Because it never happened. Because you’ve had ten years to cook up this story.”

“No, sir. I’ve had ten years to wonder how this piece of cloth got on my truck. And all I’ve ever known is I never touched your daughter, Mr. Burke. Me or my truck.”

“But you kept it,” Gordon said. “Why did you keep it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know…” The boy shaking his head. “I thought I might need it.”

“The perverts always keep something. Like a kind of…” He couldn’t think of the word. He was so tired, suddenly. Dead tired. He needed to sit down.

He let the boy go. His hands were cramped and he put them to his skull and ran them backwards, as if to restore order to a head of hair gone wild. He looked toward the woods but did not see them. The whole world a meaningless flat arrangement of shape and color, sickening to see. He turned back to the boy and with effort brought his face into focus. He could see the streaks of yellow in the blue irises.

“Why now?” Gordon said. “Why show this thing now? Do you think anyone will believe you?”

“No, sir. I just didn’t want to be the only one anymore. If something happened—” He looked off, toward the house, and looked back. “I just wanted you to hear it, that’s all.” He put his hand into his jacket pocket, the square of cloth disappeared, and he turned to collect his cap from the bed of the truck.

“And all this while,” Gordon said. “Ten years. You never thought of this before—that it was the deputy?”

The boy turned back to him holding the cap. He stood looking into the bowl of it as if finding something there that shouldn’t be.

“I was young, Mr. Burke.” He looked up and gave a kind of smile, shaking his head. “I just didn’t think a man, a cop…”

He put the cap on his head and snugged it down.

“Moran,” said Gordon.

“Sir?”

“The deputy. Was it Moran?”

The boy held his eyes. “Yes, sir, it was him.”

SHE AWOKE ONCE again in strangeness: the bed not her bed and the room not her room, and neither was it the hospital, or her father’s living room. Dim light of day behind the curtains—dawn or dusk, she had no idea. And, oh God, so hot under these blankets, the comforter, whatever else was piled on top of her… Audrey shoving at these, kicking and twisting until it all slumped off her and she lay there on her back, getting her breath and feeling the cool air find her.

She was wearing the same flannel shirt of her father’s she’d put on when she first got the chills however many days ago, and now she lifted the sleeve to her face and smelled it, but it smelled like nothing and she knew it had not been taken off her and that it must smell terribly, as she herself must.

She sat up, putting her feet to the floor, and sudden moons of color floated across the room. A half glass of water stood on the nightstand and she drank it down, then pushed up from the bed and got to her feet and stood through a second wave of colors and dizziness—then stood listening for any sound in the house that wasn’t her own heavy breathing.

No clock in the room, and no sign of her father’s phone or his watch. There was a bureau and a vanity and a chair, all in the same unpainted, pinewood style as the nightstand. The bureau top was bare but a middle drawer was pulled partway out, as if recently opened but then incompletely shut in the haste of dressing. She crossed to it and pulled it all the way open. Sweaters. Folded, of muted colors, soft to the touch. Clean-smelling when she bent to smell. In the drawer above she found panties and bras and camisoles. She lifted one bra to see the cup size and put it down again. In the drawer below, a bright bonanza of socks.

On the vanity top sat a wooden box with the lid down, a brush and comb set, and a color portrait in a frame of dull silver, but the image that stopped her was the face in the mirror: waxy, pale face of shadows, of cracked lips and black ropes of hair.

Another girl altogether was pictured in the silver frame—a picture she’d seen before on TV and in the newspapers. It was Holly Burke’s high school graduation picture, and she knew that the girl had hated it and would not have placed it here herself. In it she was pretty and honey-skinned, her brushed hair catching the light. Bright-green eyes and a young woman’s mouth of glossed lips and white teeth, and nothing in that face to convey a heart with so much in it, so bursting and hungry and bruised and defiant, so alive!

The brush and comb set were not silver as in her dreams but fake tortoiseshell and when she lifted the brush she saw no hairs and when she put it to her nose it smelled of nothing but the synthetic bristles. Brand-new.

Inside the wooden box was a stash of jewelry: silver and gold and colored stones all in a rich jumble. She chose an antique-looking silver ring and slipped it over her knuckle, admired it against the pale skin, slipped it off again and lowered the box lid without a sound.

The floorboards popped and the door hinges creaked and she stepped into the hallway and stood at the head of the stairs looking down, listening. He would’ve heard the floorboards, the hinges, would’ve come to the stairs and called up to her, or by some other means let her know of his presence, but he did not and she knew she was alone in the house.

The bathroom looked like a bathroom in a hotel: not a thing in it to indicate a man had used it even once. Pale-blue towels folded and stacked largest to smallest on the counter. A new tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush still in its packaging placed beside an empty glass. A pink razor in its packaging next to ladies’ shaving cream. Ladies’ deodorant. New bar of soap in the wire rack under the shower head, matching bottles of shampoo and conditioner.

There was a bolt on the door and it popped cleanly into its socket.

She pulled the flannel shirt over her head like a dress and stripped off the heavy socks and stepped out of the panties and stood looking at the creature in the mirror. White as bones. Thin as bones but for the fat purple club at the end of one arm.

She’d have stood under that showerhead forever, just forever, but she didn’t want to use up his hot water, and at last she shut off the valves and ran the largest towel over her skin and made sure the bottoms of her feet were dry before she stepped on the bath mat. Then, with the towel wrapped around her, she peered into the hallway and listened again—not a sound, not even a light on downstairs that she could see—and then she scooted back to the bedroom, her dirty clothes clutched to her chest, and shut the door behind her.

HE CROSSED INTO Iowa on the 52 and twenty minutes later he found the building on Main Street and there was an open space out front and he took it. It was just 2:15, a cold and gray Wednesday afternoon in Iowa, as it was in Minnesota.