Timothy Johnston - The Current

The last three entries in the notebook, in that large but nearly unreadable scrawl of his, were the names and addresses of the garages, and she went to the nearest of these first, Yoder Auto Repair, and there she was met by Yoder himself, who stood wiping his hands with a red rag as she explained who she was and why she’d come. Strong smell of oil and gasoline in the garage. A radio voice talking and talking from a shelf at the back until Yoder stepped over to it and shut it off. He came back and looked at the large canvas jacket she wore, then he looked her in the eye and said, “I’m sorry for your loss, miss.”

“Thank you.”

“I only met him the one time when he came in here himself, but from what I hear he was a good man. And a good sheriff. Despite what he came down here and did. And even that… well.” He frowned. “I got a daughter myself about your age. She’s off to college down in Kansas and—” His voice caught, and he looked down at his hands. She saw a vein jump with blood in the side of his neck. He looked up again and said, “Way I see it, he let that boy off easy.”

“Yes, sir,” Audrey said. “If it was the right boy.”

Yoder frowned again. “I reckon your dad was pretty good at finding the right boy.”

Audrey said nothing. Did they even know about Holly Burke down here? Would that name, or the name Danny Young, mean anything at all? How quickly did you forget about people when they weren’t your people? When it wasn’t your town. Wasn’t your river… even though, really, it was the same river.

Yoder began wiping his hands again with the red rag. “Well, it never was in the papers,” he said, “but it might as well of been. You could of asked anybody and they’d of told you: the boy’s name is Ryan Radner. Do you know Anderson Auto, down on Frontage Road?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve got it on my phone.”

“I figured you would. But he won’t be there.”

“He won’t?”

“No, he won’t.”

“How do you know?”

Yoder tucked the rag into his hip pocket. “I’ve been in this business since I was sixteen and in all that time I’ve only known one mechanic who didn’t have two of these.” He showed her his open hands. “That was old Boots Franklin who worked for my old man. Best damn auto mechanic I ever knew but then he’d been born with just the one good hand. Now maybe getting shot in the hand isn’t much of a reason to fire a good mechanic. But then again maybe it is. In any case that boy got fired.”

“Ryan Radner,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, but don’t ask me where he lives. I don’t know and I wouldn’t tell you if I did. I’d more likely tell the sheriff—the new sheriff. Ask him to come and have a word with you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Yoder.”

“All right. Well.” He frowned. He nodded. “You take care, young lady.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, “I will.”

THERE WAS ONLY one Ryan Radner in that town and he lived in a mobile home park a mile south of the last stoplight, and if that was his truck parked beside the trailer then he drove an old two-tone pickup truck, green and a lighter green, of a year she couldn’t even guess and nothing about it to distinguish it from any other two-tone truck she’d ever seen or ever would see. She saw her father opening it up, shining his light, searching for something he’d never seen but knew must be there, it must be…

She sat in the sedan watching the trailer, the curtained windows. It was late in the day but the sun was not yet down, the days getting longer as they got warmer, and there were kids’ toys and bikes strewn in the patches of dead grass between the trailers, but no kids. As if they’d all abandoned play and run inside at her arrival. Nothing moved anywhere but a single cat, a large orange tabby crossing the pitted and muddy road on delicate paws, and she watched as the cat made its way toward the Radner trailer, as it found a crack in the plywood that ran around the base of the trailer and stepped warily into the crack—head, body… and when the last of the tail twitched from view she reached into the glovebox and took out the .38 and slipped it into the hip pocket of the canvas jacket. She’d washed the jacket but it was still stained from the mud of the spillway and it still gave off a whiff of the river.

She got out of the car and shut the door behind her. Dogs began barking from other trailers up and down the road but no one came to the door or to the windows of the Radner trailer. From inside she heard the voices of a TV show, the applause of an audience.

She thought her heart should be pounding but it wasn’t, and she thought about Caroline with her arm raised so straight and steady, her voice steady too, Say that to my face, you slackjawed muppetfucker , and a wave of love went through her.

The three iron steps and the railing were all of a piece and they wobbled independently of the trailer as she climbed them, and there was no bell that she could see and when she rapped on the aluminum stormdoor the dogs in the other trailers barked the more crazily and were joined by other dogs and none of them visible anywhere. She rapped a second time and the TV was abruptly silenced and she thought she could see the trailer itself shuddering as footsteps neared the door. There was a window in the inside door and a curtain was drawn aside and a man’s bearded face appeared, looking out, not liking what he saw, and the curtain fell again and the inside door swung open.

He stood in a red sweatshirt and blue jeans, his dark hair lifted and tossed and held in place by its own oils. “Can I help you?” he said through the stormdoor, the plexiglass, and it was as if there were no door at all between them. Lidded dark eyes staring out from a puffy face. The face of a man who has been sleeping and watching TV and not much else. In the bristles of his beard lay a pair of girlish lips, pink and wet. She thought she should recognize the eyes, those lips, but she didn’t. And if there were still signs of the scratches on his face these had been overgrown by the climbing, untended beard.

“Are you Ryan Radner?”

“Who’s askin?”

“Audrey Sutter.” She removed the sunglasses but she didn’t have to, he knew the name. He raised his hand to scratch at the right side of his face, at the beard. He moved his whole hand to scratch, as you would a wooden hand, and before he lowered it again she saw the wound, the bright-red puckering in the back of his hand where the bullet must have exited. He looked beyond her to the white sedan and then looked at her again through the plexiglass.

“I know that car. What are you, Daddy’s little deputy?”

She didn’t answer. Searching this face as she’d searched the faces Moran had brought her, trying now to match this one up with one of those, which was all backwards she knew, but what did it matter if there was a match?

Because it did. Because it only worked the other way.

“ Hello—? ” said the face, larger suddenly in the plexiglass, the wet pink lips holding the O shape perversely.

“I came to see you face-to-face,” she said. “To see if I remembered you.”

“From what?”

“The gas station. The ladies’ room.”

He smirked. He shook his head. “Just as crazy as your old man. You got a gun too? Excuse me a second while I make a quick phone call.” He patted his jeans pockets and looked around but he did not turn away from the door. As if he would not turn his back on her. He looked at her again. Thinking things over. He said, “I know you already know the case was dropped. Your daddy shot the wrong man, Little Deputy.”

She looked past him, into the cramped darkness that was his home, and she remembered opening a metal door and flicking a filthy switch, stepping out of the bright stink of the ladies’ room into darkness, into that blindness after a light is turned off, and she remembered a hand reaching out of the darkness to touch her, to stop her with its fingers, a voice— Where you goin, little girl? —and she remembered trying to duck under the hand, and the hand grabbing at her head, and there was the electric crackling and sparking of her hair suddenly… And she had not remembered that until this moment, standing here. She’d thought she’d lost it in the river, along with everything else. But he’d taken it from her there, at the ladies’ room.