Timothy Johnston - The Current

He sat watching her. The laundry thumping and ticking.

“I remember looking out the window upstairs and seeing two men standing in the snow talking,” she said.

“That wasn’t no dream,” he said. “I come back upstairs and there you are lying on the floor by that window, and the window wide-open.”

“Sorry.”

He looked into his mug again. She turned back to the sink and began scrubbing the saucepan.

“You hear what those two men said?” he said.

The saucepan slipped out of her grip and splashed in the water. She retrieved it and resumed scrubbing.

“I heard,” she said, “but I thought it was just part of the dream.”

“What did you hear?”

She worked at the saucepan. Then, without turning around, she told him what she’d heard—about the deputy, about the piece of cloth. Feverish, crazy things.

Gordon was silent. She rinsed the saucepan one-handed and racked it.

“You heard all that?” he said, and she turned to him again.

“That was Danny Young,” she said.

“Yes, it was.”

“I didn’t think he lived here anymore.”

“He doesn’t. But he’s back now. Came out here to tell me he didn’t do it. All these years later.”

She leaned against the counter and dried her good hand with the dish towel.

“Do you believe him?”

“I don’t know.” He put his hand to his forehead. “I went down there and talked to that deputy. Sheriff, now.”

“What did he say?” she said—and heard herself and said, “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“He said what you’d expect him to say,” Gordon said. “Had an answer for everything.” He looked up again. Watching her standing there. “What?” he said.

“What what?”

“You were gonna say something.”

She shook her head, but then she said it: “My dad didn’t like him.”

“Who?”

“Ed Moran.”

“The world’s full of people who don’t like each other.”

“I know. But I think—”

He waited.

“I think he knew something about him,” she said.

“Like what?”

She thought about that, but there was nothing specific, no single thing she could put into words. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I asked him one time why Moran was leaving the department and he didn’t say. He said it was none of my concern.”

“Was he wrong?”

She shook her head again. “But it was the way he said it. Like there was something there he didn’t want to talk about. Not with me, anyway.”

Gordon narrowed his eyes at her. “If you’re trying to say he knew about this…”

“No, not about this,” she said quickly. “Not about Holly. I mean—” she said, but then lost her voice in the rush of her thoughts… because if her father had known that Moran might’ve been involved in Holly’s death, if he’d had any suspicion whatsoever, then he never would’ve let him go down to Iowa like that—he’d have kept him in Minnesota until he had his case. Until he could bust him and hold him. And he certainly would not have allowed him to become an Iowa deputy… and so whatever he’d known, or whatever he’d suspected about the deputy, it hadn’t been enough to act on, and it hadn’t been enough to say something against him to the Iowa sheriff.

Or did he just say nothing at all, as he’d done with her? None of your concern .

“I don’t know what it was,” she said finally. “But it wasn’t about Holly. It couldn’t have been.”

Gordon looked at her. Then he looked into his coffee again. Silent. Far away in his thoughts, in his pain, so that when he spoke again she knew it didn’t matter that she was there to hear it.

“I watched that boy grow up. Him and his brother. Their daddy was my business partner. Our kids used to play together when they were little.” He tilted his mug, watching. “I saw the other one just a few days ago, over at Wabash’s. Or I guess it was longer ago than that.”

“The other one?”

“Other brother. Twin brother. Marky. He works there. And after that I go on out to their mother’s place, I don’t even know why, I haven’t said one word to that woman in ten years, and here she is trying to bury a dead dog in the frozen ground.” He shook his head. “The world is just too strange for words, that’s all.”

She watched him. Then she stepped back to the table and sat down again.

“So what are you going to do?” she said.

He didn’t look up. “About what?”

“About what he told you—what Danny Young told you.”

He looked up then, and she felt the blood rising to her face.

“What am I supposed to do?” he said.

“You could go to the sheriff, Mr. Burke. Sheriff Halsey. Or a lawyer. I know a good one, I could—”

“Lawyer? I don’t need no lawyer. And I can just see the sheriff’s face. This boy comes to tell me a story about a deputy—a full sheriff now—trying to frame him ten years ago? Hell, he’d lock me up.”

“But there’s evidence now.”

“There’s a piece of cloth ten years old, and I don’t even have it. He took it with him.”

“But the sheriff—”

Gordon pushed back from the table and stood, as if remembering something he’d forgotten to do, but then did nothing, just stood there. Then he went to the sink, and after a moment there was the sound of his mug going into the water, the dull, underwater note of it hitting bottom.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s none of my business.”

He stood staring into the water. “Nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “But to tell you the truth, I wish like hell you never opened up that window. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

She watched him. The back of his neck.

“I don’t know, Mr. Burke,” she said. “Maybe I was supposed to open that window.”

He glanced back at her then without quite looking at her. “Supposed to?”

“Yes. If you think about how it all happened… me getting sick, you bringing the firewood, then bringing me here. Danny Young showing up like that. The fact that it was my dad’s case…”

He turned back to the kitchen window. “You’re a strange girl, you know that?” He was silent a long while, and she was too. Then he said to the window, “I went on up there to Rochester, to that hospital, when you were there. He tell you that—your dad?”

“No.”

“Well. Can’t say I’m surprised, after what I said to him.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Said I wished it on him. What happened to you. It was a long time ago, but after he let that boy go, after he let Danny Young walk away, I wished it on him. Just so he’d know what it was like.”

She watched him but he would not turn to look at her.

“You don’t think…” she began. “Mr. Burke—you don’t think that had anything to do with what happened to me and Caroline, do you?”

He didn’t move. Staring out the window.

“Mr. Burke?”

“I don’t know what I think. I just got a funny feeling that if you never went into that river, you and Caroline, Danny Young never would of come to show me that piece of cloth. And don’t even say it,” he said, turning toward her again. “I know how it sounds.”

He held her eyes, then turned away again. “I just wanted you to know I wished for it, that’s all. I wanted you to know that about me.”

She was silent, imagining that moment: Gordon Burke standing with her father in the hospital and telling him that—that he’d wished harm on her.

“What did he say?” she said finally.

“Who?”

“My dad. When you told him that.”

“Said what a decent man would say. Said he was sorry.”

“He was, Mr. Burke,” she said. “He never got over it. He never stopped thinking about it. I know he didn’t. I know that’s why he went down there and shot that boy in the hand like that. It wasn’t just about me and Caroline. It was about Holly too, and Danny Young, and—”