Richard House - The Kills

What had he said? He’d said what anyone would say who did not know her son, blank niceties about his popularity and character and how sorry he was, mostly, just about how sorry he was.

He started the car and checked the mirror and found her standing on the corner, not coming toward him, and not retreating, but fixed with the sun hard on her shoulders. He could drive, he thought, leave, as none of this was his business, but he wanted to know how long she would wait, and if this waiting would produce any kind of result. Finally, the smallest of gestures — an unclasping of her hands — drew him out of the car.

She waited for him to approach. ‘I have work and I have a room if you’re still looking.’

Rem, now fixed in place, squinted back at his car, everything in this town hard and unrelenting, concrete, brick, and glass, laid flat or vertical.

* * *

She returned to find Nut on the sidewalk, sat beside the door, and came into the apartment to find it also unlocked.

Nothing appeared to be disturbed. She checked the bedside cabinet for her jewellery — small pieces from her family, all of little value. Money she’d left out on the counter was not taken, and as she walked about the apartment she thought of Roscoe. Would he do this? Doubtful. He’d have taken the dog.

Papers were missing from her desk. Her files also, but not all of them, and the chair was set at an angle, as if someone had, at their leisure, sat down and read through every single scrap of paper.

As far as she could tell, every piece of information about Paul Geezler had been removed.

* * *

Mud on the porch threatened to make its way into the house courtesy of three sets of feet, despite her mother’s agreement that she would keep the heating on if they all but entirely disrobed in the entrance. Jackets, pants, boots, anything spattered with mud should stay in the vestibule. Cathy’s mother had used this word once, years before, as a joke and it had stuck. A word that sounded like boiled candy. There had to be a less formal word. Cathy settled against the shoe rack, stacked with coats and boots and hats, and the soft wall of coats to read Rem’s letters.

He called her ‘honey’ in his letters, a word he never used in person, and she liked that he found this tenderness when he addressed her, although she felt none of this herself. If he can still love me, she reasoned, then he can love someone else. She liked how he fought to keep his writing legible, how he insisted on writing as well as sending emails, and that these letters arrived without anticipation. Rem was awkward, easily embarrassed, not so unlike her father, or perhaps any man, and did not like to appear to be a fool. She held the letter to her stomach, now tight, and still she hadn’t told him. And there was more news to tell him.

In the afternoon she would speak with a student radio station, a friend’s daughter’s project, a favour she did not mind making. The call had come through, a request that took some time to organize because she was becoming a figure, she was told, a name, someone hard to get hold of. Unpractised, Cathy worried that she would say the wrong thing, or that she would somehow become part of an aural wall, that anyone who listened to her would hear the same words of any other soldier or contractor’s wife, and she did not like that category. She would instruct the student not to mention her pregnancy, the material would be available on the web, anyone could hear it, her pregnancy was private business.

* * *

The reporter, a girl of about seventeen, left her boyfriend in the car, who would not be persuaded to come inside. Cathy looked through the kitchen window and watched him, a boy wearing sunglasses on an overcast day, strong short black hair, head nodding, and the slow thud of some music. It was easy to imagine his body under those loose clothes. The girl, she kept forgetting her name, had an unbelievably bad complexion. She needed sun, make-up, a make-over. She needed not to be eating whatever she was eating as her lower jaw was lined with a rash. The girl appeared so sticky-looking that Cathy wiped the surfaces in her mother’s kitchen as she talked to keep from staring. She wasn’t pretty, and she imagined that the girl would allow her boyfriend to do pretty much whatever he wanted with her, because that’s what it would take to keep him interested, a girl who would do anything.

Cathy talked about Howell, Southern-CIPA, about HOSCO, but most of all about Geezler. Contracting work to civilians in a military zone was really the single and entire origin of this problem. She used the idea of Howell as a child, selfish, greedy, lonely, buying friendship and influence, but wasn’t so convinced this time. Geezler was harder to quantify. He’d moved up in the world, as the head of HOSCO in the Middle East he was disassembling the company, and she still didn’t quite understand the logic of his manipulations. She couldn’t prove anything she was saying about Geezler because she didn’t have evidence. ‘You have to look at who’s still standing. There’s only one. Paul Geezler.’ She gave the girl the documents forwarded by boston_adams, and when the girl asked where these had come from, Cathy answered, HOSCO, although she couldn’t prove it.

The girl wanted simple answers, but Cathy resisted. ‘If we reduce this to one source,’ she said, ‘to one man, then we’ve failed to see what’s really happening. No one wants to talk about it because it’s too painful. Think about it, we had the public enquiry open one month after the death of the boy at Amrah, and soon we will have the hearings. Think about how long this has all taken.’

The girl’s complexion seemed to worsen. This wasn’t the interview she wanted. Cathy looked at the small digital recorder set on the counter between them, the mugs of coffee, her attempts to be nice.

‘There’s a man called Paul Watts.’ Cathy leaned forward, decidedly maternal. ‘Go and speak with him. He is missing a lung because of the work he undertook at the burn pits. Go and speak with him, speak with the other men who worked at Camp Liberty and ask them about what happened. Ask if they were told anything about the dangers of their work. Then speak with HOSCO, speak with Paul Geezler, and speak to the people who know him.’

* * *

Cathy sent the article as an attachment to Rem. In the subject line she typed a row:?????? The attachment was an article about the country singer Grey Wills and the dispute on a house outside of Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his neighbour, Paul Geezler, who had bought the land and developed a property without apparent permission, then cut down the bordering trees in order to build a second building closer to the ridge and river. The property, a five-bedroom country house in the English style, was built without the appropriate approvals and on inspection violated several county and state codes — and was, to Grey Wills’ satisfaction, ordered to be demolished.

The article, dated five years back, was intended as a last gift to Rem. A kind of statement about the men he’d done business with, how they had always been this greedy, this disregarding of other people, and how they would not change.

* * *

Santo drank and insisted on driving. He knew the route, he said, so Rem wouldn’t have to pay attention to the maps. He knew how to get there. South, then west.

Rem watched the last of the city pass behind them. One remaining building from the Robert Taylor Homes, the last out of a scattered wall of high-rise blocks. It didn’t occur to him until later that they were heading east not south — toward Michigan — a mistake which took a further two hours to correct.

The men hardly spoke, and Rem could not be certain what this drive was about, except that they would end up in Austin, see what work they could hustle from one of HOSCO’s subsidiaries, although any debate about this idea soon dissolved into argument: both of them unhappy to return to the company, but neither seeing a choice.