Peter Orner - Esther Stories

Talk about embarrassing Degardelles if he walked out of there looking like this. He thought of what Lance would say if he could see him now. You know the real miracle here, Frank, is that you haven’t gotten all that uglier. And it was then that he prayed, for the first time, without watching himself and laughing. Prayed that his brother, though he loved to inflict pain, had felt none. Frank prayed standing, still gripping the sink, still watching the siege in his face. Lance changing a tire too close to the road and the trucker, who maybe dozed for a split second or maybe didn’t see him, edged a sliver to the right and, without even nicking the Impala, ended Lance at seventeen. He prayed for Lance and the trucker who’d scooped him up and brought the bloody mass that was his brother to the emergency room. When the trucker heard that Lance was gone, he’d stormed out of the hospital and dumped his cargo into the parking lot, kicking and dragging boxes, ranting, How late, Mr. Haskins? How fucking late am I now, Mr. Keith Haskins? He went on for hours, whacking away at boxes and cursing Haskins. His mother always insisted that the trucker’s performance in the parking lot was grief over himself, over the potential loss of his job, his license, his reputation. She said she forgave him, but that didn’t mean she had to believe him. I’m sorry to say it, she said, but nobody gets that crazy over a stranger. But Frank had an idea then — and he was only twelve when all this happened — that his mother was a fool. And here was that trucker now staring out from his own bloated face, still furious, still shouting — on his way somewhere then, now going nowhere, still in the parking lot hysterical.

Lemoyne kicked the door harder. Some other guys joined him. He heard Candice say, Maybe he knocked himself out like Frank Knipp did that time. What’s with the Franks? Maybe they should start pissing in the alley behind Daskell’s. And he heard Raymond shout: “You defrosting the tenderloin in there, Frank?” Somebody — it sounded like Cash Lorimer — asked why Candice didn’t just go and get the key, and Candice screamed, It bolts from the inside, dildo! Frank pinched the bulb of his oozing nose and tried to hold his breath. Raymond had once told him that there’s no real difference between faith and endurance. He talked about the waiting and the hoping after he got back from the Gulf, even though he’d confessed in a whisper to Frank that working the computer on the USS Saratoga was about as dangerous as dealing blackjack on the gambling boat in Bettendorf. “Even had women commanders in tight pants. Not like my Uncle Telly getting his ass cheeks shot off at Chu Lai.” He thought of Nancy’s fearless gobble-gobble. How there was always the chance she’d circle around to a point. So he continued to watch himself as the old familiar silence engulfed his ears and the racket they were making outside the door became low and faintly melodious, and then it got so soft he couldn’t hear it anymore, like the moment just after a song fades for good but somehow it’s still there. And even later, when their pounding drifted as far away as his brother, he recalled the shouts, their concern, their alarm, with fondness.

HER NAME was Clare Warnoc and she was from Superior, Wisconsin, and she was out in the country on her way to visit her sister in Solan Springs. His name — it came out later — was Vern Troyer, of Vernon Troyer Trucking, Ashland, Wisconsin. The discovery happened roughly like this: Clare, whose vision had always been better than her sister’s (Clare told her bridge friends back in Superior that Evelyn wouldn’t have noticed the murdered man if he had dropped out of the sky and crashed into the hood of her Fairmont), was driving west on County Road G, past Score’s Bait, past the Norwood Golf and Driving Range, when, just before the north entrance to the Nekoosa Industrial Forest, she spotted, through a stand of bare poplars, a pair of blue-jeaned legs and booted feet hanging out of what even from that distance she could see was a bathtub. Clare said she saw the whole picture all at once like that. She said it was one of those rare times when your first view of something from a ways away is right on target. She pulled over, and a closer look verified it: a dead man in a discarded tub. Then Clare, who, unlike her sister Evelyn, had never waited out a shy moment in her life, immediately reached down into the thick green murk of a three-nights-ago rain and yanked up the man’s wrist. Dead and slimy as a trout in a plastic bag. After that Clare stood for a couple of moments and examined the dead man’s face before walking without hurry back to her car. When she arrived at Evelyn’s, Clare called the Douglas County sheriff, a man named Furf, a man with an aching back and sweaty feet, a man who at first didn’t believe her story.

The circumstances of the murder were reported in the Duluth Herald-Tribune, the Superior Telegraph, and the local Spooner paper. The crime was categorized in the police report as domestic in nature. Vern Troyer was involved with someone else’s wife. Her name was Carrie Somskins. The husband was a hothead named Richard. They lived in Hayward, but Carrie had gone to high school with Troyer back in the late seventies. They’d gone to the junior prom together. In April 1988, Carrie and Troyer bumped into each other at the pumps at the Holiday Station in Iron River. They had both been struggling for a while. Carrie’s marriage had never been happy; Troyer was already divorced. It didn’t take a lot to rekindle the high school flames. One thing led to another, and before either of them could catch a breath, the thing was full-blown. Then came crazy talk of Carrie filing for divorce and them moving to the Twin Cities, starting over. They were never serious about it, but that didn’t keep them from talking their dreams. And writing them. One of Carrie’s kids, while raiding his mother’s purse for Tic Tacs, found a letter Troyer had written to Carrie. The boy was loyal to his father.

No one has been able to explain why Richard Somskins stuffed Vern Troyer’s body in an abandoned bathtub only seventeen miles from his house, although more than a few people in Spooner and Hayward and Solan Springs speculated at the time that it had a lot to do with the contents of that letter, which was never found. Richard went mute after his arrest. Refused to say a word to his lawyers, the cops, anybody. That made the papers, too. The “dumbstruck killer” is what they called him in the Telegraph. In court, he just sat there slack-faced and refused to speak to the judge or even enter a plea. His lawyer tried to have him declared insane, but there was no law that said you were nuts if you didn’t talk. When Carrie brought the kids to the county jail in Ashland on the eve of his conviction, he smiled at each of them — including Carrie — but still refused to say even a single word.

There’s this also. Four years after she discovered Vern Troyer’s body, on December 20, 1994, Clare Warnoc spent the last ten minutes of her conscious life talking to a nurse named Meryl Dudziak at Superior Memorial Hospital. Clare told Meryl something she had never told her bridge friends, or even Evelyn, who had passed on in ’92. She told Meryl about Vern Troyer’s face, how it was sticking out of the water so that she could see his eyes and nose. Vern Troyer’s face, purple and fat-cheeked, but kind-looking, too. She could see that for certain. And her instincts were right. People said at the time (and the local Spooner paper reported) that Vern Troyer was known for never being serious, and so, considered always dependable. Never got excited. He’d never turn you down is what a lot of people said. The man would laugh if you asked him to haul scrap at the last minute, laugh because you bothered to ask, as if it would be any trouble…Clare Warnoc told Meryl Dudziak that for a moment she mistook the corpse’s bloated face for her brother Jed’s. Jed, who was killed in the war, dead at twenty-five, fighting Mussolini in Africa. Jed with his stupid jokes and his wild, hairy, pinching fingers. Jed whom she hadn’t laid eyes on since 1943. Jed, who kissed her and swapped her on the head with his flimsy hat. Clare gripped Meryl’s thin wrist and told her that out on that road, in front of that tub, she thought she’d found her brother. I’ve never been a woman to fantasize or make up stories. You probably know that about me already, Meryl dear. But my heart got crushed out there on that road, because for a half a second I wanted to shake him and scream, All these years, Jeddy. All these years.